Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  While I can’t say I could have predicted this behavior, unlike my friends at CBS I understood and was elated by the audience’s reaction. Who, sitting among a group of strangers, with that dial in his or her lap, is going to tell the world that they approve of Archie’s hostility and rudeness? And who wants to be seen as having no problem with words such as spic, kike, spade, and the like spewing from a bigot’s mouth? So our focus group might even have winced as they laughed, but laugh they did, and dialed left. Comedy with something serious on its mind works as a kind of intravenous to the mind and spirit. After he winces and laughs, what the individual makes of the material depends on that individual, but he has been reached.

  CBS gave me a heads-up a few days before that All in the Family would start airing Tuesday, January 12, 1971, at 9:30 P.M. (right after The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Hee Haw). I alerted everyone in my world. There were some who still couldn’t believe it was actually happening. Monday morning, the eleventh, Program Practices paid me a visit and—hold everything—asked me to make one trim in our pilot episode.

  As taped, this for the third time, our story opens on a Sunday morning with Gloria putting the finishing touches on an anniversary brunch she is planning to surprise Archie and Edith with when they return from church. Michael is helping her, but in a touchy-feely mood. It turns serious. They rarely have the house alone together, he says, and he wants Gloria to go upstairs with him. She demurs. He continues his pursuit, catching her and kissing her. The front door opens and Archie and Edith come in. Archie has caused them to leave church early, and enters complaining about the preacher and the sermon they walked out on. They go into the dining area and encounter Mike and Gloria in a passionate embrace. Archie takes it all in and says, as if he caught them in the act, “Eleven ten on a Sunday morning!” CBS insisted we eliminate that line.

  “Why?” I asked Program Practices.

  “Because it makes it explicit.”

  “Makes what explicit?”

  “What they were going to do.”

  “At eleven ten on a Sunday morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “So? They’re married, aren’t they?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It won’t fly in Des Moines.”

  “And there’ll be a knee-jerk reaction in the Bible Belt?”

  “Not if you cut the line.” I said it didn’t make sense, and the line was in.

  “Then we’ll cut it,” he said. “Either way it won’t be in the broadcast.”

  That was the first time it occurred to me that the network could have the last word by editing out what we didn’t agree to. Fred Silverman called later to mollify me.

  “You’ve got a great show, Norm. What does one line matter?”

  I told him the line had to stay in and he said I could talk myself blue in the face but “the boys upstairs” had drawn a line. (I learned later that William Paley, who started and owned the network, had had grave reservations about the show.) Somehow I knew that far more than differing opinions over one line was at stake here. As tiny as this issue was, much of the program content of the series depended on our relationship with Program Practices, and that would be determined right here and now by the way this difference of opinion was resolved.

  I knew myself to be reasonable and open-minded, with some fine, experienced writers and a brilliant cast to sift ideas through. And I knew that Program Practices had their people living so much in the fear of offending that the satisfaction of reflecting life realistically, even when it hurts, was anathema to them. Then, too, there were many rungs on their ladder, so no Program Practices executive could think just for himself without worrying for and about those above him. That became my definition of mounting fear, and I was sure I couldn’t work that way. The report back to CBS in New York was that the offending line was to remain.

  At five P.M. L.A. time, an hour and a half before the show was to go on in New York, Bob Wood called with a breezy “Hi, fella.” He had a terrific compromise idea and felt sure I’d have no problem with it.

  “Listen, you’ll love it, we’re gonna run the second episode first,” he said. “Then next week we’ll run the show intended for tonight. We won’t change a word and you’ve saved your precious line. Done?”

  “No,” I said. We weren’t done, and the rest of the conversation was like drowning in the dark, legs pumping to keep head above water, hands grasping for something, anything, to hold on to. “The point is that we can’t keep giving in . . .”

  “But we’re still talking one line . . .” “Yes, but after that, trust me, I know where this is going . . .”

  “So, you’d lose an entire series for one stupid line?”

  “It isn’t the line, it’s the decision.”

  “So you’d lose the series for one stupid decision? Is that what you’re telling me? We got twenty-five minutes to airtime, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “I’m sorry, Bob.”

  My whole world was flashing before me. Was I being foolish, childish? I certainly wasn’t being brave because there was still a three-picture deal sitting out there. And there was Frances, and all my good friends, advising me to take it. The question was all about what was motivating me. Was it a matter of ego, of my having to have my own way? Or was CBS being ridiculously wary? Would Program Practices ever be strong enough to think for itself? Not if you’re right, Norman, about understanding the gutless, fear-ridden place they’re coming from.

  “I’m sorry, Bob,” I repeated. “I want the pilot to air first and the line of dialogue to remain as taped.”

  “And if not?” Bob asked.

  “Don’t expect me back.”

  When we hung up it was about 6:10 L.A. time, twenty minutes before the show was about to go on the air in New York. We were working on the script for what would be the fifth episode, preparing to close shop and race home to see our debut with our families. At six-thirty, just as I was about to call a friend in New York and ask what they were showing on CBS, the phone rang. It was Silverman from New York.

