Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (15 page)

In other words, where are the brass tacks?

I had been looking for something I could offer these young scientists that was more useful than admiration. And it was through playing Feynman that I found it. Feynman and I were light-years apart, but two things we shared were curiosity and a desire to see science communicated clearly. I took a chance and challenged them.

Okay, let me be more or less practical. I’m going to propose something to you today. I realize it’s a childish idea, something only an unschooled layperson would come up with, but it’s specific enough that it might get you thinking.

What if each of you decided to take just one thing you love about science and, no matter how complicated it is, figure out how to make it understood by a million people? There are about five hundred of you taking part in this ceremony today. If just a few of you were successful, that would make several million people a lot smarter.

How you do it is up to you. You’re clever people, and I bet you’ll come up with some ingenious solutions. On the other hand, you may be thinking,
Why? Why should I do this impossible thing?

Well, I don’t know, maybe for the same reason that the birds sing.

If it does for you what it does for birds, there’s a lot to recommend it:

1.
It’s a good way to improve your chances of having sex.

2.
It feels good to sing.

3.
Singing is the music nature makes when it dances the dance of life.

You are the universe announcing itself to itself. You open your mouth, and a little muscle in your throat makes a corner of nature vibrate. You’re one part of the forest saying, “This is what I think I know,” while another part of the forest is saying, “Yeah? Well, this is what I think
I
know!” Your chirpings are the harmony of all knowledge.

You’ve studied how nature works. Is there anything more beautiful than that? Is there anything greater to sing about?

So sing.

Sing out.

Sing.

Out.

Thank you, and good luck.

I wonder if they knew how much I envied them. My curiosity helped me feel alive—it kept a spring in my step—but they could make their curiosity work for them. The spring in
their
step could let them bound tall buildings.

They could look inside a universe so much more complicated than my mother’s watch. How could I not envy them? They could see the wheels spinning and figure out what made the hands turn—and they knew how to get the cover back on without using their teeth.

Chapter 13

As Friends Go…

As I watched him from the wings, there was one point in the play when he behaved with such passion that I thought he was possessed by something out of his control. I had seen comic actors take off in a moment of improvisation, but I had never seen this kind of inspired anger and overwhelming strength. I stood next to the house curtain ropes and watched that event every night for most of a year and wished I could become him. Ossie Davis was a big man, and kind; he taught Sunday school; he was gentle with children and courteous to strangers. He wrote a play that for all its contempt for racial injustice was a rollicking comedy. But when he became aroused in anger near the end of the play, it could stop your breathing. That he had that much fury on the stage and yet was so gentle in life were the two best reasons to want to be like him.

I met Ossie in my early twenties when I acted in his play
Purlie Victorious,
and we saw each other on and off over the next few decades. He sometimes sent me a script he had written, generously asking if I had any comments. With all his talent and skill, he was always humble. Humble and funny. He came to see me when I did a one-man show and kidded me that I finally had a part in which I could talk as much as I wanted; and then at dinner afterward, he made a toast to me that brought tears to my eyes. His heart was as full as his laugh. In the sixties, his wisdom, his dignity, and his courage during the civil rights movement had helped pull America from the thorny bramble of hatred and set it back where it belonged on the road to equality. He was a big, granite monument of a man and a sweet candy bar of a friend.

And then he was dead.

He died suddenly, on a film shoot. His heart just gave out. I got a call that Ruby was inviting me to speak at his funeral service, and I was touched that she had thought of me. As I thought about what I would say, I realized that a moment like this is a small test of what a life means. When the person is gone and all that’s left of someone you’ve loved is the body, how do you call him back? Is it by reciting his accomplishments? I couldn’t forget what Ossie had achieved, but I found myself remembering him better and more pungently in his simplest, most human moments. Those were the moments when his life came up against mine and made it better.

His funeral was on February 12, 2005. Those of us who had been asked to speak met in a small room at the back of the Riverside Church in New York City. There were people there from all parts of Ossie’s life: actors, politicians, civil rights leaders. We chatted for a while, as you do at a funeral, in an odd combination of sadness and laughter, and then we took our places in a pew at the front of the great Gothic cathedral. One by one, Ossie’s friends got up to speak, except for Wynton Marsalis, who simply played his horn as he paced slowly at the front of the congregation. Then it was my turn.

Ossie was my hero, and he still is. He was my friend, and I loved him for forty-four years. And the day he died, I had a reaction I’m sure many of us had—I didn’t believe it. Somehow, I had thought that his grace, his laughter, his everlasting smile, were all so alive that they would always be with us.

