Pocket Express Interview with Alan Alda

Nominated for 31 Emmys (and winning five), Alan Alda was also nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. For 11 years he played Hawkeye Pierce on the hit TV series M*A*S*H, hosted PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers for another 11 and also starred in the TV series West Wing. Besides that, Alda also writes and directs.

His second book, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (Random House 2007; also available through Random House Audio read by the author and will be released this September in paperback), is a follow up to his autobiography, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. And yes, his eccentric family did have the family dog (who died from eating bad Chinese food when Alda was seven) stuffed and placed in their living room. Alda talked about all of that and more to RED.

You personify normal, but your childhood was anything but. Your mother was diagnosed as schizophrenic and tried to stab your father, actor Robert Alda. And you spent part of your childhood hanging around strippers while your parents performed onstage. You also had polio. How did you become so stable?

When Carl Reiner read my book, he told me I had a right to be a lot crazier than I am. But I credit my wife, Arlene, whom I’ve been married to for 51 years.

What made you decide to write?

When I was recuperating from surgery, I just had the overwhelming obsession to write. And as I’d walk around my apartment in New York, I would scribble down thoughts on little pieces of paper and stick them in my bathrobe pockets. Listening to yourself is hooking into the little modules that are working on things. Listening to these things and getting to the point where you trust yourself brings them to the surface.

You seem to find humor in almost everything, including the emergency operation you had in La Serena, Chile several years ago.

That’s how my mind works. I remember when Dr. Zepeda explained what he was going to do before the operation. He told me that the blood supply to some of my small intestine had been choked off, and it was dying. He was going to go in and take out the bad part and then sew the good parts back together. And I said, oh, you’re going to do an end-to-end anastomosis. He asked me how I knew that and I told I did many of them on M*A*S*H.

Friends and family mean a lot to Alda. He and Arlene have three children and numerous grandchildren. The family frequently vacations together but that doesn’t mean Alda has slowed down his work schedule. He’s in two films this year, Flash of Genius with Greg Kinnear and Dermot Mulroney and Diminished Capacity, and he also has another in post-production, Nothing But the Truth with Kate Beckinsale and David Schwimmer. Alda talks to RED about family time.

So tell us about your annual family vacations.

We’ve been going to St. John Island at Christmas time for the last 30 years. First, it was us and our children and then us and our children and their families and that kept growing and growing and growing, so we have a big bunch of people that go with since we have grandchildren now. We get everybody together, we lug presents down there to open and then we lug them back. It’s a good thing we love presents.

You must really like the island, why did you choose it?

know St. John, which is in the American Virgin Islands, very well. I’ve been all over the Virgin Islands in both a speedboat and a helicopter when I shot the movie The Four Seasons down there. I scouted all around there to find locations for the movie and looked all over the place. We were trying to find the perfect place and I wound up back there because that was the most beautiful I could find. So it just seemed right for all those reasons.

So are you a beach bum when you’re down there?

I don’t go to the Caribbean for the beaches. The sun is too hot and salt makes you sticky. I can do without it. Not liking the beach but loving the Virgin Islands is probably one of the many things that made Peter Jennings (who was a trustee for the British Virgin Islands) and me good friends. What he did for the British Virgin Islands was so terrific. I felt very badly when he died, it happened so fast. I think he thought he would be able to be back on the air but it just didn’t happen. He was very heroic, too. I never saw anybody face death the way he did.

Well, do you do water sports?

I never liked snorkeling much, which did not come in handy when I was hosting PBS’s Scientific America Frontiers, which I did for 11 years. I also don’t like boats and I don’t like the ocean. It’s hard to believe, but I don’t go to the Caribbean to go in the ocean, to go snorkeling or to sit on the beach. Usually I go in the ocean once or twice on our whole trip. The ocean scares me. The thing I don’t like about the ocean is it’s so unpredictable. It’s a big, heavy thing and it’s got a lot of force. I’m not a brave person and yet was constantly in dangerous situations when filming down there, so I must be stupid because I don’t really want to be on a boat and a lot of the filming was on the boat or around the boat. In an emergency, I do fine. I don’t quiver and shake—I just take care of business, but I don’t like the sound of things that could be emergencies on boats or on or near the ocean.

So what do you do in the Caribbean if you don’t go in the ocean and don’t hang out on the beach?

I play tennis a lot and they have great tennis down there. But, because of the heat, you can only play in the morning or late in the afternoon. What I do like about the Caribbean is the weather and the beauty of the islands and the people and the food and the culture. It is all wonderful and amazing. It’s also a great place for our family to be together. It’s a perfect place for our family—all of them—and our presents.

–Interview by Jane Ammeson, RED Editorial Staff
–Photos courtesy of Random House