Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  One of Embassy’s films, The Emerald Forest, was due to play at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. I had never been to the festival and could hardly have a better reason to go, especially when I thought of the few days to follow at another exotic European location with Lyn. My friends Stanley and Betty Sheinbaum had a small house on the island of Giglio, off the coast of Tuscany, which they offered to let me have for a week. Not one to dismiss a romantic good deal out of hand, I grabbed the opportunity.

  The Cannes experience was thoroughly unmemorable, probably because what I wanted out of the trip was what was coming next. I leased a small jet to fly me to Pisa, from which I would taxi to Porto Santo Stefano for the ferry to Giglio. We were late flying out of Cannes and, to make matters worse, the taxi I’d called ahead for was no longer waiting on the runway when we landed late in Pisa. A replacement was called for, I told the driver I’d pay double his rate, and he sped to Santo Stefano, leaning on his horn all the way.

  As we rounded the bend in the approach to the port, there was the ferry, blaring its departure. At the rail on the top deck Lyn was waving frantically, jumping up and down like a little girl. She rushed down the stairs to the first deck as the ferry inched away from the dock. I tossed my bag ahead of me and reached out with both hands to two men at the rail who grabbed them and hauled me aboard. In the history of ferryboat embraces there could not have been another more ecstatic.

  Giglio is a small, eight-square-mile rocky island with three villages, lots of hiking trails, and few roads, only one of which, like a ribbon wrapped around the island’s edges, winds its way to the walled fortress at the top, the village of Castello. Our cottage was perched on a promontory overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, about four hundred feet below Castello. One bedroom with an emperor-sized bed, a kitchen, and a living room, it was a beauty mark on the face of bliss, looking down one thousand feet on the Italian archipelago.

  On Giglio Lyn could breathe free. Back home, we were a secret wherever I could be recognized. Our time together had been largely confined to her apartment, hotel rooms we sneaked into, or drives in the dark of night. Here, for the first time, we were in the world. No one on Giglio knew my name or was likely to recognize me. I am stunned to recall the ten to eleven hours of unaided sleep I got each night on the island. I awoke to the sound of eggs frying, the smell of coffee brewing, and the sight of Lyn in the gauzy late-morning light, hovering over the stove with one thing in mind—to delight me, and me alone.

  In the late afternoon we’d drive the narrow winding road to Castello, the top of the world on Giglio, and dined in one of several small cafés that gave us the feeling they were in business only to serve us. I have to believe we took a hike or two, but for the most part we read and talked much of the rest of the time. I opened up to Lyn as much as I could, hiding nothing except that which I hid from myself and have been digging out slowly here.

  I’ve asked myself whether “opening up” on these pages demands that I say more about our lovemaking and concluded that it doesn’t. Breathing is a big part of my life, too, but I don’t go on about it. I have had a hearty appetite for every physical pleasure available, from a good cry to a great laugh, from anything tasty on the tongue to the afterglow of a terrific dump, from a succulent kiss to the explosive ecstasy of every climax. Suffice it to say, when Lyn was in my arms—well . . . suffice it to say.

  • • •

  THERE WAS A TELEPHONE in the Giglio house. Neither of us made an outgoing call and there was only one incoming. Jerry Perenchio phoned with Alan Horn on the line to tell me that the Embassy deal had just closed. I was officially a very good provider. Jerry’s and my split was not a fifty-fifty arrangement. It varied from show to show and entity to entity, and was so complicated that teams of accountants and attorneys representing each of us could have spent weeks haggling over it.

  Before I left for Cannes Jerry and I decided instead to make it an inside job and let Alan lead the effort to crunch the numbers along with Daryl Egerstrom, our long-standing chief financial officer. Jerry and I had absolute faith that when Alan Horn said to us, “This is what you get and this is what you get,” the numbers would be as correct as they could be and we needn’t spend another minute on it. Knowing Alan as he did, my attorney, Deane Johnson, as high-minded and respected a barrister as existed in entertainment law, was totally on board with that decision. And that was the way it went down.

