When you saw Carney as Norton, it was hard to believe you were watching an actor at work, exposed to the pitiless eye of a single camera trained on a single cheesy set. He was Norton, the Fool to Jackie Gleason’s low-rent Lear, Ralph Kramden. As Kramden redlined between rage and self-pity, Norton cruised in a private world defined by his innocent appetites–that refrigerator at the right of the stage exerted a gravitational pull on him–and an absurd dignity (he called himself an “underground sanitation expert”) masking a radical humility. He was Charlie Chaplin without the artiness, Stan Laurel without the reticence, Sancho Panza without a lick of sense. Gleason, the show’s mastermind, invented Norton, but Carney gave him life. And it was hard to get it back.
Carney himself, unprotected by Norton’s harebrained innocence, visited the too-familiar hells: divorce, nervous breakdown, alcohol. But he got sober, remarried his first wife and kept making movies. He was a pro, and sometimes inspired; he could even keep you from picturing that T shirt, vest and beat-up hat. But that’s all we can picture now. It’s not Ed transcending Art so much as Art transcending Life.
