Best known for his starring role on M*A*S*H several decades ago, Alda broke out in his seventy-first year on film, stage,
and television, receiving nominations for an Emmy, a Tony, and an Academy Award. While he didn’t win, he proved that he still has the talent that made him the only person ever to win Emmy awards for writing, directing, and acting.
You could add a fourth achievement to Alda’s banner year: his curiously titled memoir which, while not up for any awards, certainly stands out among
celebrity autobiographies as witty and captivating, both thoughtful and thought-provoking.
"Unconventional" is perhaps the kindest word you could use to describe his childhood. His father, Robert, was a singer, actor, and dancer in a travelling burlesque troop, so Alda lived his first years on the road, often above the nightclubs where the troop performed. His mother, a former dancer, showed signs of a mental illness as far back as he could remember. The book's opening line introduces this sad fact rather dispassionately: "My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that." Her growing paranoia and loss of touch with reality, probably due to undiagnosed and untreated schizophrenia, were a continual source of heartache for him.
The family settled down to a more ordinary kind of life when Robert Alda signed a Hollywood contract, but Alan Alda’s continued association with
performers and comedians shaped his dreams and identity. He divided the world up into “us” and “civilians.” The time spent among the “civilians” at boarding school and then at university fueled his desire to perfect his craft and join the ranks of performers as a legitimate equal. The book provides an intriguing look at the actor’s craft, as Alda describes his quest to find his character and achieve spontaneity on stage. He tells about his first moments on the set of M*A*S*H, awaiting his cue in a tent where he felt nothing like the character he was about to portray. He willed himself to just jump into the scene, and, as he walked across the compound, came up with the perfect piece of business to convince both himself and the audience that he was Hawkeye Pierce.
The rather manic edge to his personality comes out in this book. Not content with acting, he went on to write another TV series while both writing and directing episodes of M*A*S*H. He also makes some interesting observations on fame, describing his first bizarre encounter with celebrity, in which a teenage girl came up behind his father, punched him in the back, and swore at him. Growing up in the business, becoming a part of it himself, he still wasn’t prepared for what fame would do to him.
Apart from the chapters remembering M*A*S*H, you’ll find less name-dropping than you might expect in a celebrity memoir. Alda seems to anticipate the reader's wish for a bit of kiss-and-tell, however, and somewhat abruptly lists the famous women he has kissed in his line of work. He follows this up with a sweet tribute to his wife Arlene for the professional attitude she takes towards this element of his work. Of all his achievements, perhaps the most remarkable is his fifty-plus year partnership in marriage.
The book is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive or even very well organized. He leaves out large chunks of time and glosses over some events while recounting others, such as his recent nearly fatal experience in Chile, in fine detail. He is very sparing with his dates, and includes no time-line to sum up his life in a neat little page. But life isn’t neat, he tells us, and the life he presents is not so much the absolute facts of what happened as it is his interpretation of his own history. By times hilarious and heartbreaking, it is an exceptional record of a fascinating life.