by Norman Lear
There was a fellow sweeping the sidewalk in front as I drove up. Noticing me sitting there, he asked, “You new here?”
“Yes, I am,” I answered. “Matter of fact, I just got here a few hours ago from Connecticut.”
The man with the broom was George Boroff, who ran the Circle Theatre. He got a kick out of my having just driven cross-country with a wife and kid who were now stashed in a motel while I shot the breeze with him. I told him I had come to Hollywood to be a publicist. The theater had a publicist who could probably use help, Boroff said, and, intrigued by my story, he offered to let me hang with him until I learned enough to move on. At my grateful reaction, he sweetened the deal, offering me a seat he had been holding for tonight’s opening, lights down in thirty minutes. I couldn’t say no. It was too much. And it was certainly too much for Charlotte.
How hard would it be to get your wife to accept that you couldn’t resist a burger and a few beers with your buddies before you came home to the birthday dinner she’d spent all day preparing for you? That would be a little nothing compared to the phone call I had to make. “Our first minutes in California, and you’re going to leave your wife and daughter in this hellhole to see some goddamn play in a round theater?” she cried out in furious disbelief. “On our first night?”
“I have to,” I said, in the spirit of “One day you’ll understand.” There was no way in this lifetime that could happen, or, from her viewpoint, had any right to.
My seat was in the second row, and in front of me there were three seats taped off. As the house lights dimmed and the stage lights were coming up—a moment when I have always been moved to whisper to my seatmate, “Magic time!”—three people entered and approached the empty seats. As they drew close I recognized the great character actor Alan Mowbray, multiple Academy Award nominee Dame Gladys Cooper, and—it could not be, but it was!—the best-known face and silhouette in the world, Charlie Chaplin. His son Sidney, it turned out, was in the play, along with Strother Martin, William Schallert, and Diana Douglas (Michael Douglas’s mother).
It was easily the best production of Major Barbara I’m ever likely to see. Mr. Chaplin, we soon learned, was equally impressed. When the show ended and the house lights came up, all eyes were on him as he remained seated. No one moved. There being no backstage, the cast began to slip into the theater and sit on the floor facing him.
When they were all there, he rose. Expressing his deepest respect for the production, his all-out praise for the cast and direction, and his gratitude for being so well entertained, he concluded with something to this effect: “I rarely feel words can convey what I feel when I’ve had such a good time, and the best way I’ve found to handle that is to attempt to pay you back in kind.” At which point, just a few feet from me, within a few hours of my arrival in California, Charlie Chaplin proceeded to perform a pantomime of a man, a bit tipsy, a letter in hand, trying to reach a mailbox in a high wind.
When I got back to the motel, well beyond enchanted now, Charlotte wouldn’t talk to me. I’m not sure she would ever have cared to hear about my experience at the Circle Theatre that night. I had no idea what interested Charlotte. We lived in two different worlds, separated by infinity.
I left the motel soon after dawn, L.A. Times in hand, to check out apartment rentals. My eyes searched each neighborhood as I raced through them to the one promising listing I found, which turned out to have been rented. Driving glumly away, just two blocks over, on Kenmore Street, a block off Beverly Boulevard, I spotted a woman, still in a robe and nightgown, approaching a spot on her lawn with a FOR RENT sign in one hand and a hammer in the other. I swerved to a stop and leaped out of the car, shouting, “Hold that hammer!” She laughed and held. Her rental was a small one-bedroom cottage behind her house. I took it in an instant and the Lear family moved into their first Los Angeles residence the next day.
• • •
WHILE I SOUGHT A JOB in publicity, I decided to join my cousin Elaine’s husband, Ed Simmons, who, while trying to find a gig as a comedy writer, had just begun selling home furnishings door-to-door for the Gans Brothers. Elaine, who had worked with me on Saturdays at our grandfather’s dress shop, could not have been closer to me. In her eighties she would still repeat (and laugh as joyously as ever at) the title of a story she insisted I wrote at age nine: “Hachoo Blow Nose, My Blue Honey Maid.”
