Frances Lear admits to having a trait that could be considered a curse. Or a blessing. Or perhaps both.
”I cannot write anything but the truth,” says the 68-year-old founder of Lear`s magazine about her life. ”I can eliminate things I don`t want known, but I cannot change what happened.”
Which is why her recently published first book, ”The Second Seduction”
(Knopf, $19), recounts her battles with alcohol and marijuana, her suicide attempts, her bisexual relationships as well as her failed marriages and her stepfather`s sexual abuse.
”I knew I would receive some flak, but it didn`t matter because I had no choice” but to tell the truth, she says, when asked why she wrote the book.
”But I also wanted it to have an impact on people who have gone through trauma or who have been victimized. I wanted the book to mean something.”
The book, in which Lear considers the major influences and changes in her life, is coming out at a time when she is making another important change. She recently relinquished her editorship and brought on a new editor-in-chief, Caroline Miller, to be involved in the day-to-day operation of the magazine.
This move, Lear says, gives her time to devote to writing a second book, possibly a novel, and time for ”developing a new project for Lear`s, something I have been thinking about for several years that could be very important for magazines,” neither of which she is willing to discuss.
(While the magazine industry has seen ad revenues decline over the past several years, in the past quarter there has been some recovery. Lear`s ad revenue increase was slightly ahead of the general industry for the period January to March 1992, according to Magazine Publishers of America.)
But what Lear will talk about is how she overcame her childhood traumas and her dependencies to launch a successful magazine and fulfill her lifelong desire to write.
”I`ve always had an attraction to journalism,” she says. ”I don`t think there has ever been a time in my life when I would not have preferred to write.”
In addition to lacking the education and experience to be a journalist, Lear came up against the barriers that kept women out of that profession for many years.
”It was a rare women,” she says in her book, ”who was paid to be a reporter in the 1940s.”
Beyond this instance, Lear sees many parallels between her life and women`s history and says that from the outset the women`s movement attracted her on a ”very deep level. It had a message that I felt was critical to my life.”
Lear describes her life as falling into three major parts that parallel women`s history: victimization, freedom and the creating of an identity.
Her victimization began as a child, which, Lear says, is ”true victimization.” Born in 1923 in Hudson, N.Y., to an unwed mother, she spent two years in an orphanage before being adopted by Herb and Aline Loeb, who took her to live in their home in Larchmont, N.Y.
Lear describes Aline as a cold, unloving mother obsessed with physical beauty. Lear recalls that at age 7, when she asked Aline why she had chosen her from all the other little girls in the orphanage, her mother replied,
”You were the prettiest child in the nursery.”
From her mother, Lear says, she learned the importance of looks in this world and acquired her vanity.
Herb Loeb, who provided the love and warmth in Lear`s early life, committed suicide when she was 10, after losing his money during the Depression. Her mother then married a man who, Lear writes in the book, abused her sexually through her adolescence.
When a therapist Lear was sent to revealed the abuse to Aline, she refused to believe her daughter.
That same evening, Lear recounts in her book, her stepfather met her at the door with a kitchen knife in his hand, demanding that she tell her mother she had lied about him.
”I left home that night after Ben (her stepfather) had chased me into my room and buried his knife in the door I had slammed shut,” Lear writes. At age 16 she began to work and support herself. She never returned home.
”What I did in my early years in the workforce was to acquire the work ethic,” she says. ”I began to understand what work meant and what one had to do to hold a job and be promoted in a job.” In that area, Lear says, she differed from many women of her generation.
Even when she was on her own, though, the pain and damage inflicted on the child stayed with the woman.
”I became a victim as an adult,” says Lear, explaining that the male-dominated environment ”encouraged my (sense of) victimization because women were victims. I sunk deeper and deeper into that identity.”
After going through several jobs, including one as camera girl at the Copacabana, taking pictures of guests at the famous New York nightclub, she was hired as a salesgirl at a New York department store and went on to pursue a career in retailing as a buyer.
During the early `40s she had two short and unhappy marriages.
”Because of my problems and background, because I hadn`t worked my problems out before I went into long-term relationships, I often chose people with whom a lasting, healthy love was not possible; but, God knows, I believe in love,” says Lear, declaring herself to be ”Freud`s girl-I believe in love and work.”
Yet the road to love was a long, painful one for Lear. In the book she describes how in early adolescence the need to find affection caused her to jump out of her bedroom window and run to town to ”meet one man or another, necking, petting, never having intercourse, stopping just before
penetration,” Lear writes. ”I became whole with a man, any man. The pain was stopped. And began again when he, whoever he was, was gone.”
At times, sex was even used as barter, for a psychiatrist`s services or for a fur-trimmed red wool suit in a 5th Avenue shop window.
”To accommodate my expensive taste and to abate my terror of poverty, it was necessary, on occasion, not without serious reflection, never without some loss of self-respect, to sell out,” Lear writes, describing her early years as a poorly paid assistant buyer. ”I never compromised my political beliefs or my dreams for the world, but everything else has been on the block.”
The road to loving and healing also included bisexual relationships.
