The Filmmaker Elda Hartley 
(1911- 2001)

[from Chapter 8 of Women Who Could...and Did: Lives of 26 Exemplary Artists and Scientists by Karma Kitaj]

Overview

The late Elda Hartley was a filmmaker, who, although she worked in the film industry all of her adult life, did not make her own films until she was 56. In 1965 she and her husband, the cinematographer Irving Hartley, were traveling in Japan with the world-renowned spiritual thinker, Alan Watts, when she decided to make a film on Zen. Against her husband's wishes, she took control of the camera and shot a film on her own for the first time. The results were so good that she won a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival. This launched her third distinct career in the film industry, subsequently producing more than 80 films concerning the world's spiritual traditions and personal growth. Some of her most popular films are: The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith (viewed on a Bill Moyers special), Zen: the Best of Alan Watts, and Voices of a New Age (which was a PBS Special).

Hartley began her life in film as a movie actress, quickly becoming disillusioned with the lack of educational value in Hollywood movies. Her second career in the industry encompassed the next thirty years, when she and her husband made hundreds of travel, training and promotional films for corporations. During this time, she did everything but the actual filming, including managing accounts, writing scripts, doing public relations, and selling. In the early days, she and her husband also reared four sons.

Life Story

I interviewed Elda Hartley in 1996 in her sprawling Connecticut home when she was 85 and still going strong. Vexed about expending a great deal of energy making a film about altruism and prison reform and failing to find a producer, she was almost, but not quite, prepared to give it up and start a new project. Unlike her contemporaries, who were cloistered in expensive retirement communities, eagerly awaiting a phone call from relatives, Hartley was filled with ideas for new projects. Quoting from her film, Green Winter, a memoir about aging, she said, "Not having work to do is my idea of hell!  What I'd really like to do is have something I'm so excited about I can work sixteen hours a day and not even be aware of the time —that's when you're in heaven." 

This passage describes the passion that has occupied Hartley for the past thirty years. The obsession for making educational films, for germinating ideas and bringing them to fruition kept her young, she believes. Losing herself in work, being oblivious of time's passing, these experiences for her were sublime. Hartley epitomizes the creative person whom Csikszentmihalyi described as being in "flow."

Hartley has lived by herself for the past ten years, since her husband died. At age 85, mortality was on her mind, and she had a plan for how she preferred to leave this life. She said, 

I'm going to decide when I'm going and I'm gonna call my children around me and I'm gonna say 'This is the day I'm leaving. Let's all celebrate!'...I think we should all be willing to go when we have become dysfunctional...If we believed that we were going to have another life, or to continue in some way, we'd be willing to go. I believe in reincarnation, so, even if it isn't true...I'd still believe there's some kind of continuity. So, I'm not afraid of death. Not at all.

Hartley's husband died in a way that was totally inconsistent with her philosophy. 

He was senile. He wasn't really sick, but he would fall and when he fell... it took two men to get him up. He was just dead weight. And he fell one Sunday out here in the driveway and I had to go and find neighbors to help me get him up. So, I realized that I just had to put him in a nursing home. He just hated it. He died six months after. 

Born in 1911 in Dallas, Texas, Hartley recalls being thrilled by the process of learning. "In the first grade, I remember the day that I learned how to read...I went running home to my mother and I said 'I can read! I can read!' And I've been like that about education ever since…I really get excited about new ideas." This was her first Aha! experience, the "click" where life after the Aha! was qualitatively different from before. Her passion for life started early on. Perhaps it was her nature to be passionate. 

She was the younger of two sisters. As a child she endured the tragic institutionalization of her sister when Hartley was eight years old. "I had a sister who had epilepsy...It was very hard on my mother...It's a terrible thing to see...She would have one of these epileptic fits and fall and hurt herself and it was just ghastly." Her sister, eight years her senior, was not able to get the treatment that became available several decades later and allowed people with epilepsy to live a normal life.

