I thought “what brands me?” and that gave me an idea.
I’ll admit that when I first heard about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon I didn’t like it. I thought it was a joke at my expense.
I think that’s part of the fear thing, your head gives in to that and you think people are laughing at you. But, as time went on, I met the guys that conceived the idea and I realized that they had a real fondness for my work. They had chosen me because of the sheer number of films I have crammed into my life. I’ve taken the little and the big parts and I’ve been in films in which I was one of a huge cast—every actor in the world was in JFK. That made me the ideal “six degrees” guy. It was cool!
I thought, “That’s my brand now. I can use that.” Because I do believe that we’re all connected, not just in movies or photographs, but in the world. All of us crawled out of the same swamp. Nothing happens in a vacuum, the butterfly flaps her wings in one part of the world and there’s an effect in another; we use all this fuel in the West and there’s severe flooding thousands of miles away across the ocean. The idea comes up all the time now. I bought the domain name, www.sixdegrees.org, brainstormed with friends and family, and the folks at Network for Good who said, “Great, we’ll do it with you” and created a new way to give.
Through this site, people can learn about and support various charities. It’s celebrity-driven, which gives us press attention for the causes. But anyone can put up a badge for their favorite charity. You can say, “I believe in animal rights,” “I want to find a cure for autism,” or whatever moves you. We have little races to see which charity gets the most donations and then I donate my own money to boost the top ones. I’m excited because it’s a viral sort of thing. People like to go to Amazon.com to shop and online charity giving is as easy as that. I’m hoping it spreads exponentially. People get in touch with each other this way. They can post pictures of their friends, say “this is my favorite band,” and “by the way, let’s help save the rainforest.”
That’s powerful stuff. That’s the kind of “six degrees” we need to tap into.
Doing good work makes you feel good, makes you feel as if you have some control over your life and your future. I have this joke motto: someone asks me, “How are you doing?” and my answer is “I’m doing what I can with what I’ve got.” That can work for everyone.
BRIGITTE BARDOT
Sex Kitten and Matriarch of Mice
Brigitte Bardot’s movies were the talk of the Western world. She made fifty of them in twenty years, some light French farces, some sex romps on the beach, perhaps none more well known than Et Dieu Crea Eve, or And God Created Woman. She was the epitome of the fantasy female. She was, however, deeply unhappy in the role. And, although she stuck it out for twenty years, she did it while fighting depression. At the age of forty, Brigitte Bardot took her pouty lips and went home to the south of France, vowing never to appear on the screen again. She had made the decision to do what her heart told her she must: champion the cause of animal rights. No matter what directors said or did to try to persuade her to return—and many tried hard to get her back—when Madam Bardot said “non!” she meant “non!”
In 2006, I happened to go to Paris to protest Jean-Paul Gautier’s use of baby foxes as panels in a frock coat (the bodice of which was made of calves’ hide trimmed with lamb). Madam Bardot had been in the city a few days before, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, and had delivered a rousing speech to thunderous applause about the responsibility to stop cruelty. Now, from her home outside St. Tropez, she heard on the nightly news that I had been arrested. She immediately fired off a letter to the jail and, more importantly, to Monsieur Gautier, asking him to be decent enough to hear the animals’ cries and creative enough to abandon fur designs. As soon as I heard of her action, I was reminded that her sassiness, her independence, and her activism belonged in this book.
I had an unhappy childhood, but I have a happy childhood memory. When I was ten years old, I managed to rescue a tiny mouse who appeared at our dinner table. My father wanted to kill this little creature, but, luckily, she ran up my sleeve into my sweater. My parents thought that I was itching, that I had a rash. It was quite funny! Later on, during the night, I went downstairs and released her into our garden. I saved her! It was my first official animal rescue and one of the most fulfilling moments of my life, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time.
My career in film was busy and exotic, but it was never very fulfilling. Of course, I have lots of memories of those times, but, honestly, they’re more of a nuisance than anything else! I was often depressed by that way of life. Sometimes I couldn’t really overcome my sadness during these cinema days. I couldn’t imagine myself in such a world forever, and on occasion I wanted to simply stop living. I even attempted suicide, but, fortunately, I didn’t succeed. I stayed in the business because I told myself, and my mother told me, that I needed money. I didn’t have a dime, I was just a kid. I thought that I needed money to be able someday to protect animals. I had an affinity for all of them, little birds kept in cages so that they cannot stretch their wings and fly, rabbits who are killed to be eaten. This thought of how to help them began to consume my life.
When I was eighteen, I married the great French director, Roger Vadim, and we started making movies together. It was Vadim who told me about vivisection, animal experiments. That absolutely chilled and haunted me. He told me of how animals suffer in laboratories, in their cages. I found it shocking that humans could be so horribly cruel. This passion for animals carried over into movies. I loved the little animals in my films so much that I couldn’t let them go and would keep them. I had a very small apartment in Paris, and one day I rescued a performing monkey from a production and took him home. He broke everything in the place, he ate all my makeup, and he soiled everywhere. I was very young then, about nineteen years old, and I became upset, even angry, but I felt sorry for him, too. I knew that he couldn’t help it. I finally took him to a sanctuary for exotic animals where he was very happy.
