The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead Read online

  By age 35, nearly everyone shows some of the signs of aging, such as graying hair, wrinkles, less strength, less speed, stiffening in the walls of the central arteries, degeneration of the heart’s blood vessels, diminished blood supply to the brain, elevated blood pressure. In my father’s case, the only sign of aging at 35 was a rapidly receding hairline. One out of three American adults has high blood pressure. The maximum rate your heart can attain is your age subtracted from 220 and therefore falls by one beat every year. Your heart is continually becoming a less efficient pumping machine.

  You couldn’t prove this decline in efficiency by my dad, who, until his early 90s, would awake in darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit. Birds would be just starting to call; black would still streak the colored-pencil soft blue of the sky: my father would be jogging. In an hour, he’d run 20 (then, when he got older, 15 and, later, 10) times around a track that was without bleachers or lighting or lanes, that had weeds in the center and a dry water fountain at the end of the far straightaway and a running path littered with glass and rocks. He didn’t care. He pounded his feet through the dirt and pumped his arms and kept his rubbery legs moving until, by the very stomping of his feet, night withdrew and morning came. As he once wrote me, apropos of nothing in particular, “I am, no surprise, that same skinny kid who ran with the speed of Pegasus through Brownsville’s streets in quest of a baseball.”

  Rheumatoid arthritis most frequently begins between ages 35 and 55.

  In 1907, the French writer Paul Léautaud, at 36, said, “I was asked the other day, ‘What are you doing nowadays?’ ‘I’m busy growing older,’ I answered.”

  In My Dinner with André, Wallace Shawn says, “I grew up on the Upper East Side, and when I was ten years old I was rich, an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now I’m thirty-six, and all I think about is money.”

  Mozart died at 35; Byron, at 36; Raphael and Van Gogh, at 37.

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer, said, “I must fairly acknowledge that in my opinion the disagreement between young men and old is owing rather to the fault of the latter than of the former. Young men, though keen and impetuous, are usually very well disposed to receive the counsels of the old, if they are treated with gentleness, but old men forget in a wonderful degree their own feelings in the early part of life.” When Boswell wrote this, he was 37 and Samuel Johnson was 69. Whenever I mention an accomplishment of mine to my father, he quickly changes the subject or mentions a more impressive accomplishment by someone else. I asked him once whether, in his view, competition was built into any relationship between father and son, and he briskly denied it, saying he’s never felt anything except pride and admiration.

  London Symphony Orchestra conductor Colin Davis said, at 38, “I think that to so many what happens is the death of ambition in the conventional sense. That great driving motor that prods you and exasperates you and brings out the worst qualities in you for about twenty years is beginning to be a bit moth-eaten and tired. I find that I’m altogether much quieter, I think. I don’t love music any less, but there’s not the excess of energy I used to spend in enthusiasm and in intoxication. I feel much freer than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  The oldest person ever to hold a boxing title was 38. The oldest person ever to play in the NBA was 43. The oldest age at which anyone broke a track-and-field record was 41, in 1909. The oldest person to win an Olympic gold medal was 42, in 1920. In the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer wrote, “If gold ruste, what shal iren do?”

  At age 40, your preference for fast-paced activity declines.

  Beginning at 40, your white blood cells, which fight cancer and infectious diseases, have a lowered capacity.

  Jack London died at 40; Elvis Presley, at 42.

  On my 30th birthday, under my girlfriend’s influence, I got my left ear pierced and bought a diamond earring. I wore various earrings over the next 10 years or so, but wearing an earring never really worked for me. Earrings forced me to confront the nature of my style, or lack of style. I’m certainly not macho enough to wear an earring as if I were a tough guy, but neither am I effeminate enough to wear an earring in my right ear as if I were maybe gay-in-training. Instead, I’m just muddling through, and the earring forced me, over time, to see this, acknowledge it, and respond to it. On my 40th birthday, under the influence of Natalie, who thought it made me look like a pirate, I took out the earring I was then wearing—a gold hoop—and haven’t worn an earring since.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died at 44, wrote in his notebook, “Drunk at 20, wrecked at 30, dead at 40.”

