by Norman Lear
• • •
I CAN’T IMAGINE A CRAZIER, more inept work schedule than Ed and I maintained writing, and in my case also directing, The Martha Raye Show. It’s possible that Ed Simmons was a clutch writer for neurotic reasons of his own, but I believe it was I who brought clutch to the party. I could not and did not write with Eddie. We never sat in a room together and wrote. Nor did I ever work that way in my long history of collaborations. I could sit for days and talk through stories and scenes and dialogues. All the later work with multiple writers was recorded and transcribed, and much of that material still exists. After we agreed on a story, Ed, the only writer I worked with in partnership, would write the first or second half of a show, while I tackled the other half. Then each of us would rewrite or touch up the half we hadn’t worked on. After that, compulsively, I had to spend time alone with every script.
We would broadcast live every other Tuesday from eight to nine P.M. and have a table reading of the script for the next show, on Wednesday eight days later. Depending on how well that went, we then either started to rehearse or went home to rewrite and start rehearsals the next morning. We’d rehearse dry—that is, without cameras—through Friday and, in an emergency, some of Saturday, move into the theater Monday, and rehearse our way to a stop-and-go dress rehearsal with songs and dances by Monday evening. Tuesday, after an early start, we camera-rehearsed until three-thirty P.M., had a complete dress rehearsal before an audience at five, broke for notes and dinner, and broadcast live before a second audience at eight o’clock. On average the show broke down to three or four major scenes, out of which grew three or four songs, a couple of full dance numbers choreographed by Herb Ross (who went on to direct, among dozens of films, Footloose, The Turning Point, and Play It Again, Sam) and a handful of interstitials. It all had to serve Martha; her goombah, Rocky Graziano; and guest stars such as Cesar Romero, Tallulah Bankhead, and Paulette Goddard.
All of that was hard enough. What complicated it even more was how Simmons and I approached the writing of each script. Wednesday and Thursday following the broadcast we took off altogether. It was our weekend. When we sat down to talk script on Friday we had five days to write the show for Wednesday’s table reading. Don’t ask me where the next three days went. I know we tended to wake early, have breakfast, and start talking. I see flashes of us now, sprawled in a variety of positions on couches and on the floor and at a table in the living room. In the evening we’d have some food delivered or walk over to The Palm, a steak house on Second Avenue, return to the apartment, and scratch our heads some more.
By day two I was starting to feel what I described, when I sought therapy years later, as “shit in the head”—“S.I.T.H.” My God, it’s an anagram!—a mental state that tied ideas and concepts into knots; saw them banging smack into one another; had them brawling, begging individually for consideration; and at the same time battling collectively against the intrusion of disconnected ideas, recollections, contemplations, problems, and fears having nothing to do with the subject at hand, all making for a giant jumble of mind-blowing shit. I must have been eating at my desk many years ago in just such a mood when I wrote this:
THOUGHTS WHILE LUNCHING ON A BOWL OF CHICKEN SOUP WITH RICE
How long dead the chicken from whose minimal residue
This soup was made and named, killed by whom?
Who fed this fowl, penned it, and what did it see
Before it lent itself to soup and me?
Isn’t it interesting that such thoughts lurk
Only when I sit down to work?
While my S.I.T.H. was clogging my synapses, several departments were waiting to see what the next script would require. Set construction, wardrobe, music, and choreography all had to get to work days before the table reading. Ed and I were always late to get words on paper, and several times so late that it was early Monday morning, the table reading just two days away, before we could meet with the department heads and tell them what they needed to know. When the meeting ended the set designer knew we were opening in Martha’s home, the choreographer and designer knew it would be a street corner next and a park following, the wardrobe people had a sense of what everyone would be wearing scene by scene, and the music people knew that Martha needed a happy song here, a heartbreaker there, etc.
