Eight-Five And Coming On Strong Poem by gershon hepner

She’s eighty-five, and comes on strong,
and writes about it in her books
her son approves of. Nothing wrong
with mothers who on tenterhooks
puts readers, who turn every page
to find out what she tells us next
about her love life. At her age
it’s so great to be oversexed,
enjoying all erotica,
idildos, whips and silken cords,
and writing, episodic, a
recollection of awards
that she received, and still receives,
in bed, exciting readers with accounts
of tangled sexwebs that she weaves
in unions that she won’t renounce.
Determined to be naughtier
each year that she remains alive,
this greatest double-fortier
is focused still at eighty-five
on banning sexlessness from lives
of women prepped like her, prepared
to play the role that even wives
could play if only they just dared.

Inspired by a book by Gloria Vanderbilt, “Obsession, ” reviewed by Charles McGrath in the NYT, June 18,2009 (“Brahmin in Denim Writes of Sex, Masks and Veggies”) :

Gloria Vanderbilt’s new novel, “Obsession: An Erotic Tale, ” which comes out next week, may be the steamiest book ever written by an octogenarian. And it’s one of very few volumes to arrive on the sex-book shelf accompanied by a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates, who calls it, “a remarkable tapestry of human passion — an interior world of highly charged erotic mysteries that teasingly suggest, but ever elude, decoding.” In other words, it’s not always clear what’s going on. “Obsession, ” published by Ecco, is the story of Priscilla Bingham, the widow of a Frank Lloyd Wright-like architect who, after his death, discovers a cache of letters, wrapped in magenta grosgrain ribbon, revealing in considerable detail his secret, kinky sex life. The author of these letters is Bee, a mysterious woman who may be a figment of Priscilla’s imagination, or possibly Priscilla is a figment of Bee’s. Either way, the letters don’t leave much out. “Obsession” is written in stylized literary prose that owes something to Pauline Réage’s “Story of O, ” and is set in a world that’s partly fantastical. It’s erotica, not porn. But it nevertheless uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from. There are scenes involving dildos, whips, silken cords and golden nipple clamps, not to mention an ebony, smooth-backed Mason Pearson hairbrush purchased at Harrods. As the book explains, spanking with a Mason-Pearson is a “serious matter, ” not the kind of thing that is rewarded with the “luscious afterglow of warm cocoa butter.” Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by “The Joy of Cooking.” And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.
Now 85, Ms. Vanderbilt could easily pass for 25 years younger. She still has the high cheeks and the wide, stretchy smile she flashed back in the ’80s, when she was selling jeans on television. She has a Brahminish, boarding-school accent but a down-to-earth steely determination. On days when she doesn’t write she paints or makes collages and Joseph Cornell-like “dream boxes, ” some of which have been featured in literary magazines. “I’m always in love, that’s one of my secrets, ” she said recently, sitting in the living room of her apartment on Beekman Place. “I’m determined to be the best I can be for as long as I can, and when I’m not, I have my plans. I walk a lot and watch my diet. That’s the key of it. I’ve always had a lot of energy.” Sex, presumably, is something Ms. Vanderbilt knows about, after four marriages, as well as affairs with, among others, Howard Hughes, Gene Kelly, Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. She said she wasn’t at all embarrassed about the explicitness of her book, adding: “I don’t think age has anything to do with what you write about. The only thing that would embarrass me is bad writing, and the only thing that really concerned me was my children. You know how children can be about their parents. But mine are very intelligent and supportive.” Ms. Vanderbilt’s son Anderson Cooper, the CNN newscaster, who read “Obsession” in manuscript, said: “The six most surprising words a mother can say to her son are: ‘Honey, I’m writing an erotic novel.’ But actually she’s pretty unique, and there’s not much she does that’s surprising anymore. At 85, whatever she wants to write is fine with me.”

6/1/8/09