All my life I’ve been touched by particular cases that I didn’t understand fully but that I could feel so deeply. Stories about slaughterhouses shocked me even when I was small, but, as horrible as it made me feel, I didn’t know what to do about it. Then, in 1986, I sold everything that had a monetary value to start my foundation for animals. People ask if that was a difficult thing to do. No, not at all! Well, it was a little hard to find myself selling the very first diamond that I bought myself!
It was difficult because my mother had told me to buy it and I remember the moment well. I must have been twenty-three or twenty-four years old. She warned me that it was best not to keep money but buy precious stones instead. She said if there is a war, if there are social problems, at least with a diamond, you can hide it on yourself, in your panties, and you can always survive with a precious stone!
So, we went to Mellerio’s—a large French jewelry store, the equivalent of Cartier. I don’t know if it’s still there, in the fabulous Place Vendome in Paris. I paid for this diamond with my very first large fees from my films.When I sold it to support the work of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for Animals, I felt quite sentimental. I never wore that ring, it wasn’t for wearing, but it was symbolic! But there it was on the auction block, and I knew I was getting much better use out of it than having it sit in a vault in a bank.
When I see people eating animals, I always say “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends.” But I never forbid anyone to eat meat. I just wish that they would eat less if they’re not going to be vegetarians. When I was a kid, we ate meat once a week. We ate fish, eggs, and pasta, and we didn’t put meat on the pasta. We had meat only on Sundays, once a week. No one needs to eat meat morning, noon, and night. It’s very bad for your health and it’s really a horror for the animals, a dreadful industrial death, with conditions getting worse.
I quit the cinema thirty-three years ago, and since the
n I have had no help whatsoever in my animal protection work from the French government. None! However, I have had help from foreign countries. It is scandalous and sad. I must have seen fifty ministers, three presidents of the Republique, I forget how many representatives, yet the French government has never helped. They would do well to listen to the words of Leo Tolstoy, words that I believe in. He said, “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” It’s formidable and apropos in these frightening times, when we see more and more battlefields and more and more slaughterhouses opening up all over the world.
There’s no relief at all for these poor animals that go to the slaughter. It’s abominable. I think animals help us live; they’ve helped me live. It was only when I began to devote myself to protecting animals that I blossomed completely. Taking care of them, looking out for them, has given my life true meaning, a meaning I hope future generations can also experience. Young people are always a hope. More of them must realize that the animal is not an object for profit, not a toy for our amusement, hunted for sport, not some thing to be cut up for his fur. They may see that the animal has the right to live, just as we have the right to live. We, the animals, the plants are the whole, and the whole makes a chain, and if we break that chain, all of humanity will pay. That’s it.
These days, I have horses, ponies, donkeys, goats, sheep, chickens, geese, cats, dogs, ducks, and, like George Clooney, I have four domestic pigs. Wild boars come on my property in the south of France and have their young. I have doves and lots of pigeons. And guess what? I have mice! And I don’t want them killed! Even my cats respect them because they understand from me that the mice behind my little desk must not be touched. They are musaraignes (like shrews, field mice), very small with very pointed noses. No bigger than my thumb. . . . The dogs don’t hurt them either because they’ve been asked to leave them alone, please! When the mice come to eat, I give them little crumbs and pieces of this and that and nobody moves! It’s quite extraordinary because they aren’t tame. They came to live in my bedroom behind my little desk and believe me, they’re happy there because nobody touches my mice! Yes, the first one I saved was when I was ten years old, and here I am, saving mice again!
For me it is a vocation. I live only for them twenty-four hours a day, because if I didn’t have them, I would have killed myself a long time ago. That’s the truth. When you love, you devote yourself, body and soul, for the love you have for something; it can be religion, it can be for older people, children, perhaps world hunger, or whatever, but one must do it completely, one cannot do it halfway. That’s why I left everything behind to be completely available to try to protect animals anywhere in the world . . . because cruelty doesn’t only occur in France; it’s everywhere and with all animals.
Kisses to all who care.
DR. NEAL BARNARD
A Healthy Outlook
Dr. Neal Barnard fits the description of an ethical physician as perfectly as a surgical glove fits the hand. I met him in the mid-1980s, when a scandal was erupting over the U.S. military’s plan to suspend dogs in slings, shoot them, have medics practice emergency wound treatments on them, and then dispatch them. Dr. Bar-nard offered to help research alternatives, and thanks to him, the Department of Defense suddenly found 900 emergency-room physicians knocking on their door, eager to offer their services to train the young military medics without the use of animals. That helped win the case, and I will always be grateful to him.
