by Alan Alda
Meanwhile, I was still walking in circles, the way I had in Times Square that snowy night. In the little town in New Jersey where Arlene and I lived, we picketed an apartment house that discriminated against black people. It’s possible we shamed them into changing their policy, but I never knew for sure. We would turn out for demonstrations more in frustration than in hope. A year after King was assassinated, a call went out for a demonstration to mark the anniversary of his death. Those of us who had picketed together stood in silence with bowed heads in an intersection in downtown Hackensack, and then we sang “We Shall Overcome.” Again, there was no one in the street but us and a few cops who were assigned to keep the peace. There was no chance that the peace was in danger of being disturbed. The cops looked at their watches and glanced at one another, shaking their heads. As I looked over at them, I felt they were a little given to smirking. But on the way home, I thought it over. What were we achieving by standing on an empty street, holding hands and singing? All it did was make us feel good. I wondered if I was accomplishing anything or just playing in the street.
I got the answer to that a couple of years later, while I was having lunch with an old friend. Bert Convy had started in the theater around the same time I had. I had known him a long time, but he casually told me a story I hadn’t heard before, and it made me put down my fork and listen. A stillness came over me, the kind that hits you when you hear something that goes to the core of who you think you are. I had never thought of Bert as a political hero. He had played Perchik in Fiddler on the Roof; he had gone on to a career as an actor in films, a host of game shows, and an affable raconteur on the Tonight show. To most of us, he was a cheerful guy, skating nimbly over the surface of show business. But as he told me his story, I realized that in 1968 he had performed a small but dangerous act of courage.
That year, in frustration over events they couldn’t control, people were increasingly taking to the streets. Sometimes, frustrated themselves and occasionally goaded, the cops didn’t just stand around looking at their watches. Bert was there in Chicago the night they exploded. He had been working in the presidential campaign and had been sent as a delegate from New York to the Democratic convention. From his hotel room, he could see the anger growing in the street below. The crowd and the cops took turns surging toward each other, and at one point the cops began attacking the crowd with their clubs. The only escape for some demonstrators was through the doors of the hotel and into the lobby. The cops chased after them into the building, grabbing some and dragging them back into the street and into police wagons. Some demonstrators managed to make it upstairs, where Bert and other delegates let them into their rooms. Several of the young men had faces streaming with blood that Bert and his friends sopped up with hotel towels. They watched through the windows at the mayhem in the street below and saw the police getting ready to enter the hotel again. Within minutes, the police were banging on doors, demanding entry. They burst into Bert’s room, started hitting the demonstrators, and pulled them, some by the hair, out of the room.
Bert was angry and upset at the violence and what he felt was unlawful entry into his room. Having seen the kids roughed up in the hotel, he was afraid of what would happen to them at the station house. He got on the phone and found out where they were being taken. He put on his jacket and tie and went downstairs, threading his way through a violent crowd, and headed for the police station. The jacket and tie were a form of dressing for the part. When he got to the station, he identified himself as the lawyer for the demonstrators and demanded their release. The police wanted to know what law firm he was with. He said he was a lawyer from New York and wasn’t going to wait until morning to verify the fact that he was a lawyer; they had violated the civil rights of his clients, and he wanted them released immediately. The audacity of his demands and the authority he was able to summon as an actor put enough pressure on the police that night for Bert to get seventeen people released.
When Bert finished his story, which he told simply and without self-aggrandizement, I was moved by his courage. Having just seen people beaten by the police, he had walked into a station house and pretended he was an officer of the court. He could have been thrown in jail himself. Years later, Bert died of a brain tumor after a long and humbling illness, and I thought that the legacy he left behind was not the lighthearted performances that many people knew him for, but the instantaneous bravery he had shown that night. Without thinking, he had stepped into danger to help people he knew nothing about, except that they were in trouble. I had done what I could in those days, but compared with Bert, I felt I had been at play in the streets.
