Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  The next morning I was on the Today show with the Declaration, followed by an interview at CNN. As we were leaving CNN a young man on his way to deliver a FedEx envelope leaped off his bicycle when he spotted us. “Holy gee,” he exclaimed, in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. “You’re the guys who just bought the Declaration of Independence! Can I see it? I gotta see it!” I unzipped the thin leather case Sotheby’s provided and the boy’s eyes popped as he read aloud, “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary—” and he started to cry, which completely confirmed for me that this document had to travel to the people.

  For the record, Lyn and I originally partnered with another couple on this venture. Shortly thereafter, unfortunately, that couple’s financial situation took a sad turn and they asked if we’d let them out. By that time my impresario gene had taken hold, I imagined myself the Sol Hurok (he’s worth looking up) of America’s beginnings, and I was happy to return the money they’d invested and go it alone.

  • • •

  JULY 4, 2001, one year after our purchase—and another indication of the universe conspiring—was the 225th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That historic fact helped me to secure presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter as cochairs of the tour of the document, and to help sell ABC on the idea of a live ninety-minute television special from the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, built around an all-star reading of the Dunlap Broadside. Well over 1 million people gathered in the square for the broadcast that balmy, historic Fourth of July evening and were absolutely awed when the stars Rob Reiner helped me recruit—Michael Douglas, Mel Gibson, Whoopi Goldberg, Kevin Spacey, Renée Zellweger, Benicio Del Toro, Morgan Freeman, Kathy Bates, Edward Norton, and Winona Ryder—stepped onstage, backed by the John Williams orchestra, to read the words that declared them Americans.

  At the conclusion of the broadcast it was the Hollywood contingent’s turn to be awed. We were bused over to Constitution Hall, where, exactly 225 years before, the document had been drawn and ratified, and where to that moment no cameras had ever been allowed. As staged by Arvin Brown and introduced by Morgan Freeman, Academy Award cinematographer Conrad Hall filmed an impeccable reading of the DOI. By four A.M. on July 5 that iconic rendition was in the can for posterity.

  I’ve talked often of watching my children grow and “fill out their silhouettes.” I love the expression as I do the idea behind it, and I’ve lived the phenomenon six phenomenal times. It is only here, as I contemplate my right to the pursuit of happiness, that I think of the DOI purchase and what followed as the filling out of my silhouette. Not my father’s, but mine, that evening in Philly.

  • • •

  THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE I and our team faced as we began was finding the millions of dollars and other support required to realize the plans we developed for our tour of the DOI to all fifty states. But wait! The good luck—here he goes again!—that lit my path in life one day brought to my Beverly Hills office building a giant of a man, straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan, the very model of a modern major billionaire. As he was leaving whatever meeting brought him there, he saw my name in the lobby, came up to my floor, and thundered, “Norman Lear. I came to see Norman Lear!”

  When I stepped out of my office I was grabbed and hugged by this giant, my face head-on against his shoulder, and we heard the sound of my glasses breaking. Ken Langone, a billionaire investor in Home Depot, reacted to seeing my name because his personal physician was my son-in-law, Jon LaPook. Mr. Langone fussed over me as though he’d nearly killed me and insisted he take my broken glasses back to New York, where he had some octogenarian genius of a frame maker who worked no more than three days a week and only for the members of twenty families—or something like that.

  Out of all that energy known as Ken Langone has come a ton of charitable giving, including a $200 million endowment that resulted in the NYU Langone Medical Center, from which my son-in-law, CBS medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook, now conducts his practice. Of course I thought the Fates had sent Mr. Langone to me to godfather the DOI tour, but when I mentioned that possibility his face lit up with another idea. “You should call Bob Nardelli, the president and CEO of Home Depot,” he said. The next day I was on the phone with Mr. Nardelli, who, as it happened, was bringing his sons to California the next weekend to visit a few colleges. We arranged to meet at nine A.M. Sunday in our Concord Music Group conference room.

