by Norman Lear
We went off in different directions and consequently didn’t have much contact during the years that followed. He and my cousin Elaine divorced, so that connection, too, was ended. After helping Dean Martin craft his nonchalantly drunk persona, Eddie went on to write for Red Skelton, Carol Burnett, and Vicki Lawrence. He also wrote a delicious little book of poetry, I’m Okay and Neither Are You. In the nineties he was a big hit lecturing about comedy at OASIS, a center for senior citizens, and called one day to ask if I would be a guest lecturer. One spring afternoon, Simmons and Lear, in their seventies now and drenched in nostalgia, were a heartwarming success with a few of their peers and a number of their elders. Eddie passed away the next year, in 1998.
• • •
I’M OFTEN STRUCK by the consistency of the themes that run through my life, so there is something satisfying and appropriate about my first solo job as a TV writer having been for country singer Tennessee Ernie Ford, who crossed over to the top of the charts in 1955 with the biggest of the midcentury protest songs, “Sixteen Tons.” It was a dark ballad about the life of a coal miner, with an unforgettable chorus:
You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
Not that Ernie Ford was any man’s rebel. His catchphrase was “Bless your little pea-pickin’ hearts,” and he recorded enough religious music over the course of his career to wind up in the Gospel Hall of Fame. It was I, I guess, who heard it as one of the early protest songs, nurturing my equal opportunity and fairness sensibilities, and my respect for those the establishment labeled “the blue-collar class.”
When I worked with Ed Simmons it was I who steered. If what made sense to Ed didn’t make sense to me, we worked until it did. If I didn’t find it satisfying, we worked until I did. And so it was throughout my career, except for the man I came to work for on the Ernie Ford show, the head writer, Roland Kibbee. There were times working with Kibbee when the jokes were good and made sense to me, but they had to make a more refined kind of sense to him, and he would not settle for less.
I learned from Kib that just about anything can be improved, and that reaching for perfection, not necessarily achieving it, was worth the effort. He couldn’t tolerate a false note, not in the slightest of sketches or among the jokes in a monologue. The monologue had to have structure, or, as Kibbee put it, “a spine.” It seemed to me from then on that everything, from a relationship to a simple dinner conversation, benefited from a structure, a spine.
The need for things to ring true grew in me because of my experience with Kib, and I can’t think of anything anyone ever taught me about writing that was more important. I couldn’t have had this career without having taken this to heart and mind.
Just as I can’t overstate Kibbee’s influence on me, neither can I overstate the torture I put myself through when it came to writing my portion of the show. I was light and funny when I sat with the writers and we pitched ideas for the sketches, the guest star, and the subject of Ernie’s monologue. The monologue was my beat. It was to be three to four minutes long, and I had two days to write it. I’d sit at my typewriter for those days, starting and stopping, firing and misfiring, mountains of crunched paper building in the wastebasket beside me.
By nightfall I’d clocked six to eight hours at the typewriter, smoked a couple of packs of Old Gold cigarettes, and spoken to my shrink several times, until the shit in my head bid fair to explode. And then, at, say, two A.M., the very last minute, the shit inexplicably drained, my head cleared, and I wrote, rewrote, and tweaked the monologue. I finished, a happy man, around five A.M., got a few hours’ sleep, and arose in time to shower and drive to the studio, eager to hear Ernie read my words and confident of the laughs he was going to get.
Guests on the Ernie Ford show included Jane Wyman, Charles Laughton, José Ferrer, Ronald Reagan, Rosemary Clooney, and Lee Marvin, among many others who brought a good deal of attention to the show—and to us writers. So much attention that after just one season I was asked if I’d like to write and produce The George Gobel Show, a giant half-hour hit that was expanding to an hour early in 1958 on NBC. My salary was equal to what I was making when Simmons and Lear were riding high.
• • •
IN OCTOBER 1957, Frances and I moved into a larger and more expensive home, nursery included, also off Mulholland. On December 13, my darling daughter Kate came into the world. On December 23, Herman K. Lear left it.
