by Norman Lear
Some guy from a neighborhood that had to have resembled mine once said, “The pessimist sees a pile of horseshit and thinks that’s all there is. The optimist thinks that if there is enough horseshit around, there must be a pony someplace.” And sometimes the plot in which we find ourselves requires us to become our own pony.
Living from age nine to age twelve at the pleasure of relatives, while your dad’s in jail and your mother and sister are residing in another city, just might qualify as such a plot.
• • •
MY MOTHER’S FATHER, Shia Sokolovsky, underwent a name trim (to Seicol) when he arrived at Ellis Island from Russia in 1904. He settled in New Haven, and a year later he sent for his wife, Elizabeth, their two sons, Al and Eddie, and their oldest child, Jeanette, age six.
It was Al to whose home I was first shipped after they’d taken my dad. Uncle Al managed the John Irving Shoe Store, a ladies’ shoe emporium in downtown Hartford. He had two salesmen working for him, with a third on Saturdays, and a woman at the cash register. He was also a district manager, which called for him to visit and report on two other John Irving stores in the area. In his eyes that made him a master of the universe. At his direction his salesmen dressed to the nines, while Al dressed to the twelves. Damon Runyon would have called him a “swell.” To me he was just another relative who didn’t seem to know I was there.
Al and his wife, Sadie, had three children: my cousins Elaine, Noel, and Bunny. My way of singing for my supper while I lived with them was to make them laugh a lot. I thought it was my obligation to entertain my cousins because I was the beneficiary of their family’s largesse, so I would tell them stories, especially stories taken from films, and I did impressions of the actors. One in particular stands out in my mind. Henry Armetta was a featured player who portrayed combustible Italian characters. In a 1933 comedy starring Wheeler and Woolsey, a classic comedy duo of the time, Armetta played a street cleaner afraid of losing his job because the horses he used to sweep up after were all but lost to the motorcar. At age eleven I thought his rave about the absence of horses, and the consequent lack of manure to engage with his broom, was hilarious. And I was funny—dare I say hilarious?—imitating him.
It was a bifurcated life. There was the reality I was actually living, which I could do nothing about. And then there was the reality that was a product of my need and imagination. That was what I showed to the world, and what I did not yet understand.
I didn’t stay that long with Al and his family before being shipped to my maternal grandparents, where I remained until my dad was freed. This meant leaving Hartford, where my mother and sister continued to reside, and moving to New Haven. Many years later, when I finally began to see how hard that had been on me, I confronted my mother about it, and she said dismissively, “What do you mean, you never saw me? You just don’t remember.”
“Mother,” I said, “why don’t I remember? Help me. Remind me of something we did together.”
“We saw each other practically every day,” she insisted.
“But how can that be? I was in New Haven, two hours away. I don’t remember us being together more than twice a year.”
To which she answered, “Oh, please!”
If my mother’s “Oh, please” reads amusing to you, it does to me, too, now. As a child those two syllables made me feel worthless, like an insect she was flicking off her sleeve.
• • •
MOTHER’S PARENTS, my bubbe and zayde, lived in New Haven at 74 York Street, an address and a neighborhood that no longer exists, in a small two-bedroom, fourth-floor walk-up apartment with patterned oilcloth on the kitchen table and on the floor.
My grandfather, tall and slender, wore quiet very well and so was considered learned. Not that he was, but he did make a scholarly figure poring for hours every day over his Yiddish newspaper, which no one else could read, as he sipped tea from a tall glass, a cube of sugar held lightly between his teeth. He had a dress shop, a small lower-middle-class establishment where, on Saturdays, my cousin Elaine and I used to take the black cardboard marked “Seicol’s” and fold it into boxes for which we were paid a penny apiece. Ten pennies each got us into a movie—actually, two movies, a double feature. A hot dog or corned beef sandwich cost another nickel. With twenty cents you were rich for the day.
If you knew a little trick, you were even richer. At the Roger Sherman Theater they had two candy machines. In one of them was a great candy bar called Mazuma, and packed with the bar were three play coins called Mazuma Money. What Mr. Roger Sherman evidently didn’t know was that the Mazuma coins from the one candy machine worked like the coin of the realm in the other machine. Elaine and I and a few friends sworn to secrecy never ran out of candy through the double features that were preceded by the latest episode of a serial western, the weekly news highlights, and the coming attractions.
