How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am (15 page)

She very much liked to go to the theater, and I didn’t. There was one particular play she wanted to see that I had been told
by friends would drive me screaming into the night with boredom. Not to say it wasn’t any good; I’m sure it was, but let’s
just say it wasn’t my cup of tea. She said, “If you don’t like it, we’ll leave at intermission.” I said, “Really?” She said,
“Absolutely.” We went to see it. It was everything I thought it would be, which meant I wanted to leave at intermission. She
then said, “We can’t leave. People from the cast know we’re here.” I looked at her for a long moment and reminded her of our
deal. She again said, “People know we’re here.” I stayed.

After the play, as we walked up Broadway, we debated what had happened. We were going to meet some friends of mine, and one
of them was an official with Amnesty International, an organization that looks into human rights violations. Not that sitting
in a theater past the point where you want to leave would in any way be considered a human rights violation, but I thought
presenting our cases to an Amnesty official might inject some much needed humor into our latest debate. When we got to my
friend’s apartment, I said we’d had a disagreement and wanted to present the story for her judgment.

At that point my girlfriend piped up and said she was agreeable to this, if she could be the one to describe what happened.
Not the
first
one to describe, the
only
one! In other words, I would get to say nothing. My Amnesty friend gently said that didn’t seem quite right. I honestly don’t
remember what happened after that.

She liked to refer to me, I think affectionately, as having “exotic neuroses.” I don’t remember her ever acknowledging that
she wasn’t exactly the girl next door. We eventually went our separate ways, but whenever I run into her over the years, we
always have some laughs. Of course, we chat for only a few minutes.

Some relationships just work better that way.

It must be obvious by now that in some of these stories I name names and in others I don’t. Some people deserve to be named,
and others deserve the respect of not having that happen.

I
was going out to dinner with a friend of mine in the late 1970s, and I couldn’t help but notice he seemed more muscular.
I asked him about it, and he said he had run into a guy at a gym who was a trainer, and the fella was training him. He gave
me his name, and the trainer started to come to my apartment to train me. While I had been reasonably athletic as a teenager,
that was quite a while ago, and I hadn’t worked out for years, if ever.

This guy jumped right in and started to work me as though I had told him I’d decided to go for the decathlon. I figured he
must know what he’s doing (a notion I’ve long since gotten over about people in all fields), so I went along, even though
I couldn’t help but notice that after the hour with him, I would just stare vacantly into space for about twenty minutes,
having no desire to even consider standing up.

This went on for a couple of months. This is a good lesson learned about the importance of being skeptical, which, given my
penchant for questions, I’m amazed didn’t inform my judgment when I was forty-five years old!

Eventually, I was so messed up, I couldn’t even stand up to get out of bed. I called the trainer and told him what had happened.
He suggested he still come over to “tone me up.” I’m still not quite sure how you tone up someone who can’t move, but I just
let it go and thanked him for everything. I always try to be nice, even in circumstances when logic doesn’t call for nice.
It felt like it never for one moment occurred to this
all knowing
trainer that he had been very damaging.

My next call was to a doctor who suggested I come see him. I said, “I can’t move.” He said, “Have an ambulance bring you over.”
I said, in a nice way, of course, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Another character who doesn’t see how all knowingly nuts he is.

I found a doctor who suggested that the ambulance bring me to a prominent New York hospital. The next day they wheeled me
down the hall. Through my drugged haze (I had gotten myself prescription painkillers because I was in a lot of pain even lying
still.) I asked where we were going. A nurse said, “The doctor has scheduled a myelogram for you.”

That’s a procedure where they inject you with a dye to see exactly where on your spine they’re operating. Someone once told
me that dye can give you a headache for about twenty years. I had no way of confirming that, but I looked up at the nurses
through my haze and said, “I haven’t agreed to surgery.” The nurses gave me a strange look and wheeled me back to my room.

