I’m going to miss Nancy Pelosi. She was one-of-a-kind. I felt safe with her as House Speaker. I wish I personally knew her. She stood up to Trump in a way most Republican men didn’t have the nerve to do. Do you remember how she tore up his speech for all America to see? I wish Hillary would have humiliated him during their presidential debate when he was hovering over her on stage as an intimation ploy. He should have been characterized as the “poison” that America was going to have to suffer through right then and there. We would have been so much better off if Hillary was our leader.I can’t wait to watch the Pelosi documentary. I will be cheering and throwing kisses at the TV screen with Eliot at my side—LWH
Advice From a Political Daughter: ‘Every Woman Needs a Paul Pelosi’
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, a multimillionaire venture capitalist recovering from a brutal attack, has long taken care of the couple’s “business of living,” including shopping for the speaker’s clothes.
WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was glued to CNN the night after the 2020 election, while her husband, Paul Pelosi, sat nearby unwrapping a package.
“What is that?” she asked him in a scene from the new HBO documentary, “Pelosi in the House,” directed by their daughter Alexandra Pelosi.
“Dish towels,” Mr. Pelosi responded with a hint of irony as he popped the bubble packing. Ms. Pelosi smiled and then turned her attention back to the election coverage.
It was just one instance of a dynamic on display throughout the film: Mr. Pelosi, who was brutally attacked at the couple’s San Francisco home by an assailant who was said to have been targeting the speaker, takes care of what their family refers to as the “business of living.” That leaves his wife, who will step down as speakerwhen Republicans assume the House majority on Jan. 3, free to focus on her work.
It is the kind of relationship that women in politics rarely talk about, but can sometimes help make the difference between success and failure: a partner willing to take on the mundane tasks and supportive role that traditionally fell to political wives. And although the Pelosis are wealthy and can get all the household help they need, the documentary captures that being a political spouse can mean simply showing up, and then standing off to the side.
Throughout the film, as Ms. Pelosi does business on the phone with Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Chuck Schumer or Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was then a presidential candidate, Mr. Pelosi, 82, a multimillionaire businessman who founded a venture capital investment firm, is often in the same room dealing with the day-to-day necessities of their lives.
In one scene, Ms. Pelosi was in her pajamas strategizing on a call with Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, about the first impeachment of President Donald J. Trump while Mr. Pelosi, sitting across from her, was on his cellphone dealing with a contractor trying to access their San Francisco home to fix a broken shower.
“I don’t know what happened to that key,” Mr. Pelosi said, using an expletive.
Paul and Nancy Pelosi met as college students while taking a summer class at Georgetown University in 1961. They married two years later and had five children in six years. Ms. Pelosi spent her early years in the marriage as a stay-at-home San Francisco mother and did not run for Congress until she was in her 40s. What followed was nothing that Mr. Pelosi ever pictured for his wife, or his family, according to his daughter.
“I don’t think this is what he signed up for in 1987,” Alexandra Pelosi said in an interview, referring to the year Ms. Pelosi was first elected to Congress. “He just had to get over it.”
Mr. Pelosi, according to his daughter, never caught the political bug. He forbids political talk at the dinner table. But over the years he has been at his wife’s side at her big political moments, and has taken on many of the duties of the homemaker. He does the dishes, deals with contractors, pays the bills and shops for Ms. Pelosi’s clothes.
“She’s never ordered dish towels in her life,” Alexandra Pelosi said. “That’s what he’s been doing forever. He does the shopping for her, from the dish towels to the Armani dress.”
“He’s got Armani on speed dial,” she added, referring to the Italian designer Giorgio Armani, one of the speaker’s favorites. “He’s the full-service husband.”
Ms. Pelosi had more to say: “The dress she wore to the state dinner; he ordered it for her, and he sent my sister to go try it on.” (Ms. Pelosi was referring to a gold sequin gown by another Italian designer, Giambattista Valli, that her mother wore to a White House state dinner early this month for President Emmanuel Macron of France.)
The documentary, focused on Ms. Pelosi’s rise and professional accomplishments, offers glimpses into how a marriage to a supportive spouse helps create the space for a woman’s work — in her case, operating years as the most powerful political force in the Democratic Party in recent years.
Other than Hillary Clinton, few women in politics have risen to Ms. Pelosi’s stature, and there are not many male spouses like her husband. Former President Bill Clinton played the role of supportive spouse during Mrs. Clinton’s two presidential campaigns, but after he had already had his turn.
Doug Emhoff has assumed a supporting role to Vice President Kamala Harris, but that has also meant becoming a public figure in his own right. Mr. Pelosi never wanted anything close to that.
“He’s a private person with a private life with a very interesting collection of friends, including Republicans,” Alexandra Pelosi said. “He didn’t sign up for this life.”
But, she said, he has made it work. “Every woman needs a Paul Pelosi.”
In one scene in the documentary, Mr. Pelosi was scraping breakfast dishes in a robe while his wife spoke on the phone to Mr. Pence. At one point, she put herself on mute and blew kisses at her husband.
In a scene shot during the 2020 presidential campaign, Ms. Pelosi was on the phone with Mr. Biden advising him “don’t go too far to the left.” Mr. Pelosi was sitting next to her, reading his iPad, only half paying attention to his wife’s conversation.
Mr. Pelosi appeared at ease in his supporting character role.
“Are you in line to get a picture with the speaker?” his daughter shouted at him from behind the camera at a gathering at the U.S. Capitol ahead of one of Mr. Trump’s State of the Union addresses, while Ms. Pelosi was working a photo line.
“Oh I am,” he joked.
The following year, there he was again, sitting and snacking while Ms. Pelosi worked the room.
“I heard Paul Pelosi was here,” his daughter joked.
“I just came for the pistachios,” he said.
As Ms. Pelosi prepared to enter the House chamber — where she would eventually tear up Mr. Trump’s speech and dismiss it as a “manifesto of mistruths” — her husband was with her in her office offering moral support.
“You look great, hon,” Mr. Pelosi told her.
Despite his appearances in the documentary, Mr. Pelosi is not always at the speaker’s side, including in May, when he was in a car accident in Napa County, Calif., and afterward pleaded guilty to a single count of driving under the influence of alcohol. Ms. Pelosi was across the country, preparing to deliver a commencement address at Brown University.
“He’s there for the days that matter,” Alexandra Pelosi said. “It’s really just because she says you have to come. These kinds of people need a family to be there for support on days that matter.”
In October, Mr. Pelosi was beaten with a hammer at the couple’s San Francisco home by an assailant who was said to have been targeting the speaker. He suffered major head injuries, but has appeared in recent days by Ms. Pelosi’s side, including her portrait unveiling at the Capitol and at the Kennedy Center Honors celebration.
Still, his daughter said he was on a long road to recovery. “He has good days and bad days,” she said, noting that he has post-traumatic stress and tires quickly.
The attack on the man who has been a quiet pillar of the Pelosi family life has taken a toll on all of them. The speaker told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in a recent interview that “for me this is really the hard part because Paul was not the target, and he’s the one who is paying the price.”
“He was not looking for Paul, he was looking for me,” she added.
His daughter said one of the most uncomfortable parts of the ordeal has been the glare of the public spotlight on a person who has tried to avoid it.
“He’s remained out of the limelight as much as he could,” she said. “He almost got to the end without anyone knowing who he was.
