So, an old man walks into a TV studio... How old? He's so old he's been bald since the 1950s. He's so old his eldest daughter is 70. This isn't a joke, exactly. But the old man does wear a funny hat. Because years ago, when he was writing sitcoms, he'd pick at his bald pate out of nervousness. And he does have this perpetually bemused smile on his face, like he's about to laugh at a joke or crack one. But, anyway—old man walks in with an idea for a TV show, an idea so old it was hatched before Nixon's resignation, that's how old it is. About a divorced mother raising her two kids.
Look, this is the mid-'10s. We're all about to die in nuclear Armageddon with North Korea, so maybe someone at the studio takes the meeting because the old man has been big in the business. We're all gonna die, so why not make a little television in the meantime? But has the old man not seen Gilmore Girls or Reba, has he not seen Jane the Virgin or The New Normal? Seems as if the single-mother thing's been done before.
But he's seen them all. And he knows exactly how his show, One Day at a Time, fits in, its essential place in the universe. Because this old man, no matter that he's 94, not only knows funny, he knows better than almost anyone else the hows and whats and whys of good comedy on television. Because he was there at the beginning, and because it just so happens he made the first show ever about a divorced mom raising kids. When he walks out of that meeting at the TV studio—because he does yoga every day, he can walk—he's got 13 episodes of this new show, which eventually gets re-upped for another 13 because people like it. They really like it.
After having begun his career writing monologues and skits for comics including Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, after running the table in the '70s with hit sitcoms like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and the original One Day at a Time—which, as it turns out, became the template for all those other shows about single mothers raising kids that followed—this old man isn't just badass, he's regarded as something of a national treasure. He's been around so long, he knows everyone. He's more connected than a Verizon cell tower. And people like him as much as his shows, it seems, drawn to him not because he's an old man but because he's such a young old man. On the one hand, he once watched Charlie Chaplin perform; on the other, he's the godfather of Trey Parker's kid. He connects all the TV-comedy dots, ancient to modern, and he happens to be the architect of the sitcom as we know it. Louie, Girls, Black-ish: They are all, in one way or another, spawns of his work.
So an old man—who is so old he was born before the television itself was even invented—walks into a studio with an old idea, rebooted to star a Cuban-American family, and does it yet again. Suddenly, he's got a legit, goddamn 2017 sitcom hit on his hands. It makes him smile that bemused smile. It makes him get up in the morning to do yoga. He's got a whole boxful of un-aired ideas and scripts in his office. He says he feels as if he's just getting started.
When you're as old as Norman Lear, you go to a lot of funerals—even in Plastic Town, U.S.A., where people often embalm themselves prior to death. On a spotless L.A. spring day, he's just back from one, of a dear friend, and ever the producer, he doesn't love the way it played. In fact, it's left him a little stunned, the part where they stuck the coffin in a slot at the mausoleum.
“I saw a coffin put in a wall,” he says. “I'd never seen that before. God, I thought it was much less pretty than scattering ashes over some beloved terrain. I would prefer the prettier ending.” That we don't know how “the game of life” ends drives us “fucking crazy,” he says. But this is part of “the foolishness of the human condition,” as he sees it, the built-in absurdity of life that he learned at the tender age of 9 (more on that later) and that he's reflected and exploited again and again in his 67-year career, showing us our worst foibles while making us spit-up laugh at ourselves.
“I can't imagine floating up to heaven,” he says. “The only thing I can imagine is sleep. But to me there's some, you know, excitement about sleeping like that, and what the fuck follows.” He pauses, and does a double wink with his eyes. This is a guy who's ridden the rides: drank with the Rat Pack, hobnobbed with presidents, seen the world, had three marriages (his second ending in one of the biggest divorce settlements at the time, 1986, about $220 million in today's dollars) and six kids. Here's a guy who made hundreds of millions of dollars, then lost many millions…and remade them again, calling home a beautiful Brentwood estate that he recently listed for $40 million. And all those television shows he created and developed—from Sanford and Son to Good Times, from the avant-garde Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman to one of the first parody talk shows, Fernwood 2 Night: At one time, in any given week in America, 120 million people were tuning in to watch. Even President Nixon, who was overheard on tape kvetching to Haldeman and Ehrlichman about how All in the Family was “glorifying homosexuality,” a particular badge of honor for Lear. Later, fed up with our government, he started his own political-action group, People for the American Way, which still exists today, working closely with Senator Elizabeth Warren. It all sounds good in a paragraph, but as he says, “being a human being is hard work. For me, laughing has been what adds the years.”
