Gus Lee

http://www.dreamstime.com/cginspiration_info#res11334290

Last week, I was in Houston, practicing skills of bridge building and teamwork with great people in 104°temperatures. It reminded me of West Point’s summer training, just completed by the strong Class of 2019. I remember the high heat and sapping 90% humidity while being hampered by two months of food deprivation. Absent were the easy West Coast climes of my childhood. This New York summer had simply become moving One Boot At a Time. Legs in deep fatigue, lungs wheeze, backs ache, and it all seems uphill. Sweat stings the eyes and streams like the water which we carry but are not permitted to drink. Instead, we down salt tablets (Science hadn’t yet figured out that this could kill a person). The M-14 rifle weighs 9.1 pounds without the magazine; at the 10-mile, steep, up-strike mark, it feels like the decimal point dropped out. I’m a 17-year old asking, “Are we there yet?” I’m trying to survive. Teamwork? Good luck with that!

Despite ten years of earlier YMCA coaching in boxing, track, and long-distance swimming, I harbor a fondness for isolation and quitting when it gets tough. I want desperately to stop for a little water. I stumble and almost pitch into a ravine: wow – the ravine looked inviting. My weaknesses tempt: “you’re special and unique and deserve a break today! Stop and steal a sip from your canteen!” But if I do, I’ll trigger a centipede-like recoil through the column, causing the suffering stragglers at the rear to double-time to close the gap. I don’t care. I’m uncomfortable! I’m in the grip of what St. Augustine called INCURVATUS IN SE – my fierce instinct to protect my own needs.

A sudden and loud crash of metal and skidding, skinned flesh, and a cry of pain: an exhausted buddy has fallen on the trail and is sliding downhill. He’s one of the less popular guys, a complainer who gives voice to what I feel. I think: MAYBE NOW I CAN STOP. A squad mate named Bob Lorbeer quickly grabs the guy, lifts him up and smiles as if we’d been playing Catch. Cadre sprint forward to help as the column keeps marching. “You can do this, Buddy,” says Bob, slipping the guy’s 91-pound rifle on his own free shoulder – Bob now has two rifles. “You’re good to carry your pack. But I can take it. I’ll be right here.” The buddy nods – he can do it. Bob helped everyone.

Magically, on seeing this, the sour lactic acids in my legs evaporate. Cool air relieves my breathing. My back, the heavy pack, and steel pot feel fine. I’m not thirsty. Bob’s moral example has inspired me, and that inspiration has removed my physical complaints. Bob’s type of attitude and action was what I was supposed to practice in the hard black mountains of West Point. I wasn’t supposed to serve my comforts; I was to build moral fiber, to grow my wishbone into a backbone, to practice ancient disciplines of responsibility and accountability, to bridge-build and demonstrate truly generous teamwork without internal carping. West Point had poured a code into our DNA that said we should care for others more than for ourselves.

Truly, I do wish you genuine “good luck with that” in your summer training.

© Aydindurdu | Dreamstime.com –

Rich Karlgaard, Forbes’ publisher, recently wrote, “Being a jerk isn’t worth it. It will damage your heart and soul. It will hurt, not help, your teams. It will lead more often to poverty than to riches. Instead, follow B.C. Forbes’ advice: Produce happiness.” To this we can say, “Bravo, Rich Karlgaard!”

But we face the age-old question that could stump a “Jeopardy” show champ: As everyone wants to be happy, how do we produce true happiness?

In my childhood, meals were foraged and Happiness was a noun in the dictionary. In Peanuts-talk, happiness wasn’t a warm blanket – it was food of any variety as long as it didn’t fight back. In boxing, happiness was not kissing the canvas to be revived by heavy ammonia smelling salts. I once thought I’d be happy if I simply ran 5 miles a day, did more sit-ups, and cut out sweets.

When I was a studious teen, I learned that the great sage Aristotle would’ve disagreed with my conclusions. “Everyone,” he said in ethics lectures in the Lyceum recorded for his son, “wants to be happy. People believe wealth, power, and physical pleasure will make them happy.” I liked that: wealth meant food. “But what people seek in happiness,” he continued, “will not provide it.”

