Sally Jessy Raphael talks about how people find her “cute again” as she celebrates turning 90
She also admits she’s “settled on somebody,” taking her off the market
Raphael was the first female to host an audience-participation, issue-drive talk show
Sally Jessy Raphael is as feisty and fabulous as ever.
Speaking with PEOPLE to celebrate turning 90 and the wonderful life she continues to lead, the veteran journalist opened up about visiting Paris with friends as part of milestone birthday festivities.
“We went to Paris, my favorite city. And I went to my old haunts. I won’t tell you what they are because then they’d be everybody’s old haunts,” she says with a laugh.
“But we had a very good time. We went to two or three museums and not much shopping. I was with two women. Actually, I should have gone with a man because it’s romantic, but I went with two women. So it was good.”
“It’s really interesting being 90 because if you dye your hair and you don’t have any veins in your legs, then people say you look young,” she continues. “And that’s always nice that people say, although why they think looking young when you can claim 90 is beyond me, but they think it’s a compliment.”
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Acknowledging the privilege that comes with reaching 90, she continued, “I think that it has to do with the word ‘cute.’ You’re cute when you’re young, and then for a long time, you’re not cute. And then when you get to be 80 or 90, you’re cute again. People always say, ‘That cute old lady,’ so I guess I’m cute again.”
Raphael’s Instagram, which looks back at some of her most epic career moments while also keeping fans up to date on what’s new in her world, proves that she’s faring better than most in the media landscape.
“It’s a way of keeping in touch with people that I care about. When you’re 90, you do have certain privileges. People tend to listen to you a bit more. You get a wheelchair at the airport, but that’s dubious because they sometimes dump you where you don’t want to be dumped, and don’t take you where you want to go, so you have to be careful of that,” she jokes.
“When you’re 90, [people] don’t think that you have sex. I guess most people don’t think that a person 90 would have sex, but they believe that. It’s like I saw that Doctor Odyssey thing on cougars. Cougars are always 50- to a 30-year-old, 50 woman, 30 man. When you’re a 90 woman to a 70 man, then you’re not a cougar. You’re a lion, I guess.”
While Raphael is no stranger to the dating scene, she’s happy to report, “I’ve settled on somebody.”
“But there are a lot of men out there. The women who say they aren’t interested in a man as they get older, they like their freedom. I think they’re lying,” she continues. “I think it’s because they don’t want to make the effort. It does take an effort to find someone.”
Whether it’s just a buddy or a romantic interest, Raphael revels in the fact that at 90, “You really have no one to please.”
“You don’t care what you wear. You can wear anything. You don’t care what you say. You can say anything,” she says. “Not caring about people and what they think is the best thing for getting older.”
Jim Lord/Getty
Sally Jessy Raphael at the taping of the final episode of “Sally” in 2002
With a bustling personal life, Raphael is also excited to keep her professional life going, admitting, “I’m always looking for work.”
Raphael was the first female to host an audience-participation, issue-drive talk show — predating Oprah Winfrey by nearly three years.
The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, later shortened to Sally, began in 1983, covering human interest subjects and hard-hitting news items, but it devolved in its later years into daily stories about feuding relationships or sexual exploits in order to compete with the shock tactics dominating the market in the 1990s.
Today, Raphael says there is a challenge in the fact that producers show concern that “they can’t insure you, or they worry about insuring you.”
“But they worried about insuring me when I was 60, so that would’ve been 30 years of no worries,” she points out. “That’s their problem.”
“The thing is that you’re better off in other countries than you are here. Recently, I was in London and I turned on the morning news and the morning shows, all of the women were my age, and there were tons of them,” Raphael says.
“You come here, and everybody in the morning shows are young. So what happens is we don’t have a lot of respect for experience or wisdom. The word wisdom in China or any place that’s quite old, that is completely out of style. Power is in style, but wisdom is out of style.”
Read the original article on People
