I asked her if looking back, she regretted giving up her career. “Oh, Lord, no,” she said. “Had I done it the other way around, I’d be miserable today. If I just had movies to look back on and not have known my boys.”
For years Audrey had been a special ambassador for UNICEF. She was tireless in her efforts to make life better for impoverished children. She had just returned from tours of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala when we met for our interview. “I have this extraordinary thing that’s happened to me,” she said. “To be able to express my need to help children and to take care of them in some way.”
Audrey Hepburn died much too young, at the age of sixty-three, in 1993, at her home in Switzerland. The cause was cancer. But she lives on in her films—forever radiant and the fantasy of every young woman watching a rerun of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Charade, or Funny Face.
So here were these three very smart women also with very different approaches to the balance of family life and career.
Where did this leave me? I used to say you could have a great marriage and a great career (notice I use the word “career,” not “job”) or a great marriage and great children or a great career and great children, but you couldn’t have all three at the same time. I have changed my mind. Today there are many husbands who care deeply about having a strong relationship with their children and will help with their care. They’ll even help with the housekeeping. And there are companies like ABC that let women work part-time or do job sharing. On The View some of our working mothers bring their children in, breast-feed when they need to, and do their jobs well. Do women need more help? Day-care centers at work, more flexible hours? Sure. But things have improved so much that I do think these days you can have marriage, career, and children. But make no mistake about it, it is not easy. I was never able to do it.
The ability to take a tragic situation and turn it into optimism and purpose is rare. There’s no better example than a man you’ve probably never heard of. (I include him even though he is not a celebrity.) Over the years people have often asked me who, among the countless interviews I’ve done, is the most memorable. If I’m thinking historically, I say Anwar Sadat. But if I’m thinking on a human level, the answer is Robert Smithdas, whom I first interviewed more than thirty years ago on the Today show and again, in 1998, for 20/20.
Robert Smithdas is a teacher and a poet. He is also totally blind and profoundly deaf. I remember his putting his thumb on my lips and his fingers on my vocal cords during our first interview. Lord knows how, but he was able to understand what I was saying. I was absolutely flabbergasted.
Smithdas had graduated from college at the top of his class, the first deaf and blind person to do so since Helen Keller. He then earned a master’s degree from New York University, the first graduate degree ever, anywhere, for a deaf and blind student. In the years since I first interviewed him, he had married and was teaching other blind and deaf people at the Helen Keller National Center on Long Island. At his side, also teaching, was his wife, Michelle. She, too, was blind and deaf.
If ever a person gets beset by frustration or poor-me self-pity, one day, even one hour, with Robert and Michelle Smithdas will cure all. In the course of our profile with the couple for 20/20, we first went with them to church. Michelle had just had electrodes implanted in her inner ear and was thrilled to finally have some limited hearing; Bob felt the vibration of the choir simply by touching the pew. Later I went to their apartment, where Bob made us chicken cacciatore, even slicing the onions. He cooked on a gas stove, gauging the heat of the flame as expertly as any chef. He and Michelle could see nothing and hear little, but how rich their lives were and how independently they lived!
They communicated by “finger-spelling” into the palms of each other’s hands. Michelle, who also holds a master’s degree (Columbia University’s Teachers College), could tell if her husband was angry or upset if “he finger-spells too fast.” An interpreter from the Helen Keller Center finger-spelled my questions to the couple, and they answered me in their own voices. At home they each wore vibrating pagers to signal that the doorbell was ringing or to “find” each other in their apartment. They had some help from sighted friends, especially from one truly special woman named Linda Stillman. Mrs. Stillman had spent five years with Michelle while she was attending Columbia, finger-spelling the graduate school lectures for her and translating the necessary textbooks into braille. Can you imagine the task this was for both women? The patience each must have had? The enormous reward for both when Michelle received her master’s degree?
