by Alan Alda
A few months later, when we were living in an apartment overlooking the East River, she found an unusual way to express herself in an argument with my father by going out on the balcony and throwing her diamond wedding ring into the street below. The police came to the apartment and helped us look in the street for the ring, which we never found. Then they came back and sat on the couch to reason with her. Why did she want to do a thing like that? they asked. Didn’t she want to be a good girl? She sat quietly, smiling at them with a pleasant, unfocused look, like a little girl who’s just baked a perfect cake and is basking in the attention.
The crazier she got, the more I went to church. It gave me some feeling of control over a life that was at the mercy of her whim of iron. For a while, I went to mass and took Communion every day. Convinced there was a heaven, I decided to campaign for it. I smelled of incense, holy water, and unleavened wafers. Maybe inspired by my constant visits to the church down the street, my parents decided to visit with the priest in his rectory so they could be counseled on some of our family problems. The three of us went together. On a late winter afternoon, we sat in a small office with a young priest, all of us a little uncomfortable. My father was a well-known actor, they said, and asked the priest for complete confidentiality, which he assured them they had. After a half hour of a few embarrassing admissions about life in our family, there was a noise in the other room and we noticed the door was open. My mother was immediately on alert. “Someone is listening to us,” she said. “Is someone spying on us?” Here she goes again, I thought. But then, to my surprise, the priest admitted that another priest had been listening to the entire conversation from the other room. My mother and father both felt betrayed and said so, and the priest said—lamely, I thought—that this was something he often did for “security purposes.” It looked to me as if it were more for gossip purposes. We left, and they never went back for counseling.
That aborted visit, and the cops’ questions the night she threw her diamond ring off the balcony, was the closest my mother ever came to therapy. Since we never spoke about mental illness, our family silence, combined with where science was at the time, left her without a lifeline.
My own lifeline came when I started college. I was young, only sixteen. The succession of tutors had had the effect of advancing me several grades while not necessarily teaching me anything, but college was where I suddenly realized there was a world of ideas. I became inflamed by them. I wanted to know how people got ideas. The notion that each book contained at least one original idea made them magical to me. I wanted to possess books and, if I could, to always have one in my hand.
Every day, I took an hour’s ride on the elevated train that rumbled up Third Avenue past second-story bedrooms to Fordham in the Bronx. On the train, when I wasn’t reading, I was writing plays I would later direct on the college radio station, and when I didn’t have an idea for a script, I would listen to the people on the train and copy down bits of overheard conversation on index cards as I taught myself what real dialogue sounded like. I had a special fondness for ideas that went against the current. I was surprised to find out that the church still used an Index of Prohibited Books, so whenever I could find out what current books were on it, the Index became my unofficial reading list.
Ideas were an escape and a defense, and I holed up in my room, reading for six or eight hours at a time. My mother had never seen anyone do this before, and she became alarmed. She began looking into the books, trying to figure out what mysterious forces were taking over her son’s mind. There was one in particular that worried her: a book on sociology that was popular at the time by David Riesman called The Lonely Crowd. She read a chapter and became disturbed. She called the college to find out if they had actually assigned this disgusting material. “What about this word that keeps appearing in here?” she wanted to know. “Peer groups.”
Although she didn’t say it aloud, “peer groups” sounded to her like people peering at one another. To the priest who answered the phone, the book, and possibly all of sociology, may have smacked of godless secularism. “We’re concerned about that book, too,” he told her. Neither one of them was fully aware of what the other meant. Two utterly different forms of paranoia had met in the dark and agreed there was something under the bed.
I really scared her one day while she was out of town for a couple of weeks with my father. I wrote them a long, rambling, adolescent letter in which I talked about my obsession with books. I said knowledge was good in itself, and it had the added advantage that knowledge was power. For some reason, this sounded to her like the note of a depressed misfit. She called me with panic in her voice. “What’s the matter with you? You’ve got to get out and see people. What do you want power for? Are you eating? You’re not taking anything, are you?” No, I said, I’m just reading. I had felt, mistakenly, that they would be pleased by my progress, but my new interests had separated me from them as abruptly as if I had jumped out of an airplane.
