Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

by Alan Alda

  It would have been smarter to get out of the way. The jagged top of the tin can came toward me end over end and sliced open an inch-long patch of skin on my head. Within seconds, my scalp was gushing and my body was covered with blood.

  The boys quickly sobered and walked me back to the brownstone where we lived and handed me over to my mother. For years I had a scar where the slice intersected the part in my hair. This gave me my first lesson in public speaking: Say what you mean and mean what you say—and don’t expect to get a laugh when they’re hurling metal at you.

  I stepped up to the microphone at Emerson College in Boston on a day in May, hoping to say what I meant and not have to duck. I was forty now, and M*A*S*H had been on the air for five years. Emerson, a communications college, had asked me to speak to the graduating class, who, I was sure, would be sitting there, hoping the commencement speaker wouldn’t trash their day. I thought for a long time about what I’d say to them.

  It was 1977, and the Vietnam War had ended four years earlier, with some wounds that had not yet hardened into scars. Watergate had forced Nixon out of office, and the shock of it was still with us. We were not that far removed from the years of assassination and unrest. The deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and the riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, and the protests at Kent State in 1970 in which four students had been shot and killed had stunned us, and we had not fully recovered. Little yellow smiley-face buttons began showing up everywhere not long after Kent State, and soon fifty million of them had been sold. It was as if the country were signaling itself that it had suffered enough.

  Our recent history had been tumultuous, yet I’d be speaking to a generation that was changing. They had turned away from boisterous demonstrations and were beginning to think more about their own careers.

  I wanted to say something that wouldn’t just bounce off them, something they could take in and connect to. I took off my mortarboard, looked into their faces, and dove in.

  I hope I can say something that will have some meaning for you. I hope I can say something that will set you so on fire, you’ll never forget it. Because twenty-one years ago when I was on your side of the academic footlights and I was graduating from college, we were addressed by several distinguished people who gave us encouragement and wisdom and wit, and I can’t remember a damn thing anybody said.

  Well, I’m going to tell you something you’ll remember. You may not believe this as you sit here now, but at some point in your lives a lot of you are going to look up from your work and wonder: “What’s the point of it all?” You’ll wonder how much you’re really getting accomplished and how much it all means. I think it’s safe to say that most of you will experience this.

  The sentence “What’s the purpose of all this?” is written in big letters over the door of the Midlife Crisis Butcher Shop. You can’t miss it as you lug the carcass of your worldly success through the door to have it dressed and trimmed and placed in little plastic packages so you can dazzle people with it in your showcase. “What’s the purpose of all this?” You may ask yourself that question next year or twenty years from now. But when you do, you’ll remember what I’m going to tell you now.

  Well, that was a little brash. I don’t know why I thought anything I said would be remembered. This is how you remember things:

  A few weeks after I got my head split open on the trash heap at the age of four, I let myself be inspired by the comics again and got another lesson I wasn’t expecting. I was outside our brownstone apartment on Thirty-second Street, sitting on the running board of a car, chatting with a girl my age. I liked her, and I decided to make her laugh. Who knows what I said. There were all kinds of rude words and rough humor that passed between the comics and strippers out on the road. I didn’t know what most of it meant, but I knew it made people laugh, and I tried some of it out on the running-board girl. She pulled back her hand and whacked me across the face. My cheek stung, and my eyes teared instantly. She looked over at her mother, who was sitting across the sidewalk on the stoop, watching us. Her mother said, “Hit him again.” She hit me again. What had I said? I never found out.

  But the sting of the slap remained on my face as a reminder that I was an outsider; our language wasn’t spoken here. Jim McGaugh, the memory researcher, told me that centuries ago, when a village wanted the memory of an important event to pass down to the next generation, the villagers would take a seven-year-old who had witnessed the event and throw him in the river. They would rescue him before he drowned, but the shock of the experience registered the day in his memory for the rest of his life. The little girl’s slap did the same for me. For a long time, I remembered that I was not one of these people. I never abandoned the comic end of the running board, but the slap was one of the signals I got from the civilian world that I’d have to learn to modify my sense of humor to fit the company I was in.

  So there was no chance the graduates would remember what I said that day, unless I took them over to the Charles River and threw them in. But I did get their attention. Now there was the little thing of what I was going to tell them. It was going to be something personal. I had gone for the personal the first time I spoke in public, and I never veered from it, even though the results that first time were nearly as memorable as the slap in the face had been.

  I was dry at the back of my throat that day. I wanted to make a good impression, but I didn’t stand much of a chance. I was in a citywide speech competition, and the topic was “Tolerance: How Can We Promote It in Burbank?” Not that tough in itself, but I was fourteen and up against my school’s football hero, who was three years older than me. He was a tall, good-looking quarterback with a smooth style. He had the authority of someone who called the plays and knew his calls would be followed. Pretty much all I had was sincerity, which kind of paled against Strong and Handsome.

