The Art of Manliness - It's Never Too Late to Achieve Your Dream, Receive Recognition, or Make Your Mark

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.420 As you get older, you can start to feel like you'll never achieve your dream or receive

00:00:15.500 recognition for your contributions to a field or that your best work is behind you.

00:00:20.320 Mo Rocca has compiled stories that demonstrate that you shouldn't give up hope and that no

00:00:24.160 matter your age, the best may yet be to come.

00:00:27.160 Mo is a humorist, journalist, and the co-author of Rock to Generians, Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks,

00:00:33.520 and Triumphs.

00:00:34.720 Today on the show, Mo shares the stories and lessons of entrepreneurs, artists, actors,

00:00:39.180 and more who achieved greatness or adulation in their twilight years or had a new spurt

00:00:43.380 of creativity when they thought the well had run dry, including KFC founder Colonel Sanders,

00:00:48.480 the artist Matisse, a couple of guys who didn't receive their first war wounds until they were

00:00:52.660 old enough to qualify for the senior citizen discount at Denny's, and even a virile 90-year-old

00:00:57.440 tortoise.

00:00:58.400 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash lateinlife.

00:01:13.160 All right, Mo Rocca, welcome to the show.

00:01:15.400 Thank you for having me, Brett.

00:01:17.740 So you got a new book out called Rock to Generians, Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks,

00:01:22.640 and Triumphs.

00:01:23.600 So you're talking about people who, in their elder years, did some really cool stuff.

00:01:30.160 And you talk about in the beginning of the book that you had an interview with Chance

00:01:34.380 the Rapper that kick-started the idea for this book.

00:01:37.960 So how did Chance the Rapper get you thinking about old people who are doing cool things in 0.70

00:01:42.860 the winter of their lives?

00:01:44.760 Well, you know, I think that there's a meaning behind any joke you tell, whether it's a traditional

00:01:50.900 joke or even a jokey question.

00:01:53.060 And I'm a panelist on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which is NPR's news comedy quiz show.

00:01:58.600 I've been on it for a long time.

00:01:59.980 And back in 2015, Chance the Rapper came on as a guest.

00:02:04.320 And it was a really big crowd that turned out in Millennium Park in Chicago.

00:02:08.660 And those of us on the show were kind of quizzing him on how you write a rap.

00:02:12.880 And I thought, oh, here's a hokey question I can ask him that'll be an easy laugh.

00:02:18.600 And I said, because at the time I was 46, I said, I'm 46.

00:02:23.020 Is it too late for me to become a rapper?

00:02:26.120 And, you know, it got a laugh, kind of an easy joke.

00:02:29.660 But he looked at me dead on seriously.

00:02:32.920 And without skipping a beat, he just said, I don't know.

00:02:36.460 Some people might say it's too soon for you to become a rapper.

00:02:39.300 And people laughed and the conversation moved on.

00:02:42.840 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.

00:02:52.880 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 going to become more likely to have something meaningful to say, something to express creatively.

00:03:11.900 And I'd fallen into that trap of thinking of life as kind of a series of sort of doors closing, of exits being, you know, shut off and of diminishing opportunities.

00:03:25.740 And again, I was 46 and it's kind of nuts.

00:03:28.700 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.

00:03:39.300 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 going to be a great artist, you got to do it when you're in your 20s.

00:03:47.620 Or if you're going to start up a startup, you got to do it in your 20s or 30s.

00:03:51.520 But you highlight a lot of great people who did some really amazing things in the second half of their life.

00:03:56.640 So besides, you know, being on a panel for Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, you're also a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning.

00:04:03.780 So you get the opportunity to interview and spend time with people from all walks of life.

00:04:08.560 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.

00:04:16.580 Why is that?

00:04:17.280 What do you like about elderly people?

00:04:19.280 You know, I think there are a few things at play.

00:04:21.740 I think that older people tend to have better stories, for one thing, you know, maybe simply because they've lived longer.

00:04:29.540 But there's also something that happens where people who are older generally are more comfortable in their skin.

00:04:38.280 And I find that when I interview them, I have to go to them.

00:04:42.320 They're not playing up to me.

00:04:43.920 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.

00:04:53.120 And that makes the conversation more interesting.

00:04:55.680 You know, I think they realize if you're, you know, 80 and you're in a movie, okay, it's cool, but it's not high stakes.

00:05:01.980 So they're just kind of where they are.

00:05:04.640 And I have to come to them.

00:05:05.960 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.

00:05:16.160 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 want to be.

00:05:25.420 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.

00:05:38.000 You're more just willing to go for it.

00:05:41.100 In my experience, I think younger people tend to crowdsource not only their decisions, but kind of who they are and their personalities.

