Sam Bittman is the least funny wise guy among these rare comedians. As the show’s producer, however, he takes great pleasure in editing them mercilessly when they make him look bad. Nah. Sam is also the guy who had the notion that an intimate community of old guys could be created in cyberspace and has been watching the Third Act Project blossom ever since. He may even by now have proved to his wife Maggie of 44 years, his three beautiful sons and five grandchildren, that he’s not nearly...
How did it get late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time had flown. How did it get so late so soon? – Dr. Seuss
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change. -Thomas Hardy
Time is a current that runs deep in the Third Act. Though some of us have been sensitive to it in our earlier years as well, there is no denying its influence on our thoughts and feelings as we grow older. We think: “How is it possible that so many years have passed since we left high school or college to start our adult lives?” And the emotional accompaniment is like the thud of a big drum, the crashing of cymbals – our hearts pound for a few seconds, we let go our suspended breath, and find our balance again – which is to say, an acceptance of life moving forward, however it will.
In literature, the flow of water is an oft-used and profound metaphor for the passing of time, a symbol of never-ending life but also of its constant changeability and ephemerality, as in the following excerpt from Aidan Chambers’ This is All: Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn.
“Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to a wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for their own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?”
Widening the lens, Hermann Hesse’s old ferryman in Siddhartha reminds the now not-so-young seeker of Prana of the illusion of time and the ubiquity of the present, for which all things exist — a lesson which the aging Siddhartha has after years of meditating on the nature of the river begun only now to understand:
“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
The present is all we have in the Third Act, and must find ways to use the moments it offers. The present need not – in fact, to many, must not – require certainty. It is enough to know that one is in the flow of life; not being able to see around the next bend is less important than discovering what might happen when we get there. It is this relaxation about time that modulates the frantic drive to suck every moment dry, and, rather, simply live it, whatever it is and however it comes and goes. Consider Milne’s thought in The House at Pooh Corner.
By the time it came to the edge of the Forest the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.”
In fact, uncertainty – if one can allow it — may be the perfect condition for letting go of our ‘secure base’, and experiencing what comes. The Turkish playwright Mehmet Murat ildan asks:
“Do you know where you are going? Do you know what you are going to do? Do you know what you are going to say? Sometimes you better know nothing and flow freely just like a river, not knowing where to go, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say!”
Finally (for now), music that on the one hand is created within the strictures of time, on the other unchains itself from time’s strictures, and sings of special memories in our lives – and in an instant we are transported from the present to seminal memories of our earlier lives, often accompanied by powerful emotion. Check out this animated musical piece that captures a lifetime of memory. Maybe a little sappy, yet still it is full of genuine sentiment.
The lovely excerpt on friendship in old age comes from Daniel Klein’s Travels With Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life.
The author (also one of the Five Wise Guys) re-discovers the power of friendship and play on his return to the island of Hydra, where as a young man he often escaped when strenuous bouts with real work (gag-writing at the time for the likes of Flip Wilson) made him weary. His agent was frustrated because how was his client Danny Klein going to produce an income for them both if he was always running off to a Greek island instead of sticking around to build up his career as a comedy writer?
So here it is 2014, and Danny is back on the sun-bleached island wondering about what constitutes a “fulfilled life” in one’s mid-70s.
What is a fulfilled life? Is yours a fulfilled life? Anything missing? Any new plans? Lord, lord, do tell us!
As I coast into old age, no philosopher speaks more meaningfully to me than that ancient Greek, Epicurus. For starters, there is his delicious dictum:
“It is not the young man who should be considered fortunate but the old man who has lived well, because the young man in his prime wanders much by chance, vacillating in his beliefs, while the old man has docked in the harbor, having safeguarded his true happiness.”
I reread that lovely maxim recently while sitting on a taverna terrace on the Greek island of Hydra, a place where I have spent months at a time over the years. This time I was on the island to think about my new stage of life and what it might offer. One of my suitcases was packed with books by my favorite philosophers.
At a table near mine, I saw my old friend, Tasso, a man about my age who is a retired judge. Tasso was playing cards with three friends, also white-haired, and from the ease of their chatter and laughter, I knew I had come to the right place to learn how to live an old age that both Epicurus and I would approve of.
