Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  • • •

  DAN SEYMOUR WAS the executive vice president of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in 1962, and he called on Bud and me to ask what we thought of doing a weekly variety series with Andy Williams. Andy had done a series on CBS and Seymour thought he was a terrific singer. He wondered, however, if he wasn’t “too uptown,” meaning too unfolksy for the products J. Walter Thompson had in mind to sponsor the show. We thought it funny, because Andy was from Wall Lake, Iowa, as folksy a town as one might find in America. But that gave us an idea. We sat down with Dan Seymour again and told him how we would bring Andy Williams “downtown” if we were given the opportunity. We would feature Andy as coming from Wall Lake, create some funny Wall Lake characters to interact with him, put him in a sweater, seat him close to the audience, and have him sing a set of down-home songs. Dan Seymour liked what he heard, as did Andy, and we got the order.

  Busy as we were with other projects, our deal called for us to bring on a first-rate producer of musical variety for the day-to-day work, and for Bud and me to serve as executive producers. We hired Bob Finkel, long a highly regarded producer of the genre. I had conceived of a pair of characters from Wall Lake to fit the talents of a comedy team that I remembered from the days I was scouring Off-Broadway clubs and theaters. They were Marian Mercer and R. J. Brown, known as “The Prickly Pair.”

  Of course, for it to work, our producer, Bob Finkel, had to see what we saw in them, so we had them audition for him. He didn’t get them. I decided to go over Bob’s head and have Mercer and Brown audition directly for Andy, not in a cold rehearsal hall but in a crowded nightclub. I asked our former agents, MCA, for help, and a young agent, A. Jerrold Perenchio, was assigned to book the act into a club, which he did expeditiously and without fanfare—no small feat in Hollywood. Andy Williams liked Mercer and Brown, and the Wall Lake characters became part of the show.

  The Andy Williams Show on NBC was a smash and ran for nine years. One of the talents responsible for its success, it pleases me to recall, was George Wyle, who came up with all the special material, arrangements, and medleys Andy did with his guests. Their product suggests to me that there was an entirely different individual work ethic at play back then. The bar was set higher. It just might be that they loved what they were doing more than their counterparts do today.

  5

  THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD Bud and I had been shopping a film of the play Come Blow Your Horn that Neil Simon sent me. From the day we read it the only actor we could see in the lead was Frank Sinatra, and Paramount agreed to finance and distribute the film if we could get him. Getting Frank to read my script over the next year was equal to the wildest, craziest chase scene I could imagine. Howard Koch, who later went on to run Paramount Pictures, as dear a man as I knew in the business, was Frank’s producer. He liked the script, thought Frank would be perfect in the leading role, and did all he could on his end to call Frank’s attention to it. Nothing worked. I went on a mad campaign.

  Come Blow Your Horn concerned an older brother, a bit of a rogue and a lothario played by Sinatra, who is tutoring a shy, introverted younger brother awakening to the ways of the world, especially the ladies. And so we changed the title to Cock-a-Doodle-Do to reflect that awakening more directly. Over many months, script in hand, I hunted down Mr. Sinatra all over town—at restaurants, hotel bars, a few recording studios, a men’s shop, and once when I wormed my way into a secured soundstage where he was rehearsing with Judy Garland for a special they were doing.

  They were at a microphone together when he saw me from across the stage some fifty feet away. I was as bald as I am today, but the hair I had was darker and cut very close. By then he’d seen me time and again over several months and knew my look well enough to have given it a name, because he stopped the music and yelled, “Is that The Helmet? How the fuck did The Helmet get in here?” And a big burly guy eased me out.

  My gut told me that my actions had triggered something in Sinatra and he was getting a kick out of what he was putting me through. Not because he was a sadist, but maybe because he picked up on the hint of fun I was having and wanted to see how far I would take it. If so, he had to enjoy the cage of roosters we delivered to his home one morning along with another copy of Cock-a-Doodle-Do, and the box of toy trumpets we had at his front door on another morning after we changed the title back to Come Blow Your Horn.

