Terry Prone: Anthony Fauci, Ken Auletta, and Paul McCartney show us what 80 can look like

The ex-Beatle has been joined by two Americans (also in their eighties) to collectively head-butt ageism where it hurts. Good.

Paul McCartney allowed up-and-coming rocker Dave Grohl (53) perform alongside him at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England, last month. Picture: Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP

You have to love Anthony Fauci’s indecisiveness at the moment, if only because it’s so out of kilter with how clear he was during the pandemic. In the last week, Fauci, the man who faced down Trump on the latter’s headbanging theories about the coronavirus, started dithering and backtracking. Not about the virus. About his own retirement.

First, he told Politico that retiring around the time Joe Biden finished his first term as US president would be a good thing. 

Then he told The New York Times that he would “almost certainly” exit his post around that time while telling CNN they shouldn’t consider it an official retirement announcement.  He might exit government (as the US describes its public service) but he wasn’t having anything to do with the R word.

This, despite his age (81) and the fact that he first joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as a clinical researcher in 1968 and has been there ever since.

“I do want to do other things in my career, even though I’m at a rather advanced age,” Fauci said, adding that he still had passion and energy.

At the age of 81, Anthony Fauci, the resolute US chief medical adviser who stood up to Donald Trump, is only now wondering if he, maybe, might retire. File picture: Jim Lo Scalzo/AP

What a lucky lad, I hear you say, to have lived in the US, rather than Ireland, where a 50-year career, much of it at the top, in a public service body isn’t possible and where, the minute you hit 60, the talk is of pensions and grandchildren. Because what else would you be talking to an 80-year-old about?

Ken Auletta

The other American 80-year-old in the news, this time because of his latest book, is Ken Auletta. 

Auletta’s written dozens of big chunky doorstopper books about politics and media, virtually all of them bestsellers. The latest is about a man with an exquisite taste in films, including obscure, little-known art-house movies from European producers, and an affection for the books on which many of them based their screenplays.

At high school, this guy, in common with his classmates, fell in love with the poetry of Padraic Colum, the Longford man born in a workhouse, who was then in his 90s.

Somehow, the idea took hold that Colum might be persuaded to visit the John Brown High School. Of course, lots of ideas take hold of enthusiastic teenagers, but this one came to fruition, because one of the students simply made it happen.

That student didn’t come from an Irish background or a literary background or even from money. But he had artistic awareness, drive and determination. 

His name was Harvey Weinstein.

Ken Auletta's book lays out how Harvey Weinstein was a sensitive and perceptive reader, writer, and film producer — and, at the same time, a terrifying thug. File picture: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

That’s one of the themes that distinguishes Auletta’s book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence,  from most of the other books about the sexual predator; the fact that Weinstein could — at one and the same time — be a terrifying amoral thug and a constant and discriminating reader of fiction.

This was a man who could — on one overnight reading — identify, in the screenplay of Good Will Hunting, a short discrepant scene which turned out to be a plant by the writer to trap potential producers who didn’t attentively read the script. 

Weinstein introduced America to cinematic works of art from overseas and facilitated the creation of beautiful, thoughtful movies, yet, as revealed in earlier works by Ronan Farrow, among others, had a three-decade track record of rape and sexual malfeasance characterised by a spectacular crudity and violence.

Journalist Ronan Farrow — the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen — sought out Ken Auletta after reading the older journalist's 'New Yorker' article about Harvey Weinstein. File picture: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty

Auletta wrote a New Yorker profile of Weinstein 20 years ago. Weinstein didn’t like it, probably because it edged towards a version of him that he didn’t want to accommodate.

When Ronan Farrow first encountered women claiming the film producer had sexually assaulted them, he read it and sought out Auletta. 

The much older man helped him with his research and, when Farrow ran into problems getting his story published, helpfully intervened with publishers. Auletta, although he has carved out legendary status for himself by doing exemplary research for massive tomes on subjects ranging from broadcasting to Lehman Brothers to — now — Harvey Weinstein, is that relatively rare phenomenon: A journalist admired and sometimes loved by other journalists for his grace and generosity.

Readers of his earlier books might be attracted to this one because, at the very least, his track record would suggest it would be competent. What’s fascinating about it is how much more than competent it is and how subtle is his examination of the contribution to his power games of those around Weinstein. 

Some of those staff, according to Auletta, were instructed to leave syringes loaded with erection-producing medicine in the bathrooms of their boss’s hotel suites. Some were deputed to bring the latest target of his lust — usually an ambitious aspirant actor — to his room for discussion of their career. Some were hauled in to draft the gagging contracts which peppered Weinstein’s life, year after year. 

These NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) were the wrapping around money handed over to ensure women didn’t talk about what they claimed Weinstein had done to them.

Ken Auletta, a gracious and generous journalist who has written an extraordinary thorough and fair examination of Harvey Weinstein. File picture

His employees are not accused in the book (or here) of doing anything illegal, but it’s difficult to imagine him doing the damage he did if he hadn’t been surrounded by employees whose career dependence on him may have influenced their capacity to not hear the sounds of struggle or register that the distress of these young female departing “guests” was untypical of even the most challenging of normal business meetings.

So much about Harvey Weinstein is in the public domain that, given the insights and recorded research from the 20,000-word original profile, Auletta could have done a respectable enough cut-and-paste job during the pandemic and saved himself a lot of time.

Instead, he trawled through court documentation, interviewed key witnesses, and followed the story as if it had never previously been told. He even, fairmindedly, checked details with the imprisoned producer himself. That last exercise emerged as being somewhat redundant because Weinstein’s understanding of truth and of himself is tenuous. But the end result of Auletta’s labour is a book filled with energy and the excitement of discovery.

The writer, while recounting in sometimes revolting detail the physical manifestations of the producer’s contempt for women, never caricatures him. Other writers have mocked him for carrying books into court every day. Auletta doesn’t, pointing out that Weinstein’s vulgar crude rages ran parallel, throughout his life, with a subtle literary sensibility.

At what Fauci admits is an “advanced age”, Auletta has crafted an in-depth study of a monster. The point here is not the book per se but how it reads as if written by someone half Auletta’s age, making the reader forget the longevity issue.

Add Paul McCartney to the public health expert and the writer and you get a trio worth celebrating, not just for energy, expertise, and genius, but because they have head-butted a hole in the ageist assumptions of their time, and they personify what is possible.

To paraphrase Gloria Steinem; This is what 80 can look like.