Prime Time (27 page)

With Pat Mitchell and Eve Ensler at Pat’s wedding to Scott Seydel.

With my friends Jodie Evans and Pat Mitchell at a fund-raiser for The Women’s Center.
REBEKAH SPICUGLIA, WOMEN’S MEDIA CENTER

With Lily Tomlin when she did her one-woman show in Atlanta.

My best friend, Diana Dunn (middle), and me (far right), age 11.

Left to right: Diana Dunn, me, and Sue Sally Jones in 2004.

It’s good to have younger friends. At least that way not everyone you know will die before you do! As Dr. Ken Methany, Regents Professor in the Department of Counseling and Psychological Services at Georgia State University, told me, “Someone said, ‘The worst thing about getting old is that there is nobody around anymore to remember when you were young.’ But there is compensation for this. Older people tend to have more intense relationships. So there are fewer people in the network, but the relationships are more intense, more deep. You can’t maintain all the acquaintances you had when you were thirty-five, you don’t have the energy to do all of that anymore, so people tend to invest themselves with a bit more authenticity, more disclosure.”

With Sally Field in the 1970s.

In 2011, with my friends Sally Field and Elizabeth Lesser, at then First Lady Maria Shriver’s California Women’s Conference, where we all spoke.

Me with my new haircut and Vera Wang dress at the 2000 Oscars, two months after Ted and I split up.
ERIC CHORBONNEAU/BE IMAGES

In Atlanta, with Pearl Cleage and her husband, Zanon.

I agree with this. I think it’s also nice to have different kinds of friends. My friends have values, passions, and even early traumas in common, but they’re not all alike. With a few I can talk about face-lifts and curtains. A few are immeasurably intense and make me feel downright sluggish in comparison, but they inspire me to expand my horizons and my heart. Three of my friends have rich spiritual lives. One is a Zen priest, one a reverend
and
a sexologist (a useful combination to have in a friend!). Paula Weinstein is my film-producing friend of more than thirty years who always housed me when I was single and in Los Angeles. Whenever anything is physically wrong with me, she will do the research to find the right doctor and actually go with me to the appointment to make sure I ask the right questions. I’m her daughter’s godmother; she’s a surrogate mom to my two offspring, the one they can go to for an unending supply of advice and a wise referee when the family needs one. She’s the one who made me cut my hair and get Vera Wang to design a special dress for my reappearance as a presenter at the 2000 Academy Awards when I was under a bushel from the Ted separation, too down to think about hair and ready to wear an old number from ten years before. Many moons can pass without my seeing Paula, but when we do reconnect, right off the bat we drill down to an intense, subterranean level, as though no time has elapsed. Actually, that is true of all my women friends. I’ve had this with a few men, and I know it’s possible because two of my friends say they have emotionally intimate friendships with men. It’s far rarer, though.

With pal Wanda Sykes at the opening of
Monster-in-Law.
KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES

With Pat Kingsley on the set of
Georgia Rule.

For intimacy, men tend to rely on their significant other, which is why married men seem to do better and live longer, healthier lives than their unmarried counterparts. Because women form broader networks of friends, they do better following divorce or widowhood than men do.

The late Dr. Robert Butler, founding director of the International Longevity Center, told me, “We may have the old boys’ network that helps us get jobs, but we don’t have the same capacity for intimacy, for dealing with grief or dealing with the kinds of issues women are much more gifted at dealing with.”