BOOK REVIEW – THE RISE AND REIGN OF THE MAMMALS:

BOOK REVIEW – THE RISE AND REIGN OF THE MAMMALS: A NEW HISTORY, FROM THE SHADOW OF THE DINOSAURS TO US

Imagine being a successful dinosaur palaeontologist and landing a professorship before you are 40, authoring a leading dinosaur textbook and a New York Times bestseller on dinosaurs. Imagine achieving all that and then saying: “You know what really floats my boat? Mammals.” After the runaway success of his 2018 book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, palaeontologist Stephen Brusatte shifted his attention and now presents you with the follow-up, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. Taking in the full sweep of mammal evolution from the late Carboniferous some 325 million years ago to today, this book is as epic in scope as it is majestic in execution.

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us, written by Steve Brusatte, published in Europe by Picador in June 2022 (hardback, 500 pages)

Mammals shared our planet with the dinosaurs throughout their long reign, from the initial split of our amniote common ancestor into synapsids (us) and diapsids (them), to their extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. Over the course of some 100 million years, a parade of lineages evolved—archaic mammals all—piecemeal developing the traits we recognize as mammalian today: pelycosaurs with canine teeth, the first “whispers of a dental revolution” (p. 13); therapsids with the first hairs and a new form of metabolism, endothermy; the cynodonts, some of whom miniaturized while the dinosaurs became giants; the mammaliaformes who developed a new jaw joint; the docodonts and gliding haramiyidans who had fur; the multituberculates who had increasingly complex teeth; and the therians who gave rise to today’s placentals, marsupials, and monotremes. However, the above must not be mistaken for a linear march of progress. “[M]ammals were a still unrealized concept, which evolution had yet to assemble. […] they were not evolving [these traits] to become mammals. Natural selection doesn’t plan for the future” (p. 20). Simultaneously, it does not behove us to call these now-extinct groups evolutionary dead ends. “This is the privilege of hindsight. […] In their time and place, these mammals were anything but obsolete” (p. 88).

With the extinction of the dinosaurs, the rise of mammals turned into a reign. Isolated on various land masses after the supercontinent Pangaea had fragmented, they were poised for a slow-motion taxonomic starburst that would play out over the next 66 million years. In the northern hemisphere, multituberculates and metatherians were replaced by placental mammals who in the wake of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum rapidly evolved into primates and the odd- and even-toed ungulates. The odd-toed ungulates spun off brontotheres and chalicotheres, some of the largest terrestrial mammals ever, while the even-toed ungulates spun off the cetaceans, some of the largest marine mammals ever.

Brusatte’s strength is to bring to life the above flurry of names. What kind of creatures were they? And how can we deduce this from fossil evidence? Somewhere between chapters 6 and 7, I became awestruck by his narrative as the enormity of the mammalian evolutionary trajectory started to come into full view: bats took to the air, elephants evolved into a riot of tusked giants, South American native ungulates (origins: uncertain) flourished, monkeys and rodents rafted across the Atlantic to join them, metatherians migrated across Antarctica to Australia and spawned a spectacular marsupial radiation, grazers diversified as grasses went global, and somewhere at the end, hominins evolved and repeatedly spilt out of Africa, contributing significantly to recent megafauna extinction. What a wild ride!

“Over some 100 million years, a parade of lineages evolved, but this must not be mistaken for a linear march of progress, nor does it behove us to call these now-extinct groups evolutionary dead ends.”

The macroevolutionary story is fascinating in itself, yet Brusatte makes it even better with some interesting observations of his own. We usually think of the dinosaurs as dominating the mammals, but, he suggests, this went two ways: “While it is true that dinosaurs kept mammals from getting big, mammals did the opposite, which was equally impressive: they kept dinosaurs from becoming small” (p. 95). Furthermore, DNA studies suggest that many modern mammal lineages originated back in the Cretaceous. But where are the fossils? Could some of the poorly understood archaic placentals such as condylarchs, taeniodonts, and pantodonts be the missing fossils that we have not yet been able to link to modern groups because of the lack of signature anatomical features? Excitingly, Brusatte is part of a research consortium that is building a master family tree based on both anatomy and DNA.

As in his last book, Brusatte excels at explaining complex research methods and scientific concepts. One example is Tom Kemp’s concept of correlated progression. Several times during early mammal evolution, a whole suite of anatomical, behavioural, and functional traits were changing together, making it hard to unravel what was driving what. For instance when cynodonts shrunk in size and changed their growth, metabolism, diet, and feeding styles. Then there is the revision of the mammal family tree based on DNA sequencing. The classic tree, championed by zoologist George Gaylord Simpson in 1945, was based on anatomical features. By the early 2000s, DNA-based genealogies suggested that many supposed relationships were actually cases of convergent evolution, resulting in a new classification that reflected geographical patterns rather than anatomy. The new groupings came with some tongue-twisting names: Afrotheria, Xenarthra, Laurasiatheria, and Eurarchontoglires. A final example is tooth morphology, an important diagnostic trait in this story. Humans have a tribosphenic molar, a complexly-shaped affair. Interestingly, this is not a novel tooth shape but was already found in the 160-million-year-old Juramaia. At a time of competition with docodonts and haramiyidans, “the tribosphenic molar was a useful gadget for tiny insect-eaters, but not yet a game-changer” (p. 141). It became one when flowering plants diversified—and with them insect pollinators—some 100–80 million years ago. It is a brilliant example of what Neil Shubin highlighted in Some Assembly Required; that evolutionary innovations never come about with the great transitions they are associated with.

“Somewhere between chapters 6 and 7, I became awestruck by Brusatte’s narrative as the enormity of the mammalian evolutionary trajectory started to come into full view.”

What helps with these explanations are some excellent illustrations. A selection of black-and-white photos shows amazing fossils. Todd Marshall has again been commissioned for both decorative chapter headings and some explanatory artwork. And Brusatte’s former student Sarah Shelley has contributed black-and-white diagrams that are exceedingly useful, illustrating for instance the remarkable changes in jaw bones and how some of these were repurposed to become our inner ear bones! I would be remiss if I did not mention the stunning jacket art. Both for the UK and US versions, the publishers have commissioned the same artists as for The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, respectively Andrew Davidson and Todd Marshall, meaning the books look exquisite next to each other.

Woven throughout are stories of the people behind the research. Brusatte introduces the young scientists, such as Amusuya Chinsamy-Turan, who is a pioneer in bone histology and gathered evidence in favour of endothermic therapsids; or his student Ornella Bertrand, who is an ace at CAT-scanning skulls and showed that most palaeocene mammals had unusually small brains. But he also includes many past scientists that are not widely known, such as Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska—who he visited at her home in Poland—and her expeditions to Mongolia; Robert Broom, who trained up some of today’s leading South African palaeontologists; or Walter Kühne, who discovered and described the tritylodontid Oligokyphus while held captive in a World War II internment camp.

“By the early 2000s, DNA-based genealogies suggested that many supposed relationships were actually cases of convergent evolution.”

In what is surely a hallmark of his love and enthusiasm for the field, Brusatte’s bibliography has again been written as a narrative. It is like a chatty literature review in which he recommends books and papers, indicates where literature has become outdated, adds more technical details or clarifications, discusses where there is active debate and disagreement, and shortly touches on topics that he had to omit from the main narrative. Yes, this takes up more space than a regular reference section, and I am sure it is more time-consuming to write, but it is ever so useful. You could not wish for a better starting point if you wanted to read deeper into the technical literature.

Finally, you might be left wondering how this book compares to Elsa Panciroli’s Beasts Before Us which covered early mammal evolution up to the K–Pg extinction. There is overlap here in more than one way; Brusatte co-supervised her PhD project describing the docodont Borealestes from a Scottish fossil. I was therefore mildly surprised that he does not mention her book. There is some inevitable overlap as both books walk through the same groups, though Brusatte provides a fuller picture by covering mammal evolution up to today. Panciroli’s book stands out for its fantastic writing, though, so you cannot go wrong by reading them both.

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals is a more-than-worthy successor to The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and has already secured a place in my personal top 5 for 2022. Brusatte convincingly shows that the evolutionary story of mammals is just as fascinating—if not more so—as that of the dinosaurs.

How Animals See Themselves

Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and the author of “An Immense World.”

Spectacle floods into my eyes whenever I watch a wildlife documentary. A vortex of small fish is gradually picked off by waves of oceanic predators. Snakes chase after marine iguanas. Giraffes clash at sunset.

While the nature shows I grew up with were more like didactic lectures, their modern counterparts — all of which seem to have the word “Planet” in the title — have the bombast of summer blockbusters. Technological advances are partly responsible. Wild creatures are difficult to film, and when footage is fleeting and scarce, narration must provide the intrigue and flair that the visuals lack. But new generations of sophisticated cameras can swoop alongside running cheetahs at ground level, zoom in on bears cavorting on inaccessible mountainsides and capture intimate close-ups of everything from wasps to whales. Shots can now linger. Nature documentaries can be cinematic.

But in the process, they have also shoved the square peg of animal life into the round hole of human narratives. When animals become easier to film, it is no longer enough to simply film them; they must have stories. They must struggle and overcome. They must have quests, conflicts, even character arcs. An elephant family searches for water amid a drought. A lonely sloth swims in search of a mate. A cheeky penguin steals rocks from a rival’s nest.

Nature shows have always prized the dramatic: David Attenborough himself once told me, after filming a series on reptiles and amphibians, frogs “really don’t do very much until they breed, and snakes don’t do very much until they kill.” Such thinking has now become all-consuming, and nature’s dramas have become melodramas. The result is a subtle form of anthropomorphism, in which animals are of interest only if they satisfy familiar human tropes of violence, sex, companionship and perseverance. They’re worth viewing only when we’re secretly viewing a reflection of ourselves.

