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♪
So this is just a weight.
- You just drop it down, okay? - Okay.
♪
- Hi. - Hi!
- Welcome, it's good to see you. - Good to see you too.
Thanks for joining us, sit down.
- Thank you for having me. - Yeah.
Well, as you may have been told,
we're going to do a series of questions
but very conversational, very simple.
- Let's do it. - Okay.
What would you like to know about this project?
Well, I guess first and foremost,
you know, what even made you wanna leave
the corporate world and you know,
leap into the world of filmmaking
and making a documentary?
This is obviously a huge change,
so you know, what made you want to do that?
Well, you know, after 20-plus years
of being a successful vice president
in a large national corporation,
I was... it was the clock that did it.
You go through this inventory of your life
and all the things you wish you had tried.
I've always wanted to do film.
If I was ever going to do anything in film,
- it needed to be very quickly. - Yeah.
I didn't have another 20 years or who knows.
One of the themes of this whole film
is about storytelling
and how important storytelling is
so that we learn from the people that tell stories to us.
A lot of the stories that I see coming from women
are young women who are blogging
or something like that online.
I see a lot of those.
But I haven't seen too many older women.
Women who are, you know, over 60
I don't know where I would... I mean, I could probably
Google one of their stories.
So you don't see it in front of you?
- No, no. - Yeah.
I mean yeah, I think it would be really cool
to see more older women putting their stories
out there through the internet or social media.
I mean, that would definitely be something
I would be interested in seeing.
And I think a certain sense of like wisdom and insight
into situations would be lost without those stories.
The whole idea with this project
was to bring those women's voices to the forefront
and bring them in front of people
who might be kind of shocked to hear
what it is that they're doing
and how old they are.
And then, maybe prompt them to go find
some other women to speak with.
You know, that are older.
Storytelling takes on different levels
and, you know, different parameters all the time.
It's so much more of a connection
to the bigger world,
and the connection becomes greater
when different people share their stories.
So thus, the Beyond Sixty Project.
♪
We did not live near anyone.
We were in a very isolated area.
The nearest neighbor was about a mile away.
♪
Everyone kind of cooperated with everyone else
back in that day and age.
Back then, we looked out for each other.
♪
Forgiveness is the key
to any tragedy or any misunderstanding
or misfortune that you encounter in your lifetime.
♪
Everyone labeled him as being strange,
different,
not normal,
and then I learned, after three or four days,
that this person had a real mental illness problem.
♪
On May 11th, 1966,
I was leaving the high school around 3:15,
arrived at the entrance to my home
at the bottom of the lane
somewhat between 4:00 and 4:15.
And shortly after getting off the bus,
about 200 or 30 feet from the bus stop,
I was approached by a man who came out of the bank
on the left-hand side from behind a tree.
He had a mask and he had a sawed-off shotgun.
He grabbed me by the neck and he pointed the gun to the kids
and he said, "You're mine, I'm taking you.
Tell them little bastards to leave
or they're all gonna die right here."
And he grabbed me by the neck
and drove me into the woods with him.
♪
That's women, women's history.
That's all women.
Women, women, women.
That's a lot of women stuff.
Some business.
And I, you know, as the girl...
I mean, I don't know that this is...
This is not necessarily true,
but I think in a lot of families,
it's the women who are the keepers
of the family story.
Um, newspapers, photographs.
So, you know, I have a lot of stuff,
but it's, you know, that's why I'm never writing
another biography like this again,
'cause I can't go through this again.
But this is sort of the mission, you know.
This is the mission.
♪
I started knowing who these ladies were
before I knew their name.
I was born in Chicago.
We moved to Indianapolis,
which is where both of my parents had grown up.
So I was three years old.
So we're in this apartment
and it's my grandmother's room,
and I just remember, as a little girl,
that I would go in that bedroom
and there were ostrich-feather fans
and opera glasses and photographs
and you know, the Shalimar perfume
that my grandmother wore was still infused
in the fabrics that were in the drawers.
And we had the silverware
that had Madam Walker's monogram
was the silverware that we used every day
and the china for special occasions.
So I knew about Madam Walker
but it was kind of a larger-than-life figure.
And in some ways, a little bit of a burden for a kid,
because there were some people who'd say,
"Oh, you think you're this and that
because of Madam Walker" and I'm like,
I don't even really know what that means.
And so, I didn't really embrace it,
and my mother, who had grown up with everybody
identifying her in that way,
didn't want that to be a burden to me
and so didn't make it a big deal.
So we didn't sit around the table
telling Madam Walker stories.
She wanted us to follow our own dreams,
and my passion was writing.
Something that I sort of gotten the bug
when I was eight years old,
and they really supported that.
♪
I still was kind of ambivalent about Madam Walker honestly,
because this was the era of afros
and not straightening your hair,
and there were many people who identified Madam Walker
as the women who invented the straightening comb
who wanted to make Black people look white.
So I was like, I don't really know
that I want to deal with that.
For me, the irony is that I ended up
telling the Madam Walker story
after many years as a journalist.
♪
I think that the number one responsibility
you have to yourself, you know, in this lifetime,
however long that may be none of us know, right,
is to get in touch with the things
that really inspire you and make you happy.
♪
I'm not sure what led me to art specifically,
I feel like it was something inside of me
that just was always there.
But I also got, when I was later in high school,
involved and had an interest in medicine.
I think my dad was like, "Oh, you know, I know
you love art but you should be doing something more practical."
I was like, all right.
Honestly, I'd go to microbiology class
and my head would be spinning.
But then at a certain point I was just like,
I really wanna pursue art,
and I remember having this conversation with my mom.
She was like, "Look, if that's what you really wanna do,
you know, I support you, I'll talk to your father."
Even though when she was young,
what she really wanted to do
was she wanted to go to medical school
and become a doctor.
