Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  • • •

  AT ABOUT THE TIME Come Blow Your Horn opened, I finished my first draft of Playboy—to star Tony Curtis as Hugh Hefner—for Columbia Pictures. The film never came to pass. Tony and Hef had had a falling-out before my script was finished and the project was a no-go. But I spent some interesting time with Hef in Chicago and he visited me on the Paramount lot as we began the project.

  He arrived late one afternoon in a chauffeured stretch limousine. We talked about the story I was working on, and when he was ready to leave I asked if he’d like to come home with me to have dinner with the family.

  “Thank you, but I have very important work to do tonight,” he said, pulling a few five-by-seven photos out of his pocket. The girl couldn’t even have been twenty and, with or without clothes, was drop-dead gorgeous.

  “Our March Playmate,” he said. “I’m sending the car to pick her up in Encino.”

  “Encino? I live in Encino,” I offered absently.

  “She lives with her parents,” Hef added.

  “She lives with her parents?” I exclaimed, altogether shocked.

  As someone who lived for years with his family in a modest house in an Encino cul-de-sac where a dozen couples and their thirty kids would hold holiday barbecues, take weeks to prepare for Halloween, and stay in touch for years after moving away, I held the photos up to Hef’s face and rasped in astonishment, “You mean to tell me there’s a family in Encino with an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old daughter that looks like this who’s going to watch that daughter step into a block-long limo in front of their very own Encino home, to be carted off and delivered to Hugh Fucking Hefner?”

  “Don’t you know anything about this culture we live in?” he said. Who did I think those naked photographs of beautiful young women came from? They came from fathers and husbands. From brothers and boyfriends. From mothers and sisters, too.

  Hef looked at me as one might look at a twelve-year-old on life support.

  6

  IN 1964, AT FORTY-TWO, I was fairly young as producers went then. As a result of my years in New York combing through the theater and nightclub scene, often with my friends Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe—manager/mentors to Harry Belafonte, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Woody Allen—I was aware of theater talent in the East of which the insular Hollywood cognoscenti were totally oblivious. My friend Howard Koch, who had become president of the Film Producers Guild, asked me to join that board, and at a meeting to discuss entertainment for an upcoming Lewis Milestone Awards dinner, I suggested Woody Allen to emcee, or at the least do a comic turn. I’d seen Woody in small Village nightclubs, “yearning to go back to the womb—anybody’s,” and found him unique and hilarious. Actually, I had already talked to Jack Rollins and knew that Woody would come out if invited. None of the illustrious names around the table, from Roger Corman to Stanley Kramer, had ever heard of Woody Allen at that point and they turned down the idea of inviting him. A year later, What’s New Pussycat? was released and overnight made a household name of Woody Allen. He never accepted an invitation to perform at another such event.

  Also in 1964, Bud and I were asked by Warner Bros. to produce and direct the film of Sumner Arthur Long’s Broadway hit Never Too Late, for which he’d already written the screenplay. Ready to go, starring Paul Ford, Maureen O’Sullivan, Connie Stevens, and Jim Hutton, it fit into a relatively short pocket of time, so we were able to take it on. The most memorable thing about that experience was coming to know Jack Warner. Jack emerged from among the four siblings to rule over the Warner Bros. studio and its output for forty-five years. He was Hollywood royalty, and was also a loudmouth and a vulgarian. To make matters worse, he thought he was funny, and he read as amusement the discomfort his antics caused in others. The choicest story of Jack Warner at his obnoxious peak was repeated so often over the years as to have become legend.

  One day at lunch in his private dining room, his special guest of honor was Madame Chiang Kai-shek. It was one of those days when Jack’s warped sense of humor was at the peak of its power to humiliate. Mr. Warner entered a minute or two after Madame Chiang, whom he had seated next to him at the head of the table. Everyone else was already sitting, among them Mervyn LeRoy, Ann Sheridan, and Farley Granger, along with several Chinese who were obviously accompanying the first lady of China. As Jack walked along the table to his seat he was introduced to the other Chinese guests and finally to Madame Chiang. He bowed courteously to her and then, looking down the table to the others in her party, smiled his version of winningly and said, “They will have my laundry by four P.M., won’t they?”

