Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  When Gloria delivered a baby boy the network execs knew, as sure as if they were comedy writers themselves, that the time would come when Archie had to diaper his grandson. Two months later, when the script we were about to go into rehearsal with called for Archie to be left alone with the baby, a young man from Program Practices came to see me. He was a fresh face, a Princeton type—you might think him a young physician. He asked me if we contemplated any close-ups of the baby. I told him I had no interest in a close-up of an infant’s genitalia, if that was what concerned him. Then I shouldn’t mind, he said, if Archie diapered him on his belly. I admit that as the father of three girls I wondered aloud for a moment if that was the way male babies were diapered. Then I caught a look from one of the writers overhearing this who had a son.

  Archie diapering his grandson was as dear as it was funny. For perhaps an instant the child was fully exposed and, assuming they spotted it in the first place, if any of 40 million viewers were offended by the little bugger’s doohickey, they never let us know.

  2

  THE SECOND SERIES Bud and I brought to the little screen, Sanford and Son—inspired by the British series Steptoe and Son—starred Redd Foxx, whom we’d seen and fallen in love with in Las Vegas. In the history of the medium it was probably the only television show seen and purchased by one network under the roof of another—and there were only three nets at the time. I was producing All in the Family at CBS, and we rented a small studio down the hall to rehearse what we hoped would be our pilot episode for Sanford. One day Bud and I invited the AITF company to come see what Redd and Demond Wilson, playing his son, were up to. We saw the first act of the pilot episode and howled. Redd, a true original, was as fresh and funny as only he could be. For a week or more I asked, ultimately implored, CBS execs just a few floors above us to take a look at what we had. For whatever reasons no one found the time, and so I phoned a programming executive at NBC. A few hours later two of the top guys at the Peacock net stopped by, collars up and hats pulled down like a pair of hoods seeking to go unrecognized. They watched and on the spot offered to purchase Sanford and Son, which, for the next seven years under Bud’s supervision, was one of their highest-ranking shows.

  And next came “that uncompromising, enterprising, anything but tranquilizing” Maude. When I was a kid the best family fights took place on holidays, when uncles, aunts, and cousins with long-standing grudges came from everywhere and had just one day to settle old scores. And so, in an episode of All in the Family in which we wanted someone to clobber Archie as he’d never been clobbered before, who better than Edith Bunker’s cousin, her closest friend and confidante when they were kids, someone who adored her and all those years ago couldn’t face losing her to Archie, that “slob of a Nixon lover”? She, Maude, hated him from the minute they’d met and the feeling was mutual. Perfect. We had the character, but what about the casting?

  In 1955 I saw an Off-Broadway musical called Ben Bagley’s Shoestring Revue, which featured a showstopping torch song called “Garbage,” written by Sheldon Harnick and sung by a tall, deep-throated woman in her early thirties. She was leaning against a streetlight at night, in a slinky black dress, singing a bluesy torch song about a man she loved who treated her like garbage. Every time she hit the word “garbage” the audience howled. She was altogether hilarious, but with a voice that demanded she be taken seriously at the same time. That was my introduction to Bea Arthur.

  Fourteen years before casting her as Maude, I brought Bea to L.A. to make her television debut as a guest on The George Gobel Show. The sketch characters she played with Gobel, the woman who sang “Garbage” in Shoestring Revue, Vera Charles (the role she played opposite Angela Lansbury on Broadway in Mame), and later Dorothy on Golden Girls—were all fitted to the tall figure, baritone voice, acid tongue, and totally unique physicality and personality of Beatrice Arthur. That was true, too, of the role of Maude Findlay, which called for her to be both politically and socially 180 degrees from Archie.

  Bea Arthur as Maude made me laugh in places in my body I would never have known existed otherwise. She mirrored the most profound understanding of the foolishness of the human condition. It wasn’t anything she thought about, it wasn’t anything she could talk to you about, it wasn’t anything she knew, but her reaction to the bullshit in ordinary life was a gift to the character and contained a degree of truth-seeking madness that got to me and wrung me out. The madness originated in the woman, the actress.

