Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  Another by-product of this assault on freedom of speech was that writers of new shows were sanitizing their scripts to minimize potential offensiveness, because no one wanted to cut their chances of getting on the air by a third, which would be the effect if you were precluded from the Family Hour. Additionally, scripts that would have raised four or five objections were now raising dozens, and the intensity of the discussions escalated as well. The creative climate was becoming increasingly oppressive—there was a vapor that snuck under doors and through walls, even on shows ostensibly safe from Family Hour restrictions.

  The best example from that season was what Program Practices came to call the “Raspberry to God” show. In the episode, Archie and Mike are arguing about religion, and whether or not Archie’s grandson would be brought up to believe in God. Mike’s attitude is, “He’ll grow up and make up his own mind,” and Archie’s is, “No, he won’t. He is going to go to church. He is going to be a good, God-fearing Christian.” Mike restates his opinion, Archie says that if Mike raises his son that way, “God will punish you,” and Mike says, “If I did believe in God, he wouldn’t be the kind of God you believe in. He wouldn’t be a punishing, vengeful God.” The argument continues in this vein, and at some point Mike gives Archie a raspberry, and Archie interprets it as his having given a raspberry to God.

  Previously the network might, on occasion, have objected to this kind of thing in the script, and I would have said, “Let’s wait until you see it on its feet, and if you still have a problem we can talk about it.” Now they just decreed, “You can’t do it.” I suggested that we invite several clergymen from various religious factions to attend the pretaping run-through and said I’d be willing to abide by their decision if they deemed it sacrilegious. A man named Dick Kirschner from Program Practices rejected that idea, saying, “We don’t program for clergymen,” and assuring me that while he understood that the raspberry was not directed at God, others—i.e., our unsophisticated middle-of-the-country viewers—would not.

  “There is going to be a knee-jerk reaction,” he said, “because they are talking about God and the raspberry comes in the middle of it and they are not going to hear it right. And there is going to be this knee-jerk reaction, and we don’t want that.”

  “So,” I said, “you’re not programming for the clergy, you’re programming for the knee-jerkers.”

  In the end we shot the show we wanted to shoot, and sometime later we got the word that it had been accepted by the network, so the ultimate result was that dozens of man-hours that could have been creatively spent were instead squandered on useless discussions that produced nothing but needless anxiety and animosity.

  The combination of potential financial losses and the climate of unspoken censorship caused by the Family Viewing Hour prompted me to call my friend Geoff Cowan, then the head of UCLA’s communications law department, to ask if he thought we had First Amendment grounds for a lawsuit. He did, and a few days later, at Geoff’s suggestion, I met with a young attorney, Ron Olson, with the law firm Munger, Tolles—today, Munger, Tolles & Olson. (Charlie Munger is the partner of celebrated investor Warren Buffett.) I liked Olson immediately, and when I learned that he hailed from my adopted home state of Iowa, we linked like a pair of twelve-year-olds.

  As I said in my deposition for the lawsuit, “A great deal of what you term excess violence occurs because there is a program department that is asking for action . . . and the euphemism for violence is action . . . In search of ratings, excess violence is coaxed out of writers and production companies by the very networks that bring on from another direction a Family Viewing Hour to lessen it.”

  The foolishness and perniciousness of the Family Viewing Hour was evidently clear to Los Angeles district court judge Warren J. Ferguson, too. In November 1976 he ruled that the FCC’s Family Hour concept, and the NAB’s extension of it into pre–prime time, did indeed violate freedom of speech guarantees. “The desirability or undesirability of family viewing is not the issue,” Ferguson said, “but censorship by government or privately created review boards cannot be tolerated.”

  Judge Ferguson’s decision was a source of joy and achievement for all the guilds. “One for the good guys,” we all felt on the creative end of TV. But little could change materially as long as the business end, the networks in particular, were addicted to and controlled by the numbers.

