Prime Time - Jane Fonda [111]
Over and over again, I have found this true in my own relationships with youngsters. As Carolyn Heilbrun wrote, “The secret … of successful—and therefore continuing—association with the young lies in knowing that they are more valuable as suppliers of intelligence than receivers of it.”
Eva and Yoel Haller.
NORMAN-MARQUEE PHOTOGRAPHY NEW YORK
Janet Wolfe was ninety-three when we met at a party in Southhampton. She radiated such good humor and vitality that I asked to interview her. She took me to a restaurant close by her small New York apartment, where she eats lunch every day: spaghetti alle vongole (she brings the leftovers home for dinner) and a glass of pinot grigio.
What surprised me, given her ebullience, was that Janet has had a very difficult life, one that could well have made her bitter. She told me, “I had a mother who hated me. She’d say, ‘You ugly thing, you’ll never amount to anything.’ In her will, she left everything to my two brothers and a dollar to me, so I wouldn’t break the will. My father didn’t know how to cope with her.” Janet’s father was a Wall Street broker. They were wealthy but lost everything in the Depression. “I’m the most successful failure,” Janet said. “I could have been a good actress, or a director in the theater, but I didn’t stick to anything. I never had a sense of worth. I worked a little in Hollywood as an extra. Danced in some pictures till they found out I couldn’t dance.” She headed the officers’ club for the Red Cross in Rome during World War II. Despite her ability to make friends and make people laugh, at sixty and supporting two daughters, Janet was running out of money. She asked the chairman of the New York City Housing Authority if he could give her a job.
He said, “What can you do for the housing authority?”
“Nothing,” she answered.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I grew up in the projects and was never exposed to classical music. Could you start a symphony orchestra for us?”
That’s just what she did, and she was still running the orchestra when I interviewed her.
The orchestra Janet founded has produced fifty public concerts every year for residents of housing developments in New York City—at public schools, in prisons, and in city parks—and has performed annual concerts at some of the city’s most prestigious halls. This is the work of Janet’s Third Act. She used to sneak in black musicians from Juilliard who were being pushed into jazz because there was a perception that blacks couldn’t or shouldn’t play classical music. The late Max Roach, a famed composer and percussionist, who performed with the orchestra, said of Janet that she “has provided more work for black, Hispanic, and Asian players than anyone in New York. It’s probably the only orchestra in the country that gives minority musicians, including black composers and conductors, an opportunity to perform classical music with a symphony orchestra.”
Janet has a wonderful, self-depricating sense of humor about herself. She told me over lunch that she’s always trying to raise money for the orchestra. “I said to this wealthy man recently, ‘If you give me enough money, you won’t have to sleep with me.’ And he replied, ‘How much is enough?’ ” Despite health problems and a painful past, Janet is doing well by doing good.
We know that just about everything that is part of the world around us right now will continue on after we are gone. Therein lies the sadness. I take comfort in the thought, expressed by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, that by using our later years for Generativity—for guiding and nurturing others, especially the next generations—we ensure that our lives are “saved” in the same way we save something we’ve written on our computer to ensure that