I Think I'm Outta Here: A Memoir of All My Families - Hardcover

Carroll O'Connor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671017586 ISBN 13: 9780671017583

Publisher: Pocket Books / Simon & Schuster, 1998

Synopsis

From his childhood in Depression-era New York to his salad days in Dublin to his rule of the roost as the bumptious Archie Bunker, the actor looks back on his life, including his son's tragic drug addiction and death.

About this title

About the Author:

Carroll O'Connor is a fifty-year veteran of stage, screen, and television. He created the role of Archie Bunker on All in the Family in 1971 and went on to produce and star in two more successful televison series, Archie Bunker's Place and In the Heat of the Night. He has appeard in twenty-five feature films, and has been awared five Emmy Awards®, the Peabody Award™, two NAACP Image Award ™, and two Golden Globes ™. He is also in the Television Hall of Fame.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

Some time during the fifties I read an actor's autobiography, Errol Flynn's, and loved it; it was full of fun, an unblushing confession of marvelous outrages, and I envied it because if was the kind of story I wasn't able to write about myself. What could I tell that would be even half so entertaining? What, for instance, about sex and love, topics large in the Flynn book and requisite to success in all biographies of no consequence. Boy and man I had been the typical American innocent of the thirties and forties (an innocence annihilated by the fifties), suffering a few semi-arid attachments and the one long wet blundering affair. I could reveal nothing that would nowadays excite more than a shrug. I married once -- so did my wife -- in 1951, and the marriage was still happy and promising, untroubled by supplemental relationships or disagreeable surprises. I often wondered whether Nancy and I did not strike some of our mobile friends as quietly repressed. My life had not been dull, but if was a chain of events that did not glitter even for me. I was thinking about all this because of Jimmy Cagney. Jimmy's was the next actor's autobiography I read, and it differed from Flynn's as a glow in the hearth from a fire in the rafters. Jimmy wrote about a life that was hard and professionally painful, yet not without fun. I thought that if I could arrive somewhere in that neighborhood I might do a book some time; not now, later, probably when I retired. One day over lunch -- this was in 1977 -- Jimmy told me that I ought to start a book, and noting my reluctance he told me that he himself had never wished to write one. He looked wistfully at his collection of Charles Russell sculptures (which I love even more than the miniatures of Donatello), and said "I know I'm unimportant, but a couple of hacks who think anything is important if it turns up a buck were going to write about me, so in self-defense I had to do it myself." He was a keenly intelligent man who had made a very modest estimate of the actor's contribution to life and art.

By the most improbable chance, on the very next morning my mail included a letter from a man who wanted to write my life story. I knew the man slightly; he was a Hollywood writer, a distinction not meant to be geographical but which I leave to a later consideration, and he formally apprised me, in a kind of raw puerile English, of his intention to write his book whether I approved or not. I couldn't remember when anything bothered me more. Writers of unauthorized biographies have the decency of burglars, and here was a burglar coming straight at me with a brazen warning that if I did not let him in through the door he would break in wherever he could. A prospective victim of burglary should really be entitled to legal protection, but your life story, if you are well known, is lawfully subject to seizure, distortion, and sale by any browsing hack who finds himself without provender in television. You can't protect yourself from him. You may bring suit against him only after he has robbed and assaulted you, and then the law will want to be shown your damages, the proof in cash terms, or any other terms, of the harm done you -- not an easy thing to show.

I got in touch with a publisher right away and made a writing deal for myself, and then placed an ad in The Hollywood Reporter and in Variety, the two show business trade papers. The ad reprinted became a news story in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and a number of other widely read papers.

Carroll O'Connor Fights With a Biographer
by Aljean Harmetz
Special to the New York Times

Los Angeles -- The letter appeared as a full-page advertisement in the Hollywood trade papers on Feb. 24.

"From Carroll O'Connor to His Friends and Colleagues of The Bizness, 1951-1977 in Dublin, London, Paris, Rome, New York and Mostly Hollywood;

"Dollings All,

A furtive fellow may come among you hunting bits of information for a biography of me. I do not approve. I have seen his other unauthorized biographies and they are wretched; they have provoked some unwilling subjects, his father included, to furious legal reprisal.

"He does not invite a collaboration -- an 'as-told-to' joint authorship -- because that would require sharing the proceeds from the book, and the mind of the poacher runneth not to the even split. He knows I would not work with him anyway.

