Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  • • •

  SOON AFTER BEN’S BIRTH I went to see my urologist with a complaint about having to get up twice a night to pee. He explained that this was common in men my age, but he examined me anyway. I checked out fine, no problems, but as I was leaving his office, he said he’d like to see me again in three months. I asked what he might do then that he hadn’t done today. “A sonogram.” I asked if he was awaiting delivery of the necessary equipment. He responded with a laugh and a no, and I stepped back into his office.

  The sonogram was clear, the doctor said, but he still wanted to see me in three months. I knew now that he was operating on an instinct, a hunch, which was just fine with me. I asked again what he might do in three months. “A biopsy,” he answered. Twenty minutes later, biopsied, I left his office with his promise to call me in a couple of days with the results. Late the following afternoon his nurse phoned. “The doctor wonders if you can come by tomorrow.” I told her I could, she set the time, and then, to my dismay, she added, “Oh, and he said it would be good if Mrs. Lear could come along.”

  It was prostate cancer. “Not to worry,” said the surgeon, “it was caught early. If you need time . . .” I had everything I could do to keep myself from screaming, “Are you fucking kidding?” I didn’t want to live a day longer than I had to with that word on my mind. Although the risk of impotence came with the surgery and that concerned me, the thought of cancer reoccurring and the possibility of its consequences were far worse. Lyn felt the same way and the surgery was scheduled. Ben was only a few months old, it was too soon for Lyn to attempt a second pregnancy, and our understanding had been that we’d have only one child anyway. So why, then, was Lyn suggesting that we collect and save as much of my maleness as we could before the surgery? “Just in case we change our minds,” she said, unable to resist a smile, and for the weeks leading up to my surgery we husbanded—love the word in this context—as much of my maleness as we could.

  The operation, which son-in-law Jon came out from New York to oversee, went without incident. Actually, my recuperation period was a gas. Taking a page from Norman Cousins about laughter and healing, I called Lorne Michaels. He sent me a bunch of SNL tapes, and my ass disappeared with my cancer because I laughed it off.

  • • •

  MY RECUPERATION ALSO GAVE ME the much-needed time to start what turned out to be a lot of work on Sunday Dinner, the show based on the Lyn and Norman Lear story. After much struggling to get it right, it went on the air in mid-1991. As I rethink the project, I’m satisfied that the basic idea was solid, up to and including the notion of a young woman who grabs a moment of solitude here and there to talk to God. “Morning, Chief,” she greeted Him on the first show. “How can anyone wake up on a morning like this and not believe in you?” I loved that and can’t overstate my belief in the project and in the central characters, played by Teri Hatcher and Robert Loggia, yet it was a dud.

  Noting that the May-December relationship in Sunday Dinner reflected its creator’s real-life marriage, Ken Tucker, critic for Entertainment Weekly, wrote: “Rooting a show in reality is no guarantee of either truth or quality. Sunday Dinner is awful, fascinatingly awful . . . what makes the awfulness fascinating is that Lear has chosen to make TT a deeply spiritual soul who frequently looks up into the studio rafters and talks to God, or, as she calls the Supreme Being, ‘Chief.’ Loggia’s grimace is never more convincing than when he is expressing his discomfort with TT’s God talk . . . ‘Why can’t you talk to Martians, like other people?’”

  If I were to do it again—and I’m open to talking about it—I’d make it an hour show and learn more about the daughters, and especially about the effect of TT’s devotion on each of them. Also, Loggia’s character had a son, and today that son’s reaction to TT’s physicality, as well as her spirituality, would be something fascinating to deal with.

  Just a few weeks after the six-episode run of Sunday Dinner, we taped the pilot of The Powers That Be, television’s first cutting-edge look at the sleazy underside of DC politics. John Forsythe starred as a charming, senseless, utterly pliable senator married to a scheming, castrating, maid-slapping bitch on wheels played by Holland Taylor. Their daughter (Valerie Mahaffey) was a near-hysterical bulimic married to a congressman (David Hyde Pierce) whose one ambition was to kill himself. Joseph Gordon-Levitt made his prime-time debut as their twelve-year-old son.

