Someone forgot to tell Alan Alda that there won’t be an exam on, well, all human knowledge at the end of his career.
In the past two decades, in between acting in films by directors as diverse as Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, the 71-year-old has traveled the world interviewing scientists – 600 to 700 to be exact. Along the way, he got bored, so he taught himself how to program computers. He also learned to build websites, had his car converted to electric power, befriended inventors, began fiddling around with solar panels. He even designed a computer game to mimic a therapy session.
“If you mentioned your mother, it would pick up on that,” he says, sitting at an Italian restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, “and it would begin asking questions about your mother. And as soon as you got really, really involved, it would say ‘I’m sorry, your time is up.”‘
Were a man of this temperament to have a brush with death, he wouldn’t simply walk it off, as they say after a rough tackle in American football. He would figure out what it means.
And the quality of analysis wouldn’t surprise the millions of fans of Hawkeye Pierce, the thoughtful surgeon that Alda played for 11 years on “M*A*S*H,” one of the most popular American television series ever, on both sides of the Atlantic. The 1983 finale was watched by 106 million Americans, and even now the reruns still draw millions of viewers.
Alda could have coasted after that, but he has branched out – writing and directing his own film (“The Four Seasons”), playing a jerk (in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors”) and going back to his comedy roots (with John Candy in “Canadian Bacon”).
He also began to indulge his interest in science by hosting the “Scientific American Frontiers” television program. It was in this capacity that Alda did have a brush with death. He found himself on top of a mountain in Chile – as he was wont to in his 11 years of hosting the show – with terrible stomach pain.
It turned out that about a yard of his large intestine had died, and if he hadn’t reached a doctor in time, the rest of him would have gone too.
Alda survived, and the experience rejuvenated him. He wrote a bestselling memoir, “Never Get Your Dog Stuffed,” and was nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta for Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” but his life began to feel a little empty.
“That whole thing about meaning,” Alda says, his big, sensitive eyes crinkling, “I really did begin to think it was meaningless. That word has no meaning after a while.”
So Alda began combing through his notebooks and old speeches, looking at what he pretended to know – or seemed to know – in the past. The result is a second memoir, “Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself,” a project that would be self-indulgent were it not so unabashedly earnest in its pursuit of meaning.
“Never Get Your Dog Stuffed” told of his growing up as Alphonso D’Abruzzo, the son of a burlesque comic and a schizophrenic mother. This installment weaves further tales about his life as a father, grandfather and activist.
Many times, Alda was speaking to people who knew more than he did about the topic at hand – such as the historians of a Jefferson society, or the doctors at Columbia University College of Physicians, who knew him only as Hawkeye Pierce.
“It’s interesting how often I was telling young people about values, and to live according to their values,” Alda says. “I kind of left out ‘I hope you have good values, or values we can all agree are good,’ because there are people in both prisons and palaces who are living their values.”
There was a time when Alda would have launched into a political discussion at this point. But he has given that up. In 1975, at the height of his M*AS*H* fame, he briefly considered running for the U.S. Senate, until he realized the level of decision-making that it would require. “The idea of running simply because you could get elected I found appalling.”
But he has played politicians on the screen – mostly Republicans of late. He won an Emmy in 2006 for his portrayal of the presidential hopeful Arnold Vinick in “The West Wing,” and an Oscar nomination for the rich sense of entitlement he brought to Sen. Ralph Owen Brewster in “The Aviator.”
“People would turn to me and say: ‘Is it going to be hard to say these conservative things?’ When I played a murderer, nobody asked me how I would go and do that, but if I played a Republican, look out, it was like I had crossed a line!”
In fact, fittingly for the child of an improvisational comic, he has played everything from death-row inmates to struggling husbands to the American physicist Richard Feynman (in the play “QED”). Now he can see a similarity between acting and what he does when trying to make sense of the world and his own experiences in it. “I think it’s the same process – in both cases I am drilling down into my own unconscious to see what is there.
“I had to improvise a scene in ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’ where I was coming on to a young woman – I don’t do that – but if I did do that, how would I do it? I realized that I wouldn’t flatter her beauty, I would flatter her intelligence.”
This year, Alda celebrated the 50th anniversary of his marriage to his wife, Arlene, a photographer and children’s author.
As he reveals in “Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself,” even when he was shooting M*A*S*H*, he commuted from New Jersey to California so that his children wouldn’t grow up into the kind of warped kids of stars that we see these days.
It seems to have worked. His three daughters have given him seven grandchildren, and he is just as intent on rearing them into thinking individuals. One chapter of the new book describes the coffee talks that he has with them on the Upper West Side, encouraging them through ethical puzzles like a Jesuit teacher.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
