Collages: Simone Tieber
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Forever Cool
By David Dudley
They've been around forever. So why are Johnny Cash, William Shatner, Mister Rogers, and a few other (mostly male) icons a hot ticket for twentysomethings?
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For Johnny Cash, it started right about when he hit 60.
This was in the early 1990s. The country music legend was playing a festival show in Europe, and he noticed that the audience didn't look like the fans he was used to seeing. "There were thousands and thousands of young people there," he remembers. "People in their 20s and their 30s."
What happened? Throughout the 1980s, the middle-aged Man in Black had seemed trapped in the familiar entertainment-business arc: His record sales had declined, and younger artists had pushed his tunes off the radio. But now suddenly Cash wasn't a nearly-washed-up country music star any longer. He was something else—something… cooler. Ask around on any college campus today: Even the kids who barely know the tune to "Folsom Prison Blues" have a clear and intuitive understanding that this old man is an original, someone to be reckoned with—one very cool man.
And Cash isn't the only performer who has experienced a late-career change of fortune. In recent years, a select group of Americans over 60 have achieved a new kind of celebrity among the very young, a cultural status never before imagined.
Call it Eldercool.
The alchemy of coolness is poorly understood under the best of circumstances. Add a few wrinkles to the equation and things get even more complicated. In a culture geared toward the pursuit of ever younger consumers, visible maturity often equals irrelevance. Computer wizards, television writers, and rock stars are considered nigh unemployable after age 40. And, as many a movie star and athlete has painfully learned, one generation's rebel hero is the next's dimly recalled infomercial pitchman.
And yet, a handful of vintage TV stars, well-preserved legends, hard-living music artists, and assorted has-beens, survivors, and elder statesmen seem to have gained a mysterious new cachet. Any way you look at it, it's a motley crew: Cuban strongman Fidel Castro, heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali, and starship captain William Shatner are members of the club (though you may have a hard time finding a young person who idolizes all three). Former president Jimmy Carter has a bit of Eldercool in him, but then so does former Batman Adam West. Photogenically creased leading men such as Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood make the cut; in this arena, however, they might well be overshadowed by the Dalai Lama or even Mister Rogers.
The Eldercool are, with a few exceptions, men. This is not because men are inherently cooler, but because relatively fewer women over 60 have careers that give them the sort of widespread pop-cultural resonance that Eldercool seems to require. This will no doubt change in the years to come, as a generation of prominent, liberated women comes of age.
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