The Sheila Variations

The Books: "The Right Words at the Right Time" (Marlo Thomas)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

We're in my "therapeutic section" and the next book is The Right Words at the Right Time, Margo Thomas' latest project.

Margo Thomas would have always had a place in my heart just because of Free to Be You and Me - an enormous part of my childhood. ("There's a land that I see ... where the children are free ..." "Brothers and sisters, sisters and brothers, ain't we everyoooooonne ..." "Bald? You're bald as a pingpong ball, are you bald!!") - but her book Right Words at the Right Time is yet another gem from this extraordinary woman. In her foreward to this book she describes a moment in her life when her father, Danny Thomas, said something to her that changed the course of her life. It was one of those bright "a-ha" moments that sometimes happen, and in thinking about it - Marlo Thomas wondered about other people's stories - when someone says to you "the right words at the right time". Here is an excerpt from her foreward, just so you can see what she's getting at here:

I played the lead in Gigi in a summer stock production at the Laguna Playhouse south of Los Angeles. The excitement of finally being a real actress was painfully short-lived. All the interviews and all the reviews focused on my father. Would I be as good as my father? Was I as gifted, as funny? Would I be as popular? I was devastated.

I loved my father; my problem was Danny Thomas.

"Daddy," I began, "please don't be hurt when I tell you this. I want to change my name. I love you but I don't want to be a Thomas anymore."

I tried not to cry during the long silence. And then he said, "I raised you to be a thoroughbred. When thoroughbreds run they wear blinders to keep their eyes focused straight ahead with no distractions, no other horses. They hear the crowd but they don't listen. They just run their own race. That's what you have to do. Don't listen to anyone comparing you to me or to anyone else. You just run your own race."

The next night as the crowd filed into the theatre, the stage manager knocked on my dressing room door and handed me a white box wtih a red ribbon. I opened it up and inside was a pair of old horse blinders with a little note that read, "Run your own race, Baby."

Run your own race, Baby. He could have said it a dozen other ways: "Be independent"; "Don't be influenced by others." But it wouldn't have been the same. He chose the right words at the right time. The old horse blinders were the right gift. And all through my life, I've been able to cut to the chase by asking myself, "Am I running my race or somebody else's?"

The impact those words had on me made me wonder if others had such words too. What follows on these pages are the stories that changed the lives of more than one hundred remarkable people who responded to my invitation to reach back into their own lives in search of that moment when words made all the difference.

An abbreviated list of the people who answered Margo Thomas' call (in the same way as those who responded to her call to be on the Free to be you and me album):

Muhammad Ali
Billy Crystal
Steven Spielberg
Frank Gehry
Mary Matalin
John Leguizamo
Quincy Jones
Shaquille O'Neal
Al Pacino
Sally Ride
Tom Wolfe ...

They come from all walks of life: they are architects, athletes, politicians, writers, actors, musicians ...

And they all share a story from their lives, where someone (or sometimes it's a book, or a quote they read) comes in and says "the right words at the right time", propelling them to the next level, helping them see the forest for the trees.

Each story is a gem. Shaquille O'Neal's KILLS ME. But there are so many good stories here. It's hard to get through the book without crying. I treasure it, and I pick it up often, just leafing through it - for inspiration.

All royalties from this book go to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, founded by her father, Danny Thomas, in 1962.

Below, is one of the stories in the book. It is the entry written by journalist Vladimir Pozner. I read it, and it feels like my heart is going to burst out of my chest.

EXCERPT FROM The Right Words at the Right Time, put together by Marlo Thomas.

Vladimir Pozner: In 1977, living in the Soviet Union, I found myself at a point where I could no longer endure the psychological pressure of living under confinement, both physical and mental. If the KGB had come to me and made another offer to coax me into their ranks, I don't know how I would have reacted. I am glad to say that final offer never came.

