Liz Smith: All This and Johnny Depp Too

I've never considered a facelift because I earn my living by looking old. ~Liz Smith

There's a Liz Smith who calls herself "the 2000-year-old gossip columnist." She's often a skilled and entertaining writer.

We won't be talking about her. We will, however, be talking about Hollywood.

I've written elsewhere about the foibles of living in Hollywood.

On the one hand, my 50-something self still looks pretty darn good. Or so says my British Hubby (BH), who's eight years younger.

On the other, everyone in this town over age 35 is invisible, so it doesn't matter (except to BH, who's the only one who really counts).

In my official status as a scribe of the Great Unseen, I'd like to pay homage to the other Liz Smith. (Like Buster Merryfield, BH introduced me to this UK treasure. I owe him so much. What was my life before Dr. Who? Black Adder? Red Dwarf? 10/14/10 addendum: As of last weekend -- Mr. Bean!)

Our Liz Smith is a British character actress born Betty Gleadle in 1921. She's one of those faces you've probably seen but never noticed.

ABANDONMENT MULTIPLIED

Smith's mother died in childbirth when she was two. Her baby sister died a few months later. When she was seven, her father walked out on her, promising he'd write. The letter never came.

In her own words, "My father was a bit of a sod really... he just went off with loads of women and then married one who said he had to cut off completely from his prior life and that meant me." Her beloved maternal grandmother, who raised her, died when Smith was 20.

During World War II, Smith served in the Women's Royal Navy. Right after discharge, she married sailor Jack Thomas, whom she met while serving in India. Thomas walked out on her when their children were two and six -- with a good friend.

After my divorce was a terribly bitter time. For about 18 months I walked the streets openly crying, I didn't care. I used to go to jumble sales and spend three old pennies on a whole pile of old china; cups, saucers, plates, anything, and then go home and throw them at the wall. When I look back I think that was healthy.

Smith worked odd jobs, mostly in shops and offices, to support her children. She felt the stigma of single motherhood in the '50s: "As a woman with two kids and the husband gone, nobody wants to know you. Neighbours would cross to the other side of the street in case they had to say good morning."

But when did she know she wanted to be an actor?

As a girl, her grandmother sent her to after-school elocution class so she could make friends. The class often toured village halls, putting on shows. She says, "The warmth and lights and laughter was magic, just magic."

FLOGGING TOYS ONE CHRISTMAS

When her children got older, Smith took acting classes at night and worked summers at Butlins, a family resort chain that also provided entertainment. She could spend all day with her kids, Sarah and Robert, and appear in the evening shows. Her big break came in 1971:

The moment that my life transformed was when I was standing in Hamleys one Christmas, flogging toys, and I got a message from this young director named Mike Leigh. I was nearly 50 at the time, but he wanted a middle-aged woman to do improvisations. I went to an audition and I got the job of the mother in this improvised film – Bleak Moments, his first film – and it changed my life.

Since then, she's worked non-stop and has become the UK's favorite fictional granny. Some shows you may have seen her in (and not even realized):

• The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
• The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
• The Vicar of Dibley (BBC Series)
• A Christmas Carol (with Patrick Stewart)
• Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist
• City of Ember (with Tim Robbins and Bill Murray)
• Charlie and the Chocolate Family (with Johnny Depp -- now do you recognize her? Sleepy Grandma Georgina)

FINALLY A ROCKSTAR

In 2007, Smith published a short story collection entitled Jottings: Flights of Fancy, appeared in a music video by Little Man Tate, and won the "Best Television Comedy Actress" at the British Comedy Awards for her role as the tippling Nana in The Royle Family.

(The Royle Family, a BBC show that ran from 1998 to 2000 with subsequent yearly specials, centered on a telly-obsessed Manchester family. Although it never made it to the States, you can pick up the first few series on Netflix.)

In July 2009, she received an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for services to Drama.

Smith has never forgotten where she came from or what matters. In 2002, she said, "I have four grandchildren, aged from 12 to 27, and next year I'll have had 30 years without working in a shop. Not everyone has a nice slice of life like that."

She retired from acting recently, at age 87, after having a stroke. She's still having trouble walking and reading, but plans to write more short stories.

I can't even imagine what kept her going -- abandoned by her father and her husband, spurned by her neighbors for the awful crime of not having a husband, having to work in toy store during Christmas (that's really paying your dues). I adore her even more because she's no Pollyanna. She admits to very natural feelings of envy for her child co-stars because she didn't have their opportunities.

Yet she kept the spark in her soul alive, the warmth and lights and laughter that was magic, and at 50 carved out a whole new career that lasted almost four decades.