It was difficult to leave my newborn daughter to face the reality of my father’s death across the country. Talking to my mother on the phone, I felt the pain begin. Not that she phoned me herself to tell me Dad had died. My sister gave me the news and added that there was to be a funeral in a few days. I was surprised because H.K. had spoken often about wanting to be cremated when he died, with no funeral. H.K. hated funerals. When I phoned my mother and reminded her of that, her answer, of course, was, “Oh, please.”
I got to Hartford and the funeral home as they were about to transport the body to the synagogue. When several men arrived to pick up the casket, I asked them to hold it open a moment longer. It was then that I learned that, according to Mrs. Lear’s instructions, this was to be an open-casket funeral service, something H.K. particularly despised. I could have slapped my mother. This wasn’t just adding insult to injury, I thought, this was the crown jewel of her narcissism. And of course it played out just that way. After the service, led by a dreary rabbi who knew nothing about my father but never met a corpse for whom he couldn’t find some empty rhetoric to indifferently intone, they had a hard time pulling the weeping widow away from her beloved. It was one of her better performances.
As she carried on, I had that moment I’d asked for in the funeral parlor. Dad lay there, so calm and serene in his velvet-lined coffin, looking for all the world like he’d just left the barbershop, tipped munificently for his haircut and shoe shine, and was ready now for his lunch date with a lady lobster at Christ Cella.
The official cause of death was coronary thrombosis, but the H.K. we all knew was never the same after the train hit him. The old H.K. passed away two years before his actual death. Cleaning up after him took several visits to Hartford and, between the bank and the several farmers he bilked and still owed money to, something like $100,000. Earlier I labeled my father’s activities as “shoddy.” That was as far as I allowed myself to go to avoid calling him a thief.
I knew him. I knew his fingers and his strumberries and his bathroom fragrance. I saw him leap over a bush once when I was five. I saw him sing “Ol’ Man River” in some show the temple put on when I was little and he was ten feet tall. I saw him tip a shoe shine boy a whole five-dollar bill once. I saw him order female lobsters, and listen to The Lone Ranger, and nap on the living room floor, and roll around there with me when Notre Dame beat Ohio State. I saw him in my rearview mirror, chasing me across Connecticut so I could take my date to the theater in his new car. I saw him come home in the evening, worn, so worn, but carrying the dry cleaning and groceries my mother had him pick up, and I saw him the following morning, as bright as a penny—or was that a slug he was calling a penny?—then off with a smile and a shoe shine to take on the world. And, it tears at me to say it, I saw him, more than once, found out. My dad, “found out.”
If H.K. was a marvel of sorts, so were Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, and Maude Findlay, among others. They were all entertaining marvels, examples of what I think of now as the H.K. genre. Larger than life, they were all repositories of that need to be seen and heard and understood, even as they showcased themselves, and dealt with in others, the foolishness of the human condition. That foolishness, it occurs to me, includes a fellow in his tenth decade as he writes this, still seeking to create a dependable full-blown father figure out of two letters of
the alphabet.
• • •
THE GEORGE GOBEL SHOW was as strong and joyful a building block as I could have wished for at this transition in my career. Lonesome George, as he called himself, started as a country singer who gained more favor talking to his audience than singing. He was a sharp, witty, and astringent commentator, but his look and personality were his most unique features. Stated simply, George Gobel was adorable. At a time when TV variety shows opened with big music and big sound, the Gobel show would open cold. Lonesome George, in black and white, was standing there talking, alone and endearing. No one else at the time could have pulled that off.
As before with Martha Raye and Nat Hiken, I inherited The George Gobel Show from another great comedy writer, Hal Kanter. It was a half-hour show at first, Saturday night at ten on NBC. Wherever you were, whatever you were doing, as long as you were near a TV set everything stopped for George Gobel on Saturday night. No less than Milton Berle or Martin and Lewis or Ed Sullivan before him, George Gobel was “it” when NBC decided to expand his show to an hour and hired me to write, produce, and shape it.