I’m really surprised that none of my friends who are my age told me about this article. I saw it when it was first published a few days ago but I really thought I wasn’t going to post it. I was concerned it would embarrass too many people. Then I thought, if it was in The New York Times, then why wouldn’t I post it in DigiDame? Most readers don’t usually remark about stories I run here anyway. They are too preoccupied with their own lives. Let’s see if anyone has the guts to mention this one to me. I would also like to hear from my single straight and gay friends too who are in my age bracket. I’m sure they have plenty to say. They keep their part time partners,with benefits, very quiet. Smart—-LWH
Credit…Marilyn Minter for The New York Times
Sex can drop off in our final decades. But for those who keep going, it can be the best of their lives.
By Maggie Jones
Before David and Anne married, they hadn’t ventured beyond touching.
It was 1961. She was 21, he was 22 and they were raised in conservative Catholic homes. “Thursday and Friday, sex is a sin, then you get married on Saturday,” David said. “What’s a clitoris? I didn’t know about that.”
From the outset of their marriage, the two explored sex together. David was more lustful and eager; Anne was more hesitant, at times leaning toward accommodation rather than enthusiasm. A few years after their wedding, they had their first child, and David began traveling half the month for his job. Over the next five years, they had two more children, and Anne sometimes felt exhausted, managing homework, schedules, driving, emergencies, meltdowns. She loved David and liked sex with him, but it often fell lower on the list of what she needed: a good night’s sleep, an arm around her shoulder, no expectations. Anne also never fully escaped the feeling that sex was taboo: “We weren’t allowed to even think about it,” she said about her parents’ approach to sex. In the early part of her marriage, she felt horrified about oral sex and struggled to have orgasms. “I don’t think I was what David had hoped for,” she told me.
David and Anne are in their 80s now, and they recently told me that at this stage of life, sex is the best it has ever been. But getting there took effort. David, a curious, gregarious bear of a man, always believed sex was important to happiness, and he regularly sought out tips for improving it. In the late 1970s, he read a magazine article about a “girl’s best friend,” a vibrator called a Prelude. He bought one for Anne. (She asked me to use her middle name to protect her privacy; David asked to be identified by his first name.) It didn’t go so well at first: For Anne, it was a reminder of what she saw as her own deficiency. She imagined that other women orgasmed more quickly, while she needed mechanical intervention. But David encouraged her to try the vibrator on her own, and they began occasionally using it during sex.
Sex was great at times, like when Anne took a human-sexuality class one summer, by which time the kids were teenagers and more independent. In the evenings after class, she and David sat on their front stoop overlooking a park, and she shared what she was learning about desire and the physiology of sex. It became their foreplay. But soon, David began working longer hours, and Anne started a job in the evenings. Their busy schedules pulled them back to the routine of discordant desires. At the lowest point, sex dropped to a couple of times a month — far too infrequent for David. “We were going through the motions,” he said.
By the time David was in his 50s, he had had two affairs — in large part because the women made him feel desired. Anne also had a brief affair, in response to his cheating. Then, in his 60s, David retired from a career that had defined him, where he was surrounded by co-workers who loved him. Anne, meanwhile, was increasingly out of the house, volunteering in their community. Eager for more attention and affection than Anne was able to give him, David had a third affair, this time a more emotionally involved one, with a woman who was as enthusiastic about sex as he was. He never had to hint that he wanted it. He never had to ask. She was game for pretty much anything.
Anne was furious when she found out, but still, she didn’t want to lose him. She pushed him to end the relationship; the other woman told David he had to choose. At the precipice of separation, Anne and David went to therapy, and slowly they became more honest with each other. Anne talked about her anger over the affairs and her withholding of sex because of them. David expressed his hopes that he could bring the kind of sexual excitement he found outside the marriage into their relationship. If she wanted to hold on to him, Anne decided, she needed to try opening up. David worked to be less expectant. And slowly, in their 70s, they moved toward more intimate and compelling sex.
“The affair was the best and worst thing that happened to us,” David told me one afternoon last fall.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Anne said. We were speaking over Skype on their 60th wedding anniversary. The couple sat side by side at the kitchen counter in a house they designed together 30 years ago, overlooking a lake. As they talked, Anne occasionally put her head on David’s shoulder. Behind them was a bank of windows and, in one corner, a vase of dried sunflowers. Anne, who has bright blue eyes and a sweep of silver hair that falls onto one side of her face, has a measured way of talking. She is a private person, but honest and searching. “We needed a jump-start somehow,” she said, before pointedly adding, “but that wasn’t the only way to do it.”
Aging has diminished them physically: Anne had colon cancer; David has spinal stenosis and uses a walker. But in these later years of life, they’ve consciously held on to their intimacy by creating a different kind of sexuality than when their bodies were strong and lithe.
Most Sunday mornings, after coffee and fruit, David goes to their bedroom. He pops a Viagra, straightens out the bed cover, showers and, when he’s ready, calls for Anne. Their phones remain in the kitchen, the dog outside the bedroom door. They cuddle and touch each other. Sometimes they mutually masturbate, which they just started doing in the last decade. (Anne still has her Prelude, which David has rewired over the years, along with a few other vibrators that they use regularly.)
Even with Viagra, David can’t always have a full erection, but they usually have intercourse regardless; sometimes he has a dry orgasm, where he doesn’t produce enough semen to ejaculate. The missionary position no longer works for them — David has put on weight and would be too heavy. Instead, he often lies behind Anne and puts one leg between hers, the other to the side. They explore and try new things. Last summer they began doing what’s known as edging. During oral sex, David stops just when Anne is on the verge of climaxing. He repeats it a couple of times to build up the intensity before she finally has an orgasm.
Sex is more relaxed than it was in their 20s and 30s, when they had so much responsibility and little time. And it’s deeper because they feel more connected. “We nearly lost each other,” Anne said. She emphasizes that their relationship is far from perfect; they argue plenty. But she has overcome some of the sexual barriers from the past and feels more present during sex. Much of it is related to their awareness that time is running out, which makes intimacy feel more sacred. Now, at the end of sex, one of them says a version of: “Thank you, God, for one more time.”
Then they make brunch and talk about the kids, the grandkids, their plans to move into a smaller home. They know that sex might not stay the same as they continue to age. There will come a time, David wrote me in an email, “when one of us will say, ‘I’m sorry, but would you be hurt if we just cuddle?’ The spirit is willing, but the flesh is getting weaker.”
It’s not surprising that sex can diminish with age: Estrogen typically drops in women, which may lead to vaginal dryness and, in turn, pain. Testosterone declines for women and men, and erection problems become more commonplace.
In a 2007 New England Journal of Medicine study of a representative sample of the U.S. population, Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau, a professor of obstetrics-gynecology and geriatrics at the University of Chicago, and colleagues surveyed more than 3,000 older adults, single and partnered, about sex (defined as “any mutually voluntary activity with another person that involves sexual contact, whether or not intercourse or orgasm occurs”). They found that 53 percent of participants ages 65 to 74 had sex at least once in the previous year. In the 75-to-85 age group, only 26 percent did. (Lindau notes that a major determinant of sexual activity is whether one has a partner or not — and many older people are widowed, separated or divorced.) In contrast, among people ages 57 to 64, 73 percent had sex at least once in the previous year.
There’s a poignant paradox about older people and sex. As our worlds get smaller — work slows down or ends, physical abilities recede, traveling gets more challenging, friendship circles narrow as people die — we tend to have more time and inclination to savor the parts of our lives that are emotionally meaningful, which can include sex. But because bodies change, good sex in old age often needs reimagining, expanding, for example, to include more touching, kissing, erotic massage, oral sex, sex toys.
