Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

by Alan Alda

  As your public persona grows, it becomes based, in part, on some aspect of you, but to a large extent on descriptions of you by people who don’t actually know you. The image flies around like the goddess of rumor and builds until it may be seriously at odds with who you really are. In any case, it’s not a three-dimensional picture. If you have any desire at all to be human, you want to have at least one more dimension beyond the two that are allotted to a cartoon character. But it’s hard to escape the public character you become. Mine was “Mr. Nice Guy.” It became my nickname. It started early in the run of M*A*S*H with a Newsweek headline: “Nice Guy Finishes First.” The headline hooked into a cliché and turned it around slightly, lodging in the minds of other writers, who repeated it, amplifying the effect. I didn’t mind it at first, but when I began to see it was becoming my identity, I bristled. Especially when I started being told I was “too nice.” It became harder to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and legal equality when people could dismiss my arguments as the sentimental oozings of a weakling. But once the phrase caught on, it was unstoppable. Ten years later, the writer of the article introduced himself to me. “Hi,” he said apologetically, “I’m the one who started it.” But to be admired and derided at the same time was probably going to happen anyway, and according to Samuel Johnson, I should have welcomed it. He said, “It is advantageous to an author, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.” But that sounds to me more like a description of why fame isn’t worth it.

  I was able to wait it out, and eventually it pretty much went away. Camus, who died young, never really had the time to wait it out. In an interview he gave when he was forty-five, the year before he died, a reporter asked him: “Do you find yourself at ease in your personality as a writer?” He said, “Very much at ease in my private relationships. But the public aspect of my calling, which I have never liked, is becoming unbearable.”

  But none of us is immune; people keep coming along who are sure that fame will solve their problems. Instead, I’ve seen them become despondent. It turned out they had the same problems as before, but magnified, and now they even had a few more. We suppose that the attention we’ll get will feel like we’re being adored. It never occurs to us that it might feel, instead, like being hunted. Sometimes it’s both.

  As loved as she was, Princess Diana was also hunted. Her public persona was loved by a whole nation who never knew her. They loved her so much that after she died and Elizabeth didn’t quickly make a public display of grieving, they began to reconsider their love for a queen they had loved and whom they had also never known.

  I met Diana a few years before she died. I met her because I was famous and she was famous. I was acting in a play in the West End of London, and one day, for some reason I can’t remember, all the theater people in town were invited to lunch. I went and was surprised to see that I was seated next to Princess Diana. I knew by now that the only way to speak to a famous person was as a person, not as someone famous; to talk about their job, their interests, something simple and human. When famous people meet, they often go out of their way to speak simply, idiomatically, sometimes even using slang and coarse language to deflect any sense of trying to appear special to the other person. When I see photographs of world figures with their heads thrown back in abandoned laughter, I think one of them has probably just said something startlingly ordinary to break the ice.

  I tried to be direct with Diana, but it came out a little forced.

  “It must be hard, having to go out day after day and make these public appearances. Probably at a lot of places where you don’t even really want to go.” If I was awkward, she was gracious and answered me simply and with a certain amount of force.

  “It was very hard in the beginning. And they didn’t give me any help at all—the family. They just shoved me out there and let me figure it out for myself.”

  She was angry, and I was surprised at her candor, because she was still a member of the British royal family at that point. We chatted some more, and the lunch was over, but I remembered her vulnerability.

  Then six years later, pursued by paparazzi in a Paris tunnel, her car crashed and a few hours later she died. People around the world were sorrowful. And I found myself angry at the photographers who I felt had hounded her to her death. Three days later, I had to fly to California, and as I got off the plane, there was a photographer waiting in the terminal. I hadn’t been on prime-time television for years. I wasn’t hot. There was no reason to be lying in wait for me. But these guys would bribe people working for the airlines for a look at the manifest list and then take pictures of anyone well known, in the hope they might do something inappropriate, or be with someone they shouldn’t, or stagger off the plane drunk. I ignored him, but then he began that ritualistic backward walk: always facing me, snapping the shutter, and flashing his strobe in my face; leading me in a compliant dance of self-betrayal. Hiding my face from him would be as good a picture as posing and smiling; even better. I had a flash of anger. I turned on him and put my face in his. He took a step back toward the wall.

  “How dare you?” I said. “How dare you do this, three days after what just happened?” I felt she had been hunted, as I had been when fame first hit me. But I had had the time and the luck to adjust. For me, the discontents of celebrity had leveled off, but hers had only deepened.

  The photographer didn’t know what I was talking about. I was blaming him for being a member of the tribe that had killed her, and he looked at me as if I were a little out of my head. And to some extent, I was. A touch more testosterone and I might have turned into Zidane. But my anger didn’t change anything. It contributed nothing to my contentedness.

  For this discontent to go away, or at least diminish, I think the trick is to somehow be able to live both a public life and a private life at the same time, without one threatening or destroying the value of the other.

  I looked at my watch.

  I see we’re coming to the end of the hour—and it’s time for the cure. If you don’t mind, I’ll go ahead and administer it myself.