But a hero doesn’t die if the people he touched remember the ways in which he touched them. When I was twenty-five, I stood in the wings every night watching Ossie in
Purlie Victorious;
it was one of the ways I learned how to act. His power and his spontaneity were so vivid that it made the hair rise on your neck, and you thought you were looking at someone who was being struck by lightning. Forty-four years later, I still aspire to what Ossie had, and I hope that I can have just a little bit of Ossie in me.

I learned many things from Ossie and Ruby. When we shot the movie version of
Purlie,
they taught me how to eat sweet-potato pie. They did. They said, “You take a bite, and then you go like this: uhn—uhn
—uhn.”
And I still do that—not just with sweet-potato pie, but with a plate of pasta, too. And every time I go like that, I think of Ossie and Ruby, and I love them again.

As a writer, he mixed laughter and pain and the longings of all humanity. As a citizen, he brought all of those longings off the stage to help resolve them in our own lives. I love him for his laughter and his kindness. I love him for his service to his country—a country that with all the honors it gave him never could give him what he gave to his country. He gave a rich, deep voice to all our longings for simple brotherhood. He gave us pride in ourselves, no matter what part of the earth we sprang from. “I find in being black a thing of beauty,” I heard him say every night in
Purlie.
“A native land in every Negro face,” he said. Ossie was a thing of beauty, a native land for everyone whose heart aches for justice and compassion. He spoke of black princes—he was one.

His was the power of decency, the power of art, the power of intelligence and love, and sometimes the power of righteous anger. If we’re decent and artful and smart, and we let ourselves love and be angry at injustice, then Ossie—that beautiful black prince—will never die. I love you, Ossie.

A tape of the service was broadcast on stations all over the country. Ossie’s death was a national event. People stopped me in airports thousands of miles away from New York to tell me they’d seen his memorial on television. They wanted to talk about how much Ossie had meant to them. A day or so after the service, Peter Jennings and his wife, Kayce, were over for dinner, and as we sat down at the table, a rebroadcast of the service was coming over a local channel. Peter hadn’t been at the ceremony and wanted to see a few minutes of it. We stood and watched it on the kitchen television. My talk came on the air, and then a few minutes later, Bill Clinton spoke. Through the lens of the television camera, you could see two very different styles. We both had strong feelings for Ossie, but my words had been chosen; his words seemed to come to him on the spot—without hesitation. You could hear the people in the church responding to his spontaneity. His simple, unaffected presence was exactly what I’d always admired in Ossie’s acting.

As we walked back to the table, Peter said to me, “You were very good….” He paused. “But Clinton was
great.
” And he was.

We smiled and sat down to eat, neither of us aware that within seven months I would be speaking at Peter’s memorial.

Peter died August 7, 2005, from lung cancer. His illness shocked people all around the country and even his friends, who weren’t prepared for how swiftly the illness had ravaged him.

But even while Peter was still fighting for his life, I lost a third friend in the same year. In June, Anne Bancroft died of cancer of the uterus.

I first met Anne when we were kids. I was in college at Fordham. I was nineteen, beginning my senior year, and because I loved to perform and was unafraid to get up in front of a crowd, I was asked to emcee a football rally. It didn’t bother me that I had no interest in football and couldn’t even pronounce the coach’s Polish name. I liked the idea of getting a crowd to its feet, roaring with energy. I didn’t even mind that I got a laugh when I mangled the coach’s name. All I knew then was the fun of their cheers. But when I introduced Anne and she came out onstage, I heard what cheers could sound like. She was four years older than me and had just come back to the Bronx after a couple of years in Hollywood learning the trade of the starlet. Going through the motions of the Good-Looking Girl from New York probably irritated her, because she was a serious actress, but someone in the senior class had asked her to help out at the rally, and she gamely played the part. She came onstage with a smile as big as the Bronx itself and an armful of roses that she tossed, one by one, into the audience. With each rose that was tossed, the screams of joy that swelled from the testosterone-soaked crowd in the gymnasium was deafening. Fordham was an all-male school at the time, and you saw women only on the way there in the subway. Women were an underground interest, and Anne made the ground shake like the A train.

A few years later, Anne married Mel Brooks, and a couple of decades later, when we had all become successful enough to vacation every year on the same island in the Caribbean, we became friends. I came to understand that the sources of some of her best acting were her own deeply felt passions. Anne had a volatile temper that she could spring on you with no warning. She was a Vesuvius of emotion, and watching her erupt, I was inspired to write the part of the incendiary Italian woman in
The Four Seasons.
Rita Moreno played the part in the movie brilliantly, and I can’t think of anyone else playing it, but it was Anne who made me laugh first at the character.

