Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  With Debralee Scott as Mary’s sister, Phil Bruns as her father, Claudia Lamb as her daughter, and Victor Kilian as her grandfather/flasher, we went into rehearsal for the pilot. On day one I realized that we had too much material for one episode, and that Louise at her best called for a slower pace. That night I talked to Perenchio and we decided to make the pilot and a second episode. Joan Darling as the director turned out to be a great choice, as did every cast member, and Louise Lasser’s Mary Hartman was lethally funny. She was the mirror image of a stretched-beyond-reason reality, to help the viewer see what the media and consumer culture were turning us into. But go explain that to the binary imaginations of TV station programmers. Tandem/T.A.T. was handling its own distribution by then and our sales team tried tirelessly, but MH2 was not selling well. It was “too off the wall,” our salesmen reported.

  I knew the show was off the wall, of course, but “too off the wall”? As nutty as I can get, I was and am a down-to-earth person and producer, and a commercial one at that, and so I wondered if the independent station guys who didn’t know me personally would feel differently if they saw that my feet were on the ground. I decided to use my home and my family to sell my real-life husband and father image in the pursuit of selling a show. Our sales team liked the idea and we invited TV station execs who bought product for some thirty station groups, representing more than one hundred stations across the country, to our home. They were in L.A. for a convention and responded to the invitation well. Out on the grass on a warm August evening, with my wife and young daughters as hostesses and violinists strolling between the tables over dessert, the meal fit the occasion. After dinner we repaired to our screening room, where I told them what I thought and felt about the show, interjecting a few asides to my wife and kids that indicated their appreciation of Mary Hartman, too. Now, this, it occurs to me, was truly a family hour.

  The reaction to the show was tempered but clearly good. I’m sure that many in that fraternity didn’t want to be seen liking something they might be fearful of buying for other reasons. There was some reasonable applause, and before I could begin to open up a discussion one of the most conservative and influential TV buyer/programmers in the room, Al Flanagan of Combined Communications, raised his hand and said, “Norman, how soon can I have that for my five stations?” I’ll never know what intrigued the most savvy but unlikely guy in the room to behave as he did, but it mattered a lot. The show was on its way. Several other buyers for multiple stations followed Al, and as it began to flourish on those stations, others jumped aboard. During its first six months on the air, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman made the covers of Newsweek, TV Guide, Rolling Stone, People, and a number of Sunday supplements, including the New York Times Magazine.

  In addition to the syndication of Mary Hartman being profitable, it established a first-run syndication market that had never existed before. Those independent stations that carried it, for the most part at eleven P.M., became known as affiliates of the Mary Hartman Network. As Newsweek reported, “In big cities, where the serial is usually shown in the late nighttime slots, the average station has seen its Nielsen numbers more than double since Mary came aboard; at Cincinnati’s WXIX the ratings increased a staggering sevenfold.”

  In Cleveland, which was a top-ten Nielsen market, the show was on a CBS affiliate, which made the show very important in that area from the start. A new station manager, Bill Flynn, who’d been brought in from Boston, decided to program Mary Hartman at seven-thirty P.M. It was programmed even earlier in a few places, but Cleveland was, and I assume still is, the home of a very important archdiocese, and the Catholic bishop there went up the wall and organized twelve-hour-a-day picketing. The city council voted unanimously to condemn the station and its manager for making the move. Bill Flynn, heroically to my mind, preempted an hour of prime time on his station and bought an hour on Telstar, a communications satellite, to have me face the head of the PTA, a critic from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a particularly vicious councilman, and one Episcopalian minister who had flown in from Evanston, Illinois, and was a great Mary Hartman fan. The councilman, representing the thirty-one out of thirty-three members of the council who condemned the time change, said that the council just didn’t want it on the air at seven-thirty “harming innocent minds.”

  I reminded the panel that the local news was run at five P.M. on two stations in Cleveland, and on the other two in this four-station market at six P.M. Since the average local TV news show starts with any homicide in the vicinity, any rape, any kidnapping, and every kind of violence, weren’t they concerned, I asked, about that “harming the innocent minds” of children? The answer given by the woman representing the PTA was stunning. “Yes,” she said, “but that’s not as real as Mary Hartman.”