Adding years: That's one of Norman Lear's highest compliments. For instance, last evening at an event partly honoring his old buddy Mel Brooks (90), he stood in the wings, laughing like hell at Sarah Silverman as she did her bit. He laughed at Dave Chappelle when he did the same.
Those two, he says, they're year-adders. They're blessings. It's “delicious” to listen to people like that. But it's not like every night has to be improv, or stand-up. “Doing nothing is something, you know?” he says. “What were you doing? Nothing. That's something. I was laughing.” In the middle of talking, Lear rubs his eye. “I'm sorry I've got an itchy eyelid,” he says. “Tomorrow I drop dead, and you say, ‘He said he had an itchy eyelid, I didn't think it meant anything.’ God has a sense of humor.”
What's fascinating about Lear is how fluidly he moves in time, how young and old he seems, both at once. Someone once said about him that he's always the exact age of the person he's speaking with, whether it's one of his grandkids or, say, an even older codger, like buddy Carl Reiner (95). He can describe stealing to a matinee in an empty theater just the other day, to watch Jordan Peele's Get Out, about a black man trapped in a white nightmare, which knocked him out. (In fact, as we talk, Lear receives a callback from Peele's agent. “I have to see and hug and thank and ask questions of Jordan Peele,” Lear says into the phone.) And then, he can recount the time, back in the day, when he walked in on Jerry Lewis sporting a boner, slowly moving a lit match toward a candle that was somehow affixed to his Johnson, singing “Happy Birthday” to it, which demonstrates how far some guys will go for a laugh and how weird they can be about their penises. He can tell you about flying over Europe in the glass nose of a plane after World War II, and compare it to the high he felt the first time he did Ecstasy, in the Seychelles at 65 with his third wife. “I remember thinking I would want to do more Ecstasy if I didn't know that high without the drug,” he says. “My favorite thing in the world might be going to a beach resort, knowing that getting dressed is rolling out of bed and throwing on a pair of shorts. Dressed for the day. I just love that, that's as big a high as being on Ecstasy. We didn't do Ecstasy a lot, but we did now and again over a few years. You know, you live a full life, you try a lot of things.”
That full life reflects on the walls of Norman Lear's office, too. There's a portrait parodying the Last Supper, with all the writers from All in the Family seated at a long table, Lear in the middle as Jesus. There's a picture, given to him by the cast of Good Times, of Lear and a caption reading: “American Black Leader.” The theater in Greenfield, Iowa, named after him; the Peabody; the Writers Guild of America and lifetime-achievement awards; the National Medal of Arts given to him by President Bill Clinton: Each has its own story. The Emmys? At the 1972 awards show, at which All in the Family was nominated for 11 awards and won 7, the emcee, Johnny Carson, greeted the crowd after a commercial break by cracking, “Welcome to an evening with Norman Lear.”
But maybe what keeps Lear going is how un-nostalgic he is about that life, which like a rich novel has possessed its own illustrious chapters, lightly dog-eared but now paged past. “The old days are over,” he says to me. “Next!” On to the new adventure. “You know what I like thinking about?” he says. “I've lived every friggin' moment of my life to get to look at you leaning on your hand. To get that smile just now. To hear whatever you're thinking, to be in the room while you thought it. It's taken every split second of my life to get here. And here we are.”
So, listen up, kids: Let me tell you why Norman Lear matters—and always will. Once upon a time, in the late '60s, television kind of sucked. You always had to sit in the same room to watch this 17-ton box, and the shows were goofy as hell. There was one about a troublemaking nun who when the wind blew and levered her cornette, she took flight, like a Piper Cub; it got so bad that in one episode a pelican fell in love with her. There was another show, about a talking horse named Mr. Ed, a sardonic wiseass who made his human owner, Wilbur, look like an absolute idiot. And there was another, about an astronaut, who splashed down from space near a desert island where he found a bejeweled bottle in which resided a genie, who was a bombshell; they moved back to his Cocoa Beach bachelor pad, and she lived in her bottle on his bureau while their relationship remained platonic until the goddamn fifth season, even though she was just dying to grant him any wish he ever dreamed in his horniest secret dreams.
