Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  Then the phone rang just past ten-thirty one November morning and a friend told us to turn on the TV. President Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas. From that moment until three days later when his body was transported to his grave in a horse-drawn carriage, a lone empty-saddled horse behind it, I can’t remember moving an inch from my television set, caught in a time capsule of helplessness.

  I’ve always been attracted to the values that derive from the Left in our culture, but it was John Fitzgerald Kennedy who sold me on the language that defines those values. “I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion . . . for liberalism is not so much a party creed as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.”

  On the plane back from the Dallas assassination, Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as our thirty-sixth president. This telegram to him during the next year’s election was typical of me and of my voice.

  DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:

  IT HAS BEEN REPORTED THAT THE GOP IS GOING TO WRITE OFF THE STATE OF NEW YORK IN NOVEMBER STOP AND IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED THAT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WRITE OFF THE STATES OF MISSISSIPPI AND ALABAMA STOP TELL US PLEASE THAT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND LYNDON B. JOHNSON AREN’T ABOUT TO WRITE OFF ANY UNDERLINE ANY STATE IN NOVEMBER STOP THERE ARE FIFTY STATES IN THIS UNION AND YOU INTEND TO GO AFTER EVERY ONE OF THEM STOP IF THE GOP INTENDS TO WRITE OFF A STATE OR TWO THAT’S THEIR BUSINESS STOP BUT TO COIN A PHRASE DOESN’T THAT REPRESENT A NO WIN POLICY? STOP PARENTHESIS LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE CLOSE PARENTHESIS

  NORMAN LEAR

  That wire to LBJ was found in storage among twenty-some boxes of my correspondence with senators, congressmen, governors, and the Departments of State and Justice on issues running from my concern over the sale of eavesdropping devices to the separation of church and state to urging a Democratic Party rebuke of Barry Goldwater for not disowning the support of the KKK. Once begun, it never stopped.

  7

  A RELATIVELY NEW FILM COMPANY, National General Corporation, agreed to finance the John Henry film as part of a two-picture deal we made with them, and I went to work on the screenplay. The story National General bought for our second film was sparked by the title of a 1961 Italian film, Divorce Italian Style, and based on what I had gone through in my divorce from Charlotte. I brought in a fine comedy writer, Robert Kaufman, to work on the outline of the Divorce American Style story while I was writing about John Henry and the Do-Right People.

  And somewhere, somehow, I also found time to fall in love with a book by Rowland Barber, The Night They Raided Minsky’s. The name Minsky and burlesque were synonymous when burlesque, to my everlasting enrichment, reigned over my parade. Barber’s story was about the attempt by the “Society for Decency” to outlaw burlesque (which had its origins in Italy of the 1500s as commedia dell’arte) after the accidental invention of what became one of its key components: the striptease. National General passed on it but my friend David Picker, one of the most effective of the studio heads I have known, liked it. David is one of a handful of people I have thought of as “congenitally secure.” He was running United Artists at the time. We agreed to make two films for UA, The Night They Raided Minsky’s and Cold Turkey, the only film I wrote and also directed, about a small town in Iowa that attempts to stop smoking to win a $25 million prize.

  Ironically, I wrote the screenplay for Cold Turkey in a small study off our living room, smoking three-plus packs a day and an occasional cigar, a statistic that amazes and startles me to this day. As someone who now can sniff out the one smoker in a crowd from the smell of that person’s coif, no matter the density of hair spray, I can’t imagine what our house smelled like and how we lived with it. When I recall that my daughters were raised in that smokehouse, I feel mortified at my unconsciousness.

  I wished to be there for my kids at all times, and for the most part conned myself into believing I was. They knew they could call me at work at any time and my office would put them through to me. They could be sure that a “Daddy, make me laugh” would cause me to perform, on the spot, until something—now and again bright, but more often a mental or physical distortion for preteens only—earned the laugh that was called for. The only place I could be counted on to be totally present, though, was at work. The Lear household got shorter shrift from their dissociated Dad than did his TV families.

  • • •

  I’D LIKE TO SAY that what my girls missed from their dad they received from their mom, but Frances, unfortunately, was far more occupied with her as-yet-undetected bipolar self and the escalating war that was our marriage. Frances’s jealousy simmered through my early successes and came to a boil one night in May 1972, when All in the Family and Sanford and Son were creating a stir. Johnny Carson was hosting the annual Emmy Awards and came back after a commercial with “Welcome back to an evening with Norman Lear.”

  The impact of that moment on Frances was monumental. She described how she felt this way: “The disease of lost identity had been forming slowly in me, and became acute when fame moved its goods through the front door. . . . I walked down the street with the man I was the wife of and I was recognized and greeted. I walked down the street alone and I was not recognized, nor was I acknowledged. We had become he.”

  In 1992, six years after we divorced, Frances wrote her book, The Second Seduction, and in it, four lines, a quatrain, make the point like a stiletto:

  My life is like an epic poem

  With lines that rhyme with he and she.

  He is what I might have been

  And she is only me.

