Dirty Old Men

How do you people feel about Sean Penn hooking up with Scarlett Johansson?  Are some first year stomachs churning at the thought of the lecherous old sheep dog getting his paws on those succulent, twenty-something breasts?  For those of us closer in age to Penn he’s become a bit of a hero.  Winning two Best Actor Oscars is one thing, surviving a marriage to Madonna is another but sleeping with the finest movie star mammaries in the world really takes the cake.  It beats even those earlier rumours about him and Natalie Portman for this time there’s photographic evidence.  Get to your nearest internet connection or women’s magazine and check out Sean and Scarlett playing inter-generational footsies!

Age differentials in leading couples are part and parcel of Hollywood folklore.  Bogie and Bacall?  He was 45, she was 19.  Charlie Chaplin and wife Oona O’Neill?  He was 54, she was 18.  Woody Allen and former step-daughter Soon Yi Previn?  He was 57, she was 21.  Cary Grant and final squeeze Barbara Harris?  He was 77, she was 30.

Things have been known to work the other way around too, especially if the female is the bigger star.  The world continues to take guilty pleasure in the last gasps of 94 year old Zsa Zsa Gabor as she’s exploited by a bogus prince of a spouse who’s over a quarter century her junior.  1930s beauty Merle Oberon married for the last time at age 64 to then 39 year old Robert Wolders.  After her death he romanced Audrey Hepburn, a comparatively insignificant 7 years his senior.

Off screen romantic patterns reflect on screen sexism.  In an industry where an actress’s use-by date tends to be around 40, chronological mismatches are legend.  Who could blame Hepburn for ending her days in the arms of a toy boy after a studio career in which she endured a succession of geriatric leading men?  Gregory Peck was a mere 13 years older, but Henry Fonda was 24, Cary Grant 25 and Gary Cooper 28. Fred Astaire and Humphrey Bogart were born in a different century, a full three decades before Hepburn.

Woody Allen’s unusual private life has had plenty of precursors in his art.  Allen’s “Manhattan” is the definitive middle-age man/teenage girl relationship film, his character’s fling with barely legal high school student Mariel Hemingway the template for the seduction of Soon Yi 15 years later.