I’ve been writing about Alan Ladd this week for TCM’s upcoming “Summer Under the Stars” festival of classic films.  Growing up in the years after his death, I knew only two things about the star of Shane (1953)—okay, I knew three things about him:  he had starred in a movie called Shane, he was so short he had to stand on a box to kiss his leading ladies and he died young.  I never bothered to find out how young – since he looked way older than I was (which is to say 10 or 11), I didn’t sweat it.  Many years later I learned the sad truth that alcohol and depression had aged Ladd prematurely, making him appear at the time of his death on January 29, 1964, a good decade older than his 51 years.   

Yeesh, I say now (well, by the time you’re reading this—late last night)… I’ll be 51 in 6 years and I haven’t done half the things Alan Ladd did, like sacrifice my life for the French Resistance, clear myself for the murder of my slatternly wife, protect settlers from leering gunslingers or stand two years before the mast with my puffy shirt off.  I guess my consolation is that I look younger than my years, at least if I’m to believe the Armenian guy who towed my Honda Fit last weekend.   I had a slight alarm issue.

But I digress. 

Less than two months after Alan Ladd died, Hollywood lost Peter Lorre. One of the earliest Hollywood factoids that impressed itself upon my 10-year-old brain was that Peter Lorre died at age 60.  I hadn’t yet seen Lorre in his heyday, in M (1931) or The Maltese Falcon  (1941) and knew him from his later work in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961).  Graying, lined and chubby, Lorre seemed like an old man and his death age-appropriate.  In my very limited understanding of the human lifespan, 60 represented the end cap on the aisle of existence.  I knew that people could live to be older (Boris Karloff proved that, damn straight), but that after 60 you were living on borrowed time.   

I’ll be 60 in less than fifteen years… but I’m okay with that.  I’ve done a bit of living in the intervening three decades and my sense of the appropriate lifespan has been recalibrated.  Helping me crunch those numbers is the fact that actors look younger now.  Take Harrison Ford, for example.  Born in 1942, Harrison Ford turns 65 this July.  Indiana Jones is retirement age!  If Peter Lorre reappeared in Hollywood tomorrow (well, by the time you’re reading this—today), hale and hearty at age 60 he’d wind up cast as Ford’s father.  Well, that’s genetics for you.  And not so much smoking.  And some plastic surgery.  

But I digress.  I hear that comes with age.  So anyway, my point… it’s all relative.  Life is what you make it.  Hell, Ernest Borgnine turned 90 this January and he’s got four movies coming out in 2007.  It’s like Indiana Jones once said:  “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.”