Once they all left, Ed and I would sit in separate rooms and start writing. With two days to turn out a full script, enter the Alwyn Pharmacy and those much-needed writers’ assistants Dexedrine and Seconal. Tuesday evening we’d finish working on the script and try to get a few hours of sleep before I’d run it over to the mimeograph people, whose smelly purple ink-drenched runoffs preceded the Xerox machine, so that copies would be ready for me to take to the table reading Wednesday morning at eleven.
In the days we had relatively free between shows, Eddie and I held some great parties at our showplace of an apartment. The winding staircase served as a stage, and I can still see the likes of Gordon MacRae, Imogene Coca, Red Buttons, Jack E. Leonard, Henny Youngman, and Martha herself, singing or clowning from a perch on that staircase some feet above us. One party stands out in my mind. The crowd had thinned out and a handful remained, including Martha and a couple of the singers who backed her up. As a performer, Martha was a cartoon character, loud and vulgar and physically outrageous, with a mouth that looked like a large rip in her face. When called upon, however, she could also evoke enough sadness and compassion to tear your heart out. It was that Martha, sitting on the floor now, more than a bit high, singing everything in her repertoire from a heart soaked in tears. Not that there was no joy to be had. But it, too, was soaked in tears. Martha Raye at her best was a clown.
• • •
IT HAD BEEN almost ten years since I’d last seen him in Foggia, Italy, when I got a call from my 772nd Bomb Squadron buddy Leonard Sosna. He was in town from Chicago with a friend, they were visiting a girl they knew, and he somehow got my phone number through NBC. Could we get together? Of course, I told him.
“Great,” he said, “we are in a town house on Thirty-eighth Street near Fifth Avenue.”
“I’m on Forty-first,” I said, “ten minutes away.”
How could I have known this was the lead-in to my second marriage, the beginning of a thirty-year chapter of my life, when Frances Loeb opened the door to her second-floor flat?
“So you’re Norman Lear,” she exclaimed, as if thrilled by a name she’d known all her life. She hadn’t, of course—she’d probably never seen or heard of it before that evening—but that didn’t stop her. “I never watch television, but I certainly know of you,” she continued warmly. That was Frances. What I didn’t know as we met that night was that in another mood she could meet someone who said, “Hello, I’m Cindy Crawford,” respond crisply, “Of course you are,” and move on without another word.
Frances Loeb, thirty-two and twice divorced, was excitement personified, effusive, combustible, and striking. She had great flair and a great figure, a combination that leaned as much toward elegance as it did toward sex appeal. When she walked into a room, an air of danger and a touch of class came with her. And that was true whichever of her bipolar moods she was in. (She wouldn’t be formally diagnosed as manic-depressive until eighteen years later, shortly after turning fifty.)
I didn’t think I’d see Frances again after that evening with Leonard and friend. As it turned out, it was Leonard I didn’t see again. Frances phoned me a few weeks later, said she was unhappy making the call because she fully expected me to phone her, but promised to get over it if I accompanied her to a dinner party Saturday night. The conversation was great fun, and as it was ending I asked what time she would be picking me up on Saturday. She laughed and said, “See you here at seven-thirty.”
“Uh-uh, see you here,” I replied.
“I’m not that hard up,” she chirped. “See you here!”
Now, I�
�ve never been as indifferent to the prospect of being with a beautiful woman as this could make me sound, but I was a clutch writer who felt he needed every second at his Remington. Then, too, I suspect a bigger need was to prove something to myself, so I stood firm. Following some minutes of strain and a few laughs, Frances swallowed her pride. When she called from the lobby on the night of our date, I said I’d be a few minutes and asked her to come up.
“Why don’t I lie down under a steamroller first so I can slip myself under your door?” was her response. I met her in the lobby.
