Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  “He’s not sure how long the temperature will hold?” I asked in alarm. “What does that mean?”

  “You know George, he’s a perfectionist.” And then, even more nonchalantly, “And, anyway, he’s had three more days.” I recalled Dad bragging once about his prowess as a salesman—“I can sell refrigerators to Eskimos”—and gritted my teeth.

  Four very impressive executive types—dark-suited, square-jawed, and extremely Gentile—showed up in the suite at the Waldorf Astoria for the presentation. We had been there since noon, when we’d put a few bottles of beer in the prototype, allowing them four hours to be refrigerated. In all that time neither George nor my father checked to see what was going on inside. George, I think, was too busy praying. My father didn’t want to let any of the cold out.

  When the time came, everyone sat around a low coffee table on which rested the prototype, while George Thompson explained his new refrigeration system, a speech so indecipherable to me it bid fair to make my eyes cross. But I do remember “propane” and maybe “kerosene” being a part of it. Dad smiled and nodded with deep understanding at everything George said, and when he felt the timing right he interjected suddenly, “By the way, anyone thirsty? How about a beer?”

  Flipping open the fridge door, he turned to the most senior-looking executive. “General?” The general reached in, grabbed a bottle, and his expression twitched in multiple directions. H.K. took the bottle from him. It was as warm as spit.

  To my astonishment, my father didn’t see this as a disaster. George Thompson looked as if he expected, perhaps even wished, to be whipped. Our guests, stunned and bewildered, were stopped dead for a moment, like robots waiting for someone to throw a switch. But H.K., running at the mouth in a kind of “These things happen and who would know that better than you guys?” mode, persuaded his guests—to his satisfaction, though, as time would prove, not to theirs—that this was just a glitch. The general and his cohorts got up, stuffed whatever they were feeling into a few tight-jawed exit lines, and fled.

  Lear, Incorporated, staggered through 1947 and 1948, its hot plate output limited by one problem or another, but still managing to eke out its electric tea kettle. Of course, forcing the kettle into production when Lear, Incorporated, still had problems getting its hot plate out the door only added to the overall stress the company was dealing with. Everyone working for or dealing with Lear, Incorporated, could see that—except, of course, Mr. Lear.

  • • •

  I’M NOT SURE when I came upon the notion of a mountain climber and his grappling hook as a metaphor for living. Until he reaches the very peak, the climber tosses that grappling hook over and over into the space ahead of him and pulls himself toward it. Whatever I may be engaged in at the moment, I see myself as needing something more, maybe several things that I am pulling myself toward at the same time. While working with my dad, I had a grappling hook out there in a new manufacturing enterprise that I started with Lester Gowin, whose tool-and-die plant was stamping out the hot plate frames.

  Lester and I became good friends. Since I was in and out of his plant several times a week anyway, we talked up the possibility of doing something else together. Most of us were smokers in those years. I, along with every other GI, had been encouraged to smoke by the armed services. A little brightly colored pack of three cigarettes, donated oh so generously by the tobacco companies themselves, was placed in every prepackaged meal, known as K rations. By the time I met Lester I was smoking two packs a day.

  One day I came up with an idea that addressed an annoyance—a trivial, silly piffle of an annoyance—related to after-dinner smoking, particularly in the home. When coffee was served at dessert, guests who smoked were inclined, to the distress of their hostesses, to flick their ashes into the saucer. To relieve those poor women, I dreamed up a small ashtray that would clip to the rim of the saucer and be delivered to the smoker with his beverage. Lester thought it a nifty, easy-to-produce gift item. We named it the Demi-Tray, made a pilot set of four in copper, and boxed it as fancily as we were able to.

  I knew I had to find a distributor with a truly enterprising spirit. A good sense of humor couldn’t hurt also. My first stop was a prominent high-end gift shop on Madison Avenue, Carole Stupell Ltd., and it was Ms. Stupell herself, a large, garrulous woman, often credited with the first bridal registry—enterprising indeed—who greeted me.

