https://archive.ph/LmhBDWhat a lovely article. A lot to learn from that old man. I quoted a few things, for the HN crowd (myself included) that often reads comments and seldom reads articles:
>He’s also a youthful, gentle man glowing sans peur et sans reproche while bringing a moment of grace, manners and style to largely impolite, undignified and profane times. That’s why people, even the known and confident, seek admission to his court, to be touched by politesse: Because he’s an escape, a salve that somehow, just for a moment, delivers us from what’s out there, which is harsh and threatening. Or as friend and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik says: He is our perception of the ideal grandfather. Or how grandfather would be if he left grandmother home. “People . . . ask to meet Irving just so they can say they had at last met a man who has it all figured out,” says Gopnik, now living in Paris. He sees Link as a true California type as much as any snazzy actor or wealthy courtesan. “He puts me in mind of some great performance piece. Irving is his own creation.”
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>Yet Link’s daily ritual hasn’t gone away. He walks two miles from home each morning to the hotel, for granola, bananas and berries over The Times and the trades. One cup of decaf. Then onto Wilshire and Camden and Little Joe’s barbershop, where little Giuseppe Bausoue (“I make house calls to Frank Sinatra”) coiffures, blow-dries and sprays Link’s pearl-white hair into a stiff sculpture. Max, chauffeuring the hotel’s black Rolls-Royce, has Link back at the Peninsula around 9:30 a.m. Upstairs to the spa, into a terry robe and slippers, and out to a cabana for the first of dozens of incoming and outgoing phone calls. Maybe a turkey sandwich lunch alongside the pool where tans are oiled umber, cellular phones tinkle incessantly, and nobody swims. Usually there’s gin rummy twice a week, Fridays and Sunday, for 5 cents a point. Sometimes dinner at Drai’s. But always the framework of a permanent schedule. “Call me a creature of habit,” suggests Link. He doesn’t drive, doesn’t move far from the Peninsula, doesn’t shock his system with unfamiliar experiences, doesn’t get close to people who converse in negatives. “That creates stress, which is the root of bad health. A routine means I don’t worry about what I have to do this afternoon, or should be doing later in the week, or must get done by next month. “That way, I hope to live to 100.”
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>“Everything went,” Link says. “I sold our home and our properties and moved into an apartment in Santa Monica.” But he did have the support of a wife and his children. “They knew that in both cases I had done the right thing,” he says. “So I really couldn’t have cared less what other people thought. I didn’t mind eating at McDonald’s.” He picked up new work as a $15,000-a-year public relations spokesman for National Distributing Co., his brother-in-law’s liquor business. At 64, for the first time in his adult life, Link was working for someone else; a hired hand, a salaried employee. “That was the saddest point of my life,” he says. “What I really cared about was what I had done to myself and my reputation and my self-respect. I could find excuses. I could come up with explanations. But deep down I knew. I blamed myself.”
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>Believe part of that. Friends suggest that engineering something for nothing today is a smart way of setting up deals for tomorrow. It has to do with quid pro quo, creating allegiances, issuing markers. Link is aware of his gift: “You approach this business the way you approach life. Positively. With a sense of fun, with humor, and with a certain amount of mental creativity. “But if you aren’t sincere and are involving yourself with perceptive people who know facts from bull----, then you’ve created a negative. Then your deal’s off.”
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>Link gets a 10-minute coif, stiff enough to last until July.
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>“You have the impression that [Link] irons his socks and gets dressed in the middle of the night just to go to the bathroom,” Davis says. “I think he truly believes in the saying that anybody will be in good spirits and good temper if they’re well dressed.”
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>“I miss the past to a degree,” he muses. He’s drinking Evian at lunch and saving his one Chardonnay for dinner. “But I’ve adjusted to what exists now. I’ve learned to prefer the day I’m living in. If you don’t grow with the times, you grow old with the past.”
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>Link has tallied his life. Its rewards are “family and friends who have supported me, loved me, cared for me.” The price has been no higher than “always giving a little more than you get.”