Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  • • •

  THAT SUMMER I rented a cottage on Fire Island, two doors away from Carl and Estelle Reiner. Ellen, nine years old now, spent a month with me. The four Reiner kids meant a lot to her that summer, especially Rob, who was within a few months of her age. He was playing with Ellen one day, showing her how to play jacks, when I first thought, “That kid is funny.”

  By nine years of age Rob had already spent scores, if not hundreds, of hours in the company of Jewish comics and writers. He never attempted to imitate them, he simply sounded like one of them. He intonated, cocked his head, and used his hands like one of them. So when he sat on the floor with jacks in one hand and the ball in the other, telling Ellen how to toss the ball (“Not too high, you don’t get points for how high”) or how to pick up the jacks (“You don’t grab, you scoop. No one ever taught you how to scoop?”), he was hilarious. Sixteen years later, watching him rehearse with Carroll O’Connor, I would be reminded daily of Rob on the floor with Ellen, teaching her jacks that summer on Fire Island.

  Frances drove out from Manhattan every Friday night, usually bringing a friend or two with her. When we were planning the summer, before Ellen ever heard of Frances, I thought it would all go down best if Ellen met some of Dad’s friends, one of whom was Frances Loeb. Of course Ellen went to bed first, so there was no problem with Frances sleeping with me—until morning, that is. I handled that brilliantly, I thought. I woke Ellen every morning for a father-daughter breakfast date, and by the time we returned, Frances and friend would be up and having their breakfast. It was many months later, after Ellen and Frances had become close, that I asked my daughter if she had known what had been going on that summer. Summoning up every ounce of the pity youth takes on their elders’ blindness, she gave me that roll of the eyes for parents only and said, “Are you kidding??”

  • • •

  ONE NIGHT THAT SUMMER the Reiners had a group of us over and Carl, playing the host of a TV talk show, started to interview several of us on a portable tape recorder. When he got to Mel Brooks he got to a man who seemed to know everything. Somewhere in the interview Carl asked Mel how he could have known about something that took place centuries before, and Mel said he was there when it occurred. Carl had to ask, “How the hell old are you, anyway?” Came the answer, “I’m two thousand,” and what had been a routine that amused Sid Caesar and his writers on Your Show of Shows started to go wide. By the end of that summer the entire island was gathering at one house or another to hear Carl Reiner interview the 2,000 Year Old Man.

  • • •

  AS HARD AS ED AND I WORKED, as little as we slept, and as much Dexedrine and Seconal as it took to keep us on our toes and our backs, our time in New York doing those one-hour book-musicals with Martha Raye was a gas. In 1955 television was still a baby, and among its babysitters, Simmons and Lear were on the A list. We lived in a showcase apartment. We were invited to many but had no time to join more than a few of the three- to four-martini lunches at Toots Shor’s, the place to be seen during the fifties, named after its big, bear-hugging, backslapping host. From Mickey Mantle to the chief justice, you weren’t as “in” as you thought if your entrance didn’t earn a big welcome by Toots.

  I’ve often wondered if the casual male hug wasn’t born and raised at Toots’s place, from which it matriculated to the late-night TV talk show, where the male guest always made his entrance to the thundering sound of the house band, into the waiting arms of his host, and hugging became an accepted male ritual nationwide. To me, Toots Shor’s place and the multiple-martini lunch best reflected the Madison Avenue mood of that time—what, as a result of the hit show, the current generation looks back on as the Mad Men years.

  Early in the 1955–56 TV season the writing was on the wall regarding the demise of The Martha Raye Show. Two back-to-back shows did us in with the sponsor, Revlon, and specifically with its boss and creator of the brand, Charles Revson. I liked Mr. Revson. He had a reputation for being gruff but I found him direct and agreeable. Revson wasn’t the biggest fan of Martha Raye personally, but he appreciated her popularity and the ratings the show delivered. When the shit hit the fan, however, he let us know in no uncertain manner. And soon thereafter let us go.

  In September 1955 The $64,000 Question was a phenomenal hit CBS quiz show. It was one of the highest-rated shows on television, hosted by a man who later became a good friend, Hal March, and who still later starred on Broadway in the Neil Simon play that became Bud Yorkin’s and my first film, Come Blow Your Horn.

