Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  I brought in Charles Strouse and Lee Adams to do the music, and they wrote a score that deliciously evoked the period, including one song-and-dance number that particularly delighted me, “Take Ten Terrific Girls (But Only Nine Costumes).” Another delightful memory was working with Elliott Gould, whom I’d cast to play Billy Minsky. Elliott was married at the time to a young woman who, four years earlier, had become a sensation on Broadway in a musical called Funny Girl. While we were shooting Minsky’s, the film of Funny Girl, in which she also starred, was opening in New York, and Barbra Streisand was on her way to a legendary career as a recording artist, a star of stage and screen, a film producer, and a director.

  This comment by Roger Ebert, reviewing Minsky’s for the Chicago Sun-Times, pleased me enormously: “It avoids the phony glamour and romanticism that the movies usually use to smother burlesque and really seems to understand this most American art form.” How gratifying that was! Time magazine called the film “a valedictory valentine to old time burlesque . . . offering an engaging blend of mockery and melancholy.”

  • • •

  THE WORD “MINSKY” was heard in my home many times, day and night, long after the movie was out of our lives. For years it was spoken and shouted by family members, visitors, and household staff alike. I’d come home from the London premiere of the film to learn that Frances had promised Maggie, “When Daddy gets home he’s going to take you to the pound to buy a dog,” which is exactly what I did. On the way there I asked Mags what kind of dog she was looking for.

  “I’ll know Minsky when I see him,” she said, surprising me with the name she was fixated on.

  We looked at thirty or more dogs at the pound before we came across one little guy, white and kind of wet, with matted hair you hoped would be fluffy when dry, but with an angelic face and the most soulful eyes. When those eyes drifted over to Maggie she blurted, “That’s him, that’s Minsky!” I turned to an attendant who had overheard Maggie and she said that several others had chosen the same dog.

  “But I’ve already named him. Minsky!” Maggie cried out proudly, as if the name made her case for getting the dog. The attendant couldn’t have been more sympathetic, but explained that when this happens the dog in question is auctioned off to the highest bidder. This auction had been set for the next morning at nine.

  We arrived at the pound at ten minutes to nine. There were about ten groups of people who’d come to bid on our Minsky, among them a few faces I still recall: a boy of about ten and his mother, a thirteen-year-old girl and her granddad, and a woman who looked to be in her forties and her mother—all of them mad for our dog.

  When the auction began the little guy could be had for four dollars. Someone said six. Another went to ten. I said, “Twenty.” At that, several of the hopefuls moved off, among them the ten-year-old boy, utterly crestfallen. The woman in her forties said, in a voice that sought to close the deal, “Thirty dollars.” Those would-be buyers who remained were sadly out of it. They all but gasped when I said, “Fifty,” and then did gasp when the woman countered quickly with, “Fifty-five.” Maggie read a “Well, that’s it” into the moment and couldn’t believe what she heard when I said, “One hundred dollars.”

  I swear I heard the air go out of everyone else. Minsky was ours. But it was an extremely uneasy moment for me. Several kids I hadn’t paid attention to were in tears. The woman and her mother, who looked like they’d already centered their lives on taking the little dog home with them, seemed heartbroken. And as happy as I was for my child, I felt like I was in a place where I didn’t belong and had taken advantage of people who had every right to be there. When I looked in my wallet for the money I needed to pay for the dog, I was embarrassed by the sight of the hundred-dollar bills I’d received the previous night when I cashed in my British pounds at the airport.

  • • •

  THERE WERE SEVERAL PROJECTS I’d been carrying in my head or working on in bits and pieces over the previous two years, and while editing Minsky’s I found the time to develop them further. One idea for a film, Two Times Two, was the story of two sets of male twins, born in the middle of the night only minutes apart, who in the confusion are mixed at birth. JFK, the president, and RFK, his attorney general, was the image I held for who one set of twins would become. The other set would turn out to be a not-very-talented comedy team, a pair of con men, or circus roustabouts. In the story the two pairs of twins wind up in proximity to each other, another mix-up between them occurs, and the roustabouts are taken to be the real attorney general and president of the United States. Before coming to New York for Minsky’s, I hired two very funny comedy writers, Fred Freeman and Larry Cohen, to write the screenplay.

