Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  There was my Daniel, whose personality and character lends new meaning to the words dear and true. I want to be there to see the good he’s doing when he’s thirty. And his brother, my theater-mad actor/singer/director—look for me sitting in E-101 when you land on Broadway, Noah. And Griffin, who drummed so spectacularly at his Bar Mitzvah and creates electronic dance music—I see him at twenty when Maggie and Dan wheel me into a club where he’s leading his own band, the Katz Boys? And his sister, Zoe, the life of the party even when there is no party—at nineteen what corner of the world will I see her lighting up? Then, of course, there were Zoe’s step-aunts and -uncle, Maddie, Brianna, and Ben, my noble younger children. How I can avoid wishing to grandfather their children?

  The stats deem it unlikely but it doesn’t seem to stop the possibility from crossing my mind. Recently a friend told me that someone in his family had just died at the age of 104. In the time it took me to express my delight at his relative’s longevity, this is what was going through my mind. God, or the minion in charge of such matters, offers me a guarantee that I could live to 104 if I agree to die the next day. I don’t take the deal. Is it because I’m a great risk taker? No, it’s just that I don’t want to miss anything.

  • • •

  MY NINETIETH EXTENDED into the following week, when we all met in DC to visit our nation’s capital, explore its historic treasures as a family, and bring the curtain down on my birthday celebration Friday night at the Kennedy Center, where People For the American Way was honoring me.

  I have never been in Washington without feeling a half inch taller, my voice deeper, and experiencing a touch of red, white, and blue piety. People For the American Way arranged the tour for us and it was all first class. We started at our offices, which happen to be handsome in a historic way and lovelier than most. I was very proud. We toured the White House, which was thrilling, but unfortunately the first family was traveling. That might sound less presumptuous if you knew that it was Lyn and I who had an event for the president at our home the very first time he came to L.A. when he was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004.

  • • •

  THE TWO DC stops I recall most vividly were to the relatively new World War II Memorial and the Library of Congress. Knowing I would be coming, the library filled a long table in a private room with news clippings, government papers, photographs, DVDs, CDs, and other rare items that referred back to my work starting in the fifties. When I saw a tape referencing Bob Hope and me, I was sure it was his appearance at the USO show in my honor. But to my amazement—because I had not the slightest memory of it—there was Hope in front of the curtain at one of his own shows, calling on “the extraordinary Norman Lear” to join him onstage. For some four or more minutes he talked to me quite seriously about how I managed to produce so many shows.

  You have to know Bob Hope was a showbiz god to my generation. Although at a 180-degree remove from Charlie Chaplin’s art, he was as well known and as highly regarded by his community. I was awed to see myself deemed a peer by Bob Hope.

  At the World War II Memorial, what caught my breath was a set of computers set into the brick wall that invited the visitor to type in the name and serial number of any GI who served in any capacity. Surrounded by family, I typed in the info, and in a second there I was—my photo, enlistment date, where I served in the States, the date we flew to Italy, every mission, every target, and the date of our return. The expression “mind-blowing” preceded that moment by a long shot, I know, but was nonetheless created for it, I also know.

  The People For thirtieth anniversary event in my honor was an emotional high and a financial bonanza, raising over $1.5 million. The thing that made me proudest, though, was the appearance of several members of our 750-body Young Elected Officials, one serving in the U.S. Congress and the others holding statewide office. They spoke of their difficult beginnings and how they got from there to elected office, and to this moment at the Kennedy Center. Led by the dazzling Andrew Gillum, they could not have been more compelling.

  When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi introduced me, I spoke of having accepted an invitation some months before from Nancy Reagan and Jerry Perenchio to attend the debate among the candidates for the Republican nomination that was taking place at the Reagan Presidential Library. (In 2004, at the invitation of Mrs. Reagan, I’d also attended her husband’s funeral.) That down-to-earth civility, despite our politically contentious relationship, is what I wished to emphasize, especially as compared to its opposite when the seven Republican candidates began another of their truth-bending, screw-the-facts, disdain- and scorn-filled debates—all of which has escalated to the sheer hatred and billion-dollar defamation we are witnessing from the far Right today.

