Keith Richards and Cher: Two extremes of aging ungracefully

Similar signs might have presaged the fall of the Roman Empire. It was nothing but an interesting juxtaposition on the newsstand: Cher on the cover of Good Housekeeping, looking like an ersatz Barbie doll, and a few covers down, a shirtless Keith Richards on the cover of Rolling Stone, looking every bit a prehistoric reptile.

Taken together, these two cover models are much more than a study in beauty and beastliness; they are twinned poster children for a persona-driven culture that cannot begin to age, because it has never learned to grow up.

Richards, at 58, looks like he’s been staked to an ant hill in the Gobi desert for the last 40 years and is proud of his status as an unrepentant and unreformed libertine. If there really were an island of lost boys, this is what their leader would look like after six decades of fun and games.

Cher, on the other hand, is as photogenic at 56 as she was at 18 (except that it’s creepy now), and speaks often and eloquently about how much she hates growing old. Lithe as any cheerleader, with a face as smooth as Tupperware, she’s fresh from a rockin’, racy concert tour, so it’s difficult to reconcile her image with the fact that the woman is the same age as President George W. Bush. As gritty as Richards is, Cher appears equally unscathed. Yet, somehow, they are emblematic of the same trend.

We have been a youth-obsessed culture for a long time, but look at these two and suddenly, the buck stops here. Enough already. What’s next? Abe Vigoda in a wife beater?

How long can we sustain the illusion that youth at any price is a good thing?

Cher, for example, doesn’t seem to have aged since the day she was invented, probably because she isn’t a real person. This isn’t meant to insult Cher; she said so herself. According to her, “Cher” is a fictional character to which she lays no claims of authorship.

Around the same time that David Bowie was inventing Ziggy Stardust, Sonny Bono was inventing the two-headed creature known as Sonny and Cher. One of Bono’s first creative decisions was to pass a short Armenian teenager off as a lanky, one-named Cherokee.

But unlike Ziggy, whose creator kept his alter ego on a short leash and euthanized him once the joke got old, the celebrity-known-as-Cher divorced her creator and started a solo career. She succeeded in setting herself up as a powerful multimedia entertainment franchise, selling movie tickets, CDs, concert tickets, even shampoo and housewares. With Cher in charge of Cher, the distinction between woman and character all but disappeared.

But Cher is savvy despite the faintness of her identity, minting millions from the marketing of her persona. The plastic surgery, the wigs, the clothes -- each manifestation is an ad campaign selling a product with a bar code. She has said as much herself, responding to a plastic-surgery query on ABC news in July by saying, “I’m just trying to keep the package viable.” But Cher the woman seems an oddly plotless creature.

Unable to age, she is a character with no story line. She has no childhood, no adolescence, no great love, no middle age, and there is no dotage in store for her -- Cher is like the runaway replicants in “Blade Runner,” a tragic figure imbued with a soul but lacking the equipment necessary to complete a normal lifespan.

Keith Richards, while appearing to be Cher’s opposite, is just as impaired. Instead of being frozen in his body, Richards is frozen in his own adolescence. As a founding member of the Rolling Stones, Richards began his public life as the quintessential angst-ridden youth. Drink, smoke, drugs, women, more drugs, more drink, more smoke. He was ugly at 40; at nearly 60 he is loathsome. This, also, should not be taken as an insult.

Richards wears his elephant hide with pride, as willfully ugly inside as he is out. Because of his strange failure to mature, Richards’ ravaged face and body are as fascinating to gaze upon as a 10-car pileup. You can’t help looking, because there but for the grace of God go you.

Just as Cher is a doll-like image of our perfect selves, Richards is a portrait of our worst-case scenarios, his face a clinical record of the excesses of the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Here is a man who has taken all the hits but learned none of the lessons. He is repulsive, to be sure, but seeing him on the cover of Rolling Stone is strangely heartening, if only because it shows how many mistakes the rest of us didn’t make, how ordinary and successful we really are. For most of us, there is little to be gained by achieving Cher’s level of polish, and even fewer of us have the means or the stamina to remain in a state of protracted adolescence the way Richards has. But their images are our signposts.

We market our slickest selves on dates and job interviews, and many a male’s midlife crisis seems to take the form of adopting some level of Richards-esque bad behavior. The one we accept as beauty, the other as truth.

They are the end points of our youth-obsessed culture. Don’t worry, it’s probably just a phase, a kind of cultural adolescence we’ll all eventually grow out of -- around the same time Keith Richards grows up and Cher grows old.