Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  And did it my way . . .

  The record shows I took the blows

  And did it my way.

  That moment, that woman, that statement will live in my mind to eternity as if it had been shot ten minutes ago. And as I exit this life, however many years from now, I imagine running into Bea Arthur and having this exchange:

  “You know, Bea, I think I lived a better life than Fontazoo.” To which she’ll reply: “Better than Fontazoo?” BLACKOUT.

  Even that!

  SET DOWN IN A GOING WORLD

  My first white hat.

  My fourteenth summer, working on Coney Island.

  My maternal grandparents, Lizzie and Shia Seicol.

  My parents, Herman K. and Jeanette Lear.

  WWII

  In uniform, with my sister, Claire, and our parents.

  I looked like this for ten minutes in Rome one day.

  Marrying Charlotte in Buffalo, New York.

  Bomb crew Umbriago, 1944 (I’m standing on the right).

  Our same crew, fifty years later.

  IT BEGINS

  With Ellen and “Ginger, a dog I know.”

  With Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

  Taking notes with Ed Simmons, Vincent Price, Martha Raye, Hedda Hopper.

  With (clockwise) Ellen, Frances, Maggie, Kate.

  On the Come Blow Your Horn set with Bud Yorkin and Frank Sinatra.

  TALENT TO SPARE

  Maude.

  All in the Family.

  On the Good Times set.

  The Jeffersons.

  One Day at a Time.

  Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

  With Mary and Tom Hartman.

  With Martin Mull (Fernwood 2 Night).

  With Alex Haley and our ten-year-old alter egos (Palmerstown, U.S.A.).

  With my TV families.

  CONCURRENT WORLDS

  The original Fab 5: Frances and me with (left to right) Ellen, Maggie, and Kate.

  Yenem Veldt, our “other world” get-away group. Clockwise from top left: Carl Reiner, Anne Bancroft, Frances, Pat Gelbart, Carol DeLuise, Dom DeLuise, Estelle Reiner, me, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart.

  “IF THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT TO DO, WHO AM I TO SAY?”

  Television Academy Hall of Fame induction: Milton Berle, me, Mrs. Edward R. Murrow (accepting for her husband), Robert Sarnoff (accepting for his father, David), Lucille Ball, Bill Paley, Bob Fosse (accepting for Paddy Chayefsky).

  WITH FRIENDS

  With Jerry Perenchio and Alan Horn.

  With Hal Gaba, Howard Schultz, and Concord’s first CD for Starbucks.

  Cartman and gang.

  NO PROUDER MOMENTS

  Declaration of Independence road trip.

  Eightieth birthday.

  Declare Yourself.

  People For the American Way.

  ACT V

  At long last, with Lyn Davis Lear.

  The second Fab 5: Lyn and me with Brianna, Madeline, and Ben.

  Godmother Maya Angelou with Madeline, Ben, and Brianna.

  Lyn and Ben in the Lincoln Bedroom.

  MY FAMILY OF FAMILIES

  Me and my kids at The Gulley. Left to right: Ben, Kate, Madeline, Brianna, Maggie, and Ellen.

  Celebrating my eighty-fifth in Majorca: (back row) Jon LaPook, Daniel LaPook, Ben; (middle row) Kate, Noah LaPook, Lyn, Brianna, me, Madeline, Maggie, Dan Katz; (in front) Griffin Katz, Zoe Katz. Unable to attend: my dearest darling Ellen.

  Acknowledgments

  IN ADDITION TO THE CHERISHED members of my family, my life has been blessed with friends and associates who qualify as loved ones, and, while I would like to mention them all, as a nonagenarian and an author with a finite number of pages, I have found it impossible. Forgive me all others.

  I HAVE SIX CHILDREN: five daughters, one son. I have to believe that you know me well enough by now to know how much I love them, but perhaps not to know why, beyond the fact that I’m their father and love goes with that territory. The fact is, my kids are splendid people. “Splendid”—how seldom we see or hear that word. I have to believe it is because so few things are splendid, especially when the word is taken seriously. With all our mistakes as parents—Charlotte and me, Frances and me, Lyn and me—Ellen, Kate, Maggie, Ben, Madeline, and Brianna all grew up with two feet on the ground and their heads on straight. Their personalities are very different, as are their talents, but their desire to live life well, while helping everyone else to do the same, is an evergreen.