And my grandmother, who was, you know, also very interesting,
she went to Parsons School of Design
and was in fashion, the fashion world.
When it came to my mother, she sort of really pushed her
into getting married and having a family.
The example of her not really doing
what she wanted to do
was partially my inspiration
to make sure that I always did what I wanted to do.
I think in my second year, I took a sculpture class
and I knew immediately once I got involved in that
that that's what I wanted to be doing.
♪
When I was younger,
there was a lot of messaging about, you know,
you need to be at this place
by the time you're that age,
or you need to be at that place
by the time you're this age.
I feel like when I was younger,
I kind of sort of bought into that.
I really believe that
there is no prescription
for how to live your life,
and if there were any times
I was sort of sent down a path to divert from that,
it usually wasn't of my own doing.
It was someone saying, you know,
you should do this or, you know,
you can't be an artist, you'll never make any money,
what's the point of that?
And, um...
somehow, miraculously, I figured out how to have it all.
Women's voices tend to be associated more with,
you know, just giving information and compassion,
and so, we're associated a lot with healthcare
and, you know, fashion, cosmetics, and things like that.
And also, telephone systems,
because traditionally,
the operators were all female.
When I was a kid, that was my favorite toy.
How ironic that I would grow up to be the voice
on millions of phone systems,
when I used to just play operator.
♪
I became the original voice of Siri
in a very mysterious way.
In other words, I don't know.
I had done some digital voice recording
for a big company that became Nuance,
an IVR company text-to-speech,
and so I knew that I was recording
for some kind of phone system.
At that time, none of us could picture
that the phone system would be handheld,
a tiny miniature computer
that would interact with you.
Actually, Apple came in after the fact.
You know, so...
And I don't know whether the original creators of Siri
chose my voice or whether Apple chose my voice.
So that remains a mystery.
The original recordings were done in July of 2005.
Four hours a day, five days a week,
and it's very tough on the vocal cords
in the sense that it's not creative speaking
and you don't change the pitch or the tone
or the timbre or the pacing of your voice.
Everything has to be read the same.
Everything has to be read like this.
You're reading like this
and you have a director and it's very...
It's very controlled and very restrictive.
I found out that I was the voice of Siri
because a fellow voice actor emailed me and said,
"Hey, we're playing around with his new iPhone,
isn't this you?"
So I went on the Apple site and I listened
and I said, "Yes."
"Really?" "Yes, that's me."
So it was very surprising.
On the one hand, it was extremely flattering
to have been chosen to be that iconic app,
and it was iconic because it was the first
concatenated voice that sounded human
and that was able to interact with you.
So it was definitely an iconic thing.
So that was very flattering
and that part of it was great,
but it's kind of disconcerting
to hear your voice
in a device like that
that's on, you know,
distributed to millions and millions of people,
and without you really knowing about it.
Because your voice is very personal.
Your voice is like your face
or your fingerprints.
So on the one side, it was really cool.
On the other side, it was like gee, that's kind of weird.
Okay, now I think I'll make one for Zack.
Okay, so the pod goes down,
go like this,
get the amount of foam you want by that.
You know, how foamy you want it.
My mother and father were not your average people.
They were pretty uneducated.
My mother was very childlike and fantasy oriented.
She starting having me modeling at three years old.
One of the major lessons
and traumatic moments in my life
was when she had me on Princess for a Day.
But I didn't realize how traumatic this experience was
till I start writing this book about my life.
That's the first thing I wrote about,
on a quiet deck in Connecticut in the forest.
And I started crying and I realized
that this was a very sad thing
that she had me do.
You know, and the lesson was, you know,
do anything to be known and to stand out
and you know, lie, do anything.
You know, I'm not going to be happy
unless you become a princess.
♪
I guess it was New Year's, maybe it was '68.
Our wild friend Margaret invited us.
I came to the party after they left and she said to me,
"Guess who I met at the party?" I said, "Who?"
She said, "I met Claude Picasso
and I'm gonna introduce you to him,
and you're gonna fall in love with him
and he's gonna fall in love with you."
And then we went to the city and Claude opened the door,
and I had never seen anybody who looked like him.
He was very dramatic looking.
He looked very much like his father, Pablo Picasso.
And the next day, Margaret called and said to me,
"Claude asked me for your phone number."
I said, "Really?"
So about ten minutes later, he called me
and he said, "I'd like to take you to dinner."
And I said, "Well, why don't you come to Brooklyn for dinner?"
Even though I didn't know how to cook.
He said, "Well, where's Brooklyn?"
And so I told him how to get to Brooklyn on the train,
and he came, and we never left each other
for the next three years.
Well, when I introduced my mother to Claude,
she said, "Picass-io?"
She had no idea who he was or who Picasso was.
And then I got her a book about Picasso's sculptures.
Then she started to realize,
"Oh, now she's a princess.
Yeah, this is what I wanted, yeah,
She did what I wanted."
I went away with his sister Paloma
to an island on a vacation.
When I came back, he said, "I want to marry you.
So let's go to City Hall."
Well, it's like in New York, you know,
there's a group of people who have access to each other,
and if you're not part of their group,
you don't have access into that world
of very famous artists, wealth,
you know, interest... writers.
And every door had just flung open in a second.
But I felt something was very empty.
And so, I began to feel frustrated
and curious about other people, other worlds.
I didn't feel... there was something unreal going on.
And Claude started to get very upset about all of this
and threatened, and felt that I was no longer...
My allegiance was no longer with him.
And he said to me, "The student eventually leaves the teacher."
'Cause he knew I would leave, yes.
And I did.
This was taken probably four weeks
after I was home and out of the hospital
and back in school.
Probably four weeks.
- That's not much. - I was in a lot of pain.
- Really? - Oh my.
You can tell, look at my face.