We could, instead, try to view them through their own eyes. In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.

While walking my dog, I see a mockingbird perched on a lamp post. With eyes on the side of its head, it has close to wraparound vision; while we move into our visual world, birds move through theirs. Their eyes also have four types of color-sensing cells compared with our three, allowing them to see an entire dimension of colors that we cannot; those colors, which are present on their feathers, allow male and female mockingbirds to tell each other apart even though they look the same to us. A mockingbird’s hearing differs from ours, too: It is so fast that when it mimics the songs of other birds, it accurately captures notes that fly by too quickly for our ears to make out.

I watch the mockingbird for about a minute, during which it belts out a few bars and flies off. But what more does it need to do? The baseline condition of its existence is magical. Its simplest acts of seeing, hearing and feeling are spectacular without spectacle.

By thinking about our surroundings through other Umwelten, we gain fresh appreciation not just for our fellow creatures, but also for the world we share with them. Through the nose of an albatross, a flat ocean becomes a rolling odorscape, full of scented mountains and valleys that hint at the presence of food. To the whiskers of a seal, featureless water roils with turbulent currents left behind by swimming fish — invisible tracks that the seal can follow. To a bee, a plain yellow sunflower has an ultraviolet bull’s-eye at its center, and a distinctive electric field around its petals. To the sensitive eyes of an elephant hawk moth, the night isn’t black, but full of colors.

Even the most familiar of settings can feel newly unfamiliar through the senses of other creatures. I walk my dog — Typo, a corgi — three times a day, passing the same streets and buildings that I’ve seen thousands of times. But though this urban landscape seems boring and stagnant to my eyes, its smellscape is constantly fascinating to Typo’s nose. He sniffs constantly, his nasal anatomy allowing him to continuously draw in odors even while exhaling. He sniffs the individual leaves of emergent springtime plants with utmost delicacy. He sniffs patches of dried urine left behind by the neighborhood dogs — the equivalent of a human scrolling through a social media feed. On every walk, there’ll be at least one moment when Typo stops slowly and excitedly explores a patch of sidewalk that looks nondescript but is clearly bursting with enthralling odors. By watching him, I feel less inured to my own life, more aware of the perpetually changing environment around me. Such awareness is a gift, which Typo gives to me daily.

These sensory worlds can be difficult, and sometimes impossible, for nature documentaries to capture (although some, like Netflix’s “Night on Earth,” make a valiant effort). No special effects can truly convey the wraparound nature of bird vision to the front-facing eyes of a human viewer or translate the wide spectrum of colors visible to a bird into the much narrower set that our eyes can see. Nonvisual senses are even harder for a visual medium to capture. You can play recordings of a whale’s song, but that doesn’t show what it means for whales to hear each other across oceanic distances. You can depict the magnetic field that envelops the planet, but that can’t begin to capture the experience of a robin using that field to fly across a continent.

In his classic 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote that the conscious experiences of other animals are inherently subjective and hard to describe. You could envision yourself with webbing on your arms or insects in your mouth, but you’d still be creating a mental caricature of you as a bat. “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” Dr. Nagel wrote. Most bat species perceive the world through sonar, sensing their surroundings by listening for the echoes of their own ultrasonic calls. “Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task,” Dr. Nagel wrote.

Our own senses constrain us, creating a permanent divide between our Umwelt and another animal’s. Technology can help to bridge that chasm, but there will always be a gap. Crossing it requires what the psychologist Alexandra Horowitz calls “an informed imaginative leap.” You cannot be shown what another Umwelt is like; you must work to imagine it.

Watching modern nature documentaries has almost become too easy, as if I am being passively swept away by the torrent of vivid imagery — eyes open, jaw agape, but brain relaxed. By contrast, when I think about other Umwelten, I feel my mind flexing and the joy of an impossible task nonetheless attempted. In these small acts of empathy, I understand other animals more deeply — not as fuzzy, feathered proxies for my life, but as wondrous and unique entities of their own, and as the keys to grasping the true immensity of the world.

 

OLD, NOT OTHER

AEON

OLD, NOT OTHER

Kate Kirkpatrickis and Sonia Kruks

old age is not exactly a time of life that most of us welcome, although globally speaking it is a privilege to reach it. In Western societies, the shocked realization that we are growing old often fills us with alarm and even terror. As Simone de Beauvoir writes in her magisterial study of the topic, La vieillesse (1970) – translated in the UK as Old Age, and in the US as The Coming of Age (1972) – old age arouses a visceral aversion, often a ‘biological repugnance’. Many attempt to push it as far away as possible, denying that it will ever happen, even though we know it already dwells within us.

In fleeing from our own old age, we also seek to distance ourselves from its harbingers – from those who are already old: they are ‘the Other’. They are (with some exceptions) viewed as a ‘foreign species, and as ‘outside humanity’. Excluded from the so-called normal life of society, most are condemned to conditions where their sadness, as Beauvoir puts it, ‘merges with their consuming boredom, with their bitter and humiliating sense of uselessness, and with their loneliness in the midst of a world that has nothing but indifference for them’. Beauvoir’s work sets out to show how old people are viewed and treated as the Other ‘from without’ and also – by drawing on memoirs, letters and other sources – to present their experiences ‘from within’. Her aim is to ‘shatter’ what she calls the ‘conspiracy of silence’ surrounding the old for, she insists, if their voices were heard, we would have to acknowledge that these were ‘human voices’ (emphasis added).

On Beauvoir’s view, most societies prefer to shut their eyes rather than see ‘abuses, scandals, and tragedies’ – they opt for the ease of accepting what is, instead of the self-scrutiny and struggle that is required to envision and enact what life could be. Speaking of her own society, she claims that it cared no more about orphans, young offenders or the disabled than it did about the old. However, what she finds astonishing about the latter case is that ‘every single member of the community must know that his future is in question; and almost all of them have close personal relationships with some old people’. So what explains this failure to face our future, to see the humanity in all human life?

Beauvoir’s answer is that famous existentialist phenomenon: bad faith. She believes that bad faith is a persistent human temptation, but that it does not take the same shape in all lives, or at all stages of life. In general terms, bad faith is the over-identification with one of two poles of human existence: on the one hand, there are all the contingent and unchosen facts about you, such as when and where you were born, your parents, your country, your material conditions, the shape, colour and ability of your body. They also, and importantly, include your dependency on other human beings and their dependence on you. This pole Beauvoir calls ‘facticity’.

The other pole, ‘freedom’, concerns your ability to act as you will, within the constraints of your situation, to take up and transform these facts. If you are a waitress with no corporate experience and you apply to be a CEO, this is likely to involve facticity-denying bad faith. If you are a waitress and conclude that you will never be anything but a waitress, this is likely to involve freedom-denying bad faith: you are foreclosing your possibilities by concluding that only what already is could ever be. So how does this temptation affect our attitudes toward the old? Beauvoir thinks that the not-yet-old are guilty of facticity-denying bad faith: their aversion to the already-old expresses an attempt to flee from their own ageing and mortality. This flight may offer them temporary refuge from unwanted futures but, for the old people they flee, it creates a hostile and lonely world.

After all, the not-yet-old may want or resent what the old have and they lack

In her analysis of old age, Beauvoir expresses sadness and outrage at the bad faith of the not-yet-old with respect to the old. On her assessment, a characteristic attitude of the not-yet-old is ‘duplicity’. On the one hand, many acknowledge that the old deserve respect – at least the respect befitting any person, if not the greater, relative respect befitting a person whose life and learning are great. On the other hand, ‘it is in the adult’s interest to treat the aged man as an inferior being and to convince him of his decline’. Alongside preaching an official ethics of respect, in practice the words and actions of the not-yet-old are frequently demeaning. Consider, for example, Father William, the subject of Robert Southey’s didactic poem ‘The Old Man’s Comforts’ (1799) – and Lewis Carroll’s scornful satire of it in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Southey’s Father William is put forward as an exemplar of life well lived, hearty and hale, and worth learning from:

You are old, Father William, the young man cried,

The few locks which are left of you are grey.

You are hale, Father William, a hearty old man, 

Now tell me the reason I pray.

But then, Carroll:

‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man said,

‘And your hair has become very white.

And yet you incessantly stand on your head –

Do you think, at your age, it is right?’

Adults’ relationships with the old are frequently characterized by ambivalence: many scorn the idea that there is nothing to be learned from those whose hair is so laughably scarce or lacking melanin. Old age is not always healthy or wise, and the not-yet-old may want or resent what the old have and they lack – most obviously in terms of resources and wealth. Instead of acknowledging the mixture of their motives, or questioning the values that shape them, Beauvoir claims that many adult children do their best to make their parents ‘aware of [their] deficiencies and blunders so that the old [person] will hand over the running of his affairs, give up advising him and submit to a passive role’.

The bad faith of the not-yet-old can take many forms: one of its common manifestations involves disgust at bodily decline. Edward Said’s description of his 1979 encounter with Jean-Paul Sartre exemplifies this shock and revulsion – Said is appalled by Sartre’s frailty, dependence, and lack of bodily control:

Sartre’s presence, what there was of it, was strangely passive, unimpressive, affectless. He said absolutely nothing for hours on end. At lunch he sat across from me, looking disconsolate and remaining uncommunicative, egg and mayonnaise streaming haplessly down his face. I tried to make conversation with him but got nowhere. He may have been deaf, but I’m not sure. In any case, he seemed to me like a haunted version of his earlier self, his proverbial ugliness, his pipe, and his nondescript clothing hanging about him like so many props on a deserted stage.

