Books of Jewish Interest: “Even This I Get to Experience” by Norman Lear
The July 24, 2024 Books of Jewish Interest book selection was “Even This I Get To Experience” by ground-and-norm-breaking TV producer and writer Norman Lear. Melissa Potter led the discussion, providing an extensive summary of Lear’s autobiography.
In the discussion that followed her presentation, attendees shared their memories of watching “All In The Family”, reminiscing about favorite episodes and characters. Gail Robinson recalled attending a live studio taping. Ed Cowen noted that a former “left of center” colleague found the Archie character difficult because he had a certain charm; others commented on how Lear’s compassion showed through that characterization. Lear was honored for his chutzpah in confronting studio executives and taking on sensitive and difficult topics.
The meeting ended with a group rendition of the “All In The Family” theme song, “Those Were The Days.”
Melissa Potter’s summary of “Even This I Get To Experience”:
Norman Lear was born July 27, 1922 and died at age 101 in December 2023. He was 92 when this book was published,
Norman Lear had an amazing life, and he wanted to preserve it, with all his life experiences and accomplishments in this book. Now, the title of the book is a little unusual, and in the Preface, he explains it like this: Read preface Page 13.
The first thing he talks about in the Preface, though, is how when he was just shy of nine years old, and he was excited that he’d be going to summer camp for the first time, his father, Herman Lear, who called himself H.K., the K standing for King (like King Lear?), was getting ready to go on a business trip on an airplane, which was a very big deal in 1931, and his mother, who sensed that the business partners were not on the up and up, told him that she didn’t want him to see those men. H.K. screamed at her, “Jeanette! Stifle!” and off he went on his business trip. When he returned about a week later, he was arrested for receiving and trying to sell phony bonds to a brokerage house in Boston. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. It was all over the front page of the newspapers, and his mother decided she couldn’t continue to live in that town. He then talks about how his mother sold everything they owned to get some money so she could move, and how painful it was for Norman when his mother sold his father’s red leather chair, the throne from which he controlled the radio dial on their Atwater Kent radio, which was central to family entertainment at that time. These were the models of Archie Bunker’s outbursts to Edith to STIFLE, and how Archie considered his chair to be his throne. If you recall, only very special guests were offered that seat as a place of honor, and his son-in-law, whom he called Meathead, was NEVER allowed to sit there.
But I digress. There were about 200 pages of reading before we get to All In the Family….
Not only didn’t Norman get to go to camp that summer, but his mother took his sister and moved out of state, leaving him to live with various uncles on his father’s side.
In chapter 1, Norman Lear starts out talking about his mother whom, he described as narcissistic. I’ll say! He opens the book with this story: In 1983, he got a call from the president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences that they were creating a Hall of Fame and that he was going to be one of the first inductees, along with the man who started NBC (General David Sarnoff), the founder of CBS (William S. Paley), Edward R. Murrow (very famous and respected newscaster), Paddy Chayefsky (easily the best writer that ever came out of television), Lucille Ball and Milton Berle (the most famous comedians on television at that time). After he hung up the phone, he instantly called his mother, hoping to get the maternal seal of approval that he was still searching for at age 61. When he told her the news, she said, “Listen, if that’s what they want to do, who am I to say?” In truth, Norman Lear was a genius who changed television for the better.
He tells another story about his mother, when he was 65 years old, so his mother had to be in her 80’s. She was coming to visit him in California, so he had a car pick her up at her home in CT and drive her to JFK airport in New York, where Norman met the car with a wheelchair and an attendant, so he had flown out to NY to meet her and fly with her to Calif. While on the plane, she asked a complete stranger to help her put her eye drops in her eyes, while her son sat next to her in disbelief. He angrily asked her why and she implied that he wasn’t careful and patient enough. Yet she had confidence in a stranger who happened to be walking up the aisle!
