Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  There was the thinnest, palest guy I’ve ever seen, with breath that could peel an onion, who operated a six-for-a-nickel photo booth. I’m not sure whether he spoke English. He hired me off my pool and ocean bathing gig by waving a couple of dollar bills at me. I hoped he meant per hour; he meant per day.

  “Hey, hey, it’s six for a nickel, five cents, the only place on the island! Looky here, little girl, you ought to be in pictures! Six for a nickel, five cents! A twentieth of a dollar gets you six delicious photos of yourself to last a lifetime! My personal guarantee: If you find a better deal on the island, let me know and I will personally help you spread the word!” In the rain of hyperbole it didn’t matter what the hell I said.

  My third job at Coney that summer was selling ears of corn out of a steaming barrel for an elderly, sheet-garbed Sikh gentleman who taught me a lesson of the natural world that, like my uncle Ed with the porcelain, he wished me never to forget. “You salt the ear of corn before you brush on the butter. Why, you wonder? Because the less expensive salt when applied first will prevent the more expensive butter from running off as quickly, and so that way we use how much of the more expensive ingredient? LESS is how much, we use LESS!”

  I recall thinking that if he had thirty kids selling from thirty barrels for thirty summers, all employing his salt-first strategy, it might have sped up his retirement by thirty minutes. Maybe forty.

  • • •

  THE BEST TIME of year was when my grandparents, Bubbe and Zayde, came to stay with us for the High Holidays. Their arrival was preceded days before by two or three barrels of dishes, carefully wrapped in the Yiddish newspapers Zayde had read to the last word. (The wrapping was to keep the dairy dishes at a remove from the meat dishes and vice versa.) I’m not sure what would have happened had anyone set down a lamb chop on a dairy dish, but the way my grandfather carried on if he saw a hat on the kitchen table or an open umbrella in the house, I’m sure there would have been hell to pay. Granted, the hat and umbrella instances were only superstitions, but they caused him to pound furniture while praying aloud agitatedly between gritted teeth, the Jewish equivalent, I thought, of crossing himself a thousand times. But mixing meat and dairy was a no-no from on high, and I thank God it never occurred in Zayde’s presence when I was about.

  I loved my grandparents’ visits. They provided a reprieve from the four-way stress we lived with daily. And for me there was the oasis of peace, love, and understanding that was my bubbe. For several days there was someone in the house who “got” me. My parents and grandfather had one another to stress over, and the difference for us kids was like a month in the country.

  • • •

  IN THE COURSE of our Brooklyn years there was a big stir regarding bonuses that Congress promised to World War I vets in 1922 and finally paid in 1936. My father saw prewar service in the Navy and then joined the Army after the war started. He was stationed in Mexico and did not see active duty, but as a vet he received something like twenty-one hundred dollars, a small fortune at the time. Mother and he ceremoniously placed it in a safe-deposit box, as opposed to an interest-bearing bank account, so that she could visit her cash whenever she felt the urge. No one knew better than her husband that Mother was certain to feel that urge on a regular basis, so it was as meat-headed and irrational as it was deceitful when he raided that box and “borrowed” the cash, all of it, to invest in something that was due to pay off in ten days to two weeks—tops.

  My mother cried, beat her chest, and pulled her hair for days. My dad went dumb. I didn’t have the stomach for picking up my clipboard. Watching my mother beat herself, I fought hard not to come apart. I thought, “I don’t know whether to shit or go blind,” an expression I’d heard that conveyed what I was going through and amused me at the same time. It was the amusement I needed.

  My sister was in some sort of shock and wouldn’t come out of her room. As an older brother, I tried to make her laugh at the goings-on. This was a comedy, I told her, and we should be laughing. That might have worked, but when she looked into my eyes my age and fear showed. There, I was four.

