by Norman Lear
That last line takes me to my knees like a head-butt to the belly. Only the next Next in my extraordinary life—in this case a week on a yacht in the Mediterranean, just Lyn and me and a crew of six tending to our every want—could allow me to stuff it.
5
SETTLING DOWN WITH LYN and my newly realized wealth, I thought this was an opportunity to stretch in other directions. When I look at where I went, however, it is hard to believe the person stretching was me. Given my background and known talents, a new direction for me would have been teaching, speaking, writing a play, or authoring a book. It would not have been buying businesses, even ones engaged in publishing, broadcasting, and theaters. That was more like something Jerry Perenchio would do. Or what Herman Lear would attempt to do. An early interview to find an executive to run what I decided to call Act III Productions, Inc., had the H.K. stamp all over it.
Peter Chernin, who had already been president and chief executive officer of two entertainment companies, was considering an offer to join Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in its executive ranks when I invited him to discuss the possibility of his coming with Act III instead. It’s so clear to me now that this was my uncannily similar version of H.K. inviting the heads of major manufacturing companies to a hotel room to see a product made by his ragtag company before its inventor had it working. Chernin listened to my pitch—delivered as energetically as kid star Mickey Rooney’s “Let’s put on a show!” speech in Babes in Arms—and just as the general walked out on H.K.’s one-cubic-foot refrigerator pitch, Chernin left our meeting and took the job at News Corp. There, of course, he served for twenty years as its president and chief operating officer, leading it to become one of the world’s largest media conglomerates.
I didn’t interview anyone else. At someone’s suggestion I split the titles of president and CEO and hired an impressive thirtysomething executive who’d been involved in the Coca-Cola/Embassy negotiations to fill the CEO role. He was, to me, the very model of a modern Harvard MBA: bearded and well tailored, cool and distant, with an acquired jocularity. I would have enjoyed his company at a luncheon, but going into business with him because I wished on some subconscious level to stretch in H.K.’s direction was as misguided as it sounds.
No more misguided, though, than my engagement of a former executive vice president at Disney Studios to be Act III’s president. All I remember of his brief time there are two memos and one order for a piece of equipment. The memos both went to my assistant: the first asking for a pair of good seats at the upcoming Oscar ceremonies, the second objecting to the seats she’d procured and “assuring” her that she could do better. The purchase order was for a button to be placed at the side of his desk so that his forty-year-old body didn’t have to get up to open or close the door. Within months my original hire was serving as president and CEO.
Before long Act III was on its way to building a theater chain of 550 screens, led by a young theater manager we brought on. Another hire came aboard to put together a chain of independent TV stations. Two years later Act III owned eight independent Fox affiliates across the country, and our budding management team included a publishing guru who was on his way to building a miniempire of eleven trade publications. It pulverizes me to remember that I did not make or help to make a single decision about buying a single magazine, theater, or TV station when my company was borrowing vast amounts to make those purchases based on my worth and the assets themselves.
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents,” psychiatrist Carl Jung famously said. All my life I’ve swallowed the anger to which my childhood entitled me, while aching for my dad to realize even a fraction of his dream. It never happened. H.K.’s unlived life was my hidden curse, and there was no way I was going to live his life, his dream, with my Act III.
Isaac Newton observed that we stand on the shoulders of giants and see further as a result. Unfortunately, the giants at the beginning of life, our parents, can be emotionally and psychologically handicapped, and our fight as we grow is to separate; to find other shoulders; mentors in persons living or dead. Or stubbornly, to try, against all odds, to make giants of the emotional and psychological pygmies we were born to. Answering to life for our parents’ inadequacies can choke that life out of us.
• • •
LYN AND I had rented a small house on Mandeville Canyon Road, fully furnished, in a romantically flawless garden setting. Cognizant of the mistake I’d made by throwing everyone together so precipitously on the tall ship, I asked and Lyn agreed to put off the actual wedding for a year. When it took place on September 10, 1987, it was a small family affair at Lyn’s sister’s home in Belvedere, a San Francisco suburb. My longtime friend Martin Marty, Lutheran minister and religious historian, flew out from Chicago to marry us; Jerry Perenchio was my best man; and Lyn’s sister, Diane Cassil, served as her maid of honor. Ellen, Maggie, Kate, and Kate’s husband, Jon, came out from New York. Diane’s husband, Rob, their son Kevin, Lyn’s brothers, Ron and John, and their families, and a few old friends of Lyn’s completed the wedding party.
The Norman so woefully responsible for the tall ships saga was convinced that enough time had passed, managed to avoid the remaining hint of anxiety in his bride’s and his children’s eyes, and saw no reason why the words “I now pronounce you man and wife” wouldn’t make for instant kinship in every direction. It took a New Age psychiatrist Lyn met at Esalen in the seventies to help me see my reality when he whispered to Kate, loud enough for all to hear, “I feel your pain.”
