Second Acts:
Changing Careers at the Half-Century Mark
By David Gibbons
Had F. Scott Fitzgerald survived another 50 years beyond his premature death in 1940 at the age of 44, chances are he would never have lived down his infamously erroneous pronouncement “There are no second acts in America.” (He might have even had one himself.) In fact, Americans have practically taken it as a birthright, a constitutionally guaranteed freedom, not only to invent but to reinvent themselves. They’ve done it repeatedly over the years with amazing comebacks and fantastic second careers, very often concocting brand new identities, personal and professional, of their own imagining.
Old ballplayers mostly fade into obscurity, become beer distributors or buy car dealerships; a few lucky ones, swift of tongue and mellifluous of tone, go into broadcasting and become beloved (or despised) celebrities all over again.
In California, they have a minor tradition of former Hollywood actors going into politics; two were elected governor and one went on to even higher office.
The Gipper took his easy-going tough-guy act on the road. With help from some really good speechwriters (although he apparently continued to write his own jokes), our 40th president eventually got credit for the fall of communism before riding slowly off into his own sunset. Quite a second act, Mr. Fitzgerald. By the way, Ronald Reagan was 56 when he was elected governor and 69 — our oldest thus far -- when elected president. The latest Hollywood-star-turned-California-governor — also, ahem, elected at 56 – has at times struggled to keep his foot out of his mouth, jeopardizing his dream for a constitutional amendment allowing foreign-born people the opportunity to run for president. Far from the State of Enlightenment, here on what is (ironically) referred to as The Right Coast, another extremely famous and popular Hollywood actor who resides in Westport, Connecticut, became a charitable natural-food entrepreneur, as if he wasn’t busy enough with film roles and a serious car-racing habit. Since its founding in 1982 (when Paul Newman was 57), Newman’s Own brands have donated more than $200 million to worthy causes under their tongue-in-cheek motto: “Shameless exploitation in pursuit of the common good.”
Ex-presidents embody a kind of career pyramid quandary: once you get to the top, is there anywhere else to go but down? The two most recent ones have become amiable do-gooders, sometimes perpetrating their charitable deeds in tandem while carefully avoiding debates about politics. (Bubba, just 47 when he won the presidency and now 60, also commands an average fee of $175,000 for paid speaking engagements.) Jimmy Carter, 82 now but just 53 when he was elected as an obscure Southern governor, was arguably the only U.S. president overthrown by a foreign power. He may also be the most honorable and beloved of our former commanders-in-chief. Carter has volunteered for more than 20 years, wielding a hammer and pounding nails, lending his considerable publicity clout to the efforts of the Habitat for Humanity charity. HFH has a division called the Jimmy Carter Work Project, which specializes in “blitz-building” of homes in downtrodden neighborhoods.
Barry Diller, 64, started in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency — naturally — before the age of 20. His career has morphed numerous times — from TV executive to movie-studio chief to head of Fox Broadcasting to chairman of QVC home-shopping network to CEO of InterActiveCorp, under which he owns and runs various internet companies including Match.com, Ticketmaster and Citysearch — each iteration as powerful, innovative and lucrative as the next, an amazing résumé that defines him as the ultimate modern media mogul (although Rupert Murdoch also deserves mention).
In his first act, Steve Case founded AOL and became chairman of Time-Warner after its merger with his company; now he may be in the process of out-Dillering Barry. Case has elevated his entrepreneurial spirit to a celestial fervor and started an ambitious, fascinating (some might say arrogant) new venture called Revolution, which is literally out to change the world and the way people live in it. If and when it succeeds, he will be in his fifties; he’s 49 now.
But what of us normal folks? What prompts regular people to change careers after 50? How and why do they do it? Is it a mere shifting of gears, applying a well-developed “skill set” in a different arena or by alternative methods? Or is it a 180-degree shift, an about-face, the notion that your first career was not your true vocation and that you’re finally knowledgeable and confident enough to get it right?
I knew a therapist (okay, he was my therapist) who for the first half of his career was an Episcopal priest. He tired of church dogma and bureaucracy yet he wanted to sustain his work counseling people in their hours of need. So he went back to school, got a degree in psychotherapy, put out his shingle, and worked at it gracefully, compassionately, with humor and skill, literally until the day he died. I know he was happier and I suspect he also helped his “congregation” more in Act II of his life.