  • • •

  IN DECEMBER 1975 One Day at a Time began its nine-season run. Allan Manings and his wife, Whitney Blake, wanted to do a comedy about a divorced woman raising teenage kids alone. “What happens to Ibsen’s Nora after she leaves the Doll’s House?” was the question they were asking, and they’d been trying to sell the show for ten years. As the father of three daughters, two of them teenagers, I loved the idea, and over time we developed Ann Romano, her daughters, Julie and Barbara, and a backstory that had them moving to Indianapolis after Ann’s divorce into an apartment building with a superintendent, Schneider, as proud of his tool belt as any honored marine is of his medals. Schneider, hilariously played by Pat Harrington Jr., would become a de facto uncle to the girls and would-be suitor to Ann. There was no way I could have guessed that this simple, interesting situation would give rise to one of the fiercest battles with Program Practices we’d ever been through. It was a story involving Julie, the older, more outgoing, and rebellious daughter, that set things off.

  When it came to casting the role, Mackenzie Phillips, popular for her part in George Lucas’s American Graffiti and daughter of John Phillips (leader of the hugely popular sixties band The Mamas and the Papas), was a shoo-in. For the part of the younger daughter, Barbara, fifteen-year-old Valerie Bertinelli came in to audition. Although she had little professional experience, she read the part well and was winning and eager. She also bore a certain resemblance to my youngest daughter, Maggie. I couldn’t resist offering her the role.

  As to the lead, we read a number of actresses who would have been good in the role, but both Manings and I fell in love with Bonnie Franklin, whose look and personality clashed with the general perception of a divorced woman and mother of teenage daughters. Bonnie was thirty-one at the time, and a young-looking thirty-one at that. There was also a certain spunk and fire to her personality that added to her youthful look. We found her irresistible but didn’t think the network unreasonable to advise against casting her as the mother of teenage daughters, one of them sixteen. Still, remembering the lesson we learned when we chose not to play Archie Bunker as Irish despite Carroll O’Connor’s indubitably Irish face, I cast Bonnie Franklin as Ann Romano. That, though, wasn’t what caused the battle with Program Practices.

  The pilot story was about Julie, excited that she’d been invited to go on a weekend camping trip with some new friends in their new surroundings. There would be six of them, three girls and three boys. Ann voiced all the concerns you might imagine, Julie became hysterical and accused her mother of not trusting her, and the dialogue bounced off the subject of boys and girls alone in the wild with raging hormones and sleeping bags with zippers. Allan Manings said of Program Practices, “They had almost as many notes as there were pages in the script.” We took some of their notes, made changes, and stood fast on the rest—in particular, a beat where Julie talked about mooning somebody in a car.

  There was no moment of mooning on the show. She just talked about it. The line wasn’t important to the episode, but I understood that if I allowed this Family Hour victory, the floodgates of such bullshit would be forever open.

  After the five o’clock taping, CBS West Coast VP Perry Lafferty reported to New York that the show had been taped without several of the changes they had asked for. We were giving cast notes for the next taping when Perry, accompanied by the Program Practices guy, came down and took me aside to tell me New York was unhappy and demanded that several trims and changes be made. We went over them, accepted a couple of their notes, and said no t
o the others, including the mooning. Ten minutes later, Mr. Lafferty, a nice man and good friend, returned.

  “I just got off the phone with New York,” he said. “You make this show with that line in it and not only won’t they air it, they won’t pay for it.” Everything in me ached to say “Screw them” and make the eight o’clock show with only the changes we’d accepted. But this would be taking a huge financial risk, and I had a fiduciary relationship with my partners that made that decision questionable.

  My life in TV flashed before me. When I dealt with network executives personally, away from our business together, I found them, for the most part, to be bright, engaging, and able men. But when they retreated into that monolithic conglomerate and became units of the corporation, they suddenly became vague and faceless and tended to view those of us who produced their shows the way they viewed their audience—as “they”: We, the network executives, moral guardians of the nation—a handful of people sitting around on the thirty-fourth floor of some black building in Manhattan—know what’s in the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere. And we know what’s best for them. We understand and they don’t.

