Starting Over at 85

by Lawrence Grobel

    In the summer of 1992, I arranged to visit James A. Michener in Brunswick, Maine. I was then collaborating with the renowned author on a book of conversations. "Could we meet him?" my younger daughter, Hana, asked.

    She was only eight at the time, but Hana knew Michener was someone special. She'd seen how carefully I'd arranged all the first editions of his books on our bookcase. Each was personally inscribed and redstamped with the initials JAM.

    "That would depend on his schedule," I said. "He's a very busy man."

Nevertheless, Hana told me it was really important that she talk to him. Then she went to work to prepare for the meeting. She took a two-inch blank book and began to write and illustrate stories about seals, one of which was called The Adventure of Taking Erny the Seal to School. To encourage her, I told her that Michener liked to write about animals.

    On July 17 I took my family to the simple house where Michener and his wife, Mari, lived. Jim remembered holding my older daughter on his lap when she was a baby. But this was the first time he had met Hana, who told him that she, too, was a writer and had brought her work with her.

    Jim smiled. "Well," he said, "I wonder if you'll let me see it." He sat down on his couch, and Hana joined him. He opened to the first page and read out loud, "Seals, by Hana Grobel.”"

    "I'm reading an original story by a young writer," he told the caller. Hana beamed. Then Michener excused himself to take the call in his study. When he returned, it seemed as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. 

    "I've just given away my last 15 million dollars─all my money," he confided to me. "I'd better be nice to Mari. I'm going to have to make do with what she's got and with whatever I can earn from future books." 

    I was stunned. He was 85 years old and about to start all over. 

    I first met James Michener in the spring of 1981 when I went to interview him for a national magazine. Our talks led to friendship. Over the following years I would see him wherever he was living and many times at airports as he traveled to and from the Far East and South Pacific, recording his adventures. 

    "My life has been, in its way, a fable for our times," he told me. "For a guy like me starting with absolutely nothing to wind up giving away a fortune is incredible." 

    It was incredible. Michener began life as a foundling. Mabel Michener, a poor widow in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, took him in. Like her own child and the others she cared for, he wore secondhand clothes and sometimes went without food. 

    He never discovered his birth date (perhaps 1907) or the place. "I could be Jewish, part Negro, probably not Oriental, but almost anything else," he said. A bright student, Jim yearned to see America. "As a kid of 14," he said, "I bummed across the country on nickels and dimes. Before I was 20, I had seen all the states but Washington, Oregon and Florida. I had an insatiable love of hearing people tell stories and what they didn't tell, I made up." A scholarship permitted him to attend Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College, and although he was suspended twice ("I was quite a radical in those days"), he graduated with highest honors in 1929. 

    Like the stories he told, his life was filled with extraordinary twists and turns. Between conventional jobs such as teaching and editing books, Michener traveled with Spanish bullfighters, worked on a coal barge in the Mediterranean and collected folk songs near Scotland. He joined the Navy during World War II, where he compiled colorful fictional accounts based on the exotic people he encountered in the South Seas. 

    In 1948 his collection of 18 stories─Tales of the South Pacific─won a Pulitzer Prize. The book soon became a best-seller.
    For Michener, it signaled a new beginning, launching him in his 40s on a spectacular career. By 1959 Hawaii appeared, Michener's first in a series of blockbuster sagas, those well-loved historical epics spanning generations of families that became his trademark. 

    His life, however, wasn't entirely focused on writing. In 1962 he ran for Congress, thinking he'd give up his writing career if elected. Thank goodness he lost, or we wouldn't have had what he considered his two best books, The Source and Iberia, not to mention the others─a total of 44 books, translated into many languages, with an estimated 50 million copies sold. 

    Michener lived modestly, and his money accumulated. What to do with it seemed obvious, at least to him: with no children of his own, he would give to others. 

    His desire to donate came from two life-changing incidents in his own childhood. One involved a set of Honor de Balzac books that a salesman sold to his aunt, who then sent them on to young Jim's mother.

     "The fortunate person," Michener told me, "is the one who reads or hears music or sees art or has an experience that resonates with his position as he is at that time. In my case, some clown comes through town and sells my aunt a set of Balzac. What for? She is not into Balzac; she can't spare the money. But I read the whole bunch, and it hit me like an explosion! If a man could write just as he wished, he'd write like Balzac." 

    The other incident occurred when Michener received a scholarship to Swarthmore. The principal of his secondary school came to see Mabel Michener. He was convinced that the boy would not be a credit to that university and should instead become a plumber. "He despised poor people," Michener recalled. "It burned him up that I got that scholarship." 

    Michener never forgot the importance of his education─and spent a lifetime quietly helping others get theirs. I remember visiting him in June 1983 when he was in Pasadena to deliver an address. There was a knock on the door of his hotel room, and a nervous engineering graduate student entered. 

    He was there to meet his benefactor and thank him for two scholarships. Michener had heard how the talented student had to drop out of school to work. He seemed glad to have helped the young man get back on track. 

    Michener and his wife, Mari, also helped educational institutions. The amounts were staggering. The University of Texas alone received a total of $44.2 million. During the week I was with him in Maine, he had been called daily regarding his offer to fund a writing program there. "It's part of what I have always believed about the tremendous value of creative writing," he explained. "If through some accident you get richly rewarded for it, the only sensible thing is to plow it back into the system." 

    When that final call of acceptance came through in Maine, it was a moment of personal triumph, and I felt privileged to share it. Michener had yet to tell Mari they were suddenly $15 million poorer. But first he had another obligation to fulfill: he hadn't finished reading Hana's story. So he sat down next to her and gave it his full attention. His mission, after all, was to encourage future generations, and here was this eight-year-old looking for encouragement. 

    "Oh, my," Michener said when he came to the part where the teacher wouldn't let the seal stay in school and had him taken to the zoo. 

    "See, he's crying," Hana said, pointing to one of her drawings. 

    On the next page the zoo keeper gave Erny back to the girl, and Michener nodded his approval. "This is a very good story," he said, "because everybody is happy in the end." 

    In life, endings aren't always so happy. Mari Michener died of cancer in September 1994. Machinery's kidneys began to fail, and he had to go on dialysis, ending his world travels. He lived then in Austin but continued to write books─seven more, in fact, after he "started over" in 1992. 

    On October 6, 1997, I called and spoke with his devoted caretaker, Amelia, who said the end was near. She put Michener on the phone. 

    "Are you in pain?" I asked. 

    "We're bearing up under it." 

    "There's not much time, is there, Jim?" 

    "How're your daughters?" he replied, signaling enough about him. I told him that my older girl, Maya, was looking at universities. "Which ones?" he wanted to know. After I told him, he was quiet a few moments. Then he said, "If you want to bring her here, to the University of Texas, we'll pay her tuition for the first year." 

    That was the last time I talked to James Michener. Even though he would be gone in a few days, his instincts were always to life, and he was extending his hand once again. 

    The day Michener died, October 16, 1997, Hana opened Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature, the book he had sent her a few months earlier. She ran her finger down the table of contents. "He never wrote about a seal," she said. 

    "Maybe," I offered, "because he knew another, younger writer was on to that." 

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