00:05:49.500 I know I did it.

00:05:50.300 You try on different personalities.

00:05:52.180 You're figuring out who you are.

00:05:54.000 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.

00:06:04.680 Yeah, I've noticed that, too.

00:06:05.420 And I've noticed as well when I interact with older people, they lack self-consciousness, but in a good way.

00:06:12.200 When 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.

00:06:18.920 And I was talking to my cousin, and I said, you know, Grandpa, he just didn't seem like he was thinking too much about himself all that often.

00:06:26.560 And he's not the kind of guy that would need to download the Headspace app and meditate and figure out.

00:06:31.900 But, you know, it wasn't like he wasn't, you know, that he was shallow or anything, that he wasn't curious, but he just wasn't thinking about himself.

00:06:41.780 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.

00:06:49.360 God, you know, it's so funny.

00:06:51.000 I'm trying to think this is going to be a little sloppy because I haven't worked it out, but it's almost like the camera is just shooting out, right?

00:07:00.220 They're not looking at the reversal shot.

00:07:02.040 They're not looking at the monitor, which would show you what the camera from the other side is looking at.

00:07:07.480 They're just outward facing.

00:07:09.760 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.

00:07:18.600 Right. I agree.

00:07:19.720 So let's talk about some of these roctogenarians you highlight in the book.

00:07:22.260 And you start off with one of the most famous roctogenarians of all time, Colonel Sanders of KFC fame.

00:07:29.620 This guy is a global brand icon, but he didn't start out that way.

00:07:34.540 So what is the colonel's story?

00:07:36.420 What was his life like before he became the colonel?

00:07:39.680 Well, it may be a surprise to some people.

00:07:41.380 He was a real person, Harlan David Sanders.

00:07:43.640 He was from Kentucky.

00:07:45.240 He grew up very, very poor, had a seventh grade education.

00:07:48.600 From early on, was working to help support his family.

00:07:52.680 As a young man, at one point, he was a midwife.

00:07:55.140 He did whatever he could.

00:07:56.820 By the time he was in his middle age, he had a Shell gas station slash chicken and biscuits joint in the small town of Corbin, Kentucky.

00:08:07.060 He was doing fine.

00:08:08.460 He was getting by.

00:08:10.080 But then in the 1950s, a highway cut through Kentucky.

00:08:12.980 It bypassed his restaurant, kind of like what happens to the Bates Motel and the movie Psycho.

00:08:18.540 This has a much happier ending.

00:08:20.480 And the bottom fell out of his business.

00:08:22.260 He had to sell it at a loss at auction.

00:08:25.420 He was 66.

00:08:27.160 He was living off of Social Security, $105 a month.

00:08:31.440 He could have subsisted.

00:08:32.660 He could have just continued on and probably, you know, survived in some way.

00:08:38.680 Instead, he got in his car with two pressure cookers, a bucket of his secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices.

00:08:45.680 And he drove from town to town to town, from restaurant to restaurant, cooking for people, hoping to hook them on his chicken.

00:08:54.100 And within eight years, he was the face of a Kentucky Fried Empire, over 800 outlets worldwide.

00:09:01.140 You know, and what I like about the story is it's so forward moving.

00:09:05.260 I mean, even him getting in that car, I mean, that's the perfect Oscar montage, right?

00:09:09.460 Like if it's, you know, you did the Colonel Sanders biopic.

00:09:13.280 But he just does what he has to and he just gets in the car and he drives.

00:09:19.260 And I think there's something so significant about that.

00:09:21.960 So this wasn't, and there are in the book, this wasn't an artist sort of, you know, pursuing something creative, which is wonderful.

00:09:32.600 This was somebody who had to survive and just did what he had to do.

00:09:37.700 And there's something so bold about that.

00:09:40.020 And it's funny because the story has been told, you know, a lot through the years in various ways, but it never gets old.

00:09:47.880 Yeah, it doesn't.

00:09:48.380 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.

00:09:56.080 And it became a success.

00:09:57.320 And eventually what happened is he's able to sell the whole company for $2 million in 1964, which is about $20 million in today's money accounting for inflation.

00:10:07.900 So that's a lot of money.

00:10:09.280 And then after his success, he lived a pretty modest life.

00:10:12.640 Like he just did this stuff to make a living.

00:10:14.920 It wasn't anything more than that.

00:10:16.180 But yeah, it wasn't like some big dream or something.

00:10:20.520 This is this thing he had, this recipe, and he had to survive.

00:10:24.540 And he did live modestly and he actually didn't eat much chicken.

00:10:27.240 He had a diet that he hoped would take him to 100.