The Gans Brothers operated out of an untidy combination of storefront and warehouse, and it was there that we door-to-door salesmen gathered each morning. Ed and I had only one clunker per family, so our wives drove us to the brothers Gans, one of whom would drive us “to territory”—single-home suburban neighborhoods—to ply our trade. I loved that expression, “to territory,” and it still amuses the hell out of me. Territory was where the American Dream of owning your own home was being lived. It was where those simple tract homes began to sprout second garages, and where a number of their driveways began to sport RVs and trailers hauling boats.
The dream was seen as so pure that the signs of its certain long-term disintegration—poor zoning, insufficient planning, too few parks, too much asphalt, sensible cars morphing into gas-guzzling, vision-blocking vans—were overlooked altogether. Companies like the Gans Brothers flocked to these neighborhoods as if welcomed by a giant neon sign: CONSUMERS LIVE HERE.
Each morning before heading out to territory, we salesmen were given the choice of a gift item with which to entice the unsuspecting housewives we were calling on. We could carry either the “large lamp,” pretty much what it sounds like, or the “ship clock,” a piece of crockery in the shape of a ship with a timepiece in the middle. By ten-thirty each morning there we were, facile-tongued and hungry to score, with our lamps and clocks in tow, knocking on doors in search of our prey. I would step or lean as far inside as possible when the door was opened by the lady of the house, scan the room for the condition of the furniture, and introduce myself.
My job was to leave the lamp in exchange for setting a time for our Mr. Simmons to meet with the lady. He was the “closer” and his job was to sell her a seven-piece dining room set or an upholstered chair, ottoman, and end table, for which she had already received a lamp. Of course, if she bought nothing, he took the lamp with him on his way out, making a liar out of the man who’d given it to her. I did mention how much I hated this, didn’t I? With the hope that we might do better selling a different product, Ed and I switched to taking and selling family photos door-to-door. We traded in our bait, the clocks and lamps, for an album of family pictures only a mother could envy.
As we perused the neighborhoods, we favored homes with tricycles, scooters, and carriages strewn about, looking for those young mothers with a tendency to believe that every shot of their precious children captured an instant of priceless memory. When I found one, I would announce with as dazzling a smile as I could manage, and in a “how lucky can you get?” tone of voice, that our photographer, Mr. Simmons, would be in the neighborhood that afternoon and the coupon I was about to hand her would entitle her to a free photograph, an eight-by-ten, no less, “that is, unless you would prefer a five-by-seven, which an occasional mom does, you understand, because her shelf can accommodate more pictures that way, but no matter, you can have your choice when our award-winning photographer, Mr. Simmons—you can’t believe how great he is with children—gets here around three o’clock.”
So I would make appointments for our Mr. Simmons one day, and he would make appointments for our Mr. Lear the next. The free photo, chosen from the dozen or more proofs, was never the best shot of the child. “May I see those other proofs?” the young mother would invariably inquire after a quick glance at her disappointing gift. A smile of relief followed her flipping through the far more worthy photos, and the skids were greased for ordering a number of prints. What a lovely surprise for Dad! But, then, shouldn’t the beaming mother of those adorable children be thinking of the grandparents?
Both sets? Not to mention aunts and uncles, we all have our favorites, and don’t overlook the wallet size.
• • •
CHARLOTTE AND ELAINE, young mothers themselves, became friendly, and the four of us spent a good deal of time together after Ed and I returned from territory. Neither of our families could afford a television set, so we visited Uncle Al and Aunt Sadie, Elaine’s parents, religiously on Tuesday nights to see Texaco Star Theater, also known as The Milton Berle Show. At eight P.M. on those Tuesdays, neighbors everywhere descended on the houses on their block that boasted a TV set. Berle, also known as “Mr. Television,” was an outrageous funnyman. Loud and hilariously vulgar, he personified the guy who’ll do anything for a laugh. A lot of his humor could be described as “early homosexual.” He swished and puckered and spoke with a gay inflection before gay became a topic or an issue in the media.