  The show, with a script by Marta Kauffman and David Crane (who next created Friends), was as funny and meaningful as any our company ever produced, and with that cast I couldn’t resist directing the pilot episode. The same critic who wrote off Sunday Dinner credited the new show with “having no problem biting the hand that feeds it,” and he welcomed me back with a four-letter word I treasured.

  “Who’d have thought that after all these years producer Norman Lear would have enough bile left in him to oversee a series as energetically nasty as The Powers That Be. This low-down satire of Washington politics (the first on TV) and the American family offers the broad laughs and sly cunning of a first-rate Broadway farce . . . The Powers That Be could prove to be an upscale uproarious All in the Family for the ’90s.” Instead, it merely proved to be too soon. The way it savaged the DC political scene of 1992 was too much for NBC. “What would you have us do, root for the bad guys?” one exec asked incredulously. “No,” I said, “I’d have you rooting for the next week to pass in two days so you could see the next episode as quickly as possible.” The network pulled the plug after just twenty-one episodes.

  Another high concept idea, 704 Hauser, saw a black family move into the Bunkers’ old home, thus closing out my career at CBS—at least to date—on the same set it started with. The patriarch of this family tried to raise his grown son, Thurgood, in the image of the acclaimed liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall, but the boy had instead grown into another Clarence Thomas. He was also seriously black, not the light-skinned male most favored in such situations, and in love and smooching with a beautiful young white woman who happened also to be Jewish. The Program Practices team called it “politically disquieting.” Although Rush Limbaugh was an unexpected fan and had me on his show to promote it, we came on too fast with too much on this one and made just six episodes. It’s possible it would last six years if made today by Judd Apatow.

  6

  AS I REPORT ON MYSELF in these pages what surprises and pleases me most is the consistency in my life. In the middle of my financial woes, I began a six-year effort whose roots went back to when I was a junior in high school. I liked reading Walter Lippmann, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune who bemoaned the declining influence of church, family, and community on the values of society, fearing that business—and its obsession with profits—had begun to fill the vacuum and grown to be the fountainhead of values in our society. That read like common sense to me at seventeen and early in my career I thought I saw the signs of it increasing, especially with the explosive impact of television. That’s what Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was all about. That’s why she was standing there in the very first scene declaring that there couldn’t be a waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor because the product she was holding promised that there wouldn’t be.

  The problem crystallized for me when I came across a 1980 article in the Harvard Business Review, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,” by Harvard professors William J. Abernathy and Robert Hayes. This brave and revolutionary essay dealt with what the professors had come to believe was the most rapacious societal disease of our time: short-term thinking. I flew to Boston to meet with Abernathy, a meeting that resulted in a quick kinship and a three-hour lunch in a Cambridge coffee shop in which he provided me with the most striking physical metaphor for that malady.

  “You have to understand, Norman, what is coming,” he said, sitting across from me and looking straight into my chest. “There will be a time very shortly when young people—very young people—will be looking i
nto computer screens like I imagine myself doing now.” Unblinking, he continued, “They will be looking directly into screens, not to the side, so there will be no peripheral vision; they won’t be looking over the top, so they won’t see what’s ahead; they’ll be staring straight into those screens, blind to everything ahead and around them, and they’ll be punching numbers and causing billions of dollars to be transferred in split seconds from London to Tokyo to Hamburg to Zurich to New York. With that narrow focus, like a horse with blinders, they will have more control and hold more power in those split seconds than we can today imagine. And all of it entirely focused on short-term gain.”

  I told Professor Abernathy that I wanted to help get his message out and that I hoped we could meet again, at which his demeanor abruptly changed. Looking deep into my eyes, he told me he had recently been diagnosed with a terminal cancer and had some six months to live. I held his gaze and cried. He passed on in December 1983, at fifty.

  As the world turned, one had only to follow the daily news to see how on the mark the Abernathy vision was. Slowly the values our culture held dear were giving way to numbers. Our political leaders began appealing to their constituencies more as consumers than citizens and the disease of short-term thinking soon infected the government as well. “Advertising,” observed historian Stuart Ewen, “has become the primary mode of public address.”