  The episode guest-starring Bea aired halfway into All in the Family’s second season. As the end credits were running in New York, CBS’s programming chief, Fred Silverman, called. “That woman should have her own show,” he said, to which I responded, “What a great idea!”

  Within weeks producer-writer Rod Parker was at work, Charlie Hauck was hired as his right hand, the team of Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf were added soon thereafter, and Hal Cooper signed on to direct.

  • • •

  WITH THREE SHOWS on the air and ideas for several more moving forward, Bud and I realized we didn’t have our business base covered adequately. We had a personal attorney, a personal business manager, and an attorney and business manager for our company, Tandem Productions. What we didn’t have was a businessman on the inside, a president and CEO. I knew that we, like others before us, could create several TV shows that were basically owned by the network. Paul Henning, who created Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and The Beverly Hillbillies, was the example that immediately preceded us on CBS. However well paid, he might as well have been an employee of CBS. Ultimately, we wanted to own and distribute what we created, and we knew we didn’t have the business savvy to accomplish that.

  I had never forgotten A. Jerrold Perenchio, the agent assigned by Lew Wasserman to book an act for us when we wanted Andy Williams to see it in a professional situation. Jerry is Italian and he wears it like a glove, a very fine glove. No one loves and reflects finery better than Jerry. He is a piece of finery himself. When they made him they threw away the mold, the room, and the building he came in. Those who work in the creative side of entertainment often feel superior to those who tend to the business, but there is more originality, imagination, and vision in Jerry Perenchio—and a number of other executives I’ve met who are never considered part of the “creative community”—than there is in a large percentage of that community’s bona fide members.

  I’d started talking to him about joining us as soon as we got the go-ahead for Sanford and Son. Jerry had left MCA by then and started his own company, Chartwell Associates. He turned me down, but I persisted, almost in the going-after-Frank-Sinatra fashion. It was in the process of his turning me down repeatedly over many months that Jerry and I became good friends.

  Finally, after Maude went on the air, I went to see Jerry’s attorney, Allen Sussman. I talked about it being “How high is up?” time at Tandem, and convinced him that a truly big company could be brewing here with the right promoter and business mind steering it. With Allen’s help we turned Perenchio around, and in January 1973 he joined us as Tandem’s president and CEO. The following year, for financial reasons, Jerry and I formed the separate company T.A.T. Communications, whose initials came from the Yiddish expression tuches ahfen tisch, roughly translated as “enough talk—put your ass on the table.”

  Our deal with Perenchio dictated that we also bring aboard a young executive he had just hired away from Procter & Gamble. He knew nothing about the entertainment industry, had never considered being in it, but something about him spoke loudly to Jerry, who coaxed Alan Horn to join him nonetheless. I met with Alan at my home one Sunday morning before signing the contract and got the same message. He was considerably younger than Jerry and me, great looking, very smart, and extremely likable. He mentioned coming to California with Charles, spending so much time with Charles, and feeling so good about the way Charles took the trip.

  I was sure Alan had come west
with a family member, and it was some time before I realized that Charles was his car. You have to know there’s something special about a man who would name his car Charles.

  Bud and I could not have handled the business matters that were about to hit us when Perenchio and Horn joined the team. When Maude came along CBS was becoming short of space, and with another show on the way, Perenchio started negotiating with another studio, Metromedia. When a fifth show in development made even that complex too small, another stage had to be built. More negotiation. More writers. More contracts. More offices. More executives. Jerry and Alan had come aboard in the nick of time.

  • • •

  THE STORY LINE for every episode of every show originated at the conference table in my office. I had instructed our writers to come to work prepared to talk about their marriages, kids, family problems, health problems—their lives in the context of what was going on in their communities and the world. The topicality of our work, the personal nature of so much of it, and the serious subjects we chose to deal with grew out of that.

