When Conan O’Brien walks into a room people immediately get a merry look, and when he spoke at a university commencement this week it was good to see an air of expectation ripple through the crowd.
The flame-haired entertainment icon didn’t disappoint. His message: Be modest. You’ll make mistakes. Don’t be afraid to try. Be ready to “pivot.”
I was seated to the left, with four other nominees for honorary doctorates, the great crowd spilling before us, and I’ll tell you where my thoughts were, far away and far back in Massapequa, Long Island, when I was a child.
Oh those old days in the 1950s, when the houses that became part of the great substantial suburbs of today were brand-new. Their dormers hadn’t been built yet; the lawns hardly had grass; the trees were plants held steady by sticks, a piece of paper attached by wire to the branches: “Apple tree.” “Peach tree.” So people from the city would know what it would become.
As you grow older you’re more able to see the poignancy in your life, and in others’.
We’d moved out from Brooklyn into a little house—two bedrooms downstairs and two in the unfinished attic if you could finish it. We were a family of five, then six, then seven children, nine in that small space, and we had brought the ways of the European immigrant enclaves of Brooklyn and the Bronx with us. I think now that Brooklyn came out to Long Island in hopes it would make us get organized, like an American, like a stakeholder. Many did but some did not, and they lived the great unspoken humiliation of the 1950s, of not making it work, of not being up to it when the prevailing national spirit, the prevailing insistence, was America Works. My parents were in their 20s when most of those babies came, and overwhelmed by circumstances.
I was a most unpromising child, third of seven—poor grades, thought I was a comic, didn’t do my homework, missed a lot of school, preferring to stay home and watch endless repeats of old movies—“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “The Grapes of Wrath.” I read a lot, anything—tabloid newspapers, children’s biographies of the great. I had an active fantasy life and wished to be heroic.
All this culminated at the start of seventh grade when I met with a guidance counselor, who flapped through my record, sized me up—unkempt, ill-dressed—and told me I wouldn’t be on a college track, but that if I aimed high, cleaned up my act, got myself together, I had a chance to become a clerk in an office, a person who files things. This wounded me. I’m sure I made a joke—“I was thinking poet laureate”—but it cut because I had it in my head that somehow a person in a position of authority who knew things might see beyond the mess and mediocrity, spy some promise in me, hearten me. Save me.
Having been tagged a loser I went on, as children do, to make my loserdom official. We moved a lot, sometimes suddenly, winding up with the nine of us in a two-bedroom apartment over a candy store in Rutherford, N.J. My sister Cookie was older by a year and we blew off school together, wandering around and chain-smoking. She did her hair like Cher, loved the Shirelles and the Ronettes, fashioned herself as a hood. (Decades later it was she who called the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy and told me of his power.) I presented in a would-be collegiate style, I think to cheer myself up. I didn’t go to my high school classes, because I stayed up all night reading novels—Fitzgerald, Hemingway—and biographies. I’d sleep all morning, then creep out of the apartment when school was over and run back in banging doors, shouting to nobody, “I’m home!”
College wasn’t in the picture. On graduating high school I went to work in the world, commuting on a bus to Newark to a job as a clerk at the Aetna Insurance Co. on Broad Street. The next year three unhappy friends and I ran away, pooling our money for an old car and driving south until we reached Miami Beach. We got jobs as waitresses at the Lincoln Road Restaurant. It was near the auditorium where Jackie Gleason taped his weekly variety show, and his June Taylor Dancers used to come in for lunch. Once one came in and sat at the counter and we talked a long time about the news and life, and when I cleaned up after she’d gone she’d left a $20 bill under the saucer. Wow. My fellow runaway Kathy, working the same shift, ran over to say, “She almost left $100. She had it in her hand but hesitated!” Kathy thought I might be sad. No. It was one of the greatest moments in my life. I did have promise! A dancer for Jackie Gleason wanted to encourage it!
This and many other things helped activate something inside, some foundationless sense of promise, a belief that I was a writer, that this would somehow become apparent and concrete.
We returned to Jersey, I enrolled at Fairleigh Dickinson University at night and made up the classes I’d failed in high school, and at age 20 I was accepted to attend FDU full time during the day. I was a college student. And eager now, finally, to sit in a class and listen, absorb. I worked hard, did well, edited the school newspaper. In coming decades I went on to work as a writer for a radio station, then a network, then for a great president, now a great newspaper.
I’m saying what you already know: Never count anyone out. Don’t count yourself out. Don’t take the world’s appraisal of you and make it your own. Be aware of its appraisal—maybe the world has reasons for its reservations, maybe you should work on them. But maybe the world isn’t giving more than a cursory look; maybe it’s hardly looking at all. Even if it is, its estimation will likely lack a warmth of imagination. You may have to bring your own.
And after the warmth, the work. Becoming who you are ain’t for sissies.
So back to this Thursday, and I am surrounded by other happy honorees in a bubbling brew of crimson robes and black caps.
Mark Twain said the honorary doctorate he was given by Oxford University in 1907 marked the healing of an old wound. He felt he’d been overlooked for such honors by American colleges.
That isn’t the purpose of such worldly honors, healing wounds, but I suspect it’s often an effect.
And so hello, seventh-grade guidance counselor: I am waving at you from the steps of Harvard University, where they have announced me a doctor of laws. Hello Massapequa, and the apartment over the store in Rutherford, and the Lincoln Road Restaurant and the June Taylor Dancers, one of whom gave me such a lift so long ago.