Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  I thanked Frances and my office staff, who’d helped her to pull off the surprise of a lifetime, expressed my gratitude for the songs and toasts and the presence of just about everyone I loved—and then expressed something I’d thought about often but had never said out loud. I confessed that even while standing there and thanking everyone, my mind was on the taste of coffee the next morning.

  “As much as I’ve loved it,” I said, “as grateful as I am to all of you, this evening is Over and I am on to Next.” When something, however great it was, is over, it wants to be OVER without regret, because immediately available is NEXT. Reflecting on this later, I imagined a bulging hammock between Over and Next, and realized: that is where the struggle to live in the moment resides.

  My problem—and, of course, my simultaneous good fortune—was that there were so many Nexts I rarely faced one at a time. Sometimes, like those amusement park bumper cars, they thudded and crashed until there was a pileup of Nexts.

  2

  THE BIGGEST NEXT after my decade in network television was sociopolitical. It had begun brewing in me years earlier with the proliferation of fundamentalist TV ministries that perverted the pulpit by mixing politics and religion and spewing the sort of malice that horrified me when I was nine and came upon Father Coughlin on my crystal set. What they were calling the Religious Right began with Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network in 1966 and really caught fire in the late 1970s when dozens more religious radicals added their voices.

  “This nation was built upon a Christian foundation, upon a Bible foundation,” declaimed Rev. James Robison, roaming from the pulpit and brandishing his Bible like a weapon as he decimated the Constitution in Jesus’ name.

  On a different channel, Paul Weyrich, a leading lay leader of the Christian Right and cofounder with Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, fumed: “We don’t want everybody to vote. Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

  “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools,” said Rev. Falwell. “The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

  For all of their virtuous posturing, the morality these power-grabbing men of the cloth were championing was their singular version of it. As their crusades to spread fear and division became more blatant, so did my desire to sabotage their efforts through ridicule. I’d begun making notes for a screenplay titled Religion, with the intent to satirize these fundamentalist TV ministries as savagely and commercially as Paddy Chayefsky, mocked television itself in the film Network.

  Mischievously thinking I would take my producer credit as “The Rev. Norman Lear,” I sent a twenty-dollar check and became a minister in the Universal Life Church, the largest of the worldwide mail-order ministries. (As a clergyman of the ULC I have yet to baptize a child or offer a wafer, but I have officiated at four weddings, including the first marriage of South Park cocreator Trey Parker, which I mention only because I take such pride in our friendship. I think of Trey and his partner Matt Stone’s musical comedy The Book of Mormon as one of the great gifts of sanity to the world.)

  My interest in the ULC was rewarded when I visited its founder, the Rev. Kirby Hensley, at his headquarters in Modesto, California. Hensley was a small, crackly bundle of nervous energy from North Carolina. Speaking with the tangy Southern drawl that I’d learned to love when it issued from the mouth of that left-leaning clodhopper (his term, not mine) John Henry Faulk, Hensley laid out the ULC faith in six words: “Do only that which is right.”

  One of Hensley’s aims for the church was to give the working class a legal opportunity to avail themselves of business-related tax exemptions “just like them fat cats and their teams of accountants do.” But didn’t it disturb him to see Scripture used for personal gain? I would be surprised, he said, how many ULC ministers “take their holy posts seriously, wrap themselves in their religions, and truly find God.” And as for the crafty ones who become reverends only for the write-offs, “Well,” said Hensley, grinning, “ain’t no one said God was short on patience.”

  Researching the church ministry for me, an aide came across two best friends whose lives contained the seeds of the kind of story I wanted to develop. In their day jobs they were policemen. As clergymen they held Sunday services in their garages or playrooms, which, for tax purposes, they wrote off as sanctuaries. Their family vacations were claimed as religious retreats. All in all, church-related tax write-offs could allow them four thousand dollars more a year in take-home pay, a considerable sum given the salary of the average cop.