Once we were married the house we were renting developed the aura of a dreamy honeymoon cottage and I felt wrapped in it with Lyn. When we had our children life became far richer, of course, but for sheer, stripped-down, cloud nine elation, the time on Mandeville was matchless. There were no restraints, no intrusions, and no time limits on the spiritual bond we shared. The one spike in our wheel was daughter Kate’s reaction to hearing we were trying to have a child. So upset after two years of struggling to get pregnant, she was sure her father and his young bride would get there first. And sure enough, within a month of our wedding Lyn was pregnant. Kate tried to be happy for us, but had to give up the fight. Lyn understood but was deeply hurt by it. I was of no use to either. Dumbly, I parceled out smiles and assurances to both that this, too, would pass. Both wanted to choke me. My mind was in the vicinity but on a different block. The father to three daughters already, I blithely assumed Lyn was carrying my fourth. Then one day she called and asked, “Are you sitting down?” As it happened I was, but I jumped up when I heard her happily say, “We’re going to have a boy.”
“Holy shit,” I thought. “I’m going to be a seventy-year-old Indian guide!”
Not long after Lyn’s news, Alan Horn’s wife, Cindy, learned that she, too, was pregnant. The two couples went out for a celebratory dinner, in the course of which we talked about the world our kids would be entering. NASA scientist James Hansen had just testified before the Senate that global warming had begun and was man-made. As soon-to-be mothers, Cindy and Lyn wondered how they might help, and as supporters of the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, and Greenpeace we recognized that the environmental movement didn’t need another organization fighting the good fight so much as it needed a bigger presence in the media. Who better than the four of us, we concluded, to establish that presence? And thus, the Environmental Media Association was born. For a quarter century now it has been responsible for urging the creative community to cover environmental issues in its work, and then providing them with accurate information. For those of us who put more trust in the 97 percent of scientists concerned about climate change than we do in the Tea Party, EMA’s work is more urgent with each passing day.
Coinciding with Lyn’s pregnancy, I became aware that there was considerable cause for concern on the financial front. Save for our homes, art, and furnishings, our entire personal worth was tota
lly invested in Act III. The company was overleveraged, the economy was starting to slump generally, and the fate of Act III was beginning to concern me. Further, a stock market collapse in October 1987, known historically as Black Monday, resulted in instant panic. That’s when I gave two investment teams access to everything they needed to assess Act III’s holdings and determine its current net worth and potential. Lyn was about five months pregnant when, late one afternoon, that fateful meeting took place at the Bel Air Hotel with Jerry Perenchio, the Boston Ventures Group, and me. A few minutes of clubby chitchat, and then, with great difficulty, they gave me chapter and verse about my businesses. It was not a pretty picture. Jerry and the teams I’d hired worked exhaustively, and came to their assessments independently. They all concluded that the health of Act III hovered between grave and desperate. When I asked what my combined assets might be worth if I were to sell, Boston Ventures’ advice was to take $15 million if it was offered. Perenchio suggested I think hard before holding out for that amount. My investment was more than $100 million.
I left the Bel Air Hotel with a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I hadn’t felt since our first days in L.A. when I didn’t have a job. When a tire blew back then, I’d scour the city’s lots looking for the lowest price on a retread, and shopping for a retread was the taste in my mouth when I came home to Lyn that night. I was compelled to report what I’d heard, but not fully. I couldn’t let her in on the depth of my concern, and I couldn’t risk her worrying about my sanity if I was to tell her that, flashing across my mind and lightening my concern was the thought “Even this I get to experience.”
There was still no risk that the word desperation would reenter my children’s lexicon, but the lifestyle we’d grown used to was severely threatened. What lay ahead was painful and we had to suffer through it, but as 99.999 percent of the world’s population understands the word, we would not be “suffering.”
As I relate this Act III story and the part I played—and failed to play—in it, I confess to feeling like a fool. But a fool couldn’t pull together PFAW, or write and produce a line of hit television shows and films. So what explains my ability to work my ass off and get so much done, yet dissociate so intensely from my personal life as to feel more the clown than the ringmaster? Recently I read of the “parallel play” that occurs when several toddlers are seemingly at play together. While all might be engaged in the same activity, they are actually each playing by themselves. The first twelve years of my life saw me at parallel play, and through my adulthood all that changed in my life were the ages and sizes, talents and personalities, of my fellow toddlers. As much as I’ve worked in collaboration with others and sought with everything in me to be a good father and husband, my guard against the terrors of my childhood was to dissociate and carry on with my life in parallel play.
I carried on with a cluster of efforts—one might think of them as Overs and Nexts—at any given moment. From my productions across the media, political organizations and causes, and events and festivities prepared for my family, my production skills were in evidence everywhere, but my inner self—my emotions—were on display in my work, not in my being. Pieces of me existed in the characters that inhabited my TV shows and films, most at a considerable volume, all begging to be heard and understood. It is especially painful when I consider the productions that I identify as Mooncrest Drive, Chadbourne Avenue, and Westridge Road. There I see six children in the show that was my life, aching for their dissociated father just to be where he was (but wasn’t). Trying not to be too harsh on myself, I think of how easily and sincerely I committed across the board to rational, reasoning, even intimate relationships. But where did I commit to emotional intimacy?
