Bruce Willis turned 54 on March 19, the same day his famous friend David Letterman married Regina Lasko, his girlfriend of 23 years. Two days later Willis married Emma Heming, a former Victoria’s Secret model who was seven years old when Letterman and Lasko began dating and Willis was becoming a star on ABC’s Moonlighting.
The Associated Press article about Willis and Heming’s nuptials included a picture of them at last summer’s premiere of The House Bunny, which costars Willis’s 20-year-old daughter, Rumer. All of a sudden the star of the four Die Hard movies looked — God forbid! — mortal, mostly because of the lines around his eyes. I’m 33, so I have lines around my eyes too, but I’ve gotten used to seeing myself age. (My conscience would like to interrupt this column with an important announcement: “Robert is a terrible liar.”) But childhood heroes from movies and TV? That’s something else. Thanks to home video and syndicated reruns, they’re supposed to live forever. And they will, at least in that sense, but even Hollywood types know that nothing lasts forever, unless we’re talking about The Simpsons. That’s why it’s important even for stars to acknowledge that they’re no longer spring chickens. Once they’ve done that, they can proceed to marry a spring chicken who models underwear if they so desire. Midlife crisis? No. Midlife bonus.
I told my longtime girlfriend, Aimiee, that if I could just find a woman 24 years my junior to marry me, I wouldn’t feel so old myself. I meant it as a joke, but since she’d just gotten home after a long afternoon of reluctantly shopping for her third bridesmaid dress in the past 12 months, she wasn’t in the mood to laugh. And that’s when it hit me — if I married a woman 24 years younger than me, she’d be a nine-year-old girl.
But then it hit me that things like that really shouldn’t be the primary thing hitting me when my girlfriend is standing right in front of me and talking about bridesmaid dresses with a quiet note of resignation in her voice. Aimiee is a beautiful, strong, intelligent woman, but do I ever mention those qualities in my Sugar Water columns? No. I only mention the bad things, which I then exaggerate, and that’s only when I’m not taking previously published material and passing it off as my own with Aimiee’s name replacing Charles Manson’s.
She deserves better, and neither of us is getting any younger. That’s why I’ve asked Harrison Ford, another childhood hero, to take Aimiee off my hands and give her the rich, rugged husband she deserves. See, it was reported on Monday that Ford proposed to his longtime girlfriend, Calista Flockhart, on Valentine’s Day weekend. He’s 66, she’s 44. Bad move, Mr. Ford — at that age she’s already acquired too much wisdom. Abort! Abort! Meanwhile, Aimiee’s still in her early 30s. Think about it, sir, and leave your decision in the comments section below once you’ve made up your mind.
Mortality may or may not have factored into Willis’s desire to get married for a second time (his first wife, Demi Moore, is married to Ashton Kutcher, who’s 15 years younger than her; both attended Willis and Heming’s wedding), but it’s harder and harder to ignore the older you get. So, on that note, I’ve rounded up all the death-related clippings I’ve collected in the past year or so. By the time I’m finished with this edition of Sugar Water, I hope to have found the meaning of life, and it’d better not just be “the short-but-still-pretty-long thing that comes before death.”
On July 12 of last year, the world’s oldest blogger died. When I saw the Agence France Presse headline I thought it meant that the person with the world’s oldest blog had passed away (which made me wonder how old the oldest blog is, and it turns out it’s 21 — have a cheap domestic beer on me, rec.humor.funny!), but the blogger in question was a 108-year-old Australian woman named Olive Riley. She was born October 20, 1899, meaning the centenarian lived in three different centuries, even if she was only two months old when the 19th century ended. The AFP article said Riley had posted 70 entries on her blog since February of ‘07 and that the response it got from people as far away as Russia and the U.S. “kept her mind fresh,” according to her great-grandson Darren Stone. Riley was living in Woy Woy at the time of her death; the Australian town’s name translates to “Why Why” in an American accent, though there really isn’t any need to scream that question at God when someone as old as 108 goes to the great barrier reef in the sky.
Riley may have been the world’s oldest blogger, but the world’s oldest person, Edna Parker, was 115 when she died on November 26 in a nursing home in Shelbyville, Indiana. Parker’s husband died of a heart attack in 1939, and she’d been a widow ever since, living in their farmhouse by herself until she was 100, at which point she moved in with one of her sons. The record for the world’s oldest person then went to Portugal’s Maria de Jesus, who had youth on her side — she was five months younger than Parker — but you can probably tell by my use of past tense that De Jesus is no longer with us either; she died on January 2, having held the record for five weeks. Now the record belongs to Gertrude Baines, who lives in Los Angeles and turns 115 on April 6.
My favorite centenarian — you know, if I had to pick just one (it was so hard to choose, especially with Willard Scott looking over my shoulder the entire time I was digging through his files) — would be Jeanne Calment, a French woman who died on August 4, 1997, at 122, making her the longest-living person in history aside from Methuselah. I still have an AP story from December 1995 about Calment: “Andre-Francois Raffray thought he had a great deal 30 years ago: He would pay a 90-year-old woman $500 a month until she died, then move into her grand apartment in a town Vincent van Gogh once roamed. But this Christmas, Raffray died at age 77, having forked over $184,000 for an apartment he never got to live in.” Earlier that year, on Calment’s 120th birthday, he was quoted as saying, “In life, one sometimes makes bad deals.” An attorney who died of cancer, Raffray was reincarnated in 2008 as a Lehman Brothers executive.