Hartley's parents separated when she was ten. Although her father was never an actively involved parent, she remembered his being interested in ideas, especially spiritual ideas. She had not been told much about her parents' relationship, but she surmised what went wrong.

He was a lousy businessman. He would make money and then lose it all, investing... in oil, options, or whatever… My mother just got so fed up with that...so she'd have to take in sewing or rent a room to make a little money... She'd always have to save us from starvation...so that got tiresome, I think. My mother was a vigorous woman...And she just finally decided, 'Listen, if I'm gonna have to do this, I can do it by myself.'

In the South in the early part of the twentieth century, women who chose to take care of themselves rather than endure an unsatisfactory marriage were unusual. Some of Hartley's independence may have been learned from her mother.

Despite the hardship of growing up with little money, in effect being an only child of divorced parents, and the trauma of her sister's illness, Hartley still professed to have been happy.

I did well in school and I had lots of friends... Even though they [my parents] didn't get along, I wasn't aware of that...I never thought that we were poor, but I know that now. But I was well enough dressed. My mother was always a good provider... and I seemed to be like all the other children...We had a simple real middle class life.

This passage conveys Hartley's capacity for looking on the bright side, for positively construing a difficult situation. Not a child who was coddled, nor one who was given special opportunities, nor one who was validated for her talents, she relied on her own inner resources to make an interesting, meaningful life for herself.

Even though her mother appeared to have been a reliable caretaker, her values and beliefs did not for long coincide with those of her adolescent daughter and Hartley soon distanced herself from her. Her mother's social life centered around the fundamentalist Southern Baptist church. 

And this was fine, until I got to be in my teens when you get a little rebellious and you begin to think...This fundamentalist Christian idea...I began to rebel against. And I still do. It absolutely kills me that these people can take the Bible literally. It's just unbelievable. She [my mother] was a real Religious Right.

Unlike contemporary adolescents, Hartley had not confronted or debated her mother about their differing beliefs. She thought it would be useless, as her mother was a "true believer."

Hartley's independent spirit shines through here. Even though she was brought up in a conservative Southern household, she began in her youth to develop her own ideas about the world, ideas that she has tirelessly worked to convey in her spiritual films. She was a "free spirit," even before she was exposed to differing philosophies. Graduating from high school at just under age 16, she had to wait two years until she became of legal age to leave home. During this enforced waiting period, she took courses at a nearby school, where she learned diction and a little about the theater. There she met a friend who became the conduit from Texas to Hollywood and the beginning of her life in the film industry.

My mother gave me $60 ...and I knew I was never coming back. I was just incredibly lucky! I met a young actor who was going around leaving his pictures at different casting offices and we went to the Paramount office. I just went with him...The casting director looked at me and I was very pretty when I was young and he said 'Why don't you come back and try out for this film that we're doing next week?'

So I, with about 300 other gals, went and tried out for a part in The Vagabond King and I got the part and that was it...I naturally read lines well...so that they sounded like conversation...I was making 75 bucks a week. This was in 1930, during the Depression. And then I got another picture contract to do a thing called Only the Brave with Gary Cooper...I had a lot of talent. I have to admit that. I'm a born actress. I like to perform. I really get a kick out of doing it.

Here Hartley describes herself as someone who threw herself into what she was doing. Later when she found her true calling, this "kick" transformed into an obsession, a passion, an addiction, which many other women also depicted. Hartley received gratification from the experience, from the process of doing it. But the delight she felt in those early days did not last long. She was always looking for a meaningful message to contribute to the world. 

She was married briefly at a young age to a film director named Bill Keeley. She described a scene that began in typical Hollywood fashion, but quickly evolved into another epiphany for Hartley.

We met [on a movie set] and after a few months, we were married. I was making more money than he was, because I was under contract to Fox...[Soon after] he got a contract with Warner Brothers...and they liked him there and they finally gave him his own films to do...So, he made this film with Jimmy Cagney, called G-Men and it made so much money for Warner's, that...by the time we were divorced, he was making $100,000 a year, which is like making $1,000,000 now...and he [her husband] was, of course, being fawned over by all the women.