  I was close to losing hope of nailing Sinatra when I came up with an idea that I thought irresistible. No way could he deny me a look at the script after this. I would send him a reading nook, the corner of a room perfect for sitting down with our script. The “Reading Kit” consisted of a rug, an easy chair and ottoman, an end table, an ashtray and a pipe, a smoking jacket, a floor-model reading lamp, a record player with an album of Jackie Gleason’s Music to Read By, and, of course, another copy of the script.

  The Paramount prop department set up our Reading Kit in the back of a truck, where it looked ideal, the corner of a lush den waiting for the lucky reader. Howard Koch had assured us that the house was empty. Frank was flying in from New York that night with his valet and it was the other help’s day off. Perfect. I made sure there was a long cord on the lamp and record player, and told the driver, since no one was home, to set up the delivery on the lawn, and be sure the light was on and the music was playing when he drove away.

  It delighted me to imagine the look on Frank’s face when he drove up his driveway that night and saw a lit lamp in the distance, heard music as he drew closer, and came upon this cozy reading alcove on the lawn near his front door. But it didn’t work quite that way. Koch was wrong about there being no help on hand for Mr. Sinatra’s arrival late that night. They showed up after the delivery of our Reading Kit but before their boss’s arrival. Joke killers and tidy housekeepers that they were, they put the delivery away. All Sinatra knew about any of this for several days was that he had a smoking jacket in his closet that he couldn’t recall buying. I, on the other hand, certain that Frank had found our delivery and, alas, did not appreciate it, was furious and wrote him off. His agent was informed that Frank wouldn’t be troubled by me again. The agent, who hadn’t heard about the latest stunt, called me and laughed when I described it. There was no way, he said, that Frank could have seen this and not reacted to it big-time. He simply did not know.

  “Well, too late now,” I said. A few days later I found myself joyously eating my words. Frank learned about the Reading Kit, loved the energy and creativity that went into it, and—this is the important part—had as good a time reading the script. I knew that for sure when he phoned me and, tongue in cheek, bawled the shit out of me for not getting it to him sooner.

  The day Variety announced that we were making the film I got a call from Leo McCarey, one of the top movie directors of the forties and fifties. Mr. McCarey had just met with a recent graduate of his alma mater, Notre Dame, and was very impressed with him. His name was Tony Bill, he’d appeared in several productions at Notre Dame, and McCarey had a hunch he could be just what we were looking for to play Frank Sinatra’s younger brother in our film. A meeting within an hour of the phone call resulted in a screen test the following morning, and a day later Tony had the role.

  Tony, a gentleman and a scholar—his subject, the human species—is the only actor I have ever heard of who, after enjoying a brief brush with movie stardom, playing opposite Frank Sinatra in his first film and on his way to leading-man status, walked out on it all. Within a month of the film’s opening at Radio City Music Hall, Tony was in my office to ask for some advice. He didn’t like the nature of the attention he was getting, 90 percent of it having to do with his good looks. He thought himself far more serious than that and wondered if he shouldn’t produce and direct rather than continue to perform. I advised Tony that, given these feelings, he should drop acting and follow his heart. He did, and most successfully.

  For the mother I cast a great star
of the Yiddish theater in New York, Molly Picon.

  The role of the father was written for the great character actor Lee J. Cobb, who played it on Broadway. Lee, a longtime friend of Roland Kibbee’s, became a fixture in my life until his death in 1976.

  Lee Cobb was regarded as one of the greatest actors of his day, notably remembered for his roles in On the Waterfront and Twelve Angry Men, and for creating the iconic Willy Loman in the Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. He was blacklisted in the fifties because of his “involvement in left-wing political causes and his support of political and charitable organizations alleged to be communist fronts.” The blacklist hurt him so much that when Salesman went to film, despite the aura of greatness that followed him for the rest of his life as a result of his Willy Loman portrayal, Cobb was not offered the role. It was performed by Fredric March.

