How Old Age Was Reborn
It started, like many good things, as a joke. NBC was filming a preview of its 1984 lineup, and Selma Diamond, a comedian in her sixties, had been tasked with introducing “Miami Vice,” a flashy affair of Ferraris, cocaine cartels, and designer sports jackets. She pretended to misunderstand. “ ‘Miami Nice’?” At last, a show about
It started, like many good things, as a joke. NBC was filming a preview of its 1984 lineup, and Selma Diamond, a comedian in her sixties, had been tasked with introducing “Miami Vice,” a flashy affair of Ferraris, cocaine cartels, and designer sports jackets. She pretended to misunderstand. “ ‘Miami Nice’?” At last, a show about retirees, with their mink coats and cha-cha lessons. She got a laugh. And some execs thought it might not be a terrible idea.
The network proposed Diamond’s concept to two producers, Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas. The show, an executive explained, should feature ostensibly “over the hill” characters who were nonetheless “young in attitude.” Witt brought the idea to the writer Susan Harris, his wife, who came up with a pilot script. Harris had already pushed television’s limits with a show featuring an openly gay character (“Soap”), a show about a lusty divorcée (“Fay”), and a controversial story line about abortion (on “Maude”). Having written four seasons of “Soap” episodes, she was drained and planning to leave television. Still, a sitcom about older women was hard to resist. Here was another barrier to smash, Harris felt—“a demographic that had never been addressed.”
“I was figuring women who were sixty to seventy,” Harris later recalled. She gulped when she realized that the network expected to see women in their forties—her age. A compromise was reached. When “The Golden Girls” débuted, in 1985, one of the lead actors, Rue McClanahan, was in her fifties, and the others—Bea Arthur, Betty White, and Estelle Getty—were in their sixties. Usually, television consigned such women to unflattering supporting roles. Here, they were the stars, with nary a young or male co-star in sight. (A gay live-in cook appeared in the pilot but promptly vanished. Coco, you are not forgotten.) The feminist Betty Friedan praised the show for defying the “universal grayout of older women on network TV.”
It was the right moment. The President, Ronald Reagan, was a septuagenarian who made a show of chopping wood and riding horses. More generally, healthy seniors—the “wellderly”—were on the rise. Popular culture’s usual parade of toothless codgers and crones increasingly seemed obsolete. “The Golden Girls” (1985-92) joined a silver surge of television shows featuring energetic older protagonists, including “Murder, She Wrote” (1984-96), “Matlock” (1986-95), and Susan Harris’s “Empty Nest” (1988-95).
“The Golden Girls” was particularly adored. It ranked among the ten most watched shows for six of its seven seasons. Emmys rained down: three awards for best actress in a comedy, in three consecutive years, for White, McClanahan, and Arthur, and a supporting-actress award for Getty. In ratings and acclaim, “The Golden Girls” blew “Miami Vice” and its speedboats clear out of the water.
Not bad for a show that was almost militantly unglamorous. The Golden Girls had old-lady hair, wore loose clothes, and joked about their faltering bodies. A much loved scene, written by Harris, has the Girls considering the effect of various body positions on the sagging of their faces and breasts. There was a burlesque quality to this but also defiant pride. Here was a senior subculture, with its own fashion, politics, and humor.
It also had some continuities with what the historian Steven Mintz calls the “youthquake” of the postwar years. The baby boomers developed “intense generational self-consciousness,” Mintz writes, as they came to identify more with their peers than with their parents. Something similar happened at the other end of the age spectrum—a geriatric rumble. “Older Americans are now historically in the process of changing from a category into a group,” the sociologist Arnold Rose observed, presciently, in 1965.
The emergence of senior politics is chronicled in James Chappel’s new book, “Golden Years” (Basic). Chappel, who’s a historian at Duke (I overlapped with him briefly at another university), describes how older people changed the narrative about aging and created “perhaps the most powerful interest group in twentieth-century America.” Today, he notes, they receive about a third of federal spending. “Golden Years” is a highly perceptive account, the most substantial one we have, of how seniors rose to become a dominant force in the United States.
