Paula Weinstein reveals her secret to being a good parent. Then Max talks with Norman Lear about his relationship with creativity, the moments that he can't forget and how he finds the energy to keep working at age 98.
Know someone who should be on 70 Over 70? We’re looking for all types of stories and people to feature at the top of the show. To nominate yourself or someone else, email 70over70@pineapple.fm or call 302-659-7070 and tell us your name, age, where you’re from and what you want to talk about.
transcription
[PRE-ROLL]
[OPENING MONTAGE]
Madeleine Albright: I know this program is 70 Over 70, but I really wish I were younger. I wish I was 70 … but, I am ready!
[THEME MUSIC STARTS]
William: I’m 72 years old.
Paula: I’m 75, miraculously enough.
Sandy: I am 83 years old.
Betty: I am 88 years old.
James: You know, I’m here at 92.
Lucia: I’ll be 94 in May.
Donalda: I’m 101 years old.
Paula Weinstein: I'm Paula Weinstein. I'm 75 and I live in New York City.
[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]
Paula: Now, I’m not a stupid person, but in my 30s and 40s I-I had absolutely no sense of the nuclear family, nowhere close. Were you involved in the world? Were you curious? Were you successful? That's what mattered to me...at the time.
[MUSIC STARTS]
Paula: I'm not sure my childhood was glamorous. I think it was... fun. My mother was a political activist. She began as a journalist. She met my father because they were both speech writing for Mayor LaGuardia. He was charming. He was funny. He was so not a father figure, I mean at 13 and 14 I'd be out and drinking a whiskey sour with him. Anyway many many years later, when my daughter was born, I did what I was shown by my parents, work was the first call of business. But here I was not wanting to repeat that.
[MUSIC PAUSES]
Paula: So I went to a therapist and I said to her I need to learn how to love.
[MUSIC RESUMES]
Paula: And, um, that’s when the therapist said to me when you don’t know what to do put it to the deathbed test.
So the deathbed test is an amazing lesson to learn if you don't know how to prioritize your life or you're used to making it just what you want all the time. It's really giving you the tools to say what is important, what am I going to remember. So it became ‘have this meeting at nine o’clock at night when Hannah’s asleep or have it now and don’t go home. Go to this dinner party from work or go home when I said I’d be home and everytime I put that to the deathbed test, I made the right choice. I’m going home to my daughter because that is what’s going to be meaningful.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Paula: Now I’m so conscious of not having a long time left that I don’t have to put things to the deathbed test and I do believe that after a while of doing it, and for me it probably took a long while, you make the right choice instinctively. It becomes second nature and more than that it becomes your desire. That doing the right thing isn’t doing the right thing and saying ‘I’ve got to be a good parent here,’ it’s ‘I want to be there,’
[THEME SONG STARTS]
Paula: So I don’t have to put it to the deathbed test very often anymore.
Max Linsky: That was Paula Weinstein and from Pineapple Street Studios, this is 70 Over 70, a show about making the most of the time we have left. I'm Max Linsky.
[THEME SONG CONTINUES]
My guest this week is producer and writer Norman Lear. Norman's credits are almost too many to mention, so let me get the big ones out of the way quickly here.
[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]
He's the guy behind All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Maude, and a slew of other television classics. But his career is far from over. Even through the pandemic, he was writing pilots, pitching shows, reaching out to actors he's always wanted to work with. I wanted to talk to him about where that creative energy comes from and how he still has so much of it. And for Norman, it comes from moments.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Small little moments that are beautiful and grim and hilarious and meaningless all at once. Moments that reveal what he calls the foolishness of the human condition.
Norman Lear is 98 years old.
INTERVIEW
Max: Norman Lear, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for doing this.
Norman Lear: You're welcome, Max.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Max: Is it ok if I call you Norman?
Norman: Please call me Norman. You know why I like that? Because it’s my name. I hate being called Jeff.
Max: [laughs] I’ll stick with Norman. [Norman laughs] I got all kinds of questions for you, but I was wondering if we could start with your current working life. [Norman laughs] You're 98 years old. You're still working in this industry that you started in and you're still working pretty consistently, right? You're making stuff.
Norman: Yes, but I'm not at this moment because the lot is closed for all the reasons we understand, but uh hope to get back soon. Hasn't stopped the work we're still uh building, you know, projects, but can't be shooting them at this moment.
Max: Do you feel as creative as ever?
Norman: 100 percent.