  A year or more later, his family’s needs unfilled, Lee had reached a point of desperation. As he asked himself when interviewed then by The Nation: “Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? I am just as idealistic as the next fellow, but I just had to be employable again.” He submitted to an interview with the House Un-American Activities Committee and pandered to them by naming names of some people he’d seen at events he’d attended that the committee held suspect. Every name he gave them had been mentioned before, so no one new suffered from Lee’s testimony, but elements on the Left never forgave him for caving in.

  One night Frances and I had a party and I mistakenly invited the director Marty Ritt (Norma Rae, Hud) and his wife, Adele, along with Lee and Mary Cobb. Marty had been blacklisted, too, refused to testify, and hadn’t forgiven Lee, so he didn’t go near him that evening. Adele Ritt chose to show her disdain for Cobb flagrantly. She sat in a folding chair facing a wall in the living room. It couldn’t have been a stranger sight and every one of the sixty or so guests who came by had to know what was going on. That was what Adele wanted, of course, and she conducted her one-woman protest against Lee Cobb all evening. Her husband could have left early and taken his wife home, or Lee could have left early to spare his hosts, but there are no more stubborn, intransigent people than dyed-in-the-wool lefties, and neither Lee nor Marty would give the other that satisfaction.

  • • •

  ALSO IN THE CAST of Come Blow Your Horn was Phyllis McGuire, the youngest sister and the beauty in the famous singing trio the McGuire Sisters. Phyllis had a visitor on the set the day we were shooting the first of her two scenes. He was called to the phone a number of times and answered every “Call for Dr. Stern” in a strange, guttural voice with a “Yeah, Dr. Stern, ovah here.” But for his phone calls, the good doctor seemed uninterested in what was going on to the point of napping on the set, until wardrobe brought a couple of leopard coats for Phyllis to choose between. She would be wearing one of them in an upcoming scene.

  Phyllis was pleased with one of them but Dr. Stern asked to see a few more. To his chagrin, he was told that there were no other leopard coats in Beverly Hills at the time. My script called for a leopard coat for no reason that any snazzy coat wouldn’t cover as well, and I told Dr. Stern as much. If looks could kill, I’d have been dead in a week.

  “She looks good in leopard,” Dr. Stern growled. “I like it.” Two days later two racks of leopard coats were delivered to the set, one from Chicago and one from New York. They were sent overnight, courtesy of the notorious Mob boss Sam Giancana, longtime beau of Ms. McGuire’s and a.k.a. our own Dr. Stern.

  • • •

  WE HAD A GOOD TIME on the set of Come Blow Your Horn. We’d heard Sinatra wasn’t easy to work with, but by the same token we knew what to expect, so there were no surprises. Well, there was one. Frank was notorious for not doing retakes, and late one day I was on the set and suggested to Bud and Frank that they do another take of a scene they’d just shot. He refused.

  “No retake, no way,” he said.

  To ease the moment I muttered something to the effect that I might agree with him after I’d seen the dailies. The first thing the next morning I looked at the scene in question and was even more certain that it needed to be reshot. I picked up the phone. Frank, whose day didn’t start until eleven A.M., was in a makeup chair.

  “Frank, I just looked at that scene and we really have to do it again,” I began. He asked why, and I told him.

  “My mother in New Jersey ain’t going to notice that,” he said.

  “But, Frank—”

  “Did you hear me, pally, there is no fucking way I’m doing that again.”

  “But we have to, Frank,” I said earnestly.

  “You give me one reason why,” he fumed.

  “Because I fucking said so,” I exploded.

  “Okay,” he said. And I was frightened by what he perceived as my rage.

  • • •

  FRANCES AND I had been married six years when, one Monday morning in 1963, I was watching the previous Friday’s Come Blow Your Horn dailies and someone ran into the dark screening room giddily calling out for me with a message from my attorney. Over the weekend Charlotte had gotten married! A bet I’d made years earlier had finally paid off.

