I have a friend who is extremely blond. One might almost say excessively so, except that her blondness is natural, as are her very large breasts. To give you an idea of just how blond and buxom she is: One Valentine`s Day when the two of us-journalists both-found ourselves on Ted Kennedy`s campaign bus, my friend received from our fellow passengers a total of 23 red paper hearts. There were 23 men on the bus. I received not one symbolic token of palpitating organs.
I was not blond at the time. I was older than my friend and slightly graying, which is really what this story is about: age and gray hairs. It is also about wrinkles and droopy breasts, plump thighs and stomachs that get caught in zippers, and self-replicating chins. It is about losing the irretrievable, losing, in short, your looks.
At the time that all this rejection took place, I did not realize what it was I was losing. I thought maybe it was sleep or perhaps my sense of humor. But it was, in fact, my looks. And that was a pretty raw deal because I had spent a number of years working on looking good. It occurs to me now that the total time between acquisition and loss amounted to about three years.
My younger, blonder friend was nothing if not sympathetic, and some weeks after the Valentine`s Day massacre I received in the mail a tube of Maybelline mascara, which she always claimed was the real secret of her success. It was
(I did not learn this until much later)the classic feminine response to aging. Lose your looks and gain a mascara wand. My blond friend was 29, and I was not. It was as simple as that. It was as unfair as that.
That was seven years ago, at which time my friend was very partial to pink, which was, in her case, a somewhat redundant color. Last month, bowing to the demands of a friend who insisted that more sophisticated hues suited an older woman, she wore for the first time a slinky black dress to a cocktail party. There, as luck would have it, she ran into her mother, who, taking in the startling new attire at a glance, said:
”Darling, I hate to tell you this, but you have lost your major asset:
your Youthful Freshness. Please throw away all the clothes you just bought that are black and wear only pale pink. It will not revive your Youthful Freshness, but it may help.”
My blond friend, who is now 36, believes she knows precisely when a woman starts losing her looks. ”It happens when you`re 36,” she says. ”And it`s not as though anything about you is radically different. If you take your features separately, it`s the same, more or less. But one day you look into the mirror, and the whole of you is in some way different. You know your looks are gone, that`s all. And it changes everything.”
Women whose looks are fading know that the most dramatic changes occur not merely in the mirror but in that other, crueler reflection: the response of passersby. ”I used to walk into a room,” says one former beauty, ”and men would-I mean, they wouldn`t just turn around to look at me, they would stare. Really stop and stare. Now they just look, and then look away.”
At 44, she just adopted two children. ”I got on a plane with my kids the other day,” she recalls, ”and the stewardess said, `Those children-are they yours?` And I knew exactly what she was thinking. She was thinking, `That woman, she`s so old. How could those kids possibly be hers?` ”
Age is not a subject with which too many women wish to be identified, hence the anonymity of these two ladies. In the first place, most women harbor the fond notion that if they don`t advertise the passage of time, their audiences will fail to notice it. And in the second place, it has become ideologically repugnant as a topic of conversation among feminists.
The traditional woman who relied flagrantly on her beauty for acceptance and advancement may see no reason to publicize its disappearance. But her more liberated sister refuses even to consider the dilemma, since by rights-which is to say, if we all lived in a just and equitable society-the slow erosion of a woman`s outward appeal should be of no more account than a man`s.
Moreover, the modern woman argues, age is not simply a ravager; time can be kind. Older women are wiser. They have character. They know more. Sex is better-when they can get it.
”Why are you even writing about this?” demands an outraged Frances Lear, the former wife of producer Norman Lear. ”What does it do for me and other older women?”
At 63, Frances Lear is about to launch a magazine for women over 40 (or, as she prefers, ”a magazine for the woman who wasn`t born yesterday”), and so she likes to concentrate on the rosier aspects of galloping maturity.
”When one has enlarged one`s life and made it more creative and stimulating, one remains sensuous,” she says. ”When one`s brain gets exercised, it makes you more youthful. The blood courses. The juices flow. You see your reflection in other people`s faces as they look at you.”
This notion of aging as the ultimate aphrodisiac, capable of luring armies of men, weary of bimbos, to the side of the mature woman, is by no means exclusively Frances Lear`s. It is the yearning rhetoric of consolation, and embodied in its promise of afterlife are some basic truths. Unfortunately, these truths are not wholly absorbed by men.
”One day a woman looks into a mirror,” says sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, ”and it occurs to her suddenly-very suddenly-that everything is different. There are little lines. And, my gosh, it`s a shock! And she starts thinking about the competition, knowing that men in our society mostly like young women. And that is the way of the world.”
”Why is that the way of the world?” I ask.