Above all, such an old age would fully embrace friendship and playfulness. Epicurus wrote, “Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.” But even more significantly for me at this time, he was convinced that we old folk have a unique opportunity to elevate companionship to its highest level. Epicurus believed that we oldsters no longer ever need to treat our fellows as means to an end and therefore we always can enjoy them as ends in themselves.
In old age, we can be free from what the philosopher called, “the prison of everyday affairs and politics.” Retired from business and striving, we no longer need to see other people as a way to close a deal or get a raise or obtain a contract. Having said goodbye to all that, we are left with pure camaraderie, the kind that Tasso and his fellows were contentedly enjoying. Tasso wanted nothing more from his tablemate, Kostos, a retired fisherman, than to simply be with him — to pass the time with him, to talk with him, even just to sit in silence with him as they both watched the sun settle onto the horizon in the Peloponnesian straits. Indeed, Epicurus believed that being together in silence was the highest form of personal communion. Clearly such communion did not come easily to us when we were still in that stage of life when we were hell bent on achieving goals.
The idea of playfulness in old age also resonates with me. I was happily surprised to discover how many of the philosophers in my little portable library paid tribute to “play.” In his popular essay, “In Praise of Idleness,” the 20th century philosopher, Bertrand Russell, lamented modern man’s loss of his capacity for play, seeing it as having been erased by the “cult of efficiency.” But perhaps the philosopher who best understood the transcendental possibilities of play was Epicurus’ forbear, Plato, who wrote: “Man is made God’s plaything and that is the best part of him. … What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play.”
I found myself recalling the first time I saw old Greek men dancing. It was on a night in 1968, during my first long sojourn on Hydra. Outside the window of my hillside house, a full moon had set the whitewashed houses aglow and the unearthly light drew me out of my room and down to the coastal walkway for a dreamy ramble. It was utterly quiet except for an occasional donkey bray and rooster crow.
Then I heard music coming from the direction of the main port, at first only the stuttering beat of bass notes, then, as I walked toward the music, the Turkic twang of a bouzouki. I followed the sound to a taverna called Loulou’s. By then I recognized the music; it was a classic song by Mikis Theodorakis, whose music at the time was prohibited by the ruling dictatorship because of his antifascist activities. The doors to Loulou’s were locked shut, but one of the windows was open. I peered inside.
Five old men were dancing side by side, connected one to the other by handkerchiefs held in their raised hands. Their craggy faces were tilted upward with what struck me as pride, defiance, and, above all, exultation. All of them were straining to keep their backs erect, though none fully succeeded, yet their legs executed the dance’s sideward steps in perfect, graceful synchrony. When, toward the end of the song, the music gradually accelerated, their steps accelerated along with it. For a long moment after the music’s crescendo climax, they remained standing silently next to one another with upraised arms.
What I had witnessed, quite simply, was a dance to life and to its consummate fulfillment in old age. This was play at its most exalted.
I fully understood what Plato meant when he wrote that pure play has intimations of the divine. And now, in my old age, I feel I am finally ready to play and dance with well-earned abandon.
I’ve loved this deeply emotional song — “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” — for a long time, and these days it evokes in me an entirely new way of asking the question because I’m feeling it in the heart of a now older man. What is love and how do you hold onto it in a relationship that is decades old? How do you keep the music going? How do you keep your passion for life alive? The fire to endure whatever gets handed to you?
One simple lyric provides an answer to life itself: “If we can try with every day to make it better as it grows/With any luck, then, I suppose/The music never ends.”
But what makes the music better? Often I don’t know and just keep moving — exactly where, I don’t know either; just one foot in front of the other. When I have a hard time hearing the music anymore, it’s like I’m lost in the woods and the only way out is to backtrack to the last place you remember and go on from there.
Now listen to Tony Bennett (who was 88 when he sang this) and Aretha Franklin (now, sadly, gone) fly with this one. Play it loud! And write us back with your impressions.
How Do You Keep the Music Playing?
Music: Michel LeGrand
Lyrics: Alan and Marilyn Bergman
How do you keep the music playing? How do you make it last? How do you keep the song from fading too fast? How do you lose yourself to someone? And never lose your ways? How do you not run out of new things to say? And since we’re always changing How can it be the same? And tell me how year after year You’re sure your heart will fall apart Each time you hear her name? I know the way I feel for you It’s now or never; The more I love the more that I’m afraid That in your eyes I may not see forever… Forever… If we can be the best of lovers Yet be the best of friends; If we can try with everyday to make it better as it grows, With any luck, then I suppose, The music never ends.
