by Goldie Hawn
I think I had to become successful to understand what success really means. I was supposed to be happy about it, but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt bereaved—mourning the life I wanted, the life I had striven for—that of a chorus girl. Having more money than I knew what to do with, having more opportunities, a new apartment, a new car—all these things brought me down instead of lifting me up. It was such a shock to feel so much guilt about my success.
Success isn’t a bad thing, but sometimes we put too much emphasis on the things that appear to be the outward signs of success. The real success is how you handle your success. How generous you are with it. I believe that success only enhances who you are. It confronts you with the truth about yourself. People who are nasty become nastier. People who are happy become happier. People who are mean hoard their money and live in fear for the rest of their lives that they will lose it. People who are generous use their gifts to help people and try to make the world a better place.
My father always said, “Expectation is greater than realization,” and he was right. Success is something worth striving for, but be careful what you wish for. It may not be all that you expect it to be.
altered states
Exploration of the mind is the most powerful frontier of all.
“Lie down, Goldie, and tell me what you’re feeling.”
My analyst’s voice mellows me, and I breathe a deep sigh of relief. I have found my doctor.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I tell him, lying on his soft leather couch. “I am so scared, and there is so much going on in my life. My whole life is changing, and I feel like my friends are changing around me, and my world just doesn’t look the same as it did. I’m always happy but…but now I’m not happy anymore. I really want to go home, I just want to go back to where I was before, because I’m scared…and yet I don’t know what in the world I’m scared of. And yet when I went home, that had all changed too, so now there’s nowhere I can go that feels safe anymore. I don’t know what to do…”
“Okay, now, Goldie, why don’t we slow everything down and start at the beginning?” he says, patting my arm. And so we do.
Having been given his number by a friend, I dialed it more than fifty times before I got through. Like an addict who needed a fix, I needed him to mend my head. When I finally spoke to him, he sounded to me like the voice of God.
Until I walked into his office in Century City, I was like an automaton, barely able to place one foot in front of the other. I’d had two full days on the set of Good Morning World, where, for the first time in my life, I had to force a smile. I could barely speak. I was still sleepwalking through a living nightmare. Between each shot I ran to the bathroom to throw up.
Dr. Grearson is my ticket out of this kind of hell. When I set eyes on his open, smiling, wonderful face for the first time, I know I’ve found the right man. I am so relieved to finally have someone I can talk to, some professional who can try to figure out what is wrong with me.
“Now, Goldie, tell me all your thoughts as they come into your head. It’s called ‘free association.’ Don’t be afraid, and just relax.”
With his help, I have just enrolled in the University of Goldie Hawn, the best college I ever attended. Gently, he leads me on the long journey down into myself. Tenderly, he teaches me about anger and fear. Tactfully, he makes me accept and understand my uncertainty about stretching the umbilical cord to leave all that I’ve ever known. Under his close guidance, I major in my own psyche, taking his enlightening tutorials as often as four times a week. I live for every session. I become his most devoted student.
Day after day in those early months of my time on Good Morning World, I turn up for work, do what I have to do and lie down in my dressing room in between takes. Anxiety attacks, depression and overwhelming nausea are my constant companions. Maintaining the cover that I am feeling happier than I am is a hundred times harder than the acting I had to do before; so is trying to be funny when I am going through the most devastating period of my life to date.
I can’t remain in the apartment where I first felt I was losing my mind, so I move to a different one, a place that isn’t so isolated, an apartment block built around a swimming pool where I can look out the big picture window and see people, night and day.
Despite dozens of offers to go to parties or out to clubs and restaurants, I become a recluse. At the end of my working day, I hurry home and cloister myself away in my big blue fuzzy chair, drinking tea or trying to read The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm. It is the only thing that brings me peace.
Severed from the world, I find that my only other trips out are to Dr. Grearson to spend an hour or so lying on his couch. Even with his almost daily sessions blunting the edge of my pain, I suffer anxiety attacks at all times of the day and night, when I least expect them. I lose my appetite, and my weight drops below ninety pounds.
“Tell me about your father,” Dr. Grearson asks softly, and I think of Daddy with his glide-step and his hee-haw laugh. “And your mother.” I can see my mom in her pointy heels and pencil skirt. “Tell me everything.”
This episode was probably one of the most important of my life. It presented me with a pure and simple opportunity for growth. These events forced me to go inside myself and examine what was wrong. My analyst provided me with the help I needed to do that.
I’m not saying that a psychologist is always the answer; I’m not married to psychology. It could be a faith, Buddhism, a wise man, a friend. It doesn’t matter how you do it, but it is very important to understand the workings of your own mind and to unlock your own truth fearlessly.
I have come to believe that the decade between the ages of twenty and thirty is the most difficult of our lives. We individuate from our parents, and questions arise like, Who am I? What am I going to be? We don’t know where we’re going, or if we’ll be successful when we get there. But before we even address those questions, we should take the time to find out who we really are. What do we believe? And how do our relationships inform what we believe? Because if we don’t figure out who we are in our twenties, the question is going to hit us hard later. We can’t sail through life’s difficult passages until we have first dealt with the child in us, the place in us where we feel like being young will just take care of everything, because it doesn’t.