  Everyone who held a job at Embassy benefited from the sale. If you were there for only a week or a month you received a little something, a small percentage of the close to $15 million Jerry and I decided to spread among our employees. Alan Horn, of course, worked out the formula, but those who worked for us longest at every level did very well. Some—those who came with us early on—thanked us for the apartments and homes they could afford now, for the things they were able to do for parents in retirement, for college educations and new cars and trips abroad. Amid hugs and tears they came at us from all sides.

  • • •

  WHEN WE RETURNED from Giglio I met with Deane. There were a bottle of vodka, two glasses, and a bowl of ice on his desk when I entered his office, and we had a high old time toasting the sale of Embassy. Deane, of course, had the numbers and pushed them across the desk to me. After taxes I—make that Frances and I—were worth $200 million. Was my half of that really worth one hundred times my father’s ten-days-to-two-weeks goal? Deane told me I looked like I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Then we had this memorable exchange.

  “Deane, would you say I’m really rich now?”

  “That depends on how you want to use it, Norman.”

  “Well,” I thought aloud, “a group of us are sitting around figuring out how we can raise seventy-five thousand dollars for a cause we believe in. Some say let’s do a dinner, some say it should be a screening, others want to do an auction—and finally I get tired of the discussion and I say, ‘Forget about it, I’ll cover the seventy-five Gs, let’s move on.’”

  “And how often might you want to do that?” Deane asked.

  “As often as I fucking please,” I responded.

  “You’re not really rich,” was his answer.

  Deane didn’t know he’d soon have an accomplice in getting that message across to me. After the Embassy sale I made the Forbes list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans. A week or two after it was announced my mother phoned me. Her voice was teary.

  “Hello, darling,” she said. “I hope you’re not upset. It’s not the worst thing in the world, you know.”

  “What, Mother? What are you talking about?”

  “Well,” she said, “I saw the magazine.”

  “You mean Forbes, Mother?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Why would I be upset about that?”

  “I didn’t want you to feel bad they put you near the bottom of the list.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “What can I tell you, I’m a mother.”

  4

  AFTER THE COCA-COLA/EMBASSY DEAL was announced, a member of the press phoned me to ask how I felt about the sale—not the deal, but the sale itself. What did it mean to me personally? “I guess you could say the curtain is coming down on act two,” I replied, “and going up on act three.”

  “Oh,” her tone was somber, “it’s act three already?”

  “Hold it,” I responded quickly. “We’re talking about a Shakespearean piece—there could be five, possibly six acts here.” There were so many Nexts—in my personal life, in movies and TV, and in the public arena—that no part of me felt a final curtain coming down.

  Just as Coca-Cola was becoming interested in acquiring Embassy, a script was in development for a film based on a Stephen King novella called The Body. When the director read a final draft and abandoned the project, it was brought to Rob Reiner. Rob returned to the novella, and between the lines of King’s
story he discovered what I can best describe as its soul. He pitched us his ideas for a rewrite, and Embassy—which had just released his second feature, The Sure Thing—decided to make the film with him. Rob and his associate Andy Scheinman went to work with writers and simultaneously started the preproduction process so he’d be ready to shoot when the script was ready. Cast and crew were in Oregon with a script everyone loved, freshly titled Stand by Me, when the deal to sell Embassy closed. Unknown to us at the signing, but quickly learned, was that every project Embassy had in development would now be released (or not) by Columbia Pictures, and Columbia had already turned down Stand by Me when it was called The Body. Their minds were not changed when they read the new script.

  Rob and company were on location ready to go. It was all over for Stand by Me unless . . . I felt as if the eyes of everyone on the planet were turned toward me with a big “And . . . ?” hanging in the air. My confidence in Rob and the new script outweighed the advice of the better business heads, and I underwrote the film, budgeted at $7.5 million.

