Several years ago I was working on a movie and the star was having an affair with his leading lady. That is not unusual. Nobody was concerned or even very interested in it. The problem was that he became so enamored with her that he came to the set unprepared day after day. He eventually turned the whole film over to her, and that became a problem for the rest of us. It was fascinating to watch this star being reduced to the proverbial “puddle of emotions.” A few years later I saw our female star at an event. She had gotten married—to someone else. But she took the time to apologize to me, telling me how sorry she was for what had happened. “It got out of control,” she told me.
Emotions run wild! Been there, done that. Early in my life it happened to me. Then it happened to me again. And again. I was a handsome man back then. I look at the photographs of myself at that early stage of my career and I think, Geez, I was good-looking. I didn’t feel that way, though. Not at all. I had the looks, the physique, the desire, and the talent. I was one of those fortunate people to whom so much was given. Of course the compensation was that I didn’t accept it. When I looked in the mirror I didn’t like the reflection. I thought I wasn’t especially attractive to women, and so I pursued them even more to make myself feel better. To complete myself. I didn’t think much about love at that time, other than what the playwrights had written for my character or what the popular singers were telling me. What I knew mostly about it was that it felt good. At times it felt unbelievably good. But my definition of love was limited to a relationship between a man and a woman and what I was supposed to feel for my family.
That definition started changing when I was a teenager visiting New York City for the first time. I went to an afternoon movie by myself at the great Radio City Music Hall. A man sat down next to me. After a few minutes his hand drifted onto my knee. I had not the slightest concept of homosexuality at the time. I moved my leg, figuring I was taking too much space. But seconds later his hand was on my knee again. Then his hand was between my legs. I jumped up and screamed; I was terrified. I ran out of the theater, feeling violated.
What that stranger was expressing toward me was not love. Not at all.
But it was my first experience with a homosexual. I was at the beginning of my career in the theater, so obviously it would not be my last one. A year or so later I was stage-managing a show in Montreal. Our star was a French actor. He invited me to join him for dinner. I was thrilled, a fine actor asking me to have dinner with him. We were going to a nice restaurant, he said, and I needed a jacket. “Come up to my room. I have a jacket there to lend you.”
Within minutes he was chasing me around the room. I tried to make a joke of it, but it gave me a glimpse of how someone in a subservient position might feel about being oppressed. I like to believe it changed my behavior toward women. I like to believe it. I do know it took me a while to understand that the same emotion I feel, and have identified as love, is exactly what everyone else feels, whatever their gender, whatever their sexual preference. I have a dear friend who is gay. Even as we became friends, and I knew he was gay, his sexuality was a subject we intentionally avoided discussing. Or at least I did. There was nothing to be said about it.
Then one day I saw a sadness in him and, as a friend, asked what was wrong. A relationship had gone bad, he explained; he had been rejected. And what was so obvious was that the pain he was feeling was the same as I had felt when a relationship with a woman had turned out badly. We sat down and over time talked about love. I learned how ordinary, and at times tortured, love is for everyone.
What would the world be like without love? Well, for starters, there would be many fewer country songs. As many people might remember, I have explored a world without love in a series called … Star Trek! (The Applause sign is blinking!) My close Vulcan friend, Spock, grew up in a society that intentionally suppressed emotions because they are so powerful and potentially dangerous. Emotions, he had been taught, could be messy and troublesome, leading him to admit, “May I say that I have not thoroughly enjoyed serving with humans. I find their illogic and foolish emotions a constant irritant.”
With the wisdom that comes from living eight decades on this planet I can write with confidence that Spock’s Vulcan is not a planet on which I would ever choose to live. I wrote a song titled “Alive”; part of the lyric explains:
The day is alive with color and sound;
My joy is back and I’m glad I found it
Before it was too late.
The air carries the scent of hope and joy;
The breeze weaves its touch on my face and hair.
The scent of hope is in the air.
Many years ago, even before I was born, Sigmund Freud wrote: “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth in uglier ways.” It isn’t quite use ’em or lose ’em. Rather, it is use them or suffer the consequences. Emotions are the color and sound of our lives.
It is our emotions that can take us to heights and to depths of spirit that we can reach in no other way. What I’ve learned is to embrace them all, the pain as well as the joy, and let them resonate through my body. I can’t tell anyone how to gain greater access to their emotions, but what I can write with confidence is that doing so will make a significant difference in your life, as it has in mine.
5. The Basic Ingredients: Health and (Some) Wealth
WE JEWS HAVE traditionally described our culture through humor. Once, for example, an elderly Jewish man was crossing a street on New York’s Upper West Side when a taxi came speeding around the corner and just clipped him, knocking him down. The people who saw it came running to help him. One man took off his own jacket, folded it, and gently slipped it under the victim’s head. When the victim opened his eyes, the bystander asked him, “Are you comfortable?”
