by Alan Alda
I was trying to be famous and ordinary at the same time, and it was difficult to accomplish. I had never really wanted to be famous. Everyone is supposed to want to be rich and famous, but as a boy I never knew what rich was, and the first view I had of famous made me leery. I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard late one night with my parents when I was eight years old and a young girl about sixteen came up behind us, punched my father in the back, and screamed, “You son of a bitch!” then ran off down the street. We were all shaken. My parents explained to me 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. Being afraid of a person like that, though, seemed like a good idea.
I had always wondered why people wanted to be rich and famous. If you could be rich and anonymous, that would be fun. To be famous and not rich, the way we were, was the least fun. It takes time and effort to be famous, and if they offer you fame without the money, don’t take it. It’s a scam.
Finding myself the object of sudden and intense attention was disorienting. I knew, of course, that signing on for a television show was going to involve getting better known, but I thought I could handle it. I simply didn’t know what it involved. Now people were pulling at me, yanking at my clothing, grabbing me, putting their hands on me in places I had reserved for other occasions. Sometimes they were hostile, demanding I smile or cross the street to where they were standing.
The first time I saw someone in my bedroom in the middle of the night, glaring at me, I started screaming. The next time, screaming was difficult because I woke up only after he had gotten onto the bed and was choking me. He came every night, at about the same time, and each time I jumped up in bed, screaming. These night terrors began about the time the show first climbed in popularity, and they lasted for months.
Sometimes the threat wasn’t imaginary. I got a call on the set one day from the FBI. Two agents were asking to meet with me. The next day at lunchtime, I sat with them in my dressing room. They were polite men in sport coats, assigned to the show business unit of the local FBI office. The show business unit? There’s a show business unit of the FBI? I thought this was pretty amusing until they told me in a matter-of-fact way why they were there. Nothing to worry about, probably, but a young woman had escaped from a mental hospital in Florida and she was thought to be headed for California, where she was going to get revenge on Alan Alda and Clint Eastwood. It seems we had both abducted her in a car in Los Angeles a couple of years earlier and had driven her around town for a while before dong something unspeakable to her, 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. I don’t know what Clint Eastwood did about it, but I noticed he ducked out of sight for a while by becoming mayor of Carmel or someplace.
I began to be self-conscious about going out in public. But I loved big, ordinary events like street fairs. There was a street fair on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan I really wanted to go to with Arlene and the girls. There were going to be stands selling Italian sausages and sfogliatelle. I couldn’t stay away. I pasted crepe hair on my face and gave myself a beard. I put on a fedora and glasses and went to the fair. We stayed out for hours. Too many hours. Pushing it a little, we went to dinner at Mamma Leone’s. Unhappily, I still didn’t know how to glue fake hair to my face, and as I ate dinner, the hairs started separating from my skin and the beard got longer and longer. By the time dessert came, I looked like a Hasidic rabbi playing Howard Hughes. I went into the men’s room and stared at myself in the mirror. There was this strange man in a fedora, with a straggly beard down to his pupik. This was not how I had expected to look at this point in my life.
A man came over to the sink and silently washed his hands. Then he dried them, without looking at me. Before he left, he came up behind me and spoke quietly: “Nice disguise.”
When I got home, I threw out the crepe hair. If I was going to deal with the changes in my life, I would have to rearrange things inside my head.
chapter 16
THE DEVIL IS IN THE BEDROOM
In a way, it was her madness that was killing my mother.
She never left her house, never saw a doctor. She wouldn’t cook because she’d seen the devil in the kitchen, so she would send out for pizza and try to live on that. She wouldn’t sleep in her bed because she also saw the devil in the bedroom, so she slept on the sagging couch in the living room. Finally, her body gave out and one of her organs started to fail. I met an ambulance at her house and rushed her to the hospital.
I was with her as two doctors came into the hospital room to examine her. She watched them come in, then turned to me and whispered something I couldn’t understand. I asked her to repeat it.
“I can’t let them touch me,” she whispered a little louder.
“Why not?”
“They’re devils.”
There was a pause. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I can tell. Take me home.”
I was crestfallen. I had just rushed her to the hospital to save her life. I couldn’t let her go home without being examined. Somehow I had to get past her paranoia without letting her think I was a devil, too.
“You know what?” I said. “I’m not going to disagree with you. I’m not going to deny your reality.” I actually said it in this awkwardly formal way. “But I think I know what you can do about this.”
“Really?” she said. “What?”
She looked up at me with the trusting face of a child. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was going to say. How could I find the words to ask her to let a devil examine her?
I decided to just keep moving my mouth and see what came out. I reached into the dark.
“Well, I think this would work, if you’re willing to try it. . . .”
“What?”
“Even though you know they’re devils . . . if you act as if they’re doctors, I think they’ll be able to help you.”
“Really?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I really think so.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll try it.” And she let them treat her.