Older people get little guidance about any of this. Realistic portrayals in the media are rare, especially in the United States. Some couples therapists don’t talk about sex with their clients. Many primary-care doctors don’t raise the topic either. The American Medical Student Association says 85 percent of medical students report receiving fewer than five hours of sexual-health education. (The University of Minnesota is an outlier, requiring 20 hours.) If a man complains of erectile problems, doctors often offer drugs like Viagra and Cialis. But these can have side effects and are contraindicated with some medications. Plus, prescribing them presumes intercourse should be the goal. For women, the medication Addyi does very little to increase sexual desire and is only for premenopausal women. And while doctors may offer women cream or vaginal rings with estrogen, few provide tips about sexual alternatives to penetration when it hurts.
“Most physicians don’t ask questions and don’t know what to do if there’s a problem,” says Dr. June La Valleur, a recently retired obstetrician-gynecologist and associate professor who taught at the University of Minnesota’s medical school. “They think their patients are going to be embarrassed. In my opinion, you cannot call yourself a holistic practitioner unless you ask those questions.”
Few senior-living communities offer much — if any — sex information for residents or training for staff. A sex educator told me about one older woman looking for information on sex and aging at a senior center. She couldn’t access it on the computer because the word “sex” was blocked, most likely to prevent people from getting on porn sites.
But as baby boomers, who grew up during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, age — the oldest are about 75 — many sex experts expect they will demand more open conversations and policies related to their sex lives.
A subset of older people who are having lots of sex well into their 80s could help shape those conversations and policies. In the New England Journal of Medicine study, though just over a quarter of participants ages 75 to 85 said they had sex in the last year, more than half that group had sex at least two to three times a month. And almost one-quarter of those having sex were doing it once a week — or more. Along with pleasure, they may be getting benefits that are linked to sex: a stronger immune system, improved cognitive function, cardiovascular health in women and lower odds of prostate cancer. And research — and common sense — suggests, too, that sex improves sleep, reduces stress and cultivates emotional intimacy.
Over the last three years, I spoke with more than 40 people in their late 60s, 70s, 80s and early 90s who have found ways to shift and improve their sex lives. Some sought out sex therapists, who, among other things, help people broaden their definition of sexuality and take the focus off goal-oriented sex — erections, intercourse, performance. Others deepened their sex lives on their own.
In 2005, Peggy J. Kleinplatz, a professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa and a sex researcher, began interviewing people who have built rich and intimate sex lives. For decades, much of sex research focused on dysfunction. In contrast, Kleinplatz, who directs the Optimal Sexual Experiences Research Team at the university, explores the aspects of deeply fulfilling sex that hold true regardless of other factors: age, health, socioeconomic status and so on. (Her work also includes L.G.B.T.Q. couples, polyamorous couples and people who are into kink and B.D.S.M.) Her 2020 book, “Magnificent Sex: Lessons From Extraordinary Lovers,” with the co-author A. Dana Ménard, is based on research involving people whose sex lives grew better and better over time. Forty percent of the participants were in their 60s, 70s or 80s. “Who better to interview about fulfilling sex than people who have practiced it the longest?” Kleinplatz said. Some of these “extraordinary lovers” said when they reached their 40s and 50s, they realized that their expectations for sex were too low. If they wanted significantly better sex, they knew it would require a commitment of energy and effort. “It takes an investment to be more vulnerable and trusting when you’ve been together for decades,” Kleinplatz told me. “It takes so much willingness and courage to show yourself naked, literally and metaphorically.”
In the interviews, people noted that they had a better sense of what they wanted as they aged and matured and were more willing to articulate it to their partner. They expanded their views of sex and addressed anxieties that had been fostered by mainstream media and porn that made sex seem fast and easy. And while one might assume that certain health problems limit sexuality, Kleinplatz’s interviewees had a wide variety of them: heart disease, strokes, multiple sclerosis, spinal stenosis, hearing loss, incontinence. In some cases, it was a disability that allowed them to set aside assumptions and preconceptions about sex. People who are not disabled, as one person told Kleinplatz, sometimes “hold themselves to standards that get in the way of open-mindedness and experimentation.” One man who suffers from a degenerative disease told Kleinplatz that his illness allowed him to accept that his previous definitions of sex weren’t working. Instead, he became more open to experimenting, communicating and responding to what his partner wanted. And even though he wasn’t having erections or orgasms himself, he said “sex was much more intense than it ever was before.”
People of all ages said they tried to be in sync with their partners and “embodied” during sex, which they described as slowing down and being fully engaged. “You are not a person in a situation,” as one man said, describing what embodiment during sex feels like. “You are it. You arethe situation.” Couples also talked about the importance of creating a setting for sex: turning on music, putting away laptops, taking showers, cleaning the room. It’s not about aiming to have the ultimate experience all the time. Even extraordinary lovers have merely satisfying sex at times. What matters overall is having “sex worth wanting,” Kleinplatz says.
Another researcher, Jane Fleishman, the author of “The Stonewall Generation: L.G.B.T.Q. Elders on Sex, Activism and Aging,” told me she sees signs of greater interest in older sexuality from academics, therapists and others who work with older people. She offers sex-education trainings — including about sexually transmitted infections, which have been on the rise among older people — at senior-living communities and to professionals. When I first met her, in 2019, she was invited to only a smattering of places. Now she speaks more frequently at geriatric conferences and at clinical grand rounds in hospitals.
There are small inroads in the media, too. Several years ago, the TV show “Grace and Frankie” devoted a season to Jane Fonda’s and Lily Tomlin’s characters creating and marketing ergonomically correct vibrators for older women. And last year, Ogilvy UK created a pro bono ad campaign, “Let’s Talk the Joy of Later Life Sex,” for one of England’s largest providers of relationship support. The campaign features 11 people ages 65 to 85. Five of them are couples — straight, gay — and one is a widowed woman. They sit on a couch in plush white robes. “As we get older, we get more experimental,” one woman says, sitting next to her husband. A man talks about his feet touching his husband’s feet in bed. “It’s moments like that that are important to you, as much as, you know, banging each other’s brains out.”
On a Thursday evening, inside a sleek concrete house in the San Fernando Valley in California, I stood next to Joan Price, who is 78, isn’t quite 5 feet tall and wore pink sneakers, a black lace top and a silver ring in the shape of a clitoris. This was more than two years ago, before the pandemic, and Price, a sex educator, was watching the filming of “jessica drake’s Guide to Wicked Sex: Senior Sex.” Several feet in front of her, a 68-year-old man named Galen, dressed in a black T-shirt and boxers, kissed the face and neck of a woman, also in her 60s, as she lay across a king-size bed. While the cameras rolled, Galen moved his right hand down her body and pulled aside her one-piece lingerie to touch her vulva. A minute into the touching, Price’s typically perky face dropped. “He’s not using lube,” Price whispered to drake, the film’s director, who nodded. “That would be uncomfortable for 80 percent of us.”
Price, the film’s co-creator, was talking about women in their 60s and 70s and older, who, along with men of that age, were the audience for the educational film. Her collaborator, drake (who uses lowercase letters in her name), is 47 and a well-known porn actress and director; she also makes instructional sex films and is a certified sex educator. Both women wanted the film to convey that people can have great sex throughout their lives and to offer tips to make it happen. The camera wouldn’t avoid sags, cellulite, stomach rolls, flaccid penises. And the accouterments that help with older-age sex — lube, as well as vibrators and other sex toys — would be integrated into the scenes as though they were no big deal: just everyday sex aids.