”I have been involved three times with women sexually, but I do not believe that makes me a lesbian or especially masculine as a woman or anything but admiring of and drawn to women, their bodies and the warmth and ease with which they communicate.”
While working as a buyer for Lord & Taylor, some friends introduced her to Norman Lear, who then was writing for ”The Martha Raye Show” in New York. They hit it off right away, she says, and she entered her third marriage at age 33 and moved with Norman Lear to California, where she lived for the next 30 years and raised two daughters.
Despite the length and importance of this last marriage, Lear mentions her ex-husband only briefly in her book, and then in positive terms. She only expands on the marriage slightly in person, saying that she and Norman learned a lot from each other during the relationship.
She does discuss at length her children and her desire to be a mother.
”My children gave me the chance to be what Aline was not,” writes Lear in her book, explaining this further during an interview in Lear`s Madison Avenue office.
”I waited until my children were born (to fulfill) this great need to be maternal and loving to a child, understanding how tough it is to have an unloving mother. I am an extremely maternal woman, and I think it is because my mother was not.”
Her two daughters, Maggie, 33, who is completing a master`s degree in social work, and Kate, 34, treasurer of a company that she and her husband own, live near their mother in New York. And, Lear announces proudly, Kate recently made her a grandmother for the first time.
However, unlike her daughters and women of their generation, Lear did not work while raising her family.
Without work, without being able to express herself in the way that she wished, which Frances Lear believes is ”the ultimate purpose of the women`s movement,” made life difficult for her, especially in Hollywood.
When Norman Lear became successful creating television shows such as
”All in the Family,” she was relegated to the position of ”a wife-of,”
an unenviable position as far as she is concerned.
”The name and face and voice and character and personality of a Hollywood wife-of are so often unnoticed, not listened to, not admired, that in time she feels she does not exist,” writes Lear in her book. However, she also admits that many wives are able to deal with that position, involving themselves in their husbands` careers in ways she could not.
During this period Lear made one of her three suicide attempts.
”My failure to live life with an independent self interfered with the living of life by each member of my family,” she writes. ”I became deeply depressed.”
She says the pain that drove her to attempt suicide eventually was brought under control when she was diagnosed as manic depressive and started taking lithium at age 50.
At 61, Lear says she finally admitted to being an alcoholic after
”having hidden behind set phrases like `problem drinker,` `allergic to alcohol,` `addictive personality.` ”
With the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, she was able to stop drinking, she says. But breaking her addiction to marijuana proved more difficult and required spending time in a rehabilitation center.
”The measure of a good rehab center is whether it can turn an addict`s head around in only six weeks,” Lear writes. ”The probability of that is not good, but the odds improve when the therapist is talented. I lucked out. A young European, Lau Hanning, forced me to face my addiction, to understand the meaning of being an addict and to accept the truth that addiction is permanent and requires lifelong vigilance.”
Not until after her divorce in 1985, when she moved back to New York, did Lear enter the second phase of her life, the phase that had to do with freedom.
”Freedom means many things,” she says, ”freedom from dependence, from being a victim, from the role of the submissive wife, freedom from the need to express oneself.”
And not until she achieved that freedom could she embark on the third phase of her life, ”the making of my identity.”
One way she established her identity was to create Lear`s magazine. Everyone thought it was a wonderful idea to create a magazine for women over 40, but Lear claims that she knew nothing about demographics when she came up with the idea.
”I just knew that there were no magazines for me,” she says. ”So I started a magazine for me.”
While the audience for the magazine has changed to include women over 30, which Lear says is in response to the way women`s lives have changed over the last five to six years, she still feels she is addressing a group that largely has been ignored by American industry.
Despite the naysayers, despite the hard work and long hours, Frances Lear believed that she had to make the magazine work.
”I was putting my money and ability and self right out there on the line; it had to work,” she says, acknowedging that what the success of Lear`s has given her is credibility.
In regard to personal survival, Lear points out that there are many other people who have had childhood experiences similar to hers, and who, as she, have prevailed. And today, with support and self-help groups, there are more options to help people cope with the traumas of life, she says.
”There are people today who talk about things that we never talked about when I was younger,” says Lear. A recent story in Lear`s dealing with personal stories of incest brought more than 1,400 letters the first week and more than 100,000 requests for reprints, she says.
”When I talked about sexual abuse to physicians, they didn`t believe me or take me seriously or understand the depth of the damage,” she says.
”I think that there is a sisterhood now, and within that sisterhood are women who talk to each other and help one another. This is the information age. Those things that traumatized us as children can now be worked through with the help of many systems, programs, support groups.”
Having supportive friends and family also has helped her on the way to recovery and identity, Lear says. Because loss is very hard for her, she says, she needs to have a number of people to love. Especially men.
”I need to have four or five men who are extremely important to me, so that if something happened to one of them I would still have others. They are not all romantic, not all equal in intensity, but all very important to me. I think it is necessary for people like me to have a safety net.”
But even with all the help and support possible, Lear still believes that prevailing and succeeding comes down to a matter of individual choice.
”Everybody has a choice. You are in control of your life at any point other than early childhood. I think that once you have made a commitment to happiness, you can get there.”
