If I Only Knew Then...

by Charles Grodin

  Someone did a study on the cell phone calls made from the Twin Towers as they fell. The question: Was there any pattern in what people said? The researchers expected they would find repeated SOSes—pleas for life, asking for absolution—but there was remarkably little of that. Instead, what the people said over and over again as they died, what they sent out across the sea of static: “I love you.” These words, when said sincerely, have the capacity to right our wrongs, and live on long after we have gone back to being stars.

  NICHOLAS PERRICONE, MD

  World-Renowned Antiaging

  Expert, Bestselling Author

  As the late afternoon’s twilight faded into night, a fierce wind-driven sleet rattled the windows and shrieked in the chimneys. I hurried through the drafty corridors and breezeways of the hospital, feeling the February chill seeping into my tired bones. Twenty-nine hours and counting, I said to myself, over and over, not knowing when this interminable shift would end. I struggled against the exhaustion that threatened to overtake me and put a premature end to my unfinished rounds. Both my mood and my future appeared bleak—long days, longer nights, sleep deprivation, high stress, crushing fatigue, and the constant pressure and responsibility of caring for seriously ill children in endless succession.

  Such was life during my internship in pediatrics at the Yale University School of Medicine. It was not much different from that of any other intern; however, this night would turn out to be one I would never forget.

  I headed toward the admissions desk in anticipation of greeting one of my favorite patients, a bright and cheerful nine-year-old slated for cardiac surgery in the morning.

  Carrie’s smiling face and calm demeanor belied the harrowing experience she was about to undergo. This was Carrie’s eighth surgery, and she knew the drill: Check in the night before the surgery for a series of blood tests. Once they were completed, an IV would be started—not an easy task given her small, delicate veins and pathetically thin and tiny arms.

  I waved as I saw Carrie, but my approach was slowed by the densely packed room, filled with children and adults in various stages of distress. I noticed one child in particular, who appeared to be terrified, refusing to accompany his nurse to the ward. I watched as Carrie took his hand in hers and began to walk toward the ward with him. I followed, finally making it to the pair as they reached his assigned bed. “Hello, Dr. Perricone,” Carrie said as I came into view. “This is Harry. I was just explaining to him how the IV works.” I watched as Carrie carefully explained that once the needle was inserted it was easy to forget that it was even there. “In fact,” she said proudly, “this will be my eighth time. Dr. Perricone, would it be okay if Harry watched me so he can see how easy it is?”

  I forgot my fatigue in the face of Carrie’s generosity of spirit and selflessness. An IV insertion is difficult at the best of times—and vastly more difficult with children.

  Harry’s face shone with hope and trust as he gazed at Carrie, whose courage and kindness accomplished what his parents and the highly trained medical staff could not. “I’ll watch,” said Harry, “and then it will be my turn.”

  Harry waited patiently while Carrie had her tests and got settled in her bed. As Harry watched, I inserted the IV in Carrie’s arm. She smiled and chatted the whole time to Harry, never once flinching or otherwise indicating that the experience was unpleasant in any way.

  Like fear, bravery can also be contagious. Harry’s IV insertion went smoothly, and he wore it like a badge of courage. I could see in his face that he had undergone a profound change deep in his being. The fearful, cringing little boy had taken a first step toward becoming a man.

  And it wasn’t just Harry who underwent a heartfelt change of attitude. My self-pity at feeling that I had been through hell and back during the grueling hours of my internship receded into the netherworld. Carrie was a living embodiment of the spirit being stronger than the flesh, and I vowed to endure whatever hardships came my way with equal valor and dignity.

  Carrie’s final surgery was not a success. It was with great sadness that I learned of her death the following day. Although short, her life was not in vain. At least two other lives, both mine and Harry’s, were irrevocably changed by Carrie’s heroic spirit that stormy winter’s night.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  Perhaps the biggest mistakes I have made and observed made by others are those arising out of having the wrong perspective. Perspective is our own personal worldview, and it can be difficult to alter it. However, sometimes we get lucky and our perspectives can be radically shifted, resulting in positive life changes.

  My perspective was that of an overworked intern who was perilously close to losing sight of the reason he had chosen a career in medicine. The selfless caring and love expressed by this little girl taught me what healing is really all about.

  The lesson I learned was never to go through a day without reexamining my perspective, and this can be accomplished only by trying to see a situation through the eyes of others.

  ALFRED MOLINA

  Actor

  I was not quite thirteen years old and my parents were halfway through a divorce. It was, to tell the truth, embarrassing. My mum and dad were Mediterranean, from Italy and Spain respectively. They were loud, and public, in their demonstrative, theatrical style of bickering. Name-calling was a specialty, one I have inherited and, to my shame, reduced myself to falling back on occasionally.

  My solace was school, a bustling inner-city high school where anonymity was key to survival. I was able to disappear and be someone else. At school I was no longer Alfredo, the gangly, overweight son of a disappointed father and a mother whose emotional and creative horizons had dwindled to an obsession with food and daily assessments of how quickly she was aging. At school, I was Fred, and, more important, I could pretend and lie that I came from a stable family home where both parents lived in the bosom of each other’s love. This lie, maintained over a period of years, became so much a part of my life that I was confident enough to create quirky details: nooks and crannies where, as in fiction, they could reside, uninvestigated and beyond reproach.

