Keep Moving (7 page)

Rewriting the Rules
Rewriting the Rules

It was a sunny afternoon, and I was strolling along Robertson Drive in Beverly Hills. The meetings that had brought me into town were finished, and I thought a walk past all the fancy stores would be fun—and it was. The sidewalks were crowded with fashionably dressed people, a few of whom said hello, causing me to smile and say hello back, which made the world seem smaller and friendlier than it normally comes across on, say, the local news.

As I passed the Tommy Hilfiger store something in the window caught my eye. I went inside for a closer look but quickly got the impression that the store wasn’t used to customers my age. Otherwise, I can’t imagine why the young saleswoman, after seeing me looking around, would have approached me and said, “Sir, I don’t think you’ll find anything here that you’ll like.”

It was not my first encounter with ageism, but it was the most blatant. Typically the remarks are subtler.
Someone will come up to me and say, “Wow, you look good.” What they really mean is that they are surprised I am alive. Nobody said I “looked good” when I was thirty-five. Or someone will ask whether I have trouble remembering my lines or need cue cards written in EXTRA-LARGE TYPE or require a wheelchair getting to the elevator. Then there are the jokes we’ve all heard: “What were Adam and Eve like?” “Do you need help blowing out your birthday candles?” “At your age, I bet your back goes out more than you do.”

I get it. I’ve heard them—and more. And most of the time I laugh. But it’s time people got over the jokes, the fears, and the discrimination. Old age isn’t catchy. I understand the media is obsessed with youth. Fine. But there isn’t anything wrong with getting older. It happens. It’s healthy. And it is a reality—our reality. As the ranks of seniors and elderly grow, we should think of it as the new normal—a desirable new normal that does away with ageism and commands respect. How does this happen? I think we may need a revolution. We have gone through the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Gay Rights Movement. Why not the Gray Rights Movement?

The Gray Rights Movement has something going for it the others lacked—actually two things: (1) no one is going to get hurt in this revolution—we’ll move slow and deliberately: protests will end early so we can be back home before the ten o’clock news; and (2) old age is blind to differences and labels: black, yellow, white, gay,
straight, conservative, liberal, Christian, Jewish, atheist, rich, poor, middle class—everyone has a shot at it. And everyone should want it. The number of people sixty-five and older is only getting larger, as is the number of people eighty-five and older. Life is getting longer, which is a good thing if it is done right. How do we do it right?

We have to rewrite the rules, which I am doing at my age, by focusing on living, not dying. I am married to a young woman who finds me charming, fun, and dashing (her words). I perform four-part harmony with a singing group I put together about fifteen years ago as a retirement gift to myself. And if the right scripts come my way, I say, “Yes! When do we start?”

But I’m not an isolated case. There’s an eighty-something movie producer up the street from me who drives a Tesla. There are a couple of guys in the neighborhood well past seventy who carry their long boards under their arm every morning as they head out to catch waves. My friends Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Richard Sherman, Don Rickles, and Bob Newhart continue to work. Likewise the handful of senior statesmen I only know from TV but see all the time, including politician Bernie Sanders; Bob Schieffer, seventy-seven, the recently retired host of CBS’s Sunday talk show
Face the Nation
;
NBC Nightly News
anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw, seventy-five; and Charlie Rose, who, at seventy-three, seems to work both mornings and nights.

And I don’t want to overlook the women, who on average outlive men—and can probably out-work us too.
Jane Fonda, seventy-seven, and Lily Tomlin, seventy-four, are starring in a new television series; Betty White is cracking jokes in her nineties; and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is still fighting the good fight as a nimble-minded octogenarian.

Clearly we have entered a new era. As the instigator of the Gray Revolution, I suggest ignoring the anti-aging tips that are so prevalent in the media and search for pro-aging tips. I want to see more older people celebrated for continuing to be vital and active as role models. I want to see experience valued. I want to see older people appreciated in the workforce. I would like to see more people sixty-five and up in movies and on TV in roles other than commercials targeting memory loss, heart disease, diabetes, urinary problems, arthritis, cancer, depression, insomnia, anxiety, high cholesterol, erectile dysfunction, and Crohn’s disease.