  My personal memories of Jack are two moments that occurred while watching our Never Too Late dailies with him. The film was about an older couple—she’s fiftysomething, he’s sixty—having a child. I had a scene where the hus-band has just learned that his wife is pregnant and he’s going to sleep, and he’s lying there in bed with his eyes wide open. She says good night, he says good night, she rolls over, and we fade slowly to black. We stay on black for an eternity, maybe twenty or thirty seconds with the screen totally dark, and then the dawn comes up ever so slowly, and we see him lying there with his eyes wide open in the same position. It was a great, great laugh. Jack Warner watched it and said, “What the fuck is that? There’s nothing going on in that scene.” To his credit, he didn’t ask me to change it.

  And, in his own abrasive way, he taught me a lesson I never forgot. After viewing a half dozen scenes and some terrific performances, he got up to leave and snarled, “That tie your star was wearing could catch flies. You want them listening to him or applauding his neckwear?”

  • • •

  WHEN PARAMOUNT BOUGHT the rights for Tandem Productions to make the film of Come Blow Your Horn, it also secured the rights for us to Neil Simon’s next two plays, which turned out to be Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, two of his biggest hits. They became hit films, too, but Yorkin and Lear had nothing to do with them. Foolishly and unintentionally I gave away our rights to those plays.

  You could call what I did a crime of passion, with Bud and me the victims. My passion was for the story of a blacklisted radio performer who’d just won the largest judgment ever awarded in a libel case and had written a book about it, Fear on Trial.

  Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee were running rampant in the cold war era of the fifties, accusing dozens of prominent Americans of having Communist affiliations. The committee’s favorite targets were high-profile people in the arts, and a for-profit corporation inspired by the committee, AWARE, Inc., became the leading tool for sniffing out the low-lying Commies. In 1955 they developed a nose for radio folk humorist and civil libertarian John Henry Faulk, who was fighting blacklisting. Having made the blacklist he was fighting against, by 1957 John Henry (as he was known) couldn’t find work anywhere. With the support of such people as Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, the fabled New York attorney Louis Nizer took the case for a song and brought the suit that resulted in that record $3.5 million libel judgment. An appeals court later reduced it to $500,000, and accumulated legal fees took most of that, but the original figure remained for some time the symbol in the public mind of the court’s rejection of blacklisting.

  Fear on Trial and John Henry Faulk fanned the civil liberties embers in me that were present when I stood with my grandfather at parades and looked up to see him cry; when, alone in my bed with my crystal set, I learned with dismay that there were people who hated Jews; when I entered the American Legion National Oratorical Contest; when I started the Collegiate Defense Stamp Bureau; and when I enlisted in World War II. But I was pretty much alone in those instances. With John Henry Faulk I found a partner and mentor in those beliefs and stirrings, and one who had been articulating them long before he met me.

  Then there was John Henry’s inimitable sound. He informed and entertained our world
in a nasal, syllable-stretching East Texas twang that sounded to this northeastern Jew how deep-down “Amurican” was supposed to sound and turned up every patriotic ember in me into a four-alarm fire. That fire in the belly for Fear on Trial made me neglect Tandem’s option to bring Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple to the screen. Fires in the belly can often melt minds.

  Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley starred in the pre-Broadway summer theater production of Barefoot at the Totem Pole Playhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Since we were due to make the film, Bud and I flew east for a weekend on behalf of Paramount and Tandem to attend the opening. Only days before we were to leave for New York I read and fell in love with Fear on Trial, published in 1963, two years earlier. An inquiry into the film rights revealed they were still available and that John Henry was in New York discussing that very matter with his publisher. Before we boarded our plane on Friday I had reached him, gushed over his book, and we agreed to have an early breakfast Saturday morning. On the trip east Bud read the book and was as excited as I was about it.

