Hollywood maverick favored creativity over easy money

[Appreciation, from A1]

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ROB REINER, left, during taping of the "When Harry Met Sally..." soundtrack. FLOWERS are set atop Reiner's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Monday.

(HULTON ARCHIVE Getty Images KAYLA BARTKOWSKI Los Angeles Times)

evaded expectations and the industry's attempts to trap him in a box.

Many tried, of course. As an unknown theater actor, Reiner recoiled when strangers pegged him merely as “Carl Reiner’s son.” His father, the multi-talented comedian and creator of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” didn’t think his boy had much talent and pressed him to be a ballplayer or a doctor. Norman Lear, a friend of the family, disagreed. Watching young Reiner play jacks in the living room, he thought the kid was hilarious.

“I was still searching for an identity for myself,” Reiner told an “All in the Family” fan magazine in 1971, the year Lear offered him the role of Archie Bunker’s hippie son-in-law Michael “Meathead’” Stivic. The part made him famous, but it wasn’t the identity he wanted.

Reiner, then 23, was already weary of being typecast as a mop-haired, love-bead-wearing revolutionary, a cliché he'd already played plenty, including in a cameo on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” He said yes to Meathead, assuming that the sitcom’s hot-button bigotry would be so incendiary that it couldn't possibly last longer than 13 episodes. Instead, “All in the Family” became the No. 1 TV show in America and ran for eight seasons.

“They still call me Meathead,” Reiner lamented in 1985. “It doesn’t matter what I do—it’s always going to be there.” As a Reiner fan who wasn’t even born until after Meathead was off the air, I hope he knew how many of us wouldn't rank it at the top, or even the top five, of his overall accomplishments.