A short walk and a trolley car ride away lived my mother’s other brother, Eddie, his wife, Ida, and their little girls, Beverly and Myrna. If they’d had a fourth bedroom I might have been sent to live with them, because I spent every weekend at their house babysitting my cousins (who I also happened to adore).
Eddie was a dentist, a sweet but vacant round-faced man with an indiscriminate high tenor laugh that seemed to require no context. Ida, in her late thirties and early forties when I knew her best, was still a little girl, and as uncomplicated as a comma. Never without a smile that said “hug me,” Ida was born to serve her Eddie and be thrilled by his attentions to her. Neither had ever dated anyone else and both remained throughout their life together as naïve and unworldly as the day they met. That was not enough, however, to prevent Eddie’s father, my zayde, from accusing Ida—tell me there’s not a touch of insanity in every family!—of having an affair with my father.
One had a hard enough time imagining Ida in the act of making love with her husband, who probably giggled a lot, let alone with a man who was likely to tell her she was the best lay he’d had since Jean Harlow. But I don’t have to imagine the spectacle that took place one day in my grandparents’ kitchen when my zayde, his face twisted in righteous anger and contempt, repeated his allegation about H.K. and Ida. As out of control as I’d ever seen him, H.K. leaped about and hollered back in his own defense. And in the middle of this escalating, vein-popping madness, there was my mother dropping to her knees, her hands clasped prayerlike beneath her chin, knee-walking across the oilcloth from one to the other, begging them to stop. I used to do a mean impersonation of my mother whenever I told that story, which I did often until age put a stop to my crawling about on my knees.
Uncle Eddie took care of my teeth throughout my teens and didn’t charge. My mother’s obsequiousness toward him for this—and toward everyone in the family who helped us during my father’s absence—made me feel even more diminished. I loved my young cousins, but I’m sure the reason that I gave up my weekends to babysit them had everything to do with how beholden I was to their parents. But as grateful to them as I felt I should be for giving me shelter, nothing eased the hurt I felt at how little attention Uncle Eddie paid me, especially in football season.
I was excused from my babysitting duties Friday nights and Saturdays before sundown during the 1932 and 1933 seasons so I could make some money selling souvenirs to the crowds that flooded New Haven on their way to the Yale Bowl. I was so in love with football and the football scene that engulfed the city that thinking about the long-gone romance of it can get me misty-eyed even now.
Late Friday afternoon on a game weekend, I and dozens of other kids my age would be downtown in the commons area. The Green, as it was known to the locals, was already swarming with out-of-towners in their hats and raccoon coats, armed with pocket flasks—the repeal of Prohibition was still a year away—and out for a good time.
Each of us kids carried a board about the size of a large computer screen, to which our wares (pennants, mini
ature footballs, and other related trinkets) were pinned. I nailed a woolen mitten to my board and put my hand in it to support it, a bit of invention I recall thinking would catch on. It didn’t.
Saturday mornings we’d all be at the Yale Bowl with our goodies, awaiting the arrival of the dozens of open-air trolleys, packed to the gills with fur-coated revelers hanging off both sides of the cars. It is an image of such explosive joy and felicity that I’m sure I couldn’t forget it if I lived to be a thousand.
There was one Saturday morning, though, which I’d happily forget. Harvard was the visiting team, and the rivalry between the Harvard Crimson and the Yale Bulldogs was and still is one of the longest-running (since 1875) and intense in the history of college football. On top of that, my two greatest football heroes—Clint Frank in the backfield and wide receiver Larry Kelley—were playing for Yale. Heaven for me would have been a seat at that game. I had been dreaming of it for weeks. Uncle Eddie knew how much I loved football, but how much I ached for him to take me to a game never occurred to him. I was hawking my wares and experiencing the ache most keenly on that day of the 1932 Harvard-Yale game, and of course it turned out to be the day I spotted my uncle arriving with a friend of his and the friend’s son, just about my age. I wanted to throw up from the hurt I felt, and hid in tears behind my pennants and trinket board as they walked past me into the Bowl.
