by Norman Lear
We sold some merchandise, more Willkie than Roosevelt in New England; it didn’t take much to satisfy our needs. Compared to the frenzy and vitriol of the election process today, the entire populace was sleepwalking. The Democratic and Republican conventions (in Chicago and Philadelphia, respectively) were raucous, at times rancorous, but the thousands of delegates from around the country, most from small towns, left no doubt that whatever was on their minds politically, they were also out for a good time. It was rare for most people to be that far away from home and shackle-free, and there was a palpable sense of joyous abandon and conviviality we don’t see at conventions today. The word gentler comes to mind when comparing that time to now. Even at the tail end of a depression and with a war brewing, we were living in a gentler time. Day after day Sidney and I lay on neighborhood lawns under giant oaks, talking for hours and napping. I haven’t napped in as blissful a state in any circumstance since.
• • •
I FELL IN LOVE with Emerson College and with Boston. Both felt absolutely right for me. Emerson had been known since its founding in 1880 as the Emerson College of Oratory. Just a few years before my arrival, the “Oratory” was dropped and the Emerson College that today specializes in the dramatic arts and communication—with campuses on both coasts—was born.
Since my ambition was to be a press agent, I enrolled with the intention of majoring in journalism, a new program that was being offered as a junior-year option. The student body was around two hundred (today it’s four thousand) and overwhelmingly female, which presented no problem for the dozen or so of us who were male. We were there to study the “spoken arts”—voice, theater, radio announcing, and radio as theater. Talk of communications as a field of study was in the air, enhanced by speculation about this thing called television, though its realization was extremely remote. (A few scientists were on record saying it would never happen at all.)
I lived at 270 Clarendon Street with four other Emerson freshmen, all male, and a handful of women in their thirties who worked for one of the many insurance companies headquartered in Boston. The Back Bay rooming house was owned and run like a dormitory by an Irish couple in their forties known to us as Ma and Pa Lawless. Except for me, everyone at 270 was Christian, and despite my lack of direct connection to my religion, I couldn’t have been more conscious of myself as a Jew if Hitler had been in the room pointing at me. Not that my being Jewish mattered to anyone else there—I never got a hint of that.
But that didn’t stop me from being extremely conscious of my circumcised penis. In those years, whether it was or not, circumcision seemed to be a particularly Jewish thing, so for weeks I scheduled my shower times to be sure I was alone in there. One day, off by a few minutes one way or the other, I found Stewart McGreggor entering the shower just as I was stepping out. There we stood, each of us stark naked, and I was stunned to see that he had been circumcised also and that his penis had a strong resemblance to my own. I couldn’t have felt more like a winner and a regular guy if I’d been awarded the Heisman Trophy.
• • •
THERE ISN’T A LOT TO SAY about my academic work at Emerson. I was not a serious student, there was no pressure from my parents to be one, so I aimlessly peeked into every nook and cranny of the Emerson curriculum. I did as much with the city of Boston, fell more and more in love with them both, and made some wonderful lifelong friends. But I never lost the sense of being outside looking in. I could be, and often was, at the very center of things and still felt like an outsider.
In the South Boston of that time Scully Square had a reputation for being a naughty neighborhood, which is why I quickly began to explore it. What kept me coming back was my discovery of the Old Howard, a historic theater established in the 1880s as a home for Shakespeare and other classic theater. By 1940 it had suffered two fires and a downturn in the number and class of people who were attracted to it. Now it was a well-known burlesque house featuring the most celebrated strippers of the day, along with some of the bawdiest comics, a few of whom would, years later, make big reputations on television.
I saw every new bill at the Old Howard during my two years at Emerson, soaking up the comics and the sketches and delighting in the bump-and-grind grand dames of strip. I think I learned as much about comedy from those queens of burlesque as I did from the comedians. Strutting the stage imperiously, and so teasingly taking it off, were, among others, Sherry Britton, Ann Corio, Georgia Sothern, Rose La Rose, Lili St. Cyr, Sally Rand, and Gypsy Rose Lee. And performing a handful of sketches that would outlast all of them—“Meet Me ’Round the Corner,” “Pay the Two Dollars,” “Slowly I Turned,” to name a few—were the likes of Red Buttons, Rags Ragland, Jack Albertson, B. S. Pulley, Bobby Clark, Phil Silvers, Bert Lahr, Joey Faye, and Red Skelton.
