Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  There then came a moment when—after expressing this for the umpteenth time—I thought: Wait a second. Who said the comedies that preceded All in the Family had no point of view? The overwhelming majority of them were about families whose biggest problem was “The roast is ruined and the boss is coming to dinner!” Or “Mother dented the fender and how is she going to tell Father?” Talk about messaging! For twenty years—until AITF came along—TV comedy was telling us there was no hunger in America, we had no racial discrimination, there was no unemployment or inflation, no war, no drugs, and the citizenry was happy with whomever happened to be in the White House. Tell me that expressed no point of view!

  People also talked about the anger in the shows, and of course there was anger in them. It was social—I was angry at the lunacy that I saw in the world. But for me there was always infinitely more love. I think the shows loved people, and that’s why they tried to deal so deeply with the human condition—with all of its suffering, hysteria, foolishness, and sublimity.

  It’s taken me a lifetime to repeat this, but I think Paddy Chayefsky had it right when he said of me, “Norman Lear took television away from dopey wives and dumb fathers, from the pimps, hookers, hustlers, private eyes, junkies, cowboys and rustlers that constituted television chaos and, in their place, put the American people. He took the audience and he put them on the set.” My view is that we made comedy safe for reality.

  That reality included black people. As a teenager, I remember taking the train to New York. When we reached the city, we’d slow down for our first stop, 125th Street. We were on an elevated track, quite close to the third- or fourth-floor windows of tenement buildings, and as we slipped past I could see all kinds of activity: family after family—almost all Negroes, as we referred to them then—living their lives. I would imagine their stories; assign a hero here and a villain there; imagine myself one of them; pretend I knew what would happen next. Although there were no black families in my neighborhood, and only one black kid in my high school graduation class, they were a strong presence in my mind.

  3

  THE CHARACTER OF MAUDE’S MAID, Florida, as played by Esther Rolle, was a standout. In our second season the network and Tandem all thought that with solid support she could carry her own show. From that idea came Good Times, our fourth big hit. It was called a spinoff, but I’ve always considered the term as making too light of a far more thoughtful and innovative approach to birthing a show.

  When Esther Rolle was a featured player on Maude, I thought of her as performing in the bush leagues while being groomed for the majors. Acting on that, we gave her more to do and her character more background, revealing that she was married and had children. And then, on one episode, we introduced her husband, James, and cast John Amos to play him. Florida and James clicked loudly together and CBS saw as quickly as we did that—add children and stir slowly—we had the potential for another very funny family show.

  The story of how Good Times went from an idea to a script we felt worthy of presenting—it was, after all, the first full black family on television—just might fall into the “No good deed goes unpunished” department. Mike Evans, the young actor who played Lionel, the son of George Jefferson on All in the Family, wanted to write as well as act, and I suggested he take a crack at the Good Times pilot script. He brought in Eric Monte, a black writer he wished to team up with. Eric (who later sued me, Jerry Perenchio, Tandem, and CBS for something like $185 million) came from the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago, so we settled the James and Florida Evans family there. I was charmed by Eric Monte and, having worked for years with Mike, liked him a lot, too. A number of black writers worked with us through the years, but thus far none had created a show. Mike and Eric now had the opportunity to be the first.

  They blew it creatively with a poor copycat of a script. But even though what they wrote was a far cry from what we shot, we did not seek to change their credit as the sole cocreators. I could be confessing to a bit of inverse racism here when I admit that it even pleased me to see them credited and paid. That would not have happened, at least not gratuitously, if they were white.

  • • •

  ALLAN MANINGS, a respected comedy writer Tandem had signed, went to work writing a new story and filling out the family members. The Evanses would have an older teenage son, J.J.; a younger teenage daughter, Thelma; and a second son, Michael, age eleven; plus a neighbor and close friend to Florida named Willona. Manings once recalled that I phoned him at one o’clock in the morning and said, “I want to tell you how much I love your script. So much so that I think we can go right to a table read with it.” And then he added, “Fourteen rewrites later we were in rehearsal.” We had a good time casting, as indicated, I think, by the actors we wound up with—Jimmie Walker as J.J., Ja’net DuBois as Willona, Bern Nadette Stanis as Thelma, and Ralph Carter as Michael.