Allow me to set the stage. In 1952, my father moved our family from the United States, via Germany to Moscow. He decided on this path because first of all,m he had been born in Russia and spent the first fourteen years of his life in Petrograd and, second, even though he emigrated with his parents, he grew up a staunch Communist and a Soviet supporter. From the age of eighteen, I grew up in the Soviet system. I received a biology degree from Moscow State University. I worked as a managing editor of Soviet Life, a monthly propaganda magazine circulated in the United States in exchange from Amerika being circulated in the USSR. After nine long years at the magazine, I moved to the Soviet version of Voice of America. Looking back on that time, I can now say that what I really wanted was to be accepted, fully accepted as "nash", a word that can loosely be translated as "one of ours". After having been moved from place to place in my youth, never setting down roots and being accepted as one of the boys, I wanted to merge with the crowd. Despite my loyal service to the Soviet media, I knew I had never officially been admitted.

The clear signal of my outsider status was that I was never allowed to leave the country. In the Soviet Union, every person who traveled abroad had to be vetted by thye KGB, and that agency apparently regarded me in the same category as refuseniks and dissidents -- people I certainly did not admire. I wanted to travel! How I yearned to go to America and look up my school buddies, walk my New York paper route again. How I wanted to enjoy travel -- that supreme expression of my new country's faith and trust in me, a freedom I profoundly believed I deserved, being as I was, one of the most visible and effective proponents of the Soviet Union.

I never saw my KGB file, but I strongly suspect the primary reason I never got a visa was that I refused to cooperate with the KGB. For several years, they hotly courted me. The last time I met with a ghebeshnik, as those agents were called, I flatly told him to go to hell. "You will rue this day," he said to me. "I promise, you will never forget us." And he was right, I haven't.

My desire to travel went unanswered for many years. Imprisoned in my own country, I began to care less about things that had been most important to me, including my family. I began to drink. Strangely enough, by the time I was informed that I was being sent to Hungary as part of a Soviet delegation -- clearly a test run for further travel -- I felt neither joy nor relief. I no longer cared. I had given up, mostly on myself.

So there I was, walking down a street in Budapest, completely disinterested, when something caught my eye. On a movie theatre marquee were the English words: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. JACK NICHOLSON. IN ENGLISH.

I had never heard of Jack Nicholson, let alone the movie. But the idea of watching a film in my native tongue appealed to me, so I bought a ticket.

I came out a changed man.

For those who have never seen the movie, Nicholson plays a somewhat violent man named McMurphy, who is committed to a mental institution. What he enters is in fact a small-scale model of totalitarian society. Some members of this society are indeed insane. Others have problems (who doesn't?) and have been committed either by relatives only too happy to get rid of them, or fearing society and lacking self-confidence, have committed themselves. The institution is expensive, to the administrators try to keep them there. The less the patients believe in themselves, the greater they fear the outside and become dependent on the institution. If they give up, they'll stay until they die.

But McMurphy challenges the patients to rebel. One of his favorite tricks is to m ake bets that they are sure to win, thereby building their confidence. At one point, he bets that he can pick up a massive stone sink bolted to the bathroom floor. Watching the scene, I thought, The guy's nuts. There is no way he's going to pick up that sink. The bets are made. McMurphy bends down, grasps the washstand with both hands and pulls. And pulls. And pulls. The veins in his neck stand out like ropes. As he strains up and back, you feel he is going to bust a gut. You can almost see the blood beating in his temples. You stop breathing. The effort has you on the edge of your seat. You feel you are going to explode -- and then with a whistling, hoarse sigh, he lets go. And the patients start laughing at him and pocketing the cigarettes (money is not allowed) he put up. And at that almost mystical moment in my life, Nicholson looks at them with the most haunted expression I'll ever see and says, "At least I tried."

And I wept.

All the way through the movie, the tears kept coursing down my face, up until the very end, when one of the patients, a huge Indian, rips that sink from the floor, bolts and all, hurls it through the barred windows of the institution and lopes off like some great graceful moose into the freedom of the velvety black night.

Only later, much later, did I realize that those were tears of joy, of recognition that, by the most unexplainable confluence of circumstances, I had been saved. That I would never again be tempted to give up, sell out, betray myself.

That no matter what, I would be able to say I tried.

