Even This I Get to Experience - Hardcover

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WHEN I WAS A BOY I thought that if I could turn a screw in my father’s head just a sixteenth of an inch one way or the other, it might help him to tell the difference between right and wrong. I couldn’t, of course, and ultimately he—and I—had to pay a serious price for his confusion.

In late June of 1931, just out of third grade and a month away from turning nine, I was eagerly looking forward to my first experience at summer camp. A roll of cloth tape imprinted with “Norman M. Lear, Norman M. Lear, Norman M. Lear . . .” sat on the kitchen counter, waiting for my mother to cut it up and sew my name into the clothes I’d be taking with me in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, my father was about to take a plane to Tulsa. None of my friends in Chelsea, Massachusetts, knew anybody who had ever flown anywhere. It had been only four years since Charles Lindbergh flew thirty-three and a half hours in his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis to get from New York to Paris, and the rare plane that was spotted in the sky had us kids chasing around in the street yelling, “Lindy, Lindy!” So Dad flying to Oklahoma was a big deal.

He was traveling on some kind of business—“Monkey business!” said my mother, who sensed that the men he’d fallen in with were not to be trusted—and for my upcoming birthday he was going to bring me back a ten-gallon hat just like the one worn by my favorite film cowboy, Ken Maynard.

“Herman, I don’t like this,” she told him. “I don’t want you to see those men.” But Herman, as always, knew better.

“Jeanette!” he screamed, the veins in his neck bulging as he stood over her with his nose all but pressing hers. “Stifle!” And off he went.

Herman Lear, or, as he preferred to be known, “H.K.”—the K standing for “King,” a name he insisted he’d been given and would never admit to having appropriated—was a man of supreme optimism. A predecessor to Arthur Miller’s salesman, Willy Loman, H.K. went out into the jungle each day with a shoe shine and a smile, pledging to come home, his fortune made, in ten days to two weeks, tops. And this—whatever he was doing in Oklahoma—was merely the latest scheme that would soon result in our being millionaires.

He was arrested upon his return on July 3 for receiving and trying to sell some phony bonds to the Boston brokerage house E. A. Pierce & Co. High on my list of vivid childhood memories is the photograph of my father on the front page of the next day’s newspaper, coming down the steps of the courthouse with one hand holding his hat over his face and the other manacled to a detective. Five weeks later he was convicted and sentenced to three years in Deer Island Prison, off Boston Harbor.

That evening our house was filled with friends and relatives offering comfort as they bought the furniture my mother was selling, she having decided on the spot that we couldn’t possibly continue to live in Chelsea in such disgrace. At one point, someone I didn’t know (but instantly disliked) offered to buy my father’s red leather chair—the throne from which he had controlled the radio dial on our floor model Atwater Kent, just as, forty years later, Archie would control the Bunker family’s TV viewing from his living room armchair.

As my mother and this scavenger agreed on a price, I was devastated. The loss of my father’s chair was like losing him twice in the same week. And, as if that were not bad enough, I would soon learn that my mother planned to take my younger sister to live with her and leave me with various relatives until my father got out of jail and the family could be reunited. I clutched all that remained of my summer dream—that unused roll of “Norman M. Lear” cloth, a piece of silent sadness which I managed to keep with me well into my thirties, perhaps even my forties—and my eyelids bit down hard on the tears I was fighting to hold back. At that point someone—an uncle or cousin or neighbor—placed his hands on my shoulders, looked deep into my eyes, and announced, with that soapy solemnity that so many adults use when they are offering gratuitous counsel to the young, “Remember, Norman, you’re the man of the house now.”

This had to be the moment when my awareness of the foolishness of the human condition was born. I was just past my ninth birthday, my father had been brought down before my eyes from a ten to a zero, my mother and sister were about to disappear from my daily life, my own identity was no more than a thin bit of fabric in my fist, and I was looking up into the face of this fatuous asshole telling me that I was the man of the house now. And then he added, with a smarmy smile I wanted to rip from his face: “No, no, son! A man of the house doesn’t cry.”

How could I not have developed a deep appreciation for the absurdities amid the gravity of our existence?

• • •

IN MY NINETY-PLUS YEARS I’ve lived a multitude of lives. There was that early life with my parents and relatives; a life as a kid with my blood buddies Herbie Lerner and the Schwarz twins; a life in high school zeroing in on the humor in our existence; a life in college cut short by World War II; a life as a crew member in a B-17 bomber flying fifty-two missions over Europe; a life in the world of entertainment, with sublives in television, radio, movies, and music; a life as a political activist; a life in philanthropy; a late-starting life as a spiritual seeker; three lives as a husband, six as a father (with my youngest born forty-eight years after my eldest), and four as a grandfather.

In the course of all these lives, I had a front-row seat at the birth of television; wrote, produced, created, or developed more than a hundred shows; had nine on the air at the same time; finished one season with three of the top four and another with five of the top nine; hosted Saturday Night Live; wrote, directed, produced, executive-produced, or financed more than a dozen major films; before normalization, led an entourage of Hollywood writers and producers on a three-week tour of China; founded several cause-oriented national organizations, including the 300,000-member liberal advocacy group People For the American Way; was told by the New York Times that I changed the face of television; was labeled the “No. 1 enemy of the American family” by Jerry Falwell; was warned by Pat Robertson that my arms were “too short to box with God”; made it onto Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List”; was presented with the National Medal of the Arts by President Clinton; purchased an original copy of the Declaration of Independence and toured it for ten years in all fifty states; was ranked by Entertainment Weekly fortieth among the “100 Greatest Entertainers of the Century” (twenty-nine places ahead of the Sex Pistols); ran the Olympic torch in the 2002 Winter Olympics; blew a fortune in a series of bad investments in failing businesses; and reached a point where I was advised that we might even have to sell our home.

Having heard that we’d fallen into such dire straits, my son-in-law phoned me from New York and asked how I was feeling. My answer was, “Terrible, of course,” but then I added, “but I must be crazy, Jon, because despite all that’s happened, I keep hearing this inner voice saying, ‘Even this I get to experience.’”

Early the next morning my son-in-law was on the phone again. He’d heard me say once that I wished to be cremated when I died and he...