This prompts a confession about me and the women in my life. I’ve bragged to myself for years that my advances were never spurned by a woman I fancied. It wasn’t until sometime recently that I recognized the reason behind that reality. I was never spurned because it was never I who made the first move. I needed a sign, a hard-and-fast signal that my move would be welcome, before I came on to anyone. Charlotte, at the very beginning of our relationship, and again at the lead-up to our marriage, was enthusiastic at just the sound of my voice on the phone. Frances was similarly inviting. In every relationship I might have behaved like I was cocksure that I was wanted, but I never moved on it before the woman involved signaled me to come and get it.
Frances Loeb was a big deal at Lord & Taylor, which was a very big deal then for fashionable women. She was the sportswear buyer. Sportswear occupied the entire fourth floor, and that was her domain. Imperious and impeccable, a pencil in her prematurely gray hair, she crisscrossed her floor, weaving between the racks and tables, her perfect body astride—in playwright Larry Gelbart’s words—“legs so long they looked like they would go on forever if there wasn’t a floor to stop them.”
I was altogether taken with the dramatic figure Frances cut, and when I learned the childhood she came out of I marveled at the distance she’d come. In a nutshell, she was in an orphanage until she was six, when she was adopted by a couple who were split as to whether they wanted a child. He very much did. She did not. He committed suicide when Frances was ten. Her mother remarried when she was twelve and her stepfather began making nocturnal visits to her bedroom when she was thirteen. The mother, who knew what was going on, died when Frances was nineteen and left a note to be sure her daughter knew how “terribly disappointed” she was in her.
Everything I knew about her difficult and colorful life before I appeared at her front door fascinated me and caused me to admire her more. She’d made it, and made it so well, in a man’s world, through that horrendous childhood, two failed marriages, a half dozen relationships worthy of discussion over long dinners and packs of cigarettes, among them one or two that began, admittedly, as career builders (but she did care for the men), and several attractions that never made it to a relationship. And when, soon after we met, she was flying off to Paris on her first buying trip, everything I found strong and admirable about Frances’s past became a threat.
A Parisian named Claude, a figure in the fashion world, weaved in and out of Frances’s relationships. Their affair had ended years before but they remained good friends. I liked what I knew of Claude. Amazing how abruptly that feeling was reversed when Frances so matter-of-factly told me that her old friend Claude had found her a lovely suite at a charming little hotel and was taking the time out of his busy schedule to show her Paris. In an instant I became obsessively jealous. I hated and feared Claude and loathed the words lovely and charming as applied to a hotel room. I asked the William Morris Agency to find me a super suite in the finest hotel in Paris. Frances checked it out at my request, granted me it was lavish, but garish, too, and asked me to understand if, in Paris, she chose “lovely and charming” over “lavish and garish.” Manfully I said I did, and shriveled boyishly inside.
The following day I made an appointment with Frances’s psychiatrist. I didn’t understand at the time that seeing me without his patient’s knowledge was a violation of her trust, a violation he compounded by asking me to keep our meeting confidential.
Her psychiatrist was Nathaniel Breckir, like Frances a striking figure. Because he’d had polio as a child, one leg was shorter than the other. He walked with a singular limp and an antique cane, and he wore an evening cape, usually off the shoulder, and a homburg hat. At the sight of him you felt it was the early 1900s and there had to be an opera house nearby. As befitted his appearance, he spoke softly, struck poses during pauses, and seemed to be a very wise man. He assured me that Frances and Claude were friends only and that Frances wouldn’t be unfaithful under any circumstance. Then he spoke of Frances as a person and as a patient, and I heard something that touched me to the core.
He described Frances as “the most alone person” he had ever met. He didn’t say she was lonely. She was alone, the most alone person he had ever met. I cannot overemphasize the effect on me of those words. I knew what it was like to feel completely alone in the world.
• • •
WHILE LIVING IN NEW YORK, I flew out to Los Angeles to see Ellen as often as I could, and on her school breaks she visited me. Since it was three hours earlier in L.A., I was able to touch base with her just about every morning before she went to school, often before she was out of bed. The divorce consumed more cross-country telephone time, endless conference calls in various combinations between me, my accountant, my attorney, Charlotte’s accountant and attorney, and, of course, Dr. Luster, whose job it was to interpret Charlotte’s feelings and reactions. While necessary, these long-distance calls were expensive as hell and were of mounting concern, until suddenly the impossible occurred and I might as well have owned the phone company.
