by Norman Lear
Many years later, after the war and my Army discharge, I was working as a press agent, just as I’d always imagined. My first task every morning was to page through the eight daily New York newspapers to see which of our clients’ names we’d managed to get into print that day. On April 10, 1946, I picked up that morning’s Daily Mirror and found this front-page headline: TOY GUN BANDIT NABBED IN PHILLY. It was Uncle Eli. He’d been arrested several times before for robbing hosiery stores. This time he was sentenced to twenty years to life at Leavenworth, then the country’s largest maximum security prison. He was fifty-two when he got out, which he did by dying.
• • •
I’VE SAVED THE BEST FOR LAST: my maternal grandmother. If Bubbe wasn’t the first person to truly love me, she was certainly the first to show me that love, on her face, in her voice, and in every other possible way. She was the most adorable full-grown human I’ve ever known—short and stout, perpetually moist and tender, with a smile on her round face that assured me instantly that my heart was safe in her care. Her name was Elizabeth, and when we weren’t calling her Bubbe we called her Lizzie.
Lizzie, I’ve realized as I’ve thought about her over the years, had the only real sense of humor on either side of the family. One rarely saw her when she wasn’t in action: cooking, cleaning, sweeping, but always listening. Listening was her strong suit. She didn’t speak a lot, but every reaction to what she heard was there to be read on her face and in her smile, the wryest of smiles. Whatever feeling she couldn’t contain in a look escaped under her breath.
I picked up on a lot of it, I guess because I knew to wait for it. Most of the others didn’t get my bubbe. You could eat off her floor. Her fridge was always full. She made the best gefilte fish. They got all that. But there was far more they didn’t get. My mother, Lizzie’s only daughter, seemed to have no relationship with her. None of her children—or her husband, or my father—got how funny she was, how much of a comment on everything around her flowed from her very being.
Those comments, as I said, were “on everything around her,” which means her family and their friends, the pleasures and problems of their lives, and the world that they brought into her kitchen. If something she knew nothing about was mentioned, she had just one question, one concern. The first time I heard it was when I lived with my grandparents and my cousin Noel asked our grandmother, “Did you hear, Bubbe? The Dodgers won the pennant!” Looking up from whatever she was doing and recognizing that here was a subject she’d never understand, she asked her question: “Good for the Jews?”
Despite the vast amount of knowledge Lizzie lacked, she understood her life moment by moment. To do that, I think, you have to be an onstage presence in that life and a member of the audience at the same time. Lizzie had that gift in spades, and it was never better exemplified than the very last time I saw her. I had a speaking engagement in Boston and on the way I stopped in Hartford to see her.
She was in a nursing home, strapped in a wheelchair and slumped so that the waist strap was across her chest, her eyelids gently drawn in the pretty, round, ninety-four-year-old face that was looking more and more like the baby pictures of her first great-granddaughter, my Ellen. She had defecated, judging from the smell probably hours earlier, and had not yet been cleaned. I spoke loudly into the bouquet as I approached her.
“Bubbe, darling, it’s Norman. From California.”
Her eyelids lifted and her lips parted to become that sanctuary of a smile that had always been a place of comfort for me.
“Norman? Norman from California?”
“How are you, Bubbe?” I asked cheerily.
Her eyes opened a tad wider and played with the fringe of her smile, reaching deep into where my sense of the ridiculous lived, inviting me to take in the totality of her situation. “How am I?” she replied.
I laughed, and, oh, how I loved her. “I dressed for you,” she added.
“I’m on my way to Boston,” I said. “I’m speaking at Harvard. They invited me to talk about America and its problems as I see them. You hear that, Bubbe? They’re interested in what I have to say.”
Her eyes, a mirthful blue, scanned my face, and she replied, with a line reading no amount of direction could have improved upon, “Go know.”
