by Norman Lear
• • •
OVER THE WEEKEND I received a number of happy birthday phone calls, none more touching to me than Maya Angelou’s. (Maya passed away as I was putting the finishing touches on this book. I’d been on the phone with her just a few days earlier and she sounded wonderful. Her son, Guy, spoke with her the evening she died and heard nothing that suggested it could happen.)
• • •
I MET MAYA when we were both invited to address an all-day media conference in New Orleans. She spoke first and I couldn’t get over her power and presence. Maya Angelou was tall, elegant, precise, and regal. When she entered a room—robed in her history, her “Hello” a song of promise—one sensed the centuries of struggle from which this indomitable figure emerged triumphant.
Dr. Angelou had followed my work over the years as I’d followed hers. We became fast friends in minutes, and I told her I wanted to do a late-night talk/variety show dedicated to the life of the spirit—a show as upscale as The Tonight Show, with a full orchestra and well-known guests who wouldn’t come on to hawk their films and books, but rather to talk about what gets them through their days and intoxicates them spiritually. Maya loved the idea. She, too, believed that America was losing touch with the best of its humanity and that our spiritual lives as expressed in words, art, and entertainment were exciting fodder for a talk show and the start of a national conversation. Although circumstances in both our lives dictated that we would never get to do that show, we became family.
Maya was godmother to our youngest and asked to speak to them on her birthday call to me. I enjoyed hearing them address her as Godmother Maya, which Maya insisted on. And I savor the times they dined with Maya in her North Carolina home, where the races mixed without a hint of color line.
Lyn and I were weekend guests at Maya’s home when she hosted a party for her friend Toni Morrison, who had recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Other guests included Coretta Scott King, Rita Dove, Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Dorothy Height, Jessye Norman, and Rosa Parks. The Court of Saint James comes to mind—not that I know anything about the court—because the words conjure up a sense of nobility similar to what I experienced rubbing elbows with those women and their life stories. In their case the nobility was earned, not inherited, and I felt that so deeply it crowded my insides.
I don’t hear it as much these days but black women used to refer to each other as sisters. Lyn felt like she’d made it into the inner sanctum the day that Maya called her Sister Lyn. Long before I was in the Maya Angelou orbit, I had a brother relationship with Alex Haley, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Roots, the story of an eighteenth-century African sold into slavery in the United States and six generations of his descendants. The miniseries based on it became such a cultural phenomenon that it prompted widespread interest among Americans to research their own genealogy. As brothers we collaborated on the only dramatic series with which I was involved.
Our relationship reminded Alex of a deep connection he’d had with a white boy when they were ten years old. In fourth grade they bonded, became inseparable, and, despite their racial differences, spoke of themselves as blood buddies. Their closeness brought their two families together and they believed that this was it, forever. It wasn’t. I asked Alex what had interceded.
“Puberty,” he said. “Everything changed with puberty.”
“There’s a series in that,” I said. “Three seasons of a boyhood friendship in a culture made uneasy by their relationship, yet managing somehow to transcend the problem—until puberty.” Assuming a reasonable run, Alex and I figured we’d be able to cover their early teens, until girls and sex enter their lives. Then the community at large, threatened by the specter of the races mixing, takes to all the racist excesses we’ve come to know so well. Michael J. Fox, who two years later became a star in Gary Goldberg’s Family Ties, made his acting debut in Palmerstown, U.S.A. It played out more like a miniseries than the seven-season hit we’d hoped for, but it dealt intimately with the race issue in a small southern town in the thirties like no other show.
• • •
AS I’VE SAID, we are all versions of each other, but the thought pinches a little when I move from thinking about Alex Haley to Justice Clarence Thomas. Two years after the justice took his seat on the Supreme Court, I was in town to speak at the National Press Club in DC and a mutual friend, the young conservative radio commentator Armstrong Williams, invited me to visit with him in his chambers. Lyn, daughter Maggie, and my associate David Bollier, in town for my talk at the Press Club, accompanied Armstrong and me to our meeting.
It was clear that Justice Thomas wished to be a good host. He took pains to be sure we were all seated well—“You’ll be more comfortable here, Mrs. Lear”—and that a clerk brought us the beverage of our choice. People For the American Way had come out strongly against his nomination for many of the reasons it had opposed Robert Bork’s, and in consideration of that, I told the justice I thought it quite special of him to wish to meet with us. That was greeted with increased cordiality and I recall thinking he cared a lot that we saw him as a regular guy—and in just those words. It struck a chord in me that touched on my bumper sticker, and that led me to comment on a red leather chair that provided a familiar accent to the somber, dark-paneled elegance of this judicial chamber. It reminded me of my father’s red leather chair, I said, and told him briefly about its importance to me.
What followed was, according to Armstrong Williams, some two hours of deep and personal conversation. Maggie, Lyn, and David agree with Armstrong about the time, but they remember it as more of a long recitation than a dialogue. The justice spoke of his childhood with an emphasis on his hero, Booker T. Washington, whose portrait hung on the wall. It was clear that the foundation of Justice Thomas’s belief system, as it concerned the historically disenfranchised, was a Booker T. hand-down.