I’m very proud because I had rejection for so many years, and it seemed as though I’d never get anywhere, but I was determined to keep on trying. And I’m thrilled I did get somewhere in the end.

WHAT LATER BLOOMERS CAN LEARN FROM LIZ SMITH

• Like her contemporary, P.D. James, Liz Smith shows you can take care of your people and pursue your dream. They needed to persevere over the long haul to do both, but they kept going.
• Excavate that magic memory. Let it lead you on a new adventure or help keep you going.

SOURCES

It happened to me: actress Liz Smith. Legion Magazine.
Liz Smith: I'm a little off-centred. The Independent: 19 June 2002
Her Royle Highness. The Daily Mail: 28 September 2007
This much I know. The Guardian: 21 October 2007
Liz Smith cruises into her retirement. The Telegraph: 09 July 2009
Liz Smith's Wikipedia entry
Liz Smith's IMDB entry

Movies, Misfortune And The Making Of Roget's Thesaurus

At 14, he went to university and by age 19 he'd earned his medical degree. (You might call him a Georgian-era Doogie Howser.) He went on to teach physiology at the University of London, helped found Manchester Medical School, invented a new type of slide rule, designed a pocket chess board, and arguably invented the first movie camera.

But perhaps his greatest accomplishment was a list.

Maybe you've heard of it?

Roget’s Thesaurus.

I can’t write in my house, I take a hotel room and ask them to take everything off the walls so there’s me, the Bible, Roget’s Thesaurus and some good, dry sherry and I’m at work by 6:30. ~Maya Angelou

The man is not wholly evil – he has a Thesaurus in his cabin. (Captain Hook as described by J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan)

Strictly speaking, Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) doesn't qualify as a late bloomer.

He was a precocious scholar who began his career while in his teens and went on to pursue a challenging medical and scientific career.

At age 55, Roget wrote a paper entitled “Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures.” In it, he described an odd phenomena -- that if a person observes a moving wheel through a series of vertical slits (such as a picket fence), the spokes of the wheel seem to curve. Roget devised a shutter-and-aperture device to study this observation -- a movie camera prototype.

But it was when Roget retired from medicine in 1840 to pursue his true passion -- the classification of words through their synonyms and antonyms -- that he achieved his ultimate accomplishment. Roget published his Thesaurus in 1853, at age 74.

Roget's Thesaurus is so comprehensive and useful, that during the 1960s, '70s and even the '80s, two reference volumes could be found on every student bookshelf in America: Webster's Dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus.

His list was his life's work.

His list -- Roget's Thesaurus -- has helped millions of people across more than a hundred years.

And it may have saved his life.

A MAN BESET BY HEARTBREAK

Although obviously accomplished, Roget experienced overwhelming heartbreak in his life. His father died of tuberculosis when he was four. His mother suffered from paranoia, often accusing the servants of plotting against her. Both Roget’s sister and daughter experienced mental breakdowns. His wife, 16 years his junior, died of cancer at age 38. His favorite uncle and surrogate father slit his own throat, while Roget fought to take the knife from him.

To cope with this litany of tragedy, Roget developed an abhorrence of dirt and disorder and an obsession with lists and counting. He showed the hallmarks of what we today call obsessive-compulsive disorder, not to mention depression. No wonder.

And so, in his biography of Roget (The Man Who Made Lists), Joshua Kendall concludes that the Thesaurus did much more for Roget than for its millions of users across the centuries. The ultimate book of lists became his salvation and "it enabled Roget to live a vibrant life in the face of overwhelming loss, anxiety, and despair."

Twenty-eight editions of the Thesaurus were published during Roget’s lifetime. He died at age 90.

Obsession served him well.

And Roget's "later blooming" has served all of us well, too.

WHAT LATER BLOOMERS CAN LEARN FROM PETER ROGET

• Never discount your passion because it seems too strange or too simple.
  Roget's lists have benefitted millions.
• We each have a personal battle that defines us. Later blooming involves unearthing a creative, individual strategy that increasingly leads us beyond coping into the sublime. Check out Josh Hanagarne, The World’s Strongest Librarian. He will gleefully destroy every stereotype you've harbored about Tourette's Syndrome while bending a grade 5 bolt Ironmind yellow nail. Plus, he loves books.

SOURCES
The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus by Joshua Kendall
New York Times book review of Joshua Kendall’s The Man Who Made Lists by Thomas Mallon
"The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited," Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 1993): 3-12
Download Roget’s Thesaurus for free on the Project Gutenberg Web site

Acknowledgement:  Many thanks to Kelly Diels for providing editing assistance.