It's painful looking, and he thought
that was because I was sad.
I hurt so bad I couldn't hardly stand to stand on that bridge.
I still had ulcers on the bottom of my feet
about that big around.
- I mean, did everybody know? - Everybody figured
that it was somebody from the turnpike,
because the turnpike opened about ten years
prior to my abduction.
It was the most exciting and most colorful thing
in this whole area, and we just assumed
that somebody was coming off of that network of people
that were new in the area.
It's a new place, new adventure,
and he was just stalking people
and doing terrible things.
No one knew that he lived here.
He said, "Now, tell me who I am," and I did not know.
He said, "Does 'Bicycle Pete' mean anything to you?"
He said, "You kids make fun of me all the time
on the school bus,"
and then I knew who he was.
♪
"Now, your goal is to do what I tell you to do."
And I go to him one... this is like the third or fourth day,
I said, "What is it you want me to do?"
He said, "Do you know how to drive?"
I said, "Yeah."
I had had no driving training,
but I figured it was a survival technique.
I have to do this, I'm gonna have to figure it out.
And his goal was to get to the golden egg,
and I had no clue what that was.
I'd never heard that phrase before.
And during the conversation of three or four days
of him screaming and yelling at me,
I realized what the golden egg was.
It was the turnpike, and I learned that
when we got to Sidneys Knob.
There's a cave there on the top
which overlooks the turnpike.
♪
And inside the cave, he said "Reach in there
and get me that can, and don't do nothing else,
'cause I'll shoot you right in the back."
And I pulled out this can and it was an old rusty can
and it had been there a long time.
He took an old rusty hunting knife
and he charred it open with the knife and he goes,
"Well, I guess you're gonna eat today, blue eyes."
And he put three peas on the blade of a hunting knife
and stuck them in the back of my throat and turned the knife.
Said, "Can you feel that?"
And I said, "Yeah, I can feel that."
And he said, "Well, blood can come at any time,
you better swallow."
And that's the only food that I recall ever having or seeing.
♪
Every day was more violent than the day before,
and the more intense it got when he killed Terry Anderson,
the anger and the beatings and his demeanor
changed completely on day seven.
And he shot Terry Anderson within 18 feet of me.
♪
Terry Anderson was an FBI agent
who was sent here for the search from Philadelphia.
He was 44 years old.
♪
He was the father of four.
♪
And after that happened,
Hollenbaugh's rage was manifested
to really out of control.
He was running around talking in tongues.
It was like a raging maniac.
He had such an evil mind of just killing people.
"You saw me kill one, I'll kill more."
That was the day... seventh day
that I was with William Hollenbaugh.
The following day, I was rescued
and Mr. Hollenbaugh was killed.
He was shot immediately by the officer
who came from behind the house.
And that's end of story here.
♪
I am very lucky that I graduated from college
at a moment when doors were opening for women.
When I talk to young women, they have no idea that there
was time women couldn't get credit cards in their names,
or when there couldn't be a women CEO, or you know.
So lots and lots of doors opened up,
both for me as a woman
and as an African American.
When I was at Columbia,
my advisor Phyllis Garland
was the only Black woman on the faculty.
We were talking about what my topic was going to be,
and I gave her some really clichéd,
unimaginative kinds of topics.
Like Fulton Fish Market, you know,
something that a girl who hadn't grown up in New York
would think, "Nobody's ever done this before!"
And at the end of the conversation,
Phyl said to me, "You know, your name is A'Lelia,
do you have any connection to Madam Walker
and A'Lelia Walker,
Madam Walker's daughter?"
And I'm like, "Yeah, that's my family."
Because, you know, I wanted to be me.
I didn't want to be somebody's great-great-granddaughter only
and that was my only identity.
But I said, "Yeah, that's my family," and Phyl said,
"That's what you're going to write your paper about."
So that's the fall of 1975.
I mean, that was, you know,
there was nobody else saying to me, "A'Lelia,
this is really an important story and you need
to write a book and somebody's gonna publish a book."
But Phyl sort of planted that seed,
so I had begun to do some research.
I'm still really... I gotta make money.
I didn't inherit, you know... I didn't have a trust fund.
So I was able to get a fellowship from NBC
that NBC sponsored, and that gave me
a little foot in the door at NBC.
So when I finished, I was hired by NBC.
You know, it was an interesting time
because it was... you never knew
what any day was going to be.
I kept a suitcase packed in my car.
So you could be, you know, in the middle of the night,
you get a call and you run to the private airport
and jump on a plane, and you didn't know
where you were going to be for the next week or so.
I flew into Memphis.
At the time, I had a big afro,
and I went to the rental car place,
and the only car available was a red Camaro.
So I'm driving from Memphis to Mississippi.
I've never been in Mississippi before.
But it's a beautiful spring day.
It's a beautiful place, the wildflowers are blooming,
I see a cardinal fly across, I'm thinking,
"Mississippi, all these horrible things
I've heard about Mississippi, what a beautiful place.
How ironic this is."
So I arrive in Tupelo in my red Camaro,
and you know, again, at that point, no cellphones.
So I needed to make a phone call.
You have to call the New York desk
to tell them where you are,
and the one place to make the phone call was a pool hall
with a Coca-Cola machine
and a bunch of old boys standing around.
But my camera guys came in with me,
I made my phone call.
That evening, we went to cover the rally.
That was probably one of the pivotal moments for me
that I, you know, I knew that I was safe
because I was with people who were watching out for me,
but it was also something that was very frightening.
But it was really an experience for me
to say, you know, you're a journalist.
You're supposed to be able to go into a war zone,
you're supposed to be able to go into a place
that's uncomfortable and you have to figure out
how to navigate it.
I covered the child murders in Atlanta.
I was the lead producer on that.
I then was a producer on the Jesse Jackson campaign
and on the Geraldine Ferraro campaign.
