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A Convertible, Nicki Minaj and Lunch inBeverly Hills: A Day With Norman Lear at909:15 AM PDT 9/12/2012 by Kim Masters

[2]

Art Streiber

With a memoir in the works, the "All in the Family"creator reflects on his favorite series ("Maude"), his mostdifficult star (Carroll O'Connor) and why his continuedfear of the Christian right overcame his disappointment inthe President: "There's nothing I wouldn't do forObama... Nothing."Norman Lear guides his white Lexus convertible out of the driveway and down the winding

curves of L.A.'s Mandeville Canyon with Nicki Minaj booming profanely from the speakers.

Jaunty in his trademark white hat, Lear is heading to a lunch at Bouchon in Beverly Hills, and

as he goes, he's checking out Grammy nominees.

Lear would like you to know that this is part of a very busy day. This morning, at his sprawling,traditional house -- the walls bedecked with De Kooning, Rothko, Rauschenberg -- heconsulted on the phone with Michael Keegan, president of People for the American Way, anonprofit progressive organization Lear founded in 1981 out of concern about the rise of theChristian right. (Today's subject is a column for The Huffington Post in which Lear thwacksGOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan for laying claim to "a divine mandate for the TeaParty's radically restricted view of the role of government.")

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Naturally, Lear is supporting Obama despite some disappointment with the administration andthe Democrats in Congress who lack the "passionate intensity" of the other side. "What I sawhappening 30 years ago with the religious right is now in full force," he says. "There's nothing Iwouldn't do for Obama to defeat what I see coming from the right. Nothing."

After lunch, Lear drives to his nearby office at the Concord Music Group, where he is chairmanof the board. Concord, one of the world's largest independent record and music publishingcompanies, boasts a roster of 125 artists including Paul McCartney and EsperanzaSpalding, the 2011 Grammy winner for best new artist. But today, Lear is getting a briefing onanother Concord initiative that involves an app that will use music (and neuroscience) topromote sleep and stress relief. Then, after a haircut, Lear will head to former Warner Bros. co-chairman Bob Daly's house for dinner.

If all this activity seems atypical for a 90-year-old, Lear hardly is typical, though he wouldargue that he is. He created a bumper sticker for his car that reads, "Just Another Version ofYou." His message is that we are all alike. But really, there's no one like Lear, creator of suchgroundbreaking sitcoms as All in the Family, Maude, One Day at a Time, Good Times, MaryHartman, Mary Hartman and Fernwood Tonight.

"He's a giant," says Fred Silverman, who ran programming at CBS from 1970 to 1976. "Hereally showed 'em how it could be done." He singles out Good Times, set in the Chicagohousing projects, as the type of show that no one had done before. "It was about something,"says Silverman. "It wasn't just trying to be funny."

Unlike the frothy sitcoms of the day -- CBS was airing Petticoat Junction, Green Acres andThe Beverly Hillbillies in the years leading up to All in the Family -- Lear's shows dealt withgritty issues: abortion, rape and murder and even impotence. Rob Reiner played ArchieBunker's son-in-law coping with that last affliction in an early episode, and he recalls that theCBS standards department balked at airing it. "Norman said, 'This is what I'm going to do, andif you don't want it, I quit,' " says Reiner. "He was serious. … He's got balls the size ofMontana."

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Lear has been tested by enemies tougher than standards and practices: He's a decorated warveteran -- as a radio operator and gunner, he flew 52 combat missions in World War II. He's anEmmy winner (15 nominations and three wins) and a relentless political activist. He also is thefather of six, ranging from a 65-year-old daughter to 17-year-old twins (part of his second or, ashe calls it, "young" family).

Still very engaged with the TV industry, Lear has befriended its brightest lights: Seth

MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy; Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the duo behind South Park;and Mad Men creator Matt Weiner. In 2006, Lear officiated at Parker's wedding -- and theirfriendship has outlasted the marriage.

Weiner says he gets calls from Lear, who has helped him to reckon with the challenges ofrunning Mad Men. "I get pleasure out of him talking about 'people like us,' " says Weiner. "It'smy fantasy that I am like him." Stone says he and Parker feel the same way. "He's one of thecoolest people I've ever met," he says, adding that Lear is not only current on the industry butfar more informed about politics at 90 than he is at 41. "It's one of the fun treats of this ride ofours that we've gotten to know Norman Lear," says Stone. "I can't even believe I'm sayingthat." But when they meet for dinner, adds Stone, Lear is a straight-up good time. "Just sittingdown with him, the dude is fun," he says. "His status as an icon I think about after the fact."