Coming from some—her daughter, for example—that could have been a put-down. But not from my bubbe. That was her signature way of expressing her gratitude for the bounty of the universe, for yet another gift she could not have imagined. As life has teased and surprised me over the years, I have taken my grandmother’s “go know” with me everywhere. When I’ve been recognized in restaurants and at airline counters, I have often thought, “Go know.”
“I’ll see you again soon,” I said as I left that afternoon.
“I’ll be here,” she said. “If I’m here, I’ll be here.”
2
WHEN MY FATHER completed his sentence in the summer of 1934, he went to the Boston station and boarded the train on the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad that was bound for Manhattan. My mother, my sister, Claire, and I were at the station in New Haven, ticketed to go to New York with him, where we were all due to live with another couple and their child, in what turned out to be a smallish three-bedroom apartment, until Dad got a job and we could afford our own.
Standing there waiting for his train to pull in, I was just one small boy, but I was a crowd of emotions. I can’t overstate how much Herman Lear—H.K., my father, “Dad!”—affected everything in my life from my earliest memories. He was a flamboyant figure with what appeared to me to be an unrivaled zest for life, and he seemed to fill every room he was in. He leaned into everything that came his way. He bit hard into all of life, and everything in the same measure. He loved my mother, but no more than he loved strawberries, which he ate out of big soup bowls with juice-dripping fingers and which he called “strumberries.” I don’t think there was any difference between the way he loved The Lone Ranger (sacrosanct listening for him) and the way he loved me or my sister. However painful this capacity of his might have been for me, I was so in love with my father that I made a virtue—no, a glory—of it.
As the train pulled into the station and I stood there aching for the sight of him, I remember not being able to shake the warmest yet oddest of memories. Every morning after his first cup of coffee, H.K. would repair to the bathroom with the Hartford Courant and a few cigarettes. It had been three years since I’d entered a bathroom and been greeted by the combined aroma of my dad’s shit and his Old Golds. It was a ritual we had gone through every morning. By the time he finished his first cup of coffee, he would signal with a couple of high-lows—high-pitched, low-volume farts, like a small child on a trumpet—that he’d be needing the toilet very soon. Thirty or so minutes and a cigarette or two later, he’d vacate the john, sumptuously self-satisfied, like a bear wanting to be tracked to the spoor he’d laid down.
“Tomorrow, maybe,” I thought.
The train pulled to a stop in a cloud of steam, and as it thinned, there was my father standing at the end of the car. He was in the same suit he’d worn the morning he left for the airport to fly to Oklahoma, but it was a size and a half too large for him now.
When the train pulled out of the station Claire and I sat together while our parents talked. The three-year difference in our ages, compounded by the infrequency of contact during the years of separation, trumped the brother-sister relationship, reducing us to something close to just having met. After a time my father changed places with my sister, and he and I were sitting together.
There wasn’t a word—then or ever—about where he’d been or what he’d been through, nor was there anything more than cursory questions about what those three years had been like for me. We talked about Max Baer, who had just knocked out Primo Carnera to become the first Jewish Heavyweight Champion of the World, and the recent death in a shoot-out of th
e notorious bank robber John Dillinger. And then he told me something as memorable as anything I’ve ever heard.
We’d gotten around to talking about my being twelve now, when his face lit up suddenly with the birth of a dream meant for instant sharing.
“Norman,” he said, “you’re going to be thirteen next year!” Then, despite looking lost in his oversized suit, without the few dollars needed to have it taken in, no job in sight, and on his way to mooch on another family’s largesse, my dad told me, “For your Bar Mitzvah I’m going to take you, your mother, and your sister for a trip around the world. We’ll be gone a year.”
He was dead serious and he was my dad, returned to me at last after a long absence. I believed him totally. “We’ll be gone a year” became the mantra of my heart.
