Ageless Love

It was a day like any other when Florence Courts meandered into a Santa Ana store to shop for furniture.

Then, bam!

It hit her.

“Like a lightning bolt. A thunder jolt. It literally threw me off my feet and I had to sit down,” she says of meeting heartthrob Art Sherman. He’s the tall, athletic, fun-loving guy who sold her four chairs and etched himself indelibly in her heart. They stayed in touch.

Sixteen years later, after Art’s wife died, he and Florence began to date.

“It’s been a wild, passionate roller-coaster ride ever since,” Florence reports. “Together we just click,” says Art. “We’re possibly the two happiest people on Earth.”

On June 9, they celebrated their first wedding anniversary. She’s 81; he’s 79.

Do old people have sex?

Do they experience real romantic love?

Do they feel the same yearnings, churnings, giddy desire, agonizing intensity--and the same serene fulfillment when they find the perfect mate--that we usually think of as the exclusive province of the young?

The answer is yes, yes, yes, to all the above.

What’s more, these questions are being asked with greater frequency as people live longer, divorce later and become widows and widowers at very advanced ages, but often still in good health. They are alone on life’s road once again . . . and looking for love.

And that’s why more families of old people are noticing--often with some embarrassment--thatGrandma or Grandpa is acting oddly adolescent these days: Worrying if the phone will ring. Wondering what to wear on a date. Spending hours with friends to plan romantic strategies. And sometimes (horrors!) staying out all night.

Cell phones are the latest rage for oldsters who don’t want their children to know they’re not sleeping at home, gerontologists say.

“In the morning, when their kids call to see if they are still alive, they answer the cell phone and nobody has to know whose bed they are in,” says Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of “The Anatomy of Love” (W.W. Norton & Co., 1992).

And as the huge baby boomer generation gets older, we’ll be hearing much more about all this, Fisher says: “Until now, our culture defined old people as sexually and romantically dead. We were wrong.”

*

Harold Goodman and Marj Lintz were married 44 years--to other people.

Each had enjoyed life’s bounty, and neither expected much more. Then, widower Harold went bowling and met widow Marj.

“She was it,” he says emphatically. “I was overwhelmed by him,” she recalls.

By the second date, they knew that this was something “different and special.” Very shortly thereafter, they knew that this was love.

“You cannot call it companionship. Or friendship. We would never have moved in together for that,” Marj says.

“No, indeed,” says Harold, trying hard to explain the depth of their union, and succeeding with three little words: “We are one.”

If they had met earlier in life, they say, they would have probably married each other instead of the spouses they chose. “We were each happily married,” Marj explains, “but not like this. For this . . . there are no words.”

They have lived and loved for the past nine years in a pristine, light-filled Woodland Hills cottage from which they sally forth to dine, dance, bowl, golf, act in commercials (he was a retired insurance agency owner when “discovered” as an actor at age 72).

Now, they’re “the Miller Lite couple,” advertising beer in a striking TV commercial, by groping each other while rolling around on a sofa, teenage style.

Harold is 92. Marjorie is 80.

What they really advertise best is their ardor’s agelessness.

*

The dynamic of elder love is not very different than for any other kind of love, experts say.

Only two factors mitigate against it: the absence of suitable partners (there are many more older women than men) and severe illness (with great age, physical problems tend to crop up). But if a person remains relatively healthy and is lucky enough to find a mate, then it’s business as usual, doctors and social scientists say.

“People remain sensual and sexual until they die. There is no age at which it ends,” says Dr. Loren Lipson, head of the geriatric division at USC School of Medicine. “When you are 85 and fall for someone, you act goofy and gaga and hold hands and do the same romantic things you might have done 65 years before.

“Younger people tend to think that’s yucko,” Lipson says. “Old people are supposed to be over the hill in that regard. Of course, they are anything but.”

The sexual yearnings of an older person are not met just by sex itself, he says, “but by holding, touching and communicating--the same as it is supposed to be for younger people. Too many young people think ‘the act’ is all there is to sex,” he says.

Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatrist and director of UCLA’s Center on Aging, says: “What we now know shatters all the standard myths: that older people don’t experience passion, have no interest in sex, or that the norm is to become feebleminded or get Alzheimer’s disease. Gerontologists have studied all this.”

Only 5% of the population above age 65 gets Alzheimer’s. Above age 80, the percentage rises, he adds. “But as long as someone is in reasonable health,” romance and all that goes with it is an option few would refuse, no matter how old they are, he says. “Older people do feel desire . . . and they are able to satisfy it.”

Anthropologist Fisher explains that women’s sex drive tends to peak in their late 20s or early 30s, and then remains the same in most women after menopause as before.

Men’s sex drive is highest in their early 20s, “and then goes slowly down until somewhere in middle age, when the sex drive in men and women becomes quite similar and equalized,” she says. This creates a perfect path, she says, for satisfying late-life love.

*

Gussie and Clyde Latham of Spur, Texas, know all about such things. They’ve been married three years. He’s 87; she’s 84.

But Clyde’s 53-year-old son, New York-based writer Aaron Latham, was not prepared for his father’s late-life love.

“It was totally unanticipated,” and at first seemed “a bit bizarre,” Aaron Latham says.

Only a few years before, the son had spent weeks with his father in his dying mother’s hospital room, trying to ease his dad’s profound despair, wondering how the older man would survive the death of the woman he had loved so deeply for so many years.

Indeed, his father seemed to fall apart after his mother’s death, which spurred the son to start calling Texas every night from New York, to see how his dad was doing.

Soon, he couldn’t get through.

