The Full Pacino

Older men in younger clothes. The city is filled with them. Soft and sagging. Pants too low and colors too bright. All chasing lost youth on Melrose Avenue and at tony purveyors of “active wear.”

Most of us are simply too polite to say what needs to be said to friends, colleagues, bosses and brothers: “Skin-tight jackets, moddish, clunky shoes and diamond earrings do not strip away the years.”

And then there is my friend, a lad of 59.

Now, he does not wear his age the way, say, Kirk Douglas did. He is of medium height with shoulders turning farther inward and downward with each passing year. This despite StairMasters and rowing machines and chicken breasts without skin. He is terribly disciplined.

For my friend is smart and industrious, a television producer who has middling cable TV hits every two or three years. He lives modestly. He divorced long ago and educated his children. They seldom visit.

These days he is in the market for a companion. “A girl of 45, maybe 50,” is the way he puts it. So funny, so touching, when we knights of the rounding middles handicap mature women with adolescent fervor.

Thus my friend did something to his appearance. As a marketing ploy. As a lure. He colored his gray hair. All of it. Didn’t leave a strand unstained. No white temples to suggest wisdom or experience. He wanted the Full Pacino, something on the order of chestnut brown. What he got was an inglorious crown that, in certain lights, appeared purple or mauve or some awful color usually found on those sofas that no one buys.

But he didn’t see it. He saw chestnut. His friends and colleagues saw an older man trying to look young and not succeeding at all. Because while my friend may have the jeans and sneakers of a skateboarder, he still had purple hair. He still had lines on the face under that purple hair. He still had ears that needed waxing and a neck that needed tightening and hands that were young when George Segal was a bankable leading man.

He was still 59.

And I was still his friend.

I was his friend when his wife walked out and his business failed and he bravely soldiered on. He is, in many ways, a remarkable fellow. You would want to be with him when he talks about history or sports or a long-ago date with Linda Ronstadt. What you wouldn’t want is to walk into a restaurant with your wonderful friend and watch strangers stare and mock his appearance. What you wouldn’t want is to look up from your plate and see a train wreck of color.

This is no way to get a girl of 45. Or 50.

My barber--she prefers to be called a stylist--tells me that men who color their own hair are dopes. That is what my friend did. He went to the drugstore, paid his $12 and wound up purple. The barber says dye jobs can be complicated trial-and-error propositions; the good ones also can cost $100 or more. The good ones, she says, leave credible amounts of age-appropriate gray or white.

In short, the good ones don’t make you look like an old guy with young hair.

Which is what I tell my pal the day I see one of his assistants look twice at his head and smirk behind his back.

“You mean it?” he asks. “I thought it looked pretty good.”

“I mean it,” I say. “Don’t be offended--I’m your friend, right?--it looks weird and it makes you look weird. I can’t let you go on this way. Not anymore. You are better than this.”

So this is what it has come down to: Instead of talking about baseball or business or vacations, I am sitting in a Chinese restaurant talking about hair color with a literate, grown man old enough to remember Alan Ladd, Perino’s and Pacific Ocean Park.

“And it costs a hundred bucks?” he asks.

“Yes,” I answer. “That’s what it costs. If you want to do it right. If you don’t want to look like a jerk, which you certainly are not.”

Is he hurt? It’s hard to tell. He’s a tough guy, a mensch. Good poker player, too. Then the bill comes and the cars come and he and I, old friends, drive off in the hard white daylight of L.A.

Weeks later, my friend pays a small fortune to some Beverly Hills salon with a continental name to strip the purple from his hair and lay in some salt-and-pepper shade of brown. It is not unappealing. It looks almost natural.

We meet for lunch at our regular Chinese place. The food is good; the light isn’t.

“Looks OK, huh?” he says. “I look better, right? Younger?”

“Looks good, kid,” I say. “You’re ready for Sharon Stone.”

“Actually,” he says , “I was thinking of someone a little younger. Maybe Diane Lane-ish. What do you say?”

I say I think Diane Lane already has a guy.