Life As Imperfection
I go down my share of rabbit holes while I empty my online inbox every morning. I am always on a kick to unclutter that inbox by unsubscribing from various emails and spam, but for one reason or another, like for most people, miscellaneous emails still find their way into or back into the inbox. If I am not in any particular rush at that moment or on that morning (like today, a bright and sunny Monday morning) I feel like I should be doing something productive and pruning my inbox at least seems somewhat productive. I don’t know how many emails I get every day, but its a lot. If I didn’t touch it for a whole day, something I can’t remember doing lately, I imagine the pile of incoming emails would exceed 100. It is not unusual to see the little red ball counter on my Home Screen go into the 70s when I go out-of-pocket for a big part of the day. If you are a lot older than me (I am quickly approaching 70) you may not be as email focused. If you are my children’s age you also may not be as email focused, texts and podcasts and social media being your milieu. But I seem to be right in the sweet spot of the email generation. I even remember when it was “invented” and will stand by this as the Garden of Eden of email.
My first wife worked as the receptionist at Honeywell on Long Island when we met. It was her first job out of college and she was bright and personable and, I imagine, considered quite a good catch for such a position. Soon after we wed, her boss left Honeywell, a company we would have to have called a high tech firm of its day, and started his own company with some outside investor money. I imagine this as a prehistoric version of venture capital (it was 1977). That company set up shop in Manhattan and took offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza on the 54th Floor if I recall correctly. I guess the concept of creating an illusion of success overwhelmed the concept of keeping expenses low. The business model in hand was that this company took a long-term lease on a large block of mainframe computer time (I think the IBM 370 was the go-to mainframe computer in those days, having followed its 1960s big brother, the IBM 360). They then did something fairly radical (for the day) in that they developed programs for that mainframe and sold those capabilities to companies using a business model called computer timesharing. When I think of it now, it was sort of the computer version of WeWork for its day, lease big and sublease small. The key was in developing useful programs and then selling those protocols to companies that could benefit from the service. In 1977, the personal computer was, of course, still in the Popular Mechanics stage of development. You could buy kits as a hobbyist, but not much more. Large financial institutions used computer, but they were the workhorses that did the processing businesses at hand and were not used for ancillary administrative services for the most part.
The ancillary services were things like communications among the expanding staff networks. In those days in the banking world, the biggest communications issue was with the growing international offices. The telex was just one step ahead of the old telegram, and just slightly beyond Morse Code. It was expensive and had to be succinct, but even more expensive was the telephone since transoceanic cables were still in the stone ages and the cost of a long distance phone call was a budgetary skull and crossbones. That’s where these Honeywell boys came into play. They developed a program for their computer timesharing business that allowed for cheaper communication through a radical new service called “electronic mail” (a.k.a. Email). While my ex-wife was dealing with all the shenanigans in that start-up company in Rockefeller Center, a few blocks away at my Park Avenue bank, our systems wizards had developed their own version of this new beast called OIS (Overseas Information System). We all got OIS accounts and had to do that thing that has now become one of the banes of our existence, create individual passwords. Now that I think about it, that may have been my first password other than the one to get into my treehouse with my buddies in grade school. That was all happening in about 1983, so the internet, which was technically invented that same year by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) of the Department of Defense, was not really launched for broad public use until 1993 with the creation of the World Wide Web. And now we all have email.
So, this morning’s email rabbit hole was compliments of Apple News, one of the emails I don’t think I ever signed up for, but which I do not try to unsubscribe to since there are occasionally interesting articles from publications which I don’t otherwise review and certainly don’t choose to have a paid subscription for. This article was from an old publication that I used to subscribe to called New York Magazine and it was about the aging stars of the Franco Zeffirelli 1968 film Romeo and Juliet, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. I was a mere 14 years old in 1968 and just about to move from Maine to Rome, about as big a transition as one could imagine in life, sort of like moving from the Mariana Trench to the Moon. Nevertheless, there are lots of movies I recall from that meaningful year including Funny Girl, Oliver, Bullitt, The Odd Couple, Where Eagles Dare, Hang Em’ High, Planet of the Apes, Barbarella, The Lion in Winter, Yellow Submarine, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Party, and….Romeo and Juliet. Wow! I had forgotten how many great movies that rocked the world as I know it came out that year…and that’s just the top fifteen on my hit parade. I actually don’t recall Leonard Whiting’s name, but I certainly remember Olivia Hussey. And this article is about some guy in Cleveland who is championing their joint cause to sue Paramount for taking advantage of them in their youth (they were 15 and 16 at the time of the release), especially by surprising them without specific permission with a totally nude bedroom scene that made the Zeffirelli film a groundbreaking classic.
There are lots of things that happen in life that are a shame. People have been taken advantage of by others more worldly or shrewd since time began. It is relatively easy to imagine that these two young people were mere babes in the wood at the time and just happy to be getting so much attention and to have an opportunity to become movie stars that they may have looked the other way while the advantage was being taken. Its as old a story as the Shakespearean love story that gave rise to it. The question that gets presented to us is whether a company like Paramount, which has passed through many storied corporate hands including Gulf & Western and Viacom over the years since 1968, and with assets of $58+ billion, should owe these two aging people $500 million for the advantages that were purportedly taken from them back in the bad old days. You just know someone is already working on a screenplay about this very tale…and should the aging duo also have rights to a piece of that action?
At the end of the article, Olivia Hussey says something that caught my attention. When asked if this was her fault in 1968 and if she was righteous in her present day claims, she said, “If we were perfect, there’d be no need for all this charade, this illusion that we call life.” I love that thought. Life as imperfection is a great and unifying concept that can be used to more or less explain or justify almost anything. I think what it will cause me to do is to leave more of the spam in my email inbox and think of it as the detritus of life that brings me all these great stories and thoughts.