The doctor, a very nice guy, came to my room and kindly said, “I understand you don’t feel you’ll need surgery.” I said, “Since
I’ve been in the hospital, I feel the pressure on my lower back has let up a bit, as I’m in a different position than I was
at home, as well as now being in traction.” I think he already thought I was nuts, so I chose not to tell him I had played
a doctor in the movie
Rosemary’s Baby
, and even though I played a gynecologist, I felt I knew a little something about backs. Most of the time when I do jokes
like that, people think I’m serious.

He took a position at the foot of the bed, bent my leg, and slowly moved it toward my chest. I remember how his eyes widened
as he bent it way more than he thought he could, before I asked him to stop.

He then graciously said, “Well, I’m always willing to learn,” and it was decided to give bed rest and traction a try. As the
days went on, I still wouldn’t even attempt to stand, but I felt I was improving.

I asked the night nurse if my girlfriend could visit me after work, which would be around seven p.m. She said that was past
visiting hours. I felt that since I had a private room I should be allowed to have a visitor. She glared at me and suggested
I could take it up with her supervisor. I did, and the supervisor said that would be fine.

Now I had an enemy in the night nurse, who always acted as though she owned the hospital—all knowing with a chip on her shoulder,
and she made no effort to conceal her feelings. I remember trying jokes with her like, “I don’t want an enemy giving me a
enema.” She didn’t think anything I said was even remotely funny. I was supposed to rest and relax there for three weeks,
but because of the tension with the night nurse, I chose to have an ambulance take me back to my apartment.

My nice doctor offered to move me to a room at the other end of the floor, but I declined. I didn’t want to think about that
nurse showing up in my new room and confronting me while I was lying flat out. That wouldn’t have been a good idea for me
or for her. She should have been fired.

Herb Gardner came to the hospital to accompany me in the back of the ambulance, where he and a guy in a white uniform chatted.
Herb, I’m sure trying to amuse me, asked the ambulance attendant to share different code descriptions of patients in ambulances.
I remember LRGDNR, which means last rights given, do not resuscitate, and LOB, liquor on breath, which also didn’t apply to
me, which I would have found funny if I hadn’t been in pain from the ambulance hitting bumps in the road. Back home, with
a lot of help from my girlfriend and two former girlfriends, each doing eight-hour shifts, I was up and around in about a
month.

Today I have no back problems at all, but I do have problems with trainers or anyone else who thinks they know everything
and with hospital personnel who are hostile to people who can’t stand up, or even those who can.

Actually, as I’ve said, I have a lot of problems with know-it-alls on any subject and
a lot
of problems with anyone expressing hostility in or out of hospitals.

Too many people everywhere foolishly consider themselves authorities. Many years ago I had a meeting with a top executive
at a talent agency that represented me. I wasn’t working all that much. With full certainty he said, “If you don’t make it
by the time you’re thirty, forget it.” I chose not to tell him I was thirty-two. Early in their careers, Clint Eastwood and
Burt Reynolds were both dropped by Universal Studios, Burt because they said he couldn’t act, and Clint because they said
his Adam’s apple was too big, and then of course there was the talent executive’s report on Fred Astaire, which read, “Can’t
act, can’t sing, can dance a little.”

Of course, I’d have to include in this category the executive producer of the Simon and Garfunkel special who pronounced it
“not air worthy,” and then the next day “the best rough cut I’ve ever seen.”

I’ve never heard anyone more all knowing than Dr. Laura Schlesinger on the radio. There almost never seems to be any doubt
that what she’s saying could possibly be anything less than 100 percent right. Even though she only talks to people for a
relatively brief period of time, she and, of course, others are more than willing to tell them what to do about something
that could impact the rest of their life. Leave your husband, leave your wife questions? No problem, here’s what you should
do.

It doesn’t seem to ever occur to these psychologists that the picture they’re getting may not be the full truth. Most people
describing a problem can’t get the full truth out in five minutes, if we are
ever
capable of seeing it.

