Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  “But, Mother,” I said, baffled, “that plane crash was in Canada.”

  “So?” she responded. “I suppose you don’t travel a lot? What do you want from me, I’m a mother.”

  Mother spent her last month in a hospital bed in Hartford. Her last words to me were that she was ready to go, but it wasn’t the soft sound of letting go I heard. It was a sound of annoyance. It annoyed her to be alive. Weeks later I flew in again for her memorial and told the story of her discounting my presence in the adjacent airline seat and asking a stranger to put drops in her eyes. It elicited a warm laugh from those who had similar memories, now viewed through a sweetened lens with her passing.

  • • •

  BY THE TIME Ben was four, he was bright, thoughtful, and intuitive enough, even at that tender age, to suggest a mensch was on the way. Lyn had not stopped lobbying for another child, and as I watched Ben develop it got to me. I imagined him calling down the hall to a sibling, not having to go to bed alone, growing up with someone besides Lyn and me to talk to. Finally, I told Lyn, “Let’s.”

  And so a call went out to the service that had been keeping fresh the maleness we’d collected before my surgery; then, mixed in a lab with the other half of the equation extracted from Lyn, no two petri cohabiters ever mixed and mashed more prayerfully to generate a pregnancy. After a couple of years with no success, we began to explore the possibility of adoption, but quickly learned how difficult that would be given our ages, and especially mine.

  Finally, Lyn’s gynecologist told her that if Ben was to have an in vitro sibling it would take two donors and a surrogate. Lyn could not have toiled harder over the next year if donors and surrogates were mined like ore. She pored through the health, education, and family records and photographs of scores of male and female donors and shared that information with me before making those decisions. She also met with a number of potential surrogates. When I heard that the woman she was leaning toward choosing was married, had two sons, and simply “felt a need to do something for someone that no amount of worldly anything could buy,” I had to meet her, too.

  She and her husband joined us for coffee one afternoon. They were a straightforward middle-class couple, very likable, and it touched me deeply to learn that the idea of a seventy-one-year-old man wishing to do this for a wife twenty-five years his junior was another reason they chose to do this for us. We didn’t meet with the faraway egg and sperm donors, but their backgrounds were, as compared to what we knew of our own family histories, peerless. They were from families whose education and levels of success far surpassed ours.

  As we were about to tell the world we intended to have another child, we received the joyous news that Kate was expecting. Kate and Jon were over the moon and I was sitting atop it. Since Ben was born, just about every good moment with him made me think of how much I wanted this for her, too, and for Jon, my son-in-law and buddy. Kate’s pregnancy with my first grandchild, Daniel, was the root of such excitement in the Lear clan that it freed her to be happy for Lyn as well.

  Meanwhile, my efforts to be a buddy to Ben continued apace. When he was four, I gamely assumed the sound and stance of an outdoorsman and asked him if he’d like to camp out. Evidently he knew more about the subject than I thought because he blurted, “Yeah! How about the Grand Canyon?” Maybe the first time should be a little closer, I said, suggesting that we camp out on the lawn just beside our guesthouse. That was fine with him, so we went shopping for supplies. I bought a tent, sleeping bags, and a headlamp so I could read to him in bed. I felt like a horse’s ass during the hour it took me to pitch the tent that should have been up in ten minutes, but I struggled to look like I knew what I was doing.

  The guesthouse, just a few feet away, had an outside fireplace that “happened” to be set up and ready for a match. Skewers were also at the ready, as were the hot dogs, potato salad, coleslaw, and soft drinks. Finally we crawled into the tent and our sleeping bags, and there ensued as delicious an hour as I’ve known. With Ben lying beside me and a pinpoint of light from my headlamp directed at the page, I read to him until he fell asleep. I, so content and proud of myself, fell asleep soon after. At about two A.M. Ben awakened me.