A character in George’s monologue was his wife, Alice, previously played by Jeff Donnell. I delivered Alice in the person of Phyllis Avery, a piquant actress who innately shared George’s innocence. And, having spent years scouring the Off- and Off-Off-Broadway scene when I lived in and visited New York, I brought out, for their first time in Hollywood, Rue McClanahan, Carl Reiner, Tony Randall, Bea Arthur, and Paul Lynde, among others. Our guest actors from then on featured dozens of New York theater people, including Dabney Coleman, Conrad Bain, Bill Macy, Jean Stapleton, Bob Balaban, John Amos, Sherman Hemsley, and Barnard Hughes.
Ron Meyer and Mike Ovitz, two of the founders of Creative Artists Agency, the largest talent agency in the world today, have said that when they started out in the seventies and we had multiple TV shows on the air, they would hang out at our rehearsals to meet our stage-trained East Coast talent and seek to become their West Coast representatives.
• • •
BUD YORKIN AND HIS WIFE, Peggy, and Frances and I became close friends in this period. The Yorkins had two children, Nicole and David, who were the same ages as our Kate and Maggie (who was born April 16, 1959), and nothing can bring two families closer than having kids who are growing up together. We were inseparable, especially after we Lears moved into a home in Encino, just a few blocks away from the Yorkins. Until Kate and Maggie were ten or so we spent virtually every weekend around our pools. I carried a large attaché case, I recall, filled with water guns of various shapes and sizes. Half the time Bud had a kid on his shoulders trying to rip a kid off my shoulders. The Kibbees, with slightly older kids, came over in the late afternoon in time for a quick swim and a barbecue. Or we would all trek down for ribs at Monty’s Steak House, where the kids crawling around beneath the table were literally underfoot.
When Ellen turned fourteen the law allowed her to decide which parent she wished to live with, and she chose us. She’d asked, even pleaded, to make the move several years before. Charlotte, however, insisted it would be wrong for Ellen because she needed her mother, and Henry Luster agreed. I offered to pay for a child psychiatrist the two sides would agree on and let him or her help with the decision. With the aid of doctor friends we came up with six local child psychiatrists for Luster and Charlotte to choose from. Luster tossed our list aside, offering to agree on one name and one name only. His choice was a nationally recognized child psychologist whose practice was located at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
I didn’t trouble to ask Dr. Luster if he expected the Stockbridge doc to move to California to spend time with Ellen and the two homes and lifestyles she was to choose between, or whether Charlotte, Frances, Ellen, and I should move to Stockbridge. Instead, I told Ellen that any day she felt she had to be with us, she should take a taxi to Encino and there would always be someone at home to pay for it. She did that a number of times. It drove Charlotte nuts, but Ellen persisted, and she celebrated her fourteenth birthday by moving in with Frances, her sisters, and me.
• • •
IN OCTOBER 1958 Bud Yorkin caught the brass ring and it turned out to be gold. He produced and directed An Evening with Fred Astaire, a one-hour musical special on NBC, and the very first to be shot “in living color.” It attracted enormous attention, was well conceived and produced, and earned nine Emmys, two of them Bud’s. Already a known commodity, he became an overnight sensation in the musical-variety arena. Shortly after that the Yorkins and Lears met for a meal in Beverly Hills. We were walking to our cars afterward, Bud and Frances walking ahead of Peg and me, when Peg asked if I’d ever thought of teaming up with Bud—me writing, him directing, and producing jointly. We stopped for a nightcap to discuss it.
Some weeks later Bud and I formed Tandem Productions. The paperwork was handled by Bud’s attorney, Greg Bautzer, the best-known, best-dressed, best-looking celebrity lawyer in the business. Greg was married to Dana Wynter, as ravishing a screen presence as ever there was. I’ve never thought of Dana without seeing her dazzling, bikinied body, and face to match, coming ever so slowly out of the surf in front of their beach home in Acapulco, Mexico.
