When stars die in their prime, they never age, and yet . . .
Shakespeare got it right, which figures. In his Sonnet V, he wrote lines to chill the soul of even the ripest or tautest sex symbol among us:
For never-resting time leads summer on/To hideous winter, and confounds him there;/Sap check'd with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,/Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness everywhere.
Heavy.
It brings to mind The Who, those great philosophers, who said: Hope I die before I get old.
They didn't really mean it. It's just a song, an attitude. Heck, it even took drummer Keith Moon 42 years to exit the earth, no matter how much he tried.
But we think of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow, River Phoenix and Heath Ledger. They're among those who did indeed die before they got old.
Tragically young, tragically beautiful, and forever fixed in our minds that way. They make for great wall posters in college dorm rooms.
Because as some wags point out, dying young can be a great career move. Consider:
Die young, and you don't ever go on Dancing With the Stars.
You don't make commercials for Viagra or for songs we used to love.
No one ever says, "Didn't you used to be . . .?"
No one ever says, "She was once a great beauty."
You don't have ugly episodes with your grown children.
You're never roasted by the Friars.
You never make a reunion special for TV.
No one makes snide comments about your hairpiece.
No one ever wonders how much work you've had done.
Comedians don't make fat jokes about you.
Tabloids and TMZ don't drool over your wrinkles-without-makeup, your drooping gut, your cellulite in a bikini.
You never star in a reality show about your pathetic, washed-up life.
You never have to make a comeback.
Your chances of making crazy anti-Semitic rants are greatly reduced.
You just stay young - forever.
But . . . but . . .
Check out early, and there's much that you miss out on. There are far worse things, after all, than being an aging sex symbol, especially if you handle the years with some grace and character.
So spite the tabloids and TMZ, spite the comedians. Watch the carbs, work out. Welcome the decades. Be more like Paul Newman or Helen Mirren, Sean Connery (when he ditches the hairpiece) or Julie Christie. Age gracefully.
You might not have the glamor that comes with dying young. But it's hard not to think of the missed opportunities, those vanished decades, of those who went too early.
Take Marilyn Monroe. She'd be coming up on her 82nd birthday; don't you think she could have had some fun with growing old? James Dean would be just 77; how could he have changed the craft of acting if he hadn't crashed on that lonely California road?
And Health Ledger? Man, he was just getting started.
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