Although it may have been amplified by Said’s shock that such a fate awaits even a ‘great man’, his repulsion and lack of sympathy for Sartre are all too typical of how the old are judged ‘from without’.

More than half a century has passed since Beauvoir’s Old Age was published, and many things have changed – and yet they have also stayed the same. The ‘conspiracy of silence’ has been replaced by a proliferation of public discourses about the old, who are now more often euphemistically referred to as ‘seniors’ or ‘the elderly’. However, these discourses still treat the old ‘from without’ and their voices are not heard. Instead, they are presented as ‘problem’ objects: the old are a ‘they’ about which ‘we’ (the active members of the society of which they are no longer deemed a part) need to decide what should be done. But rather than considering how to enable people to flourish in old age for as long as possible, much of the focus is on what ‘they’ are said excessively to consume and how ‘they’ are harming society. An ever-growing number of those aged over 65 today belong to the post-Second World War ‘baby boomer’ generation, and it is about this so-called ‘gray tsunami’ that the silence has been displaced by voluble expressions of hostility and sometimes panic.

In profit-driven, market societies, as Beauvoir argues, human worth is often measured in abstract, economic terms, and cost-benefit values – which judge people primarily by their utility – predominate. Such values cohere with bad faith attitudes toward the old, and they mutually reinforce each other, a tendency that is especially marked in attitudes toward the ‘boomers. They are accused of being a privileged generation who, having feathered their nests during the period of postwar economic growth, are now unjustly devouring resources at the expense of the young. They are simplistically blamed for a variety of ills that have complex and structural causes and have even been called ‘a generation of sociopaths. The question of intergenerational justice is important. However, it is also important that the boomers are far too different from each other to be regarded as a monolithic social category, sociologically speaking. We should not be satisfied with false generalizations to explain the effects of large-scale socioeconomic changes that are more complex.

Moreover, economic issues are far from the only ones. Respect and social recognition are also vital, and the stereotype of the ‘greedy’ boomers adds to the panoply of demeaning characterizations of the old that Beauvoir depicts. Today, the term ‘ageism’ is sometimes used (analogously to ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’) to describe the array of social attitudes and practices through which the old are rendered ‘Other’. Not all old people are subject to ageism equally or in the same ways, and some (such as older politicians and business leaders) may, for a time, be less affected by it. However, few can fully escape its more insidious forms.

The old are still treated with a ‘contempt not unmixed with disgust’ that casts them ‘outside humanity’

Ageism is still so deeply engrained as to go undetected. Stereotypes (often especially hostile to women) are learned and internalized in childhood, from the wicked old witches and vicious aunts in children’s stories (think Hansel and Gretel; think Roald Dahl), to demeaning representations of old age seen on various media, to overhearing parents and others ridicule old relatives or call them a burden. In these ways, children learn to participate in the general social stigmatization of the old that they will then perpetuate as adults.

But it is not only that the bodily signs of old age – wrinkles, grey hair, deafness, dribbling one’s food as Sartre did, a shuffling walk, and so forth – incite aversion. In addition, such signs are often wrongly taken to reveal the entire ‘inner’ being of an old person. The visibly old are commonly presumed to be incompetent and unable to engage in meaningful or socially valuable activities, even though this is usually not the case. They are assumed to be dementing when they have not lost their mental acuity, and they are often spoken to in the condescending, infantilizing tones known as ‘elderspeak’. They are – conveniently – assumed to have few needs or desires that society ought to address. They are expected to dress and act as people of their age ‘should’ – and the idea of sexual activity among them remains shocking. In short, the old are still treated with a ‘contempt not unmixed with disgust’ that, as Beauvoir puts it, seeks to cast them ‘outside humanity’. Such attitudes serve to legitimize their social exclusion and to justify the general lack of concern with their material and existential needs.

From within, this banishment is experienced as an alienating and gratuitous degradation. Unlike the inevitable diminishment of the body, it is avoidable if we are willing to listen to the voices of the old – and to work for conditions in which decline and death are not accompanied by this degradation:

When do you see me sitting quietly?

Like a sack left on the shelf,

Don’t think I need your chattering.

I’m listening to myself …

I’m the same person I was back then,

A little less hair, a little less chin,

A lot less lungs and much less wind.

But ain’t I lucky I can still breathe in.

– from ‘On Aging’ (1993) by Maya Angelou

What, then, should a society be like, so that all may flourish in their last years of life? One answer is that there is no one answer to this question. For, contrary to how they are often treated, old people are not a homogenous ‘they’. Their needs and desires may be truly diverse, and, for many, these are also likely to alter over time as they experience increasing debilities and disease. What is called ‘old age’ can span several decades of a person’s life, often involving shifts from an initial, post-retirement period of greater relative autonomy to an increasing dependency on the care of others. The differences between the lives of those in what social gerontologists call the active ‘third age’ and those in the ‘fourth age’ of advanced ‘frailty and impairment’ can be immense. Even so, one can characterize the needs of old people under two general, but strongly intertwined, criteria: first, meeting their material requirements (broadly conceived); and, second, offering them recognition, both as individuals and as a group that continues to have a valued place in society.

The material needs for flourishing in old age include far more than a generous personal income. Public resources should be extended from their present levels to meet the needs of those (including some younger people, too) who, for example, are deaf, blind, or less mobile. From redesigning the built environment to create greater access, to establishing more spaces for social participation, to the generous provision of high-quality personal prosthetics, we must work to furnish many such resources. Providing them should not be seen as an unfair ‘burden’ on the not-yet-old but, rather, as public goods that they too will enjoy in their later years.

But here we return to the problem of the bad faith flight from our own old age and the aversion to the already old it engenders. Seeing the old as a ‘foreign species allows us to ignore that we are already incipiently its members. ‘We must stop cheating,’ Beauvoir writes. ‘If we do not know what we are going to be, we cannot know what we are; let us recognize ourselves in this old man, or that old woman.’ She is surely right that what it is to be a human being is at issue in how we see the old. However, recognizing ourselves in our older elders is far from easy to achieve, so deep is our fear of old age and so ingrained society’s ageism.

Beauvoir gives us a truncated account of old age that excludes the ‘fourth age’

Against the combined forces of personal fear and social stigma, what is to be done? Beauvoir argues that society must be radically reconstructed, that we must ‘change life itself’, so that, instead of suffering exclusion, deprivation, and misery, the old can remain – and be recognized – as active and valued members:

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual, or creative work … in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

The vision of meaningful activity that Beauvoir offers here assumes the continuation into old age, if diminished, of the passions and vitality that fuel the projects of younger adults. This is an admirable ideal about those in the ‘third age’. However, Beauvoir does not consider whether those who have become so debilitated that they can do little or nothing might still have lives of value. She gives us a truncated account of old age that excludes the ‘fourth age’, when activity such as she describes it ceases to be possible.

Rather than speculate about the reasons for her omission, we propose that we need to rethink meaningful activity in other, less demanding, terms than Beauvoir’s. Today, those in the fourth age remain the most invisible. Their mobility is severely limited, or precluded, by their impairments, and they are most confined and sequestered. They are often also less able to give an account of their experience than the more robust ‘young-old’ of the ‘third age’. Indeed, some of them literally cannot speak they may be unable to communicate about their most basic needs to those who (one hopes) look after them. This may be particularly the case for those with severe dementia, as well as for others, for example, after a major stroke. Their experiences – be they of their own bodies, of other people, of time or, indeed, of approaching death – usually remain an unknown blank for the rest of us. Thus, even if we can succeed in overcoming our bad faith, as Beauvoir urges, and cease to view them as members of a feared ‘foreign species’, they still seem to be the inhabitants of cut-off, different worlds. Theirs are worlds that most of us do not know how to enter, and that we have difficulty imagining.

Yet their worlds may not be devoid of value and meaning. Even when overt, physical or linguistic expression becomes near impossible, there may still be desires, intentions, feelings for others. And there are entry-points to these worlds that can be explored. For example, there are memoirs by some in the earlier stages of Alzheimer’s; and there are narratives by close family members, who have struggled to grasp how the world feels to a much-loved person who now has dementia. There are also descriptions of life after a stroke; or of trying to adapt to a world in which one discovers one can no longer see.

To conclude, in addition to addressing our own bad faith, it is also vitally important to break the ‘conspiracy of silence’ about this furthest frontier of old age where Beauvoir herself did not venture. For it is the oldest of the old whose humanity is least recognized. It is they who are conceived as no more than bodies, who are treated as inert objects, considered outside humanity. And it is we who must resist their degradation.

When Baking and Real Estate Collide

Tartine, a beloved San Francisco bakery, wanted to grow. Partnering with a developer was one way to rise.

By Anna Wiener


In the Silicon Valley of the early twenty-tens, startups followed a new business rule: grow or die. But how much was it possible for an artisanal bakery to grow?Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

Tartine, a world-renowned bakery and San Francisco institution, opened in 2002, on an unassuming corner of Guerrero Street, at the edge of the Mission District. The dot-com bubble had recently burst, and the city was in a period of transition. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment had fallen from three thousand dollars a month to just under two thousand. Development had slowed, evictions and unemployment had spiked, and commercial vacancies had risen. In the Mission, a historically working-class and Latino neighborhood, artists’ spaces battled with real-estate developers. Tartine’s neighbors included a used-furniture store and a community center. The storefront, which had previously housed a cake shop, came with a panic button.