I wanted to point the kids at Emerson toward something that could stir them to meaningful action, and I guess to point myself in the same direction.
It seems to me that your life will have meaning when you can give meaning to it. And not until then. Because no one else will give meaning to your life. There isn’t a job or a title or a degree that has meaning in itself. The world will go stumbling on without you no matter how high your office. And there isn’t any liquor that will give meaning to your life, or any drug, or any type of sexual congress, either. Not for long, anyway.
I’d like to suggest to you, just in case you haven’t done it lately, that this would be a good time to find out what your values are, and then figure out how you’re going to be able to live by them. Knowing what you care about and then devoting yourself to it is just about the only way you’re going to be able to have a sense of purpose in your life.
There was a day in my youth when I suddenly realized I had values. I had been acting on Broadway in The Apple Tree for a few months when my agent urged me to leave the show long enough to shoot a movie called The Extraordinary Seaman. I was still in my twenties, but I had clear ideas about what I thought was good material, and I thought this script was terrible. But my agent insisted; it would be good for my career, she said.
I couldn’t understand how being in a lousy movie would be a career booster, and besides, the producer of The Apple Tree wanted fifty thousand dollars to let me out of the play for the three months it would take to shoot this pathetic thing.
“That was what Richard Burton paid to get out of Camelot in order to do Cleopatra,” I told my agent. “Richard Burton. People actually knew who he was.” Arlene and I had nothing in the bank, and we would have to go into debt to make the payment.
This, I’m sorry to say, was not the moment where I found out I had values. I borrowed money to make a movie I didn’t believe in. When I got back to New York, though, my agent called and said excitedly that she’d found a way to wipe out the debt. She had lined up a cigarette commercial that would pay me exactly fifty thousand dollars. This was when the values kicked in.
“No. Thanks,” I said, “I’m not interested.”
She was shocked. Why would I turn down fifty thousand dollars when I was exactly fifty thousand in debt?
“Well,” I said, “because I don’t want to take money so people can get cancer.”
She thought that was a strange line of reasoning. I wasn’t giving people cancer—I was collecting fifty thousand for a day’s work. To be fair, this was a time when cigarettes were advertised on television and the surgeon general’s warning was not yet on the package. If you wanted, you could tell yourself you were simply in step with everyone else. But in reality, we all knew cigarettes were killers. I said no again and hung up.
When I got off the phone, I realized that there were some things I valued more than others. And because of that, there was nothing hard about the choice. I hadn’t faced down the Chicago police and made them hand over the bloody kids, the way Bert had. I had simply said “no thanks” to poisoning people. But I was acting, finally, on what I had suggested to the mayor of Burbank: that the people who can change things are right in this room. I realized, though, that finding out what you value isn’t always that easy.
It can be surprising when you try to rank your values. Ask yourself what’
s the most important thing in the world to you. Your family? Your work? Your money? Your country? Getting to heaven? Sex? Dope? (Thanks, but I don’t need a show of hands on this.)
When you come up with an answer to that…ask yourself how much time you actually spend on your number one value and how much time you spend on what you thought was number five…or number ten. What, in fact, is the thing you value most?
This will matter, regardless of what business you go into. When you sell a product that you know will fall apart in a few months…. When you sell the sizzle and you know there’s no steak…. When you take the money and run…. When you write an article or a political speech or a television show that excites and titillates but doesn’t lead to understanding and insight…. When you’re all style and no substance…then you might as well be tossing poison into the reservoir we all drink from.
Suppose somebody offered you fifty dollars to throw a little poison in the reservoir? “Look,” he says, “it’s just a little poison. How much harm can it do?” What would you take to throw just a little poison in the reservoir? Fifty dollars? A hundred dollars? Ten thousand dollars? How about a half million with stock options and a Christmas bonus?
It may be “just a little,” but if everyone’s little bit of poison combines with everyone else’s…then together we’re tampering dangerously with the moral ecology.
