If I Only Knew Then...

by Charles Grodin

  Peggy said, “Carol, where’re you goin’? You can’t leave yet—Cary’s dying to meet you!”

  Oh, gee. I looked up into his face . . . that face . . . and I forced a lame smile. He took my hand and his mouth started moving. Trouble was, I couldn’t hear him! My heartbeat was so loud, I thought my ears were going to implode. Watching his lips move, I just knew what he was saying had to be the most charming sentences anyone had ever uttered, but I couldn’t hear.

  He kept on and on . . . holding my hand . . . sometimes even squeezing it a little. I thought he’d never stop. Oh, but then he did . . . his mouth had stopped moving. Oh, God, it’s my turn now. He’s waiting for me to say something . . . anything.

  Then it came out in a rush. “You’re a credit to your profession.”

  Why didn’t the floor open up? Why didn’t someone distract him before I opened my mouth? Why didn’t we make it to the door in time? Why did we go to the party in the first place? Why was I born?

  On the way home in the car, Joe looked at me and said, “You were right.”

  WHAT I LEARNED

  Trust your instincts.

  GOLDIE HAWN

  Actress

  Good morning, Miss Hawn,” the security guard greets me cheerfully as I pull into the NBC parking lot for the last time.

  “Morning, Jim,” I reply with a smile that doesn’t quite reach my eyes.

  Steering my maroon Chevrolet Corvette into the slot marked by a sign on the wall reading LAUGH-IN: GOLDIE HAWN, I head with a heavy heart for the door I have opened every working day for the last three years, in beautiful downtown Burbank.

  As I walk down that long, long corridor to the studio, passing people I have come to know and love, I can hardly believe I am leaving the show today. Peering in through every doorway, I am wistfully aware of how much I have taken everything for granted. Five days a week, I have walked this corridor without thinking. Now I really look at the stages, the rehearsal halls I’ve worked in, the room where my bikini-clad body was painted with words and symbols, the newsroom.

  Passing Hank, the funny makeup man, the one I joked with all the time about the double chin he insists I don’t have, I wave and giggle. I pass Tom Brokaw, the new NBC anchor, who greets me each morning with a smile and a bright hello. I must admit I have a bit of a crush on him.

  Looking into one rehearsal hall, I remember the day I danced there in a tight red sweater jumpsuit. I glanced up and could hardly believe my eyes. Elvis Presley had wandered in to watch us rehearsing.

  I stop, soaking up the memory now, and still taste how it felt to see the King standing there, emitting such incredible sexual energy, I thought I was going to swoon just being in the same room. That man and his music made my teenage hormones rage. Despite my promises to my father to listen to only classical music, I lived head to toe for rock and roll.

  Elvis was introduced and walked over to me, reached out, and touched my tousled hair. “Why, Goldie,” he said, smiling that crooked smile of his, “no wonder you’re so funny. You look like a chicken that’s just been hatched.”

  Walking on down the corridor, I remember the time we all chased George Schlatter, the producer and director of Laugh-In, when he had us working on a sketch until three in the morning. Dick Martin, Dan Rowan, Ruth Buzzi, and I were dressed in overalls, supposedly to paint a wall, but it was so late and we were so tired and none of us wanted to get covered in paint. With one look, we yelled, “Get George!” instead. We chased him down this hallway with rollers dripping paint until he ran upstairs and locked himself in his booth.

  Turning down a side corridor into the Laugh-In hallway, the place where our little family gathers every week, I step into my dressing room, which looks just the same as it always has. There is the old telephone, the bowl of fresh fruit, the makeup table, and the ugly brown couches. Only now they don’t look so ugly anymore.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  Try to fully appreciate what you have when you have it. Nothing is forever.

  ALAN ALDA

  Award-Winning Actor,

  Bestselling Author

  One of my charming failings is that I don’t mind if people think I’m smarter than I am. I guess, actually, this is only charming to me, but I usually find it captivating.

  This little idiosyncrasy rose up to bite me one day, though, and it didn’t bite me in private, where nobody would notice; it took a chunk out of me while I was in front of a television camera.

  For eleven years I hosted a show on public television called Scientific American Frontiers. I got to interview scientists from all over the world; hundreds of them. And it was a feast for me. As they worked on unraveling the mysteries of nature, it was like listening to a detective story told by Sherlock Holmes himself. Sometimes they would tell me about an invention that was limited in scope, such as a device that helped you lift heavy weights, and I could ask questions that were sensible and not too far-reaching. But sometimes the area of the scientist’s interest was much broader.

  Early in the run of the show, I was set to interview Carl Sagan and I realized suddenly that we wouldn’t be talking about a device in a lab. I was going to be asking him about the whole cosmos. I was a little scared. Where would I begin? “So how did this universe thing get to be like this? Where did all this stuff come from?” Somehow, I needed to start off a little smarter than that. I read everything I could that Sagan had written. I had been doing this with all the scientists I met, but with Sagan I piled it on. And I had to cram, because I only had a couple of weeks before we’d talk.