An insightful, caring person and mentor to up-and-coming physicians, Dr.Barnard gave up his individual practice to devote himself fully to the charity he founded, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. He is a prolific author of books on the power of nutrition to prevent and combat disease, including Food for Life; Eat Right, Live Longer; Foods That Fight Pain; and Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes. His journey shows that setting your mind to a problem can help fix it!
We didn’t talk health food in North Dakota in the 1950s, especially those of us with families in the cattle business. My grandfather, uncles, and cousins all raised cattle, and roast beef, baked potatoes, and corn were our everyday fare. Except for special occasions, that is, when we ate roast beef, baked potatoes, and peas.
My father didn’t care for the cattle business, and left it to go to medical school. Toward the end of college, I decided to do the same, and, while my medical school applications incubated, I took a job in the bowels of Fairview Hospital in Minneapolis. Located in an otherwise unused basement hallway, the hospital morgue was a desolate museum of medical tragedies.
No living person ever went there if they didn’t have to. The telephone was a hefty brick-like device from the 1940s, and the place suffered from general neglect. My job was to assist the pathologists as they examined the bodies. One day, a man died in the hospital of a massive heart attack (probably from eating hospital food, but that’s another story). To expose the heart, we removed a section of ribs from his chest—an indelicate procedure performed with a hefty garden clipper—and we set the large pie-wedge of ribs next to the body. The pathologist knew I was headed for medical school, so he made sure to drill the details of each examination into my head. Slicing into a coronary artery, he pointed out the atherosclerotic plaque that had choked off the blood supply to the heart. And he found more plaques in the arteries to the brain, the kidneys, and the legs. He explained that these came from the cheeseburgers and steak Americans use as staples, something I hadn’t heard before. At the end of the examination, I carefully put the ribs back in the chest, cleaned up the body, and went to the cafeteria to see what was for lunch.As it turned out, the day’s featured dish was ribs. Between the look and the smell, eating them was not an option. I didn’t become a vegetarian on the spot, but that was the day meat began to lose its appeal.
All to the good, because, although I was unaware of it at the time, research studies had already begun to indict the foods my family raised for their contribution to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, and to roughly half of all cancer cases. In fact, Western diets, centered on meats and dairy products, have a more negative effect on health than any other single factor. Like me, American medicine paid little attention to any of this. When I finished my medical training, I took a job at St.
Vincent’s Hospital in downtown New York. As I talked with my colleagues, I began to realize that we were good at diagnosis and reasonably good at treatment, but we were absolutely abysmal at prevention. We did nothing about heart attacks until they came through the emergency room doors. We did nothing about cancer until it showed up on a mammogram or blood test. Our collective task, as we saw it, was to clean up the wreckage of bad habits, bad genes, or bad luck. All the while, we neglected the most critical part of what doctors ought to be doing, and I resolved to change that.
In 1985, I started an organization called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) in order to bring prevention and nutrition front and center in medical practice. The original plan was to build a group of perhaps fifteen or twenty doctors who would opine on these issues, and I began to advertise for like-minded physicians. But this mission touched a nerve, and more and more doctors began to join. Today more than 6,000 doctors belong to PCRM. We conduct research studies, focusing on the power of healthier diets. While we do not discount the value of drugs, we would like to see the roles of “conventional” medicine (i.e., medications) and “alternative” medicine (i.e., diet changes) reversed.
Often, a diet change is more powerful than drugs. In 2003, my research team began a study testing a new dietary approach to diabetes for the National Institutes of Health. We eliminated meat, dairy products, and other fatty foods, and emphasized fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains, and we compared this diet against a more traditional diabetes diet. A man named Vance read about the study and came in to see me. He described how his grandfather had died at age thirty, and how he was just thirty-one when he was diagnosed with diabetes. His weight had climbed
over the years, and despite medication, his blood sugar was terribly out of control. We sat down and looked at how a low-fat vegan diet might help. He was glad that this was not just another pharmaceutical study. And, a bit to his surprise, he took to oatmeal, topped with apples and cinnamon, along with toast and fresh fruit. Lunch or dinner would be salads, dressed up with beans, blood oranges, or other additions. He enjoyed burritos, pasta, fresh vegetables, and fruits. As the weeks went by, his weight plummeted. After a year, he had lost sixty pounds. His blood sugar fell, too, to the point that he no longer needed medication. By rearranging his plate, he had tackled his disease. I was as thrilled as he was. Following a similar diet, I’m pleased to say that others have reversed heart disease, cured migraines, and relieved arthritis.
Now, some patients are a bit of a tough sell, as I learned from my own mother. My father and she still live in North Dakota, and she’s had a high cholesterol level for years. Despite the fact that I’d done a number of studies on diet and health and had written several nutrition books, she wasn’t interested in a diet overhaul. What finally put her over the edge was her own physician, who wanted to put her on cholesterol-lowering medications. For a woman born in 1924, the idea of being dependent on medication was simply out of the question. At that point, she picked up my book Food for Life, and started a vegan diet.
One Can Make a Difference Page 3