And put older people behind the camera too. Many of the comedy writers I knew from the sixties and seventies, brilliantly funny, clever people, could not get hired in the eighties and nineties. By the 2000s they were dead. How many laughs did we miss? Speaking of laughter, I once worked with an actress who told me to stop making her laugh; she didn’t want to get wrinkles. I’d rather end up a very amused prune than miss a laugh.

I have a feeling that Baby Boomers get this, and they’ll rewrite the rules, making the concept of old age as it has been known obsolete. Stereotypes of old people as frail, forgetful, boring, cranky, sick, unattractive, and
unproductive will be replaced by pictures of eighty-year-olds scaling mountains, starting new businesses, going back to school, creating great art, discovering new talents and passions, and figuring out new ways to improve life’s twilight years.

My hope is this will have a positive impact on the worlds where I have experience: comedy, music, and entertainment. Too much of acting on TV today and comedy more specifically, seems the same, without distinction. Everyone looks the same: there’s canned laughter; people get hysterical at a door slamming, and the shows are sped up to cram more into twenty-two minutes. It ruins the timing. My advice to TV producers and writers: let your shows breathe, take a moment, be human, make it real. That’s where you find the funny.

I think the same can be said of music. Every time I get in the car and turn on the radio it sounds the same. I don’t know one band from the other, but I’ve been informed that FM radio is playing the same songs that have been played for the past forty years, and that is too bad. It’s boring. It misses out on other great music—Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, George Gershwin, Cole Porter. Mix it all together.

I do. We started singing “All About That Bass” at a Vantastix rehearsal. It was a pretty good tune—and I liked its message too.

Life is about variety, and music has always been my road to it. At seventeen, I was a DJ at the local radio station in my hometown, Danville, Illinois, and I played the
same records over and over again. I quickly lost my taste for the popular music and began to explore new bands. Through Stan Kenton and his orchestra, for instance, I discovered saxophonist Stan Getz and singer Anita O’Day. I also remember perking up when I heard the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, a pretty adventurous group in their day. Glenn Gould’s recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” remains as fresh and exciting to me as it did when I first heard it in the 1950s. I also loved Sinatra, and I have not seen anyone with the versatility onstage as Sammy Davis Jr.

Once, I saw Lena Horne at the Fairmont in San Francisco, and she took my breath away. I was also a fan of Carmen McRae, one of the greatest jazz singers I ever heard. She just happened to come along at the same time as other greats like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn. I envy young people the thrill of hearing these great artists for the first time.

This whole concept of rewriting the rules is really about being open to discovery and learning and appreciating life—all of life, not just from birth to age sixty-five. Henry David Thoreau’s great quote, “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment . . . there is no other life but this” is even more meaningful later in life, when you know your time is limited.

Back in the midsixties I was made an elder in the Presbyterian church where I took my family. I used to speak on Laymen’s Sundays, as they were called, and my talks
became fairly popular. Suddenly I found myself on the circuit, driving out to towns and speaking on Sundays. My primary topic was the hypocrisy of people who were pious only one day a week. “What about the other six days?” I used to ask.

Though popular, my turn as a speaker didn’t last long—my heart wasn’t in it.

And then I lost my taste for organized religion. After the Watts Riots, race, and, more specifically, racism within the Los Angeles Police Department made it to the top of the news, similar to what has happened recently in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Cleveland, a number of us at our church felt like we should do something to try to heal the city and understand the issues. Someone suggested inviting a Baptist choir from Watts to our church. I thought that was a great idea. What better place than a church to bring people together? What better place to celebrate differences and discover similarities? And how perfect to do that with music?

But in a meeting of the church elders several people objected. They did not want any black people in the church. I was disgusted. I left that meeting, and that was my last Sunday in any church.

