Prime Time - Jane Fonda [110]
My friend Scott Seydel, a biochemist, built an international textile-dyeing business. In his Third Act he is using his scientific expertise to help New York City, Walmart, and other companies use recyclable products and packaging. His wife, my close friend Pat Mitchell, told me, “I find him at three A.M. sitting at his computer at the dining room table writing a PowerPoint script for a speech on recycling.” Scott views his new life as “atonement for having been part of the industrial complex.” Atonement or not, he’s making a difference.
The Honorable Robin Biddle Duke (left) with friends.
The gorgeous Robin Biddle Duke was eighty-three years old when I interviewed her. Her whole adult life has been devoted to expanding life choices for women and girls through her work with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). She has an activist spirit coupled with an abundant talent for diplomacy that was honed by her long marriage to Angier Biddle Duke, President Kennedy’s chief of protocol. No on-the-arm-of wife she, Robin used her contacts and positions to promote international cooperation on behalf of women’s human rights. Angier was killed in a Rollerblading accident when Robin was seventy-three, but she kept right on going.
“Sitting around waiting for something to happen is certainly not the name of my game,” she told me. “I mean, come on. You pull your weight in a boat. If you’ve been as lucky as I have in life, you put your oar in the water and you keep rowing. So what if I don’t row as fast as I once did? It’s more fun to be involved.” At eighty she decided to learn French, partly to be useful to the International Rescue Committee in the French-speaking African countries and partly because, as she said, “I wanted to see if I could still learn. You know how your machine gets rusty.” She told me that she enjoyed being the oldest person among the young students. “I try to stay on top of my game, but I am a bit slower,” she admitted. She doesn’t go to all the receptions, she said, and she’s begun to cut back her to trips to Africa (to only twice a year!). Assuming the role of sage, Robin had just brought her granddaughter along on a trip to Africa when I interviewed her. “I wanted her to see the on-the-ground realities of the developing world and how much work there is to do,” she explained.
Another wonderful example of having a purpose in late life comes from my friends Eva and Yoel Haller, both seventy-seven years old when I interviewed them. They met when they were fifty-seven and she was a widow running a major international marketing company that she and her fourth husband had created together. Three years later, Eva sold her marketing company to the employees, Yoel retired from a long practice as an ob-gyn in San Francisco, and they have worked together ever since on numerous philanthropic efforts. “I don’t play golf, don’t play tennis, don’t play bridge,” Eva told me. “I don’t do luncheons and I don’t pour tea. I’ve always been a social activist. I can’t think of another way of living. What other reason is there to get up in the morning? What are you going to do with your day? You need to have a reason to live.”
Eva describes their activities as “incubating” new youth organizations. One major nonprofit she chairs is Free the Children, which has built more than five hundred schools in Africa, Asia, and South America. “It is organized, run, and financed through fund-raising by young people,” she told me with pride. She also sits on a variety of mostly international boards of nonprofits that are dedicated to education,