New Haven's Norman Lear Dead at 101

Sad news about the death of the great Norman Lear at 101, a New Haven native who never forgot his roots. I first interviewed him in the mid-'70s and here's a piece I wrote the last time we talked, several years ago.

Try to get Norman Lear to sum up his long list of accomplishments with some winter-of-my-years pronouncement. Just try. He’ll joke, he’ll sidestep, he’ll tell you about projects he has coming up. He loves talking about what’s next.

It’s not that he isn’t proud of his 65-year-plus career as a creator, developer, writer and producer of some of television’s most successful and influential programs, including All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. (In 1973 he had seven shows on television — when there were only three major networks.)

He also understands full well the impact of his work as a liberal advocate and philanthropist. The World War II veteran (he was a crew member in a B-17 bomber, flying 52 missions over Europe) co-founded the advocacy group People for an American Way, led major voter-registration initiatives and bought a copy of the Declaration of Independence for more than $8 million in order to share it with the American public.It’s just that the New Haven native prefers looking forward rather than back. And even at age 94 — fit, trim and frisky — he has a new television series set to launch in January and a second in the wings.

“I don’t look back at anything at all,” he says during a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I am happy at this very moment. I am sitting here at a breakfast table with my wife where I have been reading three newspapers, visiting with two glorious daughters who are here and then suddenly you’re on the phone. This is the moment that I’m alive. Everything else preceded it.”

But Lear can’t help the backward glances lately with the paperback release of his memoir Even This I Get to Experience, and in late October he will be profiled on PBS’s American Masters, a 90-minute show that chronicles his life, which spans his “front-row seat” to the history of television, starting with his first job in 1950 with The Colgate Comedy Hour writing for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

Talking to Lear, you quickly get the sense he is a spiritual man, one who can veer into Yoda territory, complete with cosmic adages.

Writing the book, he says, “taught me that every moment that I have lived brought me to the moment I am at now: here and alive. I had to live every split second of my life to get to talk to you this morning. We are both alive and living in this moment.”

But what about his early life? How much did his early days in Connecticut influence the man he would become?

“Everything begins at the beginning,” he says.

So we begin there. Lear was born at New Haven Hospital in 1922. His young life changed at the age of 9 when his father, a Willy Loman of a man of shady business dealings, was sent to prison for three years.

His mother took his sister to live in Hartford while he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment on York Street in New Haven.

“I was on my own then,” he says.

He remembers going to the Roger Sherman Theatre on College Street, over to Sloppy Joe’s down the beach at Savin Rock and — what “was the star of my life” — games at the Yale Bowl, but only as a hawker of pennants and trinkets outside. He fondly remembers watching the crowds arrive for the games in the open-air trolley cars, full of joyous college revelers wearing full-length fur coats and waving their full flasks.“I ached to be one of those people,” he says.

But he remained outside the Bowl, and on one heartbreaking day he watched his uncle take a friend and his friend’s son — who was the same age as Lear — to the Yale-Harvard game of 1932, and walk past him as he sold souvenirs on the street.

“It was a tough time during a formative period of my life,” he says. What “sort of saved my life,” he says, was a gray-and-blue sweatshirt which was his main source of comfort and support and what made him feel “hugged.”

When his father was released from prison, the family relocated to Brooklyn. But the relationship with his father remained unfulfilled. Elements of his father’s personality would emerge later in the character of Archie Bunker in All in the Family, which ran on CBS from 1971-79: the husbandly command of “Stifle!” the traits of pride and vanity and Bunker’s know-it-all arrogance. But unlike his father, who was optimistic and embraced the future, Bunker feared the changing world.

What would Archie Bunker make of the Trump campaign?

“I think he might have favored Trump for a while,” says Lear, “but I think he would have a very, very hard time with it. He probably would be a Trump person to his son-in-law because it agitated him so much, but would confess to Edith he didn’t know if he could [expletive] or go blind, an expression he could use if he were on television today.”

“It’s an interesting thing. You write a character like Archie and Edith and you have something in mind. I can no longer remember exactly what I had in mind, but it certainly wasn’t Carroll O’Connor, whom I didn’t know. He comes into the room [for the audition] dressed as the character, sits down and suddenly Archie Bunker is sitting there. For Jean Stapleton as Edith it was the same thing.”

Lear says these characters have remained as vivid now as when they were created “because human nature doesn’t change. The culture changes and we respond differently, but basically we’re versions of each other that we’ve always been.” Indeed, Lear’s bumper sticker on his car once read: “Just another version of you,” which is the title of the PBS documentary that also touches on his early television career, writing for Martha Raye, George Gobel, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Henry Fonda and Danny Kaye, and his screenplays for the films Divorce American Style, Cold Turkey and The Night They Raided Minsky’s.

And his views on comedy on television today?

“There’s so much glorious material on television with South Park, Seth MacFarlane and shows like Modern Family,” says Lear, who officiated the wedding of Trey Parker, the co-creator of South Park.

But it’s what’s next that Lear wants to talk about: a new series with a familiar title, One Day at a Time, about a Latino family and starring Rita Moreno, premiering Jan. 6 on Netflix.

And as a result of his auditions for a pilot called Guess Who Died?, which was publicized in an online New York Times video, he is now in talks with three groups about making that a series, too.

Network screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky once said, “Norman Lear … took the audience and placed them on the set.” Lear responded with, “We made comedy safe for reality.”

When reminded of his line, Lear brightens as if he found a ticket to the Yale game: “I’m so glad you reminded me of that. I love that line. God, that’s good.”

The PBS American Masters film Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You premieres Oct. 25.