Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  Nick and I staged fights in front of friends and strangers everywhere. Carrying on one day in Filene’s Basement in Boston over who reached first for a particular shirt for sale, we cut ourselves short when we saw the color drain from a salesperson’s face as she struggled soundlessly to call for help. I carried the shtick forward for many years without Nick and that is what I was up to at the top of Holiday Hangovers.

  Several years later, when I was writing on the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis radio show for NBC, Jerry and I would do the routine as part of the audience warm-up. Jerry, faking anger about a bad joke his writer had written for him, carried it to such a fevered pitch, while I, the writer, cried and begged his forgiveness, that we brought the audience to a giant wince, their discomfort obvious until we let them off the hook and they laughed explosively.

  • • •

  PERHAPS THE BIGGEST, certainly the most celebrated, American entertainer in 1945 was Frank Sinatra. He’d already had some two dozen top ten hits by then and his appearances at the Paramount Theater in New York in those years were known to cause riots. As many as thirty thousand fans, largely female, jammed the streets in front of the theater. Time magazine said of him in that period, “Not since the days of Valentino has American womanhood made such unabashed public love to an entertainer.”

  Overseas, the average American soldier had a difficult time with this. Never having seen the man, all they knew was that Sinatra had been classified 4-F, disqualified to serve in the military because of something laughably (it seemed to us) labeled a punctured eardrum, and that back home all their girlfriends, sweethearts, and wives were carrying on over him like loony tunes and throwing themselves at his feet. The only way I can aptly express their feelings for Sinatra is to say they hated his fucking guts! And then one day, to our antipathetic delight, we read in the GI publication Yank that the USO was bringing the skinny little prick to Foggia. I couldn’t have guessed that hot spring day—with some twenty thousand of us GIs all prepared to hiss and boo, many carrying excess vegetables the cooks and KPs had been saving for us to toss at the stage—that later in life I’d make a film with him (Come Blow Your Horn), fall in love with the guy, and enjoy a long, slight but storied relationship with Ol’ Blue Eyes. Another thing I could not have guessed was the showbiz lesson I would be taught that afternoon, a lesson I found applicable from then on in situations of all kinds.

  Crackling in anticipation and giddy with the grudge we were about to adjudicate, we sat on the field before the wooden stage that had been built that morning, we baby men of the 15th Air Force. As some canned music played loudly over speakers, three khaki-clad GIs finished setting up and fine-tuning the equipment. Suddenly, the music scratched to a halt and a big voice blared over the speakers that the USO was proud to present, as a big surprise to the troops, “One of America’s most beautiful women . . .” (TWENTY THOUSAND GI HEARTS SKIP A BEAT) “As a top model, her face and figure are well known to all of you . . .” (YELLS, WHISTLES, AND CHEERS) “Fresh from the Hollywood Canteen—for you guys and your eyes only . . .” (HOW DO YOU FORGET THAT LINE?) “Here, on her very first visit to Foggia . . .” (AS IF THERE’D EVER BE A SECOND) “is the lovely and talented Jinx Falkenburg!”

  If there had been a vote to select the Body of the Year in 1945, it could have been Jinx Falkenburg. She just might have known that, too, because she walked out in tennis shorts and heels. The boys went ape shit, of course, and she said something that strained to be amusing about having just run over from the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. She picked up a racquet and a bucket of balls upstage and proceeded to hit autographed tennis balls into the crowd. That was her entire act, but from the reaction of the troops at the sight of her in shorts, and the escalating frenzy when she complained of the heat and whipped them off to reveal more skin in a bathing suit, Ms. Falkenburg had every right to feel she gave her all for the war effort. And, for the rest of her career, to rest well on her laurels for having “entertained the troops abroad in World War II.”

  Now, we thought, the moment we were really there for. The three GI stagehands were back onstage tidying up after Jinx, and more music was blaring, when the big voice cut through again and an expectant rumble rolled across the field. This crowd was READY. When it heard that some comic was being introduced, not Francis Albert, the expectation turned to annoyance, as if to say, “Okay, we played along with that chick and the tennis balls, but let’s not take advantage—we want what we came for!” Instead, we got Phil Silvers.