In barely a whisper the man replied with a verbal shrug, “I make a living.”
“I make a living.” That was my father. That was his ethic. More than anything, that might have been what I learned from him: Take care of your family. Work hard; earn a living; don’t depend on anyone else. The historic slander about Jews has always concerned money; Jews were the money changers. That was always the foundation of the anti-Semitic slurs. The reality has always been very different, of course. The real foundation of Jewish culture has always been, as my father taught me by his example, work hard, take care of your family, give to others when you can. It isn’t necessarily happiness that money buys; it is security.
Or, as great Jewish comedians have often reminded us, what is true for everyone, “Rich or poor, it’s nice to have money.”
I have been poor and I have been rich. I have lived both lives. I’ve lived in the back of a pickup truck and I’ve lived in a beautiful California home and on a Kentucky horse ranch. I know the real value of money. I know what it buys, but I also know what it costs. I have earned a considerable amount of money in my lifetime. Quite often people will come up to me and ask for financial advice. My response is immediate: laughter. I am the last person anyone should ask for financial advice. I tell them that if I knew what to do I would be doing it, I wouldn’t be telling other people about it. I always wonder how people could fall for those so-called experts selling a course about how to become rich; doesn’t it occur to people that if these “experts” really had that knowledge they would become rich by doing it, rather than preying on other people?
I have made my money by working, rather than investing. Many years ago the great Canadian actor Lorne Greene gave me an investment tip. “Buy uranium stocks,” he told me. “It’s going up!” Lorne Greene was a sophisticated investor, so I bought uranium. It was a can’t-lose situation. The day after I bought it, the prime minister of Canada announced the country would no longer be mining uranium. I lost my entire investment. Through the years I have heard a lot of different advice about investing. Years ago my business manager, concerned that I was spending too much money on my horses, offered what he thought was sage advice: “Don’t buy so
mething that eats while you sleep.” Another friend of mine who enjoyed gambling told me his secret of investing: “Never bet on anything that talks.” So while I am not an expert, I have learned from many experts in different financial areas. And considering all the advice they have given me, I think I can sum up my strategy of investing: try to be lucky.
I think it is well known that I supposedly earned several hundred million dollars as the spokesperson for Priceline.com. What is much less known is the real story, which properly illustrates my financial acumen. My late wife, Nerine, had a friend who had some connection to an internet start-up site named Priceline.com. It was an interesting concept; rather than setting a price on things or services like an airline ticket or a hotel room, buyers named the price they were willing to pay and Priceline.com tried to find a supplier of that product or service who would accept that offer. Like any start-up, they had limited resources, so Nerine’s friend asked me if I would do a radio commercial for them.
Here’s the best business advice I can give: When the phone rings, say yes. Don’t even say hello; say yes. I told them I was going to New Zealand and would do it there. I knew nothing about the company; I did it because the people seemed nice and my wife asked me to do it.
That commercial was successful, so they asked me to do several more. Unfortunately, they said, they couldn’t pay me in dollars, but they would pay me in stock. I knew about the internet boom. So I agreed.
Eventually I owned quite a large number of shares, which originally were valued at about $0.25 each. And then the company caught fire. I helped, I know I helped, bring attention to them; the commercials were well written, but it also was a good service. It helped people save a lot of money. The value of the stock kept rising. I would look at the paper every day and I couldn’t believe it. In that paper I was a wealthy man. The stock went from essentially no value to about $175 a share. Suddenly I was worth a lot of money. By that I mean I was worth enough money to spread it to those in need and still have a significant amount left over. I would read stories about how wealthy I had become: Supposedly I was worth several hundred million dollars.
Let me repeat that: I was worth several hundred million dollars. (Please note, this time I left out the “supposedly.”)
I knew very little about being worth several hundred million dollars in the newspaper. It had never happened to me before. Obviously. But then I learned about something called a lock-up. This is a law that prevents people from selling stock for a period of time. It was passed to prevent people from starting a company, running up the value of the stock, then selling, leaving shareholders with a worthless company. My lock-up prevented me from selling my stock.
While I was waiting, the dot-com stock bubble burst. The value of my stock plummeted. Many dot-com companies went out of business, but Priceline.com managed to hold on. Eventually I sold my stock for considerably less than it had been worth. Let me put it this way: It had once again become a penny stock.
After I sold it the value started rising again, because it is a good company. The value went up to more than $1,000 a share. So as it turned out I made my usual mistake: I held it when I should have sold it; I sold it when I should have held it. It was an interesting learning experience and the next time I’m worth several hundred million dollars on paper I won’t make the same mistake.
Which is why no one should ever ask me for financial advice.
