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.
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