  The outline of my story had these good men entering the ministry, motivated entirely by the tax savings it provided them. Both take to their pulpits successfully, but the one with the larger personality outshines his friend and, as the word gets out, finds himself invited to move his Sunday service to a local auditorium, where a TV camera and a vast public soon discover him. Riding on the back of Jesus and seduced by celebrity, big money, and power, he develops a “Feel Good” brand of Christianity that ultimately begets him a megachurch and lands him on the cover of Time.

  The other cop actually “finds God.” His ministry becomes a bastion of help and healing in his community, and his faith grows apace with the results of his commitment. As things play out, the first man gets drunk on his fifteen minutes of fame and becomes a political tool of right-wing billionaires. He gets razor close to running for high office, at which point something unsavory comes to light and, just as he is about to lose everything, he’s “saved” by his pal.

  Universal Pictures found the story intriguing and ordered a screenplay. I met with two of the funniest comics around, Richard Pryor and Robin Williams, and we couldn’t have had a more hilarious time coming up with characters and potential scenes. The more we laughed, the more serious the project became in our minds. Then one day, while working to realize the film we envisioned, my concern reached its peak. I had tuned in to Jimmy Swaggart and caught the reverend, Bible in hand, railing about a constitutional issue that was due to come before the Supreme Court and asking his “godly” viewers to pray for the “removal” of a certain justice. That was the last straw for me—I had to do something. I knew that even if I had a Religion script ready to go, it would still take a couple of years to make the film. The need to alert people immediately to the danger at hand was pressing and I realized I could create a public service announcement (PSA) and get it on the air in a matter of weeks. That is what I did.

  My PSA was on the money. It had a working guy, a hard hat, standing next to a piece of factory equipment, talking straight into the camera, which pushed in from a wide shot to a close-up as he said:

  Hi. I have a problem. I’m religious. We’re a religious family, but that don’t mean we see things the same way politically. Now, here come certain preachers on radio and TV and in the mail, telling us on a bunch of political issues that there’s just one Christian position, and implying if we don’t agree we’re not good Christians. So, my son is a bad Christian on two issues. My wife is a good Christian on those issues but she’s a bad Christian on two others. Lucky me, I’m a hundred percent Christian because I agree with the preacher on all of them. Now, my problem is I know my boy is as good a Christian as me. My wife, she’s better. So maybe there’s something wrong when people, even preachers, suggest that other people are good Christians or bad Christians depending on their political views. That’s not the American way.

  The actor was perfect and I couldn’t wait to share the spot with my friends and associates. Echoing Mickey Rooney years earlier when I’d described Archie Bunker to him, Robin French, Tandem/T.A.T.’s head of distribution, said, “They’re going to kill you, Norman.” Everyone felt I was making a big mistake. I was from Hollywood, a Jew, and wealthy, and if that wasn’t three strikes against anyone going to war w
ith the Christian Right, my pals couldn’t imagine what was.

  Realizing that they were correct, and that my TV spot could benefit greatly from the endorsement of mainline church leaders, I reached out to many, first among them Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame. Father Hesburgh was a brilliant and gentle warrior who had served on the board of the United States Civil Rights Commission since its inception. I flew to South Bend, Indiana, and we discussed my fears about the toxic preachments of the fundamentalist ministers. When I played my PSA he thought it right on target. Most mainline church leaders would agree, he felt, that a voter’s political point of view has no bearing on his or her standing as a Christian. Moreover, he shared my concern about the way so many evangelical ministers, as he so unforgettably put it, “torture Scripture.”