With Dr. Grearson’s help, I was able to carefully peel away the layers of my own being and examine what was underneath. I worked harder at my therapy than almost anything else. I became intimate with my fears and my insecurities and my lack of self-esteem, and I was able to dissect these deficits and see what they were made up of, and how much of it stemmed from my mother’s control issues and my father’s physical aloofness. Despite regular anxiety attacks, agoraphobia and the frequent need to go to the bathroom to heave, I persisted.
Only when I really started examining my life and my relationships honestly, without painting them rosy pink, did I truly begin to understand. My self-image was changing; the image others had of me was changing; my relationship to my parents was changing. Finally, I was able to forgive and come to love fully, deeply and honestly.
I remember one day in my analysis when I was crying and crying because I realized that however much I loved my father, however much I cherished his free spirit, he was a man who couldn’t nurture others. He couldn’t nurture my mother; he couldn’t nurture me. I was the one who took everything from my father; I took what I needed at any cost.
As I was lying on my back on the couch and crying about Daddy, I suddenly realized that I was playing with my toes just as I did when I was in the crib. I could suddenly remember everything about that perfect yellow day when I was a tiny baby. I could remember the warm water and the baby oil and the powder and my mother’s love, and I realized that I could go back there whenever I wanted and feel safe. It was such a wonderful feeling.
Dr. Grearson also helped me deal with my success. He helped me understand that the adoration or unkind criticism wasn’t m
ine to own. That it was all about how other people perceived me to be, not how I really was. I needed to take no responsibility other than just being a Rorschach test, an inkblot that others interpreted whichever way they needed to.
The key is to learn to respect and honor the complications of other people’s lives. It allows me to not identify personally with others’ perceptions, or to become wrapped up in my own defenses against them. If someone tells me “I love you,” it should carry no more weight than if they say “I hate you.” I give them back their joy; I give them back their anger. My truth is detached from theirs.
Consequently, I became infinitely more self-aware, more enlightened and more connected with my own mind. I was able to see that my parents’ relationship wasn’t perfect; I was able to forgive them for the things that they couldn’t do, things that people never do in a lifetime. I was able to redirect the music of my brain and take a look at the beauty of my life instead of its ugliness.
The joy of all this was that I started so young. I was just twenty-one, such a malleable age, with my childhood still so fresh for psychological excavation. Digging around in the mud of my psyche was the most important thing I could ever have done. It helped me be a better mother ultimately, a better mate; it helped me become tolerant in the face of intolerance. It helped me become, in the long run, more balanced in my failure as well as my success.
It took dedication, and great tenacity, and it would be nine long years before I graduated from my own personal college, but, when I did, I felt safe in my own arms.
I remember the day I went in to see Dr. Grearson not realizing it was to be our last session. He didn’t ask me to lie down. Instead, he took my hand, sat me on the couch and said, “Goldie, I am so proud of you. There is nothing else I can do to help you. You are on your way. You don’t need me anymore.”
Looking up at him, I couldn’t believe what he was saying. “But…”
“No buts!” he interrupted, shaking his head at me. “It is time for you to fly.”
postcard
I rejoice in the spaces between thoughts.
A beautiful woman leads me into a quiet room. The warm California breeze drifts through the open window, gently billowing the curtains and lifting my hair.
Dominating the room is an altar, adorned by a pretty pink-and-gold cloth. On it is an exquisite rose in a glass vase and a single lit candle. A picture of Maharishi Maharesh Yogi hangs on the wall above.
There is a lone chair in the room. She offers me the seat and whispers a secret mantra in my ear. Just before she leaves the room, she says, “Repeat this in your mind, over and over again.” She closes the door behind her, leaving just me and my secret mantra.
I have always been drawn to unseen powers, to the mystical and the magical in life. With her help, I am about to discover the power of my own mind.
Closing my eyes, I feel the breeze lightly brushing my skin, while in my mind I dutifully repeat my mantra. I can smell incense burning in the room and the rose petals scattered all about me. This is my first experience of attempting to quiet my mind.
I chuckle to myself at first. What a cliché I am, sitting here in this room, in the seventies, with flower power at its peak, the latest celebrity to join the Transcendental Meditation bandwagon.
Whoops! That’s a thought. Shhh. I have to go back to my mantra. She said thoughts would come in and out of my mind. “Just witness them,” she whispered. “Don’t judge them or give them any credence. Let them drift away, and then go back to your mantra.”
It is not so easy to do.
But the more I repeat the mantra, over and over, the more I feel my body relax. My breathing falls away to an almost imperceptible rate. My heart beats more slowly, and the blood it pumps through my veins lessens its pressure.
Thoughts roll into my busy mind again—people I must call, places I must go—and I push them away, hoping for a longer period of calm before the next wave of thoughts.