  But the network executives didn’t understand. Maybe those of us in the creative community didn’t understand perfectly either, but our talents were engaged in dealing with a complex world the way we saw it, albeit comedically, and as honestly as we knew how. And we left the “understanding” of our work confidently to our viewers. It seemed to me that was the more grown-up point of view and it pushed me to tape the eight o’clock show our way.

  The following morning Frances, the girls, and I were leaving for Kona Village in Hawaii. We would be gone a week. As we were wrapping up after the taping it concerned me that the network would have that week to mess with the show without me around. Then it occurred to me that it wasn’t really their tape, since they’d said up front that they wouldn’t pay for it. And so I asked our associate producer, Patricia Palmer, to have the original and backup tapes put in my car, and when we left for Kona the next morning they were locked away in my garage. This happened well before cell phones, and the Kona resort being known for its no-television-or-phones policy, it took Fred Silverman a few days to reach me. Fred, who I always felt came down more on my side than the network’s but who was married to that mob, was doing what his position called for. The network wanted the pilot—and now! As its owner, I said, I was well within my rights to keep it. But it was CBS who ordered it and had every right to see it, Fred said. My response: not until they agree to pay for what they ordered. A day later they agreed.

  5

  BACK IN 1968, when ABC agreed to fund the original pilot for what became All in the Family, I told them about an idea I had for a late-night Monday-through-Friday soap opera and they offered to pay me for the first ten scripts. While active productions kept me from writing, the idea continued to mature in my head. Speeches I made about the media, testimony before congressional committees, interviews I’d given, and articles I’d been asked to write all served to whet my appetite for a show that examined the impact on us of the metastasizing media and consumer culture in which, as Andy Warhol memorably predicted, “everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” How was the average American family affected, I wondered, by commercial products being pounded at them every few minutes from the multiple television sets broadcasting in their homes an average of seven-plus hours a day? The best vehicle for tackling the subject as I saw it was a story that played out on a daily basis, five episodes per week. Preferably, for reasons of content and because it had never been done before, I began to see the soap opera playing in a late-night time slot.

  What became Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman had been percolating in me for several years when Al Burton, an able and energetic executive, became our director of Creative Affairs. He loved the idea and never let me off that hook. A late-night soap had never been done before, so no network executive was willing to take a chance on such an untested idea without numbers in which to take refuge. Also, it was my intention to satirically comment on the impact on an American family of commercial-driven all-day-and-all-night television, especially on the housewife who was more inclined in those years to be at home with the TV on. By the time I started interviewing writers, I had a few pages of notes that contained all the elements I wanted to see in the pilot episode.

  I wanted the mass murder of a family of five, along with their two goats and eight chickens, to take place just down the street from Mary Hartman’s home. Inured to such wholesale violence by the unrelenting media, we see it command less of our housewife’s attention than the promise of quality on the label of a product she’s using, as advertised on the kitchen TV that is never off. At the same time, an elderly flasher who has been exposing himself during milk breaks at the grade school turns out to be her grandfather, and she and her husband, Tom, are having a problem in their sex life. He hasn’t exposed himself to her in months.

  I must have interviewed a dozen highly talented writers, including Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr., who wrote I Love Lucy for many years. I could not have respected them more, but we were not on the same page with this one. They asked, as did many others, “Norman, how can we expect laughs after the slaughter of an entire family?” “Plus their goats and chickens,” I reminded them. I didn’t expect ha-ha laughs, I explained, but there was humor in the deleterious lunacy of our escalating consumer culture, as illustrated here by Mary, so enthralled by the merchandising of a floor-waxing product as to be numb to the most extreme violence in her very own neighborhood. They didn’t see it that way. The writer who did, Ann Marcus, eventually came up with this reaction for our title character.