“You’re not a late bloomer, says Times Columnist Roxanne Gay to those of us who are writers, “You are already blooming.”
The following excerpt from “Ask Roxanne,” (New York Times, December 30, 2017) exhorts us to keep at it. Our words and our voice are the things we can control; so don’t let them grow silent. And this applies to whatever your art is, whatever expresses your spirit in only the way YOU can. Isn’t this commandment just another way of saying: “Don’t die till you’re dead”?
What are you working on these days? Want to share it with the Project?
“The older we get, the more culturally invisible we become, as writers, as people. But you have your words. Writing and publishing are two very different things. Other writers are not your measure. Try not to worry about what other people your age or younger have already accomplished because it will only make you sick with envy or grief. The only thing you can control is how you write and how hard you work. The literary flavor of the week did not get your book deal. All the other writers in the world are not having more fun than you, no matter what it might seem like on social media, where everyone is showing you only what they want you to see.
“Write as well as you can, with as much heart as you can, whenever you can. Make sure there are people in your life who will have faith in your promise when you can’t. Get your writing in the world, ideally for the money you deserve because writing is work that deserves compensation. But do not worry about being closer to 50 or 65 or 83. Artistic success, in all its forms, is not merely the purview of the young. You are not a late bloomer. You are already blooming.”
What should we old guys leave of ourselves to our children and grandchildren so they might know who we once were? Does it matter?
I have a wide bookshelf filled with my journals of thirty years or so. They contain story ideas by the score, and my very personal responses to events and people in my life at the time. Do I share these? Throw them out before I die? Just leave them to be discovered? I wish I had a better sense of what was going through my father’s mind in his 50s and 60s. But that’s me; maybe not my kids’ idea of great discovery.
What to do with your own stuff? Do let us know, will you?
Colin Levy’s illustrated video remembrance called ‘My Grandfather’s Memory Book’ (The New York Times‘ Op-Docs video series) is full of the young man’s gratitude that his grandpa left so many notebooks filled with drawings and person reflections.
Just recently the Five Wise Guys (Episode 1: Season 2) discussed the notion of getting one’s papers in order, and we weren’t talking about wills and insurance and stuff like that. Should we leave something of ourselves to our children and grandchildren, a way of letting them knew who we were?
An answer floats around in this moving video from The New York Times‘ Op-Docs video series, Colin Levy’s charming, illustrated remembrance, ‘My Grandfather’s Memory Book’.
What is it like to care for a lifelong companion who is slipping away from you day by day?
I found this Japanese video touching — though some will call it schmaltzy — because it speaks in very honest and realistic terms to the enduring love of a husband for his lifelong companion who is steadily fading away into Alzheimer’s disease. His endless patience and love and the memories of easier and happier times are what keep him going.
What keeps you going when things get tough, really tough? How do you return to the business of living?
Oliver Sacks writes about the heartfelt pleasures of turning 80. I so totally relate when he says: “I am grateful that I have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible … and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called ‘an intercourse with the world.’”
Just find and delight in his abounding thoughtfulness and gratitude for not just being alive but still exploring new avenues of adventure at 80. May it continue to be so for all of us!
What about you? Still discovering new ways to experience life while you have it? Let us know how!
LAST night I dreamed about mercury — huge, shining globules of quicksilver rising and falling. Mercury is element number 80, and my dream is a reminder that on Tuesday, I will be 80 myself.
Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. At 11, I could say “I am sodium” (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold. A few years ago, when I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his 80th birthday — a special bottle that could neither leak nor break — he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, “I take a little every morning for my health.”
Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over. My mother was the 16th of 18 children; I was the youngest of her four sons, and almost the youngest of the vast cousinhood on her side of the family. I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.
I thought I would die at 41, when I had a bad fall and broke a leg while mountaineering alone. I splinted the leg as best I could and started to lever myself down the mountain, clumsily, with my arms. In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude — gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude, too, that I had been able to give something back. “Awakenings” had been published the previous year.
At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”) I am grateful that I have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible — and that I have been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “an intercourse with the world.”
I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.
I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever “completing a life” means. Some of my patients in their 90s or 100s say nunc dimittis — “I have had a full life, and now I am ready to go.” For some of them, this means going to heaven — it is always heaven rather than hell, though Samuel Johnson and James Boswell both quaked at the thought of going to hell and got furious with David Hume, who entertained no such beliefs. I have no belief in (or desire for) any post-mortem existence, other than in the memories of friends and the hope that some of my books may still “speak” to people after my death.