Mr. Washington didn’t believe in agitating for equal pay. He favored individual initiative to the exclusion of the collective. He believed in training his people in agriculture and industry, and they would prove themselves worthy of equal pay down the road. He instructed them to forgo the struggle for political and voting rights in order to achieve the economic rights he believed would come. While Justice Thomas may not be a literal copy of Booker T. Washington, I certainly see in that relationship the roots of his ultraconservative bent on the Court. The connection I cannot make is the one between the talkative—make that garrulous—host in his chambers and the quiet—make that altogether taciturn—Justice Clarence Thomas, more than twenty years on the bench emitting rarely a word while the Court was in session.
• • •
AT ONE DINNER THAT WEEKEND, one of the kids asked me if there was anything they didn’t know about me. I think he was looking for something perhaps a little salacious, so I stopped him cold with, “I saved a man’s life once.”
The older daughters remembered that in the late seventies I took a few solitary rests where a family vacation might have been. The difference was that, on these rests, there was only me to satisfy. I could sleep, drink, swim, eat, and talk only when I wished to. One afternoon in Tahiti I took a long slow walk on the beach, as distanced as I could be from a sign or a sound of another human being, not even of a boat or a plane. And then I thought I heard a distant cry. Looking around, I saw nothing. But there it was again. And again—a woman’s voice . . . a scream. I looked behind me and saw two dots out in the deep that I’d already passed without noticing.
I tore off my shirt and ran into the water toward them. The tide was out, way out, and it seemed a city block before I was up to my knees. But I made out a woman, arms flailing, her cries for help now directed toward me. Another block and the water was above my waist. I could see more clearly now. The woman, not a swimmer, was chin-deep and beyond her, over his head and unable to swim to her, was her husband. He had experienced a sharp pain on his left side, thou
ght it a heart attack, and panicked. I somehow pulled him to where he could stand and then helped both of them back to the beach. It took more out of me getting to them than actually saving him, but that made me no less a hero to the couple. The woman, crying in relief and joy, couldn’t stop thanking and blessing me, as her husband repeatedly gasped, “It’s a miracle, a miracle.”
If I learned the couple’s name on that lonely beach, I didn’t remember it by the time I got back to the hotel. And if I told them my name they didn’t recognize it or remember it either. And so, when I got home, my heroics, known only to three people, the other two nameless, fell flat in the telling. Frances and the girls wouldn’t hurt me by suggesting I made it up, but the possibility lurked in their body language.
Months after my Tahiti trip, Frances, the kids, and I were having a meal at Chasen’s when a couple, that couple, spotted me on their way out and rushed over to our table. They relived what was for them a harrowing episode, thanked and blessed me again, and now my story about saving a man’s life landed solidly. A few weeks later I received a letter from a sitting judge, the man I pulled out of the ocean, expressing his gratitude in writing.
• • •
THERE ARE SOME GREAT HIKES in the woods of our Vermont property and I wasn’t as up to the longer ones as I was in other years, so reflecting and calling up the past to put my life in perspective is what came naturally when the others were hiking. On one such afternoon, like whiplash, an annoying memory of a long-ago evening snapped into my mind again. It was of a dinner party at the Yorkinses. Frances and I were seated some feet away from another table, at which sat the writer/director Richard Brooks, of In Cold Blood, Elmer Gantry, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof fame, with his wife, the British actress Jean Simmons. I had never met Mr. Brooks before and was in awe of him, so over the lively discussions at both our tables it was his voice—quite authoritative and, helpfully, loud—that I was fastened on.
Richard was talking about himself and I hung on every word. I was in my midforties, he about ten years older, and I was startled and turned off to hear him earnestly complain that there was so much he wished to leave behind in this life and so little time to get it done. “Bullshit!” my entire chest would have screamed if a chest could scream. How egotistical can a man get? Over the years each time that incident came to mind I would hold Richard’s words just as shamefully self-serving as the night he spoke them.
Even though we became such good friends that I accepted the invitation to direct Cold Turkey on his advice and cast his wife in Divorce American Style, I always had the feeling that Richard took himself too seriously—until, pondering it in Vermont, it dawned on me that maybe it was I who had the problem. Of course Richard Brooks took himself seriously. And while seriousness is what I’ve projected all my life—in my work, in my social and political life—it’s not what I felt or believed about myself. That’s where the dissociation came in, the kid in me seeking subconsciously to make good for my dad.
I had time to walk about The Gulley alone while the others were on their hike, and I drank in what I’d provided for my family. “This is what a father does,” I thought proudly as the weight of H.K. slipped away from my being. I liked my past as I thought about it, something I couldn’t recall doing earlier. I liked it well enough to reflect on some difficulties that I hadn’t wished to face before, such as time’s way of thinning out the heady rapids of love and spirit that swept Lyn and me up when we met. “Slowly it turned”—as the old burlesque sketch told it—into a pleasantly hurried stream, then a comfortable steady flow, and finally into a dependable trickle with an occasional series of spurts. We loved one another as deeply as ever, but neither of us was as trouble-free and at peace as we were in the romantic first throes of a loving relationship. Like all couples, we had to come to know each other, and if any couple tells you that process was easy for them you can be sure they were lying in their teeth all the way back to those they lost when they were kids.
