Excerpt: 'Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself'

— -- Acclaimed actor and author Alan Alda recalls his greatest life lessons in his new book, "Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself."

I fell deeply in love with her. When we brought her home from the hospital, I carried her up the narrow stairs to our second-floor apartment as Arlene walked ahead of me, climbing slowly against the pull of her stitches. We were in Ohio, where I was making $60 a week at the Cleveland Playhouse. With local commercials, I could sometimes bring it up to $80 a week, and we had four sunny rooms and a couch we'd bought for $5 at the Salvation Army that was comfortable, if lumpy, and equipped with a set of fleas.

Very soon, our freshly born girl looked us in the eye and smiled toothlessly. They said in those days that babies didn't smile, that it was just gas. But we knew that in spite of science and all of nature, she was smiling at us. It wasn't gas; it was love beyond the limits of anatomy.

We called her Eve. For us, she was the first woman ever born.

During the day, while I was at rehearsal, Arlene would walk down the empty streets of our neighborhood with Eve in her carriage, partly to get some air but mainly in the hope that someone would pass by and stop to look at our amazing baby. At night, when I wasn't onstage, I would read Sholom Aleichem stories aloud to Arlene while she cooked dinner and Eve slept in her crib.

As the soup simmered, Tevye delivered his milk and our girl slept quietly until she woke and called for her late-night meal. There was no doubt in that moment what our purpose in life was. Arlene would make her own milk delivery, and then I would walk barefoot on the midnight linoleum, our daughter slung over my shoulder, urging up a burp. There was no question that she, with her gummy smile, was all the reason we needed to be alive.

When she was six months old, we moved back to New York, where I took part-time jobs while trying to find work on Broadway. After three months as a doorman outside a ritzy restaurant near Rockefeller Center, I auditioned for a part that consisted of five lines of dialogue. I got the job and was completely thrilled. It was my first Broadway show. I gave back my elaborate doorman's costume and began a month of rehearsals, during which time I must have said my five lines 500 ways. Herman Shumlin was directing the show, a thin comedy called "Only in America." Shumlin was a tall man in his sixties, as thin as the play, but with a sense of humor he had apparently picked up watching Gestapo officers in war movies of the '40s. Every time I read one of my lines, he turned his bald head in my direction and looked as if he were going to ask me for my papers. He never smiled. Instead, he would hold his forehead and wince. After a few days, I realized he was constantly in the middle of a migraine attack, and I could see that the whole process of rehearsal was torture for him. It wasn't all that great for anyone else, either.

In those days, plays went out of town to get the kinks out of a show. Ours was composed almost entirely of kinks, so they had to pick and choose which ones to drop. I was hoping they weren't going to drop the five that made up my whole part. Arlene and I packed up Eve and her carriage and got on the train for Philadelphia, where we rented the cheapest room we could find. It seemed to me that the show wouldn't run more than a week or two when we got back to New York, so we wanted to save as much cash as we could while we were on the road. We found a charming hovel that was almost a replica of the rooms I had stayed in as a child, traveling with my mother and father on the burlesque circuit. The walls were covered with wooden slats painted a shade of green that must have been a high point in the history of bile.

After a couple of days in this cheerful place, Arlene caught the flu. She was unable to get out of bed and needed to sleep from morning until night. We were rehearsing onstage for the first time on the full set, and I had to be there, so I put Eve in her carriage and took her to the theater. I kept her backstage, out of the sight of Shumlin, who I felt pretty sure would see her and start clutching at his head. But then I heard my cue coming up, and I had to run onstage. I asked the other actors to watch Eve for me. They were thrilled. Actors love babies. They're a perfect audience. As I looked over my shoulder, I saw Eve in her carriage surrounded by six actors cooing and making faces. She looked a little bewildered.

I was playing a telephone lineman, and my part went like this: I came onstage, said a line intended to make the audience laugh, then climbed up a telephone pole, where I said two or three lines whose main purpose was to call attention to the fact that the producer had paid for a real telephone pole; then I hung there for 20 minutes while the play went on before I climbed down, said another funny line, and left. At this rehearsal, I got up to the top of the pole and spent my time hoping Eve was all right in the middle of the crush of actors. After only a minute or two, though, a loud wail rose from behind the scenery. It spread across the stage and hit the back wall. Then another wail. This one made it all the way to the box office in the lobby. Everyone stood completely still. Shumlin turned his bald head and looked up at me. I tried to look apologetic.

"I imagine that would be your child," he said.

"Uh, yes. I'm sorry."

Then the unbelievable happened. A gentle smile spread over Shumlin's face, possibly the first in his life. "Why don't you go look after her? We'll work on something else." I shimmied down the pole and ran to Eve. Her lower lip was up, and the corners of her mouth were down. She reached out her arms for me. I hugged her, and in a few minutes she was contented again, but that scene came back to me many times as Eve grew up. The actors had tried to entertain her, because entertaining is what we do. But she hadn't needed entertainment, she'd needed safety. Years later, I wondered if I had given in too many times to that same actor's impulse. I'd certainly entertained my children, probably to the point of being their playmate. Once, when Eve was four, we were standing in the basement having one of those endless arguments.