I wasn’t quite done with religion, though. I began attending Jewish services with the Congregation Beth Ohr, whose members met in a Unitarian church in Studio City. Anybody was welcome. I was impressed with their rabbi, a man named Michael Roth. He would speak for thirty minutes, and then everybody went in another
room, had coffee and cake, and discussed the service. They questioned ideas, debated them, related them to the real world, and talked about how the age-old themes might be applied to our lives. To me, that felt more like it.

I attended services for about six months and then lost touch with the rabbi until not too long ago when our paths happened to cross. He was in his nineties.

“What do you do now?” I asked.

“I’m still learning,” he said. “Still reading and learning.”

Letters to an Editor
Letters to an Editor

Old Things—And What Really Matters
Old Things—And What Really Matters

No one was more surprised than me to hear that the striped satin blazer I wore in the “Jolly Holiday” scene in
Mary Poppins,
the one where Bert the chimney sweep dances with animated penguins, sold at auction. According to reports, a collector of movie memorabilia paid over $60,000 for it. The label still had my name on it. As far as I know, that was the second time the jacket was auctioned, and my reaction this time was the same as the last time—wow!

Around the same time, my wife bought a “Dick Van Dyke” signature cardigan that was manufactured at the height of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
in the early 1960s. She’s constantly finding rare photos and merchandise of mine on the Internet, and this signature sweater was the latest. She purchased it for $15 and gave it to me as a birthday present. I was pleased to see that the gray
sweater had held up over the years. It had a small fray on one of the sleeves; otherwise all of its original buttons were intact, and it looked pretty good—kind of like me, I suppose.

It’s a funny thing, though, about things. I have never felt an attachment to material things. Not old things. Not new things. Not anything. Once I was able to afford sports cars, I went through my share. I owned Corvettes, Jaguars, an Avanti, and even an Excalibur. I enjoyed nice cars. But I didn’t “collect” them or anything else. Not stamps or coins or baseball cards. Not ashtrays, matches, or postcards. Not paintings, records, or movies. Not favorite old T-shirts. And obviously not jackets, costumes, or sweaters with my name on the label.

I once read that collecting things is related to anxiety. I am not an anxious person. Is there a connection? I don’t worry. I don’t get nervous. I can’t remember the last time something wound me up. The shelves in my home do not boast anything I would show off to visitors. My parents did not collect anything either. Of course, they didn’t have any money. Even if they had been well off, I don’t think they would have bothered. They weren’t sentimental in that way, and neither am I.

My biggest indulgence over the years has been clothes. Though I knock around the house in a T-shirt and sweat pants, I like nice, fashionable clothes, a preference I attribute to my father. He loved to dress stylishly. He copied Fred Astaire. He used a necktie in place of a belt and wore ascots. His suits cost $40, which was a good deal
but still expensive in the thirties and forties. Like my dad, I also admired Fred Astaire, but I took my fashion cues from Cary Grant. Once I got to New York and had a steady paycheck, I had suits custom made at J. Press. I paid between $200 and $250, probably the equivalent of $2,500 today, but I loved a suit that fit.

It was noticed. I wore my own suits while starring in
Bye Bye Birdie
on Broadway, and I won the After Six Award as “Broadway’s best dressed star of the 1960–1961 season.” Soon after, following a Friday night performance, there was a knock on my dressing room door. I opened it, and there stood Cary Grant, the most dapper man on the planet. After a congratulatory handshake, he playfully shoved me aside and started going through my suits. “The best dressed star on Broadway? Well, I’ll see about that.” It tickled me to death.

Today my After Six Award is on a shelf, framed, with a torn piece of paper inside the glass that says, “Well!” and it’s signed, “Cary Grant.”