How James Michener Derailed My Career

As an archaeology grad student, I decided to reread one of my favorite novels, The Source, to judge its accuracy.

The story takes place in Israel, on a mound (also known as a tel) formed by millennia of habitation. As each artifact comes to light, the story flashes back to its origin. The Source depicts awful excavation standards, even for the 1960s. But the artifacts reveal some incredible human stories.

Of course, you might think. That's what archaeology does.

Not really.

In the early '90s, archaeology still aspired to be a hard science.

The "publish or perish" academic journals preferred articles steeped in the jargon of scientific method. For my masters thesis, I statistically analyzed thousands of flint waste flakes to discover signs of "sickle craft specialization as an indication of increasing social complexity." Not like you see on TV.

I eventually chose storytelling over science, and skipped the Ph.d. program. I blame James Michener (1907-1997), author of The Source.

A CHILDHOOD OUT OF DICKENS

The man who derailed my archaeology career didn’t know where or when he was born, but his best guess was around 1907. He was raised as a Quaker in Doylestown, Pennsylvania by an adoptive mother. They lived in extreme poverty and relocated often.

At Christmas, we rarely had anything. As a boy, I never had a pair of skates, never had a bicycle, never had a little wagon, never had a baseball glove, never had a pair of sneakers. I didn't have anything. And do you know, at about seven or eight, I just decided, "Well, that's the way it is. And I'm not going to beat my brains out about it."

His mother loved literature, however, and often read to Michener from Dickens, Thackeray and Balzac.

Before Michener entered Swathmore College on a full scholarship, he peddled chestnuts, traveled America on a boxcar and did carnival private detective work. During college he was employed as a night watchman.

He graduated Swathmore with honors, and taught English and History for several years. In 1941, he became a textbook editor at Macmillan Publishing.

A QUAKER GOES TO WAR

Later that same year, Japanese military forces attacked Pearl Harbor. Michener waived his Quaker principles and volunteered for service. “I had taught about Hitler, and I had taught about the Japanese war machine, and I knew that this was a battle to the death, so I enlisted.”

The U.S. Navy assigned him to the Solomon Islands as a war historian. Each night, in his Quonset hut, he recorded his impressions of life around him:

Sitting there in the darkness, illuminated only by the flickering lamplight, I visualized the aviation scenes in which I had participated, the landing beaches I'd seen, the remote outposts, the exquisite islands with bending palms, and especially the valiant people I'd known: the French planters, the Australian coast watchers, the Navy nurses, the Tonkinese laborers, the ordinary sailors and soldiers who were doing the work, and the primitive natives to whose jungle fastnesses I had traveled.

HE MADE HIS OWN RULES

Michener anonymously mailed his manuscript to Macmillan in 1947, since they had a strict policy against accepting employee submissions. He planned to return to his job after the war, but decided he was not technically their employee at the time.

Macmillan found him out, but decided to publish Tales of the South Pacific anyway. Michener was 40.

The following year, in 1948, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The book was not a huge financial success, however, until it became the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical, South Pacific.

In 1949, Michener quit Macmillan to write full time.

He penned 40 books over 50 years. Many were epics with evocative settings that spanned several generations. Some required so many years of research that Michener would spend months on location or even move there to finish them -- Hawaii (1959), Iberia (1968), Poland (1983), Texas (1985), Alaska (1988), Mexico (1992).

UNTIL THE VERY END

Even at age 90, he maintained a disciplined writing schedule. He awoke at 7:00 a.m., ate a light breakfast and wrote until 1:00 pm.

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Michener underwent kidney dialysis treatment, which confined him to the environs of his clinic in Austin, Texas. "I sit in the TV room and see shows on the big ships I used to travel or areas that I used to wander, and a tear comes to my eye."

In October 1997, he chose to discontinue dialysis and died shortly thereafter of renal failure.

A close friend said,

"He felt he had accomplished what he wanted to accomplish in terms of his life's work. He did not want to suffer a long series of complications.''

WHAT LATER BLOOMERS CAN LEARN FROM JAMES MICHENER:

• Use your day job to advance your later blooming.
• If you begin at 40, you could have another good 50 years -- over half your life -- to live it.

SOURCES:

• James Michener at Wikipedia
• His New York Times Obituary
• His entry at the Academy of Achievement
• The Grand Times interview

P.D. James: From Bureaucrat to Writing Royalty

Nothing that ever happens to a novelist is ever wasted. ~P.D. James

I have a love-hate affair with crime novels. As a girl, I couldn't get enough of the Nancy Drew stories. By the age of 13, I'd read my way through the adult mystery shelves at my local library.

But as I grew older, they lost their fascination. Good mysteries are truly hard to find. There's nothing worse than a dull whodunnit.