H. Auden often told me he thought he would live to 80 and then “bugger off” (he lived only to 67). Though it is 40 years since his death, I often dream of him, and of my parents and of former patients — all long gone but loved and important in my life.
At 80, the specter of dementia or stroke looms. A third of one’s contemporaries are dead, and many more, with profound mental or physical damage, are trapped in a tragic and minimal existence. At 80 the marks of decay are all too visible. One’s reactions are a little slower, names more frequently elude one, and one’s energies must be husbanded, but even so, one may often feel full of energy and life and not at all “old.” Perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work, the two most important things, Freud insisted, in life.
When my time comes, I hope I can die in harness, as Francis Crick did. When he was told that his colon cancer had returned, at first he said nothing; he simply looked into the distance for a minute and then resumed his previous train of thought. When pressed about his diagnosis a few weeks later, he said, “Whatever has a beginning must have an ending.” When he died, at 88, he was still fully engaged in his most creative work.
My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together. I am looking forward to being 80.
Oliver Sacks was a professor of neurology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine and the author, most recently, of Hallucinations.
While Stephen Zimmer is unnerved by his own frightful symptoms of possible illness, he shares at the same time an ongoing grief over his younger brother’s untimely and eventually mortal condition.
The Blue Mosque at once dominating and enchanting is the view from our Istanbul hotel window and the last thing I see before I lay down and try to sleep. But I am preoccupied by an irregular growth the size of a furry caterpillar in the center of my chest; a slowly growing rough edged slightly raised area of gray skin, which I noticed last week. Frightened into action I phoned the first five dermatologists on the insurance company list, but no one could see me. This thing had been there for years but smaller, innocuous. Now it is aching and the ache goes deep into my chest, the way a melanoma would. Great. We’re traveling. Sans children, sans work worries. We’re actually doing what we always wanted. Now, first night out, I may be dying.
Carole is six inches from me in bed. She’s not asleep either; her breathing still slightly uneven, but I say nothing. She’s the worrier and I’d like to keep it that way. Lung disease, heart attacks, brain tumors, she wakes with a list. Not only illnesses, her worries cast a wide net: what’s wrong, what might go wrong, what needs to be fixed, what we’ve run out of, that sort of thing. And she is anxious to fill me in as if my knowing brings her a modicum of relief. I guess there’s a compliment in there somewhere. When I’m feeling particularly good humored the first thing I say when I walk in the door is not “hi,“ or “I’m home,” its: “Honey, what’s wrong.” She starts right in, as if that’s the way everyone says hello: “We need to get that chair put down into the basement. It doesn’t fit anywhere.” Love the “we.”
So I keep my cancer to myself. I don’t want to be The Whiner; The Hypochondriac; The Big Baby. If I don’t say it maybe it’s not real, or not yet real. Once you know, the clock starts ticking. That’s not quite right. In fact, my ticking started on 5/4/48, but once you think you know, you hear the ticking. Not that hearing the ticking itself is the thing. That happens fairly often these days. Some one you know dies and there’s the ticking. But it’s temporary. Like when you land on jail in Monopoly but are “just visiting.” When you get the Diagnosis, you transfer from visitor to inmate. You hear the ticking, it doesn’t disappear, and your normal life is over. Death sentence.
Listen to me: Just visiting,/not just visiting. When I was 26 I thought when you’re old, you can take it easy. But these waking nightmares never happened when I was twenty-six or even fifty-six. I’ve got to get some sleep.
Sleep will not come. There is a thing on my chest. It is not temporary and will not be going anywhere without the aid of a surgeons scalpel. It’s raised, rough, has irregular borders and is getting bigger. What if it’s been growing for years unnoticed and it’s too late?
Like Joel.
In September 2008 my little brother emailed me this: “Yo bro-I just went to see an oncologist about a swollen lymph node. He didn’t like the way it felt and I’m going for an MRI tonight to see if I have head and neck cancer. Oy Veh, Jobo.”
It was already too late for him. Four years later the ordeal that had replaced his normal life was finally over. Perhaps this terror of mine is Joel inspired.