“For now, cover her back up,” drake told Galen warmly. “We aren’t ready to see it. We’ll get there, I promise. We are going to do some body pans and following of the hands.”
The day before, Price sat in a white leather armchair, wearing a Pucci top and low-heeled sparkly silver shoes, for the narration of the film. She offered tips and advice. She explained that many older people (like those of any age) experience responsive desire, in which arousal springs up in response to pleasure and stimulation, such as touching or being touched, rather than spontaneously. And she encouraged people to push their doctors — or find a new one — for help with any physiological impediments to sex.
Several years ago, Price approached the founders of Hot Octopuss, a sex-toy company, after finding that their products worked well for aging bodies but noticing that the photos on their home page were of the “young and tattooed,” as she put it. “It was a real sit-up-and-think moment for us,” Julia Margo, a Hot Octopuss co-founder, told me. In 2020, the company, with Price’s help, added a section called “Senior Sex Hub.” It includes resources like videos with Price talking about sex and aging, along with photos of people in their 60s and 70s and Hot Octopuss’s products for people with “older vulvas” and “older penises,” including a penis vibrator that can be used without an erection.
Price got into the sex-education field after years as a high school teacher and a second career as both an aerobics and line-dance instructor and a writer on health and fitness. She was in her late 50s and long divorced when Robert Rice walked into her dance class. He was lean, comfortable in his body, a trained dancer in his mid-60s with a head of white hair. When Price saw him, she felt as if she couldn’t breathe.
They started getting together for dancing, walking and talking — foreplay, Price would later say — and nine months later, they had sex. When Price worried aloud to Rice that he might get bored with how long it took her to climax, he said: “It can take three weeks as long as I can take a break sometimes to change positions and get something to eat.” They tantalized each other on the phone, talking about what they’d like to do together. He also wanted her to have orgasms with him during intercourse, but Price knew her body: It wasn’t going to happen without a vibrator. Rice was initially reluctant; it seemed mechanical, not natural. “He had this idea that the vibrator would take over,” Price told me. She convinced him otherwise, and “from then on, we were a threesome.” They also discovered sex worked best if they did it before a meal, not after, so blood flow went to their genitals instead of toward digesting food. “Joan, I’m starting the rice cooker,” he would announce. And then Price would slowly peel off her clothes.
They married about five years after becoming a couple, and Price used her knowledge and excitement to write her first senior sex book, part memoir, part celebration of older sex, “Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty.” Soon, people were emailing her, stopping her at the grocery store, at the gym. They’d say something along the lines of: It’s great that you’re having spectacular sex, but that isn’t going on in my life. They told her stories of so-so sex and bemoaned the things that didn’t work. They had lots of questions about how to make it better. She tried to address them in her next book, “Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud About Senior Sex,” which delved into research on sex and aging, enlisting doctors, sex therapists and other experts for advice.
Before she even started writing the second book, though, Rice was diagnosed with cancer. He died seven years to the day after their first kiss. It would be years before Price could work through her grief enough to date again. When she ventured back out, she was in her late 60s and signed up for OkCupid. She created rules for herself. She would not lie about her age. A date was an audition only for a second date, not for a lifetime partner. If she wanted to have sex with someone, she first made sure they both could talk openly about what they liked and didn’t like and agree to have safe sex.
Five years ago, she met Mac Marshall, a retired anthropologist, who is 78. Like Price, he talks freely about sex and is open to new experiences and ways to work around their ailments and creaky joints. She introduced him to different kinds of vibrators, including ones for his penis, and a variety of lubricants, which are now a regular part of their sex lives. They plan for sex, sometimes a day or more in advance, fantasizing about it beforehand. And when the time arrives, it’s a ritual of frank talk, pleasure and awareness of their old bodies.
On a winter afternoon in Quincy, Mass., I met with Stephen Duclos, a family, couples and sex therapist, in his office, before his evening patients arrived. Art hung on the walls, the windows stretched almost from the floor to the ceiling and carefully arranged books lined his shelves. Duclos, an intent listener with close-cropped gray hair and green eyes, has been a therapist for more than 48 years and a certified sex therapist for more than 20. He also teaches sex therapy to therapists and psychologists-in-training. And as he has aged (he’s now 72), younger colleagues have sent many of their older couples his way. Among the thousands of clients he has seen, several hundred have been in their 60s, 70s and 80s.
Often, when couples arrive at Duclos’s office, it’s because sex has dropped off over several decades. The relationship may be warm and high functioning, but sex is dormant. Or the couple is gridlocked, living separate lives without much connection, emotionally or sexually. Sometimes they come to see him because medications or cancer treatments have affected sex. Or the couple is contemplating a change in their relationship. A man has had an affair or is considering one. A woman wants to open the marriage or engage in sexual fantasies that she’s never been able to express. Some of this, Duclos notes, is driven by our fear of “not being sexually relevant anymore and losing that part of our identity.”
When couples have been together 40 or 50 years, it can be harder to address sexual issues than for those earlier in their relationship. “We make all sorts of concessions to each other in marriages over the decades, including with sex,” Duclos told me. “Let’s say there’s a 1-to-10 sexuality scale. One is really bad, and 10 is a spiritual tantric thing. Most of us don’t have much of 1 or 10, but we settle on 5 to 6, if we are lucky. We know what to do. And that’s what we do. There may be some minimal discussion about doing something different, but it almost never amounts to much.”
For some people, that feels like enough. Or they don’t care about sex anymore; they are worn down by disease or just done with that part of their lives. If people in a relationship have discussed it and agree they no longer want sex, there’s no issue. But one of the most frequent complaints among couples is a discrepancy in desire. A small discrepancy is fine. However, when one person is initiating sex 95 percent of the time, she may feel unwanted, while the person who says no — and therefore has the ultimate control over whether consensual sex happens — often feels guilty. (The pandemic has only exacerbated sex issues because many couples have so little differentiation and little time away from each other, Duclos notes. Enmeshment mutes desire.)
And a mediocre sex life that was tolerable when life was consumed by children may feel the opposite as you have more time in your final years. The concessions people make around sex, as Duclos puts it, “can feel like a 1,000 paper cuts. You don’t notice any of them until you are really bleeding.” In therapy, Duclos calls it “accumulated sadness.” Clients weep upon hearing the term. It feels so true, so familiar, so entrenched.
Many of the older people I interviewed told me they wish they had invested in sex earlier in their lives, including through better communication, more intimacy and overcoming sexual anxieties. “I think we were both lonely,” said Marie (who asked me to use her middle name to protect her privacy), referring to decades of often lukewarm sex with her husband. “At one point, I didn’t care if I never had sex again,” she said. “We were like brothers and sisters, with an occasional romp.” Then about six years ago, Marie, who is 70, and her husband, 74, drastically changed their diets and lost about 50 pounds each. And something about that triggered their ability to see each other afresh and to begin a process of reimagining sex. Now foreplay often starts in the morning with texts about what they want to do with each other. During sex, they talk and act more openly than in the past. And afterward, they tend to sit with coffee and talk by the fireplace.
For a man named Patrick, too, intimacy and sexuality have deepened over the years, in his case both with his partner and, when it comes to sex, outside his relationship. A retired therapist in his mid-70s, Patrick, who is gay, has been with his partner more than 30 years, and over time they developed a ritual in which they trade off every Sunday: One person gives a massage one week, the other the next, followed by kissing, touching and oral sex. Though Patrick wanted to have anal sex, his partner was no longer interested.