00:10:30.720 He made it to 86, but it involved eating sardines each morning.

00:10:33.560 And I do think about that when I'm going food shopping and I look at the sardines.

00:10:37.260 Now I think of Harlan David Sanders.

00:10:40.500 But he, you know, he testified in front of Congress about aged people and said, you know, a man will rust out sooner than he'll wear out.

00:10:51.220 So you also highlight some men who came out of retirement to fight in wars.

00:10:55.100 And the first guy you talk about is Samuel Whitmore.

00:10:57.520 This guy's story is incredible.

00:10:59.060 Tell us about Samuel Whitmore.

00:11:00.600 Well, this, I mean, I love these stories because I didn't know them before.

00:11:05.120 And when we dug into this, you know, I said I wanted to include soldiers because what could be more counterintuitive for an older person to do? 0.99

00:11:16.080 And so Samuel Whitmore, before we were the United States, he had served the crown, you know, in America as a royal dragoon, which just sounds really cool.

00:11:27.800 He'd been in the French and Indian Wars.

00:11:29.560 But the Stamp Act of 1765 really converted him to a revolutionary.

00:11:35.040 He was very fervently pro-independence by the time the American Revolution started with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April of 1775.

00:11:44.320 And on the very first day of battle, when Samuel Whitmore was already 78, he was there on the front lines.

00:11:52.280 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.

00:12:05.480 He survived against all the odds, and he lived another 18 years.

00:12:10.760 So this guy, I mean, you know, 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.

00:12:21.280 I mean, it's just an amazing, an amazing story.

00:12:24.260 And of course, Samuel Whitmore's family did not want him doing this, but he felt so ardently, you know, pro-independence.

00:12:32.480 He just couldn't help himself, and he became a legend, understandably, you know.

00:12:37.960 I mean, really, half his face blown off and stabbed in the head and keeps going.

00:12:42.040 That's great.

00:12:42.480 And you talked to, you had the chance to talk to General Wesley Clark, and you asked him about this guy.

00:12:46.960 He's like, what was, like, why would he come out of retirement?

00:12:49.140 He's 78 years old.

00:12:50.100 He'd just be sitting on the porch in his rocking chair.

00:12:53.760 And his answer he gave you, it surprised you.

00:12:56.360 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, you know, spooky music here, born the year that Samuel Whittemore died, as if passing the baton, or I guess in this case, the rifle.

00:13:15.560 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.

00:13:22.660 And both those stories were unfamiliar to General Clark, and he said, you know, 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.

00:13:40.360 He felt like that that was the initiation into this lifelong fraternity and service, you know.

00:13:49.920 And so everything changed with that injury for him.

00:13:54.160 And he believes that the fighting spirit really intensifies with age.

00:13:59.020 The fervor only grows stronger.

00:14:00.980 And that part, I mean, I was fascinated by it, and I suppose, yeah, I was surprised by it.

00:14:06.020 And I was also, I had to brag here, happy that I could tell him these stories, which he was unfamiliar with.

00:14:12.200 And yeah, that Burns guy, he was interesting.

00:14:13.520 So he's a civilian, and the war was basically in his front yard at Gettysburg.

00:14:17.540 And he's like, well, I'm going to go there, take my musket.

00:14:19.900 They gave him a rifle, and he saw action.

00:14:22.820 And he became famous, and he kind of, he didn't handle fame very well.

00:14:26.320 I think he kind of let it get to his head.

00:14:28.260 Yeah, I think he was apparently kind of blustery.

00:14:30.360 I mean, one of the funny things, by the way, just I had to add, is that he had fought as a very young man in the battle of, in the war of 1812.

00:14:37.900 But by the time the Mexican-American War came along, and he tried to enlist in 1846, he was already too old.

00:14:44.340 So cut to 1863, and he's really too old, you know, as far as the military goes.

00:14:50.020 And he takes this kind of sinecure of a job as a constable, and it happens to be in the town of Gettysburg.

00:14:58.700 So the war wouldn't let him go to it, but the war came to him, in a sense.

00:15:04.880 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.

00:15:14.860 And so he grabs his very outdated uniform, his very outdated artillery.

00:15:20.440 His wife is like, don't do this. 1.00

00:15:22.980 And he's like, sorry, got to go.

00:15:24.940 And he eventually, it's, I believe, with a, I might have this wrong, it's a Wisconsin or a Michigan militia.

00:15:31.940 He manages to fight with them, and he does indeed kill, I believe, three Confederates.

00:15:38.420 And that night, he's sort of stranded.

00:15:41.280 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.

00:15:48.640 But they let him go, and he meets Lincoln when Lincoln comes to Gettysburg later.