  “Rest easy,” he said. “You won this one.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, and I was no clearer about that at home three hours later, where a few friends and members of the cast and company who lived nearby were gathered around our TV set with us as the show began in the West and I found out what came with my victory. Before the fade-up on Carroll and Jean at the piano singing “Those Were the Days” (to which Jean had added that crack in her voice on the line “And you knew where you were then��—we did more than four hundred tapings and it never failed to get a laugh), there appeared this advisory:

  The program you are about to see is “All in the Family.” It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show—in a mature fashion—just how absurd they are.

  The first episode of the nine-season run of All in the Family followed. Thirty minutes later America had been introduced to the subversive mind of Norman Lear, and not a single state seceded from the Union.

  Despite my being aware that with every episode going forward we would face the same mental masturbation from the network that preceded episode one, I slept well. But I was totally unaware of how much my life would change—and how much the establishment would come to believe that TV and the American culture had been “radicalized” overnight.

  Five years later we had seven series on the air and Mike Wallace was introducing me on 60 Minutes as the man whose shows were viewed by more than 120 million people each week.

  PART 3

  Joyful Stress

  Happiness is the exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope.

  —ARISTOTLE

  1

  ON THE NIGHT All in the Family debuted, CBS and its affiliates
across the country had hired dozens of additional telephone operators to handle the tsunami of protest the network expected, but they proved unnecessary. The torrent turned out to be more of a trickle. Not that there weren’t questions of taste raised, and some severe condemnation, but most of that came from establishment professionals, the people who run research and do focus groups and are paid by the media and academia to tell us at any given hour who we are and what we are thinking.

  To me the most telling letter we received was from a woman who had been divorced many years before, when her son was four years old. The boy had never seen his father after that. On the night All in the Family debuted, her son was now thirty-two years old and living twelve hundred miles away. The show was on for about ten minutes when the lady ran to the telephone and almost broke her dialing finger phoning her son. When she reached him she screamed across the miles: “You always wanted to know what your father was like—well, hurry up and turn on channel two!”

  But while the public seemed to take it in stride, the press expressed a good deal of shock. The reviews were generally poor, which was all it took for the trickle to be judged a torrent. Those in Program Practices particularly were “trickled” to death with the outcome they could claim to have forecast.

  In March, Life magazine’s John Leonard, reviewing the first few shows under his pen name, Cyclops, gave the torrent theory a big boost. “All in the Family is a wretched program,” he wrote, “and why review a wretched program? Well, why vacuum the living room or fix the septic tank? Every once in a while the reviewer must assume the role of Johnson’s No-Roach with the spray applicator: let’s clean up this culture.”

  Neither was Richard Nixon a fan. As he complained to H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman in a critique secretly recorded on the White House tapes, “CBS came on with a movie, one that they made themselves and . . . they were glorifying homosexuality . . . I think the son-in-law obviously, apparently goes both ways, likes the daughter and all the rest . . .”

  Still, the show was also reviewed well by some. Jack Gould in the New York Times wrote: “Except for ‘All in the Family’ it is difficult to recall another TV attempt to bring the disease of bigotry and prejudicial epithets out into the open with the aim, one hopes, of applying the test of corrective recollection and humor.”

  Not long after, seeming to have second thoughts, the Times asked the noted novelist Laura Z. Hobson to write an opinion piece that might reexamine the kudos some readers—and possibly an editor or two—viewed as questionably “fit to print” in Jack Gould’s official review. There was no better choice to do that than Ms. Hobson, author of Gentlemen’s Agreement, the bestselling treatise on anti-Semitic bigotry and intolerance, and she did it brilliantly in a lengthy Sunday Arts section piece on September 12, 1971, just as the new season was starting. The Times then invited me to respond to Ms. Hobson’s critique, which I did three Sundays later. The centerpiece of her criticism was that I’d tried and failed to make a bigot lovable because “you can’t be a bigot and be lovable.”

  My response: “I am 22 years your junior, Madam, and meaning you no disrespect, if you have not known bigots of different stripes and attitudes, and to varying degrees, we are obviously aging in different wine cellars.”

  While some accused us of reinforcing racism through Archie’s attitudes, others gave us credit for exposing the absurdity of prejudice. I don’t think either is true. On the one hand, we never received a letter from anyone who agreed with Archie that didn’t somewhere say, “Why do you always make Archie such a horse’s ass at the end of the show?” It didn’t escape the notice of any of those “Right on, Archie!” people that the point of view of the show was that the man was foolish and his attitudes were harmful. And as much as Archie reminded viewers of fathers, uncles, and neighbors, I don’t recall a single letter that said, “I see a lot of myself in Archie.”

