FOREVER YOUNG: QUELLE HORREUR!

By Lawrence Schubert

I recently celebrated a most inauspicious birthday-57.

 Having said that, I now feel like Margo Channing in “All About Eve” when she admits that she is 40. “Lloyd, I'm not twenty-ish, I'm not thirty-ish. Three months ago I was forty years old. Forty. Four O. That slipped out. I hadn't quite made up my mind to admit it. Now I suddenly feel as if I've taken all my clothes off.” So here I stand, naked in public, like someone in a Spencer Tunick photograph. I just hope the lighting is forgiving.

   There’s no sense in trying to hide it: It’s already on the public record. I am one of those guileless fools who entered his complete birthdate—month, day and year—when I joined Facebook. That was before I realized that F-Book is the Peter Pan adjunct of the Internet where everyone is ageless, like Matthew Rolston, who has been using the same Contributor’s photograph in magazines for the last two or three decades-and even when he started it was at least ten years out of date.

    I recently heard someone of advanced age described on the radio in an infuriatingly popular and condescending manner as “80 years young.” That the person described was a seasoned symphony conductor, and not some aging Hollywood starlet raging, raging against the dying of the light, and that I heard it on KUSC and not on “Showbiz Tonight,” made it even more execrable. Of course the opposite, “80 years old,” is almost as bad. We either try to deny aging or bury the living alive in America. Europeans have a much more sensible phrase: 80 anni. The middle ground is always the most sensible, but since we have no middle ground in America, and hardly even a middle class anymore, of course it goes unconsidered.

   To be forever young: Quelle horreur! It seems to be the unblinking goal of most of the entertainment industry, a pernicious pastime that has spread like a virus to large portions of a population hypnotized by its products.

   One would think that by now we would have learned the lesson of such cautionary tales as Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” published 1890, or Robert Zemeckis’s film “Death Becomes Her,” released approximately a century later. 

   Forever fit: yes, please. Forever useful, forever engaged: better yet. Even forever chic, as superficial as that is: Why the hell not? No one ever said that one has to age in dowdiness, wrapped in a Slanket and trundling about in one of those goddamned Rascals. When the legs give out, get a fucking rocking chair, knit, and await the end in dignity.

   For a few minutes in the last century, before Tina tarted it up and Graydon cauterized it, Vanity Fair used to have covers with photographs of real people with real faces. Wrinkles and all, they were captured with surgical precision by the likes of Irving Penn, who mapped the visages of artists and intellectuals like a cartographer. Nowadays the portraiture purveyed by practically everyone except National Geographic owes more to porn than Penn. The old VF epitomized what used to be the East Coast standard of Aging with Dignity (and hopefully, money; LOTS of money) as opposed to the West Coast standard of Aging with Surgery. (And money, lots of money. Some values are just universal.)

  It is a dichotomy now mostly superseded by the bicoastal cult of celebrity, but well summed up by Neil Simon’s snappy badinage in “California Suite,” the playwright’s 1978 examination of East vs. West, no better encapsulated than in the “bantering” between Jane Fonda’s Hannah Warren and her-ex husband Bill (played by Alan Alda) as to who will raise their teenage daughter, Jenny, who has fled her domineering, careerist mother to seek refuge with her mellow dad, reborn in the palm latitudes of Southern California.

Hannah: When you haven't seen your ex-husband in nine years, your eyes have to... adjust. You look so... what is the word?

Bill: Happy

Hannah: [ignores his reply] Casual. What have you done to your hair? You look like the sweetest, 16 year-old boy. (Steps back, examining him) I’ll bet they call you Billy… (He looks at her without answering) They do, don’t they? (She glances at his tennis outfit.) And I love your California clothes. Where do you get them?

Bill: At Bloomingdales. That’s the best place for California clothes.

Hannah: I suppose if Jenny stays she'll grow up to look like that. Blonde hair. Blonde teeth. Blonde life.

   Of course, since “California Suite” the distinction between Eastern intelligentsia and Left Coast vapidity has gradually dissolved. The hottest after-party on Oscar night is Vanity Fair’s. Nowadays everyone wants blonde teeth, if not a blonde life. But age is still the great divider.  Still, I’d rather be cool like Betty White than Kool-Aid like Justin Bieber. Granted, I prefer the taut skin of a twink to the crepe paper of an octogenarian, but you can’t always get what you want. The flesh withers but the soul is eternal, and Olay Regenerist is available at Rite-Aid for a fraction of the cost of the high-priced creams, with visible results in just 30 days.

   The last Ziegfeld girl just died at age 106, and I’ll bet she never took Boniva.

   Here’s to aging with integrity, and an elastic spirit, if not elastic skin.