00:15:54.940 And, yeah, he becomes a real braggart, really blustery.

00:15:58.700 Eventually, he succumbs to dementia and is found wandering the streets of New York City and dies a few years later.

00:16:05.720 So what did you take from these guys?

00:16:07.040 You know, 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.

00:16:23.400 And I find that extremely powerful.

00:16:26.060 People who put their butts on the line, and these two guys did, you know, 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.

00:16:44.160 And that is extremely powerful.

00:16:45.760 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.

00:16:57.780 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.

00:17:10.240 So, as we mentioned earlier, there's this romantic idea that if you want to do your best work as an artist, writer, painter, musician, you got to do it when you're young.

00:17:21.980 I think it comes from this, the romantic era with Keats and Byron.

00:17:25.780 Like, if you don't get it before you're 30, like, you're hoes. 1.00

00:17:28.100 You're never going to have a chance.

00:17:28.880 But you highlight several artists who did some of their best work late in life.

00:17:33.020 And I want to talk about the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, because I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

00:17:37.480 We're not too far from the Price Tower, the only skyscraper that Frank Lloyd Wright did.

00:17:42.540 So, he experienced early success.

00:17:44.540 He had some early success, but then his career kind of sputtered out.

00:17:48.620 Tell us about that.

00:17:50.460 Well, I mean, Falling Water, 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.

00:18:06.980 Put Frank Lloyd Wright on the cover of Time magazine, which then was a really big deal.

00:18:13.280 So, Frank Lloyd Wright was already a great innovator, seen, hailed as a great innovator and master by his middle age.

00:18:19.720 But then the world of architecture moved on, and he was seen as yesterday's news, certainly as the international style came into vogue.

00:18:28.680 And he was in his late 70s when he received the commission from the Guggenheim family for a new museum in New York.

00:18:37.840 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.

00:18:57.780 That was going to be in the, I always mispronounce this, the Catocton, I think I have it right, mountains in Maryland that hadn't happened earlier.

00:19:06.260 He had taken this design and he sort of pulled it out and refreshed it for the Guggenheim Museum.

00:19:12.680 And these artists saw it and said, this is more about the architecture than our art.

00:19:17.200 This is unsuitable for us.

00:19:18.460 These curves, you know, these curved walls are not ideal for exhibiting our art.

00:19:23.480 So he really was up against it.

00:19:25.880 He had, you know, the leading artists of the age saying, you're past your prime, what you're doing is wrong.

00:19:33.140 He persevered.

00:19:34.740 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 falling water is to Western Pennsylvania.

00:19:47.060 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.

00:20:04.600 Frank Lloyd Wright was too much of an artist and believed too much in himself to not push through that.

00:20:10.860 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, you know, buck up against this idea that your time has passed, gracefully bow out.

00:20:25.300 Frank Lloyd Wright was not going to allow that to happen to himself.

00:20:29.140 Yeah.

00:20:29.300 He even wrote a letter to all these artists who were saying, hey, get out and stop this.

00:20:33.020 He's like, yeah, just take a hike.

00:20:34.260 I'm going to do it.

00:20:35.000 You guys know what you're talking about.

00:20:36.000 So you got to harness a little bit of that grumpy old man to get what you, get your vision happening.

00:20:41.120 So don't sell yourself short, even if you're old.

00:20:43.400 You also talked about, oh, go ahead.

00:20:44.300 If I may interrupt from what I was saying, I also have to say that it's funny because, you know, the cult of likability is so powerful.

00:20:53.160 And as somebody who works in TV, I understand how powerful it is.

00:20:59.140 And in putting this book together, we did think, you know, Frank Lloyd Wright isn't very likable.

00:21:03.400 So we actually debated it.

00:21:06.740 But ultimately, the willfulness, the sheer willfulness of Frank Lloyd Wright made the story irresistible.

00:21:17.540 Yeah, he knew who he was.

00:21:18.620 Like, he was comfortable in his own skin.

00:21:20.020 So maybe he was a bit of a curmudgeon.

00:21:21.920 That's okay.

00:21:23.500 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:21:30.380 And now back to the show.

00:21:31.880 You highlight a few writers.

00:21:34.040 One you highlight is Jorge Luis Borges, the Spanish author who's famous for his surreal, mind-bending short stories.

00:21:41.400 But in his 60s, he started to lose his vision.

00:21:44.600 So how did he turn losing his vision into an asset and begin a new phase in his career?

00:21:50.040 Yeah.

00:21:50.260 Well, this is in a section of the book called Loss and to Gain.

00:21:53.060 And it's something that a few of the people have in common in late-in-life achievers, which is that whether by design or by instinct, they turn loss into gain.