  I don’t know about anyone else, but for me, the antidote to the discontents of the public face is to be as authentic as possible—to be simply who I am, both in my public face and in my private one.

  So what we’ll do is, we’ll take this boy—born into a life of illusion, bred by a mother who had hallucinations, trained in the art of being someone else, and who found himself known for someone he only partly resembled—and we’ll give him a new identity.

  After a life of trying many others, this one may work best. The identity we’ll give him is himself.

  I felt pretty good about the talk. I had tried to be honest with them, and putting my tangled feelings into words had unraveled a few knots in them. Their questions were generous and supportive. I’d spoken in a place where I didn’t really belong, and I seemed to have got away with it again.

  A few weeks later, I was having dinner with Mona Ackerman, a therapist friend who had been there that day. She had listened closely, and she’d saved her question for when we were at dinner. “You told us in your talk,” she said, “that you never wanted to be famous. I wondered about that.”

  “I didn’t. I never wanted to be famous.”

  “Really? Not at all?”

  It was an innocent question that made my eyes lock on hers. How honest had I been with myself?

  “Well, I guess it’s possible…maybe I wanted it a little.”

  “Why did you choose show business, I wonder?”

  “Yes, well, that’s true….”

  We looked at each other for a few seconds—and smiled. She had me. Of course I’d wanted it. It was a way to live forever. There was even a moment in my life when I’d worked out my strategy for eternal life. Sitting there with Mona, I flashed on it.

  I was in my twenties, in
a Howard Johnson’s near Times Square with a couple of other actors. We were passing time between auditions, and I mentioned that I was teaching myself to write and that I wanted to write really well because otherwise my work wouldn’t last very long. Writing lasted, I said, but stage work evaporated as it was being performed.

  I smile now at the young man I was then. I assumed that whatever I wrote would be taken to heart by millions, and through my work I’d go on living. I didn’t know what the years in between have taught me: It all evaporates. When film was invented, they thought it would allow stage performances to last forever; but silver nitrate burned like flash paper, and celluloid turned to dust. One day colors burst on the screen, and the next day they faded. Brilliant hues turned to green and eventually to pink ghosts. Everything goes. Chaucer needs to be translated now. In time, so will Shakespeare. And just as books rot and go to worm, and Edison cylinders gave way to wax and wax to vinyl—everything we do, or make, or think of, will give way to something else.

  Celebrity won’t let us live forever. It barely lets us live for now. So I think I’ll cross that off the list. But what’s left? Isn’t there anything that can give us that jolt we’re looking for—that feeling of satisfaction that lets us know how good it is that we’re here? Maybe there’s one. But it’s so ordinary, so foolishly simple, it’s easy to miss. I’ve walked right by it time after time.

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  Bosco’s Belly

  We were just finishing a comforting bottle of Brunello when my friend Arnold looked across the table and put down his glass. He’d been listening to my ruminations with compassion. Where was I going with this? I wondered. Was I asking questions that had answers?

  “You know what you should do? This will tell you how you really feel about all this. You should write one more talk. But a special one.”

  “Like what?”

  “If you were asked to give a commencement talk on your deathbed, what would you say?”

  Arnold Steinhardt is a great violinist who is also a shockingly good writer. He can draw sense out of the simplest words the way he can draw music out of catgut and horsehair. So I paid attention. What would I tell the kids if I were writing a commencement talk on my deathbed? Would it bring me closer to the heart of it?

  I doubt that on my actual deathbed I’ll use my time trying to crank out a few fresh platitudes, but I thought I’d see what I could come up with as if it were my last chance to make sense of it all.

  So here goes. Today, for all you graduates who are moving out into the world, looking with hope toward the future, my message is this: “Go forth. And stay there.”

  What do I mean by this? Do I mean you should get out of town? Go away and not come back? Well, in a way, yes. I’m saying, Go; set off on an adventure like Lewis and Clark’s—but don’t come back to where you started. Lewis and Clark almost died on their adventure, but they had a worse time when they came back. Instead, why not keep exploring, keep learning? Why fall back into old ways? Why ever give up trying to get where you’ve never been before? Someplace that, maybe, no one has ever been? Take what you need to survive in the wild, and go. When you get there, take what you find and make what you need to keep going. Go with someone you can lie out under the stars with and who can help you tell the mud from the quicksand as you cut a path through the unknown.

  But whatever you do, and this may sound odd on commencement day: Don’t go looking for Meaning. I once took that trip myself, thinking it would be fun and easy. I would look back at all the things I’ve said on days like this—urging young people in one way or another toward a life of meaning—and the answer would be clear. But I’ve come to hate the word. It’s meaningless. My dear friends, are you looking for meaning? Don’t do it. I’ve driven myself crazy with it. I have the distinct suspicion now that there is no hidden meaning to life. Looking for one is just our problem-solving brain chasing its tail—its long, lizardly, snake-brain tail. Whenever I’ve wanted some meaning, I’ve had to make it myself. It wasn’t included in the box from the store.

