I was often offered opportunities to go on other shows. Once I was asked to cohost the show Friday Night Videos. I had to think long and hard about that one because of who I was supposed to cohost with, Ozzy Osbourne. Of course, I didn’t know who he was, but I did my homework, and when I read about some of the antics he’d done onstage—biting off the head of a chicken, for example—I wasn’t so keen on the idea of sharing a stage with him! Maybe he’d bite off my head! But I was assured that he’d behave himself, and so I agreed.
Ozzy and I were put onto a set made to resemble a psychiatrist’s office. I was sitting in a chair and he sat on a psychiatrist’s couch, with his legs crossed under him. He wore a suit and, apart from his long hair, didn’t look very scary. In fact, he was probably more afraid of what I might ask him than I was of what he might do. He turned out to be very civilized, but he did say that his “friends” had been asking him what Dr. Ruth’s sex life was like, which was his roundabout way of posing the question of me. Not only don’t I ask personal questions, but I don’t answer them either. But I do have sort of a standard answer for that one.
“Ozzy, I never allow my husband Fred to come to television appearances like this one. You know why?”
“Haven’t got a clue, Dr. Ruth.”
“Because you would ask him about our sex life and he would say, ‘Don’t listen to her, it’s all talk!’”
The one show that I really loved being on was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous because, thanks to Robin Leach and his producers, I got to see parts of the world that I otherwise might never have visited. They sent me, all expenses paid, to Africa, India, and China. And if I was sleeping in a tent in Africa, it was the most luxurious tent you could find. But to me, more important than the luxury accommodations—which I understood the viewers at home liked to see—was the fact that a production team took charge of making all the arrangements. All I had to do was show up and allow myself to be filmed in exchange for some fabulous trips that didn’t cost me a cent. (If you hear any celebrities complaining about how hard it is to be one, cross them off your list of favorites!)
The One That Got Away
I was friends with Raymond Burr, better known to TV audiences as Perry Mason. He lived in California, where he had a house with a vineyard, but he would come to New York regularly, and we’d get together. One day he called me on a snowy day and said I had to come to lunch. I try not to venture out in New York when it snows because I live all the way uptown and the streets where I live are hilly, so I’m a bit afraid of not being able to get back home. But Raymond insisted, and we met at a fancy fish restaurant.
Raymond did the ordering—which I didn’t mind, because when I’m at a restaurant with someone, I’m more interested in the conversation than the food. We were four at the table and I didn’t hear what he told the waiter, but soon enough a five-tier platter loaded with assorted raw shellfish was set down in front of us, along with a magnum of wine, and all I was going to drink was one sip. More food followed, and most of it wound up on Raymond’s plate. But while he was eating and drinking, he was also making me an offer.
“Ruth, I’ve got a great idea for a TV series for you.”
“Raymond, quick, tell me. I’m all ears.”
“I want you to be a tugboat captain. We’ll shoot it up around Vancouver, where production costs are less. It’ll be a big hit.”
“A tugboat captain? Why do you think I would make a good tugboat captain?” I asked. That was a role I certainly never would have considered myself ideally suited for.
“I was given the script and it’s a great part. It needs a lot of energy—that you have; a lot of chutzpah—which you have in spades; and I’ll make sure there’s a love interest for you.”
I wasn’t very confident about the premise and I’m not much of a sailor, so a TV show that would have me on a boat for long periods of time wasn’t that appealing. But Raymond knew me well enough to have found my weak spot: a love interest.
Raymond put a lot of effort into trying to make this show a reality, but sadly he got sick and that slowed him down. When he passed away, that was the end of the project. One of the saddest parts—to me, at least—of his final days was that somehow the paparazzi had found out that he was sick and were following him to see if they could catch him going to the doctor, and he was doing all he could to maintain his privacy. That he would have to play such games during his last days made me very sad. So you see, sometimes you should be glad you’re not a celebrity (though, as I said, you are the star of your own life and you should never forget that).
I love being on television because I know that I can spread my messages to a wide audience. And I watch some television, though not a lot. According to studies, the average American watches more than five hours of TV a day. To me, that’s the best way to kill the joie de vivre in your life. Television sometimes entertains, and sometimes is educational, but it’s a basically passive occupation. Oh, yes, you might guess along with the contestants on a game show, and if you watch an interview by Charlie Rose, you might learn something. But for the most part, you’re existing while in front of the set, not really living and growing as a person. So my advice is not to use TV as a crutch. If there’s something you really want to watch, go ahead, but don’t just turn on the set because you’re bored and need a companion. Your TV is not your best friend, and the less time you hang with it, the greater the potential for joie de vivre in your life.
CHAPTER VIII
Always Learn New Things
Since I’m known as Dr. Ruth, you can presume I have a doctorate. Mine is an EdD from Columbia University’s Teachers College. Working backward, I also have a master’s in sociology from the New School for Social Research. Go back a bit further and you’ll discover that I have a . . . college degree? Not really; I studied psychology at the Sorbonne for four years, but I never got an actual degree before I left the country. A high school diploma? Nope, I have that utterly fabulous degree in Swiss housekeeping. And go all the way back to elementary school and the cupboard is completely bare. That’s what growing up during wartime will do for your collection of diplomas. (By the way, I didn’t just waltz into the New School without a degree. They had me take a couple of extra courses so that I qualified for graduate school.)