  We met Sagan in front of his house at Cornell University. As we walked down the path to his front door I could see a huge, crashing waterfall in a gorge a hundred feet below us. It was dramatic and exciting, and it mimicked the rush of thoughts in my head. I had filled my brain with big bangs, expanding universes, extraterrestrials, gravity, black holes, asteroids, and a few other things that didn’t quite fit. Shreds of knowledge attached themselves to one another and re-formed into cockeyed notions, but I was eager to talk with Sagan, and I knew I could rely on his experience at being interviewed to get us through.

  We sat down to talk in the airy, sunlit office where he did his writing. He was congenial and responsive, and everything seemed to be going well until we got to the subject of the expanding universe. Many years earlier, when I had first read that the universe was expanding, I picked up a pencil and wrote in the margin of the book I was reading, “This must be like a ball being thrown in the air over and over. It goes up and comes down again.” I was sure that if the universe expanded, eventually it would run out of steam; gravity would start to pull it back again until there was another big bang. It seemed to me it was like respiration: every universe would have a life of one breath. This is a nice idea, and it might make some kind of poem. It might even make a question in a conversation with a scientist, but it’s not a very good assumption to make, and it certainly is not something that you want to try to maneuver Carl Sagan into agreeing with. I didn’t even ask him if anybody else had ever thought of this idea. I just thought if I moved him in the right direction, he’d tell me that that’s the way he saw the cosmos too and I would be really smart.

  I didn’t know it then, but physicists have thought of this clever idea. Unlike me, they also have the ability to add up all the stuff in the universe and they figured out it doesn’t add up to a bouncing ball. I noticed a slight unfocusing of his eyes as I cheerfully danced down this path. Is he stunned, I thought, that I see so deeply into the cosmos?

  After a couple of hours the interview was over. He was probably exhausted, but I was exhilarated. I’d had an actual conversation about astrophysics with a real astronomer. The producer of the show invited me out for a cup of coffee before we met with the next scientist. I didn’t want to gloat about how well it had gone with Sagan, and I was ready to respond to his praise modestly. Instead, his eyes drilled into mine and he said in a very direct way, “I’ve been wondering why you were showing off. I’m surpris
ed you would do that.”

  My ears burned with anger. Showing off? What was he talking about? I was trying to be up to the job.

  He didn’t stop there. Why hadn’t I just asked questions as if I didn’t know the answers, he asked, and let Sagan be the smart one?

  My ears burned for another day or so, and then it finally sank in. All the preparation I was doing, reading everything the scientists had written, was making me ask questions that I thought revealed a knowledge of their work, but it only got in their way. My questions were based on assumptions that left them no room to tell their own story. After that day with Carl Sagan, I began to go into interviews with little or no preparation, which forced me to ask truly basic questions. This way I could let the scientists explain their experiments from the ground up—now that I was willing to look as dumb as I actually was. And suddenly, something happened between us. They were talking to me in a way they never had before. I was hearing about a universe I had only imagined, but which they had seen. I was letting in reality, and it was thrilling.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  I got smarter by being dumber. That was a surprise.

  My afternoon with Sagan started me off on a journey on which I discovered that there are actually several levels of ignorance. And I’ve done time on all of them. The rudimentary level is simply not knowing anything and keeping quiet about it. This is the blissful level. You don’t bother anyone else and they don’t bother you. A lower rung of ignorance hell is “knowing” something that’s not so—and then telling everybody else about it. An even lower rung, and maybe the most dangerous, is thinking that what you know, whatever it is, even if it’s right, is all there is to know. That’s where I was with Sagan. I was enjoying my little smattering, and I thought it put me in a position to frame complex questions.

  The elevator up out of this hell was an easy one to take. All I had to do, I found out, was to listen. What an idea.

  I began to see that no matter how much I thought I knew, if I actually listened to what other people were saying, I would wind up knowing more. Even if I thought I knew more than they did. Because letting other people in always led to hearing what was behind what they were saying. Somewhere in them there was something valuable that I would miss if I stopped them and made them check their forbidden ideas at the door.

  What I learned is that nothing beats listening. Real listening leads to questions instead of oratory.

  And, suddenly, I got it. I’d been doing it all along; I’d been doing it on the stage, but not in life. I’d learned as an actor that listening isn’t just waiting for my cue, for the moment when I get to talk. Listening is letting the other person change me. On the stage, I always let what the other person says force me into saying my next line. I don’t say it because it’s written in the script; I say it because this person has forced it out of me. And when I listen in life now, thanks to that moment with Sagan, I try to leave myself open, to listen closely, without defenses. And if I don’t like what I’m hearing, sometimes I actually remind myself, Maybe this person can change me. And then I hear stuff I never heard before.

  BEN STILLER

  Actor, Director, Producer

  I have made many mistakes in my life. Probably one of the biggest was quitting college. I started making my own home movies when I was about ten: Super 8mm epics made with my friends on 84th Street and Riverside Drive. The films usually involved murder and some form of revenge. We were probably inspired by Death Wish and other gritty seventies fare we were watching at way too young an age. So movies were what I always wanted to do, and I knew it.