  I could not feel prouder of these children. As I write this, Ben is producing and directing his first documentary film; Madeline’s long-time passion for photography and photojournalism has broadened at Harvard to include Mideast studies and the Arabic language; and Brianna’s singing and rich stage presence is alive and well at Vassar (though, if we’ve been interpreting her phone calls correctly, we may see it compete with a passion for neuroscience).

  I talk to their older half sisters several times a week, and to Dan and Jon, husbands of Maggie and Kate, respectively, often as well. That Kate chairs the board of Ballet Hispanico and produces Broadway theater thrills me, as does Maggie’s involvement with juvenile justice issues (also the subject of Ben’s documentary). And how about this: There are no other couples anywhere with whom Lyn and I would rather spend time.

  As for Ellen, the family member I’ve known and loved longest, she has lived the most independent life of any of us. Married twice and cheerily divorced each time, she elected not to have children of her own but is a terrific grandmother to the triplets of one of her stepsons. Ellen, with a PhD in psychology and a lifelong love of horses, combines the two admirably through the therapeutic riding facility Pal-O-Mine, using the animals to help emotionally and physically troubled young girls fight their demons.

  Kate and Jon have selflessly provided me with two glorious grandsons, Daniel and Noah—and Maggie and Dan, with my fabulous Griffin and only granddaughter, the inimitable Zoe. It is they who fill me with my keenest sense of legacy.

  JOE TORRENUEVA, “Little Joe,” has been cutting my hair for over fifty years, and has spent his life unknowingly giving “How to Be a Human Being” lessons. When my family would assemble in L.A. for the holidays—eventually adding sons-in-law and grandchildren to the mix—we’d all gather in the living room where, sitting on a high stool brought in from the kitchen, Little Joe would cut each one’s hair to the music of the others whooping and hollering around them.

  I’VE WRITTEN and worked with so many men and women with whom I’ve laughed, and laughed outrageously. I see each of their happy faces as clearly as the screen in front of me and recall the deep debt I owe to, among so many others, Don Nicholl, Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, Mickey Ross and Bernie West, Alan Thicke, Rick Mitz, Rod Parker, Paul Bogart, Charlie Hauck, Eugenie Ross-Leming, John Rich, Hal Cooper, Susan Harris, Mel Tolkin, Mort Lachman, Hal Collins, Gail Parent, Ann Marcus, Joan Darling, Fred Freeman and Larry Cohen, Hal Kanter, Allan Manings, Charlotte Brown, Phil Mishkin, Ron Burla, John Baskin, Judi Ann Mason, Elliot Schoenman, Larry Rhine, Jack Shea, Jack Ellinson, Herb Kenwith, Frank Tarloff, Saul Turteltaub, Bernie Orenstein, and Ed Simmons.

  I can see us all one day at that longest of conference tables where only God, or the gods, or no one at all, will hear us, but that won’t keep us—nothing ever did—from “killing” each other.

  And, at another table a
great many years from now, will be the guys and gals, writers and performers, who have me laughing today—and they know who they are because I tell them at every opportunity.

  FOR ALL THE HIT shows we had, there were many others that, for varying reasons, failed. Several of them are discussed in the book, but four that weren’t demand mention here: a.k.a. Pablo, the first show that centered on an extended Latino family; All That Glitters, a late-night soap set in a world where Genesis had been rewritten and man was taken from the rib of a woman; A Year at the Top, about a rock band whose members sell their souls to the devil for twelve months of stardom; and The Nancy Walker Show, starring the truest female clown of the century. That I let down someone whose comedy added time to my life pains me every time I think of it.