Listening to my mind saying the words of my mantra, sensing their rhythm and primordial sounds in my head, an inexplicable feeling begins to wash over me.
Deep inside, I feel I am going down and reconnecting to something I know, like an old friend, that deep place that is ever constant, ever joyous, ever alive with creativity. It is the deeper part of me that knows something. It is such a great connection, and fills me with such joy, that I feel like giggling.
Pushing the temptation aside, I carry on, wanting to feel it again. The more I repeat my mantra over and over, the more I let go. As my thoughts flow in and out, I become quieter and quieter in my mind.
My consciousness feels like a teabag being dipped into a glass of hot water and lifted out again. I can feel it becoming slowly saturated with nothingness. When I say nothingness, it is sort of a space in time in which no thought takes place.
Each time I repeat the mantra, the phenomenon becomes stronger, and the teabag becomes heavier and heavier, sinking deeper and deeper, its rich essences seeping into the water.
After a while—I can’t say how long—I lose my sense of place. I can visualize the clear glass full of the rich goodness that is my life. I feel like I am merging my spirit with something that is very familiar to me, very safe, and it tickles my joy center.
I am filled with a sense of such purity, such clarity, like I have never experienced before. There is no ego, no self, no thought. I am just here. Nothing matters. I am coming back to the purest state of being. I feel unadulterated bliss.
Presenting an award to the wonderful George Schlatter, my director and mentor on Laugh-In. (George Schlatter Productions)
laugter
Comedy breaks down walls.
It frees us for just a moment from the ugliness of this world.
“Good morning, Miss Hawn,” the security guard greets me cheerily as I pull in to the NBC parking lot for the last time.
“Morning, Jim,” I reply with a smile that doesn’t quite reach my eyes.
Steering my maroon Chevrolet Corvette into the slot, marked by a sign on the wall that reads LAUGH-IN: GOLDIE HAWN, I head with a heavy heart for the door I have opened every working day for the last three years, in beautiful downtown Burbank.
As I walk down that long, long corridor to the studio, passing people I have come to know and love, I can hardly believe I am leaving the show today. Peering in through every doorway, I am wistfully aware of how much I have taken everything for granted. Five days a week, I have walked this corridor without thinking. Now I really look at the stages, the rehearsal halls I’ve worked in, the room where my bikini-clad body was painted with words and symbols, the newsroom.
Past Hank, the funny makeup man, the one I joked with all the time about the double chin he insists I don’t have, I wave and giggle. Past Tom Brokaw, the new NBC anchor, who greets me each morning with a smile and a bright hello. I must admit, I have a bit of a crush on him.
Looking into one rehearsal hall, I remember the day I danced there in a tight red sweater jumpsuit. Glancing up, I could hardly believe my eyes. Elvis Presley had wandered in to watch us rehearsing.
I stop, soaking up the memory now, and still taste how it felt to see the King standing there, emitting such incredible sexual energy. I thought I was going to swoon just being in the same room. That man and his music made my teenage hormones rage. Despite my promises to my father to listen to only classical music, I lived head to toe for rock and roll.
Elvis was introduced and walked over to me, reached out and touched my tousled hair. “Why, Goldie,” he said, smiling that crooked smile of his. “No wonder you’re so funny. You look like a chicken that’s just been hatched.”
Walking on down the corridor, I remember the time we all chased George Schlatter, the producer and director of Laugh-In, when he had us working on a sketch until three in the morning. Dick Martin, Dan Rowan, Ruth Buzzi and I were dressed in overalls, supposedly to paint a wall, but it was so late and we were so tired and none of us wanted to get covered in paint. With one look
, we yelled, “Get George!” instead. We chased him down this hallway with rollers dripping paint until he ran upstairs and locked himself in his booth.
Turning down a side corridor into the Laugh-In hallway, the place where our little family gathers every week, I step into my dressing room that looks just the same as it always has. There is the old telephone, the bowl of fresh fruit, the makeup table and the ugly brown couches. Only now they don’t look so ugly anymore.
Usually from here, I can hear George’s voice bellowing down the hallway. Usually, he pops his head around each dressing-room door. “How are my crazy inmates?” His large physique fills the doorway, as do his big blue eyes. He is a man who laughs easily and with all his heart. He looks like a big strong bear on the outside, but, boy, is he soft and mushy on the inside.
But George doesn’t come this morning. Everything is quiet. I know why.
Nobody knows me better than George. He sees my soul. He gets the way my brain works and the way my heart feels. He always used to say, “Goldie is as dumb as a fox.” He knows me so well. I can’t fool him, nor would I ever try. He is one of the great loves of my life.
The first time I met him, he came onto the set of Good Morning World and stood there, staring at me disconcertingly. I was summoned to his office at NBC a few days later and sank to the bottom of his big red leather wing chair.
“Now, what do you do?” George asked, looking down at me and laughing.
“Well, I dance.”
“No. I mean, what do you do, Goldie Hawn?”