Michelle and Bob were both avid readers, especially Bob, who read about twenty braille magazines a month, ranging from The Economist to Popular Mechanics to Martha Stewart Living. And neither one complained about their disabilities. Michelle had had some sight and hearing as a child, but an illness and then an accident robbed her of both. Still, she told me, “I am rather happy with what I am able to do and for what I have. Especially for my husband.” Throughout our day together she was smiling and upbeat.
Bob, who had lost his sight and hearing at the age of four, admitted that he missed the ability to see his friends and especially to hear them. “Blindness takes you away from scenes, but deafness takes you away from people,” he said. “But at this stage in life, I am very used to being deaf-blind.”
When I left their house, I was humbled at what an open and optimistic mind can achieve, and brimming with admiration for them. I determined to remember, every day, how blessed I am. To anticipate your question, I don’t remember each day, but I should, and I try.
No one has lied to me more or touched me more than the late Richard Pryor. At our first interview in 1979, Richard said, “Are we going to end up liking each other?” I answered truthfully, “I don’t know.” Richard then said, “Oh good. I’m glad it’s still out there.”
If Robert and Michelle Smithdas are examples of people who have risen above the difficult circumstances of their lives, the brilliant actor and comedian Richard Pryor is my example of a man who took the enormous talent he was born with and destroyed it. He couldn’t help it, and his struggles affected me from the first time we met.
I did end up liking him. How could I not? He told me of his horrific childhood. He, a young boy, living in a house with his mother, who was a prostitute, listening to the moans and grunts of the lineup of men who came up to her room. He, trying to ignore the men rapping on the door to get in. He, a little older, sleeping with a girlfriend he liked, only to be told by his father that he had slept with the girl, too. So how could he possibly trust anyone, male or female?
At the time of this first interview, Richard was a huge star. He was appearing in the film The Wiz with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Almost every young comedian, black or white, wanted to be like him and follow his cutting-edge humor. I, too, was also taken by his brilliance and felt I could ask him anything. He wasn’t offended. He welcomed it.
ME: Are you totally off drugs?
RICHARD: No. I love drugs. I really do. But I can’t do them a lot because it messes my life up and every time I get in trouble it’s because I end up drinking too much or snorting too much. But I like drugs. I like some cocaine every now and then.
Richard had a beautiful white girlfriend named Jennifer Lee living with him, and he spoke of their relationship as being “magic time.” I stupidly thought he was talking of his love for her. He was actually talking of their doing drugs together. Still, I liked Jennifer and she seemed to be genuinely devoted to him and to trust him. So did I.
That is why, when in 1980, Pryor set himself ablaze and then ran screaming through the streets of his Los Angeles neighborhood with more than half his body burned, I believed everything he told me. He had been rushed to the hospital and after a month or so of treatment, he sat down once more with me. He looked god-awful, emaciated and shaking, and although his face had not been burned, he could barely sit because his scarred body was still so painful.
“Richard, how
did it happen?” I asked as gently as I could.
“It was stupid,” he replied, laughing. “Me and my partner had been drinking this Jamaican rum and it spilled and he went to get a towel out of the bathroom to wipe it up and I lit a cigarette and the next thing I knew, I was on fire.”
“Were you on drugs?” I asked.
“No,” said Richard, almost offended that I had asked.
Six years later we talked again. There had been enough rumors so that I knew that the last time I had talked to him, Pryor had looked me right in the eyes and lied.
“I asked you about the accident and you carried on and said, ‘Oh, it had nothing to do with freebasing, it had nothing to do with drugs.’ In short, you lied to me.”
“That’s true,” Pryor said sheepishly. “One reason that I like to lay it on is this. My lawyer at the time had made a statement to the press about how it happened. He didn’t really know what happened, and he was trying to cover my ass. By saying it wasn’t freebasing, I was trying to cover his ass. Inside I’d be screaming. I wanted to tell you the truth.”
ME: It was no accident.
PRYOR: Yes. To tell the truth, I got crazy one night and went mad and tried to kill myself.
