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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. You're listening to the On The Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Michael Loewinger. Norman Lear, legendary screenwriter and producer, died last week at the age of 101.
There have been obits aplenty about him already, so this week we're bringing you an episode of Death, Sex, and Money, in which host Anna Sale and Norman Lear met and talked about family, death, and creativity. The fact of my life is, wherever you are at the moment, it took every bit, every second, every split second of your life to get there. It's gone. You did it. It's over. It's over.
This is Death, Sex, and Money. Listen, little girl, respect is for the dead. The living need dough. The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot. I think he's going through male menopause. And need to talk about more. We don't often talk about death, sex, and money. I'm Anna Sale. My name is Norman Lear. I was born on the 27th of July, 1922, which makes me 93 if I'm counting correctly.
Norman Lear is the TV writer and producer behind iconic sitcoms like The Jeffersons, All in the Family, Good Times, and Maud. Carol, you want to move? Then move. You mean that? No. His shows took real life and put it on the small screen. All right, we both own a house, we both own a furniture, we both own a window, half and half. I want my hair blue. And they
And they became some of the most watched TV programs of the 70s and 80s. Hold it, Diane. We are the Jeffersons.
Norman spends most of his time in Southern California, but I talked with him a few weeks ago in the luxury building in Manhattan where he has an apartment. It's been called New York's most exclusive address. I wanted to be able to say to my kids, you will not want for anything at all, far from that, but you will not be desperate for a dollar. And that meant different things along the way.
You know, probably when I was a kid, it meant if you had $200,000, you were not going to be desperate. And along with the times, the number increased. It's now $60 billion. That's a joke. Yeah.
Norman's worth an estimated $700 million now, according to Inside Philanthropy. But growing up, he didn't have much. His father was arrested when Norman was a kid for selling fake bonds. When my father was hauled off, I was nine years old, to prison, served three years. And my mother was selling all the furniture because she felt we couldn't live any longer. And that much shame, and she needed the money, and God knows what.
So the evening he was taken away, she had people over and they were buying furniture. And she was selling my dad's red leather chair. And that hurt more than anything. And in the middle of all of that, some horse's ass of a neighbor or a relative or something, an adult, put his hand on my shoulder and said, you're the man of the house now. And I don't know whether in that instant or the next morning or...
But reflecting on it, certainly, I thought, my God, how funny, strange that is. And then he said, ah, the man of the house doesn't cry. Did your dad ever tell you why he went to prison? Did he speak to you directly about it? Well, I read the paper. I knew why he went to prison. And my mother had said to him, I don't like those men, Herman. Don't go with those men. She tried to warn him. Nobody ever told Herman anything. He...
I've been everywhere where the grass goes green and I know everything, he used to say. I adored my father. I continue to love him despite all the difficulty because he leaned into life. He ate it up, you know, and whatever was going wrong, he was, you know, going to turn it around in the next 20 minutes. In two days to two weeks, he was going to have a million dollars, always.
And when you think about how your father was trying to raise you as a young man, what did he teach you about what it was to be a man? Well, now we're getting into the sex part because the one thing I can remember, a couple of things. Advice that he gave me. Norman, he said, never take a wet deck. He had been in the Navy.
Now, a wet deck in his terminology meant, you know, three guys are going to have sex with the same woman. You be first. So pretty vulgar advice. Yeah, pretty. And then at one point, I was driving a good humor truck, came home at 11, 11.30 at night. He leaned out of the bedroom window and threw me the keys to the car and said, why don't you and Sid, that was a friend of mine, why don't you and Sid go up to Troy and
and get laid. He thought it was time that I thought about that. So, you know, I don't like saying what I heard myself say because out of affection for him. Poor bastard. I mean, this is what he knew. Did you go to Troy? We went to Troy. Yeah. We spent an hour driving around Troy. Got there about 4 o'clock or something in the morning.
looking for red lights because it was supposed to be notorious for red light. There's no such thing, at least not for us.
Norman's father died in 1957, but he kept showing up in Norman's work for decades after. When Archie yelled at Edith to stifle during an argument on All in the Family. That's what Herman Lear used to yell at Norman's mother.
And I would score their arguments. Norman's father also showed up in the psychiatrist's office with Bea Arthur on Maude. The man never gave me one decent moment, not one. Maybe one. That was a real experience in my life. I rewrote it. When it came to a grandstand play, he was good at it. I was dating my first wife, the woman who became my first wife. I was going to pick her up in West Hartford.
in my car, which was a Model T or some of the ancient car we paid $35 for or something. And my father was driving a Hudson Terraplane, new car at the time, and he was going to come home. He said, you take my car. So he was due home at, say, 3 and then 4, and finally I left and drove through Meriden and Waterbury and all that distance away from Hartford. There's suddenly a honk, honk, honk behind me.
And my father has caught up with me in the terraplane. And we exchange cars. And I take my girl to the theater properly. And that was a giant. That was, you know, it overwhelmed me.
So I wanted to do that with Maude. She came into a psychiatrist's office. Anyway, the thing is, I can't believe I'm here. I mean, me, Maude Findlay, actually talking to a psychiatrist. And then she remembered something about her father. And then he broke every traffic law in the books so that he could get there in time to give me this coat with the Persian lamb collar so that I could wear it to the prom.
It was the same kind of grandstand gesture. And Maude, crying on the couch, said, what am I talking about? I loved my father. How could a thing like that? She had previously said, I guess, doctor, this will be the last time I see you. Anyway, after realizing that she loved him after all, she got up and walked to the door and turned around.