I was really still in midair, though—separated from them, but not yet grounded in anything else. I was parachuting into unfamiliar territory. One afternoon, I saw in the newspaper that the college radio station was going to play a Beethoven quartet at one o’clock. I had never heard a quartet, but I was curious and interested. I made myself a sandwich, opened a bottle of beer, and sat down to listen as they tuned up. A few minutes later, they were still tuning up. I had a drink of beer. A good five minutes went by. I couldn’t understand this. How long does it take to get started with this kind of music? Then, in a stunning flash, I got it: They weren’t tuning up; this was the music. I was used to a melody line and maybe a countermelody. Here were four voices zigging and zagging, diving under one another, playing tag with a tune I couldn’t follow.
I started listening as often as I could to these strange sounds. I wanted to crack the code. I was looking everywhere for windows and doors through which I could squeeze into this new world.
Toward the end of my first year, I found out that Fordham had a program that allowed a few students to spend their junior year in Paris. This was a very appealing idea to me, because Paris was in France, where they had French girls. It sounded enormously intellectual. I asked to speak with the dean to see if I could be included.
On the appointed day, I entered a large Gothic building, complete with gargoyles, and made my way to a spacious room paneled in wood, in the corner of which was a large desk. Behind it sat a very smart Jesuit. He wasn’t unkind, but he had the ability to look through you and see everything you were made of: your bones, your liver, and your ambition. He listened quietly as I waxed on about how educational it would be for me to study in Paris. Then he spoke in a measured tone.
“Yes, that’s interesting,” he said. “We’ve been watching you.”
“Really?” I asked. I always assumed that someone’s noticing me was a compliment.
“Yes,” he said. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’re still here. We all thought you’d have dropped out by Christmas.”
There was less flattery here than I had thought, but I forged ahead.
“Was it the placement exams?” I asked, referring to the trivial formality of three days of testing to determine to which courses students should be assigned.
“That’s right,” he said, “the placement exams. We get a number of foreign students here, and we weren’t sure from your results that you could actually speak English.”
This was getting tricky. If I told him why I did so badly in the tests, he might think I wasn’t a serious person. The fact was that I had decided to act like a college boy and go out drinking in the German beer houses on Eighty-sixth Street each night before the exams. I had already been accepted at the college; the placement exam seemed more of a bureaucratic exercise to me than a test. As a result, each morning I would sit at my desk and fall asleep on the exam papers.
This turned out, though, to be lucky. I was placed in a remedial English class (along with some Italian students who actually
couldn’t speak English), where, under the guidance of Mr. Memmo, I relearned my language, and I reveled in it. Mr. Memmo helped me take apart English and put it back together again in ways that let me express things that up until then I could never get out of my head and onto paper.
The dean didn’t know any of this, and I didn’t tell him. I let him assume that I probably possessed some native genius that allowed me to go from total incompetence to near mediocrity in only a few months.
He looked at me in silence for a moment, while I tried to look bright.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll make a deal with you. If you can maintain a ninety average for your sophomore year, I’ll let you go to Paris.”
My heart soared. I agreed and thanked him. It was only when I got down to the ground floor of the Gothic building and out into the daylight that I wondered how I would actually be able to get an average score of ninety.
I was interested in my courses and I was reading the material, but I wasn’t getting nineties. I decided to marshal my energies. If I put more effort into certain critical classes, I could raise those scores. But which ones were critical? I made some more appointments, this time with my professors. I was going to campaign for Paris the way I had campaigned for heaven. The idea was to explain to each of my teachers that I had been given the chance to go to Paris if I got a ninety average and then ask each one adroitly, “Can you tell me what I need to do to get a ninety in this class?”