  One week, twelve-year-old spelling whiz kid Gloria Lockerman won the $64,000 prize and, as Jet magazine described her, “emerged as the brightest Negro juvenile entertainer since the heyday of boogie woogie pianist Sugar Chile Robinson.” In the heat of that moment, Eddie and I booked young Gloria to appear on our show and wrote a story about a little girl’s fantasy in which Martha played her Good Fairy and that week’s guest, the great and fierce stage star Tallulah Bankhead, played her Bad Fairy.

  The show was hilarious, the studio audience fell in love with the girl (as did Martha and Tallulah), and during the final bows both women showed it by hugging and kissing her. A number of viewers in this pre–civil rights era were disturbed, and it was reported that letters of protest “flooded” the Revlon ad agency. As I would learn in the seventies, a dozen protest letters from among millions of viewers were considered a “flood” to an advertising agency, also referred to as shit hitting a fan. In the fifties, however, the shows were produced by the ad agencies representing the sponsors, not the networks, and so the Young & Rubicams, BBDOs, and J. Walter Thompsons of the time had far more power regarding content than they do now. Charles Revson and his team insisted that they did not take personal exception to the tenderness expressed so publicly by Martha, Tallulah, and Gloria Lockerman, but they had a product to protect and were obligated to take corporate exception to the incident. “I’m sure [Martha] can be entertaining without being so physical and unwomanly,” was Mr. Revson’s carefully worded admonishment.

  Our guest star on the next show was the distinguished actor and motion picture star Douglas Fairbanks Jr. In the course of the story we developed for him and Martha, we based one scene on an old vaudeville and burlesque sketch known as “Guzzler’s Gin.” Our rewrite had Martha trying to make a very special tropical drink for Fairbanks’s character. While the drink was supposed to be without alcohol, Martha was unknowingly using a mislabeled bottle of fruit juice that contained an appreciable amount of whiskey. Not satisfied with what she was preparing after tasting it, and tasting it again, she tossed it down rather than offering it to Fairbanks, and started over. She was, of course, getting soused.

  In rehearsal I asked Martha not to play drunk, but rather to play tipsy. And to play tipsy as one of the great cinema queens, like Irene Dunne, Loretta Young, or Myrna Loy, would play it. Martha Raye, elegantly tipsy à la Myrna Loy, mincing about on her tippy toes, was an outrageously funny Martha Raye. I was overjoyed and proud of her performance and told her after dress rehearsal not to change a hair for me. But as luck would have it, as I went on to give production notes to others, Martha’s husband, Nick Condos (a former dancer and Mob favorite) visited her after watching the dress rehearsal from the back of the theater.

  “What the fuck are you doing, woman?” he asked her. When she told him how I directed her to play it, he blew his top altogether.

  “Myrna fucking Loy?” I was later told he had screamed. “What is this Myrna Loy shit? You’re Martha Raye! You’re funny, for Christ’s sake!”

  At eight P.M. we were on the air live. Martha, able to please only one boss at a time, chose her husband. When the scene came up, I, her clueless director, stood by helplessly as tipsy swiftly gave way to sloppy drunk, and as Charles Revson’s words “physical and unwomanly” flashed in neon before my eyes, there was Martha sluicing from the bottle, pouring it into her cleavage, tossing it up into her ar
mpits, and finally spraying it from her aforementioned unusually large mouth directly into the face of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. As swaths of makeup ran down Mr. Fairbanks’s face, Mrs. Fairbanks was standing nearby in the wings looking at a TV monitor and roaring with laughter.

  Martha brought the house down. A live audience will always howl over such chaos. They know that something unscripted has happened and they’re thrilled to have been there to see it because it happens so rarely. To everyone who’s not part of that “in” group, though, it feels like they don’t care about you and they’re just carrying on for their own amusement. To the viewers at home—for example, at Charles Revson’s home—it just seems self-indulgent and unprofessional.