Times have changed since the sixties. In those days, we were all out on the streets. We were impatient and passionate, and the depth of our caring was matched by the flamboyance of our gestures. But you’ve come in out of the street. They say you’re thinking more about your own careers now than about marching.
If that’s true, the funny thing is that it’s possible that you can do more to change things than anyone could in the sixties. If you can put a high value on decency; if you can put a high value on excellence—and on family—if you can love the people you share your lives with, and if you don’t shortchange them for a few bucks; if you can love the work you do; if you can give full measure to the people who pay you for your work; if you can try not to lie, try not to cheat, try to do good just by doing well whatever you do…
Then you will have made a revolution.
I stepped back from the microphone and went to my chair. I’d managed to say what I meant. As I sat there, half listening to the other speakers, the action on the East River went into slow motion and the tin can reversed its course. The wound in the scalp closed, and the girl on the running board smiled. Even the mayor of Burbank smiled.
Chapter 4
* * *
Bandages and Badinage
I walked out onto a grassy field on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, looked at the expectant faces of the young doctors and their parents, and tried to establish my noncredentials right away.
Ever since they announced that an actor had been invited to speak at this commencement, people have been wondering—why get someone who only plays a doctor when you could get a real one?
This had been a tough one. I had been asked to speak to the graduating class of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, one of the most respected medical colleges in the country. Karen Kosovsky, a young friend of our family, was graduating that day, and I wanted to accept, but the invitation scared me. In what way could I possibly speak from my own experience to medical students? The closest I had come to a personal experience with doctoring had been trying to wash the fake blood off my underwear when it soaked through my fatigues on M*A*S*H. I worried that even showing up that day would make it seem that I was an actor who actually believed he was the doctor he played. I couldn’t think of an angle to come in on, and I thought I ought to turn it down. But I couldn’t disappoint Karen, and I said yes. As the day came closer when I’d have to get up and speak, I wondered what use I could be to young doctors.
Maybe the school has done everything it could to show you how to be doctors, and in a moment of desperation they’ve brought in someone who can show you how to act like one. I’m certainly not a doctor. In the first place, I’m not a great fan of blood. I don’t mind people’s having it, I just don’t enjoy seeing them wear it. And I’ve yet to see a real operation, because the mere smell of a hospital reminds me of a previous appointment.
I had heard too many stories of medical students fainting at autopsies for me to be able to watch actual surgery. And the idea of seeing surgeons piercing living people with a knife and spreading their ribs apart so they could stick their hands inside their warm, personal interiors just didn’t seem like fun. I had done my research for Hawkeye in books rather than operating rooms. But as hard as it was to believe, at some point in the eleven years M*A*S*H was on the air, in some people’s minds, I had become a doctor.
Once, in the middle of the night, our friend Esther’s husband fell down in the bathroom a few steps from their bed, and, hearing the thump, she woke and went to him. He was facedown, unconscious, blood spreading from his head onto the white tiles. As she tried frantically to revive him, she mentally listed all the people she could call for help. And the first person she thought of was me. I was what came to mind when there was blood on the floor.
Fortunately, she also came up with a couple of other people who were actually doctors, and one of them came to the house and tended to her husband. When she told us about it the next day, I was astonished that I was at the top of her list. “What did you think I could do?” I asked her. “Run over and tell him a couple of jokes?” We laughed about it, but I realized how easy it is to let playacting substitute for reality. It was a mistake I didn’t want to make myself when I talked to these brand-new doctors.
My knowledge of anatomy resides in the clear understanding that the hipbone is connected to the legbone. I am not a doctor. But you’ve asked me here, and all in all I think you made a wonderful choice. That’s because I probably first came to your attention through a character on television that I’ve played and helped write for the past seven years: a surgeon called Hawkeye Pierce. He’s a remarkable person, and if you’ve chosen somehow to associate his character with your graduation from medical school, then I find that very heartening. Because I think it means that you’re reaching out toward a humane kind of doctoring. And toward a real kind of doctor. We didn’t make him up. He really lived as several doctors who struggled to preserve life twenty-five years ago during the Korean War.
