High Life
In praise of older women
When I read that actor Robert Wagner had had a four-year-long affair with Barbara Stanwyck back in 1952, my first reaction was that of envy and more envy. Wagner is 77 this year and Babs would have been 101, so when they were canoodling together he was 22 and she was 47. Excellent. Perfect. Young men need older women for sex as much as older men need younger ones later on. It is nature’s fit, a perfect combination which carries the eloquence of the unspoken.
I am now 72 but 50 years ago I would have given two legs and an arm to bed Babs. She had made her name playing Brooklyn-bred, regular-gal toughies, but although as American as apple pie, she always had an air of mystery about her. Plus a pair of gams to drive schoolboys to onanism for life. Barbara Stanwyck played ‘loose’ women, which in the repressed morality of the times drove men even crazier with desire. Take for example Ball of Fire, the Howard Hawks 1941 black and white comedy written by the great Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Babs is Sugarpuss O’Shea, a nightclub singer and gangster’s moll. Gary Cooper is Bertram Potts, a college professor writing the entry for slang in a new encyclopedia. He thinks Sugarpuss implies a certain sweetness in her, he tells his colleagues with a straight face. (She is assisting him with his research in slang.) When it’s over he bids her adieu thus: ‘Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.’
Told like a real absent-minded prof. Of course they fall in love and everything ends hunky-dory, the way those things should end. Babs was not a classical beauty, far from it, but she had S appeal, street appeal, that drove randy young men nuts. She met Wagner on the set of Titanic, a very good movie far closer to actual events than the blockbuster of 45 years later which cost ten times what the real ship had cost. Clifton Webb, whose Norma Desmond-like delusions about his dead mother had driven Noël Coward mad (Oh, Clifton, do shut up), played Barbara’s hubby, an inveterate womaniser (Clifton was as gay as they come and then some), who had driven her away and back to America. Every schoolboy knew that Webb was a gent, but a gent that preferred gents, so when I saw the movie while in boarding school I thought I’d die with frustration. What the hell was Babs doing being upset with a man who liked men when she could have Taki, who’d give his right arm for her.
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ghostof'lectricity
October 3rd, 2008 2:13amUh, Taki, I loved Barbara Stanwyck, but she died some time ago. If you didn't get the emeo, it was Paul Newman who died this past week. Also a gracious and physically beautiful member of Hollywood elite, sorely missed. I can understand your confusion, since your characteristic self-absorption does not allow for close following of the current news, of either the "soft" (the death of a Hollywood actor) or "hard" (e.g., the demise of the American financial system) variety.
Kered Ybretsae
October 3rd, 2008 7:53pmWhen I was young and in my prime, I used to do it all the time. But now I'm old and really grey, I only think of it, once a day.
David Watkins
October 4th, 2008 9:37pmTaki's memory is weirdly at fault. Hollywood didn't "employ only handsome people" in Robert Taylor's heyday. Edward G Robinson, Fred Astaire and Humphrey Bogart were certainly no prettier than Hoffman, and not half as pretty as Pacino was in his early starring roles. Taylor was rather an exception. More typical was John Wayne, who was rather beautiful when he worked in B westerns, and only became the biggest star in Hollywood after he'd lost his hair and his waistline.