Doctor’s Orders: Live Well and Get Better

“Be colorful,” the prescription might have read. “Dye your hair hues that don’t exist in nature. Tattoo conspicuously. Practice body-piercing. Headbutt authority figures, get to know Madonna and just be bad as you wanna be.”

Maybe it’s just as well that Dennis Rodman didn’t respond to Dr. Jarvey Gilbert’s request. Gilbert had sent basketball’s anti-hero a blank prescription form along with a letter soliciting his Rx for everyman, everywhere, complete with signature.

But who knows? Perhaps Rodman would have said something apt and valid, like “Hustle, play tough D and go after every rebound.” And perhaps his words of wisdom would find their way into Gilbert’s next edition of “Prescriptions for Living,” alongside advice from such figures as Chiang Kai-shek and David Ben-Gurion, Georgia O’Keeffe and Norman Rockwell, Edward Teller and Dr. Benjamin Spock, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. . . .

Ted’s and Jane’s are new additions to Gilbert’s collection and among those that have been on display at the Burbank Public Library for several weeks. Turner’s “Lead, follow or get out of the way,” while hardly original, seems true to character. Fonda’s seems more thoughtful and heartfelt: “Stay curious. Keep learning and remember, it’s not what was done to you, it’s what you do with it that makes a life.”

The display is scheduled to come down today, but you never know. Gilbert, 78, has connections in Burbank. Back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, he was a city councilman and mayor while “Laugh-In” and Johnny Carson made “beautiful downtown Burbank” famous.

When we met at the library, Gilbert, an energetic man with a quick smile, remembered those years fondly. Once he traded lines with Carson on the “Tonight Show.” Another time, when he sought “Laugh-In” star Arte Johnson’s autograph for one of his daughters, all he had was a blank prescription.

Johnson, known for his satiric depiction of a Third Reich soldier, wrote: Wir haben wege euch glucklich zu machen. Translated from the German: “We have ways of making you happy.”

From this, Gilbert got his idea--and began soliciting prescriptions from people throughout the world. “Prescriptions for Living” was published in 1971 and sold about 10,000 copies.

Although much of the advice is timeless and universal, perusing the book is a little like opening a time capsule. By accident of alphabet, a prescription from Joan Baez Harris (using her married name) faces one from S. I. Hayakawa, then the president of San Francisco State College.

The folk singer and antiwar activist recommended: “Spend twenty minutes a day in silence--not eating, not driving, not smoking, not reading, not using any outward distractions--just listening and watching and trying to be aware.”

Hayakawa, whose confrontations with antiwar protesters would later help him win a Senate seat, wrote: “Napoleon said, ‘Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself.’ ”

Elsewhere, poet Allen Ginsberg mentions cannabis, LSD and “experimental sexuality” in a prescription that Gilbert describes as “filthy” and wishes he had never shared with publishers. The updated collection, Gilbert said, will preserve some of the oldies while adding many new prescriptions.

The physician politely prescribed an angle for this column. He was struck, he said, by the fact that so many different people--among them J. Paul Getty, Earl Warren, Gerald Ford, Bing Crosby and Pat Nixon--emphasized the importance of work. Georgia O’Keeffe simply scrawled the word.

Hers was not the only one-word prescription.

“Love,” wrote Dr. Spock.

“SMILE!” commanded a sign held by a grumpy woman drawn by the political cartoonist Interlandi.

And, cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer admonished: “DUCK!”

Indeed, if this compendium of advice could be distilled into a drug, the chief ingredients would be love, work and a sense of humor.

As it happens, Gilbert’s life seems to have mirrored these values. In dedicating the book to his wife, Sally, and their three daughters, Gllbert described them as “the best prescription for me.” As for work, Gilbert retired his stethoscope only a year ago, after a career that lasted half a century.

No longer working in the conventional sense, Gilbert has more time to send out his blank prescription forms in hope of finding cooperative souls, not to mention a cooperative publisher. He is also taking courses in philosophy and history at Valley College. “I never had a chance to take them before,” he said. When he was studying to become a physician, “it was all science.”

I asked him if he had sought and received prescriptions from any personal heroes. His answer suggested that to be a student of life, one need not have heroes.

Gilbert quoted something he read as a teenager in an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“He said, ‘Envy is ignorance.’ ”

I wonder what Dennis Rodman would say about that.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311. Please include a phone number.