  Ms. Stupell and I hit it off immediately. She took one look at our simple set of copper Demi-Trays that Lester Gowin thought we could retail at $4.95, smiled, and asked, “Can I have these in silver plate to retail at $12.95, and sterling silver at, say, $35.95? And can I have them in the shop for the holiday season just before Thanksgiving?” A phone call to Lester revealed that we could make the date and the prices, but the sterling silver would require a substantial down payment. Ms. Stupell did not need to be talked into it. I felt like the million dollars H.K. was to have received from Bill Lear by now as I made my way to Penn Station with a purchase order and the promise of a check when production began.

  Carole Stupell had a big Christmas in 1947 and did very well with her expensive novelty item. “A practical measure for smoking pleasure,” read the copy line. Lester and I did very well also, and with Carole Stupell’s encouragement we decided to develop a line of small silver and silver plate products for the 1948 holiday season. Lester designed a small line of products to follow the Demi-Tray, and we used every penny of our current profits to invest in the tools, dies, and metals needed to make them.

  Since we’d gotten lucky manufacturing with the smoker in mind, and the more expensive product seemed to sell best, Lester created a bed of four small sterling silver ashtrays and, in sterling and silver plate, a handsome silent butler. (The silent butler was a larger ashtray with a lid that a maid or the hostess herself would empty smaller ashtrays into during the evening.) Then, thinking of the candles on most fine dinner tables, Lester added a candle snuffer to the line, also in sterling. Carole Stupell agreed to carry these items, but she short-ordered at first to see how they sold. They didn’t.

  We had made a classic mistake. My Demi-Tray was an original—a cutesy trifle, but an original. Nobody had ever seen one before. Price it high enough and it’s a “How darling!” for one season only. And so Ms. Stupell ordered it in sterling silver. What Lester and I did with the silent butler, the ashtrays, and the candle snuffer was totally unoriginal. Yes, Lester effected some design change, but these products were still known in the trade as knockoffs. We had violated the First Commandment of retailing: Thou shalt not mark up when knocking off. And in no time at all we were out of business.

  • • •

  WHEN CHARLOTTE and I moved to Windsor I tossed out a second grappling hook, this one in search of a social life. We joined a young theater group, the Hartford Players Guild, a company that staged four plays a year at the Avery Memorial Theater. I remember it, among other things, for Tom and Gladys Conroy, veterans of the Players Guild and members of a middle-class union family.

  I loved hearing the Conroys talk politics. My family’s discussions couldn’t get past a headline or subhead before they ran out of information on whatever the subject. The Conroys held sharp and distinct points of view and had the subtext to back it up. I learned the importance of subtext and context from my time with them. And as clear, too, in my head is a moment of Gladys’s performance in a Noel Coward play, the unforgettable sound of her British accent, playing a haughty socialite referring to a trip she took. I shall never forget the way Gladys held her head, the pitch of her neck, the little trills in her voice as they rose and fell and finally ripened and climaxed over her trip’s destination: “. . . and we disembark finally at Kuala Lumpur.”

  I ask myself again and again why that bite-sized memory of Gladys’s reading of “Kuala Lumpur” should stick with me all these years, as if under glass, while several weeks in a Players Guild production that by all
odds was sure to have affected me quite traumatically has gone totally unremembered. There is a framed, yellowing newspaper photograph of me, cut out of the New Britain Sunday Herald and dated March 1949, on the wall just a few feet from me as I write. It has hung there for the quarter century we have been in this house, and in other homes that preceded this. Despite the proof positive of that photograph, I have absolutely no recollection of having played a starring role in a major Players Guild production, let alone that of the son, Chris, in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.

  No doubt this clipping has caught my eye thousands of times. I’ve paused over it often when visitors to my study have taken notice of it and asked me questions that I have absently answered. It is only now, as I get to this part of my life, that I am forced to make sense of it, and it stupefies me that I am unable to dig up one memory of the entire production. How could I not remember having been cast in a leading role in a play by Arthur Miller that just two years earlier had won a Tony for Best Play and for its director, Elia Kazan? How could I have submitted to an intense rehearsal schedule, forged the uniquely emotional on- and offstage relationships that go with the territory, taken a ton of direction, experienced the inevitable stage fright as house lights dimmed and a curtain parted, and then played a highly dramatic character in front of a live audience, and remember not a minute of it? It is a puzzlement that had me staring at these words for hours. And then I made a connection that, unbelievably, I had never made until it stopped me dead in my tracks.