When my Bar Mitzvah arrived it was 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, and we were living in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment on St. Marks Avenue in Brooklyn. It had been exciting to think we were going to make that kind of a trip, but it was just another broken promise. His personality was such, however, that there was always enough of tomorrow’s anticipation to drown out today’s disappointment. The closest I came to hearing again about a trip around the world was when an older buddy, fifteen or sixteen, said he’d been taken to a hooker who asked him if that’s what he wanted. He didn’t know what the hell she was talking about and neither did I.
• • •
MY BAR MITZVAH ceremony was at the Shaari Zedek synagogue. We ordered extra blocks of ICE for the party afterward. I capitalize ICE to look like the card my mother put in the window to let the iceman know ICE was needed upstairs. Way upstairs when you’re climbing four flights with a fifty-pound block on your back, which rested on a leather pad and was gripped by a pair of giant steel tongs in your hands. The home refrigerator was relatively new and expensive at the time, and fewer than a million American families had them. We Lears still lived out of our icebox, and the man who breathed life into it, the iceman, was a welcome fixture in our lives.
On the streets, as he crawled at ten miles per hour so as not to miss window signs, smaller kids scrambled after his truck for the slivers of ice that resulted from his chipping smaller chunks from one of the giant two-hundred-pound blocks he’d picked up at the icehouse earlier. For them the street was their entertainment zone, and when the ice truck made its rounds it drew as much excitement as a roller coaster, as did the fireman who appeared occasionally on the hottest of days to open the hydrant for the express purpose of allowing the kids to frolic in the spray.
The iceman made several trips up those four flights to our apartment on the day of my Bar Mitzvah. The family bathtub was the logical cooler for the beer and soft drinks, and that’s where all the ice was chopped and deposited. My parents’ friends outnumbered my friends by far, and so our apartment felt like the lobby of a small theater with a hit show. The bathroom, if you could get into it, was like the men’s room at intermission.
When I was sure I’d been gifted with my last pen—“Look, Ma, it’s a Waterman!”—and had received my last cash handoff, I joined my friends outside. With some thirty-two dollars I’d just earned by turning thirteen and becoming a man (the original Jewish joke!), we decided to go to Coney Island.
A nickel bought a Nathan’s hot dog and a frozen mug of root beer in 1935 and the best rides were five to ten cents, so that night we were rich beyond dreams of avarice. We ate everything, rode everything, played everything, and had one hell of a time. The highlight of the evening occurred when my cousin Murray put a penny into a device labeled “How Much Electric Shock Can YOU Take?” and grabbed hold of the two metal handles in front of him. Depending on how widely one could pull those handles apart with an increasing electric charge to each hand, a needle moved from WIMP to REAL GUY. Murray must have been feeling Coney Island brave that night and a little too eager to prove himself a real guy. Instead of slowly pulling apart the metal handles, he jerked them apart, throwing his arms out as wide as he could. In that instant his mouth ripped open, his face contorted to a picture of agony, and, with his arms outstretched like a sixteen-year-old Christ figure, he screamed and cried, “Let me go! I didn’t do anything! Please, God, let me go!”
When I got home the crowd had thinned out, a good time was being had by all who remained, and no one, including my parents, asked where I’d been. It took me a full day to realize that I hadn’t been missed at my own Bar Mitzvah.
• • •
MY FATHER WAS extremely outgoing and affectionate, but the underside of his great good nature was not admirable. Enormously insensitive, he treated absolutely everybody the same way, never taking into consideration that the person he was talking to now might be just a little different from the person he was talking to ten minutes before. Consequently, he would take advantage of people weaker than him, and he wouldn’t recognize the strength of people much stronger. He would brag about his ability by saying that he could “sell shit on a stick for lollipops.” The problem was that he didn’t always know, or particularly care, when it was shit he was selling. And so my mother grew to be frightened when the doorbell rang. Neighbors and family just opened the door and walked in. The sheriffs were more formal.