  Another idea was prompted by my attempts to stop smoking and the tobacco companies’ efforts to keep me hooked and seduce new generations to join up. (Remember, it was as late as 1994 that presidents and CEOs of America’s top seven tobacco companies testified before Congress and stated their uniform belief that “nicotine is not addictive.”)

  In my story, a cynical adman talks an elderly tobacco magnate and his board of directors into offering $25 million to any town in America that can give up smoking for thirty days. The bet was that no town could pull it together, or make good on the pledge if they did, and the company would reap the benefit. One down-and-out town in Iowa, led by a driven, celebrity-hungry minister, gets every smoker to sign a written pledge. Halfway through the drive the town’s smokers are crazed, but the tobacco company begins to worry that the town could succeed and decides that something must be done to see that this doesn’t happen. I brought in a delightful writer from South Carolina, William Price Fox, to write the screenplay with me, but an earlier commitment called him back so I wrote it myself.

  Meanwhile, after working on Two Times Two for some weeks, Freeman and Cohen came in to suggest that the basic idea of two sets of twins mixed at birth would play funnier as a period piece. We tossed it around and finally agreed to set our story in the French Revolution. The screenplay for what became one of Bud’s most memorable directorial successes, Start the Revolution Without Me, was on its way. Starring Gene Wilder, Donald Sutherland, Hugh Griffith, and Billie Whitelaw, and shot in France, the picture was so funny and out of the ordinary that it became a cult classic, much to my pleasure as its executive producer. Hugh Griffith’s standout line, “I thought this was a costume ball,” has been quoted to me dozens of times across the years, usually by strangers, as has been a line ad-libbed by Gene Wilder. In the scene Gene is the roustabout now mistaken for his twin, the count, dressed in finery he could never have imagined, and escorted in one scene around the castle, including the dungeon. There, he walks by a ratty skeleton of a man with a whiplashed back, stretched over a rack, in torn shorts and sandals, and says in passing, “I like your shoes.” On elevators, at bars, at rare moments over the years, I have had that line tossed at me, often from a face I didn’t know.

  9

  IN THE LATE SIXTIES I became obsessed with the idea of doing an off-the-wall late-night soap opera to air weekdays Monday through Friday. The only thing that could have interfered with that, and it did, was reading a squib in TV Guide about a British show, Till Death Us Do Part, that centered on a bigoted father and his liberal son who fought about everything under the sun. “Oh, my God,” I thought instantly, “my dad and me.” As a kid, when I wasn’t moving as fast as he thought I should, H.K. would call me “the laziest white kid he ever met.” When I’d accuse him of putting down a whole race of people just to call his son lazy, he’d yell back at me, “That’s not what I’m doing, and you’re also the dumbest white kid I ever met!” I was flooded with ideas and knew I had to do an American version of this show. In a few days I wrote about seventy pages of notes and asked a well-known, wonderfully peculiar, and very successful New York agent, Sam Cohn, to represent the project.

  Between early August and the end of September 1968, we secu
red the rights to the show from its British rep, Beryl Vertue, ABC commissioned a pilot, and I wrote and cast the episode. It was taped before a live audience with Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton in the leads, but it would take a second pilot, two more years, and another network, CBS, to get it on the air.

  Marion Dougherty, a first-class casting agent, worked with me to secure the senior and junior leads. The first time around the show was called Justice for All, and Marion and I read a number of actors in New York for the roles of Archie and Agnes (later changed to Edith) Justice. I’d seen Jean Stapleton in Damn Yankees on Broadway and was eager to meet her. She liked the script and loved the role of Agnes, so our meeting was a kick from the start.

