Grim Reader, July 31, 2009: Merce Cunningham, E. Lynn Harris and Rev. Ike
by Michael Schaffer
JULY 31, 2009 TAGS:
Obituaries of prominent figures, at least in this country, tend to put the dearly departed in some sort of historical context before getting into the grubby business of assessing their life’s work. Merce Cunningham, though, seems to have done a little better than most dead artistic legends: The choreographer’s send-offs begin with the glowing assessments and never let up.
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For instance, here’s how the Los Angeles Times’ obit begins: “Merce Cunningham, arguably the greatest, most pioneering and widely influential contemporary choreographer of the past half-century, has died.” Other major-media obits are no less restrained. “His achievement is not limited to style, subject matter, quantity of works,” reads the Washington Post’s piece, which goes on to enumerate said achievements. And the New York Times’ take involves language an ordinary obit would only include as an expert quote: “Over a career of nearly seven decades, Mr. Cunningham went on posing ‘But’ and ‘What if?’ questions, making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography,” the story reads. “He went on doing so almost to the last.”
If the tone seems a little unusual, it’s no surprise: The papers all call on their dance critics, rather than their obituary writers, to pen the stories. The results are smart, thoughtful descriptions of Cunningham’s role in dance history — they read more like a critic championing some new performance than a journalist writing up a life story.
Grim Reader isn’t complaining. Assigning politicians’ obits to political writers, or author obits to book critics, is not uncommon. An authoritative critical assessment is often better than, say, forcing a music writer to seek out clichéd quotes from some Rock and Roll Hall of Fame curator whenever an old rock star dies. But perhaps because the literature of dance is somewhat more obscure, one side-effect was to make Grim Reader feel like a bit of an ignoramus. How, for instance, to interpret sentences like this one? “His movement — startling in its mixture of staccato and legato elements, and unusually intense in its use of torso, legs and feet — abounded in non sequiturs.”
--
A pair of more readable — deliciously so — obits awaits those mourning Sandford Dody, ghostwriter to the stars. Dody dreamt of being a playwright, but stumbled instead into a series of gigs writing autobiographies on behalf of celebs like Bette Davis, Elaine Barrymore, and Helen Hayes. In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Miller writes that Dody found the work “spiritually destructive,” and allowed his disdain for his employer/subjects to creep into his work. How do we know this? In 1980, Dody settled scores in his own memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. In the Washington Post, Joe Holley dredges up a telling passage: “Could there be anything madder than an autobiography written by someone other than oneself?”
Semantics watch: In the Post, news of Dody’s July 4 death is confirmed by “his close friend of 60 years, Granville McGee.” In the Journal, McGee is referred to as Dody’s “partner.” All of Cunningham’s major-media obituarists, on the other hand, note that the choreographer’s partnership with composer John Cage was romantic as well as professional -- “One of the great, if sometimes turbulent, love stories of the age,” notes the Los Angeles Times.
--
The death of E. Lynn Harris earned significant attention around the Obitosphere this week. A former computer salesman, Harris became a bestselling author with a series of books telling stories of gay black life — often involving wealthy or powerful African American men struggling with their sexuality. In the Washington Post, Matt Schudel says Harris’ descriptions of homosexuality life “on the down-low” were “taboo-breaking.”
More like taboo-smashing: Harris’ first 10 books were bestsellers, and according to an obit in the New York Daily News, Harris’ death was the most searched-upon term on Google the afternoon he died. Indeed, all the obits about his depictions of wrenching sexual struggles, running beneath headlines crammed full of identity markers (“Gay African American Author Dies”) make it easy to forget that Harris wrote paperback potboilers, not sociology tomes. Writing in the Root, Teresa Wiltz celebrates this: “To read an E. Lynn Harris novel was to eavesdrop on the lives of the young, black and fabulous,” she writes.
