People.com Archive So Long, Archie By Claudia Glenn Dowling Published on July 9, 2001 12:00 PM Share Tweet Pin Email Everywhere he went, he’d get it—the double take followed by a greeting, as if to an old friend. “Arch!” they’d say. “Archie!” It didn’t matter that many of them weren’t even born until All in the Family was well into reruns. Even two decades after the last episode aired in 1979, Carroll O’Connor was still Archie Bunker, the pigheaded Neanderthal, a paragon of political incorrectness who, despite his bigotry, was each week welcomed into the homes of more than 50 million Americans of every color and belief system and into their hearths and hearts. Those were the days. For O’Connor, they ended abruptly on June 21, when he died of a heart attack after complaining of chest pains at his Westwood, Calif., home. Accompanied by Nancy, his wife of nearly 50 years, he was rushed to a hospital but died two hours later. He was 76. “It was a shock for Nancy,” says All in the Family costar Rob Reiner. “She knew he was not in good health from the diabetes [he’d suffered from in recent years], but this was unexpected.” Even now it seems hard to believe, for there was a stubborn permanence to Archie Bunker, the Queens warehouse worker who called his wife, Edith, played by Jean Stapleton, a “dingbat,” his son-in-law Mike (Reiner) “Meathead” and daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) a “weepin’ Nellie atheist.” He delivered his bombast from the security of his armchair—and from his faith in his unassailable role as head of the household. “We didn’t have no tails, we didn’t come from monkeys, you atheistic, pinko meathead,” he’d say, stating his irrefutable argument against evolution. Along the way, he contributed the first audible toilet flush in prime time, and aired his views on subjects that, until he and show creator Norman Lear came along, just didn’t get raised on U.S. TV: homosexuality, rape, menopause and race. To any family member who dared offer a contrary opinion, he’d have the last word: “Stifle yourself.” And yet we liked the guy. There was something sad and sweet about him, despite his misguided views. We could relate. He was real. At the Democratic convention in 1972, he even got a vote for Vice President. “Archie Bunker wasn’t very likable,” conceded the man who played him for 13 years. “But everybody loved him.” If so, it was a testament to O’Connor’s acting skills, for his was no Bunker mentality. His views were as reasoned as his character’s were retrograde, his accent as cultivated Broadway British as Archie’s was strictly Noo Yawk, his dedication to fighting racism as fervent as Bunker’s fear of the Other. Okay, they did share a temper—O’Connor’s was so legendary that he once took out an ad in Hollywood trade papers acknowledging it and pledging “possibly (though I hate to make big promises) to having a pleasanter personality.” On the set, too, O’Connor was head of the household, vetting scripts, directing, producing, controlling. Sally Struthers even called him Daddy. He was born in Manhattan—not Queens—the oldest of three sons of a schoolteacher mother and a lawyer father. After serving in the Merchant Marine during World War II, Carroll followed a girlfriend to the University of Montana. She dumped him, but there the 5’11” O’Connor met 6’1″ costume designer Nancy Fields in a campus production of Life with Father. “I loved his sense of humor,” she recalled. He allowed, “If you can make the girl of your dreams laugh a lot, she’ll fall for you.” When he went to study history at National University in Dublin, Nancy followed. They married in 1951 and eventually set up housekeeping in New York City, where O’Connor made audition rounds, substituting as a high school English teacher to pay the rent on a cold-water flat. He landed minor roles in several films, including that of Casca in Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s Cleopatra. While on location in Rome in 1962, Nancy, an Episcopalian, converted to Catholicism. They remarried in the Catholic Church and, unable to have children, adopted a baby they named Hugh after one of O’Connor’s brothers, who had died in a motorcycle accident. “Carroll wasn’t gung ho but not at all rejecting,” recalled Nancy. “He grew to just adore Hugh.” A decade later O’Connor became the most famous father in America. When All in the Family premiered in 1971, the actor himself had no idea how successful the series would become. “I thought it was a noble experiment, but I didn’t think it was going to last,” he said later. “I was wrong.” The show lasted from the Nixon era through the Carter Presidency and was, for five successive years, television’s No. 1 show, earning O’Connor four Emmys. When Reiner and Struthers left Family for better neighborhoods in 1979, the main man and, for a time, Stapleton, carried on at Archie Bunker’s Place. CBS finally pulled the plug on a widowed Archie in 1983. Ironically, it was when O’Connor’s fame as a father figure was at its height that his own son began to have drug problems. Hugh began smoking marijuana while fighting Hodgkin’s disease at 16 and struggled with drugs and alcohol for the rest of his life. His father tried to help him with rehab and acting jobs, and from 1988 to 1994, barely slowing down for bypass surgery in 1989, O’Connor played a small-town southern lawman who married an African-American councilwoman on TV’s In the Heat of the Night. His son joined the cast as his deputy and married a wardrobe assistant from the show. But by 1995 Hugh’s wife and son had fled from his addictions to the safety of the O’Connors’ home. His father spoke with him three times on his third wedding anniversary, in March of that year. In their final phone conversation, Hugh, then 32, threatened suicide. By the time the police got to him, it was too late; he had shot himself. “I can tell you Carroll never looked the same after his son died,” says Reiner. Dallas star Larry Hagman, a longtime friend of O’Connor’s, agrees. “He was always bitter and always heavy-duty into drug prevention,” says Hagman. O’Connor once took out a copy of his own 1998 memoir, I Think I’m Outta Here, and flipped through the photographs of Hugh from boyhood to manhood. “Look at that handsome guy,” he said sadly. “How could a guy like that kill himself?” In his grief and rage, he helped to get the man he blamed for his son’s downfall convicted in 1996 of possessing and furnishing cocaine. But O’Connor’s wrongful-death suit against the man was dismissed a year later. Afterward the O’Connors doted on grandson Sean, 8, in their apartment in New York City and enjoyed walking their dog Dakota Lily in Central Park. Back home in California, O’Connor fussed with restoring cars, including his 1936 Rolls-Royce Phantom III, a passion he had shared with his son. At O’Connor’s funeral on June 26, the Rolls was parked outside St. Paul the Apostle Church in West-wood, in tribute to its owner, as some 200 fans gathered quietly nearby. Inside the church sat 800 mourners—including O’Connor’s All in the Family castmates Reiner and Struthers and producer Norman Lear, as well as showbiz pals Hagman, Martin Sheen, Don Rickles, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. O’Connor, Meara told PEOPLE, “was the consummate actor. He could make you laugh and cry.” Certainly tears were abundant at the midpoint of the 60-minute service, during a violin solo of “Danny Boy.” And later, as O’Connor’s pine casket was carried out, the mourners rose in unison to give him one final standing ovation. Claudia Glenn DowlingVicki Sheff-Cahan and Maureen Harrington in Los Angeles