Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  Ken had purchased the farm from the Frost estate in 1963 and turned a large barn into his studio. Painter friends, including Jules Olitski, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Motherwell, and sculptors like David Smith and Tony Caro, loved The Gulley and would often visit Ken there for periods of time and work alongside him. On that first visit a beautiful sculpture garden representing their work sat on flat ground just in front of the house. On the other side of the driveway there was a bronze plaque declaring The Gulley a NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK.

  I was awash with a quite bearable lightness of being on entering the home, and later the separate one-room cottage in which Robert Frost wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning poems. The house was as warm and welcoming as a hug, and as Ken Noland walked ahead, pointing things out, from the mudroom to the kitchen and the short hallway to a library on the right, a bedroom following, and the living room straight ahead, I caught sight of a small blue Noland stripe painting on the living room wall we were walking toward. With his back to me I asked for the first time how much he wanted for the farm. He mentioned a figure and I said, “If you throw in that Noland, you have a deal.” Ken turned, we shook hands, and that was the entire negotiation. For the three-plus decades since, it has been a family-and-friends paradise. I think of it always as our Hebrew Hyannisport.

  7

  I’D BEEN SAYING for years that one of the problems with television was that shows overstayed their welcome, and that they should get out of the way and make room for fresh ideas and fresh talent. By 1978 I thought All in the Family had run its course, and when Rob and Sally said they were leaving after the eighth season, it seemed like a natural stopping place.

  We prepared to end the series with three episodes that saw Mike getting an offer to teach in California, he and Gloria wrestling with the decision, and then finally deciding to take their leave of Edith and Archie. The farewell scene is a tearjerker to this minute.

  After all the other good-byes have been said—with Gloria and little Joey waiting in the cab and Edith having rushed back into the house in tears—Mike and Archie are alone on the front porch. And despite the fact that we’d seen them for eight years disagreeing about everything, there was no way you could miss the love between these two men. Mike understood how much Archie loved his daughter and his wife, and how hard it had been to support a family with the education he’d had. And Archie, whatever else he couldn’t really understand about Mike, knew that he loved and would take care of his daughter and grandson. “I know you always thought I hated you, Arch, but I love you,” Mike says, embracing him and crying on his shoulder as Archie tentatively and briefly returns the hug.

  That was the natural ending to the series, but the relentlessly contrarian Carroll, who had been saying he wanted out for years, changed his mind at the last minute and—with the network’s blessing—convinced Jean to do one more season without Rob and Sally.

  The best thing that came out of the extra season of All in the Family was that it allowed us to do a two-hundredth episode. We produced a two-hour special of which I was particularly proud. We treated it like a broadcast of the Oscars, but instead of a star-studded audience, every chair was filled with a longtime fan from across the country. In two hundred words or less, AITF viewers were invited to tell us what the show meant to them and why they wished to come to L.A. for the taping and celebration. There was an avalanche of responses, from which two hundred couples representing all fifty states were selected and flown to L.A., thanks to a participating airline, for a three-day stay at a well-known hotel. The evening of our taping, our guests were brought to the theater by limousine, announced by name at their arrival, and interviewed on the red carpet. I hosted the event, which consisted of clips from across the nine seasons. My narrative provided an inside view of the exhaustingly hard work all of us absolutely relished. It was a blue-collar love story.

  • • •

  AS THE END of the ninth season approached, Carroll still couldn’t bring himself to let Archie go. He wanted to continue, even if it meant carrying on alone, and he had an idea. Archie would buy Kelsey’s Bar and the show—Archie Bunker’s Place—would be centered there. The network, believing correctly that the name Archie Bunker attached to a new show would bring ratings, bit hard on the idea. My partners and associates were running a business and could not look a gift horse in the mouth.

  Archie as I conceived him was in some but not all respects a version of my dad. When I first started to write about Archie forty-five years ago, I borrowed the pride, vanity, and conviction that he knew it all from H.K., but I substituted Archie’s fear of progress for H.K.’s certainty that change meant that he’d reach his pot of gold in ten days to two weeks (even if he had to bend the truth a whole lot to get there).

  I ached for both men and loved them at the same time. But while one was all mine, I shared the other with Carroll. Archie’s physicality and personality were all Carroll, but his emotional being and belief system came from me. That was the basis of our quarrels and the crux of my problem as I wrestled with the notion of Archie Bunker going on without me.

  Before long I received a call from William Paley. “Norman, when are you going to be in New York? Love to see you,” he said. Eight years on CBS and I’d never heard from Mr. Paley directly before. I assumed he’d okayed a full-page ad that CBS ran in Variety the year before thanking me for providing the network with “a dazzling variety of high comedy enriched with humanity,” but that was hardly the same as evincing a desire to meet me. Of course the meeting was all about convincing me that there should be an Archie Bunker’s Place.