I think about him nearly every day. Either I remember something I associate with him, like eating crab after blue crab and making an incredible mess, or me cringing while he practiced the West Coast Swing standing in the foyer of his house waiting to go out to dinner; or else I think about what he’s missing, like going sailing, or Thanksgiving this year. Two years ago he was there at the table rhapsodizing over our mother’s brisket but not all there. He knew he was leaving the party so in a way he’d already left and you could tell by the terrible sadness in his eyes.
Giving up on sleep I stand in front of the open window and let the cool air envelop me. It’s still there, the Blue Mosque, in all its glory, glowing purple, bathed in the barely visible light of the rising sun. It will still be there when I’m long gone.
If this is it, if my normal life is over maybe I should get that Corvette I’ve yearned for ever since my teacher Mr. “D” showed up at my elementary school parking lot with a new ’61 ‘Vette. It was probably the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and cemented his reputation as the coolest cat around. So what if I need a second garage space? The idea of retirement savings suddenly sounds like the punch line of a bad joke. Midnight black. Red’s safer, easier to see, but safety has lost its relevance. Black is badass. Drive that beauty across the U.S.A. and go down guns blazing.
But if I’m dying, what’s the point of living out one more fantasy? What is the point of dying with a Corvette in the garage? Will my last days be any happier? No, my last days will suck because I’ll never want to leave the party.
A piercing wail blasts through the dark interrupting my thoughts. I realize It’s the early morning call to prayer booming from enormous loudspeakers mounted on the six minarets of the Blue Mosque. It would be charming if it weren’t screaming at me. I’m exhausted. When I get home I’m going directly to a doctor but today, assuming I’m not too tired to go anywhere, we’ll take the ferry up the Bosporus all the way to the Black Sea and tonight after dinner we’ll watch the Dervishes whirl. Have fun, stay busy. I could be “just visiting.”
French impressionist Claude Monet — who painted well into his 80s, even after his vision was clouded by cataracts — created some of his most well-known works in the last decades of his life. After a long career as a renowned and financially successful artist, Monet retreated to the beloved gardens of his home in Giverny, 20 miles outside of Paris. His gardens became his artistic obsession.
The passion an artist brings to the work of his later years is no different from the fire that drove him at thirty: a compulsion to express — in form, line and color; in the written word, and in melody. In an excerpt from Lastingness: The Creative Art of Growing Older by Nicholas Delbanco, (2010, Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group US) we are offered sharp insight into Claude Monet’s last and perhaps most lasting work, according to some. See what you think. It’s a little long, but hang in. It’s an absolutely fascinating discussion of the dimensions of vision.
In Monet’s last landscapes we see the final outcome of a lifelong development, during which the subject matter was gradually absorbed by an ever more conspicuous texture, fully realized in his water lilies, his footbridge paintings, and other late works. Essential to our appreciation of these works, however, is the fact that, despite the radical transformation of the subject matter, all the fullness and wealth of experienced reality remains present. The greatest possible range of artistic content reaches from the concreteness of the individual things of nature to the uniformity of the artist’s all-encompassing view.
Born in 1840, Monet died in 1926, and only in the final months, when entirely enfeebled, did he cease painting. One of the six founders of Impressionism as an artistic movement, he had a long embattled history (of exclusion from juried exhibitions, then inclusion in the vanguard and acceptance by collectors). The slow shift in status from outsider to elder statesman describes the arc of a career that’s not so much an arc as a straight upward trajectory. Less and less did he care for commercial success, staying home in Giverny, a village on the River Seine, forty miles northwest of Paris. By preference Monet showed pictures only to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, and a trusted circle of friends; at the last, one has the sense he painted for himself, and himself alone.
As early as April 27, 1907, he wrote Durand-Ruel:
I’m very dissatisfied with myself, but that’s better than producing things that are mediocre. I’m not postponing this show because I want to exhibit as many pictures as possible. On the contrary, I feel I have too few works worthy of being shown to the public. I have five or six at most that merit consideration, and have just, to my great satisfaction, destroyed at least thirty. . . . As time goes by I recognize those pictures that are good and those that should not be kept.
The paintings “that merit consideration” remain; they are objects preserved while a morning cadenza or scrap of rhymed verse disappears. Imagine for a moment what would happen to the record of Impressionism if the work of this artist’s old age had been non-selectively destroyed. A canvas is an artifact that can outlive its maker, and the hundreds of thousands of visitors who now stand rapt in front of his water lilies would have astonished Monet; he labored in a privacy that grew near absolute.