  The episode ended with my mother packing to leave and me thinking the time had come when I was going to live with her and Claire with my dad. Given what had gone down between them for so long, that would have been logical. Instead, she was leaving alone and asked me to help her to the subway with the bags. For me it was a three-block death march. She stopped when we reached the entry to the subway and stood there looking down the stairs, then furtively over her shoulder, and then all around, not talking, not descending, and beginning to cry again. A minute or two later, collecting what remained of herself, she turned abruptly and started walking away.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Home,” she responded. “Where else would I be going? Home.”

  • • •

  SOME MONTHS AFTER the bonus money fiasco, my folks celebrated their fifteenth wedding anniversary. H.K. took us to his “favorite restaurant in all the world.” Not that we had reason to believe he’d eaten in that many fine restaurants, and certainly not across the globe, but whenever he was asked to back up some seemingly questionable declaration, or explain how he happened to be in possession of some arcane statistic that supported his point of view in an argument, he’d say, “Because I’ve been everywhere the grass grows green and I’ve seen everything.”

  Christ Cella on West Forty-sixth Street was famous then for its steak and lobster. The H.K. who walked in with his family that night had very likely had a haircut and manicure that afternoon. Mother enjoyed that H.K. to the hilt, accepting the goods and grandeur, never asking how we could afford it.

  Mother, Claire, and I ordered steak, Dad a lobster. “A female lobster,” he specified. The waiter seemed confused.

  “Do you know a female from a male?” Dad asked. It was obvious that the waiter did not.

  “The females,” Dad informed him, “are more tender.” All the waiter could manage was an uneasy smile. My mother to a degree and Claire to the limit were embarrassed. When Dad suggested the waiter bring some live lobsters to the table so he could pick a female, Claire begged him, “Don’t!”

  Finally, the maître d’ interceded and told the waiter to escort Dad to the kitchen so that he might carefully pick out his entrée. Out of his chair in a split second, Dad said, “Come on, kids. I’ll show you how to pick a female. Sweet as your mom.”

  Claire refused to move. I, who’d been hovering between “My dad’s being an asshole” and outright awe, was now in the “totally awesome” camp. I followed the waiter and my father into the Christ Cella kitchen. To my surprise, perhaps to my father’s also, there were a few tables and people were dining there. They must have looked like the “in” crowd to Dad, because he took me there a few times before I went overseas, and from then on we always ate in the kitchen. As to how you can tell a female lobster from a male? I watched closely with our waiter, the maître d’, and a few other fascinated workers as H.K. picked up and poked around the bellies of several clawing lobsters. Finally he said, “Ah, there!” and the others applauded. To this day, you’d have to slip a lobster into tiny panties and a bra before I could identify a female.

  On Mother’s pillow when we arrived home was a poem Dad had ostensibly written to commemorate the occasion. Actually, he’d confidentially asked me to write it for him. I’d been writing poems for a little while. One of them, nothing one couldn’t imagine any young kid writing, received an honorable mention in a New York Daily Mirror contest. That gave him the idea and so I wrote, and he presented as his own that night, “TOGETHER”:

  The 15 years I’ve been with you,

  We’ve shed many a tear, ’tis true.

  But life for us has just begun

  We’ve yet to have all our fun,

  As long as we’re TOGETHER.

  And when, my dea
r, we’re old and gray,

  And life for us is sunny weather

  We’ll look back on our lives and say

  It has been fun TOGETHER.

  Mother was thrilled with the poem and wept when she read it. Between Christ Cella and “TOGETHER,” if their love life was half as hot as she coyly and mischievously maneuvered conversations to suggest when she was in her eighties, they must have had a passionate night.

  When we moved to Hartford a year later, Mother framed and hung that poem in the vestibule, where it remained as long as we lived there. To my knowledge she never knew its true author—not even thirty-five years later, when, on the very first episode of All in the Family, daughter Gloria buys a gift for her father, Archie Bunker, to give to Edith, his wife, on the occasion of their twenty-second wedding anniversary. Edith takes the little package, tears off the wrapping, and opens the box.

