Why Norman Lear put his foot down
EVERYTHING written about Norman Lear anymore leads with his age, which is impressive, but it’s far from the only thing to talk about, so we’ll talk about it last. It’s a Thursday morning in October, and Lear, whose phenomenal streak as a creator and producer of TV sitcoms in the 1970s included All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, apologises for dawdling at his breakfast table past 10.
“I was out pretty late,” he says. “1:30 or so.”
Lear will be receiving the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, but the president and first lady won’t be anywhere near the awards show. When Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter called Lear a few months ago to tell him about his selection, Lear said he’d be thrilled to have it, but as they worked through the details, he realised he had a problem: Donald Trump.
The man who brought Archie Bunker into the American living room nearly 50 years ago – teaching tens of millions of viewers each week that even the most hardheaded bigot can be reasoned with or simply loved for who he is – just couldn’t abide the idea of standing in the White House shaking Trump’s hand. Days after the Kennedy Center announced this year’s honorees, Lear said he would boycott parts of the event.
“I will not go to this man’s White House,” he says. “I will GoodTimes
not go to my White House so long as this man is president.”
Politics have traditionally been set aside at the Honors: Barbra Streisand, queen of the Hollywood left, and President George W Bush awkwardly smooched at the executive mansion medal ceremony before the 2008 awards show. But things are different now. In August, after first Lear and then dancer Carmen de Lavallade said they would avoid meeting the president – and their fellow honoree Lionel Richie also started to waffle – the White House announced that the Trumps would not be participating in any of the events, “to allow the honorees to celebrate without any political distraction”.
“I’m glad [the Trumps] backed out, because the emptiness of that place America is used to seeing, with those of us
being honoured together with the president – that emptiness will make a bigger statement.”
In his 2014 memoir Even This I Get to Experience, Lear writes of his euphoria on visits to Washington, how being in the White House makes him feel “a foot taller”. The city stirs Lear’s patriotism the National World War II Memorial, especially. Lear flew as a radio operator and gunner on B-17 bombers over Europe in the war.
His politics have always leaned left; he believes we’re all just versions of one another, lucky to live in a land of tolerance and diversity. That’s what his best TV shows were about, at their core.
Concerned that the religious right was claiming patriotism and faith for itself, Lear took a break from television in the late 1970s.
Lear was friends with all kinds of Republicans, starting with Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (“We didn’t agree on anything,” Lear says. “I might have been the only liberal at his memorial.”) He once had lunch with Clarence Thomas in his Supreme Court chambers. He got Gerald Ford and Lady Bird Johnson to co-chair a TV special called I Love Liberty and arranged for Barry Goldwater and Jane Fonda to share a stage.
Lear isn’t surprised that a sense of outrage and disillusionment has taken over – a Bunker mentality fused with a Meathead stridency, everyone digitally shouting one another into oblivion. He feels disillusioned, too. Many nights, he and Lyn sit up in bed and turn on the TV, and before they know it
Flipping channels, there are the late-night hosts, trans- formed into pundits and opinion-makers. Viewers look to them, he supposes, because of an absence of leadership.
“The late-night hosts remind me how inefficient, ineffective and – what’s really the right word? – how deeply disappointing the Democratic [representation in] Congress is,” he says.
It’s the absence of anger that gets him. “T-A-T!” he says, employing a favourite Yiddish phrase, Tuchus affen tisch: “Ass on the table! Tell it like it is . . . call [Trump] out.”
The years have turned Lear into a sort of a cross between Warren Buffett (nowhere near as rich, he points out) and George Burns in those Oh, God! comedies. On Twitter, Lear recently showed his support for National Football League players who took a knee during the national anthem by sharing a photo of himself as a young man in uniform and on one knee in World War II.
And even though there are around 500 scripted dramas and comedies in production for the US television market, Lear decided a couple of years ago to get back in the game of making TV in a meaningful way: He’s a producer on the superbly reimagined version of One Day at a Time on Netflix, based in spirit and tone on his 1970s hit. It returns for a second season in January.
The Lear touch is evident on the new One Day at a Time, which weaves the topical and the familial. For years, when his shows were criticised for having too much “point of view”, Lear would respond that TV always had a point of view – but that in the 1950s and ’60s, the point of view was domestic bliss, happy times and white people galore. All Lear says he did was change the point of view.
What really strikes him about TV today: “There’s just so much of it, it amazes me!” Lear says. “When we were three networks, nobody was saying, ‘Wait a minute, there isn’t enough content!’”
Everywhere he goes, someone is telling him about some new show he ought to watch. He tries. There was a time when his shows occupied half of the Nielsen’s Top 10 list. Now, who knows if anyone is watching. “Netflix doesn’t share information,” he says.
He turned 95 in July. Big whoop, he said. At 90, Lear noticed that women started saying he was cute. At 95, he says, you get applause for standing up – and an ovation for walking across the stage.
“I don’t wake up in the morning to be old,” Lear says. “I wake up to do the things that were on my mind when I fell asleep last night.”
On his mind most is his next series, which is about to start filming its pilot episode. It’s a comedy called Guess Who Died? It’s about old people – not the sunshiny, silver-fox AARP vision of old people, but the nitty-gritty of ageing, the inherent humour in it. Once again, Lear will invite viewers into a demographic situation they might otherwise ignore.
“We don’t look at ageing in our culture,” he says. “And the crazy thing is, we all want to get there! It’s good stuff.”