Letter to Demi

Some women

are too sexy to bother with aging

H

ere I am looking at these randy-making photo­graphs of you and all I can think about is death. Don't get the wrong idea. It's not you. It's me. One of my favorite writers, Thomas McGuane, wrote that a "sane man, thinking of death, however casually, should immediately visit a girl whether in quest of information, affinities or car­nal gratification. It's a case of any port in a storm, mortality being, in any case, an omnipresent hurricane."

In my case, I guess I'm looking at a magazine. That's the difference between me and Ashton Kutcher, right? He's out there punkin' people and selling cameras and being a charming companion 15 years your junior, and I'm in my room, staring at pictures. But you and I share

a little something that Ashton doesn't: that omnipresent hurricane of mortal­ity whirling a little nearer. I'm an "older man," it would seem, and you at 47—hot damn, you still look good, mind you— are an "older woman," or a "puma," as you prefer to call yourself, thankfully refusing that inane label "cougar."

The reason I'm thinking about death, Demi, is that as I was in the middle of admiring those photographs of you, my mother called to tell me that a turkey vulture (big, black, ugly) had settled on the roof of her house and was eyeballing her through the up­stairs window.

"He's looking at me right now," she said. "What am I, carrion? I don't know when I'm going to die, and that bird is unnerving."

Her voice trembled, a seismograph of doom. I confess I also felt an imme-

diate fore-1) o (1 i n g . My heart went out to my mother. And to all of us who must die,

including, somewhat centrally, myself. I bet if a turkoy vulture landed on your mother's roof, you'd feel the same way.

Eveiy time she walked into the living room, that bird was up there, staring at her through the glass with red, beady eyes, like some pot-smoking Jamaican drug-dealing assassin with a job to do. (This is not my mother's metaphor.)

"You know I like birds," my mother said. "But this is the ugliest bird I have ever seen."

"Damn," I said.

"I was having a good Sunday and he just showed up. I asked your brother to come over and he shook a broom at him and that bird just looked at him and then he just Hew a few feet away. Can you believe it? Do you think he is trying to tell me something? I can't help but think he is."

It was a reach, dear Demi, but I had to tiy. "Remember how Daddy said that when he died if he had to be reincarnated, he wanted to come back as a bird?"

"Yes, that's right. I had forgotten. But as a cardinal," my mother said.

"But maybe he didn't get to be a cardinal," I said. "Maybe he did some things in his life that required him to come back as a turkey vulture."

My mother laughed. "He sure did some things."

When he was still a man, my father liked to snap the sleeves of his blue blazer and exclaim, "I look good!" lie had his pride.

How wounded he would have been up there on his old roof, encased in that turkey vulture suit. But it gave my mother and me some comfort to look at the bird in this way.

Why do I tell you these things, Demi? As a fixture on Hollywood's A-list, you are the furthest thing from a turkey vulture on a mother's—or anyone's— roof! But if there's any place in the world where the vultures are on the roof, it's Hollywood, if you know what I mean. All those producers evaluat­ing and appraising, asking you to turn around, always hunting for the new hot young thing.

That said, can we agree there's nothing particularly novel about the notion that Hollywood is hell for older actresses not named Meryl Streep? In fact, let's say that life is hell

for older women, period, though I'd go so far as to say it's no picnic for men of a certain age either, and I say that as a card-carrying member of that club, if I could just remember where I put the card.

Margaret was my first older woman. A minister's daughter from upstate New York, she confessed that as a cliild she liked to think about nasty things while her father preached.

"What kind of tilings?" I wanted to know. We were playing pool, on the edge of drunkenness, having known each other for only a day or two. She was a junior member of the faculty; I was a freshly arrived student.

"I'd rather not. say," she said.

One afternoon I went over to her place to see if Margaret would tell me what kind of nasty things. I could be persistent if the information sought seemed promising. That fall, she had started teaching freshman composition and American literature at a football-crazed Southern university. She rented a second-floor apartment reached by a rotting outside staircase. Omnivo­rous Alabama vegetation, green until November, scaled the flaking sides of the house.