  At that time, I might have been the only GI on the field who’d ever seen or heard of Phil Silvers. He had played the Old Howard burlesque theater in Boston when I was at Emerson, one of those funnymen I learned so much from. Silvers didn’t do jokes. He played a character—a glad-hander and hustler, armed always with an ear-to-ear smile and a tall story. Just his “Glad to see you” earned a laugh. In the 1950s Silvers would become a household name when he starred as Sergeant Bilko in a show created around his character by the man I thought to be the best of the TV comedy writers, Nat Hiken. That afternoon in Italy, totally unknown, Silvers’s job as an entertainer was to secure—in his case, hustle—a warm welcome for Frank Sinatra from the twenty thousand pent-up airmen gathered there. It was the equivalent of wringing blood from a turnip.

  Wearing a kitschy houndstooth jacket, and flashing his come-one-come-all salesman’s smile, Phil said something by way of hello and, noticing the GI stagehands about to walk off, called out: “How about these guys? Let’s hear it for three of your own, Curly, Moe, and Jack.” A small laugh was accompanied by big applause and cheers. Then: “Hey, you, Moe, come here.” The GI didn’t seem to like being called “Moe” and just stood there. Silvers turned to us: “What’s he afraid of? I’m not gonna bite him. Don’t tell me you guys in the Fifteenth are all scaredy-cats!” Putty in deft hands now, like any people throughout history (a phenomenon that is as good an explanation as any, I suppose, for the war that brought us together that afternoon in Italy), in an instant we joined forces with Phil Silvers and shouted and hooted the GI to Silvers’s side. He stood there embarrassed and nonplussed. Silvers asked his name. Giving up, the GI shrugged and said, “Moe.” We howled.

  “What’re you, a wise guy?” Silvers shouted into his face. Then, turning back to us: “You know this guy. Is he a wise guy?” Some shouted no, some yes, but pretty much everyone was caught up in the web Silvers was spinning. He turned to Moe again. “You wouldn’t be here to stop me from introducing Sinatra, would you?”

  “God, no,” the guy all but cried.

  “Maybe you think you can do better than him. Let me hear you sing. Three notes, give me three notes. Do re mi. Do it!”

  A low, timid do issued from Moe.

  “You call that a do? A note, even a single note, comes from here”—a poke in the chest—“to here”—a slap under the chin to indicate the throat—“and away.” He squeezed Moe’s open mouth roughly several times. We howled at all of this. “Try it again,” Silvers said. “And again.” Dissatisfied each time with what he heard, he insisted it be repeated. The jabs became slaps to both cheeks, a palm of the hand to the forehead, and a full body shake following the squeezed mouth.

  It reached a point of total hilarity, but then, as funny as Silvers was, a rumble of empathy began to overtake the sound of mirth. At a point when the empathy threatened to take over, Silvers suddenly said, “I give up,” pushed Moe away, and stormed off the stage. That was the cue for an offstage hand to place a needle on a recording, and over the speakers came Sinatra’s music, a full orchestra playing one of his big hits, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Twenty thousand men in uniform didn’t know what hit them when Phil Silvers’s bedraggled victim reached for a microphone and started singing a lyric that would cut to the heart of every man present, no matter who was singing. And here was Frank Sinatra, who would come to be considered peerless at mining the meaning of a lyric:

  I’ll be seeing yo
u

  In all the old familiar places

  That this heart of mine embraces

  All day through . . .

  As unpopular with this crowd as Sinatra was at the beginning, he survived by emerging in a cloak of empathy that had been masterfully woven for him before his arrival. The characters of Archie, Maude, and George Jefferson all benefited from that lesson I was taught, wet-eyed, on the grass in Foggia.

  • • •

  ON THE SUBJECT OF TEARS, some minutes after we were awakened to fly a mission on April 12, 1945, a second face representing the command poked its head into the tent and announced that word had just been received: President Roosevelt was dead. Everyone was devastated. At mess most eyes were red, some couldn’t stop carrying on about him, and some of us had to sit alone in our grief. I was one of the latter.

