Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  Our crew, all in civvies now, sat up all night with our wives, attempting to retrieve a spark of that bond we shared so long ago when we were young, endangered, and responsible to one another for our very lives. Basically, the conversation we had as sexagenarians in Tucson was pretty much the conversation we’d had on that flight home from our service abroad. Of course we’d all been living lives worth reporting on in the forty-three intervening years, but we shared far less of that than we did of our wartime memories. For six hours or so we sat there, life-tested men recalling the almost unimaginable fact that once upon a time we were prepared, or at the least offered ourselves as prepared, to die together. If anyone were to tell me at any time that I could benefit from a nice cry, I might drag out two photographs of crew Umbriago, the one taken in Florida when we were assigned our plane and the other forty-odd years later at our Arizona reunion.

  • • •

  WHEN WE TOUCHED DOWN on American soil for the first time since we’d left for combat duty, it was Florida again, this time Palm Beach. Getting off the plane, we all fell to the ground and kissed America. As I did that I thought, “After what I’ve been through, how can I ever be afraid again?” A couple of hours later, all checked in, freshly showered, and feeling every bit the returning hero everyone on base was treating me like, I was bused off the field and deposited on a highway to hitchhike my way to Miami, where Charlotte and my in-laws, who lived there, were waiting. Why weren’t they in Palm Beach to greet their loved one just returned from battle? I had a pretty good guess.

  Charlotte’s father, Al Rosen, was a peerless tightwad. When she was a teenager he checked the mileage on the family car each time Charlotte drove it, insisted the car got far fewer miles per gallon than it did, and billed her allowance for every thimble of gas it consumed. Since Umbriago’s exact arrival time could not be determined, if it landed later than expected they would have had to spend the night in Palm Beach, which would have entailed the expense of two hotel rooms. Enough said.

  Everyone in the area was aware that GIs returning from abroad were landing daily at the local airfield. Talk about being treated like a hero! When I was on the road hitchhiking, my medals and citations firmly planted, drivers pulled up to me before I could raise a thumb. “Hey, soldier, bless you for your service. Can I buy you a beer?” “Can I buy you a dinner?” “When’d you last have a good steak, Sergeant?” It was thrilling and I was sky-high without a plane.

  When I arrived in Miami at my in-laws’ apartment, all that changed. My mother-in-law did not cook that evening because they thought that to really celebrate we’d all go out to dinner. Hooray! We left the apartment and walked several blocks to a commercial area with numerous restaurants and cafés, where Al checked the menus posted in their windows. We walked past those that had no postings. Ostensibly he was looking for great dishes, food fit for a kid just returned from fighting for his country, who hadn’t eaten anything but GI food—meals prepared for hundreds at a time, ladled onto a metal tray by some phlegmatic nineteen-year-old in a space appropriately named a mess hall—for almost two years. Tough order; no wonder Al was having a difficult time. And then suddenly, eureka! What an idea, why didn’t he think of it earlier? There are no delis in Italy. And we’re in Miami, for Christ’s sake! “Look at the grin on that boy,” Al said.

  I have to admit it was a fine delicatessen he took us to. They had takeout, of course, and a table area where, given that it was well past nine by now, only a few people were dawdling. As we walked to a table, we passed one that hadn’t been cleared yet, and several dollars, obviously a tip, sat among the dishes and flatware. Just as I noticed it I heard my father-in-law again. “Hey, whadda we need with these bright lights and strangers, anyway?”

  Twenty minutes later we were sitting at a kitchen table in the Rosens’ extremely efficient apartment, making our own salami sandwiches. “They make them there, you eat them there, and you pay twice as much, you know,” Al instructed. “Tricks of the trade,” he added with the wink that usually concludes lessons from assholes. And, should you be wondering why salami and not corned beef for the returning vet, well, the beef wasn’t up to speed that night. “Too fatty,” said Al.

