Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  Just as the clock struck twelve and all the couples turned to each other, another solo gent I knew slightly but liked quite well sidled up to me. We exchanged a look that said, “Why not?” and kissed. And then one of us cautioned—we each credit the other with saying it—“I hope you realize this isn’t going anywhere.”

  As it turned out, it went everywhere. After some twelve years as head of production at Walt Disney Studios, Dr. Marty Kaplan joined my old friend, Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the Annenberg School of communication at USC. In 2000, as associate dean, Marty conceived of a piece of research that struck at the core of my concerns regarding American media. His research measuring the amount of airtime California TV stations were giving to that year’s gubernatorial race, concluded with this statement: “The final imperative to entertain had warped the civic obligation to inform.” Only 0.45 percent of local news throughout California had been devoted to covering local politics.

  I thought that statistic a most threatening development in our media culture and offered financial support from the Lear Family Trust. My offer of support prompted a suggestion from Geoff and Marty that the Annenberg School establish a Norman Lear Center for the study of the impact of entertainment on the way the American people were informed. Marty’s delineation of the center’s mission grabbed me:

  “Think of entertainment not just as leisure activity, but as the way the messages grab and hold our attention. Think of entertainment not just as a sector of the economy, but as a driving force—maybe the driving force—of daily life in this brave New World . . . Today there is scarcely a domain of human existence unaffected by the battle for eyeballs, the imperative to amuse, the need to stimulate and titillate, to tell us stories, to play with us. The stakes for society are enormous. This is the terrain the Norman Lear Center is mapping.”

  And Norman Lear is mad about its work.

  • • •

  AT THE START of the New Year back home, I agreed to try a kind of trial separation that Frances thought up: we’d live apart during the week and come together on the weekends.

  It was then that the USO asked if they could honor me with their Distinguished American Award for my service in World War II. In no mood for a celebration that would include family at its core, I declined their invitation. They persisted, however, and their pitch all but brought a tear to my eye: it was important that the war, and the way Americans had united and sacrificed to win it, not be forgotten. The USO’s way of reminding people was by celebrating high-profile figures who had served in battle. They pledged to put no pressure on friends or family to attend, promising to fill the room with no help from my Rolodex.

  And that is exactly what they did. The USO avoided soliciting the entertainment industry altogether. The hotel ballroom was jammed with regular folks who’d driven in from as far away as Long Beach and Santa Barbara to see this program: emcee Bob Hope, known for entertaining troops across the globe, introduced comedienne Phyllis Diller, singer Roberta Flack, a huge choir, two splendiferous United States Marine bands, and, to make the presentation, the most decorated airman in World War II, Colonel Frank Kurtz.

  Colonel Kurtz flew a plane he named the Swoose Goose. It became so celebrated that when their daughter was born the colonel and Mrs. Kurtz named her with the aircraft in mind. Swoosie Kurtz is one of the finest actresses of her time. The colonel, too, was possessed of great flair and spent the years since the war speaking for the Army Air Forces. By the time I was being honored, Colonel Frank Kurtz had become as brilliant and dramatic an orator as I have ever heard. He told the audience he was going to take them on a mission he and I flew together, describing every moment of it so dramatically it made everyone in that ballroom feel it was their life at stake.

  By midmorning, while you’re having your coffee here at home, Norman has long since donned his flak suit, helmet, and oxygen mask, and headed for the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plant in Berlin. Suddenly the plane’s nose lurches upward—then drops a hundred feet. It’s ack-ack fire. The Germans are throwing big shells up at us and the sky ahead is solid black with flak. The top turret gunner calls out, “Fighters twelve o’clock high.” Every gunner opens up . . . the entire plane quivers as guns burst from the top, waist, and bottom—while enemy planes fly down right through our formation. Our number three bomber takes a direct hit—he’s on fire—peels away—parachutes start to billow out. We lose more bombers, and we’re still forty minutes to target . . .