Max: You have the same relationship to creativity that you did when you were 40, 50, 60, 70, 80? It hasn't changed?
Norman: Uh, it hasn't changed in terms of my desire, in terms--I feel anyway--of my ability. Uh, what has changed is the fact that the uh... Sony Lot, on which our offices exist is closed and I'm only within a couple of weeks of going out for dinner or visiting friends, uh, having friends come over and so forth. It's been a long drought. [laughs] People-wise, a long drought. I have uh six daughters. They've been visiting me one and two at a time.
Max: I want to talk about your kids. I'm interested in your relationship to your kids, but I want to stick with work for a second. Are the stories that you want to tell now, are those different than they used to be?
Norman: I don't think so. I don't think so. Uhh, a good example of that is I did, uh, a pilot of a show a great many years ago with two names, I--I wonder if you ever knew about. But Suzanne Pleshette was a brilliant young actress, a great many years ago, and James Franciscus was a marvelous young actor, a brilliant, beautiful young man. And I did a pilot with them called Brand of Gold, where they played a different couple in love every week. The reason I'm mentioning it now is I've been thinking about it for the last several weeks. It--it didn't happen back then, but I think it could happen now and it's an idea I like a lot.
Max: Do you think it can happen now 'cause the world has changed in some way, or have you just personally not given up on it and you want to make the thing happen?
Norman: No, what I needed then I have now. I mean, people's desire for entertainment and-and care about individuals that are performing for them and so forth. That hasn't changed in my view and my feelings about work.
Max: Has your energy for work changed?
Norman: I think you have to ask a few observers.[Both laugh] It doesn't feel to me like it's changed.
Max: How do you do that? How do you keep doing this work decade after decade? Like, how do you still have the energy for this?
Norman: Well, I believe, uh, there were two little words that we don't pay enough attention to. They are 'over' and 'next'. When something is over, it's over and we're on to next. If there was a hammock in the middle of those two words, that would be the best description I could find of living in the moment. That moment between over and next. And I like living--I like to think I live in the moment -- and uh and feel that I do. Here is an amazing statistic; it has taken me almost 99 years to meet Max.
Max: [laughs] That's true.
Norman: No, is that-that not amazing? I've been on this planet for 99 years and I'm meeting you for the very first time. It's taken me all those years to get to you.
Max: Right. You've been walking around doing all of these incredible things and every moment has led to this.
Norman: To this! Yes! So what of that moment? How about that?
Max: Yeah, that's some shit.
Norman: [laughs] You know, it's the absolute reality. It-it's taken every split second of your life to meet me. To see this hat.
Max: [laughs] Well, it's a hell of a hat. [Norman laughs] This is maybe a hard question to answer, but what does that feel like to you, sitting between over and next?
Norman: It's like uh...understanding that every moment is a new one. I never saw your face before and here I am looking at it. The--the crazy thing is I kind of...I don't understand totally the depth in which of--of what I'm saying, but I delight in it. I delight in thinking, holy shit, it took me all these years to get to meet this Max guy and to speak the words I'm speaking now. I never spoke them to him before.
Max: How long has that been true for you? How long you've been--been lying in the hammock?
Norman: Well, my father went to prison when I was nine years old. He was caught selling some fake bonds or something, I don't know. And when he got out, I was living in New Haven with my grandparents and uh we went to New York, they picked me up at the Railroad Station. We went to New York...going to New York, where we are about to live --uh my sister, my mother and father and I--with another family who had--also had two children. Until my father got a job and found an apartment and everything else, we were going to live with these friends of theirs. In that circumstance, on the train, my father, just out of prison sitting with me alone for a little while, said, ‘Norman, in a year you're going to be bar mitzvahed. For your bar mitzvah I'm going to take you and your mother and your sister for a trip around the world. We'll be gone a year,’ and I believed, of course, every word of it. [Max laughs] Uh, and he, of course, believed every word of it, and there was no chance in the world this could happen. I didn't know that at that age. But when I started to realize, I began to understand what I have long thought of as the foolishness of the human condition. You can find it everywhere and anywhere it's in all of us. Uh to--not on the same level, the same degree or same direction as my dad's, but I've had a lot of moments over the years where I've seen the foolishness of my own human condition.
Max: What is that? What's the foolishness of the human condition?
Norman: Oh, to uh... to think the world of somebody who doesn't deserve any of it? [Both laugh] Or been--and vice versa. To, uh, not understand the worth of this person, think you're putting up with it and you're not. You're benefiting from it instead. Those ordinary human mistakes.