My mother was a Harvard graduate student in the 1950s. (I know, I know, this is getting a little ridiculous; first he brings in his therapist and now his mother … but can’t a guy mention his mother?) When she became pregnant with yours truly, she quit school in order to mind the house and raise the family. More than two decades later she went back to school, eventually earned her Ph.D. at the age of 50 and embarked on a career teaching and researching art history, which she continues today in her late seventies. She was of that transitional generation when being a housewife still wasn’t considered “real work” — or at least certainly didn’t command enough respect to be labeled a true career. Many of my mother’s friends (and also friends’ mothers) were dubbed “women’s libbers” and lumped into the cultural rebellion of the sixties and seventies simply because, as women, they fashioned second acts after their stints as housewives and mothers: one of them transformed her hobby of running the local historical society into a career as a well-known author and expert on architectural preservation; another completed her law degree and became an administrative judge. For many, their second careers necessitated difficult juggling acts between professional and personal (child-rearing) obligations.
Everybody’s favorite corollary of the American Dream is to make a lot of money and retire early, becoming a gentleman farmer, buying a wine estate in Napa or Sonoma, or perhaps pursuing some interesting, exciting, even risky hobbies (see P. Newman Racing). Some people have a long-term plan along those lines; they’ll work 14-hour days, 6½-day weeks as corporate attorneys or investment bankers, for example, sacrificing family and social lives. Once they hit 50, presumably having collected plenty of loot, they “retire” and launch their second careers as teachers, musicians, artists, even ski instructors.
The conventional career model is to be serious in your first act, then loosen up a little in your second. Karen Haglof, an oncologist at NYU Medical Center, did the reverse: she dropped out of college and a rock guitarist for the first 15 years of her “adult life.” She went back to school in her mid-30s and soon was on track to becoming a doctor. Her bands were moderately successful; asked whether a few big hits would have forestalled her change of course, she replied: “Had I been Joan Jett, I don’t know if I’d have ever come to the point where I asked myself: ‘Is this what I want to bge doing?’ I realized I was more of a restaurant worker who sometimes went on tour rather than a musician who worked in a few restaurants.” As a doctor who cares for cancer patients, she has found a “meaningful, challenging varied career” and plans to pursue it for as long as possible.
Angela Miller, 59, a successful New York literary agent since the mid-1980s, had been looking for a ski house for several years when she and her husband, architect Russell Glover, bought a farm in West Pawlett, Vermont, in 2001. They parlayed some smart real-estate investments — a coop on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; a rambling Victorian on Shelter Island — into a mortgage on this beautiful 300-acre property, which turned out to have an impressive pedigree. In 1862 its owner, a dairy-farming entrepreneur named Consider Bardwell, made it into the first cheesemaking coop in Vermont. It became the model for such modern-day operations at Cabot Creamery (founded 1919).
Ms. Miller had entertained the notion of making cheese for some time. In her teens, her father, an attorney, had a “hobby farm” in Pennsylvania so she was familiar with dairying; she was a lifelong cheese lover and also happened to represent the literary efforts of my co-author, Max McCalman, the noted cheese expert. It took persistence and several years of false starts at Consider Bardwell Farm before, in 2004, Miller obtained a license to sell the goat’s- milk cheese. Within a couple of years, she had fully embarked on her new career without giving up her old one. “I had no intention whatsoever of getting my hands dirty,” she says. “Well, maybe for fun … but I hadn’t expected to be selling cheese. I planned on having business partners and employees to do the farm work, make the cheese, and sell it.” She jokes that the decision to buy not just any farm but a large one with a distinguished history reflects “my neurotic impulse to be grandiose.” Clearly, though, there is genuine passion and drive. She is unwilling -- or perhaps unable -- to back away from the commitment required to launch such an ambitious enterprise.
On weekends, when her workers are off, she does the farm chores. Early Friday mornings, you’ll find her setting up to sell cheese at the City Hall greenmarket, on the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. “I suppose it hasn’t quite dawned on me that it’s my second career,” she says. “Maybe I’m in denial. It’s gotten to the point where I have to say to myself: ‘This is really serious.’ ” Starting this winter, she plans to work with the top consulting cheesemaker in Vermont, Peter Dixon; they will have to increase production to insure profitability.