  Our Saturday meeting with John Henry, from early morning until midafternoon, when Bud and I had to leave for Bucks County, was a love-in. How do you not love a man who, in that East Texas drawl, says of some fatuous asshole in the news, “I’d like t’buy the somunabitch for what he’s worth and sell’m for what he thinks he’s worth!” After six hours of conversation about him and the blacklist and what turned out to be the incipient beginnings of the Moral Majority and the proliferation of evangelical TV ministries, we had a clear path to John Henry and the Do-Right People, a title—and what it implied—that I went mad for. The “do-right people” was an expression of John’s reflecting the generous Christian angle from which he always approached individuals on the Religious Right. He chose to see them as people no different from everyone else, and no matter that they insisted you lost all standing as a Christian and would never make it to heaven and to Jesus if you did not see it their fundamentalist way.

  On the way to Bucks County that’s all we could talk about. We were excited about seeing Barefoot, the play, and elated to be the team charged with making the film. We knew we had to come clean about wishing to do another film first. We knew, too, that Paramount wanted to get started on Barefoot right away, however early in its Broadway run. But if Bob Redford, Neil Simon, and Mike Nichols, the director, didn’t mind the film coming out later in the run, we thought the studio would go along.

  Because it was a rain-filled weekend, Bud and I expensed a limousine to take us to and from Bucks County. In my early forties, and despite having earned some good money, I was still relatively broke and did not take being in a limo for granted. It was a big deal. And I knew it would be a big deal to Mike, Neil, and Bob, too. We were all pretty much at the beginning of our careers, and a limo from New York, no matter the pouring rain, screamed “Hollywood!” at the Totem Pole Playhouse in Pennsylvania. Bud and I were grateful that no one saw us as we arrived.

  Barefoot in the Park was a hilarious piece of work, this production was excellent, and Robert Redford emerged into all of our lives and has maintained a presence there for fifty years. Bud and I knew it would be a big hit on Broadway, and it did indeed become the longest-running play by Neil Simon, winning three Tony Awards. But we knew, too, that we had to come clean about the John Henry project while we were together after the opening.

  The audience was on its feet before the curtain fell and it was bedlam backstage. With all the celebratory hugging and kissing, the popping of corks from champagne bottles, and the explosive release of the anxiety that had been riding herd on cast and crew for months, it was impossible to broach the subject. And so we hugged, kissed, and extolled, too, but less as the participants we had every claim to be and more as the defectors that guilt made of us.

  Mike and Neil walked us to the stage door, where the limo was so close that the overhang covered us to the backseat door. Surely they were expecting to hear something about how excited we were to be making the film of the crowd-pleasing play they’d just shown us. But even as we continued to laugh and pay them more compliments, we choked on the commitment we’d just made to John Henry to film his story next, and raved on about the great time we’d just had. We did that all the way through the handshakes, hugs, pats on the back, and into the limo with a cheery “Talk to you soon” before the door slammed.

  Convinced we had hurt them to the quick, and worried that we’d made the mistake of our lives in terms of our own careers, Bud and I didn’t say two words to each other on the way back to our hotel.

  • • •

  WHEN WE RETURNED to California I took the John Henry project to studio head Jack Karp, and told him that we’d like to make it our next film and how eager I was to start on the screenplay. I pointed out that there was no rush to film Barefoot, since it would surely run on Broadway for years. When Jack told me that Neil hoped he could write his own screenplay this time, I thought that strengthened our case. While Neil was working on his screenplay, I would be writing mine, and Bud and I would produce, and he direct, whichever film was ready first. Somehow, though, in the exchange of personal and informal interoffice memos that followed, my request was interpreted as a willingness—worse, a request—to drop Tandem’s option to produce, in conjunction with Paramount, Neil Simon’s second and third films so that we were clear to proceed with John Henry and the Do-Right People.