  Rob made a tender, sentimental film, and still no studio wanted to pick it up for distribution. Key creative decisions like this one are too often made according to focus groups, the heat on a particular star, the cachet of the director, and how well earlier films on the subject had done. Seldom is the gut reaction of an executive responsible for making or picking up a movie without the support of extensive research. But that is what happened here.

  Oddly enough it was Columbia—the studio that twice turned it down—that decided to distribute Stand by Me. Over a weekend Columbia hired a new head of production and distribution, Guy McElwaine. Having learned of the appointment, I got the film to him at home on a Sunday morning so he could see it before he was shown the research. The movie brought him to tears, and it had a distributor before McElwaine reported to his new office on Monday morning.

  Stand by Me did very well. It appealed to young boys and teenagers and, through them, their families. It solidified Rob’s reputation as a director, though not so much that the studios raced to do it when he wanted to make William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Goldman had written the screenplay from his own book, published in 1973, and in the history of the written word—I know I’ve used this phraseology a number of times, but I’m happy to be known as an “in the history of” addict—it has to be one of the most delightful reads. It seemed inconceivable—a word that became celebrated in the mouth of Vizzini, a character in the film—that the script had been circulating for several years and no one at any studio caught a glimmer of the movie that lurked in it. Norman Jewison, Robert Redford, and François Truffaut had all wanted to make it and none of them could find the funding.

  Unfuckingconceivable!!

  So funny and so rich in character and satire, it was right up Rob’s alley, which is where I lived as well. Nobody had to sell me on it. The young lovers, Princess Buttercup and Westley, scaling the Cliffs of Insanity, battling Rodents of Unusual Size, and facing torture in the Pit of Despair, did that. Goldman’s script was deliciously faithful to his book and Rob was bringing that story and those characters to life. I was delighted with the opportunity and agreed to fund the film with a $16 million budget.

  Rob and his partner, Andy Scheinman, cast the picture brilliantly and turned out one of the most successful cult films ever made. Over time the film sold so well in home video and DVD that it outgrew its cult status and became a bona fide hit. What made The Princess Bride so rare was that it appealed to the entire family, to couples on a date, to teenagers of both sexes, and to the kids-only matinee crowd. It found an audience among those who favor fantasy and those who love comedy, and it played to the unsophisticated and highbrow as well. On its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2012 there was a special screening and celebration in New York. Rob and most of his cast were there, and a packed audience of rabid fans who knew the dialogue as if they had played every character themselves shouted out line after line with the actors on the screen.

  The Princess Bride has to be one of the most beloved pieces of cinema extant. I was not involved creatively, and but for saying yes to making it I had nothing to do with the business side of it. Mark E Pollack, on and off set, handled that. And yet, if not for me it might never have been a film. Few things have made me more proud. (Another film I helped get off the ground was Fried Green Tomatoes. I’d read the script at the request of its brilliant director, Jon Avnet, loved it, and put up the early money to get it started.)

  And here’s one that got away. Ever since the Jackson 5 made their TV debut on The Andy Williams Show—of which Bud Yorkin and I were executive producers—I’d been as big a fan of Michael Jackson as the world of kids who were so visibly crazy about him. One morning I awoke with what I thought was a superb idea for a starring vehicle for him. In Carson McCullers’s magnificent novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the three main characters are a deaf-mute, his pal—also mute—and a sixteen-year-old girl. Alan Arkin played the mute in a well-reviewed 1968 film of the novel, directed by Robert Ellis Miller, and I had in mind a remake with Michael in the Arkin role. Given the surprising sound of his normal speaking voice, I felt this very dramatic role was perfect for Michael and would make for a giant surprise and a big hit.