  We were giving our talks in a large room above a catering hall, with the mayor and his staff judging us. The afternoon sun spilled across the bare wooden floor, and the judges looked at us from the other end of the room with polite neutrality. Tony, the football hero, was up first. He made his way effortlessly, and I thought glibly, down a list of public service announcements and essay contests that could inspire support for tolerance in the town of Burbank. I could see the judges nodding. The quarterback sat down, confident that he had scored.

  I rose and called a smile up to my face. They smiled back, politely. I wasn’t going to try to use humor, but the only other tool I had was a kind of passionate naïveté. I looked at the mayor and his aides, and I said, “The people who can do something about tolerance in this town are right here in this room.” I could see their smiles tighten just a little. This was probably not what they were expecting.

  Then I got personal. “When you walk down the street and someone approaches in the other direction, do you play a game, wondering what their ethnic background is, or their religion? Does that matter? Couldn’t we, each one of us, see people for who they are? Wouldn’t that be the real beginning of tolerance in Burbank?”

  I was suggesting that, generally, people should look inward, but as I talked, I was getting a vague feeling of doom. The mayor and his aides were beginning to look uncomfortable, as if I were questioning their own sense of tolerance. I saw the danger, but pluck rose in me like fetid floodwaters and I couldn’t stop. When it was over, they awarded me second prize, which wasn’t all that bad, even though there were only two of us in the contest.

  I decided to leave public speaking for a while. Instead, I joined the school chorus because I had a crush on the nun who conducted the singing group and also because it got me out of study hall, where they actually expected you to study. Spending an hour watching Sister Mary Alice waving her arms at us seemed much more productive. The only thing I didn’t like was that she had seated me next to Tony, the football hero. And he was even more self-assured about singing than he was about public speaking. As we practiced, I was surprised to find out that harmo
nizing required you to sing a completely different tune from what other people were singing. You had your part and they had theirs, and there were little marks on a musical staff in the songbook that you were supposed to be able to read. I had thought singing was just something you did, but this seemed a lot like study hall. My father sang for the half-naked chorus girls in burlesque without agonizing over it. Why couldn’t I?

  I opened my mouth and sang what sounded to me close enough to what the people in my section were singing. But I kept drifting halfway between what they were doing and the melody. I was singing, as they say, in the cracks.

  The football player listened to me struggling and deftly put me away. He never said I stank; he just launched into a conspiratorial account of how some people in the chorus had no idea how to read music. “This is what they think a half-tone interval is,” he said, and sang a couple of notes. “And this is a whole tone to them.” He sang another two notes, which sounded to me exactly like the first two. I nodded my head, only vaguely aware I was being mocked.

  A couple of weeks later, the ax fell. Sister Mary Alice made us sing a passage over and over. “Somebody’s flat,” she said. “Who is it?”

  There were no volunteers, so she asked only the left side of the room to sing, then the right side. Then the top half of the right side, then the bottom half. She was zeroing in. I knew it must be me, but I couldn’t stand the thought that I was letting her down. I had a crush on her. I dreamed about her. I couldn’t be the one who sang flat.

  But I was. She asked me into her office, where she explained gently that different people have different skills, while I ignored the tears in the back of my throat. As I left the chorus for good, the football player winked at me. He managed to get more derision into that one little wink than I thought was possible.

  My revenge was going back to class and getting into politics. I was beginning to be noticed in school because I could get even more laughs than the official class clown. He was Tom, an admirable boy who knew how to look surprised while he fell over backward in a chair and tumbled out of it. He taught me how to fall backward in a straight-backed chair, and I felt we were part of the brotherhood of pratfall artists. We amused the class so much, they elected us both president of our respective homerooms.

  The election taught me one of the great uses for politics: You could transform the slights dished out by one or two people in your life into the comforting praise of a large number of others who, in voting for you, were saying they liked you. At fourteen, I didn’t know much more than that about the real world of politics. On the other hand, there may not be much more than that.

  By the time I got to college and was about the same age as the kids I’d be speaking to at Emerson, I had only a hazy understanding of what was going on in Washington. I’d heard of Senator Joe McCarthy, who was in full flower during my college days at Fordham, and I wasn’t immune to the seductive perfume of his tirades. I remember walking with a friend along a campus path. He talked with real feeling about how McCarthy was attacking the country’s fundamental values. I didn’t read the newspapers much in those days, but I knew from headlines in the Daily News that McCarthy was accusing a lot of people of being Communists. McCarthy had a certain appeal for me. This was a time in my life when I was looking for refuge from a childhood of uncertainty. Since I was a baby, I hadn’t been able to count on my mother, who was schizophrenic, paranoid, and alcoholic. She loved me, certainly, but her version of reality shifted from hour to hour. I was looking for a rational universe, and one that included layers of authority that would be consistent from top to bottom. The church had it all figured out with a formula that was tightly reasoned, once you accepted its first premises on faith. So when my friend agonized over Joe McCarthy, it didn’t seem like a difficult question.