“Hello, Herman,” they’d say. They seemed to know him well. I never knew exactly what brought them there. They stood in the corner and talked in hushed tones about checks (specifically, bad ones), car payments that had not been made, outstanding balances, and some other stuff I didn’t understand. When they left, my mother was always crying, and my dad was trying to explain something away.
In Divorce American Style, a film I wrote and my partner Bud Yorkin directed in 1967, the sixteen-year-old son of Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds is seen in his bed with pad and pencil, scoring the fight his parents are having in the kitchen below, under such headers as “WEAK,” “STRONG,” “LOGICAL,” “POOR GRAMMAR,” and “OVEREMOTIONAL.” I was that kid sitting at the kitchen table in our Brooklyn apartment, scoring any number of my parents’ fiercest arguments. It was at that table that I frequently heard: “Jeanette, stifle! Will you stifle yourself?”
My parents, and the Lear clan generally, lived, to use my friend Herbie Gardner’s line, “at the ends of their nerves and the tops of their lungs.” I thought of inner tubes as I saw the veins in my father’s neck bulge as he spat those words—“Jeanette, stifle yourself!”—just above his clenched fists, positioned less to hit my mother, it seemed, than to beat his own chest in frustration.
My dad, like Archie later, was portly. But, unlike Archie, he was natty. He wore a freshly pressed suit, in the corrugated way of portly men, and rarely passed a bootblack without getting a shine. Bootblacks were predominantly older men and, as they were called then, Negro. Relics now, in the thirties they could be found—on street corners, at bus stations, in hotel lobbies and barbershops—in towns large and small across America.
As polished as H.K.’s shoes were, so were his fingernails. He loved his weekly visits to the barbershop and the “great guy” role he played there. As I left the shop with Dad after his haircut and yet another shoe shine, his fingernails freshly manicured and topped off with a colorless high-sheen polish, just right for a man of his big-tipper status, my cup would run over with pride and dazzle.
I never thought to wonder—when money problems were table conversation at every meal—how Dad could afford a weekly haircut and manicure and even more frequent shoe shines, not to mention the fat gold ring with a large onyx stone that he wore on his right pinkie. I hated that ring. It must have symbolized all the other off-kilter things about him of which I was instinctively if not consciously aware.
• • •
DESPITE ALL THE HURTS and disappointments, how I loved my father! I wrote love letters to him all my life, many of them in All in the Family, in which Archie has so many of my father’s characteristics. For example, H.K. believed there were three medicatio
ns that could cure just about everything—aspirin (only Bayer at the time), bicarbonate of soda, and iodine. If one couldn’t fix what ailed you, certainly one of the others could. His belief in bicarbonate of soda was so profound that his face registered pleasure whenever he announced, as he did frequently, that he had “a terrible heartburn.” Anticipating instant relief, he’d call for his miracle powder: “Jeanette, the bicarb, please.”
In an episode of All in the Family, when Edith brought Archie the bicarb he shouted for, Mike said, “Look at him, he’s a robot. He swallows the potion, and exactly fourteen seconds later”—finger snap!—“the heartburn’s gone.” Archie drank and fumed, waving Mike off as he enthusiastically counted the seconds in his face. On fourteen exactly, much to his relief and chagrin, a long, mellifluous belch erupted out of Archie. “Dumb Polack,” he said, stomping off.
There was another unforgettable incident involving Dad’s miracle prescriptions that wasn’t quite fit for prime time. It occurred on a cold winter morning in Boston during the Christmas holiday season. My family was visiting and my uncle Ben Susskind (married to my dad’s sister Fanny), his sons, David and Murray, and I were taking one of Ben’s daily brisk constitutionals. Ben was a small man with a florid face, a big voice, and an outdoorsy personality who sold insurance door-to-door, unsuccessfully. He was a rarity in that he was able to scratch his crotch through heavy pants and a winter coat, which is what he was vigorously doing as we strode along. Murray was embarrassed by the movement of Ben’s hands in the pockets of his coat. He made three syllables of “Dad.”