I think the thing that has surprised me is that a mistake is a dynamic thing. Like any action, there is always a reaction. There are always consequences.
I don’t think we realize that when we’re young we make decisions that have the power to have an impact on the rest of our lives.
For me that was the decision to give up piano lessons after four years of study. I had adored music since my earliest memory and dreamed of someday having a career in the entertainment business. But as a young teenager—and therefore a genius who knows everything—I decided that cheerleading was far more important to my development as a human being. (I’m embarrassed to admit this even today.)
Anyway, it doesn’t take much effort to surmise that I haven’t led a cheer or done a cartwheel, a C-jump, or a split in a very long time, but I have been a professional musician for forty years. Not having the skills that come from having a solid command of a musical instrument has made a difficult career choice even more difficult—not impossible, but far more difficult.
I watch other people sit down at a piano and effortlessly play sonatas or concertos or ragtime or swing or folk or rock and roll or even a little ditty and I’ve got to admit I regret my decision so many years ago. And it’s not even all about performance. It’s about the simple joy of being able to create beauty anytime one wants to, in the privacy of one’s own imagination.
I cheated myself out of a blessing and I have no one to blame but myself.
My daddy also used to say, “Honey, find something you love to do and then figure out a way to get paid for it.” He understood that where your true passion is, there your joy is also. And a joyful life is a truly successful life. Perhaps not by the world’s standards, but whose life is it, anyway?
I’m grateful I was able to take steps later in my life that ensured I could continue in a business I loved. I majored in voice in college. I have continued with voice lessons ever since. And after I left Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, I began a whole new career as a songwriter and playwright that I never dreamed I was capable of.
But my daddy knew.
Years ago he was tape-recording me singing a simple little childhood song a cappella. I must have been about five years old. After singing a phrase or two I looked around, surprised that there was no musical accompaniment.
“Where’s da moosic, Daddy?” I asked.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I can still remember him tenderly saying, “you’ve got to learn to make your own music.”
WHAT I LEARNED
Make no mistake, it’s never too late to start.
LEONARD NIMOY
Actor (Mr. Spock, Star Trek)
Having established a relationship with a California company that had published two books of my poetry, I agreed that we would develop a sort of Star Trek memoir. The book was to deal with questions that I was frequently being asked: “How did you get the role of Spock?” “What was your favorite episode?” “How did you prepare for the character?” and so on. This was at the time when an intense interest in Star Trek was building as a result of a very successful syndication of the original series.
During the writing process I had an experience at the San Francisco airport that prompted an idea for a chapter in the book. A lady with a young child in tow recognized me. She stood with the boy, perhaps nine or ten years old, in front of me and announced to him, “This is your favorite character on television. This is Mr. Spock.” The child looked at me with a blank stare, obviously confused by the information his mother had given him. For him this was not Mr. Spock standing in front of him: no pointed ears, no arched eyebrows, no greenish skin, and no Star Trek uniform. Of course, what the mother meant was “This is the actor who plays Mr. Spock,” but that’s not what she said.
As a result of the confrontation I wrote a chapter titled “I Am Not Spock.” I told about the differences between the character and myself. My parents were immigrants from Russia. Spock’s certainly were not. My parents were both humans. Spock was born of a Vulcan father and a human mother. I enumerated the differences and then went on to explain how the character was built.
When the book was finished I had a discussion with the publishers about potential titles. I suggested that the title of the chapter “I Am Not Spock” might be provocative and engender interest as the title of the book. The publisher warned me that it was a negative title and that negative titles tended not to sell well. I gave him a wise-guy response. I said, “What about Gone with the Wind?” He said, “Very well; the book is yours. We’ll title it whatever you want,” and that’s the way it went out.
At the time there was enormous hunger for more Star Trek but there were no episodes being produced. When the book was published the very intense Star Trek audience came to believe, as a result of that title, that I was rejecting the character and all things connected with Star Trek. The widely held belief was that my position was preventing more Star Trek from being produced. None of this was true. In fact, in the book I took pains to comment on my deep caring for the character and for what he and Star Trek offered. Nevertheless, the rumors persisted, and many more people read the title than read the book. Using the title I Am Not Spock was a big mistake.
In 1977 George Lucas’s Star Wars opened to enormous audiences. Paramount Pictures, the holders of the Star Trek franchise, took note and we went into production on the first of several Star Trek movies, which were followed by subsequent Star Trek TV series. The rumors subsided, and I was welcomed back into the Star Trek fold.
WHAT I LEARNED
Today, I am still not convinced that negative titles are a problem. The current Fiasco and State of Denial, though quite negative in name and content, are selling briskly. Nevertheless, if I had it to do again, I would give more thought to my publisher’s concern rather than simply brushing it aside with my wise-guy response.
Live and learn.
ISADORE ROSENFELD, MD
Rossi Distinguished Professor
of Clinical Medicine,
Weill Cornell Medical Center
The Albert Lasker Medical Research Award jury was set up by the late Mary Lasker, whom I always considered to be the American equivalent of Florence Nightingale because of her belief in the importance of medical research. For many years, she successfully lobbied every American president from Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush for their commitment to medical research. The jury was composed of leading scientists and researchers in various fields of medicine and was chaired for many years by Dr. Michael DeBakey. Mary was good enough to appoint me to the jury because I was her personal physician. To this day, most of the winners of the Lasker Award go on to receive the Nobel Prize. In fact, a representative of the Nobel committee often sits on the Lasker jury.
