Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  By 1995 and the occasion of her fiftieth wedding anniversary, something had changed. Not in Claire; in her brother. I couldn’t write about it if I didn’t have the evidence in a DVD of that event. I had finally grown past the superior attitude I held for so many years about my sister and her extended family. Of course our worlds differed. I caught a different current and gained altitude and distance in my fight to escape the beginnings Claire and I shared. But her escape took no less effort and, in the great scheme of things, was no less successful than mine.

  Richard was in on it, but their fiftieth anniversary party was a total surprise to Claire. The camera caught her arrival at a country club where she thought her Dickey was taking her to dinner. We see her enter the big party room and one by one the sixty-some guests pop into view. I have no way of overstating the unbridled joy and accompanying scream that each new face elicited from Claire. It took several sightings, including her children, Diane, Linda, and Robert, before she realized there was a plan here, this was a party, and it was she and Dickey who were being celebrated. And oh, as the camera reveals, how this woman could love and be loved. I was thrilled that Lyn and my three older daughters were there to see this, and to hear my toast.

  A fiftyish blind man with a modest voice preceded me to the mike. He sang something he wrote for Claire, and tearfully thanked her for naming him the new president of SENSE, for letting him be a part of the troop that entertained at outlying hospitals, halfway houses, and retirement homes around the state. His was a perfect lead-in to the relatively new understanding I wished to express that night at age seventy-three, and I told them this story:

  When I’d suggested once to Claire that she write her councilman about a neighborhood problem, her response was, “A lot of good that’ll do. I’m Claire Lear, not Norman.” “Claire,” I heard myself say, perhaps for the first time, “think about it. You have some sense of the size and scope of the Creator’s enterprise here—this earth of ours being one planet among billions that form one single universe of which they tell us there are also billions. Claire, that being the reality, in the great scheme of things you cannot press your fingers close enough to measure the difference in the impact or importance as between any two of us humans.”

  In a speech some time after Claire’s fiftieth I expressed the same idea and a rabbi came up to me afterward to share his Talmudic-style version of what I was attempting to convey: “A man should have a garment with two pockets,” he said. “In the first pocket should be a piece of paper on which is written, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ In the second should be a piece of paper on which is written, ‘For me the world was created.’”

  I wish I’d been able to express my thought that exquisitely for Claire, but the way I put it was still central to everything I wished to impart. I spoke of our parents and described—jokingly, of course—the giant fights they used to have. I told how H.K. and our mother, the Saint, talked about the divorce that would come one day, and how they would split the kids. Claire, who carried the Lear blood, would go with our father. I, with the Seicol blood, would go with our mother. No one who knew our history thought that amusing. If there was anything funny there, they didn’t get it. But unbelievable as this might seem, until the moment I revisited my toast to Claire and Richard on that DVD, neither did I. The joke was on me. When my father went to prison and the children were split up, which one of her kids did my mother take with her? Lear blood and all, she took my sister.

  Claire’s fiftieth could not have moved or informed me more. After it I understood her whole life more clearly than I’d understood any single day of it before. I understood myself a good deal better, too. (Presently Claire is in a home for the aged, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She sits in a rocker most of the time, with the sweetest of smiles on her face, and her head somewhere in the clouds, likely with Doris Day.)

  • • •

  IT WASN’T LONG after that event that I got word that Frances was dying of breast cancer. I can’t recall being sadder, not simply for her illness but for the torment that had marked her every day. Frances had broken her daughters’ hearts when she attempted to leave them with a note that failed to mention them. But when Kate and Maggie talk about their last days, up to the very last minute with her, their faces light up with decades of imprisoned love and respect now free to flow. As her time came, no longer driven by a manic compulsivity, Frances was finally able to express her adoration of her daughters. And loving soul that she was at her deepest, she obviously creamed them.

  • • •

  SADLY, Frances never got to know the man Maggie fell in love with and married—Daniel Katz, the founder of one of the most significant of the environmental groups, the Rainforest Alliance. As a bonus, Dan turned out to be a pal of a son-in-law, too. The wedding took place in June of 1998 at The Gulley in Vermont and had to have been the ultimate in precious family sharing.

  Maggie’s five-year-old sisters, Madeline and Brianna, were her flower girls, seven-year-old nephew Daniel was the ring bearer, and a miracle played out that had many thinking Frances made it to heaven and had come into her own there. The ceremony was set up to take place at four P.M. in a spot on our property known ever since as Maggie’s Meadow. From the main house it was about a ten-minute hike through the woods. The morning was cloudy and in the early afternoon it started to drizzle. No one ever counted on Vermont weather, so an alternative plan called for the ceremony to take place in the tent on the front lawn that had been set up to serve the wedding dinner. The groom was hell-bent on going through with the ceremony in the meadow, however, and every umbrella in the area was on hand. That added up to five at best. At 3:45 most of the guests sat in a light drizzle in the meadow, while a horse and carriage pulled up to the house to pick up the wedding couple.