  Each year, more fat gets deposited in the walls of medium and larger arteries, causing the arterial walls to narrow. The weight of your small intestine decreases; the volume and weight of your kidneys shrink. Total blood flow to the kidney decreases by 10 percent for every decade after the age of 40. Every organ will eventually get less nourishment than it needs to do its job.

  Don Marquis, an American newspaper columnist who died at 59, said, “Forty and forty-five are bad enough; fifty is simply hell to face; fifteen minutes after that you are sixty; and then in ten minutes more you are eighty-five.”

  “Forty-five,” said Joseph Conrad, “is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the sinister valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill.” Those clichés of male midlife crisis—having an affair, for instance, or buying a red sports car—are, on a biological level, anyway, profound rebellions of the “rage, rage, against the dying of the light” sort. My father’s first marriage broke apart when he had an affair with his gorgeous, red-haired secretary at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, one picture of whom appeared—somewhat bizarrely—in our family photo album.

  Cicero said, “Old age begins at forty-six.” He died at 53.

  John Kennedy died at 46.

  Virginia Woolf said, “Control of life is what one should learn now: its economic management. I feel cautious, like a poor person, now I am forty-six.”

  Victor Hugo said, “Forty is the old age of youth. Fifty is the youth of old age.”

  On my 10th birthday, when my father was 56, he pitched so hard to me and my friends that we were afraid to hit against him. “Get in the batter’s box,” he growled at us.

  Bloodline to Star Power (ii)

  In 1955, my parents were living in Los Angeles, my mother was working for the ACLU, and she asked my father to ask Joseph Schildkraut to participate in an ACLU-sponsored memorial to Albert Einstein, who had died in April. “After all,” my father wrote in reply to one of my innumerable requests for more information, “Einstein was a German Jew and Pepi [Schildkraut’s nickname] had spent so much of his professional life in Berlin and was a member of a group of prominent people who had fled Germany in the years before Hitler and lived in the Pacific Palisades–Santa Monica area.”

  My father got Schildkraut’s phone number and called him, telling him he was a Schildkraut, too, and inviting him to speak at the memorial tribute. “After much backing-and-filling and long, pregnant pauses (his, not mine) on the phone,” my father said, Schildkraut told my father to bring him the script. A few days later my father went to Schildkraut’s house in Beverly Hills to show him the script he would read at the memorial if he decided to appear on the program. Schildkraut came to the door, greeting Shields (né Shildcrout) stiffly. “He was very businesslike—cold, distant.” For a moment or two they talked about their families. My father told him about the backstage visit in 1923. Joseph knew absolutely nothing of the Schildkraut family’s ancestry. “Joseph Schildkraut, I would say,” my father said, “and I think it’s a fair statement, was somebody who didn’t think about his Jewish heritage.”

  Schildkraut talked to my father for about thirty minutes in the foyer of the big, rambling house. “Later, in telling the story, I often exaggerated—said he clicked his h
eels, Prussian-like. He really didn’t.” Schildkraut said that he had to show the script to Dore Schary for approval. (Schary was a writer who had become the head of production at RKO and then MGM. Anti-Communist fears lingered; the blacklist was still in effect.) Schildkraut told Shields to come back in a week.

  When my father returned, Schildkraut again talked with him rapidly in the foyer of the house—“On neither visit did he have me come into the living room, nor did he introduce me to his wife, who was moving about in the next room”—and wound up saying that Schary had read the script and said it was all right. The script was taken almost entirely from Einstein’s writings on civil liberties, academic freedom, and freedom of speech. The memorial was held at what was then the Hollywood Athletic Club and later became the University of Judaism. Also on the platform were Linus Pauling; A. L. Wirin, the chief counsel to the ACLU; John Howard Lawson, a screenwriter and the unofficial spokesman for the “Hollywood Ten” Anne Revere, who before being blacklisted won an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her performance as Elizabeth Taylor’s mother in National Velvet; and a novelist who my father insists was once famous and who in any case has a name worthy of the Marx Brothers—Lion Feuchtwanger.