The bakery didn’t have prominent signage and didn’t need any: almost immediately, people began lining up out the door for citrus-perfumed morning buns, billowing banana-cream pies, and loaves of custardy millet-porridge bread. The bakery garnered praise from Martha Stewart and Alice Waters and made the cake for a “bohemian bourgeois”-themed birthday party attended by Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. Its married founders, Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson, started to become food-world celebrities: Prueitt was admired for her elegant pastries and, later, her artful use of nontraditional flours, and Robertson for his approach to bread-making, with wet dough long-fermented, then prepared by hand according to a strict schedule. Tartine’s loaves almost always sold out within the hour. In the pre-Yelp, pre-iPhone, pre-cronut era, waiting in line for baked goods was unusual in the Bay Area, and the queues outside Tartine became a local landmark and a symbol of a changing city. “Our favorite thing about this bread-rich city is the chewy-crusted, nutty-crumbed pain au levain from the Mission’s new Tartine,” Gourmet wrote. “Get in line,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “Everyone else is.”

Prueitt and Robertson radiated a particular kind of Gen X bohemianism—dedicated, ambitious, and breezy. Aspiring chefs and bakers travelled across the country to work with them. The bakery brought on a fleet of young and beautiful artists, musicians, and writers to work the front of the house, and for a certain set of locals the “Tartine girls” were a draw. The café, with its sturdy, dark wood bistro tables arranged knee-grazingly close, took on the qualities of a clubhouse, with bakers, baristas, and servers playing their own music on the stereo, hanging out after their shifts, and enjoying free glasses of “shift wine” from uncorked bottles. Samin Nosrat, then a fledgling chef, hosted ticketed dinners at Tartine; concerts and monthly art openings included works by employees, and one bread-themed show featured a bread chandelier that lightly toasted itself as it luminesced. “It was just the crux of the Mission for me,” Rachel Corry, a sandal-maker who worked at the bakery for nine years, told me. Another employee said, “It wasn’t a professional place to work, but that was what was so great about it. Our friends were our bosses. It was like a dream time, a pretend time.”

In 2005, Tartine began a small-scale expansion. Prueitt and Robertson opened a nearby restaurant, Bar Tartine, which was praised for its inventive, sophisticated take on Japanese, Scandinavian, and pan-European cuisine. They were nominated for James Beard Awards and published a celebrated cookbook. Prueitt gave birth to a daughter who has cerebral palsy, and co-founded the Conductive Learning Center of San Francisco, a specialized nonprofit school for children with motor disabilities; she continued to run Tartine’s pastry program, and in 2008 she and Robertson won the James Beard Award for outstanding pastry chef.

A decade on, “artisanal” breads and bakeries were popping up everywhere. San Francisco was rebounding, and the process was soon to accelerate. In 2012, Facebook went public, and the median rent for a two-bedroom shot back to nearly three thousand dollars a month. Activists started blocking the paths of double-decker shuttles run by Google, Facebook, and other companies, which picked up tech workers at public bus stops. Facebook bought WhatsApp and Oculus, Google bought Nest and DeepMind, Amazon bought Twitch, and the minting of new millionaires accelerated. By 2014, the median rent for a two-bedroom had passed thirty-seven hundred dollars. Some of Tartine’s staff members faced rent hikes or were threatened with eviction. “It really felt, like, Ugh, are we just working at the Disneyland for Google employees?” Katie Lally, who was at Tartine from 2007 to 2011, told me. She recalled a customer who’d ordered in tech-gadget lingo: “What’s your sexiest pastry? What’s the thing everybody wants?”

Tech was booming. Rents were skyrocketing. Tartine had thrived during an economic downturn. Now it was operating in one of the most expensive cities in the world. In Silicon Valley, startups were following a new business rule: grow or die. But how much was it possible for an artisanal bakery to grow?

In 2014, Prueitt and Robertson started work on a restaurant, café, and ice-cream bar called Tartine Manufactory. They leased an airy, six-thousand-square-foot space in the Heath Ceramics building, on the other side of the Mission. Robertson had begun collaborating with Washington State University’s Bread Lab, and there were plans to integrate a mill, allowing the on-site production of unusual flours. “This is kind of what happens: you find another place, you build a nicer kitchen, and keep people,” Robertson told the food magazine Lucky Peach.

The Oakland coffee company Blue Bottle, which had just raised forty-five million dollars in venture capital for its own expansion, needed a bakery partner to provide food in its coffee shops. (Today, there are more than a hundred.) Tartine soon announced a merger with the company. Anticipating a personal windfall, Prueitt and Robertson moved into a luxurious house in the Castro. A photo shoot published by the Web site Eater showed off their specialized cookware, heated outdoor furniture, and lemon trees. By the time the Eater piece went live, the Blue Bottle acquisition had fallen through; the couple put the Castro house up for sale and moved out. Still, Tartine Manufactory opened in the summer of 2016. According to its designers, its space, with light wood tables arrayed beneath Noguchi paper lanterns, represented “a new type of luxury,” and referenced “Alpine lodges, Danish cafes, Stickley furniture and Japanese teahouses.” Manufactory’s menu offered sea-urchin smorrebrod, beef-heart tartare, and buffalo-milk soft serve; the next year, it was nominated for a James Beard Award. Meanwhile, Tartine launched its own coffee brand, Coffee Manufactory, in partnership with Chris Jordan, a former Starbucks executive. Jordan became Tartine’s C.O.O. Tartine developed a series of partnerships with investors, among them a real-estate private-equity firm called CIM Group.

CIM was founded in 1994, by Richard Ressler, an investment banker, and Avi Shemesh and Shaul Kuba, two Israeli immigrants whose landscaping company Ressler had employed. The firm raises money from individual and institutional investors, such as pension funds, and manages about thirty billion dollars in assets, focussing on what it calls “thriving and transitional urban communities” and “opportunity zones.” It is one of the largest property owners in Los Angeles, and a prominent commercial landlord in Oakland. Like many large real-estate companies, CIM is also a lender, providing the kinds of loans necessary for big development projects.

CIM invested in Tartine’s café and bakery business. Coffee Manufactory planned to move into Jack London Square, a waterfront neighborhood in Oakland where CIM was pursuing redevelopment. For CIM, Coffee Manufactory was intended to be an anchor tenant—a business that could attract customers and other businesses, increasing the over-all value and cachet of the area. “It’s hard to grow these types of communities in the right way,” Jordan told the San Francisco Chronicle, in 2017. CIM, he continued, “gets it, essentially. They see consumers want an organic and local experience.”

In the mid-twentieth century, developers might have taken on shoeshines and newspaper stands as amenity-oriented tenants. Today, they are more likely to seek out gourmet coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants, and cafés. It isn’t unusual for developers to offer such tenants leases with reduced rent, or no rent at all. In some cases, the tenants pay real-estate companies a percentage of their revenue. For the real-estate firms, these arrangements can help open or revitalize a building; for business owners, they can offer a respite from worrying about fund-raising, being profitable, and paying rent; and for low-margin businesses, such deals may be one of the few viable routes to expansion. (In New York City, Tishman Speyer, the real-estate firm revamping Rockefeller Center, has offered custom leases to restaurants and smaller businesses including Van Leeuwen Ice Cream and the record store Rough Trade.)

Tartine was a particularly appealing anchor tenant. The food was great, and most of it could be made off-site, requiring a fairly modest square footage for retail sites. And Tartine had a history: the flagship location, with its artistic staff and communal ambiance, radiated the sort of authenticity that a real-estate developer could only dream of cultivating. Year on year, Tartine’s brand had become cooler, airier, and more transportable. Photographs of its pastries and its Guerrero Street bakery had appeared in Apple commercials and product demos; Sweetgreen, riffing on a recipe from one of Prueitt’s cookbooks, had offered a “Tartine bowl.” In 2018, an Eater article titled “Do You Even Bake, Bro?” credited Robertson with helping to inspire hobby baking among “the disruptors, engineers, and tech bros” of Silicon Valley. That year, the bakery opened the first of six licensed locations in Seoul, one of which is located in Kinfolk Dosan, a cultural space created by Kinfolk, the aspirational life-style magazine.

Tartine’s brand was symbolic of a specific era of gentrification. The presence of a Tartine seemed to suggest a neighborhood on the cusp. During the past two decades, other businesses associated with the same era had taken on private investment and morphed into national brands. Roberta’s, the punkish pizzeria that opened in Bushwick, in 2008, now has a supermarket line of frozen pies and upscaled locations in the U.S. and Singapore; Stumptown Coffee, which started in 1999, in Portland, Oregon’s then sleepy Division-Clinton neighborhood, is now owned by JAB Holding Company, the German conglomerate behind Panera and Krispy Kreme. Real-estate developers also saw an opportunity in food culture. RSE Ventures, an investment vehicle co-founded by Stephen Ross, the chairman of the real-estate firm Related Companies, has a minority stake in David Chang’s Momofuku Holdings; Related’s Hudson Yards development touted two Momofuku businesses at its opening. (Both outlets have since closed.) On a smaller scale, Rolo’s, a restaurant in Ridgewood, Queens, is co-owned by Kermit Westergaard, a developer with a portfolio of apartment buildings in the area; in a 2018 interview, John Ortiz, a co-owner of the bar Sundown, which is in one of Westergaard’s properties, joked that the developer was “curating the neighborhood with buildings and tenants.” General Irving, an all-day café in Bushwick, was designed in partnership with Venn, an Israeli real-estate company. “With a network of purpose-built spaces and local partners, the entire neighborhood becomes an amenity for your residents,” the company’s Web site explains.