  With that, The Martha Raye Show was canceled with just a few shows left to deliver. One of the last guest-starred Errol Flynn, Captain Blood himself, the only swashbuckler since Douglas Fairbanks Sr. who also made it to matinee idol. Mr. Flynn’s swashbuckling wasn’t limited to the silver screen. So celebrated by the press were his predilections for booze and young women, some underage, that any man who was scoring with a woman in those years was described as “in like Flynn.” We of The Martha Raye Show caught up with Mr. Flynn after thirty-some years of swashing and buckling, three years before he died of a heart attack. He looked worn, his in-like-Flynn persona still in play but on automatic. So was his appetite for sex. Our dancers knew that. He hit on them because it was expected of him. He had no other investment.

  • • •

  THE END OF MAY saw the end of The Martha Raye Show. Meanwhile, my divorce settlement talks were still going on. Charlotte’s attorney, as my father would say, was “a pip, a real pip.” I was awed by the fact that the man had nine children. It moved me to listen to him more than I might have otherwise, and he came up with a very unusual proposal. He said he had represented several women whose magnanimous divorce settlements provided them a way of life that, in most cases, they would have to give up were they to fall in love and wish to marry again. As a divorcée Charlotte could easily be in that category, and this was his recommendation: Should she remarry, all alimony would expectedly cease immediately. If, however, within two years of that marriage she left her husband, the alimony would return in full. By allowing her room for a mistake, I would be encouraging Charlotte to feel far less at risk should she wish to enter a relationship that might result in marriage. It made no business sense to my attorney, who flatly rejected the idea, but it appealed to me as sane and commonsensical. Overriding the advice of others who were more numbers oriented, I accepted it. (Mary liked it, too.)

  With the agreement finally in place, I left for Las Vegas in late October to set up temporary residence. Divorces were granted in Vegas in six weeks, as long as one partner in the proceedings had been a resident for that amount of time. Proof of that residency was a witness who charged “no more than the daily rate for a good hotel room”—an exceptionally good hotel room, it turned out—who would testify to having seen me every day during that period. My witness, like the many I’d heard about, had a vivid imagination, sufficient to have imagined seeing me all the days I wasn’t there—likely about half the time—because I was in Los Angeles. After months without a paycheck, with my alimony and child support choking me, and within weeks of getting married again, money was a big concern, and the stolen time in L.A. was spent writing original material at night and looking for assignments during the day.

  My six-week Las Vegas residency was up and I was a free man on December 7—the fifteenth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Frances, having left Lord & Taylor and closed her apartment, arrived in Las Vegas on the sixth. I had arranged for a rabbi to marry us in his home the next day, as soon as my divorce was final and I had the decree in my hands. The rabbi cautioned me to be sure we got to him before sundown, as the seventh was a Friday and of course he couldn’t work on the Sabbath.

  The decree wasn’t in my hands, however, until midafternoon; we were due to fly back to L.A. that night, and with everything else there was to do, the sun was setting as the three of us—Ed having flown up to be my best man—finally set out for the rabbi’s house. On the way there, as the sky darkened, I imagined the rabbi turning us away and our having to get married at one of the ever-ready chapels that dotted the landscape. But as we drove up his street I reflected on his being a rabbi in a resort town, Las Vegas, no less, so I had two hundred-dollar bills in my right hand as I stepped out of the car in the twilight. When he opened the door his look said “So sorry,” but it quickly became a bright “Come in” as he shook my hand. Half an hour later, courtesy of the Resort Rabbi, Frances and Norman Lear were at the start of their nearly thirty-year marital journey together.

  Ed peeled off after the ceremony so the bride and groom could have dinner together. Frances chose the dinner show at Caesars Palace, where Milton Berle was playing. She had never seen Mr. Television in person and he cracked her up totally that night. But it wasn’t the laughs she remembered through the years, it was what took place when we went backstage to see him. With a full line of chorus girls and other acts, the star’s dressing room was kind of small. Milton was sitting down, bathrobe open, in his boxers, when he yelled his “Come in!” Even if he hadn’t been touching himself, his package had not been exaggerated. Still, his bathrobe remained open as we chatted and we had all we could do to look Uncle Miltie in the face as we talked. At one point Milton asked me, “You smoke cigars, don’t you? Somebody just gave me some great ones.” When I said yes, he shouted to the closed door, “Schvartz! Hey, Schvartz!” Yiddish for “black one,” Berle’s incantation saw the door open and his black valet enter. He wore a smile that looked like it had been stamped there. “Schvartz, Mr. Lear likes a good cigar, get him one.” Immediately next to where Miltie sat, there hung his suit jacket. It all but grazed his face. The valet reached into an inside pocket, maybe a foot and a half from his boss’s left arm, and withdrew a cigar for me. If Berle thought that was funny, I was grateful that Frances did not.

