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Her whole life, Johnnetta has been fighting against the isms: racism, sexism, classism. “And,” she added with fervor, “I also signed up in strong opposition to heterosexism, ageism, ableism”—discrimination against people who are physically challenged—“and any other ism. My way of looking at and moving through the world has been shaped by experiences growing up in the South in the days of legal segregation, participating in the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War and women’s movements, and, yes, by academic training in anthropology, women’s studies, and African American studies. Now I can bring all of the knowledge and experiences from Acts I and II together with what this Third Act has to offer and, hopefully, I can make a few more contributions in our ongoing struggles against all systems of inequality.”

For a number of years, Johnnetta was closely involved with the Johnnetta B. Cole Global Diversity and Inclusion Institute, founded at Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. When the institute was at its height of success, it annually convened the Chief Diversity Officers Forum. I had never heard of a chief diversity officer (CDO), but Johnnetta explained that more and more corporations are appointing CDOs to provide leadership for the necessary tasks of increasing workforce diversity and creating an inclusive culture that is welcoming to all employees. Such actions, Johnnetta pointed out, are necessary if a company wants to successfully compete in the increasingly diverse global marketplace. Attracting and keeping a diverse workforce and creating an inclusive culture is not only the right thing to do, Johnnetta said, it is the smart thing to do. In short, there is a business case to be made for diversity.

With Pat Mitchell in the mid 1990s.

Actually, Johnnetta’s Generativity is not only about encouraging diversity in the corporate world; she is passing on her wisdom and experience so as to build a younger generation of leaders. Power Girls, another program of the institute, brought fourteen- to seventeen-year-old girls from the United States and several other countries to Bennett College for a two-week leadership training program. “One way to have a vigorous and exciting Third Act,” Johnnetta said, “is to hang out with young’uns!”

A year and a half ago, Johnnetta explained, “I received my third F minus in retirement as I assumed the position of director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. And,” she added, “I could not be happier because in this Third Act of my life, I have the joy of bringing together my passion for African art, my knowledge of anthropology and African studies, my belief in education as a powerful instrument for change, and my responsibility to be of service.”

For some, having a purpose can mean getting better and better at what you’re already good at. I once saw an inspiring photograph of the bedridden Henri Matisse still painting from his bed, with a brush attached to the end of a pole. Winston Churchill’s last tenure as England’s prime minister began at age seventy-seven. Michelangelo was sculpting up until a week before he died, at eighty-nine. At age ninety, Albert Schweitzer was working with lepers.

Sure, it’s easier to keep doing what you love doing to the end if you’re your own boss, a stand-alone artist (which actors aren’t, at least not movie actors), or a constantly reelected politician. It’s a lot harder when your work depends on other people’s decisions, as it does in the corporate world. But you might think of ways to go back and develop old interests you never had time for, such as writing, ceramic sculpting, working with young people, coaching, or teaching adults to read. Explore new interests or find a way to use your special skills and knowledge in new guises.

My friend Scott Seydel, a biochemist, built an international textile-dyeing business. In his Third Act he is using his scientific expertise to help New York City, Walmart, and other companies use recyclable products and packaging. His wife, my close friend Pat Mitchell, told me, “I find him at three
A.M.
sitting at his computer at the dining room table writing a PowerPoint script for a speech on recycling.” Scott views his new life as “atonement for having been part of the industrial complex.” Atonement or not, he’s making a difference.

The Honorable Robin Biddle Duke (left) with friends.

The gorgeous Robin Biddle Duke was eighty-three years old when I interviewed her. Her whole adult life has been devoted to expanding life choices for women and girls through her work with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). She has an activist spirit coupled with an abundant talent for diplomacy that was honed by her long marriage to Angier Biddle Duke, President Kennedy’s chief of protocol. No on-the-arm-of wife she, Robin used her contacts and positions to promote international cooperation on behalf of women’s human rights. Angier was killed in a Rollerblading accident when Robin was seventy-three, but she kept right on going.

“Sitting around waiting for something to happen is certainly not the name of my game,” she told me. “I mean, come on. You pull your weight in a boat. If you’ve been as lucky as I have in life, you put your oar in the water and you keep rowing. So what if I don’t row as fast as I once did? It’s more fun to be involved.” At eighty she decided to learn French, partly to be useful to the International Rescue Committee in the French-speaking African countries and partly because, as she said, “I wanted to see if I could still learn. You know how your machine gets rusty.” She told me that she enjoyed being the oldest person among the young students. “I try to stay on top of my game, but I am a bit slower,” she admitted. She doesn’t go to all the receptions, she said, and she’s begun to cut back her to trips to Africa (to only twice a year!). Assuming the role of sage, Robin had just brought her granddaughter along on a trip to Africa when I interviewed her. “I wanted her to see the on-the-ground realities of the developing world and how much work there is to do,” she explained.

