KIRK DOUGLAS’S BOOK LET’S FACE IT
I’m listening to a book on tape during my commute from our home in Gig Harbor to our office in Seattle. The actor Kirk Douglas has written nine books in his retirement and this one was written at age 90 years. The book Let’s Face It, is, like his other books, enjoyable. One story I enjoyed was about his close friend, the late Bert Lancaster. The two were together at a dinner honoring Douglas. Lancaster noted that Douglas wasn’t eating and asked about it. Douglas said when he gave talks, as he was in a short while, he liked to “keep his stomach empty and his brain full.” After giving the talk, Douglas sat down next to Lancaster who leaned over and said to him “you could have eaten.”
I also like Douglas’s observations about the importance of friends as you grow older. He is right that they take on new significance as one grows older. He quotes Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the advice of Polonius to Laertes: “Those friends thou hast, and the adoption tried, Grapple them unto they soul with hoops of steel.” That is good advice