Clyde was on the phone with Gussie, a woman who’d moved from Spur to Sacramento, Calif., 70 years before. A woman Clyde hadn’t laid eyes on in more than 50 years. A woman whose husband had died at about the same time as his own beloved wife.

And a woman for whom, it seems, Clyde had nursed a secret soft spot ever since he was a teenage boy.

After months of phone calls, Gussie promised to visit Clyde in Texas. Then she canceled. Then she promised and canceled again. And again. And again.

Each cancellation sent Clyde, a retired high school football coach, into deeper depression, it seemed to his son from afar. He started disliking this woman for hurting his dad, even though he didn’t know her.

Gussie’s family was equally protective. At first, her married daughter wanted to travel with her. That plan was scrapped, and the nervous Gussie decided to brave it alone.

After many aborted attempts, she finally made the trip with only four changes of clothes. This was to be her graceful way out, she later explained. When she’d worn each outfit once, there would be nothing left to wear and she’d have the perfect excuse to go home.

As it turned out, Gussie and Clyde were like powerful magnets that, once connected, could not easily be pried apart.

They couldn’t take their eyes off each other. Couldn’t stop chattering to each other. Didn’t endure a dull moment in that two-horse town. Or find a dark cloud in that huge West Texas sky, no matter how bad the weather was.

The day Gussie finally departed, Clyde was desolate again. He got his daughter-in-law, Lesley Stahl (of “60 Minutes” fame), on the phone.

“Would Aaron be upset if I got married again?” he asked.

She didn’t think so, she said. So Clyde packed a bag, flew to Sacramento, asked for Gussie’s hand and called New York to say they were going to elope.

The younger Latham, aghast at the speediness of it all, asked, “Do you really know this woman? Don’t you think you should slow down?”

“ ‘I’m in my 80s; I don’t have time to slow down,’ ” Clyde replied.

Soon the younger Latham flew to Texas to visit the newlyweds. He found them sleeping side by side in their twin reclining chairs, holding hands.

“The Ballad of Gussie & Clyde” (Villard) is Aaron Latham’s just-published literary tribute to the tender beauty of his father’s newfound love.

It’s a subject whose time has come, the author says. His mail, since the book was published, shows that many sons and daughters are “totally unprepared” to have an elderly parent fall in love. They are also unprepared, as he was, to find that love “can turn you into an adolescent again. Last love is very much like first love in its intensity and torment,” Latham says.

New York producer David Brown has purchased film rights, and Latham is now writing the screenplay. If it gets made, the film would stand out in Hollywood, which, with a few notable exceptions, shuns romances involving anyone over 30.

*

Anthropologist Fisher says there’s no surprise about this, once you understand how love operates.

Now writing a book about romantic love in the 21st century, Fisher says the thunderbolt of emotion “can hit you at any age. And the essential elements of it never change.”

She is studying the physiology of romantic love and believes that although men and women both experience some lessening of sexual prowess and physical satisfaction as they age, they seem to experience “much greater emotional satisfaction from their sexual activity.” They enjoy more foreplay, tenderness, intimacy.

Can they enjoy sex?

“In some ways, they will enjoy more than ever before; in other ways, not as much,” says Fisher.

She believes the brain is “deeply wired with circuitry” for basic mating emotions that have been in place over millions of years.

* Lust: “A tremendous thirst and craving for sexual gratification that lasts through old age.”

* Romance: “The exhilaration, euphoria, intrusive thinking, the sleeplessness and loss of appetite. The big craving for emotional union. This is governed by a different circuitry and a different set of chemicals,” she says.

* Attachment: “That’s the sense of calm, peace and serenity that people find with a particular partner, and that can happen at any age.”

Nothing changes about this physiology as we get older, Fisher maintains. What has changed is the times. As people live longer, and remain healthier, a lot more elderly are in “a perfect position to go out there and have a wild, emotional, teenage romance.”

*

Of course, there’s the potential for as much agony as ecstasy.

An old cad is as bad as a young one. And Ginny of Ventura, who does not want her real name used, can attest to that.

At 57, she met a man through business who swept her off her feet. “The attraction was incredible. We looked in each other’s eyes, and that was it. We both dove right in.”

“Four beautiful years later,” when she was thinking of marriage, her 67-year-old lover announced at dinner that he was finished with her. He’d fallen for a woman younger than Ginny’s daughter, a woman 30 years younger than him.

“I was devastated. I went home and cried and screamed. I drove around with my car windows up, screaming and crying at the top of my lungs. I felt the same agony and torment I’d felt as a teenage girl. And I was amazed that, in a sense, I had never really grown up.”

Then there’s Richard, 75. He’s tall, lean, craggily handsome. He skis, sails, writes poetry, loves Shakespeare, goes on archeological digs. “The perfect man,” thought Victoria, 63, a West Hollywood marketing executive who’s been married twice. Their three-year affair intensified to the point she thought they would marry, or at least live together. Until she found that he had at least five other women in three other states. And he was unwilling to give up any of them.

Now Richard calls her regularly to say he loves her, but cannot relinquish his independence. And she calls all her friends with equal regularity, moaning and crying because “I love this man, and I can’t give him up.”

Truth is: It never ends. The yearning, the churning, the biological urges and the passion for romance that used to be thought of as characteristic of youth.

Fisher tells the story of one ancient who “escaped” an old-age home on a bicycle and rode 100 miles to a place where the elderly meet every winter in Arizona. “This guy pulled in on his bike, met a neat woman, and for the last two years they’ve been traveling the country in her RV, having a wonderful love affair.”