THE HUMAN CONDITION / KNOWING WHEN TO QUIT : Getting Out of Limelight Before the Cheers Fade

With reelection almost certain, U.S. Sen. Timothy E. Wirth stopped political traffic last spring by announcing that after 20 years on Capitol Hill, he was quitting.

“I was going to work angry, and not liking what I was doing,” recalled the 52-year-old Colorado Democrat, whose name is frequently mentioned for a cabinet post in the Clinton Administration. “It just got to the point where it didn’t make sense to me anymore.”

Wirth’s decision puzzled many in Washington, where hanging tough is an assumption on the order of breathing. Wirth’s friend Louis Preston, president of the World Bank, looked at him quizzically and wondered, “Getting repotted, are you?”

Pulling up one’s roots is, in a sense, another way of describing a phenomenon that is very much in the public eye these days. When figures like Earvin (Magic) Johnson, Ross Perot and Brandon Tartikoff--players seemingly at the peak of their games--announce that they are quitting, albeit for different reasons, Americans find themselves re-examining their complicated feelings about the subject.

In an interview after announcing his departure as chairman of Paramount Pictures two weeks ago, Tartikoff said the reactions from industry insiders were harsh. “For a week, Hollywood wouldn’t believe what I said.”

What motivates some people to bow out while the crowds are still roaring? Why do others stay on long after the music has stopped? How about the proverbial Comeback Kids--those who refuse to quit, only to rise again in spite of adversity and indignity?

Robert O. Redd, author of “Achievers Never Quit,” said a “value change” explains why some people manage to quit with their pride and integrity intact.

“It’s a shift of the brain, from ego values to a sense of involvement with relationships and emotions,” said Redd, who left accounting 20 years ago to study philosophy. “You stop depending on the projection of what other people think of you.”

But much of contemporary culture argues against that kind of emotional luxury. In a society founded on a tradition of self-reliance, quitters are not the “cultural norm,” said Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer. And those who see themselves as quitters “are bound to suffer a loss of self-esteem.”

Americans make heroes of those who fight to the bitter end. Reaching a new plane of personal awareness earns far less admiration than defending the Alamo or, in the case of poor John Paul Jones, going down with the ship.

On a more prosaic level, one need look no further than the vanity wars of late 20th-Century America. Grown-ups actually part with hard-earned money to hire personal trainers to monitor their perspiration and shout (by means of encouragement), “Don’t quit! Don’t quit!”

Langer, a specialist in the psychology of motivation, observed: “As a culture, we do have a sense that we should stay with things.”

Yet at the same time, Americans are trained to cut their losses.

In terms of quitting, this means the discrete exit--leaving before the abstract or actual costs become excessive--has become an American art form. No better example exists than former “Tonight” show host Johnny Carson, who had the perspicacity to quit before his ratings could plummet. Boston Celtics superstar Larry Byrd made a similarly glorious separation from the court last season, quitting his sport while he was showered with praise, not peanut shells.

But baseball great Willie Mays lingered beyond his glory days. Now, said Boston University sports psychologist Leonard Zaichkowsky, “People just feel so bad for him, because they remember him at his worst.”

Performers--athletes and politicians included--and others in public life are particularly prone to the urge to stay too long, Zaichkowsky said. “The cheering is all they know, and it’s hard for them to leave it.”

But when booing replaces the cheering, it’s probably time to go. A 68-year-old leading man, his teeth capped once again, tends to look ridiculous playing opposite a starlet younger than his own daughter.

Or, as Ellen Langer put it, “It’s mindless to stay with things that aren’t working.”

Certainly that maxim might apply to Magic Johnson’s most recent decision to drop out of professional basketball. A year ago, Johnson announced that he was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. He retired from the Lakers and took a position on the National Commission on AIDS--then last month gave that up to return to basketball.

But his rebound was short-lived. “He looked at his teammates and saw them back away,” said Zaichkowsky. Last week, Johnson was out of the game again.

Ross Perot’s exit from national politics on July 16 drew equal scrutiny. But 11 weeks after he abandoned his quest for the White House, Perot was back on the campaign trail, this time maintaining that he had scrubbed his bid for the presidency in order to spare his family the embarrassment of a smear campaign by anxious Republicans.

Many disaffected Perot supporters, however, believed he was shamed into reactivating his candidacy. The label of “quitter” that was attached to him--including, in big letters, on a Time magazine cover--was just too great a stigma, they said.

Brandon Tartikoff said the specter of social opprobrium never fazed him in announcing two days before Halloween that he was resigning as chairman of Paramount Pictures. In September, Tartikoff said he spent 10 days in New Orleans, where his wife, Lily, and their 9-year-old daughter, Calla, have been living while Calla undergoes treatment for brain injuries she suffered in an automobile accident almost two years ago.

After he saw “how big a project that was and how grueling their daily routine is,” Tartikoff concluded that “my priorities were all out of whack” in remaining in Los Angeles, “eating at Morton’s with agents.”

After that epiphany, Tartikoff said, “it was a very easy decision” to walk away from Hollywood.

But Tartikoff soon found himself in a bizarre spin cycle. Quitting makes people so uncomfortable that a raft of predictable “explanations” are immediately put forth. Press agents who draft the announcement of an executive’s departure, for example, often veil the truth with a positive twist--as in “Mr. Anderson is looking forward to tending his prize tomatoes.”

Frequently, those who are leaving a job feel the need to defend their own deportment. Faced with possible contempt charges, Anne McGill Burford, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Reagan, self-righteously reminded the world in her resignation announcement that “I have a strong commitment to the environment.”

Another Reagan appointee, Helene von Damm, struggled to find the proper tone when she left her post as U.S. Ambassador to Austria. Von Damm, married to an American millionaire, was involved in a messy love affair with a debonair hotelier from Vienna.

“Circumstances have led me to the conclusion that the interests of our country . . . are best served by your appointment of a new Ambassador,” Von Damm demurely told the President.

In Tartikoff’s case, quitting turned out to be “too un-Hollywood” for “a town that likes things black and white, a town that likes Hollywood endings.” Tartikoff quit because he was about to be fired, the gossips thundered.

Never mind the gigantic severance check that he bypassed by giving his own notice. “Everybody was walking around saying, ‘What really happened?’ ” said Tartikoff.

As it turned out, the toughest judge the 42-year-old ex-studio chief had to face was his own daughter. For almost two years, the child has struggled to recover from injuries incurred when the car her father was driving spun out of control near their vacation home at Lake Tahoe. In recent months at a rehabilitation center in New Orleans, Calla Tartikoff has been involved in a treatment program so rigorous that her father likens it to the Marines.

“You instill in her the idea that you’re not supposed to quit,” said Tartikoff, “and she says, ‘Why are you quitting?’ ”

Tartikoff said he was shaken, but that it was easy to give Calla an honest answer.

“I said, ‘I’m leaving them because I’m going to work for you.’ ”