  Although the film never got to production, my passion for it never waned. John Henry the man and his one-in-a-million Southern Baptist liberalism had an enormous influence on my developing political activism. From my ninth year on the planet and my introduction to Father Coughlin, I was a kid version of a political junkie. In New York, around the time of my Bar Mitzvah, I discovered The Nation, a liberal journal that is part of my life to this day. The writer George Seldes rocketed to my attention from those pages. Seldes was an investigative journalist and a muckraker, a term attributed to Theodore Roosevelt to describe a journalist who indulged in “the relentless exposure of every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life.” Seldes exposed everything from homegrown red-baiting to the truth of Benito Mussolini’s Fascistic nature (for which Seldes was run out of Italy) to one of the earliest exposés of the relationship of cancer to smoking tobacco. He went on to publish his own periodical, In Fact, a four-page weekly compendium of “the news other newspapers wouldn’t print.” It became my behind-the-headlines bible. George Seldes was a hero to me, and, as my luck would have it yet again, a great many years later I was flying up to White River Junction, Vermont, with his niece, the actress Marian Seldes, Senator Patrick Leahy, and Abigail Van Buren to spend an afternoon with him on the occasion of his ninety-eighth birthday.

  I. F. Stone, whose Weekly for many years followed in the Seldes mold, was another hero of mine. As was Thomas Paine, the original American muckraker, and as are the biggest muckrakers of this moment, Bill Moyers on PBS, Christopher Hedges on Truthdig, and Thom Hartmann, author and dynamic radio host. Even more than my boxing hero, Max Baer; my football hero, Knute Rockne; or my movie hero, Clark Gable, they were and are the kind of men I wished my father to have been.

  Reflecting further on this, I’ve wondered why the political activist in me took four decades to fully surface. I think it had something to do with money. Not dollars per se, but the feeling of comfort and safety that flows from acquiring enough of them. As a young married man I was focused on becoming a success and taking care of my family. As a kid of the Depression I heard the term “He’s a good provider”—from the lips of my grandparents and other Yiddish-speaking ancients—so often that to this day it sounds to me like a much-beloved Yiddish expression.

  At the time, “He’s a good provider” could be said of very few men—one of whom used to flick me that quarter, you may recall—so to be a good provider became the holy grail to me. No story lines in all the shows we did in the seventies tou
ched me more deeply than those that dealt with Archie’s worries about making a living. A scene with Edith and Archie in bed comes to mind. She, seeking to comfort him at such a moment, is turned away by Archie, whose pained “Aw, Edith, not now, huh?” is excruciating still.

  I recall exactly when it dawned on me that perhaps I’d reached that lofty place where my ancient aunts Cookie, Hannah, Rachel, and others would consider me a good provider. When Bill Moyers interviewed me in 1982 for a series he called Creativity, he asked what that expression meant to me.

  “Well,” I said, “every once in a while, after a party at the house . . . I’ve seen the last guest out and I turn around . . . the lights are still on, the house is nice and bright, and we have provided the ambiance for all those people . . . and I hear the chorus of my grandparents, aunts and uncles, dozens of them out of the past in my head’s version of a Tabernacle Choir, singing, ‘He’s a good provider.’”

  It occurred to me in a dollars-and-cents way when I awoke one morning and started to pack for a trip. I had been flying cross-country quite often and thought it necessary to get to the airport forty-five minutes early. Not for searches and pat-downs—we Americans were all good guys then—but to take out extra flight insurance. In some airports there were coin machines, in others salespeople at card tables, and ten bucks bought you ten thousand dollars’ worth of added insurance—for the one flight only. I was up early one morning and dressing for such a flight when I realized that someone else was handling that concern for me now, an insurance broker. Not an insurance salesman like my door-to-door uncle Ben, but a real broker, with an office that had his name on the door and others in his employ, a broker who wasn’t just selling me a policy but “fulfilling all my insurance needs.” Hot damn, was I a good provider! And from that moment on I added the role of a social and political activist as well.

  My activism began in December 1962 with a letter to Chief Justice Earl Warren about a speech he’d made suggesting the need for advisers on ethics in business, education, and government. This was followed by a letter to President John F. Kennedy suggesting that this might be the time in our history to create a new cabinet post, minister of ethics. I was committed to the idea, convinced that this was the president who would do it, and I started talking to others about a letter-writing campaign on its behalf.