By Clay Lambert [ clay@hmbreview.com ]
Before she moved to Half Moon Bay, before she found herself "sexy at 70," before all the Toastmasters meetings and the personal ad dates, and long before her two cancer scares, Lyn April Statten used to send movie pitches to Alfred Hitchcock.
"The Composite" may have been her masterpiece.
"It was about this little old woman in a small town," Statten begins. "She had never been married. One day she decides to make a composite of the perfect man."
The woman clips from magazines the best eyebrows, the strongest chin, the most alluring eyes, putting them together in one picture of the perfect man. Then she tells her friends she is the bride of that handsome magazine Frankenstein.
Because everyone wants to meet this lady-killer, eventually the plot's main character has to "kill" her man.
Here's the kicker: One day, after telling friends and family her imaginary man had died, she runs into his spitting image at the grocery store. "But I killed you!" the woman shouts.
Nearly 40 years after dreaming up the story, Statten still knows it is the stuff of Hollywood.
"If my letter had made it to Hitchcock, he would have made that movie," she said last week.
Some movie director might be equally interested in her own, unusual quest for the perfect man. You can read all about it in "Sexy at 70."
Statten came to Half Moon Bay about seven months ago and lives in Ocean View Plaza. She is the type of woman who lists her weight on her resum/ but not her age. She has fiery red hair and a career that includes television and big-screen performances.
She keeps dusty VHS copies of her movies. In one, called "The 7th Commandment," she stars as a down-on-her-luck looker, whose luck changes - temporarily - when she sees a man in the newspaper with whom she has a past. She is gorgeous in grainy black-and-white. She has Bette Grable's legs and Bette Davis' face.
To this day, she is not shy about her sensuality.
Perhaps that is why, when she called a screenwriter about five years ago to talk about her latest screenplay idea, Statten blurted out her plan to date men through ads in the personals of the San Francisco Chronicle.
"I don't know why I told the lady," she said. "I barely knew her."
The screenwriter told Statten that there was a book in the story of a woman over the age of 70 who dates men through newspaper advertisements and that is all it took. All she needed was a hook.
How about 50 dates arranged through personal ads after the age of 70?
Thrill of the chase
"Grow young in my arms," one ad began. She may have been the only advertiser who didn't fudge on her assets. She called herself "ebullient, vivacious, jaunty, svelte, affectionate, vibrant" and every word was true.
Would that the resultant dates were so well executed. How many of the 50 men were potential keepers?
"Probably six," she said. "Maybe three."
Not that she is complaining.
"I was amazed," she said, sounding not at all daunted by dozens of less-than-perfect dates. "I dated professionals - attorneys, doctors, a publisher, a race car driver."
The dates took place between 2001 and 2003.
"It would have been quicker, but I was interrupted by cancer."
Statten suffered through a near-fatal case of uterine cancer in the late 1960s.
"It didn't really hit me," she said of her feelings at the time. "I think it took maturity to appreciate life."
Seven years ago cancer returned. She suffered through chemotherapy and radiation.
"It was hell," she said, "but I had family and friends and my sense of humor."
She also had her dates and the book project.
Putting it all into words
Statten disguised all the men in the one-and-a-half-inch thick manuscript that is part dating guide, part philosophical tome, and part schoolgirl diary. Each man has his own chapter, with headings such as "The Silent One" and "The Young Buck." And the still-unpublished book begins with some tips - "What to Wear on the First Date," "What to Eat on the First Date" and the like.
She quotes Shakespeare and Shelley and Kahlil Gibran. The writing is precise and lyrical - just like her spoken voice.
"I do have a sexy voice," she allows. "One man heard me talk and he flipped out. He wouldn't talk any more. He just wanted to hear me speak."
The book ends with the admission that her search for a man didn't come up roses, but also with her assertion that that was never really the point:
"This may be the end of the book, but it is not the end of my life. I share the great Bernard Shaw's sentiments, 'I want to be thoroughly used up when I die - for the harder I work, the more I live ...'
"Thank you for sharing my adventures. I enjoyed your company."
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