Ed and I tried to schedule our job-hunting interviews and other efforts on the same days. I’m not sure what Eddie was doing to become a comedy writer, but I started knocking on the door of every publicity firm I could locate and tried to get an interview with the press department at every studio. While this effort was gestating, I threw out a couple of grappling hooks far afield from the career I was seeking, both quintessentially misguided.
The 1950s was known as the Golden Age of Wrestling, and the order of the day for a star wrestler was, as the Stephen Sondheim song goes, “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.” The gimmick consisted of a move or a hold, unique to that wrestler, that put his opponent away. Argentina Rocca, for example, had an elaborate, pretty much trademarked kick to the lower back that rendered the other guy “absolutely helpless.” He’d drop like a stone.
We met a guy who’d been captain of his college wrestling team who was also a baritone capable of reaching a single high tenor note. The gimmick we conceived for him was built around that note. Fans would cheerfully go along, we felt sure, with our guy wrestling his way to a position that saw his mouth within an inch or so of the other guy’s ear. Once there he would let out just two notes, going from a low-register baritone to a piercing high tenor, ostensibly shattering the other fellow’s eardrum and causing him to fold like a towel and fall to the mat.
The second grappling hook occurred to me one day driving along Sunset Boulevard in Bel Air. Every half mile there seemed to be another car pulled over on a side street, the driver on the boulevard holding a sign that read, MAP OF STAR HOMES. For five bucks you could have the addresses so you could drive to the homes of your favorite TV and movie stars. It hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. What, I wondered, about all the fans who couldn’t afford a trip to Hollywood and must settle for writing to their favorite stars? Wouldn’t they relish the opportunity to reach them directly at home? A little research and we learned that three hundred dollars would buy an inch-and-a-half classified ad in Sunday newspapers around the country whose combined circulation would reach more than 25 million readers. We were off and running. Our ad offered six addresses—“you name the stars”—for one dollar.
A Master Clark Lee of Bowling Green, Ohio, was our one and only respondent. In westerns of the day, the lead always had a Mexican sidekick, whose girlfriend was usually played by the actress Estrellita Rodriguez. Master Lee’s request was for her address only, and he was happy to pay the full dollar for it. That was one dollar more than we made with our Singing Wrestler, on whose behalf it took some serious muscle just to make it into a room with a promoter.
• • •
OUR LUCK CHANGED one night when the Simmonses and the Lears had an early meal, and the girls, as we referred to our wives then, decided to go out to a movie, leaving the men to babysit the kids. I had a book to read and Eddie was working on a parody of some popular tune. At some point we started to talk about what he was writing and wound up finishing it together. When the girls came home we sang it to them and they laughed. It was amazing, one of them said, that we hadn’t thought of writing together before.
I saw Eddie putting the song in a folder and asked what he intended to do with it. He didn’t have much of an answer; he was building a library for when he got a job writing for some comic. I suggested we go out right then and find a comic to sell it to. It was only eleven or so, and there were a number of nightclubs featuring live entertainment back then, several of them well known, like Billy Gray’s Band Box, Eddie Foy’s, and the Bar of Music, among others. Charlotte and Elaine encouraged us.
Our first stop was the Bar of Music, and when we walked in there was a woman at a piano doing insult humor, interspersed with an occasional song and story. Her name was Carole Abbott, and we sold our parody to her on the spot for forty bucks. Since I didn’t make more than fifty in a good week and I’d just made twenty in a couple of hours, it became clear to me, and to Eddie also, that we should continue writing together. The idea of earning a living by sitting around making each other laugh was clearly preferable to trudging about with clocks and lamps and photo albums trying to separate innocent housewives from their money.
Eddie and I rented a little office above a delicatessen on Beverly Boulevard for six bucks a month, worked in territory during the day, had dinner with our families, then wrote or whiled away the hours above the deli attempting to write, until one of us dropped. One day we came up with an idea for a routine for Danny Thomas. In nightclubs Danny was as big as you could get, a magnificent raconteur. The next day, browsing a copy of Daily Variety, we noted that Thomas’s agent was Phil Kellogg at the William Morris Agency.