"If he approaches you, show him your backs, my loves! Show him not, I beg you, the way to my property! The still-forming vines of my life are hardly burgeoning, God knows. What fruit may come, let me with mine own hand offer when I judge it worthy, but expose not my pale buds to the ignorant teeth of the fox.

"Or to put it succinctly, I am writing my own book, so tell the bum nothing.

"Your imperiled pal, Carroll."...

The writer in question -- Arthur Marx, son of Groucho Marx -- quotes George Bernard Shaw in rebuttal. "Shaw said, 'Nobody is good enough or bad enough to tell the truth about himself.' That's why I won't write an as-told-to book. O'Connor is a public figure, and I'm a legitimate writer. He may think my books are wretched, but they've been very well reviewed. Even The New York Times said 'Life With Groucho' was great."

Mr. O'Connor's letter "hasn't deterred me at all. It's made me more determined," says Mr. Marx, who has also written "television scripts, four Bob Hope movies and a play, "The Impossible Years,' which ran for two years on Broadway."

Although Mr. Marx started out by "admiring and respecting O'Connor" and still insists he has "no hard feelings," he thinks the whole incident "makes O'Connor look like an ass. A fellow who claims to be liberal should not be trying censorship."

To Mr. O'Connor, the question is not censorship but privacy. He stopped giving interviews even to legitmate publications several years ago "because The National Inquirer distorted them and then republished them." He winces even now at the memory of a "maudlin, tasteless, revolting piece of writing they served up on the adoption of my son."

He questions whether the false stories, doctored photographs and pictures of homosexuals and heterosexuals fornicating in certain publications deserve protection. "I don't think the action of a printing press on newsprint makes something The Press. There is a violence to personal freedom these people do on a daily basis."

Both Mr. Marx and Mr. O'Connor have, at least fleetingly, thought of suing the other. "There are lies in his ad," says Mr. Marx. "I've never been sued. He said I had."

"There are laws in New York and California," says Mr. O'Connor, "giving you remedy if people use your name or image to hawk a product. My lawyers don't think anyone has tried to use those laws quite this way."

In the meantime, both men are working on their Carroll O'Connor books. Mr. Marx will neither confirm nor deny that W. W. Norton -- which published his last book, on Samuel Goldwyn -- is his publisher. And Mr. O'Connor has started writing his autobiography -- without outside help -- for Simon & Schuster.

Note that my trade ad mentioned no name but my own. How a man of common sense could come bounding onto the public stage, eager to fit his foot to the ugly shoe I had fashioned and then stick the ensemble into his mouth, is hard to imagine. But then everything nowadays is hard to imagine.

"Above all, keep it light!"

That was my wife's warning on heating that I was going to write an autobiography. I had just hung up the phone in the bedroom after agreeing to the deal.

"You're not at your best" Nancy told me, "when you get too serious. You've been too serious on a couple of those talk shows. You disappoint people; they expect yon to be entertaining."

"I know" I said, leaving the bedroom.

"Just keep it light!" she trilled.

"I'm not getting the book out today" I called back.

"Play down the politics and the anger. People much prefer to know about all the fun you've had." I was on the stairs. Her words were at my heels. "But of course when it comes to my advice you seldom listen!"

I pressed an intercom button near the kitchen door and said "I always listen. I seldom reply."

Silence. She was postponing her response. She was aware that corroded wires in the kitchen speaker made everybody sound ridiculous. She did not want to sound ridiculous.

I got the car out and headed for CBS, a twenty-minute drive from Brentwood by way of Sunset Boulevard through Beverly Hills, and then along Beverly Boulevard to the comer of Fairfax Avenue. Because the day was Monday, I was driving a Rolls-Royce. And of course I must explain riffs odd offering of intelligence.

I was not due till eleven on Mondays. I wanted to pass the Bel Air Gate as a certain television executive, who was not due till eleven on any day, was himself driving out onto Sunset. I hoped my arrival at the gate would be timely. This executive had roared at my agent, who was demanding a revision of my contract, "Don't tell me the son-of-a-bitch needs more money. I see him driving to work every day in a goddam Rolls-Royce!" That was not so. He may have seen me in the car once. But I was thereafter determined that he should see me in it a lot.

Luck ran in my favor that very morning. He and I stopped abreast at a red light. His passenger window slid down and he, looking directly at me, taking no notice of the car, called out "Doing anything new?"

I shrugged. "Maybe a book aleut me."

"Sensational! Who's going to write it for you?"

"Well -- " I began.