ME: You really did it deliberately, didn’t you?
PRYOR: Yes. I was crazy. I had gone over the top. So I don’t really even know how I did it. I remember pouring rum all over my clothes and lighting a cigarette lighter.
ME: Knowing that you wanted to die. No accident. Why did you want to kill yourself?
PRYOR: I was ashamed.
ME: Of what?
PRYOR: I was ashamed of myself. I had come to this. God had given me all this. And what did I do with it? I could only end up in a room alone, smoking a base pipe. All day long, I couldn’t stop. I put the pipe down. It jumped back into my hand. I couldn’t stop five minutes. Do you understand that? Five minutes. I said to myself, all right, five minutes. I won’t smoke anymore. It wasn’t a minute that would go by. I had to pick that pipe back up. I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell anyone.
Pryor tried to put the pieces together again. But it was never the same. Jennifer had left him after the fire. Nothing in his life seemed to be working out. Then he got multiple sclerosis. From time to time I called him and we talked about this and that, but we never did another interview. He didn’t want to. I didn’t want to push. Jennifer, who had always loved him, came back. They finally married and she took care of him until his death. Jennifer knew how fond I was of Richard, and she called me herself in 2005 to tell me that he’d died. He was sixty-five. Even though he had lied to me, I still think he may have been the most painfully honest man I have ever interviewed.
Now I am going to take a huge leap from a man who destroyed his own life to a man who has tried to uplift the lives of others. I speak of the Dalai Lama, whose words have affected not only me but millions around the world. I met and interviewed the Dalai Lama in 2005 for an unusual two-hour Special we called Heaven: Where Is It? And How Do We Get There? (By the way, we were originally going to call it Heaven: Does It Exist? but we were told we shouldn’t because some evangelical Christians have no doubt that heaven exists and might boycott the program. Not that we were threatened, but why offend if we didn’t have to? After all, we wanted the evangelicals to watch the program, too.)
I had briefly met the Dalai Lama some years before in the most improbable place—the boardwalk at Venice Beach, California. I was married to Merv. We’d decided we weren’t getting enough exercise so off we went at 6:30 a.m. to bicycle. The only person we saw was a man walking his dog until a car drew up and six monks in saffron robes emerged to look at the ocean. One of them was the Dalai Lama. I went up to him, said something inconsequential like, “Good morning, Your Holiness,” to which he responded in kind (well, without the “Your Holiness” part). Then the monks got back in their car, and Merv and I went off on our bikes, leaving behind the man and his dog. I can only imagine what his wife thought of his mental stability when he went home for breakfast and said, “Guess what, honey? I just saw Barbara Walters and the Dalai Lama on the boardwalk.”
It was harder getting to the Dalai Lama this time. Physically. I flew to New Delhi with my producer, Rob Wallace, and a camera crew, then on to a small airport an hour or so outside Dharamsala, the little mountain sanctuary given to the Dalai Lama for his government-in-exile in 1960 by Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. This followed the Dalai Lama’s expulsion from Tibet by the occupying Chinese. We timed our visit to coincide with his annual two weeks of teachings to his monks and pilgrims. We should have looked at the weather report.
The air got colder and colder as we drove up into the mountains, where monkeys looked down at us with surprise from the trees and we looked up at them with our own surprise. Rain added to the cold when we finally reached the narrow, cobblestoned streets of Dharamsala. Our hotel had no heat or hot water, and I slept fully dressed under a lot of blankets. Still, the chill went right through you.
The Dalai Lama didn’t seem chilled at all as he sat outside in the rain, wearing his one-shoulder red robe, chanting for hours to his young monks. There were a few headphones for translations into different languages, but they were hard to come by. Evidently he occasionally said something funny because his students would laugh and he would giggle. It really was a giggle, not a laugh, and quite infectious.
