Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  We realized early on that being neighbors to the Bunkers was the bush leagues for these talented players and there was another show in The Jeffersons. The plan to see them “moving on up to the East Side with a duplex apartment in the sky” came about in a most interesting way. One day three members of the Black Panthers, a militant civil rights group of the sixties and seventies, stormed into my offices at CBS saying they’d “come to see the garbage man”—me. Good Times was garbage, they said, and on they ranted: “Show’s nothing but a white man’s version of a black family . . . Character of J.J. is a fucking put-down . . . Every time you see a black man on the tube he is dirt poor, wears shit clothes, can’t afford nothing . . . That’s bullshit, we got black men in America doing better than most whites . . .” Hours later, as I was telling my associate Al Burton about the Black Panthers’ visit and their view of the Evans family’s struggle in Good Times, his eyes lit up. I got his meaning—and so did The Jeffersons, who were now “Moving on Up.”

  The show debuted on CBS on January 18, 1975. Sherman Hemsley, already popular as Archie’s neighbor, became an instant star on his own show, as did Isobel Sanford as his wife and his equal in the “I give as good as I get” department.

  Upstairs lived a mixed-marriage couple played by Roxie Roker, a lovely black actress, and an extremely white comedic actor, Franklin Cover. I describe him as “extremely white” because he had the kind of pure white face that didn’t show the slightest sign of assimilation in any direction, at any time over centuries. Roxie was cast first. When I told her she could have the part, I prefaced it by emphasizing several things about her on-screen marriage. Her husband would be seriously white and their marriage would be as real as any other on TV. I cautioned her that television had never seen a mixed couple in a real relationship, never seen them kiss on the lips and sleep in the same bed, and there was no way we could foretell the audience reaction. John J. O’Connor, writing in the New York Times, voiced the same concern. Noting that our shows had “a reputation for dealing with the unusual and controversial: breast cancer, menopause, drugs, abortion, rape . . .” he added, “this time, however, whatever the collective psyche of the nation may be at the present moment, Lear is teetering on the explosive.”

  I told Roxie I thought America was ready for it, but the network’s concern exceeded that of Mr. O’Connor’s, and if she felt the least bit squeamish about it I would understand. Roxie’s answer was to dig into her purse and show me a copy of her marriage photo. “We’ve been married for nearly fifteen years,” she said. “Does this answer your question?” There stood Roxie, the bride, with Seymour Kravitz, her white Jewish groom. A second photo she showed me proudly was of their young son, whom you know as the musician and singer Lenny Kravitz.

  Marla Gibbs played the role of Florence, the maid, and everything that fell out of her mouth seemed to be funny. Her reaction to meeting the Jeffersons when she came for her job interview was unforgettable. Given the Park Avenue building she was in, she’d expected to be reporting to a white couple. “Wait a second,” she said, pointing to Louise and George. “You mean to tell me you two live here?” And then, pointing to the visiting mixed-marrieds, “And you two live upstairs?” On their nod, she exploded with, “How does it happen we already overcome and nobody told me?”

  Paul Benedict, a remarkable comic actor playing a Briton in the next apartment, rounded out the regular cast. In the opening show, after dipping his head in the doorway to call out a “Welcome!” to his new neighbors, he turned back in wonder to exclaim, “Good God, you’re black!”

  Unlike Good Times, The Jeffersons ran smoothly and, at eleven seasons, was our longest-running show.

  • • •

  PERHAPS THE FASTEST SOCIAL and civil rights progress America has seen in the past fifty years has been in the area of gay and lesbian recognition. It raced to the forefront of our culture as a topic of conversation, and was accepted with relative ease by the broad body of Americans and by our justice system as a civil rights and liberties issue, despite its being so bitterly opposed by religious and legal fundamentalists.

  There is no doubt as to which direction this civil rights battle is headed and few disagree that the media has led the way. I take great pride in the thirteen-episode run we had on ABC in early 1975—premiering just six days after The Jeffersons—of our sixth show, Hot L Baltimore, from a play by Lanford Wilson. The title was of course intended to be Hotel Baltimore, but the e had fallen out of the sign.

  I’d fallen in love with a photograph of a mother and her baby lying face-to-face on a bed in a book of photos called The Family of Man. I wrote something about the photograph that traveled alongside it to museums across the country. From that moment on, the expression “Family of Man” has rarely left my mind, and that is exactly the way I viewed the characters who resided in the Hot L Baltimore. There were a pair of ordinary hookers, not lookers (Conchata Ferrell and Jeannie Linero); a middle-aged pair of straightforward gay men who’d been a couple for twenty years or more (Lee Bergere and Henry Calvert); a dotty old woman (Charlotte Rae) who visited her wacky son “Horse,” whom we never saw, and reported on his insane off-camera antics; a well-read spiritual and free-thinking black dude who had the answers to everything (Al Freeman Jr.); the hotel’s owner (Richard Masur); and his exhausted desk clerk (James Cromwell). I’ll flatter myself—and bless our casting director, Jane Murray—to say the entire cast was brilliant.