A more interesting obit may be one with a different sort of identity politics in the headline: “Arkansan author of best-sellers dies at 54,” declares the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, noting that although Harris was born in Michigan and lived mainly in Atlanta, he was raised in Little Rock and remained devoted. Among the accomplishments that go unmentioned elsewhere: He was the University of Arkansas’ first black male cheerleader. Later, when he returned as a famous author for a visiting teaching gig at the school, he served as assistant cheerleading coach. “The thing about him that a lot of people don’t know was that one of the most important things to him in his entire life was Arkansas Razorbacks football,” a friend tells the paper.
--
Major players in two hugely prominent lawsuits died this week. The New York Times devotes an obituary to Gerald Gardner, who provided research on pay differentials for a landmark case that prohibited sex discrimination in want-ads. “He was a total feminist,” former NOW president Eleanor Smeal tells the paper, in a slightly awkward quote. And in the Miami Herald, there’s a send-off for Howard A. Engle, a beloved pediatrician who served as lead plaintiff in a landmark class-action lawsuit against Big Tobacco. Yes, he died of smoking-related respiratory disease — no surprise to those who read through the piece to find this passage: “’Goddammit! I’m an addict!’ he growled to a Herald reporter in 2006, lighting a Marlboro Medium as he gasped and coughed.”
--
Elsewhere in the Obitosphere, papers on both sides of the Atlantic memorialize jazz composer George Russell, with the United Kingdom’s Guardian providing the longest take…. The Washington Post catches the death of Martha Stern, the breeder of Bo, President Obama’s Portuguese Water Dog…. The sports world marks the shooting death of boxer Vernon Forrest, killed in a gas station robbery. In the heroes vs. heels media shorthand reserved for professional athletes, Forrest was apparently in the former category, as obits full of tributes to his charitable work attest. “Vernon didn’t drink,” an old coach tells the Detroit Free Press. “He didn’t use drugs. He didn’t beat up on anyone. What happened to him could happen to anyone.”
--
When he’s not perusing obits, Grim Reader enjoys cheap espionage books, so he’s always excited to read an obituary for an espionage legend. Unfortunately, the real-world rules of spying mean many of the better exploits go to the grave, too. All the same, the Guardian’s obit for Meir Amit, onetime head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, offers some fun, recounting Amit’s back-channel contacts with official enemies like Jordan and Morocco, and capers like the 1966 defection of an Iraqi pilot and his MiG-21. And in the Wall Street Journal last week, an obit credits Amit with pioneering the use of female agents in a scheme known as a “honey trap.”
--
The death of Ernest Lefever, a think-tank scholar and briefly a Washington cause celebre, occasions a nice obit. Nominated as a human rights official by Ronald Reagan, Lefever was rejected by the Senate, in part because of writings that sought to differentiate “totalitarian regimes” (bad) from merely “authoritarian” ones (who we can do business with). The piece describes the dramatic hearing-room showdown that featured a victim of torture at the hands of one of those Washington-friendly authoritarian governments, the Argentine dictatorship. The combination of bellicosity, moralizing, and distinction-drawing, in hindsight, seems like a prelude to the debates of the Bush years. Grim Reader would have liked to see some protagonists from those later debates show up in the story.
--
Rev. Ike — officially Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II — was another man ahead of his time, preaching that God wanted everyone to get rich. Including, naturally, the good reverend himself, whose opulent life is nicely described by the New York Times’ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt: “Whether legitimately or not, the money flooded in, making him a multimillionaire and enabling him to flaunt the power of his creed with a show of sumptuous clothes, ostentatious jewelry, luxurious residences and exotic automobiles.”
--
Last week, the New York Times’ John F. Burns reported on the death of 113-year-old Henry Allingham, described as “one of Britain’s last three surviving veterans of World War I.” This week, when 111-year-old Harry Patch died, his paper’s headline proclaimed him “the Last of Britain’s Army Veterans of World War I.” So was there an unreported death in between? No, Burns writes: 108-year-old Claude Choules, who served in the Royal Navy, is still going strong. Burns, whose Allingham obit also questioned the sourcing of reports of his being the world’s oldest man, does appear to back down from that stance, acknowledging in the Patch piece that Allingham had been listed by Guinness World Records.