00:22:04.120 And it's almost as if obstacles force them to sort of become reborn.

00:22:14.840 And it's almost like – I don't know.

00:22:17.700 My mother has a real green thumb. 1.00

00:22:19.560 And sometimes I see with this grapefruit tree that as a kid I planted and she keeps in her apartment still, you know, 45 years later.

00:22:29.300 She said, I've got to cut this branch off so it will grow much stronger.

00:22:32.600 And that's sort of what I think about, but then the plant will actually become healthier.

00:22:37.440 Borges had been known for what were called fictiones, for short stories.

00:22:41.380 So not the poetry that he became even more famous for later.

00:22:45.600 But as he began losing his sight in the 50s, it became harder for him to write.

00:22:51.000 And so instead of just giving up altogether, he switched from these short stories to poetry, to verse.

00:22:57.700 Because this he could compose and he could compose in his head while he was walking around.

00:23:02.040 And so that's what he did.

00:23:03.480 So it opened up a whole new vein, a whole new avenue for him.

00:23:07.920 And Borges talked about how he looked to other famous blind poets.

00:23:11.740 Homer was supposed to be blind.

00:23:13.960 And then Milton.

00:23:15.180 Milton was blind and he did Paradise Lost.

00:23:18.100 Exactly.

00:23:18.820 Exactly.

00:23:19.480 And then, of course, Borges ended up writing about both of them in his own work.

00:23:23.200 Yeah.

00:23:23.520 And then another artist who – same sort of thing.

00:23:25.420 He experienced a loss, but he turned into, again, Matisse.

00:23:27.800 My daughter's got Matisse things in her – hanging up in her bedroom.

00:23:33.220 You know, I love this because Matisse was already hailed as a great modernist by his middle age.

00:23:39.360 But in his 70s, cancer robbed him of the ability to paint.

00:23:43.880 He could no longer sit upright.

00:23:45.280 He had to recline in a wheelchair or in a bed.

00:23:47.480 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.

00:23:59.180 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.

00:24:09.840 He still had assistants with him, and he would have them pin these paper cutouts to the walls of his room.

00:24:19.620 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.

00:24:29.240 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 take the pins – move the pins with it.

00:24:40.760 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.

00:24:53.040 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.

00:25:04.380 It was unburdened by too much thought.

00:25:08.400 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.

00:25:22.120 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.

00:25:38.980 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.

00:25:49.880 Yeah, and I think it's inspiring too, these guys.

00:25:52.000 They embrace the limitations that come with old age.

00:25:54.480 Like it's – I think there's – we have a culture where we're just constantly fighting against old age.

00:25:59.940 Like we're just doing all the exercising, taking supplements and doing Botox and peptides just to fight off old age.

00:26:07.080 And I get it.

00:26:08.040 I understand why people do it.

00:26:09.160 But there's something kind of unseemly about it as well at the same time.

00:26:12.400 Well, I think a lot of it ends up making people actually seem older in a weird way, right?

00:26:18.840 Like I think the people who embrace their age and their aging actually seem more energetic and youthful and certainly more at peace.

00:26:28.400 Yeah, so find out how you can turn your limitations into assets like these guys.

00:26:33.680 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.

00:26:41.520 And one of these guys is Tyrus Wong.

00:26:43.980 I never heard of this guy before until I read your book, but this guy has an incredible story.

00:26:47.280 What's Tyrus' story?

00:26:49.220 Well, we wanted to include people who didn't necessarily accomplish great things in late life but were acknowledged before they died.

00:26:57.720 It's sort of the reverse Van Gogh.

00:27:00.140 Like, you know, Van Gogh, great artist, dies very young, largely unrecognized in his time.

00:27:05.640 And to me, there's something very sad about that.

00:27:07.520 You wish that some people that died young and were recognized later could come back from the dead just so that they could be like, wow, people really did actually appreciate what I did.

00:27:17.420 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.

00:27:27.900 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.

00:27:41.100 When he was eight years old, his father took him to America.

00:27:44.640 He never saw his mother and sister again.

00:27:46.280 He was for a month on Angel Island where immigrants would come in in California near Los Angeles, was separated from his father for a month, which alone would have been traumatic, right?

00:27:57.120 You leave your mother and your sister and you're just with your father and then you're separated for a month.

00:28:00.660 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.

00:28:13.660 And he quickly excelled there.

00:28:15.940 As a young man, he was actually exhibited at the Art Institute in Chicago.

00:28:20.240 And he made his way to Walt Disney, to Buena Vista Studios.

00:28:24.200 And there he worked on the movie Bambi.

00:28:27.080 Disney had already had a big success in feature films with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but Bambi had a completely different look.

