Even this I get to experience /

"MAUDE, C'EST MOI." Norman Lear could easily have adopted Flaubert's famous phrase about Emma Bovary to explain who inspired one of his most beloved sitcoms, "Maude." Because in his charming, candid and copious autobiography, "Even This I Get to Experience," Lear holds back only when it comes to the real-life model for Maude. Many people, including obituary writers, assumed that Maude, the passionate, argumentative liberal feminist played by Bea Arthur, was at least partly based on Lear's former wife, Frances Lear, who died in 1996, and was a passionate and argumentative liberal feminist. In his account, Lear is not unkind about his ex, her battles with bipolar disorder or their 1986 divorce settlement of more than $100 million. But he doesn't allow that she inspired Maude, the perfect foil to the bigoted Archie Bunker. He doesn't answer the question until the final pages of his memoir, where he describes a late-life epiphany. "Of all the characters I've created and cast, the one who resembles me most is Maude. That's the character who shares my passion, my social concerns and my politics," he writes, adding, "Oh, and as important as all the rest combined, it was Maude who dealt best with the foolishness of the human condition because she knew herself to personify it. Oh, my Maude!" Lear was a one-man Golden Age of Television, a sitcom savant who at one point had seven series on the air and more than 120 million viewers each week. There was comedy on television before Lear, and certainly plenty of shows with a social conscience, but the creator of "All in the Family" was the first to blend the two so daringly and successfully. His memoir covers 92 extraordinary years of life in which, among other things, Lear flew 52 missions as a radio operator and gunner in World War II, wrote television scripts for the country singer Tennessee Ernie Ford and witnessed a naked Jerry Lewis blow out a birthday candle attached to his penis. Lear explains that growing up in a time of Jewish quotas and a racially segregated military shaped both his comedy and his politics, leading him to found the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way in 1981. He also explores how his unusual childhood molded his psyche. Lear's father, H.K. Lear, was a jaunty, confident and incompetent con man who spent three years in prison for fraud when Lear was a boy. His mother, Jeanette, was no day at the beach either. But this is not a dark, contemplative look inward, like the autobiography "Elia Kazan: A Life," or a witty, gossipy raconteur's riff, like "The Moon's a Balloon," by David Niven. It's mostly a wonder-struck account of drive, luck and longevity. The reader is a little like a child being dragged through the aisles of a giant supermarket by its mother - the child wants to linger over a bright, arresting display of cereal (wait, Jerry Lewis did what?), but the mother is hellbent on getting through dairy, produce and the checkout line. Lear, always eager to move on, takes a brisk, at times hurried canter through a past he knows is rich ("next" is a favorite word). The book title is almost a family joke, a phrase that Lear says sums up his ruling attitude in life; no matter how difficult a situation, he felt somehow detached enough to revel in the sheer novelty of the experience. That includes a diagnosis of a near-fatal blood infection. He was less sanguine about prostate cancer in 1988, but not much. The cancer was caught early, and the surgery was successful. Lear says his recuperation period was, as he puts it, "a gas." Lorne Michaels sent him tapes of "Saturday Night Live." Lear says: "My ass disappeared with my cancer because I laughed it off." He doesn't dwell on any one part of his life or anatomy, instead firing a wide spray of turning points, including his first marriage to a high-school sweetheart; his first job in show business as a publicist (he made up a tidbit for the gossip pages about Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle); writing "The Martha Raye Show" on a diet of Dexedrine and Seconal; casting the great Carroll O'Connor to play Archie Bunker; his fights with network censors over issues like sex, race and abortion; and even his compulsion to buy a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence. He also bought a Vermont farm that once belonged to Robert Frost and turned it into his family compound. "I think of it always as our Hebrew Hyannisport," he says. He is generous about collaborators, co-workers and protégés like Rob Reiner, whose humor he discovered when Reiner was a teenager and taught Lear's eldest daughter how to play jacks. He later cast him as Michael, the left-leaning son-in-law whom Archie called "Meathead." And he is frank about his often tempestuous collaboration with Carroll O'Connor, who died in 2001. Lear calls the actor "relentlessly contrarian" but also brilliant: It was O'Connor who came up with some of Archie's best malapropisms, including the opinion that jails are a "detergent" to crime. Perhaps not surprisingly, he is more concise when explaining how he created "All in the Family," which was adapted from a British comedy, "Till Death Do Us Part." Lear says that he read a "squib" description of the show in TV Guide and knew instantly that he wanted to do an American version of a bigoted working-class father who clashes with a liberal son-in-law. '"Oh, my god,' I thought instantly, 'my dad and me.'" He lyrically describes his courtship of his third wife, Lyn Davis Lear, but there is no need to explain why he fell in love with a lovely woman 25 years his junior, who sought his advice for her Ph.D. thesis. She reproached him for not taking himself more seriously. Lear listened to her (and his therapists) in writing this book, but thankfully not too much. There is still a lot of zest, passion and whimsy in the man who taught Americans to laugh at their failings. As Frances Lear would say to him when they were married: "Not bad for a little Jew from Hartford." ALESSANDRA STANLEY is the chief television critic of The Times.

*Starred Review* This is, flat out, one of the best Hollywood memoirs ever written. In most Hollywood bios, we skip through a lot of sections, waiting to get to the good stuff, but here it's all good stuff. Lear, the creator of the classic TV series All in the Family and Maude (among many, many others), had numerous jobs before he fell into television writing: he was a PR man, a door-to-door salesman, an inventor, a radio operator aboard a B-17 bomber, and each of these stages of his early life easily could be a book unto itself, so entertainingly does Lear write about them. And the story of how he came to be one of television's top producers reads like the script for a really good movie: Lear teams up with a buddy to write comic songs; they parlay this into a gig writing sketches and routines for Danny Thomas, which leads to writing full-time for legends like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, which leads (for Lear, anyway) to writing movie scripts, which leads to Lear's changing the landscape of television in the 1970s with his truly revolutionary approach to the types of characters and themes that could appear on the small screen. Now in his nineties, Lear writes about his own life with a sort of can you believe it? approach, and at times you can see him opening new doors in his own memory (as, for example, when he realizes that he's spent most of his life trying to whitewash the truth about his father, who was a fraud and a liar but also a pretty likable guy). An absolute treasure.--Pitt, David Copyright 2014 Booklist

The television producer whose controversial sit-com hits-All In The Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, One Day at a Time-virtually defined the culture of the 1970s looks back on his triumphs and vexations in this feisty, thoughtful autobiography. Lear vents sharply conflicted feelings about nearly everyone and everything: his father, a charismatic con-man; his mother, a sour woman who constantly disparaged him (when he made Forbes 400 Wealthiest Americans she noted he was near the bottom of the list); Carroll O'Connor, a sublime Archie Bunker but also a megalomaniac forever threatening to shut down the show over script complaints; the United States, which, as founder of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, Lear celebrated in patriotic extravaganzas while deploring patriotic excesses. Lear pens sharply observed studies of the creative process on his many iconic productions and bares plenty of raucous, sometimes bawdy anecdotes-readers get to experience a nude and lewd Jerry Lewis-before the narrative peters out in a third-act haze of nostalgic testimonial and light spiritual rumination. Still, in keeping with the bigoted, mouthy, complex and loveable characters he created, Lear's knack for sizing up a flawed humanity makes for an absorbing read. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.