Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

by Alan Alda

  When morning came, I went into performance mode. I’ve done this before, and I can do it again, I thought. But a voice in my head was saying, Excuse me? You keep doing things you have never done before and shouldn’t even consider doing.

  In the cab on the way to the hospital, I tried to read through my talk while the driver raced through traffic with his radio at full volume. He was listening to a program in Russian, which I couldn’t understand, but still, it distracted me. And then it got worse. He got on his cell phone and started screaming at someone in passionate Russian. This was followed by the guy on the radio talking even louder. Distracted, the driver took a wrong turn, and I was afraid I’d be late for my talk. I raised my voice above all the Russian coming from the front seat.

  “Can we go north instead of south? And can you please get off the phone? In the first place, it’s against the law, and in the second place, it’s making me late.”

  “I have to be on phone. This man is making me crazy. Is not patriotic what he says. I am American. I am proud to be.”

  “Yes, good, but can you put the phone away and drive?”

  “I can’t put phone away. I am on radio.”

  He was on the phone with a call-in radio show. I was going to be late for a talk on celebrity because the cabdriver was in the middle of his fifteen minutes. He made a U-turn, and driving as fast as he could with one hand, while screaming in Russian, he got me to the lecture hall on time and on edge. It was the perfect preparation for the confusion I felt about the subject I was there to talk about.

  Thank you for taking the time to see me. I’ll get right into it. Here are my symptoms:

  I see strangers staring at me in the street. When I pass a group of people, I hear them saying my name behind my back. People I’m sure I don’t know try to touch me. Some of them try to kiss me. Once I hired a guard because I believed a woman was coming after me with a handgun. And sometimes I’m asked to speak in front of learned people about subjects in which I have no training—and I do it.

  Actually, I know what I’m experiencing. It’s called celebrity and its discontents.

  Celebrity, of course, seems trivial—the insignificant pairing of underdeveloped rock groupies with borderline narcissists, preening across the footlights—but actually, it’s all around us. The drive over with the cabbie was a small example of how the public and the private are blurred now. And the impact celebrity has on us isn’t confined to shallow entertainment. It influences almost everything we do. It’s been doing it for centuries.

  The Greeks saw fame in two ways: as the reward for a virtuous life, but also as rumor and scandal.

  Homer wrote about honor and renown: the public recognition that came to a person who lived life in the fullest flower of self-worth. But on the other hand, Hesiod, who lived around the same time as Homer, said: “Do as I tell you and keep away from the gossip of people. For Pheme (which was a name for both fame and rumor) is an evil thing, by nature. She’s a light weight to lift up, oh very easy, but heavy to carry, and hard to put down again. Pheme never disappears entirely once many people have talked her big. In fact, she really is some sort of goddess.” This was the dark side of fame: fame as a goddess of rumor, gossip, and report.

  So as long as 2,700 years ago, people saw that fame had two sides to it. But in our world, even the renown that comes as a reward for virtue can be burned around the edges by the goddess of rumor. They said then that Rumor flew with the speed of a raging fire, but now, with modern communication, she flies at the speed of light.

  If you go to Google, you can see a fascinating example of the influence that the goddess of rumor has on our lives. Google began a new service a few months ago called Google Trends. You can chart the popularity of various search terms around the world. I thought it would be interesting to compare the number of searches for Angelina to the number for Katrina. Hurricane Katrina hit in late August 2005. It was one of the deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States, taking at least 1,800 lives. In September, Katrina far outshone any interest the public had in the actress Angelina Jolie. By October, though, their chart lines were crisscrossing each other. In December, Angelina broke through and pretty much stayed above Katrina. The week it was announced that she and Brad Pitt were having a baby, the search term Angelina Jolie got more attention than the term Iraq. And it stayed that way for months. According to Google, the news media during this period were consistently covering Katrina and the Iraq war far more than they were covering these two actors, but that’s not what people were searching for on Google.

  Celebrity gets into the most serious parts of our lives. There was a time when politicians simply courted celebrities. Now they try to become celebrities themselves.

  Simple name recognition is one of the benchmarks of success in politics. Candidates spend millions trying to get it. Name recognition is so powerful that every few years an election is won by someone whose name is well known but who, at the time, is actually dead—which isn’t all that bad, because the dead ones do less damage than the live ones.

  I found out how much stock politicians put in fame a few years after M*A*S*H hit and I had been placed up on the pantheon of recognizable faces. A delegation from a political club in New Jersey flew out to the set and asked me to run for the U.S. Senate. I found it hard to believe they were serious. “No, no,” they said. “We mean it. We want to back you.” I thanked them but said I didn’t want to be a politician; I wanted to act and write. And that’s all I was qualified to do. Their answer was, “But you could win.”

  Eventually they left, disappointed.

  It’s not just politics, of course. Celebrity is tied to the way we sell things to one another.

  Twenty percent of all the ads in the United States use celebrities— twice as many as ten years ago. And public health is tied to celebrity, both for good and for bad.