Dr. Laura once made a lot of working mothers furious by suggesting they couldn’t possibly work regularly and be Dr. Laura’s
concept of the right kind of mother. Oh, she tells us it can be done if mother and father take off from their jobs and share
the responsibility for their children. That comes under the heading of “nice work if you can get it.” Dr. Laura, of course,
controls where she works, so she can properly look after her children. For me personally looking back as a kid, I don’t think
I’d much want someone around who seems to know everything about everything, and if I did have someone like that, I sure wouldn’t
want them around
all
the time.

There doesn’t seem to be anything these people don’t know. I once heard Dr. Laura tell a caller that “when most people do
sit-ups, they really work their hip muscles instead of their stomach muscles.” Perish the thought.

Somebody should call and ask, “What do you do if you live with someone who acts as though they know everything about everything?”
That’s an answer I’d like to hear.

I drove by a sign on a preschool the other day that said it was for children 2.6 to 6 years of age—2.6! It reminded me of
a story I heard years ago from some friends who were trying to get their child into a preschool. The little girl was rejected
because the instructor said her hand-eye coordination wasn’t where it needed to be, and it wouldn’t be fair to the child to
put her in with a group of kids with superior hand-eye coordination.

When my friends asked how the instructor knew this about their child, he showed them a drawing she was asked to do of a kangaroo.
It didn’t look much like a kangaroo, but when my friends asked to see the other children’s drawings of kangaroos, they didn’t
look much like kangaroos, either. Their child later became one of the top female athletes in the state.

In preschools, and just about everywhere else in life, don’t believe everything you hear.

Part of the know-it-all epidemic is the instant e-mail voting on cable television. A question that was raised recently was,
“What countries do you feel should help in Liberia?” Who’s doing all this voting? Are they experts on Liberia, or just on
Africa in general?

An earlier one was, “What do you think we should do about nuclear weapons in North Korea?” These are questions that the most
informed experts wrestle with daily, and yet thousands of people instantly vote on this, and the results are given as though
they tell us something.

There are an awful lot of people out there who are willing to give you their opinion on
anything
, whether they know much about the subject or not, so obviously be skeptical, but—forgive me for digressing a moment—
accept all compliments
.

In the 1970s, I was filming a movie in London. We were on location, shooting outside the campus at Oxford University. One
night I went to dinner at a restaurant by myself. I sat at a small table for two and faced the wall. To my right and left
were the same size tables, only about a foot away from mine. To my right there was a middle-aged couple, the man facing the
wall as I was. To my left there was a mother and her daughter in her twenties.

I ordered some kind of meat dish. When I tasted it, it was inedible—filled with fat and startlingly tough. I sent it back
and ordered something else. This is actually the only time in my life I’ve felt compelled to do that. The man to my right
asked what it was I sent back. I told him, and he said, “That’s what I ordered.” He had yet to receive his dinner.

As I waited for my new dinner, the mother at the next table recognized me from an earlier movie I had done and began to pay
me effusive compliments on my acting. This went on for a few minutes.

The man to my right was served his dinner. After a moment, he said to me, “I don’t know how good an actor you are, but you
sure know lousy food.”

I
n the midseventies to 1981 I made movies with a big ape, King Kong, a shrinking woman, Lily Tomlin (
The Incredible Shrinking Woman
), and Miss Piggy (
The Great Muppet Caper
).

Ironically, around that same time I became friends with Donald Kendall, who was the CEO of Pepsico as well as the president
of the United States Chamber of Commerce, a conservative group that was formed to help business corporations. The two of us
flew in his private plane to Washington.

At that time, I was appearing regularly on television, mostly comedically but sometimes as a serious guest, and Don Kendall
wanted me to meet members of the incoming Reagan administration and hopefully help get their points of view out there on television.
I had a lot of meetings with different groups, and as they explained to me why they wanted to have fewer government programs,
I cautioned them on the need for a safety net for the truly needy. I said that the first time someone committed suicide because
they had nowhere to turn, it would be a real blow to their policies.