Norman Lear, the writer and producer who created topical and outrageous comedy in such wildly popular sitcoms as All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and The Jeffersons, has died. He was 101.
Lear died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles surrounded by his family.
“Norman lived a life in awe of the world around him. He marveled at his cup of coffee every morning, the shape of the tree outside his window, and the sounds of beautiful music,” read the post. “But it was people — those he just met and those he knew for decades — who kept his mind and heart forever young. As we celebrate his legacy and reflect on the next chapter of life without him, we would like to thank everyone for all the love and support.”
He and Yorkin rose to prominence writing for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s variety show in the 1950s.
At one time, Lear had nine shows on the air and finished one season with three of the top four highest-rated series.
He provided the funding for such films as This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Stand by Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987) and Fried Green Tomatoes (1991). The first three were directed by Rob Reiner, who taught Lear’s daughter Ellen how to play jacks, and went on to star as “Meathead” Michael Stivic on All in the Family.
A two-fingered typist, Lear was known for the headwear he first donned so he wouldn’t pick at his bald head during bouts of writer’s block. “One day [his second wife] Frances came into my study and threw a little white boating hat on my head to keep me from picking. It worked, and that is how my nearly 50-year love affair with that white hat began,” he wrote in his 2014 memoir.
Yorkin, in England directing Inspector Clouseau (1968), watched an episode of the BBC’s Till Death Us Do Part, a sitcom that centered on a bigoted father and his liberal son who bickered all the time, and brought it to Lear’s attention.
“As a kid, when I wasn’t moving as fast as he thought I should, [Lear’s father] H.K. would call me ‘the laziest white kid he ever met.’ When I’d accuse him of putting down a whole race of people just to call his son lazy, he’d yell back at me, ‘That’s not what I’m doing, and you’re the dumbest white kid I ever met!’ ”
For the series that would become All in the Family, he and Yorkin secured the rights in September 1968 and had Mickey Rooney in mind for Archie Bunker, but the actor didn’t think the series would last.
“You want to do a show with The Mick, listen to this: Vietnam vet. Private eye. Short. Blind. Large dog,” Rooney told Lear.
ABC passed twice on the series before CBS, then looking to wean itself of rural comedies like Green Acres and Petticoat Junction, signed on.
With Carroll O’Connor as the racist Archie, Jean Stapleton as his naive wife Edith, Sally Struthers as their daughter Gloria and Reiner as their Polish-American son-in-law, All in the Family, taped before an audience of about 250 in Hollywood, debuted at 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 1971.
It began with this disclaimer: “The program you are about to see seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices and concerns. By making them source of laughter, we hope to show — in a mature fashion — just how absurd they are.”
All in the Family was No. 1 in the ratings for unprecedented five years. At its peak, 60 percent of the viewing public, more than 50 million people, tuned in on Saturday nights.
“All in the Family endures because its creator was angry about injustice in the world: racism, sexism, homophobia, abuse of political power, economic disparity — the list goes on. In other words, angry about the right things, Seth McFarlane wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014.
Lear rebooted One Day at a Time for Netflix (and then Pop) with a Latino cast and saw episodes of All in the Family, The Jeffersons and Good Times revitalized for ABC specials that made him the oldest Emmy winner ever.
Lear was born to Jewish parents on July 27, 1922, in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Herman, known as H.K., was scheming salesman who did jail time. His mother, Jeanette, was housewife who often was told to “stifle” when H.K. wanted her to be quiet.
Lear wrote a speech, “The Constitution and Me,” that won him a scholarship to Emerson College in Boston, where he majored in drama.
He enlisted in the Army Air Forces during World War II, flying 52 missions over Europe in a B-17 bomber, and said he was lucky to survive.
But after another (untrue) item about little people made it into another column, he was summarily dismissed, and without severance.
Lear moved to Los Angeles to try his hand at publicity. On his first night in town, in spring 1949, he stumbled onto the Circle Theatre in Hollywood, which was staging George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. Chaplin was there to watch his son, Sidney perform.
Lewis, who was about to host the Colgate Comedy Hour with Martin, liked a Lear-Simmons bit he saw on the Haley show and swiped them for the Lewis-Martin variety hour in 1950. In 1954, Lear and Simmons moved to The Martha Raye Show.
When Raye’s show was canceled, Yorkin, who was stage manager and director on the Colgate Comedy Hour, asked Lear and Simmons to write for new variety show hosted by country singer Tennessee Ernie Ford. Lear agreed but Simmons said no, ending their partnership. In 1958, Lear wrote for and produced a variety show led by George Gobel.
Yorkin, who produced and directed An Evening With Fred Astaire, the first musical hour to be shot in color, and Lear formed Tandem Productions, with three-year deal with Paramount to develop TV shows, specials and films.
Tandem packaged NBC’s The Andy Williams Show, and the company’s first feature was Come Blow Your Horn.
Lear co-wrote and produced the $3 million musical The Night They Raided Minsky’s, starring Jason Robards and Britt Ekland.
Lear and Yorkin brought Sanford and Son, based on another British series and starring bawdy Las Vegas stand-up Redd Foxx as a junkman, to NBC. The show, supervised by Yorkin, debuted in January 1972 and lasted six seasons.
CBS’ Maude starred Bea Arthur as Edith’s cousin Maude Findlay and polar opposite of Archie. In the spinoff’s first season, Arthur’s character, who was nearing 50, decided after much soul-searching to have an abortion. Two affiliates did not air the two-part episode, the first time any CBS station had rejected an installment of a continuing series.
“Of all the characters I’ve created and cast, the one who resembles me the most was Maude,” Lear wrote in his book.
Maude’s maid Florida (Esther Rolle) became the matriarch of CBS’ Good Times, set in the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago. The idea for CBS’ The Jeffersons, a spinoff featuring the Bunkers’ neighbors who strike it rich and move to a Manhattan “deluxe apartment in the sky,” came to Lear after members of the Black Panthers visited him to complain about Good Times being “a white man’s version of a black family.” The Jeffersons lasted a whopping 11 seasons.
The delightful soap satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, starring Woody Allen’s ex-wife Louise Lasser, was sold in syndication to 128 stations outside the three-network system and aired for two seasons in late night, five nights a week. That show spawned Fernwood 2 Night, starring Martin Mull as a talk show host and twin brother of a character who had been impaled on a Christmas tree on Mary Hartman.
Lear made millions selling his share of Tandem/Embassy Communications to the Coca-Cola Co. (which earlier had bought Columbia Pictures) in 1985. He later formed Act III Communications, which owned theaters, independent TV stations and trade publications, and bought Concord Records, merging it with an Australian company to form the Village Roadshow Entertainment Group.
Lear was married three times: to Charlotte Rosen, whom he met in high school, from 1943-56; to Frances Loeb from 1956–85 (she claimed to be the inspiration for Maude and received $100 million-plus in her divorce settlement from Lear); and to former teacher Lyn Davis, whom he wed in 1987 and who survives him.
Lear had 6 children — Ellen, Kate, Maggie, Benjamin and twins Brianna and Madeline — with the youngest and oldest 48 years apart. He is also survived by four grandchildren.
“The audiences themselves taught me that you can get some wonderful laughs on the surface of anything with funny performers and good jokes, but if you want them laughing from the belly, you stand a better chance of achieving it if you get them caring first,” he wrote. “The humor in life doesn’t stop when we are in tears, any more than it stops being serious where we are laughing. So we were in the game to elicit both.”