  Mary Hartman turned out to be a seminal hit for us and became the subject of numerous sociological studies and phenomenal watercooler conversation. “The nihilistic edge to Mary Hartman,” wrote James Wolcott in the Village Voice, “is that though the characters are trapped in those soap opera rooms, the viewer is always aware of the chaotic world outside.” The New York Review of Books reported that some viewers “recoiled from its assaults on their cherished ideals and modes of behavior, while devotees would rush home of an evening in time for the latest encounter between the staff psychiatrist of Fernwood Receiving Hospital’s mental ward and its celebrated inmate, ‘The Number One Typical American Consumer Housewife.’” And as recently as 2010, essayist Claire Barliant wrote, “No program has gone as far as this one in ridiculing the medium, as well as in warning of its power to reduce its habitués to followers of herd philosophies.”

  MH2 was as personally fulfilling as anything I ever did in the half-hour form on TV. I intend the word fulfilling to carry a lot of meaning here. Imagine having this kooky little scenario in mind for thirty or so years and finally producing the one show that could handle it. Ever since I started to drive and became obsessed with cars and girls, I loved the role of playing the gentleman—walking on the curbside when with a girl; taking her arm when crossing the street; opening the car door for her, just like Melvyn Douglas, Cary Grant, and Fred Astaire. And so, once, in my twenties, I let a girl into my car, and as I was walking around the rear of the vehicle to get to the driver’s seat, I was thunderstruck with this idea: What a wonderful way to have someone disappear from the face of the earth. You let a woman into a car, she sees you crossing to her left in the rearview mirror, loses you in that corner blind spot, expecting you to show a split second later, and you don’t. You’ve disappeared, never to be seen again. I’ll bet I pictured that scene and smiled to myself 80 percent of the times I let a lady into a car, and then, finally, that is what happened to George Shumway, as inimitably described in a courtroom scene by his daughter, Mary Hartman.

  Another MH2 storyline that tickled the hell out of my funny bone had Dabney Coleman playing Merle Jeeter, the father and manager of an eight-year-old superstar televangelist, Jimmy Joe Jeeter. In their last scene together, Jimmy Joe convinces his father to hang a TV above the bathtub so the violence reported on the evening news can give him inspiration for his next sermon while he bathes. He works himself into a frenzy as he watches, and the camera briefly cuts away as we hear a splash and a loud sizzle. At this point, neighbor Loretta Haggers comes in and sees that Jimmy Joe has been electrocuted. “He died for the six-thirty news, Lord,” she says. “For the sins of the six-thirty news.”

  My God, what a good time I had working on Mary Hartman! To have a vehicle for one’s wildest sense of the outrageous that can be shared with millions is a gift from the heavens and beyond. A prime example: Leroy Fedders, a neighbor, was the football coach at Mary’s daughter, Heather’s, high school, and for story reasons we needed him dead. We had him coming down with the flu and Mary bringing over a bowl of chicken soup to help cure him. What Mary doesn’t know is that he’s taken a number of pills for the pain, the cough, the fever, and the need to get some
sleep, all the while sipping vodka, too. He doesn’t want the soup, but his wife and Mary insist he have it. They leave him alone in the kitchen, his head over the bowl, with the instruction, “Eat!” Because he’d taken so many pills and mixed them with all that booze, and because we were making a soap opera, we could take all the time we needed for the camera to observe Leroy’s head sinking slowly, slowly toward the bowl, until—plop!—Coach Fedders drowns in his chicken soup.

  Gore Vidal was so struck by Mary Hartman that he phoned me from Ravello, Italy, where he lived and to whose villa a friend had been sending VHS tapes of the show. He was coming to L.A. in a few weeks and begged to be written into the script. Because he had no time to memorize lines and no experience at improvisation, we pasted clues to his dialogue on tabletops, doors, lamp shades—in every direction he was required to look. All of us—the writers, cast, director, crew, and especially Louise—were thrilled to have him on the show, and a seven-episode Gore Vidal story line was invented that started with him at Mary’s kitchen table telling her he’d like to write a book about her.

