Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  • • •

  TO WRITE the generically American score for Cold Turkey I brought in Randy Newman. It was early in Randy’s career, his first film, and I think what he composed is one of the most brilliant, underrated film scores ever. Randy also wrote and sang a song over the opening credits, during which you see a lone dog walking down the road that leads into the town, passing signs along the way that advertise stores, businesses, and an air base that have all been closed or shut down. At the end of the road, the dog pauses at the base of a signboard, lifts a hind leg, and the camera pans up to reveal a WELCOME to the twenty-plus churches in the town of Eagle Rock. The song that he plays over that footage, so Randy Newman–like, is “He Gives Us All His Love.”

  • • •

  DICK VAN DYKE was as decent and dear and easy to work with as any of his fans might guess. Taking that cue from the star, the entire cast and crew quickly became family. I had determined to quit smoking when I boarded the plane at LAX to fly to Des Moines for the shoot. Two days into it I was directing Barnard Hughes, playing the town surgeon and a heavy smoker. The scene called for him to be taking one last puff of a cigarette in keeping with his pledge as the clock on the town square was striking midnight. I wanted Barney to inhale that last puff and go orgasmic, and instructed him to do so. That’s when I learned he had never smoked, never even held a cigarette. I had to show him what I wanted, all but had an orgasm myself with that first puff in three days, and there went my own pledge to quit the habit.

  I did quit for good when I boarded the plane back to L.A. after the filming. It is hard for me to believe that I have lived at a time when so many things that seem now to have been there forever were nonexistent. Air travel. The refrigerator. Television. The means to end scarlet fever, polio, and malaria. And this, which used to be the norm but is now so much less usual: rooms full of people smoking, their toxic exhalations sitting in clouds above their heads. That’s the way Cold Turkey opened. I was attempting to satirize the phenomenon, of course, but what astounds me is that I lived with it. The country lived with it, much in the way we live now, despite some protestations, with climate change, nuclear waste stuffed where we pray it will never surface, and hundreds of products with lies on every label.

  My eight weeks in Iowa in the summer of 1969 directing Cold Turkey remain a highlight of my life. When I was seeking Richard Brooks’s advice about whether to do it, he quoted Alfred Hitchcock as having once said that no man could feel closer to playing God than a director of a film on location. Think about that. You are in Greenfield, Iowa, which you alone have renamed Eagle Rock, to the township’s great pleasure. The town is somewhere you—and the 150 or more actors, technicians, and craftsmen accompanying you—have never been. They are all waiting minute by minute for you to determine what they will do next. Your mood each day is their emotional thermometer. You are also the key connection to the host community, whose sense of pride and excitement at your presence among them knows no bounds. Cast, crew, and township—for eight weeks your wish is their command. Go get closer than that.

  Frances, Kate, and Maggie visited me several times during the filming of Cold Turkey. Nothing made me prouder than to have them with me on the set. The cast adored them. They were there the evening before we started, when Greenfield held a rally for the cast and crew in the town square. With a police escort, we all rode in a pair of fire engines and antique cars through outlying communities, some cornfields, and into town, where everyone in Greenfield and from neighboring Winterset (in which we were also scheduled to shoot) seemed to have turned out.

  I adored Iowa and Iowans. Among other things, they taught me not to take for granted that the Program Practices departments of the networks, steeped as they were in research, were correct when they complained of something in the earliest scripts for All in the Family and said, “This won’t fly in Des Moines.” Don’t ask me where that came from, but from the very beginning, across the three networks, when Program Practices determined that a moment, a line of dialogue, or a bit of behavior was offensive, “This won’t play in the Bible Belt” or “It won’t fly in Des Moines” was their informed reason for saying “Take it out.”