  You have to be wondering what Charlotte and I said to each other that night. Very little that wasn’t perfunctory, halfhearted, and forced, I’m sure. We barely knew each other at all, well enough to go to a movie together—a matinee—but that was about as far as it went. She was a stranger to me, as I must have been to her. We had practically nothing in common. I was trying to build a marriage, a life, on the foundation of one moment of delight in a phone conversation. The only thing that kept us together, once she arrived, was our daughter, Ellen.

  • • •

  JUST A FEW WEEKS AFTER arriving home, landing in Palm Beach, kissing the earth and telling myself I could never be afraid again, there I was sitting in the anteroom of George and Dorothy Ross Associates in New York, waiting to be interviewed for the job Mr. Ross had promised two months earlier, and scared shitless. Inside my head I was screaming at myself, “It hasn’t been a month since you came home from a fucking war, what do you mean you’re afraid now?” When Mr. Ross came out of his office to bid me come in, I must have slipped into some hidden reservoir of self-confidence, just as I did at seventeen when I won that oratorical contest instead of staying in bed with a nervous stomach, as my mother had advised.

  George Ross was a natty professorial type who radiated Harvard despite having graduated from Brooklyn College. George was a far cry from the Damon Runyon types, like his wife, Dorothy, who inhabited the Broadway scene. I remember the Rosses, their two associates—Michael Frank, a woman, and Bunny Simon, a man—better than people I worked with longer and far more recently. I was there to innovate, to write witticisms, to make up stories and attention-getting comments that would be put into the mouths of a long client list of actors, playwrights, producers, designers, and others, for the many columnists—Dorothy Kilgallen, Leonard Lyons, Walter Winchell, Frank Kingdon, Earl Wilson, Ed Sullivan, Danton Walker—who held forth in the eight daily New York papers, each of them as powerful in their own way as the talking heads or commentators on television and cable news today. And, as advertised in my announcement from Foggia, I wished to be the person behind the curtain, the shadow promoting someone else from his anonymous, well-worn Remington.

  Ross told me that I could start on Monday and that my pay would be thirty-five dollars a week, which by inflection he made to sound like an important sum. Then, because I’d foolishly told him up front that this appointment with him was the first of two, he added, “And I have to know now that you want to be here.” As he awaited a reply, I was thinking about George Evans. This was a job in hand, Evans only a possibility. But with Evans came “The Voice,” as by now Sinatra had been labeled. I was in no position to walk out on a job in hand, but fortunately Mr. Ross misinterpreted my pause. “Forty dollars,” he said.

  A year or so before I started to work at Ross Associates, my father had turned over a new leaf also. His work as a ten-percenter in the war effort having concluded, H.K. decided that, with the contacts he’d made among small manufacturing plants around Connecticut, he would go into the manufacturing business himself. During the war, the big companies—General Electric, Westinghouse, and Whirlpool—cut way back on the manufacture of home appliances in order to serve the product needs of the military. At war’s end the pent-up demand for new stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines had those major manufacturers working at warp speed to answer it. While they concentrated on major appliances, there was, as H.K. perceived it, a window of opportunity for a new company to make a line of small appliances—toasters, hot plates, waffle irons, and tea kettles. And so my dad’s Lear, Incorporated, was born.

  There was another, earlier and far more established, Lear, Incorporated, in Michigan, founded by Bill Lear, inventor of the car radio. H.K. knew that, of course, and that was the who
le point of naming his company Lear, Incorporated. H.K. was confident that Bill Lear would not want the identity of his firm confused with another and would pay him a million dollars to change the name of the company that was producing the coveted Lear Two-Burner Hot Plate and the soon-to-come Lear Whistling Tea Kettle. Bill Lear, unfortunately oblivious to the advent of either product, went on instead to design and manufacture the Learjet.

  My work as a fledgling press agent didn’t last a year, but it was packed with incident and seasoning. Getting along with George, Dorothy, Michael, Bunny, and the other Broadway types I had to deal with was a high-wire act. The tightrope was a line of communication that one walked balancing bluster and wit with a full imagination and a touch of veracity. Ironic that my strengths on that tightrope were exactly what got me fired.

