Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (18 page)

When I talked to the graduating class at Caltech, I asked them to devote a significant part of their lives to figuring out how to share their love of science with the rest of us. And I’m asking the scientists here tonight the same thing.

Be personal about science; arouse our lust for it. Tell us a story and make our hearts quicken.

Let’s listen to one another, let’s commit to one another.

Let’s fall in love.

After the talk, as we walked to the president’s house for dinner, Paul Nurse told me he had been interested for some time in this problem. He said that for several years in England, he had run training programs to help scientists improve their communication skills, and in one he had even brought in actors to work with them. I knew Paul was naturally talented at holding an audience, but I could see now that he had been methodical about it, too. He had worked at it systematically, the way he had worked at science.

Fifty years earlier, I had thought I couldn’t stay in that dim amphitheater if I wanted to be an actor. But Paul had brought actors
into
the amphitheater. He was reconnecting the cord between the hemispheres. He was pulling the continents back together.

It was a while before I began to see what I was telling myself in this talk: to listen. I was asking scientists to listen to what their audience was thinking, but really I was telling
myself
to listen, too. To not think that my present interests defined all there was to me. To move outside myself to what was in the other person’s mind, no matter how alien it seemed. To find what was interesting and valuable in their strangeness.

I could see now that my father wasn’t asking me to follow his dream, but to find my own and not limit myself only to what interested me then.

Pushing past our fathers, like Oedipus on the narrow road, is one of the ways we move on into adulthood, and I had pushed mine aside. I had undervalued him. I had thought of my father as a vain actor with few interests. But, in fact, he was curious and, in a way, even studious. He was excited by the land when we moved to the country, and he sent away for pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture. He studied them at night and transplanted olive trees by day. He had gone to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where you had to be good at math just to get in. He told me often that his favorite book was about the scientists who had discovered microbes. He did have interests outside himself, but I didn’t listen for them. He might have been vain, but he was far less of a show-off about his curiosity than I was about mine, and I mistook that for a lack of interest. I mistook his gentleness for passivity. How could he urge me to find my own way if he insisted on the road I take? He gave me the freedom to discover it for myself. It was the way he taught me to act in the burlesque sketches we did together: “Say that line a few times. As many as you feel is good. Usually three is good, but whatever you feel.” And it was the way he pointed me toward the chemistry class. “Just give it a try,” he said.

In gently urging me to explore, he gave meaning to my life that I think neither of us expected. I might not have responded at that very moment, but eventually I did, and it gave me the nerve to go places that scare me, but where I find excitement and adventure. I’ve wound up going where he wanted me to go: toward all the things that could interest me, if I’d let them.

Long after we had gone our separate ways, I met my father on the road again–and this time I let him pass.

Chapter 15

Celebrity and Its Discontents

While I was playing on television in
M*A*S*H,
a poll was taken of schoolchildren, and the appalling finding was that my face was more recognizable to them than Abraham Lincoln’s. Lincoln: the man who freed the slaves, who wrote the Gettysburg Address, whose face is on the penny; if only he could have appeared weekly in prime time, he could have been somebody.

A delegation from the magazine that did the poll came to the set and took my picture, and we had lunch under a tent in the Malibu mountains where we shot the exteriors. There was a lot of laughing and joking. They were delighted to be on the set of a popular show, and I think they expected me to be delighted by how well known my face was. I was amazed, but I was a little uneasy, too. That afternoon captured what all of us feel about celebrity. We don’t understand it. We chuckle at it, even as it touches us in countless ways. But what exactly
is
it? Three decades later, I was thinking about it again in the middle of the night.

I couldn’t sleep. I got up three times during the night to sit at the computer and fix a word or straighten a twisted metaphor. The next day, I would be giving one of those talks that I had no business delivering. My friend Mike, the psychoanalyst, had asked if I’d give a talk at his hospital. At first I’d said no, and then I thought maybe I did have something to talk about. I had been thinking for a while that one of the ways people have of looking for meaning in their lives is celebrity. It’s one of the ways we hope to live forever. Maybe by talking with Mike’s group about this, I could understand it better. I said yes.

Amazingly, I had agreed to give the Grand Rounds lecture at the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University. The audacity of this didn’t really hit me until the night before the talk. Why had I thought I could say anything to a hundred psychiatrists that they would find remotely interesting? How could their response be anything but one that ranged from condescension to outrage? I had to stop this thing of testing myself all the time. It was getting ridiculous. There was enough adrenaline in my bloodstream to get a herd of cattle across a river. I took a pill and drifted off.

When morning came, I went into performance mode.
I’ve done this before, and I can do it again,
I thought. But a voice in my head was saying,
Excuse me? You keep doing things you have
never
done before and shouldn’t even consider doing.