  The meeting with an affable Bob Nardelli and his sons was not a long one. The DOI reading, viewed at the start of a college tour in closed offices on a Sunday morning with a well-known face speaking every line, was the sneak preview of sneak previews. No one spoke for some seconds when it was over, and Nardelli was still looking at the screen when he asked, “How much did you say you were looking for?”

  “Thirty million,” I responded.

  He looked at me, threw out his hand, and said, “You have half of that.” Five minutes later they were gone and I was on the phone like a kid, blubbering over too much good news.

  • • •

  THE GOOD NEWS CONTINUED. I was on my treadmill and watching TV shortly after meeting Nardelli when I happened on a show called Pinnacle. The architect David Rockwell was the subject of this episode and I fell in love with him in minutes. I was due in New York a few days later, so I phoned to ask if we could meet. That meeting proved we were destined to know each other, and before it was over he volunteered to create a logo for the Declaration of Independence Road Trip, and to design an exhibit large enough to fill the rotunda at a state capitol yet capable of being broken down for use in smaller venues.

  We were looking for a trucking sponsor to transport Rockwell’s exhibit from town to town when I remembered our postmaster general, John C. Potter, whom I’d come to know when the post office issued its All in the Family postage stamp. A phone call to General Potter and a subsequent meeting resulted in the U.S. Postal Service becoming a proud sponsor and our “official carrier.” That resulted in the gift of a sixteen-wheeler and driver for as long as we toured. I don’t remember playing with toy trucks, but I’ve observed other little boys enough to know that our sixteen-wheeler with that Rockwell-designed logo splashed across its length tickled me in just the same way. The memory of its arrival in small-town America—and I witnessed this again and again—is indelible. The procession was led by as many cops and motorcycles as were available locally, followed by two or more high school bands and cheerleaders, elderly veterans in their uniforms, and, finally, the DOI in the emblazoned sixteen-wheeler. Gathered and waiting in front of the venue where the procession stopped were the mayor, the town’s high school glee clubs, or a church choir, or some combination thereof.

  People stood on line for as long as ninety minutes to spend just a few seconds with the Declaration, often teary-eyed and always grateful. Especially touched were teachers who’d dreamed of taking a class to DC to see such a document. “And now here it is in our hometown!” we heard over and over from teachers reaching for their handkerchiefs. In short order we started adding other elements to travel with the document and fill out the exhibit experience. We learned that one of the signers of the Declaration was John Witherspoon, a great-great-uncle of the actress Reese Witherspoon. Ms. Witherspoon was kind enough to film an introductory welcome to the exhibit and the document. It ran all day in an area designed for it.

  In Nashville some fifty country music stars, including Toby Keith, Amy Grant, Lyle Lovett, and Kenny Rogers, gathered at the invitation of music producer James Stroud and Rob Light of CAA to have their pictures taken with the DOI and to be filmed singing a new version of “America the Beautiful.” Some iconic footage of America, contributed by famed nature photographer Louis Schwartzberg, was edited into the film, and this rendition drew cheers everywhere.

  The Muppets’ film of the Constitutional Convention, created for me years before for I Love Liberty, was perfect for the thousands of k
ids being brought to the exhibit, and those who represented the estate of my friend Jim Henson made sure it was part of the Road Trip’s portfolio.

  As a measure of how all this went down in small-town America, when the tour was on its way to Atlanta, Georgia, I got a call from Jimmy Carter asking me if we could make a stop in his hometown of Plains, population around seven hundred. We accommodated the president, and more than three thousand people showed up, many having driven hours to get there.

