Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  Mickey was a great attorney and tough as hell, but the “killer” moniker grew out of his having had a hernia at one time. The Yiddish word for hernia sounds like “keeler,” and when Frances heard a Jewish associate call him that kiddingly one day she grabbed it. Mickey Rudin was as tough as nails, but also as fair and straightforward as could be. He helped us keep our sanity throughout.

  I wasn’t unhappy splitting everything down the middle, and that’s pretty much what we did. We quarreled over only two things. Frances thought splitting everything meant that she should share credit with me retroactively on every episode of every show I produced throughout our marriage. The killer told her that was ridiculous.

  The other item was The Gulley. That was a long and emotional struggle. I don’t remember what I had to give up by way of art and cash, but Vermont meant more to me than it did to Frances, and over time she recognized that and we worked it out. The divorce settlement—a little more than $100 million—got a lot of press, some sources calling it the largest settlement ever granted (a record that would be shattered soon and often), but it was a tonic to Frances at the time. As for me, I was sure that my obituary, whenever it appeared, would begin with that statistic.

  Frances officially filed for divorce in June 1986. Many months later I was sitting over coffee in our home on Chadbourne Avenue with an associate, Rick Mitz, who remembers the moment well. Someone walked in with the mail, and as I looked through it I came across an envelope on the back of which I saw in large print, “Frances Lear.” Printed across the front side of the envelope, which contained news of her forthcoming magazine, were these words: “Two years ago, on a brilliantly sunny day in October, I left Los Angeles and a 29-year marriage to the television producer, Norman Lear.”

  Rick recalls me laughing when I opened the envelope, took out the letter, and continued to read: “I landed in New York, my hometown as a young woman, with two suitcases of the only clothes I really wore and a few sheets of paper on which I had scribbled an idea for a magazine.” Talk about funny—maybe she did deserve credit on those scripts.

  Though I didn’t want to be involved with it, I had no problem with Frances naming her magazine Lear’s. It had been her name for more than a quarter of a century. It’s the name Kate, Maggie, and Ellen continued to use after their marriages. It belonged to all of us. The word that came back to me as she worked to get Lear’s together was mixed. She was difficult, vacillating, demanding, smart as hell, impossible to work with, generally admired, and loved by some. For the first time she was in the position—if she was the woman she wished to be—to live her dream.

  • • •

  I WAS IN A DREAM STATE ALSO, fighting to free myself to be altogether in love and to share Lyn fully with my family, friends, and associates. Lyn still talks about what she went through as pockets of my world opened up to her and her days became a series of entrances: “Of course I knew what I was getting into and I was excited because it was what I always wanted. But as they say, ‘Be careful what you pray for’ . . . it was overwhelming . . . I felt intimidated meeting Joan Didion and John Dunne one night, Barbra Streisand and the Bergmans the next; all the stars from his shows and his political life—it was hard to believe how much he does and who he knows.”

  In the “how much he does” department, I’d read that on July 4, 1986, there was to be a giant celebration of the centenary of the newly restored Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Chief Justice Warren Burger was to conduct a naturalization ceremony and swearing in of a large group of immigrants on Ellis Island, and President Reagan was to speak from the USS John F. Kennedy as the largest flotilla ever assembled of “tall ships” (sailing vessels with at least two masts) was passing by. The vessels were to sail upriver before turning and coming back down and around Lady Liberty. The day’s events would conclude with twenty-two thousand aerial fireworks launched from thirty barges and other vantage points.

  I was as turned on by all the red, white, and blue hoopla as I’d been while holding my granddad’s hand at a parade. I was especially moved by the image of dozens of tall ships in New York Harbor, each representing a different country, and I knew in an instant that I had to have one. I had to be in that parade of tall ships, not watching it from a motor yacht, and the cherry on the cake would be the opportunity under those amazing conditions to introduce my bride-to-be to everyone I cared about in the East. I told my world-class secretary, Jackie Koch, and my right- and left-hand associate and friend, Mark E Pollack, to go wherever they had to go, do whatever they had to do, but find me a tall ship.