On autumn Saturdays, the football stadium down the street roared like a

blast furnace with tho molten sound of 80,000 liko-niindod souls, none of whom cared a whit about Elizabeth Bishop or Marianne Moore at that moment, while she sat alone at her kitchen table, marking student compo­sitions for run-ons, misplaced modifi­ers and subject-verb disagreement.

Her faith in a life in literature, which had sustained her, was to be severely tested in such a place.

As she showed me around her apartment, I decided to lie down, fully clothed, in the bathtub. The reason for tiiis escapes me now, but I don't doubt that the wish to sleep with her lay somewhere close behind it. The wish to sleep witli someone lay behind almost everything I did in those days. Maybe I was showing her that I was an unconventional fellow in a conven­tional town, the sort of fellow who just might lie down in your bathtub with all of his clothes on.

(Demi, I suspect Bruce Willis and Ash ton Ku tcher never lay down in a bathtub for you.)

She knew real writers—famous poets, novelists, people I had merely read or pretended to read. There was the novelist from Baltimore, for instance, who had propositioned her at

a party but later that night at liis motel room had boon "unable to perform."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

She gave me a superior look. It was going to be part of her responsibility as an older woman to educate me.

"He couldn't get it up," she said.

Such information was at once glam­orous and appalling. Margaret already had a sense of life's trajectories, a knack for calculating winners and los­ers from the scant evidence of faculty cocktail parties, workshop short sto­ries, barroom gossip.

She was only a few years older than me, though that seemed a lot at the time. An older woman is an older woman only (continued an page 111)

OU/, THAT IS OUR

COVER GIRL A

few years before

she hit the big time

in Hollywood,

a demure Demi

Moore posed for

the cover of Out

magazine. Thirty

years later she is

slill turning men's

heads everywhere.

DEMI

(continued from page 55) in relation to someone else, though most important she is an older woman mainly in relation to her view of her own romantic possibilities—whether they are increasing or diminishing. Soon Marga­ret was to be embroiled in a desperate campus affair that would end one mar­riage and begin her own, which would end soon enough itself.

Now, years later, the Margaret I knew then strikes me as impossibly young, more posturing than knowing, more wounded than sophisticated and more doomed than either of us could have known. But that's because I am older now. Older than the writer who couldn't perform.

I am old enough that when I told a friend I was writing a piece about "older women," he laughed and said, "Older than you? That's funny!"

Although both men and women end up lugging the battered suitcases of our aging bodies to destinations undreamed of in our youth, men can usually afford to be a little more lighthearted about the trip. We have our vanity, to be sure, but we haven't spent our lives fearing that with age comes invisibility.

The male gaze, upon which magazines like piayboy (and writers for piayboy) depend, gets a bad rap in feminist polemics, where it is deemed, at least when directed at women, as appraising, predatory, dismis­sive. Maybe so. But in my experience, the male gaze can't hold an interrogator's bare lightbulb to the harshness of the female gaze focused upon its source.

Men stare ferociously at women, forgiv­ingly at themselves. Women tend toward generosity when it conies to men's physical attributes (their earning power is another story), but themselves they scrutinize as harshly as the desert sun illuminates a her­mit's shack.

With middle-aged women in particular, that gaze goes about its daily inspections only to witness the object of its atten­tion beginning to crack and crumble, to slide and sag. Even younger women are not immune to this despairing survey. My former girlfriend, at the ripe age of 29, swaddled her face nightly with Oil of Olay (or "Oil of Old Lady," as another gal calls it). "What will I do when you die?" she asked me. There was a 21-and-a-half-year difference in our ages and I assume she was making what the insurance industry calls an actuarial assumption.

"Find yourself a randy 77-year-old," I told her.

She was not amused.

"I already have frown lines," she said, massaging the cream into the corners of her mouth.

"That's because you're worrying about these sorts of things," I said.

