YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE
At 84, actor Alan Alda still has plenty to say ... and people are listening
NEW YORK Eighty-four-year-old Alan Alda bounds into his company’s glass-walled Manhattan offices housed in a co-working space otherwise occupied by startups, millennials and geometric sculptures.
Alda is nearing the end of an acting career that began before most households had colour TV. The six-time Emmy winner who smart-mouthed his way into our hearts as doctor Hawkeye Pierce on MASH is, according to his eldest daughter, Eve Alda Coffey, “working harder now than ever before.”
His work has become more ambitious than acting. Alda says he wants to teach people how to better communicate with one another. To that end, he’s deployed all the available tools of communication: a Twitter feed, an Instagram account, a weekly podcast called Clear+vivid with Alan Alda. He’s written three books and a play and given speeches around the world.
He’s always been ready to speak, but now he’s eager to listen. Alda takes listening very seriously.
“I have this radical idea that I’m not really listening unless I’m willing to be changed by you,” he says.
Which leads to the question: Is anyone listening to Alan Alda?
“Is this our car?” Alda asks, pointing to a black SUV waiting down the block from the co-working space. He piles in with two staffers named Sarah — Hill and Chase, chief operating officer of Alda Communication Training — and they zigzag to the headquarters of the podcasting giant, Stitcher, where he’ll fix his own cup of tea before heading into a studio to wait for foreign affairs wonk Fareed Zakaria, today’s guest on Clear+vivid.
Zakaria explains why the U.S. feels so at odds. And how dangerous it could be if people keep talking past one another. Alda listens and nods. He has no notes in front of him. Every question seems to prompted by something his guest just said.
Alda first learned how to get people’s attention from his parents, vaudeville performers who christened him Alphonso Joseph D’abruzzo. The family travelled with a troupe of showgirls, strippers and comics who adored him, and eventually they settled in California when his father got into the movie industry.
Alda performed in sketches with his father, whose stage name was Robert Alda. When he showed up at public school for the first time in Grade 7, he surveyed the other students on the playground and thought, “Wow, look at the size of that audience.”
“Within a few minutes I was up on a lunch table performing,” Alda writes in his memoir. “I did bits, impersonations, a little improvised tap dance. For some reason I didn’t understand, this made kids want to hit me.”
Alda persevered, attended Fordham University and studied theatre and improvisation in New York. He learned how to communicate scripted emotions to large audiences — well enough to land on Broadway at age 23 — but that didn’t necessarily translate to real-world panache. When he met Arlene Weiss, after watching her play Mozart on the clarinet at an apartment party in college, all he could manage was: “Hi. You were good.”
A few weeks later they were both invited to a dinner at the same apartment. When the hostess’s rum cake fell from the top of the fridge to the kitchen floor, Alda and Arlene were the only two guests who dug in with spoons.
“So that was it,” he says. “From that time on we were almost inseparable.”
His parents’ marriage had been fraught. His mother was schizophrenic, which opened a void of trust and predictability in their home. When Alda was six, he watched her stab his father after accusing him of an affair.
Alda and his wife have been married for 63 years. He says she taught him to read the newspaper and to be a better thinker, that she held him to his values and never asked him to get a corporate job during the lean early years. “I was thinking the other day she’s the soul of my soul.”
Last year, Alda appeared opposite Laura Dern, Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in Marriage Story, playing the thrice-divorced, cut-rate lawyer who serves as the movie’s moral compass.
Marriage Story is a story about a breakup, and what struck Alda was that the relationship between the two main characters fell apart because they couldn’t communicate with each other.
And then, to survive their eventual divorce, they had to relearn to communicate.
Alda is 6-foot-2 with grey hair that starts at the top of his head. His tremors are noticeable, though not as bad as those of his character on Ray Donovan, the Showtime series on which Alda plays a therapist with a more advanced case of Parkinson’s than his own.
He is thinking about the future. He’s been doing that for a long time. After MASH ended its 11-year run, Alda was flush with opportunities, one of which was an offer to host of a PBS documentary show, Scientific American Frontiers. Alda, a science buff since childhood, agreed to do the show on one condition: that he be allowed to interview the scientists, not just introduce segments about them. That’s how he realized most of them, no matter how smart and accomplished, didn’t know how to talk to people.
Alda pulled simplified explanations out of his guests on camera. Behind the scenes, he lobbied every person he knew connected to a university to set up a program to help scientists become better communicators.
Finally, in 2009, administrators at Stony Brook University in New York took Alda’s suggestion and unveiled what would eventually be named the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science.
Since then Alda has been giving the program most of his spare time, energy and money. In 2016, he set up Alda Communication Training, a for-profit company that offers workshops to scientists, doctors and technologists — about 15,000 so far — who get trained in some of the same improv techniques Alda learned as an actor. The goal is to help them better relate to their audiences.
I did bits, impersonations, a little improvised tap dance. For some reason I didn’t understand, this made kids want to hit me.
Seventeen years ago, Alda nearly died of an intestinal obstruction while travelling in Chile.
In the months that followed, he woke at night with a nagging question: “Are you living a meaningful life?”
He knew he was living a good life. The acting, the fans, the family and marriage. Time split between Manhattan and a house in the Hamptons. He knew he’d at least tried to do good in the world. In the 1970s and ’80s, Alda spent so much time campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment that the Boston Globe dubbed him an “honorary woman.”
But meaningful? Alda agreed with the existentialists he’d studied in college: “They said the meaning of life is the meaning you give to it. Life seems to be a lot more fun if you have a purpose,” he says. These days, the meaning Alda wants to give to his life is “to be helpful, where I can.”
He treats Parkinson’s disease like (another) part-time job, keeping up with the latest research and strategies to slow the disease’s progression. Aging gets the same emotional distance. “I think of it as an acting thing. Right now, I’m playing an older guy with less hair,” he shrugs. “So, that’s fine. I’ll play that part.”