  I had every confidence that Jackie and young Pollack would deliver. Then, and through all the years since, Mark E has been there and has always delivered. MEP is a floater with a purpose. He floats in and out of everything going on around him, sees something—or a thousand and one things—that need to be done, and simply shows up to help. Helping is his purpose in life. He hasn’t worked for me formally in decades, but no matter what I’ve been up to, Mark E has been at my elbow or out in front of me every step of the way.

  Mark E came up with the Galaxy, a two-mast vessel representing the State of Israel that was on its way to participate in the centennial tall ships parade, now two months away. That gave me time to accept an invitation from Gore Vidal to come to Ravello, on the Amalfi coast of Italy, to discuss a miniseries “based on” Abraham Lincoln. “Lincoln, the man, does not as yet exist in literature,” he said, and had intended to write a book about him. But then he fell in love with Mary Hartman, appeared on it nightly for a week, and was now convinced that was the way he wished to do Lincoln—a miniseries that would run Monday through Saturday for one week that he would write and I would produce.

  I brought Lyn with me, of course, and we had two beautiful days with Gore and his partner, Howard Austen, in their home jutting out over the Mediterranean, motoring the coastline in their small boat, tying up to have lunch at one of the family restaurants dotting the cliff, sipping wine and dining at night at an outdoor café, and in between finding time, Gore and I, to hie off and talk about Lincoln. Gore’s mind, historical memory, and verbal acuity dazzled and entertained me. So did his take on the Washington of the time—“a world of gambling clubs and whorehouses that catered to every taste and income.” It did not stun Gore, as it did me, that his research into Lincoln unearthed a law partner who claimed the president had confided a concern that he might have syphilis. It revealed as well that Salmon P. Chase, his chief rival for the presidency, had “an uncommonly close relationship with his daughter.” As did Walt Whitman, the research indicated, with a nineteen-year-old boy.

  Gore wrote a twenty-four-page outline to pitch the miniseries, which we did some months later. The networks gulped at the Chase and Whitman “revelations” and thought connecting Lincoln to syphilis, even through hearsay, was a joke. Gore sold hard and brilliantly, but I don’t think my association with comedy, let alone my being well known, according to Jerry Falwell, for bringing “filth and perversion into America’s living rooms,” was of much help to him. Eventually Vidal wrote the book he started out to do in the first place, and then it was picked up by NBC for a miniseries that starred Sam Waterston and Mary Tyler Moore and won an Emmy for its director, Lamont Johnson.

  It was May 11 when we left Ravello. Lyn’s birthday was coming up on the fourteenth, and where better to celebrate it than the Hotel San Pietro, one of the most romantic spots I’ve ever visited. Built into the top of a cliff in the neighboring town of Positano, with an elevator going down some hundreds of feet through the rock to a small Mediterranean beach and a dock below, there could not have been a more perfect location for a proposal of marriage. Not that I brought Lyn there to do that. It just popped into my head like any other idea. What’ll I do for her birthday? Ask her to marry me.

  On the big day, while she was napping, I spoke with the pastry chef preparing Lyn’s birthday cake—and made him smile. Lyn was exquisite at tab
le that night. The dining room at San Pietro is an inside garden with lush, leafy vines along the walls and forming a design on the ceiling. Did I mention that Lyn was exquisite? As we sat over drinks in this magical place, words did not come easily. It was the pauses that spoke volumes.

  At dessert the waiter brought a bottle of champagne, two glasses, and a small birthday cake, the frosting styled to make the loveliest of “Lyn.” She was teary with sentiment when she started to cut into the cake, and surprised when her knife engaged something hard in the middle. It was a chunk of rolled tinfoil.

  Inside was a slip of linen paper folded many times. Unfolded, she found a single sentence on it, in Italian. “Only in Italy,” she said, smiling, as she signaled for the waiter. The tux-attired maître d’ came over instead. Lyn handed him the paper and asked him to read the sentence to her. Obligingly, he looked at the paper and said, “Will you marry me?”