Among his other activities, Lear is writing his memoir -- a massive undertaking that doesn'thave a publisher yet. "Four hundred pages," he says, "and I am only at 56 years old." Theheadquarters for this effort is his home office, with a sweeping view of his expansive, gatedproperty. The room is redolent of books: desk, shelves and chairs are stacked with them.

As part of his research, Lear watches an interview that Mike Wallace did with him in 1976 for60 Minutes. Lear was in his heyday -- six of the top 20 series on television were his. As helistens to Wallace estimate gross revenue from Lear's shows at $30 million a year anddescribe his personal salary as "immense," present-day Lear barks at the screen. "That'sbullshit!" he says.

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So what was it really? "I couldn't tell you," says Lear. "Of course I did very goddamn well. Butwhen we're talking in 2012 -- and people buy $82 million apartments for their 22-year-olddaughters -- it was pigeon shit compared to what is going on today." (The reference is to aRussian billionaire's purchase of former Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill's Central Park Westapartment.)

Lear is less offended when Wallace declares that no producer ever has paid more attention todetail. ("You can write that down," he instructs.) And he is very pleased as the newsman turnsto Lear's successful legal battle against the networks over the government's policy, adopted in1975, requiring networks to air "family friendly" content from 8 to 9 p.m. These rules naturallywere a burden to Lear, whose shows often dealt with then-taboo topics, like when EdithBunker nearly was raped. As a consequence, All in the Family, then the number-one show ontelevision, was moved back an hour to 9 p.m. Recruiting the guilds to support his argumentthat this was government-imposed censorship, Lear got a federal court to reject the policy.

This man who has dedicated himself to changing the world acknowledges, with somehesitation, that his motive in launching his first sitcom, All in the Family, was money -- whichhe never had growing up. Born in 1922 in New Haven, Conn., Lear had a childhood markedby the Depression. When he was 9 years old, his father went to prison for a phony bondscheme, and for the next three years, Lear scarcely saw his mother as he was farmed out tovarious relatives.

Lear got into Boston's Emerson College by winning a scholarship in an American Legion

oratorical contest. His education was disrupted, though, by World War II. As the war wounddown, he found a printer in the Italian town where he was stationed and created a cleverrésumé that netted him a public relations job on Broadway. He was later fired for plantingfanciful news items that failed to amuse his clients.

Next, Lear and a friend patented a clip-on ashtray, but that business went belly up, and Learrelocated to Los Angeles in 1950. He and his cousin Eddie Simmons went door-to-door,taking turns posing as baby photographers. One night on impulse, the two wrote a songparody and sold it to a nightclub singer for $40. "Twenty dollars in an evening was exactlywhat I was making in a week selling door-to-door -- because I was lousy at it," says Lear.When he came up with an idea for Danny Thomas, Lear called the comedian's office and,posing as a reporter from The New York Times, wheedled Thomas' phone number out of anassistant. Thomas was amused by that audacity and put Lear to work.

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For several years, Lear had a successful career in variety, teaming with producer Bud Yorkinin 1958. The two made variety shows and a few movies, like 1963's Come Blow Your Horn,but it was a friend's divorce that sparked Lear to create a sitcom. "All his wife wanted was the[lucrative syndication rights] to certain shows he had created," says Lear. That led him to therealization that "the only way you could own something was situation comedy. I wasdetermined to do it."

In the trades, he read about a British show, Til Death Us Do Part, which featured a right-wingfather with a goodhearted wife and a slacker lefty son-in-law. Lear and Yorkin bought therights. Lear says he wrote 80 pages before he even watched the British version. ABC boughtthe idea and made the pilot -- twice. "The exact same script because I wouldn't change aword," says Lear. "But they were afraid of it." Lear and Yorkin then took the project to CBS,and All in the Family debuted in 1971.

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"It was funny and heartwarming, and it broke ground," says Bob Daly, then in business affairsat CBS (and who later would become president of the network). Silverman, then working torevive the network's schedule, says quite simply, "All in the Family really saved my ass."

Of all of his shows, Lear is most fond of Maude. His choice seems to reflect his connectionwith the actors. "Bea Arthur made me laugh in corners of my being I didn't even know existed,"he says. "I can't tell you how she touched me." Lear remembers Carroll O'Connor, on the otherhand, as the most difficult talent with whom he ever worked. The star balked at every script."We would have meetings, and he would have his agent and his manager, and there was a lotof carrying on," says Lear. "But then he slipped into that chair -- and he was flabbergasting."