This question, I thought, was extremely artful. It announced my willingness to work hard in the course . . . if necessary. And if the professor wanted to help out a little, he could let me know that and I wouldn’t have to kill myself trying. Everyone saw through me, of course, but the way they responded helped me steer my way through the year. My history professor, a man I admired for his ability to express complex thoughts with colorful vulgarities, said, “Hey, Paris would be great for you. Sure, read as much as you can and turn in the assignments, and I’ll give you a ninety.” The priest who taught logic, on the other hand, was not quite as enthusiastic. He met me on a rainy day in a faculty sitting room. He came in and silently took off his coat, then methodically removed his galoshes, agonizingly slowly, and put them by the door, still not saying a word. He was a handsome man whose brother had been a movie star on the same lot with my father, but whose face had none of the willingness to please that an actor’s face would have. It had long ago been made featureless by scholarly objectivity. He sat opposite me and looked at me through rimless eyeglasses. “Yes? What would you like to discuss?”
By now my mouth was dry, but I gave him my spiel. He listened with no reaction until I’d dribbled to a finish. Then, with finger and thumb he reset his glasses on his nose and spoke softly, but especially distinctly. “In order to get a ninety in my class, you’ll need to do all the reading, hand in all the assignments on time, and get at least a ninety in the quizzes and the final exam. And that includes, of course, the surprise quizzes.”
The surprise quizzes; he was going to lay traps for us. This was a class I’d have to be alert for. A second later, he made it explicit. “I think I should tell you—as a friend—that I don’t think it would be good for you to go to Paris. I don’t think you’re mature enough.”
As a friend? Oh, that’s nice, I thought. As a friend?
I took the warning seriously and nearly wore out the textbook on logic. For the next few months, I was all syllogisms and predicates, universals, obverses, and inverses. The first rule of logic—that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect—became my mantra. I applied it to everything. Maybe I loved it so much because it was so different from the first rule of paranoia that had been my mother’s milk, where anything could be anything else. And when it came time for the movie star’s brother to test me, I was ready. In the final exam, I got a hundred.
By the end of the year, with all my courses added together, my average was exactly ninety. But the path to Paris wasn’t clear yet.
The year abroad was officially part of the honors program, which I had never been asked to join. Now, in order to have some control over me, I suppose, I was invited by the priest who ran the program to come to one of the meetings and think about becoming a member. I smelled a rat. The dean had said I could go to Paris. But joining the society, whose director had the final decision about the travel plans of its members, was a step backward. Maybe I was wrong, and maybe I had spent too much time listening to my mother’s tortuous reasoning, but I was wary.
I couldn’t be discourteous, so I went to the meeting without committing myself to join. The subject under discussion that night would be Greek comedies. I was nervous, just the way I had been standing in the wings at the Hollywood Canteen. What if they see these enormous gaps I have in my education? What if they find out that my study of antiquity and the classics was confined to sitting on the couch next to my buxom tutor, leafing through pictures of half-naked deities?
We sat in a dark, wood-paneled room, a half dozen honor students, a Jesuit in black robes, and me. We were each given a little glass of intellectual sherry. Disgustingly dry, it made you witty without actually being funny.
They began discussing Greek comedies, and immediately I felt swamped; I’d read the plays, but these people had read them in the ancient Greek. What could I say that wouldn’t sound stupid? But as they talked, I began to have an odd feeling: I know about this. Greek comedy was a ribald, coarse, bacchanalian revel. So was burlesque. Pretty soon, I was regaling them with an analysis of Greek comedy as practiced by Hank Henry, Rags Ragland, and Rose LaRose. I began to realize that my education, as peculiar as it was, had been a kind of education after all. I finished my riff, and as far as I could tell, they looked dumbstruck. All of them—the priest, the students—no one knew how to react. They may have simply been appalled by my audacity, but I had the feeling I had actually come up with an idea—something I had wished for since I got to this place.