  I reminded him of the CBS ad that thanked me for comedy “enriched with humanity,” and said that Mr. O’Connor and I held different views as to how that is achieved. Turning control of the character over to him would threaten that, I added. I was a fool to think things like that mattered in a business meeting, although his parting words would give that impression: “Archie belongs to the American people, Norman, and so long as they want him, and I would add need him, it’s our obligation to serve that need.”

  Before I’d sign off on it I asked CBS for two concessions. First, I wanted some assurance that Jean Stapleton would appear in a few episodes to help the show get off the ground. Carroll happily agreed, advancing the notion that the first episode of the second season would deal with Edith’s death. The other concession was dedicated to seeing that Edith did not die in vain. I asked the network to give $1 million to the National Organization for Women in Edith Bunker’s name in support of the ERA. We settled for $500,000, passed through to NOW as a gift from Tandem/T.A.T. to establish the Edith Bunker Memorial Fund for the Equal Rights Amendment.

  On November 2, 1980, Edith died off camera of a stroke. In the final scene of the episode, a bereft Archie is seen entering the bedroom they shared. He sits on the bed, touches one of her slippers to his cheek, and tells her how much he loved her. It could not have been a more touching scene, and it played without a laugh to an audience stilled with sorrow. That represented a departure from a dramatic tenet basic to my way of looking at comedy: there is a laugh in every situation; beware of treacle.

  In an early AITF episode, Archie, about to become a grandfather, visits Gloria at her bedside just after learning she miscarried. He so wanted a grandson and the audience was numbed by his heartbreak. As directed, however, the scene recognized that these two had never faced such an intimate moment before and it was amusing to see how they coped with it. The laugh that was evoked served to enhance the empathy between the characters and their audience, bringing many to tears. Without me, Carroll’s Archie didn’t reach for such moments. He simply didn’t see comedy my way.

  • • •

  FLASHING FORWARD for a moment, I received news of Carroll’s death in June of 2001. It was not a surprise. He had been ill for some time, and it is inexplicable to me that I had not visited him during his illness. My only excuse, and I do not o
ffer it proudly, is that I felt very strongly that I would not be welcome. His antipathy toward me had increased over the years, to the point where he’d gone on TV to lament that my partners and I had failed to give him a piece of the “empire” we’d created as a result of the impact of his character.

  When Carroll died I grieved for what had never been, and for the fact that a talent so rare had, by his own admission, managed to put together so little joy in his life. After his memorial I went to his home to see his wife, Nancy. She and I enjoyed a mutual respect and I always thought she understood my position in relationship to her husband. There were a number of people there when I arrived, and Nancy asked me if I could wait for a while because she wished to show me something. When the crowd thinned out she invited me to follow her into Carroll’s study. As she opened the door she told me that nothing had been touched—his desk was exactly the way he had left it. On it were a couple of books and one single paper that I instantly recognized as having come from me.

  For his birthday some years before I had written Carroll as much of a love letter as I could. In it I’d explained how, despite our constant disagreements, I so deeply respected him as a talent and so loved the character he created for the character I’d created. Nancy allowed me to read my letter and stood by as I cried. She told me that Carroll had put it on his desk the day it arrived years earlier. And it was there in the same place the day he died.

  PART 4

  Over and Next

  Loneliness is the absence of accepting the joy of social responsibility.

  —NADINE GORDIMER

  1

  AT ABOUT SIX P.M. one summer evening, Frances drove me out to Van Nuys Airport, walked me up the steps of a small jet, blindfolded me, and off we flew to . . . I didn’t know where. We landed a little more than an hour later and, still blinkered, I was ushered to a waiting car. It was my sixtieth birthday so I’d been expecting a surprise, but this was beyond the pale. From our flying time I deduced we were in Las Vegas and wondered who we were driving to meet—likely our daughters and a handful of close friends. Or perhaps, despite the difficult state of our marriage, Frances had arranged for a weekend alone. So maybe we were in Palm Springs.

  I was helped out of the car and led indoors. From the voices that suddenly went silent—at the sight, I assumed, of a blindfolded man—I knew we were in a public space. A lobby? We walked a short distance, went down a flight of stairs, walked a few steps more, and suddenly there was the unmistakable sound of a crowd being hushed. It was as if the room itself, and a big one at that, were holding its breath.

  The removal of my blindfold was followed by a roar as every family member, every good friend, and dozens of business associates shouted, “Happy Birthday!” in the filled-to-overflowing ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  Recalling such an event is like rediscovering something long forgotten in an attic somewhere. I cried when Perenchio, in the most tender voice this side of Mel Torme, sang “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” And I cried and laughed and cried some more when Bea Arthur, who had leaped out of a cake moments before, sang “My Man” in her heart-rousing fashion. The Bergmans touched me deeply with their adaptation of a song from Guys and Dolls: “We’ve got the guy right here, his name is Norman Lear . . .” Among the many toasts, the one still pinned to my heart was from daughter Kate, speaking for herself and her sisters and describing me as someone who “walks through life’s peaks and valleys with equal wonder.”