  The event was free. Every seat in the immense auditorium was filled. Hundreds of people sat in the aisles. Eason Monroe, the executive director of the ACLU and a man upon whom my mother had an immense, lifelong crush, asked the overflow audience to find seats or standing room in several small rooms upstairs. Monroe assured them that all the speakers would come upstairs to address them after speaking in the main auditorium. The program started a little late, about 8:30 P.M., but Schildkraut still hadn’t shown up. Monroe asked Shields, “Milt, where’s your cousin? It’s getting late.” My father assured Monroe he’d be there. “He was too big a ham to stay away on such an occasion.” His name had appeared prominently in the ads as one of the main speakers.

  Finally, Schildkraut showed. Monroe greeted him and asked him if, as the others had consented to do, he would also speak to the groups upstairs. Schildkraut said that first he’d speak to the main auditorium audience; then he’d “see.”

  The other speakers—Pauling, Wirin, Lawson, Revere, and Feuchtwanger—spoke to the audience in the main auditorium, were “warmly received” (whatever that means), then went upstairs to speak once again to the overflow audience in a couple of anterooms. “The occasion lifted even the most uninspired speaker and material to emotional heights,” according to my father. “But then came Pepi, the last speaker on the program. When he got to the podium, the audience was noisy and restless. After all, people were feeling the emotion of the memorial to this great man. Schildkraut took one look out there and employed the actor’s stratagem: he whispered the first line or two, and a hush fell over the audience. Then, when he was sure he had their attention, he thundered the next lines. When he finished, he got a standing ovation. And this for a political naïf, or worse: a man who certainly didn’t agree with everything he had just read, or anything else Einstein stood for. But he was the consummate actor, and he read his lines—to perfection.”

  When Schildkraut finished, my father asked him about going upstairs. Schildkraut looked right through Shields and walked out the door. “Now he truly was like a Prussian soldier. That’s the last time I saw him. In person, that is. Of course, I saw The Diary of Anne Frank on the screen half a dozen times. And if it’s ever on television, I watch it again.”

  Boys vs. Girls (iii)

  By ages 30 to 34, women are 85 percent as fertile as they were at 20 to 24, and the rates decline to 35 percent by 40 to 44, and to virtually 0 percent after age 50. Among men, the decline in fertility is more gradual: at 45 to 50, men retain 90 percent of their peak fertility, a rate that declines to only 80 percent after 55. Males who mate with older women pass on less genetic coding, while females can mate with older men without the same problem.

  On January 22, 2005, in Palm Beach, Florida, at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, before 400 of their friends, Donald Trump, now 61, who is estimated to be worth $2.5 billion, married his companion of six years, blue-eyed Slovenian-Austrian model Melania Knauss, now 37. Trump was previously married to models Marla Maples and Ivana Winklmayr. Two sons and a daughter from his first marriage, and his daughter from his second marriage, attended the half-hour wedding, which was the culmination of three days of celebrations.

  At the ceremony, the bride, who said she may want to have children (when her baby was born the following year, the baby pictures were sold to People for what were estimated to be “the mid-six figures”), lit the unity candle that she had used during her baptism. Knauss said she wanted an event that was “chic, elegant, simple, and sexy.” Her dress was made of 300 feet of white satin, had a 13-foot train, weighed 50 pounds, took all 28 of Christian Dior’s seamstresses 1,000 hours to stitch, and took an additional 50 hours to embroider. Trump said about Knauss, “When we walk into a restaurant, I watch grown men weep.”

  According to French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who donated his services, the new Mrs. Trump has “impeccable taste” Donald Trump is his landlord. The wedding cake stood two yards high and was covered with 3,000 sugar roses. The reception, held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion, featured a 36-piece orchestra.

  Billy Joel, who at 55 had recently married “restaurant correspondent” Katie Lee, 23, in a wedding at which his daughter, Alexa Ray, 19, was a maid of honor, said Trump’s wedding was a “beautiful ceremony.”

  When he was 53, John Derek was asked by Barbara Walters whether he would still love his wife, Bo Derek, then 23, if she were disfigured or paralyzed. He thought for a moment and said no. Bo Derek tried hard to smile, but she couldn’t.