  When my classmates spoke of their parents, either boastfully or otherwise, I was able to keep up, at least in my own mind, with an itinerary in my head (a complete fabrication) of what we had done over the weekend or during the holidays.

  Most children of divorced parents create some kind of alternative family. Sometimes it takes the form of friends at school or work, and sometimes another family takes on a role as surrogates. In my case, I created another person, a happier, more confident person who, while denying the truth, forged a family that was actually not bad. I made excuses constantly for why only one or the other parent showed up for school events. As time went by the excuses became wilder and more exotic. As a consequence, I distanced my parents more and more from their actual lives, and from my own. We became strangers in a manner only sanctioned by intimacy. Once I had grown and moved away from the family home, the lies were no longer necessary.

  As my parents belligerently succumbed to old age, I began to see them as they were: flawed, exasperating, individual, headstrong, loving, proud, and disarmingly human. My lies blinded me to these gifts of theirs.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  I denied myself the opportunity to know my parents at their most vulnerable, at the point of their greatest stress—perhaps, to tell the truth, when they needed me more than I needed them. My lies and the distance they caused were a big mistake.

  CLAY DETTMER

  Producer, The Charles Grodin

  Show on CNBC

  It was graduation day at Yale in May of 1972. While sitting in a Gothic turret, I had my final heartfelt conversation with friend and roommate Alex Ponti (Carlo Ponti’s son and Sophia Loren’s stepson). Our backgrounds couldn’t have been more diametrically opposed—he, the scion of Italian aristocracy, and I, a poor kid from a wildly dysfunctional family who had been given a full college scholarship. We spoke of the future and
laughed heartily when he revealed his goal to go to med school and become anonymous and I revealed my goal to go to Hollywood and become famous.

  Well, I never became famous, but I did attain a modicum of success as a working actor, mainly doing commercials and television. Nearly two decades into my career I read Charles Grodin’s first book, It Would Be So Nice if You Weren’t Here, a cautionary tale about his journey through show business. Chuck likened the prospects of pursuing an acting career as second only to selling poetry door-to-door!

  About this time another classmate of mine, Geoff Taylor, was producing a movie for Disney called Taking Care of Business, starring Charles Grodin. Geoff had been admonishing me for years to find more gainful employment and offered me a production job as Charles Grodin’s assistant. On the surface it seemed a risky pairing, putting me and Chuck together. After all, Chuck described himself as “low-key but high-strung” and later was fond of describing me as “high-key and high-strung!” But Geoff’s instincts turned out to be right, as Chuck and I developed a very close personal and professional relationship.

  I worked with Chuck for five years, making movies. He then signed on with CNBC to replace the departing Tom Snyder and do his own talk show. The natural progression for me was to move from California to New York and go from überassistant to television producer.

  By the time I showed up at CNBC I was a fairly well developed free spirit. Based on my childhood on the streets, my college experience in the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s, and my subsequent twenty-year career as an actor, I had pretty much perfected living life as a free agent. I had no problem questioning authority and had little patience for standing on ceremony. As such, it never dawned on me that my wearing a clean pair of sweats to work instead of, say, “a suit” would be a problem for anyone at the network. I did notice that more than one executive there said to me enviously, “I wish I could get away with that!” Yet it was many months, if not years, before I became aware that my dress was an issue . . . and here’s how.

  Evidently, Chuck had been getting some heat about my wardrobe. I’m sure Chuck couldn’t have cared less how I dressed, but he certainly could do without the distraction. But it’s not Chuck’s style to be confrontational, especially on a seeming nonissue such as this. Knowing Chuck the way I did and having seen him in action over the years, I’d learned to listen for the subtext in what he said. He would indirectly get his point across, perhaps by telling a story with a moral involving a similar experience, or by simply “modeling” a certain behavior he might lead by example. Whenever Chuck would tell a story I would ask myself, Is he trying to tell me something?

  I had been making periodic appearances on the show, usually comedic bits Chuck had dreamed up. When I mentioned going on a diet, Chuck jumped at the opportunity to have me do it on national television. I happily agreed, figuring rightly that it would give me added pressure to succeed. In hindsight I realize Chuck may have had additional motivation, and that was to get me into a pair of pants and thus get the “suits” off his back.

  So I made biweekly appearances giving a progress report on my weight loss. On one such appearance the show’s guest was Hugh Hefner. Chuck asked Hugh if he had seen the segment with his producer who wore sweats to work and what he thought of that. Hugh answered, “All of my executives come to work in bathrobes!”

  The ultimate payoff came when I appeared thirty pounds lighter, looking good dressed in a pair of slacks and a Burberry coat and tie. The “new me” was met with applause and enthusiasm as Chuck gleefully put up stills of me fatter and in sweats to emphasize the before and after.

  Chuck then asked me if he had seen the last of me in sweats, and I said, “Of course not!” I now understand the crestfallen look on his face.