Jury members spend many hours each year reviewing the current literature and considering the scientific contributions of hundreds of researchers worldwide. In 1974, one name came up that appealed to many of the jurors—John Charnley, an English orthopedic surgeon who invented the artificial hip. I did not agree with the nomination. With so many thousands of people dying from heart attacks, strokes, and cancer, I was not in favor of giving this most prestigious award for a mere orthopedic discovery, which at best would provide pain relief for a relatively small number of individuals. I argued in vain. The jury voted to give Charnley the Lasker Award.
Fast-forward to the year 2001. My wife and I were walking at a leisurely pace one morning on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida. I was suddenly seized by the most severe pain I had ever experienced. My right hip felt as if it had been smashed into pieces; I could barely make it into a cab to return to my hotel a block away. There I needed a wheelchair to get to my room. My wife called an ambulance and I was taken to the emergency room of a local hospital. An X-ray of my hip revealed that it had virtually crumbled. I was flown back to New York the next day, where I underwent immediate hip replacement—thanks to Dr. John Charnley. (The reason my hip fell apart was that many months earlier, while in the Caribbean, I had appare
ntly eaten some fish that contained a toxin that spread throughout my body, affecting my heart, muscles, and nervous system. I recovered fully after receiving large doses of cortisone for several weeks. Unfortunately, in a very small percentage of cases, such steroid therapy can result in bone destruction, notably of the hip. I was fortunate that only one hip was involved.) Today, I can’t even tell which one was replaced (but airport security workers can every time I’m screened). Had Charnley not invented the artificial hip, I might well have remained bedridden for the rest of my life. Had my colleagues on the Lasker jury been foolish enough to listen to me and withhold the recognition and prestige that Dr. Charnley deserved, I’d never have forgiven myself. So even with the best of intentions, it’s easy to make simple mistakes.
WHAT I LEARNED
In retrospect, the Lasker jury logic was absolutely correct. By 1974, which was when they were considering the award, some 50,000 hip operations were already being performed annually (currently that number is approximately 400,000 a year). The jury estimated—again, correctly—that millions more would ultimately benefit from it.
Note: After my operation, I did some further reading about John Charnley. He was an extraordinary man. He became interested in bone metabolism early in his career. At one point, he was curious about the role of the thin covering of the bone called the periosteum. Such was his dedication that he actually persuaded a younger colleague to remove a piece of bone from the upper end of his tibia and to implant one piece above and the other beneath the periosteum. I don’t know what he learned from that experiment, but he eventually developed osteomyelitis (a severe infection of the bone) of his tibia and required several operations before it was cured. The history of medicine is filled with such examples of unselfishness and devotion to the public good.
DON HEWITT
Creator of 60 Minutes
My judgment over the years has been pretty good, but it wasn’t flawless. I’m the one Barbara Walters came to in the 1950s when she was a producer on the Today show and said she’d like to be a broadcaster. “Barbara,” I said, “with your voice, no one is going to let you broadcast.”
I’m also the guy who told a kid named Marty Ehrlichman back in the early 1960s, when he was working in the CBS film library for maybe sixty dollars a week, to stop coming up with get-rich schemes and pay more attention to his job. One day he came to me and said, “I’m going to quit.” “Okay, Marty, now what?” “I’m going to manage a singer.” “Oh, shit,” I said. “What do you know about managing a singer? What singer?” “Well, I saw her in a club. She’s a Jewish girl with a big nose, but she can sing.” “Forget it, Marty,” I said. “Get rid of her. Get rid of that girl.” That girl’s name was Barbra Streisand and that kid who worked in the CBS film library for sixty dollars a week got rich and famous by ignoring my advice.
But, for the most part, I seem to have guessed right more than I’ve guessed wrong. Maybe that’s why I’m still around in my eighties and why Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, when he toasted Al Newhart, chairman of the Gannett Company and founder of USA Today, at his retirement, told the assembled guests that Al had an impossible problem. He was “too old to work for a newspaper and too young to work for 60 Minutes.”
The truth is that when you’ve been around as long as I have, you get set in your ways. For example, I am computer illiterate and have no desire to be otherwise. There is nothing I need that I am not willing to go to a store to buy, although I am prepared for the possibility that before too long there may not be any stores (as we know them) or schools (as we know them) or hospitals (as we know them)—that anything we need, from a pair of socks to a college education to medical treatment, will come from a Web site, which is why I got to thinking the other day about what we all took for granted before the computer age. I worked up a scenario in which a man comes home and tells his wife that he heard about a great new gadget that works without any connection to the Internet—no screen, no laptop, no mouse, no gigabytes. A guy named Alexander Graham Bell came up with it. He calls it a telephone, and all you’d have to do is punch in a bunch of numbers that would be listed in something called “a telephone book” and you could talk to anyone in the world—even in Chechnya, if you knew someone there and could find his or her number in the book. Dollars to donuts, his wife would tell him: Oh, God, you’re so gullible—you believe anything anyone tells you.
