Age-Before-Beauty Weekend

As 94-year-old Kirk Douglas upstages the upstarts at the Oscars comes word that the oldest living veteran of World War I has died at 110.

Kirk teases the supporting actresses by dawdling with the envelope, pinches winner Melissa Leo at her request and, after she drops an F-bomb, lets her grab his cane as they exit, she looking less steady than he.

Meanwhile, Frank Buckles, who as a 16-year-old lied about his age to enlist in 1917 and survived World War II as a civilian Japanese prisoner, takes with him not only his title but the apparently easygoing temperament that sustained him for a century plus a decade.

In the longevity sweepstakes, my bragging rights as 87 looms later this week seem feeble by comparison but prompt thoughts about aging, a subject that usually elicits commentary from isn't-he-or-she cute to it's-the-pits. ("Old age is a shipwreck," said Charles de Gaulle, but typically the General was middle-aged and not talking about himself.)

The truth, as it usually is, exists in a (forgive me) grey area. If you're healthy, you can do much of what you did before but, like life insurance, it costs twice as much to get half the return.

If there is a secret to aging, it involves the paradox of simultaneous involvement and detachment. Younger people keep urging you not to live in the past, but the past keeps living in you in a search for meaning in what you were too busy to think about when you were doing it.

With the dropping away of old grudges and regrets comes a focus on the present and a future you will never see but hope to influence in some small way with what you have learned over the years.

Watching Kirk Douglas now recalls a time when we were together in a Park Avenue duplex at one of those gatherings where the privileged babble away with no human connection whatever.

To keep the conversation going, I suggested a game: Name the actor you would want to star in a movie of your life. “As for me,” I said, nodding at him across the table, “I see Kirk in the part.”

He smiled the familiar dazzling smile that never quite reaches his eyes, a flash of the amused anger that fueled his movie-star charm. I smiled back in what I took to be a moment of shared irony between Jewish boys of dirt-poor parents being wined, dined and bored by the very rich.

I meant what I said then. I still do. Colin Firth is much too young and callow for the part.

Senate's Grumpiest Old Man Faces Charges

The proponent of the "Bridge to Nowhere" may be going somewhere after all. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska was indicted on seven counts of corruption today involving doubling the size of his home at the expense of lobbyist friends.

They literally raised the roof of what is called Stevens' chalet by lifting the building onto stilts and putting an entirely new first floor under it.

For someone of my generation, the decline and fall of the irascible 84-year-old is a sad reminder that aging is no protection against self-destructive behavior.

Stevens started out as a World War II pilot who received the Distinguished Flying Cross for two years in the China-India-Burma Theater, supporting the "Flying Tigers" and Chinese combat units behind enemy lines.

Now, after 38 years in the Senate, during which he has grown increasingly ornery in pursuit of pork for his constituents, the Alaska Senator will be going on trial for making false statements on his Senate financial forms.

Long before he faces a jury, those constituents will be rendering a verdict on Stevens' continuing in the Senate in November.

While West Virginia's Robert Byrd, who turns 91 that month, is still going strong, the Stevens indictment raises questions about term limits in the Senate. Maybe 40 years is enough.

Exits: Paul Newman and Robert Redford

“Certain friendships,” Robert Redford once said about Paul Newman, “are too good and too strong to talk about.” This month, Redford broke his silence to say that the final movie they planned to make together was not to be:

"It's not happening, sadly. Paul and I were planning to do a film version of Bill Bryson's wonderful book ‘A Walk In The Woods.’

"I got the rights to the movie four years ago, and we couldn't decide if we were too old to do it. Then we decided, 'Let's go for it.'

"But time passed, and Paul's been getting old fast. I think things deteriorated for him. Finally, two months ago he called and said, 'I gotta retire.' The picture was written and everything. It breaks my heart."

Like their other work together, it would have been about the friendship of men, two old college buddies walking the Appalachian trail from Georgia to Maine.

Toward the end of life, biology is destiny. A British actor of the past century, A. E. Matthews, who worked to the age of 90, explained, “I get up every morning, look at the obituaries in the Times and, if my name isn’t there, get dressed and go to work.”

But last spring, the 82-year-old Newman told an interviewer, "I’m not able to work at the level I would want to. You start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention. So I think that's pretty much a closed book for me."

Redford at 71 has a new picture coming out next month, “Lions for Lambs,” which he directed and plays a leading role in. More polemical than his previous work, Redford hopes the movie will encourage young people “to take command of their voice" in American politics.

Over long careers, Newman and Redford personified an alternative American manhood to the full-throttle macho of John Wayne and the young Clint Eastwood--a more complex mix of strength, wit and sensitivity. (Newman turned down "Dirty Harry.")

Off-screen, they lived away from Hollywood--Newman in Connecticut, Redford in Utah--lives of social responsibility rather than movie-star celebrity.

In 1968, my path crossed Newman’s as we both stepped out of our working lives to oppose the war in Vietnam. When I invited him to lunch with a dozen magazine editors, he told me the prospect of talking about himself was so unnerving he had stayed too long in a steam bath to calm down. Sitting next to him, I had to titrate the balance of beer and ice water to keep him relaxed and hydrated as he eloquently described his feelings about the war.

In the early 1980s, our mutual friend A. E. Hotchner wrote about their light-hearted efforts to bottle and sell Newman's salad dressing. Since then, a line of Newman's Own products has earned $200 million for charity.

Meanwhile, Redford was creating a mecca for independent film makers in Sundance, Utah and giving their work recognition and commercial opportunities.

As Newman exits from the public stage and Redford keeps working for the public good, those repeated showings of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" on TV are reminders of how much actors can accomplish in what we call real life.

Terrorists Get Old, Too

Time works its will on everyone, even fanatics. Those who don’t strap explosives to themselves and ascend to their 72 virgins are not immune to the coming of age.

Here is Osama bin Laden in the latest terrorist video, looking wan and grey, reduced to a 50-second cameo, waxing philosophical:

"So this whole broad life is summarized by him who was inspired by God, the Lord of the heavens and earth, praised and exalted is he. This glorious prophet who was inspired by God summarized this entire life by these words...Happy is the one who was chosen by God as a martyr."

That elegiac snippet of uncertain vintage suggests aging and the loss of fire in the belly. In Wordsworth’s words, “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?”

But compared to Carlos the Jackal, bin Laden is still in his prime. Venezuelan-born Vladimir Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, who bombed his way to fame in the 1970s, in an interview from a French prison this week, called the current Islamic terrorists the Gallic equivalent of whippersnappers.

“They are not professionals,” Carlos scoffed. “They’re not organized. They don’t even know how to make proper explosives or proper detonators.”

In his day, Carlos pointed out, killing people at random was amateur night. He selected his targets to make a point.

Comforting as it is to know that terrorists get old and flabby, like the rest of us, it would be churlish not to wish them an early death to escape these mortal pangs.