As you get older, you can start to feel like you’ll never achieve your dream or receive recognition for your contributions to a field, or that your best work is behind you.
Mo Rocca has compiled stories that demonstrate that you shouldn’t give up hope, and that no matter your age, the best may yet be to come.
Mo is a humorist, journalist, and the co-author of Roctogenarians: Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs. Today on the show, Mo shares the stories and lessons of entrepreneurs, artists, actors, and more who achieved greatness or adulation in their twilight years or had a new spurt of creativity when they thought the well had run dry, including KFC founder Colonel Sanders, the artist Matisse, a couple of guys who didn’t receive their first war wounds until they were old enough to qualify for the senior citizen discount at Denny’s, and even a virile 90-year-old tortoise.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM Podcast #849: Live Life in Crescendo
- Samuel Whittemore
- John L. Burns
- Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater
- Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum
- Henri Matisse’s The Swimming Pool
- Documentary about Tyrus Wong
- Mr. Pickles the Tortoise
Connect With Mo Rocca
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. As you get older, you can start to feel like you’ll never achieve your dream or receive recognition for your contributions to a field or that your best work is behind you. Mo Rocca has compiled stories that demonstrate that you shouldn’t give up hope and that no matter your age, the best may yet be to come. Mo is a humorist, journalist, and the co-author of Roctogenarians, late in life debuts, comebacks, and triumphs. Today in the show, Mo shares the stories and lessons of entrepreneurs, artists, actors, and more who achieved greatness or adulation in their twilight years or had a new spurt of creativity when they thought the well had run dry, including KFC founder, Colonel Sanders, the artist Matisse, a couple of guys who didn’t receive their first war wounds until they were old enough to qualify for the senior citizen discount at Denny’s, and even a virile 90-year-old tortoise. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/lateinlife. All right, Mo Rocca, welcome to the show.
Mo Rocca: Thank you for having me, Brett.
Brett McKay: So you got a new book out called Roctogenarians, Late in Life Debuts, comebacks, and Triumphs. So you’re talking about people who in their elder years did some really cool stuff. And you talk about in the beginning of the book that you had an interview with Chance the Rapper that kickstarted the idea for this book. So how did Chance the Rapper get you thinking about old people who are doing cool things in the winter of their lives?
Mo Rocca: Well I think that there’s a meaning behind any joke you tell, whether it’s a traditional joke or even a jokey question. And I’m a panelist on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, which is NPR’s news comedy quiz show. I’ve been on it for a long time. And back in 2015, Chance the Rapper came on as a guest. And it was a really big crowd that turned out in Millennium Park in Chicago. And those of us on the show were kind of quizzing him on how you write a rap. And I thought, oh, here’s a hokey question I can ask him that’ll be an easy laugh. And I said, because at the time I was 46, I said, I’m 46. Is it too late for me to become a rapper? And it got a laugh, kind of an easy joke. But he looked at me dead on seriously. And without skipping a beat, he just said, I don’t know, some people might say it’s too soon for you to become a rapper. And people laughed and the conversation moved on. But I was kind of thunderstruck because I realized in that moment that I’d fallen into the trap of thinking of myself as kind of over the hill at 46.
And now I’m not suggesting that I’m going to become a rap star. But I think what he said to me had a lot of truth in it, which is that as you get older, you’re only gonna become more likely to have something meaningful to say, something to express creatively. And I’d fallen into that trap of thinking of life as kind of a series of sort of doors closing, of exits being shut off and of diminishing opportunities. And again, I was 46 and it’s kind of nuts. So my eyes were opened. And I was also kind of embarrassed that even though it was just a jokey question, that it came from a place of me thinking of myself as maybe past my prime.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think a lot of us put those limitations on us because we have this idea in the culture that, okay, if you’re gonna be a great artist, you got to do it when you’re in your 20s. Or if you’re gonna start up a startup, you got to do it in your 20s or 30s. But you highlight a lot of great people who did some really amazing things in the second half of their life. So besides being on a panel for Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, you’re also a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. So you get the opportunity to interview and spend time with people from all walks of life. And in your book, you talk about how you really, like you enjoy speaking to all these people, but you really enjoy speaking to the older ones. Why is that? What do you like about elderly people?