  THE BUSINESS ENTITIES with which I have been associated over the years could not have succeeded as they did without the help of such key executives as Daryl Egerstrom, Art Warshaw, Kelly Smith, Barbara Brogliatti, Michael Weisbarth, Fran McConnell, Jeanie Bradley, George Sunga, Gary Lieberthal, Jeff Stott, Jess Wittenberg, Fern Field, Andy Kaplan, Viva Knight, Ken Stump, Brooke Buhrman, Glenn Padnick, Helen Hernandez, Stephanie Sills, Martin Shafer, Andy Scheinman, Al Burton, Robin French, and, of course, my long term associates and closest of friends, Bud Yorkin, Jerry Perenchio, Alan Horn, and Hal Gaba.

  I’VE NEVER WORKED on a production where a woman wasn’t “the glue that held things together.” The metaphor stands for an amalgam of personality, strength, and common sense that was a force for uniting disparate individuals and their talents. Among them were Jackie Koch, Marian Rees, Patricia Palmer, Rita Dillon, Brigit Jensen, Madeline Smith, Rita Riggs, Lorraine Sevré, Sylvia Ogilvie, Gloria Vinson, Jadi Joe, Ana Maria Geraldino, Jackie Jensen, and Cherry Alvarado.

  Cherry’s daughter, Julie Dyer-Lopez, came to work to assist her mother when she was seventeen, and learned on the job so well that she has worked for me for twenty-eight years now, the past seventeen of them as Act III’s CFO. I think of Julie as a tower of trust and the mother of my financial life.

  TIME PRESSURES led me to do much of my writing in cars. For thirty years, a series of drivers—young guys who wished to, and more often than not went on to, become writers, directors, producers, set designers, and decorators—allowed me to keep my eyes off the wheel and in my work. I am indebted to Jeff Shapiro, Todd Waldman, Sean Dwyer, Troy Hutchinson, Sandi Veith, Sam Wendell, Richard Draney, David Hoberman, and Greg Cope White.

  AT NINETY-TWO the best thing I have going for me is my predilection for, and working relationships with, young people. A key associate today, Brent Miller, is as talented, charming, and certain-to-make-it a thirty-something as I’ve ever worked with. Iara Peng and Andrew Gillum, without whom Young People For and Young Elected Officials might not have succeeded, are two more of the young who have inspired me. Among friends I see often are several of the spoken word artists who traveled and performed with the Declaration of Independence—the brilliant and riveting Steve Connell, Sekou Andrews, and Beau Sia.

  And then there’s Anthony Rich and Mark Johnson. “Ant,” as he calls himself, is a young cat—I know, nobody but an antediluvian uses that word anymore—in the music business. When Hal Gaba and I owned Concord Music, award-winning sound engineer Mark Johnson filmed an elderly guy sitting on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, playing a guitar and singing his version of “Stand By Me.” Johnson then took that footage around the world, put headsets on street singers and musicians, and filmed them singing and playing along to the original track. That became a video that had audiences jumping to their feet. Ant brought it to me, I showed it to Hal, we took it to Howard Schultz, and Starbucks put Playing for Change’s Songs Around the World CD on the map. The PFC band has produced several CDs since, toured the world, and the PFC Foundation has built six music schools for children in as many African countries.

  ADDITIONAL HUGS and kisses to:

  David Picker, my longtime friend and the best studio head of his time. Had he not offered me a three-picture deal at United Artists, I might not have had the strength to tell CBS, “I’ll walk if you cut that.”

  Skip Brittenham, the most dynamic and laid back (an extraordinary combination) of entertainment industry attorneys. While executing many of the biggest Hollywood deals you’ve ever read about, he’s found time to sail fish the world.

  David Nochimson, a partner of Skip’s and the gentleman attorney to whom I most often gratefully turn.

  Geri Jewell, who I’m proud to have cast in The Facts of Life, and who has been a great inspiration to me. If cerebral palsy couldn’t keep this enlightened comedienne down, nothing could.