Certain gentrifiers, who consider themselves culturally savvy, “don’t want Le Bernardin, or some four-star restaurant, moving into their neighborhood, because that would ruin the charm,” Sharon Zukin, a sociologist and urbanist at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, told me. “That would ruin the ‘authenticity.’ They might have a lot of economic capital, but they still want to have that authentic cultural capital that Roberta’s, or Tartine, signifies. Now, for me, and maybe also you, we’re asking: How can something still be artisanal if it has six branches in Seoul?” Zukin described the process of bringing intense, aggressive real-estate development to upper-middle-class neighborhoods, to cater to an even more affluent stratum, as “super-gentrification.” (The concept was originally introduced by the urban geographer Loretta Lees, in 2003, in reference to Brooklyn Heights.)

In 2019, Tartine opened two new bakeries in CIM-affiliated properties, in West Hollywood and San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood. (CIM has since sold the Inner Sunset property.) The West Hollywood location, Tartine Sycamore, is industrial chic, with brick walls and exposed pipes; it is within walking distance of several other CIM developments, including a creative campus and a new high-rise. That year, in expansions unrelated to its CIM partnership, Tartine also opened Manufactory Food Hall, in San Francisco International Airport; L.A. Manufactory, a restaurant in the Row, a huge, newly developed compound in downtown Los Angeles; and Tartine Berkeley, a café inside the Graduate, a chain hotel owned by Adventurous Journeys Capital, a self-described “vertically integrated real estate developer, owner, and operator.” On the occasion of Manufactory L.A.’s opening, Food & Wine published a feature on Robertson and Prueitt, with the headline “With L.A. Opening, Tartine Positions Itself for World Domination.” On Tartine’s Web site, inspirational copy asked, “What if a bakery kept its heart and soul, but always remained open to new ideas? What if a strong sense of place could successfully go more places?”

An artisanal business might grow slowly, along artisanal lines, but overheated real-estate markets offer other, faster possibilities.

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

By 2019, those hoping to make art, music, or porridge bread in San Francisco were faced with a nearly impenetrable housing market. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment had reached nearly five thousand dollars. Many small businesses seemed to be looking for an exit; a host of larger local companies had sold to multinational corporations (La Boulange to Starbucks, Annie’s Homegrown to General Mills, Lagunitas to Heineken, Niman Ranch to Perdue, Anchor Brewing to Sapporo, Blue Bottle to Nestlé, Cowgirl Creamery to Emmi). Tartine’s employees in San Francisco watched investment flow into the new locations and felt left behind; workers at the Mission bakery suspected that they were the engine of an empire. There was confusion about the company’s investors—who were they, and how much power did they have? The Coffee Manufactory retail space, in Jack London Square, had never opened; why not? Workers wanted insight into the bakery’s finances. Tartine was expanding, and yet the Mission location needed repairs.

Workers noticed cultural changes. Shift wine was eliminated, and management introduced a monthly music playlist. Some were dissatisfied with wages, raises, and scheduling. Employees wanted certain benefits, such as paid time off separate from state-mandated sick leave, and raises larger than the annual increases mandated by the city. All this looked feasible to them, given the company’s expansion. When they brought these requests to Tartine’s newly created human-resources department, they were confused to find that it was run out of offices leased from CIM affiliates, in Los Angeles.

As Tartine expanded, operational difficulties grew. Money was allocated to ventures that didn’t pan out. The whole enterprise seemed stretched thin. Around Thanksgiving of 2019, the San Francisco bakery closed for a couple of days, on orders from the Department of Public Health. At the Row, L.A. Manufactory was struggling: after an initial flurry of publicity, crowds stopped coming. Tartine took on a new investor, Monogram Capital Partners. As the year came to an end, Manufactory L.A. closed for good, laying off its remaining workers ten days before Christmas. Around this time, Robertson appeared on Tartine’s Instagram in sponsored content for Blundstone boots.

Two months later, a hundred and forty-one of Tartine’s more than two hundred Bay Area employees announced their decision to unionize with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Many workers told me that they respected and admired Robertson and Prueitt and wanted to work with, not against, them. “This is not trying to bring Tartine to its knees,” Sarah Gagnon, a barista who was one of the union organizers, said at the time. “It’s just to try to have a bit more transparency, and to try and fight for the things that a lot of us have been wanting.” Pat Thomas, another union organizer, said, “We don’t know what their financial situation is. What we’re asking for is the opportunity to see.” Tartine management declined to recognize the union; they brought on Sam Singer, an infamous crisis-P.R. specialist, let him go amid criticism, and then hired a firm called Quest Consulting. A recent article in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat noted that Quest’s founder, Lupe Cruz, is seen “among labor organizers” as a “notorious union-buster who specializes in influencing Latino-dominated workforces.”

When we spoke during the union drive, in February of 2020, Robertson and Prueitt seemed surprised by the unionization effort. Restaurant margins were paper-thin, they emphasized, particularly in the Bay Area. Prueitt recalled how, in the early days, even as people queued up outside, the bakery almost went under; Bar Tartine, she said, had never turned a profit. (The restaurant closed in 2016.) “We’re perceived to be something bigger than what we are,” she told me. “There is no there there. It’s a water sandwich.” There seemed to be a fundamental disconnect. New investment was focussed on new ventures, but Tartine’s expansion relied on the strength of its brand. Existing workers, who saw themselves as essential to that brand, felt excluded from the company’s plans for the future.

That Valentine’s Day—just after the U.S. reported its fifteenth case of the coronavirus—I stopped into the bakery on Guerrero Street. Things looked much as they always had. The walls were hung with vaguely psychedelic nude paintings, and Sade flowed through the stereo. Employees working the counters and register wore Tartine Union pins, decorated with an illustration of two baguettes with a large rose in the center—an agrarian Jolly Roger. The café was packed, cozily, as usual. In one corner, two women splitting a morning bun took a video of themselves toasting glasses of champagne. I sat down at a table beside two Facebook employees, one in a T-shirt that read “I??NY.” They were discussing their career trajectories.

“I have all these extra options. Sometimes I want to vest them—” one said to the other.

“—and just chill,” her friend finished.

An artisanal business might grow slowly, along artisanal lines, but overheated real-estate markets offer other, faster possibilities. Prueitt and Robertson, who divorced in 2020, are reluctant to talk about the company’s exact relationship with CIM, but the developer has an interest in Tartine’s newer locations—five in Southern California and one in San Francisco, all of which opened in CIM-affiliated properties. For a few months, Gary Schweikert, an executive at CIM, was the company’s interim C.E.O. (Dar Vasseghi, the former C.E.O. of Yoshinoya U.S.A, a Japanese fast-food chain, recently took over.) Richard Ressler’s daughter Jillian, a former CIM employee, is now Tartine’s vice-president of brand.

Tartine’s employees, like many service workers, have suffered during the pandemic. In early 2020, the company laid off the majority of its workforce. The San Francisco Manufactory shifted to selling pantry items and prepared foods, and the Berkeley location closed for good. Chris Jordan left the company, and several months later workers at Coffee Manufactory learned that the roastery was closing and lost their jobs with hardly a week’s notice. A small constellation of Tartine-related L.L.C.s received loans, amounting to at least five million dollars, via the Paycheck Protection Program; eventually, the San Francisco locations began rehiring employees. In March, 2021, following a thorny, protracted dispute over challenged ballots, the National Labor Relations Board announced that Tartine’s workers in San Francisco had officially unionized; the Tartine Union is now negotiating a contract, and the I.L.W.U. has begun reaching out to workers at other bakery locations. Coffee Manufactory’s production and packaging is now under the purview of J. Gursey, a wholesale roaster headquartered in Las Vegas that partners with casinos, hotels, and the band Korn.

According to Prueitt, Tartine is in debt and struggling not to sink further. Still, outside the Bay Area, it continues to grow. Tartine Silver Lake, which opened in late 2021, occupies the ground floor of a new, CIM-owned office building on Sunset Boulevard, in an area that realty agents refer to as Sunset Junction. An upscale market, Erewhon, recently went in down the block, in another new complex developed by CIM. (The market sells Tartine bread.) A new fifty-unit condo building—also a CIM development—has also opened a few minutes away. The surrounding neighborhood is a historically Latino area that has rapidly gentrified during the past two decades; it is often compared to the Mission.

CIM has also begun to invest heavily in West Adams, a historically Black and working-class neighborhood in South Los Angeles, not far from the city’s growing tech hub in Venice Beach. According to a recent article in Bloomberg, it is currently working on forty properties in the neighborhood, including new apartment complexes, and retail and commercial spaces. The area is changing quickly, and rents are rising. CIM’s presence in West Adams is controversial: Bloomberg reports that some of the strategies CIM has used in its efforts to buy up property have left local residents and business owners feeling targeted and harassed. In 2020, the firm attempted to purchase a nearby mall, Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, but withdrew its plans following concentrated, organized community pushback.

In November, Tartine West Adams opened on the ground floor of the Zoe Lofts, a new, mixed-use development, owned by CIM, in which a studio apartment starts at around nineteen hundred dollars a month. Previously, the lot had been occupied by the Zoe Christian Fellowship, a modest community church that hosted twelve-step recovery meetings, meal programs, and a summer “adventure club” for children. The new building—a low-rise wrapped in fog-colored corrugated metal, with persimmon accents framing the windows—sits across from a Seventh-day Adventist church, a parking lot, and a squat, beige apartment complex built in the nineteen-sixties; at the end of the block is another newly built, mixed-use CIM development, across from a body shop. Two nearby restaurants, Mizlala and Johnny’s West Adams, list Jordan Dembo, CIM’s chief legal officer, on L.L.C. filings for their holding companies. The Alsace, a boutique hotel developed by CIM, recently opened on the same strip.

