Sitcom king, TV pionee r Norman Lear pens memoir

By Frazier Moore

AP Television Writer

NEW YORK

From the moment Norman Lear began writing his memoir, he knew what the first line would be: “When I was a boy, I thought that if I could turn a screw in my father’s head just a sixteenth of an inch one way or the other, it might help him to tell the difference between right and wrong.”

Lear’s father, Herman — by turns flamboyant, loutish, charming and downright criminal, and an inspiration for his tragi-comic hero, Archie Bunker — occupies an overarching presence in Lear’s “Even THIS I Get to Experience” (Penguin Press).

The 92-year-old Lear, still full of pep and new projects, reigns as a filmmaker, humorist, impresario, activist, TV pioneer and, of course, unrivaled sitcom titan with a portfolio of hits in the 1970s and ’80s that included “Sanford and Son,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons,” “One Day at a Time” and the show that started it all, “All in the Family,” whose patriarch would make famous Herman Lear’s own habitual demand that his wife “stifle it.”

“I wanted to run as far as I could from anything he stood for,” says Lear, his voice choking as he recalled life with his father in Connecticut and Brooklyn during a recent interview.

“But at the same time, I wished to make him everything I wanted him to be. My favorite way of thinking about him was as a rascal, and not — I have a hard time saying it even now — as a thief.”

The book, published Tuesday, became a reckoning for Lear.

But it is no dirge.

This is an entertaining, penetrating celebration of a richly lived life, as well as a show-biz chronicle kicking off in the late 1940s when Lear, after being fired as a press agent pitching publicity items to such gossip columnists as Dorothy Kilgallen and Walter Winchell, landed a writing job on NBC’s “Ford Star Revue,” one of TV’s original variety shows.

“It was so early in the [TV] game that after a couple of weeks we were considered veterans,” laughs Lear, speaking of himself and his partner at the time. “We had cachet.”

Jobs followed with such ’50s TV headliners as Martha Raye, George Gobel and Tennessee Ernie Ford, not to mention the superstar team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

By the 1960s, Lear had moved into writing films including the Frank Sinatra comedy “Come Blow Your Horn” and “Divorce American Style,” starring Dick Van Dyke, both directed by his production partner Bud Yorkin.

In 1971, the duo’s TV ascension began with “All in the Family,” adapted for CBS from a British sitcom about a blue-collar bigot locking horns with his liberal son.