Mo Rocca: I think there are a few things at play. I think that older people tend to have better stories for one thing maybe simply because they’ve lived longer. But there’s also something that happens where people who are older generally are more comfortable in their skin. And I find that when I interview them, I have to go to them. They’re not playing up to me. So even if we’re talking about a movie that maybe they’ve been in, they’re not really overly eager to sell it to me. And that makes the conversation more interesting. I think they realize if you’re 80 and you’re in a movie, okay it’s cool, but it’s not high stakes. So they’re just kind of where they are and I had to come to them. I did this cooking series for about four years called My Grandmother’s Ravioli, where I went around the country learning to cook from grandmothers and grandfathers in their kitchen. And what I learned through doing that is that the older you get in general, the less you care about what other people think of you, which I think is where we all wanna be. And so it’s not a coincidence that my co-author John Greenberg and I could fill this book with stories of people accomplishing great things late in life, because I think as you get older, you’re more unfettered.
You’re more just willing to go for it. In my experience, I think younger people tend to crowdsource not only their decisions, but kind of who they are and their personalities. I know I did it. You try on different personalities. You’re figuring out who you are. But I think a lot of the qualities we ascribe to younger people about, oh, he really goes it alone or she really does it her way. They’re really more applicable to older people.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. And I’ve noticed as well when I interact with older people, they lack self-consciousness, but in a good way. My grandfather passed away a couple years ago. He’s 100. And we were at the funeral and we were looking at photos of him from his life. And I was talking to my cousin. And I said Grandpa, he just didn’t seem like he was thinking too much about himself all that often. And he’s not the kind of guy that would need to download the Headspace app and meditate and figure out. It wasn’t like he wasn’t that he was shallow or anything and that he wasn’t curious, but he just wasn’t thinking about himself. And I find that incredibly refreshing in a culture where everyone’s just constantly thinking about themselves and where they stack up compared to everyone else.
Mo Rocca: God you know it’s so funny. I’m trying to think this is gonna be a little sloppy because I haven’t worked it out. But it’s almost like the camera is just shooting out, right? They’re not looking at the reversal shot. They’re not looking at the monitor, which would show you what the camera from the other side is looking at. They’re just outward facing. And I think it’s just easier to do, to just act, just like do stuff when you’re not hung up on how you look doing it.
Brett McKay: I agree. So let’s talk about some of these Rocktogenerians you highlight in the book. And you start off with one of the most famous Rocktogenerians of all time, Colonel Sanders of KFC fame. This guy is a global brand icon, but he didn’t start out that way. So what is the Colonel’s story? What was his life like before he became the colonel?
Mo Rocca: Well, it may be a surprise to some people. He was a real person, Harland David Sanders. He was from Kentucky. He grew up very, very poor, had a seventh grade education from early on, was working to help support his family as a young man. At one point, he was a midwife. He did whatever he could. By the time he was in his middle age, he had a shell gas station/chicken and biscuits joint in the small town of Corbin, Kentucky. He was doing fine. He was getting by. But then in the 1950s, a highway cut through Kentucky. It bypassed his restaurant, kind of like what happens to the Bates Motel in the movie Psycho. This has a much happier ending. And the bottom fell out of his business. He had to sell it at a loss at auction. He was 66. He was living off of Social Security, $105 a month. He could have subsisted. He could have just continued on and probably survived in some way. Instead, he got in his car with two pressure cookers, a bucket of his secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices. And he drove from town to town to town, from restaurant to restaurant, cooking for people, hoping to hook them on his chicken.
And within eight years, he was the face of a Kentucky fried empire, over 800 outlets worldwide. And what I like about the story is it’s so forward moving. I mean, even him getting in that car, I mean, that’s the perfect Oscar montage, right? Like if it’s you did the Colonel Sanders biopic, but he just does what he has to. And he just gets in the car and he drives. And I think there’s something so significant about that. So this wasn’t, and there are in the book, this wasn’t an artist sort of pursuing something creative, which is wonderful. This was somebody who had to survive and just did what he had to do. And there’s something so bold about that. And it’s funny ’cause the story has been told a lot through the years in various ways, but it never gets old.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it doesn’t. And like you said, the way he built his business, he just drove around from town to town, trying to sell franchises with his recipe and it became a success. And eventually what happened is he’s able to sell the whole company for $2 million in 1964, which is about, I think it was about $20 million in today’s money, accounting for inflation. So that’s a lot of money. And then after his success, he lived a pretty modest life. Like he just did this stuff to make a living. It wasn’t anything more than that.
