IT’S THE SAME OLD STORY
Jane Fonda looks ageless — and that’s not a compliment
I am all for over-50s looking fabulous. So it was with heightened appreciation I watched the Emmys and saw the older broads socking it to their younger sisters. Susan Sarandon, aged 70, was both sassy and elegant in an off-the-shoulder, long-sleeved royal blue dress. Michelle Pfeiffer was exquisite in black lace Oscar de la Renta. Nicole Kidman, who turned 50 in June, was ageless in a scarlet full skirt that would have made anyone else look like one of those crochet dressing-table dollies.
It was a heartening sight. Hollywood is not exactly known for its courtesy to middle-aged women. You might say female stars’ ages are a lot like dogs’: every year an actress spends on the planet is equivalent to seven for a man.
Even what Liz Hurley once called “civilians” — women who don’t have to do an annual bikini shoot and, therefore, would not regard six raisins as a treat are affected by the pressure. But where does it all end?
On the red carpet, with Jane Fonda in a Barbie-pink column dress with Barbie fringe and hairstyle to match, I’m afraid to say. Fonda looked as though the intervening 37 years had barely laid a hand on her. I don’t mean that as a compliment.
The hair, lent lavish, preternatural volume by extensions. The figure was as athletic and enviable as it was when she starred opposite Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park. In 1967. Through the taut, rather eerie mask of her face peered the famously lovely blue eyes she got from her father. Was this really a 79-year-old woman we saw before us?
It was both an awesome sight — Mother Nature defeated by the surgeon’s art and superhuman willpower! — and a sad one.
Yes, I do realize that the approved reaction of the righton sisterhood in such cases is to punch the air and say, “You go, girl!” But Fonda doesn’t make me feel that way. Not at all. I think of all those years when she reported being depressed as the malleable plaything of powerful, abusive men. I think of her father, Henry Fonda, toward the end of his life, starring opposite Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond with Jane playing their daughter. Hepburn was 74 then. Still with that delicate bone structure and wonderful top-of-the-milk skin, but recognizably, proudly old. You can’t imagine Hepburn buffed and trussed like Fonda at the Emmys, pretending to be anything other than her authentic, brilliant self.
I think also of Fonda and Redford reunited recently for a Netflix drama, 50 years after Barefoot in the Park. Guess who’d had the facelift and who got away with looking their age?
I once interviewed Redford and asked if he would ever consider having work done. He smiled, scooped up the wattles beneath his chin and pulled them behind his ears. For a few seconds, I glimpsed one of the most beautiful men that ever lived. Then he laughed and let his face fall back into place. He said it would be too weird, looking so much younger than his contemporaries. I think he meant it, but then he was allowed to; he was a man.
Jane Fonda claims the role in her life that has made her happiest is being Grandma. You would never guess that to look at her. We say that someone looks comfortable in their own skin; this almost-octogenarian looks uncomfortable in skin that is barely her own.
I’m not saying I’m nostalgic for that time when menopausal women were expected to adopt a drab wardrobe that reflected their waning powers of attraction. When my grandmother was the age I am now — in housecoat, zip-up booties, grey perm — she was old before her time.
We should be glad women have burst through those limitations, and refuse to go into their twilight years in shades of beige. But there is a danger the philosophy “Old is the New Young” brings a punishing tyranny of its own.
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety,” said Shakespeare’s Enobarbus of Cleopatra. It’s a matchless declaration of love, but getting old is surely part of that infinite variety.