  With Father Hesburgh’s endorsement, I traversed the country to visit with other mainline church leaders: in Chicago, Dr. Martin E. Marty, religious historian at the university there; in San Antonio, Rev. Jimmy Allen, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the last moderate to serve in that role; in DC, Rev. James Dunn, national spokesman for the SBC, and Charles Bergstrom, spokesman for the Lutheran Church; in New York, William Sloane Coffin, senior minister at Riverside Church (whom I once begged to run for the presidency), Colin Williams, dean of the Yale Divinity School, and minister (and former Republican congressman) John Buchanan; and in Austin, inspirational congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

  To a person they approved my PSA and several offered to sign on if I decided to organize around it. After vetting the notion with several friends—Stanley Sheinbaum, a major civil and human rights activist; Rev. George Regas and Rabbi Leonard Beerman, cofounders of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace; and Marge Tabankin, the best-connected civil rights activist in L.A.—I decided to move ahead. “That’s not the American way,” our hard hat said of the mixture of politics and religion in the PSA, and so People For the American Way was established as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

  We found our first president and CEO when Marge introduced me to Tony Podesta, who had worked on the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Ted Kennedy. He whipped a terrific staff together in what seemed like no time, while I continued to travel, showing the PSA, pitching my heart out in countless homes and hotel ballrooms across America to raise money and awareness.

  All of that became easier after we ran the PSA on a local DC station. The national press covered the ad, the nightly news shows played it in its entirety, and I was invited to be interviewed by Tom Brokaw, then on the Today show. Brokaw’s producers saw the PFAW story as “Hollywood Coming After the Christian Right.” To disabuse viewers of that notion I asked former Iowa senator Harold Hughes, himself an evangelical Christian but politically moderate, to appear with me. A single impression on a network news broadcast back when there were only three of them (plus a months-old CNN) was a very big deal, and in a single eight-minute interview—the news had room to breathe then—People For the American Way gained recognition by the establishment and more media attention followed. Our numbers grew and well-known faces became more interested in supporting us.

  I wrote several more PSAs, and director Jonathan Demme (later to win an Academy Award for The Silence of the Lambs) came aboard to direct them. They featured Carol Burnett, Goldie Hawn, Ned Beatty, and Muhammad Ali, among others, and further emphasized that the right to freely express differing opinions was the American way. Demme’s light touch brought humor to each piece, which gave the taglines more punch. It also helped to raise the money required to buy the TV time to run them, and provided me with a degree of pride and satisfaction very similar to what I derived from a hit show. I was reaching people to share my passion. Talk about highs!

  Maintaining that high late in 1981, I produced a half-hour documentary about the Moral Majority, narrated by Burt Lancaster, a role-model citizen activist who used every ounce of his smarts and celebrity in pursuit of social justice. Life and Liberty for All Who Believe mischievously featured the views of the Moral Majority and its leaders, as expressed in their films, speeches, interviews, and sermons. Giving them the opportunity to reach an audience that didn’t already agree with them was tantamount—no surprise—to letting them hang themselves.

  • • •

  AS WELL AS PFAW was doing two years in, it didn’t assuage my frustration over the still unfinished script for Religion. God, the Bible, and love of country were still, as I saw it, the sole province of the Right. On the Left we were behaving as though we didn’t care, and I simply had to do something about that. One morning I awoke with an idea 180 degrees removed from Religion—a two-hour, star-studded, nonpartisan salute to America on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of George Washington’s birth. I would produce it under the People For the American Way banner “to show that God and the flag belong to all of us, no matter where we stand politically.”

  By the time I shopped that idea to the networks, I had the title, I Love Liberty, and ran the notion by a number of stars who were intrigued by the project. That didn’t make it an easy sale. The press had already labeled us “The liberal People For the American Way” and the media could not—and to this day cannot—conceive of a liberal or conservative group engaged in a deliberate nonpartisan effort. Everything requires a label. At the risk of being considered hopelessly naïve or, worse, disingenuous, I say I Love Liberty was conceived, written, staged, and produced to be impeccably nonpartisan.

  ABC, the network most attracted to it, held back the order until I could offer what they considered proof of its nonpartisan origin. “Get two ex-presidents, one Republican and one Democrat, to cosponsor the show,” I thought. The only former Democratic president living then was the recently defeated and still widely unpopular Jimmy Carter, and one of the two living Republican ex-presidents had resigned in disgrace, so I asked ABC if they would be satisfied with a president and a first lady, Gerald Ford and Lady Bird Johnson, as cochairs of I Love Liberty. They said yes.