Lear may be on his third marriage, but he has a gift for very productive partnerships. (He'scelebrating 25 years with wife Lyn Davis Lear, who is on the board of the Sundance Institute.)Together, he and Yorkin built an empire studded with such hits as The Jeffersons, One Day ata Time, Sanford and Son and Good Times, but that partnership dissolved in 1975. By then,talent agent Jerry Perenchio was working with Lear, and the empire-building continued.Perenchio made a series of deals that included the purchase of Avco Embassy Pictures,

which had produced The Graduate and The Producers. (Lear arranged financing for Reiner's1984 directorial debut, This Is Spinal Tap, through that company and later paid for Stand byMe out of his own pocket, which Reiner describes as "the ultimate leap of faith.") In 1985, Learand Perenchio sold their entertainment interests to Coca-Cola for a $485 million stake in thecompany, which owned Columbia Pictures at the time.

Lear went on to found Act III Communications and expanded into trade publications, such asMedia Decisions magazine. "Act III got into trouble," says Lear. "We were in businesses wedidn't understand." Lear brought in an associate from Embassy, Hal Gaba, to help turn thecompany around. After adding a theater chain as well as a broadcasting unit, Lear and Gabasold their assets in 1997. The TV stations alone sold for more than $500 million.

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"We looked at each other and said, 'We want to stay together,' " says Lear. "I said, 'We werefollowing my bliss -- let's follow your bliss.' " For Gaba, that was music. He and Gaba boughtConcord Records, a small jazz label, and expanded it to include artists from classical to rock.Gaba died at 63 in 2009, leaving Lear at the helm. Lear concedes that Concord doesn't makea lot of business sense. "I don't want to talk about money," he replies with slight irritation whenasked about its finances. "There can't be anybody who doesn't know the music business isbetween a rock and a hard place at the moment, but … we'll climb out of it. Music isn't goingaway."

There's no question that Lear has every interest in succeeding in music and in television, too,if he can sell a project -- last year he wrote a sitcom pilot about life in a retirement community,called Guess Who Died?, but didn't find a buyer. Lear also is involved in a panoply of political,civic and philanthropic activities: He's the founder of the Norman Lear Center, based at theUSC Annenberg School for Communication, which studies the impact of entertainment onsociety, and the Lear Family Foundation, which makes grants supporting progressive causes.To Daly -- a relative youth in his mid-70s -- Lear is an inspiration. "He is so with it," he says."And he has so much interest in what's going on in the world."

With a rich past in every sense of the word, Lear clearly is a here-and-now type of guy. "If I'menjoying something, it's the best thing I ever watched," he says. "If this meal is good, I don'tcompare it to any other meal I've ever eaten in my life."

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And he doesn't mind playing the role of 90-year-old marvel. "I think it can be helpful for peopleto see somebody alive and well and eager," he says. "For a lot of years, I've thought wakingup in the morning is really swell."

SETH MACFARLANE ON LEAR: The Family Guy creator remembers a call from theking.

I picked up the phone one day at Family Guy, and it was Norman Lear calling to say he was afan of the show. Obviously, for me, as a comedy writer and television producer, that's thegreatest possible call you can get. I had always assumed that somebody from thatstratosphere either wasn't aware of us or wasn't a fan. It was the most validating thing in the

world to know that Norman Lear watched our show. It made every bad review I'd ever receivedmeaningless. He is proof that you can have a decades-long career and still be in your prime.... All in the Family still stands to me as the crowning achievement of sitcoms. It's still invokedby networks and studios as what one wants to achieve. It was fearless. It showed a ballsinessthat was much more edgy and much more open-minded than anything we're seeing ontelevision now. You watch All in the Family today -- it's rich, textured writing, and it just doesn'tget any better than that. Every comedy writer hopes that they have it in them to reach thatlevel.

NORMAN LEAR'S GREATEST HITS: His socially progressive, immensely popularcomedies defined the 1970s.

All in the Family 1971-79

Cast: Carroll O'Connor, Jean Stapleton, Sally Struthers, Rob ReinerRatings High: 34.0 (1st place) in its first season

Good Times 1974-1979

Cast: Esther Rolle, John Amos, Jimmie Walker, Ja'net Dubois, Ralph Carter, JanetJacksonRatings High: 25.8 (7th place) in its second season

Sanford and Son 1972-77

Cast: Redd Foxx, Demond Wilson, LaWanda Page, Don Bexley, Whitman MayoRatings High: 29.6 (2nd place) in its fourth season

One Day at a Time 1975-84

Cast: Valerie Bertinelli, Bonnie Franklin, Pat Harrington Jr., Mackenzie PhillipsRatings High: 23.4 (8th place) in its second season

Maude 1972-78

Cast: Bea Arthur, Conrad Bain, Rue McClanahan, Bill Macy, Adrienne BarbeauRatings High: 25.0 (4th place) in its fourth season

The Jeffersons 1975-85

Cast: Sherman Hemsley, Isabel Sanford, Marla Gibbs, Roxie Roker, Franklin CoverRatings High: 27.6 (4th place) in its first season

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