So years ago, he posted on a gay dating website for older people, writing that he was seeking men for anal sex. (His partner gave his blessing and took the profile photos.) And now, every so often, his partner leaves the house, and one of a few men arrive for sex. As a gay man, Patrick said, “one of my intentions in life is that coming out is not an event, it’s a process. Every day I try to find a way to come out more.” Having the variety of sex he desires is “my sense of carpe diem. It’s integrating pieces of myself I’ve pushed aside.”
One therapist I spoke to, Sabitha Pillai-Friedman, said that some of her older clients also wanted to expand sex by doing something “more edgy.” So Pillai-Friedman, who is a relationship and sex therapist, as well as an associate professor at the Center for Human Sexuality Studies at Widener University, began suggesting that they consider role playing and using mild restraints and blindfolds. Those who tried it told her it unleashed a playfulness between them. “When bodies are not cooperating,” as Pillai-Friedman told me, “why not eroticize their minds?”
Kleinplatz made playfulness a part of a sex-therapy program she created several years ago. More than 150 couples, including some older people and some who hadn’t had sex in at least a decade, have gone through the eight-week group therapy. Along with doing exercises in empathic communication, the couples learn to be vulnerable and trusting, even during conflict. And an instructor of massage therapy teaches them how to stay “absorbed and engaged,” Kleinplatz says, while the partners touch each other.
According to a study by Kleinplatz’s team published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine in 2020, couples — heterosexual and same-sex, young and old — continued to experience significantly improved sex for at least six months after finishing the program. Those positive outcomes were due, in part, to the sexual wisdom of older couples. Kleinplatz’s team based the group-therapy program on lessons they learned from her in-depth interviews with “extraordinary lovers” — almost half of whom were over 60.
A few years ago, Ann greeted me at the door of her home in a pink turtleneck sweater, pants and knee-high boots. She was in her late 80s and returning from a morning exercise class. Several years earlier, Ann (who asked me to use her nickname) moved into a retirement community, expecting that, among other things, her sex life had come to an end. Her first marriage was sexless long before her husband died. When she remarried several years later, for a while the sex was great. But as she reached her 70s, her vaginal walls became dryer and sex hurt more. Her husband, who hadn’t let her use lube before, did not want her to start now. He felt insulted and hurt that she needed lubrication, Ann said, as if his own sexuality wasn’t enough to turn her on: “He thought I didn’t love him.” Eventually they divorced for other reasons, and she spent several years in a warm, sexually satisfying affair with a married man.
When Ann finally moved into the retirement community in her 80s, most of the residents were women, and the men she met were either married or unappealing to her. But one afternoon, someone introduced her to Lee. He was round-faced and warm, with the look and manner of a kindly school principal, curious and eager to chat. They flirted, they went to the symphony together, they shared a love of politics and the arts. One night, Ann fretted that she had been too bossy with him. She called to tearfully apologize, fearful that she may have pushed him away. Lee showed up at her door, hugged her and gave her a kiss on her cheek. “I’d like to hold you for hours,” he said.
As much as Ann wanted to be with him, the thought of exposing her body to someone new felt terrifying. The first time they were together in bed, Ann and Lee lay down with their clothes on and hugged for a long time. The next time they did the same, only naked, with the covers over them, lights out. “You want to die,” Ann told me, remembering that night and her self-consciousness about her wrinkled skin and belly rolls. “Who is going to want me looking like this?” It helped that Lee was in his 80s, too. It helped that she really liked him. At some point that night, she thought to herself: Screw it. This is who I am. And she realized there was something about being in her 80s, feeling lucky to be alive, lucky to find a new partner who made her feel so good. It smoothed the edges off her vanity; she couldn’t have done at 75 what she was able to do now.
The biggest hurdle was that Lee was married to a woman who had end-stage Alzheimer’s — she was largely unaware of her surroundings — and lived in a memory-care facility. Lee, who visited her often, struggled to tell Ann he loved her out of loyalty to his wife, and Ann initially felt uneasy that he was married. Though some residents gossiped and seemed to judge Ann for being with a married man, her friends and family, along with Lee’s, were supportive. They could see how happy the couple was and wanted them to be together. As Ann thought to herself: Who, after all, were they really hurting?
Since then, Lee’s wife has died, and he and Ann have moved in together. “It’s very important to us that we never go to sleep without intimacy,” Ann told me a couple of months ago. Sometimes it’s oral sex or intercourse. Often, it’s hugging, kissing and holding hands. And that, Ann and Lee said, is more important to them than ever before.
Years ago, at Hebrew Home, a nonprofit nursing home overlooking the Hudson River on the northern tip of New York City, a nurse walked in on two residents having sex. She immediately went to Daniel Reingold, then Hebrew Home’s executive vice president. What should I do? she asked. Reingold, who has told this story often, replied, “You tiptoe out and quietly pull the door closed.”
Reingold used the incident as an impetus to establish what’s recognized as the nation’s first sexual-expression policy — and still one of the few — for residents of senior-living facilities. The policy promotes consensual sexual intimacy as a human right, regardless of sexual orientation, and requires staff to “uphold and facilitate” residents’ sexual expression. Reingold put the policy on Hebrew Home’s home page because the facility may not be the right culture “if you have a problem if your widowed mother becomes intimate with another man,” he said.
We need to “act like adults when it comes to intimacy,” said Reingold, who has worked at Hebrew Home for more than 30 years and is now the president and chief executive of RiverSpring Living, which operates the nursing home. “The boomer population is about to come into this new world. We need to blow it up.” Reingold’s staff comes from almost three dozen countries and practices many different religions, but they are prohibited from bringing their personal, religious or moral values related to sex to their job. (Long-term care facilities can be unwelcoming of L.G.B.T.Q. people, who sometimes have to “come out” again — or choose not to — when they move in.)
At Hebrew Home, staff members make an effort to seat romantic couples together at dinner. They are also expected to pick up prescriptions for Viagra, just as they would any medication, or a tube of lubricant — and to do so “without smirking,” Reingold noted — and, if needed, help a resident access porn on an iPad if the Wi-Fi isn’t working. I asked if the policy would include, say, giving a resident her vibrator if she was unable to reach it. It not only would, Reingold said, but the staff should ensure that the batteries work. “It’s no different than making sure the batteries work for a resident’s hearing aid.” And if a woman is having a consensual affair with another resident, it’s not the staff’s responsibility to intervene.
Reingold is aware that society’s paternalism around aging can create roadblocks to intimacy and sex. “We in the field have an obligation to do everything we can to preserve whatever pleasures we can for older people who have lost so much,” Reingold says. “If they want more salt when they are 95, give them salt. Same with sex.”
But dementia complicates sex — and the prevalence of dementia in nursing homes complicates administrators’ treatment of it. People with dementia are more vulnerable to sexual assault and sometimes behave sexually inappropriately. And if they are nonverbal, gauging consent is challenging. Many nursing homes take a conservative approach: avoid the problem by creating barriers to sex. In contrast, Reingold expects his staff to enable intimacy for all residents, including those with dementia, while also protecting people from unwanted touch. Staff members typically know the residents very well, he said, and can assess what nonverbal residents do and do not want.
Gayle Appel Doll, the author of “Sexuality and Long-Term Care” and a former director of the Center on Aging at Kansas State University, where she is an associate professor emeritus, says there are several ways to assess nonverbal consent. Does a resident express pleasure around her partner? Does she avoid the partner or look uneasy? “What happens if you can’t say no? Then you can’t say yes either,” Doll says. “Your life is decided by other people.” Sometimes, as she notes, the need for sex lasts longer than some cognitive functions. And the need for touch never leaves us.
