Alan Alda shares the rest of his life, so far

I was playing a telephone lineman, and my part went like this: I came onstage, said a line intended to make the audience laugh, then climbed up a telephone pole, where I said two or three lines whose main purpose was to call attention to the fact that the producer had paid for a real telephone pole; then I hung there for twenty minutes while the play went on before I climbed down, said another funny line, and left. At this rehearsal, I got up to the top of the pole and spent my time hoping Eve was all right in the middle of the crush of actors. After only a minute or two, though, a loud wail rose from behind the scenery. It spread across the stage and hit the back wall. Then another wail. This one made it all the way to the box office in the lobby. Everyone stood completely still. Shumlin turned his bald head and looked up at me. I tried to look apologetic.

“I imagine that would be your child,” he said.

“Uh, yes. I’m sorry.”

Then the unbelievable happened. A gentle smile spread over Shumlin’s face, possibly the first in his life. “Why don’t you go look after her? We’ll work on something else.”

I shimmied down the pole and ran to Eve. Her lower lip was up, and the corners of her mouth were down. She reached out her arms for me. I hugged her, and in a few minutes she was contented again, but that scene came back to me many times as Eve grew up. The actors had tried to entertain her, because entertaining is what we do. But she hadn’t needed entertainment, she’d needed safety. Years later, I wondered if I had given in too many times to that same actor’s impulse. I’d certainly entertained my children, probably to the point of being their playmate. Once, when Eve was four, we were standing in the basement having one of those endless arguments.

“You have to clean up this mess you made.”

“No, I don’t have to clean it up.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You do.”

“I don’t.”

Finally, I called upstairs. “Arlene, will you come down here and tell her I’m the boss?” It kind of took the authority out of the exchange.

I had always been moved by Alan Jay Lerner’s lyric from Camelot’s “How to Handle a Woman.” The way to handle a woman, he said, was to love her, simply love her. Love her. Love her. It took me a while to figure out that that’s probably the best way to handle a child, too. But I really liked trying to teach them and stimulate their minds.

From the time they were able to talk, I was always starting dinner conversations with them about world events, but our three girls only stared at me, thinking it was one of my actorish riffs that just wasn’t that amusing. If they waited long enough, I’d change the channel. I was flummoxed. I wondered: How did the Kennedys accomplish all the dinner conversations we always read about? How did they get their children to talk?

When Eve was ready to graduate from college, I was asked to speak at her commencement, and I said, yes, of course I’ll talk. I was more than touched. I would finally be able to talk about anything I wanted and she’d have to listen.

But what would I talk about? As the day came closer, I sat and wrote on the porch of our room on a Caribbean island, where I was directing my first movie. I had all the worries of a first-time director, plus a rainy season that had put us behind schedule. But in every spare moment, I sat on the porch and tried to figure out what I’d say. There was plenty going on in the world, if I’d wanted to start another of my dinner conversations. The past ten years had been hard to take. It was 1980, and there was already a frightening amount of terrorism in the world. I recently looked it up on the Internet. In those ten years, there had been over six thousand terrorist events, bombings mostly, that had killed 3,500 people and wounded 7,600. This was supposed to make the world a better place. The Equal Rights Amendment was about to run out its time limit. Eve knew I had worked hard for ten years trying to help get it ratified and that I had traveled to state after state, lobbying state legislators. Eve knew how much it had meant to Arlene and me, and now, three states short of ratification, it was becoming clear it would not become part of the Constitution.

I had plenty to talk about, but what I most wanted to say to her were things that were hard to put into words. They were things I’d wanted to say all along, but somehow they didn’t come out early on.

Eve graduated from college on a hot day in May. I walked out onto the sun-washed green, dotted with white folding chairs and people fanning themselves in the late spring heat. I knew I wouldn’t be able to tell Eve what I wanted her to hear by talking to her as part of her whole class. She’d get lost in the crowd. So, instead, I spoke directly to her. I called her by name and poured out my heart and hoped that the other graduates would see that, through her, I was talking to them, too.

Deep in our hearts we know that the best things said come last. People will talk for hours, saying nothing much, and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart. We’re all gathered at a doorway today. It’s the end of something and the beginning of something else.

We linger with our hand on the knob, searching for words, but the best things said slip out unheralded and often preceded by the words Oh, by the way. Patients can talk to their therapists for an hour, hardly saying anything, but just as they’re leaving, they’ll turn at the door and say, “Oh, by the way,” and in one sentence reveal everything they’ve been avoiding for fifty minutes. Doorways are where the truth is told.

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