Never mind that a president and civil rights leaders were being assassinated and there was this little war in Vietnam. Never mind that there was a cultural/racial/generational revolution underfoot—with its attendant sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll—television did its darnedest to pretend that none of that was happening. Until one Tuesday night, when on January 12, 1971, at 9:30 P.M., something very strange happened, something that might be counted as the moment television exploded into the modern age and gave birth to the sophisticated sitcom we now take for granted.
On that night, in the big box in the living room, the pilot for a show called All in the Family introduced America to a paunchy, balding middle-aged loading-dock foreman named Archie Bunker, someone whom we'd never seen before, though we seemed to recognize him instantly as he blew through the door to his Queens row house. Here was an equal-opportunity, working-class bigot, punctuating his opinions with incendiary epithets. If he was inappropriate, he was also shockingly funny as he lambasted Catholics, Jews, blacks, gays, hippies…you name it, for no one escaped his withering slings. In Archie's crude world, his wife, Edith, who was as pure as the driven snow, was a “dingbat”; his hippie son-in-law, Mike, was a “Polack meathead”; his daughter, Gloria, “a weepin' Nellie atheist.” The shows were videotaped as one-act plays, which gave the sitcom a new intimacy. And thanks to the erudite, left-leaning actor Carroll O'Connor, who played Archie with the perfect mix of oblivious confusion, temper, and melancholy, his protagonist rose above the harshness of his bigotry to become an emblematic American in trembling fear of what the future held.
No one quite knew what to make of Archie Bunker's show. It was transgressive, scatological (featuring the first offscreen flushing toilet in TV history), and provocative. It was loud and quarrelsome, etched in sepia tones and jagged dialogue. Every week the show's producers found themselves in a fight with the network censors. Was this the glorification of a bigot, or the questioning of him? Either way, it didn't matter—America was watching, sometimes more than 50 million people at a time.
Go back and take a gander at some of the old episodes from All in the Family and it's odd how fresh they feel, and how prescient, as relevant as anything on your lightweight device right now. It doesn't take a parallelogram to spy Archie Bunker's xenophobic, isolationist desire to go backward in our new president. (Either Archie voted for Trump, or he is Trump.) That the '70s have a lot to say about this moment we're stuck in. The characters of All in the Family weren't necessarily glamorous or pretty, they were us—and as cantankerous as it got, they were at least talking to one another across all these boundaries: young, old, black, white, etc. And that's more than some say we're doing right now.
Take, for instance, an All in the Family episode from season four centered on Lionel Jefferson's engagement party, a layered push-and-pull about race. By the time Archie and Edith arrive, the party's in full swing. George Jefferson—the Jefferson patriarch, and Archie's strident equal as a racist—ushers Archie to the bar, where a white bartender serves them. The bartender addresses George as “sir,” which takes Archie aback. “That bartender's willing to work for me,” declares George, “because if you got enough green in your pocket, then black becomes his favorite color.”
From here things escalate. While the mother of Lionel's fiancée is black, the father is white (their names are Helen and Louis), something that stuns George, who won't shake Louis's hand. “It's a kick in the head, ain't it?” says Archie, relishing the irony of George's pain. The soon-to-be-in-lawed families break into pods and begin bickering among themselves, until George perks up as Helen and Louis seem on the verge of a real ballyhoo. And then something happens, something stunning and unbleeped. “Listen to them, Louise,” crows George to his wife. “That's what happens when you mix black and white. Ten more seconds, he's going to call her nigger!”
You can almost hear the breath go out of the live audience, and then there's shocked laughter. He's gone there. And standing to the side, Archie raises his eyebrows sleepily and says, “I ain't used that word in three years.” As the argument carries on, Archie adds, “In another minute, she's going to call him a honky.” Archie pushes Edith toward the door before “a race riot” breaks out. It's all here—the cross-current complexities of bigotry, the generational clash, the paranoia, befuddlement, and partial paralysis of the old order as American apartheid breaks down.
As is often the case in the show, it's the younger generation that saves the day. Mike and Gloria arrive with music—albums, kids!—and Lionel tells them to turn it up loud, in hopes of avoiding “World War III.” Eventually, Louis, the white husband, decides to take matters into his own hands and approaches the Jeffersons, seemingly hitching himself up to deliver a rebuke. Then he surprises everyone, asking Louise to dance, an invitation she accepts to the shock of George Jefferson. The pair dance by George and Archie, who end up at the bar. George's dry-cleaning enterprise is about to launch him to great wealth, while Archie, who is stuck in place, is, as Lear says now, “afraid to play the game.”