  One disgraceful result of the ugliness being spewed is the way the rabid extremists who now define the party have abandoned and discarded one of their own, a giant Republican figure it shames our entire culture to have tossed aside. Not once in all of the debates that culminated with Mitt Romney’s nomination for president did any candidate mention the five-star general who commanded our troops to victory in World War II and went on to a two-term presidency of these United States, Dwight David Eisenhower. Maybe it’s just my loyalty to the ultimate WWII commander showing, but I can’t help but wonder if the denial of General Eisenhower by his party has anything to do with the words he spoke as he left office: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” (It was “the congressional-military-industrial complex” as originally written.) “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” he continued, “can compel the proper meshing of the huge military and industrial machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

  I know that Ike was late to come down on Joe McCarthy and failed to take any kind of lead on civil rights, but we have yet to elect the perfect president. And so, well aware of his shortcomings, I have nonetheless recommended to many on the Left that, since the political Right has sought to abort any memory of Ike and the speech that presidential scholars believe to be one of the most significant ever delivered, we should adopt him. No way, they say, and I think Robert Frost had it right: “A liberal is a man who is too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.”

  • • •

  THE MAIN THING I took away from Vermont and that celebration of my life was—I know I’ve touched on it but it’s worth amplifying here—the overwhelming part that a four-letter word, LUCK, has played in it. My Fates, God, the Creator, Whoever, Whatever, have certainly been generous to me over the years, not least by allowing me so many of them. Unlike an earlier Norman, I’m eager to take the credit and the pleasure my accomplishments have earned me, but not at the cost to my soul of overlooking the consistent aid of a conspiring universe. Yes, I enlisted in World War II, totally committed to serving in battle, but it was good fortune that placed me in the only bomb group of B-17 Flying Fortresses, a faster, more maneuverable plane with a better safety record than the B-24 Liberators that filled out the rest of the 15th Air Force.

  I was equally committed to working hard and taking risks, but David Susskind still had to have turned up at Ciro’s the night Danny Thomas delivered our routine about Yiddish words, or Simmons and I would not have been in New York three days later writing for Jack Haley. And nothing about how hard Ed and I worked or how well we wrote had anything do with the myriad turns of events in Jerry Lewis’s life and career that found him watching Jack Haley one night and then, at the sight of a sketch he thought would work brilliantly for him, moving heaven and earth to have MCA yank us from Haley to work for him and Dean Martin, a team destined to become the toast of the nation.

  And through those early years, many of them so financially difficult because of my divorce settlement and remarriage, what else but luck explains why there appeared out of the blue a
Mary, the AT&T operator in Boston who so gratuitously saved me tens of thousands of dollars in telephone bills as a result of her most unusual circumstance?

  As for the career that followed, while the decisions to cast Carroll O’Connor, Jean Stapleton, Rob Reiner, and Sally Struthers in All in the Family were entirely my own, the four-way chemistry that resulted in each player drawing comic strength from the other characters, at the same time brilliantly playing against them to deepen the humor in every direction, was a gift that I can only take credit for nourishing and using well. And then there’s the luck of ABC not having picked up the show, which gave Rob time to age into the part of Mike while allowing me to earn the three-picture United Artists deal that emboldened me in my dealings with CBS.

  Describing Lyn’s and my African safari I mentioned that it ended with a cruise on the Mediterranean. Here’s how that came about. Just one day before we were headed east for our tall ships regatta and our prehoneymoon in Africa, I was lunching in a trendy L.A. restaurant and stopped to chat with a friend who happened to be dining with Charles Knapp, founder of a major investment firm. After I told my friend of my plans for the summer, Knapp, who had only just met me, said as casually as if he was handing me a napkin, “If you’re flying home through London, as I suspect, and you can tack another week on the trip, hop over to Naples and pick up my boat, why don’t you?” No reason why we couldn’t or didn’t, and that resulted in ten rapturous days cruising the Mediterranean on a gorgeous 110-foot yacht with a most accommodating captain and crew of six—a gift from a total stranger. Go top that for good fortune!