  I can’t imagine a subconscious love-hate relationship expressed more exquisitely. Frances adored the me she wished to be, but then could not bear that me in contrast to what she thought of herself. And so the marriage went downhill and the pain uphill in direct proportion to my rising star. We fought a great deal, I know, because I’ve heard about it every time I’ve asked those who were there. And because I do remember such surreal moments as overturned tables of food, baked fish and sauce slipping down a wall, and the time I was driving down Melrose Avenue with a boiling Frances beside me and my great friend Herb Gardner trapped in the backseat and wondering if he’d ever see his family again. Frances and I were carrying on to such a degree that I, having lost all control, stopped in the middle of the street, in traffic, no light or stop sign, jumped out of the car, dodged vehicles to get to the sidewalk, and ran blocks before Frances could make it to the wheel, drive to catch up with me, and beg me to get back in the car.

  Many of our male friends who suffered her inverse chauvinism also recall laughing with her. For me, laughing with Frances ran parallel to quarreling with her. Our daughters remember us laughing a lot together, and talking. “You never stopped talking,” Maggie has said. “We always marveled at how much you had to say to each other.” Much of what Maggie remembers as talk early in her life and our marriage were disagreements that didn’t make it to the category of a fight. The laughter was nonetheless real. One of my fondest memories is of handing Frances something I’d written and hearing her laugh all the way from our bedroom to my study.

  Frances shared in my early success. She loved my being a writer, had a keen intelligence and a wicked wit, and early on, as she read and gave feedback, she felt she was a part of the process. That was not to last, however, and would never be enough in any case. When it all began, although we were as much in love as we could be, the life we were building together was a struggle. It is easy enough to write here that Frances and I, with two children in two years, had to live on less income than did Charlotte with her settlement, but living it was a big struggle for us both. In that struggle we were equals. We were no less e
quals the evening All in the Family debuted and the career that had been launched years before we met now reached the stratosphere. Frances and I were relieved of our common struggle, but she inherited another in the same instant. And the new struggle hit her right in her sweet spot.

  Evidently I had an inkling of that when we married and begged her not to stop working, but to continue on her career path. I convinced her to at least see if there wasn’t a great job opportunity for her in Los Angeles, building on her career in New York. Frances confirms this in her book when she writes of moving to L.A. and visiting with the merchandising head of the May Company, who invited her to take over the sportswear department at a salary “higher than I had ever expected to earn in this life.” As she went on, I could not imagine her being more successful at screwing herself if she had a doctorate in it:

  “I was afraid for my marriage, for myself, afraid that buying for the May Company would keep work as the focus of my life. I had a new focus now: a home, a husband. His career was my security. I would have children. I would live as women were supposed to live, sheltered and adored. In the swiftest and deepest and most lasting misstep of my life, I turned down the job. One person, a man, told me I was making a mistake. But I was too caught up in my new role to listen to Norman Lear.”

  Frances’s attitude to being a woman was as bipolar as her chemistry and mood swings. Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963. The Frances who turned down the May Company hated that book and sat down to write her own book, A Critique of the Mystique. She struggled with that for two years, but she couldn’t finish it. It all but tore her apart. By the time she had come through that period, Frances had done a 180-degree turn and embraced the mystique, feminism, and Betty Friedan wholeheartedly. From then on there was no more vocal and ardent feminist anywhere.

  There was no better illustration of Frances’s rabid feminist persona than one evening on Mooncrest Drive when she tangled with a genuine movie star who also happened to be spectacularly male. Roland Kibbee, Lee J. Cobb, and their wives and kids were over for a weenie roast one evening when Burt Lancaster, a great friend of Kibbee’s, dropped by. Kibbee and Burt had made the fabled film The Crimson Pirate together. I got to know him well years later when I became an officer of the ACLU and he was our spokesperson, as flamboyant as the roles he played, more flamboyant even than Frances, on the world stage, no less, and certain to grab column inches on any issue with which he cared to be identified.

  On this night the Lears were meeting Lancaster for the first time. Typical of Mrs. Lear, when the conversation turned political, she took an opposing view to something someone, in this case, Burt, had just espoused. He took the bait. We onlookers were at once concerned for where this could be heading and excited by every twist and turn. It was clear that the two flamboyancies had met their match. Until—as their complexions reddened and their volumes rose—this unforgettable moment took place.

  Burt was seated in an easy chair on one side of the room when it began and Frances was standing over him, in his face, telling him he didn’t know what he was talking about and relishing it. The rest of us sat there mouths agape. Lancaster, looking up at Frances, astonished at first, started to respond, quietly to begin with, and then, also no slouch at taking umbrage, growing charismatically lustier as he rose out of his chair. Totally into his role and more the master of his argument than was Frances, he backed her across the room, where she plopped on the sofa next to a shaken Mary Cobb and Louise Kibbee, silent now in the face of his well-practiced fury. Clearly the scene—and the combatants, too, perhaps—had climaxed. In the manner of delivering a curtain line, Burt issued his final words to Frances, strode to the front door, and exited, slamming it behind him.

  There is a postscript to this story. On page 104 of her book, Frances wrote just two lines. “I married three times in front of a judge and not one photo or one marriage remains.” The second line reads, “I hungered after Burt Lancaster for most of my life.”