And the way she said, See you Friday? Oh, my God. How I treasure that. Coming up, what Norman learned from the generation after him, his children. Is there a blind spot that you've had that your children have revealed to you? I'm sure I will reflexively jump, leap,
to a liberal position before I have thought it through. This is Death, Sex, and Money from WNYC. I'm Anna Sale. A decade before Norman Lear started working in television, he began another career as a soldier. When Norman was a sophomore at Emerson College, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. You enlisted when you were a college student? I did.
which is not something you hear of happening in 2015 to leave college. Certainly we don't see people like me and you enlisting. And probably 90% of your listeners are not enlisting. Kids who are hungry for something that makes for a career or to learn something or to have the comfort of a dollar are enlisting.
And you served in Europe during World War II. Yeah. Do you think back on your time in Europe often, or does that feel like a long time ago? My wife and I, Lynn and I, were in Berlin three weeks ago. Flying into Berlin was an experience I don't have the words for because I had bombed. I had been in a plane bombing it twice. I have no way of expressing what I felt there.
except remembering how I didn't care when I saw the bombs drop and then gather with the bombs from other planes. And I'm looking at a hundred, if not thousands of bombs falling and thinking they might, that might probably are going to fall on farms or co-ops or where innocent people are going to get killed. And I didn't care.
And then thinking about that hours later or days later, I don't know when, often wondering if anybody gave me a piece of paper and said, sign this, that you're somebody who would never give a shit how many people were killed innocently down there. I have to believe I would never sign it. But I do remember feeling it. The feeling was, screw him. Yeah. You know? I mean, to make it a little clearer, if somebody harmed one of my children...
Norman has six children from all three of his marriages.
There was one daughter at the end of my first marriage and three at the end of my second marriage and three more children in my third marriage. I have five daughters and one son. The daughters range from, I love saying this, from 20 to 69. Wow. I mean, when you say that, that's incredible. I know, it's quite a spread. Do you think you were a different sort of father to your children?
since you had them at such different points in your life? Looking back, I wasn't an ever-present... I was much more an ever-present father to my television shows. And, you know, I've learned not to regret. If I had to do over again, I think I would lean the other way.
Norman met the mother of his three youngest children, Lynn, in 1984. At the time, Norman and his second wife, Frances, were separated. I was determined not to divorce, and so I caused Frances to divorce me. They were spending the weekdays apart and trying to make it work on the weekends. That's how I met Lynn. One of those weekends when we were trying to work it out,
We had a dinner party, and one of the guests called and said he had a blind date. Could he bring her? So I met Lynn at my front door. Why, after getting divorced once and feeling like it was a good decision, why did you not want to get divorced again? It had something to do with my children. I don't know. He had to explain everything, my own behavior, all the time. But what I've told myself is...
Foolishly, the grown children. I wouldn't do that to them. And Lynn, I want to know more about Lynn. She is a student of psychology. She's 25 years younger than you. You were famous when she met you. I was well-known. She is 25 years younger, which never seemed to matter at all. What struck you about her? She was deeply spiritual.
deeply spiritual. And I was not, my family was not religious as Jews. I was bar mitzvahed, but that was kind of more tradition than religion. He hit it off on these weekends of spiritual conversation. You know, we never stopped talking about what's it all about, Alfie.
And it's still the best conversation going. And nobody knows, in my opinion. Did you want to become a father again when you married Lynn? Did you want to have more children? Well, we had talked about that. I knew that I had agreed I would become a father because she just had to have a child. What I didn't expect was that she would want more children. But by the time she wanted another child, I was thinking, well,
And my son, which is a big surprise to me. By then, you know, when he was a couple years old, I thought his life would be happier if he grew up with another kid in the house. And then we had twins. You were having your first child with Lynn when your older children were of childbearing age. Yeah. And what was that like? Very difficult. My middle daughter was...
You know, had for four or five years been hoping, wishing, trying to be pregnant. And her dad is suddenly married to a younger woman. And in a year's time or less, she's pregnant. And that happened before my daughter got pregnant. So that was not an easy time. But I can tell you today, we have Thanksgiving and Christmas coming. And we'll all be together.
as a result of everybody wishing to be together. What's that process been like of trying to make sure that your kids, some of whom have different moms, that they have a relationship together and that they're close? How has that unfolded over the years? I don't know. Love. They've spent time together and fallen in love with each other.
And that part hasn't been tough. It grew naturally. How are you talking to your family about death and your death? That's a conversation that hasn't started. I haven't talked to them about that. I can see that, you know, the way they express themselves and the way they reach to help me physically and so forth. I can see that it's on my kids' mind.
I haven't brought myself to talk about that. I think, I don't feel near that, you know. I'm not someone who's afraid of it. I think it's interesting that we approach it, at least this is my point of view, not knowing, you know. My wife, Lynn, will tell you something greater, better is next. She is thoroughly convinced that we go on from here.
I am thoroughly convinced that that's possible, but I don't know. I'm content that, you know, we're going to get a lot of answers to the deepest questions at death. Or not. Or not. Or not.
Anna Sale is the host of Death, Sex, and Money. On The Big Show this weekend, Brooke has a report from the front lines of the book banning wars. In the meantime, sign up to our newsletter, follow us on threads, and write a review on iTunes. We really appreciate it. I'm Michael Onger.