Inside, Tartine West Adams looks much like the other, newer locations: airy and white, with tiled walls and creamy terrazzo counters. Each morning, bakers arrive in the predawn hours to prepare frangipane croissants, morning buns, banana cream tarts, and Robertson’s famous porridge bread. In our conversation, Zukin, the sociologist, had noted the ironies of the cuisine-real-estate business model. “There’s a kind of schizophrenia between cultural capital and financial capital that takes physical form in a Tartine bakery, or in a baguette,” she said. The real estate is appealing in part because of the trendiness and quality of the goods; the production of the goods is entwined with the real estate. Tartine is no longer a small neighborhood bakery, yet the bread is still artisanal—“chewy-crusted, nutty-crumbed”—and the pastries are delicious. In West Adams, the doors open at eight, and as customers walk in they may not feel that they’re entering part of a real-estate empire. They leave with loaves that are still warm. ?

Tom Hanks Explains It All

By David Marchese The New York Times

There are some artists, and Tom Hanks is one, who go beyond mere popularity and instead come to embody some part of our shared American story. Ever since the actor broke out from a string of roles as a goofy, lovelorn leading man via the complicated innocence of his work in “Big” (1988), Hanks has gradually become an avatar of American goodness. Over the course of his long career, he has found clever ways to convey a fundamental and aspirational decency. He has played honorable men on society’s then-margins (the discriminated-against gay lawyer of “Philadelphia”) and at the center of our history (“Forrest Gump”; “Apollo 13”). At other times, he has found ways to imbue with can-do optimism characters who are caught in the middle of seemingly unbearable situations, whether they’re alone (“Cast Away”) or surrounded by enemies (“Saving Private Ryan”). Such is the malleability of his gift that he has created trustworthy portraits of real-life characters (the heroic airline and cargo-ship captains of, respectively, “Sully” and “Captain Phillips”), cartoons (Woody the cowboy from the “Toy Story” films) and real-life characters who easily could have come off like cartoons (as Fred Rogers in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”).

Is it telling, then, that in this time of declining trust in our institutions and one another, Tom Hanks is now playing a bad guy? One with a hand in the downfall of another American icon and myth maker? But in true Hanksian fashion he finds something unexpectedly hopeful even in this character. “I’m not interested in malevolence; I’m interested in motivation,” Hanks says about his role as the shadowy talent manager, Col. Tom Parker, in the director Baz Luhrmann’s biopic “Elvis,” which premieres June 24. “All you can say is that he’s wrong,” he adds, “not evil.” There’s a useful lesson there. With Hanks, there often is.

Tom Parker was a Dutch guy who

passed himself off as a Southern colonel.1

1Despite his claims to the contrary, Parker was no colonel, nor was he even an American. Parker was Dutch native whose birth name was Andreas van Kuijk.

Elvis was a poor kid from Tupelo who turned himself into a superhero. Both were careful to present very specific versions of themselves to the public. What might a movie star like you know about what’s underneath that kind of self-presentation that the rest of us don’t? Well, I don’t think in show business there were more authentic-to-themselves personalities than those two. Elvis dressed the way he dressed because he had to. He felt he looked good. Onstage, he wasn’t wiggling to say, “Hey, time to turn on the sex appeal.” It was instinct. Col. Tom Parker was the same exact type of thing on a crass, nonartistic level. I heard a story: When he was a carny, he had a dime welded to his ring. He’d say: “That cost 90 cents and you gave me two dollars. I owe you a dollar 10.” He would then take the customer’s hand, put the change in, close it up, say “Thank you very much” and cheat people out of that dime. He got the same pleasure from that as he did signing a deal for Elvis with the International Hotel in Las Vegas for millions of dollars. That’s got nothing to do with power, nothing to do with influence. It is a dispassionate desire to always get this other thing. That was the secret sauce of living for Col. Tom Parker, the same way that his hair and clothes and the music he loved was the secret sauce for Elvis.

Tom Hanks, as Col. Tom Parker, with Austin Butler as the title character in “Elvis.” Warner Bros. Pictures

That’s them. I’m asking about you. What do you know about the performance of authenticity? Me? You mean career-wise?

However you want to take it. You know, I was not an overnight sensation. I had been in movies for a long time until I had enough opportunities and experience to realize that I don’t have to say yes to everything just because they’re offering me the gig. Some of that was, What am I going to do instead? Wait for the phone to ring? The phone rang! I said yes! But I was fortunate in that my sense of self and artistic thirst grew at the same time. I had done enough romantic leads in enough movies and had experienced enough compromise to say, “I’m not even going to read those scripts anymore.” So then you hold out for something that represents more of the artist you want to be. When Penny Marshall came to me on “A League of Their Own,” I said: “Penny, this is written for a guy who’s older than I am. The character is in his 40s and washed up.” She said: “That’s why I want you. Because this guy should have been great until he was 40 and wasn’t.” I went Aaaah. Before that a director had never said something to me like, “Come up with a reason why you’re 36, broken down and managing a woman’s baseball team.” Then it was, Katie, bar the door! I was looking for more of that from then on. The other thing that happened in the ’90s was when

Richard Lovett2

2Hanks’s longtime agent and now a co-chairman of the C.A.A. talent agency.

at C.A.A. said, “What do you want to do?” No one had asked me that question, either. People always said: “What do you want to do with this opportunity?” But what do you want to do? I said I’d like to make a movie about Apollo 13. That was the first time where I was saying, “This is the type of artist who I want to be.” But if you look at anybody’s career, there’s hits and misses. There’s movies that simply don’t work, and if something not working is debilitating to you, you’re toast.

Hanks with Geena Davis in “A League of Their Own” (1992). Columbia Pictures, via Everett Collection

What about trying to make Col. Tom Parker work? It’s rare for you to play a villain. I would say that with the Colonel, whatever motivation it is, the Colonel is often right, and the dynamic that I respond to best is not the antagonist-protagonist dynamic, it’s when everyone is coming from a position where they think, This is the best thing to do. You can say, “Where was the Colonel when Elvis was having drug problems?” The Colonel would argue that what I was doing was protecting my boy’s reputation as the world’s greatest performer. You will give him what he needs, and he will get up and sing enough so the audience will have what they want and Elvis will not be put in a position where he’s some rock ’n’ roll junkie — because he’s Elvis [expletive] Presley. The Colonel was not going to allow that man to be letting down his fans. So Col. Tom Parker’s motivations were oftentimes self-serving, but they were also motivations that anybody can understand, whether you agree with them or not.

I think of you as basically a naturalistic actor. Was it tough to translate that to a Baz Lurhman film? His aesthetic is so much about heightened reality. No, because it’s all connected to the logic of the piece. Every movie establishes its own parameters for what’s allowable and what’s not. Certainly, with “Elvis,” Baz would be saying: “You’re in a morphine dream! You’re high! It’s the morphine talking!” It all comes down to what the thing is. One of the most presentational movies I’ve ever been in was Frank Darabont’s

“The Green Mile.”3

3Directed by Darabont and co-starring Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan, “The Green Mile” (1999) was an adaptation of a Stephen King story about supernatural goings-on at a 1930s Southern penitentiary.

Most of the movie is major bum bum buuuh moments. It was all heightened reality and not naturalistic at all but was the logic of the piece.

Did you read the biography of Mike Nichols that came out last year? No, why do you ask?

There’s an anecdote in there about “Charlie Wilson’s War” that I wanted to ask you about. Apparently you and Aaron Sorkin didn’t want to show Charlie Wilson using cocaine because you thought it made the character unsympathetic. It made me wonder about what you believe audiences do or don’t want to see Tom Hanks doing up there onscreen. Let me tell you a story. The original “King Kong.” They’re on Skull Island. They’re going to try to save Fay Wray. They’re on a log across a ravine. King Kong picks up the log and knocks a bunch of guys off and they fall down into the ravine and break some of these viny things across the bottom. That’s all you see in the movie. In the first cut, though, those viny things were spider webs and out of a cave crawled the biggest spider you ever saw. What the filmmakers discovered was that after seeing those big spiders, the audience was not afraid of King Kong.

So they cut it.4

4It’s unclear whether the spider scene Hanks is referencing was ever actually filmed. But a Los Angeles Times story from 1933, the year “King Kong” was released, reported that the film’s director, Merian C. Cooper, opted not to include the scene.

There is that thing that can happen in a movie where, if you show the giant spider, it might blow your real story out of the water. But it was never in the script to show Charlie Wilson snorting coke. I could walk you through different disagreements I had: On “Saving Private Ryan,” Steven Spielberg said, “I don’t think I want to see John Miller fire his gun and kill Germans.” I told him: “I’m sorry, Steven. You’re not going to get me all the way over here and turn me into some other guy just because you don’t want Tom Hanks to kill soldiers.” We had this same moment in “Forrest Gump.” There’s the scene with the ambush in Vietnam, and Bob Zemeckis originally wanted Forrest to be confused and run away. I said, “Bob, why am I playing a soldier who is really good at his basic training without then showing me slapping in my clip and firing a set of rounds?” Anyway, with Charlie Wilson, not snorting coke was not spiders in “King Kong.” I would have done it. I didn’t care. Those kinds of choices are in every single movie.