Getting back to more recent inductees in the triple-digit club, another centenarian who was in the news last year was Johannes Heesters, a Dutch entertainer who became popular in Nazi Germany during World War II. Heesters is now 104, but he still had enough fire left in him last November to file a lawsuit against German author Volker Kuehn, who claimed that Heesters performed for Nazi troops at the Dachau concentration camp near Munich in 1941. Heesters says he merely visited the camp and that the visit was a PR move engineered by the Nazi regime: according to his attorney, “It is well known that sort of thing happened, where people were brought in to give a positive picture — prominent people who could then go and tell their impressions to others.” So it’s a lie that Heesters sang for the Nazis at Dachau but it’s not a lie that he visited Dachau and then lied about what he saw to make people think Jewish prisoners weren’t dying there? I’m confused, but since Heesters is 71 years older than me, I bet he’s even more confused.
Death itself can be confusing, especially when United Feature Syndicate’s Mr. Know-It-All, a.k.a. Gary Lee Clothier, was asked a question in his syndicated column last fall about stage actress Ruby Keeler, who “B.G.” from Dickson, Tennessee, thought had retired prior to the ’70s. Clothier wrote that Keeler retired “sometime after 1941″ upon marrying her second husband but came out of retirement in ‘71 to star in the Broadway revival of No, No, Nanette. However, Clothier’s answer ends with this puzzler: “She died in 1969.” A simple typo, or a third-act plot twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan in his prime? You be the judge — it’ll free up Death to be the executioner, a role it relishes.
The end can be a relief, of course, even for God’s smallest creatures. You see, back in November (I really had a one-track mind that month, didn’t I?), Gus died of cancer. He was only nine years old. Gus was a Chinese crested — or hairless — dog with one eye and three legs, which helped him become the 2008 winner of the World’s Ugliest Dog contest, proving you can win some and lose some all at the same time. I just hope that award helped Gus get some from a sexy, sexy bitch before he died and that there were even more groupies waiting for him in doggie heaven.
French movie star Gerard Depardieu’s son Guillaume, who was also an actor, died last October at the age of 37 after developing a sudden case of pneumonia, according to the AP. Its obituary mentioned that he’d been convicted as a young adult for “traffic violations, insults, and narcotics.” Now I’m curious to know how one gets convicted for insults in France. Does claiming that The Birdcage is superior to La Cage aux Folles count as an insult? What if you say you don’t give a merde about Jerry Lewis’s entire body of work? If you tell a French waiter that the French fries and French toast you ordered aren’t up to American standards, will that persuade the judge to give you a life sentence? What if you top it all off by giving the judge a French kiss? I have a feeling that when French people are rude to American tourists, the cops tend to look the other way, probably with an official excuse like “Ze stupid American has to know he is being insulted for it to count as an insult.”
In happier news, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia isn’t dead. But shortly after last November’s historic presidential election he announced that he’d be stepping down as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee now that he’s 91 and his health is declining. His replacement? Fellow Democrat Daniel Inouye. He’s only 84. But he represents Hawaii, which is the youngest state in the union — number 50 turns 50 this August, in fact.
I guess the meaning of life is that none of us know it all, even Mr. Know-It-All, and since we can’t reverse the clock, we’d better embrace life while we still have it. If anyone insults us by saying we’re ugly in our old age, we should use our weathered visage to our advantage by winning contests, just as we should make friends with French policemen so we can get those who insult us thrown in prison across the Atlantic. (But if we’re ever accused of singing for the guards at that prison, we’ll sue.) It also doesn’t hurt if we can find a hot young underwear model who wants to marry us for our warmth, intelligence, and humor, not the millions of dollars we’ve earned over the years. None of us will live forever, but if we can make it to 122 like Jeanne Calment did, we’ll probably realize we accomplished all we ever needed to accomplish by, say, 119.
Life may be fleeting, but I think the meaning of life can be found in a person’s smile (or smirk, in Bruce Willis’s case), whether they’re one or one hundred. Aimiee’s smile may have dimmed somewhat in the last few years because of my romantic inertia, but it can still light up a room, and that definitely came in handy during the massive blackout I caused along the east coast in August of ‘03.
You know what? I’m rescinding my offer, Mr. Ford. You’re a gentleman, so I’m sure you’ll understand, and I’m sorry for calling Calista wise — I was just trying to seal the deal. With any luck, by the time I publish my next Sugar Water column Aimiee and I will have made it official. I can’t waste another second. Except when it comes to writing my next Sugar Water column, but you knew that already.
Patton Oswalt, “You Are Allowed 20 Birthday Parties” (from 2007’s Werewolves and Lollipops)
Tags: Ashton Kutcher, Bruce Willis, Calista Flockhart, Daniel Inouye, David Letterman, Demi Moore, Emma Heming, Gary Lee Clothier, Gerard Depardieu, Guillaume Depardieu, Harrison Ford, Jeanne Calment, Jerry Lewis, Johannes Heesters, Regina Lasko, Robert Byrd, Rumer Willis, Willard Scott