What motivates an apparently sane, intelligent person to get up at 5 a.m. and milk a herd of bleating goats in the dark when she could be conspicuously sipping cappuccino, at a significantly more comfortable hour, at Trattoria dell’ Arte with Judith Regan? (Is there such a difference?) Seriously, though, is it such a surprise that Angela Miller was right around 50 years old when she began contemplating her second act as a cheese baron? “I needed something like that in my life. I knew about being a literary agent. I still loved the book-publishing world but I needed to learn something else. That’s what this is all about. At some point — call it a midlife crisis if you like — you start to wonder: ‘Is this all I’m ever going to do with my life?’ I did a few other things. I bought myself a little red Miata convertible and rode around in it for a while ... My daughter became seriously ill and recovered; then my father died after an eight-year illness. It makes you rethink everything. After that, it was my turn to have some fun.” The real fun — a/k/a the challenge of serious cheesemaking — was not far off.
Cecelia Bakare, 61, worked as a legal secretary and administrative assistant at large law firms in Washington, D.C.. She spent much of her free time doing volunteer work through her church. The firm where she had been for 32 years went through a merger in 2005, and she decided to retire. “The mindset of the new firm was different from what I was used to,” she says. “Everything became very automated and mechanical; they left out the human factor.” She still does some contract work for lawyers but most of her time now is devoted to working in adult literacy at the Johnson Center for Education and Development, which is part of C. Philip Johnson Ministries, Inc. Through the Ministries she also trains substance-abuse counselors and does career-development counseling. “I was always blessed to work with people who saw potential in me and would train me and help me develop my career. It’s important for me to give back, using the skills I learned and not letting them to go to waste. Everybody needs a boost, and at this point in my life I can provide it to young people who are just getting started and are willing to learn.”
Agi Nadai, 74, has graduate degrees in pharmacology, biology, and geology and worked for many years as an environmental scientist. She used to eat meat and tease her daughter, Serena, who took yoga classes and was a vegetarian poetry-writing hippie in the 1970s at Scarsdale High School. It took until the age of 55 for the mystic lurking within Nadai to emerge fully. Now it’s she who follows a vegetarian diet and has become the bona fide hippie.
Actually, Nadai has had more than two careers. The first was teaching and researching cell physiology at the Columbia University College of Pharmacy. The second came as a result of a rafting trip down the Grand Canyon in the mid-1980s. “I fell in love with all those beautiful rocks,” she says. “I had always wondered about the mysteries of our planet, so I decided to explore them scientifically.” She took a geology course, which led to more courses and eventually a graduate degree in the subject. In 1997, she officially launched Career No. 2 as a geologist, becoming an expert on the Caribbean (she had projects in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and the Florida Everglades) and working at the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency.
Around the same time, a sore back from years of strenuous outdoor pursuits -- hiking, skiing, swimming, and canoeing — led her to take up yoga, which became her entrée to Career No. 3. By 1994 (age 62), she had earned her yoga teaching certificate and was giving classes during lunch hour to her fellow workers — among them FBI and IRS agents -- at the Federal Building in downtown Manhattan. She left the EPA in 2001 and continued to teach yoga full time for several years. Now semi-retired, she continues to seek enlightenment through such practices as Deep Ecology and Yogagaia, both of which combine meditative thought with action aimed at understanding, revering, and preserving the Earth. “In Hinduism,” she says, “they have a tradition of men, at the age of 50, having set up their homes and provided for their families, leaving to wander in the forest and look for spiritual awakening. I guess I’ve been doing the same sort of thing for quite a while.”
One gets the feeling that the biggest part of inventing a second career is figuring out how your skills and abilities — and comfort level — fits with a new job description, perhaps one of your own invention or perhaps one you had to seek out in unexpected places. In other words, it takes knowing yourself well (by now you’ve had a half century for that), imagining a new trajectory, and figuring out how to launch yourself on it.
In Part Two of this article – naturally, it had to have a second act, which is set to appear in next month’s issue of this magazine -- we’ll look at a few more examples of people who’ve launched successful second acts, and we’ll explore some of the motivations and reasoning that led to their “self-reinvention.”
David Gibbons is a freelance writer and editor who is co-author, with cheese expert Max McCalman, of The Cheese Plate and of Cheese: A Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best, which won a 2006 James Beard Award.