Max: And that moment, sitting on the train with your dad when he's saying something that he thinks will happen and you think will happen and you realize now was never going to happen, how does that connect to the hammock?
Norman: Well, it--it was a moment I lived. It was a moment I lived. My--my mind just came across a memory, sight-only. I'm at a funeral--I don't even remember whose funeral it was--but there are 60, 80, 100 of us, I dunno, standing around a gravesite and the coffin is being lowered into the grave. And a woman, just ahead of me, has an itch and scratches her ass. [Max laughs] It was to me funny as hell [Max continues to laugh] and I thought, well, it's in every moment, you know. We did the episode of All in the Family where Archie comes into his--their bedroom after he's uh... Edith has--has gone. And the way he touches the pillow that was hers in the bedroom alone, after Edith's passing; the audience, it-it-it got the laugh that I was positive it would get. Not because....maybe-maybe as much because they needed the laugh and had laughed at him so much before, they were not laughing at that moment, they were laughing at the human condition. That the guy they spent so much time understanding, not understanding, laughing at feeling for, there is sadness and humor in the human condition. And it's there every moment.
Max: I'm just trying to really hear what you said.
Norman: Maybe I'll say it in English this time.
Max: [laughs] Listen, I'm slow on the uptake, but I'm--I'm trying to--trying to I'm trying to figure it out.
Norman: You're--you're good on the uptake. I see you thinking and I--and I find myself appreciating it a lot.
Max: The thing that I want to ask is whether that connection to the human condition, your capacity to be on the hammock in those moments, whether that's something that you've gotten more and more access to over the course of your life or whether that's just who you are?
Norman: I think it's some of both. Certainly it's matured in me. I have spoken it before and perhaps I wish I had recordings of my articulation of the same kind of thing forty years ago. It's probably richer now or benefits from the years that I've been feeling it and thinking about it.
Max: Yeah, I mean, I wonder how the Norman Lear that had nine shows on TV at once, and I assume was working all the time, was as connected to---to the hammock as you are now.
Norman: I have to believe things deepen or grow or you know...that the way I feel it now is more solid or has--or it's greener [laughs] [Yeah] than there was all those years ago, but I enjoyed--I enjoyed thinking about it. I enjoyed talking about it. And probably, it's deepened by virtue of your questions and my talking to you now.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Max: Right. Well, you know, every moment in both of our lives led to this moment, so.
Norman: Yeah. And is leading to the next. [laughs]
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[BREAK/MIDROLL]
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Max: How does ninety-eight feel?
Norman: Ninety-eight feels uh...surprising. [laughs]
Max: How so?
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Norman: Every, you know, every once in a while I realize how old, uh, 98 is and I think, holy shit [Max laughs], but, you know, I just learned this morning that a guy I've known for some time....an actor named Norman Lloyd passed yesterday at 106. 106. And he was a glory, you know, at his last birthday. I was there. And his voice was deep and resonant and...and uh and full, as was his spirit and, uh, passed at 106.
Max: Does 106 feel really far away to you?
Norman: Uh, you know, I thought this--I'm thinking it now--if somebody came up to me and asked me to sign a paper and guaranteed that I could live to 106, if I knew I was going to pass then, I wouldn't sign the paper. And I wouldn't sign the paper because, uh, I liked the game the way it is, I don't want to know how it's going to end. Or when.
Max: Are you scared of it ending?
Norman: Not at all.
Max: How come?
Norman: Well, nobody's ever come back and told me any reason to be frightened about it. I've never heard anybody talk about how terrible it was. [both laugh]
Max: Do you think about it? Do you think about dying?
Norman: Well, I can only in the context of age. You know, I can't help but understand. I'm you know, uh, I'm an old chap [both laugh] and, uh, and not that many people pass a hundred. I think the figures are probably growing, longer lives are being lived now. But so I am I'm-I'm, of course, aware of my age and...uh but I am satisfied with the game the way it is. I don't need to know.
Max: Right. Right. I want to talk to you about--about your family for a second. There’s a pretty significant age range of your kids.
Norman: Yeah.
Max:The oldest is 74 and your youngest daughters are 26.
Norman Lear: That's right.
Max: How do you--how do you keep all those people connected?