“Bunker,” says Jefferson, “what is this world coming to?”
“Beats me, Jefferson,” says Bunker. “All I've got to say is, here's to yesterday.”
When I ask Lear about the N-word being blurted on network TV that time on All in the Family, he says, “ ‘Nigger’ is the N-word. I'm fed up with hearing ‘the N-word.’ It isn't as if we've worked through it and can say it because we're racially sound and it's all behind us. But I'd rather hear the word. I'm not brave enough to use it. I am brave enough with one-on-one. I would use it being assured that everybody knows why I'm using it, but it's still so socially strange. I ran across it today in the newspaper, quoting somebody in Georgia or someplace. I mean, people are still using it with racist intention.”
Aside from having to wrangle with network censors over the word, Lear had to contend with Carroll O'Connor, who was convinced each week that the fine balancing act couldn't be kept up—Archie's despicable narrow-mindedness coupled with his humanity—that the spell would be broken and that the character would be badly misread, seen solely as a hero for racists. Lear describes O'Connor ranting with each new script, sometimes with his own lawyer in tow, certain that whatever the new lines, they were outrageous, offensive, an overreach. As the face of the bigot from Queens, O'Connor carried his own heavy weight and seemed infected by an almost existential dread. And yet the closer they came to airtime, the more he would slip, molecule by molecule, into the character and find its genius again. “Here's the crazy, amazing, magical thing about it all,” says Lear. “I write a script. I have a character in mind. Do you think I had what Carroll O'Connor made of Archie Bunker in mind? No way.
“We had some difficult times,” he continues, “but after he passed, I went to see Nancy, his widow. She asked me to wait until the others had left, and when we were alone, she took me to his study. His desk was clean but for a couple of things, and one of them was a letter I had written him four or five years before, telling him how grateful I was to him, and how much I loved what he had brought to me and the country and the world. Anyway, he kept that letter on his desk.”
When it came to Archie, Lear has oft repeated his model was right before his nose: his father. And also the father he never had, because his father went to prison for fraud when Lear was a boy, in 1931, leaving him in limbo as he drifted among aunts and uncles who never seemed to care very much. (His mother apparently cared even less, because she took Lear's sister and lived elsewhere.) He vividly recalls seeing his father on the front page of the local newspaper.
“You know, you realize the human condition when you're 9 years old and your father is going to prison and your mother is selling his red leather chair, from which you listen to the Friday-night fights and Saturday college football games,” he says. “I was going to go to camp in a few weeks, and I had a roll of cotton tape that said norman m. lear, norman m. lear, norman m. lear to sew onto my clothes. While all of this is going on, some asshole places his hand on my shoulder and says, ‘Well, Norman, you're the man of the house now.’ I knew that was funny in the most terrible way. That this was funnier than it was sad. That's a gift from the gods, you know? To understand us, at that age.”
“At one time, I had five families on the air and one on Mooncrest Drive,” says Lear, referring to the street he lived on in Encino with his second wife and their children. “Where was my attention going? I think about it that way because you know, the families I was writing about needed us for every breath they took. The family on Mooncrest, the kids were getting up and making their own breakfast, going to school. I don't say that with any particular pride. I wish they had gotten more from me.”
He admits that a few years back, in his late 80s, he went into therapy, for real. It helped him understand how much he'd disassociated himself at times from his real family. And it helped him to understand why he'd created white lies about himself in the past, including having once struck an anti-Semite (he only wished he had) and having a grandfather who wrote letters to the president (his friend's grandfather did). “It's weird: You get old and people think you suddenly have this wisdom that maybe you don't,” he says. You grow fully into this role, inadvertently or not, of being the father you never had, warts and all. You create and resist, transgress and protest and love. He tells a story, then, about just after his own father went to prison. “I was feeling terribly alone,” he says, “and the thing that made me feel best was a blue-and-gray sweatshirt that I treasured. I would put it on in late afternoon, and take a walk every evening. I would feel taller and thinner and stronger and older, wiser. I'd feel great in my blue-and-gray sweatshirt.”