  School was never ever something I liked. From kindergarten on, through grade school, I went against the norm. I remember not liking being assembled into a group. It felt like we were being imprisoned or institutionalized in some way. Once when I was talking to a friend during an assembly in second grade, the teacher in charge, Mr. Shild, asked me in front of everyone at the school, “Benjamin, did you hear me, or have you not washed out your ears today?” That was it. I was personally devastated and after that never really got with the program.

  High school was even worse. So when it came time to go to college, I was already lobbying my parents to let me stay in New York and try my hand at acting and directing movies. But there was one school I would consider: USC film school, to which every aspiring filmmaker aspired. I went and visited with my dad. It seemed like another universe, where the students lived on a higher plane. I also remember there was a Sizzler across Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, where I sat with my dad and realized that this was the place I belonged. Of course I didn’t get in. I don’t know if it was grades, or that my application lacked any sort of spark, or probably both.

  After that, the only other place I wanted to go to was UCLA. They had a good film program too, but it didn’t start until junior year, so I enrolled in the acting program to bide my time till junior year, when I would tear it up. I lasted seven and a half months. Perhaps it was the huge size of the place—I was used to a small high school in New York City that had about a hundred students. My first history class at UCLA had 350. Also, at my high school we didn’t have homerooms. We had “clusters” (it was progressive), and we called the teachers by their first names. Not at UCLA. I was terribly intimidated and lonely too. But I did have a great roommate, a girl who was a junior and so nice to me. She was basically the only person I hung out with

  I got in a production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, in which I had about five lines. That was exciting but ended quickly. My most gratifying college experience was being an intern on Thicke of the Night, a short-lived talk show hosted by Alan Thicke. I got to drive him around a few times, walk Charlton Heston to his car, and stuff like that.

  Meanwhile, I was plotting my escape. I wrote my folks a letter explaining that I needed to come back to New York to start auditioning and taking acting classes, that this whole college thing was a waste of time. I know they didn’t want me to quit, but I was really adamant. So I sold my slate-gray metallic Rabbit and flew home on the red-eye the night after my last exam for third-quarter classes. I think it was March of ’84.

  I got home to my folks’ apartment on the Upper West Side. It was about 7:00 a.m. I think they were still sleeping. I walked down the long hallway to my room. It had been converted to a “guest suite” already. I plopped down on my suitcase, looking out the window over the rooftops of the brownstones to the west. I thought, “Finally, no more homework. Ever! No more school, ever again for the rest of my life. I am free to do whatever I want to do.” I heard the clinking of the old radiator pipe from my bathroom. A sort of chill came over me as I looked out at the cold gray sky. Now what?

  WHAT I LEARNED

  Sometimes, you need to embrace where you are, even if it is not the most comfortable place. I was impatient when I was young, always wanting to get to the next experience. But in reality, I couldn’t get there till I was ready to get there. I missed out on a part of my youth—the college years, the time in your life when you have a chance to find your independence without the pressure of having to succeed in the real world. I wish I had stayed in college. The next few years, in essence, ended up being my college experience, only not in college but living at home and working in New York.

  Someday I think I might go back to school.

  JOHN GABRIEL

  Soap Opera Star

  I played the role of Dr. Seneca Beaulac for ten years on the highly successful soap opera Ryan’s Hope.

  I’d played the same character for so long that people would sometimes ask me if Dr. Beaulac ever crept into my real life. It only happened once.

  I went with a couple of friends to see Sylvia Syms, a very talented singer, at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. It was a wonderful act. She was a pal of Sinatra’s and her show was a homage to him. She had just finished and had come back for her encore. As Sylvia was about to introduce the musicians, she paused for a moment and, without warning, fell like a rock to the floor. There was about ten
seconds of absolute silence. The audience was stunned. We didn’t know if her collapse was part of the act or if it was for real.

  Now, I’d had three rather large glasses of cabernet, and my character on the soap was in the middle of a story that required me to spend weeks in the emergency room as Dr. Beaulac, brilliant MD. These factors partially explain my next move.

  I jumped up (Dr. Beaulac to the rescue) and ran to the still unconscious singer. As soon as I arrived, of course, I realized I didn’t have a clue as to what to do. There wasn’t a cue card in sight. I asked with desperation if there was a doctor in the house. There was, but it was no help to poor Sylvia. According to the doctor she was gone as soon as she hit the floor. He assumed it was a massive heart attack.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  As an actor it’s important to believe that you’re the character, but it’s best to confine that belief for the camera.

  GENE WILDER

  Actor, Writer

  Jerome Robbins was going to direct Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage on Broadway, with Anne Bancroft as the star.

  Mr. Robbins wanted to audition as many actors from the Actors Studio as he could, and since Cheryl Crawford, one of the founders of the studio, was producing the play, it was easy. (She was the one who got me in, along with Elia Kazan.)

  I read for the small but very good part of Swiss Cheese, Mother Courage’s son. I memorized the scene I was supposed to read, as I always did, and found a “character jacket” to wear. The audition went so well that Mr. Robbins asked me to come back the next day and read again. The second audition went so well that he asked me to study the part of the chaplain, which was one of the leading roles.