00:28:35.180 Instead of clear, bright lines, people will remember that it's much more evocative of the forest and the moisture.

00:28:44.000 And that was due to Tyrus Wong, who was doing backgrounds.

00:28:47.720 And Walt Disney himself was so impressed that Tyrus had sort of combined the Impressionists, whom he'd studied, with the brushwork of the Song Dynasty, of the Chinese Song Dynasty.

00:29:00.020 So everything was much more impressionistic.

00:29:02.940 There weren't clear, stark lines.

00:29:04.740 It was a completely different look.

00:29:06.840 However, he was never – first of all, he never even met Walt Disney himself.

00:29:10.580 He ended up getting laid off from Disney after a strike by animators, even though he himself had not been striking.

00:29:18.200 And he just went on without ever having received recognition for the look of what became a blockbuster.

00:29:24.140 He ended up then continuing his art at different studios and then making kites.

00:29:29.340 By all accounts, he had a very, very happy life with his wife and his two daughters.

00:29:33.840 In his 80s though, close to 90, suddenly Disney made him a legend and a whole cascade of honors followed, including a documentary.

00:29:43.900 And he died at 106.

00:29:45.800 And he had been working very, very late in life.

00:29:49.720 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.

00:30:05.720 Tyrus Wong was married, I believe, for 58 years.

00:30:08.180 And, you know, if you're going to continue pursuing something, certainly like art, and you're not going to be really recognized, you're going to need somebody, I think these stories tell us, who is going to be your champion in life and is going to help you get through those downturns.

00:30:26.080 I imagine, too, it helped having another way to, I don't know, feel good, like another mission in life.

00:30:31.180 If the only thing he had going on in his life was his work, didn't have family, well, if your work didn't work out, like, you're hosed. 0.60

00:30:38.420 You don't have another thing to fall back on.

00:30:41.080 I think that's right.

00:30:42.840 And I think you can even see it in the photographs of Tyrus Wong.

00:30:46.400 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.

00:30:56.720 And he means it.

00:30:58.140 And, yeah, it's a beautiful story.

00:30:59.960 And, actually, one of my colleagues, Tracy Smith, who was a correspondent at Sunday Morning, actually interviewed him before he died.

00:31:07.780 And that's how I learned about the story.

00:31:09.360 And you can just feel the love coming off the guy.

00:31:13.020 Another person you highlight that worked tirelessly to build a career but didn't experience success and recognition to later life was the actress Estelle Getty, better known as Sophia from the Golden Girls.

00:31:25.340 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 her for a long time.

00:31:32.000 Tell us about her career.

00:31:32.800 Well, you know, you can't do a book like this and not include at least one Golden Girl.

00:31:36.740 I think the book would have been banned or something if they hadn't.

00:31:39.600 So she was the one.

00:31:41.300 All four were pretty great.

00:31:43.360 But Estelle Getty was such an interesting story, and she played, as you pointed out, she played the mother Sophia on the Golden Girls, a hilarious character.

00:31:49.260 But the other three Golden Girls had all had big careers from early on, and, you know, I think it's fair to say they had really put their career center, and good for them.

00:32:01.260 Estelle Getty had actually wanted to act from a very early age. 0.98

00:32:04.780 She grew up in the Lower East Side of New York.

00:32:07.360 Her father, who was working class, would take the family to the Academy of Music when she was just a kid to see Baudville and early talkies.

00:32:14.960 And she had gone to the Catskills to wait tables and try her hand at stand-up comedy.

00:32:20.620 She married when she was 23.

00:32:22.500 She had two sons.

00:32:24.420 And raising a family just made it impossible for her to pursue her career full-time, at least at that time.

00:32:31.700 She did take whatever small parts in place she could get.

00:32:36.900 You know, 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.

00:32:44.340 She once said she played everyone's mother except Attila the Hun's mother.

00:32:48.560 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.

00:32:56.060 And she was in her 50s by this point.

00:32:58.560 And she did something, I think, that's really, really pivotal here that characterizes a lot of these late-in-life achievers.

00:33:06.460 She went to see a play off-Broadway by a then-unknown playwright named Harvey Fierstein.

00:33:12.900 And she liked it.

00:33:14.040 And she went backstage.

00:33:15.740 And she basically forced herself on the playwright. 0.93

00:33:18.780 She said to him, I want you to write a part for me.

00:33:21.520 And I think he was so taken aback and charmed that he did it.

00:33:25.780 He wrote a part for her as the mother in what became Torch Song Trilogy, which was a very, very big play on Broadway, very important in the 80s.

00:33:33.600 And that became her Broadway debut.

00:33:36.680 And I think she eventually did it in a touring company in Los Angeles.

