My name’s Liz and I’m 58. Now it’s your turn to tell the truth

IT’S not often I can say I know exactly how an A-list Hollywood star feels, but it happened on Friday. I was reading the court reports from a defamation case in Melbourne brought by Rebel Wilson, star of Bridesmaids and the Pitch Perfect movies, against Bauer Media. The publisher alleged that the actress had lied about her age by claiming that she was 29, when she wasn’t.

Wilson never lied about her age, but merely didn’t broadcast it from the rooftops. The article meant she was dropped from the cast of at least two huge films, and had to ‘beg to meet’ producers. Wilson claims the article, and the subsequent lawsuit, meant she lost two years of her limited time in the Hollywood spotlight. She was dismayed that classmates appeared to have hawked their stories to the highest bidders and, in doing so, sold their former friend down the river.

Unlike Rebel, I did lie about my age. Blatantly and repeatedly, in newspaper articles, and on my CV. I told my fiance that I was born in 1963, when in fact I was born in 1958. I told my bosses, about to hire me as editor of Marie Claire, the same huge, fat fib.

I remember the night before an interview announcing my appointment was to be published in The Guardian, I couldn’t sleep, so terrified was I that the headline would read: ‘New editor of feminist glossy is so anti-women, she’s shaved five years off her age! Off with her wrinkly old head!’

But I got away with it. For a while. But after I left that magazine and got a job on a daily paper, I started receiving sinister emails, with the header: ‘I have seen your birth certificate. I know how old you are.’

After some digging, I found out the emails were from a young woman who had been to my high school (she was a few years below me), and who I’d given work experience to some years before. This is how she repays me! This is how she is planning to force me into giving her a job! Like Rebel, I felt someone was trying to ‘shake me down’; the threat to reveal my age was tantamount to blackmail.

I also found out that someone had logged on to Wikipedia, and changed my date of birth to 1948! It took a great deal of correspondence to persuade the mediators at the online encyclopaedia that they were not only publishing a lie, they were damaging my reputation and future prospects.

In truth, though, I’d been sabotaging my life all by myself. I wish that I hadn’t lied to land the editorship of a glossy. I was so afraid of being found out that I accepted a really rubbish deal, refused pay rises, and even when I was sacked unreasonably (ironically, I was ‘asked to step down’ for championing older, bigger women in my pages!), I didn’t contest it.

BUT I know why I did it, and why Rebel kept her age under wraps: because almost every other woman is at it. I remember interviewing, for the second time, an A-list British star, who I knew had shaved five years from her age, as though her date of birth were a trifle. ‘But I first interviewed you when you were at school,’ I told her. ‘I know exactly how old you are. I met your mum.’

‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ she begged, so I didn’t.

If only we had the courage to declare an age amnesty; to be grown-up about growing older. But that would require men to change their whole mindset, too, and that’s not going to happen any time soon. I cling instead to small gestures: that’s why I refuse to print Rebel’s age here, or her dress size. They are irrelevant. All that matters is whether or not she makes me laugh, which she does. In a world where young girls are seen as cannon fodder, that’s a rare talent we should cherish, not ridicule.

The fightback starts here.