Norman: I hope this is true. I mean, that's my observation. For me, it's true. There's enough caring to go around and we enjoy being together. In July, late July, I'll be turning 99. And we'll all be together. And the fact that everybody wishes to do that is the dearest thing I know.
Max: How'd you make it so everyone stays together?
Norman: It took all of us playing our own roles.
Max: What's-what’s your role?
Norman: The papa, the papa! [both laugh] and I much enjoy it.
Max: Have you always enjoyed that, like again, I'm thinking about you were as responsible as anyone in America for putting forward a vision of what family life was in America. And I-I guess I'm curious about what your family life was like then, what kind of father you were then, and how those two things were talking to each other.
Norman: Well, one of my older daughters was here, she just left and uh we talked about this to some degree. You know, I was away a lot. Not away in the sense I was out of town, I mean, I was working. I worked a lot of evenings, uh, all day and evening and loved it. You know, uh, nourished by it. It would have been better had I been able to spend more but I seem to have spent enough time. I'm assured by my kids and as I watch their lives and uh--and understand the people they've grown to be...uh I'm proud to have done as well as I'd done ‘cause they are glorious people. I couldn’t be prouder or more in love with them.
Max: It's a beautiful thing. What makes you laugh now?
Norman: That question.
Max: [laughs] That--that shitty question?
Norman: [laughs] What makes me laugh now? Uh, I mean, anything I think is funny. [Max laughs] But I, uh, I appreciate the gift of laughing as much as I have laughed and I've always thought that laughter adds time to your life, you know. I don't know how many hundreds of times I have stood behind or to the side of two hundred or so people, at the shows, watching them when they are especially in a belly laugh, when they're really guffawing. And the human of the species has the habit of coming out of [unclear] of their seats a little bit, you know, half an inch out and coming back down and roaring back. You see a couple of hundred people doing that, and, uh, if there's a more spiritual moment in this lifetime, I don't know what it could be.
Max: Have you been chasing that your whole life?
Norman: I think finding that is truer. Not chasing it, just finding it. I mean, just understanding it's there. And appreciating it and loving it. That when I talk about the foolishness of a human condition, I'm talking about it's dearness also. It's dear. I mean, it's sweet, it's enjoyable. It's fun. It's human.
Max: I want to understand that--that way you just corrected me, because I think that distinction is pretty interesting. The idea of chasing versus finding. Like what I hear you saying is it wasn't some sort of desperate need you were trying to fill some if you are trying to scratch. It was just like um something you were--
Norman: No, here's an illustration of exactly--actually, I was on my way to telling this story earlier, and I don't remember what took me in another direction. But the night my father was hauled away--or a couple of nights later maybe--my mother was selling the furniture. And there were people who I didn't know, strangers, in the house, looking at different things and so forth. And there was one chap--this moment is indelible in my life--and the man and his kindness and tenderness put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Well, Norman, you're the man of the house now,’. Nine years old, and I'm the man of the house now. That is fucking funny [Max laughs] and totally illustrative of what I mean.
Max: I mean, it is funny and it's brutal. I'm not surprised that it's something that sits so deep for you that you hold onto so tightly 'cause, I mean, if ever there's like a defining moment in a person's life, it's that.
Norman: That's exactly, Max, the way I always viewed it. With an appreciation for the gift of understanding because I'm not sure everybody in that circumstance would understand how funny that was, how foolish that was.
Max: And can you draw, like, a direct line between whatever it was in you when you were nine that was able to actually see that--that gift that you're talking about? Can you draw a direct line between being able to recognize that and the work that you have done?
Norman: No, that's too mysterious for me [laughs] but I--I understand it was, uh, was an occasion in my life and it lived with me and in me and in my mind and in my attitude.
Max: I guess I'm asking like a little bit of like a nature-nurture question, you know. Like, you have this undeniable gift to be able to create worlds and moments that can show the foolishness of the human condition in a way that millions and millions of people can understand. Do you think that's thing that allowed you when you were nine to realize that that guy saying you're the man of the house was so fucking funny?
Norman: I don't think we necessarily--well, I'm sure we don't--necessarily understand the gifts we've been given until life helps us understand it, because I was a kid in the depression, the biggest conversations we ever had around the family table was what we could afford. Could my sister get the sneakers or could I get them this week or sending me on a hot summer's night for a quart of ice cream, which I think was a quarter then or a pint. Uh, I mean, it was a discussion whether we were going to spend the quarter that way. So that's why when my father gets out of prison and says he's going to be taking a trip around the world in a year, that's why that was so [laughs] so sadly funny. Uh, I like sad and funny because it [phone starts to ring] reflects life best. [phone continues to ring] This is the daughter that just left this morning. Hey, Maggie. Hi sweetest of hearts, how are you? Say hello to Max.