  I phoned Betty Ford, with whom I’d enjoyed a warm friendship based on her fondness for Maude. Mrs. Ford said she’d be happy to arrange for me to meet with the president in Palm Springs. They lived by the 13th Fairway at the Thunderbird golf course and I’d be welcome anytime. When Jerry Perenchio, a staunch Republican, heard what I was up to he asked if he might come along. The company had a Learjet at the time, and as we flew down we had a laugh or two at the president’s expense. Having bumped his head on a helicopter doorway and fallen down the steps of Air Force One, President Ford’s reputation for awkwardness was the subject of sketches and stand-up comedians everywhere. If only he’d do something clumsy for us, we joked.

  Mrs. Ford greeted us warmly and escorted us to the president’s den, which had a pair of French doors that opened onto the golf course. He would be coming in soon, she said. The room was warm and book-lined, with family pictures cozying the volumes on every shelf, the president’s imposing desk opposite the couch Jerry and I were sharing. On a coffee table in front of us sat a very large ashtray with a heap of ashes. It seemed that the president had recently smoked his pipe while receiving someone who enjoyed a good cigar. The feeling in this room was as welcoming as Mrs. Ford’s smile.

  Minutes later President Ford entered with a cheery “Hello, sorry to keep you waiting.” We told him we hadn’t been there long and were enjoying all the family photographs. Perenchio, pointing to one of them, asked, “Your grandchildren?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the president, who hadn’t really looked at us yet, “but those are at least a year old. I just got some new ones—let’s see here . . .” He rummaged among a desktop of papers and found an envelope. “Here we are. Yes, these were taken just last week.” The president came around the desk with the envelope, looking at the photos as he withdrew them. “Here’s Hannah, she’s the little one, and Sarah. That’s Rebekah, second oldest . . . Hannah again,” he said, as he flick
ed each photograph toward us, totally unaware that they were failing to reach us, landing instead among the ashes. Lifting his head after flicking the last photo, the president, perplexed for an instant that we were empty-handed, looked down into the ashtray. “Oh, no,” he said, smiling woefully.

  President Ford believed firmly that the government must not favor any one religion over others and that each man’s love of God was unique to the individual. The same held true for love of country, and so religion and patriotism, as symbolized by the Bible and the flag, belonged equally to people of all faiths and beliefs. This was the credo our show would seek extravagantly to celebrate, and we left the Ford home, after a very pleasant chat, with the president’s agreement to cochair I Love Liberty.

  A week later my associate Catherine Hand made arrangements for me to meet with Lady Bird at the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin. As I was driving home on Sunset Boulevard the evening before I was to fly down there, I was broadsided at a right angle by a car seeking to beat out the cautionary yellow blinker as I was passing through. (Could it have been my fault as well? Not as long as I’m telling the story.) In any event, my mouth hit the steering wheel, I was attended to in the emergency room at UCLA Hospital, and the next morning I flew to Austin with the swollen lip of a Ubangi tribe member. Lady Bird, who in her graciousness reminded me of Betty Ford, made no reference to my aberrant mouth and agreed to cochair the program.

  • • •

  BRINGING I LOVE LIBERTY to fruition—before some ten thousand people in person and millions on TV—was the headiest experience of my life. (Up to that point, I should add.) On what other occasion might you see Robin Williams, as touching as he was hilarious, playing the American flag? Or Senator Barry Goldwater—likely the most conservative candidate ever to run for the presidency—introduce the most fantabulous opening this liberal could imagine? Alone in a spotlight, the senator disappointedly explained that he’d hoped to introduce a much bigger and more patriotic opening number but the producer wanted something far smaller. “We argued back and forth,” he lamented, “but finally, just as happens in Washington, we had to compromise.”