He tells many more stories about his father’s schemes, and about his father’s brothers, his uncles. One uncle screamed at him for peeing loudly (but showed him how to pee quietly), one uncle tried to steal all the women’s fur coats and purses at a family Thanksgiving gathering, and one uncle, Uncle Jack, was the nice one who flipped Norman a quarter every now and then. So he wanted to be like his Uncle Jack when he grew up, Uncle Jack was a press agent. That desire eventually led Norman Lear to New York and then to California. But before we go there, let’s talk about wife number 1: Charlotte Rosen. He met her during his junior year of High school on a hayride that he organized, and dated her a few times that summer and his senior year. One time, he took her to a play at the Westport Playhouse and one of his few happy memories of his father was when his father promised him that he could take his new car, a Hudson Terraplane on the drive from Hartford, but his father wasn’t home in time, so he had to take her in his old Model A car. His father ended up chasing after him in the Hudson, eventually catching up to them when they were within ½ hour of Westport where they stopped and switched cars. Norman says that he and Charlotte saw each other only about a dozen times before they were married, and that they really had nothing in common.
He won a scholarship to college and attended Emerson College in Boston, where he attended burlesque shows and comedy shows in a grand old theater (Old Howard) and he began acting in a theater group. Three semesters into his college career was the attack at Pearl Harbor, and Norman enlisted in the Army Air Forces. He had basic training, radio operator training, machine gun training, and then he finally got his wish and was sent to Buffalo NY for pilot training. While he was there, and on a blind date, he excused himself and went to a pay phone and called Charlotte Rosen collect and asked her to come to Buffalo and marry him. He says he has no idea why he did that! Without hesitation, she said Yes. Both sets of parents, who had never met before, drove up to Buffalo together, and Norman’s father brought along his best friend, who his parents insisted was to serve as Norman’s best man, even though Norman had asked HIS best friend to be his best man. The parents won out through their guilt tactics.
The week the newlyweds spent together was described as unromantic, just like the proposal, and then she returned home to CT when he was sent to a military staging area and was shipped out. He didn’t do well on an aptitude test, so he couldn’t be a pilot, but was instead a radio operator and a gunner on a B-17 as part of a Bomb Squadron. He spends some time talking about that experience and how lucky he was to have made it through that experience alive. He flew 52 missions over Germany. While he was stationed in Italy, he tells a story about Frank Sinatra coming to do a show for the troops. The soldiers all knew that he was 4-F, due to a punctured eardrum which laughably made him unfit for duty, yet all their wives and girlfriends were swooning over him, so they hated him, and had stashed vegetable to throw at the stage while booing. Well, when the show started, the first act was a beautiful woman, who came out scantily clad, and hit autographed tennis balls into the crowd. The soldiers loved it.
Then, Phil Silvers, the comedian came out as a second act, playing a role as a hustler, and called over one of the GI stagehands and started messing with him and embarrassing him. At first the crowd laughed, but as the harassment continued, they began to empathize with the stagehand, and then finally Phil Silvers gave up and walked off stage. Just then, the stagehand, who turned out to be Frank Sinatra, was handed a microphone and started singing. The soldiers no longer hated him because he emerged in a cloak of empathy that had been masterfully woven for him before his arrival. Norman writes that he learned a valuable lesson that day, and that the characters of Archie, Maude, and George Jefferson all benefitted from that lesson he learned as a soldier in Italy.
After the war ended, and his enlistment was up, he got his dream job as a press agent in New York that lasted only a year before he screwed up by making up a story about one of the people they represented, who was a midget, saying that she was seen shopping while riding a St. Bernard on Fifth Avenue, which didn’t go over well, and Norman was fired. Then his wife Charlotte got pregnant so they moved back to CT in 1946 and he started working for his father in one of his hair-brained businesses that included a refrigerator that didn’t require electricity but didn’t work when they tried to sell the technology to a group of manufacturing executives. They also sold hot plates and electric teakettles, but the business was plagued with problems. But during this time in CT, Norman joined a local theater group and had starring roles in some plays. In 1949, the state of Connecticut dissolved his father’s business for operating for 2 consecutive years without filing an annual report, and that’s when Norman decided to start over and move to California, taking his wife and 2 ½ year old daughter, Ellen. He said that Ellen was the only thing that kept him and Charlotte together.