  They played hardball. If not for what I learned in Greenfield, Des Moines, and Winterset (where, by the way, John Wayne came from), I can’t be sure I’d have stood up to them as I did. After our writers had their say, and the actors in the rehearsal process weighed in, and I saw two run-throughs and made my comments, I automatically resisted Program Practices’ position when they asked for something to be removed from a script. I admit to times when the discussion that followed resulted in a change that bettered the script and solved their problem at the same time, and I thanked them. But those occasions were relatively rare. When they were insistent on a change I could not agree with, they were saying in effect that their research-oriented take on the audience trumped our instinctive understanding. I’d hold my ground. Inevitably I would then hear, “Sorry. It will not fly in Des Moines.” The knock-down, drag-outs followed.

  • • •

  BEFORE LEAVING for Iowa and the filming, Frances and I rented a house in Brentwood, our first home out of the valley, on the upscale Westside of L.A. In those years, living in the valley was treated as déclassé. An entertainment industry joke of the time went: “Poor Sammy Davis. Short, black, Jewish, one eye, lives in the valley.”

  Two blocks away from the house we rented was a house we had hoped to buy. It was owned by Paul Henreid, the Austrian actor famed for playing opposite Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. He’d also played opposite Bette Davis in Now, Voyager in one of the most memorable and alluded-to scenes in American cinema. Amid swelling strings, in a pair of lushly lit, dripping-wet close-ups, Henreid lights two cigarettes before handing one to his steaming costar. No couple in a modern film, even naked between the sheets and pumping away to brass and drums, can stir audience fantasies more than that incandescent black-and-white moment in a movie made seventy years ago.

  The word was out that the Henreids were looking for a buyer, but the price they were asking was a bit over-the-top. This was the house Henry Fonda had owned for many years, the home he raised his kids in. It was only a few blocks from the famous Brentwood Country Mart, and Jane used to ride her horse to it. The property was well known and much sought after. I checked with Henreid often to see if he’d lowered his price. We became friendly, and Frances and I were invited to dinner there several times. A time or two we reciprocated. A year or more into our relationship I learned one night that the other two couples at the Henreids’ dinner table had met them the way we did. They’d come to see a house for sale. I began to wonder if the elderly Henreids (there were people older than me then) weren’t lonely and might not have found the house useful for making friends. While I can’t prove it, until the day we finally owned it, and that took a couple of years, everyone I met at dinners there had an interest in acquiring the house of our dreams.

  • • •

  I WAS EDITING Cold Turkey on the MGM lot while we kept our eye on the Henreid house. It turns out that the smokers of Eagle Rock do succeed in keeping their thirty-day nonsmoking pledge and win the $25 million award. We see the worldwide media clogging every street, the three network news anchors and their crews on hand, and President Nixon heeding the sweet siren of celebrity and making a last-minute appearance as the clock strikes midnight on that thirtieth day.

  The film ends with a wide shot of blue skies, open plains, and farmhouses that we’ve seen before, Iowa at its most glorious, from which we do a slow dissolve to the same scene some years later. Iowa is now a modern success story and the evidence is everywhere. In the foreground we see community after community of tract homes, and in the background a few large factories with smokestacks belching cones of black smoke that blanket those homes.

  In 1969–70 only one studio in town had the effects equipment to deliver that optical, and that i
s why we were editing at MGM. But there was a wrench in that wheel and it was my old friend Jim Aubrey, the Smiling Cobra. Aubrey had been hired to run MGM and cut costs to the bone. The bone, according to Aubrey, included everything and every department he didn’t see as absolutely needed. So, despite the deal we had made to edit Cold Turkey there, he was selling the equipment we required out from under us. When I sat with him to plead my case, Jim, in a major rewrite of our history, smiled and said, “You know I’d do anything for you, Norman, but . . .”

  It took the threat of a lawsuit to cause Aubrey to hold back on selling the equipment we needed for that last shot in Cold Turkey.

  • • •

  BEFORE I’D FINISHED editing the film I sent a rough cut over to David Picker. Within a week he’d screened it for Arthur Krim, the top man at United Artists, and they called to offer me a three-picture deal to produce, write, and direct for them. It was the thrill of thrills. At that time the only filmmakers I knew of who were hired to produce, write, and direct comedy were Blake Edwards and Billy Wilder.

