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| Jean Stapleton as Edith Bunker in "All in the Family:" |
It was Jimmy Wechsler, the last unadulterated liberal
on the face of the earth, who one day in our hideaway next to
the City Room on the New York
Post told me I should start watching a television program called
"All in the Family." "It's about this guy, Archie
Bunker, all-American bigot,"Wechsler said. "Lives out
in Queens. Got this wife. It's funny as hell."Television!
Vast wasteland! Sitcom! Comic bigotry! Who needed it? I went home
and turned on the tube. CBS, Channel 2. And didn't turn off "All
in the Family" for the best part of the next seven years.
Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker -- overweight, beer-guzzling,
ignorant, opinionated Archie -- was funny as hell, and
I had seen him in a scary performance Off-Off-Broadway in "The
Big Knife" (Odets) years before "All in the Family,"
but his was what I would call external acting -- laid on from
outside. It was the woman playing Edith Bunker, Archie's just
slightly ditsy wife, whose acting was, miraculously, from the
inside. On television yet! The actress was Jean Stapleton, and
I had seen her, too, years before, in Jose Quintero's production
of Jane Bowles's "In the Summer House," but had forgotten
it.
Now the question was: How does she do this?.How
does she convey six or eight mingling emotions -- pity, shock,
love, ignorance, insight, protectiveness, prudishness, protest
-- all in the same breath at the same time? Magic isn't in it,
as my mother would have said. Meaning yes, it is magical, and
there are nights when Edith Bunker leaves you gasping in tears
of wonder and fury and joy. I wonder what Edith Bunker would have
said about the bunch of vicious clowns who've made Archie Bunker's
worst political and racial prejudices stifle our brains these
past six years.
Whenever James A. Wechsler would sneak out of our office a little
early, with a slight grin on his serious face, I knew where he
was going. Home
-- or maybe some saloon? -- to watch Archie and Edith and Gloria
and the Meathead. Miracles don't happen every day. So long, Miss
Stapleton. So long, Edith.For that matter, so long, Jim.
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