Burlesque and its practitioners touched me to the marrow as they mirrored the foolishness of the human condition. Absent all depth, absent all subtlety, but falling-down funny, these comics hung humanity out to dry. Their imperious counterparts, the statuesque strippers, did it their own way. They put us all on. It was our response that made us the ones who’d been had. Gypsy, Georgia, Lili—they all paraded, peeled, and undulated with a bump here and a grind there that were about as erotic as a stewardess pouring hot fudge on a ball of ice cream. But generic to the moment were those mostly middle-aged and older men in the first rows, whooping and hollering “Take it off” while a stripper was taking endless time to seductively roll a long sleeve from a naked shoulder and down a bare arm as if she were approaching climax.
I loved every second of it and, without being aware of this at the time, used it as a course of study. You could call it my major. Burlesque and its audience were my acting, producing, directing, and casting school. I think back on my TV shows and the lead characters they spawned and couldn’t be more grateful to the Old Howard. And as the world has turned for me, small wonder that years later, long after burlesque was gone, several of its practitioners would turn up in my life again, a few rather importantly.
• • •
IN MY SECOND SEMESTER at Emerson I played Uncle Stanley in a production of George Washington Slept Here, a trifle of a play, but a hit, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. As it turned out, at the very beginning of my career I would have a rather significant influence on the life of Mr. Hart. Leaping ahead for a moment:
It was after the war and I had become the press agent I’d always wished to be. I was working for a Broadway publicity firm, and it was my job to get our clients’ names in the news or in one of the several well-known gossip columns. There were eight major daily newspapers in New York at the time: the Times, the Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the Daily Mirror, the Post, the Journal-American, the World-Telegram, and PM, the only outspoken leftist daily I can ever recall. No paper today would dare lay claim to being left leaning; at the same time we witness an entire media empire, Fox, leaning decidedly rightward and denying it under the preposterous rubric “fair and balanced.”
Two of the clients represented by the company I worked for were Moss Hart and actress, singer, and future game show panelist Kitty Carlisle. Dorothy Kilgallen, famed showbiz columnist for the New York Journal-American, printed this squib concocted by me out of thin air in my first month on that first job: “Kitty Carlisle gifted friend Moss Hart with a pocket flask measured to his hip while he napped.” Moss and Kitty met for the first time when he phoned her to laughingly thank her. Within a year they married and were together until Hart died in 1961.
• • •
I WAS IN MY THIRD SEMESTER at Emerson when all hell broke loose for America. It was a Sunday and we were rehearsing an old play called The Two Orphans in the small theater behind 130 Beacon, under the direction of Gertrude Binley Kay, a tall, effusive Back Bay Brahmin of a woman who headed the theater department and directed most of its productions. GBK spoke in a loud, hilly coloratura that seemed to bounce off whichever colorful, large-brimmed hat she h
appened to be wearing. She was carrying on at the top of her powers when a woman from the front office staggered in weeping, barely able to choke out something she’d heard on the radio about the Japanese and an attack on our sleeping forces in Hawaii. Before she could get it all out coherently, two separate phones were ringing and someone remembered there was a radio in a cupboard backstage. Within minutes the rehearsal was over, we were gathering all the facts about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Gertrude Binley Kay was bellowing an invitation to join her and “march right down to that Japanese store on Commonwealth Avenue and throw a brick through the window!” The next day a more sensible, though no less passionate, President Roosevelt declared December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy” and Congress took a vote. America was at war.
• • •
SOME WEEKS LATER I phoned my grandfather to tell him I was thinking of enlisting. I called him first because I’d always loved the way he talked about his enlistment as a boy in Russia. “Oh, when I went for a soldier . . .” was the way his remembrance would begin, and I was enraptured. As I think about it, those words pretty much bookended our life together. They were among the last words that passed between us just a day before he died at ninety-two. He was in New Haven Hospital and I was told he hadn’t spoken or reacted to anything for a day or more. I, too, got no reaction from him, not even to my big hello, or to the mention of my name, or that I’d come from California—nothing, until I said, “Zayde, tell me about when you joined the army.” A beat and then, as if the sun were rising inside him, he beamed and murmured, “Ohhh, when I went for a soldier . . .” I must have relived that moment a thousand times since.