  Before she auditioned we talked about the thrust of the series should it get on the air, and the odds on that happening. When she heard that my intention, first and foremost, was to entertain, not to raise eyebrows, she was certain we’d get on the air. Jean, more than anyone else involved with the show, always believed it would eventually get on. That positivity, as it happened, was at the core of Edith’s character, as were love and faith and empathy. Ms. Stapleton read the role and nailed the part.

  Interspersed with auditions for Edith were auditions for Archie. We read an equal number of good actors for that role, too, and Marion Dougherty also scheduled a trip for me to Los Angeles to see actors there. One of our ideas for Archie was the only star on the list, Mickey Rooney, which, if you didn’t have Carroll O’Connor so fixed in your head, you might agree was an interesting idea at the time. I knew Mickey’s manager, Red Doff, so I called him and asked if Mickey would be interested in doing a series. Go forget this conversation:

  “Mickey happens to be in the office now,” Red said. “What’s the role?”

  “Well, it’s best we discuss that in person,” I replied.

  “Okay, I’ll put him on,” he said. “Tell him in person.” Before I could say another word Mickey Rooney was on the phone, calling me “Norm” as if he’d known me for twenty years and speaking of himself in the third person.

  “Got something in mind for the Mick, Norm? What’s the character?”

  “Well, Mickey . . .”

  “Call me Mick.”

  “Mick, I’m coming out there in a couple of days, why don’t we meet and . . .”

  “Tell me now, Norm,” said the Mick. “If it can’t be told in a few sentences, it can’t be much anyway.”

  “Well, [deep breath] this guy is a bigot, he calls people spics and spades and kikes . . .”

  “Norm,” the Mick interrupted me, “they’re going to kill you, shoot you dead in the streets. You want to do a TV show with the Mick, listen to this: Vietnam vet. Private eye. Short. Blind. Large dog.”

  Some years later I worked with Mickey Rooney on another show and loved being around him, but the memory of that conversation remains for me the hallmark of our relationship.

  • • •

  MARIAN REES WAS the first of a series of women who provided the glue that held things together in the most hectic of times and situations. She had Tandem Productions set up in a small office suite on Sunset Boulevard where I auditioned the actors Marion Dougherty had recommended. I’d seen one of them, Carroll O’Connor, in a 1966 Blake Edwards picture, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? I liked his face. It was very important to me that Archie have a likable face, because the point of the character was to show that if bigotry and intolerance didn’t exist in the hearts and minds of the good people, the average people, it would not be the endemic problem it is in our society. As the “laziest, dumbest white kid” my father ever met, I rarely saw a bigot I didn’t have some reason to like. They were all relatives and friends.

  The actors Marion Dougherty brought in for me to meet had all seen the script and had had a chance to think about the role. When Carroll came to audition, he entered as the cultured, New York– and Dublin-trained actor he was. In that mode we discussed the script and the role of Archie quite thoroughly, and I couldn’t be sure what he really thought of it. When he turned to the script to read, however, his voice, his eyes, and the attitude of his body shifted, he opened his mouth, and out poured Archie Bunker. Not that I knew exactly what I wanted to hear before Carroll started to read. It was more like Justice Potter Stewart’s oft-quoted definition of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Carroll hadn’t reached page 3 before I wanted to run into the street shouting for joy. When I told him how I felt, he was pleased, but not about to join me in the street. Yes, he’d be interested in playing the role, but asked if we might meet again before I went back to New York.

  Two days later he came to talk further about the script. He’d “done a little work on it,” he said, and hoped I liked it. Actually, he had rewritten the first act entirely, the second act to come. And now I had the first of hundreds of difficult moments with Carroll O’Connor, many of them extremely difficult on both sides. At times they were murderously difficult. I was sick to my stomach at the thought of losing him, and that first moment concluded with my telling Carroll that I was committed to my script, as was the network, and that it was the script he had to commit to also. Through his agent, he did.