So that night my mother was given another couple of years to live by Konstantin Stanislavski.
But then too many parts of her body began to fail. And her dementia got worse. They put her on Haldol, one of the drugs our silence had helped her escape when she was younger, and now she did turn into the zombie she might have become then. She curled up, fetal and glassy-eyed, and drool came from her mouth. Her speech was slurred, and it was difficult to understand her. She called me in New York and asked in a faint voice when I was coming out again to California. “Not for three weeks,” I said. She said something I didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I can’t last that long,” she said.
Sure you can, I told her. But she knew better, and a week later I got a call that she had died.
At the funeral, I stood by her casket and spoke about her, not as authentically as I’d have liked. I said she had led a troubled life and had suffered. I tried for compassion, but the conflicts in my feelings came through. As I finished speaking, I said, “So long, Mom,” and patted the casket. I was only dimly aware at the time of how strangely theatrical this gesture was, indicating emotion without really feeling it. The casket, the least garish one I could find, was made of a crappy-looking burnished metal, and when I patted it there was a hollow, tinny sound, the same sound my words had. The words were meant to express feeling, but they didn’t. They just expressed ambivalence. Our daughter Elizabeth, my pomposity detector, told me later how weirdly funny it was to see me tapping on her casket as if I were trying to see if anyone was home.
A week later, I went to her house alone to clean it out. I sat on the floor of her locked storage room and sorted through dozens of shoe boxes and paper bags filled with memorabilia and mail-order junk. I was sorting through my feelings as much as through her belongings. There was the sterling silve
rware, never used. The gold flatware, never used. Hummel statues and plastic Kewpie dolls. The remnants of a life that was almost lived. Then I opened a box and saw an envelope. Inside it was a key. There was one last inner sanctum to look in: the safe-deposit box, where she kept her most secret treasures.
In Burbank, I walked down blazing white sidewalks with no one else on them, the hot sun bouncing off everything around me, dizzying me.
As a boy in Paris, I had steeped myself in the existentialists. The first line of The Stranger by Camus was in my head now; it had always been my favorite first line: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”
I pushed my way through the heavy desert air of the San Fernando Valley. Camus was saying, “. . . today, with the sun bearing down, making the whole landscape shimmer with heat, it was inhuman and oppressive.” I walked from my car to the building on the corner and pushed open the brass door beneath the giant gold leaf emblem of the Bank of America. I showed a tall, thin woman my mother’s key. The woman got a matching key and took me down to the vault. We unlocked the drawer, first with the bank’s key, then with my mother’s. And then she stepped out of the room so I could open the box in privacy.
I lifted the lid, wondering what my mother had hidden away all these years.
Now, in my memory, I’m in the vault again and I lift the lid, but this time I see what’s in the box in a way I couldn’t see it then. Then I could see only the artifacts of a damaged mind. Now I see that as damaged as she was, there were things she treasured. And the person who is still somewhere deep in my brain, the remains of the woman who was my mother, can move me now by what she chose to keep deep down in her own vault.
The box was nearly empty; there were just a few simple things that an eight-year-old might keep in her special drawer. A bracelet. A letter. And at the bottom, an old photograph: a picture of me when I was a boy.
In her childish handwriting, on the scalloped edge of the picture, it said: “My beloved Allie.”
chapter 17
MR. SMITH GOES ON AND ON
People were screaming at me. I was standing at the podium in the Illinois State Legislature, thanking the legislators for asking me to speak. They hadn’t really asked me to speak. I was in the Capitol looking for support for the Equal Rights Amendment, and the president of the senate had asked if I wanted to say a few words. As I walked to the podium, our ERA political consultant had said, “Don’t make a speech about the ERA.” But that’s what I was going around the country doing, and I had been brought here by her to get support for it. They had just passed a measure in Illinois that would help the Equal Rights Amendment enormously around the entire country, and I thanked them for their vote. I hadn’t meant to make an actual speech, but I went on for a few rousing sentences, and the more I warmed to the subject, the more restless the legislators became. It didn’t occur to me that since the measure had just squeaked through, almost half of the people in the room were opposed to it. They didn’t just disagree with the ERA, they hated it. And it became clear that they hated me for mentioning it. Catcalls started, then booing and whistling. Then yelling and screaming. Like an idiot, I kept talking. The political consultant who had brought me there crawled on her hands and knees to a place behind the podium where she could pull on my pants leg. I looked down and saw her looking up at me with an urgent expression on her face. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
I thanked them for their kind attention, a gesture that went unheard in the din of hoots. We had to walk through the chamber to get out, and people were coming up to me, denouncing me angrily. I wondered how the measure had managed to pass at all in this group of people. A short, thin man in his eighties squared off in front of me. He spoke rapidly, in a voice pitched with fury.