  Almost immediately I returned to my sweats, opting for comfort ahead of appearance. Chuck never mentioned the clothes issue again, and I assumed he felt that if it meant that much to me, he would live with it.

  This attitude was in direct contrast to his attitude on another subject. He chose to personally pay my and another friend’s salary out of his own pocket for years rather than have us report to the CNBC brass, whom he liked very much, but whose initial treatment of us he found unacceptable. But on the sweats he remained silent.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  You can always do a better job for someone. Because I worked for and was paid by Charles Grodin Productions, the clothes police at the network had no authority over my attire. But if I ever do work with Chuck again, I won’t be in sweats unless I’m sure it’s okay with him, and since I haven’t gotten thinner with age, it probably would be okay with him.

  Incidentally, I’m able to wear sweats to work in my current position as a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

  SHIRLEY MACLAINE

  Academy Award–Winning

  Actress, Bestselling Author

  So I said to Charles Grodin (Chuck, to those of us who have loved him for years), “What? You want me to write about my biggest mistakes? Goodness me, Chuck, I’ve spent my entire adult life writing about how there is no such thing as a mistake! But Chuck pressed me. Okay. Maybe the time I pulled a toy pistol on Sam Giancana and he reached for his .45 was a mistake. Or the time I kneed him in the balls because he twisted my arm so I’d eat his spaghetti. I don’t know. A lot of guys with pinkie rings showed up ringside at my Vegas performances after that, so was it a mistake?

  Maybe it was a mistake to purposely miss a train in the Soviet Union so I could smuggle myself into Leningrad University to observe anti-Catholic weeks. The Soviet state travel agency, Intourist, took my passport and stole my luggage. Okay, so I was stuck in Soviet Russia for a week, because I was then there illegally. But how could it be a mistake when I got to tell Brezhnev I would dance the cancan nude in Red Square every May Day if he didn’t let me go home? I don’t think that was really a mistake.

  Was it a mistake for me to launch into metaphysical speculation about spirits who talk to God and extraterrestrials?

  Goodness me, Chuck, even our president does that, except I think he’s talking to an evildoer.

  As a matter of fact, Chuck, why don’t you call W. and ask him to contribute his biggest mistake. Do you have enough time?

  I’ll talk to God and ask him to wait.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  Mistakes are “lessons in learning for growth.”

  PAUL RAGONESE

  Retired Hero, New York City

  Police Officer

  Claude “Danny” Richards was a New York City detective. In the mid-1980s I had worked with him on the Bomb Squad, and from 1998 to 2000 we worked together as private security at the New York Stock Exchange. At the NYSE we worked from six p.m. on Friday nights to six a.m. on Saturday mornings. Danny and I (he was still an active detective, but I had retired in 1988) were charged with searching the entire building and all entering vehicles for explosive devices with the assistance of explosive detective canines. When you work with someone for twelve hours on the overnight shift, conversations range from sports to religion to world events. We spent many nights solving the problems of the world and discussing whether Pete Rose should be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  Working on Wall Street and in the shadow of the World Trade Center, we spent numerous hours discussing the 1993 bombing and the incredible loss of life that would have resulted if the buildings had collapsed as planned by the terrorists. Danny had even commented on how we would be digging for over a year if that tragedy had occurred.

  Danny was a special person. He was incredibly intelligent, caring, and compassionate. He had spent more than a year in Bosnia as a volunteer, helping to train and assist police in the war-torn country. He even spoke of returning, if it could be arranged. He was moved by the pain and suffering inflicted on the children and how they were deprived of the minimum needs of life, with no food, no clothing, and in many situations separated from their families. He was an expert on the political and social problems facing tha
t country and educated me on what he felt should be done by America to help.

  Danny, who was single, never had a bad word to say about anyone. Even when he was overlooked for a promotion, he never spoke badly of those detectives who had been given grade. “He has a wife and kids and can use the money,” he would say, knowing full well that he was more deserving of the increase in pay and prestige. Many nights when I was exhausted from working my primary job during the day, we would get a call to search a vehicle at two a.m. and Danny would say to me, “Sit down and take a break. I’ll take care of it.”

  On September 11, 2001, while off-duty and carrying an injured woman over his shoulder, Danny was killed when Tower 2 collapsed. I didn’t hear about Danny’s death even though I had volunteered to help in any small way I could at Ground Zero and at Fresh Kills Landfill. When I heard of his death I was hurt but not surprised. Anyone who knew him would expect him to act as heroically as he did, but the pain was still strong. Days turned to weeks and then months as the recovery operation continued. Danny’s remains were not recovered. I went back to work and thought only of Danny, including him in my nightly prayers.

  In the early spring of 2002 the recovery effort was still ongoing. My family and I were making preparations for Easter Sunday. On Holy Thursday evening I was in my bedroom when I bumped into an end table, flipping over a bowl containing numerous business cards that I had acquired over the years. One card fell to the floor, and I bent over and picked it up. It was Danny’s NYPD card. I looked up and thought, What do you want, buddy? I smiled and went to bed.