So I was doing, you know, I was making my way
up the ladder.
This was summer of 1976.
Women had just sued Newsweek
and they had sued NBC and ABC,
because women, young women were hired
as secretaries or researchers
and they stayed at that level,
and young men would be hired as associate producers
or desk assistants and then they would become producers.
And so, a new bureau chief came in
and he had been replaced
by the first Black woman bureau chief.
We just really clashed.
This guy really, he was mad because he had been replaced
by a Black woman.
I was ready to quit.
♪
I feel that these days, there's probably
a more equal mix, but for sure,
you know, the art world, like the rest of the world is,
has always traditionally been more male oriented.
I think that's no secret to anyone.
I've always wanted to have a very diverse studio
that's able to explore all kinds of different techniques,
use all kinds of different materials.
And this is actually how big he was.
This is his life size, like, they very meticulously
recorded all of his measurements.
And I even had like xeroxes of his hands
so we knew how big his hands were.
It's pretty amazing right?
- Stand next... yeah, that's great. - Look at that.
I mean, I have big hands, but look at that.
Pretty crazy, right?
Then I had, you know, one assistant
for a couple of years and then it just,
you know, we got bigger projects and needed more people
and it just sort of grew over the years.
We did a project for Lady Gaga a couple of years ago
that was part of her Fame perfume launch.
We've done a few projects for her.
So now we've got this challenge.
We need to make this giant transparent egg shape,
like her perfume bottle,
that also sits in a carriage
that she can get in and out of
and there's a scene inside it, you know.
And it's all attached to this actual carriage
that is being shipped to us from Los Angeles.
And when it gets here,
is going to be drawn by an actual horse.
So it's just like, whoa, you know,
and all this has to come together
in like ten days.
All my cumulative experience and experience making, you know,
all kinds of different things
kind of informed who I am and what I am today
and what I am interested in doing
or not interested in doing.
It's fun to have stuff here in the city
that people can actually see and experience.
So in Phase 3 of the High Line,
we were asked by Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the architects,
to help them develop a rubber material
that resembled the beam forms
and create a couple of levels
and sort of in-and-out areas
so that kids could use it as a play area.
Underneath all these pieces of rubber that we made
are part of the original beam structure of the High Line.
Then they cut through and made this second level here
so the kids could sort of go in and out.
They have all these openings
they can climb around,
and then there are periscopes also
that you can see different views of the city through.
Even though I always wanted to, you know,
live in different places and experience different things,
I never really questioned what I wanted to do.
You know, so that was always very crystal clear to me.
♪
Lake Champlain was always down the hill
and we could see it from the top of the hill
and we would always walk down to the lake at look at it
and sometimes we'd go swimming and stuff.
I ended up working there summers
when I was going to veterinary school.
I looked at the lake and said,
"I think I want to swim across that."
That crossing is like between eight and nine miles.
So we went and did our little adventure
and swam across Lake Champlain in August of 1977.
So I think that's the first time that it entered my head
that I wanted to swim across something.
♪
My first job as a veterinarian was in Vermont.
It was in the northern part of Vermont
in a town called Newport.
There were farms that I would go to
where I wouldn't be allowed out of the truck.
I'd be met at the truck by the famer
and he would tell me to just leave
and I would counter that with,
"So you're going to just let the cow die
and not have anyone look at her?"
And he says that he would prefer that to having me.
After three years, the veterinarian I was working for
decided to finally have a contract drawn up.
Some of the stipulations in the document
weren't what I was expecting.
The lawyer that I was consulting said,
"Well, if you take a stand because you feel this strongly,
what's the worst that could happen to you?"
And I said, "Well, I could lose my job,"
and that's exactly what happened.
I was five months pregnant
so I was going to have a baby at the end of that year
and I started working out of my living room,
you know, taking large animal calls
and having people come see me.
Then toward the end of that year,
I talked to my in-laws who ran a business
called Martin's Snack Bar
and said, you know, what would you think about me
turning that into an animal hospital?
♪
It was one of those things where I think the moment
was driven by necessity.
I just was responsive,
I didn't really have a lot of background
in running a business.
So I basically figured I'd enrolled
in the school of hard knocks.
Because you do make these bad decisions or mistakes
because you just don't know any better.
One example, which is a very minor example is,
I got employees, and there's this thing called withholding.
And then, after a little bit of time,
the government wants what you withheld, and I said,
"Oh. Where is that?"
We grew steadily.
We started getting busier,
and then I had a veterinarian call who said,
"Are you looking for another veterinarian?"
I said to her, "Oh, what an interesting idea."
So we did keep on growing.
It was always steadily growing,
and it was 15 years
when we decided to expand into a bigger building.
♪
During my young childrearing and building the practice,
I wasn't swimming nearly as much as I do now.
♪
I think back then, I might have been too busy
to swim as much as I do now.
When I told my husband I was going to swim
the English Channel, he says,
"Uh, Paula, that window has closed for you."
And I said, "What does that mean?"
He says, "Well, you're too old
to do something like that."
I want to say something.
I don't want to make any mistakes.
It's too important.
Why can't I get what's in my head
out to my voice?
You mean, our voice.
Our voice.
Begin with the truth.
What if I don't have anything to say?
What if they listen to what I have to say
and hate it?
Colette wants.
Colette wants...
you to listen to her,
pay attention to her
and consider her ideas and opinions legitimate.
Colette wants people to stop bullshitting her.
Colette wants you to forget how old she is
and remember how young her mind is.
♪
This is me in Sweden.
Yeah, that was the beginning of the year.
So my junior high school and high school years
were my quest to find people I belonged with.
People who were like me,
who would accept me.
Because the cheerleaders
and the football players
and the, you know,
the larger population was...
I was nobody, and so I was always trying to be
accepted and fit in.