  “Oh, my!” she screeches, and, as if picking up the Hope Diamond, adds, “It’s a Lady Gillette!” With it came a greeting card that causes Edith to announce delightedly, “I bet it’s a Hallmark!” Tearing it open, she adds, without a trace of disappointment, “Well, almost.”

  And then Edith begins to read “Together.” Overcome by just the title, she turns lovingly to Archie, who can’t handle affection. “All right, Edith, get on with it, get on with it,” he says, and she reads on, with just one change in the first line to accommodate the story line: “The twenty-two years I’ve been with you . . .”

  When Mother called after the show I expected some degree of sentiment, but the poem was never mentioned. She did hope I wouldn’t be troubled by what some people might say about Archie’s language. And she snickered when she said, “And leave it to that Edith to carry on about a Lady Gillette!”

  • • •

  OUR TIME IN NEW YORK, almost four years, came to an abrupt end one day on the New Jersey Turnpike, near New Brunswick. On April 6, 1938, six men were involved in a two-car collision and only three of them lived to talk about it. One was “Herman K. Lear of Brooklyn, N.Y.” The car he was driving was described in a newspaper clipping as “a car full of novelty salesmen.”

  That clipping was in my pocket days later when the doctors pronounced him out of danger and I was brought to the hospital to see him. Out of danger? I burst into tears at the sight of him. This, you understand, was before television and before the ERs of that fast-growing world, the hospital dramas. Seeing a body strapped to a hospital bed, especially your own father’s—with broken bones wrapped in splints, one leg hoisted, needles stuck into and tubes protruding from every part of him and connected to strange, beeping medical equipment—was horrific, something I could never have imagined. To my nearly sixteen-year-old eyes, he looked more like he was being tortured than cared for.

  We never learned what that “car full of novelty salesmen” were peddling that day, but as anguishing as it was to see Dad that way, I still could not help being amused by the presence of “novelties” in the details of the collision that came close to killing him.

  4

  WE MOVED BACK TO CONNECTICUT—Hartford, to be specific—when Dad was out of the hospital. His recovery took months. To see him anytime after that was to know the man had been in a terrible accident. It left him with a limp for which he often needed a cane. Then there was the facial scar that came down from his forehead and seemed to go off in several directions. With all of that, I have no recollection of my father complaining. If he was in pain I never heard it. If he felt the need to slow down, he didn’t mention it to me.

  I can recall only exchanges with my dad, never a real conversation. I can see his fingers feeding strumberries to his mouth. I can see him picking his nose, thumb-and-forefinger style, as he drove. I can see him in his red leather chair controlling the radio dial. But for the life of me I cannot recall us sitting together in conversation. Nor can I recall looking at him as he looked at me. Did we ever look each other in the eyes?

  Whatever energy it might have taken to feel sorry for himself, H.K. put it into building his empire in Hartford. Not that he spoke of building an empire. That was my presumption as I watched him fail in business after business, but failing forward and upward, each venture grander than the last.

  • • •

  WE STARTED OUT in Hartford in an apartment on Woodland Avenue, which I remember for three momentous reasons. It was there that I turned sixteen, started to drive, and inhaled my first breaths of freedom. It was there also that I experienced my first love: live theater and vaudeville.

  The State Theater in downtown Hartford had no balcony and was said to have had the largest single-floor seating capacity of any theater in the country, some thirty-eight hundred seats. It was built in the early twenties for live theater events only, but made the screening of movies a secondary attraction when the theatergoing tide turned in that direction. When I caught up with the State Theater in 1938 they were showing two films, an A and a B, and a serial western during the week. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday they intercut a live big band stage show three times daily. I saw Harry James with Betty Hutton there, along with Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Artie Shaw, Tony Bennett, Gene Krupa, Duke Ellington, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, and more.