  What had ripened so vividly for me was the blending of my spiritual groping with what I had taken from my meeting with Professor Abernathy. I addressed these concerns repeatedly in various speeches over the years with the help of David Bollier, as bright and interesting a sociopolitical mind as I’d yet encountered, whom I stole from the staff at People For. He worked with me on a 1986 talk at the Wharton School of Business, and again four years later in my keynote address at a convention of the National Education Association in Kansas City. At both I referred to “a trickle-down value system that breeds in a climate where leadership in the Congress, federal agencies, state legislatures, labor, the universities, leaders everywhere glorify the quick fix and refuse through greed, cowardice, or myopia, to make provisions for the future.” The speeches were interrupted frequently with applause, the one in Kansas City ending with a whopping standing ovation. But despite the audiences’ reaction, they drew no more media attention than the dropping of a pebble into a Great Lake.

  Then one day my experience in the world of entertainment gave me an idea. By honoring their best work with Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards, and conducting a competition in the process, the motion picture, television, music, and theater communities cause the entire country to focus on them and their function. Why not, then, establish an entity to shine a spotlight on exemplary acts of courage, integrity, and social vision in the world of business? Why not honor instances of bold, creative leadership that combined sound business management with social conscience?

  I invited David Bollier to draw up a mission statement, and another spectacular young talent I won away from People For, Betsy Kenny, to assist me in my scheduling and in spreading the word. The first businessman who took an interest in the idea, and he was a titan, was Thornton Bradshaw, a friend and former president of the Atlantic-Richfield Company, and then chairman of RCA. Brad, as he was known, seemed more the Harvard professor he started out as than the tycoon he became. I was thrilled when he agreed to chair what we were now calling the Business Enterprise Trust (BET), but as Fate would have it, some weeks after signing on he took ill and a short time later, to everyone’s horror, he passed away. “Thornton Bradshaw,” wrote the New York Times, “enjoyed a reputation as a corporate statesman who campaigned for the social responsibility of business.”

  Looking for a replacement, Betsy arranged for me to seek the advice of a TV pioneer and one of its greatest innovators, Joan Ganz Cooney, creator of the Children’s Television Workshop—the home of Sesame Street. Of the men Joan knew who set the kind of example the BET required, her first choice was Jim Burke, the former chairman of Johnson & Johnson, known to everyone in the business world as the “Tylenol Hero.”

  In 1982 seven people in the Chicago area died from arsenic-laced capsules found in a few bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol. As chairman of J&J, Burke expeditiously yanked 31 million bottles of Tylenol off drugstore shelves countrywide. It was a stunning act of, yes, courage, integrity, and social vision, and when Jim Burke agreed to chair the Business Enterprise Trust, the announcement alone served as a mission statement.

  In the course of my friendship with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn I had met Kay Graham, president of the Washington Post Company. Now, with Jim Burke as chair of the BET, it wasn’t hard to persuade Mrs. Graham to become a trustee. With Burke and Graham on board, the same was true for Warren Buffett. With those heavyweights on board, trolling for other trustees became a relative cinch. One night, I was the guest of honor at one of Katherine Graham’s celebrated dinner parties, where Sol Linowitz, adviser to presidents and the man who delivered the Panama Canal Treaty, accepted my invitation to join the BET board.

  I was well aware that business executives such as those we would be honoring needed another tribute or cause-oriented hotel dinner like they needed a hole in their budgets, but they just might be up for a breakfast, especially one with all the bells and whistles of a major evening event. And so, in March 1991, at seven-thirty on a weekday morning, in the famed Rainbow Room high up in the GE Building, the first of the Business Enterprise Trust Breakfasts and Award Ceremonies was held. It was attended by, among two hundred of corporate America’s top executives, Jack Welch, Larry Tisch, Pete Peterson, and David Rockefeller, and was hosted by Barbara Walters.