  The Evans family still lived, as marginally as possible, where Mike and Eric placed them, in the Cabrini-Green project. James held down three jobs if he had to. Still, we were determined that (a) the family would never go on welfare; (b) they would deal with the reality of their world—gangs, drugs, crime, poverty, etc.; and (c) despite that, the kids would not fail to get an education.

  By the time we were to go into rehearsal for the pilot episode, CBS had upped their order to thirteen on the air. When we taped that first episode, the cast and audience were aware that history was being made, and the sense of discovery and exhilaration on that stage could not have been higher. The actors all scored in their roles, and when the show aired it was an immediate hit. And not with blacks only, as some predicted would be the case. The viewership was 60 percent white. It was heralded as a breakthrough by the press generally and the black press especially, the actors were proud and excited, and it was a kick sitting down each week to a reading of the new script.

  That lasted for about eight weeks. What followed taught me a great deal about a lot of things, including myself. With all the attention being paid, Esther and John began to feel a personal responsibility for every aspect of TV’s first black family’s behavior. That was quite understandable. The off-camera crew, too, couldn’t have cared more about how we portrayed the Evans family. But for the actors, after reading and hearing from all the world about the show—their pastors, their families, their friends, the press, and soon their egos—the weight of believing themselves to be the public image of their race became a bit too much for them, especially when they themselves held different views. The Evans family they thought they should be presenting to the world was becoming too good to be true. In disagreements over a line or a bit of business, Allan and I, their white producers and writers, would often hear from Esther or John, “No, we wouldn’t do that.” Or, “Uh-uh, I wouldn’t say that,” or “She would never feel that way.”

  Some of the cast’s input was invaluable and I learned a thousand lessons from John and Esther, not just about black people but about our joint humanity. Still, their hypersensitivity to how they were perceived—by social forces that were not of one mind—cost us all dearly. We were losing some unique subject matter and a degree of reality that made for our show’s freshness. This had to stop, and one story line Esther was refusing to consider resulted in a turnaround.

  Thelma, the Evanses’ mature and beautiful sixteen-year-old, had a boyfriend she cared about who started to hit on her quite seriously. Physically, she had every desire to sleep with him, and a girlfriend was advising her that she should, but Thelma was fighting it and wanted to talk it over with her mom. When Esther heard about it, she refused the script.

  “No point in even reading it,” she said. “The last thing we want this family to deal with on our show is teenage sex.” The fact that Thelma ultimately came to the same conclusion as her mom made no difference to Esther. “It is morally wrong, let’s not even discuss it,” she said. “There is enough that’s morally wrong on TV. Not on my show!”


  Maybe it was the “my show” syndrome setting in that did it, but finally I knew I had to do something. At the next rehearsal I asked all the cast members, the writers, and the director to pull up a chair and “Let’s talk.” I told them that I couldn’t be prouder of them and what we’d brought to TV together. I spoke of how much I’d learned in the process about the black culture, for which I held such a deep affection and appreciation. I understood and respected why each of them felt entitled to their feelings about how their race should be represented on TV, reminded them of how many times even they disagreed, and then asked them to consider the problems these mind-sets were presenting to the creative staff, particularly me. Worst of all, I pointed out, this problem had started to affect our work, and we had to put an end to it.

  The buck was going to stop with me, I told them. When we couldn’t reach an agreement on whatever the issue, I would make the decision as to what route we took. On the matter of “Thelma’s Problem,” I told Esther, the discussion was over and we were going ahead with that script. But lest they think me arbitrary and dictatorial, I reminded them that we were doing a family show and that I, too, grew up in a family and had made families of my own. I, too, was a father, a son, a husband, an uncle, and a grandson. In the way they all interact and relate, I haven’t detected that much difference from one race to another. The difference lies in the patina, the way we may express the same feelings, the way we arrive at similar conclusions. I would continue to defer to them in those matters, but even then, as their executive producer, I’d continue to provide the guideposts.