Aristotle had empirically researched people who had The Big Three goodies. He found that these fortunate people weren’t particularly happy. Thus Aristotle, who also invented the modern Western university, long ago disproved what most people still believe today. This, despite ample proof of the woes of many who enjoy excesses in fun and toys. Aristotle’s next logical question was, “If not wealth, power, or pleasure, what then actually brings happiness?”

Aristotle found the answer. After 2300 years, it continues to be counterintuitive and true. People of virtue – those who do the right thing – and who live moderately, are the most loved, admired, respected, and the healthiest and happiest. Wealth, power, and pleasure might be there, but they aren’t required.

I was happy when I worked for a principled, Aristotelian boss or with principled colleagues. I was happiest when courageous leadership created those two conditions in an organization that sought to be principled. Predictably, misery was working for a toxic boss or having predatory co-workers who spewed gossip.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, three wise Athenians, held that happiness isn’t material or physical. It can’t be bought, connived, smoked, or put into a chocolate brownie. It is an interior quality that nests in unseen heart and soul and is developed by virtuous conduct. Right living – disciplined self-governance, principled leadership, love, and caring action – can replace our focus on ourselves.

Talk about bunkum, I thought; it was Greek to me.

When I was 20, my mentor, Norm Schwarzkopf, saw that my rejection of Aristotle predicted my resistance to change, and that I’d seek meaning by chasing status, money, and pleasure. He tried to move me from this common and deceptively easy 8-lane toll road to instead climb upward to a high, narrow ridge.

Rich Karlgaard rightly advises that we should make happiness our goal instead of pursuing wealth like a pack of dogs barking after elusive, exhaust-billowing buses.

Norm Schwarzkopf set the example that happiness comes from doing the disciplined duties of virtue – controlling our fierce love of self and freeing ourselves from being slaves to our insatiable wants and grand appetites – and aligning with principles instead of profits. I believe he was a happy man.

What happiness mistakes are you making?

Forbes’ publisher, Rich Karlgaard, asked this week, “Are the dirtbags winning?” He cited the hyper-rich and abrasive personalities of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Uber’s now-infamous Travis Kalanick.

Let’s accept that dirtbags do wheelies on workplaces and the economy like Evel Knievel on a Vegas strip. Cruel, oppressive, and authoritarian behaviors have harmed leadership, teamwork, productivity, and our mental health since the first caveman picked up a club.

Karlgaard observed that titan dirtbags might be rare. He cited magazine founder B.C. Forbes’s words: “Business was to produce happiness, not to pile up millions.”

I think the late General H. Norman “The Bear” Schwarzkopf would’ve agreed. The Bear fiercely believed that leaders must always model right and selfless action. An Adam Smith purist, he thought business should serve the community with rational self-interest. He knew that doing the right thing was the most practical and effective business strategy. Research into longitudinal profitability and institutional results by Jim Collins and others proved him right.

But should we focus on a few bad-acting hyper rich? The truth is that we all own a streak of dirtbag behavior. Triggered by fear and fatigue, our worst impulses can steam up like a seething volcano. The Bear encouraged me to act rightly and correctly, especially when faced with fear, fatigue, bad news, poor performances, and a burned-out Keurig 2.0. He wanted me to be my best self while others turn on their Bad Behavior Apps.

Aristotle researched the tỳrannos, the dirtbags of Athens. In Politics he wrote that the bad ruler advances by sowing fear instead of fostering courage and by silencing critics while entertaining flatterers. Tyrants disgust freemen, but the courageous, virtuous leader assures his survival and the success of his followers by “limiting his own powers.”

How to deal with a tyrant? Aristotle advised that the tỳrannos should change his behaviors. I love this radical answer. The Bear taught this to me when I was a diffident cadet trying to get through West Point with recreational reading and poker playing. The Bear taught that I, a natural moral coward, could succeed by doing my assignments, addressing wrongs, and apologizing to those I harmed. He knew that at 20, I was actively developing dirtbag habits of acting arrogantly and selfishly with an unearned sense of my own importance.

When we see powerful tycoons act poorly and prosper, we fear they’ve turned the world upside down. It follows that when I act like a pompous know-it-all, I turn my own world askew.