I didn't embrace being different
until much, much later in my life.
♪
I applied to be an exchange student
because I wanted to leave home.
I saw it as a way to get out of Dodge.
I went to Sweden.
I lived in Gothenburg
but it's pronounced in Swedish Göteborg.
And I didn't mind being the outsider.
Before I went to Sweden, I wanted to fit in.
When I came back from Sweden, I didn't care.
I think being an exchange student,
even though I made some errors in judgment
over that year, showed me
using your imagination,
you could accomplish a lot.
That was the first place I ever went
where I was embraced,
and I wasn't looked down on
for being different.
♪
I ended up getting my degree in fine arts, in drawing.
I was assisting an art director
on a magazine at Rodale Press.
I worked as an artist, a board artist
for New Jersey Magazine.
I knew that's not what I wanted to do
for the rest of my life was art.
I took an acting class and that was it.
I knew immediately.
I was in the classroom for an hour
and it was like, I found my passion.
That's it.
Long story short, I got accepted
into the first graduating class
of the Masters of Fine Arts program
at the Actors Studio Drama School
at The New School.
And that's where I went.
I graduated in 1997
and I was the first class that graduated from that program,
which is now pretty well established.
All my acting teachers were trained by Lee Strasberg.
So they had to study with him and they also had to be
members of the Actors Studio, which is a very closed club.
Then, we would have master classes
with people like Estelle Parsons
and John Patrick Shanley,
who is a playwright that I admire
and was mesmerized by him.
Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet
and Sally Field and Jessica Lange,
and Paul Newman, who I got to do a scene with in graduate...
I mean, it was like...
You couldn't ask for anything better.
♪
I try not to say "I'm sorry" anymore,
and sometimes I do let it slip,
and then I say, "I'm not sorry."
I give myself more permission.
I, uh, I say "no" more
to things I really don't want,
and I say "yes" more
to things I really do want.
We're taught
from a very early age as women
what's wrong with us,
and I try to embrace
what's right with me.
♪
So, that leads me to where I am now...
a show for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
♪
It's a very special place to live.
You feel like you're in New York and not in New York, you know,
and, um, I like it.
I like the contrast, you know.
I guess maybe getting older, you do want something
sometimes more peaceful.
That might be one of the indicators of my age.
There was a certain power to having that name.
And giving up that power,
I didn't know exactly who I was going to become.
And I knew I wanted to give the name Picasso up,
and several people said, "Don't give that up!
You can sell things, it could be to your advantage."
And there could... there were advantages to keeping the name.
Andy Warhol couldn't believe that I was...
Wanted to give up the name.
You know, there was something that was missing
that I wasn't really
totally connected
with who I really am.
And so, I eventually met my second husband,
Bill Lavner.
Well, we were working at the same office.
These neighborhood little directories, uh, bluebooks.
Bill and I got married,
and we had this... Uh, we lived in the Village,
and Bill was a publisher,
and we had this
very nice life.
We traveled.
He was brilliant at frequent flier miles,
so we traveled around the world.
We eventually found my children's birth parents
and went to Korea.
Now the children were 16 and 14,
and my husband started to walk funny.
So the next day he went to St. Vincent's Hospital,
and the operation showed that
he had a tumor on his spine,
and it would have to be removed
in a special operation.
Eventually, we went to another hospital,
and something happened during the operation.
There was an accident, and, um,
he was paralyzed.
And, I went home,
poured myself some hot milk and cognac,
drank it,
went to sleep.
And the next day, I began my new life.
♪
So I said to my husband,
"Guess what? I'm gonna join the Sun City Poms."
He looked at me, and he said,
"Over my dead body!"
Well, unfortunately, he passed away.
♪
I thought, you know,
he said over his dead body, and maybe that means,
"Okay, now go and join them."
♪
When you are a Sun City Pom,
you gotta be one tough old broad, really.
If you wanna be on there and you wanna be on stage
and you wanna perform,
you perform, it doesn't matter what's wrong with you.
Yes, I hurt.
It kills me to get outta bed.
And it hurts all the way,
but those girls are waiting for me,
and I have to get there.
Then you get to the block that's mobbed with people.
Nothing hurts anymore,
'cause you gotta put on a show for those people.
♪
Well, the Poms started in 1979
as a cheerleading squad
to a women's softball team called the Sun City Saints.
They were having poor attendance, I guess,
at these women's softball games, and I think they figured
if they had some cheerleaders there,
maybe they'd get more men to show up.
So the Poms have been around,
well, we'll be celebrating our 40th anniversary
in a couple of years.
♪
You have to want to do it...
And of course if they didn't, they wouldn't be there...
And you have the desire for perfection.
You have this, uh,
desire to perform.
And no matter what is bothering you,
that desire takes over
because you can be tired, you can be sick,
you can lay down when it's over,
but you've got to get through these performances.
♪
I think I started having symptoms of my arthritis
in my hands when I was about 24.
When the doctor told me that
I would end up in a wheelchair by the time I was 45,
and it scared me.
I thought, "I can't let that happen.
That's too young, that's...
I've gotta keep going."
And then, it wasn't till I turned 62,
the year I retired,
I got up one morning, and I just fell.
My... I just couldn't walk anymore.
Today, I am going through the breast cancer
that I was told I was free and clear of after 10 years.
It came back and metastasized into my liver,
and Stage IV.
It's in any type of situation like this,
you have to have something that's important to you,
something you like,
that keeps you going.
And you say, "Well, I'm not gonna give in
and just sit around and do nothing"
because that's the worst thing you can do is sit and lay.
♪
And then, um,
I noticed my neighbor Greta,
she would leave in these nice costumes.
And so, I talked to her,
and she says, "Well, we do dancing."
And I said, "Oh, I'd love to get back into dancing."
I said, "I don't know how well I would do anymore,
but I sure would love to get back into dancing."