Mo Rocca: Yeah, it wasn’t like some big dream or something. This is this thing he had, this recipe, and he had to survive and he did live modestly. And he actually didn’t eat much chicken. He had a diet that he hoped would take him to 100. He made it to 86, but it involved eating sardines each morning. And I do think about that when I’m going food shopping and I look at the sardines now, I think of Harland David Sanders. But he testified in front of Congress about aged people and said a man will rust out sooner than he’ll wear out.
Brett McKay: So you also highlight some men who came out of retirement to fight in wars. And the first guy you talk about is Samuel Whittemore. This guy’s story is incredible. Tell us about Samuel Whittemore.
Mo Rocca: Well, this, I mean, I love these stories because I didn’t know them before. And when we dug into this, I said I wanted to include soldiers because what could be more counterintuitive for an older person to do? And so Samuel Whittemore, before we were the United States, he had served the crown in America as a royal dragoon, which just sounds really cool. He’d been in the French and Indian wars. But the Stamp Act of 1765 really converted him to a revolutionary. He was very fervently pro-independence by the time the American Revolution started with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April of 1775. And on the very first day of battle, when Samuel Whittemore was already 78, he was there on the front lines. He picked off between one and three redcoats before he was shot in the face and had one of his cheeks blown off and then was stabbed in the head by a redcoat and left for dead.
He survived against all the odds and he lived another 18 years. So this guy, I mean, we put in the book that, I mean, Clint Eastwood, who was 78 when he was in Gran Torino, this would be the perfect biopic for him. It’s just an amazing story. And of course, Samuel Whittemore’s family did not want him doing this, but he felt so ardently pro-independence, he just couldn’t help himself. And he became a legend, understandably. I mean, really, half his face blown off and stabbed in the head and keeps going.
Brett McKay: That’s great. And you had the chance to talk to General Wesley Clark and you asked him about this guy. It’s like, why would he come out of retirement? He’s 78 years old. He’d just be sitting on the porch in his rocking chair. And his answer he gave you, it surprised you.
Mo Rocca: Yeah. Well, General Wesley Clark was unfamiliar with this story and with another story we tell, which is about John L. Burns, a 70-year-old veteran of Gettysburg who was, almost kind of spooky music here, born the year that Samuel Whittemore died as if passing the baton, or I guess in this case, the rifle. And John L. Burns became the only civilian known to have fought at Gettysburg and certainly is the only civilian with a monument to him at Gettysburg. And both those stories were unfamiliar to General Clark. And he said he could understand because when he, as a young man, had been injured in Vietnam, when he woke up the next morning and he looked around at other wounded soldiers, he immediately felt a sense of fraternity. He felt like that that was the initiation into this lifelong fraternity and service. And so everything changed with that injury for him. And he believes that the fighting spirit really intensifies with age.
The fervor only grows stronger. And that part, I mean, I was fascinated by it. And I suppose, yeah, I was surprised by it. And I was also, I have to brag here, happy that I could tell him these stories, which he was unfamiliar with.
Brett McKay: And yeah, that Burns guy, he was interesting. So he’s a civilian and the war was basically in his front yard at Gettysburg. And he’s like, well, I’m gonna go there, take my musket. They gave him a rifle and he saw action. When he became famous and he kind of, he didn’t handle fame very well. I think he kind of let it get to his head.
