The woman who makes me wish I were 60 years older
A 104-year-old Australian dancer makes a good case for immortality, writes Darrel Bristow-Bovey
My grandmother died at the age of 103, and the news has come as something of a blow to me, not because we were at all close — I didn’t like her and I don’t think she thought much about me one way or the other — but because I assumed she would live forever, like some sort of terrifying, Anubis-headed Egyptian grandmummy-in-waiting.
She didn’t, though, which makes me consider the possibility that immortality doesn’t in fact run in my bloodline. There are many ways of growing old — my grandmother favoured regular walks after lunch, games of tennis and eating the souls of the unwary — but in the end I wouldn’t say hers worked especially well for quality of life. Other than taking satisfaction in her life-long hobby of keeping people waiting, I don’t imagine she took much joy from her last years. But that isn’t the way it has to be.
Last year Trudy Smith died, also 103, and I was far sadder about that. I never met Trudy Smith, but she was an inspiring old broad. She was a working artist. Oil paintings were her field — sometimes abstracts, sometimes landscapes — and when she held an exhibition in 2018 she was pleased with the work of creating and arranging and hanging the pieces, but found the job of talking to people somewhat distasteful. Fairly late in life, she had realised that she was actually quite shy and anti-social and didn’t care, and she preferred spending time with her paints and her canvasses rather than fussing and making conversation and having to care what other people think about her. She made this realisation round about the first time she first picked up a paintbrush — just after her husband died, when she was 85 years old.
They had been married for some 40 years and after he was gone she felt a great loneliness, but when she sat with the loneliness long enough, paying attention to it instead of hiding from it, she saw that it also felt like a very great freedom. “I have realised,” she said, “that it is lovely to be free of everything. You can say what you like, you can do what you like, you can think what you like.”
So Trudy was my inspiration for a while, but it’s good to have heroes who are still alive, so I’ve turned to Eileen Kramer.
Eileen turned 104 in November last year, and at her birthday party she was concerned that her balance might be deteriorating, so she might have to give up dancing solos for her dance troupe.
Eileen is one of those women you wish you could live with and follow around so that some of what she has rubs off on you. Eileen was born in 1915, and was 26 when she went to see Australia’s first modern dance troupe performing in Sydney. She was so taken with them that she presented herself to ask for a position. Twenty-six is very old to start dancing, but she stuck to it and had some qualities of personal charm, and within three years was a principal performer.
She travelled the world dancing and took many lovers, including a glorious affair with a married French diplomat in India. She took time off by herself and learnt traditional dances in Kashmir and painted murals on restaurant walls in Karachi. She met Ella Fitzgerald in Paris, and flirted with Louis Armstrong in a casino. “He was a very naughty man,” she says now, with a glint in her eye that makes me wish I were 60 years older.
When she was 42 she met a 36-yearold Polish filmmaker with an eye for the ladies, and they married and spent 30 years together. “I was the one he always came back to,” she says cheerfully. “He was a very good husband in that way.”
She stopped dancing for two decades to care for him after his stroke. She was 77 when he died and she took up dancing again and married an 80-year-old man in West Virginia. This was, she says, the most passionate relationship of her life. After he died she travelled the world a little, then in 2016 moved back to her native Australia and started up a new dance company. She was 99.
In 2017 she wrote and choreographed a dance show called A Buddha’s Wife, designed the costumes and performed as one of the principal dancers. She was 102.
In 2018 she wrote and published a book and appeared, looking aquiline and beautiful, dancing in a music video for Lacey Cole, high on a rock beside the stony Southern Ocean as dusk comes on and a rain storm rolls in. The song’s OK; she’s wonderful.
This year she took up painting, and submitted a self-portrait to the 2019 Archibald Award, Australia’s premier portrait prize. She has another book coming out next year.
She says she feels fine and her mind and memory are as clear as ever, but she supposes she’ll die one of these days.
“You can’t go on forever,” she says. I don’t see why not.