  Occasionally there would be comedy on the bill at the State Theater, and one Saturday an act that I adored from their films showed up. They were the Ritz Brothers, my beloved Ritz Brothers. To me, Harry Ritz (the middle guy in the act) was the funniest man alive and his brothers merely appendages. But by the time I reached my early twenties I understood how much Harry needed his brothers Jimmy and Al framing him. Harry was a great clown, and clowns work alone, even in crowds. With his brothers, Harry was a clown encased in an act, and acts play theaters and nightclubs and films.

  I began to see, too, how much of Harry’s riotous physical comedy erupted out of a deep sadness, a sadness that cloaked every inch of him, with a degree of heartbreak lining his every comic expression. A true clown can make you laugh and, with just a change of expression, can evoke some inner sadness and bring you to tears. Bert Lahr, one of the great clowns in my experience, could do that. Nancy Walker could do that, and Red Skelton, and Redd Foxx. The people I think of as having been great clowns did not necessarily understand their art. They could not talk about it or write about it. They were not, in a conventional sense, intellectual. They were altogether intuitive, comprehending not just the closeness but the oneness of laughter and tears.

  I met Harry Ritz at the State Theater when I interviewed the brothers for the weekly Weaver High Lookout, where I served as features editor and wrote the humor column. The story appeared with a photograph on the front page, captioned “Leering Lear and the Rollicking Ritzes.”

  • • •

  IT WAS IN HARTFORD, too, where I first fell in love, with the lithe and lovely Adrienne Young. Even better, Adrienne was attracted to me. And she was a great kisser. Not that I knew a lot about kissing. Everything before Adrienne was no more than the peck that came during spin the bottle when the bottle stopped and pointed at me—“Oh, my God, what do I do now?”

  I must have been quick to learn, however, because in no time at all I could spend hours kissing, or, as we called it then, necking. So much did I enjoy necking, I didn’t get to second base until my hand was actually lifted and placed there. As for “a bare one,” the only reason I remember the expression is that it was the first question my buddy and confidant Leon Cooperman asked me: “Get a bare one?” When I did say yes, it wasn’t from Adrienne. And it was probably a lie, anyway. We guys lied a lot in those years. Eager to be men, we climaxed in our jockey shorts, occasionally from hand jobs, but reported to our buddies that we’d gone all the way.

  The girl who would orally copulate a guy was very rare in 1938 and was called that three-syllable c-word. As for a man who would do as much for a woman, he was seen as “dining at the Y” and was described with a similar three-syllabl
e c-word. It was an unusual man in those years who ever dared say, let alone bragged, that he’d been there, done that. Oral sex as a topic for discussion was a generation or more from coming out of the closet. We were very naïve in many ways.

  Check out the pop songs when my generation was in its teens: “Flat Foot Floogie,” “A-Tisket A-Tasket,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “The Dipsy Doodle,” and “Whistle While You Work.” In a way, that says it all.

  • • •

  H.K. TOOK A JOB with some builder, canvassing door-to-door in communities of tract homes to sell add-on bedrooms and garages and turn cellars into game rooms. In less than a year he decided he’d learned everything he needed to know and he was a builder himself. One more year and Norclaire Construction, Inc., had six small Cape Cod–style homes being built on Woodstock Street, off of Blue Hills Avenue. We moved into one of them.

  Despite all the other addresses we shared, 68 Woodstock Street was always what Claire and I thought of as home. We went to high school there and Dad died there. It couldn’t have been more modest—three small bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs; living room, dining room, kitchen, and half bath downstairs. The front door opened to a small vestibule and there hung Dad’s ghostwritten poem, “TOGETHER.”

  The furniture was ordinary, but was treated as if it were museum quality. “You could eat off the floor” was an expression spoken ad nauseam at 68 Woodstock, not because it was true but because Mother had a kind of out-of-breath way of eliciting such flattery from friends and neighbors. Spring cleaning was a momentous occasion and every piece was slipcovered throughout the summer months. I never understood that, but the process could not have been treated more seriously if it had been heart surgery, and I never question heart surgery.