  Five years into that sledgehammer of a settlement, Frances and I had been discussing money matters and bemoaning the fact that Charlotte hadn’t remarried as yet, when Ellen said, “Mom will never get married, Dad. She never meets anyone, she doesn’t leave the house.” That’s how I learned that Charlotte wasn’t working. I asked my attorney to call hers and ask why.

  “She doesn’t have to,” came the answer.

  I told my attorney to get the word to her that I’d give her a dollar for every dollar she earned if she went to work.

  “On top of what she gets now?” the attorney gasped.

  With an approving nod from my daughter I said, “Yes.” While she didn’t have to work, Charlotte liked money, and even though it took two more years, on the job she did finally meet the man she’d marry. That marriage didn’t last two years, but before it ended she met the man she knew she would spend the rest of her life with. And she met him on the job also.

  • • •

  IN MAY 1963 the world premiere of Come Blow Your Horn was held in Palm Springs, home to Barbara Marx, then married to the fourth but least known Marx brother, Zeppo. It was there that Barbara met Frank Sinatra, whom she later married. I can’t remember why Palm Springs was chosen for the premiere. The reason it’s of any significance at all is that Barbara, still married to Frank when he died, thanked me several times over the years for staging the event, without which she and the Chairman of the Board, as he was also known, might never have met.

  The opening of the film a few weeks later at New York’s Radio City Music Hall felt more like a world premiere. Bud and I were beside ourselves. Radio City! Our film playing that most fabled of film palaces and music halls! And onstage, the Rockettes! We’re talking long ago, when the sight of a line of twenty-four pairs of legs, bare from the hip, high-kicking in unison, could tear the house down. It was heady stuff for a forty-one-year-old teenager.

  We had a party after the screening for friends and family, to which I invited Sinatra. Between us Bud and I invited about fifty people, more relatives than friends. There was no way I thought Frank would show up, but he did, and he hung in a while. I told my mother that Mr. Sinatra didn’t like to be touched, and cautioned her to remember that when she met him. So of course when I introduced her she screamed, “Oh, Frankie, my Frankie!” and threw out her hands to bear-hug him. Good-naturedly he went along with it, but over her shoulder he muttered, “I think I banged this broad thirty-six years ago.”

  Since Sinatra died there have been a dozen books written about him, and it has pissed me off that no one ever sought to interview me. I have two stories about a side of him that has rarely been reported on, his respect for talent and his capacity for friendship. Both storie
s concern Lee J. Cobb, whom Frank idolized from the moment he saw him create the role of Willy Loman.

  A few years after that, Cobb suffered a severe heart attack. Sinatra, who’d made a point of keeping up with his idol’s welfare, learned of this and of the date Lee was to be released from the hospital. A day or two before, a registered nurse appeared at Lee J. Cobb’s bedside on behalf of Mr. Sinatra, whom Cobb had never met. Mr. Sinatra, the nurse informed Cobb, was going on tour for the better part of a year and his home in Palm Springs, fully staffed, would be available for Mr. Cobb’s recuperation and recovery. And some more years later, Come Blow Your Horn finally brought them together. Had I known this story when I was trying to get Frank to read the Come Blow Your Horn script and told him I wanted Lee to play his father, I might have saved myself months of outrageous begging.

  Several years after the film, Sinatra came through for Lee Cobb once again. I got a call early one morning from Lee’s wife, Mary. She was in tears. Lee, whose penchant for gambling was a family concern, was in Las Vegas and in serious trouble. Mary had just spoken to him and could tell from his voice that he’d been up all night. The fact that he wanted ten thousand dollars wired to him right away—ten thousand dollars the Cobbs could not spare—told the rest of the story. The only thing I could think to do was to call Frank. I left word in several places that Lee J. Cobb needed help and to call me as soon as possible. Within an hour I heard from Frank directly, and soon thereafter Sinatra’s plane landed at McCarran Field in Las Vegas. Two weighty pilots, with the Sinatra imprimatur and the help of security, hauled Cobb out of the casino at the Sahara Hotel and flew him back to L.A.