Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  It was a big load that Carroll was carrying, granted, but we couldn’t allow his fear to overwhelm the good work that the rest of us churned out in support of him. The best example of the height to which our differences could take us happened early in our nine-season run. It was called “The Elevator Story.” Circumstances find Archie on the seventy-eighth floor of an office building. He gets in the elevator reading the hysterical front page of a tabloid. In the car, too, reading his New York Times, is a tall, very elegant black man, and a white woman prone to hysteria. Some floors below, the elevator stops and a working-class couple, clearly Latin, get on. They speak both Spanish and English. She is extremely pregnant and nervous. Archie is annoyed with everyone: the classy black guy putting on airs, the emotionally fragile woman, and the pregnant woman yakking unhappily in Spanish. She thought she should go to the hospital, but the doctor said next week would be plenty of time. Between the embarrassing (to Archie) soon-to-give-birth talk, the black man’s scorn of his tabloid, and the nervous wreck, Archie can’t wait to get out of there. And suddenly the elevator jerks to a stop between floors.

  Trapped until maintenance arrives, fear is rampant, but all eyes turn at the moan of the pregnant woman. The emergency has caused her to go into labor and the first act ends with this question: Who will arrive first, the baby or the maintenance team that can get them out of there?

  Immediately after the first table reading, which seemed an agony for Carroll, he announced there was no way in the world he would do this show. First of all, five people in an elevator for the whole half hour was impossible to shoot. Director John Rich said he could make it work. Carroll, as agitated as any of us had ever seen him, disagreed. “It would feel cramped on camera,” he said, and the ending would be weak as hell. “The elevator gets down, the woman’s carried off, and we’ve taken the audience through all that cramped hell—for what?” I pointed out that that wasn’t what he’d read. Maintenance does not arrive on time, the woman is not carted off, and the baby is born in the elevator.

  “But that’s a joke! You know you can’t do that! A baby born on the floor of a goddamn elevator! What’s that all about? I don’t want to talk about this anymore!”

  I tried to explain that the camera wasn’t going to be trained on the birth itself; it was going to be on Archie’s face. After all the anguish and irritation between the principals—at one point the Latin father needs some newspaper to lay down and both Archie and the black man offer theirs; the father reaches for the tabloid Archie has thrust in his face, pauses, then chooses the Times instead—the birth of this baby, I repeated, would take place on Archie’s face.

  Speaking of that face, there might never have been a face that would go better with the name O’Connor. It screamed for Archie to be Irish. And Catholic. I heard that on all sides, sometimes in anger from people close to the show. “That face screams ‘Irish,’ so why fight it, use it!” was all I heard. But I refused to pin the bigot in Archie on any specific ethnicity or religion, so we never went there. Not that the show didn’t deal with God and religion, but for eight years we avoided labeling Archie in that regard.

  But back to the elevator. As much as Carroll would have no part of it, I was convinced that when the camera witnessed the miracle of the baby’s birth on a close-up of Archie, it would be an altogether exquisite and touching moment, and one that only the rarest of actors could pull off. I had to have it.

  Carroll walked out of the reading and the rest of the cast was sent home. Several hours later, all hands were gathered in Bob Wood’s office at CBS in an emergency session. Carroll, who called us together, was there with his agent and his attorney. And with me, in one of the first of many such meetings we were to have, was my attorney. Carroll said flat out that he thought this week’s script was repulsive and unplayable and that in no way was he going to do it. When all the faces turned to me, I said I disagreed with him about the script, and on top of that it was the only one we had ready to shoot.

  We were at a standoff. In what became a heated argument, every alternative was discussed. There had to be another script we could get ready. Maybe even one without Archie? Would the network let the show take a week off? Not a chance. Carroll fell to pieces and began to cry. He couldn’t go on, hated the show, couldn’t bear me, and cried to a point that made me realize that this behavior, this degree of testing, had to end here. If he won this battle, the creative team would be throttled and the show I believed in would die anyway.