I went home feeling all right with myself. I probably hadn’t said anything especially smart, but I hadn’t said anything stupid, either. I left well enough alone and politely avoided ever going back. A month later, I was on a ship called the Ile-de-France, on my way to Le Havre.
It was a rough crossing. I stood by the railing as the ship pitched and heaved, along with a few of the passengers, and I was glad to feel the wind in my face and the roiling waves under my feet. I was eighteen and off on my own, out of the nest and headed for France, where girls were so smart they had invented a whole new way of kissing.
But, as it turned out, I wasn’t on my own quite yet. At around the same time I left for Europe, my father, needing a job, agreed to do a television series about spies in World War II that was to be shot in Amsterdam. It was weak, cookie-cutter television, written by someone who told me later he was proud that he could sell script after script “without a clever line anywhere in it,” but my father needed to work, and he and my mother would be in Europe at the same time that I was.
I wondered if the continent was big enough for the three of us.
chapter 7
PARIS IS THE CRUELEST MONTH
I brought a suitcase full of books to Paris. And as soon as I got there, I started filling up another suitcase with books, many of them in French, which I could barely read, and many of whose pages stayed uncut. Just having books was the point, and lugging a valise full of them to the train station and hoisting it up onto the metal rack made me feel like a scholar.
I sat and drank hot rum at Les Deux Magots, and that made me feel like Hemingway. If I had two rums, I felt like Sartre. Sartre liked to write in a crowded café and, amazingly, I found, so did I.
I stayed with a French couple, Pierre and Solange, three flights up at 101 rue de Charenton. Pierre was a Russian émigré with wire-rimmed eyeglasses and wiry gray hair that stood up like a porcupine’s. He was an economist who was always running out of money, which I thought was an interesting specialty for an economist. Solange, yo
unger than Pierre by ten or fifteen years, was kind and laughed easily. They seemed to make their way by taking in boarders. I slept in one bedroom, and a blind man slept in the other bedroom. Pierre and Solange slept in the living room. One day there was a knock on the door, and Pierre suddenly became panicky. “They’re here!” he said in French. “They want money. I don’t have it! Help me.” I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. I was eighteen, and he was a fifty-year-old economist. How could I possibly help? “Tell them I’m sick!” he said, and jumped into bed with his shoes on, pulling the covers up to his chin. “Allez! Je suis malade!” Then he started moaning.
Solange wasn’t home, and the knock at the door was getting insistent. I opened it and saw a squat, determined man with a briefcase. Pierre called out from the other room in a voice that quavered and broke pitiably, in a way made possible only by bad acting, “C’est . . . pour moi, Alain?”
I led the man into the living room, where Pierre coughed and moaned his way out of a final warning. When the man left, Pierre jumped out of bed and cackled. Then he went back to work filling in thousands of numbers on a spreadsheet. He had been working for years on a study that would prove to the world that the entire Russian economy was built on sand and would eventually collapse. It was a race between his collapse and theirs.
It was a small apartment. The blind boarder got on everyone’s nerves because he would often bring a prostitute up to his room at midnight and the two of them would make noise until almost dawn. And then during the day he would be cranky and irritable. I couldn’t understand how, after making that kind of noise all night, he could be so cranky, pedantic, and critical.
Finally, his severity was too much for us. One evening, the four of us were eating dinner in the cramped kitchen, and I was telling a story about a trip I had taken to the countryside. By this time, my French was good enough to make a pun, and it caught Solange off guard. She burst out laughing just as she was taking a spoonful of tapioca. Unfortunately, Pierre and Solange’s finances were so mismanaged that she had two bad front teeth. In fact, she had an actual hole in her teeth, through which her tapioca spurted and landed all over the blind guy. He didn’t know she had sprayed him, and it seemed hard-hearted of us to find this funny, but suppressing your laughter doesn’t work at a time like this, especially because the more we laughed, the more stern he looked behind his coverlet of tapioca. She reached over and wiped his lapel with a napkin. “What is it?” he asked.