“I was in World War One,” he said, a little bit of white showing at the corner of his mouth. “Do you know what war is like? Have you seen it? I have. I’ve seen what mustard gas can do to you. Blistered lungs, blindness, agonizing death. You want women going through that?”
I told him I didn’t; I didn’t want men going through it, either. I could understand his feelings. But I could also understand the feelings of the women who said they wanted full citizenship and the responsibilities that went with it. He walked away in disgust.
The consultant and I fought our way to the car and got in. She started the motor and we drove for a while in silence. “It was not a good idea to mention the ERA in there,” she said.
“Right,” I said. We were quiet for the rest of the trip.
This all began when the phone rang one night in the kitchen of our house in New Jersey and an old acquaintance asked me if I would help out with the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment. “It was ratified in state after state,” he said, “and now it’s running into trouble.” I said I’d do what I could to help. That began ten years of campaigning. When I wasn’t in front of the camera or writing a script, I was writing a speech or traveling from town to town talking in meeting halls and churches and lobbying state legislators in their homes and in their hallways. I’d fly to Oklahoma or Florida or Louisiana and drive for a hundred miles, then get out and go into a town hall where hundreds of people were waiting. Once, I had to get from a city in the Southwest to a rally a thousand miles away. Someone arranged for a private flight. There was just barely room in the small plane for me and the woman who was piloting it. We strapped ourselves in, and as she started the engine she said, “Well, this will be your test as a feminist, won’t it.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“I’ve only been flying for two weeks,” she said, and then we took off into a thunderstorm, lightning flashing all around us. The takeoff alone made such a strong impression on me that I used it as the basis for a scene in the movie I wrote a couple of years later called The Seduction of Joe Tynan. And the impression I got of politicking during those years found its way into a good deal of Joe Tynan.
I met too many people in state legislatures who didn’t seem especially inspired by the founding fathers, if they’d ever heard of them.
There was enough pointless horse trading and outright lying to depress even someone fresh out of Hollywood. One assemblyman said he would vote for the ERA if his town’s high school band could march in the inaugural parade. The president of the senate in Florida promised me he would not only vote for ratification of the amendment, but do everything in his power to round up the votes for it to pass. A few weeks later, he was reading from the Bible on the floor of the senate and preaching that God was against the ERA.
A woman in Illinois told me about an encounter with a legislator who had refused time after time to vote for it, saying it just didn’t matter to his constituents. After she had made every argument she was capable of, he finally said, “All right. I’ll vote for it if you come up to my hotel room this afternoon and give me a hand job.” And he wasn’t joking. Something like voting for the Fourteenth Amendment in exchange for a couple of good slaves.
“Why are you working so hard for equality for women?” I was asked, a little suspiciously sometimes. In fact, I was asked this so many times, I began to realize I didn’t know myself what the answer was. At first, I tried flip answers. “I come from a long line of women,” I said. Or, “Well, I’m from a mixed marriage. My father was a man, and my mother was a woman.” But these jokes didn’t explain it. Why was I spending so much energy on it, even willing to get some people mad at me?
Partly, it was that I knew it could be helpful if a man spoke out in public about these things, and I kept going out, trying to help. And there’s no doubt that I loved getting up in front of audiences and making speeches. There certainly was that. I could hear the nun behind me chuckling again. But mostly, I think, it made me angry that we were refusing to guarantee half our citizens equality under the law.
Finally, though, with all the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people, the amendment lost. These few words never made it into the Constitution: Equality of rights under the law
shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
I retreated from this brush with politics having learned a couple of things and having changed a little. One of the things I learned is what most people know going in: It’s all appearances. If you think you might lose, you don’t say so. If you think your best argument won’t fly with this crowd, you don’t make it. In the course of stumping around the country, I had learned how to talk like this, and I didn’t like how I sounded. As the time limit on ratification was approaching, I was standing in front of a crowd, making one last effort to rouse them to action. Someone in the audience called out to me. “If it fails, will you keep working?” she asked. “Will you help reintroduce it? Will you keep fighting?” I said I would, even though I knew I had run out of steam. I sounded like the people I had written about in Joe Tynan.
I went home and thought about the time I was spending trying to be an amateur politician, and I wondered how much more I might contribute if I spent that time where I had a better chance of knowing what I was doing.
But it seemed to me that a kind of time limit was approaching for M*A*S*H, too. I thought we were running out of fresh ideas. Other people on the show thought so, too, and rather than lose respect for what we were doing, we talked about ending it.
Ending my fabulous political career was easy. Ending M*A*S*H was going to be a little harder. There’s an old aphorism in vaudeville: Getting onstage is easy—just toss out your hat and follow it on—getting off is the hard part. Writing a good exit wouldn’t be easy, and neither would making the exit.
It had been life-changing work for all of us, and the show was still at the height of its popularity, but we decided to let go of it before the audience did. And if we had waited until they’d lost interest, we’d have missed a closing night that was one of the most extraordinary any of us had ever known.