• • •
SOLOMON LEAR, my paternal grandfather, married his half niece Anna in 1890, just before immigrating to New Haven from Russia. I didn’t know him very well but I knew that everybody loved him and that his favorite song was “My Blue Heaven.” On prominent display in every Lear family home was a photograph of him standing next to a rowboat at the water’s edge in Miami, wearing striped pants and a dark jacket and pointing up at the sky. It was an early black-and-white photograph, of course, but so romanced were we all by him and his blue heaven that every time I am reminded of that photo I see it in full color.
I have a fleeting personal memory of him, just a glimpse, really, from when I was six years old. I was sledding down a hill—belly flopping, as we called it—and he popped up, a surprise, to grab and hug me at the bottom of the run. A few months later, while crossing the street in Boston, he was hit by a car, thrown in the path of a second car, and killed. We were living on the second floor of a two-family house, and I can still see my father climbing the stairs to where my mother was waiting, and his reaction at seeing the anguished look on her face, even before she actually told him what had happened. They fell into each other’s arms, turning and weeping. Each time I revisit this scene I see them as if on film, with the camera circling 360 degrees around their grief-stricken embrace.
As for my paternal grandmother, she was an indecipherable presence at just a few occasions in my childhood. My father, born on March 19, 1893, was the second of her six children. He had an older brother, Edward, two younger sisters, Fanny and Jenny, and two younger brothers, Jack and Eli. The kindest way I can describe them is to say that they were all a little “bent.” My generation of Lears often wondered if that had something to do with our grandparents being niece and uncle.
• • •
MY UNCLE ED and aunt Rose had a contested beach cottage in Woodmont, Connecticut. “Contested,” I say, because the cottage had been left by my grandfather to his oldest child, but the rest of the clan never ceased to contend that it would have been left to all of them had Ed not managed to be the last one to speak to him as he lay dying in the hospital. Many critics have commented about the decibel level on my most popular shows, but no family argument on any of them could have outdone the hysterical squabbles that took place over that beach house.
But that perennial sore subject was hardly the only thing that could provoke an instant Armageddon. We kids were witness to a number of lunatic displays of fury, one of which I inadvertently costarred in with my uncle Ed. (Not to be confused with Eddie Seicol the dentist—no one ever called Edward Lear “Eddie.”)
Uncle Ed was a glowering figure, stern and stuffy, who relished the tight rein he held over the mountains he made out of molehills. As with my other surrogate fathers, I felt a constant emptiness from his lack of attention. I spent many summer weeks at the Woodmont cottage, and Ed would come home from work every day and whistle for his son, my year-older cousin Harold. We would be somewhere in the area and, at the sound of that familiar whistle, Harold would dart homeward and I would ache for a father to whistle for me. In our thirties, reflecting one day on our childhoods, Harold was stunned to learn how sweet I found that father/son moment and how jealous it made me. And I was stunned to learn how much he hated it. It made him feel like a dog.
If I’d felt like a dog that summer I’d have been feeling better. It was the second year I was alone, my mother and sister were nowhere to be seen, my dad was a hole in my heart, and I think that if I had faced my circumstance squarely I’d have fallen to pieces. Strangely, the closest thing to me in my tenth summer wasn’t a relative. It wasn’t even a person. It was a gray-and-blue sweatshirt. I don’t remember who bought it for me, or how I came to have it. I know only that for one long summer it was the source of my comfort and support. I put it on after showering in the late afternoon, a moment I awaited eagerly all day. My aunt Rose, Harold’s mother, came to call it a schmatta (Yiddish for “rag”) because she saw it on me every day, but how could she know how hugged it made me feel, and maybe slender, and good looking, too.
Sloppy Joe’s was the name of an ice-cream shop about a quarter mile down the beach, and I walked it, maybe even strutted it most nights, in my magic vestment. I had no money to spend there but I loved the people and the action and the feeling that I belonged. I felt like I had more in common with them than with my family back at the cottage. Maybe that’s because I was among strangers at both places, but at Sloppy Joe’s they were content to be strangers and no one saw me as wearing a schmatta.