Hanks in “Charlie Wilson’s War” (2007). Universal, via Everett Collection

And they’re dictated by the needs of the story rather than the image of its star? At the end of the day, the only people who care about your image in a movie is the marketing department. You know “The Gunfighter” with Gregory Peck? Gregory Peck had a mustache in that, and the guy who ran the studio said, “That mustache on Gregory Peck cost us millions at the box office.” What he was saying was, Thanks a lot for putting spiders in “King Kong.” But, and not to belabor this point, if you’re going to show Charlie Wilson in a hot tub with naked girls in Las Vegas doing coke, then he better be coked up for the rest of the scenes in Las Vegas. He better be gnashing his teeth. He better be talking fast. If we were going to do it, we would have said, “Let’s do that right.” But that’s not what was going on. [Laughs.] OK, what else can I explain for you?

You talked about a point earlier in your career when you wanted to get out of a particular box. Have you ever been concerned during the latter part of your career that you’ve been stuck in a different box? You mean the hero, the guy who could be trusted, the ordinary guy that gets put in extraordinary circumstances? I look at it like this. I have a particular cinematic countenance that I carry into any movie, the same way that De Niro carries a malevolence into every role that he plays. There can be new ways to explore what that means. For example, when Clint Eastwood said, “You want to be Sully?” I said to him, “I’ve sort of played that role before,” and he said, “Yeah, you have.” I took that as a challenge. It’s like he was saying there’s still an unplumbed thing. Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart: They brought their countenance into every movie, and we were looking for some new turn of it. There’s no shiny object you wave at the audience to make them forget that countenance. So the biggest question you have to ask is: Is each new character’s behavior authentic to recognizable human behavior? Let’s take “Greyhound”: Tom Hanks in a uniform? Jeez, we haven’t seen this enough. Me doing the right thing? Oh, that’s brand-new. All of that stuff is in that movie, but it’s through a filter of a character who is scared out of his head, and that’s different. It’s the same countenance and the same “Trust me, folks,” but the cost becomes palpable.

Can an actor consciously use his countenance in a performance? And does that countenance reveal anything innate? No, I don’t think you’re going to know the person through performance. But the piling up of the jobs themselves — if someone has only seen half of my movies, they’ve still seen 30 movies. Over the course of that will come some imprimatur. It cannot be denied. But that doesn’t mean it’s not malleable. It is, provided you’re not just doing the same thing. You’ve gotta give ’em A. You’ve gotta give ’em B. But if you don’t also give ’em K and S, you’re going to start delivering movies by rote. Mr. Bruce Springsteen said his rock-and-roll show is like going to church. Provided that what he does in the big shows is give you six songs in a row that are Bruce Springsteen at his absolute E-Street Bandiest. After that he takes you anywhere he wants. It’s not exactly the same with movies, but the audience expects a thing from my name up there. I’m not saying they come in expecting something specific, but they’re going to trust me in making my choice to do the movie in the first place. “Let’s go for the ride with this guy because he’s only let us down one time out of two. He’s still batting .500.” You can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. But no matter what, here’s what you always want people saying after a movie: “I’m glad we went to the movies today.” What is worse than going to a movie and coming out and saying, “Coulda seen that on a plane”?

So many of your movies, and also the work you do with

Playtone,5

5Hanks and the producer Gary Goetzman founded Playtone Productions in 1998. The company has produced a raft of fiction and nonfiction film and television, much of it based on American history, including the HBO World War II miniseries “Band of Brothers,” as well as that network’s “John Adams” and documentaries on each decade from the ’50s to the Aughts for CNN.

convey an affection for a particular slice of mid-20th-century America. That’s a period, the period of your youth, that makes a lot of people nostalgic. But nostalgia for that time has curdled for so many Americans into retrograde politics. What makes “back in my day” tip over into something negative for some people, and why do you think it hasn’t for you? That’s such a loathsome argument: “Back in my day.” Those days were [expletive] up! “Oh, the ’50s were this carefree time.” Excuse me, no, they were not. How come things aren’t the way they were? You mean when you were comfortable? Institutions were gaming the system in order to maintain the status quo! That has always been the case except for when some redefinition of our institutions comes along out of a public outcry because the status quo isn’t fair. I was in a movie called “Cloud Atlas” that went right over everybody’s heads. It said, What is the point of trying to do the right thing when it’s just a drop in the ocean? But what is an ocean but a multitude of drops? Things get better when a multitude of drops form an ocean and sweep things away. World War II: The Nazis were defeated, as was a Japanese empire, because enough good people said no. Civil rights came about because of, I think, an American belief that our responsibility as citizens is to work toward making a more perfect union. I don’t know if I’m answering your question but “There’s Hanks, he’s got a nostalgia for the way America used to be”: No. I have a fascination with the progress that America has made in all these incremental moments. That is an American sense of what is right and what is wrong. What I don’t do, if I can continue on, I’m not cynical. Cynicism is a default position in an awful lot of entertainment. How many knockoff versions of “Chinatown” have you seen? Eight million. The conflict of cynicism is glamorous, gorgeous. Violence is glamorous and gorgeous. But it’s cynical, and I’m not a cynic.

Making

those Robert Langdon sequels 

6Hanks played Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon in three films based on Dan Brown’s schlocky, pseudo-historical novels: “The Da Vinci Code” (2006); “Angels & Demons” (2009); and “Inferno” (2016).

wasn’t a little cynical? Oh, God, that was a commercial enterprise. Yeah, those Robert Langdon sequels are hooey. “The Da Vinci Code” was hooey. I mean, Dan Brown, God bless him, says, Here is a sculpture in a place in Paris! No, it’s way over there. See how a cross is formed on a map? Well, it’s sort of a cross. Those are delightful scavenger hunts that are about as accurate to history as the James Bond movies are to espionage. But they’re as cynical as a crossword puzzle. All we were doing is promising a diversion. There’s nothing wrong with good commerce, provided it is good commerce. By the time we made the third one, we proved that it wasn’t such good commerce. Let me tell you something else about “The Da Vinci Code.” It was my 40th-something birthday. We were shooting in the Louvre at night. I changed my pants in front of the Mona Lisa! They brought me a birthday cake in the Grand Salon! Who gets to have that experience? Any cynicism there? Hell no!

Hanks with Audrey Tautou in “The Da Vinci Code” (2006). Columbia Pictures, via Everett Collection

Just to stick with the idea of cynicism for a minute: I was always intrigued by the idea that you and Martin Scorsese tried to make

a Dean Martin biopic.7

7Man, I wish this movie had gotten made. “Dino,” the matchless Martin biography by the similarly matchless Nick Tosches, was one of the source materials. “Goodfellas” screenwriter Nick Pileggi worked on the script.

I think of him as a profoundly cynical star. What drew you to him? I didn’t see Dean Martin as being the cynical presence in the Rat Pack. I think he’s the only one who got it. Dean Martin was not into any of the show-business razzle-dazzle except for the way it gave him a degree of ease and enjoyment that he wanted because he grew up so hardscrabble. He said, “Pally, there’s got to be an easier way,” and he discovered what that way was. There’s a great story about Dean Martin: After he broke up with Jerry Lewis, everybody said, “Jerry is a genius, Dean’s just a crooner.” Dean then went to play Las Vegas, and it was a disaster. He comes back and says to one of his guys: “They don’t seem to like me without the monkey boy. What are we going to do?” I’m paraphrasing. The guy said, “You could always do the drunky act.” So from that drunky act came jokes like: “I don’t drink anymore. I just freeze it and eat it like a Popsicle.” He was not a boozer. When he’s out there with the Rat Pack, it’s apple juice in his glass. He would pretend not to know his lines. “I’d like to have a response to that joke, but I have to wait for Mr. Cue-Card Man to do his job.” This was all fake! What is that other than an expertise beyond belief? That’s why I wanted to do it. I felt like I understood that guy to a T. Also, I’ve heard this story about Dean and Jerry at the end of their lives. Jerry was in some restaurant and Dean came in — did not say hello. Just took his seat. Jerry said, “I have to go talk to Dean.” Understand, the night they broke up at the Copacabana, Jerry said to Dean, “What we had all this time was love.” Dean said: “You know what you were to me? A big fat [expletive] dollar sign.” But at the end, they’re old, they’re infirm, and they just sat and held hands at some restaurant, weeping. Forgive me if I’m telling you too much about the movie we never made.

No, no, I asked. But now I’m thinking about what you said about the struggle toward a more perfect union, and I’m thinking about it in the context of the op-ed you wrote last year about the Tulsa race massacre. That came out of unadulterated frustration. I consider myself a student, I read history for pleasure, and when I found out about Tulsa, the question I had was, Why had I not heard about Tulsa? Quite frankly, that led into a personal enlightenment.

So my question is whether the stories you want to tell about America need to have a redemptive element in order for you to want to tell them. Because your American-history projects almost always offer some redeeming idea about the country’s values and its people’s character. But are there certain kinds of American stories, like Tulsa’s, which maybe don’t offer anything redemptive, that you wouldn’t be comfortable telling? You have to take into account the economics of what I do for a living. We come along and say we would like $250 million, in the case of “Masters of the Air,” to do

a 10-part miniseries.8

8Playtone is a co-producer on the upcoming World War II miniseries, which will air on Apple+.