  Roosevelt was our family’s only full-out hero, and I don’t recall knowing a family who felt differently. The fact of his election for a fourth term says everything about his popularity, but you have to get to the American heart at that time to understand the degree of the love and trust we of the middle class had for Franklin Roosevelt. He filled the singularly most important role I feel we need from our president. He was a father to us. His “fireside chats” on radio had us sitting at his knees feeling like we were part of the American portrait.

  It would be many years until elite would become a bad word and Americans were coached to despise and mistrust anyone who appeared to be one. The Roosevelts were irrefutably among the elite, socially, intellectually, and every other way. Even when chatting, FDR’s sound had a cathedral tone. With his rakish trademark fedora atop his head, a cigarette in a holder clenched at a jaunty angle between his teeth, wearing a cape he seemed born with, in a wheelchair he made his throne, he was royalty, American style.

  We didn’t know Eleanor the way we thought we knew Franklin, but among the first ladies of my time, Eleanor Roosevelt appears to me to have been the best casting. None of the others—Bess, Mamie, Jackie, Lady Bird, Pat, Betty, Rosalynn, Nancy, Barbara, Hillary, Laura, or Michelle—seemed as inherently “elite” as Eleanor. She reminded me of Mrs. Pie, a music teacher I had in fourth grade who had a speaking voice that raked the music scale on every syllable. I can see her now, hand cranking her floor-model Victrola and playing a 78-rpm recording of a soprano singing Dvorak’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” Throughout the twelve-plus years of Eleanor’s term, there, too, was Mrs. Pie. And that song.

  Just before takeoff, the mission that had been announced moments before we learned of the president’s death was canceled. By ten A.M. dozens of us were already in beautiful downtown Foggia, and by noon the narrow streets and three bars were full of sad-eyed, wine-sluicing GIs drinking to the fallen president. The warm surprise was that we were not drinking alone. The townsfolk, largely middle-aged and older, cried and drank with us.

  I was drunk out of my gourd by noon. The scene plays in my head like an old, flickering black-and-white film: I am standing in front of the municipal building, atop a flight of concrete stairs, looking out at fifty or sixty Foggia townspeople gathered there, and I am speaking to them in Italian and English about the death of Franklin Roosevelt. A boy who spoke English about as well as I spoke Italian interpreted for me when necessary, and three things stand out in my memory: Italian faces, tears streaming down their cheeks, their mouths running with prayers as they stretched to understand me; the unstrung feeling everywhere in me from the way I was pressing, with every ounce of me, to reach them; and the trip back to base that saw Danny Carroll and waist gunner Bob Oswald holding one leg each while I, reborn as a wheelbarrow, “rolled” home hand over hand.

  I fell in love with Italy and its people during my time there, and that has not changed since. In World War II a joke described the Italian people best: “What is the thinnest book ever published? Italian War Heroes.” Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, was that joke incarnate. Italians are about music and great food and making love—the antithesis of making war. On furlough in Rome and Naples I was often taken for Italian in romantic situations and I did nothing to convince anyone otherwise. Today, among all my friends who travel extensively, I am not sure I know anyone whose favorite country is not Italy.

  8

  ONE SPRING DAY IN 1945, when the war in Europe had just been won and my tour of duty was coming to an end, I went into Foggia and found myself a print shop. It was a tiny place with a single operator behind an ancient linotype machine, so ancient that the operator had to fingerpick the letters one at a time to typeset them. I stood over him and pointed to every letter until I’d created a one-page announcement:

  One Norman M. Lear, having survived VE Day, and realizing the proximity of DD Day (date of discharge), is now able to lend active consideration to his heretofore neglected future. Somewhere there exists a Publicity Department or Public Relations Office which, if acquainted with the facts, might take interest in said future. This is an effort to link the two. Norman Lear has spent the greater part of his twenty-four years dreaming of, and preparing himself for a career in the field of PUBLICITY! . . . Lear was born to do for others—find them, mould them, publicize them—BUILD them!!! Rather than BE “IT,” he is BEHIND “IT.” . . . On his ocean of ideas it is always high tide . . .