Some of this had to do with his horror of the First World War, the catastrophic conditions abroad. Some had to do with deteriorating health, in particular his rheumatism and the cataracts that afflicted his sight. (As with Edgar Degas, whose eyes failed, or Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose arthritis required he wedge the paintbrush to his fingers, the physical decline of Claude Monet had pictorial ramifications; his outlines grew less definite, his colors more pronounced.) One of the ways an aging artist comes to terms with physical change — as suggested by Casals — is to shift the locus of endeavor, and the painter narrowed focus to the point of near obsession. When young he had painted in all sorts of weather; now he no longer felt compelled to work outside. Increasingly reluctant to leave the house in Giverny, and solvent enough to maintain the establishment (he employed six gardeners), Monet fashioned a sequence of oils exponentially more numerous than the series of bridges or poplars or grain stacks or cathedrals he had already produced. Before, he had traveled to locate his subjects; now canvas after canvas reported on home ground.
In this regard, his “final” period is a function of geography: the farmhouse and its teeming garden in the town of Giverny. Monet afforded to his flowerbeds the kind of close attention he had earlier paid railway stations or rivers in winter or outcroppings of rock — with the important distinction that all these preexisted his attempt to capture any “impression” they made.
The cities of London and Venice, it goes without saying, did not require his pictorial rendition in order to be viewed. In his farmhouse, however, he was both principal witness and maker; the lily pond was his to shape, the garden and Japanese bridges to build. And if his vision now was less than twenty-twenty, what he trained himself to paint had an inward-facing coherence that outstripped mere accuracy; his final efforts prefigure abstraction, making clinical exactness seem beside the point. The aesthetic of “Impressionism” must have helped him here. The notion, for example, of the shifting play of light (as opposed to unaltered illumination) would have enabled the old artist to rely on what he saw while looking — this even when his eyesight had gone dim. As he told the American painter Lilla Cabot, “When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field.”
The pictures of the Nympheas take advantage of the wavering imprecision an oculist might hope to mend, so that vision — in its secondary meaning — may make luminous a blurry scumbled scene.
The poet Lisel Mueller has captured all this brilliantly, in “Monet Refuses the Operation.” As of 1919, the painter was urged (among others, by his friend Georges Clemenceau) to have the cataracts attended to; in 1923 he had operations on his right eye, and glasses improved his eyesight — but only briefly, fitfully, and he had trouble distinguishing color.
Mueller’s poem begins: Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being . . .
I first saw William Holden in Sunset Boulevard when I was twelve years old. One would have thought that, given his golden voice-over throughout the film, he was going to survive the weird noir-ish nightmare he’d stepped into and took advantage of. My first experience with an unreliable narrator.
I encourage you to check out this wonderful retrospective of Holden’s 10 best that was published recently in Vulture.
If he were still alive, April 17 would mark classic Hollywood icon William Holden’s 100th birthday. Holden is one of the best American actors to ever grace the screen, with a long-running career that exists at the axis of several contradictions: golden good looks yet eyes that suggest a cleverly hidden darkness; a body that speaks to both an easy athleticism and a hard-bitten demeanor. The best directors Holden worked with — Billy Wilder, George Cukor, Sam Peckinpah — knew how to tap into his contradictions. It could have gone another way. Holden could have played it simpler, leaning into his matinee-idol good looks. Instead, his best work delves into this undercurrent of darkness and emotional remove. In honor of his 100th birthday, here are Holden’s ten essential performances that showcase the breadth of his work and artistry.
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
This venomously seductive noir was my first introduction to William Holden. And what an introduction. Writer-director Billy Wilder collaborated with Holden four times throughout their respective careers. Wilder understood that Holden works best when the contradiction of his sunny good looks and darkly cynical interior life rises to the surface. Sunset Boulevard is a bitter yet keen-eyed interrogation of Hollywood’s vision of itself, making Holden’s fine-tuned darkness and pessimism such a perfect match, it’s hard to see Wilder’s original choice, Montgomery Clift, in the role. As the failing screenwriter turned reluctant kept man of aging star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), Holden is a revelation. Everything he does afterward sits in conversation with this performance. Holden brings poignancy to moments grand (his death scene, as he staggers to the pool that becomes his deathbed with amazing physicality) and subtle (the twinge of disgust and acknowledgment of opportunity when a salesman suggests he use Norma for all she’s worth) with such dimension, I still find something new to admire in this performance.
