Fear

Karl Wallenda

Head of a famous circus family, Wallenda has spent a lifetime on high, taut wires. His family goes up with him in dangerous combinations. Spectacular falls have killed some of the troupe. The rest slay with him.

I have no personal fears. When your number is up, your number is up. My daughter is afraid to fly in an airplane because--who knows?--it might be the pilot's number that's up.

Of course, I know it is dangerous. The accident in Detroit came at the end of a seven-person pyramid. God knows what caused it. You can't question the dead, and the young man who gave way is dead. It was not our fault; it was not the fault of the wire apparatus. Everything was in good shape. We never knew why the boy couldn't hold it anymore. He must have panicked, or he had a pinched nerve, or went dizzy. There are so many reasons.

My youngest brother died in July 1936, the first time he ever used a net. We'd had a big accident and I was in the hospital. I said, "Look, you can take all my apparatus, but you have to use a net." I was here in America at the time. All I heard was that he fell from the high wire into the net and bounced out onto the concrete floor and died.

From then on, I said, "Well, now it's happened." That was our first fatality-- with a net. Now I say what has to happen has to happen.

This last accident had nothing to do with the high wire. I was working on the high wire. My daughter's husband, who was very ambitious, wanted to help me; he wanted to climb up that pole. Unfortunately, he touched one of the high high-tension clamps. There was only one wire clamp--about two feet away from the pole--that was not insulated and he touched it. I saw it with my own eyes. I was up there. My daughter saw her husband falling; she screamed to me, "Daddy." I thought that the whole thing was electric and we would all get killed. I didn't know how to get off. I was standing about 70 feet up in the air and everybody said, "Don't come to the pole, don't touch the pole. You'll be electrocuted." So we shut all the lights off and 1 had to go down that pole in the dark to save myself.

But you go right back. It's the only thing to do. Just like my daughter did, the next day. And she was thinking about her children, too. It's only the survivors you can do good for. When the good Lord tells me I have to quit, then I'll quit. But I haven't thought about it. I can't say I'll perform another six months, I can't say if I'll do it another ten years. I hope I will.

Jack Palance

Palance has played just about every kind of movie badman. Alan Ladd finally outdrew him in "Shane" and killed evil itself. Tired of his image, Palance has been taking roles that lampoon his earlier, menacing characters.

For actors there's always fear. Even after your most sensational success, you're constantly thinking of something that's coming up. So many actors sit around thinking about the one role. I know actors who are approaching 70 and are still talking about that one part. It's very difficult when somebody asks, "What is your favorite role?" Because all those parts you've played seem dead. It's like going into the graveyard and picking out a corpse and saying, "This is it"--rather than something living-- something coming out. But it you don't give somebody an answer to a question like that, he thinks you're putting him on. You're not really. What you've done is totally meaningless, nothing. This crushes an awful lot of people. The suicides. Like Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn wanted to be recognized as an actress rather than as a sensuous, erotic freak. I'm sure women--a lot of women actors --are terribly afraid of getting old, because so few women go gracefully into character roles. Men can bridge this a little better. If there is a bridge to travel on at all. If there's another role.

The telephone. I did a painting recently--I paint infrequently, but I did a painting of a man sitting in a very dark room behind a window. Outside is the sun, beautiful trees and grass, and he's sitting there in a strait jacket, whistling. And beside him is this enormous thing that he's looking at, and you know this thing is a telephone. I call the painting The Actor. He's waiting for the telephone to ring. He's tied to it and the telephone cord goes to his navel. This is it. The world of an actor, at least most actors. The telephone must ring-- an agent desperately trying to get to a producer, to the money people. It's an actor's life. It's like he's wrapped around a telephone pole.

Aaron Henry

Henry has been head of the Mississippi NAACP for over ten years. His home and office have been bombed and threats on his life don't even worry him anymore. Still . . . he doesn't drive around Mississippi alone.

I know I live in a situation where any white man in the state can shoot me down any day of the week--and nothing will happen to him. And, man, that's not easy to get off your mind. So I guess living with fear is sort of like learning to live with a broken leg.

There's no question: The most frightened I have ever been was the night they bombed my house and set it afire. I was really afraid that night, because they hit my daughter's room. The flames had engulfed the room and there was smoke everywhere: I couldn't find her and she couldn't find me. We were screaming for each other and I thought: "My God, I've killed my only child with my ideas." But when we finally met in the smoke and clasped each other and I got her outside, out of the danger of the explosion and fire, you know, that fear, like all the others before it, was gone. But for a few agonizing minutes I was overcome completely with fear and I probably came closer to losing control than at any time in my life.

I guess my other great fear came during the Sixties, when we were doing a lot of marching. I had been jailed after a run-in with the chief of police. They told me that they were worried about security. Like some damn lynch mob was going to come get me. So they decided to transfer me to a jail in another county and they wouldn't even tell my wife where they were carrying me. There were 12 or 15 blacks outside the jail when they brought me out with my body wrapped in chains--locked. Now, I didn't know where I was going to end up--in the river, across the railroad tracks, or where. I knew I couldn't defend myself and it was a damn helpless feeling. Damn helpless.

Luckily, I had established a rapport with the Kennedys and Bobby Kennedy called the sheriff of our county and said, "I'm holding you responsible for his safety." I think that call is perhaps why I am alive today. Because they had no reason to walk me out of the jail in chains unless they had something else in mind. But even then I knew that freedom is to some degree bought with blood. You see, it's not that you're afraid, it's what you can do even though you are afraid. You can't let it get you. You'd back up every time.

