Send Yourself Roses: Valentine’s Day and Every Day Advice from Kathleen Turner
Issue 221— February 13, 2023
February 14 is Valentine’s/Galentine’s/Palentine’s day. What are your plans? I first thought I’d see if any of my women friends wanted to celebrate together and then decided I’d follow my friend actor/activist Kathleen Turner’s advice and send myself roses.
Kathleen was on my mind because she had emailed to tell me that she’ll be at the Mesa (AZ) Arts Center, February 18th, thinking I might be at my Arizona home. I’m not, but if you are I highly recommend that you get tickets and go.
I’ve seen several iterations of her cabaret-style show, Finding My Voice, since she started creating it several years ago. She is forthright, courageous, and funny — and of course there is *that voice.* Which she uses to sing as well as tell the story of her life.
You may recall that she and I wrote a book together a few years back called Send Yourself Roses so I know when she’s telling it all, and believe me, she always does.
There’s how she got her breakout role of Matty in Body Heat, and then went back to waitressing, because she was paid so little for it, until the film came out and suddenly she was a star. There is her heartbreaking battle with rheumatoid arthritis that threatened to end her career and how she made her way back to the stage and film with sheer grit. Her admiration for her father and how she felt when she violated his disapproval of acting as a profession and arrived back home from an acting program to find he had died. And much more personal revelation, wisdom and wit.
The book became a New York Times bestseller, and now she has also recorded it in her own distinctive voice.
Each chapter has specific lessons or messages that Kathleen wanted to give — in fact, she said to me at the outset that her purpose for the book would not be the typical celebrity tell-all, but to share what she’d learned that would be useful to other women. And she is very outspoken about her causes: her belief that everyone can volunteer to help others, and her activism for reproductive rights and other social justice causes, for example.
Our name for the book was Take The Lead, Lady. The publisher insisted that was “too feminist.” To which Kathleen, in typical fashion, replied “Who the f*** did they think they were getting?”
Book talk and signing at NY Women in Communications.
Fun fact: we also learned that we could only have so many of the F word in the manuscript if we wanted it to be sold at Walmart. So we counted.
And now you know where the name for my organization, Take The Lead, came from. It was too good not to use!
Try as I might, I could pry very little gossip out of her though she is very honest about her life.
She says she hates it when people say, “Oh you’re such a regular person.” But she is, with healthy doses of both global sophistication from growing up in several countries while her father was in the foreign service, and solid citizen Midwestern values she learned from her mother’s Missouri roots.
Because of her varied career, I’ve found people of all ages tend to know of Kathleen Turner for wildly different reasons. You might know her from her starring roles in blockbuster films like Body Heat, War of the Roses, or Serial Mom. Or from her lauded stage performances such as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (I particularly loved learning how she orchestrated things to persuade playwright Edward Albee to bring his classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? back to the Broadway stage).
Possibly you’ve seen her as television cameo characters like Chandler’s drag queen father in Friends or, more recently, the ex-wife on The Kominsky Method. You might even have recognized her iconic voice as the feminist doll maker Stacy Lavelle in The Simpsons. The woman never stops working.
Here are three of my favorites from among the leadership lessons I learned from Turner:
Be essential in any role you play.
She says, “One thing that has always been important to me throughout my career is this: Every character I play has to be necessary to the story. In other words, if the story would make sense without that character, then I won’t play her. She must be essential.”
She adds, “For a role to interest me, the character must be strong. She must believe she can effect change in her life. She might fail at what she sets out to do, but she must try. She is not a victim. I find it intriguing that so often “strong” also turns out to be written into the script as “evil” when the adjective applies to a woman. Our culture still is afraid of strong women and tends to demonize them. To define them as selfish. But selfishness defines the lead in a drama — the lead must be someone whom the story revolves around.”
2. Don’t repeat your successes.
This one really got me thinking about how most of us focus on trying to get better at one thing we do or aspire to do and rarely are deliberate about taking on something completely out of our wheelhouse. But Kathleen calls herself a serial risk taker, a nod to her role in John Waters’ weird film, Serial Mom. It’s an accurate description of how she chooses roles. She doesn’t want to be typecast. That keeps her options open for the next role.
It’s why after playing the sultry, sexy, scheming Matty in Body Heat, she deliberately sought a comedic role and played Delores against Steve Martin’s classic The Man With Two Brains. After that, the mousy and shy Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone. And so on. She says, “I take risks not just for the thrill — though I do enjoy the thrill — but for the learning…Risk is the willingness to fail.”
Speaking of risk taking, one of my favorite bits of Turner wisdom is this: “Fearlessness at 20 springs from not knowing what challenges lie ahead. Fearlessness at 50 comes from having wrestled with life’s challenges and learned from them.” Ring true? It sure does for me.
Kathleen and I spent about six months working on the book at a time in my life when I was most vulnerable, having left an intense 30-year career that had defined my life and shaped how people thought of me. Learning about how Kathleen had intentionally chosen to do completely different roles freed me to do the same. As a matter of fact, writing the book where I was telling another person’s story was a huge stretch for me and something I had never done before. There was magic in getting completely outside of my comfort zone. I doubt that I would have cofounded Take The Lead, without this idea. I am certainly not repeating my successes now.
Always a supportive friend, Kathleen and I are clowning around at the launch of my first book, “Behind Every Choice Is a Story.”
3. Banish the yet.
She was just 17 when her father died suddenly. I think that early experience with a shocking loss must have instilled a sense that you can’t wait to do or be what you think you want.
“Turner is a verb,” she says. She observes that many people will refrain from taking a risk or taking a stand because they feel they aren’t ready, don’t yet know enough, aren’t old or wealthy enough yet, and so on. But, she says, “That ‘yet’ is a thief. It can rob you of yourself in the moment. ‘Yet’ means you are going to make a contribution someday. But each of us has so much to give right now.”
I love that advice — it’s so true. And if leaders don’t model that penchant for action, others in their team may well hold back too.
Oh, and about the title of the book? Here’s a bonus lesson for you in self-care.
The back story: On opening night, everyone sends the star bouquets of flowers. Then, nothing. Kathleen likes to have flowers in her dressing room. So, when she’s in a play, she makes a standing order with a florist to send herself a dozen roses each week. Hence the advice: don’t wait for someone else to provide whatever makes you happy. Go ahead and send yourself roses.
If you are in Arizona, be sure to grab a ticket and go see Kathleen Turner on February 18 at the Mesa Arts Center.
And if you’re elsewhere, keep your eye out because she is touring the nation. I love and admire Kathleen so much. You will be inspired by her story, and her incredible presence on the stage.
Most importantly, this Valentine’s Day and every day, remember to send yourself roses.
GLORIA FELDT is the Cofounder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker and expert women’s leadership developer for companies that want to build gender balance, and a bestselling author of five books, most recently Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. Honored as Forbes 50 Over 50 2022, and Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Tweet Gloria Feldt.