  “You feel that, Daddy?” he inquired. Pulling one hand out of my sleeping bag, I touched the grass on which we rested; it was soaking wet. A moment later a spray of water passed over us. I had pitched our tent on top of a sprinkler and had forgotten to turn off the system. We spent the rest of the night in the guesthouse that I tried to make seem a logical extension of our camping out. The look on Ben’s face said, “Are you kidding?”

  As I recall the things I did with him, I can’t believe how misguided my attempts were to be the kind of “guy” dad I wasn’t. We did the Indian guide thing, which is to say that we sat around on a couple of occasions with other fathers and sons learning what we needed to know about insect bites, tying rope into knots, and building a good fire. Trying to make the best of these evenings, the Lears never told each other how miserable they were.

  Then there were the drives deep into the valley to play the extreme sport paintball, as far-fetched an idea for the likes of Norman Lear as the pope serving halvah to his cardinals. And the highlight activity of our time together came when Ben was about ten: we drove to some county airport, got into flight gear, took a class on what we were about to do, then got into a pair of single-engine two-seater planes and took off to do aerial combat.

  The pilots, experts at inside loops, rolls, and spins, sat behind us while Ben and I shot at each other with our mock-up 30mm machine guns. The guns were computerized, of course, and we saw our hits and misses on a screen in front of us. Electronically, Ben whipped his dad’s ass in the sky.

  What I think we both enjoyed doing most, though, was writing, rubbing our imaginations together and following the sparks. We were published twice, first in Dear Socks, a book of children’s letters to their pets that first lady Hillary Clinton put together, and then in a book of short stories told in one hundred words or less.

  We also bonded, happily enough, over comedy. Ben loved South Park, and I fell in love with it while watching with him. Since he was such a fan, I called them and brought him to the studio. It turned out that one of the biggest influences on Trey Parker and Matt Stone was All in the Family—as they told 60 Minutes, Eric Cartman was conceived as an eight-year-old Archie Bunker—and a friendship between us quickly developed. They called me when they were preparing their one hundredth episode and asked me to work on it. I spent two days with them and their young writing staff. They used me to voice Ben Franklin and gave me a writing credit for the scene, though I don’t remember anything I may have contributed.

  As my son grew, I became used to hearing it said of him, “The apple sure doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?” But knowing my son as I did, every time I heard that I thought, “It may not fall far from the tree, but believe me, it rolls . . . and rolls.” There is a hint of physical and personality resemblance, of course, but it’s been clear to me for a long while that Ben is 100 percent his own person. Whatever came with the territory represented by his parents, he had woven it into an essence that was entirely new in the universe, just as his older half sisters had done.

  • • •

  NOT LONG AFTER the Northridge earthquake—which damaged our Mandeville Canyon home severely enough to displace us to Beverly Hills for a year—we learned that our lives were going to be further shaken up: our surrogate was pregnant and Ben’s sibling was on the way. Then an ultrasound revealed that the sibling had gained a sibling. Ben was due to have twin sisters, Lyn was to be the mother of three, and I the father of six, ranging from newborn to forty-eight years of age.

  Lyn accompanied the surrogate to every visit with the doctor. On the day before Thanksgiving, November 23, 1994—four weeks before she was due—the doctor shocked both women with the news that our mother-to-be had developed toxem
ia, and recommended that they consider inducing the birth as early as possible. They decided to induce the next morning, and when the doctor assured them that there was nothing to worry about, they realized the babies would be arriving on Thanksgiving and all but fell to their knees.

  That night, a question that had been dancing about in my mind for months now demanded an answer. Would the fact that the twins were not my biological children affect my ability to love them as I did their brother and sisters? I presumed the answer to be that it wouldn’t make a particle of difference, but presumptions take place before the fact. Brianna’s and Madeline’s siblings were, to put it biblically, the fruit of their father’s loins. I thought of it in those terms that night, but when it occurred to me that I, too, was the fruit of my father’s loins, it more than lost its significance. And as the girls were making their entrance—and this time it was Lyn who was saying “Push!”—I was as in love as I had ever been.

