If You Ask Me (14 page)

There are a few reasons for this.

I get a lot of mail, as I’ve mentioned before. Donna does most of the fan mail, but the volume of my personal mail, too, is enormous! I come in with an armful every day and sort it into different stacks. I may push one stack aside, but before I do, I at least have an idea of what’s
in
that stack. If I had a computer and clicked a button to “store” something, I wouldn’t sleep at night! I’d wonder what was stored in there, did I answer this or that or the other? That scares me. I think of it as the computer equivalent of my upstairs office and dining room table.

And many people use computers to write. They talk about how efficient it is, how fast. But I can’t create with a machine. As I said in “Writer’s Block,” there’s a connection from my brain to the paper through my longhand writing that just works for me.

When my agent and publisher and I got together to work on this book, my publisher worked with an amazing instrument I had never seen—a computerized pen that recorded audio and plugged into the computer. A
talking
pen? I named it Bruce.

It’s a far cry from that first book I ever wrote when I was a kid, which was one hundred pages in longhand, written with a pen you dipped in ink!

Thank you, Bruce. I don’t deserve you.

ADRIAN SANCHEZ-GONZALES/LANDOV

W
hen I was a little girl, my mother loved baby dolls. She collected them.

But my toys were always animals.

I would spend all my lunch money on little blown-glass animal families at the toy store, which I later had to spend a lot of time dusting.

Barbara Walters once asked me if I ever had desired to have a child.

The answer is, I never did think about it.

I know there are many career girls today who would disagree, but I’m not a big believer in being able to do both. I think somebody takes the short end of the stick.

I had such a wonderful rapport with my folks, but my mother didn’t work. She was home with me.

It’s an individual choice. I didn’t think I could do justice to both career and motherhood, maybe because I had the mother I did. It’s
such
an individual choice.

And I’m a stepmother. I have the best stepchildren in the world.

When Allen and I first married, I became the stepmother of teenagers. Never having had children, I was suddenly the mother of teens! But we got along great. So great, they called me “Dragon Lady,” lovingly.

Even after all these years, we love each other dearly, and I am most proud of the children this career girl inherited. A major blessing—yet again.

KEVIN MAZUR/WIREIMAGE

I
t’s important to maintain as level a head as possible in this exciting business over the years.

The toughest time is when you’re on a roll . . . when everything is going phenomenally well, like it is for me right now.

That’s when you have to remember that image in the mirror and not let success get to you. It is important that you not believe your own publicity. Be grateful for whatever praise you receive, but take it with a grain of salt.

You have to keep your feet on the ground and remember that this is what you’ve worked for all your life. And now that you’ve achieved it, you don’t want to screw it up. You can’t get carried away with your image, because you know better than anyone else who the
real
person is.

You don’t just luck into integrity. You work at it.

O
ne of the first interview questions always is: What advice would you give young actresses coming into this business?

The answer is:

Treat your profession with respect.

Come in prepared.

Walk in to every situation with a positive, open mind. Allow yourself time to experience a situation before forming an opinion.

To abuse our profession by partying or getting into trouble or copping an attitude like some people do is the height of ingratitude, in my opinion.

To not be grateful for what you’ve been blessed with, knowing how many people in the world would sell their souls to do what you do, or to abuse it is, I think, unconscionable.

In the acting profession and the sporting world, young people are exposed to more temptation, more everything, because they have a whole bunch more money than do young people in other jobs. They’re getting these phenomenal salaries; sometimes it’s too easy to slip into bad behavior. Bad stuff.

I hate to sound like I’m pontificating, but it’s hard to write a book without sounding that way from time to time. When you’re blessed to do the thing you love to do and you’re making a lot of money at it so you can benefit your passion, that’s a pretty great formula. Appreciate it—don’t abuse it.

If you’re not enthusiastic, just lie down and close your eyes and be
very
quiet.

ERIC HEINILA/CBS/NEWSCOM

On
The Late Late Show
with Craig Ferguson.

FRANCIS SPECKER/LANDOV

O
ne thing they don’t tell you about growing old—you don’t feel old, you just feel like yourself. And it’s true. I don’t
feel
eighty-nine years old. I simply
am
eighty-nine years old.

If I didn’t feel so well, I might have a different philosophy altogether.

But I fall into traps sometimes.

Let’s say I meet someone I find attractive. I have to keep reminding myself of how old I am, because I don’t
feel
like I’m that old. I fight the urge to flirt and try to shape up. No fool like an old fool.

But I don’t get depressed as the number climbs. Perhaps because I don’t fear death. To some it is such a bête noire that it ruins some of the good time they have left.

Estelle Getty was so afraid of dying that the writers on
The Golden Girls
couldn’t put a dead joke in the script. This was early on—long before she ever got ill.

Again, I’m quoting my mother, but her take on the subject I thought was great. She said we know so much and can discover so much more, but what
no one
knows for sure is what exactly happens when we pass on. When we’d lose someone we would grieve, of course, but she would say, “Now he knows the secret.” Somehow that helped the pain for me.

And now—
she
knows the secret.

If you’ve ever lost a loved one, or witnessed it, you can’t help but see that the body is an envelope for the letter.

My friends kid me that when it happens to me, Allen’s going to be up there waiting for me and probably my mom and dad. That’s my family. But before I can get to them I’m going to have to wade through Booty and Binky and Bob and Panda and Kitta and all my pets through the years—

Picturing that always starts me laughing.

DONALD SANDERS/GLOBE PHOTOS