  Our schedule called for us to work Monday through Friday, do a dress rehearsal without cameras late Friday, take the weekend off, start to put the show on camera the following Monday morning, do an on-camera dress rehearsal Tuesday afternoon, and then shoot two shows before a live audience later, one at five P.M. and the other at eight P.M. It was close to six o’clock on Monday when everything seemed to have been said. The network’s position was that they had contracted for a show a week and that’s what they expected. I said that we were keeping to our schedule with the current script and would gather again to rehearse in the morning. And Carroll left, saying it was “Good-bye.”

  The next day, Tuesday, the cast gathered on time, but for Mr. O’Connor. CBS had formally advised Tandem Productions, me personally, and Mr. O’Connor and his advisers that All in the Family would be canceled and appropriate legal action taken if they did not have a new episode to air on the expected date. Carroll never showed up that Wednesday, but we learned that he and his team were together all day and that they’d been in touch with Bob Wood and our attorney several times. Sometime that evening I got word that Mr. O’Connor would be at rehearsal on Thursday. I said that would be okay if we could make up for the lost time by working over the weekend.

  We worked on Saturday, and when the episode was taped the following Tuesday we got a phenomenal reaction. The audience cheered. Some cried. Everyone agreed it was our best work to date and simply had to win an Emmy. It did. Director John Rich did a brilliant job, Hector Elizondo and the honey-throated Roscoe Lee Browne—the Latin and black man, respectively—were perfect casting, and Carroll O’Connor’s Archie was stunning, the scene even better than I imagined. The camera in tight, we see that face reacting to the sounds of the birth taking place below, the mother pushing, grunting, yelping in pain; the father telling her in Spanish to push harder; more grunts, more pushing, more Spanish; Archie’s expressions mirroring everything going on—and then, cutting through the commotion, from the center of all life, comes that first cry and Archie melts, simply melts at the wonder, the mystery and beauty of it all. It was a watershed performance.

  For the next eight years Carroll would continue to dislike every script at the start. It was nothing but fear, and blind anger was his only defense. Certainly he bettered many a scene with it, but it needn’t have taken his belligerence to get there. The marvel of Carroll’s performance as Archie Bunker was that at some point each week, deep into the rehearsal process, he seemed to pass through a membrane, on one side of which was the actor Carroll O’Connor and on the other side the character Archie Bunker. Fully into the role of Archie, he was easily the best writer of dialogue we had for the character. He was a full-fledged version of the New York cabdriver he’d patterned himself after, as he’d told me at the beginning. As difficult and often abusive as Carroll could be, his Archie made up for it and I could kiss his feet after every performance. If Carroll O’Connor hadn’t played Archie Bunker, jails wouldn’t be a “detergent” to crime, New York would not be a “smelting pot,” living wouldn’t be a question of either “feast or salmon,” and there would not be a medical specialty known as “groinocology.”

  • • •

  CARROLL COULD NOT HAVE had a grander talent and costar than Jean Stapleton. Unlike the troubled Carroll/Archie kinship, Jean and Edith were spiritually one and the same. Once, after a particularly grueling day, she said of Edith’s relationship to Archie, “I know I love him and I have no trouble with
that. His dearness hides his foibles for me and I want to take care of him. But when he’s saying some of those things you know Edith would never want to hear, what am I thinking? Where is my head?”

  “You’re tuned out,” I said. “You’re Patty Andrews, the middle Andrews sister, and you’re singing ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.’” Jean remembered the Andrews Sisters—Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene—as I did. They were real sisters and hugely successful on radio, in vaudeville, and in films, singing close harmony in the boogie-woogie era of the midthirties. Jean might have understood intuitively why my response worked for her, and why it mattered a great deal in the way her character handled Archie, but it was reflexive on my part and I’m not sure I did. I think I understand now. The Andrews Sisters represented a freshness and a guileless innocence at a time when America needed just that. The suggestion that she was an Andrews sister evoked something native and totally accessible in Edith. Patty Andrews, singing her heart out, a sister on either side, “sees no evil, hears no evil, and speaks no evil.”