Sabrina (1954)
Rugged, open-faced, golden. Holden seems, at first glance at least, like the picture of a 1950s romantic lead. But Holden is at his best playing with some sense of duality — holding onto a secret while planning a seduction, lying with a bright smile to distract — which is why he usually fails in the typical romantic roles. It’s also why he works so well as David Larabee — the charming cad of a powerful family who vies for the affections of his chauffeur’s daughter, Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn) — because this isn’t just any romance. It’s one made by writer-director Billy Wilder (with co-writers Ernest Lehman and Samuel A. Taylor), who knew how to coax the prickly dimensions out of Holden, even in a conventional love story.
Ultimately, what makes Holden’s performance so alluring is a trait necessary for any romance, comedic or otherwise: the heated, sensual looks he gives Hepburn that communicate a world of emotional growth and longing. Holden is luminescent and sly as his playboy ways soften in the face of an unexpected love. Holden’s feelings weren’t completely an act either — he and Hepburn had a brief, passionate affair after meeting on set.
Stalag 17 (1953)
Sergeant J.J. Sefton (Holden), a POW at a German camp, is not who you’d expect to lead a World War II film that blends harrowing drama, sharp character studies, and humor. Sefton shirks any heroic categorization. He’s a proud cynic and loner, willing to trade with his captors to make life a bit more comfortable. He shrugs off any chance to connect with fellow prisoners until he’s suspected of being a spy passing off information to Nazis, which forces him to use his cunning to find the real traitor. Holden, who won a Best Actor Academy Award for this role, clearly relishes playing Sefton. He perfects Sefton’s sullen slouch and quietly sizes up every person, every situation that crosses his path, with uncanny precision.
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
A few years after Stalag 17 William Holden returned to a similar wheelhouse in David Lean’s epic The Bridge on the River Kwai, this time as a commander trapped in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. As Commander Shearer, Holden once again plays an essentially solitary soul touched by cynicism who retains his own specific moral code. Here, his physicality is even more finely tuned, able to communicate a range of states — begrudging admiration, sweat-drenched exhaustion, supreme focus. As Winona Ryder put it to An Other Magazine in praise of his performance: “He took the riskiest parts … He’s the anti-hero in The Bridge on the River Kwai. There is a great scene at the end of that movie, when Alec Guinness is pulling the cord and you see William Holden’s face. I watched it with [Martin] Scorsese and Jay Cox, and we all agreed it’s one of the best moments in cinema, the close-up of William Holden saying ‘kill him.’ The pleading in his eyes is mesmerizing.”
Golden Boy (1939)
Golden Boy — the romance-drama based on a Clifford Odets play — was Holden’s breakthrough a few years into his career. It’s easy to see why. He plays Joe Bonaparte, a promising violinist who yearns to be a boxer, with Barbara Stanwyck acting as his knowing love interest. Holden isn’t completely formed here as an actor or star. His voice is higher, his hair a moppy set of curls, and his physicality carries a level of uncertainty. But there’s a spark of charisma and earnestness that makes him easy to love. Stanwyck fought for Holden’s casting, leading him to later credit her for his success. In a 1978 interview with Roger Ebert, Holden spoke to their friendship: “She went to bat for me in 1938 or I wouldn’t be here today. So once a year I send her flowers, and a note saying I’ll never forget her generosity.”
Fedora (1978)
Wilder’s penultimate film and final collaboration with Holden is often harshly compared to Sunset Boulevard. Both films deal with the nature of stardom and critique Hollywood mores, albeit from very different perspectives. Holden plays Barry “Dutch” Detweiler, a faded Hollywood producer who gets caught up in bringing a mysteriously still-youthful star out of retirement. Fedora is an imperfect film, but the solidity and weight of Holden’s performance brings an intriguing layer to Wilder’s consideration of Hollywood’s obsession with youth. Fedora brings into focus the scope of Holden’s career and one of its most indelible aspects: how you can track the contradictory way American actors of this caliber wrestle with their beauty and aging.