In the cab on the way to the hospital, I tried to read through my talk while the driver raced through traffic with his radio at full volume. He was listening to a program in Russian, which I couldn’t understand, but still, it distracted me. And then it got worse. He got on his cell phone and started screaming at someone in passionate Russian. This was followed by the guy on the radio talking even louder. Distracted, the driver took a wrong turn, and I was afraid I’d be late for my talk. I raised my voice above all the Russian coming from the front seat.

“Can we go north instead of south? And can you please get off the phone? In the first place, it’s against the law, and in the second place, it’s making me late.”

“I
have
to be on phone. This man is making me crazy. Is not patriotic what he says. I am American. I am proud to be.”

“Yes, good, but can you put the phone away and drive?”

“I can’t put phone away. I am on radio.”

He was on the phone with a call-in radio show. I was going to be late for a talk on celebrity because the cabdriver was in the middle of his fifteen minutes. He made a U-turn, and driving as fast as he could with one hand, while screaming in Russian, he got me to the lecture hall on time and on edge. It was the perfect preparation for the confusion I felt about the subject I was there to talk about.

Thank you for taking the time to see me. I’ll get right into it. Here are my symptoms:

I see strangers staring at me in the street. When I pass a group of people, I hear them saying my name behind my back. People I’m sure I don’t know try to touch me. Some of them try to kiss me. Once I hired a guard because I believed a woman was coming after me with a handgun. And sometimes I’m asked to speak in front of learned people about subjects in which I have no training—and I do it.

Actually, I know what I’m experiencing. It’s called celebrity and its discontents.

Celebrity, of course, seems trivial—the insignificant pairing of underdeveloped rock groupies with borderline narcissists, preening across the footlights—but actually, it’s all around us. The drive over with the cabbie was a small example of how the public and the private are blurred now. And the impact celebrity has on us isn’t confined to shallow entertainment. It influences almost everything we do. It’s been doing it for centuries.

The Greeks saw fame in two ways: as the reward for a virtuous life, but also as rumor and scandal.

Homer wrote about honor and renown: the public recognition that came to a person who lived life in the fullest flower of self-worth. But on the other hand, Hesiod, who lived around the same time as Homer, said: “Do as I tell you and keep away from the gossip of people. For Pheme (which was a name for both fame and rumor) is an evil thing, by nature. She’s a light weight to lift up, oh very easy, but heavy to carry, and hard to put down again. Pheme never disappears entirely once many people have talked her big. In fact, she really is some sort of goddess.” This was the dark side of fame: fame as a goddess of rumor, gossip, and report.

So as long as 2,700 years ago, people saw that fame had two sides to it. But in our world, even the renown that comes as a reward for virtue can be burned around the edges by the goddess of rumor. They said then that Rumor flew with the speed of a raging fire, but now, with modern communication, she flies at the speed of light.

If you go to Google, you can see a fascinating example of the influence that the goddess of rumor has on our lives. Google began a new service a few months ago called Google Trends. You can chart the popularity of various search terms around the world. I thought it would be interesting to compare the number of searches for Angelina to the number for Katrina. Hurricane Katrina hit in late August 2005. It was one of the deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States, taking at least 1,800 lives. In September, Katrina far outshone any interest the public had in the actress Angelina Jolie. By October, though, their chart lines were crisscrossing each other. In December, Angelina broke through and pretty much stayed above Katrina. The week it was announced that she and Brad Pitt were having a baby, the search term
Angelina Jolie
got more attention than the term
Iraq.
And it stayed that way for months. According to Google, the news media during this period were consistently covering Katrina and the Iraq war far more than they were covering these two actors, but that’s not what people were searching for on Google.

Celebrity gets into the most serious parts of our lives. There was a time when politicians simply
courted
celebrities. Now they try to become celebrities themselves.

Simple name recognition is one of the benchmarks of success in politics. Candidates spend millions trying to get it. Name recognition is so powerful that every few years an election is won by someone whose name is well known but who, at the time, is actually
dead—
which isn’t all that bad, because the dead ones do less damage than the live ones.

I found out how much stock politicians put in fame a few years after
M*A*S*H
hit and I had been placed up on the pantheon of recognizable faces. A delegation from a political club in New Jersey flew out to the set and asked me to run for the U.S. Senate. I found it hard to believe they were serious. “No, no,” they said. “We mean it. We want to back you.” I thanked them but said I didn’t want to be a politician; I wanted to act and write. And that’s all I was qualified to do. Their answer was, “But you could
win.
”

Eventually they left, disappointed.

It’s not just politics, of course. Celebrity is tied to the way we sell things to one another.

Twenty percent of all the ads in the United States use celebrities—
twice as many
as ten years ago. And public health is tied to celebrity, both for good and for bad.