  ABC wasn’t the least bit excited about the series. But for having made the mistake of letting All in the Family go, I doubt they would ever have bought it. However, a young Michael Eisner, who had just been named head of programming at ABC, had had no part in that haunting decision, and he liked Hot L. I learned quickly that, unlike most of the TV programming executives, Eisner paid real attention, at least to the shows he cared about. His notes were delivered personally because he came to every five P.M. taping and brought with him the excitement of a kid experiencing theater for the first time. Eisner never lost that youthful passion.

  After the airing of our fourth episode he had to make a call he didn’t like, to tell me that the show would not be picked up. We were to complete our order for thirteen knowing that would be it. It seemed the affiliates and independents across the country were balking at our cast of characters, especially “those two guys who behave like they’re married.”

  Despite knowing Hot L Baltimore had no future, Michael Eisner continued to the very end to attend a taping of each episode. He brought the same fervor and dedication to the Walt Disney Studios in 1986 and took it into the next century at the top of the heap.

  • • •

  TANDEM’S SUCCESS— the 1974–75 season ended with All in the Family number one in the Nielsens, Sanford and Son number two, The Jeffersons number four, Good Times number seven, and Maude number nine—prompted a piece in the New Yorker in which critic and social commentator Michael Arlen wrote that “Norman Lear has a feel for what people want to see before they know they want to see it.” The way I experienced the wonder we were caught up in was on a number of red-eye flights from L.A. to New York. I would look down anywhere over America and think it just possible that wherever I saw a light there could be someone, maybe an entire family, I’d helped to make laugh. In my dissociated fashion I marveled at this, but it was nothing compared to what I understand now, that I was the architect of all that.

  People were forever commenting about how high the stress level must be producing, week in and week out, as many shows as I was involved with. I would inevitably respond, “Well, there is stress, and then there is ‘joyful’ stress.” What I was experiencing was joyful stress. I truly meant that. Certainly there was stress. With all the script conferences, talent to handle and support, rehearsals, tapings, and all the problems native to any effort that strives to keep hundreds of people working constructively together—all while I struggled to maintain my other role as a husband and a father
to three—there was great stress. But the kick of having an idea one week with the opportunity to convey it to some 40 or so million people not too many weeks later, plus the positive acceptance of our work as evidenced by the size of our devoted audiences, resulted in the kind of high that I believed turned all the strain and pressure into—I’ve found no better way to put it—joyful stress.

  4

  MY POLITICAL LIFE shot into high gear in the mid- to late seventies. The aroma of the dollars in my success led to my being solicited, it seemed, by every liberal, moderate, or progressive who held or ran for office in all fifty states. And calling me, from then to now, have been current leaders of the House and Senate, staff members and political advisers, the heads of political organizations, and a few presidents.

  “Basically, you in Hollywood and we in DC are in the same business,” they would tell me. “We each seek the affection and approval of the American people and, most important, we seek to communicate with the American people.” Clearly I was doing better at that, they said, and oh so humbly they asked for my help. For forty years or so I’ve spent untold hours in meetings; at breakfasts, lunches, and dinners; and on phone calls offering up my thinking for this campaign and that cause, but—as unbelievable as this is to me even now—no matter how sincerely they seemed to listen, or how grateful they were for suggestions they couldn’t wait to put into effect, no one ever acted on a single idea I presented. Not ever. Every bit of contact following versions of that speech had to do with my checkbook and my Rolodex.

  In 1973 I was invited to become president of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, following my friend Stanley Sheinbaum. Because I was so busy, my presidency would be largely ceremonial, to help raise money and such, and I accepted on that basis. My value to the organization increased, however, with the popularity of the TV shows and my resultant celebrity. I admired the ACLU for standing on principle 100 percent of the time, even when they knew a position they had to take on a civil liberties issue would make them terribly unpopular. One such occurred during my presidency. When the National Socialist Party of America (derived from the American Nazi Party) decided to march in Skokie, Illinois—home to neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors—and was denied permission, the ACLU saw this as a free speech issue and interceded on its behalf (National Socialist Party v. Village of Skokie).

  As an officer of the ACLU my name would likely have found its way into the press in any event, but I was also one of a number who wrote a check to help fund the case, and that became a big deal. One morning the phone rang around six A.M. It was Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, who lived up the street and had just passed our house on their early-morning constitutional. They apologized for calling so early but thought I might wish to deal with a problem I didn’t know I had. The words “JEW HATER—NAZI SYMPATHIZER” had been printed in large red letters across our white front gate. What the Dunnes didn’t know was that a dead pig had been tossed over the fence and lay in our blood-splotched driveway. And it wasn’t paint that those hateful red words across our gate were inscribed with.

  This was the work of the Jewish Defense League, a vigilante-styled group started by a rabbi, Meir Kahane. Jews did this? Led by a rabbi? The incident taught me everything I needed to know about the universality of all humanity. My bumper sticker reads, JUST ANOTHER VERSION OF YOU.