  The colonel was electrifying. The crowd in that ballroom was on its feet before he finished. When he called out my name, adding that I flew more than fifty of those missions, it was absolute bedlam—and there wasn’t a single person close to me in that audience.

  • • •

  ONE WEEKEND when Frances and I were trying togetherness again we invited our friends the Dorsos to dinner. Richard mentioned that a mutual friend, Dan Melnick, was in town and I suggested he come along. Dan had a blind date that night, and so our foursome became a dinner for six. When I greeted Danny and his date at the front door, little did I know I was meeting the woman who would become my wife of twenty-seven years and mother to my son and twin daughters.

  Lyn Davis, a former teacher, had been in training to be a family therapist at the Foundation for Depression and Manic Depression in New York. Born in Whittier, California, and raised in Sacramento, she had just moved back west, settled in L.A., and taken a job with Merv Griffin Productions. A mutual friend had fixed her up with Danny, and they’d known each other for half an hour when they appeared at my front door.

  In that time Lyn learned that Frances and I had been separated on and off and that she could expect to see us at each other’s throats much of the time. And she did. Melnick and the Dorsos were used to it, as if it were background music, but Lyn never forgot it.

  She also recalls my taking her around the house for a tour of the art and being surprised that I was taller than she thought I’d be from the interviews she’d seen on TV. I thought her very beautiful, but in no way a babe. She had all the parts and features that make for a babe, but put together, the hard edges vanished and a gentility and fineness took over—a touch of the noblewoman.

  The dinner conversation that night included talk about my work with People For the American Way and Lyn’s seeking a PhD in psychology. The subject of her doctoral thesis happened to be a comparison of the attitudes of two church congregations, one conservative fundamentalist, the other liberal Unitarian. To my happy surprise, I received a letter from Lyn a few weeks later, asking for some information about PFAW for her thesis.

  In my smart-ass, infant, male chauvinist way I thought this the come-on I didn’t dare hope for. A beautiful class act of a woman had made the first move and I was, as the saying went in those years, hot to trot. All I had was a return address and, while there was still a Western Union and it was almost a decade before e-mail, I sent her a telegram and asked her to call me. We met for lunch a few days later. Mark E Pollack, who started to work for me a couple of years before I met Lyn Davis, and my assistant at the time, Jackie Koch, tell me they realized early on that something was different about this relationship. Before I met Lyn they hadn’t known me to be unreachable for some hours in the middle of the day, or to leave the office suddenly, tossing an “I’ll be back” over my shoulder, only to call in later with a “See you in the morning.” At that first lunch we talked about the basis of her thesis, which was right up my alley. There weren’t that many subjects that could have maintained my concentration while sitting across from a face as lovely as Lyn’s. What she took from our luncheon, as a result of my interest, was a new confidence in her thesis. What I took from it was a strong desire “to be with her,” a more genteel way of expressing my desire to bed her.

  At our second lunch, I was looking into Lyn’s eyes, drinking in her essence as we awaited our appetizers, and heard someone say, “I don’t think I can sit through a meal before I know w
hat it feels like to kiss you.” When Lyn smiled playfully and started to rise, I realized who’d said that. Within ten minutes we were in her car on a residential street, parked in the driveway of a house for sale, her angel face cupped in my hands, eyes locked, staring down into each other’s souls before oh so slowly bringing our lips together.

  The spirituality and search for meaning that underlay Lyn’s thesis—and her very being—liberated the equivalent in me, and before either of us knew it we were a couple. The twenty-five-year difference in our ages didn’t seem to matter at all in that context and hasn’t to this day. The only time age came up was when Lyn mentioned that she had to have a child and I questioned whether it was fair to that newborn for a man my age to be his or her parent. But, then, there was little chance of that because, as I told her from the beginning, regardless of the arrangement we might come to, I would never leave Frances.