So for about three years,
I took really heavy doses of morphine.
And, um, one day I just woke up
and told myself I had to come off them.
I just had to find a way
that, you know, I couldn't get up in the morning without
having those by my bed.
And I was trying to decide
was I takin' 'em because of an addiction
or because I really hurt?
And then, I finally got down to one a day.
And then, finally one night I forgot to take it.
And I woke up in the morning and thought,
"Oh, I feel pretty good."
So as far as resilience and age
and what keeps you going,
um, I give the Poms a lot of credit.
Maybe people say, "Ugh, that doesn't mean anything."
I do.
It's that desire to do things
that keeps us going.
It's a motivation for me.
And some of these elderly ladies
that are 84 and in their early 80s,
and I just look at them and go,
"You're amazing."
And they really do, they inspire me to keep moving.
And if we forget to unzip each other when we're done,
then I get home and it's like,
"Oh, my goodness, who am I gonna get to zip me down?"
Well, usually one of my neighbors are home.
♪
Few more things, I gotta get the iPod.
That's the music that we march to.
♪
See ya at the parade.
♪
- Yup. - And your daughter too.
And I volunteer a lot to different places, so
I'm still out there and active, and that's all that matters.
He had no upbringing, no rearing,
no love, no compassion,
no one hugged him and kissed him,
told him they loved him.
You cannot be of sound mind,
make good decisions if you have hatred in your heart.
I'm in the process of dedicating the rest of my life
to mental health.
I don't know what inroads I can make in that project,
but I'm willing to donate the rest of my life,
and any money that I can contribute to that cause,
I will definitely do that.
We have to be more accountable
for the mental illness in our nation.
And if I can be remembered as one thing and one person,
I want to be remembered as being giving
and forgiving.
He cannot be responsible for his actions
when he was treated so poorly.
The system failed him,
and we failed him.
I forgave him
because it's the right thing to do.
♪
My mother was the fourth generation of women
in her family to have worked for the Walker Company,
and I think she grew up feeling that that was something
she was expected to do...
She majored in chemistry and business in college...
But she didn't want to impose that on us.
I grew up wanting to do... Wanting to be a writer,
not wanting to do
the same thing that my parents had done.
I was able to approach the story
in a way that was comfortable for me
to tell Madam Walker's story,
to discover things that others had really forgotten
or never known about her.
And I really came to it more through
A'Lelia Walker, Madam Walker's daughter,
because she had been part of the Harlem Renaissance.
In the late '60s,
as I was beginning to discover people like
Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes,
my grandfather had those books,
he had books that they had written,
and so I became attached to that
and fascinated by that
because I loved to write and I loved those writers.
So she was the person that I was really interested in initially.
Madam Walker was too complicated.
So while I was on the Radcliffe College board,
one of the other board members
was a professor named Nathan Huggins.
And Nathan also happened to be
an advisor for a series of biographies
that Chelsea House Publishing
had created called Black Americans of Achievement,
and they needed a Madam Walker book,
and there had never been a Madam Walker book,
and he knew that I was doing some research
on my great-great-grandmother.
Around this time,
Alex Haley had come to us and asked about
writing a biography of Madam Walker...
Actually he wanted to do a fictionalized version.
When we first started, Haley would say, "Baby!"
You know, "Baby, do this," and he said, um,
"Make a file folder, a manila folder for every year
of your story,
and just drop things in that folder.
And make some folders for the characters in your book,
and drop some things in the folder."
So I now have thousands of folders
because Alex told me how to organize it.
I mean, it's just a little thing,
but it makes such a huge difference.
So now on my fourth book,
I've got all of this material that I've been collecting
really for the last four decades.
At 23, I would never have thought
I would have anything at all
to do with Madam Walker.
Phyl Garland said you need to write this story.
Alex Haley came along.
And then I saw the effect that this
story had on other women.
How inspired other women were by Madam Walker,
and so that made me want to know more, made me want to,
to continue to tell the story.
Du Bois is my intellectual hero,
and as I go through this old issue of The Crisis,
he has Madam Walker's obit,
and Du Bois says great things about her.
He was just full of praise, and I thought, well, you know,
I sort of filed that away, and I thought,
"If my intellectual hero
can find something good about this person
about whom I'm ambivalent,
then I need to re-examine it."
That her real thrust was not straightening hair,
but changing hygiene
and helping people heal scalp disease,
but to understand that the caricature
that had been created about her wasn't really accurate.
And then I began to discover how much
of a political activist she was,
and how much of a philanthropist she was,
and how much she empowered women economically.
So she became then, instead of this,
you know, one little incorrect
nugget that people repeated over and over again,
she became this fully-formed human being
who really made a huge difference for women.
And now I'm at the point where
some of the seeds that I planted
by trying to keep the story alive
have now come full circle,
and I'm able to help the company,
and help the brand stay alive,
and now that will be there after me.
So, that leads me to where I am now,
and I'm in the process of writing... rewriting...
A show for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
I had started and stopped, and started and stopped
this idea of a one-woman show.
It was based on this whole concept of
me having this duality
in my life.
The thing I'm supposed to do,
and the thing I wanna do.
I'm confronting things in this play
that I didn't want to confront before
'cause I thought I confronted them in therapy,
quite frankly.
But, I embrace them now,
and my age has given me permission
to say "This is me,"
and "This is where I came from.
This is what I'm doing.
This is how I...
This is my art."
But it will feed into my resilience
in that I can get back up there.
I can get back on stage, I can perform again.
And hopefully I'll be able to do more with that.
And it's just another one of those things
I can say I did it.
You know, I wrote it,
I produced it.
I got people to collaborate with me.
And, um, I can check that off.
And maybe I'll write another one.
I think the reason why we're so willing
to allow ourselves
to buy in to someone else
and let ourselves go
is because we don't have that self-esteem.