  • • •

  COMPLAINTS ABOUT SEX and violence on television had for years been a convenient distraction from the real problems facing the nation. If one program can be said to have brought it to a head, it was 1974’s Born Innocent. Linda Blair had just starred as the possessed teenager in the hugely successful film The Exorcist—directed by my old friend Billy Friedkin—and NBC had hired her to headline the cast of a tawdry TV movie set in a girls’ detention home. Eager to capitalize on her popularity with America’s youth, the network scheduled the movie at eight o’clock on a Tuesday night despite its containing U.S. television’s first depiction of a lesbian gang raping a fourteen-year-old (Blair) in the shower with a plunger handle. When a subsequent real-life rape of a nine-year-old with a soda bottle was said to have been inspired by the movie, the notion of the early evening as a sex-and-violence-free zone took hold.

  The earliest and most passionate proponent of this noble-sounding concept was Arthur Taylor, then midway through his four-year reign as president of CBS Entertainment. Mr. Taylor had been a top corporate executive at the world’s largest pulp and paper company, with no experience in broadcasting, but that didn’t stop him from suddenly and unilaterally declaring that the eight to nine P.M. hour (seven to eight in the central time zone) should be a “Family Viewing Hour.”

  “We want American families to be able to watch television in that time period without ever being embarrassed,” read a statement from Taylor’s office. This assumed, of course, that there was uniformity in what would embarrass American families, that a significant number of families still gathered to watch television together, and that children who might have an interest in the shows that troubled Mr. Taylor all went to bed by nine o’clock—three premises any single one of which would have earned the man a failing grade in American Family Studies. But the absurdity of these perceptions didn’t stop ABC and NBC from joining CBS’s Mr. Taylor in his missionary zeal to make the TV screen safe for parents and children.

  Of course, the “Family Viewing Hour” was nothing more than the networks’ draping themselves in the wholesomeness of the term. When people get upset with the amount of sex and violence on television, they tend to look west to blame Hollywood. Wrong. The content creators—the writers, producers, and directors—are not, and never have been, in control. Television is a business and, as with all businesses, it’s governed by supply and demand. If the demand didn’t exist at the networks, writers would not be supplying it. The blame lies to the east, on Wall Street and on the giant, often international media entities that answer to its short-term interests.

  Nonetheless, sensing that a subject this visceral could provide political advantage, Congress got into the act. The House Appropriations Committee, which funds the Federal Communications Commission, pressured its chairman, Richard E. Wiley, to take action, and the FCC soon made Arthur Taylor’s brainstorm into a federal matter. With the three networks on board, the National Association of Broadcasters further demanded that local stations (the majority of them network affiliates) extend the embarrassment-proof programming back into the pre-prime-time hour as well. It was agreed in April 1975 that the Family Viewing Hour—or, as it was officially and more accurately known, the Prime Time Censorship Rule—would commence with the new TV season that September.

  I was on vacation in Paris when I first heard how this symbolic attempt to clean up television would affect our company. CBS president Bob Wood called to tell me that All in the Family would have to be moved out of its Saturday eight P.M. time slot (from which it had reigned as TV’s number one show for four seasons) to a later hour “unless it can conform to Family Viewing time.” (Apparently the presence of the very word Family in its title was insufficient to inoculate it.) I kidded him and said, “Oh, so now you have a definition of Family Viewing time? Won’t you read it to me, Bob?”

  “There is nothing to read,” he said, “but some of our people went through all of the twenty-four shows you made for this current season, and were you to make those shows next year, under the new Family Viewing concept, you would have to make considerable changes in twenty or twenty-one of them, and you would not be allowed to do two of them at all.”

  And I said, “So we only made one show this season that was as clean as a whistle?” Bob Wood reiterated that if we were going into the next season with those scripts, that was the way it would be.

  I said there was no way I was going to—or would have any idea how to—change America’s most popular show to meet the vague standards of decency that the Family Hour demanded. A few days later the fall schedule was announced
, with All in the Family moved to Monday at nine P.M., where young minds, asleep now of course, could be spared its wicked ways.

  Despite the fact that older minds must have found us in greater numbers, since the show remained number one the following season, it was instantly clear that there was a stigma attached to this move. All in the Family was virtually devoid of sex and violence, but its propensity for dealing with topical subjects was evidently deemed equally unfit for children, and the tendency of its characters to use the same language that children heard every day in their actual lives earned it banishment to the non-family-approved ghetto.

  In addition to the demoralizing effect of being told that this show families had been watching and loving for five years was now considered bad for families, our instincts, confirmed by conversations with others in the industry, told us that there could be a serious economic penalty as well. Since there was now a considerable block of time (seven to nine P.M., counting the affiliates’ hour) during which local stations would not be able to run All in the Family, its value in the syndication market—where the real money that allowed producers to continue to make new shows was earned—would be significantly decreased. And if the show was not suitable for seven P.M., wouldn’t it seem at least as inappropriate for the late-afternoon after-school time slots?