She was not placated. She staled at her­self in the future and foresaw a widow with ancient frown lines. Who would want her?

The fear, my friend Elizabeth tells me, is that a woman will find herself a

wallflower at the orgy. She once asked her grandmother, then in her 80s and vaca­tioning in Palm Beach, whether she was having a wonderful time.

"Are you kidding?" her grandmother said. "At my age, no one has a wonderful time. I have a nice time watching other people have a wonderful time."

Hollywood is doubtless a harsh mistress in this respect. When your looks are a large part of your stock-in-trade, you eye their depletion with the anxiety of a day trader in a nose-diving market. F.ven those of us who have had no reason to trade on our looks find their erosion a little dispiriting.

Against that, dear Demi, what is a woman to do? As inspiration and possible subject for a biopic you could star in (and I ask only a find­er's fee for my role in matching you to this Academy Award-winning role), you might consider the life of one fane Oigby. Born into a well-to-do British family, Digby ran oil'with gypsies while a child, before being

retrieved by her relatives. She rejected the conventions of proper society. By the time she reached her mid-40s, she had already divorced three husbands, cohabited with a bandit king in a mountain cave, conceived an illegitimate child or two and so disgraced herself in English society that there was no route home. Not that she wanted to go back to dreary England anyway.

She traveled to Syria, met and mar­ried a bedouin prince more than 20 years younger. "On her wedding night," wrote one chronicler, "she amazed her husband with her prowess." She had learned, it is written, to kiss in a hundred ways, to "clasp the penis with her vulva" and to "execute the up-and-down swinging motions of the hips called hez, moving [her] bottom like a riddle."

For the next 25 years, Digby and her prince spent half of each year in Bagh­dad, half in the desert, which husband and wife preferred, racing horses and camels, hunting antelopes and wolves, and engag­ing in tribal battles. When she died at 74,

the prince was so shattered that he bolted from the funeral procession, only to return to Digby's graveside riding her favorite mare, just in time to watch the coffin low­ered into the ground.

No offense, Demi, but Jane Digby, the ringlet-haired arisUxrat, the exiled noble­woman, the desert rider, makes G.I. Jane look like a prissy little war baby. And by the way, do you know what it is to move your bottom like a riddle?

Wouldn't it be better to move your bottom like a riddle than to get a nip and a tuck?

The French novelist Colette, hardly a poulet du printemps herself (despite hav­ing the shape of a roast chicken), as well as no slouch when it came to attracting men as she aged, wrote that her fellow older woman Mae West "does not experi­ence the bitterness of the abandoned older woman." That's because West, like Colette, refused to go gentle into that good night without hauling along a couple of enter­taining young men into that dark by the scruff of their necks. She didn't even begin her movie career until she was almost 40; she was nearly 70 when she took a 33-year-old lover. Her success with men continued throughout her life.

She refused to be defined by looks alone. She possessed the sense of entitlement more often said to be the domain of rich older men. Money, she believed, "is a great love potion for an affair." Her example suggests that when it comes to romance, the erotics of an unbridled imagination wed to an abiding appetite will always trump the mere hold­ing actions of face-lifts and tummy tucks. "Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before," she said.

Oscar Wilde, no older woman perhaps but certainly a queen, once said that "the trag­edy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young."

That's it, isn't it, Demi? Our souls may be as glistening and lovely as freshwater, but our exteriors fall down around us like a condemned block in West Baltimore. Ruin is our destiny. My philosophy is that rather than rebuild the castle, we ought to admire the light coming in through the holes in the roof.

So excuse this advice from across gender lines from a guy who doesn't have to use his appearance to make a living. But I say it nonetheless: Defiance!

Turn the withering female gaze from yourself and direct it outward at the world. Is it not more potent to look than be looked at? Why not refuse to see your­self as the object of someone else's vision and start viewing yourself as someone who does the looking?

In case you were wondering, by the way, the vulture is back. My mother just called to tell me. He's on the roof again, looking in at her. But she is now staring back just as hard at him.

Yours truly,

Will