  As we strolled down the path in the late afternoon sun, I said I didn’t think McCarthy was so bad. It seemed to me that a country had the right to defend itself against its enemies. My friend was silent for a while, but I could see his crestfallen face. Finally, he spoke softly. “These people aren’t its enemies. They’re its citizens.”

  The quiet pain in my friend’s voice registered with me. It was one of a number of small moments that made me wonder how useful prepackaged answers were. I started asking questions; and that led, as it often does, to questioning the people in charge.

  I was becoming convinced that the world wasn’t running the way it ought to and that I probably ought to fix it. When you’re an only child, brought up in the spotlight of show business, you think like that.

  There certainly was plenty about our world that needed fixing. A few years after I’d graduated from college and had finally found work on Broadway, we were in the ice age of the cold war. The Soviet Union and the United States already had enough weapons aimed at each other to blow up several planets, yet they kept testing bigger and better ones. I helped form a tiny but industrious committee of theater people who hoped, just a little quixotically, to be helpful in bringing an end to nuclear testing. We would do this by collecting signatures from other Broadway actors on a petition. We were going to mail the petition to the leaders of both the United States and the Soviet Union, who had the hotlines open—waiting to hear what Broadway actors had to say about nuclear arms. It was a gesture that was both entirely humanitarian and completely pointless, but at the time it felt satisfying.

  I was acting in Purlie Victorious, a farcical, passionate romp written by Ossie Davis and starring Ossie and Ruby Dee. Ossie’s play put racial stereotypes onstage in order to lacerate them with gusto. I was playing Charley Cotchipee, the idealistic son of the plantation owner. I was twenty-five that year and just as callow as Charley. I went with my petition in hand and knocked on Ruby’s dressing room door, certain that she would sign and march with us the next week. I told her how we were going to get hundreds, maybe thousands, of signatures from theater artists and send them to the nuclear powers and stop the testing of nuclear weapons, which was a peril to humanity. My pitch was high-flown and feverish. As she listened, I saw a weariness come over her face. I was confused. Surely she agreed with what we were doing. I asked if she thought she’d be able to join us in a demonstration in Times Square.

  “Oh, God, Alan,” she said gently, “I’ve been marching all my life.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that my deeply felt cause would be one more lean on her good nature, already heavily weighted with them. I told her I understood and went down the hall to Beah Richards’s dressing room.

  In Purlie, Beah played the woman who had raised Charley. As an actor, I was learning from her every night onstage, and I would have been glad if I had been raised by someone with her deep understanding of humanity. She was in her forties then, and in spite of the lack of opportunity for black actors, she had become extraordinarily good at her art. I truly admired her, and I wasn’t prepared for her reaction.

  She listened until I finished talking, then said in a low tone that contained more concentrated fury than I had ever heard before, “I don’t care if they destroy themselves with these bombs. They’ve brought this on themselves. I don’t care if they vaporize one another and their eyes melt and run down their cheeks.”

  I stood still, not knowing what to say. I loved this woman, and I knew she had affection for me, but I had inadvertently opened a wound, and I regretted it. This was a time when actual bombings were more real to her as a black woman than the mere threat of nuclear war could be to me. She had lived with the bombing of black churches in the South. It wasn’t hypothetical. People were dying.

  Beah finally did come and walk with us. It was a cold winter night, and after the show, we gathered in Times Square and walked in a circle in the snow for about fifteen minutes. We had notified the press, but of course no one was there to watch us, and the circle of footprints we left in the snow melted away the next day along with any effect we might have had on anybody at all, other than ourselves.

  Getting drunk on the desire to do something d
idn’t mean I was accomplishing anything, but that was something I didn’t understand until I saw someone else drink from that cup. A few months later, there was a large gathering of hundreds of people in Times Square, calling for a test ban treaty. I wasn’t able to go because Arlene was working and I stayed home with our children. But an actor friend had gone to Times Square and came to our apartment an hour later. He was shaking with adrenaline.

  “You won’t believe this,” he said. “You won’t fucking believe this.” He was carrying his fifteen-month-old son, who looked confused and scared. “They charged us,” my friend said. “The police charged us. With horses! Can you believe that? We had children there.”

  I asked him why he’d brought his child to a street demonstration. He said he wanted him to be part of a historic moment. Something he could be proud of when he grew up. “But there’s always a chance the cops will overreact,” I said. “Weren’t you putting him in danger?”

  “I didn’t think they’d charge us with horses! Why would they do a thing like that?” He shook with anger and expressed amazement for another fifteen minutes.

  We were all sincere and passionate, but I saw the difference between dabblers like us and a true force for change the day Martin Luther King came to the theater. Purlie Victorious was celebrating its hundredth performance, and he came down to the basement of the theater and had his picture taken with the cast. When I shook hands with him, the look in his eyes was unforgettable. There was an alertness I had never seen before in anyone’s eyes, almost a cold stare. There was a feeling of trauma about his gaze, of looking into the distance without seeing, yet you felt he could see through you. These eyes were ready for anything: victory, defeat, death, wherever his walk would take him. You could see how the focus in those eyes could lead marches that changed lives.