  • • •

  MOST PEOPLE SAW the Frances Lear you meet here as volatile and unstable but fiercely intelligent and exceedingly interesting to boot. Marilyn Bergman, who, with her husband, Alan, wrote some of Barbra Streisand’s biggest hit songs, including “The Way We Were,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” and the score of Yentl, was close to Frances, loved her dearly, and tells a story that best combines all of the above, along with her capacity for ending relationships. Frances had the foresight to start a Hollywood women’s feminist support group, ten to twelve high-powered women—writers, actresses, attorneys—who met monthly at our house to discuss what each of them was going through at work, at home, and in their dreams and aspirations. As Marilyn described it, “It was as if we were all lying on a couch opening up to each other, totally vulnerable, and taking turns in the psychiatrist’s chair, too, when we thought we could be helpful.”

  Frances, while smart and intuitive, had a tendency to be too helpful, to the point where the other person’s vulnerability seemed a turn-on to her. Before a sister’s problem could be fully articulated, she was commenting on it and had the cure. The others, unable to slow Frances down, found her harsh and hurtful, and voted to banish her from the group. Frances, believing the group came to their decision because they needed time to catch up with her psychoanalytically, agreed to step down, in her mind temporarily, and nobly insisted they continue to meet in our home. Unaware of her reason for exiting so genially, and in the spirit of not wishing to hurt her feelings more, they accepted her invitation. And so the meetings continued, absent Frances, at chez Lear.

  Living with Frances day in and day out, I had what theater people call a house seat—fifth to twelfth row, center section—to her every mood swing. And in the worst of those moods, I could not avoid being the prime target of her lash-outs and put-downs. Now and then, as I’ve said, I answered the lash-outs with my own fury. But I didn’t always catch the put-downs. Frances could be sly and amusing with them, or so I thought. For example, before All in the Family really hit, when we would read something special about me, or I was being honored or receiving an award, Frances would flash me what I read to be a tender smile and say, “Not bad for a little Jew from Hartford.” And thinking what I heard was just another way of saying “Look how far you’ve come, my Norman,” I would laugh with her.

  As I indicated earlier regarding those years on Mooncrest Drive—and later in Brentwood—I didn’t so much live the life we led there as produced it. Or am I just looking at the not-being-where-I-was dissociation phenomenon in a larger framework? Over time, in any number of interviews, I’ve found myself saying, “I view every day as a production.” I now see the difference between a living experience and a production. We are inside a living experience and outside the production of it. While we may enjoy producing, and I loved it, basically we produce for the pleasure of others. When we live the experience, we are sharing that pleasure with others. It has to be unsettling at the least to live with someone, a father or a husband, who even while producing a special moment stands outside of it looking on. Nor could it have been easy, as I see it now, to have been that someone.

  • • •

  WHEN I STARTED on the screenplay for Divorce American Style—ultimately and ironically nominated for an Academy Award—I was suffering from a giant writer’s block. “Shit in the head,” as I’ve termed it. I sat at the typewriter for weeks picking at my head and never getting past the first page. I’d cancel evenings when we were supposed to go out to dinner. I’d miss weekend time with my kids. I remember a gala Frances attended without me, coming home after midnight with some friends wearing party hats and carrying favors, intending but failing to cheer me up and cheer me on. I just sat there staring. And picking. There was nothing on the page, but I did have a couple of scars on my head. One day Frances came into my study and threw a little white boating hat on my head to keep me from picking. It worked, and that is how my nearly fifty-year
love affair with that white hat began.

  Another thing that worked was something a therapist said to me that has stayed with me forever. I went to him specifically seeking help for this problem, and he asked me to imagine myself in a small room with some fifty or so people. Suddenly there is some smoke, someone yells “Fire!” and there is a rush to the single door in the room. Some get out and some, jammed in the doorway, do not.

  “Your thoughts are no different from those people who rushed to the door and are crushed there. Let the people out one or two at a time and everyone gets out. If you want them assorted by height or weight or hair color, plenty of time to do that when they are all out and safe. Same thing with your thoughts, Norman.”

  The first heavyweight writing that came easier for me as a result of adopting that metaphor was my Divorce American Style screenplay. The next day I bought a tape recorder and started dictating the entire story, writing some scenes two or more ways, changing my mind and taking unexpected twists and turns, but pushing on to the final scene and the words “FADE OUT” before I had a word transcribed. It was much too long when I finished—more than two hundred pages—but every thought, scene, and sequence was on the page ready to be sorted for the rewrite. I was in heaven at high speed.

  After that I dictated the first draft of everything I wrote. It saved my life. My habit was to dictate at home, call an office number connected to a dictating machine, and play my new tape into it. That process might be concluded at, say, two A.M. My secretary would come in early to do the transcription, and the typed manuscript would be ready for me by the time I arrived, at which point I added to it, subtracted from it, or rearranged the content until I had a first draft. As I said, it proved a lifesaver. Over the years, I’ve passed that advice on to a lot of writers suffering from S.I.T.H., and I’ve been royally blessed many times for helping to drain it.