  4

  I FOUND A COZY BUNGALOW on Mulholland Drive with a master bedroom that had an unobstructed view overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Our king-sized bed had a headboard with a cutout that allowed us to lie on our stomachs with the valley spread out like a city planner’s model in front of us. At night, in the distance, the twinkling model met the twinkling sky and I felt a great peaceful oneness. Three months later Frances was pregnant and Ed and I were still out of work. Though the situation was serious, we did turn down a few jobs that offered too little money. We had been very highly paid, and an equivalent salary was simply not available to us. Close but no cigar was an opportunity to be head writers of The Perry Como Show, a musical-variety hour on NBC. The show came out of New York so we couldn’t push hard in person. We relied on our agent—nameless here to spare any of his descendants who might be reading this any discomfort—at MCA, The Octopus. It was MCA that had put the show together in the first place and we had an outstanding reputation in New York, so overall we felt very good about our chances.

  Our agent said he had pitched us on the phone and had written a very strong letter singing our praises. Only a day after his letter was due to have arrived, we learned that another team had been hired. He said he was sorry and reassured me he had done his best, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he hadn’t. The writers who got the job happened to be MCA clients also. I went to see him and, “just for the heck of it,” asked to see the letter he’d written on our behalf. He didn’t take the request as casually as I intended, and asked why. I couldn’t add more than that I was interested to see it.

  “You don’t believe me,” he said.

  “It isn’t that,” I fumbled.

  “What is it, then?” he asked directly. Feeling him to be as threatened by the situation as he likely was, I tried to tell him it was simply my curiosity as to what he’d written.

  “Norman,” he interrupted, “I can’t sit here and let you im
ply I lied. I wrote the letter. It went.”

  “Then show it to me,” I choked. It was clear that, whatever the outcome, our relationship would not recover from this. He picked up the phone and asked his secretary to bring him that Simmons and Lear letter he’d written to the Como show, then turned to me, told me she’d gone to the file room to get it, and, too hurt to spend another moment with me, asked me to wait in the empty office adjacent to his. Too restless and upset to sit, I paced that office and then ventured out into the hallway. His secretary was in a cubicle outside his office, with a telephone at her ear, typing something. I strolled over to her desk and saw that, from behind his closed door, he was dictating the letter she was typing. This was his last act as our agent, and we avoided each other from that moment on.

  • • •

  WITH A BABY ON THE WAY, I was just about broke when my friend Bud Yorkin threw me a lifesaver. Actually the lifesaver was meant for both Ed and me, but Ed had a problem with it. Bud, who had been a stage manager on The Colgate Comedy Hour in New York, became its director sometime after we moved to L.A. and was now producing and directing Tennessee Ernie Ford’s weekly hour on NBC. He offered us a job on the writing staff, headed by a writer named Roland Kibbee, but the show couldn’t pay more than $1,500 for the slot we were being invited to fill. We were almost back to our beginnings, $750 each, and Ed categorically refused it. We’d last earned more than $10,000 for the team and he wouldn’t accept the full $1,500 if it were offered to him alone.

  We were sitting at the counter at Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard, where Lana Turner was famously discovered, when I told Ed that I just might have to accept the offer. There were a couple of possibilities at much higher salaries still out there, and Ed thought it would be a mistake not to give it a few more months. But we’d seen a number of those possibilities vanish in the past year, and I had Charlotte, Ellen, and Frances to support, with a baby due in December. Hans Conried’s words about the importance of working for work’s sake were ringing in my head, too, as I told Ed, finally, that I was going to take the job. Our lives, just like Lana Turner’s, took a huge turn on the stools at Schwab’s.