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Working overtime

Celebrities used to fade gently into obscurity. Now they keep coming back for encores.

While watching one of those ESPN retrospectives recently on Los Angeles Dodger pitching great Sandy Koufax, I was reminded what an unusual hero he was. The enigmatic left-hander, who marched to his own drummer, retired in 1966 at the tender age of 30 after an outstanding season that featured 27 wins.

Koufax walked away at the peak of his popularity. That makes him a rarity in any era, but it practically renders him a saint in today's celebrity-adoring culture in which more and more stars - from politicians to athletes to actors - stay around well past their prime, refusing to go gently, or with much dignity, into that good night.

Perhaps sports provides the easiest examples of this Peter Pan syndrome, because critical physical skills erode so obviously and so quickly. The big news in hockey these days is the bound-to-end-badly comeback of Pittsburgh Penguin superstar and cancer survivor Mario Lemieux, 35, who announced a hankering to return to the brutal sport after 3 years of retirement.

In football, multiconcussed Dallas Cowboy quarterback Troy Aikman, 34, has hung around long enough to jeopardize his health and see his once-great, now-aging team founder.

Longtime New York Knick star Patrick Ewing, 38, unceremoniously excluded from that team's plans, still hauled his battered body to Seattle for one more decreasingly productive season. And by fighting into his late 30s, the great Muhammad Ali invited the punishment that has slowed him to a crawl.

Stars of the entertainment world often display the same reluctance to face facts and time. When he was recently elevated to president of NBC Entertainment, Jeff Zucker admitted that the current TV season ``has been a difficult year for big stars coming back.'' Translation: Middle-aged diva Bette Midler and longtime Seinfeld sidekick Michael Richards (Kramer) opted to star in kicky sitcoms meant for fresher faces. The results: Richards's show has already been canceled; Midler's is lousy and not even among the top 60 rated shows.

The worst movie I saw last year was Space Cowboys, a preposterous AARP buddy flick starring creaky Clint Eastwood, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland as fearless space travelers. Aging '60s rockers like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and The Who have been touring, thus validating the nostalgic yearnings of their baby boomer fans. But Stephen Stills and Roger Daltrey can't hit the same notes. (Surveying his graying audience at a Tweeter Center show last summer, Daltrey even joked that he liked it better in the days when the odor of pot, rather than cigars, wafted from the first few rows.)

Don Imus and Howard Stern - arguably the two biggest names in radio who don't preach right-wing virtues - both started out as rock 'n' roll shock jocks. Now, the 60-year-old Imus, who has lost energy and edge over the years, would rather hobnob with the elite than skewer it. Stern, 46, who basically likes to gawk at naked women, just agreed to another five-year contract, grimly retaining his tired niche as America's oldest adolescent.

Writer and frequent mainstream media scold James Fallows came up with his own theory to explain the ``disconnect'' between the media and the citizenry during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (The public was reasonably concerned, but journalists were positively obsessed.) He blamed it on an out-of-step ``geriatric punditariat'' - the several dozen influential media stars who helped drive the coverage and whose average age was 61.

Bill Clinton may be only 54, but he was impeached and presided over eight years of bitter national polarization. Yet, in a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, he wondered aloud whether the 22d Amendment, which precluded him from running for a third term, hadn't outlived its usefulness.

Why can't anyone wave goodbye gracefully? For one thing, the power and the money are simply too hard to resist. Some news reports peg Howard Stern's new deal at a mind-boggling $100 million, and I'm not sure even Koufax would have walked away from the seven-year, $130 million contract he no doubt would command today.

In making his case to change the 22d Amendment, Clinton also raised a fair point: increasing life expectancies and, presumably, the longer-lasting vigor of the over-50 crowd. Why shuffle off the stage when we feel so good, the thinking goes.

Finally, there's the fact that the glare of the media spotlight is so much brighter and more seductive. When Koufax pitched, fans followed his exploits in the gray box scores of America's morning papers. Today, they'd be displayed on countless Web sites, featured on ESPN, Fox Sports Network, and CNN, and replayed on every local TV sportscast.

A quarter century ago, People magazine turned celebrity worship into legitimate news. Today, the star-makin' media machinery fuels visions of immortality. Forget F. Scott Fitzgerald's line about there being no second acts in American lives. From Nick at Nite's nostalgic lineup to VH1's popular Behind the Music series, the message is that old stars don't fade away,

They get a second and third bite at public adoration.

In today's world, Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond really would get one more close-up - and a role as the demanding mother-in-law on Everybody Loves Raymond. And let's just assume that Gary Cooper would have stuck around for a few more ``high noon'' shoot-outs on the dusty streets of Hadleyville.