  That didn’t go down as well with Esther and John as I would have liked, but it did give them considerable pause. “Thelma’s Problem” went well and we got a lot of mail from individuals, schools, and institutions that found the episode helpful in opening up a normally difficult subject for discussion. I shared it all with Esther, but she’d received some mail, too, from her church, her pastor, and a couple of fundamentalist institutions I knew well because I would hear from them all the time. Going forward, I empathized with both John and Esther. Good people and fine actors, their egos were nonetheless bruised from both directions. They couldn’t win unless they were sufficiently flexible to open up to another point of view occasionally in the service of the show, maintaining their convictions even when performing something counter to those convictions. Sadly to say, they weren’t.

  Jimmie Walker, as the older son, J.J., was a big problem to them. It started early in the series when he ad-libbed “Dy-no-mite!” about something that pleased him. It was funny, the audience howled, and he repeated it to the same reaction. A sure laugh, at the next reading the cast found it in the script. John winced and it was clear trouble was brewing.

  Let me say that I loved J.J. the character and Jimmie the actor. In reality they were not that far apart. The actor seemed to have shrugged off what was known as “the black man’s burden.” I believed that was the way he chose to deal with it. Physically, he could have been a cartoonist’s vision of Ichabod Crane, a funnyman to the eye, to which he deliberately added the ear. The man, the boy, was just plain funny. “Dy-no-mite!” became a running joke, and the character of J.J., John and Esther began to believe, was running away with the show. It was Mike Evans’s idea that the J.J. character be a painter, too, and I thought that could be a great counter to “Dy-no-mite!” I loved the idea. It occurred, coincidentally, at the time I’d taken an interest in contemporary art.

  With my older friend (and member of the modern art cognoscenti) Dick Dorso as counselor, I visited galleries and artists’ studios and along the way met and collected a number of the modern greats, among them the black artist Ernie Barnes. Ernie cottoned to the notion of his paintings being the on-camera stand-ins for J.J.’s creativity. I’d been learning in my art travels with Dorso that, in appearance, artists were 180 degrees from what I’d ignorantly imagined them to be. They were not Peter Ustinov in a smock and beret. They looked like the guy or gal who came to fix your washer, trim your garden, or unclog your drain. The possibility of an artist lurking in everyone was a point I took special pleasure in making when J.J.’s talent as a painter unfolded.

  Ernie Barnes, in his unique style, sketched a few elongated and attenuated athletes to begin with, and J.J.’s artistry was established. Then, to make as big a splash of this as we knew how, and engage in as sensitive and worthwhile a discussion at the same time, we wrote an entire story around J.J.’s latest piece of art. It was a black Jesus, which Ernie Barnes took special pride in. To Esther, who was very devoted to her church, the portrait itself and the dialogue discussion that necessarily followed was blasphemous. Odd that the largely white writing staff of a show about a black family was defending the notion of a black Jesus to a black woman, but to me that was all the proof we needed to know what an interesting and multifaceted topic our story had engaged. Nonetheless, it left Esther Rolle and John Amos entirely on edge. “Dy-no-mite!” was a further and constant irritation. We toned it down and had Jimmie say it less often, but the audience loved it and sometimes burst out with it themselves when they felt it was coming and J.J. had been instructed to hold back.

  With all the friction and discontent, the show remained funny and we told some remarkably topical stories (about, among other subjects, VD, drug addiction, and the consequences of having a gun in the house). We’d read that the incidence of high blood pressure was greater in black men than whites and did an episode on the subject that involved John. The next day thousands of black men phoned their doctors and medical centers for more information. Months later, when the episode was rerun, the network attached an advisory for which it was lauded by the medical establishment.