The organization End of Life Washington has created a 23-page dementia advance directive. Among other things, the document allows people who have very early dementia or believe they might develop it one day to delineate their preferences for intimate relationships when their cognitive and verbal skills decline. Do you want to continue having sex with your partner, even if you can’t verbally affirm it? Do you give your partner consent to have sex with another person if you have advanced dementia? Or would that violate your “in sickness and in health” vow to each other? And what about your sex life in a facility? Do you want to be able to have a relationship with another resident even if you are married?
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor lived with this issue as her husband, John, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and became progressively worse. In 2006, she retired from the Supreme Court to take care of him. But he began wandering from home so frequently that she feared for his safety and reluctantly moved him into an Alzheimer’s facility in Phoenix. Though he seemed sad at first, he soon met another woman with Alzheimer’s. They became a romantic couple; in a TV interview, one of the O’Connors’ sons likened his father to “a teenager in love.” O’Connor was relieved that her husband found someone who so clearly made him happy. When she visited John, she often found him with his new girlfriend, holding hands. O’Connor would join on the other side of her husband and take his free hand, the three of them sitting together.
For her 80th birthday, Roslyn received a gift from her daughters: a box with a big red bow and a vibrator inside. Roslyn was amused but put it in a closet and didn’t think much about it again. Her sexual life, she thought, was long over. As with many older women, Roslyn’s husband had died. And though there were men afterward, none were long-term relationships, and none, she said, involved much sex.
She didn’t think much about the vibrator again until several years later, when she saw a segment on a TV morning show about women and vibrators. Roslyn, a retired schoolteacher, was in her mid-80s by then and had given up so much of her physical life. When family members worried that she would fall off her bike and break her bones, she stopped riding. She quit tennis after straining muscles.
She was anxious about using a vibrator: “I didn’t want to hurt myself. This is a very delicate part of your body.” And she wasn’t thrilled with the one she’d received for her birthday. But by then, her daughters, one of whom runs female-sexuality retreats, had given her a few others. She tested them out until she found the right one. “I didn’t think I had it in me anymore,” Roslyn said. “I was amazed at what it did to me.” She could feel the sensations from her toes to her scalp.
Vibrators and masturbation can be important for older women, given that they are far less likely than men to be partnered. While 78 percent of men between 75 to 85 in the New England Journal of Medicine study had a partner, only 40 percent of women did. Older women in the United States are single at higher rates than men and less likely to remarry; they also live, on average, five years longer. “The most consistent sex will be the love affair you have with yourself,” Betty Dodson, a feminist sex educator who taught masturbation workshops until she was 90, wrote in “Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving,” a how-to book that was translated into 25 languages. “Masturbation will get you through childhood, puberty, romance, marriage and divorce, and it will see you through old age.”
Roslyn is 95 now, and though she notes that, for her, nothing replaces an intimate relationship with a man, she said her vibrator makes her “feel alive.” While parts of her body have weakened — she has some hearing and vision problems — her sexual response turns out to work well.
Given her own experience, Roslyn, who at age 92 attended one of her daughter’s sexuality retreats, wondered why so few people talked about vibrators and masturbation. Her doctors certainly didn’t. People she knew didn’t. Then one night several years ago, she was in a restaurant with two friends after they attended a Broadway show. As the women talked about their sleep problems, Roslyn brought up her vibrator. She told them when she wakes up in the middle of the night, it helps her fall back to sleep.
They looked embarrassed, even shocked, as Roslyn talked. “Roz, that’s too intimate,” one of them said.
She wasn’t hurt by their dismissal of vibrators. Instead, Roslyn felt sorry for them; she wished they understood what she knew. In their waning days and with aching bodies, they were missing out on a chance for easy, deep pleasure.
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Emily in Paris’ Creator Darren Star Wasn’t Going for a Millennial Stereotype
I thought you would like this —LWH
The TV showrunner also talks about his Oura ring obsession, how his routines change from city to city and his favorite ‘White Lotus’ character
Darren Star is one of TV’s greatest romantics. From “Sex and the City” to “Emily in Paris,” the showmaker’s signatures include love triangles, lavish parties, grand gestures and, of course, over-the-top outfits. While filming the third season of his Netflix comedy starring Lily Collins, which is now streaming, he found plenty of opportunities to feel the magic himself—such as shooting a scene at the top of the Eiffel Tower late at night.
“You can’t get up there until after 1 a.m. to film,” says Mr. Star, 61. “When you write things, it’s sort of a dream of what you’d like things to be, and in this case, what we dreamed, we were able to get on the screen.”
Mr. Star, who lives in Los Angeles, New York and Paris, likes to begin each day reading hard copies of the newspapers. And like Emily, he loves to indulge in a freshly baked croissant. Here, he shares the cafe where he starts his days in each city and why procrastination is a key to his success.
What time do you get up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do?
I get up at 7 a.m., with or without my alarm. I’ve gotten very obsessive about all my sleep apps. I wear my Apple Watch and my Oura ring, and the first thing I do when I wake-up is cross reference how much sleep I’ve gotten. They’re generally pretty in sync. The Oura ring is nice because if I’ve gotten a bad night’s sleep, it’ll give me little encouraging slogans like, “You’ll be OK.”
What do you eat for breakfast?
I’ll do a couple shots of espresso when I wake up. I love going out to breakfast. In Paris, I love going to Café de Flore and buying the papers [at] the newsstand right there. In L.A., Kings Road Café or Sycamore Kitchen. In New York, I love going to Balthazar and sitting at the counter there.
What are your writing routines like? Is there a place where you get your best writing done?
I’m a big procrastinator. I’ll let the stress and tension of the deadline build up until finally I can do it literally anywhere. I can sit on the Jitney going to the Hamptons and write. Something clicks where I’m just all in. I can very easily write in bed.
What’s a vice of yours?
A great almond croissant.
Emily is very millennial, while “Sex and the City” is known for its portrayal of Gen X women. How do you think the two generations are different? Which generational stereotypes do you actually believe?
The relationship to privacy and sharing is different between those two generations. You can’t make too many broad generalizations because a character like Emily is a millennial, but I don’t know if she fits the stereotype of a millennial. She’s an ambitious striver—I feel like that’s a character that’s present in every generation. She’s someone who wants to succeed and has a big heart.
In the show’s love triangle, are you Team Gabriel or Team Alfie?
I’m Team Emily.
What are you reading and watch-ing?
I have some go-to books I love for inspiration, like “The War of Art.” I love reading history and novels. I just finished “The Lincoln Highway” by Amor Towles and now I’m reading “The Splendid and the Vile” by Erik Larson. I watched the last seasons of “The Crown” [and] “The White Lotus.”
Do you have a favorite “White Lotus”character?
Well, Jennifer Coolidge. I could watch it with the sound off, and I would still be enjoying watching her.
What were you most looking for when you tried to hire the team around you?
You have to feel like you have chemistry with the people you’re spending time with. You’ve got to feel like there’s an instinct for that. A sense of humor. I’ve been working with a lot of the same talented writers over the years. When you’re having fun together in the room, that sensibility gets translated into the show. Putting together a writing staff in a way is like putting together a great dinner party. You want different voices that all work in harmony together.
What’s a piece of advice you’ve gotten that’s guided you?
Don’t believe everything you think. We all get into those cycles of negative thinking, and I think that was a nice piece of advice.