“The Golden Girls” captured this gung-ho spirit. Estelle Getty recalled letters from older viewers who found the show “tremendously liberating.” Yet, with the boomers now fully in the Golden Girl age range—the youngest are now turning sixty—it’s worth asking where this liberation leads.
In 1932, the journalist Walter B. Pitkin published the best-seller “Life Begins at Forty.” With better technology and working conditions, he imagined people living well even into their sixties. Pitkin himself lived to seventy-four. His son, Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., published a follow-up, in 1965, “Life Begins at Fifty,” and lived to nearly ninety-four. Other books pushed further: “Life Begins at 6src,” “Life Begins at 7src.” Is there a limit? Politicians today seem unsure whether life begins at conception or at eighty.
This is the so-called longevity revolution. Medical advances, reduced child mortality, and life-style improvements have increased life expectancy by three decades since 19srcsrc, from forty-seven to more than seventy-seven. Back then, one in twenty-five Americans was over sixty-five. Now it’s one in six. The number of Social Security beneficiaries nearly equals the combined populations of California and Texas.
We are taking longer to die. This is perhaps a dubious achievement; “flogging the patient” is what some doctors call the invasive procedures that keep people going in groggy, intubated misery. The main story isn’t the prolongation of death, though. It’s the prolongation of life. With artificial joints, cataract surgeries, hearing aids, supplemental oxygen, Viagra, and maybe a squirt of Botox, seniors stay in the game. The pickleball years, as some think of them, can last decades.
No group has trumpeted this truth more loudly than the American Association of Retired Persons, founded in 1958. Fifty years earlier, the very idea of a national league for the retired would have made little sense. But by 1988 the A.A.R.P. claimed nearly half of the age-eligible population as members, and its magazine was the widest-circulating in the country. “Only the Roman Catholic church had more Americans on its rolls,” Chappel notes. In the late nineties, Washington insiders ranked the A.A.R.P. as the country’s most powerful lobby, over the N.R.A., the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and AIPAC. It’s “similar to the Mafia,” the humorist Dave Barry wrote, “but more concerned about dietary fiber.”
And about travel discounts. The A.A.R.P.’s growth was a triumph of consumerism more than advocacy. The organization started by offering insurance deals to seniors; this blossomed into the country’s largest group insurance plan. The A.A.R.P. mentioned its members’ hardships when lobbying Washington to protect Social Security, but it ultimately “saw itself less as a pressure group” than as a “lifestyle organization,” Chappel writes. To its corporate partners—selling hotel stays, cruises, and the like—it presented its members as hedonistic, affluent buyers who (in the words of an A.A.R.P. media kit) were “spending on self-fulfillment NOW” rather than “leaving large sums behind.” Of course, only a fortunate fraction, largely white, had the health and the wealth to live their later years as hyper-consumers. But the A.A.R.P. flourished on the strength of that market.
If Chappel is critical of the A.A.R.P., he has more sympathy for the Gray Panthers. They were, in the words of their founder, Maggie Kuhn, the only national old-age group that “also speaks out against the size of the defense budget.” The Gray Panthers formed, in 197src, to protest mandatory retirement but soon took on the Vietnam War, nuclear arms, and student loans, too. The Panther organization was smaller and more pugnacious than the A.A.R.P.—a Chihuahua to the A.A.R.P.’s St. Bernard—but shared the larger group’s fixation on highly active seniors. The white-haired Kuhn was a spark plug: she appeared on “Saturday Night Live,” joined picket lines, and got herself thrown out of a Social Security commission hearing. At rallies, she’d have followers stand up, raise their arms, and growl.
Both groups recoiled at the image of old people as frail or needy. Seeing them that way was “ageism,” a term invented in 1969. “Anything young people can do, you can do too” is how Chappel summarizes the A.A.R.P.’s message to its members. The Gray Panthers ran a Media Watch that scolded television shows for portraying the elderly as helpless, confused, or decrepit. “The Golden Girls” scored high marks. “You’re only as old as you feel,” the eldest Golden Girl, Sophia, insists, after staying up late dancing with the residents of a retirement home.
0 comments