”Why?” echoes Dr. Ruth, astonished that anyone would be dumb enough to wonder. ”Because we know that an older man can find a younger woman much easier than an older woman can find a younger man. Because that`s simply how it is.”
Syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith is now 64. She isn`t wholly displeased about her age, the march of time having brought her, among other things, incredible success.
”It`s wonderful, just wonderful to be settled,” she says. ”To finally, after a lifetime of ego and struggle, be Someone. I would never have known what to do with all this success when I was young and always beset by romantic passion-yes, that`s how I was once. Always beset by passion. And I can`t tell you how much happier I am now that I don`t concentrate on my looks.”
After this homage to wisdom and maturity, I asked Liz Smith one simple question: Would she sell her soul to look young again?
”Well, yes, to tell you the truth, I probably would sell my soul to look young again,” she replies without hesitation.
”I was really cute and thin when I was young. I weighed 118 pounds, and I could eat anything I wanted in those days and not gain a pound. And for the longest time I looked just like a baby. I mean I was an adolescent longer than anyone I know.
”And I was maybe 45 before it ever occurred to me that I shouldn`t be wearing miniskirts and all the Betsey Johnson clothes my friends were encouraging me to wear, which made me look ridiculous. So I probably would sell my soul. It would be great to be that cute and thin again.”
Rarely are older women so candid. After all, it is only natural for women to mourn their diminishing appeal. For one thing, the passage of years blunts practically the only weapon in the female arsenal.
”You know what good looks really represent?” says my blond friend.
”Power. And I`m not saying that they`re a form of absolute power, either. But I never realized before how much I had counted on my looks; you just take them for granted until they change.
And I know there are a lot of other ways to get along in the world. You can use your intelligence, your charm, your ambition. But for those of us women who never had a lot of power in other areas, looks really do help redress the balance. They count more for us than for men. And so it`s more painful for women when they get older.”
Experts offer only the most traditional words of solace. They speak of developing ”outside interests,” not as an antidote to aging but as a distraction. They invoke the image of Garbo, Sophia Loren, those mature glamor queens whose names are invariably modified by ”well preserved” and other adjectives normally reserved for canned fruit. They mention the twin life preservers of facelifts and remedies from Revlon.
”I myself would never get a facelift,” reports Dr. Ruth. ”Because in a few years you have to do it again and because people would never tell me their innermost secrets about their sex life if I changed myself radically.
But I`ll tell you something: There`s nothing wrong with using a little makeup. Or a lot of makeup. I certainly use a lot more makeup than I would ever have dreamed of using before. I even put cream on my face.”
But the women who have seen their youth slip away wonder if Dr. Ruth is confusing a mascara wand with a magic wand.
”The interesting thing about makeup,” muses USA Today foreign correspondent Karen De Witt, ”is that after a certain age it just doesn`t work.”
She has just turned 43, a birthday many of her friends celebrated by showering her with mirthful greeting cards. On the cover of practically all these cards were assorted caricatures of white-haired old ladies.
”I looked at these cards,” reports De Witt, ”and then I went to the mirror. And it was odd, really. I know I look good, still. I know I don`t have white hair. But when I was young and stayed out late and looked tired, all I had to do was apply makeup, and I`d look sensational. But now it doesn`t change a thing.”
So where is our consolation? What happened to the other side of the coin? To the positive aspects of losing our looks? To the genial side of moving inexorably into our 40s, 50s and beyond?
I don`t know.
I was going to leave this story at that: gloomy but concise, depressing but accurate. My tale wasn`t morally uplifting. It had at least that virtue. On the other hand, well, there didn`t seem to be any other hand.
Then my mother dropped by.
”Why haven`t you interviewed me?” she asked.
There were several reasons that I hadn`t interviewed my mother, the most significant being that when she was younger, she was tall, slender and dark, a striking beauty, and now that she is 69, I couldn`t imagine asking, ”Hey, Ma. How does it feel to have lost your looks?” But at her invitation, I did.
”I don`t mourn my looks,” she said. ”In the first place, I know I don`t look bad for my age.”
”That`s true,” I said, and it is. She looks very good. But it`s not the same. She`s not the same.
”I see these women, the ones who only worry about their hair and their makeup and how they look, and I think: `How superficial they are.` It`s as though they never really participated in the life they had. I wouldn`t want to be like that. And I wouldn`t want to be very young again, either.
When I was young, little things used to bother me more than they do now. Now I simply don`t let them bother me. So there are trade-offs, and that`s one of them.”
And what`s left after a woman`s looks are gone?
”What`s left?” She paused to think. ”Well, there are your friends. And there are your grandchildren. There`s your family. There`s your health, if you have it. I have it. I was really very lucky.
What`s left is you and the people you love. It`s not so bad.”
And for the first time in seven years, I thought: She`s right. It`s not great. But it`s not so bad.