My neighbor and friend is Robin Schultz. In May of 2020, her grandson Hunter was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease (CMT4B3). Her family has started a 501(c)(3) non-profit to save children with this rare-life threatening degenerative neuromuscular disease. Please visit her website to learn more:www.cmt4b3research
Please support the research at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine to find a treatment for children suffering from CMT4B3. We hope we can count on you to help us find a cure for children with CMT4B3 and related neuromuscular diseases.
Many of our neighbors know Hunter, and see him dashing around in his orthotics.Children with CMT4B3 lose the ability to walk, the use of their hands and potentially their sight and/or hearing. Eventually the disease can compromise their breathing, leading to premature death.There is no cure or treatment for CMT4B3 or any form of CMT.
CMT is similar to Muscular Dystrophy and ALS. Untreated, CMT causes the nerves to deteriorate, which breaks down the communication between the brain and the muscles leading to muscle weakness, wasting, limb deformities and paralysis.
In less than 2 years, the Schultz’s have: launched a non-profit, hosted an International CMT4B3 Research Symposium, assembled a renowned Scientific Advisory Board, became a patient resource for the Peripheral Nerve Society, initiated 11 CMT4B3 Research Projects (8 of which we are solely funding), and raised over $1,000,000 funding universities worldwide.
The University of Miami Hussman Institute for Genomics is taking a leading role in their research efforts. They have granted the University of Miami over $340,000.00 for phase 1 of their CMT4B3 Research.These projects aim to develop a gene therapy and small molecule drug to stop the progression of the disease.
Their research efforts are highlighted in the current issue of The University of Miami Miller School Medicine Magazine, “DNA Detectives, a family’s journey to cure a rare genetic disorder.” To learn more please click here:www.cmt4b3research.org/funduofm
If you have any suggestions for us to spread awareness or fundraise for U of M research, please feel free to email or call: rbgschultz@gmail.com914-589-8047
The CMT4B3 Research Foundation is composed of volunteers, we work from home and all operational costs are covered by the co-founders, therefore 100% of donations go towards research.
In the summer of 1970, the painter Willem de Kooningwent on a curious afternoon date with Mimi Kilgore, a radiant young Houston heiress and fixture in the arts world. The outing, a public tour of notable Hamptons homes, was an unlikely way to spend an afternoon for de Kooning. As a titan of 20th-century art who had a house and studio in Springs, an enclave of East Hampton, he was something of a local attraction himself.
But he and Ms. Kilgore, 34 years his junior, had met at a party just weeks before, and already he was smitten. At one house Ms. Kilgore came upon a frog that had been flattened by a car tire. Finding that it reminded her of an abstract shape from one of his paintings, she presented it to de Kooning as a quirky gift. But he saw it as something more. He kept the frog for the rest of his life, a symbol of his devotion to a friend, lover and muse who would remain a source of inspiration for years and who would, by many accounts, help reinvigorate his career.
“It was a classic story of an older artist falling in love with a younger woman,” said the art critic Mark Stevens, who, with his wife, Annalyn Swan, wrote “de Kooning: An American Master,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography. “And in this particular case he seemed to fall in love with painting all over again when he fell in love with Mimi.”
Mimi Kilgore with Willem de Kooning in his studio in Springs, N.Y., in about 1975. “She was very passionate about ideas and connected a lot of artists,” her son Alexander said. Credit…Nancy Crampton
Ms. Kilgore, who died on Nov. 24 in Houston at 87, certainly didn’t need a relationship with a famous man to define her life or career, those who knew her said. Still, her powerful and lasting effect on de Kooning was a testament to the charm, drive and seemingly boundless energy that made her an influential arts patron with a knack for bringing together the art world elite and the moneyed class.
“What really set her apart was her vivacious spirit and sense of humor,” her son Alexander Kilgore, who confirmed the death, said in a phone interview. “She was very passionate about ideas and connected a lot of artists — she connected just a lot of people — that wouldn’t necessarily be connected.”
In Houston, Ms. Kilgore served on the boards of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Contemporary Arts Museum and was twice the commissioner of the Municipal Arts Committee of the City of Houston. On Long Island, she was on the board of Guild Hall, a vibrant arts center in East Hampton.
Ben Love, the chief executive of Texas Commerce bank, hired Ms. Kilgore to build an art collection for the company’s newly built 75-story office tower, which opened in 1982. And for decades she managed the art collection of Fayez Sarofim, a billionaire Houston money manager.
She was also a presence in theater. As a board member of Stages repertory theater in Houston, she helped save its building from developers by arranging for it to be declared a landmark.
And following the death of her sister Susan Smith Blackburn, an actress and writer, from breast cancer in 1977, Ms. Kilgore and Susan’s husband, Bill Blackburn, created a prize in her name, given to English-speaking female playwrights; 10 of its finalists have won Pulitzer Prizes for drama. “She believed that society urgently needed more help from talented women,” her son Alexander said.
Emilie deMun Smith was born on Nov. 13, 1935, in Houston, one of three children of C. Cabanne Smith, a banker who served in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army during World War II, and Lucy (Thompson) Smith, an arts patron.
Ms. Kilgore grew up in the wealthy Houston neighborhood of River Oaks, made her debut at the Houston Country Club and attended the private Kinkaid School before heading to Smith College in Massachusetts, from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1957 after a year abroad in France.
Following college, she moved to New York to pursue a career in the art world, taking a job as an art librarian at the Frick Collection. “She studied art at Smith and was wildly excited by the art happening in all mediums in New York,” Mr. Kilgore said. “It was the place to be.”
In 1958, she married William S. Gilbreath III, a financier, and had a son with him, Cabanne Gilbreath, in 1959. The marriage ended in divorce in 1963. Two years later, she married John E. Kilgore Jr., a lawyer from Wichita Falls, Texas, and had her son Alexander with him. In 1970, her father decided to start an oil royalty business in Texas, and she and Mr. Kilgore, along with her two sons, moved to Houston. (The couple divorced in 1985; Mr. Kilgore, who remarried, died in 2005.)
Summering in East Hampton as well as in Pointe aux Barques, Mich., an affluent cottage community on Lake Huron that her great-grandfather had helped found, Ms. Kilgore seemed the embodiment of what Mr. de Kooning called a “classy dame,” Mr. Stevens and Ms. Swan wrote in their biography.
The two met at a party at the Bridgehampton home of the Iranian painter Manoucher Yektai in August 1970. “I was sort of transfixed,” Ms. Kilgore recalled in an interview with Mr. Stevens. “I think I was unaware of anything else going on. And we just talked, looking straight at each other for a long, long time. And then he was leaving, and he said, ‘Am I ever going to see you again?’”
He would, frequently, for decades. She visited him until his death in 1997, even after he had slipped into dementia in the 1980s. While the two were never a couple in the formal sense (Ms. Kilgore lived primarily in Texas), they attended art fairs, like the Venice Biennale, and mingled with other artists in New York at the nightclub Max’s Kansas City and Fanelli Cafe, a venerable pub in SoHo.
In the Bohemian art world of postwar New York, appetites for self-indulgence tended to be large, and sexual mores loose, with relationships and romantic partners ever shifting.
For de Kooning, the relationship with Ms. Kilgore proved transformative. Prone to melancholy and given to epic benders, he was in a difficult period in life when he met her, Mr. Stevens said in a phone interview. For starters, he was entangled in stressful relationships both with his wife, the artist Elaine de Kooning, and Joan Ward, the mother of his daughter, Lisa.
Ms. Kilgore provided an escape. “He loved show tunes,” she said in an interview with Mr. Stevens. “We would sing songs together. I loved dancing, so I would dance. And do cartwheels outside the studio near a gazebo.” She tried to teach him to tango, she said, but “his feet were too big.”