Another wonderful example of having a purpose in late life comes from my friends Eva and Yoel Haller, both seventy-seven years old when I interviewed them. They met when they were fifty-seven and she was a widow running a major international marketing company that she and her fourth husband had created together. Three years later, Eva sold her marketing company to the employees, Yoel retired from a long practice as an ob-gyn in San Francisco, and they have worked together ever since on numerous philanthropic efforts. “I don’t play golf, don’t play tennis, don’t play bridge,” Eva told me. “I don’t do luncheons and I don’t pour tea. I’ve always been a social activist. I can’t think of another way of living. What other reason is there to get up in the morning? What are you going to do with your day? You need to have a reason to live.”

Eva describes their activities as “incubating” new youth organizations. One major nonprofit she chairs is Free the Children, which has built more than five hundred schools in Africa, Asia, and South America. “It is organized, run, and financed through fund-raising by young people,” she told me with pride. She also sits on a variety of mostly international boards of nonprofits that are dedicated to education, the environment, and improving the lives of women and children in developing countries. The Hallers speak of the young people they work with as their extended family. “We take them under our wing,” said Yoel. “They stay with us and share our lives.” Eva added, “It’s very nourishing. We get more than they get out of it, but of course I never tell them that.”

Over and over again, I have found this true in my own relationships with youngsters. As Carolyn Heilbrun wrote, “The secret … of successful—and therefore continuing—association with the young lies in knowing that they are more valuable as suppliers of intelligence than receivers of it.”

Eva and Yoel Haller.
NORMAN-MARQUEE PHOTOGRAPHY NEW YORK

Janet Wolfe was ninety-three when we met at a party in Southhampton. She radiated such good humor and vitality that I asked to interview her. She took me to a restaurant close by her small New York apartment, where she eats lunch every day: spaghetti alle vongole (she brings the leftovers home for dinner) and a glass of pinot grigio.

What surprised me, given her ebullience, was that Janet has had a very difficult life, one that could well have made her bitter. She told me, “I had a mother who hated me. She’d say, ‘You ugly thing, you’ll never amount to anything.’ In her will, she left everything to my two brothers and a dollar to me, so I wouldn’t break the will. My father didn’t know how to cope with her.” Janet’s father was a Wall Street broker. They were wealthy but lost everything in the Depression. “I’m the most successful failure,” Janet said. “I could have been a good actress, or a director in the theater, but I didn’t stick to anything. I never had a sense of worth. I worked a little in Hollywood as an extra. Danced in some pictures till they found out I couldn’t dance.” She headed the officers’ club for the Red Cross in Rome during World War II. Despite her ability to make friends and make people laugh, at sixty and supporting two daughters, Janet was running out of money. She asked the chairman of the New York City Housing Authority if he could give her a job.

He said, “What can you do for the housing authority?”

“Nothing,” she answered.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I grew up in the projects and was never exposed to classical music. Could you start a symphony orchestra for us?”

That’s just what she did, and she was still running the orchestra when I interviewed her.

The orchestra Janet founded has produced fifty public concerts every year for residents of housing developments in New York City—at public schools, in prisons, and in city parks—and has performed annual concerts at some of the city’s most prestigious halls. This is the work of Janet’s Third Act. She used to sneak in black musicians from Juilliard who were being pushed into jazz because there was a perception that blacks couldn’t or shouldn’t play classical music. The late Max Roach, a famed composer and percussionist, who performed with the orchestra, said of Janet that she “has provided more work for black, Hispanic, and Asian players than anyone in New York. It’s probably the only orchestra in the country that gives minority musicians, including black composers and conductors, an opportunity to perform classical music with a symphony orchestra.”

Janet has a wonderful, self-depricating sense of humor about herself. She told me over lunch that she’s always trying to raise money for the orchestra. “I said to this wealthy man recently, ‘If you give me enough money, you won’t have to sleep with me.’ And he replied, ‘How much is enough?’ ” Despite health problems and a painful past, Janet is doing well by doing good.

We know that just about everything that is part of the world around us right now will continue on after we are gone. Therein lies the sadness. I take comfort in the thought, expressed by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, that by using our later years for Generativity—for guiding and nurturing others, especially the next generations—we ensure that our lives are “saved” in the same way we save something we’ve written on our computer to ensure that it lasts and isn’t wiped away by a power outage. The accumulated experience of our lifetimes, synthesized through failures and successes, are “saved” as legacies to others, long after our bodies have shut down.
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