Men grow old disgracefully so why not women?
BODY LANGUAGE
Katharine Whitehorn
The sight of Cilla Black in fishnet tights and spangled hearts at the Royal Variety Performance, not to mention the equally glittering Barbara Windsor, gave an entirely new meaning to the admiring phrase “endless legs”. Also long-life bosoms, immemorial smiles and a valiant refusal to join the dreary old Trots who prefer to look their age.
But do we really want to gaze at them or at Joan Collins swashbuckling in a bustier on stage earlier this year? There’s a dilemma here, because, on the face of it, one wants only the lovely on show and only those whose top is worth looking at going topless or anywhere near it. (The pregnant Liz Hurley, for example, may at last be achieving a bosom worthy of the exposure she gives it.)
But it’s the beauties, of course, who really make the rest of us feel inadequate. When the French first went in for topless bathing, it was highly demoralising, since only the young and lovely did it; once the droopy, the ponderous and those with breasts like fried eggs took to the water, too, the rest of us cheered up no end.
You don’t just look at other people’s bodies with lust or admiration, after all, but to see how you yourself measure up. (Prince Philip, it’s reported, was more interested in what was revealed by the male Full Monty than the Queen was; as he’s heterosexual to a fault, he presumably gazed for purposes of comparison.) And surveys of what readers actually look at in papers show that women look at pictures of other women more than men, even page three of the Sun.
These resilient showbiz women, of course, are fighting the assumption that anyone over 40 is Past All That sexually. As Agony Aunt for Saga magazine for the over-50s, I know how little their thoughts at bedtime turn only to cocoa and a good book. But to know it goes on is one thing; to watch it is quite another. You could say that when we watch perfect young bodies, on television or sculpture or anywhere else, we are identifying with an ideal, and that the reason why elderly passion has this awful tendency to be embarrassing is that by that time no one is actually relying on looks.
It is seniors who most relish the words of a Brazilian lady who said to a bulging beach beauty: “In my country, we can attract a man with our clothes on.”
The plain fact of the matter is that once you’re past a certain age you can’t get by on looks alone, and those who only have looks to rely on are in for a hard time. Yeats said: “Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young, we loved each other and were ignorant.” Which is fine, if your mind is up to it.
On the stage, though, it’s different. Only the very seriously musical manage not to titter when some seven-tonne Madame Butterfly declares she is only 15; and it was never a good idea for Dame Edith Evans to play Cleopatra once everyone thought of her as Juliet’s nurse. It is a question of what you can get away with; and Cilla, Barbara and Joan can just.
It may be deplorable it is that there aren’t more roles for the older woman who is not a glamour puss, that producers, in Meryl Streep’s words, “don’t want women who remind them of their first wives”. It’s sad that when Mrs Robinson seduces the lad in The Graduate she’s automatically a hate figure; and if a thoroughly competent and likeable housekeeping woman of a certain age appears she is only too likely to be Mrs Doubtfire, Robin Williams in drag.
Joan Collins is simply showing she can still do, magnificently, what she’s always done; and I can’t for the life of me see why she shouldn’t. If make-up and clever lighting can transform a 20-year-old in Act One to a crone in Act Four, if a man can do excellently as a woman, if Sarah Bernhardt could play Hamlet when she was not only ageing but had only one leg, that’s what the stage is for.
We should no more deplore it than we should Stanley Matthews playing football into his 50s, Haydn composing into his 80s, or Winston Churchill taking over the war when he was 66. (I wouldn’t have liked to see him in spangled tights, though.)