  Okay, I will. Given what The Gulley means, has meant, and will continue to mean to the Lear clan, how lucky was I to be sitting in the Pasadena home of that art collector, unknown to me until that very hour, when his daughter informed him that Ken Noland called and left word that his Robert Frost farm in Vermont was still for sale?

  • • •

  THOUGH I CONTINUED my involvement in PFAW, VREG, and other matters, my primary focus was on finishing this book. And then, ironically and dramatically—exactly as you might expect in a life as eventful as mine—just as its completion began to loom on the horizon, my luck changed. I woke up a day or two before Thanksgiving with a deadly blood infection, MRSA. My doctor was on holiday in Mexico, I saw someone else, was misdiagnosed as having pseudo gout, and was put on steroids. The MRSA bug, it turns out, feeds on steroids. A few days later my son-in-law Jon, who had just arrived in L.A. with his family for the holiday, took one look at my swollen hand and we were off to the emergency room, from which I was quickly taken into surgery. Some weeks later, when he was convinced that I was out of the woods, my surgeon felt free to say that when he first saw me he didn’t think I had more than twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Jon had gotten me to the hospital in the nick of time. Son of a bitch! I can’t say I wasn’t frightened, but again I couldn’t help thinking— even this!

  After surgery I spent a week in the hospital on an IV with a hand that looked like a boy’s pitcher’s mitt. Then, still requiring a nurse and a daily IV, I returned to Lyn and our lovely home, with all of its glorious modern art, family pictures, and prized belongings. Blotting out all the loveliness, however, and drawing me to it like a giant magnet to a common nail, was the computer in my study that contained among its many icons one labeled “BOOK.” I sat there unable to do much more than stare at it for weeks.

  In addition to a mind that was having a difficult time getting itself together, I didn’t have a right hand or one of the forefingers I required in the application of my two-finger typing technique. And then a second extraordinary event took place, and the bad luck of my MRSA period was trumped by what happened Next.

  A quarterly Village Roadshow board meeting was about to take place in Beverly Hills. Attending it was a friend and board member, Rafe Vogel, who’d flown in from New York the day before. He was seated on the plane next to a woman who engaged him in conversation, in the course of which my name came up. The woman caught her breath and said, “Norman Lear! You’re seeing him tomorrow? I can’t believe it.”

  She then told him this story. Through the years she had given away hundreds upon hundreds of books, but there were two in her possession that she would never consider parting with. One was her grandfather’s Bible, and the other was a book her mother, long gone, had picked up at a fund-raiser in a Jewish temple in Ohio. It was the Bible that Norman Lear held at his Bar Mitzvah. Stunned, Rafe asked if he could have me phone her. She lived in L.A.—a few miles from my home—and the next day I gave her a call. After we’d expressed wonder at the miracle of finding each other, I asked what she intended to do with the book. She said she’d always hoped to give it to me, so I said I’d send someone to pick it up. “But how do I know I’m talking to Norman Lear?” she asked.

  I laughed and offered to pick it up personally. She said she wanted to give me my Bible, not take up my time, and then she read me the dedication on the inside cover of the Bible: “Presented to Norman Lear on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah, July 1935, by the Sisterhood of Temple . . .” She paused. “Temple Shaari Zedek in Brooklyn,” I responded eagerly, and had the Bible in my good hand later that day.