H. Norman Schwarzkopf had a temper, which I’d experienced at close range. He could exert harsh anger at senior officers. I also saw him use his great will to curb it. He applied that same energy to teach others to be Aristotelian instead of tyrannical. We’re all products of change. The question is, am I becoming more of my bad habits?

What’s one behavior you can change to face the small tyrant within you?

Next week, with help from the Bear, we’ll tackle the second part of Rich Karlgaard’s article – Are rich dirtbags happy?

With Schwarzkopf: Life Lessons of The Bear, which captures many personal lessons about courage that the H. Norman taught to Gus Lee, will be published by Smithsonian in mid-October.

“Atticus Finch is a racist in Harper Lee’s recently released novel,” Kirstie sadly tweeted yesterday morning. “Currently questioning my entire existence.” I sympathize.

In Harper Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman, Scout Finch, the gutsy child in To Kill a Mockingbird, has become a 26-year old woman who learns that her heroic father Atticus is in reality a Klan bigot. It’s a heart-breaking moment for daughter Scout, for the Library Association, and for American literature. Or is it?

Author Nelle Harper Lee, an intensely private person, avoided colleges but in the fall of 1964, she came to the United States Military Academy at West Point to speak to us lowly Plebes. Diminutive on a large stage in our cannon-firing fortified campus, she spoke with quiet dignity of demonstrating love and tenderness toward our enemies. Magically, the gentle caress of her soft Southern voice began to shift our toughening personas, forming quiet moral tides that we would need when we later became officers, husbands, and fathers.

English to the Chinese ear is not easy, but her talk in the dialect of the South inspired me to become an American novelist. In libraries and our surviving book stores, Gus Lee books, due to alphabetical dictates, can touch Harper Lee’s. Not long after her life-changing talk, a new professor named Major H. Norman Schwarzkopf reported to West Point. He would advance that moral voice and touch my life like a brick hitting a plate glass window.

As a kid, I’d feared non-Chinese people. Reared in a black ‘hood, I learned to worry about white folk. But the YMCA, West Point, and the Army tried to teach me to fix my own deficiencies instead of judging and blaming others. I learned that it’s an American habit to be harshly critical and even unforgiving whenever we fail to do the right thing.

While Harper Lee penned Mockingbird, she spoke with her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, a distinguished Alabama lawyer. I imagine her wise and melodious voice detailing a more perfect world that stirred the fires of his deep conscience. From blue, say the Chinese, comes deeper blue; the young can surpass the old. I knew she’d learned some of her wisdom from her papa, and, like the Beatles, she had taken a sad song and made it better.

One evening, long ago, in a far-off disciplined military auditorium, an irresistible voice penetrated the fatigue and stress of a tired freshman class. That voice helped us realign our moral chemistry to a True North; it has spoken to our national conscience ever since.

We admire people of courage who stand for the right. As a former deputy DA, I admired Atticus Finch and his principled stand for the persecuted and innocent Tom Robinson.

But I am inspired more deeply by the privileged who sacrifice self-interest to serve as courageous moral examples. When a distinguished segregationist father loves his daughter and the deeper verities to become the iconic Atticus Finch, I am given the courage of his example, for I have found that stories of moral self-improvement are more powerful than tales of brave stands. The prophet Isaiah said, 2700 years ago, that we should set a watchman to call out that which is right. That the watchman was once blind to his own faults is to capture each of us in our humanity, and to set our eyes aright is to become Atticus Finch.

When you set a watchman in your own life, what behaviors are farthest from True North?

I’m giving talks in October for a new book about my mentor’s radical leadership beliefs. Erma Bombeck once said she’d return her advance royalties if the publisher spared her from the dreaded public-speaking author tour. I agreed when my first book, China Boy, catapulted me into a 16-city national author tour with numerous daily media events while I lived for two months on turkey sandwich midnight dinners. Now, with a seventh book, I’m still relying on the sage counsel of my mentor, four-star General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, aka “The Bear.”

We first met when I was a 20-year old West Point cadet; he was the scariest engineering prof in history. But he cringed at my public speaking – I was paralyzed at the podium, head down, reading fast so I could rapidly exit stage left. I said I’d prefer a root canal to giving the graded talk that was required of junior-year cadets.

