Prime Time - Jane Fonda [70]
I asked Rachel the secret to her joie de vivre. “There is no secret, really,” she replied, “but I find that if you smile at somebody who comes home with a sourpuss, if you just put a big smile on your face, you know, it manufactures into the next person. It causes an epidemic of love.”
Maybe we can’t all cause an epidemic of love, but putting on a smile and showing an interest in others is bound to draw them to us. Making an effort to play the hand of friendship in our Third Acts will serve us well.
With Bob Shaye on the set of Monster-in-Law, which his company, New Line Cinema, produced.
With music pals Dallas Austin and Big Boi.
CHAPTER 12
Love in the Third Act
The one thing that can’t be taken from us, even by death, is the love we give away before we go.
—REVEREND FORREST CHURCH,
Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow
FROM EVERYTHING I’VE READ AND WHAT I’VE HEARD FROM most of the gerontology experts I’ve talked to, it seems clear that Third Acts have the potential to be a prime time for deepening already existing love relationships or forging new and amazingly rich ones—if one has a desire for such a relationship, and if there is a partner! Our joints may ache and our eyesight dim, but our hearts and minds may be primed for deeper intimacy and mutuality than we’ve ever experienced before.
Intimacy: Suzanna’s Story
One woman whose experience exemplifies the later-life discovery of intimacy is seventy-year-old Suzanna Graves. A lovely, slender woman who adorns herself with teasingly sheer, lush, textured fabrics that gleam and shimmer when she moves, she was an actor and is now a therapist. We met in her small, perfume-scented New York apartment for hours, drank tea, and talked about age and art and love. I asked how she felt about being older.
“Right now I am in a state of shock,” she blurted out. “Every year in my sixties was better than the year before. I mean, it has been the best decade of my life. I just can’t tell you.”
“Why, do you suppose?” I asked
“Well, we know what Freud said: love and work. I have come to the therapy work that I adore, and I have love. It started when I was finally able to get free of my obsession with romantic love—the thinking that the answer to my life was going to be Mr. Right. I was married for seven years and have two daughters and I’ve been single for forty years. I had many lovers … handsome men, famous even. But I finally had enough of all that charisma, with me a mouse in the corner. It always felt so unequal. Then too, I was frigid until well into my thirties. I was pretty. I got it. I knew what I was supposed to do: please men. But I was frigid. I went through it all because I wanted to please men, but my sexuality? What was that? Then, with a lot of therapy, I came out the other side and stopped looking for a man to save me.”
Suzanna also attended workshops run by the famous sex therapist Betty Dodson, who taught women to not be afraid of pleasuring themselves—with their hands, with vibrators. Dodson made sexual pleasure understandable and okay for thousands of lucky women, and Suzanna was one of them.
“Five or so years ago,” Suzanna continued, “I ran into an actor friend whom I hadn’t seen in many years. We’d been in a co-counseling group together. We knew each other’s stuff. It was great to see him—chat, chat, and that was that. And the next thing that happened was that my daughter was about to get married and she asked me why I hadn’t been in a long-term relationship and I told her, ‘It’s a lot of trouble and I have no libido.’ So guess what she did? She turned me on to a gynecologist who prescribed testosterone pills. This doctor told me there’s no reason women in their sixties shouldn’t have the sexual responses of women in their thirties. Within a month or so I began to notice that men were looking at me differently. I went to Zabar’s deli—remember Zabar’s?—and I was standing looking at the food display and the woman said, ‘Okay, honey. What will it be?