Within the month, Bautzer made a development deal for Tandem at Paramount Pictures to do six TV pilots over a three-year period while allowing us to produce specials and develop films at the same time. The day we moved the company to Paramount, Bud and I could not have been more excited or confident. Peg and Frances surprised us with a tandem bicycle that was waiting for us on the lot.
Magic words, “on the lot.” To be there was a dream come true. There were the five acres of New York sets and streets where Breakfast at Tiffany’s and dozens more movies were shot; the Western Street that was home to Bonanza; the huge outdoor tank for close-ups of action at sea in a ton of movies; the European village where Star Trek and Hogan’s Heroes would be filmed; two dozen soundstages for interiors; and, in the center of it all, a row of town houses that served as on-lot “homes” for Paramount’s major stars. Dean and Jerry had houses there, as did Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, and Frank Sinatra. The sight of those guys tossing a football around of an afternoon was not unfamiliar.
Our deal at Paramount called for the development of TV series as well as films, so we hatched a few ideas and started working on them. One of them, Band of Gold, was in essence a small repertory company with the same actors playing different characters every week in a series of love stories. Those stories were to take place in or out of marriage, set in any time or location, requiring talents capable of playing a wide range of characters in tales symbolized by the Band of Gold. Happily, we found talents of extraordinary range who also made for a most handsome couple, James Franciscus and Suzanne Pleshette. The pilot episode, shot in black and white and directed by Bud from my script, turned out well. To sell the idea of the series and illustrate the versatility of our players we had to show our stars in a full half-hour story, and in several other scenes, playing a totally different couple each time.
In the full half hour, Jimmy played a European count and Suzanne a New York shopgirl. Then, combing through the standing sets on the Paramount lot, I found a fire escape on a New York tenement building that inspired me to write a Paddy Chayefsky–like love scene. On another stage there was a seventeenth-century ballroom, and I wrote a John Barry–like scene for a princess and a footman. Our pilot for the series consisted of four such scenes calling for different, contrasting characters played by Franciscus and Pleshette, tacked on to our complete half-hour episode.
That was what we sent over to Jim Aubrey, president and head of programming for CBS. Aubrey had a reputation for being tough and hard to deal with, and so it was a giant surprise when he called us that very day to rave about the show. He invited us over to tell us exactly when he was going to program it: Tuesday nights at eight-thirty. When we told him we were thinking of t
aking our wives to Acapulco for a long weekend of celebration, he wished us Godspeed and sent us off with an uncharacteristic hug.
I don’t remember whether the industry had as yet tagged Jim Aubrey, “The Smiling Cobra,” but we had no trouble seeing him in exactly that light when we returned from Acapulco and learned that Band of Gold would not be airing after all, and that what we’d been told was to be our time slot had been passed to Keefe Brasselle, a now-and-then actor who was the cunning Cobra’s closest friend.
• • •
A YEAR INTO OUR DEAL at Paramount, Neil Simon, who had worked for Ed Simmons and me on the Jack Haley show, heard that I had a studio deal and sent me a copy of the very first play he wrote, Come Blow Your Horn, which he believed was going to Broadway. We loved it, and I started working on the screenplay. The other projects in the hopper at the same time were a TV special with Bobby Darin, the young talent who had become a star overnight with a song called “Splish Splash” and an instant classic, “Mack the Knife”; another special, starring the multitalented Danny Kaye; yet another, starring Carol Channing, the inimitable originator of Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! and one starring Dick Cavett. Additionally, Bud and I made a pilot episode of a series, Three to Get Ready, about two pilots and a stewardess on international flights. We also did a most unusual special we called Henry Fonda and the Family—cowritten by me and Tom Koch, the driest comedy mind I knew—which used that year’s census figures to hold a mirror up to the state of the American family; and we conceived of and executive-produced a one-hour musical-variety series for Andy Williams. Last in that period, Hugh Hefner and Tony Curtis, who were friends at the time, decided to do a film together—Playboy, with Tony to play Hef—and asked me to write an original screenplay. Except for Playboy, all these projects were completed and found their audiences in the two years before February 1963.