  Lyn looked at the maître d’, then at me, and back to him uncomprehendingly. Her puzzlement couldn’t have lasted five seconds, but when she “got” it and looked up at me, it was as if the God she always assured me was present had haloed her face and lit a candle in each eye.

  • • •

  THE HEART OF THE CITY on the July Fourth weekend—“Liberty Weekend”—was New York Harbor, and the buzz and excitement equaled the Mardi Gras and Super Bowl combined. The weather was perfect, I was at the top of my game, as happy as I knew how to be, and, as it turned out, as big a horse’s ass as had ever existed in the Americas, North or South.

  Israel’s 160-foot Galaxy was the smallest of the thirty vessels gathered, but just perfect for my guest list of about forty people, assuming, as any horse’s ass would under the circumstances, that everyone was feeling warm and clubby, especially Lyn and my daughters. I’d phoned the girls just weeks before to tell them, as if they couldn’t wait to hear the good news, that I’d just asked that young woman they’d heard about to marry me, adding cheerily, as only an indisputable horse’s ass could, that she was coming east with me and I was so excited about their welcoming Lyn into the family on the Galaxy in New York Harbor.

  What a stranger that Norman is to me now as I tell this part of the story. On the one hand, I know myself to be a terrific host. I’ve made it my business, and it has given me enormous pleasure, to see that others have a great time. Ninety percent of everyone who has known me would support that claim. Here, I was producing a truly memorable, no-stone-unturned weekend for close friends, family, and associates. When I learned that ABC was covering the entire event—the parade of tall ships; the unveiling of the newly restored Statue of Liberty; President Reagan’s speech; the fireworks; and John Williams conducting the Boston Pops with performances by, among others, Johnny Cash, Barry Manilow, José Feliciano, Whitney Houston, and Itzhak Perlman—I told Mark and Jackie I wanted closed-circuit TV on the boat so that my guests could be on the water in the middle of the parade and at the same time see how the media was covering it all. Add three fine meals a day provided by a fine caterer Pollack found, and all the goodies in between, and could any host be more generous and considerate of his guests?

  But what about those guests? How removed from his “considerate” self must a man be not to realize that the general mood of those on board did not match his? Four miserable women trump one male cheerleader in any situation. My daughters didn’t want to rain on my parade—of tall ships, no less—and suffered in silence, but the pain showed. Lyn, who expressed trepidation about being introduced to them this way, recognized their pain, felt her own, and wanted to run. It was like being stabbed each time a couple introduced themselves as “old, old friends of Frances and Norman.” The girls heard this, too, and wanted to scream. It was a dreadful experience for the four people I cared most about.

  • • •

  THE MORNING AFTER the tall ships regatta, Lyn and I flew off for six weeks in Africa, a spectacular trip especially memorable for several once-in-a-lifetime moments. Tanzania is fixed in my mind as the place where, for the first time, I “sensed eternity,” which is the best I can do to express a feeling of oneness with the vastness. We were awakened in the middle of the night by some massive stirring. We sat out on a balcony just off our bedroom and watched a large herd of buffalo—somber van-sized presences responding to some internal command—trod heavily by in the otherwise still darkness. The process took an hour, and if I were I to call it moving beyond words, I’d be slighting its magnificence.

  In Kenya, after days of hoping to see a leopard, our guide got a furtive message on his shortwave and darted over brush and between trees to a small clearing where, on a low branch of a tree across the patch of ground, one was sitting. I got such a kick out of the spectacle of dozens of vehicles zeroing in from all directions on that lone spotted cat that I didn’t really see the animal until I watched the video of our trip some months after we’d returned from our safari.