  Madeline preceded Brianna by sixteen minutes, and some hours later the doctor announced that the surrogate and babies were in such good shape that he didn’t see why they couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving dinner. It was Lyn who led us to this incredible moment, and I thought again how, as a result of her commitment, the entire universe conspired to ensure her success. The surrogate’s family had already planned to join us for Thanksgiving dinner and Lyn’s family had driven down from Sacramento as well. The babies were the surprise guests for all of them. Our cook came through with a fabulous dinner, and there we sat, with our newborns in their bassinets at the end of the table. Talk about an occasion for thanksgiving!!

  • • •

  AS I SAID EARLIER, my bumper sticker reads JUST ANOTHER VERSION OF YOU, but I don’t intend that to water down the least bit my appreciation of anyone’s uniqueness. Again, like no two thumbprints and no two compacts with the Almighty, we are each one of a kind. And in our kind—human beings—I see us as versions of one another. Since Madeline’s and Brianna’s arrival we have been gifted with proof of that on a daily basis. From our first weeks together we were aware of their individuality, and not just because they are fraternal as opposed to identical twins. There are wondrous differences between these sisters. To know them is to know that despite their being twins, they are total individuals and could have been born worlds apart.

  Though both are beautiful—and I do not use the word idly—you have to know they are sisters before you think to look for the resemblance. When they were very young I recall being conscious of the need to know I was spreading my attention and affection evenly. That had to be true with my older daughters Ellen, Kate, and Maggie as well, but something about the twin factor seemed to raise the ante. Also, as the older father of three, from their infancy through childhood I enjoyed a sharing experience with Kate and Maggie, when they, too, were starting families. And now that my Maddie and Bree are twenty, and Ben twenty-six, I have the pleasure of seeing them share their adult lives with their half sisters and their children, Daniel, Noah, Griffin, and Zoe.

  I am knocked out by how very modern this layout of family seems, and by the privilege of being the paterfamilias to this glorious bunch. Imagine having five daughters so many years apart—and watching them grow from day one to the twenty- to sixty-seven-year-old women I know and adore today. And, of course, the only male in this brood, son Ben.

  Having been a father since I was twenty-four, hungry for connection and dissociated at the same time, I feel like I watched my kids grow from high up in the stands and close up on the field at the same time. Where they played I played, or sought to, anyway. I loved telling them bedtime stories. The older girls recall my asking them to give me five disconnected items—a giraffe, a tractor, a pound of liver, a violin, and a talking snail, for example—and listening to me weave a story that included them all. The younger kids couldn’t get enough of one particular story about a little girl who wakes up in the middle of the night with an itch in her belly button, finds a tiny silver screw in there, goes through all kinds of shenanigans before coming across a tiny silver screwdriver with which she is finally able to remove the tiny silver screw, then looks behind her and sees her little ass fall off. Oh, my God, how my girls laughed, and how indescribably happy was my heart.

  The older daughters went to public schools and were able to walk to them. The younger ones were in private schools and I drove them until the day they could drive themselves. The littler they were the longer the time together at breakfast, one of the great truths of parenting. Early on there was a variety of ordinary breakfasts I could fix, and so long as I called them Daddy Treats it was a big deal. By the time they were driving I had all I could do to shove a wrapped egg sandwich in the pocket of a fleeing jacket.

  I loved waking up to that time with the kids, whatever the length. With Maddie and Brianna, for half of their lives I was engaged in the serious business of reflecting on my own life, in the process learning who I’d come to be, and how. As young ones they had more of that Dad than did Ellen, Kate, and Maggie.

  The girls and I bonded best over a love of theater. Among dozens of shows, we saw Les Misérables four times. Brianna played top roles in many school musicals, and if there were times in my most intense periods of dissociation that I escaped that prison, it was as a member of the audience at one of those productions. Madeline favored sports for a time in her early teens, and the sight of a Lear running as well as Maddie did in a meet one day is utterly unforgettable for this least athletic of Lears.