He bared his teeth and rubbed his hands as if Christmas had come early. “Great! You need to correct this just to live right. And to pass the class.” Then, failing a single class meant expulsion from the Academy. Adopting me as his science project, the Bear labored on my weak character by having me practice that which I wished to avoid. He pounded on my well-developed immaturities and anxieties by requiring me to practice the behaviors of courage so I could develop the habits of courage.

He gave me five points which equipped me to brief infantry units and commanding generals; deliver Army ethics talks; perform 200 jury trials; testify before legislators; survive six author tours; train 140,000 attorneys; and earn a living by giving executive leadership skills programs – unimaginable jobs for a person who feared public speaking.

The Bear’s points:

1. “First, do your homework. Know your subject matter so well that you can distill it down to its clarified essence. You’re the vessel to deliver the essence to others.”
2. “Second, practice the talk enough so you don’t have to read it. Ditch the podium. Practice delivering the essence, again and again. Preparation erases fear.
3. “Third, focus on helping people with the message. Serving others erases anxiety.
4. “Fourth, do lots of talks. Don’t quit because of discomfort. Practice, practice, practice.
5. “Fifth, improve. Study the speaker evaluations and quickly correct your faults.”

It’s a fine day in the Pacific Northwest and I’m thinking of our universally shared fear of public speaking. I still feel like Bombeck, but I had practiced with Schwarzkopf.

The Bear faces you and asks, “What behaviors do you practice to face your fears at the podium?”

Leaders do the right thing. Today, many hold that no one can say what is moral, or what is right or wrong. But we admire Abraham Lincoln, a leader of character who did the HIGHEST MORAL ACTION despite the risks. To act, he first had to DISCERN which option was the highest right. He had to use the lost art of moral reasoning.

DISCERNMENT is moral reasoning. It’s the opposite of expedience, short-term-results, political correctness, acceptance, esteem, polls, conflict avoidance, protecting backsides and claiming that no one can say what is right. It’s about one thing: DOING THE HIGHEST RIGHT.

Three tools can help us discern the highest right. First is Conscience (Aug 2012 blog). I become still; I listen to the inner voice; I record its guidance in my calendar. Gandhi said that conscience, which George Washington called celestial fire, was the only tyrant he would accept. But this isn’t easy; Americans are now world leaders in ignoring our conscience.[1]

Today, I’ll describe the second tool: Tier 3 Elimination Analysis. Ask: What’s my most fearful, selfish option? A fear-driven answer pops up. Call this Tier 1 egotism — common cowardice – not a good option. Then ask: what’s the most expedient and pragmatic action for me and my own? This is Tier 2 material results for material people. Now, fear of not having money trumps love of family, and we teach children to compete for cash rather than to improve as people. I once rationalized pragmatism, fear and overwork as “taking care of family.” But I’m not in The Matrix; I was wired to be a moral being. My family wanted time with me more than money. I write this as one who was hungry as a kid and fired and laid-off as a parent of young children.

Third is Tier 3 courage: THE HIGHEST RIGHT THING among remaining right options.

THE CHALLENGE: Listen to conscience. Name and scratch off Tier 1 and Tier 2 options. Match your Tier 3 Highest Right with what conscience told you. Now imagine doing this action. Don’t do it – simply imagine taking this action. Congratulations! You’ve just practiced DISCERNMENT.

I’ll write next time of the third and final tool we can use for DISCERNING THE HIGHEST MORAL ACTION. Until then, imagine courage and character in your life.

[1] http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp, reported in the Boston Globe, June 6, 2010.

Want to acquire a life-changing competence? The big leadership authorities (Aristotle, Washington, Bennis, Burns, Maxwell, Covey, Schwarzkopf, others) teach us that character is The Single Must of the effective leader. But where can you find a course in character-based leading? Rare is the leader development program that replaces the PowerPoint lecture with the practice of behaviors, skills and tools of character-based leading.