  The audiences themselves taught me that you can get some wonderful laughs on the surface of anything with funny performers and good jokes, but if you want them laughing from the belly, you stand a better chance of achieving it if you can get them caring first. The humor in life doesn’t stop when we are in tears, any more than it stops being serious when we are laughing. So we writers were in the game to elicit both. My favorite charge to them was “Let’s bring the audience to their knees.” There was a listening device stationed midtable in my office, and down the hall a writers’ aide was transcribing our discussion. By the time our meetings concluded, those notes (or stories, if we’d gotten that far) were typed and ready for the writer or team that had been assigned the task of turning out the script.

  If asked what I thought were the five best television episodes of the more than two thousand we produced, the November 10, 1975, episode of Maude would certainly be one of them. Maude was on camera alone throughout the entire show, talking to her psychiatrist, who, but for his hand on the arm of his chair, was never seen or heard. The episode was based on one of my most memorable experiences with my dad—the day he promised me his car to take Charlotte to the Westport Playhouse, didn’t come home in time, then chased after me to take my jalopy and give me his Hudson Terraplane.

  The way I chose to have the story rewritten for a father and daughter was to make H.K.’s late-model car a lovely coat. Just as I longed for the car to take my date to the theater, Maude longed to wear the coat when she accompanied her date to their senior prom.

  The episode opened with an overwrought Maude telling her shrink about how upset she was with her father, how he was never there for her when she was growing up, and how their past relationship was affecting her current one with her husband. She hated her father, couldn’t think of a single time he’d made her happy. And then, as she wept and searched her past, she suddenly recalled something.

  She was graduating from high school and for her graduation her folks bought her the most beautiful coat she’d ever seen, “a pearl-gray coat with a Persian lamb collar.” After some minor alterations her father was to have picked it up before the store closed and brought it home in time for Maude to wear to her prom. Maude’s heart was so set on it that every time she mentioned “the pearl-gray coat with the Persian lamb collar” the audience seemed ready to cry for her. Of course her father was late, the store had closed, and Maude described how her dad, the H.K. of her life, tracked down the store owner and talked him into coming back downtown to open the store and give him the coat, which he then raced to Maude, arriving just before she was to step into her all-decked-out high school gymnasium.

  As she clawed that moment out of her memory Maude burst into tears, and the hate she had expressed for her dad turned into “Oh, no, I loved him, I loved him. Oh, God, how I loved my father.” The episode was nominated for two Emmys.

  • • •

  BILL MACY AS WALTER FINDLAY, Maude’s husband, was ideal casting. I never forgot his performance in an Off-Broadway play by Israel Horovitz in the late sixties, especially a scene in which, sitting at a table eating chicken alone onstage, he begins to choke on a bone. Should he try swallowing it? He starts and his eyes pop. Better to cough it up? He tries, but, uh-uh, no! Falls to his knees, rolls on the floor. Maybe if he coughs with his hands up? Down? He stops, dead still, and just stares out at the audience, possibly praying. They hold their breath and choke down laughter, no small trick. Then, tentatively, like the problem’s gone, Macy attempts a slight swallow. His face reads like this is working. Then—shit! It starts all over again. Blackout!

  There is no way I could have captured the hilarity of that performance for you, but I hope six years of Bill Macy’s Walter gives you an inkling of it. Offstage Bill was kind and gentle, and at the same time, surprisingly, an original brand of wild man. No one but Bill Macy would attend a black-tie dinner in honor of the show in which he starred and interrupt a solemn moment in the sold-out proceedings by leaping onstage, grabbing the microphone, tossing his arms out riotously, and shouting, “Cocksuckers of the world, unite!” Have you ever heard fifteen hundred people groan in unison? It was as if the floorboards opened and the evening fell through them.