Mo Rocca: Yeah. I think he was apparently kind of blustery. I mean, one of the funny things, by the way, let’s just, I had to add is that he had fought as a very young man in the battle of, in the war of 1812. But by the time the Mexican-American war came along and he tried to enlist in 1846, he was already too old. So cut to 1863 and he’s really too old as far as the military goes. And he takes this kind of sinecure of a job as a constable and it happens to be in the town of Gettysburg. So the war wouldn’t let him go to it, but the war came to him in a sense. So, I mean, as luck would have it, he’s in this little town and the biggest conflict of the civil war happens to arrive on his doorstep. And so he grabs his very outdated uniform, his very outdated artillery. His wife is like, don’t do this. And he’s like, sorry, gotta go. And he eventually, it’s, I believe with a, I might have this wrong. It’s a Wisconsin or a Michigan militia. He manages to fight with them and he does indeed kill, I believe, three Confederates. And that night he’s sort of stranded. When the Confederates find him, he manages to convince them that he was just out and about looking for his wife, why he would be wearing that, who knows, but they let him go. And he meets Lincoln when Lincoln comes to Gettysburg later. And yeah, he becomes a real braggart, really blustery. Eventually he comes to dementia and is found wandering the streets of New York city and dies a few years later.
Brett McKay: So what’d you take from these guys?
Mo Rocca: I took, I was inspired by their sense of public service, their duty to country when they were fighting for a world that at best they’d enjoy for a few years. And I find that extremely powerful. People who put their butts on the line and these two guys did really, truly, I mean, put their lives on the line fighting for something that they believed in, which even if they were successful, they would only reap the rewards for a very short time. And that is extremely powerful. I mean, young soldiers, young civil rights activists, those people are heroic, of course, because oftentimes they end up losing what could have been long lives at a very early age. But there’s something in a very particular way that’s very, very profound, I think, about older people who dedicate themselves to public service and in this case, quite literally fighting for their country.
Brett McKay: So as you mentioned earlier, there’s this romantic idea that if you wanna do your best work as an artist, writer, painter, musician, you got to do it when you’re young. I think it comes from the romantic era with Keats and Byron. Like if you don’t get it before you’re 30, you’re hosed, you’re never gonna have a chance. But you highlight several artists who did some of their best work late in life. And I wanna talk about the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, because I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so we’re not too far from the Price Tower, the only skyscraper that Frank Lloyd Wright did. So he experienced early success. He had some early success, but then his career kind of sputtered out. Tell us about that.
Mo Rocca: Well, I mean, Fallingwater, this home that he built for a department store family owners in Western Pennsylvania, not terribly far from Pittsburgh, quite literally on a stream, on a falls, built around the water and the rocks, integrating nature into it, put Frank Lloyd Wright on the cover of Time magazine, which then was a really big deal. So Frank Lloyd Wright was already a great innovator, seen, hailed as a great innovator and master by his middle age. But then the world of architecture moved on and he was seen as yesterday’s news, certainly as the international style came into vogue. And he was in his late 70s when he received the commission from the Guggenheim family for a new museum in New York. He was 84 when he submitted the design for it. And he had the leading artists of the day, those who would be exhibited in that structure, completely in opposition to him because they saw the design, which was actually a design that he resurrected from a Maryland car park, believe it or not, that was gonna be in the, I always mispronounce this, the Catoctin, I think I have it right mountains in Maryland, that hadn’t happened earlier. He had taken this design and he sort of pulled it out and refreshed it for the Guggenheim museum And these artists saw it and said, this is more about the architecture than our art. This is unsuitable for us, these curves.
These curved walls are not ideal for exhibiting our art. So he really was up against it. He had, the leading artists of the age saying, you’re past your prime. What you’re doing is wrong. He persevered. And that museum is as much a part of the environment of New York City and of Central Park. It sits on the edge of it, as Fallingwater is to Western Pennsylvania. So, I mean, I think it takes… Certainly Frank Lloyd Wright had an ego, but it takes a sense of self along with a great talent to push through this idea, Brett, that you’re talking about, that you basically have an era and that’s it. Frank Lloyd Wright was too much of an artist and believed too much of it, in himself to not push through that. And I think it’s that pushing through that I really admire in a lot of these people and people in life in general, who buck up against this idea that your time has passed gracefully bow out. Frank Lloyd Wright was not gonna allow that to happen to himself.
Brett McKay: Yeah. He even wrote a letter to all these artists who are saying, Hey, get out, stop this. He’s like, yeah, just take a hike, I’m gonna do it. You guys don’t know what you’re talking about.
Mo Rocca: Yeah.
Brett McKay: So you gotta harness a little bit of that grumpy old man to get your vision happening. So don’t sell yourself short, even if you’re old. You also talk about… Oh, go ahead.