Because I was cheated by fate is why I put more value into education than some people. But it also means I appreciate that education doesn’t necessarily have to be of the formal variety. There are many ways to expand your brain, and one of the best I’ve found is teaching.
I love to teach and have always done so, beginning as a kindergarten teacher in Israel and France all the way up to teaching graduates students as I do today. But some of the highlights of my teaching years didn’t happen until a stage in my life when most people would have long given up standing in front of a classroom full of students. I taught at various colleges in the New York area over the years, but starting in 2003 at the age of seventy-five, I moved into the Ivy Leagues—first at Princeton and then Yale, and for a while I was actually teaching at both at the same time. You should have seen my limo bills!
In most areas I’m not a snob. I love what Nate Berkus did to my apartment (more on that in the next chapter), but bear in mind that I never moved from Washington Heights down to a ritzy part of Manhattan. I like nice clothes, but I wear them over and over. I eat at fancy restaurants but also at street-corner hot dog carts. You get the picture. However, when it comes to educational institutions, I admit I’m impressed by the Ivies. And so that Ruth K. Westheimer, who doesn’t have a high school diploma, would be teaching at two of them at the same time was quite an ego boost. It actually made me feel at least an inch taller!
You know the expression, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”? Nonsense. To me, teaching is about learning, which takes a lot of doing. If you don’t know your subject , your students will make sure you go home at the end of the day feeling rather downtrodden. And since I want to be admired by my students, I work har
d to make sure that my classes have something of value.
The reason I like to teach at the age of eighty-six is that when you reach a certain stage, hanging around people your own age doesn’t offer all that much in terms of growth potential. Many seniors have their sights aimed inward rather than outward. In part that’s because they’re trying to see which parts of their body are falling apart, so they become focused on their gall bladder or their knee rather than the world around them. And some don’t see much of a future for themselves, so they don’t really care to broaden their horizons. I’m just the opposite. To me, the broader my horizons, the more places I can hide out in order to elude Father Time. So I’d rather be in a room full of fresh young faces than one in which wrinkles predominate. And the brighter the brains behind those faces, the more I wind up learning from them.
And talk about joie de vivre! In my classrooms, it’s the order of the day. I don’t allow any electronics. I want everyone paying attention to me, not some screen. And everybody participates. You can’t have good sex and be a bystander, and you can’t learn that way either.
But this book is as much about you as it is about me—and you don’t have to stand in front of an actual classroom to teach. If you have any young people in your family, make sure to pass on some words of wisdom. Just don’t do it in a way that will bore them to death. Let’s say you want to teach your granddaughter some of your favorite recipes. Force her to get her hands dirty. Talk about your family history as the meal you’re making is in the oven. Make it lively and fun so she’ll come back. And the more of your life you put into each lesson, the more fun you’ll have as well.
New Haven is not very far from New York City, but I took a rather circuitous route getting there. I had gone to a memorial for Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated prime minister of Israel, at Madison Square Garden. At that event, one of the performances was by a young Israeli cellist, Inbal Megiddo, who all by herself, in front of tens of thousands of people, gave an extraordinary rendition of Joachim Stutschewsky’s Kaddish. It was such a poignant moment in the event that afterward I made sure to seek her out to tell her how moved I was by her music. Inbal was studying at Yale, and she later contacted me to ask if I would speak at a Master’s Tea at Calhoun College, one of the twelve residential colleges into which Yale is divided. It took so long to arrange for me to find the time to go up there that she’d actually graduated by the time the tea took place! But as far as I was concerned, the timing couldn’t have been better.
Pierre drove me up on a gorgeous spring day. Most of the students were hanging out on the lawns, throwing Frisbees and enjoying the sunshine. At Calhoun I met the master, William Sledge, and his wife, Elizabeth. The large library in which I spoke was packed with students who greeted me enthusiastically and who posed very intelligent but frank questions afterward, such as, “How do you see the erosion of homophobia impacting heterosexual relationships?” and, “During intercourse, how does a male keep from hitting the cervix with his penis?” Questions such as these from very bright students challenge you, because you must give them an answer that meets the standard of the question.
We then moved to the dining hall, where the conversation with the students continued. Pierre and I sat with the Sledges. Bill is a psychiatrist, and he and Elizabeth had taken on the task of overseeing those Yalies living in the Calhoun residency hall. Bill—who has a long, distinguished list of credentials, including being the medical director of Yale–New Haven Psychiatric Hospital—is a southern gentleman who charms you with the combination of his slow drawl and quick, sharp intellect. I could see that he was seriously thinking about something, and by the time dessert had been served, he made his move.
