I was into MILFs way before the acronym became familiar, you bet.
When I was 12 or 13 I had the distinct hots for a married neighbor and a mother of four, although nothing ever “happened”.
The usual junior-high-school fantasies about my foxy 20something teachers interfered with my grades, of course.
When I was 15 or 16 my mother sat me down and warned me about predatory older women, which only whetted my appetite.
When I was 22 and living in Southport I was seriously entwined with a 34 year-old divorcee named Suzie, and I distinctly recall she and I being sternly lectured by her next-door neighbors about our perverse behavior.
When I was driving for Checker Cab in Boston I was briefly hot-and-heavy with a classy, salt-and-pepper-haired woman of means, and in the late ’70s I had at least three casual affairs with Westport women in their late 30s and 40s.
Hence my lifelong interest in films about same. The fruit wasn’t forbidden, but was at least frowned upon to some extent.
The first poke-through was A Cold Wind in August (’61), in which a 30something stripper (Lola Albright) fell for a 17 year-old lad (Scott Marlowe). Six years later the bloody doors were blown off by a fascinating affair between the 40ish Mrs Robinson (played by a 35 year-old Anne Bancroft) and the 20-year-old Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman was 29) in Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate (’67).
Two years later came That Cold Day in the Park (’69), in which the 30-year-old Sandy Dennis became deeply involved with an 18 year-old (Michael Burns).
Such affairs, in short, enjoyed a certain Hollywood vogue for a while, but then wore off and pretty much went away. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few titles, although Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession doesn’t count due to the emotional constipation factor, no to mention Jane Wyman‘s extremely unflattering pageboy haircut.
Now, in any event, there’s a slight resurgence of this kind of thing with May December (Netflix, 11.17), a curiously admired Todd Haynes drama that’s partly based upon the real-life affair between school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau (now deceased) and Vili Fualaau, who was around 13 when things began to happen. Letourneau was jailed but they were subsequently married, and wound up with two kids. Letourneau died of cancer on 7.6.20.
Julianne Moore plays the Letourneau-resembling Gracie Atherton, a neurotic 60something dessert chef who’s married to Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), a 36 year-old half-Korean dude who was also around 13 when Gracie technically “raped” him while they were working together at a pet store, and with whom they’re currently raising two or three college-age kids.
I’m not a fan of May December, which will open the N.Y. Film Festival on Friday, 9.29. But at least it’s resuscitated the notion of risque, once-frowned-upon relationships of this kind.
I’d like to see such pairings depicted more often. One interesting possibility, for example, would be the real-life, four-year affair between Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Wagner, whicb began when they were respectively 45 and 22 — a striking age difference that caused, in the parlance of Eric Clapton, talk and suspicion.
I’m mentioning Stanwyck-Wagner because no female industry professional or film critic would raise their eyebrows if such a relationship were to be dramatized today. It would pass muster by current standards, although the depiction of an older man-younger woman Hollywood age-gap affair of 20 or 25 years, which used to be fairly common, would never be produced in today’s climate.
It’s extremely difficult to imagine anyone wanting to remake, say, Up Close and Personal, an unsuccessful 1996 romantic drama that was vaguely based upon the life of the late Jessica Savitch, and dealt with a May-December relationship between an older TV news producer (Robert Redford) and a young ambitious reporter (Michelle Pfeiffer). Such a story would probably be regarded as problematic and distasteful, to say the least.
No one today would touch a remake of Fred Schepisi‘s The Russia House (’90) with a twenty-foot pole. A romantic espionage drama based on a John Le Carre novel, it presented a love affair between Pfeiffer (then 32) and Sean Connery (then pushing 60) — a 28-year gap.
I could go on and on about older guy-younger woman relationships of this sort, which used to be par for the course but are now mostly out of the question. But older women and younger guys? No problemo.