Mo Rocca: Yeah. If I may interrupt for one sec. I also have to say that it’s funny because the cult of likability is so powerful, and as somebody who works in tv I understand how powerful it is. And in putting this book together, we did think, Frank Lloyd Wright isn’t very likable. So.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Mo Rocca: So we actually debated it, but ultimately the willfulness, the sheer willfulness of Frank Lloyd Wright made the story irresistible.
Brett McKay: Yeah. He knew who he was. Like he was comfortable in his own skin, so maybe he was a bit of a curmudgeon. That’s okay. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You highlight a few writers. One you highlight is Jorge Luis Borges, the Spanish author, who’s famous for his surreal mind bending short stories. But in his sixties, he started to lose his vision. So how did he turn losing his vision into an asset and begin a new phase in his career?
Mo Rocca: Yeah. Well this is in a section of the book called Loss into Gain. And it’s something that a few of the people have in common and latent life achievers, which is that whether by design or by instinct, they turn loss into gain, they look at endings as beginnings. And it’s almost as if obstacles force them to sort of become reborn. And it’s almost like, I don’t know, my mother has a real green thumb. And sometimes they see with this grapefruit tree that I… As a kid I planted and, and she keeps in her apartment still, 45 years later. She said, I’ve gotta cut this branch off so it’ll grow much stronger. And that’s sort of what I think about. But then the plant, will actually become healthier. Borges has had been known for what were called fictionese for short stories. So not the poetry that he became even more famous for later. But as he began losing his sight in the ’50s, it became harder for him to write. And so instead of just giving up altogether, he switched from these short stories to poetry to burs because this, he could compose and he could compose in his head while he was walking around. And so that’s what he did. So it opened up a whole new vein, a whole new avenue for him.
Brett McKay: And Borges talked about how he looked to other famous blind poets. Homer was supposed to be blind, and then Milton, Milton was blind and he did Paradise Lost.
Mo Rocca: Exactly. And then of course, Borges ended up writing about both of them in his own work.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And then another artist who, same sort of thing, he experienced a loss, but he turned into a gain. Matisse, my daughter’s got Matisse things in her, hanging up in her bedroom.
Mo Rocca: You know, I love this because Matisse was already hailed as a great modernist by his middle age. But in his ’70s, cancer robbed him of the ability to paint. He could no longer sit upright, he had to recline in a wheelchair or in a bed, but he was not content to just sort of sit around, receive visitors and sort of play a highlights reel of his greatest hits in his mind or to others. So instead he traded his paintbrush in for a giant pair of scissors and began cutting big shapes out of colored paper. Paper that had been painted. He still had assistance with him and he would have them pin these paper cutouts to the walls of his room. And I’m lucky enough to live in New York where MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, has the swimming pool, one of the great paper cutout works of art remounted there.
And you can see up close lots of little pinholes because he was still very meticulous about where they were positioned. Move it this way, move it that, and move the pens with it. However, the work itself, and I think this is very significant, there’s something childlike about it, not childish, but childlike. The bright colors, the big shapes. And Matisse himself viewed the work as a second life for him and a kind of return to childhood because there was, he said, a lack of complication in the work. It was unburdened by too much thought. And I think a lot of these stories share that with the Matisse story, which is people returning to their childhoods in different ways. Sometimes literally like the writers Frank McCourt and Laura Ingalls Wilder writing about their childhoods sometimes with people going back to their childhood to finish something that they started like the Queen Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Brian May who had been studying astrophysics before he became a guitar… Before he joined Queen, returning at age 60 to complete his PhD in astrophysics. So there’s a lot of this sort of returning to a first love or just even a childlike outlook that is very powerful, I think.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think it’s inspiring too, these guys. They embrace the limitations that come with old age. Like it’s… I think we have a culture where we’re just constantly fighting against old age. Like we’re just doing all the exercising, taking supplements and doing Botox and peptides just to fight off old age. And I get it, I understand why people do it, but there’s something kind of unseemly about it as well at the same time.
Mo Rocca: Well, I think a lot of it ends up making people actually seem older. In a weird way, right?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Mo Rocca: Like I think the people who embrace their age and their aging actually seem more energetic and youthful.
