I went away for a few weeks this summer, and I grew a beard. I didn’t plan to grow it. I just got lazy.
The alarming thing about my beard was that it grew in nearly white. Meaning, it grew in old.
But I let it grow. I kept telling myself that it was “salt and pepper,” which, according to style magazines, is very hot right now. The truth is, my beard is entirely “salt.” And not even that dirty-looking salt they rake up on the beach on the shores of Normandy. My beard is the artificial plastic white color of a cheap Santa beard.
I looked like Ernest Hemingway just a day or so before he decided to end it all, which for all I know was the result of his looking in the mirror and thinking, “I had no idea I was so old.”
I’m telling this story because I want to make it clear that I’m just as vain and insecure about my appearance as anyone. Like a lot of people, I don’t want to look old. But there’s something a lot worse than looking old, and that’s looking like an old person who is trying to look young.
It starts with trying to get rid of the gray hairs, and it ends up in the office of an expensive plastic surgeon, talking about a jowl snip, a fat suck, a tighten here, a lift there.
Don’t do it. It will look terrible. Just as we know, deep down, that we cannot successfully nation-build in Central Asia, we also know, deep down, that we cannot make an old person look young.
I have been in Hollywood casting meetings — high-level casting meetings, with heads of networks, heads of studios, casting directors, everyone — all trying to cast a juicy part for a slightly older female.
See if you can do this: Try to cast a young, vibrant, funny older female in your head. Think of a TV star to play the role.
Now ask yourself: How does she look these days? Weird, right? All saucer-eyed and swollen-lipped and cheekbone-protuberant.
Like the Joker. Like some kind of fish.
The last time we had to cast a part like that, we all excluded the top three women on our list — women whose names you know, by the way — right at the start of the meeting because they look too “weird.”
Not too old. Old is OK. Old you can address with lighting and makeup. But “weird” you can’t do a thing about.
We’d tried to cast the part for weeks and finally decided, well, maybe in person, up close, one of these actresses didn’t look so permanently alarmed — so surgically shaped into a ghastly rictus. Maybe one of them looked actually saggy and real.
Not too saggy, of course — this is still Hollywood — but we were assured by the agent of one older star that her recent plastic surgery was, in his words, “subtle.” That the eye lift had been, again, his words, “just refreshment.”
She came into our office the next day and looked fully amphibious: eyes stretched to the side of her head, mouth carved into a permanent nonsmile.
What could we do? We had a nice meeting, but we had to move on to other choices. If we wanted to go for that kind of look, we’d do animation or set the series in some undersea kingdom.
This brings me back to my white beard. Who am I to talk? The entertainment industry is a young person’s business, an appearance business. Projecting a youthful and vibrant image is important. I understand what those women were thinking when they went into the doctor’s office and told the doctor to “stretch this” and “lift that” and “pull this back behind my head and tie it off.”
This morning, I decided to shave the beard off.
But something stopped me. Pride, maybe. Dignity. A certain courage. The sense that age and experience are things to be celebrated and honored. The white beard and the eye wrinkles are the combat medals of a life lived to the fullest.
But luckily, that feeling passed, and I shaved the damn thing off. Everyone’s gotta make a living, you know?
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and a co-founder of Ricochet.com.
