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.