The Books: "We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse"

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

We're moving on now to what I think of as my "therapeutic" section. The next book is We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse, by James Hillman and Michael Ventura. Given to me by my friend David - it is a fantastic read. Thought-provoking, fun, maddening, obnoxious ... You don't need to agree with everything, but you do need to be willing to think deeply, and ask some basic questions. It's great fun. James Hillman (a highly unconventional psychologist and author) and Michael Ventura (a music columnist) sit around and tape record their conversations about therapy, the self-help-ization of our culture, and life in general. They write long letters to each other, discussing everything from art, to genius, to what is the meaning of "normal", to Freud to Jung ... Hillman, a psychologist, is part of the therapy culture - but he takes a radically different view towards the whole thing and if you've ever read any of his books you will know what I'm talking about. I find his stuff to be extremely exciting.

I love this book, and I was grateful to my friend David for giving it to me. It's the kind of book I would never have bought myself ... but he had been talking about it to me for quite some time, really revved up about it ... and once I started it, I couldn't put it down.

The following is an excerpt from one of Hillman's letters to Ventura. One of the problems that Hillman has with the therapy culture is that it strives to make us all the same, to smooth things out, to get rid of the "mess". His point in the following excerpt is that "normalcy" is highly over-rated. Most people of genius are weirdos. The cult of therapy assumes that if someone is "different", then there are deep-seated issues that need to be worked on, delved into. Hillman can't stand that attitude. He loves people of genius, people who push the boundaries, people who achieve greatness. None of these people could have achieved what they did if the things in them that were different and unconventional had been snuffed out by therapy.

(When Hillman talks about "acorn" - he means possibility. The acorn of adulthood that resides in an infant child. The oak tree is the possibility (the entellechy - love that word) of the acorn.)

EXCERPT FROM We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse, by James Hillman and Michael Ventura.

Do you know how many extraordinary people were runaways, school dropouts, hated school, could not fit in? My source for this data [is] (Goertzel and Goertzel, Cradle of Eminence) ... Cezanne was rejected from the Beaux Arts academy. Grieg at age thirteen was completing his opus one ("Variations on a German Melody") in a school classroom; his teacher shook him to put a stop to it. Proust's teachers thought his compositions disorganized. Zola got a zero in literature at his high school and also failed rhetoric. Eugene O'Neill, Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all had failures in college. Edison says, "I was always at the foot of the class." And Einstein was considered dull by his teachers. As for Picasso, my data says he was taken out of school at age ten because "he stubbornly refused to do anything but paint."

I'm saying, among twenty other things, that we have to take a new look not only at childhood, but at psychopathology too. Did you know that when Lindbergh was a boy he had tremendous nightmares about falling from a high place, and he even tried to meet this fear by jumping from a tree? Did his interior imagination already know that he had to fly over the Atlantic? The Mexican social revolutionary painter Diego Rivera, at the age of six, mounted the pulpit in his local church and gave such a violent anticlerical speech that the priest fled and the congregation was frightened. Salvador Dali was a real weirdo child: he stomped a classmate's violin, kicked his sister's head as if it were a football, and -- get this -- bit into a rotting bat. By adolescence he was considered so strange that he was pelted with stones going to the movies. (All this good stuff from the Goertzels.) Isn't Dali's behavior "surrealism" in acorn? For another sort of kinkiness, take Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. At his school he was overeager, "ready to assume a father-role, to keep his fellow students amused, to be useful to his teachers," though his classmates thought him odd. He was in all the committees, too. Wasn't he already a Boy Scout before there were Boy Scouts?

These exceptional people reveal the thesis of looking at life backwards because exceptional people can't keep from letting it all show. I've picked peculiar behaviors rather than the usual examples of early talent -- Mozart, Yehudi Menuhin, Marie Curie. Since the peculiar genius can appear in the guise of dysfunctional behavior, we have to pay attention and revise our thinking about children and their pathology in terms of the nascent possibilities exemplified in these biographies of eminence.

You see, we need biographies of the Great to understand the rest of us. Psychology starts the wrong way around. It plots statistical norms, and what deviates are deviants. I follow Corbin. I want to start from the top down, because to start the regular way, to extrapolate from the usual to the unusual, doesn't account for the remarkable determining force of the acorn. We cannot grasp Leonardo da Vinci by examining his distorted relationship with his mother, as Freud tried. Thousands of us, millions and millions of us, have had every sort of mother trouble, but there is only one Leonardo. And Leonardo's exceptionality may prove better images, a better, more interesting approach to my mother troubles than understanding mother troubles will help grasp Leonardo.