  When her next-door neighbor rushes in with news of the killings, Mary, concerned with a “waxy yellow buildup” on her kitchen floor, says: “My, who would want to kill two goats and eight chickens?” (another moment of distraction). “And the people,” she adds, never taking her eyes off the label of the product in her hand. “Of course, the people.”

  Ann Marcus brought in three other writers, Gail Parent, Jerry Adelman, and Ken Hartman. Parent and Adelman, like Marcus, were totally in sync with that off-the-wall part of me Mel Brooks identified as “mad,” as was Hartman, who had only recently rechristened himself Daniel Gregory Browne. A dipper into New Age philosophies, including numerology, he was told the letters in his adopted name would be lucky for him. They were certainly lucky for Mary Hartman.

  The repetition of the name of the title character, by the way, was triggered by my memory of The Goldbergs, perhaps the earliest of sitcoms. It began on radio when I was a boy and opened with the sound of Gertrude Berg as Mrs. Goldberg calling out her apartment window to a neighbor, “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Bloom, Mrs. Bloom!” The melody of that opening never left me, and I was as much a composer as a producer when I cast Dody Goodman to play Mary’s mother. Her “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” fused melodically in my head with Gertrude Berg’s “Mrs. Bloom!”

  The casting of Louise Lasser, like that of Carroll O’Connor, took less than a minute. I had sent the script to Charlie Joffe, who called after reading it and said there was only one actress for this part—the former Mrs. Woody Allen. Ms. Lasser refused the role at first, but finally agreed to come in and meet with me. Charlie came with her and told me later that it was the first time he’d been present at the start of a love affair he wasn’t a part of. Louise and I hit it off instantly. She was more than a touch of Mary Hartman already. Actually, I supplied the character, but Louise brought with her the persona that fit Mary Hartman like a corset. When she read a bit of the script for me, I all but cried for joy. That reaction won her over completely.

  I knew Mary Kay Place was a natural for Mary’s young country singer neighbor, Loretta Haggers, married to an older man, Charlie (her “Baby Boy”), played by Graham Jarvis. Mary Kay had been a writer’s assistant on one of our earlier shows when I learned that she wanted to act. I loved her country accent,
which she never failed to turn up a notch or two in my presence, and cast her in an episode of All in the Family as a friend of Gloria’s.

  Greg Mullavey, who played Mary’s husband, Tom, walked into a casting session and was exactly the type I was looking for. That “type” grew out of a dinner I’d held at my home some weeks before. I knew the Hartman family should come from mid-America. I hadn’t yet decided where when I read that the United Auto Workers was holding a convention in L.A., and so I called my friend Paul Schrade, then a member of the UAW board and a onetime labor consultant to Bobby Kennedy. (He was, incidentally, accompanying Bobby Kennedy when he was assassinated, and it was Paul who was hit by the first bullet fired.) I asked him to invite a group of autoworkers from a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, to dinner at our home to discuss the idea of the breadwinner in my new show working in a plant such as theirs. It was an exciting and informative evening for me, and as I look around the table in my mind’s eye, it was a gas for them, too. Along with the information I drew from that evening was a type for the role of Tom Hartman, and that’s what Greg Mullavey walked in with at our casting session. His reading was up to his look, and we had Mary’s husband.

  While thinking about a director for the show I got a call from a woman named Joan Darling, a cousin so distant we never really figured out how to label it. A good deal younger than me, she had worked in improvisational theater, done some writing and teaching, and now had an idea for a film she wished to pitch me, a biopic on Golda Meir, Israel’s first and only woman president. We dropped that subject in minutes and, as we talked and laughed from subject to subject, I began to feel her sensibilities compatible with Mary Hartman, certainly with Louise, and I asked her if she ever thought of directing. She hadn’t, but asked if she could read the script. Before the day was out, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman had a director.