  In the Serengeti National Park, staying in an enclave of individual mud huts that were far nicer than they must sound, I opened the door on the morning of my sixty-fourth birthday—in boxer shorts and a T-shirt—to find a tall, elegant African in a three-piece suit with a sheet of paper in his hand. “Mr. Norman Lear?” he asked. When I said yes he handed me the paper, which said “Happy Birthday,” and threw the door open wider. That was the cue for music. Mark E Pollack—I never did find out how he managed it—had sent me a half hour’s worth of native African celebratory music and dance. Three groups from different tribes performed as if Lyn and I were royalty. People poured out of the other huts to watch and applaud, and I couldn’t have had a more heartwarming birthday if a party planner had worked on it for months.

  In Rwanda, we were in search of gorillas. Getting to them was a hard uphill trek through heavy brush. We climbed single file, a guide leading and making a path by swiping away the tall brush ahead of us. Our footing was uneasy, stepping over low brush and branches, and guides behind or beside me often reached out a hand to help this bald sixty-four-year-old with the white sideburns. Reflexively, I motioned them off each time. (The Rwandan people seemed to live to smile and be helpful. It is horrifying to recall that this was just eight years before the genocide that saw the Hutu Rwandans slaughter 800,000 Tutsis living among them.) Toward the end of our first day Lyn and I heard them referring to me as “Majee Kiwanna.” When we asked them the meaning, it was “Young old man.”

  About ninety minutes into our hike, the lead guide whispered something to his colleagues. A moment later, there in a small clearing was a gorilla family: a mother, father, and two little ones. Close to the large male and looking deep into his eyes, I recalled the essence of George Bernard Shaw’s quote: “This wonderful will of The Universe, struggling and struggling, and bit by bit making hands and brains for it, feeling that having this will, it must also have material organs with which to grapple with material things. That is the reason we humankind have come into existence . . . and that evolutionary process to me is God.” It could have been the Herman K. Lear family, circa twenty thousand years before. I don’t think I ever felt more connected, if only sketchily, to the universe’s plan for us.

  And finally, there was the Seychelles, and an egg-shaped bungalow that rested on a story-high rock above the beach. Inside, a velvety couch followed the curve under a round window. Lying there, the window suggesting God’s eye on us—I happily allowed Lyn that—we talked about forever things, made love, and talked about forever things some more. And made love.

  A doctor friend had given me a little Ecstasy to take on the trip, with instructions to use it when we were utterly alone and in just the right environment. We knew we’d found it lying in that oval window, and later on a huge rock beside our bungalow that thrust beyond where we sat into the gently lapping waters of the Indian Ocean.

  We kissed and, wrapping ourselves in its beams, pulled the moon closer. Not to be outdone, the stars settled on us like a twinkling shawl. At the height
of our ecstasy that night in the Seychelles, we were talking about our childhoods. What happened next was mystical and shattering. Looking toward the ocean, the rock on which we were sitting changed shape as it sloped toward the water, and as I tried to tell Lyn what I was seeing, I started to cry. At the water’s edge, some distance below us, the rock appeared to take the shape of three fingers extending into the gentle waves that washed over them. Lyn saw them, too, and held me tight.

  “My father’s fingers,” I sobbed, and the dam of memory burst. There was my dad, plucking yet another strumberry from the bowl of berries and cream, plopping it into his mouth with wet fingers, his eyes rolling heavenward with the taste. There he was, driving so contentedly, the thumb and forefinger of either hand diligently at work, depending on which nostril he was picking. There he was at table again, his hands in the air, greasy fingers accenting and punctuating every detail of the point he was making.

  At some point I started to laugh at the images tossing about in my head, the laughs and tears running together, and, as Lyn recalls, I asked out loud what my father’s hand was doing there. A day or two later we were alone on another island, where she took a video of me that I wrote about in a journal I failed to keep up:

  Yes, oh God, I’m on the beach on one of the islands in the Seychelles where we found not a soul and I come out of the water with my head wrapped in a kind of pirate wrap, and being a pirate . . . Oh, God, it so expressed my zest and exuberance and joy of the moment . . . But with my father’s hand around my neck prepared to squeeze at my own invitation.