One day I’d just hung up after a conference call when the phone rang again. It was the conference operator, inquiring in a working-class Boston Irish accent as to whether my call had been properly completed. I said it was and thanked her for her courtesy. She assured me I was welcome and then stunned me by asking if I had talked with my daughter in Los Angeles that day. It seemed that she’d heard me talk about Ellen on a conference call a day or two earlier and was touched by the idea that we talked daily. And then she wondered if I would like her to get Ellen on the phone for me tomorrow. Thus began a four-year relationship that saw Mary—she would never reveal her last name—become an integral member of the extended Lear clan, placing just about all of their long-distance phone calls from that point on, gratis.
Over time I teased out Mary’s story. She was a girl from a poor South Boston family who’d gotten a job with the phone company. She was in her early twenties when, reporting to work one winter’s day, she fell on the ice in front of the building and sustained a serious spinal cord injury that confined her to a wheelchair. The settlement her family negotiated was not a payoff but lifetime employment as a conference call operator. With the latitude that accompanied her special circumstance, Mary sat unsupervised with the means to connect people anywhere to people everywhere, while also allowing her to listen in on—and live vicariously through—a lot of lives.
She certainly seemed to revel in mine as it unfolded in front of her. Whether it was the attorney-client discussions that shaped my career, family matters and crises across the board, every aspect of my divorce, the fresh relationships that came from my meeting Frances Loeb, or the courtship that led to our marriage, Mary was involved in all of it. It never troubled any of us that Mary was eavesdropping, or that we were using the company’s goods and services without paying for them. But that’s no worse than declaring a social lunch a tax-deductible business expense, an early accounting lesson taught to us by the very best and brightest. Far more sophisticated today, thousands of high-paid attorneys, accountants, and number crunchers have found sufficient twists, turns, and loopholes in the law to sell us all—we consumers and our political, social, and business leaders alike—the kind of bull that someone I knew well used to merchandise as lollipops.
• • •
IN THE SUMMER OF 1955 The Martha Raye Show had been r
enewed, my divorce was moving forward but with great difficulty, the relationship with Frances was building furiously, and my father was hit by a train in a truck he claimed had stalled at a railroad crossing. There were no witnesses and he lay near death for a week before recovering, so his claim to his truck having stalled went uncontested. My mother thought differently, however, and I learned piecemeal over the next year how H.K. had worked himself into more trouble than he’d ever known, enough for him to consider suicide many times over.
There were numbers of farmers of fairly recent Scandinavian origin throughout Connecticut in the 1950s, and Herman K. Lear, president and chief executive officer of Norclaire Builders, combed the countryside to sell them that add-on garage, new kitchen, or playroom they desperately needed. Wary of New World banking practices, these Old Worlders preferred to pay cash, and that was perfectly fine with Mr. Lear. He’d sell the addition for, say, $795, take the money, and then have the farmer sign something to confirm the deal. That “something” was actually a promissory note that Mr. Lear promptly discharged at his bank for a second payment of $795. Of course the promissory note had to be paid back. All that was required in order to raise the money was the sale of another attachment. What complicated that for Mr. Lear, however, was that the bank expected the payback from the farmer, and was in the habit of sending out monthly notices regarding the payments. Those notices went out around the first of the month. Now all H.K. had to do was to pilfer some rural mailboxes of those notices and see personally that the bank got its money.
When he wasn’t frantically trying to sell that new garage or playroom to catch up, H.K. had four mailboxes he had to get to on time each month and two more such situations developing. In my mind’s eye I forever see Dad’s truck on a railroad track, just the other side of a sharp bend. Stalled? Or parked there?