This next story tells how little he cared about his wife Charlotte: Just hours after arriving in Los Angeles from CT and getting a seedy hotel room, he went out to get a newspaper to look at the want ads and was given the OK to check out any possibilities for jobs that might be open on a Saturday afternoon. Well, in this pursuit, he came across a theater that was having its opening night of George Bernard Shaw’s play, Major Barbara that night. Norman met the owner of the theater who just happened to have a front row seat available and so instead of going back to his wife and daughter at the hotel, he sat next to, of all people, Charlie Chaplin, whose son was in the play and afterwards, Charlie Chaplin gave a small performance as a thank you to the cast. Charlotte was not talking to him when he returned to the hotel.
Norman had one female cousin who lived in LA, so Norman and her husband, Ed Simmons, started a small business, selling door to door, first furniture, then as photographers, taking portraits of the children. There were always schemes involved, like here’s your free photo, but it wasn’t a good photo, but you can buy these other shots… or here’s your free lamp, but if they didn’t end up buying any furniture, they would grab the lamp on the way out. Ed Simmons was trying to break into comedy writing, and one night when their wives went out and left them home to babysit the kids, Norman helped him write up a parody of a popular tune, and when the wives got home, they agreed it was good, so the two men went out to the comedy clubs that evening and sold it to a performer for $40, $20 each.
At that time, he had been earning less than $50 a week, so they agreed that writing together was the way to go, while still selling door to door. His next story is how, after writing a comedy bit they thought would be good for Danny Thomas, and getting Danny Thomas’ home phone number by scamming a secretary at the Phillip Morris agency, they ended up selling him a routine about Yiddish words that have no English counterpart, and he paid them $500.
When Danny Thomas performed that routine at Ciro’s and it was a big hit, David Susskind was in the audience and asked who wrote that joke for him. When Susskind was told it was some unknown kids, Simmons and Lear, he wondered if Lear was his first cousin, Norman whom he had heard had moved to California. He called Norman and asked whether Simmons and Lear had ever written for television, and in another lie, Norman said, “Yes, of course.” David Susskind was working on a new variety show about to go into production and he asked them to write a couple of sketches for Jack Haley (who played the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz and was a comic who did song and dance). Two sketches and a payment of $700 later, and the two families, the Lears and the Simmonses, relocated to New York. When he called his father with the news of his move, and that he’d be making $350 a week, his father’s reply was “When you make a thousand dollars a week, that’s a lot of money!” Once again, so little support from his parents.
Norman Lear and Frances Loeb, wife #2
All that was in Part 1, the first 120 pages. In 3 more parts, and another 300 pages, Norman talk about his career, and how he went from writing during the earliest days of television, including a move to Hollywood to write for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, and he names probably another couple of hundred famous people that he came to know and befriend. Then at some point another offer came to work in New York again (for the Martha Raye show, the Carol Burnett of her day), and his wife’s psychologist said that for the sake of Charlotte’s emotional health, she should stay in Hollywood where she could continue her 5 days a week therapy sessions with him. After a year of separation and daily phone calls to his daughter and cross-country flights every other weekend to see her, his wife arranged for him to meet with her psychologist again, who threatened Norman by showing him a gun in his desk drawer. That was when he started divorce proceedings from wife #1, which took a long time and resulted in very generous alimony payments.