  Everyone looked at the groom, the man who had been calling the shots. He could have ordered all the guests back to the tent and had them there in ten minutes. Or he and his bride could get into the carriage and chance a drizzle that could continue or become a downpour. Dan nodded a definitive “Let’s!” to Maggie. In the meadow, when the carriage came into view, everything fell into place. The music started, the bride and groom stepped out, and the maids of honor, flower girls, and others in the procession proceeded slowly down the slight incline to the wedding canopy, where the rabbi waited. By now, in the lush majesty of the meadow, the drizzle seemed a part of the ceremony. The scene, it seemed, could not have been improved upon—until the rabbi, after a few words of welcome, opened her Bible. Miraculously, the clouds parted with the pages—thank you, Frances?—and a wide ray of sunshine cut through the wetness, holding the wedding party in a golden mist.

  • • •

  BEN LEAR TURNED TEN just a month after Maggie and Dan’s wedding, and to celebrate that milestone Bill Clinton invited Lyn, Ben, and me to dinner and a sleepover at the White House. I’d known the president since 1982. When he lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas, he accepted my invitation to meet me in New York to discuss the possibility of becoming the honorary chairman of People For. He didn’t accept the offer but we had a great time together and remained friends. When Ben was born he was among a number of such friends invited by my staff to record a bedtime story for my son. “Your friend Bill” taped a story he just might have made up on the spot about a sailboat named George. Now, on the occasion of Ben’s tenth birthday, came this invitation.

  To be stay-over guests of the president and first lady and sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom made me feel a full foot taller and practically a Founding Father myself. The dinner on the Truman balcony with the Clintons was more remarkable for its simplicity and hominess. They asked us to address them as Bill and Hillary. Chelsea stopped by on her way to a friend’s birthday party, and the Secret Service was out of sight.

  Ben recalls the conversation flowing easily and including him. Lyn and I didn’t sense the least sign of strain between Bill and Hilla
ry that night. This despite the fact that our evening together fell right between the president’s avowal to the world that he “did not have sex with that woman” and the appearance a few weeks later of the stained blue dress that proved otherwise. Hillary and Bill were, first and foremost, it seemed to Lyn and me, friends; dedicated friends of the heart, mind, and spirit. We were convinced, to paraphrase Philippians 4:7: “Their bond surpasseth all understanding.”

  The president knew our schedule called for us to be at breakfast at seven-thirty the following morning. He was leaving early to give a speech somewhere, and at seven A.M. he was at our door—the Lincoln Bedroom door, if you please—to say good-bye and hoping to have a cup of coffee with us. Leader of the free world or not, Bill Clinton never stopped being a person; and as I see it, his personhood served his presidency—and his distinguished postpresidency—very well.

  • • •

  IT WAS LATE 1999 when Hal Gaba said he’d found the opportunity in the music business that he’d been searching for. Concord Records—the home of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Ella Fitzgerald, among other greats—was for sale. A small, Tiffany-like label, Hal had plans for merging Concord with a few other boutique record companies to fashion a major minor. I was game, the deal was made, and not long after that we acquired Fantasy, Inc., owner of the Prestige, Milestone, Riverside, and Stax labels, and formed the Concord Music Group.

  Like Perenchio and Horn, everything about Hal and the way he walked in the light told you, his friend, “Count on me.” Good attract their like, and so it was no surprise when Hal told me he’d met Howard Schultz and was talking to him about partnering on a new label exclusively for Starbucks. I’d met Howard years before when Starbucks received a Business Enterprise Trust award, and in ten minutes I loved the man. We talked about fathers. Howard’s dad fell ill in his sixties and could no longer work. Though he’d worked for the same firm since he was a young man, the company had no insurance or retirement plan and the Schultz family suffered as a result. Howard never forgot that, and determined that if he ever had employees, they would not end up that way. Today Starbucks has more than 150,000 employees around the world who consider themselves partners, and that is indeed what they are called. Even part-time employees have full medical coverage and own a percentage of that piece of the business Howard set aside for them when the company began.

  Hal and Howard put Concord and Starbucks together to form the HEAR record label, and the first album to hit the Starbucks counters—Ray Charles’s Genius Loves Company, a series of duets with other major artists—was a giant success. My personal friendship with Howard Schultz was honored when the TV show Iconoclasts invited him to choose a friend to be interviewed with him for an episode about “creative entrepreneurs.” We were good together and felt we reflected something more than simple “success.” At Howard’s invitation I spoke recently at Starbucks’ 2014 shareholders’ meeting, and our friendship continues to grow.

  It wasn’t long after acquiring Fantasy that Hal told me he’d been talking about merging Concord with the highly successful Australian company Village Roadshow Pictures, longtime partners with Warner Bros. on such films as The Matrix trilogy and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The plan under consideration was to merge CMG with the Australian company to form the Village Roadshow Entertainment Group. Hal made the deal and I was with him 100 percent. I liked our Australian partners, largely represented by Graham Burke and Greg Basser, and we got off to a good start with Happy Feet, the delicious film that turned the penguin into a dollar sign.