  Of course Good Times wouldn’t have been a Tandem/T.A.T. production without at least one example of inane network censorship. In one episode the grandfather comes to visit and brings a woman with him. Everybody assumes they’d gotten married, and they all make room and give them the bedroom. Then it turns out that they weren’t married, and Florida says, “You mean to tell me that you’re . . .” and the thirteen-year-old finishes the question: “Shacking up?” After days of wrangling the network said, “We’ll let the kid say ‘Getting it on.’” They were okay with “getting it on” but not “shacking up.”

  We shot it the way we wanted to and the line got a warm and dear laugh. Two nights before the broadcast I was saying to Program Practices in New York, “If it’s on the air without that moment I’m not going to be here tomorrow or any other day, and you do whatever you want to do . . .”

  Their threat when someone stands up to them is always a lawsuit. My response was, “Back up the truck, take the house and the furniture. I know the law prevents you from taking the kids. You can’t take the family, and I can always sit down and get another pencil and a piece of paper to start again.”

  The episode aired with the line intact.

  Good Times, while it was rarely out of the top twenty and spent a lot of time in the top ten, became an agony to produce. J.J.’s popularity with the largely black audiences that came to the tapings was a friendly, joyful distraction to the company, but a great annoyance to our stars. Frankly, they hated it. And as sensitive to these fine actors as he was, Jimmie knew how they felt and it tore him up inside. That caused him to be more of what they hated on the outside, to the point where the press began calling him a stereotype.

  Had John and Esther thrown their arms around this wild but tender talent and been grateful for what he brought to the show, so hungry for their respect and kindness was Jimmie that they could have owned the lad and helped him to mature, to become more an actor and less a type. The only other adult in the cast, Ja’net DuBois, a comedienne who delivered on everything that was handed her, understood what was going on. Her friendship and respect helped Jimmie keep his sanity.

  By the end of the third season John Amos was so glum and dispirited that it seemed impossible to go on, and we decid
ed to write him out of the show. Talk to John and you might as well be dealing with the Sphinx—twenty-five hundred years of silent certainty. I was sure he felt that the work he was doing was beneath him, and that another character, not his, was why the show was on the air. His ego blinded him. Without that family, especially the sturdy, steadfast parents that John Amos and Esther Rolle represented to a fare-thee-well, Jimmie would have been just another loose cannon stand-up comic. It was the family that gave J.J. weight, “Dy-no-mite!” or not.

  The fourth season opened with the Evanses preparing to move to Mississippi, where James has gotten a good job, but before that can happen, they receive the tragic news that he’s been killed in a car crash. The next season, a new star was born on the show when Janet Jackson made her acting debut in a stunning appearance as a victim of child abuse. Janet’s performance and the subject matter captured so much attention that we found a way to keep her on the show for the full season by having Willona seek to adopt her. Good Times, which debuted in January 1974, was on the air for six seasons, but with Allan Manings in charge, I was immediately able to devote my time to the development of our fifth show.

  • • •

  EARLY IN THE RUN of All in the Family, a black family, the Jeffersons, moved in next door to the Bunkers. For the first couple of years we saw only Lionel Jefferson (Mike Evans) and his mom, Louise (Isobel Sanford), who would be better known as “Weezy” after we cast the role of George, the husband who called her by that name. That occurred in 1973. I had seen Sherman Hemsley in the Broadway musical Purlie, and from the moment we considered moving a black family in next door to Archie, I couldn’t get Sherman out of my mind. Until he was free of Purlie, George was an offstage character and the man of the house was Henry, George’s brother. Henry was Archie’s counterpart—the same size, same volume, same warped attitudes. As good as the actor (Mel Stewart) was, Henry came off as merely a black Archie, not his nemesis—not someone who could get Archie’s goat before he even entered the room. When Sherman came on the scene it was another story. He was a natural irritant—prouder, feistier, more pugnacious, and smaller than Archie—the black bantam cock version of him who could all but literally get under Archie’s skin.