Wife #2 was Frances Loeb, a woman he met when an old Bomb Squadron buddy called him up to say he was in L.A. from Chicago, staying with a friend, and asked him to come over to see him. That friend was Frances Loeb. She was apparently very attractive, whom Norman called “excitement personified.” About a week later, she called him up and asked him to take her to a dinner party, and they ended up having a 30 year marriage. She also had a difficult childhood, having been in an orphanage until she was 6, was adopted by a couple in which the husband wanted children but the wife didn’t, then the adoptive father committed suicide when she was 10, and when the mother remarried, the new husband made “nocturnal visits’ to Frances starting at age 13. Her mother died when Frances was 19, leaving a note that indicated that she knew what was going on with the stepfather and was terribly disappointed in her daughter. Oy, can you imagine that? Anyway, that had to have had an impact on her and Norman said that she was formally diagnosed with bipolar, or manic-depressive disorder 18 years after he married her.
Norman talks about jobs ending and starting, and his friendships with the likes of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, who was a summertime neighbor, whose son Rob was the same age as his daughter and they would play together on the beach. He thought Rob was funny. Later on, Rob Reiner had the role of Mike Stivik in All in the Family, Archie’s son-in-law.
Norman and Ed Simmons parted ways after they had been out of work for many months and Norman had alimony payments for an ex-wife and daughter, and a pregnant wife, and Norman accepted a job that Ed wasn’t interested in.
Just after his wife Frances gave birth to their first child together, Kate, Norman’s father died of a heart attack, two years after a failed suicide attempt after he was in financial straits due to his dishonest business affairs. His father said his car stalled on the train tracks, but Norman was sure that he actually parked there. After being hit by a train, he had severe injuries and was never the same.
Francis gave birth to another daughter, Maggie, and then when his oldest daughter Ellen turned 14, she chose to live with her father and stepmother and two sisters instead of her mother, Charlotte.
Among all the famous people Norman encountered, I’m going to mention Bud Yorkin, who made a name for himself as director and producer of a one-hour TV special “An Evening with Fred Astaire,” that was the first to be shot “in living color” on NBC and won nine Emmy’s. Norman and he started a company called Tandem Productions and soon they had a deal with Paramount Pictures. While at Paramount, he made the films Come Blow Your Horn with Frank Sinatra and Barefoot in the Park with Robert Redford, and produced the Andy Williams Show, which ran for 9 years.
During this time, he talks about how wife #2, Frances, became increasingly unhappy as his career flourished. It seemed that she was not satisfied with her role as wife and mother, and she became a feminist. Norman tells of a gathering at their home in which Burt Lancaster was in attendance and when they started talking about politics, Burt and Frances had a screaming match that ended with him backing her across the room, where he out-maneuvered her, she plopped onto a couch, and he walked out, slamming the door behind him. Eventually they separated, but he felt obligated to her and didn’t divorce her for many years.
He also talks about his interest in politics, starting in 1962, when he wrote to Chief Justice Earl Warren and President Kennedy about the need for adviser on ethics in business, education and government. Lear mentions time after time that he witnessed racism and bigotry and how much it bothered him, including his time in the military when he heard about fellow soldiers from the south, who would drive around with a baseball bat looking for black men or boys on bicycles, and from an open window they would smack them in the back of the head. Also, much later in life, when visiting Milton Berle in his dressing room with his wife Frances after a show at Caeser’s Palace, when Mr Berle called for his valet, whom he called “Schvartz” (Black person) who was outside the room, and directed him to hand Norman a cigar that was in the pocket of a suit jacket that hung right next to Berle which he could have easily reached himself. Very disrespectful. Lear also mentioned that Mr. Berle was wearing a bathrobe that was open in front, with his shlong hanging out. But I digress.
Those Were The Days
Boy the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade
Guys like us we had it made
Those were the days.
And you knew where you were then
girls were girls and men were men
Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.
Didn’t need no welfare state, Everybody pulled his weight
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great. Those were the days.
After about 230 pages, Lear starts to talk about the early days of All in the Family. How he had to fight the network on the type of language used by Archie. They wanted to tone things down, because words like fag, spic, kike, and spade had probably never been heard on TV until that time. It was 1971, and at that time, the types of shows on CBS included the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, and Hee Haw. Silly comedies with nothing political or controversial. All in the Family, in its 9 year run, dealt with the challenging and complex issues in American society including racism, antisemitism, infidelity, homosexuality, women’s liberation, rape, religion, miscarriages, abortion, breast cancer, the Viet Nam war, menopause and impotence, interjecting dramatic moments into the sitcom format. It was truly groundbreaking.
Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie, was in real life very liberal-minded, and he often objected to the lines he had to say, and sometimes scripts were changed as a result of his misgivings. Some disagreements involved lawyers and Carroll O’Connor threatening to leave the series, but eventually he grew to love the character, because it was he who suggested continuing his role of Archie Bunker in the series Archie’s Place after it was decided to end All in the Family after 9 seasons. Much of Archie’s character was based on Norman Lear’s father, Herman, HK Lear, but Archie was written as a character who longed for the olden days, because he was afraid of change, as indicated in the Theme Song:
We’ll come back to All in the Family, but I do want to mention the other shows Norman Lear produced: Sanford and Son, then Maude, who first appeared as one of Edith’s cousins in All in the Family. Then Good Times, which was a spin-off of Maude, as Esther had been Maude’s maid. That show, which I only have vague memories of, featured Jimmie Walker as J.J., their teenage son, whose famous line “Dy-No-Mite” resulted in roars of laughter from the audience.
The Jeffersons was another spinoff from All in the Family. The Jefferson family had moved into the Bunker’s working class neighborhood, but then the husband, George and Weezy moved up to the East Side when he made it big with his dry cleaning business. That show was a first because their neighbors were a mixed race couple, seen kissing and sharing a bed for the first time on TV. It turned out that the woman hired to play the black wife, Roxie Roker, was in real life married to a white man, so she had no problem playing the part.
One Day at a Time, another Lear production, ran for 9 seasons, with Bonnie Franklin as Ann Romano, trying to raise two daughters (MacKenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli) as a divorcee in Indianapolis, with Pat Harrington, Jr., playing the superintendent in their apartment building.
Before we get back to All in the Family, I need to mention three things:
(1)By 1983, Norman’s marriage to Frances was no longer working for either of them and they started living separate lives with an unspoken agreement to an open marriage. During their on again, off again, relationship, Norman met Lyn Davis at a dinner party and they ended up having a love affair that turned in his 3rd marriage after Frances divorced him in 1986 because he refused to allow her to use his name as publisher for a magazine that she wanted to create for women over 50. She ended up publishing the magazine later on with the name Lear’s, which she probably used because of his fame, but it had been her name, too for 30 years.
(2)Norman’s third wife Lyn, gave birth to Norman’s only son, Benjamin, in 1988, when Norman was 66 years old. Shortly after that, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and received treatment. But before his surgery, Lyn suggested they collect and freeze his sperm just in case they decide to have another child. Well, the in-vitro never panned out, so they found a sperm donor and a surrogate who gave birth to their twin girls, Brianna and Madeline, when Norman was 71 and Lyn was 46. All his children were clearly the joys of his life, and he writes extensively about them, their marriages and careers.
(3)The other thing I need to mention is something huge thing that I was unaware of until I read this book. In the year 2000, he paid $8.1 million at auction for an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. It had been hidden behind on old painting that a man bought for $4 at a flea market because he liked the frame. He sold it to Sotheby’s in 1989 for $2.42 million after it was confirmed as an original. The purchase was a really big deal, and Norman was interviewed on the Today Show and CNN. What he did after the purchase was monumental: He decided that the American public should see this document and he created an exhibit that would tour all 50 states that lasted for 10 years. He got huge donations and in each state there were live performances and fanfare surrounding the arrival of the exhibit, and there was a Muppet video for children to watch, an introductory video by Reese Witherspoon, whose great-great uncle had been one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The Post Office donated a 16- wheeler to haul the exhibit and Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were co-chairs of the tour. There was a 90 minute live TV broadcast for the 225th anniversary of the signing of the DOI that included all kinds of celebrities.