The good influence has been called the Couric effect because when Katie Couric broadcast her colonoscopy on network television, the rate of colonoscopies in the country went up more than 20 percent over the next nine months. Before that, screening rates rose after Ronald Reagan’s colon cancer and Magic Johnson’s infection with HIV.

But celebrity also affects public health
negatively.
There’s the phenomenon of suicide copycats, which, it’s said, are more likely to occur when a celebrity commits suicide. And countless young girls become bulimic to be like famous models.

I was hitting them with all these figures because I wanted to make sure they didn’t regard this as a completely frivolous topic. But I wanted to get under the numbers somehow and try to understand this strange part of all our lives. I’ve actually lived this phenomenon, and for me it’s not so much a question of how big it is as how deep it goes—and how utterly mysterious it is.

For most of my life, between my father’s celebrity and my own, I’ve been able to observe what happens to people on both sides of the line separating celebrities from the rest of the world. My first exposure to fame was on Hollywood Boulevard when I was eight years old, and I didn’t like it. It was about midnight. We’d just seen a movie. I was walking with my parents, and a girl about sixteen came up behind us. She punched my father in the back and screamed, “You son of a bitch!” and then she ran off down the street. My parents saw that I was shaken by this, and they tried to help me understand it. They explained that some people don’t know how to react to people they’ve seen on the screen and that I shouldn’t let it make me afraid. But it seemed to me that being afraid of a person like that was a good idea.

A few months later, I had my next look at fame—with Bogart. My father was shooting a movie at Warner Brothers, and he had asked someone in the publicity department to show me around the back lot. We were walking down one of the old New York streets, with its fake brownstone apartment buildings and the facades of theaters and banks. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks and looked at a small man who was sitting in a director’s chair, in the middle of a conversation.

“That’s Humphrey Bogart,” he said. “Ask him for his autograph.”

He handed me a scrap of paper, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. I had never been part of this ritual before. He gave me a little push toward Bogart, and I walked over and held out the paper. Bogart took it, scribbled on it, and handed it back without looking at me. “Here, kid,” he said in that voice. I looked at the paper with an illegible scrawl on it. Why had I been sent over to interrupt him for
this?
I kept the autograph on the dresser in my bedroom for months, and every day I would look at it—not to remind myself I had met a famous person, but to wonder why anyone would think this little scrap of paper was valuable.

I asked myself that question again twenty-five years later when suddenly people were coming up to me with little pieces of paper in their hands. The success of
M*A*S*H
was so great that at first I was stunned by the attention that came to me. I had to figure out a strategy or I wouldn’t be able to move down a crowded street without signing my name every few feet. After a while, I started offering to shake hands instead. It seemed more personal. It wouldn’t result in that cold scribble of Bogart’s that sat on the dresser. I knew my life had changed one day when I was sitting in a seat on the aisle, waiting for a Broadway play to start. Someone came over with a piece of paper. Then someone else, and then another. Within a few minutes, there was a line of people stretching up the aisle to the back of the theater. I was signing fast, trying to be accommodating but wishing the lights would dim so everyone would go back to their seats and I could go back to being a member of the audience. Curtains seldom go up later than six or seven minutes past the hour, but it was getting to be twelve, then fifteen minutes past curtain time.

Finally, an usher came over to me apologetically. “Do you mind if we start the play now?” she said.

“God, yes. Please. You’re waiting for
me?
I’m waiting for you.”

I’d been thinking the stage manager would start the play on time, but now I couldn’t rely on people to behave in expected ways. Having stepped into this sticky tar pit of celebrity, I now trailed a mysterious aroma that had a peculiar effect on people.

People occasionally think there’s something magical about celebrities. There were the letters from people on the verge of suicide. Only
I
could help them. And sometimes people act as if fame has made you immune to ordinary catastrophes: On
Scientific American Frontiers,
we did a story on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. As we walked inside the tower, the custodian was telling me that it was still tipping over a little more every year, and unless they could fix it, it wouldn’t just tip over, the pressure on the middle of the structure would make it explode. We passed a sign that read “No one permitted beyond this point.” I asked if people were allowed to climb the tower.

“Oh no,” he said, “not anymore. But in your case, we made an exception.”

Once, in a torrential rain, a cop was turning people away from a bridge that was about to be swept down the river, but when he saw my face, he waved me through. Fortunately, I didn’t go.

Interestingly, people often lose motor control. A few weeks after my face was newly famous, I was walking toward a couple coming out of an ice-cream shop. The man was carrying an ice-cream cone, and when he saw me, the cone flew into the air, looped around, and hit the pavement ice cream first. His wife had no idea what had come over him. “Harry. I don’t believe you.”