“Dr. Ruth, your lecture this evening was a fine example of how to get our students to pay attention.”
“My topic certainly helps keep their minds focused.”
“Perhaps, but I know some professors who could give a lecture about sex that would make even the randiest young male in the auditorium turn his thoughts to his paper on anthropology.”
“It says in the Talmud that a lesson taught with humor is one retained, and I always bear that in mind when I speak.”
“Dr. Ruth, given your skill set, I wonder whether you would consider blessing this campus with your presence on a more regular basis.”
“You mean teach a class?”
“That is exactly what I mean.”
“You know that I’m already teaching a seminar at Princeton.”
“While I respect my colleagues in New Jersey, I would argue that New Haven has just as much to offer you.”
“I like your proposition, but let me make one of my own. Since I have a busy schedule, I could use some help in my classroom. Would you be willing to share the duties of this course, whatever it would turn out to be?”
“Dr. Ruth, sharing the lectern with you is not something that I had previously considered, but I’d be honored.”
I ended up sharing the teaching duties of my Yale classes with Bill, but since Bill was equally busy with his hospital duties, we added a third member to our teaching troika, another Yale dean, Steve Lassonde, who has since become the dean of student life at Harvard. With this team in place, I had to lead, and therefore prepare, for only one lecture out of three. But I was always there to answer our students’ questions at the end of class, which as you might guess usually had nothing to do with Jewish or American family life—the topic of our seminar as listed in the catalog—but instead the birds and the bees.
Later I taught a class on Sex and the Jewish Tradition with the Yale rabbi, James Ponet, the same class that I was teaching at Princeton on my own. But at both institutions, I didn’t limit my education to what I could pick up from my students. I would make a day of it, attending other lectures or going to a concert or play in the evening. Here I was at universities where the students paid $50,000 a year to attend, in part because of these extracurricular activities, so I wasn’t going to let them slip through my little fingers if I had the opportunity to share in them.
I can’t cover the topic of my teaching years at Yale without mentioning the Beatle. Even though my title was only lecturer, I never failed to attend the graduation ceremonies. I love pomp and circumstance, and considering how much my Columbia cap and gown cost me when I graduated, I always try to amortize that cost whenever the opportunity presents itself.
In 2008, Yale honored Sir Paul McCartney with an honorary degree in music. I made sure to sit at the end of an aisle, and as Sir Paul was walking up toward the platform to receive his diploma, I stepped out from my seat and he spotted me.
“Dr. Ruth!” he cried out.
“Sing me something!” I shouted back.
So Sir Paul stopped the procession, came over to me, bent down, and sang “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.” An AP photographer happened to be nearby, and the picture of that moment circulated the globe. I felt a little guilty that I had stopped the entire graduation procession, but then again, it was one of those Westheimer maneuvers that I’ll never forget!
Speaking of forgetting, you may have noticed when I led into this story I used the term “the Beatle.” I have to be honest. I know very little about modern-day music, and while I’m well aware of the existence of the Beatles—how could anyone not—I still don’t really know the names of the four of them. And so I wasn’t excited to meet Paul McCartney in particular, but a Beatle. And to this day, I sometimes forget his name . . . but I always remember the story of the Beatle.
Most colleges that allow those not on the faculty to teach a course limit the number of semesters they’re allowed to do so. I actually pushed the envelope at both Yale and Princeton to six years, but as they say, all good things must come to an end. Still, I haven’t stopped teaching. I’m currently at my old alma mater, Columbia Teachers College, teaching a course on Family and Media; and as ever, my students are teaching me something during every class. But as I said, to me teaching doesn’t necessarily have to be in front of a classro
om. One other way that I’ve set about educating people, in numbers more than I could ever reach in a classroom, is by producing documentaries. But before I get to those, allow me to name-drop another famous institution of higher learning, Oxford.
I was invited to take part in one of their famous debates. Normally I don’t like to debate because for the most part, the end result is that nobody changes their mind. But this was Oxford with a long history of notable debates, and so here was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. The topic was abortion and sex education. While I wish there were no abortions, I am also strongly in favor of women retaining the right to control their bodies. However, it’s a subject that stirs up a lot of emotions on both sides of the issue, not to mention on both sides of the Atlantic.
I don’t like to lose, and it seems the fates didn’t want me to lose this debate. The person leading the team against mine was a well-known Irish Catholic woman with strong views against abortion and sex education. By chance—or maybe by divine intervention—I happened to meet her sister in New York before flying off to England. These two sisters were on opposite ends of the political spectrum. When she learned that I would be debating her sister, she was not just willing to give me every possible edge, she was eager. We made a date at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel to have tea, and in that imposing room, as a harpist played in the background, she gave me all the dirt she could dish. But the most helpful piece of information she passed on was this: “My sister’s a lush. She loves her glass of wine, and the second and the third as well. Given the circumstances, she’ll make an effort to stay sober, but it won’t be easy for her if there’s a bottle of wine anywhere nearby.” I didn’t say a word at that, but smiled to myself. I’d heard all that I needed to know.
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