  As Tennessee Ernie Ford would say, I was chomping in the tall cotton. My attorney and UA were negotiating a deal when, some weeks later, Bud Yorkin called me from New York, where he’d gone to pitch another Tandem product to CBS’s top dog, Mike Dann. Bud didn’t know at the time that Mike was leaving CBS and Robert Wood would be replacing him the following week. Old friends, they chatted awhile, and at some point Mike asked him about that pilot we’d made for ABC. “Funny but impossible to air,” he’d heard.

  Bud disagreed. He’d brought a tape of the pilot east just in case and suggested that Mike see for himself. In those days there were no cassettes so the show was run out of master control thirty floors below.

  Mike Dann started laughing from the first lines, and loudly. Fred Silverman, a VP of programming just under the incoming Bob Wood, heard the laughter from his neighboring office and came in. When it was over his excitement was palpable. He and Mike agreed they just had to get it to Bob Wood. “Don’t let that tape leave the building” were their last words to Bud.

  Within days of my being asked to sign the three-picture deal with United Artists, Bob Wood, newly ensconced in the offices at CBS Television City in Los Angeles, phoned me to say he’d just seen the “Archie pilot” and would I be interested in talking about it going on CBS? Although it would mean I couldn’t take the picture deal, I couldn’t resist meeting with him after two pilots and more than two years of thinking about it. Wood, an able and agreeable executive, backed up by his talented and driven programming VP, Fred Silverman, had predetermined that the kind of rural comedies that had sustained CBS—The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction—had seen their day, and he hoped to serve up something to change the CBS brand and mark his regime.

  My show would do the trick, but he asked me to rewrite the pilot. I said I wouldn’t do that. “How about if the show goes on but you make a different first episode?” he suggested. I told him there was a reason I shot the same script for the two pilots I made for ABC. It was deliberately based on the slightest of stories, which gave me the opportunity to present 360 degrees of everyone, but especially Archie—his attitudes on race, religion, politics, sex, and family, holding nothing back. Metaphorically, you can’t get wetter than wet, I told Mr. Wood, so we all needed to jump in the pool together and get soaking wet the first time out. The meeting ended with his having to think about it. With United Artists’ offer in mind, I left CBS telling myself I was better off not having to choose between the two, yet delighting in the possibility that it could still come to that.

  The which-way-to-go discussion started that very evening, just on the chance it could happen, and there wasn’t a friend or family member who didn’t advise me to take the three-picture deal. First of all, the medium known as broadcast television was the bush leagues compared to motion pictures and the big screen. On top of that, everyone was certain that if the network actually dared to air the show, they wouldn’t have the guts to stay with it and it would be off the air in a week or two.

  “They’ll break your heart with this thing” was the common refrain. Even Carroll O’Connor bet me, and put it in writing, that CBS wouldn’t keep the show on the air. He had an apartment in Rome that he would not vacate because he was so sure he’d be back there in six weeks. With all that ringing in my ears I picked up a call from Bob Wood one day.

  “Okay,” he said, “thirteen weeks, you’re on the air.”

  I think I knew at the time that the film deal presented a far surer career path and income, no small consideration since we were pretty much broke, as opposed to the big question mark All in the Family represented in a TV era defined by hillbillies and petticoats. Taking the TV deal was all risk. A show could be absolutely terrific and fail for other reasons, like the night it was on, its time slot, and how well the network was doing overall. Frances and the others were right to be advising against it.

  But if anything could keep me from accepting Bob Wood’s “thirteen on the air,” it wasn’t going to be the amount of risk we would be taking, the warnings about the mercurial nature of the ratings-driven TV business, the argument that TV was the bush leagues compared to making movies, or being told “Bury your ego, Norman, the world doesn’t need your father on TV.” No, there was only one thing that could make me change my mind—and that was CBS itself.