Okay, you say you don’t go for Bell’s telephone. Try this. I heard about a guy who has invented something called a “post office.” There would be one in every town. If you wanted to write a letter to your mother, for thirty-seven cents, a man would personally deliver the letter to her house. How can anyone be as on top of the world as I am and not want to come to terms with the twenty-first century?
WHAT I LEARNED
Maybe liking it “the way it was” gives me a perspective on the way it is, perhaps even the way it will be—or maybe it’s just another one of my mistakes.
RON DELSENER
Music Event Producer
Reaching way back, the first mistake I made was when Vivian Miller and her sister, Barbara, gave me a surprise thirteenth birthday party. My sister, Harriette, led me to our “finished” basement at 45-56 193rd Street in Flushing, Queens. There we would play cowboys and Indians or create an ice show in our slippers, sliding on the newly waxed wooden floors. Orchestra seats were folding chairs on the floor, and two chairs on a table were the balcony. A 45 rpm would play Hugo Winterhalter or a Montovani selection while we “skated”! The price of admission was five cents.
Anyway, my sister led me down the stairs and the lights were off. Vivian and Barbara shouted, “Happy birthday!” I was really mad and upset because I did not know what a surprise was. I was (and still am) a “control freak,” and reacting to a “surprise” environment that I did not control upset me. I angrily said: “Don’t EVER do anything like this again!” Needless to say, they cried. Now, after twenty years of heavy therapy and a stint as a poster boy for every prescription drug, I am happy.
WHAT I LEARNED
If someone upsets you, but you know they were well-meaning, try to be gracious.
CARL REINER
Director, Writer, Actor
I am not sure that there is such a word as schmuckery, but if there isn’t, I will be happy to contribute it to Messrs. Funk and Wagnall or whoever is in charge of dubious acquisitions for their dictionary’s next edition. Schmuck is Yiddish slang for “penis” and is used in impolite society to designate someone who does nincompoopy things. For a good part of my life, I have been an active member of that discipline.
I was eighteen years old when I was offered what I consider to be my first well-paying, professional job in the theater. For an eight-week tour of southern colleges and high schools as a member of the Avon Shakespearean Repertory Company, I was to be paid thirty dollars a week!
I traveled by bus to Atlanta, Georgia, the farthest I had ever ventured from my parents’ Bronx apartment at 2089 Arthur Avenue. It was the first time I had seen for white only and for colored only signs on drinking fountains and public toilets. I had heard about their existence, but actually seeing the signs and watching people heed them was very unsettling. I encountered many eye-opening and eye-blinking experiences in my eight weeks of traveling through the Deep South, but I will not cite examples of the old South’s demeaning and bigoted practices of legal schmuckery. I will instead recall for you a tale of my own personal schmuckery. The passage of the Civil Rights Bill in 1964 helped the South to rid itself of its schmuckerian ways, but I, sad to say, from time to time still struggle with mine.
Our first day of rehearsal for As You Like It, being held in the ballroom of the Hotel Tallulah in Atlanta, was most exciting. I had just finished auditioning for the role of Orlando in As You Like It and was rather pleased with myself. I didn’t quite understand everything I was saying, but I said it all with conviction, a strong voice, and a slight Errol Flynnish English accent. During a break, the managing director
of the company, Frank Selman, beckoned me to him. I had never met him. His younger brother, Harold, who was in his fifties, had been my contact with the company and was directing the rehearsal. Until the eldest Selman had elected to retire from acting a year or so earlier, he had been the star of this company. He was a most impressive man, radiating the air of a great actor. Walking with the aid of a cane, he slowly made his way to me. He seemed to be smiling, but as he approached it became clear that he was scowling. I concluded that he probably could see that I was a fake and was coming to fire me.
Mr. Selman brought his aquiline nose close to my less aquiline one, scanned my face, and instead of saying, “Get off this stage with your phony accent,” said, with absolutely beautiful timbre in his voice, “Say after me!”
He delivered this as Boris Karloff might have, with an English accent and a slight lisp. “Thay after me!” is what I heard.
Frank Selman then spoke the following from what I later learned was Richard III. His voice boomed, spittle sprayed from his mouth—his right hand trembled as he slowly raised it. The louder he spoke, the more spittle he sprayed and the weirder he looked—one cheek going limp, one eye drooping, his contorted lips and mouth struggling to deliver these words: “Now—ith—the winter of our—dithcontent,” he declaimed, “May—gloriuthh—thhhummer by the thhun—of—yawwwwk . . .”
Mr. Selman stopped and said quietly, “Thay!”
I assumed two things: that Mr. Selman wanted me to “thay” what he had just said and that he wanted me to say it exactly as he had said it. I reasoned that his performance, with his face taking on a gargoyle’s look, was planned—he was depicting a character who was ugly and crippled. In my mind’s eye, I saw Quasimodo, replete with the hump on his back and the face Charles Laughton affected in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It made great sense to me.
If I Only Knew Then... Page 6