  In the aged photograph I am standing, fists clenched, ready to strike the actor playing my father, Joe Keller. Chris Keller has just learned that the father he loves so much manufactured some defective aircraft parts in World War II that resulted in the deaths of twenty-one American airmen serving in Asia, and that he knew they might be defective when he okayed their shipment. As many times as I have looked at that dramatic Sunday Herald photo of me as Chris Keller, ready to strike my father, Joe, I might as well have been looking at a shot of two nameless actors in a theatrical archive somewhere. Only now, despite the several productions I have seen of All My Sons, am I realizing how deeply this father-son story affected me. So deeply that the photograph, just a few feet from the desk I have worked at for twenty-five years, had not stirred a single recollection of the production in which I apparently played a lead.

  “In which I apparently played a lead” is the way that sentence just fell out of me. I found it all so hard to believe that I could not write past it without having to learn more about a Hartford Players Guild production of All My Sons in March 1949, and I asked a researcher to check the morgues of other local newspapers of that date. Two days later she received from the microfilm files of the Hartford Courant a review of the Players Guild’s March 13, 1949, production of All My Sons bearing this headline: VIGOROUS PRODUCTION OF ARTHUR MILLER DRAMA OFFERED AT AVERY MEMORIAL. In the middle of a fairly long and positive review it says of my performance: “Norman Lear is giving a stalwart portrait of the son who manages to keep faith with the truth he has learned in war. Taking it simply and quietly at the outset, he builds the part up to an impassioned interpretation at the play’s second act close.”

  Strange how I can’t recall a moment of that, but I can see the suit H.K. was wearing when they took him away. According to a worn news clip, H.K. wasn’t, as he’d testified, trying to flip some bonds that he didn’t know were phony. The bonds were stolen, and swearing to the authorities that he couldn’t remember the names of the men who’d told him they’d sell like hotcakes was not viewed as exculpatory.

  My high school buddy Bob Krechevsky, who became chief judge of the Connecticut Bankruptcy Court, also knew my father very well. “I’d passed the bar and just opened my law office,” he once told me, “and Herman came to see me, saying he was in terrible straits, and I remember he was sweating profusely. I was in a very small office, and he needed a couple of hundred dollars, so I gave him the money and he said he would get it back to me immediately. Well, it was a few days, but he did come back and he gave me a check. I guess I waited a day or so before I deposited it and the check bounced. It bounced twice. But then he finally brought me the cash—didn’t send it, brought it because he wanted to see me and give me some advice. He sounded like a judge lecturing from the bench. ‘Robert,’ he said, ‘when someone gives you a check, you don’t know how many checks that person wrote that day and maybe only a couple of them will clear—so you don’t wait, you get to the bank soon as you can and cash that check.’”

  I remember laughing when I first heard that and thinking, “What a character!” I see clearly today what a shoddy tale that is. Earlier, I avoided naming what he was doing when I described his attempt to sell the one-cubic-foot refrigerator that he knew in his heart didn’t work, and the word fraud was missing when I told of the stolen bonds he’d tried to sell when they put him away. All my life, thinking or talking, and now writing, about my dad, I have tweaked the language or angled the story to make him seem less a liar and a fraud, and more like a rascal and a rogue. He was all of those things.

  10

  IN THE EARLY SPRING OF 1949, with Lear, Incorporated, having been statutorily dissolved by the state of Connecticut for operating for two consecutive years without filing an annual report, I talked to Charlotte about restarting my career in publicity, but this time in California. In short order we put our house up for sale and disclosed our plans. No one thought it a good idea, especially my mother.