00:33:40.360 And that's how she got noticed.

00:33:41.980 But I think it was that kind of proactivity of saying, hey, I'm really good.

00:33:48.140 You need to write something for me instead of being sort of coy about it.

00:33:53.040 And so she was 62 when she was cast in The Golden Girls as the mother.

00:33:58.080 She had never been on network television before.

00:34:00.200 And she became arguably one of the funniest characters of the last 40 years, 50 years on a sitcom.

00:34:06.440 Yeah.

00:34:06.520 And I think the lesson there is sometimes you've just got to put it on the line and ask for what you want because it could change the whole course of your life.

00:34:13.480 What happened to Getty's career after Golden Girls?

00:34:16.940 She did all sorts of movies.

00:34:18.700 You know, I'm not sure how Stop or My Mom Will Shoot You became such a funny joke. 0.62

00:34:24.300 Maybe because the title is so ridiculous and it's with her and Sylvester Stallone. 0.73

00:34:28.380 But she continued working. 0.83

00:34:30.280 She eventually had dementia.

00:34:32.640 And, you know, by the end of her run on The Golden Girls, she was having a lot of trouble.

00:34:36.600 Partly it was nerves remembering lines.

00:34:39.240 But she made it work. 0.96

00:34:40.960 But, I mean, you know, it's weird to put it this way.

00:34:44.060 But she really deserved it.

00:34:46.700 After living the life she had and never giving up on this dream, it really was the ending that she deserved.

00:34:54.780 Another actor that you talk about that had late-in-life success.

00:34:58.220 And when he showed up in the book, I was like, no, that's not right.

00:35:01.140 This guy's always been famous.

00:35:03.800 Morgan Freeman.

00:35:04.840 It's hard to believe that he was a late-in-life success because you just think Morgan Freeman has always been a big star.

00:35:09.720 But he wasn't.

00:35:10.460 What was his early career like?

00:35:11.760 Well, I was sort of familiar with Morgan Freeman from having interviewed Rita Moreno back in 2013.

00:35:18.580 And it forced me, happily, to revisit The Electric Company, a show I loved growing up.

00:35:24.660 I was not a Sesame Street person.

00:35:26.100 I was an electric company person.

00:35:28.140 And Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman had been on it together.

00:35:31.460 But they had had opposite career trajectories.

00:35:34.680 She had already been a star from West Side Story.

00:35:37.200 And she had taken this role on a PBS show.

00:35:39.380 So 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. 0.91

00:35:46.460 I mean, it's ridiculous.

00:35:47.880 But she thought, this will be a nice job as I raise my daughter.

00:35:52.080 Morgan Freeman was also on the show about the same age.

00:35:55.220 Actually, I think – is he a little bit older?

00:35:57.240 I think they're about the same age.

00:35:58.120 And he had been struggling for a long time.

00:36:01.660 And he didn't love being on The Electric Company.

00:36:05.180 And there was actually some tension between them.

00:36:07.200 They ultimately became very good friends and remained close.

00:36:10.520 But so their stories were sort of intertwined.

00:36:12.760 And doing this book, you know, it was interesting to learn about how Morgan Freeman had come up.

00:36:17.860 You know, he served a stint in the Air Force.

00:36:20.380 He went to L.A. to become an actor, but he always had integrity.

00:36:25.300 He had quit a job with the San Francisco Opera that included what he felt was a denigrating stereotype of an American Indian.

00:36:32.700 He had walked out of a television commercial audition because there was a part called The Jew, actually called The Jew.

00:36:38.560 So he had a real moral backbone from the beginning, even when he was struggling, really struggling.

00:36:45.880 And he said, you know, there was a great possibility he could have ended up homeless because, you know, he was putting everything he could into acting.

00:36:52.380 And if it hadn't succeeded, you know, things would have looked really, really bad.

00:36:56.460 So he really struggled.

00:36:58.440 And on Electric Company, he was frustrated.

00:37:01.480 And Rita Moreno said, you know, look, we didn't know how much talent this guy had.

00:37:05.180 It was then after that, that he made his feature film debut when he was well into his 40s.

00:37:13.820 It was in the Robert Redford movie, Brubaker.

00:37:16.600 And then in his early 50s, he had an Oscar nomination for a movie called Street Smart.

00:37:22.900 But then he had a real banner year that included both Glory, which he co-starred in with Denzel Washington, and Driving Miss Daisy when he was 52, although he was playing a 60-year-old then.

00:37:34.560 But it's very funny because an interviewer once asked him about the struggle of being an older actor.

00:37:40.400 And he said, I can't tell you about the struggle of being an older actor.