  Sex Changes (Everything)

  Menopause, which typically occurs between ages 45 and 50, is unique to humans, for which there’s a good evolutionary reason: by age 50, a mother is beginning to experience many of the adverse effects of aging. She enhances her genetic contribution to future generations if she stops having babies of her own and thereby increases the likelihood that she’ll survive to raise her children and assist with her grandchildren.

  Menopause happens gradually: 10 or more years before they cease menstruation, women may experience briefer cycles. At age 30, women typically get their periods every 28 to 30 days; at age 40, every 25 days; at 46, every 23 days. After age 35, women’s eggs are more genetically defective; if fertilization occurs, the babies produced are more likely to have birth defects. The follicles stop obeying orders from the brain to make estrogen. The amount of estrogen, especially estradiol, the most powerful estrogen, becomes scarce.

  As women lose estrogen, their pubic hair becomes more sparse, the labia become more wrinkled, and the skin surrounding the vulva atrophies. The cell walls of a woman’s vagina become weaker and more prone to tearing; the vagina gets drier, more susceptible to infection, and—with loss of elasticity—less able to shrink and expand, less accommodating to the insertion of a penis. (Mickey Rooney on Ava Gardner: “She was unique down there, like a little warm mouth.”) In postmenopausal women who aren’t receiving estrogen, the vagina becomes smaller in length and diameter. Women’s breasts sag and mammary gland tissue is replaced by fat, which aggravates the sagging and is accompanied by wrinkling. The nipples become smaller and get erect less easily. Stretch marks in the breast grow darker. Fat accumulates in the torso, especially near the waist, neck, arms, and thighs—which creates uneven bulges, except in the face, which loses fat and creates a hollower visage. (A friend of Laurie’s told her, “At forty, a woman must choose between her face and her ass: nice ass, gaunt face; good face, fat ass.”) Women’s skin wrinkles, dries, and thins. Men have a thicker dermis than women do, which may be why women’s facial skin seems to deteriorate more quickly. Premenopausal women typically show no loss of bone density; postmenopausal women show a faster rate of bone loss than men of comparable age.

  For women ages 20 to 40, vaginal lubrication after sexual arousal takes 15
to 30 seconds; for women 50 to 78, it takes 1 to 5 minutes. For younger women, the vagina expands without pain during arousal; for older women, there’s a limit to the expansion. Increased blood flow causes the labia minora in younger women to become red; in older women, there’s no reddening. For younger women, the clitoris elevates and flattens against the body; in older women, this doesn’t happen. For younger women, during orgasm, the vagina contracts and expands in smooth, rhythmic waves, usually 8 to 12 contractions in approximately 1-second intervals, and the uterus contracts. For older women, there are only 4 to 5 contractions, and when the uterus contracts, it’s sometimes painful. Older women return to a pre-arousal state much more rapidly.

  When men turn 40, the tissues in the back of the prostate gland atrophy and the muscle degenerates, replaced by inelastic connective tissue. A hard mass sometimes appears on the prostate, causing men to produce less semen and at a lower pressure. For many men, the gland cells and the connective tissue in the middle of the prostate overgrow, causing pain during urination. Enlargement of the prostate gland occurs in almost all men, including my father (who had prostate surgery at 85), and the hormone changes that accompany this enlargement can result in various diseases, including cancer. Rates of testicular cancer peak in the 30s, then decline sharply. More inflexible connective tissue grows on the surface of the penis, whose veins and arteries become more rigid. With the reduced blood flow, men find it increasingly difficult to produce and maintain erections. One physician calls the brief, violent upsurge of sexual desire in old men the “final kick of the prostate.”

  Men ages 20 to 40 need 3 to 5 seconds to achieve an erection when stimulated; for men ages 50 to 89, it takes 10 seconds to several minutes. Younger men quickly feel the need to ejaculate; older men feel less of a need to ejaculate, even over several episodes. For younger men during orgasm, the urethra contracts 3 to 4 times in one-second intervals; semen travels 1 to 2 feet. For older men during orgasm, the urethra contracts 1 to 2 times; ejaculation is 3 to 5 inches, with less semen and a smaller amount of viable sperm. The proportion of immature sperm increases over time. Young men return to a pre-arousal state in anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours, in two stages; older men return in a couple of seconds, in a single stage.