Five years earlier, Lyn had turned sixty, and I eighty-five. Maybe the producer in me thought he could produce a turnaround in the marital bliss department, because I’d awoken one morning with the inspired thought of celebrating both birthdays with a single party, calling it our 145th anniversary celebration.
Although sixty of the 145 years we were celebrating were Lyn’s, I produced the event unilaterally, with the help of a party planner and old friend, Sharon Sacks, and her young assistant, Brent Miller. I didn’t set out to isolate or ignore Lyn in the planning—on the contrary, delighting her and seeing her surprised was very much on my mind—but the only contribution I welcomed from her was her exquisite sense of style. Under the tent that covered our tennis court, the silk tablecloths were antique imports from India, the silverware and plating stunning, and peonies (Lyn’s favorite flower) filled your field of vision wherever you looked. The lighting was soft, lush, and romantic, as was the concentration of strings in our sixteen-piece orchestra led by Peter Duchin. (The wood we used in construction was certified through Dan Katz’s Rainforest Alliance. Every other ingredient of the physical setup was sustainable and, after the event, was given to Habitat for Humanity.)
Lyn’s sister Diane and her husband, and my family—Maggie, Kate, and Ellen and their husbands—were joined by two hundred or so of our friends and the weather partnered perfectly; it was one of those evenings that swept up everyone immediately in affection and good cheer, with one major exception: Lyn. While I felt absolutely selfless in my dissociative desire to make things perfect for her, she felt like a guest at the celebration that was ostensibly ours.
At that moment in the culture, no entertainer was hotter than Jennifer Hudson, who had just won an Academy Award for Dreamgirls. As dinner began, she walked onstage, sang “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” and killed. Then, as the next course was served, one of the greatest guitarists of all time, Buddy Guy, took the stage. He killed, too. There were no programs on the table so nobody knew who might appear next. That turned out to be Molly Shannon, who hilariously reprised her “Mary Catherine Gallagher” character from SNL. After dessert had been served I took the microphone, saluted the great talents that had entertained everyone thus far, explained how Lyn and I arrived at this 145th anniversary celebration, and toasted her, the love of my life. Then I introduced “The one, the only”—Lyn’s and my favorite of favorites—“Barbara Cook,” who began her set with the song we think of as the anthem of our marriage, “Ain’t Love Easy.” If the other performers can be said to have “killed,” Ms. Cook killed and pillaged!
When everyone thought the evening was over, just before the first person began to leave, I took the microphone again. I told our guests that a few weeks ago I’d been in New York, heard someone sing a certain song, and knew instantly it was the only way this evening could close. Here now was one of our greatest stars and a song that could have been written for this moment—and then, singing “Try to Remember,” a song so obviously written for my age, out stepped Harry Belafonte.
“Try to remember the kind of September / When life was slow and oh, so mellow . . .”
Little did I understand how much more those lyrics applied to me at my age than to Lyn.
“Try to remember the kind of September / When you were a tender and callow fellow,” the song not just written for my age but clearly for me, that still callow fellow.
Nobody could have sung it better than Harry Belafonte. We were all wet-eyed as he concluded, I especially. I took my wife in my arms. She was in tears, too, but felt curiously distant.
Friends who shared that night always recalled it—we hear it to this day—as the best party they’d ever attended. Lyn would shudder when she heard that. “That party was about you, the producer,” she’d say. “You didn’t intend it that way, but it wasn’t ours. It was yours.” We talked often over the ensuing years about the night of our 145th but I never understood what she meant, let alone agreed with her—to
my mind, if it was anybody’s night it was hers. It wasn’t until that moment alone at The Gulley, thinking it through and adding it up, that I finally understood her hurt. Daughter Kate had to take the microphone from me to make the only toast that night besides mine. Should Lyn have had to do the same, at our party?
I got it. Didn’t I say somewhere it is hard to be a human being?
• • •
MY KIDS AND LYN returned from their walk and as I saw them I recalled a long-ago walk in the same woods with Martin Marty, who officiated at our marriage. I’d asked him for the shortest definition of worship. “One word,” he’d replied. “Gratitude.”
I drank in my family to the fullest and gratitude owned me. To see my six kids come so lovingly together, despite the different mothers and the years that separate them, then to see another version of it with my younger children, Ben, Madeline, and Brianna, and my fabulous grandchildren, Daniel, Noah, Griffin, and Zoe, and add Lyn, my love of loves to the mix, and there has to be something beyond gratitude.
We sat about raking over our memories—our family vacations at Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands; in the Mediterranean on a lovely yacht; cruising the coast of Turkey and the Greek Islands; on the canals in Venice; on safari in Africa; and of course every minute we’ve spent together at The Gulley. It was impossible at my age to think about the past without speculating about the future, too, and foremost on my mind as I noodled that future were my son and young daughters and my wonderful grandchildren.