The British media, at any rate, is accepting at face value the government’s assertion that Patch was the last survivor, and giving big play to the passing. The story from the Times of London, which includes digressions into the history of trench warfare and the origins of World War I, is especially good. For the record, Patch was also the last soldier of any nationality to have fought in the Great War’s trenches.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Fridays in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
For instance, here’s how the Los Angeles Times’ obit begins: “Merce Cunningham, arguably the greatest, most pioneering and widely influential contemporary choreographer of the past half-century, has died.” Other major-media obits are no less restrained. “His achievement is not limited to style, subject matter, quantity of works,” reads the Washington Post’s piece, which goes on to enumerate said achievements. And the New York Times’ take involves language an ordinary obit would only include as an expert quote: “Over a career of nearly seven decades, Mr. Cunningham went on posing ‘But’ and ‘What if?’ questions, making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography,” the story reads. “He went on doing so almost to the last.”If the tone seems a little unusual, it’s no surprise: The papers all call on their dance critics, rather than their obituary writers, to pen the stories. The results are smart, thoughtful descriptions of Cunningham’s role in dance history — they read more like a critic championing some new performance than a journalist writing up a life story.
Grim Reader isn’t complaining. Assigning politicians’ obits to political writers, or author obits to book critics, is not uncommon. An authoritative critical assessment is often better than, say, forcing a music writer to seek out clichéd quotes from some Rock and Roll Hall of Fame curator whenever an old rock star dies. But perhaps because the literature of dance is somewhat more obscure, one side-effect was to make Grim Reader feel like a bit of an ignoramus. How, for instance, to interpret sentences like this one? “His movement — startling in its mixture of staccato and legato elements, and unusually intense in its use of torso, legs and feet — abounded in non sequiturs.”
--
A pair of more readable — deliciously so — obits awaits those mourning Sandford Dody, ghostwriter to the stars. Dody dreamt of being a playwright, but stumbled instead into a series of gigs writing autobiographies on behalf of celebs like Bette Davis, Elaine Barrymore, and Helen Hayes. In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Miller writes that Dody found the work “spiritually destructive,” and allowed his disdain for his employer/subjects to creep into his work. How do we know this? In 1980, Dody settled scores in his own memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. In the Washington Post, Joe Holley dredges up a telling passage: “Could there be anything madder than an autobiography written by someone other than oneself?”
Semantics watch: In the Post, news of Dody’s July 4 death is confirmed by “his close friend of 60 years, Granville McGee.” In the Journal, McGee is referred to as Dody’s “partner.” All of Cunningham’s major-media obituarists, on the other hand, note that the choreographer’s partnership with composer John Cage was romantic as well as professional -- “One of the great, if sometimes turbulent, love stories of the age,” notes the Los Angeles Times.
--
The death of E. Lynn Harris earned significant attention around the Obitosphere this week. A former computer salesman, Harris became a bestselling author with a series of books telling stories of gay black life — often involving wealthy or powerful African American men struggling with their sexuality. In the Washington Post, Matt Schudel says Harris’ descriptions of homosexuality life “on the down-low” were “taboo-breaking.” More like taboo-smashing: Harris’ first 10 books were bestsellers, and according to an obit in the New York Daily News, Harris’ death was the most searched-upon term on Google the afternoon he died. Indeed, all the obits about his depictions of wrenching sexual struggles, running beneath headlines crammed full of identity markers (“Gay African American Author Dies”) make it easy to forget that Harris wrote paperback potboilers, not sociology tomes. Writing in the Root, Teresa Wiltz celebrates this: “To read an E. Lynn Harris novel was to eavesdrop on the lives of the young, black and fabulous,” she writes.
A more interesting obit may be one with a different sort of identity politics in the headline: “Arkansan author of best-sellers dies at 54,” declares the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, noting that although Harris was born in Michigan and lived mainly in Atlanta, he was raised in Little Rock and remained devoted. Among the accomplishments that go unmentioned elsewhere: He was the University of Arkansas’ first black male cheerleader. Later, when he returned as a famous author for a visiting teaching gig at the school, he served as assistant cheerleading coach. “The thing about him that a lot of people don’t know was that one of the most important things to him in his entire life was Arkansas Razorbacks football,” a friend tells the paper.