I was 20 years old... It came to me that 'My God, it's awful, that this glorious medium is being used only for entertainment!'...so, again, I had one of the Aha! things. 'I've got to see how to get this used for education'....So, I started going to school [UCLA]...and I just lost all interest in being an actress and actually it led to my divorce from my husband...I always felt I had to do something to make the world a better place. That's been my passion all these years.

And when I graduated from UCLA, I decided that I had to go ahead with my career. I wanted to take a trip to Europe...to get my Master's, and Bill said to me 'If you go, you're not coming back'... I didn't think he really meant it...but he did mean it, so when I got to Paris, there was a letter...I came back and we got divorced. I didn't contest it, because I knew that I would never really be able to grow in my own career as long as I was married to Bill. Because he didn't even want me to go to school...even though I didn't have a thing to do. We had servants in this big house and what was I going to do all day? I didn't want to play bridge...Anyway, I knew that if I was going to do anything, although I wept bitterly about it, I knew in my heart I had to do it [get divorced].

Hartley had a clear vision of what she wanted. Although she didn't map out a career in any conscious way, (she just "followed her star,") she knew that she could not achieve her goals being married to Keeley. In her early twenties, she had already taken decisive steps to do what she needed for herself.

So I came to New York and lived on the fifth floor of a walk-up on practically no money. The $50,000 that I got as a divorce settlement was put in a trust and I got $250 a month that I lived on. I answered an ad in the paper for a woman who was looking for a housemate and I walked to this little two room apartment on 61st Street and it cost $50 a month, so I only paid $25. So, then I went up to Columbia University every night and worked daytime with anybody who would give me a job in visual education. Any independent producer.

These passages convey the willingness to take risks, the determination to do what was important to her to achieve her goals. Hartley had a passion for "making the world a better place" and just put one foot in front of the other to get there. As was the case for other women in this study, her passion colored her perceptions of life so as to overcome roadblocks that may have confounded others less passionate. 

Soon she met her second husband, Irving Hartley. She abbreviated the story of their meeting like this: "When I got my Master's, I told my Professor that I needed a job and he said, 'Well, why don't you go see this man who made a film for us, an independent producer...So I went to see Irving Hartley and...I married him." 

The Hartleys had four sons, one of whom they adopted after having met him on a vacation. Hartley stayed at home with the children for a while, but always seemed to have her hand in the couple's film business, making promotional films for corporate clients. 

[I was] an account executive. That was a nice euphemistic term for somebody who took care of the clients...I was the salesman and the producer and the writer and the whole works. I would do all the idea stuff and he [my husband] would do the putting it together. That's why I knew a lot about filmmaking but I had never done it myself in all those 25 years.

It had been a profitable business that allowed them to have a comfortable lifestyle in an elegant upper middle class suburb in Connecticut.

How did this very feminine looking woman manage in a field dominated by men? She explained, 

When I first started working with Irving back in the 1950s, definitely all of the competition was male. So, people make good friends of people in the advertising agencies and the managers of the companies. The guys take them out for a drink or what-not. I couldn't compete with that. Because I was competing in a man's world, I got the idea that the only way I could really do that is to cash in on the fact that I was a woman and knew the women's market, so I began to sell to the home furnishings industry... And I didn't have any competition in that, so that was good. I did real well there in the beginning. Very well.

But in the back of her mind, the Aha! experiences of her youth reverberated. She wanted to use film for education, for making the world a better place.

The turning point came when the couple went to Japan in the mid-1960s, with a group led by Alan Watts. There she had been invited to 4 A.M. meditation with the monks, a practice that she had never done before, but which subsequently became an integral part of her life. Once more she had her Aha! experience. She said, 

This was what I had to do - produce a film on Zen. So I went to my husband and said 'Listen, we've gotta do this.' And he said, 'We can't do it here. We don't have a tripod.' In those days, you did not hand hold, if you were doing anything professional. And he said, 'We've got no lights.' I said, 'I've gotten a message. If you won't shoot it, you'll have to show me how to use this camera because it's got to be done.' So he showed me how to use the camera and the rest of the trip...the last three weeks, I was shooting everything.

