IN PRAISE OF MAY-DECEMBER MARRIAGES

They come out on the world with lips shining,

Flocks and generations, until time

Seems like nothing so much

As a blinding snowstorm of virginity,

And a man, lost in the perpetual scurry of white,

Can only close his eyes

In a resignation of monogamy.

--Christopher Fry's Venus Observed

MORE and more older men refuse to be resigned. Despite today's much-heralded split between generations, which should guarantee coeval marriages, the number of old-young alliances may be increasing. Certainly their visibility is. As May arrives, December seems closer than ever.

Envy as well as enmity is aimed at Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, 70, veteran of two other alliances with pretty young things, and now married to 26-year-old Cathleen Heffernan. The recent marriage of South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond, 66, and Nancy Janice Moore, 22, a former Miss South Carolina, suggests that even hard-shell Baptists may join a trend that once seemed confined to jet-setters. The Thurmonds typify a tendency of many May-December couples: they strive to be more normal than normal. "I love her and I'm very happy," says Thurmond. "We have so many things in common." Says Nancy: "We're such good friends as well as partners."

Durable Desire

Aristotle claimed that the ideal marrying age was 37 for the man, 18 for the woman. As he saw it, both would thus reach the end of their sexual decline at roughly the same time, when he was 70 and she was 50. But what do philosophers know anyway? In fact, a woman's sexual desire may continue for years after menopause. In men, the desire may thrive until an extraordinary age. In 1583, an Englishman named Thomas Parr was found guilty of committing adultery at the age of 100 and did penance, according to the custom of the time, by wearing a white sheet at the door of the church. Legend has it that Parr remarried at the age of 120 and had children by his second wife. Teb Sharmat, a lively farmer in the Caucasus, took a third wife--who was 50--when he was in his 90s. He explained that he did not want to get out of the habit. Some time before he died at 94, Bernard Berenson confided to his diary: "Only in what might be called my old age have I become aware of sex and the animal in woman." William Butler Yeats, who finally married at 52, was well into his 70s before he began trumpeting the raw sexuality of The Wild Old Wicked Man. Victor Hugo, at 82, told the French Senate with a wicked exuberance: "It is difficult for a man of my years to address such an august body. Almost as difficult as it is for a man of my years to make love three--no, four--times in one afternoon."

Society has often had doubts about intermarriage between the generations. The Talmud warns that "the Lord will not pardon him" who marries his daughter to an old man or takes a wife for his infant son. Literature abounds with bawdy cautionary tales describing the jealous geriatric husband and his ripe, relentless bride. For all the sniggers, though, older men have historically married much younger women. Given the hazards of childbearing until 50 or 60 years ago, it was not unusual for a man to bury one or two young wives. In those days, death provided the variety now offered by divorce. On the arduous American frontier, progress was marked by the graves of countless brides.

Even today in some less developed countries, May and December marry as a matter of course. A census about 30 years ago in India listed nearly 400,000 widows under the age of 15. The custom of purchasing infants as future wives persists in parts of Africa, even though the mores are changing rapidly. Somewhat more conservatively, Chinese tradition dictates that a husband should be twice his wife's age plus one year.

A Young Man's Education

The double standard prevailing in this, as in so many other romantic matters, makes it far less acceptable for an older woman to form an alliance with a younger man. Still, there are rich precedents in that pattern as well. Oedipus and Jocasta, of course, represent a sort of ne plus ultra to cultural anthropologist, tragedian and Freudian alike. The French have a fertile background of such affairs. Henry II took his father's mistress, Diane de Poitiers, when he was 17 and she 36. Balzac met his mistress, Madame de Berny, when he was 22 and she 44, and he remained with her for ten years. Sometimes the unions have been rather pathetic, as when Singer Edith Piaf, at 46, one year before her death, married a former Greek hairdresser more than 20 years younger. In modern France as well as elsewhere, older women and younger men tend to have affairs rather than marry. For one thing, the typical older woman is a divorcee and would forfeit alimony by remarriage. Numerous sages have extolled such liaisons on the familiar ground that older women provide an invaluable education, and are more interesting both intellectually and sexually than any ingenue or debutante. "Boys and girls should leave each other alone," declares Author Stephen Vizinczey (In Praise of Older Women). "Trying to make love with someone who is as unskilled as you are seems to me about as sensible as learning to drive with a person who doesn't know the first thing about cars either." Besides, as Benjamin Franklin remarked in a letter urging a young friend to seek the companionship of older women, "They are so grateful!"

When it comes to men and girls, though, what December sees in May is fairly obvious, but what does May see in December? Christmas, wags answer; and not even the most romantic would deny that money and marriage are often intertwined. Still, today's unions of old and young seem to involve more than sex or cash. As women grow more emancipated and financially independent, the necessity of marrying older men is disappearing. Now the considerations are more psychological and esthetic. It is a commonplace that some young girls turn to older men in a psychological quest for their lost fathers. Some men resent this thought, but they should not; it is, after all, one of the chief factors they have going for them.

The older man, often fighting clear of a wrecked marriage, typically hopes that a young bride will restore some of his waning sexuality and lost youth. Sexually, at least, he may be sadly mistaken. Many cases indicate that while a man's potency can be dramatically stimulated for a few months by an affair with a younger woman, he will usually revert to the same pattern he had maintained with his coeval wife. According to Sociologist Clark Vincent, on the other hand, there is more likelihood of serious differences in sexual appetite among coevals than among May-December couples. Vincent's theory, however, has yet to be verified.