  Or, as it says on a plaque a friend gave me, “What if the hokey-pokey is really what it’s all about?”

  Instead of driving yourself crazy, I’d go for something simple:

  1. Find someone to laugh with.

  2. Find something to laugh at (yourself is always good).

  3. Keep moving.

  If I’ve ever had a sense of meaning, it’s been in simply experiencing my life: just noticing I was alive. That may be all there is. Marcus Aurelius said that all we have is the present moment. Twenty centuries ago, he understood what brain scientists have lately discovered: that now exists for just a brief moment in our brains—maybe five to seven seconds. Everything else is memory or thinking about the future, neither of which ever turns out to be what we think it is. But for me, that brief moment of now can be a fizzy quaff on a hot day.

  Just noticing life can be the whole bottle of beer. Nature is an intoxicating, tantalizing puzzle, a pyrotechnic display. I tell my grandchildren: “You’re bored? If you’re bored, you’re not paying attention.” I picked up this pithy saying from an article in a magazine, and I use it all the time on them, but they don’t seem to know what I mean by it. They look at me oddly. That’s okay. I wouldn’t have understood it at their age, either.

  The soft belly of Bosco, my grandchildren’s dog; the dreamy look in his eye when you scratch his belly: This is the meaning of life. Both for me and for him.

  When my brain gets frisky and I try to think beyond Bosco’s belly, it always boils down to the same two questions. One was what my young friend asked over coffee so long ago in a restaurant in Times Square. The restaurant is gone now, but the question lingers: Why not end it? Is there a point to living? And I think, Of course there’s a point: life is the point. That’s when the ancient Greek looks out at me from the pages of a book and asks: But what is the good life? The Greek, like the restaurant, is long gone, but the question hangs around.

  And that’s when it really matters what value we place on things. I had a friend who lived the good life. At least it seemed so to him. He wrote books that were read by millions of people, he had houses around the world. And he also liked to spend most of his waking hours in a bottle of gin. So between gin and sleeping, he was unconscious about two-thirds of the time. If I were sentenced by a court to a life like that, I think I would appeal.

  Whatever this thing is called—meaning, significance, satisfaction, fulfillment—I’ve looked for it in art and in love; in learning, friendship, faith, family, and in being helpful; even in pure motion—in just keeping busy. I haven’t found that any single one of them does the trick. If I stick with any of them too long, it loses its flavor on the bedpost and I have to switch over to one of the others. I find it for a time; I dig into a meal of it, and before I know it, I’m hungry again.

  I do have an embarrassingly big appetite. In my thirties, I hit the jackpot in every way. I had everything: a loving wife, happy children, work I could be proud of, money, friends, even the chance to devote myself a little to the well-being of other people. I was truly happy. And one day I said to myself, Is this all there is to life—happiness?

  That’s more than an appetite. It’s piggish. But I was willing to work hard to taste as much as I could of all the things that are supposed to bring the deepest, most lasting satisfaction. And then it turned out that pursuing it doesn’t always do it. Sometimes sitting quietly and letting it come to you is what does it. But you never know which it is. Sometimes it’s both at once.

  Squeezing the most out of life seems to involve some mysterious mix of floating without a care and at the same time working as hard as possible. It’s snoozing like a dog in a patch of sun on the living room floor while keeping twelve plates in the air in the kitchen. It’s motion and stillness, and both at once. It’s being Silent Sam and Scheherazade at the same time.

  So it all ends up in some damn Zen paradox. I should have known.

&n
bsp; In a way, though, I like all this uncertainty. It makes things more exciting. It ups the ante. Even when I was on my deathbed four years ago in a grimy little emergency room in Chile, I thought, Okay, this may be the end of it; I’d better leave a note for the woman I love. I didn’t pray or hope for an afterlife, or regret the life I’d lived. And I certainly didn’t waste time thinking about my so-called accomplishments. I just took care of business. I kind of like looking into the abyss.

  But you’re graduating today. I don’t want to dump too much uncertainty on you right before you go out into a world that’s filled with randomness. You need confidence.

  I’m going to drop the imaginary deathbed talk and switch to one I gave at Southampton College on Long Island in 2003. It’s a little bleak here and there, but mostly it’s hopeful.

  We people in the commencement speech racket have a few standard ways of going about it. Sometimes we ignore the graduates completely and talk right over their heads to the newspapers or to shareholders—or even to other governments, while announcing foreign policy. If it’s okay with you, though, I’d like to talk today straight to the graduating class.

  Forty-seven years ago, I was sitting out there where you are—well, not exactly where you are—it was on a large lawn in the Bronx. But I was sitting where you are in every other way while some guy, I forget who, was laying out a lot of platitudes for us. He was probably telling us about the word commencement. That’s a popular theme. This is graduation day, but it’s not the end of something; it’s the beginning of something…the beginning of the rest of your life. That’s a catchy way to start, calling attention to the fact that this event has had the wrong name for maybe six hundred years.