  • • •

  BUT I’VE GOTTEN AHEAD of myself. Madeline and Brianna arrived just as things were starting to turn around at Act III. Hal Gaba had trimmed down the staff, one by one sold off the trade publications, and reshaped the management teams running Act III theaters and our group of eight Fox TV affiliates. By the twins’ arrival things were really popping at the Fox Network. Starting with The Simpsons at the very start of the nineties, Fox began to enjoy ratings it had not known, attracting sponsors at one end of the TV spectrum and show creators at the other. Soon it had The X-Files; Beverly Hills, 90210; Melrose Place; and other high-rated shows. Fighting for recognition since its inception in 1986, it wasn’t until 1993 that Fox was generally regarded as having achieved “fourth network” status. In 1995, having contracted with the NFL to become its showcase, Fox topped its rivals to become number one in the highly coveted eighteen-to-forty-nine demographic. And in June of that year—talk about good timing, good management, and good fortune—Act III was able to sell its eight Fox affiliates to ABRY Partners for $500 million, which was a big win for the major investors Hal had accrued along the way. My sliver of that made me financially healthy, and I could not have been happier or more grateful to Hal. When he expressed an interest in our continuing to work together, I suggested that we follow his bliss and asked what it was. “Music,” he replied.

  • • •

  IN SEPTEMBER 1995 MY SISTER, Claire, and her husband, Richard, celebrated their fiftieth year together. I haven’t written much about my only sibling, mainly because until this point in my life I’d not been troubled to really know her.

  Claire met Richard Yale Brown when she was fifteen, he sixteen. From that day until and beyond the day he died in his midseventies, he was her “Dickey”—the center of her universe. When Richard—I refused to call him anything else—graduated from high school, Claire couldn’t bear his going off to college immediately, so her Dickey went to work for H.K. in whatever H.K. was up to at the time. I don’t recall whether Claire didn’t know or refused to believe it, but we were in our forties when she learned or accepted that our father had served time in prison. She didn’t remember his kiting checks or his broken promises, and she was sure she’d deserved to be slapped around. She simply adored H.K.

  The person Claire hated, and she spoke of it often, was our mother, who had very little use for her daughter. When she talked about Claire, it was with the same look she had when describing a bad meal.
Monsters raised my sister, but she persevered despite them and built a life and a world for herself just as her brother did. Those worlds could not have been more dissimilar, however. Claire was sixteen when she got married, eighteen when she had her first child, thirty-seven when she became a grandmother, and was a great-grandmother before she turned sixty. She ruled over her family with an iron will of conflicting emotions—a fierce enthusiasm, utter conviction, and bouts of unrestrained disappointment or joy.

  It is probably an overstatement to say that Claire never read a newspaper, but what she made of what she occasionally read was a glorious garble, as was her thinking generally. To Claire, being thoughtful was to have a thought. One was as important as the next and all were rendered with the same level of excitement. In 1979 she had an idea that dwarfed all the others, and she dedicated a good portion of the rest of her work life to it. Did I mention that Claire sang? It was her calling. Not that she ever expressed the desire to take voice lessons. I have no idea if she cared to sing better, or even believed it was possible. She was simply a singer. That’s the way she was perceived by family and friends—like Doris Day, Dinah Shore, and Lena Horne, she was a singer.

  And as a singer, however rarely she performed in public, Claire resented people who smoked, especially when they did it from ringside tables in clubs that featured vocalists. And so she founded an organization to do something about it: SENSE, the Society for the Evolution of Non-Smoking Entertainment. Its mission was to “find and use local talent to entertain our seniors, our handicapped, and everybody bothered by tobacco smoke.” Everyone in her life took it seriously except her smart-ass brother in California. Although he never gave her a clue as to how he felt and helped her every way he could—when she needed a portable piano, or a station wagon to haul her crew around, her brother was there—in truth, he thought his sister was a joke.