Bette Midler song lyric says
”
Old trees, they just grow stronger, / Old rivers grow wilder
every day, / But old people, they just grow lonesome, / Waiting for
someone to say, / ‘Hello in there … hello.’
”
/
Bette Midler song lyric says “Old trees, they just grow stronger, / Old rivers grow wilder every day, / But old people, they just grow lonesome, / Waiting for someone to say, / ‘Hello in there … hello.'” / When my father-in-law had a stroke, I made frequent visits to the nursing home where he was recovering. While there, I noticed a very interesting 90-plus gentleman sharing his room named Herbie. He was usually in bed, smiling, propped up and covered with lots of blankets, with one eye looking slightly askew, his balding head reminiscent of a baby’s, shiny under the convalescent lighting. He had very quickly befriended my in-laws, and talking with him was giving my father-in-law good practice at relearning how to speak. Even though Herbie was the type of person that anybody could warm up to, I took his stories to be just the senile ramblings of an old man.
He began by vividly describing the first film he ever saw as a child, projected on a sheet in a field in West Virginia. He had a million stories of Hollywood’s golden era, and his career there as a young man, where he found a job driving a car for Edith Head, the designer of Grace Kelly’s fashions in Rear Window. … Then there was the time he worked with Audrey Hepburn on Roman Holiday … the movies he worked on with Henry Fonda … Cary Grant … Gary Cooper … and Charleton Heston … Yeah, right.
When I would visit, I would indulgently let him ramble on with his fantastic tales while nodding politely … but I thought he was probably just imagining things. Then one day my husband and I were watching a DVD of Vertigo – and we were listening to some background material about the making of the movie. As I was listening to the interview but not looking at the TV, I suddenly heard a familiar voice filling the room. My husband and I both ran over to look at the screen and exclaimed, “That’s HERBIE!”
To our amazement, our Herbie was there on the DVD being interviewed all about Alfred Hitchcock in a segment filmed at the Old Mission grounds of San Juan Bautista. We only knew him as Herbie, a very alert and entertaining storyteller in his 90s, but it turns out he used to be known as William Herbert Coleman, Alfred Hitchcock’s associate director, a man who worked hand in hand with Hitchcock every step of the way on a number of his movies.
So this man I had dismissed as old and unreliable turned out to be so much more than met the eye. When Herbie passed away at the age of nearly 94, a producer was sent from Universal Studios in Hollywood to pay tribute at the memorial service held in the Notre Dame gymnasium in Salinas. Just an old guy in a rumpled nursing home pajamas, just an ancient soul I had at first dismissed – maybe there’s someone like this in your life that you look at but don’t really see … Maybe there’s a golden piece of your own history disguised as a slightly worn and weary soul that you’ve been overlooking. … As Fall leaves rustle at our feet, and Hitchcock movies are readied for Halloween viewing, let’s let Herbie remind us of those older people in our lives who need our love and attention.
“So if you’re walking down the street sometime, / And you spot some hollow ancient eyes, / Don’t just pass them by and stare, / As if you didn’t care, / Say, ‘Hello in there … hello.'”
Herbie’s memoirs have been published posthumously, in a wonderful look back at Hollywood called, “The Hollywood I Knew: A Memoir: 1916-1988.”