It’s happening in Fort Collins, August 25-29. Thanks to Colorado State University’s famous IRM program, a precious few (15-20 of you) can join a small cohort of CSU grad students in the city Money magazine said is the best place to live in America. In a 5-day program, you’ll practice and receive encouragement while being equipped in six essential, highly practical and rarely-taught take-away character-leadership skill sets. This isn’t as good as world peace, and it’s better than enduring two root canals while sitting still and looking at projected data slides for five days:

1.  Seven Character Advancement tools to strengthen character

2. Four key character and career derailers with an opportunity to change

3. Five results-producing Courageous Communication tools for verbal effectiveness as a leader

4. Three life-changing Courageous Conflict Resolution tools to solve that which scares 98% of Americans

5. A Nathan-Joab Accountability Matrix to defeat the 4 key character and career derailers (#2, above)

6. An Individual Character Advancement Plan – a calendared road map to build courage and character with key physical conditioning tips to maximize strength, endurance, hardiness and weight loss

CSU’s IRM Graduate Program helps to make this program affordable. The fee does not cover lodging and provides 5 lunches. To learn more and to register on a first-come basis, go to guslee.net. Below Upcoming Engagements, find Pages: the third item down is the CSU Building Leaders of Character course Description/Registration. Click on that and you’re on your way to CSU, the gateway to the awe-inspiring Rocky Mountains, and to becoming a leader of character.

The General and Gus in front of a tribute from the West Point class of ’68.

He was a giant in our lives and in history. When the Nation doubted itself, his example reanimated us.

At West Point, when I thirsted for character strength, he generously poured from his cup into my young, puny spine. This was all the more unusual, for in that era, most faculty kept cadets at a distance.

Throughout the 47 years that I knew him, he challenged me to suppress my strong desire for self-advancement and my fear of failure, and to replace them with the intentional behaviors of moral courage and selfless service.

He owned a temper that could rival that of Moses. I saw it many times and trembled in its exercise. He once threw chalk at me when I began to doze in his classroom. His anger came from a fear that, via inattention, selfishness and weak spines, we would fail those who were entrusted to us.

A naturally interior person, he intentionally modeled how to courageously and rightly care for our people. His formal job was teaching us engineering, but he lived, demonstrated and taught principled leadership to change our character. Like Aristotle, he knew that character is essential for professional excellence, and is the first requirement of happiness.

In periodic contacts in subsequent years, he reinforced the truth that moral cowards cannot inspire others to their best selves. In our business dealings, he encouraged me to act in the right and validated my risking my corporate vice-presidency to do the right thing. I called these actions “RORTS,” Regardless of Risk to Self-interest. I learned that concept from him when I was a 19-year-old cadet.

I spent the greatest amount of time with him before he was H. Norman Schwarzkopf, four-star general, prime presidential candidate material, Knight of the Bath and recipient of a museum’s worth of planetary recognitions. While eating hot dogs in his quarters on a Saturday afternoon while children chirped on the Plain, I was critically aware of his substantial intellectual gravity and commanding physical personality. But his impact on me was relational and spiritual. He was a chest-opening moral presence. Licking relish from his fingers in his tiny Bachelor Officer Quarters, he was the living example of the man I was supposed to become.

He was my mentor and he was like a father, and I will always be filled with gratitude for his leadership. I appreciate him with the same acuity with which I miss him.

I send heartfelt prayers and blessings to his wife Brenda and their three wonderful children, who sacrificed their time with him so he could serve the Nation and our allies.

The final stanza of West Point’s Alma Mater begins,

“And when our work is done,

Our course on earth is run,

May it be said,

‘Well done, Be thou at peace.'”

Edgar Bodenheimer
Nuremberg Prosecutor

Tito hit me so hard I crossed two time zones before I hit the canvas. After smelling salts snapped me out of my reverie, I realized I had lost. After being helped up, I took Tito’s gloves in mine. “Goo fight,” I tried to say through my half-snapped mouthpiece. Thus did a Chinese kid learn a little about being a good American sport. After the election, can you, like a good sport, Unconditionally, Positively, Respect your opponent?

Current campaigns imitate conflagrations. I work with firefighters who battled Colorado’s 2012 wildfires. The fires took lives, burned 655 homes, torched 213,550 acres, destroyed animals, cost $200 million and blew smoke and ash in our eyes. They came within a mile of adding our home to the 22 that were consumed in our neighborhood.