We don't believe in... We don't think we deserve it.
We don't... we don't think we're good enough.
And I don't know where that comes from.
I guess it comes from our upbringing.
Where else could it come from?
But the older I get, the more I see
that I am worth it.
So, I don't... I don't lose myself anymore.
I know myself,
and I trust myself.
♪
I've really lived by my gut in a lot of ways,
and I feel like that's what's led me to this place today
is just sort of following my gut instincts,
and always trying to get involved as much as possible
in things that really
are gratifying and satisfying to me
on a personal level,
and make me happy.
I'm working on a series of pieces
that are inspired by
the illustrations of
a German biologist named Ernst Haeckel.
A lot of them are based on sea creatures.
So they're inspired by him, but I think they're also
inspired by my childhood,
you know, growing up on the beach
and seeing all these cool, crazy sea anemones,
and sea urchins, and jellyfish.
So I'm sort of trying to
translate those into the third dimension.
I guess in another ten years,
I don't see my life being that much different
than it is now, only I hope to be
less involved in the commercial work.
So, I don't feel that
I'm ever gonna really retire.
My retirement is gonna be doing my own work.
♪
Starting in 2009,
I was helping a friend train
'cause that was her goal, to swim the English Channel.
One of the other support people
was on the pebbly beach and said to me,
"Are you gonna swim the Channel?"
And I said to her, "No!
Why would you ask me a question like that?"
You know, 'cause... I don't know why I reacted like that.
And she said,
"Because I think you can do it."
And so then I started to say,
"Really? Somebody else thinks I can do something?"
The time that I selected with my pilot
for my English Channel swim attempt,
uh, was chosen as September 7 to 14, 2016.
Was there ever a point during your practicing
leading up to the swim
that you didn't think you could do it?
Oh, many points,
because it's not an easy swim by any means,
and I'd had, um,
people I knew who weren't successful.
One of the things that makes it such a hard swim is that
you never know where you are, you know?
So, are you almost done, or are you only part way?
It's just a horrible thing.
And I remember swimming
and looking to the left
where there was the vast ocean,
and sometimes you'd see the big... the big ships,
and then looking to the right and seeing my little boat
next to me, and I would think,
"That's all right, I don't need to know where I am, I'm fine."
Near the end, when we were in the pitch black
and the small boat was with us,
and the crew was shining a spotlight on the cliff wall,
my support swimmer would say,
"Can you see the light? You see the light?
Go for that."
And then I'd say, "Okay."
And then I would go over, and she said
the last 200 meters I swam, I swam, um, doggie paddle.
She said, "Some of your clients might like to hear that."
I remember telling people that it felt like crawling.
And so, in a way, you are crawling in the water
when you're doing the doggie paddle.
And then when I got to there
and slapped my hand on the face of the cliff,
it was just, um,
a wonderful feeling, it was just like, "Oh."
And then my friend that was next to me, you know,
squealed in delight and says that,
"You are an English Channel swimmer, Paula!
You've made it!"
♪
So, I became stronger.
And I had to take care of all the finances and everything,
and he was amazing.
He inspired everybody.
I'm gonna start to cry.
He helped other people from Mount Sinai Hospital.
He was funny.
He read.
He gave me all the information that I needed
'cause he would read and listen to NPR every day.
He taught me more about patience
and love.
I didn't understand... I understand even more now,
'cause he died three years ago,
and I even understand more now about some of the lessons
he tried to teach me.
My most poignant memories of Bill are
when he would hug me.
He couldn't use his hands, but he would
take all his strength to hug me.
And it was almost...
I almost couldn't bear it
because it was so poignant
and so touching.
Except, you know, I embraced it,
but at the same time, sometimes I wanted to pull away
'cause it was painful.
So I finally revealed myself
almost exactly two years later in 2013.
One of the struggles that I had during those two years,
I said, "Well, this could go one of two ways.
You know, 'Oh, let's get her, she's Siri.'
'Oh, let's not get her, she's Siri, she's everywhere.'"
Corporations really seem to be quite possessive
of their digital voices.
They don't really want people to
associate a person,
a face with the device.
They want people to imagine, you know,
whoever they wanna imagine that they're talking to.
Well, it was kind of a strange thing because,
I never aspired to fame.
I call myself "accidentally famous."
So, it was a struggle for me because I basically
am more of an introvert than an extrovert.
Siri really jolted me out of my comfort zone,
and made me realize that I was capable of doing
a lot more than maybe I was doing at that point.
Suddenly, after not being on camera for many years,
after the Siri revelation, I was on camera a lot,
and I discovered that it was something that I did
fairly comfortably.
And just reminded myself that,
"Well, you know, maybe you should just
get out a little more
and do more of this type of stuff."
So, thus the Siri Sings Band,
you know, and things like that, so.
But I think as far as women aging,
there's something calming about reaching the 60s.
All of a sudden, you can just... I find myself,
I'm more able to say "no"
to things that I don't wanna do, you know.
It's like, "You know, I really hate that.
You know what? I'm just not gonna do it."
I can't do too much in here,
but I can do a little bit.
Wow.
So.
Okay.
I don't wanna break another light.
So, is that enough?
- You still got it. - Okay.
Where does my resilience come from?
I just have to think that I'm darn lucky.
I very often think,
"Wonder what it's like to die.
What do you feel like
in the days or hours before you die?"
I'm curious.
When that time comes...
I say this, I don't know if I'll follow through on it...
But I say I won't have any fear
because I've had such a good life.
So, being 63 is such a blessing to me.
My mother died when she was 46.
My grandmother died when she was in her 40s.
And so, I really sort of sweated that for a while.
Like, "Am I gonna make it past there?"
Because it seems that the women in my family
tended to die young.
And so I feel like every year
is a blessing and an opportunity.
