Courtesy of Kim Fellner
The author with Ed Asner in the early 1980s
In 1979, I went to Hollywood to begin a new job as information director for the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). I was full of spunk, but also apprehensive. I’d been working at the Service Employees International Union in D.C., and the entertainment unions seemed far removed from the action. “Take the job,” my friend Dick Greenwood at the Machinists had counseled. “They represent the new working class.”
Lucky me. I walked into a union about to be upended by massive corporate consolidation, rapid technological change, and a major strike.
And then there was Ed Asner.
When I got to the Guild, Edward Asner, who died on August 29 at the age of 91, was at the height of his TV stardom. His iconic television character, newsman Lou Grant, had migrated from the Mary Tyler Moore sitcom to an hour-long drama about a crusading newsroom. It was an ideal match between star and role, and Ed and Lou were both very popular. Many people saw them as one and the same. “Hey, Lou!” people would yell as he walked down the street.
His rise to union leadership, and his tenure as SAG president from 1981 to 1985, changed that. Not only were the film industry, the Guild, and the labor movement at a flex point, but his activism coincided with the election of his polar political opposite, former SAG president Ronald Reagan, to the White House. That serendipitous convergence transformed Ed from a well-known actor and concerned citizen into a recognized labor leader and a national anti-Reagan advocate for justice.
I first got to work with Ed during the 1980 SAG contract negotiations with the motion picture and television producers. At issue was how actors would be paid for new technological formats (video cassettes! pay TV!), and underlying these challenges was an industry morphing from the old studio system, with its dynasties and veneer of chumminess, to a far more consolidated and streamlined corporate model.
During the ensuing 94-day strike, Ed and I became allies and friends over long days and too much coffee. He not only showed up, he helped galvanize his fellow actors to do the same. Thousands took to the picket line, creating gridlock at the freeway exit near Universal Studios and shutting down Hollywood for months. Ed emerged as an anchor for a more militant bargaining approach, and that activism helped him win his election as SAG president in 1981.
It was a stormy tenure. Ed was a big personality who could be as irascible as Lou Grant, not to mention ill-tempered, pugnacious, and pig-headed. He had a ribald sense of humor and an eye for blondes. But he was also a real mensch, as they say where I come from—warm, generous, loyal, and totally committed to a vision of justice. The son of an Orthodox Jewish junk dealer from Kansas City, he never forgot his roots. And he always remembered the jobs he’d held, from shoe salesman to GM production line worker, on his way to stage, screen, and tube. During the years we worked together, and thereafter, he walked hundreds of picket lines and attended countless rallies, where he would greet fellow workers and sign autographs until his voice gave out and his hand went numb. He was willing to walk the talk, even when it cost him.
Some of our struggles involved how to deal with the changing nature of the film industry. Ed and the Guild leadership advocated a merger of the actors’ unions to better confront the conglomerates, but those efforts were vehemently opposed by a strong minority of the union. But it was the Ronald Reagan factor that defined the zeitgeist and changed our lives.
President Reagan used to invoke his former leadership of SAG, from 1947 to 1952 and again in 1959–1960, as a shield against charges of anti-unionism. However, many actors remembered him for fingering fellow union members as Communists during the McCarthy Era. Hundreds lost their jobs and were blacklisted; some never recovered. That legacy still hung over the Guild and had created extreme caution on the political front.
When Ed stepped into leadership, SAG had only recently started to elect more outspokenly liberal officers and engage more actively with the AFL-CIO. But it didn’t take long for Ed and the growing ranks of SAG progressives to butt heads with the Reaganites.
In August of 1981, Reagan fired 11,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) for going on strike, and Ed was among the “first responders” on the picket lines. A few months later, a SAG board committee in the clutches of a staunchly conservative actor decided to give the union’s annual award to none other than Reagan. Although the award winner was always shrouded in secrecy until the annual meeting, I appealed to Ed and the full board, who assessed the situation and decided not to give an award that year. That’s when Charlton Heston, himself a former SAG president, best known for his role as Moses in The Ten Commandments, stepped in to defend Reagan and become the right-wing counterpoint to Ed’s activism.
Ed deeply regretted losing the show he loved, but he never regretted the principles that led him there.
But it was Ed’s support of Medical Aid for El Salvador that crystalized the conflict. After the U.S.-backed Salvadoran regime murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero and four nuns, Ed became convinced that it was wrong for the Reagan administration to prop up that government. In February 1982, he joined other Hollywood notables on the steps of the State Department to deliver a $25,000 check for humanitarian aid to the rebel forces. One reporter asked Ed how he would feel if the leftists won and the people of El Salvador elected a communist government. He responded that if that was the result of a democratic election, so be it.
I was attending commercials contract negotiations in a dismal meeting room on Ventura Boulevard when I got the call. It was a reporter on the East Coast. “Hey, your guy just said he supports the communists in El Salvador,” he chortled. “Did you know about that? Is that the union’s position too?”
Actually, Ed had been at the State Department as a private citizen, and we had no idea he was even going there. I remember reaching him a few minutes later. “The moment the words were out of my mouth, I knew I was up shit creek,” he told me. Fortunately, the union board fended off the subsequent attacks from the Heston faction. But it couldn’t fend off the death threats and surveillance that followed. The SAG headquarters and Ed’s home were graffitied with anti-communist obscenities, and a beefy bodyguard accompanied Ed to radio talk shows in Miami, due to threats from militant anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Advertisers like Kimberly-Clark and Cadbury dropped their sponsorship of Lou Grant, and shortly thereafter, CBS canceled the show.
Ed deeply regretted losing the show he loved, but he never regretted the principles that led him there. He continued to speak out. He also became closely allied with other trade unionists who opposed the Cold War policies of the AFL-CIO and had recently founded the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador (NLC). When Ed’s address to the 1985 AFL-CIO convention turned to the subject of Central America, the then-head of the teachers’ union, Albert Shanker, cut off his mic.
I still have a copy of his address from that day. “I still believe … that support of the Nicaraguan contras is unforgivable … and that labor support of brutally repressive regimes is incomprehensible,” he told the delegates. “We have shared struggles together, walked picket lines together, broken bread together … and our work on behalf of justice, dignity and empowerment for working people has made me proud. But it does not make me proud to see us bolstering the foreign policies of those like Orrin Hatch and Ronald Reagan, whose stated goals include the destruction of our own labor movement. I do know which side I’m on, and it’s not theirs!”
That was Ed. His unvarnished activism helped advance some much-needed changes of policy, and of heart, at the Screen Actors Guild and in our larger labor movement. And he continued to make his voice heard right into the Trump era. We could use more labor leaders like him in the here and now. I’m grateful for the solidarity and comradeship we shared, and for the vision of unionism and justice that he advanced. Almost 35 years after leaving SAG, I still miss him. His memory will be for a blessing.