  While ABC was making up its mind not to pick up our show, I’d cast Jean in Cold Turkey and told her about a bit of business that I was injecting into an early breakfast scene, something I saw happen once to my aunt Rose. Sneezing incessantly as she was fixing breakfast, Rose opened the refrigerator and bent way down to get an egg from a lower shelf. Suddenly a breast was sneezed out of her nightgown and was swished back with a wrist flash as if it had happened a thousand times before. Jean smiled at the idea, but she called me from Penn Station a half hour later on her way back to Philadelphia. Unable to tell me she might have thought the bit distasteful, or that it just wasn’t something she could do comfortably, she said, “I’m sure your aunt Rose’s breast was larger than mine, which is why it would work well, but my breast just isn’t right for the scene, but it is such a sweet idea, it really must be in the picture, there are lots of actresses who could do it and I could name a few, but breast size is so personal, you know . . .”

  At some point I managed to slow her down and told her I’d already changed my mind about the bit and pleaded with her to understand that it was most important to me that she be in the film. And in my life, too, I thought, as she finally agreed once again to do it. Jean Stapleton was, in life, the very soul of Edith.

  • • •

  TO BE ALONE with Rob Reiner is to be in a crowd. His brain and his mouth, like a chain of Chinese firecrackers, are firing constantly. If that sounds like I’m describing a pain in the ass, nothing could be further from the truth. Rob was like that when I fell in love with him as a nine-year-old teaching my daughter Ellen to play jacks. What was great about Rob was that the person, the actor, the director, the friend, the participant, the activist, the star, the husband, and the father all came from the center of his being. If he was talking to you about his entrance to a scene, the importance of washing your hands, whether a line of dialogue would be better this way or that, or the need to do something politically about early education, it all came at you with the same sense of urgency and at the same volume.

  On matters political, here is the big difference between Rob Reiner and far too many of the rest of those with deep political leanings and the megaphone that comes with celebrity. Catchphrases and bumper sticker backups often pass for information with many well-known faces. Never with Rob Reiner. He takes the responsibility for knowing the history of his subject, and understanding it as well in a political, social, and economic context. Mike Stivic was his opposite, full of passion absent the facts.

  Of the four principals, I knew Sally Struthers least well. I envisioned her character as a Kewpie doll on the outside with an inner strength and street smarts that would be enhanced over the seasons. In her final episode, when she, Mike, and their baby are moving to California, it’s clear that Gloria is the head of the family now, and totally in charge. Sally was perfection as Gloria.

  There is no way to overstate the good times and laughter the creative and production teams experienced working with Carroll, Jean, Rob, and Sally. Unlike the filmed single-camera TV comedy we see so much of today, each episode was taped with multiple cameras before a live audience. We did not decide where a laugh should come and put it there. Our cast and our writers earned them all, including the wildest and likely the most explosive audience reaction in TV history when Edith escaped an attempted rape by smashing an oven-hot cake into her attacker’s face and kicking him in the nuts.

  But that cast and the stories we told often evoked more than laughter. Archie opens his front door on a Sunday morning and painted there is a swastika. Gasp. An anti-Semitic group has mistaken the Bunker home for the Blooms’ on the next block, and a member of the Jewish Defense League comes to offer Archie violent eye-for-an-eye protection should they return. His family won’t let Archie accept the offer and the JDL guy leaves. A moment later we hear a horrendous explosion offstage. All rush to the door, Archie opens it, and the camera cuts to four horrified faces, staring. “Holy Jeez,” says Archie. “They blew him up in his car.” No musical sting, no applause, just a slow fade to black. The audience was as shocked as the actors, and it was the loudest silence I’d ever heard.

  Empathy, like silence, is another sound that can’t be measured in decibels. Nothing caused our live audiences to “shout” their empathy more loudly than Edith’s reaction to the news that a transvestite who’d become her friend was murdered by a street gang simply for being a man in women’s clothes. Grief-stricken and unable to see how a just God could allow that, her faith was threatened. The audience was near tears. I knew that Edith’s faith was Archie’s tent pole, his tiller. When confounded by Edith’s truth and purity, Archie had to see her as a “dingbat.” But without that dingbat at his side, he would be lost. He needed a strong Edith, and it was her faith that gave her that strength. In the second episode of this two-part story, Edith saw that her loss of belief had resulted in a bereft and rudderless Archie, and she prayed to regain her faith. And we had what I thought was the best show we’d ever made.

  (Someone else to whom religion was very important thought that, too. In September 1978 the cast and I flew to Washington for the installation of Archie’s and Edith’s chairs into the Smithsonian Institution. President Carter invited us all to the White House, and it was a thrill to stand there in the Oval Office listening to our president talk about episodes he and Rosalynn had seen and remembered, especially “the one where Edith lost and regained her faith.”)

  • • •

  MEANWHILE, our confrontations with CBS’s Program Practices department continued. One of the biggest occurred over a story concerning Mike’s temporary inability to make love to Gloria. Nearing graduation, he is studying very hard for his exams and worried to death about them. His fear of confessing his anxiety leaves Gloria feeling unloved and unwanted. She confides in Edith, who can’t possibly tell Archie, and that was the story we were working on when the network heard about it and panicked.

  CBS wanted no part of anything to do with impotence. The subject matter so alarmed them that Bob Wood flew out to California. We met at eight A.M. on a Sunday morning—I was working seven-day weeks—and, with an “Are you fucking kidding?” look on his face, he said, “You’re doing a show, a family show, on television, about he can’t get it up?” As much as he might have meant that, I wondered if he wasn’t fighting to keep a straight face. Also, word had floated our way that it was Mr. Paley himself who found the show “unattractive” and was nervous about its potential for making the network over in its image. I felt sure he would see things differently if CBS’s “changed image” continued to be endorsed by the high ratings that translated into higher fees per rating point, so coddling Bob Wood—likable and easy to coddle, by the way—and helping him to handle Mr. Paley was the way to go.

  We talked about our ratings and their ascending curve, and about the new shows we had in the hopper, and at one point I asked Bob if he’d like to see the
script in question—a first draft the guys were still punching up. We sat there reading the script aloud line by line, he and I playing every character as they came up in “Mike’s Problem.” We howled, and Bob saw that the big laughs came from the family’s inability to discuss sexual matters, however important, and not from Mike and Gloria’s attempts to deal with the problem. In the script, when Archie approached a black friend in Kelsey’s Bar to ask his advice, because “we all know that you people, the men, I mean, are especially preficient at this,” Bob Wood, lost in laughter, had his handkerchief out wiping his eyes. And when the friend told Archie that the secret was hog jowls, and then, pulling him closer, hoarsely whispered, “But tell your friend to be careful, Archie, too many of those jowls and you get this terrible hankerin’ to shine shoes,” Mr. Wood fell to pieces altogether. So did the audience that came to see it when it was taped a few weeks later with his blessings.

  While CBS did hear from a few affiliates, largely in the South, demanding to know what “that madman in California” was up to and why they were allowing it, they also received encouraging words from mainline clergy, from mental health groups, and from numbers of family counseling services. Loud and clear came the message: “The subjects you are touching on are extremely helpful.” We heard that sentiment more and more over time from organizations and institutions dealing with everything from rape to drugs, from parenthood to cancer, religion, science, etc.

  Possibly the silliest conflict we had with Program Practices—and that’s saying something—occurred after Gloria became pregnant. Toy companies came to us and to CBS within days for the rights to Archie and Edith’s grandchild. When we delivered the script in which Gloria announced she was carrying a boy, the network pleaded that we make it a girl instead. When I asked why, all I got was a “Come on, you know.”