  The good influence has been called the Couric effect because when Katie Couric broadcast her colonoscopy on network television, the rate of colonoscopies in the country went up more than 20 percent over the next nine months. Before that, screening rates rose after Ronald Reagan’s colon cancer and Magic Johnson’s infection with HIV.

  But celebrity also affects public health negatively. There’s the phenomenon of suicide copycats, which, it’s said, are more likely to occur when a celebrity commits suicide. And countless young girls become bulimic to be like famous models.

  I was hitting them with all these figures because I wanted to make sure they didn’t regard this as a completely frivolous topic. But I wanted to get under the numbers somehow and try to understand this strange part of all our lives. I’ve actually lived this phenomenon, and for me it’s not so much a question of how big it is as how deep it goes—and how utterly mysterious it is.

  For most of my life, between my father’s celebrity and my own, I’ve been able to observe what happens to people on both sides of the line separating celebrities from the rest of the world. My first exposure to fame was on Hollywood Boulevard when I was eight years old, and I didn’t like it. It was about midnight. We’d just seen a movie. I was walking with my parents, and a girl about sixteen came up behind us. She punched my father in the back and screamed, “You son of a bitch!” and then she ran off down the street. My parents saw that I was shaken by this, and they tried to help me understand it. They explained that some people don’t know how to react to people they’ve seen on the screen and that I shouldn’t let it make me afraid. But it seemed to me that being afraid of a person like that was a good idea.

  A few months later, I had my next look at fame—with Bogart. My father was shooting a movie at Warner Brothers, and he had asked someone in the publicity department to show me around the back lot. We were walking down one of the old New York streets, with its fake brownstone apartment buildings and the facades of theaters and banks. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks and looked at a small man who was sitting in a director’s chair, in the middle of a conversation.

  “That
’s Humphrey Bogart,” he said. “Ask him for his autograph.”

  He handed me a scrap of paper, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. I had never been part of this ritual before. He gave me a little push toward Bogart, and I walked over and held out the paper. Bogart took it, scribbled on it, and handed it back without looking at me. “Here, kid,” he said in that voice. I looked at the paper with an illegible scrawl on it. Why had I been sent over to interrupt him for this? I kept the autograph on the dresser in my bedroom for months, and every day I would look at it—not to remind myself I had met a famous person, but to wonder why anyone would think this little scrap of paper was valuable.

  I asked myself that question again twenty-five years later when suddenly people were coming up to me with little pieces of paper in their hands. The success of M*A*S*H was so great that at first I was stunned by the attention that came to me. I had to figure out a strategy or I wouldn’t be able to move down a crowded street without signing my name every few feet. After a while, I started offering to shake hands instead. It seemed more personal. It wouldn’t result in that cold scribble of Bogart’s that sat on the dresser. I knew my life had changed one day when I was sitting in a seat on the aisle, waiting for a Broadway play to start. Someone came over with a piece of paper. Then someone else, and then another. Within a few minutes, there was a line of people stretching up the aisle to the back of the theater. I was signing fast, trying to be accommodating but wishing the lights would dim so everyone would go back to their seats and I could go back to being a member of the audience. Curtains seldom go up later than six or seven minutes past the hour, but it was getting to be twelve, then fifteen minutes past curtain time.

  Finally, an usher came over to me apologetically. “Do you mind if we start the play now?” she said.

  “God, yes. Please. You’re waiting for me? I’m waiting for you.”

  I’d been thinking the stage manager would start the play on time, but now I couldn’t rely on people to behave in expected ways. Having stepped into this sticky tar pit of celebrity, I now trailed a mysterious aroma that had a peculiar effect on people.

  People occasionally think there’s something magical about celebrities. There were the letters from people on the verge of suicide. Only I could help them. And sometimes people act as if fame has made you immune to ordinary catastrophes: On Scientific American Frontiers, we did a story on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. As we walked inside the tower, the custodian was telling me that it was still tipping over a little more every year, and unless they could fix it, it wouldn’t just tip over, the pressure on the middle of the structure would make it explode. We passed a sign that read “No one permitted beyond this point.” I asked if people were allowed to climb the tower.

  “Oh no,” he said, “not anymore. But in your case, we made an exception.”

  Once, in a torrential rain, a cop was turning people away from a bridge that was about to be swept down the river, but when he saw my face, he waved me through. Fortunately, I didn’t go.

  Interestingly, people often lose motor control. A few weeks after my face was newly famous, I was walking toward a couple coming out of an ice-cream shop. The man was carrying an ice-cream cone, and when he saw me, the cone flew into the air, looped around, and hit the pavement ice cream first. His wife had no idea what had come over him. “Harry. I don’t believe you.”

  More than motor control, they lose control of syntax. It’s very common for someone to come up to a famous person and say, “You’re my biggest fan.” This has happened not just a few times to me, but many times to every well-known person I’ve asked about it. “You’re my biggest fan,” they say.

  I wondered what the psychiatrists would make of this.

  What does this mean? They’re starting to say, “You’re my favorite…” and midway confusing it with “I’m your fan.” There seems to be a confusion of identity. I am you and you are me. It sounds a little like what Freud said in Civilization and Its Discontents: “At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one….”