  I phoned Carroll in Rome and he couldn’t believe we had been picked up. He was still sure he’d be on his way back to Italy in a few weeks, and I agreed to pay for round-trip tickets if he was right. I don’t recall whose idea it was, but we changed the title to All in the Family, and CBS agreed to auditions to recast the roles of Gloria and Mike. Two years earlier, the first time we’d shot the pilot, Rob Reiner had wanted to play the part but I had thought him too young, emotionally if not chronologically. This time he walked into the audition and out with the role within minutes. Now all we needed was a Gloria to go with Rob’s Michael.

  John Rich suggested I look at the top of the Smothers Brothers show and check out a young actress for the role of Gloria. There was Sally Struthers, tap-dancing in a pool of light under the opening credits, and oozing comic chops. She auditioned with Rob and it was another bolt of lightning.

  While I hired writers Mickey Ross, Bernie West, and Don Nicholl to start on the remaining dozen scripts CBS had ordered, the network decided to do some research and show the earlier pilots to some focus groups. Soon, word floated back to us that the screenings were not going well, and I had to wonder if this was the beginning of the end. Notes from Program Practices followed with suggestions such as these:

  “We ask that homosexual terminology be kept to an absolute minimum, and in particular the word ‘fag’ not be used at all. ‘Queer’ should be used most sparingly, and less offensive terms like ‘pansy,’ ‘sissy,’ or even ‘fairy’ should be used instead. And again, a term like ‘regular fella’ would be preferred to ‘straight.’”

  “Archie refers to the inhabitants of Harlem as a ‘bunch of bums.’ How about calling them ‘a bunch of good for nothings?’ Or lose the reference to Harlem.”

  “‘Hells’ and ‘damns’ should be avoided if the episode is not to be grossly offensive to many viewers.”

  “Archie’s comment on the shortness of Gloria’s skirt should not be as anatomically personal as, ‘Every time you sit down the mystery’s over.’”

  There were pages of such requests that turned to warnings and occasionally to threats. Over the years and shows they amounted to volumes. Early on I wrote long letters of clarification and reasoning, but rarely was I able to avoid the ultimate confrontation: “Remove that and I go, too.”

  In this instance, the first of that long line, I called my attorney and asked exactly what I had been contractually guaranteed by CBS. What could they do to me?

  They had ordered thirteen episodes and would pay for them, he said
. The first episode was guaranteed to air. No absolute guarantees as to the rest.

  “But Bob Wood told me ‘thirteen on the air,’” I said.

  “And he meant it,” my attorney replied, “because even they can’t believe they would put out all that money and not try to get it back. So the contract keeps his word, but they know if they break it, what are you going to do, sue? They paid for the shows, so go prove damages. You’re over a barrel.”

  I got off the barrel and attended one of the focus groups the network had contracted, hosted by a young guy who sounded like he was a psych major not yet degreed. Some thirty people, likely recruited at a mall, were brought to a screening room and seated before a large TV screen. They were a bused-in midlife group, carrying shopping bags, dressed on a warm day in shorts, sandals, and blowsy short-sleeved shirts, all wearing the “What the hell am I doing here?” expression. Questions from the psych major revealed a few California natives, the rest tourists.

  The host explained that they were going to be shown a thirty-minute situation comedy and the network was interested in their reaction to it. At each chair there was a large dial at the end of a cable. They were to hold that dial while watching the show and twist it to the right when they thought something funny or were otherwise enjoying a moment. If they didn’t think something was funny, if it offended them or simply bored them, they were to twist their dial to the left. Two big clocklike instruments hung high on the wall over the TV set to register the degree of the likes and dislikes of the group as they twisted their dials.

  Those of us monitoring the focus group sat behind them, looking into a one-way glass wall. We saw and heard everything, and it revealed a good deal of what I knew instinctively about human nature. The group howled with laughter, rising up in their chairs and falling forward with each belly laugh. But wait! Despite the sound and the body language, they were dialing left, claiming to dislike much of what they were seeing, and they were really unhappy with it. But really!