They come out on the world with lips shining,Flocks and generations, until timeSeems like nothing so muchAs a blinding snowstorm of virginity,And a man, lost in the perpetual scurry of white,Can only close his eyesIn a resignation of monogamy.—Christopher Fry's Venus ObservedMORE and more older men refuse to be resigned. Despite today's
much-heralded split between generations, which should guarantee coeval
marriages, the number of old-young alliances may be increasing.
Certainly their visibility is. As May arrives, December seems closer
than ever.Envy as well as enmity is aimed at Supreme Court Justice William O.
Douglas, 70, veteran of two other alliances with pretty young things,
and now married to 26-year-old Cathleen Heffernan. The recent marriage
of South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond, 66, and Nancy Janice Moore,
22, a former Miss South Carolina, suggests that even hard-shell
Baptists may join a trend that once seemed confined to jet-setters. The
Thurmonds typify a tendency of many May-December couples: they strive
to be more normal than normal. “I love her and I'm very happy,” says
Thurmond. “We have so many things in common.” Says Nancy: “We're such
good friends as well as partners.”Durable DesireAristotle claimed that the ideal marrying age was 37 for the man, 18 for
the woman. As he saw it, both would thus reach the end of their sexual
decline at roughly the same time, when he was 70 and she was 50. But
what do philosophers know anyway? In fact, a woman's sexual desire may
continue for years after menopause. In men, the desire may thrive until
an extraordinary age. In 1583, an Englishman named Thomas Parr was
found guilty of committing adultery at the age of 100 and did penance,
according to the custom of the time, by wearing a white sheet at the
door of the church. Legend has it that Parr remarried at the age of 120
and had children by his second wife. Teb Sharmat, a lively farmer in
the Caucasus, took a third wife—who was 50—when he was in
his 90s. He explained that he did not want to get out of the habit. Some time
before he died at 94, Bernard Berenson confided to his diary: “Only in
what might be called my old age have I become aware of sex and the
animal in woman.” William Butler Yeats, who finally married at 52, was
well into his 70s before he began trumpeting the raw sexuality of The
Wild Old Wicked Man. Victor Hugo, at 82, told the French Senate with a
wicked exuberance: “It is difficult for a man of my years to address
such an august body. Almost as difficult as it is for a man of my years
to make love three—no, four—times in one afternoon.”