  Why these exact words, over and over again? “You’re my biggest fan.” Is there an unconscious desire to resist the power they feel the famous person has over them? You’re my fan. You don’t have power over me, I have power over you. Or maybe not. Maybe in this case a cigar is just a cigar.

  Sometimes, although rarely, there is actual hostility. I was scouting locations for Sweet Liberty, a movie I was going to direct on Long Island. It had been a long fourteen-hour day when I stopped to fill up at a gas station late at night. A short, wiry man came over to the car and leaned in the window. He asked for an autograph. I said I was sorry, I didn’t give autographs, but I’d be glad to shake his hand. He said, “I don’t want to shake your hand! You know something? You’re not that great an actor. You just play the same part over and over.” He was giving me a critical review at midnight next to a gas pump. Then he got more specific. He called to a friend: “Let’s beat this guy up.” His fantasy disappointed and his rage aroused, he was no longer the pleasant Dr. Jekyll I had offered to shake hands with. I pulled my face back from the open window and drove off on an empty tank.

  But it usually isn’t hostility that surfaces. People’s emotions are stirred in a way I don’t fully understand. I was having dinner in a restaurant once, and a few tables away a woman in her thirties put down her fork and stared at me with a vulnerable, confused expression. It was early in my career, and I didn’t know how to react. Should I nod? Should I say something? I decided to do nothing and went on eating. A few seconds later, there were tears coming down her face. I didn’t know what to do. I froze. We sat there, staring at each other. And then she started sobbing. Big, heaving sobs. She got up from the table, her dinner half-eaten, and left the restaurant.

  Why are we so disoriented by the sight of a famous person? We’ve seen these famous people on a screen in a darkened room, which is a dreamlike state. Is that why, when that person steps magically out of our dreams and into reality, we become disoriented?

  Sometimes we think that objects touched by the famous have some special importance. My family and I were having breakfast in a pancake house once, and as we were leaving, the family at the next table asked my wife, “Is he finished with his napkin?” It was sticky from syrup and egg stains, but they took it as a souvenir. To some extent, most of us can behave this way. I certainly have. I bought an original Rembrandt etching once because it was beautiful—and also, when I think about it, because Rembrandt had touched it. Later, I was afraid I might have bought a fake, but I never quite found out for sure. (This way, he might have touched it.)

  Fame is an aphrodisiac. It bestows sex appeal on you. When Bill Clinton was running for president, he appeared on MTV and a young woman in the audience asked him if he wore boxers or briefs. Soon after I started on M*A*S*H, I was asked the same question by two young women who came over to me in a bar. They said they couldn’t get over having laughed at all the funny things I said on television. Hoping to defuse their interest, I introduced them to the two good-looking young writers from the show I was there with. These were the people who had actually written the funny things I said. But they weren’t famous, and the women had no interest in them or in their underwear.

  We tend to think that rich and famous go together, but fame takes more getting used to than being rich does. The difficult part of celebrity is when you’re recognized not for what you do, but simply for being famous. It can be moving when someone tells you that your work has affected them in some way. But when you’re only a facade, as recognizable as the Empire State Building and about as emotionally moving, the feeling is different. I had known, of course, that signing on for a television show would involve getting better known, and I thought I could handle it—but now, people were pulling at me, yanking at my clothing, grabbing me.

  I felt I was being
hunted. For months, I had night terrors in which I saw a shadowy figure in my bedroom in the middle of the night, glaring at me, and I would wake up screaming. After a while, I would wake up while he was strangling me. This was a little harder to take than the checks that were accumulating in the dresser drawer.

  After the shadowy figure stopped dropping in every night, I got a visit on the set one day from the FBI. Two agents came to tell me a young woman had escaped from a mental hospital in Florida. She had a gun and was headed for California, where she was going to get revenge on Alan Alda and Clint Eastwood. It seems Clint and I had abducted her in Los Angeles a couple of years earlier, and she was coming after me with a handgun. I thanked the agents, and we put a guard on the door at Stage Nine for a while.

  More difficult, though, than the way people react to who they think you are is that you can’t be who you really are. Albert Camus felt that the public man can’t be private in public or he destroys the public image.

  Something like this happened to the soccer player Zinedine Zidane (known affectionately in France as Zizou) in 2006 during the World Cup. He was thrown out of the game when he head-butted another player. Zidane, who later said that his mother and sister had been insulted repeatedly by the player, acted in a moment of rashness, not as a famous athlete with constraints, but as the private person he was underneath. A lot of articles were published about this, with some writers picking up on the Camus idea, suggesting that Zidane, consciously or unconsciously, was lashing out not only at the player who had insulted him, but also, as one said, at “the unlivable role he had been slotted into by the French.” He had to play the part of Zizou, an idealized national hero—a role that was impossible to live up to. In this way, the public image can be a cage. It can inhibit growth or change of any kind. Popular artists have trouble deepening the work they got popular for, and politicians have trouble simply changing their minds.