  “A book about you would be a book about America,” he told her. “A book about emptiness, a book about promises not kept—but also, paradoxically, a book about hope, a book about survival”—indicating a stack of magazines and the TV set—“against pretty terrible odds.”

  Most satisfying of all in the world of Mary Hartman, however, was the completion of the arc Vidal was attributing that began with my desire to show the impact of the media on an average American housewife. The penultimate scene of that first season has Mary Hartman on David Susskind’s late-night talk show Open End, a big deal at the time, and what followed from that appearance is what triggered the New York Review of Books article. Mary has just been named Housewife and Mother of the Year by some publication, and is being interviewed—hounded is the truer description—by three smug, self-centered, “intellectual” media types. Attempting to defend her TV-viewing habits and magazine selections, her very lifestyle, Mary is slowly being driven crazy—and then, asked a question about her sex life, she accidentally lets drop that her husband is having a performance problem. Between the panel’s salivating reaction to that, her terrible guilt, and the foul questions they start firing at her, Mary goes off, but OFF, her rocker. It is as fine a bit of acting—an eleven-minute scene shot in one take—as I have ever seen.

  The next season opened with Mary in the mental home to which she’s been sent. One of the most hilariously sad but illuminating moments in the entire series took place there. A nurse is seen wheeling a television set into a common room, where a group of oddball patients, including Mary, are sitting about. As the TV is placed before her, Mary sees a small box attached to its side and exclaims, “Oh, don’t tell me! Are we?” This catches the attention of the others as the nurse replies, “Yes, Mary, we are.” Mary is carried away with her good fortune. “I can’t believe it!” Every unbalanced individual in the room gathers around her as she continues breathlessly, “I can’t believe it”—the picture of Mary Hartman surrounded by a half dozen off-their-rocker faces staring at the tube is unforgettable, as she reverentially concludes—“that I, Mary Hartman, am finally a member of a Nielsen family.”

  6

  THE POPULARITY OF Mary Hartman raised my public profile enough to attract the interest of Mike Wallace, who profiled me on 60 Minutes, and, a bit later, Lorne Michaels, who invited me to host Saturday Night. This was the show’s second season, before the Live was added to its title and when the original seven cast members were billed as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players.

  I brought only one idea with me from L.A. It was called “Three Brothers,” a routine I’d done with my daughter Kate from the time she was five years old. We performed it often before my tapings when I warmed up the audience and Kate was on hand. Lorne liked the bit and scheduled it in the last third of the show. After Friday’s dress rehearsal, Kate, her mother, and I were over the moon about it and couldn’t wait for the moment we’d be playing to millions.

  The show was going well Saturday evening when, coming out of a commercial and just before I was to introduce our routine, Lorne Michaels whispered to me that we were running long. He had to cut “Three Brothers” and asked me to introduce the next thing up instead. My heart stopped. This was not an unusual occurrence in live television. I myself had asked dozens of players to cut things in the middle of a live performance. I stepped into a blinding spotlight to do as I was instructed. There were only a few rows of audience members I could see clearly, and among them sat my darling Kate, looking up at me expectantly, her expression shouting, “I’m here for you, Daddy, cue me!” And of course I did. I cued my daughter as I shamefacedly fucked my producer.

  He accepted my apology, at the same time straining to understand. But, then, it was some years before Lorne became a father.

  • • •

  WHEN THERE WERE enough episodes of AITF, Maude, Good Times, and The Jeffersons, Jerry Perenchio was able to negotiate with CBS’s Bob Daly regarding Tandem/T.A.T.’s ability to sell them into syndication. In short order it was our salesmen handling the sales and/or rejections, and most of what they heard regarding Maude was some version of this: “I don’t want that ballbuster on my station.” Among Maude’s hard-core supporters, however, was first lady Betty Ford, who would write to me whenever she missed an episode—long before the DVD and DVR—and ask me to send her a VHS copy, for which she never failed to send a note of thanks. All her letters were signed “Maude’s Number One Fan.”