Our Presidential election consumed ten battleground states, a million attack ads worth a billion clams, years of smears that burned nearly 6 billion bucks (1) and made political spit-ball a routine American Olympic event. Vicious  accusations punched my ears and yet echo in the small, hollow space between them.

I plead guilty to yearning for an earlier Golden Age. I know we had one – people used to work for a living instead of living to work, and, well, just check my waistline. Jefferson and Adams may have gone to Fist City in 1796, but there were no Presidential fisticuffs in the Fifties. We had polio, segregation, three TV channels and a high risk of nuclear eradication, but the Nation voted for Ike or Adlai without the seething anger, deep-seated hostility and vicious finger-stabs which define today’s differences. Only 7% of us had college degrees. It’s increased almost 400% (2). Now, despite a massive higher education industry and diversity, we act like accusing Javerts instead of forgiving Jean Valjeans. Somewhere, Victor Hugo weeps.

So let’s take a deep, cleansing breath as I introduce you to Professor Edgar Bodenheimer, Holocaust refugee, gentle legal scholar and my law school inspiration. He projected Unconditional Positive Respect, UPR. In fabricated German, it becomes “Ooper.”

Hitler began his persecutions in 1933; Edgar smelled humans burning and fled the Holocaust, landing happily in the US. As an American Nuremberg prosecutor, he made the case of Nazi crimes against humanity. He did it by respecting those who had done unspeakable evil.

His profound humanity dictated that he honor all persons – even those who had slaughtered his family, friends, and millions of innocents, and had made a mockery of civilization.

I can see Prosecutor Bodenheimer, who, in thick socks stood a dignified 5’-6”, facing Nazi Germany’s cruel genocidal murderers. He neither hates nor resents. He does not accuse, attack, rail, rant, blame, raise his modest voice, or tout his wisdom, acumen or intellect.

EDGAR: If you would, please, Mein Herr, tell me what you were thinking prior to your decision to build the shower installations at Dachau?

Can we show that same respect for people of the other party? My natural tendency is to only honor those I like. Ooper – Unconditionally, Positively Respecting those who disagree with me – comes as naturally as a self-performed root canal. Edgar inspired me to be a deputy DA who prosecuted evil doers with unfailing civility. Here’s an example of me cross-examining a defendant charged with despicable crimes, followed by an Edgar Ooper:

ME (NATURAL STATE): You contradicted yourself! Isn’t it true that you’re an inhuman, murderous, rapacious, deceitful, hideously twisted sick sociopath who’s worthy neither of drawing air nor worth the cost of a light bulb in Soledad Prison. (In other words, you’re a member of the opposite party.)

ME (WITH BODENHEIMER OOPER): Thank you, sir. Please tell us what happened next.

The 2016 campaign began earlier this year, but the Hobbesian brutishness of our colluding conflict began much earlier. Like when we carried clubs.

One side accuses the Other of insensitivity, brutishness, greed and cruelty.

The other counter-accuses: stupidity, irresponsibility, waste and hatred of Nation and God. We decry fundamentalism as we become increasingly fundamentalist, accusatory and intolerant.

If you didn’t deeply love the 2012 version, what can you do personally to improve our national civic culture? I challenge everyone on all fifteen sides of the American aisle to demonstrate Ooper – Unconditional Positive Respect – to the fellow Americans with whom you differ. That’s one out of every two of us. Like a boxer and a true American good sport, win or lose, congratulate your opponent for the depth of her convictions. Toast the fact that in the USA, we argue, debate and even rant, and we don’t have to imitate Congress.

(1) http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/08/2012-election-will-be-costliest-yet.html

(2) http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/p20-550.pdf

We live seriously: election hostility, the unemployed, fear of being unemployed, burn-out, the market, hurricanes, global HIV/AIDS, the national debt and the Middle East. Few giggles.

The Great Depression produced uplifting movies about prosperity, kindness and dance. Like many immigrant kids, I practiced becoming an American in Hollywood’s feel-good escapism. As a kid, I always wished I could watch the Oscars on television. Kids in our ‘hood, didn’t. I was a film buff and was very hard to beat in the Silver Screen category of Trivial Pursuits.