  Virginia Carter, a research physicist at Aerospace who realized that she’d rocketed to the glass ceiling in science and, when I met her in the early ’70s, was thinking about work in another field. A vigorous women’s rights advocate, she helped Tandem/T.A.T. establish and maintain equity in our hiring and in our scripts. She went on to produce several After School Specials, full-length TV movies on serious subjects produced by the networks specifically for a teenage audience.

  will.i.am, as talented an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and citizen as he is a producer and entertainer. He is of that rare breed of stars who sees no risk in spending their public capital fighting for the good of all.

  The relative handful of “matinee idols” and “cinema queens” who, through the years, have never ceased to speak their progressive minds. Among those I’ve known best were and are: Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Jane Fonda, Harry Belafonte, Barbra Streisand, Martin Sheen, Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson, Robert Redford, Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, and George Clooney.

  Clooney is perhaps the clearest current illustration of what I find so gutsy and admirable. He doesn’t write, produce, direct, or perform—and most remarkably he excels at all four—without reflecting his conscience and his humanity every time out.

  I’VE BEEN FORTUNATE to know numbers of philanthropically inclined couples and would wish to salute them all here. Space will not allow, so let me do that by mentioning the first one that leaps to mind, Jon and Lillian Lovelace. Jon and his dad created and ran a giant mutual fund. Giving was as natural to the Lovelaces as their breathing, and since their interests knew no bounds, causes and institutions throughout the culture were the beneficiaries.

  HAD I NOT had the advice, encouragement and support of Father Theodore Hesburgh, Andrew Heiskell, Rev. Dr. George Regas, Rabbi Leonard Beerman, Rev. Dr. Martin E. Marty, Rev. Charles Bergstrom, Rev. John Buchanan, Marge Tabankin, and Stanley Sheinbaum, People For the American Way might never have come about.

  And it might not have survived and thrived, but for the dedicated and tireless efforts of its leaders, Tony Podesta, Arthur Kropp, Carole Shields, Ralph Neas, and its current brilliant and indefatigable president, Michael Keegan. Also indispensable have been Jim Autry, David Altschul, Carol Blum, Bobbie and Wynn Handman, Peter Montgomery, Melanne Verveer, Elliot Mincberg, Tim McDonald, Nick Ucci, Ricki Seidman, Judy Green, David Kusnet, Jorge Mursuli, Ann Beaudry, Marge Baker, Debbie Liu, Mike Lux, Mary Jean Collins, Carol Keyes, Judith Schaeffer, Nancy Keenan, Ramona Ripston, Bray Creech, Kathleen Turner, Alec Baldwin, Jane Lynch, and Seth MacFarlane. Without them, the organization would not be the bulwark for civil rights and liberties it is today.

  I feel as strongly about all those who have been key to the success and cultural impact of the Lear Center at USC: Geoffrey Cowan, former dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, who, with Marty Kaplan, the Center’s founding director, brought me the idea; Managing Director Johanna Blakley; Kate Folb, director of the Center’s Hollywood Health and Society initiative; and the current dean of the Annenberg School, Ernest Wilson.

  A source of great pride, too, is the Business Enterprise Trust: its first director, Kirk Hanson; its longterm director, the indispensible Kathy Meyer; her assistants, Marilyn Turner and Stephanie Weiss; the
man largely responsible for editing the documentaries we made, Mark Kornweibel; and my speech-writing confederate—in this and so many other areas—David Bollier. Although he is a much younger man, we’ve worked together as peers.

  LARA BERGTHOLD is the living definition of solidity, smarts, and truth. For the past fifteen years, she has been my close personal associate. Lara was running the Hollywood Women’s Political Caucus when I invited her to manage the Lear Family Foundation and consult with Lyn and me in our political, social, and philanthropic involvements. Now partnered in the issue-oriented firm RALLY, Lara represents me in relation to this memoir and chairs the board of PFAW.

  MARK E POLLACK has not been in my employ for more than two decades. Surprisingly, remarkably, amazingly, he has nonetheless never been out of my life, my career, my businesses, my causes, or my conscience for a single day. If anyone lived on a practical daily basis with a functioning alter ego, it is NL with MEP.