  The next day, in rehearsal, Bill’s way of apologizing to his fellow cast members was to suddenly drop his pants. If that sounds more like an “up yours” act of hostility than one of contrition, all I can say is you had to be there. Bill’s “I’m sorry” ran so deep as to reach his childhood, where seeking further punishment by the repetition of an offensive act often signals the child’s most abject apology.

  Rue McClanahan and Conrad Bain, who played the Harmons, the next-door neighbors to the Findlays, were also actors I’d seen in Off-Broadway shows and years later brought to California. Their talents made for hilarious, multifaceted characters and perfect foils for Bea and Bill. Adrienne Barbeau played Maude’s daughter, and Esther Rolle as Florida, the maid—better known these days as a housekeeper—filled out the cast. There has never been a closer, more harmonious, and protective-of-one-another cast than the Maude ensemble. It all started, of course, with Bea Arthur, who would do anything, try anything, and give her everything to whatever was asked of her.

  • • •

  MAUDE WAS LAUDED or loathed depending on how the reviewers, and viewers as well, felt about the then relatively new feminist movement. The character was a role model and hero to all who cheered the movement on, and was reviled by those who held fast to the idea that “a woman’s place is in the home.” Men who perceived their male dominance being pissed on all but wanted her dead. On top of that, Frances and I had become close to Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Eleanor Smeal, the head of the National Organization for Women, so we wound up in the loathed list just behind Maude. Those feelings were further ruffled when I elected to have Maude get pregnant and agonize with her family over whether or not to have the child at her age. (She was nearing fifty.) She chose to abort.

  As you would expect, Program Practices fought our touching the subject. An abortion was an absolute no-no, still illegal in many states at the time (though not in New York, where Maude lived). William Tankersly, a true gentleman, was the head of the department at the time, and while our business relationship often saw us at odds, we respected and listened to each other. His initial “no way” turned into “go ahead” when I told him we would write in a good friend who had four kids, was pregnant with a fifth that she could not afford emotionally or economically, yet for whom an abortion was out of the question—and who didn’t understand how Maude could see it any other way.

  Maude’s abortion story, written by Susan Harris, took two episodes and went on the air early in the first season. Two Illinois affiliates, in Champaign and Peoria, refused to air the shows—the first time any CBS station had rejected any episode of a continuing series. Things escalated considerabl
y when those episodes were due to be rerun in August. The expanding Religious Right, energized by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision just five months earlier, went to town. Zealots across the country made thousands of phone calls; seventeen thousand similarly worded letters of protest were received by CBS; hundreds in the South and Midwest picketed their local TV stations; and in New York City protesters lay down in front of William Paley’s car as the chairman of CBS was driving into his network’s garage. Thirty-nine affiliates declined to air the reruns and, most telling of all, not one corporate sponsor bought commercial time on those broadcasts.

  The lesson here, and through the years I’ve seen it repeated over and over again, is that a relatively small group of agitators, especially when convinced God is on their side, can move corporate America to quake with fear and make decisions in total disregard of the Constitution that protects against such decisions.

  The controversy the shows set off—particularly some individual episodes—generated a good deal of criticism of me for what was viewed as editorializing. “If you want to send a message,” I was told, “use Western Union.” In the early years I would face that accusation by denying it. We weren’t sending messages, I’d say, we were doing comedy. If we could not make a story funny we would not do the story. I’ve always believed that the things that make me laugh will make you laugh, and what makes you cry will make me cry. I have to believe that or I don’t have guidelines. But to me, laughter lacks depth if it isn’t involved with other emotions. An audience is entertained when it’s involved to the point of laughter or tears—ideally, both.

  At some point my response to the accusation that I was sending a message changed. I came to realize that, as a longtime observer of the culture, now in my fifties, why wouldn’t I have a point of view and care to express it in my work? I determined that I need not be apologetic and began saying openly, “Yes, as full-grown human beings who read and think and pay a lot of attention to what is happening in the world our children will inherit, we will write and produce those stories that interest and involve us—and those are usually about something. Our humor expresses our concerns.”