  “Hollywood’s not for you, dear,” she said, reinforcing this with a look that went with smelling something rancid. Mother never had a bad thing to say about California when my father would promise it to us, and it was a verbal evergreen in our home even before he was sent away: “One day, Jeanette, I’m moving the family to California. We’re going to buy a ranch house”—he could have been invoking Monticello with the words “ranch house”—“all on one floor, no stairs, and we’re going to lie in bed with the window open and pick oranges from our tree.”

  It was late May when Charlotte, Ellen (then two and a half), and I set out for California. The Hartford Courant covered our leaving this way in a column called “City Briefs”: “Mr. and Mrs. Norman Lear and their daughter, Ellen, formerly of 55 Plymouth Street, Windsor, are en route by automobile to Los Angeles, California, where they will make their home.”

  My father having assured me—incorrectly, as it turned out—that if I bought a late-model convertible in Connecticut and sold it in California I’d make enough to cover the cost of the trip, we were en route in a green 1946 Olds 98. The drive cross-country was pretty much without incident, but for a few flat tires. Today I can’t recall my last flat tire, but they occurred regularly back then and are memorable because changing them was, along with shoveling snow to clear walks and driveways, the heaviest manual labor I’d been called on to perform since wheeling fertilizer in Florida.

  We arrived in L.A. late on a Saturday afternoon. I parked us at a cheap motel on Sunset Boulevard near Western Avenue. My cousin Elaine, the only person I knew west of New York City, had moved there some months before with her husband, Ed Simmons, who wanted to become a comedy writer, and had written to warn me that finding a rental was extremely difficult. So, despite these being our very first minutes in a strange land, and in a room that would have been ashamed of itself if rooms had feelings, Charlotte and I decided that I would go out and pick up an early edition of the Sunday Los Angeles Times to check the classifieds for a lead on the next day’s offerings. If I came across a possibility while it was still daylight, I had license to check it out. “But get back here as soon as you can” were the last words I heard as I walked out the door.

  It was a lovely June evening on Sunset Boulevard, street of dreams to this wide-eyed New Englander. No longer exhausted by the eight days I’d spent driving in this same vehicle, I cruised with the top down, smoking a Fatima cigarette, which had recently gone “extra long,” passing landmarks like Schwab’
s Pharmacy, Ciro’s, the Trocadero, and Earl Carroll’s Vanities, by then just a shell and a sign, but no less romantic to me. I was enraptured. I never imagined myself as anything other than a publicist, the figure behind the talent, but it was the broad field of entertainment that was seducing me now. “Who is that young man in the stylish convertible? I know I’ve seen him before,” I fantasized coming from gawkers I imagined on the sidewalk.

  Returning to reality, I bought a copy of the Sunday Times and headed back toward the motel, venturing off Sunset onto side streets along the way. My heart all but stopped as I drove onto El Centro, a residential block in mid-Hollywood, and came across a small building called the Circle Theatre, sporting a handmade marquee that read: OPENING TONIGHT—SHAW’S MAJOR BARBARA. The Circle had been a grocery store but was now fashioned into a ninety-nine-seat theater-in-the-round. I had never been to a theater-in-the-round and was fascinated by the idea. George Bernard Shaw was my favorite playwright, and Major Barbara my favorite of his works. Oh, my God!

  Suddenly, rejoining my family was off to the side. All I could think of was the play. It contains a colloquy between Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, and her father, Andrew Undershaft, one of the world’s largest munitions makers. Undershaft, for his own good reasons, offers to make a large donation to the Salvation Army and Barbara refuses it on moral grounds. Undershaft, she feels, made that money by selling munitions and, as a consequence, death. The major will not accept a donation from such a source. Undershaft insists she would be doing a greater good were she to accept. They parry and thrust brilliantly and at considerable length, the audience thinking at every thrust that the line just rendered could not be parried. And of course it is. Shaw comes down on Undershaft’s side eventually, or at least that’s my reading. In any event, I view it as one of the greatest exchanges in all of the English-speaking theater. It’s a high-wire act with only words to maintain balance, and its impact on me was very direct.