  I held this weathered volume of sacred text and imagined its history—all the homes it rested in, all the hands that opened it seeking strength and comfort, all the life struggles it witnessed before it was returned to me—and then in the middle of imagining that, it struck me like a bolt of lightning. My Bar Mitzvah Bible, lost to me for seventy-eight years, now back in my hands—and what was I doing? I was focusing on where it had been rather than on the staggering miracle of its return to me. Could I have a better example of my capacity for dissociation, for not taking my true self seriously? Or is it more a question of how quickly I caught on to myself this time?

  I think it is the latter. I’ve been taking myself more seriously lately, just like Richard Brooks. I may fall off the wagon now and then, but I take seriously the man who countered those religious figures sowing hatred and using God to empower themselves; the man responsible for bringing the Declaration of Independence to all fifty states; who helped to bring 2 million new voters to the polls; and whose proudest associations in adulthood have been with men and women who he believes, for their time, led public lives reflecting an understanding of sacred honor.

  • • •

  I ADMIRE THE MEN AND WOMEN who shared and valued the missions of People For the American Way and the Business Enterprise Trust, including the guy who conceived of them and pulled them together. He’s the Norman Lear I feel I own now. H.K. didn’t fill out the silhouette I held out for him. I did. It took all these years to get here but it was altogether worth it. I read with new eyes the Christian Science Monitor’s description of me as “an attractive man with an expression halfway between a professor and a leprechaun.”

  And you know what else I keep thinking? Of all the characters I’ve created and cast, the one who resembles me most is Maude. That’s the character who shares my passion, my social concerns, and my politics—not as articulately as the “professor” in me would wish—still, pleading to be heard and understood. Oh, and as important as all the rest combined, it was Maude who dealt best with the foolishness of the human condition because she knew herself to personify it. Oh, my Maude!

  Of all the moments in all the shows, nothing touched me more to the core while lifting me to the heavens , nothing in some twenty-six hundred half hours, like a certain scene in Maude. Once a year the local TV station in Tuckahoe held a charity telethon that Maude produced. In our third season, on the third telethon, we see Maude step into the spotlight to introduce a surprise guest and a song.

  “You’ve all heard of Paul Anka,” she announces provocatively. “Well, performing for you tonight, in person on this very stage, we have Mr. Anka’s very own gardener, Mr. Emile Fontazoo.”

  The orchestra begins to play the intro to “My Way,�
� while Walter, just offstage, furtively motions to her that Fontazoo has not yet arrived and adds, “You sing it, Maude.” Maude shoos Walter off as if he were kidding and continues with the introduction.

  From the first table reading and at every rehearsal something stirring in me grew more and more emotional and excited as this scene approached, and I wanted to shout and cry with what I was experiencing. Why? Coming up was a great scene, everyone present knew that, but something else had to be going on inside me. As I said, Maude represented my passion, my emotions, my caring, and my giant need to express all of it. If I could accept that part of me reflected in Maude the way I learned to accept the spiritual side of me in Lyn, I would be whole. I’d have filled out my silhouette.

  The scene ended with Maude alone onstage. My emotions overflowed at rehearsals because hidden in that fantastic performer was my alter ego. Walter interrupts again and urges her to sing; she sings a few notes and feels it’s ridiculous. “I can’t, Walter,” she says. “Paul Anka sings this song.”

  “You sing it better than him,” Walter responds. That gives Maude a moment’s pause.

  “But it was written for Sinatra,” she protests.

  “You sing it better than Sinatra,” he replies.

  “Oh, please, Walter.”

  “And better than Fontazoo,” Walter adds.

  This stops Maude cold. She turns to Walter and, with as much incredulity as anyone can muster in a lifetime, cries out: “Better than Fontazoo?” (Oh, my God, that line out of her mouth! Better than Fontazoo?) And then she turns to the camera and belts the last half of the song as full-out and with as much soul as Paul Anka, Frank Sinatra, and yes, Norman Lear combined.

  Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew

  When I bit off more than I could chew

  But through it all when there was doubt

  I ate it up and spit it out

  I did it all and I stood tall