  Subsequent ceremonies continued in the Rainbow Room and were hosted by Diane Sawyer and Bill Moyers and featured such keynote speakers as President Bill Clinton, first lady Hillary Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and Senator Bill Bradley.

  We honored five companies each year for courageous decisions in the public interest made by their leaders, and established a lifetime achievement award. I produced a group of nine-minute documentaries that told the story behind each of our five corporate honorees, a sixth about the recipient of that year’s lifetime achievement award, and they were presented before some two hundred fifty top business executives, the cream of the corporate crop, who viewed the films on a wall of dozens of TV screens.

  The stories of the first twenty-five of the companies that received the BET award are featured in David Bollier’s book Aiming Higher (AMACOM, 1996). The book, the video documentaries, and an extensive array of business education materials developed by BET’s inexhaustible president, Kathy Meyer, and her staff were published and sold by the Harvard Business School Publishing Company. More than five hundred business schools, universities, and corporate management training programs have purchased them for use in their curriculums. The materials continue to sell through Harvard Publishing to this day.

  The BET caught the attention of Dean Donald Jacobs at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business, renowned for its commitment to socially minded business practices. Dean Jacobs’s brand of academics and my media acuity seemed a perfect blend, and for a time it seemed the trust would merge with Kellogg. But the air went out of that balloon one day when Dean Jacobs informed me that an illness in his family required him to put a few of his interests on hold, among them the BET. The Kellogg board that had agreed to the merger and its cost lost interest in it before Dean Jacobs could pick up the cudgel again, and the curtain came down on the Business Enterprise Awards. Not a day goes by that something I observe in our culture doesn’t make me mourn its passing.

  7

  THERE WAS ANOTHER passing that should have—but didn’t—result in greater mourning. But then, is it possible to lose what you never had? My mother had been ill for a while and passed just a month shy of ninety-one, not too long after an afternoon with her taught me all that remained of what I didn’t know about her. I knew she had a
way of sucking pleasure out of a good moment, but I tried to think of it, especially her disaffected reactions to my personal triumphs—when I won the Emerson scholarship, the first words out of her mouth were “If I realized it was such a large auditorium I’d have sat closer”—as simply quirky. When, decades later, it was clear that I had “made it,” she was heard to rave about me as the subject of all the excitement, but she never talked about how she felt about me, the person, or said anything definitive about my career or my political work. Then came that afternoon.

  I’d flown her out to see her newborn grandson, Ben, and my son-in-law Jon, who was also visiting, decided to interview her. She was sitting in the living room in her wheelchair dressed for the occasion and well versed in performing as a model old woman. Was she ready, Jon wanted to know as he raised his camera. So ready, said Mother, that she was shaking and her heart was palpitating. Jon started by asking her a series of questions about her son. I was sixty-six at the time, but from my mother’s answers and the stories she told in support of them I was about fifteen.

  “Oh, yes, my Norman . . . always, he always made me laugh . . . he didn’t walk down stairs, he deliberately fell . . . never gave me a problem . . . what can I tell you, he’s Norman . . .” If you didn’t pay attention to the actual words, you might have thought you were listening to a mother who was just crazy about her son.

  At some point I entered the scene carrying Benjamin, her infant grandson. Since we’ve long accepted that a picture is worth a thousand words, the next few minutes of Jon’s film are equal to a twenty-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica on Jeanette Lear and what it must have been like to be her son.

  “Oh!” and “Oh!” again, my mother exclaimed, her eyes darting about to see how she was perceived as I presented the baby. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” she said. I offered to let her hold him. “Oh,” she exclaimed, but she couldn’t. Through distressed sounds and gestures she made it clear that she wanted to, oh, yes, she wanted to, but she couldn’t. Her hands fluttered about the baby, fingers stabbing in his direction, but they hesitated short of the blanket he was wrapped in. She simply couldn’t hold her grandson. How’s that for a delayed view of the love available to me when I was wrapped in a blanket? But then again, maybe what Mother was able to show wasn’t a reflection of how much she cared. After all, she did call me once in my forties, very worried and very relieved when she heard my voice. There had been a terrible plane crash and she wanted to be sure I was okay.