  My job was to get our clients’ names in print. When the Journal-American’s Dorothy Kilgallen ran that bit of bluster I mentioned earlier about Kitty Carlisle gifting Moss Hart with a pocket flask measured to his hip while he napped, it was a rare twofer, two clients in a single item, and I was king for a day in the office. Kilgallen called George to say she was embarrassed she’d printed it, but said it was indeed cute. “But tell that kid to tone it down,” she said. “I won’t think it cute the next time.”

  Some weeks later one of our clients, a hit Broadway musical revue, Are You With It?, needed some attention. It starred some favorites of the time, Johnny Downs, Lew Parker, and Dolores Gray. In the cast, too, was a major vaudeville act, Buster Shaver and His Midgets. The midgets were Olive and George. I hit another double with Kilgallen when she, or some daft associate, as evidenced by Ms. K’s later reaction, okayed this item for her column: “Buster Shaver and his midget, Olive, stars of Are You With It?, seen shopping Fifth Avenue, he on foot, she on a St. Bernard.”

  Evidently, someone had challenged her with something like, “Come on, Dorothy, how could you print such bullshit?” At which point Ms. Kilgallen had a fit, phoned George Ross, and demanded that my ass be fired. Begging for his forgiveness, I offered to take a cut in pay to the original thirty-five dollars per week, but it was a no-go. I was summarily dismissed, and without severance.

  A few days later we learned that Charlotte was pregnant, which prompted a decision to move back to Hartford. My father had been asking me to join him in Lear, Incorporated, which he believed could be the next GE. “It took two world wars to open up this big an opportunity,” he said. “Give me two years, just two years, and you can buy the company that fired you!” Despite every previous disappointment and the manic claim that we’d build a giant company in two years, this was my dad, and I went with him.

  9

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1946 Charlotte and I found a little two-bedroom house with a convertible den for sale in Windsor, a few miles outside Hartford. We didn’t have the $1,500 down payment on the $11,500 purchase price until H.K., in another of the grandstand plays for which I adored him, hocked his hotshot pinkie ring. (It was on his pinkie again within a month, most likely while he was being dunned for the money he’d borrowed to get it out of hock, or to cover the check he’d written for the same purpose.) This was something like my tenth residence in twenty-four years. I had very little space to call my own in any of them, yet I can’t recall having a bad day for that reason. That could be because wherever I was living there was so much else to do just to save my ass.

  My father lived every other day saving his ass because on the surrounding days he was busy doing something to get his ass in trouble. No one knew that better than his attorney William J. Burke, a former judge who was mesmerized by Herman K. Lear, handled all the legal work putting Lear, Incorporated, together, and even loaned him half of the forty thousand dollars H.K. raised to get started. Bill Burke was a round, life-loving Irishman. I’ve always divided people between wets and drys. Dry people are cold, brittle, and very certain; they don’t hug well, and if you should hug one you could cut yourself on his body. Wet people are warm and tender, and when they hug they melt in your arms. Bill Burke was sopping wet. H.K. was a sopping wet personality with a bone-dry conscience.

  Lear, Incorporated, was turning out about one hundred fifty two-burner electric hot plates per week, and George Thompson, its designer, had Lear’s electric tea kettle ready to go when I entered the scene. I never knew what his qualifications were as the designer and inventor he held himself out to be, but George looked the part—tall, gray, and sloped, as if he’d spent a lot of time poring over important stuff. I could see why my father was excited about the “one-cubicfoot nonelectric refrigerator especially designed for the trunk of your car” that Mr. Thompson had invented, and for which he would have the prototype very soon.

  Lester Gowin was the owner of a tool-and-die factory in Middletown, Connecticut, that stamped out the aluminum bodies for the Lear hot plate. Lester was a low-key, serious, and amusing fellow with a mustache that could have passed for an eyebrow. I liked him immediately. The burners and wiring were installed at a plant in Wallingford owned by Izzy Wolfson. Izzy, a pleasant, portly fellow, sat behind a big desk all day but was never really there. He was a ruminator seeking a topic. “How’s the missus, Izzy?” could get him ruminating for minutes. “She’s fine, she tells me, but sometimes I think women only tell the truth to other women, and I wonder if it was women only on the planet . . .” Izzy would get so lost in reflection that a person could have a heart attack in front of him and he’d incorporate it. “So the thought of it pains you, too, every man on earth disappearing . . . ?”