In fact, for most of my life I have had considerably less money than publicly believed. People looked at the tremendous success of the Star Trek series and assumed the cast had continued to participate financially in that phenomenon. The economics of Hollywood can be summed up succinctly: The other guy gets most of the money. It doesn’t even matter who the other guy is; somehow the contract benefits him. With the Star Trek series, for example, for many years while the studio was making millions of dollars we got nothing. We earned no residuals, no bonuses, no nothing. We had to take legal action to get even a small part of the earnings. In fact, it was only much later in my career, when my name had value attached to it, that I began being paid considerable sums of money.
I have earned a substantial amount of money in my career. It is still kind of shocking to me that the same person who once skipped breakfast so he could afford to go to the movies in the evening has become financially secure.
There are many things that will make a significant difference in your life, but all of them begin with health, love, and wealth. They are the dominant factors in most people’s lives. They determine pretty much everything else. Which of course reminds me of another aphorism I remember hearing as I grew up: If you have your health, you have everything. Although what could it hurt if you also had a nice house?
When I was growing up our health was not a topic of much concern; we were expected to be healthy. In those days there didn’t seem to be much you could do about your health. The Mediterranean diet? The Paleo diet? Our diet was a lot simpler: You ate what was in front of you if you knew what was good for you. It was only many years later, when I could afford to go to the best doctors, the physicians who had these amazingly sensitive machines, that I could afford to find out that I had cancer. If I hadn’t been so successful Liz and I wouldn’t have even known we had these cancer cells in our body.
Money is important. I wish I could say idealistically that money is not important, love is important, but money is the modern-world version of going out from the campfire and killing the protein so your woman and children can eat. It is that basic. It takes the form of currency, but when you leave the cave in the morning you really are going out to slay the beast. You are going to get the groceries.
Money has a direct relationship to survival. And as you go through life you become responsible for the survival of other people, so you need even more money to take care of that.
I learned that lesson from my father. His beast turned out to be inexpensive men’s suits. People often talk about the sweet smell of success. In my life it wasn’t a smell; it was the loud sound of some success. My father was a clothing salesman and later became a manufacturer of inexpensive men’s suits. He was Montreal’s Willy Loman, a very hardworking man who spent many years worrying about next month’s bills. Montreal at that time was not an especially wealthy city, and there was a market for nice, cheap men’s clothing. He had a small operation, three or four people in a fifty-by-fifty-foot room cutting and sewing. I remember the sound far more than the smell: the sound of the blades, the pressers, the rat-tat-tat of the sewing machines; that was more than half a century ago and I still hear it. There was a secretary in the front office who took orders: “I want twenty garments, sizes thirty-four to forty.”
My father was the sales force. He would travel to different cities selling his suits. At times he would be gone for the whole week. He would come home exhausted on Friday night. Eventually his business became more successful, and the name became Admiration Clothing. Economically, we were “comfortable.” We were lower-middle-class people. My dad did a good job keeping my mother and their three kids afloat. I had a bicycle, but I always had to work. I don’t actually know if my father had ever had dreams that had to be set aside to support his family.
Because of my father, I could afford to have a dream. And my dream was to become an actor. Money was never a motivating factor for me. Which was necessary, because after all these years I have yet to meet a single person who went into acting for the money. Unlike in the garment business, nobody needs to buy a new actor to wear every couple of years. It is a profession in which you live from job to job and you never know if the phone is going to ring again. I started acting on radio when I was six years old, so I have been doing this for eight decades. According to IMDb, I have appeared in 238 movies or series or programs, I have appeared as myself in 393 programs, I have directed thirteen movies or TV shows, written eighteen, and produced twenty-two. I have done video games, soundtracks, five albums, almost fifty books, and even done virtual reality. I have earned and saved enough
money that making a living will never be an issue for me. And yet I am as much in pursuit of the next project as I was half a century ago. I still feel that anxiety when the phone doesn’t ring and I begin to wonder, What if my career is over? What’ll I do?
My father certainly tried to talk me out of acting as a career. Find a job that gives you security, he told me. The paycheck makes the difference. Actors don’t get regular paychecks. An actor lives from job to job. Many people have heard the expression “make your nut,” which means to earn enough money to pay your expenses. The derivation of that expression comes from the theater; it’s not something a playwright wrote; it’s the way actors were thought of. In the American West, actors would travel from town to town by wagon, setting up their show for a week. It was exactly like a traveling circus, although lacking the appeal of the exotic animals. Usually, when the acting troupe arrived in town the local law enforcement officer would literally take the lug nut from the wagon wheel and hold on to it. Only after he had confirmed that the troupe had paid all its bills, to the hotel, to the inns, would he return the nut. Paying your bills thus became known as “making the nut.”
The majority of actors never earn the nut. It’s a profession with an enormously high failure rate. It is not a profession anyone goes into for the money. But when my father realized I was determined to do this he supported me—emotionally. He didn’t have any money to loan me. He did help me buy a car for $400, and that required a sacrifice for him. And he encouraged me, which did have tremendous value.
Live Long and . . . Page 7