  Frances had clearly gone all out to make my sixtieth a memorable event, but she didn’t join the toasters, likely for the same reason I’d wanted to save our daughters from having to salute our steadily deteriorating twenty-five-year marriage several months earlier. We’d been to two silver anniversary celebrations in the preceding year, and at both parties the teenage children toasted their parents as “More in love today than they were twenty-five years ago.” As this was definitely not the case with us, for months I’d been dreading our kids having to make syrupy toasts to our blissful marriage. Then, one Sunday night, we were running a James Bond film and suddenly there on the screen was the answer to my problem. It was a mountaintop shot looking down on an exquisite bay and, at anchor, a gorgeous yacht. The plan came to me in an instant. Everyone would understand if the Lears chose to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in the most idyllic fashion—say, a leisurely cruise with good friends on a yacht in the Mediterranean.

  Certain that Frances would like my idea, I called out, “Where is that?” Gore Vidal was with us that night and knew the island and the bay, not to mention the boat and its owner. I didn’t wind up renting that yacht—we didn’t need the helicopter and bowling alley—but ours, The Paget, was sufficiently luxurious. With three guest staterooms, we invited nine couples to join us for a week each over the course of the three-week trip. Add to that a wonderful crew tending to our every need as we gently cruised from island to island—Mykonos, Santorini, Corfu, Samos, Rhodes—and there was so much history to visit that Frances and I managed to set our own history aside for the duration.

  That history was rife with anguish for Frances. Our Greek idyll served as a miraculous escape from what she experienced much of the rest of the time. “The reasons for me to get well, to smile, to live, were real and fine and all around me,” she wrote in her book. “The good life could not bore its way through my illness. I had no alternative.” Frances was referring to a suicide attempt that preceded, by several years, our silver anniversary cruise.

  We were having a dinner party and our guests of honor were Wynn and Bobbie Handman, who were visiting us from New York. (We’d met the Handmans while working together on the 1968 Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign.) Dinner was called for seven-thirty. Frances had been out all afternoon, and when she wasn’t home by seven, I became concerned. A half hour later most of the guests had arrived, and still no Frances. I called her assistant, who, after stumbling and stuttering, finally revealed a total secret. With the approval of the psychiatrist Frances was seeing several times a week, she’d rented an apartment that only he and her assistant knew about. This sad excuse for a shrink had okayed a hideaway that only he and one other person knew about for a patient who had twice before attempted to kill herself. I went nuts.

  Fearing the worst, I demanded that the assistant give me the phone number. Frances never gave her one, she said. Well, then, the address? She didn’t have that, either. Ready to burst, I hung up and phoned Frances’s psychiatrist. A recorded voice offered me an emergency line through which I reached him. When I asked for the address and phone number of his patient’s apartment, he wondered why I wanted that information. “Because,” I screamed, “I think she could be killing herself there.” The good doctor did not have that information. As I smashed the phone down the other line was ringing. It was the assistant. She’d remembered that the apartment was somewhere on Beverly Glen, south of Wilshire.

  Within fifteen minutes I was going from building to building. Certain I wouldn’t find her name next to a doorbell, I rang each building superintendent, raced through my reason for being there, and described Frances. Well down the block, a super reacted with a troubled look and I demanded he let me in. He couldn’t because I didn’t have a warrant. I told him to get the owner of the building on the phone. He did, and the owner also refused to let me in. I threatened to call the police. He said, “Go ahead.”

  “Listen,” I said, as loudly as I’d ever said anything, “I think you might have a death on your hands here, and if the corpse is my wife I will sue your sorry ass for every fucking dollar you have and not rest until they lock you up and throw away the key!” I slammed the phone down, imagined the guy on the other end, and held my breath. It was as long a moment as I’ve ever lived, and then the phone rang. Within seconds the super and I were racing up the stairs.

  It was a small apartment, entirely furnished by its owner but for some photographs and a rug I recalled us buying ye
ars before in Morocco. Frances was lying on it in a fetal position, a small pool of white liquid at the edge of her parted lips, a near-empty cup of various pills at the tip of one outstretched hand, and a handwritten note on the desk beside her. Choking back a scream, I reached for a pulse I could not detect while the super called 911. In the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, the first doctor to see her said she was just minutes away from leaving us.

  When I left the hospital Frances was in a private room and out of danger. I’d been in touch with Kate and Maggie and knew they were awake. At the sight of them every feeling I’d been holding back broke free and I began sobbing. My children rushed to comfort me. It quickly became clear that they shared only one element of what I was feeling: anger. Their expressions were frozen. Their mother had chosen to leave them—forever. They could never forgive her. At the sight of her suicide note, they started crying. When I read it to them, it was clear from the first sentence that they could take no comfort from it. There wasn’t a mention of either of them, or of anyone else. It was all about Frances and her need to exit a life that did not allow her to realize herself.

  • • •

  THAT HORROR WAS the last thing on any of our minds that night at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Frances was on a high one would think was permanent, and everyone danced up a storm until the evening’s end, when, as expected, I took the stage and had the last word.