Brett McKay: I think so…
Mo Rocca: And certainly more at peace.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So find out how you can turn your limitations into assets like these guys. You also highlight several people in the book who did amazing work throughout their lives, but they weren’t recognized for it until they reached Elderhood. And one of these guys is Tyrus Wong. I never heard of this guy before until I read your book, but this guy’s an incredible story. What’s Tyrus story?
Mo Rocca: Well, we wanted to include people who didn’t necessarily accomplish great things in late life, but were acknowledged before they died. It’s sort of the reverse Van Gogh, like, you know, van Gogh great artist, dies very young, largely unrecognized in his time. And to me, there’s something very sad about that. You wish that some people that died young and were recognized later could kind of come back from the dead just so that they could be like, wow, people really did actually appreciate what I did. These stories, there are three that are like the opposite of that, including Tyrus Wong who lived until 106, and towards the very end of his life finally received recognition. Tyrus Wong had grown up extremely poor in China, so poor that in his village they had to hang the poultry on ropes from the ceiling so that the rats couldn’t get to them on the dirt floor.
When he was eight years old, his father took him to America. He never saw his mother and sister again. He was for a month on Angel Island where immigrants would come in in California and near Los Angeles was separated from his father for a month, which alone would’ve been traumatic, right? You leave your mother and your sister and you’re just with your father and then you’re separated for a month. The father then got a job as a laborer, but saw talent in his young son and earned the money to send his son Tyrus to the Otis Art Institute in Pasadena. And he quickly excelled there. As a young man. He was actually exhibited at the Art Institute in Chicago, and he made his way to Walt Disney to Buena Vista Studios. And there he worked on the movie Bambi. Disney had already had a big success in feature films with Snow White and the Seven to Dwarfs.
But Bambi had a completely different look. Instead of clear, bright lines, people will remember that it’s much more evocative of the forest and the moisture. And that was due to Tyrus Wong who was doing backgrounds. And Walt Disney himself was so impressed that Tyrus had sort of combined the Impressionists whom he’d studied with the brush work of the Song Dynasty of the Chinese Song Dynasty. So everything was much more impressionistic. There weren’t clear stark lines. It was a completely different look. However, he was never… First of all, he never even met Walt Disney himself. He ended up getting laid off from Disney after a strike by animators, even though he himself had not been striking. And he just went on without ever having received recognition for the look of what became a blockbuster. He ended up then continuing his art at different studios and then making kites by all accounts, he had a very, very happy life with his wife and his two daughters.
In his 80s though, close to 90, suddenly Disney made him a legend and a whole cascade of honors followed, including a documentary. And he died at 106 and he had been working very, very late in life. But his story, and two others in this section of the book have one thing in common, very, very long marriages that they credited with getting them through very rough patches in life. Tyrus Wong was married, I believe, for 58 years. And if you’re gonna continue pursuing something certainly like art and you’re not gonna be really recognized, you are gonna need somebody. I think these stories tell us who is gonna be your champion in life and is gonna help you get through those downturns.
Brett McKay: I imagine too, it helped having another way to, I don’t know, feel good, like another mission in life. If the only thing he had going in his life was his work, didn’t have family, well if your work didn’t work out like you’re hosed, you don’t have another, another thing to fall back on.
Mo Rocca: I think that’s right and I think you can even see it in the photographs of Tyrus Wong. You can see, first of all, when he talks about his wife and how taking care of her as she went into a slow decline and died years before he did, was the most important work of his life. And he means it. And yeah, it’s a beautiful story. And actually one of my colleagues, Tracy Smith, who was a correspondent at Sunday morning, actually interviewed him before he died. And that’s how I learned about the story. And you just, you can just feel the love coming off the guy.
Brett McKay: Another person you highlight that worked tirelessly to build a career but didn’t experience success in recognition till later life was the actress Estelle Getty, better known as Sophia from the Golden Girls. She had dreamed of being an actor from a young age. And she took steps to make that happen, but it didn’t really happen for a long time. Tell us about her career.
Mo Rocca: Well, you can’t do a book like this and not include at least one Golden Girl.
Brett McKay: That’s right.