  I believed that without understanding why. I remember Frances trying to convince me that I wasn’t really the “nice person, good person” many thought me to be. A need to be loved by everybody, she insisted, prompted what appeared to be a niceness in me, but it wasn’t real. In weak moments I wondered if there wasn’t some truth in it. But even if there was, so what? The need to be loved is endemic to humans, and earning that love or paying for it with niceness sounds to me like a reasonable transaction.

  As for the baggage Lyn was carrying, her father served in the 15th Air Force, as I did, and flew, as I did, out of Foggia, Italy. Unlike me, though, he returned from the war with more than his share of PTSD. Her mother took a job and Lyn, second oldest of four children, the oldest being a boy, was assigned the care of her often abusive father, her younger siblings, and the household. Somehow she managed to get through high school near the top of her class and worked her way through college and graduate school to receive her master’s degree at Cal State Northridge. She married her college sweetheart, who suffered a breakdown early in their marriage, and for three years Lyn’s income was their sole support. Her husband was her father all over again.

  One day on a lunch break a despondent Lyn was wandering through a used-book store and picked one out of a bin. Before she even opened it, she felt a tingle. It was The Urantia Book, a 2,097-page volume dealing with religion, science, and philosophy. By the time we met, Lyn Davis, on her way to a doctorate, had read it a dozen times and underlined passages throughout. What I’d been responding to in Lyn was the search she was on—because I was on it also—and also the resounding way our searches clashed. As expressed in The Urantia Book, Lyn had found “a faith that willingly carries reason along as far as reason can go and then goes on with wisdom to the full philosophic limit; and then dares to lurch out upon the never-ending universe journey in the sole company of TRUTH.”

  Here’s the clash. Lyn trusted that on her journey she was “in the sole company of Truth.” I was determined to spend my life seeking the Truth while, as John Henry would say, praying to be “spared the company of those who have found it.”

  • • •

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW spoke of God as “this wonderful will of the universe.” I found that description beautiful, and the GBS words that follow express perfectly how I hope I am acting upon that belief: “If you don’t do its work, it won’t be done; if you turn away from it, if you sit down and say ‘Thy will be done,’ you might as well be the most irreligious person on earth. But if you wish to stand by your God, if you will say ‘my business is to do your will, my hands are your hands, my tongue is your tongue, my brain is your brain, I am here to do Thy work, and I will do it,’ you will get rid of other-worldliness . . .”

  In that one phrase, “other-worldliness,” Shaw captured what causes me to be one step removed from religion generally. I am a here and now person and what is expected of us in this lifetime Shaw put very clearly. The rest I continue groping to understand. Since I have not joined a synagogue, I suppose you can call me an unaffiliated groper, struggling toward an answer to the eternal question, sublimely posed in the theme song of a famous 1966 film: “What’s It All About, Alfie?”

  Years after I happened on that Shaw quote that so moved me, I ran across another one: “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” My God, how those words satisfy me. They make me feel like I had a great meal with everyone I ever loved at the table.

  Both quotes appeared in a little-known and extremely rare volume called The Religious Speeches of George Bernard Shaw, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Eventually we learned that there was a single copy in the University of Pennsylvania Library that they refused to loan out. Since they still had the plates, I made an arrangement many years ago to print one hundred copies to give away to friends who might want one. I have three left today.

  • • •

  THE OPEN MARRIAGE UNDERSTANDING I shared with Frances was beginning to feel the consequences of my connection to Lyn. Deep into her own longtime extramarital relationship, Frances had had no problem with my “whoring about,” as she put it, but now detected a change in me suggesting that I, too, was in a relationship. While she never referred to it specifically, her “Who was that?” each time I hung up the phone was something new, and to some extent it surprised me.

  Halfway through our marriage sex had become something neither of us seemed to require. We would spend the end of most evenings in “our” bedroom, she in bed and I in a chair facing her, often while she was eating a bowl of cold boiled beets—yes, beets. I do remember laughing a lot. The toke we took of a well-rolled joint might have helped in the laughter department. (I’ve never smoked much pot, but enough to know not to do it when there is anything serious that requires attention.) When we said good night at the end of those evenings and I repaired to the single bed just outside my study, my last glimpse of Frances, alone in the big bed, saddened me. Years later, just the memory of her in that moment would make me sad. Now I wonder if I wasn’t feeling sorry not for Frances but for myself.