  I’ve never heard that anybody conducted his or her life differently after seeing an episode of All in the Family. If two thousand years of the Judeo-Christian ethic hadn’t eradicated bigotry and intolerance, I didn’t think a half-hour sitcom was going to do it. Still, as my grandfather was fond of saying—and as physicists confirm—when you throw a pebble in a lake the water rises. It’s far too infinitesimal a rise for our eyes to register, so all we can see is the ripple. People still say to me, “We watched Archie as a family and I’ll never forget the discussions we had after the show.” And so that was the ripple of All in the Family. Families talked.

  Looking back at it, I think Archie’s primary identity as an American bigot was much overemphasized because that quality had never before been given to the lead character in an American TV series. But the show dealt with so many other things. Yes, if he was watching a black athlete on television, he’d make an offhand bigoted remark, and Mike would call him out on it. But the episode in which that exchange occurred might have been about Archie losing his job and worrying about how he was going to support his family. While a line or two could reflect Archie’s bigotry, the story itself was likely to be a comment on the economics of that moment and the middle-class struggle to get by.

  In any event, it wasn’t that I thought bigotry per se could be funny, but that a fool on any subject can be funny. It was the state of the man’s mind. He was afraid of tomorrow. He was afraid of anything new, and that came through in the theme song: “Gee, our old LaSalle ran great / Those were the days.” He was lamenting the passing of time, because it’s always easier to stay with what is familiar and not move forward. This wasn’t a terrible human being. This was a fearful human being. He wasn’t evil, he wasn’t a hater—he was just afraid of change.

  AITF’s initial ratings were anemic and much of the press was dismayed by the sound of television’s first off-screen toilet flush. I thought the furor as big an affront to common sense as they thought the flush itself was to common decency. It’s likely that the very first joke that passes between every child and parent has to do with a bodily function, 99.9 percent of them in the poop arena. Go make something dirty of that. But many did. That was more than made up for, however, by the occasional critic who found a serious consistency in my work over the years. Vincent Canby, one of the senior critics of his time, wrote in the New York Times: “Both Cold Turkey and All in the Family are commendable for the courageous manner in which each works simultaneously with and against the conventions of its medium. Their success could even be a metaphor for what is genteelly called peaceful revolution” (italics mine).

  If the show had not begun at midseason, the chances are it would have disappeared after its initial thirteen-week run. But when the other two networks’ first-run programming ended, a percentage of their audiences finally tuned in to CBS to see what they’d been hearing and reading about, and our ratings started to climb. By early May the show was red-hot, jumping from fifty-something in the ratings to number fourteen.

  And then a miracle occurred. With only two weeks to go before the twenty-third Emmy broadcast, that year’s producer called. The show’s host, Johnny Carson, had an idea: What if the Emmys opened with America’s most talked-about new family, the Bunkers, sitting down together to watch the Emmy broadcast? They do their shtick, Archie hating the whole thing, of course, and Edith loving it, until the Emmys start and cut them off.

  We grabbed at the idea and wrote a short scene in which Edith is breathless with excitement as Emmy time approaches. She raves on about “how pretty everyone always looks at the Emmys and how lovely they must all smell,” causing Archie to wince. “It makes me feel so good,” she adds, “the way they all wave to each other, too. You just know there’s so much love in the room.” Archie, in the opposite direction, hates “all them Hollywood liberals and Commies” and is watching only in the hope that “Duke Wayne, the only real man in that crowd and a honest to God American, might show up.”

  Even in that ballroom full of TV professionals, most had never seen the Bunk
ers before. That was true of the viewing audience as well. Carson was wonderful, the Emmys a smash—we won three: Outstanding New Series, Outstanding Comedy Series, and Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series—and when Monday arrived the Bunkers entered the category of household names heard around watercoolers everywhere.

  • • •

  WE REHEARSED AND SHOT All in the Family before a live audience at CBS Television City in Hollywood. The episodes were written and produced as plays, with people talking and behaving in real time, like a piece of theater. We rarely stopped for a time lapse. The live interaction between our actors and the audience sitting twenty feet away was as palpable to viewers at home as it was for people in the fourth row. Much as a baker sets his dough in the oven, we set down these little plays of ours before an audience of 250, whose laughter, occasional tears, and applause, like heat to bread, caused our play to rise. Watching great comic actors sweep up a live audience and take them to the moon is an indescribable high. There’s just nothing like it.

  Carroll sat down to every reading worried and unhappy. It seemed to make little difference whether his problems with the script turned out to be few or many, small or large. Most of the time we’d hear, “It just doesn’t work.” He wasn’t always wrong, of course. When he wasn’t, his concerns were quickly addressed and the script was better for his input. But much of the time we were facing fear, a fear that could render Carroll impossible to deal with. It was understandable to a degree. He was, after all, at the beginning of a process where he was to shed the gentle Irish intellectual Carroll O’Connor to become the poorly educated full-of-himself blowhard Archie Bunker, spewing a kind of rancid, lights-out conservatism for a television audience that grew quickly to more than 50 million people.