  • • •

  ONE OF THE HIGHLIGHT STOPS for me was one of the earliest and among the largest. The 2002 Winter Olympics took place in Salt Lake City, with twenty-four hundred athletes from seventy-seven nations competing. At the invitation of Governor Michael Leavitt and Mitt Romney, president and CEO of the Olympics Organizing Committee, we brought the full exhibit to the giant rotunda at the Utah state capitol, and the crowds were awesome. President George W. Bush, attending the opening, spoke to news cameras so close to our exhibit that he couldn’t avoid mentioning the nearby presence of the Declaration. He talked of what it meant to him, and had to acknowledge that it was Norman Lear who’d brought it, adding “Although he and I don’t agree on all things political, we certainly agree on the significance of this document.” Standing a few feet away, Lyn and I swallowed a chortle.

  En route to the stadium in Salt Lake City, the Olympic torch had been passed from runner to runner through forty-five states in sixty-five days, covering some 13,500 miles. As it entered the city proper, someone was dispatched to invite me to come to the street where a runner would hand me the torch so that I could run it to the next bearer. That bearer was not more than thirty yards away, but it was a dizzying experience. I have only to look over my shoulder and see the torch hanging on the wall nearby to remind myself that it really happened.

  • • •

  WHAT I LOVED as much as anything about our DOI tour was its lack of patriotic bullshit. As grand as the exhibition was, especially in major locations, its focus was as direct and humble as these words: “all men are created equal . . . [with the right to] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The tour celebrated the Founding Fathers, who pledged their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” to make good on those words. Theirs was a start; they didn’t have time to make good in terms of the lives they pledged. Would they have delivered had those lives stretched two hundred years further? Likely not, but I’ve always been knocked out by the pledge of their sacred honor. Where do we hear or sense anything close to that in public life today? We hear a lot of “God bless America,” tons of empty praise for “our men and women in uniform,” and everywhere the little flag pin offering proof positive of the wearer’s love of country.

  But, ironically, and God bless America, the last time I witnessed a reference to anything resembling sacred honor was in Francis Coppola’s The Godfather.

  • • •

  AS THE 2004 elections approached, the tour of the Declaration had proved so winning and impactful, particularly on young people, that we thought of racking focus on the DOI Road Trip. A Princeton Research Associates survey revealed that the percentage of new voters had risen in the midterms, and that suggested the Declaration could have a role to play in the national elections. With the youth vote in mind—along with statistics that showed that youngsters who vote as soon as they are able tend to be consistent lifetime voters—we restructured our approach and named it “Declare Yourself.”

  Cherie Simon, a vigorous, no-holds-barred, natural leader who had left a government post in DC to head up the DOI tour, stayed on to run the new effort with the help of a brilliant marketer, Christy Salcido, and they brought in such commercial partners as Yahoo!, Clear Channel, American Apparel, and Comedy Central for an all-out drive to get first-time voters and other young people to the polls in just over a year.

  Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn did a twenty-minute short for me called “Let’s Go Voting,” hilariously showing kids what they have to go through to vote. Traveling with the DOI were some young, inspirational spoken-word artists, and they kicked ass for the college crowds everywhere.

  Our hugest, splashiest campaign consisted of several breathtaking short films and still photographs by David LaChapelle. There were stars like Jessica Alba and Christina Aguilera looking hot as hell but for one arresting particular: their mouths were nailed, spiked, or sewn shut. The magazine world ate it up and the photos were everywhere, including Times Square, where our partner, Clear Channel, controlled several one- and two-story billboards. Imagine turning a corner into Times Square and seeing a twenty-foot Aguilera with her mouth violently sealed, the accompanying legend reading: ONLY YOU CAN SILENCE YOURSELF. REGISTER TO VOTE NOW.

  In 2008, the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old demographic was the only age group to increase voter turnout, and the Declare Yourself clique basked in the glory of having helped that—and the election of America’s first black president—to happen. In the wake of the DOI tour, Declare Yourself, and that living certification of all men having been created equal in the last election—and despite the dismaying number of people, so many of them in government, who have continued to resist that self-evident truth—I was proud of my country and of my role as a citizen activist. It was in that mood that I told myself, “Now, Norman!”