  One day she picked up on an idea we had discussed on and off, but this time homing in on it. We should move to New York. Our daughters were in Manhattan, as were some close friends, some new friends, the theater—Frances sold it harder every time she brought it up. She pressed to get me to leave with her immediately after the wedding we had been planning for daughter Kate.

  Kate had fallen in love with a young physician who, coincidentally, she might never have met but for her mother and me. In the seventies I had helped a young woman, Corinne LaPook, who was doing her master’s thesis on All in the Family. In 1983 Frances and I were invited to attend a party in honor of the noted playwright Lillian Hellman, who was very frail and was traveling with a young intern. He introduced himself, clearly expecting a reaction to his name, LaPook, and when he got it he added, “her brother.” In the course of the evening Frances mentioned that her daughter Kate lived in New York, and slipped her phone number into Jon’s pocket. Weeks later, Jon, uncertain if he wanted to get involved with a Hollywood family, asked Lillian Hellman what to do, and she said, “Call her!”

  And so Jon LaPook called Kate Lear. A year later they were deeply in love and Kate wished to be married in the home she grew up in. Kate is as tender a human as exists, and Jon, who becomes family twenty minutes after you meet him, could be brought to tears just talking about her. We were determined to throw them a great wedding, and I think we did. The ceremony, conducted by Rabbi Leonard Beerman, was deeply felt, word proud, and delicious, totally befitting the mood under the tent that covered our tennis court.

  Personally, I was a flood of emotions. I could not help thinking of Lyn, how much I wished her to be sharing this moment with me, and how left out she must be feeling. And beside me was Frances, my wife, love, friend, victim
, and antagonist of almost thirty years. Around us laughter, sentiment, and joy reigned, and the bride and groom were over the moon, as if they’d just stepped off every wedding cake ever baked.

  Among the guests were Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. When they are together the 2000 Year Old Man can’t be far behind, but I couldn’t be sure the old guy would make an appearance. Mel turns into him on a dime, but it wasn’t clear if he had one with him until Carl got up to make a toast and earned a few laughs. Mel, fidgeting in his seat, suddenly realized he had a pocketful of change. He jumped up and, my God, he was funny. Carl asked Mel what advice he had for these newlyweds. “Ignore each other,” the 2000 Year Old Man responded, “and I say that with love and spirit and spirit and love, and in feeling and sentiment, and romance and spirit and love. Because the more you find out about each other, the more disenchanted, the more disgusted, the more you realize you are just plain people like each other, and you’ll hate each other because the same hate you feel for yourself you’re going to throw on each other. So keep the mystery alive. When Dr. LaPook comes home at night Kate should say, ‘Who is it?’ and Dr. LaPook should say, ‘It’s Irving.’ Never give your real name in marriage. Never. Once they know who you are in a marriage, you’re finished. So seriously, let me be serious. Don’t give away too much, you’ll be married a long time.”

  A camera crew filmed the wedding and the party and, of course, that toast. There was but one cutaway as Mel spoke, and it was to a close-up of Kate. This was my middle “darb,” named that by me when she was six, the word meant to convey a love beyond expression. Look at her now, a bride. Gorgeous. Lit from the inside, her soul showing. But always my darb.

  They are married for almost thirty years now, have two terrific sons, Daniel and Noah, and Jon is the medical correspondent for the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley.

  • • •

  MEANWHILE, the Coca-Cola Company, which had a few years earlier acquired Columbia Pictures, was now showing interest in buying Embassy. While we were not gung ho to sell, Perenchio was not one to dismiss a good deal out of hand, and as the talks continued, a good deal was taking shape.