So when I called my zayde to discuss the idea of my going for a soldier, perhaps I should not have been so surprised at his response. He didn’t say “Go,” he didn’t say “Don’t.” He simply wept. My mother cried, too, when I phoned her: “But you’re in college! Nobody enlists in college.” Then, calling for my father: “Herman!” As he came to the phone I heard her add, “I need this now!”
Dad played it cool. Obviously, I hadn’t thought it through. I should wait for the emotion of Pearl Harbor to settle down. In six months we’d talk about it again. And by then, as only H.K. could reason, “Who knows, with a little more education you could enlist as an officer.”
My enlistment was on hold but service was on my mind when my closest friend, Nick Stantley, and I were talking one day behind the little stand we’d set up to sell school supplies at Emerson. How we might help the defense effort was the topic, and it occurred to me that we might sell Defense Stamps and Bonds for the Treasury Department. Defense Stamps sold for twenty-five cents each. With the first purchase you got a booklet to put them in, and it held $17.50 worth of stamps. You then turned that in and it bought you a Defense Bond, which matured in ten years and paid $25.
Word in the family had it that my uncle Jack, the press agent, was now working with the government as a dollar-a-year man. These were men and women who had some expertise in their line of work that could be of value to the war effort. They volunteered that expertise for a dollar a year. Uncle Jack signed on to market “Unusual Non-Military War Efforts” by the folks at home. Our idea was right up his alley, and he phoned the guy he reported to. A few days later I got a long-distance call—“long distance” being a big deal then, automatically anointing a phone call as, at the very least, important, and quite possibly urgent—from one Millburn McCarthy Jr. in Washington, DC.
Millburn McCarthy Jr. Holy shit! Talk about your stirring, rock-ribbed American names. This was a name that suggested real class and power, and a family history that didn’t begin within a thousand miles of a shtetl. Such thoughts occurred to me then, and do to this day, because that kid poking around on his crystal set, spooked by a Jew hater, still lives in me. In 1982, for example, at age sixty, I walked into the office of Andrew Heiskell, the longtime chairman and CEO of Time magazine, six feet four, crisp, iron-jawed, gorgeous, and quintessentially Gentile. I was there to tell him about People For the American Way and ask if he would care to join the newly formed board, but the subtext in my mind throughout our meeting was “This is the tallest, most spectacular goy I have ever seen.” Andrew, a Republican, by the way, until his death in 2003, was one of our strongest board members and a great friend, but—and I said this in my eulogy for him—the Jewish kid in me never spent a minute with Andrew Heiskell when he wasn’t conscious of feeling special, “chosen,” if you will, to be close to this man.
It was the same part of me that in 1942 needed not just to enlist but to see action. Imagining the war coming up conversationally later in life, I simply had to have served and seen serious action in it. Would I have felt this special need had I not been Jewish? I’ll never know for sure, but my sense of it is that nothing much had changed in me since the American Legion National Oratorical Contest, when I wondered if my appreciation of the Constitution didn’t run deeper because I was a Jew.
Millburn McCarthy Jr.’s response to the idea of selling Defense Stamps at Emerson was phenomenal. Emerson would be home to the nation’s first Collegiate Defense Stamp Bureau, and the idea would then be marketed to colleges across the country. I don’t recall McCarthy’s notion spreading nationwide, as he had hoped, but for Nick and me it became a one-act bonanza of excitement. The Associated Press did a story, it was printed in the Boston Globe, and a few days later we received an invitation to appear on national radio. It was a CBS program called The March of Time, which featured, along with the news of the day, stories of ordinary folks who created, invented, or performed extraordinary things. It was hosted by a series of announcers who were stars in their own right then, such as Harry von Zell and Westbrook Van Voorhis. This was, of course, my first dip into show business, the human dynamics of which remain so unchanged that it could have occurred last week. We got a call from a breathless young “producer” from The March of Time, who made it sound like he had discovered us and our story, but whose real job was simply to locate us for the real producer and book our appearance.