Mo Rocca: I think the book would’ve been banned or something if they hadn’t. So she was the one, all four were pretty great. But Estelle Getty was such an interesting story and she played, as you pointed, she played the mother Sophia on The Golden Girls, a hilarious character. But the other three Golden Girls had all had big careers from early on. And, I think it’s fair to say they’d really put their career center and good for them. Estelle Getty had actually wanted to act from a very early age. She grew up in the lower East side of New York. Her father, who was working class, would take the family to the Academy of Music when she was just a kid to see vaudeville and early talkies.
She had gone to the Catskills to wait tables and try her hand at standup comedy. She married when she was 23. She had two sons. And raising a family just made it impossible for her to pursue her career full-time, at least at that time. She did take whatever small parts in plays she could get, by the time she was in her 50s, she joked that she was just getting parts as mothers, as Irish mothers, Jewish mothers, Italian mothers. She once said she played everyone’s mother except Attila, the Hun’s mother. And when her kids went off to college in the ’70s, she kind of turned her focus back and said, I’m not done yet. And she was in her 50s by this point and she did something I think that’s really, really pivotal here that characterizes a lot of these latent life achievers.
She went to see a play off Broadway by a then unknown playwright named Harvey Fierstein. And she liked it and she went backstage and she basically forced herself on the playwright. She said to him, I want you to write a part for me. And I think he was so taken aback and charmed that he did it. He wrote apart for her as the mother in what became Torch Song Trilogy, which was a very, very big play on Broadway, very important in the eighties. And that became her Broadway debut. And I think she eventually did it in a touring company in Los Angeles. And that’s how she got noticed. But I think it was that kind of proactivity of saying, Hey, I’m really good. You need to write something for me instead of being sort of coy about it. And so she was 62 when she was cast in the Golden Girls as the mother. She had never been on network television before and she became arguably one of the funniest characters of the last 40 years, 50 years on a sitcom.
Brett McKay: Yeah and I think the lesson there is sometimes you’ve just gotta put it on the line and ask for what you want. ‘Cause it could change the whole course of your life. What happened to Getty’s career after Golden Girls?
Mo Rocca: She did all sorts of movies. I’m not sure how Stop or My Mom Will Shoot you became such a funny joke maybe because the title’s so ridiculous and it’s with her and Sylvester Stallone. But she continued working. She eventually had dementia and, by the end of her run on the Golden Girls, she was having a lot of trouble. Partly it was nerves remembering lines, but she made it work. But I mean, it’s weird to put it this way, but she really deserved it after living the life she had and never giving up on this dream. It really was the ending that she deserved.
Brett McKay: Another actor that you talk about that had late in life success. And when he showed up in the book, it’s like, no, that’s not right. This guy has always been famous. Morgan Freeman. It’s hard to believe that he was a late in life success ’cause You just think Morgan Freeman has always been a big star, but he wasn’t. What was his early career like?
Mo Rocca: Well, I was sort of familiar with Morgan Freeman from having interviewed Rita Moreno back in 2013. And it forced me happily to revisit the Electric Company, a show I loved growing up. I was not a Sesame Street person, I was an electric company person. And Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman had been on it together, but they had had opposite career trajectories. She had already been a star from West Side Story. And she had taken this role on a PBS show because she’d moved to New York with her husband and daughter and thought, all right, I’m in my 40s, which at that time was considered old for actresses. I mean, it’s ridiculous, but she thought this will be a nice job as I raise my daughter. Morgan Freeman was also on the show about the same age, actually, I think. Is he a little bit older? I think they’re about the same age.
And he had been struggling for a long time and he didn’t love being on the electric company. And there was actually some tension between them. They ultimately became very good friends and remained close. But, so their stories were sort of intertwined and doing this book, you know, it was interesting to learn about how Morgan Freeman had come up. He served a stint in the Air Force. He went to LA to become an actor, but he always had integrity. He had quit a job with the San Francisco Opera that included what he felt was a denigrating stereotype of an American Indian. He had walked out of a television commercial audition because there was a part called the Jew actually called the Jew. So he had a real moral backbone from the beginning, even when he was struggling, really struggling.