He wrote about it in his memoir, and years later when he was being honored in Greenfield, Iowa—where Lear had filmed the 1971 satirical movie Cold Turkey—one extra, a woman whom he picked to appear in a montage when she was little, approached him. “We hug,” he says, “and she said, ‘Mr. Lear, I told you once what it meant to me to be in that film, and you were nice, you were real kind, but you didn't get it.’ ” The opportunity wasn't just a cool thing that had happened to her; the gesture changed her life. She'd read Lear's memoir, too: “And so she told me, ‘You were my blue-and-gray sweatshirt.’ ”
That's it, says Lear. That's the whole shooting match. “This being a planet among a billion in a universe, of which there could be a billion, we all do these little things in the course of a day that make somebody else feel good. Lift them for just a moment. I provided this kid something, and she has done that 900 times in the course of her life to other humans.”
Forget all the money and success. How do you measure that?
So, an old man wakes each morning around 7:30, 8, eats a salad and half a bagel with onion and salmon, reads three newspapers and drinks coffee, then does some yoga. How old is he? He's so old he keeps getting younger. The more he laughs, the younger he gets. “Funny is funny,” he says. That never changes: It could be a Muppet video or a fart joke. It could be a stand-up comic or the two of us sitting here on a Tuesday afternoon, having a “delicious” conversation about the universe.
Of course, there are projects still in the pipeline, things he still hopes to get made. “I wanted to do a Sunday-morning service, a service with great music and great talking about nobody's God per se, everybody's God,” he says. He also wanted to do a spiritual talk show with his now deceased friend Maya Angelou. “We talked about that for some time, but we never got that done.” Another was a show called Religion that originally was meant to star Richard Pryor and Robin Williams as two motorcycle policemen who start their own church in their garage for the tax break. And yet another, Guess Who Died?, featuring people in an old-age community, that he hasn't yet given up on, one that opens with his character, Murray, whose wife has just died, waking happy because he's taken “a great dump.” Murray then proclaims: “If everybody on earth could enjoy one good dump together, it would do more good than anything Gandhi could think of.”
There's a podcast to tape (this week's guest is Kenya Barris, the creator of Black-ish) and the next season of the new One Day at a Time. There are conference calls and fund-raisers for his political-action group. Back in 2000, he bought an original copy of the Declaration of Independence for $8 million and toured it in all 50 states. To remind America what it stood for. “We desperately need a father in the White House. FDR, who had these fireside chats where he was talking to us, that felt like a father in the White House, not a parent but a teacher, to help us talk about the things that matter. Obama, who I think was fabulous, wasn't a father figure. I think he needed a father figure like we all do,” he says. When he looks at the pictures of his kids and grandkids that adorn the office and house—all those beautiful young faces—it makes this fractured national moment with its violent spasms of racism and bigotry seem all the more urgent. “Look at what they're doing,” he says, “desecrating Jewish cemeteries, attacking immigrants. My initial reaction to Donald Trump was he represented the middle finger of the American right hand, and the American people knew he was full of it. So you pick the clown and say, ‘Fuck you all.’ This is the kind of leadership you give us? Screw you.”
At the end, we're up at the house, in Brentwood, a lovely place with art on the wall and a crackling kind of happiness in the air. One of his daughters has just come in from New York with her husband. There's food laid out in the kitchen, and after Lear eats, we retire up to his office, with its walls of cherrywood, like the inside of a humidor, but a humidor hung with all those family photographs, with the best views in the world.
I ask him about the secret to his protean longevity, and he sort of seems stumped at first, then says, “I don't know. I think living in the moment, you know, appreciating the dump. Showers are great. I'll give you a perfect example: I'm coming in from San Diego the other day on the train—I love trains!—and they had a café car and it was lunchtime. I went in there, and I had a Hebrew National hot dog—you know, a hot dog on a train. I said I've never had anything better than this. I remember an evening in Paris, when they took me to a five-star restaurant, meeting the chef, whatever the fuck, and I was supposedly eating the greatest. What did that get me? I'm telling you, nothing is better than that hot dog on the train!”
He double-winks at me, looking almost bashful.
Hot dog on a train. Secret, revealed.
Michael Paterniti is a GQ correspondent.
This piece appeared in the June 2017 issue with the title “Gods Of Comedy: Norman Lear.”