I had a light-hearted moment when I was busted by security cops at the 70^th Academy Awards. Lee Mendelson, producer of Peanuts, and I were writing a screenplay for China Boy. To distract me from our work, he invited me to the Oscars.

“The Oscars!” cried Diane. I found out that they have an annual lottery system for limited seats that means even stars can’t go. And I was going! It took a while to sink in, like learning that you’re going to be a father or your team, a perennial loser, has won the Super Bowl.

Academies, as West Point, have Rules. At the Awards, it was: no cameras; tux or gown; no cameras; only limos; and, no cameras. As a former Deputy DA, I, well, brought a camera. A small one. On the inward route, onlookers held up placards: Good Luck! We hope you win!

It was the year of Titanic and movie hoopla reminded me of the days of youth. The day was bright and the smog smiled. Exiting onto the red carpet, people shrieked at Lee, who looks like Garry Marshall; at his date, who looked like Jennifer Lopez; and screamed, “Jackie Chan!” at me. I nodded and smiled and warmly waved at my enthusiastic admirers.

I stared at petite Julianne Moore, lean Samuel L. Jackson and a very lean Celine Dion, who would sing the Titanic theme song in that season when Leonardo was a demi-god, and I collided with a building. The building wore Oakleys and said, “Non-nominees and non-winners to the left.” It was a security guard who could play tackle and guard for the Rams. Simultaneously.

Faye Dunaway, as she appeared that night.
photo by Ron Galella at wireimage.com

“What if I were Jackie Chan?” I asked. We were now on thinner carpet; I was relegated to steerage where people spoke Italian and Chinese and had no life jackets, while First Class passengers were feted at a champagne reception, no doubt with lifeboats and a silver tea service on the side. Yet, most of those present were stars; I was surprised that they weren’t taller. Faye Dunaway was next to me, tall, stunning, evanescent in a gown of seven veils that danced without apparent movement. I stopped; she stepped on my foot. Grasping my biceps and squeezing a little, the woman who was Vicki Anderson, Milady de Winter and Bonnie Parker said, “I’m so sorry!” I quickly said, “I’m not.” With the speed of a paparazzi, I readied my camera. Miss Dunaway smiled dazzlingly.

The Secret Service looks for guns. Oscar’s security scans for cameras. “No photography!” cried The Building. “Give, sir!” Busted. I surrendered the camera and my identity. Miss Dunaway pursed lips and canted her head in a gentle gesture of sympathy.

“Miss Dunaway, please,” said The Building, who lifted the velvet rope for First Class. She released my arm and joined the other Oscar winners.

Too small and agile for bulky guards, Robin Williams danced up and down the line, asking with exaggerated care, “How are you?” In a few hours, he would win an Oscar for Good Will Hunting. “How are YOU?” I asked of him. “No, no!” he protested. “I ask the questions here, wise guy!”

On this Monday night in March, 84 million would watch what we saw in person. Billy Crystal made us laugh like lunatics; Jack Nicholson made cynicism look good; the stars emitted light, like so many lasers. A disembodied Big-Brother-voice kept herding us back to our seats after every commercial TV break. “It’s your show, folks,” it intoned. “Don’t embarrass yourselves! PLEASE SIDDOWN!” A tired Walter Matthau rested what had to be size 26 clown dress shoes. Robert DeNiro looked finely human. The female stars looked inhumanely beautiful.

Big Brother then introduced 70 past Oscar winners. A sign of age: I knew all of them and could name most of their winning films. I saw Charlton Heston, and silently thanked him for giving hope; Gregory Peck for inspiring courage; Sean Connery for encouraging a taste for sports cars; Cher for the immortal line I use in my seminars: “Snap out of it!” Hollywood can sprout the sorriest values while making the best films, and these 70 actors took our breath away.

Lee Mendelson and I clapped and cheered and wiped a tear. This was a slice of America far from the chronic challenges of life. The Oscars remind me to celebrate not being so serious.

This was a light moment. What memories do you have that give pause to stress?