But back to Uncle Ed. One weekend in the summer of 1932, more than a dozen Lears—six to eight adults and as many children—were crowded into the small four-bedroom cottage. At about five in the morning, I woke up with a full bladder. I was peeing sleepily into the center of the bowl when Uncle Ed burst into the bathroom, sending the thin door stuttering loudly against the wall, and yelled—for me, our entire family, and all of Woodmont and perhaps nearby New Haven to hear—that my peeing had just awakened him and that he was going to teach me the lesson of a lifetime. He jerked me aside, pulled out his florid penis (which looked to me as angry as its master), and spurted directly into the bowl as I had been doing.
“You hear that splashing, Norman?” he yelled. “Like Niagara Falls at this hour of the morning, isn’t it? Now listen to this!” He redirected his stream against the side of the bowl. “What do you hear now? You hear nothing now! Nothing!” he shouted triumphantly. “Don’t you forget that the longest day you live!” A couple of flicks, a quick tuck-away, and Uncle Ed was gone, slamming the door behind him.
It was indeed a lesson I would never forget, and I did what I could to pass it on to future generations. Ed Simmons (my first writing partner) and I incorporated it into one of the first pieces we sold to an important player, the noted nightclub comedian Joe E. Lewis. In a riff about things that men around the globe and across the centuries agreed upon, we had him conclude, “The most universal truth, an article of faith to men of every race, creed, color, or nationality, is that
Water sprayed on water
Makes a sound that all can hear.
But water schpritzed on porcelain
Falls silent to the ear.
The Lear sisters, my aunts Fanny and Jenny, were both baleboostehs, a Yiddish word that means “the master caretakers of the house” but also carries connotations of its more explicit English relative, “ballbusters.” They were big, tough women with granitelike faces, and they demanded absolute adoration from their husbands, Ben and Joe, who ponied up
that adoration like eunuchs. Ben would finish every wretched meal Fanny cooked by pushing away from the table and saying with gusto, “Fanny! You outdid yourself tonight.” And Joe, poor Joe, spoke only when spoken to by Jenny. Both husbands died young, which I think of as their means of escape.
Uncle Jack and his wife, Zena, both pudgy, seemed to me more freshly scrubbed—their clothing nattier, their haircuts more defined, their silhouettes just a little more crisp. I remember wondering if they caught more sunlight than the rest of us. Whatever it was, I wanted some of it. Jack was also the only uncle who flipped me a quarter now and then. Since my folks never asked me what I hoped to be when I grew up, all I could think of was to be an uncle who could flip a quarter to a nephew. Jack was a press agent. I had no idea what a press agent did, but it was what I grew up wanting to be.
• • •
I DESCRIBED MY DAD and his siblings as “bent.” Eli, the youngest, was so bent he was crooked. He was one of the earliest, perhaps the first, of radio’s play-by-play basketball announcers. He broadcast on what was then called the Pabst Blue Ribbon Network as Eli “King” Lear. (More family royalty.) Such was his popularity that the first time he was sent to jail for kiting a check, the network put him right back on the air upon his release. He made money so he had no reason to steal, but steal he did. It was like a hobby.
Eli was the center of a mind-blowing incident at a Thanksgiving dinner at our home in Hartford when I was sixteen. Twenty or so of us were gathered around our dining room table, which had been extended with the addition of two bridge tables. The men had been playing Klabiash, a Hungarian card game in which the nine of hearts was called the manel. The men loved it. You could tell how long they’d been playing by how low the cloud of cigar and cigarette smoke was hanging over them.
In the late thirties, in small two-story homes like ours with little closet space, guests—especially the ladies—placed their coats and their purses on a bed in an upstairs bedroom. Halfway into our Thanksgiving meal that year, someone commented that Eli, who had left the table for the bathroom, had been gone a long time. Within minutes we kids were treated to the spectacle of our fathers pummeling Eli at the front door, where he was caught before he could escape. It seems he had been upstairs tossing his relatives’ handbags and fur coats out the bedroom window to a confederate below. Yes, this actually happened.