Making the surgeon laugh

One of life’s longed-for little twists comes when the nice guy finally asserts himself and reveals a darker side to his personality. Alan Alda, celebrated for having played Hawkeye for 11 years in the television series M*A*S*H* and an actor who always seemed slightly too eager to ingratiate, had his moment of revelation as the creepy senator in The Aviator — a thrilling performance which was nominated for an Oscar last year.

Significantly, the sea change occurred in what Alda desribes in this deft and witty memoir as ‘golden time’ following a life-threatening intestinal blockage in Chile in 2003. ‘Now, at last,’ he writes, ‘there was no pressure to succeed. There was nothing I needed to prove to anyone. There was only the chance to have another day and to have some kind of fun with it.’

Alda’s quest for self-knowledge reached a turning-point after he had collapsed with stomach cramps and the surgeon was trying to explain in layman’s language how he was going to reconstruct his intestines. ‘Oh,’ said Alda airily, ‘you’re going to do an end-to-end anastomosis.’ He added that he had done many of them on M*A*S*H*. The author reflects that his real illness is his compulsion to amuse: ‘Apparently, you can offer to disembowel me, but I’ll still see if I can make you laugh.’

That, as he explains, was how he, Alphonso d’Abruzzo (born 1936), was raised in the knockabout world of burlesque. His father, Robert Alda (later to play George Gershwin in the biopic Rhapsody in Blue), was then known in the trade as ‘the tit singer’: he would warble the opening number while the chorus girls displayed their breasts. Young Alphonso made his stage debut aged six months in a high chair.