Nothing indecent about that proposal

I

T can be easy to forget that fame is generational. A face that is supremely well known in one era may be at best only vaguely familiar in the next. My son was 17 when at an event there were murmurings in the audience when a certain gentleman, one of the best known faces in Ireland for decades, appeared. My son gazed upon the man and said: “That old guy looks kind of familiar.”

Now 22, the Boychild did it again, this time — if it’s any consolation Kind of Familiar Old Guy — about Robert Redford. “What was he in?” I was shocked but then it dawned that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is almost 50 years old. I told the Boychild that Bob had been the Leo DiCaprio of his time, and a better Gatsby. And that the last time he’d played a serious sex symbol, as opposed to a niche market one, had been in a film called Indecent Proposal. Horror alert but that was 25 years ago. I explained the outline of the film and if its stars Demi and Woody have aged well, the premise of the film has not. All that weird woman as possession stuff about asking Woody for permission to have a go of his wife, yuck.

Later, among friends we reminisced about the film and its tagline, “Would you sleep with someone for a million dollars?” It had sparked not a little pub debate, the “right” answer of course being “no”, I-don’t-havea-price kinda thing. And at the time we would have meant it. Now we just guffawed. Now it feels like such a total no-brainer. Would we sleep with someone for a million? In a bloody heartbeat. What had changed? Attitudes, experiences, our bodies, our finances. “And anyway, think of all those dopes I slept with for free. Offering to pay seems like a totally decent proposal!”