How well do marriages of noncontemporaries generally work? Some, of course, are disastrous. Dr. Paul Popenoe, president of the American Institute of Family Relations, cites the case of a middle-aged woman who married a man ten years her junior. She rapidly worked herself into such a frenzy of jealousy over her younger husband that Popenoe eventually advised the man to leave the country immediately. Instead, he stayed with his wife. Six months later she murdered him and killed herself.

So far, there is little evidence suggesting that old-young marriages are any more fatal than conventional alliances. But many experts, such as Sociologist James Peterson, are pessimistic about the whole business. "As the man ages," says Peterson, "he tends to withdraw, while she is active and vigorous and still wants to go. If he dies, even though they might have been happy, there is the problem of premature widowhood, especially if there were no children." U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist Ralph Greenson agrees: "Either the man does not live long, or after a while they find that they do not have much in common. Besides, she has missed the opportunity of dealing with her peers."

Others argue that in marriages across the generation gap, there is often so little genuine communication that each partner treats the other as a sort of exotic object. But such psychological distancing may be very valuable. It frequently breeds a courtesy and romantic regard that in a marriage of contemporaries disappears under a mound of unpaid bills and diapers.

Improving with Age

May-December defenders consider the pessimists obtuse and oblivious of the record. For one thing, the men who marry younger women these days are generally marked by conspicuous success or at least a mature sense of their own character; and those qualities go far toward cementing marriage. Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall when he was 45 and she 20. Said he: "The mature man is more experienced. He has read more books, seen more of the world. He knows how to court a woman. He has learned the hundred little courtesies that make her happy she is a woman."

Actress Hayley Mills, now 22, spent her childhood and adolescence being tomboy or saccharine in films like Tiger Bay and Pollyanna. For the past two years, she has been living with Producer Roy Boulting, 55. "I could never fall in love with anyone unless first I had enormous admiration for him," she says. "I never met a young man of my own age for whom I had this feeling." Joanna Steichen was 26 when she married Photographer Edward Steichen, who was 80. That was nine years ago,.and Mrs. Steichen says she has never regretted it. "In many ways," she observes, "the girls in such marriages want very much to conform, once they've done this nonconforming." Joanna is unusually honest about her marriage: "They--we--always marry great achievers. They are attracted to them by fear that they--we--won't accomplish much on our own. If you marry an ordinary slob, do it while you're young and innocent. But to marry an older man, he must be marvelous. A good man improves with age." Joanna is also quite clear-eyed about her motives: "Every young girl who marries an older man has certain well-developed areas of insecurity. There is an element of not wanting to take a chance and doubting one's own "judgment. When you marry an older man, you see what kind of man he is, and will be."

How must one age treat another in a May-December marriage? Carefully, very carefully. Sometimes after the first ex citement has dissipated, an older man realizes how young and unformed his bride's character is, and how much she is sacrificing, deliberately or not, in the way of normal development among her contemporaries. Such husbands must often assume a fatherly role in encouraging their wives' interests and education. Bing Crosby, who was 53 in 1957 when he married Kathy Crosby, then 23, encouraged his wife's careers as an actress and a nurse. Justice Douglas has been quietly protective in introducing his young Oregon-born wife to Washington's intimidating society. On the other hand, a young wife should not be unduly nervous about reminding her husband of their age difference--elaborately avoiding another set of tennis or politely yawning at 11 p.m. Most older men will only react by trying doubly hard to prove how young they are, sweating it out on the tennis court or discothequing it way past their bedtime.

In fact, such marriages often seem to work almost precisely because of the age differences. Eighty-seven-year-old Pablo Picasso's evident contentment with his wife Jacqueline, 43, might have been impossible in his younger years. If Charlie Chaplin had married Oona O'Neill when he was 30 or 35, it probably would not have lasted a year. Instead, he married her in 1943 at a mellower 54, when she was 18, and the marriage, with eight children, has been prolific and apparently serene. "My security and stability with Charlie," Oona has said, "stem from the difference in years between us. Provided that the partners are suited, such a marriage is founded on a rock. The man's character is formed, his life shaped." There is no generalizing on the subject, however. Pablo Casals, 92, takes an almost childlike pleasure in his wife Marta, more than 50 years his junior. T. S. Eliot felt that his marriage at 68 to a woman 39 years his junior helped him mature. When he turned 70, the mellowing poet declared: "I'm just beginning to grow up."

Need for Renewals

Regardless of age, many (perhaps most) marriages would seem ill-advised if not maniacal, could they be considered dispassionately in advance. Most May-December marriages thus considered look even worse. Yet there is no evidence that they turn out any worse than most unions--and possibly they work a lot better. Older men, for example, are no longer obsessed by their careers, and are much less likely to become obsessed with other young women. They are more indulgent; and besides, with them a woman is much less conscious of her own aging. Above all, the old and young partners are generally apt to consider their marriages more thoroughly beforehand than coevals might.

At least in absolute figures, the number of May-December marriages is bound to rise. More and more older men are divorced each year, and many will seek partners younger than their former wives. Until now, an implicit criticism has always been that such marriages somehow violate the natural order; the common reaction has been that the marriages are disreputably "Freudian," or that the husband is some sort of Lolita-chasing Humbert. As such marriages increase in visibility, however, it will probably become clear that neither reaction is necessarily just. There are obvious perils. Yet these should perhaps be balanced against the need for emotional renewals, a sense of possibility and experiment rather than mere resignation to the inevitable. A maxim has it that it is "better to be an old man's darling than become a young man's slave." At the same time, it may sometimes be better to be a young woman's darling than an old woman's curmudgeon.

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