  For years I’d been promising to “start on the book,” jotting down copious notes, reading the interviews that David Bollier on the East Coast and Digby Diehl on the West Coast conducted with high school and college friends, guys I served with in the war, family members, colleagues and associates, etc. In addition, the remarkable Jean Anderson came aboard to scour through the several hundred boxes of correspondence, scripts, musings, family albums, videos, and other remembrances that my staff had kept in orderly fashion and perfect condition through the years.

  As the first decade of the new century was drawing to a close, I determined to finally sit down and tell the stories of my lives. Aiding me as researcher, editor, and all around adviser in chief was the extraordinary Paul Slansky. Other matters would continue to occupy me as well, but the writing at last began.

  9

  FOR MY BIG NINE-OH IN 2012 there was only one place the family wished to be. We’d been to Europe and to Africa together—all thirteen of us—and both trips were magical, but when we all weighed in on this particular event there seemed to be no place on earth like our own private Camelot, The Gulley in Vermont. My actual birthday is in July, but June worked out better for everyone. It turned out to be the most glorious weekend since Henry Ford in 1926 invented the term when, for the first time, he closed his factories on a Saturday to allow his workers two full days of rest on “the weekend.”

  The interpersonal mood of everyone gathered matched the weather: a nineteen-part fusion of ages, minds, and spirits that had us all wondering if this wasn’t the best family time we’d ever experienced. I was especially pensive about my age and amused myself remembering how young I was when I first started to think about longevity, all the way back before my Bar Mitzvah, actually.

  At twelve I had a giant shock of black hair, so black and so thick I had to wash it daily in order to comb and brush it with a hairdressing called Slickum. One day I thought, “What if this is the secret to a long life—washing your hair at the same time every morning?” From that moment to this there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of other odd activities that have caused me to ask myself the same question. Another driver catches me in my car at a stoplight picking my nose. A moment of embarrassment and then I ask myself, “How do you know that picking your nose at a stoplight doesn’t add time to your life?” There isn’t a single piece of scientific evidence to challenge that possibility. The same is true of a man who at sixty, seventy, eighty, and now ninety frequently finds himself dancing to satellite radio in front of a full-length mirror absolutely and ridiculously naked. There is no guarantee that three minutes of such naked tomfoolery does not add a decade to one’s
time here. Has anyone, any parent, any professor, any boss, ever proved to you that dancing naked before a mirror cannot add years to your longevity on this planet? Case closed.

  I amuse myself thinking of that and it leads to the recall of other personal idiosyncrasies. For example, every time the door of the elevator I’m riding in opens I pay specific attention, expecting to see a very pretty woman about to enter. Every time. Whether or not I was in the mood for it, I have never seen pea soup on the menu and not ordered it. I will be driving along tapping the steering wheel to the music playing on the radio when I imagine Fred Waring—conductor of a celebrated orchestra on the radio when I was a boy—discovering me; next thing I know I am on his radio show, a featured member of his rhythm section playing my steering wheel. As the fabled Jimmy Durante was also fond of saying, “I’ve got a million of them.”

  And while I amuse myself, I remember a meal I had with a world religious leader who seemed permanently amused, the Dalai Lama. It was a small luncheon in San Francisco, three tables of ten, and the Dalai Lama was seated at my left. His smile started in his eyes and never left his face. When we took our seats there was a plate of a dozen baby shrimp in a bed of lettuce set before us. We’d all started to eat when I noticed that His Holiness had not raised his fork. Before I could say anything he responded to my attention: “You wish to know why I am not eating. Well, I view these shrimp as twelve sentient beings and—you understand . . .” I understood and we talked about other matters. When the second course was served, a small steak, I was in conversation with the person on my right. I had to turn when I became aware that the Dalai Lama was cutting into it. “Your Holiness,” I started. Anticipating me again, he said, “You wish to know about the steak. I have three reasons. First, it represents just one sentient being. Second, I would not wish to disappoint my hostess totally. And third”—oh, that smile—“I just love steak.”