  My friend, and today one of the entertainment industry’s most powerful attorneys, Skip Brittenham, set up a meeting and attended it with me. It took place in a dressing room just off a soundstage where Jackson had been rehearsing. The room was lit for a squeamish host and Michael was stretched out on a built-in couch along the wall. When we entered he raised up on one elbow and was very pleased to see me again. In a soprano whisper he told me he’d read the two pages I’d sent him, his expression suggesting he liked them, and asked me to tell him more. As I started talking his eyes fluttered to a close. He could have been listening intently or sound asleep. When I finished some minutes later, it had to be twenty seconds or more before he opened his eyes and uttered a very pleasant “Thank you.” That was it. We left and I never heard another word about my visit.

  • • •

  OVER THE MONTHS since she first mentioned it, Frances continued to coax me to move to New York. I suspected she had a second and surely more important reason than wanting me with her. I learned from our daughters that she was terribly excited about a new idea that they liked, too, but only she could tell me about. That opportunity arose when I had to be in New York very briefly on other business. I’d flown in on a small jet Perenchio and I owned for a time, and when I was due to go back Frances said she had some things to do in L.A. and asked if she could fly back with me. The trip would also give her time to tell me about an idea she had. That conversation began on the way to the airport.

  Correctly assessing a gap in the marketplace, Frances had come up with an idea for a new magazine for women over fifty. She’d met with a number of key publishing heavyweights, received all the encouragement she required, and was ready to make her first move. Just before we boarded the plane Frances said something that assumed I would be the publisher, she the editor in chief. I knew in an instant that this would be a disaster. A half hour later, the Pratt & Whitney engines were settled into that low, sleep-inducing monotone, the sound of a smooth flight, when suddenly the peace was broken and our world at thirty thousand feet combusted. The little jet became home to the first part of the longest, angriest fight we ever had—eleven hours, half in the air and half on the ground. The pilots were sitting just eight to ten feet in front of us in the cockpit, and I wouldn’t have blamed them if they’d jumped without chutes.

  Frances assured me repeatedly that I would be publisher “in name only.” Having bought into the very bullshit that was to her mind making her life impossible, she viewed “Publisher, Norman Lear” as necessary to establish the cachet the project required. In addition to thinking her entirely wrong, I told her that creatively it would send out the opposite message. With my name as publisher, no matter the truth, I
would be considered the principal creator of the magazine. But Frances heard nothing I said, and in the course of the flight she grew angrier, as did I. As these kinds of things tend to do, we wandered off and on subject, hurling every kind of invective known to man and wife, each demanding to be heard at a volume and intensity that could fill a stadium.

  “How could you not do this for me?” Frances screamed. “I’ve seen you offer to help every asshole, every fuckup, every stranger who ever wanted anything from you. But when I, your wife of almost thirty years, asks you for one thing, something that won’t cost you a dime or a minute of your time, what do I get? I get a no! Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? You cruel bastard, you!”

  There was a driver waiting for us when we touched down around midnight in Van Nuys. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still talking about what went on in the close quarters of his town car following his amiable “Hi, folks, Hugo here. Have a pleasant flight, did you?”

  We were still carrying on when we arrived home, and it continued until around five A.M. It was my habit to run from room to room, slamming doors as Frances chased after me, opening them. If I locked a door, she’d bang on it until I had to throw it open. I had to have heard “cruel bastard” a hundred times that night. And I can see her racked expression as she said it. But is that really Frances? And is that male asshole me? He’s telling Frances she’s crazy, she should see her doctor—exactly what I wish he wouldn’t say, even as I recognize that anything he might say in the situation would be futile.

  Then, suddenly, there is silence. I am alone in my study. The clock on my desk reads 6:30 A.M. There is a knock on the door, it opens, and Frances is there. She’s in business attire, smart, chic, and collected. Imperiously, as if she’s thought about it for days and has just arrived to tell me, she announces that it is over. Here—she places it on the desk—is the ring that has never been off her finger for almost thirty years; she’ll send for her personal things in a day or so; and, stopping at the door, she tells me, as a kind of by the way, that I’ll be hearing from her attorney, Mickey Rudin, who handled the affairs of Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, and Elizabeth Taylor, among other big names. “You know Mickey, Norman”—her eyes narrowed—“the killer.”