Arlene recently unearthed my best-dressed proclamation from a box of stuff I was not aware I had in my possession until she brought it into the house and put it in front of me. She found other boxes too. I didn’t know I had three-quarters of the things she pulled from them: a drawing I did of Morey Amsterdam on the set of
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
sketches I did of people on the set of
Mary Poppins,
drawings someone did of me. There were also photos, letters, and more. All great stuff, and each one brought back a warm memory, which is what I
really treasured—the memories of having been there in the first place.

My first wife, Margie, deserves all the credit for preserving that memorabilia. She packed all those boxes forty or fifty years ago. If left to me, I am sure it all would have been lost or forgotten. But don’t think I’m unsentimental. If you were to walk through my house, you’d see family photos on tabletops and a beautiful landscape on the dining room wall that was painted by my grandson Wes, a terrific artist who still paints on the easel we bought him when he was a kid.

It doesn’t take much prompting to get an update on the other grandchildren: Taryn and Kristen both work with autistic children, Ryan is a talented musician and sound engineer, Tyler just graduated from film school, brothers Carey Wayne and Shane make movies, and Jessica, an extraordinarily bright girl who died tragically of Reye’s syndrome when she was thirteen, smiles at all of us from high above.

As for the glitzy Hollywood stuff, it’s there, but you have to look up on the bookshelves to see my awards: Emmys, a Grammy, a Tony, and a recent Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. Then there’s the statue I cherish most, a one-of-a-kind Chimney Sweep Award that the crew from
Mary Poppins
made for me. I appreciate everything those represent.

But these days I get just as excited about new tools, a set of paints, or a new computer animation program. I also go all-out during Halloween; my garage is full of
decorations and devices that make young trick-or-treaters shriek and smile, and I love when I discover a new one.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m practical minded and like things that entertain my imagination more than the stuff typically coveted for status. Here’s why.

About ten years into my first marriage we moved to a two-hundred-acre ranch in Cave Creek, Arizona, an area north of Scottsdale. Today Cave Creek is fully developed, with homes and shopping malls, but back then it was empty desert almost as far as you could see. Our house was in the middle of nowhere. A creek ran past on one side, and the other side was a wall of sandstone cliffs. The entire mesa, nearly as far as I could see, was part of the ranch. I used to ride a minibike straight across the rugged landscape when I needed to touch base with civilization.

One day when we were hiking, one of my kids spotted a shiny rock. A few minutes later we unearthed an ax head. The digging commenced then and there. The whole family got into it. We noticed partially exposed rocks that were pretty geometric; they turned out to be pottery. Over several years we dug down about five feet until we uncovered an entire village. In 1982 my wife wrote a scholarly book about the structures we excavated and the artifacts we found, gobs of pottery and utensils, tools that were key to everyday life of a tribe of Hohokam Indians who lived on our ranch around 675–850
CE
. Or, I suppose, we lived on top of their village about a thousand years later.

Think about that—one thousand years later.

Up until then I thought I owned that land. But the dig set me straight, as did all the stuff that we found. If anyone needed proof of the old adage “You can’t take it with you,” there it was. We were finding things that had been essential to the Hohokam people’s survival. I wondered whether some of them had wanted larger pots or admired their neighbor’s ax blades more than their own. Had some of them complained to the chief about living in a ground-floor dwelling, preferring instead a perch higher up the mesa wall, a room with a view? Was it possible they had the same jealousies that plague modern life?

But to what purpose? They disappeared: all their homes, tools, and industry buried under layers of dirt, hidden for an entire millennium until an actor and his family dug them up.

I wondered about their last days. What had happened? There were no volcanoes nearby that would have wiped them out in a single flood of lava. There were no tidal waves. Was it a slow dissipation from desert conditions? Who was left at the end? Ten people? Three? One? Had that last person been so mad they threw the pottery against the wall? Or had they stacked it all up neatly and walked away?

The site and the thought of a once-vibrant and thriving outpost of humanity quietly disappearing underneath five feet of desert began to give me a perspective on stuff: What helps us survive? What is a waste of time or money? What makes us happy and feel like our lives have meaning? And what really matters?