At one P.M., it being 98 percent likely that Mr. Kellogg was at lunch, I phoned his office. Speaking as fast as I could, I identified myself as a reporter for the New York Times. “I’ve been out here for two days interviewing Danny Thomas,” I told his secretary breathlessly. “I’m at the airport now, writing this piece on the plane, filing it as soon as we land, and I have two last questions for Mr. Thomas. Quick, please, they’re calling my flight.”
I had his number in an instant, dialed it, and Danny Thomas picked up the phone. He was working with his piano player, Wally Popp, but was curious to learn how I’d gotten his home phone number. When I told him the truth, he laughed and was intrigued with what I wanted to pitch him.
“I’ve got a date tomorrow night at Ciro’s, a Friars’ Frolic,” he said. “They know my routines, but I have no time to learn something new. I’m looking through my stuff for something old enough to seem fresh,” he said.
“This is short and will learn easily,” I responded.
“Tell me in two sentences,” he ordered.
“Three Yiddish words,” I spoke quickly. “They have no counterpart in English and would take a paragraph to express in any other language . . .”
“Get over here right away,” he said, and gave me his address in Beverly Hills.
“I can’t get over there now, but my partner and I will be there by six. How’s that?” I asked prayerfully.
“But you said you’re in Hollywood. You’re twenty minutes away.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I’ve got other things to do.”
“You’ve got something more important to do than sell me a piece of material you’ve been killing yourself to get to me?” he yelled incredulously.
The truth was that we hadn’t yet set a word to paper. But I finessed his question with, “Well, you gotta admit, we’re off to a funny start!”
Amused despite himself, he said, “All right, but if you’re not here by six sharp, forget it.”
Simmons and I got there with no time to spare with our finished piece, “Tsemisht, Fardrayt, and Farblonjet”—three Yiddish words describing escalating degrees of confusion.
Thomas was perhaps the greatest storyteller of his time, and we’d written him a story about each of the words. One described a waitress at a diner who had to fill a take-out order for eight cups of coffee—one with two sugars, no cream; one with one cream, no sugar
; one with two sugars, two creams; etc. (And this was back when the lids and the paper cups came together much less securely.) She was tsemisht. Another woman—nine months pregnant, with an infant crawling on the floor, a cake in the oven, the phone and doorbell ringing, and her water bursting—was fardrayt. Finally, we had a guy driving a huge flatbed rig in a pouring rainstorm with a two-story home on the back, turning mistakenly into a dead-end street. He was farblonjet.
The next night Ed and I stood in the kitchen at Ciro’s, peering into the club and listening to the laughs Danny Thomas was getting with his inimitable rendition of the routine we’d written for him. He was a smash. He gave us five hundred dollars for the piece when he first read it, and said if it worked he’d pay us another thousand. He performed that piece for years, but we never saw the extra grand. I teased him about it every time I saw him, and he’d always say, “Bless you, my son. The money’s doing more good at St. Jude,” a children’s hospital Thomas raised money for tirelessly throughout his career.
The morning after the Friars’ Frolic, I got a call from David Susskind, my first cousin and son of the uncle Ben who, along with H.K., taught their sons conclusively that iodine was not the cure for an itchy scrotum. David was a young agent with Music Corporation of America, a Goliath in every area of entertainment. He had been at Ciro’s when Danny Thomas “killed, but I mean killed, Norman.” When he asked Thomas who wrote the new piece and heard it was “some kids from out of nowhere, Simmons and Lear,” he wasn’t even sure the Lear was me, but he had heard something about my moving to California and couldn’t wait to make the call.
David was the MCA rep for a new network variety show going into production and he asked me if Simmons and Lear had written for television. I said, “Yes, of course,” feeling comfortable with the lie since we had never written for a nightclub comic before, yet our success there was why he’d called us in the first place.