  When Hal Gaba took ill in 2008 and passed away the following year, I lost not just a great friend and partner, but also what tethered me most solidly to the Village Roadshow Entertainment Group. The VREG board also grieved Hal’s passing and misses him still. His wife, Carole, and their daughters, Lauren and Elizabeth, gave new meaning to the expression “grace under fire.” Heartbroken, they still made it possible for Hal to leave us smiling to the end. He was sixty-three, and all who’d known and adored him as far back as the Tandem/T.A.T. years were shattered, as were those who knew him less well. “I loved Hal like a brother,” Howard Schultz told us at Hal’s memorial. That, I know, was the way Hal loved Howard, and the way I loved them both. They, I think, loved me like an uncle. Not that their love of me suffered any as a result, but recognition of the age difference showed in them now and then, and it put me at an “ask the wise man” remove. Funny how I get that more as time moves on.

  8

  I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT!

  In June 2000 I heard that Sotheby’s was going to auction off an original copy of the Declaration of Independence on the Internet. I’m unable to express what that stirred in me except to say I couldn’t think of another thing until I learned more. It didn’t take long. With the coincidental good fortune that has defined so much of my life, I’d only recently met the father of one of my daughter Brianna’s classmates, and he ran Sotheby’s in Southern California. By the time I got him on the phone I was sure I’d read it wrong because I’d seen the signed copy of the Declaration in Washington and knew there wasn’t another. What I did not know was that the Constitutional Convention was disbanded before the handwritten copy could be prepared for signature, and a printer named John Dunlap, down the street from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, ran off a number of copies the night it was ratified, July 4, 1776. Signed only by John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, these printed copies, known as the Dunlap Broadsides, were the ones dispatched by horseback throughout the thirteen colonies to be read aloud in town squares, declaring the United States independent of the British Crown from that moment forward.

  The copy being auctioned—the only copy in private hands—had just recently been discovered. It had a remarkable history, and it also happened to be on display, I learned, in the Sotheby’s showroom just a few minutes from our offices. My associate Lara Bergthold and I practically raced over to Sotheby’s. There, on an easel behind a sheet of treated glass, was a near-mint copy of—I was in tears before I could get to it—the Declaration of Independence. Leaping out at me were those soul-massaging words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Dated: July 4, 1776. “My God,” I thought, “it took months to get all the framers to sign the handwritten Declaration that I’d seen on visits to the Library of Congress. This copy, printed within hours of its ratification, is my country’s birth certificate.”

  In 1989, a fellow paid four dollars for an old painting at a flea market, largely because he liked the frame. Behind the painting he found a folded document that appeared to be, and later was confirmed as, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, one of the few surviving Dunlap Broadsides. In short order he sold it through Sotheby’s for $2.42 million, and now, eleven years later, it was for sale again. As Lara and I walked back to the office I had something as close to a vision as I could ever have. I would buy the DOI, not as a collector to hang it on a wall in my home but as an impresario, a showman, to bring the people’s document directly to them in their communities across the country. I loved the romance of sharing it with Americans everywhere and convinced myself that, if I owned it, I’d be able to raise the money necessary to make that happen.

  You are likely to be wondering how, after suffering the financial difficulties I’ve described, I could continue to support the causes that mattered to me and now entertain the notion of participating in this multimillion-dollar auction. The best thing I ever did for myself, quite unconsciously, occurred when Perenchio and I sold Embassy. I’d long admired the idea of the family foundation and held a Norman Rockwell kind of image in my mind of a family, parents and children, sitting around a table choosing their charities and determining the size of their donations together. That image, starring Frances’s “little Jew from Hartford”
as the Norman Rockwell dad, knocks me out to this day. After we sold Embassy I set up the Lear Family Trust with a donation of $30 million. If you think that generous of me, I want you to know that I view it as equally selfish. Giving is just plain fun. It tops receiving.

  The first live online auction of its scope and significance—from nine A.M. to five P.M. on June 29, 2000—began, we were shocked to learn, with an opening bid of $4 million. Lyn and I in Vermont, and Lara at the Sotheby’s offices in New York, were on the phone all day. At $4.8 million the bidding hung tight for several hours. It became clear that we had only a competitor or two. As five P.M. approached, the bidding became extremely intense, quickly passing $6 million, then $7 million, and it became clear that we were down to two bidders. Sotheby’s had a policy of extending the deadline some minutes for any bid it received within five minutes of an auction’s close, so when we had passed five P.M. the bids came faster. From $7.1 million on, we prayed between each of our $100,000 bids that we would not hear from our competitor again. It became so tense in Vermont, the walls seemed about to crack. At $7.9 million Lyn and I swore that was it and held our breath. Counting down those last seconds—seven, six, five, four, three—and damn it, the other bidder made it $8 million. It was seven minutes after the hour and we were finished as promised, until, inexplicably, Lyn and I shared a tactic and, in one last desperate ploy, like we were a team and there was strength in numbers, we screamed together, “Eight point one!” The competition promptly dropped out and we owned the only copy of the Declaration of Independence in private hands. Minutes later we were in a car on our way to New York.