My dad didn’t like All in the Family. I think he and Archie had way too much in common, and seeing his own opinions laughed at rubbed him the wrong way. So we only watched it occasionally in the first season, or so. Usually when Dad wasn’t around.
I had mixed feelings about the show overall, and about some of the characters. Except, of course, Edith. As portrayed by Jean Stapleton, Edith Bunker was the sweet, ditzy, long-suffering wife of the unapologetic racist, conservative, and working class Archie. Edith was adorable. She was the favorite aunt everyone wished they had in their family.
By the time my folks divorced, All in the Family had been the highest rated network show for a few seasons, and the network had started broadcasting reruns of early seasons on weekday afternoons (it didn’t enter syndication for a few more years). I was able to see a lot more of the show, sometimes watching episodes with my grandmother, who loved Edith as much as I did.
Although the show was a licensed Americanization of the British series, Til Death Do Us Part, Stapleton played Edith much more naive and happy than the character from the British series. I’ve heard some people disparage the show in comparison to the British original, referring to Edith as an example of “typical American dumbing-down.”
They may be right about the show over all, but they’re wrong about Edith. Edith was ditzy, naïve, gullible, and clearly not a rocket scientist, but she wasn’t stupid. Ms Stapleton played her as warm, loving, and trusting. She was gullible because she saw the best in people, assuming that they were trustworthy until shown otherwise.
This was probably best demonstrated in an episode that a lot of people hate, “Edith’s 50th Birthday,” in which Edith is taken captive in her own home, and nearly raped in front of the audience. Edith eventually fights off the attack with a flaming birthday cake (seriously, and it wasn’t in a funny way). All the ways Edith tried to talk her attacker out of it, how she reacted to his threats, his gun, and finally, as the the birthday cake in the oven burns and fills the house with smoke, convincing the rapist to let her pull the cake from the oven, which allows her the smash the thing into his face and chase him out.
I saw the actor who played the rapist, David Dukes, on a talk show some years later, where he described the episode. The show was filmed before a live studio audience, at the time, and he said that the audience was clearly shocked when his character took Edith hostage, but they were still thinking that, since the show was a comedy, things were going to turn to slapstick at any moment. There was a point, when he had Edith up against a piece of furniture and he was pulling some of his clothes off, that the audience realized that this was serious. “There was a collective gasp,” he said, “which immediately changed into a growling. And I thought they might storm the stage and try to kill me.”
The birthday cake smoke appeared at that point, and moments later the audience was cheering very wildly as Edith scalded his face. He said he hadn’t really understood that Edith Bunker was “everyone’s favorite aunt” in the collective imagination before that moment.
And the problem was, he said, that because they filmed before a live audience, they also recorded every episode twice, each time in front of a different audience. “So, after genuinely fearing for my life, I had to turn around and do it again.”
He said he still occasionally received hate mail, “some of it with rather serious-sounding threats” years afterward.
After portraying “everyone’s favorite aunt” for over 200 episodes spanning nine seasons of All in the Family and one season of the spin-off, Archie Bunker’s Place, winning three Emmys and two Golden Globes, Stapleton thought Edith’s potential had been reached, and felt there was no story left to tell of her. When Stapleton asked Norman Lear, the creator and producer of the series, to kill Edith off, Lear was noticeably upset. Stapleton is said to have said, “Norm, she’s just a fictional character.” Lear responded, it is said with a tear in his eye, “No, she’s not.”
Before playing Edith, Stapleton played numerous roles in Broadway musicals and plays, appeared in several movies, and play dozens of guest starring roles in television. She continued to appear on TV and in movies for years afterward. But for many of us, she will always be Edith, the person we all wished we knew.
After news of Jean Stapleton’s death at the age of 90 on Friday, I noticed a sudden spike of traffic on this blog, all going to a post from last August called, “Maybe it was the heavy syrup?” I was referencing an episode of the series. I suspect people were looking for a clip. So, here’s one from the episode in question, “Edith’s Accident”:
