Andy Rooney, 92, said goodbye to “A Few Minutes With
Andy Rooney” on Sunday night. It was the 1,097th edition of his
well-known video essay, a regular feature of the CBS news magazine “60
Minutes” since 1978. That is a lot of things to have been mystified,
troubled, angered, moved or amused by, and a lot of years over which to
be mystified, troubled, angered, moved and amused by them. Viewer
reactions to Rooney’s pieces ranged similarly.
“There
is so much going on in the world,” Rooney told newsman Morley Safer (a
whippersnapper at 79) in the interview that preceded his last “Few
Minutes.” “I would be embarrassed to say I couldn’t write a column.”
His
subjects, ranging from the trivial to the momentous, included
cookbooks, car names, dairy subsidies, the moon, pennies, arms control,
warning labels, astrology, Clarence Thomas, the homeless, drug
companies, Matisse, ghostwriters, television magazine shows, classified
ads, Rodney King, Martha Stewart, the jury system, cold remedies,
parking for the disabled, two Iraq wars, women on submarines, the NBA,
9/11, the death of Osama bin Laden, e-books, his eyebrows and the stuff
on his desk: “Staple remover, one of the great inventions of modern
times — better than the staple, I think.”
We don’t
see many nonagenarians on television. Indeed, with Rooney’s retirement —
or semi-retirement, with the door at “60 Minutes,” it has been loudly
declared, remaining open to him — that number will slip to zero, at
least until Betty White’s next birthday. For this alone, Rooney, who was
nearly 60 when his “60 Minutes” run began, has performed a service, a
weekly blow against a medium that habitually marginalizes the senior
citizen. (Is there any greater insult that may be paid to a show or a
network nowadays than that its audience skews old?)
His
age was inextricable from his voice, for better and worse. He could
take the long view, but he could also sound like a man out of time or,
some would say, out of touch. Still, that’s the paradoxical nature of
the curmudgeon’s art, to cut to the heart of a matter from a point of
(sometimes willfully) limited understanding. (It’s where the jokes
live.) To one viewer who accused him of being set in his ways, he
responded, “Being set in my ways is what I do for a living.”
“I
don’t say anything that’s offensive to people,” Rooney told Safer,
downplaying his importance, though in his farewell address he also
admitted having been “terribly wrong sometimes.” (But, he thought, right
most often.) Safer alluded briefly to the 1990 controversy that had led
to his temporary suspension from CBS — his including “homosexual
unions” in a list of things that people had realized could kill you —
and to the fact that Rooney had been “pretty nasty” at the time about
the objections. But now, as then, he said he was sorry.
As
an old-fashioned melting-pot liberal in an age of identity politics, he
was bound to get into trouble sometimes. Some of these criticisms had
merit; others just misread his rhetoric. (When, for example, he wrote,
in his newspaper column, “I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but
today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me,” he was
making a point about how little attention he paid to baseball, not about
the ethnicity of the people who played it.)
Yet
in a time when insult passes for entertainment and “Tell us what you
think” has become a business model, the worst of Rooney’s transgressions
are exceeded without comment a thousand times a day. And unlike many
among the rowdier breed of commentators who now rule the air, Rooney has
always been willing — if not always at first — to learn, to apologize
and, even when he did not agree with his critics, to air their
criticisms. That he preferred his reality to yours — “I don’t know who
Lady Gaga is,” he said recently, “and kids today probably don’t know who
Ella Fitzgerald was” — did not necessarily constitute a judgment.
Over
the last couple of years, the pieces had grown shorter, less
free-associatively discursive. There was a growing breathiness to his
speech, a softness to his consonants, a whitening of the hair and a
deepening of the jowls. To Safer’s question about how he liked old age,
Rooney replied, “I hate it. I mean, I’m gonna die, and that doesn’t
appeal to me at all.” But his writing has remained crisp, and his
thinking, if somewhat more to the point, idiosyncratic.
The
final installment of “A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney” constituted, as
had many episodes before it, a description of Rooney himself in the
world, with the camera pulled back a little farther to include the
people he worked with and the people who watched him. (Was he really as
difficult a character as he could sometime seem? Yes, the answer seemed
to be, and no.) But it mostly concerned what it meant to him to be a
writer. He got into television, he said, “because I didn’t think anyone
was paying enough attention to the written word,” and he never thought
of himself as a television personality, but “a writer who reads what
he’s written,” in an effort to tell the truth.
“I believe that if all the truth were known about everything in the world,” he said, “it would be a better place to live.”
He
has left the air short of that goal. “This is a moment I’ve dreaded,”
he said. “I wish I could do this forever. I can’t, though. But I’m not
retiring. Writers don’t retire, and I’ll always be a writer.”
———
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