My idea about senior citizens changed
after my mom died,
after watching the last two years of her life,
watching my dad care for her,
watching how seniors are treated in the healthcare system,
and without an advocate how dismissed they can be,
how important it is to advocate for seniors.
I don't know, resilience it's...
It's part of being a woman,
part of being not willing to give up the ghost
and just stay in a corner
and be what people think you should be.
The only way that we grow
is when we have to deal with something
and solve a problem and get past something,
even if it's failure.
Failure is a great impetus!
I began to understand things on a deeper level about my life
and what created me,
and what I created myself.
You know, the challenge of learning to write,
now I have a great appreciation of writing
and understanding of that,
being able to write something.
I'm not the greatest writer,
but a wrote a decent book that people seem to like
and read quickly.
Um...
♪
It's like... I guess put a frame around
what happened to me and why,
and so now I can go on to, um,
not a new book, but a new chapter in my life.
Well, I've been traveling a lot...
♪
Because I was like...
There was a certain level of imprisonment
with my husband's being paralyzed.
I was also paralyzed in a certain way.
Even though he tried to give me a lot of freedom,
it was limited.
And I did do some traveling,
but I've been flying like a bird.
♪
I've begun to date a little,
which is, um,
at first very shocking.
The first date I went on very, you know,
within in the last six months, I wasn't ready till then,
I was like, like 14 years old.
I was nervous, you know.
But the great thing is how I'm different than 14
is that I know right away
what I like and don't like,
and if I'm interested in somebody or I'm not.
And I don't, you know, have any qualms about
saying "no,"
which I did when I was much younger.
♪
I think you get definitely better with age and experience.
Absolutely.
I mean, how could you not?
How could you not get better with age and experience?
At the age of 60, you know,
you could be conceivably
only at your halfway point,
or a little bit past your halfway point in life,
so that's a lot of time left to do stuff.
But I think I would tell my younger self that,
um, it'll get better in a week.
Whatever you're dealing with,
give it that good week's worth of patience,
and things will be better one way or the other.
I would say you are absolutely right
to have tried to do the best job that you could do
in whatever job you had,
that you should always go one step farther,
that you need to deliver not just enough, but more.
But there seems to be this desperate need
to hold on to youth as much as we possibly can,
and I don't know that that's a very healthy thing.
I don't think we wanna hold on to our youth,
we just wanna hold on to maybe
our youthful attitudes.
I don't see myself retiring.
I see myself as
maybe being able to pick and choose
a little more selectively about what I do.
I see myself teaching,
still teaching.
I don't wanna ever stop teaching.
I don't wanna ever stop acting.
I always say I wanna die one of three ways:
on stage, in front of a classroom,
or having sex.
I realize about myself, I know myself so much better.
I have such a creative spirit,
and I will always have to create.
So what will happen to me is unknown...
but I'm very open to the unknown.
And that... as long as you're not afraid of that,
I think things can happen.
♪
Where do you see yourself when you're 60?
- Ooh, that's a good question. - That's a ways away from now.
That's... that's a little bit away.
Yeah.
Hopefully I'm still doing really cool things.
I mean, I don't ever see myself officially retiring,
or, you know, being done with working.
I love having things to do,
and so even if I'm 60,
hopefully I'm still healthy and good to go,
but I'd love to still be able to
run businesses, help other people.
I still see myself working.
I don't know what it's gonna be like.
That's really scary.
I think that... and I was not
born when my mom was born, so I don't know
how women before perceived aging,
but I feel like now because things change so rapidly,
I feel so unsure
about what the world will be like
and where I will be in the world.
And that is so daunting to me that when I hear that question,
I'm like, "But, what is the world gonna be like?"
That would change everything.
It could change everything for me in the next five years.
Yeah, I would say I'm curious,
but I definitely haven't sat down and thought about it.
And anything, any fears about aging?
When I was younger, I was really scared
to turn 30.
- Really? - I was really scared,
um, and I think it was just my own vanity,
you know, of aging,
of who I was gonna be at the age of 30.
What was my life accomplishment at that point?
I don't know, I feel like I think about...
I almost have... I think about too much, like obsession
with what am I going to feel
when I'm five, ten years from now?
What am I gonna feel when I'm 40?
How am I going to get there?
And is it going to be what I want it to be?
I get really frustrated when people talk about age as, um,
as being this bad thing,
because everyone gets older.
Everyone experiences that,
and if not, then that's even
- more tragic. - Well, it's much better,
much better than the alternative.
Yes, exactly.
I really resent that
women's value is so perceived by their age.
- Yes, I agree. - I think that older people
in general underestimate it,
'cause they've gone through so much,
and you have so much to learn from them.
- Yeah. - That's what I found
with my grandparents, so...
I love it when I see women of any age,
especially, like, above 60 saying
"No, I refuse to go under.
I refuse to become 'invisible.'"
I'm gonna be louder.
I'm gonna really advocate for myself and women like me.
When I get older, am I just gonna lose
my voice to tell stories too?
So, yeah, I mean, I think it's really awful
because I think that there's so much
to hear from older women.
Young people have to stop
thinking that older women are
just jaded and not interested in their lives...
- Right. - And older women have to
meet us halfway too, and not think that we're just
stupid and attached to our phones,
and always thinking about the internet.
We are smart, we care, we want to know.
We want to empathize with your experience too.
I think that is, yeah,
it's like my thesis statement about everything.
Do you feel like you've learned
from the women that you've interviewed?
Absolutely!
You know, each of these series of interviews
have given me more insight into
who I am and what I'm doing,
and why I did this.
And it gives me this stronger sense of
how important women's stories are.
Because if they can affect me,
they're gonna affect other people that hear the stories,
and affect in a positive way
that will make you think about yourself,
and really challenge how you think about anything.
♪