The picture was about friendship, but I didn’t fully understand what I had written until after I’d shot and edited the movie and had to go out and talk about it to the press. This was clearly a case of finding out what you think after you’ve written it. Finally, I saw that this was a story of the four seasons of friendship: spring, where everyone is fresh and attractive and new to one another; summer, where the glare of the sun begins to show everyone’s blemishes; autumn, where the fig leaves finally fall and you see who they really are; and the winter of friendship, where you either drop them and start all over again with another springtime set of friends or take them as they are and huddle against the cold winds of aging.

At dinner one night, having written the part with Anne in mind, I asked her to play it in the movie. I think we were just moving from the springtime of our friendship and heading into summer. I didn’t know her well enough to realize that she’d be offended by my asking to have dinner with her without warning her that I was going to bring up business. I probably was too afraid she’d turn me down to bring it up in advance, but it was a mistake. Her reaction was an immediate lack of interest; in fact, I saw a little puff of smoke warning of an eruption, but I had only myself to blame.

I don’t know if she ever saw the movie, and if she did, if she recognized any of herself in it. Some of my other friends saw themselves in characters that had nothing to do with them. After the movie came out, I had to have several dinners explaining that characters with similar professions or hobbies didn’t always mean I was writing about my actual friends.

We wound up shooting some of the movie on St. John, where we had vacationed with Anne and Mel for thirty years and where Anne befriended our children and then our grandchildren. It was where I saw the woman under the actress; the girl who was born to Michael and Millie Italiano, whom they named Anna Maria Louisa. Theaters all over Broadway dimmed their lights for her when she died, but that was a gesture to the actress and star. It was the person at the white-hot core of the star that I remembered when she was gone.

On July 1, Mel took over the St. James Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street. The memorial was held in a theater, I suppose, to honor her career, but he invited only a couple of hundred people who had actually known her well. Mel wanted a private service, a personal time of remembering, and when I got up to speak, that’s what I wanted, too.

Today, as we celebrate the life of Anne Bancroft, I want to make sure we also remember the life of Anna Maria Louisa Italiano. I miss Anne; and even more, I miss Anna Maria Louisa, the Italian kid from the Bronx.

As an actress, Anne often spoke in a way that conveyed an air of sophistication and worldly learning, but in private she never lost the tones and inflections of the scrappy, passionate, loving kid from the Bronx. It wasn’t just that she never forgot who she was; she never
left
who she was. Anna Maria Louisa grew, as Anne, in her art and in her understanding of herself and of all of the people she played, but she never stopped being the Italiano girl.

She was a practical idealist. She didn’t make speeches about the rights of women. Instead, she hired women for jobs that went traditionally to men, like the director of photography of the film she directed.

I never heard her make lofty statements about loving humanity; she was more focused than that. My children and grandchildren all have memories of her that are intimate, specific moments, moments when she related to them on a simple, direct level. On vacation, she sat and admired sea glass with them, and they responded by searching for sea glass for her for days. She put them in touch with nature, not with a lecture, but with her genuine, human curiosity and love of beauty.

She didn’t just
admire
nature; she put her fingers in it and rearranged it. She loved the sea. She loved to swim in it and rummage around by the shore, and she could take seashells that were beautiful in themselves and transform them into objects of art.

She fought her last battle with the same passion and scrappiness and creativity she brought to all the rest of her life. When the time came to cover her head, she knitted hats that were marvelous inventions of texture and color.

Anne Bancroft was a beloved actress. And I celebrate her. And I celebrate the woman inside her all those years and who made her who she was: I celebrate Anna Maria Louisa Italiano.

A few years before she died, Anne and Mel bought a house near where we lived in the country. We knew they loved jazz, so we took them one night to hear a concert played by some of the great jazz musicians at Peter Jennings’s house. Peter held the concert every year to raise money for a nearby community center. He was always quietly and instinctively generous to people who could use a hand. In the streets of the big city, he felt it was the most natural thing in the world, not merely to give a homeless person some money, but to talk to him, to ask about his life, or just to see how he was doing. Peter went to a soup kitchen regularly, not to make an appearance, but to ladle out soup to people who were hungry.

Peter and I had met as neighbors twenty years earlier and had slowly built a warm friendship. He was exacting in his work, anchoring the news, and he could be frank in his assessment of everything else he saw around him. One day, he and I were talking on his porch when he felt I had said something politically partisan and a little too heated. “I didn’t realize you were an ideologue,” he said.