About what? Americans bombing Nazis. That’s pretty commercial to me. But how are we going to do that? One of the things we’re going to do is show the cost of what it took in order to do that. It was brutal. The Eighth Air Force suffered half of the U.S. Air Force’s casualties. It’s not just, Yay, we bombed the Nazis. It’s, We bombed the Nazis and the pressure of doing that [expletive] up so many Americans. Then, we can’t go back and just show white people saving the world, because the Black airmen who got shot down were in these stalags, too. So you’re going to see Black people. You’re going to see these young kids who are just like their white counterparts, the same exact kind of prisoners of war, knowing that when they get home, the land they come from is institutionally racist. So to answer your question, this stuff costs money, and it has to make money. That means we have to sneak up on the trickier stuff. Now, you’re not a naïve guy, but, honestly, some people say, “How come you didn’t make a movie about blahbiddy blah blah?” They think that you get to make any movie you want. That is simply not the fact. But we had an opportunity in “Masters of the Air” to show segregated pilots, in the same prisoner-of-war camp as everybody else, and it’s the truth. If you don’t see that, if you don’t learn about Tulsa, that is saying you’re going to keep this rosy-eyed idea of the past. But as soon as you bring it up, that’s the movement toward a more perfect union. This happened. Know it. Because if you know that, you know who we are.

Hanks with Matt Damon and Edward Burns in “Saving Private Ryan” (1998). DreamWorks, via Everett Collection

You talked about an American sense of right and wrong. Has your faith in that sense been shaken? There’s a million obvious reasons for what would cause that to happen and then also less obvious ones like the fact that some portion of people believe you’re involved with QAnon. That’s got to give you pause. Look, there’s plenty of reason to be demoralized. Goodness is not a constant, and the good fight is not always fought, but there is a strength and a resiliency and an eventuality to vox populi. There are events that shake up those Americans who still believe there is a right way to do things. It’s the Peter Finch moment: I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Now, a certain administration came down the pike, and the people who were screaming seemed to rule the day. Why? Because the people who cared about what’s right didn’t show up. Well, something egregious enough comes along, and guess what? People will show up. But their cages have to be rattled. We might be experiencing that right now. The problem, of course, is that technology has shifted so that truth has no currency. That is only going to be altered when enough people say, “[Expletive] that, I’m not going to pay any attention to social media ever again.”

Is that why you stopped tweeting? It’s been two years since you posted anything. I stopped posting because, number one, I thought it was an empty exercise. I have enough attention on me. But also I’d post something goofy like, “Here’s a pair of shoes I saw in the middle of the street,” and the third comment would be, “[Expletive] you, Hanks.” I don’t know if I want to give that guy the forum. If the third comment is “[Expletive] you, you Obama-loving communist,” it’s like, I don’t need to do that.

We’ve been talking a bunch about cultural shifts. I want to ask about cultural shifts related to

the two movies you won Oscars for.9

9Hanks won back-to-back Academy Awards for his leading roles in “Philadelphia” (1993) and “Forrest Gump” (1994). For my money, his best performances were in “Big” (1988) and “Captain Phillips” (2013).

Timely movies, at the time, that you might not be able to make now.

That’s exactly it. There’s no way a straight actor would be cast in “Philadelphia” today and “Forrest Gump” would be dead in the water. Gary Sinise would not have been able to play Lieutenant Dan because he has legs?

Not that. I’m positive that its premise alone would mean that “Forrest Gump” would be mocked and picked apart on social media before anyone even had a chance to see it. There’s nothing you can do about that, but let’s address “could a straight man do what I did in ‘Philadelphia’ now?” No, and rightly so. The whole point of “Philadelphia” was don’t be afraid. One of the reasons people weren’t afraid of that movie is that I was playing a gay man. We’re beyond that now, and I don’t think people would accept the inauthenticity of a straight guy playing a gay guy. It’s not a crime, it’s not boohoo, that someone would say we are going to demand more of a movie in the modern realm of authenticity. Do I sound like I’m preaching? I don’t mean to.

Hanks with Denzel Washington in “Philadelphia” (1993). TriStar Pictures, via Everett Collection

Do the generational politics of “Forrest Gump” register any differently to you today than they did in 1994? What do you mean?

I mean, do you remember when you were in that movie — Yes, I was in the movie.

Ah, dammit. I sound like Chris Farley interviewing Paul McCartney on “Saturday Night Live.” [Laughs.] How about when you sang that song? Do you remember that?

OK, so I’ll assume you remember the discourse when “Forrest Gump” was up against “Pulp Fiction” at the Oscars. Your movie was held up as this totem of boomer nostalgia and the other movie was

the fresh new thing.10

10The Times, in March 1995: “‘Forrest Gump’ offers an amorphous, feel-good experience loaded with special effects and platitudes. If it sweeps the Oscars in many categories beyond the technical ones (where its excellence is indeed nonpareil), the Academy will be indeed looking back to the future. But ‘Pulp Fiction’ is the future: film making reinvented from the ground up, with energy free of gimmicks and a bravado startlingly attuned to our dangerous world.”

Rightly so. Not inaccurate.

So, with the benefit of hindsight, do you think “Forrest Gump” overcame its nostalgic impulses or succumbed to them? Oh, it overcame them. The problem with “Forrest Gump” is it made a billion dollars. If we’d just made a successful movie, Bob and I would have been geniuses. But because we made a wildly successful movie, we were diabolical geniuses. Is it a bad problem to have? No, but there’s books of the greatest movies of all time, and “Forrest Gump” doesn’t appear because, oh, it’s this sappy nostalgia fest. Every year there’s an article that goes, “The Movie That Should Have Won Best Picture” and it’s always “Pulp Fiction.” “Pulp Fiction” is a masterpiece without a doubt. Look, I don’t know, but there is a moment of undeniable heartbreaking humanity in “Forrest Gump” when Gary Sinise — he’s playing Lieutenant Dan — and his Asian wife walk up to our house on the day that Forrest and Jenny get married.

“Magic legs.” Yes, “magic legs.” Then I look at him, and I say, “Lieutenant Dan.” I might get weepy thinking about it now. Forrest and Lieutenant Dan in those four words — “magic legs”; “Lieutenant Dan” — understand all they had been through and feel gratitude for every ounce of pain and tragedy that they survived. That’s some intangible [expletive] right there. That is not just running along to Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser.”

The early ’90s were clearly an important time for you in figuring out what you wanted to do with your career. Have you had any similar epiphanies since then? I’ll tell you this anecdote. There was a period of time when my wife and I were invited to all these primo dinners. You walk into the restaurant like, “Holy cow,

Swifty Lazar11

11An agent to the stars during the golden age of Hollywood and a man dubbed, in his Times obit, “a manic egotist.”

is still alive and Sophia Loren is at another table and I’m sitting with Tony Curtis!” I might have asked him a question about a famous movie he’d done. You don’t want to foam all over people at dinner. You don’t want to do the Chris Farley, “Remember when you were in ‘Some Like it Hot?’” like you did.

Yeah, yeah. [Laughs.] Right. So Tony said, “How old are you, Tom?” I was just about to turn 40. And he said, “You know, just before I turned 40” — it wasn’t

Dore Schary12

12A prolific Hollywood producer and screenwriter who worked on, among other classics, “An American in Paris” and “Boys Town.”

but I’m going to use the name — “Dore Schary called me, and he said: ‘Tony, you’re going into your 40s. I want you to put your head down and do great work and by the time you’re 50, you’ll be an international movie star.’” That’s exactly what Tony Curtis did. Somewhere between his mid-30s and his mid-40s — he might have fudged the age — he was doing “Spartacus” and “The Vikings” and “Sex and the Single Girl.” That’s when Tony Curtis became big-time Tony Curtis. I guess I did a bit of that, because going into my 40s, there was a constant stream of people wanting me to be in movies with them. I ended up saying no to an awful lot of things, and the things I said yes to were pretty damn good, and

I had a nice run.13

13From 1993 to 2000 Hanks starred in “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Philadelphia,” “Forrest Gump,” “Apollo 13,” “Toy Story,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “Toy Story 2” and “Cast Away.” So, yes, a nice run.

But “Tom’s the ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances”: I aged out of that. You can only do it for so long. So what’s left to do? If I can’t generate the things I want to do at Playtone, I will be some brand of gun for hire. That’s not a bad way to go about things. When I did Nora Ephron’s play “Lucky Guy,” that was a conscious decision to cut down on the exposure. I wanted to do extraordinary work, but I also wanted to not be carrying the economic burden of another bigass movie. Because as soon as you carry one of those and it tanks, you’re in the doghouse for a while. It’s that old story: “Get me Tom Hanks. Get me the next Tom Hanks. Get me the young Tom Hanks. Who’s Tom Hanks?” But that’s the business. You can’t change that.

Hanks in “Forrest Gump” (1994). Paramount Pictures, via Everett Collection

Is this the longest you’ve ever been interviewed without getting asked about being nice? Am I nice? I dunno.

I heard you kicked Hooch. I have never kicked Hooch!

That was a joke. [Laughs.] You know, it’s funny you say that about the “nice” thing. How many times have I been having a conversation with some journalist who wanted to say something unique and then the whole first paragraph is: “Is he nice or not?” It just goes on and on.

I have one last question: When I ask for a memory from your career, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? OK, we were shooting the park-bench scenes of “Forrest Gump.” It’s summertime in Savannah, Ga. We had shot 27 straight days. It was brutal. We were sitting there, and I got this haircut, we’re trying to make sense of this dialogue, and I had to say, “Bob, man, I don’t think anybody’s going to care.” And Bob said: “It’s a minefield, Tom. You never know what’s good. Are you going to make it through safe? Or are you gonna step on a Bouncing Betty that’s going to blow your balls off?” There’s never any guarantee. I’ll be 66 in July, and I’ve been acting for a paycheck since I was 20. Forty-six years and I now know what was evident when I was 20 years old is

what Spencer Tracy said:14

14Tracy is one of many performers who have been credited with offering versions of this advice to aspiring actors: “Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.”

“Learn the lines. Hit the marks. Tell the truth.” That’s all you can do.