It was surprising, actually, how many people had come up to me and told me they knew the actual doctor Hawkeye was based on; if they had, there would have been twenty-five or thirty Hawkeyes. There couldn’t have been that many. But he seemed so real to people, they believed they’d actually known him.
There’s something especially engaging about him because he’s based on real doctors. He has a sense of humor and yet he’s serious. He’s impertinent and yet he has feeling. He’s human enough to make mistakes and yet he hates death enough to push himself past his own limits to save lives. In many ways, he’s the doctor patients want and doctors want to be. But he’s not an idealization. Finding himself in a war, he’s sometimes angry, sometimes cynical, sometimes a little nuts. He’s not a magician who can come up with an instant cure without sweating and ruining his makeup. He knows he might fail. Not a god, he walks gingerly on the edge of disaster—alive to his own mortality.
There was, in fact, a complexity to Hawkeye’s character that wasn’t easy for me to understand at first. As actors, we pretty much had only our imaginations to rely on when we began the show. Somehow we had to take on the look and feel of people who had gone through years of grueling training and then months of combat surgery. Gene Reynolds, who produced the early years of the show, knew we couldn’t be expected to come up with all this out of pure imagination and had a medical adviser on the set when we shot the first episode.
In one of the opening scenes, we were up on the helipad, shielding our eyes as the helicopter landed, raising a cloud of dust. I ran over to it, crouching under the spinning blades—not so much because they were
low, but because I had never been that close to a helicopter before and I didn’t want to get my head whipped off. I called out directions to the orderlies as they lifted a wounded man off the chopper and carried his stretcher to a jeep. I jogged beside him, concerned, checking him out as we ran. Dr. Walter Dishell, our medical adviser, was watching us from behind the camera.
We did a couple of takes, and then Walter came over to me. “You know what? Don’t look so compassionate,” he said. “You’ve done this hundreds of times. Just get the job done.” I looked at the fake blood on my patient. How can I just take that in stride? I thought. Walter looked at me with some sympathy, but he was firm about it. “You’ve seen this over and over,” he said.
In the next take, I took my foot off the empathy pedal and the scene went better. Hawkeye’s concern for the patient had more power when it was more visible in his actions than on his sleeve.
If this image of that very human, very caring doctor is attractive to you—if it’s ever touched you for a moment as something to reach for in your own life—then I’m here to cheer you on. Do it, go for it. Be skilled, be learned, be aware of the dignity of your calling…but please don’t ever lose sight of your own simple humanity.
You’ve spent years in a grueling effort to understand the structure and processes of human life. It’s required the knowledge of complexities within complexities. You have skills that have been hard to acquire. I only ask one thing of you: Possess your skills, but don’t be possessed by them.
I was talking about how hard it can be to deal with people in a crisis. It’s more comfortable to retreat to cool skills and expertise. But the right mix of cool and warm isn’t easy to achieve. Even for those of us who were just playing doctors, finding the right mix was at the center of what we had to learn to do on M*A*S*H. The show would be serious and funny. There would be light moments and dark. Empathy mixed with shenanigans. The real doctors we were playing cared about their patients, of course, yet when they operated on them, they would often be joking with one another. I was surprised when I first heard this about surgeons, but then I realized that they would have to take the pressure off themselves in some way. And in fact, that’s what happened to us as we played those surgeons. After twelve or fourteen hours of shooting in the operating room, under pressure that scrambled our brains, we started playing practical jokes on one another. At the end of a take, anyone who had been especially sincere or heartfelt during the shot would get pelted with wads of rolled-up surgical tape as soon as we heard the word “Cut!” Or we would sneak up behind an actor and see how many surgical instruments could be clamped to the back of his surgical gown before he noticed he was dragging a half pound of metal behind him.