  There were three other factories involved in the hot plate process—the frames were painted in Meriden, the switches made in Waterbury, and the nameplates made in Bridgeport. There was a lot of hauling to be done, and there were some weeks when our deal with the trucker lapsed and I did the trucking. Any deal, as a matter of fact, could lapse at any time, so slipshod was Lear, Incorporated’s paperwork. H.K. did not have a bookkeeper or a secretary. His office was his hat, and his desk was the band at its brim, into which he stuck bills and receipts, bank notices and purchase orders, and—as many days as not—a list of food items or dry cleaning to pick up for my mother on the way home.

  On September 15, Charlotte and I welcomed our beautiful daughter, Ellen, into the world. This was before Hartford Hospital invited fathers to be present at the birth, so the closest I could get was to have her held up to me on the other side of a glass wall. I recall looking at this tiny, squished-up face and not knowing what to feel. Was I not guy enough to have that proud “fruit of my loins” kind of feeling? Or was I standing there more like a boy with a “see my new puppy” kind of feeling? Did I love this little person? If so, was that because I was expected to? Shouldn’t I have been less aware of my sterile surroundings—the lip marks on the glass separating me and my child, that disinfectant antiseptic hospital smell, the young black nurse with the old-looking hands holding the baby up for me? Shouldn’t I have been more caught up with the miracle of birth, the wonder of it all, and the God-given blessing that was about to change my life forever? But the fact is that, at age twenty-four, I was spectacularly unready to become a father.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T ACTUALLY report to anyone at Lear, Incorporated. I just saw what I had to do and did it. With an old Army jeep pulling a small trailer, I crisscrossed the state, hauling metal and parts from one place to another as needed and making excuses and apologies for everything that was constantly falling through the cracks. It all wound down to how much more H.K. promised every step along the manufacturing way than he could actually deliver.

  Orkil, Incorporated, in Hartford, was the GE distributor for Connecticut. Because GE wasn’t making small appliances at the time, they agreed to distribute the Lear hot plate and electric tea kettle, which stuttered into production late in 1947. They took a big interest, too, in Lear, Incorporated’s forthcoming one-cubic-foot nonelectric refrigerator that worked on some new cooling principle and could be k
ept in the trunk of an automobile. But H.K. didn’t encourage Orkil’s interest.

  During the war, as a ten-percent man, he’d done business with several top people in the War Department who were now retired from the military and running the Ohio companies they worked with during the war. Orkil was okay for his hot plate and tea kettle, but with the Lear, Incorporated, first-ever one-cubic-foot nonelectric refrigerator close at hand, here, H.K. thought, was his chance to play with the big boys again. And so he plucked a couple of business cards out of his hat.

  One morning my dad and I picked up George Thompson in Greenwich, along with the prototype of his one-cubic-foot refrigerator that would work in the trunk of a car, and drove on to New York, where we were to present it. I emphasize that the unit would work in the trunk of a car because that was a big selling point. In the 1940s people took a drive not just to go someplace but for the joy of taking a drive. Our relationship to the car we drove was a romance, and the thought of pulling over to the side of the road for a cold drink right out of our own trunks heightened that romance. As a nation we took enormous pride in the American motorcar. To see a world leader stepping out of an automobile, on the front page of our newspapers or in the newsreels, was to see that leader stepping out of a Lincoln, a Packard, or a Cadillac. The American motorcar was a symbol of America’s class and power, and the most visible source of its self-esteem. Its slow erosion from being the standard of the world tore the first hole in the fabric of the American Dream.

  Dad’s presentation to an eager group of manufacturing executives from major companies in the Akron and Toledo areas was set for four P.M. in a suite he’d reserved at the Waldorf Astoria. I learned on the drive to pick up George that he’d reported a few days earlier that he had the temperature down to a perfect thirty-two degrees, but just couldn’t be sure how long it would hold.