Born Yesterday (1950)
Judy Holliday, playing the brassy, curious trophy girlfriend who wises up, is the crown jewel of this George Cukor comedy. But her work is undoubtedly bolstered by William Holden as journalist Paul Verrall, who is hired by her loudmouth tycoon fiancé to tutor Billie (Holliday) out of her ignorant ways so she can fit better into Washington, D.C. high society. Most actors with Holden’s star power refuse to let a woman take the lead, even when it is demonstrably her story. But Holden knows this is a vehicle for Holliday. He softens and actively listens. He’s the perfect scene partner for the madcap genius radiating from Holliday. It’s subtle but charming work. As Sheila O’Malley writes, “One of the reasons it works so well is because of Holden’s quiet decency, and simple, rather shy charm. He’s perfect. A perfect Henry Higgins to Holliday’s Eliza Doolittle. He does not condescend. Ever. He looks at her and senses her animal intelligence, her curiosity, her desire to learn more, and so he sets about teaching her.”
Picnic (1955)
Picture it. William Holden and Kim Novak, arguably at the height of their beauty, in an overheated, small-town romance in gorgeous Technicolor shot by legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe. Hal Carter (Holden) is a failure several times over — a former football star turned college dropout and Hollywood star turned drifter. What I especially love about Holden’s performance is how he reacts to the gazes of others — those in lascivious awe of his good looks, others who look at him warily due to his status. Sometimes he matches these gazes with a smirk or glare. The standout scene comes over an hour in, as Holden and Novak dance. The way he pauses and drinks her image in is overwhelmingly sensual and seductive. Holden wears his failure like a scar, making sure people don’t get close enough to notice. He carries himself with a practiced machismo, but his woundedness and shame over his failures often bleed through.
The Wild Bunch (1969)
William Holden was not an actor who aged gracefully, which can be blamed on the years of alcoholism that was a factor in his rather depressing death in 1981. By the time he starred in Sam Peckinpah’s brutal, magnificent Western The Wild Bunch as Pike Bishop — the leader of a gang of aging outlaws aware, to various degrees, that their glory days are behind them — he wears his history in the grooves of his face. The film has many pleasures to admire and consider, but it is Holden’s performance that brings me back to it again and again. The deepened crags in his face and coarse voice seem a lifetime away from his sexy visage about a decade earlier, adding an eerie, existential resonance to the film. Holden, unlike many aging stars (Tom Cruise, I’m looking at you) doesn’t fiercely hold onto being the figure in the spotlight. He isn’t the dashing hero refusing to let go of the past. Instead, he looks at his legacy and aging dead on. In doing so he grants his character the immense weight of history and loss.
Network (1976)
Director Sidney Lumet’s Network, a satire of a fictional television network, is a stunning work in which every facet, from Paddy Chayefsky’s script to the stellar acting, work in concert to create a masterpiece. Holden was nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards, but his co-star Peter Finch nabbed the award for his much more hysterical, tragic role. Holden gives the more subtle, layered performance as the news division president Max Schumacher, who is cheating on his wife with Faye Dunaway’s craven, emotionally hollow exec. Holden is able to play everything, from uproariously drunk to knowingly pathetic, in ways that speak to his decades in front of the camera. His best scenes are with Dunaway, in which he’s moves with an awareness that he is no longer the man he once was, with a blend of sadness, regret, and understanding. As critic Sheila O’Malley notes about his performance, it takes courage to consider aging this way and Holden proves throughout his career to be an actor of remarkable courage. In his book, Making Movies, Lumet shares an anecdote that captures Holden’s presence wonderfully:
The most moving example of how much of themselves actors must pour into a character happened on Network. William Holden was a wonderful actor. He was also very experienced. He’d done 60 or 70 movies by the time we worked together, maybe more. I noticed that during the rehearsal of one particular scene with Faye Dunaway, he looked everywhere but directly into her eyes. He looked at her eyebrows, her hair, her lips, but not her eyes. I didn’t say anything. The scene was a confession by his character that he was hopelessly in love with her, that they came from very different worlds, that he was achingly vulnerable to her and therefore needed her help and support.
On the day of shooting we did a take. After the take, I said, “Let’s go again, and Bill, on this take, would you try something for me? Look into her eyes and never break away from them.” He did. Emotion came pouring out of him. It’s one of his best scenes in the movie. Whatever he’d been avoiding could no longer be denied. The rehearsal period had helped me recognize this emotional reticence in him.
Of course, I never asked him what he had been avoiding. The actor has a right to his privacy; I never violate his private sources knowingly.