And he said, there was a great possibility he could have ended up homeless because he was putting everything he could into acting and if it hadn’t succeeded, things would’ve looked really bad. So he really struggled. And on electric company, he was frustrated and Rita Moreno said, look, we didn’t know how much talent this guy had. It was then after that that he made his feature film debut when he was well into his 40s. It was in the Robert Redford movie Brubaker. And then in his early 50s, he had an Oscar nomination for a movie called Street Smart. But then he had a real banner year that included both Glory, which he’s co-staring with Denzel Washington in Driving Miss Daisy, when he was 52, although he was playing a 60-year-old then. But it’s very funny because an interviewer once asked him about the struggle of being an older actor.
And he said, I can’t tell you about the struggle of being an older actor. I can tell you about the struggle of being a younger actor. And I think he… There are actors out there, I think Angela Lansbury was, even though she had been a success early on, but there are actors who grow into their roles, who somehow they’re meant for real success later because, maybe because in the case of Morgan Freeman, that great voice and that gravitas he had, I mean, you can’t play God when you’re in your 20s.
Brett McKay: Right.
Mo Rocca: And no one has played god like Morgan Freeman or sounded like it. Since he turned 60, he’s been in 80 movies. I mean, that is the opposite of what we think of as a Hollywood career.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Like Clint Eastwood had, I mean, he was a big star when he was young, but I’m always amazed that he’s kept on producing and acting even in his 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Mo Rocca: Well, I think Clint Eastwood and actually I’m not bragging here as a college kid, I got to meet Clint Eastwood and my god what star wattage, but Clint Eastwood is amazing because to be this international film star known for Dirty Harry and Spaghetti Westerns and then just say, no, I wanna make movies and I wanna make good movies. And we forget now but there were so many naysayers early on, and Clint Eastwood has made so many different kinds of movies and I mean, talk about somebody who is not concerned with what other people think of him and just does it and has continued to grow. And like we were talking about before, just not respecting this idea, this artificial idea that you have a sort of an arc that you kind of have to observe that you do one thing and then when you’ve peaked, that’s kind of it. And no, I mean, it’s amazing.
Brett McKay: So we gotta talk about Mr. Pickles. Why did Mr. Pickles end up on the octogenarian list.
Mo Rocca: Well, we wanted to… John and I wanted to include personal milestones and because, not to make them all career or even creative or entrepreneurial, or sports, late in life achievement, but personal ones like marriage and parenthood. And Mr. Pickles is a Houston Zoo tortoise, I say is because he’s expected to live for many more years, like most radiated tortoises. And he became a first time father at 90. And, you were impressed by Al Pacino fathering a kid at 83. He was just a kid in comparison with Mr. Pickles. Mr. Pickles has, by the way, the three kids are named Jalapeno, Dale and Gherkin. Lucky he’s gonna live a long time. He could have a lot more kids. He could become the Nick Cannon of tortoises.
Brett McKay: Yeah. He’ll get to meet his grandkids too. So are there any, we’ve talked about some lessons you’ve learned from all these people we’ve talked about, but are there any through lines you found in these stories? Any overarching takeaways that you found while writing this book?
Mo Rocca: Yeah, and I’ve mentioned some of them, but I think the first one will sound, I think really obvious, but these are people who are very much in it. They’re not fixated on the past, that’s for sure. And this is what surprised me. They’re not fretting about the future. I always thought, even as I got into this project, I thought the less time you have on the other side, the more frenetic you’re gonna become about Oh my God, time is… And while there certainly is an urgency to many of these stories, there’s nothing frantic or fretful about them. So they’re neither fixated on the past, nor fretting about their future. They’re very present minded and in it, they’re very in it, which is where I think we all wanna be, which is why we should spend… And this is a note to myself, spend a lot less time on social media. So you can really be in it and not distracted. I think, as I said, these are people who were not overly concerned with what other people would think. And I think another one of these patterns is kind of a return to an early love to unfinished business.
Brett McKay: I love that. Well, Mo, this has been a great conversation. Thanks so much time. It’s been a pleasure.
Mo Rocca: Brett, thank you very much.
Brett McKay: My guest today is Mo Rocca. He’s the co-author of the book, Roctogenarians. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/lateinlife where you can find links to resources. We can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for a newsletter. You have a daily option and a weekly option through both three. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on the podcast or Spotify helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you would think get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay, the Art of Manliness podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