• • •
ON THE ACT III FRONT I took off my father’s hat, put on my own, and decided that I would hold on to the assets and seek out the executive help it required to save rather than sell them. Jerry Perenchio and Alan Horn offered to find someone to take over the management of Act III and to, as I’m sure they spoke of it, “handle Norman.” Jerry, thinking long and hard about who was up to this challenge, came up with Hal Gaba, who had worked under him at Embassy. I’d come to know Hal well socially and we’d become good friends. Jerry thought the world of him, said he was smart as hell and had the makings of a first-class executive and entrepreneur, and Alan agreed. Hal, who had been dabbling in real estate, was free to pick up the challenge and he welcomed it.
In short order the execs who’d been running the company were let go, and Hal, bringing on his own right and left hands, set about turning things around. So far so good, but with no money from stock or other investments to rely on, I needed a weekly income. As good fortune would have it yet again, Gary Lieberthal, who had grown up with Hal and under Perenchio in our company, had just been made president of TV production at Columbia Pictures Entertainment. Shortly thereafter, a joint venture that would pay $3 million per year was announced between Columbia and Act III for me to produce at least three pilots in three years for series television. “As quickly as Norman can come up with a program he loves,” Lieberthal told the New York Times, “there won’t be any problem finding a place for it on the networks.”
It wasn’t that easy, but I already had a good idea and Gary was able to make a six-episode deal with CBS. Inspired by my own life, the pitch went: “A fifty-three-year-old divorced father with daughters in their late twenties falls in love with a young woman about to turn thirty and brings her home to announce their intention to marry. Oh, and she has a strong relationship with God, to whom she tells everything.”
The media was taking considerable interest in my return to television, especially the report that the show was based on my third marriage and spiritually inclined new wife. A number of fundamentalist groups organized to demand that CBS withdraw its support of Sunday Dinner. Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, threatened CBS president Larry Tisch with a boycott of 1 million Christians. But the Wall Street Journal decided that Act III’s entrance into television production made it a ripe time to do a major business story on me—and to my huge relief they got it all wrong.
On their front page one morning was a headline about Norman Lear’s PLANS FOR A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY that referred to me as a CAPITALIST ACTIVIST engaged in ACT III OF HIS LIFE. Accompanied by one of those classic “head-cut” drawings, the article read: “Norman Lear has made a fortune, helped acquaint TV with reality, and played a major role in defeating the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork. Now at an age when people often slow down, the 65-year-old writer-producer-activist is at it again on all fronts: financial, political, even personal . . . Only last fall he married again and now is about to become a father again.”
The paragraph that followed could get a laugh from a cadaver: “But most of all, Mr. Lear is proving himself a savvy and unabashed capitalist . . . His business success is so striking because big names like Aaron Spelling, Dino De Laurentiis and others have tried to build multi-faceted public entertainment companies recently only to falter after a year or two in business. Mr. Lear is a sharp contrast . . .” For the sake of the heirs to the Messrs. Spelling and De Laurentiis, I hope the Journal reported on their “failing” businesses as loosely as they reported on the “success” of Act III.
• • •
SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT on July 10, 1988, the world seemed to hold its breath and Lyn Lear, the first woman ever to give birth in that body, went into labor. Daddies weren’t welcome in the delivery room until the sixties so this was my first time there. In an effort to soak up every ounce of the experience, Lyn had us attend a few coaching sessions where we papas-to-be were instructed—talk about bullshit—that this was a team effort. It was one thing in our practice sessions, but quite another with Lyn in labor. There I was, as coached, earnestly directing her breathing with an “Easy does it” here and a “Just relax, darling” there, until a shrill glance from Lyn all but shouted
, “Are you fucking kidding?” I relaxed.
Minutes later, there he was, Benjamin Davis Lear, set down in a bevy of going worlds, totally unaware of how difficult it is to be a human being. I had decided against a formal bris, a Jewish tradition that makes a social event of the trimming of the latest penis to appear on the scene. The baby is set before the mohel (the official name for the rabbi/clipper) on a pillow, and the guests—some already into the tea and sponge cake—gather round. He recites a prayer in Hebrew—I’ve always assumed he prays that he gets this right—then a few clipping sounds followed by a howling baby, and it is over.
Serving as our mohel was the obstetrician who delivered Ben, who asked if I’d like to assist him the next morning with the circumcision. I said okay but felt a twinge. After all, when the San Francisco earthquake hit, how do we know there wasn’t a baby on a pillow or a table someplace just about to be cut? Our doctor/mohel performed with great dispatch. I have no memory of what little he asked of me to earn “assisted by” credit, but I recall breathing a big sigh of relief when he said, “That’s it,” and Ben started to cry instead of shouting, “Oh, my God, what have you done?”
Benjamin Davis Lear and his mother came home that afternoon. Two questions followed me everywhere for some time following. How different does it feel to have a baby at your age? And how does it feel to have a son? I didn’t feel the age thing at all, but being father to a son gave me that “Chip off the old block” feeling that can’t be experienced as lucidly with daughters. That was good, as was the knowledge that the Lear surname would continue into the next generation. But having grown up without a sports gene, I worried from day one about what I would do if his athletic needs went beyond a game of catch.