Max: Hi, Maggie.
Norman: Yeah, Max is doing a series called 70 over 70. This the secret is he thinks I'm over 70. [Max laughs.] She just landed at JFK. Are you home by now? [Maggie responds] Oh, she's home with her sons, my grandsons. Oh, wait a minute, Max may have a question for you. You got a question for her, Max?
Max: Hi, how are you?
Maggie: I'm good. How are you?
Max: This is exactly how I expected this to go. [both laugh]
Maggie: You know, exactly me too. I expected to just talk to you rather than my father.
Max: Yeah. Yeah. This is totally--this is totally what I predicted would happen. Uh, here's my question for you. Your dad seems to think that he's been the same exact guy for a very, very long time. Is that your experience or is he,um, does he feel different to you at ninety eight than he did at 58 or 68 or 78?
Maggie: Oh my God, yes! I mean his life experiences! I mean, a lot has changed. He had three wives. [everyone laughs] His work has changed his you know everything has changed but--but the core, like the human being he is, is the same.
Max: Yeah.
Norman: I'll take that. Maggie, I love you. [Love you] Your visit was just the greatest. I couldn't--
Maggie: I feel the same way.
Norman: Couldn't appreciate it more.
Maggie: All right, get to work!
Norman: Thank you sweetheart. [Bye bye] Bye. [Maggie ends the call]
Max: Seems like she loves you very much, Norman.
Norman: Well, she is loved [laughs] every bit as much, but she's got two great sons and one of those sons is an actor. And I'm thinking all the time about him and a young woman I know is an actress and if I have the opportunity of all things being equal and my at my age, I will get a show done with the two of them, a pilot anyway.
Max: I was telling someone this morning who works in Hollywood that I was going to talk to you and he said his reputation as a mentor is almost as prodigious as his reputation as a creative person. How do you relate to younger people in the industry right now?
Norman: I have no difficulty caring about somebody or feeling love for the person I care about. And so I have no concern or, you know, about expressing it. I don't know how else to answer that. I mean, you know, I'm enjoying this conversation. Uh, why wouldn't I, it's all about me [both laugh]. What I think, what I feel, [laughs]. Talk about the foolishness of the human condition, when you think about it, how absolutely unimportant this is in the great scheme of things, you know. This contribution of my life and these forty five minutes or whatever. [laughs] And how seriously we've been taking it.
Max: I don't think you've been taking it that seriously.
Norman: You know, it's 45 minutes of your life-- your life, Max--so that can't be unimportant. It has to be enormously important. So you live in between those two understandings. It's ridiculously small and meaningless. And it's the totality of your life in the 45 minutes that exist.
Max: Right. It's everything and nothing all at the same time.
Norman: Absolutely. Well--well said.
Max: And there's something kind of freeing in that, you know, it can be both things at once.
Norman: [laughs] Yes.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Max: Well, I can't think of a better way to spend 45 minutes than lying in a hammock with you. It was a real pleasure, man. [Norman laughs] Thank you.
Norman:I enjoyed this, Max. Thank you very much for what you're doing. My favorite expression in the English language, to be continued.
Max: To be continued, sir.
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
CREDITS
Max: 70 Over 70 is a production of Pineapple Street Studios, and it’s produced by Jess Hackel.
Our associate producer is Janelle Anderson. Our editors are Maddy Sprung-Keyser and Joel Lovell. Research and additional reporting by Charley Locke.
Our mixers are Raj Makhija and Elliott Adler. And Jenna Weiss-Berman and I are the executive producers.
Our theme song is Like a Dream by Francis and the Lights and the music you’re listening to right now is by Arthur Russell, who would have been 70 this year. Original music by Terence Bernardo. Additional music by Noble Kids, and music licensing by Dan Knishkowy.
Our cover art is by Maira Kalman, who’s 72. And our episode art is by Lynn Staley. She’s 73 and she’s also my mom.
Special thanks to Grace Chen, Courtney Harrell, Erin Kelly, Sam Linsky, and Tom Mayer.
Thank you Paula Weinstein, and thank you Norman Lear.
I’m Max Linsky. Thanks for listening.
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
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