  When we reached a kind of stalemate in our sales, I phoned Maude’s Number One Fan, just out of the White House and living near Palm Springs, where our ex-president was playing golf every day and she was developing the now famous Betty Ford Clinic. I told her that the National Association of Television Production Executives (NATPE) was having its convention soon in L.A., that all of TV would be showing its wares, and that we needed help calling attention to and selling Maude.

  “Give me three dates that work for you that week and I’ll pick one,” she replied in an instant.

  We decided to have a dinner party on our front lawn, smack in the middle of NATPE’s spring convention, and the invitation that went out was from “Mrs. Betty Ford, Beatrice Arthur and Norman Lear.” Frances and my three daughters hosted along with the first lady. The evening was a smash. Mrs. Ford was a trouper. She yakked up Maude all evening, talked to everyone about the show—at one point grabbing the mike and raving about Bea Arthur—and danced all evening with every station manager in attendance. It was about one A.M. and she was still going strong when I finally suggested to her Secret Service detail that it was time to take Mrs. Ford home.

  When I phoned two days later to thank her and told her how well Maude was selling now, she was so pleased you would not have known who was more grateful for the evening.

  • • •

  AFTER A SECOND SEASON and a total of 325 episodes, the cast of Mary Hartman was exhausted—Louise especially—and we informed our independent stations and affiliates that the show was drawing to a close. Having carried the only first-run syndicated show to attract national attention and reach megahit status, our stations prayed for another show to maintain the franchise. That led us to Fernwood 2 Night. What if Fernwood, Ohio, had its own late-night talk show? we wondered. And wouldn’t Martin Mull be perfect as its Johnny Carson? Since his wife-beating character on Mary Hartman had been impaled on a Christmas tree and was quite dead, we made the host of Fernwood 2 Night Garth’s twin brother, Barth. We cast the incomparable Fred Willard as his sidekick and announcer, Jerry Hubbard. The last episode of Mary Hartman aired on July 1, 1977, and Fernwood 2 Night debuted three days later.

  The show became a cult hit, about which, to this day, people speak to me reverentially several times a year. The mixture of Barth Gimble’s amiable unctuousness and Jerry Hubbard’s verbose banality was so unique and hilarious as to be unforgettable to i
ts fans. One of the choicest moments—the guest physicist whose experiments with mice led him to claim that leisure suits cause cancer—added half a day to my life. Make that a full day when I picture him withdrawing a pair of tiny mouse-sized leisure suits from his pocket.

  Though its fan base was passionate, it wasn’t large enough to keep the show on the air, as was the case with two other shows I was passionate about.

  I’d been thinking about a show in which the conservative versus liberal argument, a staple of the Bunker household, was conducted this time by professionals in the political arena. All’s Fair, starring Richard Crenna and Bernadette Peters, grew out of that. Their political differences provided the troublesome center of a love affair between two very public personalities and political opposites, decades before James Carville and Mary Matalin gave us a real-life version. Our two leads were pitch-perfect, as was Michael Keaton in his first major role, as a fast-talking presidential speechwriter.

  As a fancier of melting pots, I was proud and happy to have convinced Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism (and father of current Fox News contributor William Kristol), to consult with me about our right-wing character’s philosophy and its expression. There was more context regarding the issues our characters argued about in All’s Fair than viewers can find today in their nightly news shows. We felt we were chomping in the intellectual tall cotton. But after twenty-four episodes we learned that CBS wished to chomp in what Nielsen might tell them was more fertile ground.

  Another series idea rich with sociopolitical potential, and dear to the heart and mind of my generation, was Apple Pie. What if—in the thirties, at the height of the Great Depression—a broke and lonely woman in the Midwest, out of work like everyone else, inherited a farm and some money? And what if, having absolutely no one to share it with, she decided to hire family members by placing ads in local newspapers. More than a funny idea, I sensed this was a great opportunity to compare the New Deal’s efforts to raise up the lower and middle classes of that time with the governmental indifference their children and grandchildren were experiencing in the seventies.