  Marion Dougherty brought in a slew of young actors to read for Gloria and Richard (later changed to Michael), and we found and cast two talented young players, Kelly Jean Peters and Tim McIntire, as the daughter and son-in-law. On September 29, 1968, we shot the Justice for All pilot before a live audience that roared at the taping, as did everyone for whom we screened it over the following weeks. My friend Leonard Goldberg, the celebrated film and TV producer, who was a young executive in the ABC program department then, has told me how much the top brass laughed at the show, but they couldn’t bring themselves to pick it up. Goldberg convinced them to take more time to think it over by exercising an option to have me make a second pilot. The network sought some script changes to soften Archie, and I politely refused. I did agree that the chemistry between Archie and Edith and the young couple could be improved, so we recast the Gloria and Richard (now Michael) roles with two well-known actors, Candy Azzara and Chip Oliver. We also decided to film Archie and Edith at the piano, singing “Those Were the Days.” And that, at the last minute, also became the show’s new title.

  On February 10, 1969, a little less than five months after making the first pilot, Those Were the Days was taped, again before a live audience. This time Bud was back from his Start the Revolution Without Me filming, and we directed this taping together. At the end of the opening credits and song, as a measure of the network’s concern, they added this line over the shot of Edith and Archie at the piano: “For a Mature Audience Only.” Two months later, CBS axed The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a brilliant, satirical variety show, for being “too topical” and, as one critic labeled it, “dangerously funny.” So ABC passed on Archie and Edith once again. The show was a free ball, and I was out of work once more.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T HAVE TO WAIT long for my next project to materialize. I had learned before we shot the second pilot that United Artists, who appreciated my work on Minsky’s, loved the Cold Turkey script and hoped the film could be shot that summer. The day I told David Picker that ABC had dropped their option on the pilot he told me to start casting the film. When I mentioned whom I had in mind to direct, his reply took my breath away.

  “Why don’t you direct it?” he asked.

  While the thought scared the hell out of me, I confess to having toyed with the idea. Frances, Bud, my girls, everyone in my life, supported my doing it. I asked the advice of just one director, Richard Brooks, whose work on and comments about film I so admired. I told Richard I had never owned a camera, had never taken a lot of pictures, even of my children, and knew nothing about lenses and such. He asked me, in that case, why in hell I had been toying with the idea. I was stumped, and Richard answered his question for me: “Because you know what
you want to see, don’t you?”

  Oh, yes, I had to acknowledge, I knew exactly what I wanted to see.

  “Then get yourself a great cinematographer and tell him what you want,” Richard Brooks advised.

  I had Dick Van Dyke in mind for the minister when I wrote the script, and with UA’s okay I sent a copy to him. Having just directed Jean Stapleton, I was eager to work with her again. I liked the idea of casting Bob Newhart against type as the adman who hustles the tobacco magnate, Edward Everett Horton, into his $25 million scheme. Then there was Vincent Gardenia as the mayor of the town I labeled Eagle Rock; Barnard Hughes as the town’s only surgeon (and four-pack-a-day smoker); Tom Poston as the town’s wealthy inebriate; Pippa Scott as the minister’s wife; and arguably the greatest comedy team radio ever produced, Bob and Ray, playing a couple of Walter Cronkite types who descend on Eagle Rock.

  Blind to the seduction and cheapening of his congregation and the community by the media frenzy that has the entire town, smokers and nonsmokers alike, gussying up for their fifteen minutes of fame, the Rev. Clayton Brooks is also deaf to the wife who finally cracks and lets him have it. “And finally, Clayton,” she demands, “ask yourself, what does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?” To which the reverend draws himself up sharply over her cowering figure and says, “You quote scripture to me, Natalie? A minister?” Handing her a rolled-up magazine, he adds, “A minister who just made the cover of Time magazine?” And indeed that is what we see, indisputable proof of celebrity sainthood, her husband the reverend on the cover of Time. The camera cuts sharply to her mind’s eye and a shot of Natalie, arms outstretched, shouting from the rooftop of her house, one long, end-of-the-world shriek as we pull back to infinity.