Then, on a whim, I picked up P.D. James' Original Sin on a remainder table. Five hundred pages later, I closed it and thought, "Didn't see that coming." I was hooked.

Original Sin was the ninth in her series about poet-policeman Adam Dalgliesh, commenced in 1962. She wrote it at age 42, while still in civil service and supporting an ill husband. I developed a deep admiration for her.

In 2001, just before Original Sin was published, she said, "I have lived with him [Dalgliesh] for 40 years. And I have now decided he and I will die at the same time. I shan’t kill him off."

Too many books and too little time later, I lost track of P.D. James. I wondered if she and Detective Dalgliesh were still around. (Just where does time go? How do we come to forgot about the small things that delight us, like a suspenseful book?)

I was happy to discover that she's almost 90 and still going strong, and recently gave an interview to the Telegraph UK at a book festival in Devon.

"A WRITER NEEDS AS MUCH TRAUMA AS SHE CAN TAKE"

Phyllis Dorothy James was born in 1920 in Oxford and educated at Cambridge High School for Girls. She was just 15 when her mother was committed to a mental hospital. James has little memory of the time before this happened. She does, however, remember always wanting to be a writer, particularly a mystery writer. When she first heard of Humpty Dumpty, she asked: “Did he fall or was he pushed?”

James left school at 17 and got a job in the tax office. When she was 21, she married Connor Bantry White, a young medical student. They had two daughters.

WHEN A BELOVED COMPANION BECOMES A TOTAL STRANGER

World War II broke out, and Connor went to India and Africa with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He returned a broken man, suffering from schizophrenia. He never worked again and spent the next 20 years in and out of mental institutions.

She says, "Only those who have lived with the mental illness of someone they love can understand. Another human being who was once a beloved companion can become not only a stranger, but occasionally a malevolent stranger."

James took government jobs to support her family, first with the National Health Services and then with the Home Office.

At one point, she realized that she might never a break unless she made it: "It was sometime in the mid 1950s when I suddenly realised that there was never going to be a convenient moment to write the first book. You become a writer by writing. I had to make it happen."

Connor died in 1964, when they both were both 44. James never remarried.

EIGHTEEN YEARS TO OVERNIGHT SUCCESS

James wrote in the early mornings before setting off for her job as a hospital administrator. Although the first Dalgliesh mystery was published in 1962, fame and fortune didn't come until she retired from the Home Office 18 years later, with Innocent Blood, her eighth novel.

She has no regrets about keeping that steady paycheck coming in: "I had done more reading, I had done more thinking, I had done more living. It has been extremely useful being in the mainstream of working life." She administered five psychiatric clinics for the NHS and worked in criminal law for the Home Office.

Until age 87, she had few health problems. Then she broke her hip, and while recovering, had a heart attack in her dentist's chair. "I was extraordinarily lucky with health. I really didn't feel particularly old... We don't grow gradually into old age. Throughout our lives, we're on a plateau and then suddenly, whoosh! We're five years older, and then we're on a plateau again."

James incorporated her recovery experience into the latest Dalgliesh mystery, The Private Patient, which takes place in a remote plastic surgery clinic.

Other settings from her novels include a secluded Cornish island, a decrepit medieval tower turned asylum, and a private museum with a wing dedicated to grisley killings between World Wars I and II. (Only in England!)

CRIME FICTION'S GRAND DAME BECOMES OFFICIAL

P.D. James has five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. She looks like everyone's granny, except for that "arsenic and old lace" gleam in her eyes.

In 1983, she was made an OBE (officer of the Order of the British Empire) and in 1991, a life peer (Baroness James of Holland Park).

Baroness James regards the 21st century a challenge when it comes to finding motives for her antagonists. "Dear old Agatha Christie had A murder B because A was having an affair and thought B would tell. Now, of course, people write about their affairs in the Sunday papers."

WHAT LATER BLOOMER'S CAN LEARN FROM P.D. JAMES

• Nothing that ever happens to a novelist (or anyone else for that matter) is ever wasted.
• You absolutely can take care of your people and pursue your creative dream. It may be hard and it may take longer, but just keep at it.

SOURCES

PD James 'frightened' by pace of technological change. The Telegraph: 11 July 2010
PD James: Heroine with a taste for life. The Independent: 29 August 2008
'A writer needs as much trauma as she can take'. The Sunday Times: 17 August 2008
A Mind to Murder. The Telegraph: 05 March 2001
'We regard murder with fascination'. The Guardian: 04 March 2001
The Salon Interview. Salon.com: 02/26/98
Amazon's P.D. James Page