"Spill it all on tape. Your press agent'll find somebody to pull it together. Say hello home -- "

He sped away, and I was amused to note that he was driving a luxurious foreign car that certainly cost him more than mine cost me -- because I had acquired the Rolls-Royce at cost. Bill Harrah, the late gentleman gambler, who was also an importer of foreign cars, had offered the car to me at cost. That was in 1972 when I was making a nightclub appearance at Harrah's Hotel-Casino in Reno. I did not need the car, but Bill's generosity, and my own lust for a saying on anything, swept me away. During the next four years, to the morning of my literary decision, the car had traveled fewer miles than Nancy's car usually travels in a year.

The executive's advice sounded frivolous, but it was well meant. He was a man who got things done and moved on energetically to other things, am an who succeeded not by merit but by force. I admire and envy such men. I am inclined to be dilatory, and if I had not enjoyed extraordinary luck in life and love I might have been living with my mother at that very moment, doing nothing. In evidence of this tendency I offer the fact that six years later my book was not finished, nor even well begun. Still I refused to consider giving the job to another writer. There was no public clamor for my story; it was not commercially promising, and besides, I did not believe that a good writer would be willing to "ghost" for an actor. Why not inch along with it myself, as the sluggish spirit moved me? For all I knew a rogue was still plotting entry somewhere, but at least I had fired a round of shot into the dark and maybe it would prove discouraging.

I suddenly wanted to begin my book. I recall a surge of enthusiasm, but it soon subsided. How was I to begin? Who was I, anyway? Did I know? I asked myself that question until got tired of it and one day the question was asked of me by a pretty blond woman who, with her friend, a pretty brunette, was looking at me across a luncheon table.

"Do you know who you are?"

I was thinking about a response but the brunette preempted me: she said "Of course he does -- he knows exactly who he is." I smiled at her and looked back at the blonde, who shrugged; she would have preferred the answer from me. I was not acquainted with these ladies. They had won me in a raffle. Or rather their winning tickets had entitled them to a lunch with me at my Beverly Hills restaurant. I said to the brunette: "Funny you should think I know exactly who I am. If I knew, I could start writing about it."

"An autobiography!" said the brunette.

The blonde shook her head and said very seriously "You can't tell who you are in an autobiography. Who you are -- that's not to write about, it's just for you to know."

"And he knows!" said the brunette. "He knows exactly. I know he knows."

She knew I knew? What did she mean by that? Where did she?...What? Who was she? My face is a sphere on which little, least of all apprehension, may hide, and the brunette hastened to put me at ease. "Of course I have no personal knowledge" she said, "only psychic." I relaxed. Nothing psychic ever alarms me.

"Exactly what is a book?" interposed the blonde. She did not wait for the answer I was trying to form. She said "A book is just a bunch of events from when you were born up to whenever. But the past can't tell anybody who you are because the past is not who you are."

I said "Well the past, after all, is your life." Trying to make more of the commonplace, I asked the ladies whether they knew anything about the Great Depression of the thirties. They laughed and said they did not, and how could they? They were born, both of them, during the Second World War, nearer the end of it than the beginning.

Hastily I said "It's obvious of course that you couldn't have lived before the war. I just thought you might have heard or read -- "

"I know it was a real poor time" the brunette said in a voice suddenly sad. "Were you a poor kid?"

"No" I assured her, "I was well off, but there was something about that time, growing up in it -- "

"Who you are" said the blonde, "has nothing to do with any of that; it's about right now, today, and no other day matters."

"Not even yesterday?"

"Right now only. We are who we are, moment to moment, and every moment's different and things are always different."

"You don't mean all things" I said.

"All things."

"Inanimate things? Objects?"

"Objects too. Objects are only what we see them as. So objects change as we change, all the time."

This kind of talk was not unfamiliar. It was, during that decade of the seventies, the kind of talk one often heard at trendy but goofy parties in the Hollywood Hills. The sense of it was that nothing and no one retained form, and there could be no valid standards, no definitions, no qualitative judgments -- nothing that people could be fully agreed upon. Whatever you happened to be was wonderful. Whatever you happened to know was more than enough. And if you had been conned into believing this by some self-realization guru you could fancy yourself a savant regardless of the debris or vacuity of your past; you could feel whole and worthy right now.

The brunette said "My friend is right, change is always going on, and people and things get better all the time. I'm an optimist" she added with a giggle. The blonde smiled tolerantly to imply, I think, that her friend's comprehension was characteristically in arrears. "The word 'better'" she sof...

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket Books / Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0671017586
• ISBN 13: 9780671017583
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 277