So, I shot this stuff, and because I had a background in art and knew composition, the stuff I shot turned out to be quite good, surprisingly. And I edited it, and I'd never edited before because we always hired editors and I always bought the idea that women couldn't do these technical jobs. Somebody gave me some Koto music. I put the thing together. And it won a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival. I kind of almost cry when I think of it because it seems to me that I had wanted, really wanted to do this for so long, that it was in my subconscious. It was deep in my being, that it was like God was saying, 'Look here, you wanted to do it so long. I've shown you that you can do it by yourself.'

Curiously, Hartley never perceived that she encountered sexism, even in ultra-conservative parts of the world.

I shot them [films] and I edited them and wrote them, and I didn't have a problem at all. Even in the Islamic world. I had no problem when I did that Sufi film. I went into all those beautiful mosques and nobody stopped me. It was surprising. [She did not even have her face or head covered]. Most of it was shot in India and Iran... Nobody ever made a fuss about it.

Since Hartley launched her own filmmaking endeavors in the 1960s, she has expressed her real sentiments about the world we live in, an experience that has satisfied her much more than doing promotional films for corporations. Her goal was to "promote an understanding of ourselves and our interconnectedness that transcends race, religion and national boundaries—an understanding of our spiritual oneness that can ultimately lead to world peace." Her youthful desire to turn film, this "glorious medium," into an instrument of education was fulfilled when she turned to this third career in middle age.

Although she was familiar with her "Aha" experiences, this last Aha! was the epiphany that changed Hartley's life. A spiritual person since she was introduced to Buddhist meditation practice in Japan, she attributed some of her accomplishment to a higher power. She, like others I've interviewed, failed to credit the years of hard work, perseverance, and passionate involvement that preceded her success. She recounted, 

I knew I had this burning desire. I just never knew it was going to pay off, that I was going to get that kind of help. I really do believe in God as a result of this... I hate to use the word 'God' because it is so associated in the Judeo-Christian world with...a big Superman out there. And I think it's more like in Taoism, getting in the flow, getting in touch with the river of energy that's running and if you get into that right energy, you get help. I always find that when I'm really excited about something, I do get help...Because I'm flowing with the right energy. It may sound like a nut but it works out like that for me... it comes from synchronicity, as Jung talked about... And the problem is to try to stay in that flow, because it's very easy to kind of drift off into the backwaters or something.

[To stay in "flow"] I meditate every morning and sometimes I get the right answers and sometimes I just have to be patient. I'm not very patient, but I keep at it. I have a lot of stick-to-it-iveness. I've been working on one film for two years. I'm just about to give up on it now, though. I'm just about to say to God, 'Listen here. I've spent all my time and energy and money on this thing and I ain't getting nowhere, and if you don't take over and help me, then doggonit, I'm finished with it!'

Hartley's description of her efforts to realize this project demonstrates her perseverance in the face of obstacles. At a conference on Noetic Sciences, she met Bo and Sita Lozoff, a couple who devoted their lives to prison reform, and found their story so compelling that she had to do a film about them.

And it's a mistake when you don't have an audience for that sort of thing. You see, all my films, the ones that sell, are those that are on religion and on alternative medicine. Those are the two audiences that I have. I haven't anybody there who would buy something on prison reform. And this is a message that is so important that I thought, well, I'll go ahead and do it anyway. I'll get it on television. It's showing Bo and Sita in their little house in North Carolina and the fact that they live very simply and give all their time to helping prisoners.

I've got the film practically finished but I can't get it on television. And I have exhausted practically every possible [avenue]. I made a trip to Antarctica [where a program was being filmed] to meet Bill Baker, the president of WNET with the hope that knowing him would help me to get an audience there [at WNET]. Because it's almost impossible to get them to look at anything. You've got to know somebody. And it's really tough to be an independent producer.