We did our interview after he was through with his teachings. It was still damp and cold, but everything about the Dalai Lama was warm. Including his hands. When I extended my hand to shake his, he took it in both his hands and just held it. His eyes were warm, too, and merry.
Our subject was heaven, remember, and Buddhists have a unique concept of what heaven is. “Ten directions,” the Dalai Lama told me. “East, south, west, and north, and above and below.” Buddhists don’t believe in heaven as a final destination, but as a place to further develop spirituality. “For Buddhists, the final goal is not reach there, but become Buddha, one’s self,” he said in his accented, imperfect English. Buddhists believe in reincarnation. The better you have lived your life, the happier your life will be when you’re reborn. Conversely, the Dalai Lama said, “If someone do very bad thing, kill or steal, he could be born even with an animal body.” (Gives a new meaning to “bad dog.”)
The Buddhist religion is far more complex than my brief explanation, but the Dalai Lama, who told me that he considers himself a teacher rather than a god as some feel he is, was deliberately trying to make his belief accessible. In fact, to some degree, reincarnation makes sense to me. I’m certainly not a Buddhist, but part of me believes that someone like my sister, Jackie, or others who had very difficult lives, could come back to something better. They may have done something in a former life that reduced them to a not-so-happy existence but they have paid that price and earned a chance at happiness. On some spiritual level that reaches me.
What touched me the most about the Dalai Lama was his definition of the purpose of life. It was, he said, “to be happy.” How does one accomplish that? I asked. “I think warmheartedness and compassion,” he replied. “Compassion gives you inner strength, more self-confidence. That can really change your attitude.”
It was that simple. I compared his definition with those of some of the other great religious leaders I had interviewed for the Special. The brilliant Catholic archbishop I’d talked with, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, had said the primary purpose of life for Catholics was to go to heaven. Muslims shared a similar goal, said Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the spiritual leader of the Masjid al-Farah Mosque in New York. We also talked with a noted evangelical leader, Pastor Ted Haggard of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. The purpose of life, he told me, was to be born again and to accept Jesus into your life. Otherwise, he said, you (and also, I) would probably not get to heaven. Pastor Haggard was smiling and pleasant. Unfortunately he was later defrocked by his own congregation due partly to revelations of homosexual offenses. To me
this didn’t diminish his beliefs. It only accentuated the hypocrisy of his character.
Members of the Jewish faith had a different goal than going to heaven. According to Rabbi Neil Gillman, a professor of philosophy at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, Jews put more emphasis on living a “decent” life on earth for its own sake, not for any reward.
And here was the Dalai Lama saying that the purpose of life was simply to be happy. And achieving it was as easy as being warmhearted and compassionate. I was so affected by that simplicity and by the sweetness of his personality that when the interview ended, I asked the Dalai Lama if I could kiss him on the cheek. He smiled and suggested we kiss as they do in New Zealand. And so we rubbed noses like the Eskimos. He then put a white scarf around my neck and the necks of my camera crew and my producer, giggled, and walked away.
But his message lingered. As I told you before, after the visit concluded, as a special treat, I took my small staff on a whirlwind tour of several cities in India, including the dazzling pink city of Jaipur and Agra, where we saw the Taj Mahal at dusk and again in the early hours of sunrise. Magnificent. For that week I was the most adorable person. I never got angry, I never raised my voice, and nothing bothered me. I was devoid of jealousy and ambition. I was also slightly boring. But then came the plane trip home and our return to the Western world. Little by little the old emotions seeped back in. Still, I continue to remember his simple formula for the purpose of life and I try to practice what he preached. Compassion. Warmheartedness.
Finally Christopher Reeve, a mountain of a man who took his once-strong life, diminished by a tragic accident, and found a new strength that inspired the world. It was not just that I admired Chris’s dignity and courage, I got to care about him as a person for his spirit, his humor, his determination. He had suffered an affliction that would have made most people withdraw from life. Instead he confronted it and changed the way people looked at quadriplegics.
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