--
Major players in two hugely prominent lawsuits died this week. The New York Times devotes an obituary to Gerald Gardner, who provided research on pay differentials for a landmark case that prohibited sex discrimination in want-ads. “He was a total feminist,” former NOW president Eleanor Smeal tells the paper, in a slightly awkward quote. And in the Miami Herald, there’s a send-off for Howard A. Engle, a beloved pediatrician who served as lead plaintiff in a landmark class-action lawsuit against Big Tobacco. Yes, he died of smoking-related respiratory disease — no surprise to those who read through the piece to find this passage: “’Goddammit! I’m an addict!’ he growled to a Herald reporter in 2006, lighting a Marlboro Medium as he gasped and coughed.”
--
Elsewhere in the Obitosphere, papers on both sides of the Atlantic memorialize jazz composer George Russell, with the United Kingdom’s Guardian providing the longest take…. The Washington Post catches the death of Martha Stern, the breeder of Bo, President Obama’s Portuguese Water Dog…. The sports world marks the shooting death of boxer Vernon Forrest, killed in a gas station robbery. In the heroes vs. heels media shorthand reserved for professional athletes, Forrest was apparently in the former category, as obits full of tributes to his charitable work attest. “Vernon didn’t drink,” an old coach tells the Detroit Free Press. “He didn’t use drugs. He didn’t beat up on anyone. What happened to him could happen to anyone.”
--
When he’s not perusing obits, Grim Reader enjoys cheap espionage books, so he’s always excited to read an obituary for an espionage legend. Unfortunately, the real-world rules of spying mean many of the better exploits go to the grave, too. All the same, the Guardian’s obit for Meir Amit, onetime head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, offers some fun, recounting Amit’s back-channel contacts with official enemies like Jordan and Morocco, and capers like the 1966 defection of an Iraqi pilot and his MiG-21. And in the Wall Street Journal last week, an obit credits Amit with pioneering the use of female agents in a scheme known as a “honey trap.”
--
The death of Ernest Lefever, a think-tank scholar and briefly a Washington cause celebre, occasions a nice obit. Nominated as a human rights official by Ronald Reagan, Lefever was rejected by the Senate, in part because of writings that sought to differentiate “totalitarian regimes” (bad) from merely “authoritarian” ones (who we can do business with). The piece describes the dramatic hearing-room showdown that featured a victim of torture at the hands of one of those Washington-friendly authoritarian governments, the Argentine dictatorship. The combination of bellicosity, moralizing, and distinction-drawing, in hindsight, seems like a prelude to the debates of the Bush years. Grim Reader would have liked to see some protagonists from those later debates show up in the story.
--
Rev. Ike — officially Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II — was another man ahead of his time, preaching that God wanted everyone to get rich. Including, naturally, the good reverend himself, whose opulent life is nicely described by the New York Times’ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt: “Whether legitimately or not, the money flooded in, making him a multimillionaire and enabling him to flaunt the power of his creed with a show of sumptuous clothes, ostentatious jewelry, luxurious residences and exotic automobiles.” --
Last week, the New York Times’ John F. Burns reported on the death of 113-year-old Henry Allingham, described as “one of Britain’s last three surviving veterans of World War I.” This week, when 111-year-old Harry Patch died, his paper’s headline proclaimed him “the Last of Britain’s Army Veterans of World War I.” So was there an unreported death in between? No, Burns writes: 108-year-old Claude Choules, who served in the Royal Navy, is still going strong. Burns, whose Allingham obit also questioned the sourcing of reports of his being the world’s oldest man, does appear to back down from that stance, acknowledging in the Patch piece that Allingham had been listed by Guinness World Records.
The British media, at any rate, is accepting at face value the government’s assertion that Patch was the last survivor, and giving big play to the passing. The story from the Times of London, which includes digressions into the history of trench warfare and the origins of World War I, is especially good. For the record, Patch was also the last soldier of any nationality to have fought in the Great War’s trenches.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Fridays in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
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