  As soon as this one-pager had been printed, I sent it to my uncle Jack, the quarter chucker, with the instruction that it be disseminated to publicity houses in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. At the bottom there was a small square box and, squeezed into it, this epigram, headlined ON MODESTY: “Whilst there be no one to do it for you, tootest thou thine own horn.” Attributed to Frustratees, 1050 B.C.

  Through Uncle Jack my announcement went out to sixteen publicity firms. I heard back from two. One response was from George Evans, possibly the most celebrated press agent of the moment because he handled Frank Sinatra. The other response was from George and Dorothy Ross, a firm that handled Broadway shows as well as personalities. Evans offered me a job interview. George Ross, sight unseen, offered me a job.

  • • •

  THE GERMANS SURRENDERED in May 1945, the Japanese in August, and it would be October before the crew of Umbriago was sent home to be mustered out of the armed services. While we were waiting and the U.S. military was reconfiguring its postwar presence in Europe, a notice was posted looking for volunteers to ferry men and supplies about. It occurred to me that I could be called up to be sent home and miss the opportunity because I was away. But the lure of cities like Paris, Cairo, and Athens was headier than that of Herman, Jeanette, and Charlotte, and I signed on.

  Flying over Europe on a clear day and, for the first time in hundreds of hours, with no body armor, no deadly puffs of black exploding around us, no enemy planes streaking toward us, no chance of being shot out of the sky, I was experiencing PEACE—in capital letters, underlined, and in neon. I lay on my belly in the glass nose of our plane, drunk on the sensation of the universe in my embrace. Four decades later, the time or three I took Ecstasy, I would think, “Hell, I was higher than this in the nose of that plane.”

  On October 5 we were finally on our way back to the States. Sitting alone in my radio room, I raked over all the experiences of the past few years. This might have been the first time I called to mind the terrifying moments experienced in combat. I had wanted to remember just the good things, but now everything came flooding back: Jimmy Edwards’s death; the time we came away from the target on two engines, the other two having been shot up; watching an injured plane out of formation, set upon by a half dozen Messerschmitt fighters and spiraling to the ground; several planes, ours among them, bouncing about like popcorn in reaction to a German missile exploding nearby—truly terrifying moments.

  There were also moments of exaltation on those missions and I love being reminded of them—moments of exaltation that dissolved the hate of war and replaced it with something akin to love, certainly brotherly lo
ve. The sight of a P-51 fighter plane coming to escort us to our target triggered that. There were two groups of fighter planes that came from wherever they were stationed to fly escort as we approached target: the P-38 Lightning and the P-51 Mustang. I thought the twin-engine P-38 the handsomest plane in the sky. But it was the sight of the more ordinary single-engine P-51, flown by the only black squadron in the force, that triggered the exaltation and warm feelings.

  Hailing from Tuskegee, Alabama, these pilots came to be known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Their tails were painted red, and as escorts their role was to protect us from enemy aircraft. The nearer we drew to target, the more antiaircraft fire we could expect from the ground and the more enemy fighter planes in the air attempting to shoot us down. And so the longer and closer our escort stayed with us, the safer we were. From the time they rendezvoused with us—say, twenty minutes before we reached our target—they would fly so close to our wing we could see their faces. That’s how I knew they were black.

  When we encountered enemy fighters, our fighter escorts, whichever squadron happened to have been assigned that day, went into action. We B-17 crew members were also firing at the enemy from our bottom ball turret, left and right waists, the tail gun, and top turret, but it was our fighter escorts that accounted for most of the swastikas that were shot out of the sky. And the most welcome among them were the Tuskegee Airmen in their red-tailed P-51s. They seemed to plunge and soar, swerve in and peel away, with a bravura and grace unique to them.

  Exaltation and that brotherly feeling also ran high on the long trip home from a mission when, sufficiently out of danger, we crewmen would gather in the waist section to talk about what we’d just been through, reverently and with enormous gratitude. As the missions piled up and we could compare earlier experiences, the bond between us grew tighter and stronger. At war’s end it seemed we would know one another forever. Bob Oswald tried throughout the years to keep us all in touch. His effort was pretty much in vain, but for one occasion in 1988 when he succeeded in getting all but one of us to attend a reunion of the 463rd Bomb Group in Tucson, Arizona.