00:37:43.640 I can tell you about the struggle of being a younger actor.

00:37:46.840 And I think he – there are actors out there.

00:37:50.200 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.

00:38:02.180 Because – maybe because in the case of Morgan Freeman, that great voice and that gravitas he had.

00:38:07.400 I mean, you can't play God when you're in your 20s.

00:38:10.460 And no one has played God like Morgan Freeman or sounded like it.

00:38:14.220 Since he turned 60, he's been in 80 movies.

00:38:17.940 I mean, that is the opposite of what we think of as a Hollywood career.

00:38:21.900 Yeah, Clint Eastwood had – I mean, he was a big star when he was young.

00:38:25.520 But I'm always amazed that he's kept on producing and acting even in his 70s, 80s, and 90s.

00:38:31.200 Well, I think Clint Eastwood – and actually, I'm not bragging here.

00:38:34.300 As a college kid, I got to meet Clint Eastwood.

00:38:37.080 And my God, what star wattage.

00:38:39.120 But Clint Eastwood is amazing because to be this international film star, you know, known for Dirty Harry and Spaghetti Westerns, and then to say, no, I want to make movies and I want to make good movies.

00:38:52.320 And, you know, we forget now, but there were so many naysayers early on.

00:38:57.100 And Clint Eastwood has made so many different kinds of movies.

00:39:00.320 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.

00:39:09.940 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.

00:39:21.600 And then when you've peaked, you know, that's kind of it.

00:39:24.880 And no, I mean, it's amazing.

00:39:27.440 So we got to talk about Mr. Pickles.

00:39:28.780 How did Mr. Pickles end up on the rock-to-genarian list?

00:39:32.360 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, you know, or sports, you know, late in life achievement, but personal ones like, you know, marriage and parenthood.

00:39:49.560 And Mr. Pickles is a Houston Zoo tortoise.

00:39:52.280 I say is because he's expected to live for many more years like most radiated tortoises.

00:39:58.120 And he became a first-time father at 90.

00:40:00.940 And, you know, you were impressed by Al Pacino, you know, fathering a kid at 83.

00:40:05.260 He was just a kid in comparison with Mr. Pickles.

00:40:08.020 Mr. Pickles has, by the way, the three kids are named Jalapeno, Dill, and Gherkin.

00:40:12.580 Look, he's going to live a long time.

00:40:14.100 He could have a lot more kids.

00:40:15.140 He could become the Nick Cannon of tortoises.

00:40:17.000 Yeah, he'll get to meet his grandkids too.

00:40:19.220 So are there any, we've talked about some lessons you've learned from all these people we've talked about,

00:40:24.100 but are there any through lines you found in these stories, any overarching takeaways that you found while writing this book?

00:40:31.080 Yeah.

00:40:31.780 And I've mentioned some of them, but I think the first one will sound, I think, really obvious.

00:40:36.460 But these are people who are very much in it.

00:40:40.120 They're not fixated on the past, that's for sure.

00:40:42.440 And this is what surprised me.

00:40:44.120 They're not fretting about the future.

00:40:46.620 I always thought, even as I got into this project, I thought, the less time you have on the other side,

00:40:52.580 the more frenetic you're going to become about, oh my God, time is, and while there certainly is an urgency to many of these stories,

00:41:01.000 there's nothing frantic or fretful about them.

00:41:04.980 So they're neither fixated on the past nor fretting about the future.

00:41:09.200 They're very present-minded and in it, they're very in it, which is where I think we all want to be,

00:41:15.220 which is why we should spend, and this is a note to myself, spend a lot less time on social media.

00:41:20.440 So you can really be in it and not distracted.

00:41:24.660 I think, as I said, these are people who were not overly concerned with what other people would think.

00:41:31.260 And I think another one of these patterns is kind of a return to an early love, to unfinished business.

00:41:38.020 I love that.

00:41:39.240 Well, Mo, this has been a great conversation.

00:41:41.040 Thanks for your time.

00:41:41.680 It's been a pleasure.

00:41:42.580 Brett, thank you very much.

00:41:44.880 My guest today was Mo Rocca.

00:41:45.980 He's the co-author of the book, Rock to Generians.

00:41:48.280 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:41:50.940 Check out our show notes at awim.is slash lateinlife, where you can find links to resources.

00:41:54.940 We can delve deeper into this topic.

00:41:56.200 We'll see you next week.

00:42:26.200 With a friend or family member, you would think you could get something out of it.

00:42:29.160 As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:42:31.280 And until next time, it's Brett McKay.

00:42:32.960 Remind your channel to listen to the WM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - August 28, 2024

It's Never Too Late to Achieve Your Dream, Receive Recognition, or Make Your Mark

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