Her joie de vivre mesmerized de Kooning. “I love you wherever you are forever,” he wrote in a letter to Ms. Kilgore. “You made me over …. You’re with me all the time even when you’re not with me.”
His joy soon became evident in his work. After a foray into sculpture, de Kooning returned to painting in the 1970s, producing works that were uncharacteristically buoyant and colorful, even lyrical. “They were remarkable for being so rich, luscious and sumptuous — everything you should not have been doing at a time when conceptual art and minimal art were in vogue,” Mr. Stevens said.
His 1976 painting “East Hampton Garden Party,” for example, captured a summery optimism, with its deeply saturated blues and yellows and exuberant brush strokes. It was one of many works that de Kooning would present to a woman he beatified over the years as “Santa Emilia.” With one such gift, he included a letter that said, “I dedicate all my paintings to you.”
In 1975, de Kooning asked her to marry him. Ms. Kilgore, who was still married, demurred, telling him that “so many lives would be affected” and pointing out that their time apart had actually enriched their relationship.
In addition to her son Alexander, Ms. Kilgore, who died in an assisted living facility, is survived by her son Cabanne, who is known as Cab, and two grandchildren.
“The relationship lasted because of what it was,” she told Mr. Stevens. “He could have me the way he wanted me, in his head.”
Alex Williams is a reporter in the Style department. @AlexwilliamsNYC
Photo by Eliot Hess who states,”This is very much a real Buddha, possibly Indonesian or Thai. It is the Calling the Earth to Witness or earth-witness pose (bhumisparsha mudra). It depicts the moment of Buddha’s enlightenment, sitting under the bodhi tree.”
A short interview with the artist Yornel Martinez. He lives in Havana, Cuba. Eliot and I bought the Buddha in Paris at the home of Isabelle Saltiel-Nahum, an art collector and art advisor. She and her husband exhibited the project “Cuba is in!” in their art filled Parisian home in partnership with Galleria Continua during Art Basel Paris. Thank you Kathryn Mikesell of FountainheadArts and Sarah Bartesaghi Truong of Venividi Paris for the introduction.
I reached out to Yornel on Instagram. I asked if I could interview him.
Yornel: “Hello, yes we can talk.”
Lois: “What’s with the Chiclets chewing gum?”
Yornel: “Yes, chewing gum is an unusual material for a sculpture. The Buddha refers to meditation and is a cultural element of Asia. Chewing gum is something of our contemporary culture and of many activities. These two elements generate opposing forces. However, the opposing forces generate a certain harmony in the sculpture. It is exciting to see a sculpture with unusual materials.”
Found this on YouTube. A more in-depth interview about Yornel’s work.
Selected recent solo and group exhibitions include: 2016 Mi mano derecha no sabe lo que escribe mi mano izquierda, Biblioteca Nacional José Martí. La Habana, Cuba; Transhumance, Beyond Cuban Horizons, CAB Art Center. Bruselas, Belgium; Intersecciones, The Hoffman Gallery. Portland, USA; Nano, (Remake), Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales CDAV. La Habana, Cuba; Puente abierto, Galería Evolución. Lima, Perú; Line up, Galería La Acacia. La Habana, Cuba; Poesía para ver. Expo de poesía visual cubana, Casa de la Poesía. La Habana, Cuba; 2015 Intervención en la librería, Librería Fayad Jamís. XII Bienal de La Habana. La Habana, Cuba; 2014: El arte es nuestra última esperanza, Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, USA.
Education: 2007 Fine Arts Faculty degree at Instituto Superior de Arte ISA. Havana, Cuba; 2001 Painting and Drawing degree at Academia de Artes Plásticas José J. Tejada. Santiago de Cuba, Cuba.
Bio / Statement:
Yornel Martinez is a post-conceptual artist who subverts the function of discursive elements – books, fonts, texts, archives – in order to alter their meaning. Creating a connection between words and image plays a leading role in his practice. Martinez’s interests reside in “visually transcending limits of language.” Inviting other artists to participate in the deconstruction and reconstruction of textual objects and their related environments is another focus. For the XII Havana Biennial in 2015, he collaborated with Damian Ortega and other artists in a project comprised of interventions in the Fayad Jamis bookstore in Havana, as well as featured “books as art” objects by contemporary Cuban artists.
Support: Yornel Martinez’s work is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Cuban Artists Fund. .
The words “Utopian” and “Dystopian”always fascinated me. Do they really exist? My art collector friend, Leslie Weissman, who I know through Fountainhead Arts, is also an artist. I kind of knew that but I never really explored her art. Then we went to Paris together with Fountainhead in October, and I had the opportunity to look at it on Instagram. I was hooked immediately. Every aspect of her art made me feel like she was inside my head hearing my thoughts. Each piece reminded me of subjects that I have repeatedly thought about over the years. That doesn’t happen very often. I bought four paintings on the spot. They are the first four below. The remainder are either owned by other collectors, or are still available. I can’t hog all of Leslie’s work, but I would, if I could. —LWH
It’s also very unusual that an artist can verbalize what his or her work is all about. Leslie has no trouble doing that. All the copy below was written by Leslie to explain her paintings.
“Representing a thought, a moment in time or a relationship that needs exploration, my work balances the Utopian and Dystopian environments that surround us. Constantly trying to balance the dichotomy in our world; anonymity and extreme presence, broken and perfect parts, personal histories and current circumstances, my work evolves from an initial view of my environment to an abstract depiction of relationships.
Leslie, her husband Michael and her sons. They live in Chappaqua.
“Currently exploring the suburban landscape and the real and imagined boundaries that prevail in our daily life; a thought about social, economic and political status. Approaching this from two vantage points; through the abstract and ghost like figures and the boundaries of our landscapes I am hoping to initiate a dialogue about how we relate to each other and function as a community. I am interested in personal intrigues and how those struggles and background stories impact our reactions and relations to those around us.
“The use of trees, natural landscape elements and forms are my way of depicting the boundaries we erect for ourselves and how we need to constantly adjust them to perform, survive and grow beyond. Our boundaries are often self-imposed or obtained from a desire to be part of a collective group. So long as we know our boundaries, we can live within them or push beyond.
“Life is rife with individual struggles of belonging and wanting to standout. No longer does our world provide anonymity derived from a standard way of life and uniformity. In the midst of neighborhoods and developments is a modern social revolution where individuals are looking to be known for something greater than being part of the whole.
“The dichotomy of many of us face is rich with age old questions regarding our place in the universe and what entails a perfect model for truth in our lives.”
The new Pelican Hotel and Restaurant , the new restaurant at Tiffany’s in the Design District, Burlesque, The Underline – The Three Tomatoes
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Our usual Saturday afternoon outing to the Miami Design District. I had a uni caviar sandwich ($30), the size of a White Castle 70 cent burger and a steak tartar ($29). Eliot had a short rib panini that was so big he took half home. Pricey but super delicious.
Re-entering the world as a single person after the death of a spouse is definitely a test of resiliency. Everyone reacts differently, and no one should be judged on how they want to conduct their future. It’s a very personal decision.
I would like to explore with Susan her experiences because what she experienced was very difficult and Susan had to overcome two devastating events, the loss of her son six months before the death of her husband. No one has to tell Susan how defeated a person can feel, and how overwhelming it was to move forward with her life. But she did it. Now I want Susan to share it with you. Let’s explore how you jumped into the social world.
DigiDame 