An Irishman's Diary

IT was only a line in his notebook, written late in life, and he may not have given the matter any real thought. Even so, I used to consider George Orwell’s comment that “at 50, every man has the face he deserves” to be a sort of natural law.

Like most of his opinions, it sounded fair and wise and incontrovertibly true. Moreover, throughout my early adult life it was a source of great comfort. Back then, I thought of my face as a long-term investment: not what I might want from a face now, perhaps, but bound to deliver handsome rewards eventually, when the policy matured.

Then my 40th birthday came and went, and then the 45th. And soon after that, I began to have doubts about Orwell’s wisdom. As the dreaded milestone neared, I even wondered occasionally if his words might have been interpreted as an argument for skin-care. Maybe the hidden message was that, contrary to the principles Irish men of my age grew up with, I should moisturise occasionally.

But it’s too late to start now. And anyway, Orwell’s disregard for his own personal maintenance – or any kind of comfort – was famous. He once ate a meal of boiled eels that his wife had left for the cat, for God’s sake. So, unwelcome as the conclusion is, I have to conclude that his law of men’s faces was a rare example of him being wrong.

I MEAN, everywhere you look there are men aged 50 who patently do not have faces they deserve. In fact, what was probably the most spectacular recent example is – sadly – no longer with us. Despite which, in rebutting Orwell, I must call as a witness the late Michael Jackson.

He was exactly 50 when he departed this world. And it’s true that, more than most men, he had taken an interventionist approach to the issue while alive. Yet for Orwell or anyone else to suggest that poor Jacko ended up with the face he deserved would be unduly harsh. On the contrary, for a man who worked so hard on co-ordination, it was a cruel irony that Jackson’s features should have become so tragically unchoreographed at the end.

Or consider another, very different kind of musician: the country singer, Lyle Lovett. He turned 50 several years ago, and if faces are a verdict on one’s life work, he has surely been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. What’s worse is that to the injury of his appearance was added the insult of a surname that sounds like part of a quotation beginning with the words: “Only a mother could . . .” I don’t know much about Lovett’s personal life, but based on the songs alone, his 50-year-old features should have been good-looking, in a wryly humorous way. If they are, I don’t get the joke. Mind you, Julia Roberts obviously did, to the extent that she was married to him (briefly) back in the 1990s. And he’s been a successful actor in his own right too. So maybe the inner beauty does shine through somehow.

That would also explain the success of actor Mike Myers, who will turn 50 next year and has somehow combined puddingy looks with a lucrative film career. Of course, he’s a comic actor, which helps. And some of his best roles have been mere voice-overs, most famously as Shrek, the swamp-dwelling ogre, whose face may have been loosely modelled on the actor’s.

Interestingly, personal transformation – physical and otherwise – is one of the themes in Shrek. So, Myers being only 48-and-a-half, there may be hope for him yet, under Orwell’s law. If he works hard enough during the next 18 months, perhaps he could still turn into George Clooney.

SPEAKING OF WHOM, how do we explain Clooney’s outrageously handsome features in Orwellian terms? He’s another prime example, because he turned 50 last year. And to be sure, he seems to be a good man, involving himself in various humanitarian causes outside acting. But still, he would need to be a cross between the Good Fairy and the Dalai Lama to have any moral right to look the way he does.

There are plenty like him, too. Well, not very like him, it’s true. But we all know men aged 50 and over who have faces that, if based on personal worth, they must have stolen from other people.

No, I’m afraid Orwell’s quotation is one of those things that sounds true, but doesn’t bear scrutiny. Like F Scott Fitzgerald’s “there are no second acts in American lives”, in fact. Which is still widely quoted as a truism, despite any number of contradictory examples: from Jimmy

Carter (whose first act was a bit of a calamity, but who recovered heroically after the interval), to OJ Simpson, whose story arc has gone in the opposite direction.

Orwell himself probably did end up with the face he deserved, as it happened. In late photographs, his gaze is direct, intelligent, manly, with a hint of the sense of humour that critics (unfairly) claimed he didn’t have. But the truism has a poignancy in his case, because whatever about his face, he didn’t have the time he deserved. Soon after his witticism about 50-year-old men, he died from tuberculosis, still not 47.