SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It has been a week of tributes for Rob Reiner. The actor and director was found dead on Sunday, along with his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. Their son has been charged with their murders. And those tributes, they have centered on Reiner's acting, the movies he's directed, but also on his political activism. It's something he talked to the journalist Todd Purdum about shortly before he died. Purdum wrote about that interview in The New York Times this week and joins us now. Thanks for being on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
TODD PURDUM, BYLINE: Thanks for asking me, Scott.
DETROW: When did you have this conversation with Rob Reiner?
PURDUM: Actually, on November 4, election...
DETROW: Wow.
PURDUM: ...Day, in his home in Brentwood where he had lived for many years and where, before him, his mentor Norman Lear had lived.
DETROW: I think people over a certain age might squirm when I ask you to contextualize Norman Lear, but it's been a while. For those who aren't as deeply familiar with just his role as a legendary TV producer, remind us who he was and his relationship with Reiner.
PURDUM: Yes, Norman Lear had an extraordinary American life. He lived to be 101 1/2 years old. But in the 1970s, he was the progenitor of the dominant television series of that decade. He had at one point five of the Top 10 shows on the air, and the breakthrough show was "All In The Family," the story of a family in Queens with a bigoted, white, loading-dock worker father...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ALL IN THE FAMILY")
CARROLL O'CONNOR: (As Archie Bunker) Two hundred arrested at Vietnam Day peace demonstration. Two hundred. They should have thrown a whole bunch of them in the can.
PURDUM: ...Who sparred all the time with his son-in-law, a liberal, pro-McGovern voter named Michael Stivic.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ALL IN THE FAMILY")
ROB REINER: (As Michael Stivic) Well, what would our leaving solve? I mean, with or without protesters, this country would still have the same problems.
O'CONNOR: (As Archie Bunker) What problems?
REINER: (As Michael Stivic) Well, the war, the racial problem, the economic problem, the pollution problem.
O'CONNOR: (As Archie Bunker) Oh, come on. If you want to nitpick.
(LAUGHTER)
PURDUM: And at the age of 23, that was Rob Reiner's breakthrough role.
DETROW: And this is a show that tapped into real-life conversations and arguments that so many families across the country were having, were playing out on that TV show.
PURDUM: Yes, and it brought the situation comedy of age. It dealt with issues that were of moment and current import in national life, not with burned cakes and messed-up homework and who dented Dad's car. It was really the beginning of adult sitcom entertainment, and Rob Reiner's participation in the show, and his - he also participated at times as a writer - was a crucial part of the dynamic.
DETROW: Tell me a little bit about the projects that Lear was involved in on the political side.
PURDUM: Well, so after he made his fortune in the 1970s with shows like not only "All In The Family" but "Maude," "The Jeffersons," "Good Times," "One Day At A Time" - all these pathbreaking sitcoms - he was very alarmed by the rise of the religious right at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, and he founded a public interest organization called People for the American Way to sort of take back patriotism and the flag for progressives and liberals. And ultimately, that organization was instrumental in defeating the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. And Norman, you know, to the end of his life, kept up civic activism as - and became a model for Rob.
DETROW: What did he tell you that he learned from Lear?
PURDUM: He learned that an entertainment person could have a role in public life, especially if he did his homework. And he was determined always to do that. He didn't want to be mocked by the right with half-baked views and hadn't done his homework on the issues that he cared about.
DETROW: I think that's something that struck a lot of people. It's very easy, when you're at a certain level of success, to write a check and maybe make a statement or two into a microphone or on social media. Rob Reiner went so far beyond that. He got deeply involved in the various political initiatives that he wanted to work on.
PURDUM: Yes. He wrote plenty of checks, as Norman also did, but he got very involved in the brass-tacks fieldwork. In 1998, he was the leading light of a California ballot initiative that would tax the tobacco industry to finance early childhood education programs. And when the measure passed, he then became the first head of the statewide program that was focusing on the first five years of life and education for children.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
REINER: When I hit on this, I knew this was a way to go. This was an answer to really having an impact on crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, child abuse.
PURDUM: A few years later, when California voters passed a ballot measure that outlawed gay marriage, Rob felt that that was the last frontier of civil rights.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
REINER: It's the last piece of the civil rights puzzle that's being put into place. It's - the LBGT community is the only community that is not looked at equally under the law.
PURDUM: He was involved in the founding of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which financed the court case that ultimately led to the Supreme Court's embrace of gay marriage.
DETROW: I'm sure you've been thinking about this over the past week. Do you have a thought of what one particular area or two really kind of would be his most lasting area of influence?
PURDUM: Well, I think you really have to say the successful fight for gay marriage - although there are some forces on the Supreme Court itself that have now suggested that decision should be revisited. But you have to say that that is a remarkable achievement in American history. And when he got that battle going, one of the first calls he made was to Norman Lear, who kicked in a hundred thousand dollars of seed money to help support the fight.
DETROW: When you talked to him last month, how much did you talk about the current mood of the country?
PURDUM: Quite a bit, actually, Scott. He was reflective about it. And one of the things that struck me and that I'll take away from the conversation, especially in the poignancy of hindsight, is how optimistic he remains. He acknowledged that we're seemingly in a dark and backward-moving time, but that in the arc of American history, as Martin Luther King said, you know, the moral arc of the universe does eventually bend toward justice. And he seemed very hopeful about the ultimate future of the United States and of our experiment with, you know, 250 years of a democratic republic, as he put it.
DETROW: What did you make of that? I mean, if you are somebody who had Rob Reiner's world view, 2025 was not really a year for optimism.
PURDUM: No, and I think he acknowledged that. But I think, like Norman before him, he believed very strongly that you had to look to the light where you could find it. You had to look for the glimmers of hope and for the, you know, glimmers of possibility. And he seemed more determined than ever to keep up that fight. He was not sounding retreat.
DETROW: Yeah. Is there anything else from that conversation that you've been thinking about since Sunday?
PURDUM: Well, just how warm he is - how warm he was - how embracing he was as a personality. You know, he seemed to have lost a good deal of weight in recent years, but he was a great, big bear of a man. And, you know, he asked me a lot about my children, what they were doing. He's just suffused with a great deal of warmth. And it was also - I will think very much I'm kind of haunted by sitting in that warm house which had, I said, belonged to Norman Lear before that and had at one point belonged to Henry Fonda in the 1930s, and Henry Fonda's rose garden is still there. So I think of the, you know, the tragedy that unfolded there last weekend and the way that that house has, you know, been exploded as a refuge for his family.
DETROW: Yeah. There have been so many conversations about framing Rob Reiner's artistic legacy. Do you have any sense what he would have framed his political legacy as, how he would have summed it up?
PURDUM: Well, you know, he's been quoted a lot. I've seen a lot of quotes this week that he - his fundamental belief was in the golden rule - do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. And if you did that, that was enough for him. And I think that's what he tried to live out, you know? He really did try to put his money where his mouth was in that regard. And I think show mercy, do kindness, walk humbly with your God, I think those were kind of his watchwords.
DETROW: That is journalist and writer Todd Purdum, who's working on a book about Norman Lear. His most recent book is "Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television." Thank you so much for talking to us.
PURDUM: Thank you for having me.
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