The Beauty Of Age

I just saw a current photo of comedian Carol Burnett.  She is eighty-three this month and looks maybe fifty-five.  And she will be performing in my city in a couple of short weeks.  Eighty-three and still kicking the can.  Isn't that something?  Isn't that awesome?  And wow, the years, and her plastic surgeon have been very kind to her. 

All these aging starlets, torch-singers, movie stars and comedians, all of them women, all still doing big-time gigs in their eighties and all looking not only great, but fabulous.  Sexy, gorgeous grannies and great grandmas, singing, acting, dancing and making us laugh, thanks to tens of thousands of dollars worth of work.

I think this business of being the ageless goddess has its beginnings in Marlene Dietrich, the great German-American movie star with the most intoxicating androgynous beauty and who couldn't sing worth a shit but still sang anyway and laughed all the way to the bank.  When she was what, forty-seven? there was a spread about her in Life magazine as the world's most glamorous grandmother.  At fifty she was doing the cabaret circuit in Paris, an eternally youthful Circe glowing with (likely surgically enhanced) youth.  She stuck with her personal myth of eternal beauty and glamour, lying through her teeth as her face and other body parts held bravely up against the forces of gravity till she finally threw in the towel well into her seventies.  At eighty or so, appalled that the world might see her as a wrinkled sagging granny, Marlene went into seclusion, where she died at the age of ninety-one.  Here is a portrait I did of her almost twenty-years ago:



I have included the text of one of her many remarkable quotes, this from her final interview in seclusion as a woman well into her eighties speaking with the actor Maximilian Schell: "We cannot live without illusions even if we must fight for them"  I cannot think of anything I could add to this. While researching for this portrait I particularly focussed on an archive photo taken candidly of Ms. Dietrich in the early sixties at the funeral of Edith Piaf with whom she was lovers for a while.  She looked in this photo every one of her sixty years, a grieving, sad and desolate old woman.  I also borrowed features from other photos of Marlene taken throughout her life in order to bring out as complete an expression in my interpretation of her as possible.

Gentle Reader, aging is beautiful and old age is a gift.  Every wrinkle, every sagging feature is like a detail in a map and we do ourselves and others an absolute disservice when we try to disguise or extinguish the marks of time.  Cosmetic surgery does nothing to beautify and everything to turn someone into a sad, pathetic old doll.  I would love to see Carol Burnett, Sophia Loren and Jane Fonda in the authentic glory of their authentic old age: grey and white hair, wrinkles, sag, drooping breasts cellulite and varicose veins and everything else that tells that you have lived, that you have lived well and authentically and the stamp of time is nothing to be ashamed of because this in itself is the true mark of beauty.