Even though Hartley's films had recently aired on prime time television, the Bill Moyers series on the wisdom of faith, for instance, it didn't seem to help. "I'm not asking any money for it. I'm willing to give it to somebody," Hartley explained.

Although she and her husband had been a team when they did the corporate work, the spiritual and human potential films did not appeal to him ("Irving was not an idea man at all."). Then his approaching senility (he was in his early 70s, 10 years older than Hartley) had forced him to phase out of all production work. But, unlike her first husband, Irving had encouraged her to take initiative.

That was one wonderful thing about him. Right from the very beginning, he always really liked to have me take responsibility. And of course, that was good for me. At one point, I really kind of resented the fact that I was having to run the business and do everything, because I come from the South where women are supposed to be taken care of, so I minded it. But in retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I learned. If you have to do something, you do it.

Although Hartley recognized the lack of interest and support she received from her family, she remained spirited and determined. 

My sons are like that also [like their father]. They're not interested in ideas either...I mean, I'd like it if they were a little more interested in my work... I want to hear about what they've done. It always is a puzzle to me why they're not interested in what I do. But I haven't got an answer to that. It seems to me that it doesn't show much love, but maybe that's a bad judgment. They seem to love me, you know...Oh, if I get an interview on TV, they love that, they want to see that. It's amazing, isn't it? They like it if I get publicity, but they don't care about seeing what I've done. I could hit 'em!

Hartley took pride in her educational films. Disinterested in making money, knowing that she has enough to live well for the rest of her years, she just wanted to disseminate her works. "I'd like to get the stuff out, but I figure it'll live a lot longer than I will because my stuff is timeless. It's material you can't get today." In addition to Alan Watts who had been instrumental in launching this third and most satisfying of her careers, Hartley also filmed Margaret Mead, Bernie Siegel, Dolores Krieger (researcher of "therapeutic touch,") Huston Smith (the MIT philosopher who was a specialist on Islamic mysticism), Deepak Chopra, and many other holistic healers and thinkers. Late in life, she very much wanted to pass on her wisdom to the public through her films, regardless of financial remuneration. A sense of generativity was deeply satisfying to her. 

What does Hartley do when she encounters obstacles? She said, 

I just keep on trying to get over it...If after a while, I've gotten to the point where every time I have crossed one obstacle...I get another one, it just seems like maybe I have to give up on it. I don't usually do that, but two years is a long time ...That's the worst obstacle I've ever had [failing to find a producer for the prison reform film]...I always have two or three things going on the back burner, so if I keep running into obstacles with one of them I just drop it and go to another one...If I'm really keen on something, I just keep going at it...If I can't get anybody to help me, an expert, then I go ahead and do it myself and it turns out all right. God helps me, you know."

I'm always trying to make the world a better place. I'm passionate about that. I really do feel strongly that older people who've had the great good fortune to live in this country and have a good education,...it's sinful for them to go to Florida or wherever and just do nothing. It seems to me that they have the experience and the knowledge to really give back and I rail against that all the time.

I have so many friends who are miserable. They're so bored. What do they do with themselves? I can't say, 'Well, start doing something that you love' because there's not anything that they love. That's the problem. If they had loved making something or doing something when they were younger they'd still love it now, wouldn't they? But they never learned to do anything. That's why I keep thinking that I've got to get this message to younger people so they realize how important it is to have something, find something you really love to do that you can continue to do after you have retired.. I was lucky that I did learn how to produce films and how to write scripts.

Steeped in our culture of youth idealization, it was hard for me to believe that exuberance, passion, and determination were so alive in a woman of 85. But this was a commonplace experience in conducting these interviews. Hartley made an ardent plea to "find something you love" at a young age, to nurture it, practice it, refine it, experiment with it. This prescription for well-being, oft quoted by scholars of creativity, was embodied by Hartley's story. Surely, she and most others whom I have interviewed here, epitomize the kind of aging that we would all look forward to.

Read about the author of Women Who Could…and Did.