If that was the start, now, as I near ninety and can look back over many decades of life experiences, joys and heartaches, moves and missed opportunities, seven-inch TVs and sixty-inch TVs, celebrations and disappointments, friendships, separations, reunions, marriages, and divorces, births and deaths, I think I have a handle on the stuff that has truly made a difference, in the deeper sense of giving my life definition and meaning. Not surprisingly, it’s also the stuff that continues to do so.

So what do I think really matters?

1. Family and friends:
I would hate to think I was alone on this rock floating around the solar system. That’s why family and friends matter. Period. I never had a bachelorhood, I suppose. I had planned to marry my high school girlfriend, Nancy Frankieburger, but she dropped me when I came back from the service. Then I was with Margie for twenty-eight years. I spent thirty-three years with Michelle. Given that track record, I am counting on at least twenty to thirty years with Arlene. I have enjoyed being in relationships and raising a family. For me, life has always been about accepting responsibility for the well-being and happiness of the people I love. Even though I didn’t have any money, I embraced the arrival of each one of my children. They give your life gravity and meaning. They create a moral compass that is real, not abstract or theoretical. They have lives of their own, but you can always reel them back in. I’m thinking of the old joke about the couple who find themselves alone
on Thanksgiving. The husband calls their children and says, “Your mother and I are getting a divorce.” Then he hangs up, turns to his wife, and says, “The kids will be over in fifteen minutes.” Friends enjoy a similar standing. They are also people with whom you share your life’s experiences. Do they enjoy you? Do you step up when they are in need? Do they want to check in with you? The way we interact with people is what defines us and how we come to be defined. How we spend our time with them is what gives life meaning. You can look in the mirror to see the way you look on the outside. But the way family and friends regard you is a real measure of the way you look on the inside.

2. Questions.
Early on, I wanted to feel that my life mattered, that my existence had meaning, and to do so, I had to figure out what mattered to me and then apply myself to it. I knew that I wanted to get into radio, and that led to performing in nightclubs, which opened the door to Broadway and television, and then movies. By that point I was beyond questioning whether I had made the correct choices in my professional life. In terms of my career, I knew I was applying myself the way I was supposed to. But even with success, I heard the constant refrain of my soul asking questions, some of which were within my grasp and others that soared way beyond my reach.

I trace this restless desire to understand the big picture back to my childhood. At eleven, I went to Bible
camp. For the next three years, I carried around a Bible which I read from cover to cover. The stories filled me with awe and curiosity, even though my intellectually immature mind strained to understand the meaning within the rich tapestry of allegory. I decided I would become a minister—that is, until I joined the high school drama club.

Suddenly my plans changed. My Bible ended up on the shelf, and I started down the road that eventually landed me in Hollywood. But I never lost my curiosity about my place on this mystical, magical map, nor did I quit asking questions. In fact, success probably made me even more curious about the nature of my existence. I read constantly, mostly theologians and philosophers. Among those whose books I have turned to repeatedly are Søren Kierkegaard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Paul Tournier, a Swiss physician and religious scholar I once met when I wrangled my way into a lunch he and his wife were having with people who brought him to Hollywood.

Though he didn’t speak any English, we communicated through an interpreter. I managed to explain that I was impressed with the way he applied his biblical teachings to his patients. In a way I applied my principles to my work, making it a rule long ago not to work on any projects that my children couldn’t see.

The thing these writers have in common is that they mostly ask questions, either of themselves or others, but especially of those who claim to know all the answers. Doubt shines through all of their writing, an unrelenting,
resilient doubt that I relate to intellectually. As I have grown older and, hopefully, wiser, I’ve come to see that there are no sure answers, only better questions—questions that get us closer to the truth about whatever it is we want or need to know. Just knowing you don’t have the answers, in fact, is a recipe for humility, openness, acceptance, forgiveness, and an eagerness to learn—and those are all good things.