In a matter of weeks a date had been selected, and Nick and I were in a parlor car on a train to New York, heart-pumpingly out of our league but attempting to appear casual to the porters. In New York we were put up in a stately two-bedroom suite at the Roosevelt, one of the top hotels in the city at the time. The Guy Lombardo Orchestra famously played for dinner dancing at the Roosevelt. For two nights we were pigs in heaven in our hotel suite. To Nick and me, Room Service was a film starring the Marx Brothers. Suddenly it was a wheeled table, draped in an elegant white cloth, tended by a pair of waiters who brought the food we’d just ordered on plates and with cutlery fit only for aristocrats.
That night we slept in the kind of lush bedding we associated with movie queens and matinee idols. And when I woke up the next morning, staring up at the ceiling was a spiritual experience. It was, by many feet, higher than any of the eight-foot ceilings I had looked at from any bed I’d slept in before. Gone were the white stucco and the round air vent with the ring of brownish stain around it, at that point all I had ever opened my eyes to among the ceilings of my life.
Room service breakfast was even better than the previous night’s dinner, and we were far more laid back in the way we received it. Before we were finished, a script arrived from The March of Time for the Stantley and Lear segment that we were to rehearse starting at midday for the live broadcast at eight P.M. that night. It called for Mr. Van Voorhis to announce that the Treasury Department had just discovered the work of two young patriotic students whose brilliant concept to help the war effort at Emerson College was about to go nationwide to colleges everywhere. At which point music was to swell, then come down to hear the two students, Nick Stantley and Norman Lear, speculating as they walked along Boylston Street in Boston about what they might do to aid their brothers fighting abroad, until one of them, in a “Eureka!” moment, erupts with the haunting and unforgettable “Hey
, that’s it! We start the first Collegiate Defense Stamp Bureau!”
Nick and I read our lines together fifty times and had them memorized before we got to the CBS studio, met our producer and director, shook hands with Mr. Van Voorhis, and learned, to our dismay, that professional actors were going to play the parts of Nick and Norman. Following that, a ninety-second slug of time was allotted for Mr. Van Voorhis, known to conduct one hell of an interview, to chat with the real Nick and Norman.
The show was in full rehearsal from the top, and just as they were getting to the “CDSB STORY,” as it was listed in the rundown, we became aware of some bustling in the control room. Before we could hear ourselves played by actors, someone came out waving a copy of one of the afternoon papers, which featured a front-page photograph of an adorable little boy in leg braces, a victim of polio, kissing President Franklin Roosevelt, himself a later-in-life victim of the disease. Further, word came down from the powers that be that the boy had been located at Campobello, Roosevelt’s home, not far away, and would be on his way to CBS shortly to be spontaneously interviewed on The March of Time in place of the “CDSB STORY.”
In an instant it was as if Nick and I were standing on the sidewalk watching The March of Time march on. And no one found a moment to apologize. If our friends at Emerson who tuned in heard anything at all about us, it flew past at the very end of the show as fast and unintelligible as the disclaimers we hear today after every commercial for a medicinal product. “People taking this drug have been known to develop worms, or suffer heart attacks and strokes; do not take this drug if you have liver problems or a history of forgetting your keys; call your doctor if you have ever sneezed or coughed or scratched an itch anywhere on your body or the body of a family member, especially anyone named Helen.”
6
AS A RESULT of my generation’s response to Pearl Harbor and a war for which we were totally unprepared—yet, with our allies, managed to win—Tom Brokaw titled his book about us The Greatest Generation. There was indeed an instant and phenomenal coming together of Americans everywhere, men, women, and children alike. The votes to declare war—82–0 in the Senate, 388–1 in the House—were a perfect reflection of the overnight solidarity Pearl Harbor generated. And “the war effort,” as it was termed, was an extraordinarily modest title for what followed. From a standing start we had to conscript and train our troops; ship them to two theaters of war, Europe and the Pacific; and clothe, feed, and supply them with the firearms, ammunition, trucks, tanks, boats, submarines, and planes to do battle on the ground, on and beneath the water, and in the air—an altogether impossible task but for the backbreaking, mind-bending effort of all those at home, including men who for whatever reason could not serve in the military, women who had never worked in factories before, and mothers who historically never worked anywhere before. This greatest generation, almost to a person, quickly became a round-the-clock workforce as able, revved up, and dedicated as our fathers, brothers, and sons on the battlefield.