The woman who was seated next to me at a dinner party on this Island paradise of mine, was one of some accomplishment; a doctor, and one of Miami’s shining lights in her field. She was having trouble grasping my concept that it is just as possible to be compulsive about doing nothing as it is to be obsessive over actually accomplishing something.
Explaining my post-Hollywood
life during the quarter century that had elapsed since my early retirement at
age 58, I articulated how it was that once upon a time all my “wires” were
plugged into a television monitor, but that just before coming into the current
century, I removed them all in order to reinsert each one into a Fisher Island
monitor.
“The secret,” I confided, in
something approaching sotto voce: “no loose wires.”
In other words, once I had
made my decision to move to Florida, I resolved not to dabble in my former
business. The very few times I found myself in any way tempted, it almost
destroyed my formula for success in my newfound world of contentment. Without
exception, I have regretted any flirtation with my erstwhile career.
The Doctor stared at me.
Besides being a scientist heavily vested in the system, she was born and
brought up in a Korean household… a culture that has, along with most of Asia,
taught its children well how to work and achieve in the American way. Dinner
now being over, so was our evening; the good doctor had to be up early for
surgery.
Not me. I enjoy my rest, my
recreation, my time to myself, but more and more of late people wonder if I
might experience an ever-growing sense of a loss of identity…or, more to the
point… a loss of self-esteem and/or self-purpose as the years go by and the
successes of the past grow ever more distant.
I recall that very “grown up”
movie my parents took me to where the leading man (I think it was Fredric
March) had left his wife in the East for an illicit romantic idle at some
exotic locale on the coast of central California. Now, unhappy with the aimless
life he had so recently sought, Mr. March complained to his mistress, “… it’s
always Indian Summer here…”
I didn’t get his problem at
the age of six and, frankly, I still don’t. I do appreciate that, on many
levels, that this is “it” for me…that with no more mountains to climb, no more
wars to win, I long ago abandoned that thing that traditionally drives men on
and that
being me is not what it used
to be. And if I can’t be who I have always been, then what?
I find that I am becoming… if
not boring, then certainly potentially less relevant and, coincidently (?),
ever more reclusive. My mind leaps to the bull elephant “thing.” The
preparation to go off from the herd to find that final place of rest.
The ROMEOs (Retired Old Men
Eating Out), with whom I meet every Friday, occasionally touch on this, but
unlike me, most of them seem more interested in living forever than figuring
out where that final exit ramp might take them.
My life is good, albeit inordinately
long, and that is cause for some amount of worry. Not only because of the
possibility of too much life at the end of the money, but possibly because the
longer I am on the planet, the farther I am from those days that for most of my
life defined who I was because of what I had done. It was not always thus.
Years before I had told P.K. Knelman, my one-time fabulous assistant, that I
did not want to be defined by my work.
“I hate to tell you this,”
came Ms. Knelman’s retort, “but Mother Theresa is defined by her work. It is
not necessarily a bad thing.”
Those were the days when Cagney
& Lacey, my signature hit, was mentioned in nearly everything written that
defined quality television, when Gloria Steinem paraded me through multiple
events in Washington D.C. as the darling of the women’s movement, and when (at
Hollywood’s Genie Awards) following Norman Lear’s introduction as “King” Lear,
I was introduced as the industry’s “heir apparent.” Those were the days of another
century.
Since then, there has been an
explosion of brilliant television: The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Game of
Thrones, The West Wing, Homeland, Justified, The Americans… and we are
barely a quarter of the way into the 21st century. Variety no
longer finds it necessary to mention my show in its top 100 list of the best of
the all-time shows on television. For twenty years or so I never cared all that
much, but I find that now, that I no longer have the tools with which to fight
back, it stings.
Several years back, grazing
through the plethora of shows on my bedroom television screen, I finally settled
on a documentary about the life of famed film producer, David O. Selznick. A
good place for me to halt my graze.
“He’s a producer, I’m a
producer... could be interesting,” I remember thinking.
Interesting, yes, but Mr.
Selznick and I had little in common outside of that producer’s credit. He was a
driven, unhappy man who literally ruined his life in the failed attempt to
change what he believed would be the headline for his obituary in the New
York Times:
David O. Selznick, Producer of
“Gone With The Wind,” Died Today.
Selznick was a young man when
he produced that singular hit and its specter haunted him. With each passing
season, and with each less than spectacular film that followed, it became increasingly
clear that he would never surpass what he had done so many years before with
the result being that Selznick died an unhappy and unfulfilled individual.
I remember turning off my TV
at that final informative moment and thinking, “that’s interesting. When I die,
the New York Times will write:
Barney Rosenzweig, Producer of
“Cagney & Lacey,” Died Today.
What can I say? That worked
for me.
That was then. Now, although
the headline still does “work” for me, I am none too sure that is what will be
written… or if the Times will even deign to have an obituary of any kind
for this one-time/too long-ago TV heavyweight of the 1980s.
Staying too long at the fair
used to be something that applied to my fellow show runners who hung around
past their prime in the world of show business. Now I see it as a flaw in a
world of longevity run amok with octogenarians running for President and more.
Once again I find myself at
odds with the politics of the now. Who gives a damn about the “Right to Life,”
I shout at my television screen as I realize I am far more interested in its
opposite. I think of how well I feel, how good I look at 86 and a half years of
age, and I resolve to check that portrait of me in the storage room.
Like Selznick’s famous
heroine, maybe tomorrow.
Barney Rosenzweig
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