一个娱乐界偶像充满意义的一生小说

EH: It's interesting yocall it a benefit.

NL: Benefit in that it gave me that springboard. I mean that I could think how foolish it was to say to this crying nine-year-old boy, "You're the man of the house now." And then I was crying, and then he said, "And men of the house don't cry." And I ...

So ... I look back, and I think that's when I learned the foolishness of the human condition, and it's been that gift that I've used.

EH: So yohave a father who's absent, yohave a mother for whom apparently nothing is good enough. Do yothink that starting out as a kid who maybe never felt heard started yodown a journey that ended with yobeing an adult with a weekly audience of 120 million people?

NL: I love the way yoput that question, because I guess I've spent my life wanting -- if anything, wanting to be heard. I think -- It's a simple answer, yes, that was what sparked -- well, there were other things, too. When my father was away, I was fooling with a crystal radio set that we had made together, and I caught a signal that turned out to be Father Coughlin.

Yeah, somebody laughed.

But not funny, this was a horse's -- another horse's ass -- who was very vocal about hating the New Deal and Roosevelt and Jews. The first time I ran into an understanding that there were people in this world that hated me because I was born to Jewish parents. And that had an enormous effect on my life.

EH: So yohad a childhood with little in the way of strong male role models, except for your grandfather. Tell us about him.

NL: Oh, my grandfather. Well here's the way I always talked about that grandfather. There were parades, lots of parades when I was a kid. There were parades on Veteran's Day -- there wasn't a President's Day. There was Abraham Lincoln's birthday, George Washington's birthday and Flag Day ... And lots of little parades. My grandfather used to take me and we'd stand on the street corner, he'd hold my hand, and I'd look up and I'd see a tear running down his eye. And he meant a great deal to me.

And he used to write presidents of the United States. Every letter started, "My dearest, darling Mr. President," and he'd tell him something wonderful about what he did. But when he disagreed with the President, he also wrote, "My dearest, darling Mr. President, Didn't I tell yolast week ...?"

And I would run down the stairs every now and then and pick up the mail. We were three flights up, 74 York Street, New Haven, Connecticut. And I'd pick up a little white envelope reading, "Shya C. called at this address." And that's the story I have told about my grandfather --

EH: They wrote him back on the envelopes --

NL: They wrote back. But I have shown them myself, going way back to Phil Donahue and others before him, literally dozens of interviews in which I told that story. This will be the second time I have said the whole story was a lie. The truth was my grandfather took me to parades, we had lots of those. The truth is a tear came down his eye.

The truth is he would write an occasional letter, and I did pick up those little envelopes. But "My dearest darling Mr. President," all the rest of it, is a story I borrowed from a good friend whose grandfather was that grandfather who wrote those letters. And, I mean, I stole Arthur Marshall's grandfather and made him my own. Always.

When I started to write my memoir -- "Even this --" How about that? "Even This I Get to Experience." When I started to write the memoir and I started to think about it, and then I -- I -- I did a reasonable amount of crying, and I realized how much I needed the father. So much so that I appropriated Arthur Marshall's grandfather. So much so, the word "father" -- I have six kids by the way. My favorite role in life. It and husband to my wife Lyn. But I stole the man's identity because I needed the father.

Now I've gone through a whole lot of shit and come out on the other side, and I forgive my father -- the best thing I -- the worst thing I -- The word I'd like to use about him and think about him is -- he was a rascal. The fact that he lied and stole and cheated and went to prison ... I submerge that in the word "rascal."

EH: Well there's a saying that amateurs borrow and professionals steal.

NL: I'm a pro.

EH: You're a pro.

And that quote is widely attributed to John Lennon, but it turns out he stole it from T.S. Eliot. So you're in good company.

EH: I want to talk about your work. Obviously the impact of your work has been written about and I'm sure you've heard about it all your life: what it meant to people, what it meant to our culture, yoheard the applause when I just named the names of the shows, yoraised half the people in the room through your work. But have there ever been any stories about the impact of your work that surprised you?

NL: Oh, god -- surprised me and delighted me from head to toe. There was "An Evening with Norman Lear" within the last year that a group of hip-hop impresarios, performers and the Academy put together. The subtext of "An Evening with ..." was: What do a 92-year-old Jew -- then 92 -- and the world of hip-hop have in common? Russell Simmons was among seven on the stage. And when he talked about the shows, he wasn't talking about the Hollywood, George Jefferson in "The Jeffersons," or the show that was a number five show. He was talking about a simple thing that made a big --

EH: Impact on him?

NL: An impact on him -- I was hesitating over the word, "change." It's hard for me to imagine, yoknow, changing somebody's life, but that's the way he put it. He saw George Jefferson write a check on "The Jeffersons," and he never knew that a black man could write a check. And he says it just impacted his life so -- it changed his life.

And when I hear things like that -- little things -- because I know that there isn't anybody in this audience that wasn't likely responsible today for some little thing they did for somebody, whether it's as little as a smile or an unexpected "Hello," that's how little this thing was. It could have been the dresser of the set who put the checkbook on the thing, and George had nothing to do while he was speaking, so he wrote it, I don't know. But --

EH: So in addition to the long list I shared in the beginning, I should have also mentioned that yoinvented hip-hop.

NL: Well ...

EH: I want to talk about --

NL: Well, then do it.

EH: You've lead a life of accomplishment, but you've also built a life of meaning. And all of us strive to do both of those things -- not all of us manage to. But even those of us who do manage to accomplish both of those, very rarely do we figure out how to do them together. Yomanaged to push culture forward through your art while also achieving world-beating commercial success. How did yodo both?

NL: Here's where my mind goes when I hear that recitation of all I accomplished. This planet is one of a billion, they tell us, in a universe of which there are billions -- billions of universes, billions of planets ... which we're trying to save and it requires saving. But ... anything I may have accomplished is -- my sister once asked me what she does about something that was going on in Newington, Connecticut. And I said, "Write your alderman or your mayor or something." She said, "Well I'm not Norman Lear, I'm Claire Lear." And that was the first time I said what I'm saying, I said, "Claire. With everything yothink about what I may have done and everything you've done," -- she never left Newington -- "can yoget your fingers close enough when yoconsider the size of the planet and so forth, to measure anything I may have done to anything yomay have done?"

So ... I am convinced we're all responsible for doing as much as I may have accomplished. And I understand what you're saying --

EH: It's an articulate deflection --

NL: But yohave to really buy into the size and scope of the creator's enterprise, here.

EH: But here on this planet yohave really mattered.

NL: I'm a son of a gun.

EH: So I have one more question for you. How old do yofeel?

NL: I am the peer of whoever I'm talking to.

EH: Well, I feel 93.

NL: We out of here?