The latest must-have for geriatric actors: a baby
There’s a new status symbol in town and it has nothing to do with how many bathrooms you have in your house or whether you know what gorpcore is (currently the only acceptable fashion trend for the modern billionaire — if you don’t, think the slick outdoorswear of Succession’s Lucas Madsen, which instantly made Kendall Roy’s stuffy suits look passé). No, if you really want to prove you’re a big swinging alpha dog, you need to be a geriatric dad. And I don’t mean “geriatric” the way doctors use it in reference to a woman over 35 who is having a baby. I mean an actual geriatric.
So, congratulations to Al Pacino, 83, currently expecting his fourth child, and young whippersnapper Robert De Niro, a mere 79, who has just welcomed his seventh. Both will now spend their ninth decade hanging out in soft-play centres and attending Mini Mozart music classes with their babies, which is not an outcome many would have predicted for Michael and Vito Corleone.
But Pacino and De Niro are veritable babes themselves compared with former Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, who in 2020, three months shy of his 90th birthday, fathered a baby boy. (Although if we’re talking relationship age gaps, Pacino wins this contest. Ecclestone’s wife, Fabiana Flosi, is only 46 years younger than him, whereas Pacino’s 29-year-old girlfriend, Noor Alfallah, is an impressive 54 years younger. A “source” told the New York Post: “She mostly dates very rich older men. The age gap doesn’t seem to be a problem.” Do I even need to tell you that Alfallah was previously “linked” to Mick Jagger?)
Having a baby in one’s fifties or sixties to appease the second (or third, or fourth) wife has long been par for the course for wealthy men. But geriatric fatherhood goes beyond that. It’s a public statement that it doesn’t matter if you die tomorrow because you’ve earned so much your kid is taken care of for life (and your wife will be well-supplied with childcare regardless, as it’s unlikely anyone expects the geriatric father to do night feeds).
It’s also a stout refusal to countenance the risks of conceiving with older sperm, such as a higher chance of the baby developing psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and developmental ones such as autism. But of course, these geriatric dads have only prime sperm! Who could doubt it? I have wondered if this is why De Niro has long maintained — despite all medical evidence to the contrary — that there is “a link” between childhood vaccinations and autism. He has an autistic son, born when the actor was 55. But according to De Niro, it is vaccinations that should be investigated.
A refusal to accept one’s own frailty is typical of today’s alphas. Silicon Valley billionaires such as Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos have long been investing in research into ways to “cure death”, as Peter Ward puts it in his book The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever. And yet, despite the billions invested in potential death cures such as “injecting youthful plasma” (pumping young blood into old veins), no one has yet cured death, or even ageing. But if you’ve amassed more wealth than any human being in history and live a life that precludes you from ever having to deal with members of the grimy public, it’s not a surprise if you believe the normal rules do not apply to you. The character Logan Roy didn’t grasp he was mortal until pretty much the day before he died, and his children didn’t entirely believe it even when he proved he was.
People have children for many reasons, such as to enjoy them and to watch them as they grow — neither of which really applies to men who father babies in their ninth decade. But there is another less-discussed reason for procreating: immortality. Even if you don’t live for a further decade, you’re leaving behind your DNA to carry on your legacy. Birth is even more of a repudiation of death than attempting to resuscitate your aged body with a litre of a young person’s blood.
Incidentally, my favourite geriatric dad — who is actually very youthful by today’s standards — is Alec Baldwin, 65, who followed up the recent birth of his eighth child with a hip replacement. Some men have a baby shower, some men have major surgery. The baby, Ilaria, was born in September, less than a year after Baldwin shot a prop gun that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on a movie set. How about that for valiantly fighting against death with birth?
Whereas women have the full stop of the menopause, that visceral proof that you are not immune to the passing of time, a man can pretend he’s still 35 — procreation-wise — decades after the fact, blocking his ears to people asking whether the baby is his grandchild. Whether he should is a different matter.
Never mind the psychological effects on the child who has to face the prospect of their father’s imminent death from the moment they’re born, there is nothing like parenting to make a person feel their age. I had my youngest child when I was in my forties and have suffered from slipped discs ever since, and those two things are not unconnected.
“It’s not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was 73,” Sally sobs in When Harry Met Sally. “Yeah,” Harry replies, “but he was too old to pick ’em up.”
Pacino and De Niro better have an osteopath on speed dial.