Red Adair

Adair developed a simple method for putting out oil-well fires: Get close and plant an explosive that starves the flames. It's made him a lot of money; but then, he hasn't had any competition for 30 years.

Fear? A lot of jobs we get into-- whether they're in Sumatra or the Middle East or wherever--you've got a lot more to worry about than fires. Rebels, for instance. You're more afraid of those guys than you are of the fires or explosions. Over in Libya, they'd blown up four wells and when we were going in there to blast out the fires we got buzzed by jet fighters. You never know.

We were in Nigeria during the Biafran war, working just a few miles from the front lines. And if that wasn't enough, we had to worry about witch doctors. They're still there, you know. They come up with their followers. You don't talk back to them, I'll tell you that.

I guess I came the closest on New Year's Day in 1953. I was crushed by a big dragline and they gave me up for dead. They took me back to the hospital and couldn't get a heartbeat or anything. But I could hear them talking. I could hear everything they said, but I couldn't move anything to let them know. I was afraid they were going to pull that sheet over my head. And I tried, man. I tried to move anything, an eyelid, a finger, anything. The doctor gave me shots and 1 could hear them talking. Then they got a little heartbeat. That's a weird feeling.

There's a lot to worry about. We've had sharks to contend with in the Red Sea, leopards in the jungles of Mozambique and poisonous snakes in Guatemala. Had them all. But the one thing I really worry about, I mean really worry, is the way some of those guys drive when they're taking you to a well fire. They're all excited and nervous and they get to driving faster and faster. Hell, you finally just have to say, "Slow down before you kill us all."

Robin Olds, U.S.A.F.

Olds finished first in 17 dogfights. He shot down 13 German planes in World War Two and still had the touch 20 years later. One more MIG kill and he'd have been Vietnam's first ace. He was unhappy about missing Korea.

In world war two, I was very young, tremendously eager, and I knew I was a good pilot. There were times when I was very excited--times when I might have a momentary tightening of the stomach muscles, constriction of the throat or whatever. But things happen so quickly and you're so damned busy coping that you really haven't got time to sit there and be afraid. Fear comes at night when you're alone, when you're dropping off to sleep, and that takes on a more--to use a word I'm not sure of--mordant. . . anyway, a deeper thing of dread. And this builds and builds and builds. I had a roommate who was that way, and sure enough, it happened; he was killed. But I never let myself think things like that. I was shot at and missed and shot at and hit quite a bit in World War Two. There were wild times; like getting hit very, very solidly strafing an airfield. Pieces of your airplane are flying off, and you're knocked upside down right above the ground, going like the hammers of hell, and you manage to extricate yourself and roll out and try to get away and you get slammed again. You know it is going on--you may not have time to be frightened--but by God, they certainly have got your attention.

When I first took over my wing in Vietnam, the big talk wasn't about the MIGs but about the SAMs. I'd seen enemy airplanes before, but those damn SAMs-- When I saw my first one, there were a few seconds there of sheer panic, because that's a most impressive sight to see that thing coming at you. You feel like a fish about to be harpooned. You go to bed at night and whether you like it or not, you may dream about that damn thing. I'd wake up at the bottom of my bed, dodging the damn things. I had over 240 shot at me and never got used to it. I got awfully cagey. If you're just one or two seconds off, you've had the schnitzel. In Vietnam I did the same thing I had in World War Two, lived one day at a time. The only things you were interested in were flying, eating and drinking. You do a lot of drinking. If you didn't, you couldn't sleep at night, because all these things were going through your head, whether they were aggressive thoughts or not--so strongly you couldn't go to sleep. So about three good belts of Scotch, sleep like a baby, you're up six hours later and ready to go again.

Denton Cooley, M.D.

To keep his patients alive, Cooley has tried a number of radical surgical techniques. He was one of the first to experiment with artificial heart valves; he performed one of the first successful heart transplants in this country.

People ask how a man can get accustomed to seeing flesh and blood. But it doesn't bother you to make a three-foot incision in a patient. It's a matter of building up tolerance to something.

In the beginning, it was an awesome thing to actually go into a patient; but as time goes on, your experience increases. Routine things you just take in stride. But as you get into more difficult problems to handle surgically, you fear other things; the death of a patient, particularly on the operating table, is one.

At first the most routine appendectomy was a very gripping experience that made my heart race and made me break out in a cold sweat. At the present lime, my threshold of fear has been raised to the point where it takes something like a heart-valve ring that will not hold suture--where there is a distinct possibility that you'll never get the valve seated and that it will float out once you get the heart started--to create fear in me.

So, even today, there are times when the uneasy feeling returns to me. The first valve and the first transplant--both of these things--brought it back. Everything, my whole career, was on the line. I think I came away from it in good shape, but I had no way of knowing just how I would be able to land on my feet if it had been a total fiasco.

When we did the first heart transplant, we had the heart all sewed in place, then the moment came to restore the circulation to the coronary system and wait for the heart to make its response. The anticipation was so great that defeat or failure at that time would have been a real catastrophe for everyone. Defeat wouldn't have been merely the loss or the death of the patient--patients die all the time from heart disease--but I would have opened myself to serious criticism if it had been a failure, and my judgment would have been questioned. But I think we have a certain responsibility to develop some new things to challenge some of the old rules and regulations . . . and not just leave it to some subsequent generation of physicians to make these discoveries.