Grim Reader, March 25, 2011: Elizabeth Taylor, Dorothy Young and Pinetop Perkins
by Michael Schaffer
MARCH 25, 2011 TAGS:
Grim Reader once heard someone explain that there were two types of stories that the tabloids loved more than all others: stories involving death, and stories involving Elizabeth Taylor. So it stands to reason that, even as radiation floods Japan and bombs rain down on Tripoli, this is the greatest week in National Enquirer history! Within hours of the star’s death, Liz stories crowded even the impending royal wedding of the tab’s homepage. The headlines for the various stories say it all: LIZ & DICK: FORBIDDEN LOVE (about her two tumultuous marriages to Richard Burton). LIZ TAYLOR’S SECRET SORROW (about the death of hubby Mike Todd, the “one true love that broke her heart forever”). THE NIGHT DEBBIE REYNOLDS CAUGHT HUBBY IN BED WITH LIZ! (self explanatory).
Even the Weekly World News, normally home to bat boy and space alien sightings, gets into the act, running a straight obit that touches on ordinary tabloid subjects such as Taylor’s beauty, her eight marriages, her friendship with Michael Jackson and her work for AIDS. But other celeb publications are less obsessed -- a sign, perhaps, that the 79-year-old doesn’t have the pull she once did. Star and US Weekly, which aim at a younger demographic, offer traditional obits that fail to dominate other coverage. And, rather than assuming all readers are as up on Taylor’s romances as they were during the 1970s, People’s main obit offers a comparatively tasteful retrospective on “the iconic Hollywood star whose tumultuous romances and precarious health challenges often played out as larger-than-life Elizabethan dramas.”
But of course, the tabs’ Elizabethan Liz is a different one from the actress who lives in the mainstream Obitosphere. Supermarket publications’ readers know a baroque story of loves, divorces, infidelity and secrets, and have a vague sense that the protagonist in those dramas was actually an actress once. The major outlets, by contrast, give us “the actress who dazzled generations of moviegoers,” in the New York Times’ words, citing Oscar performances in Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf well ahead of all that business with Burton, Todd, Henry Kissinger, Malcolm Forbes, John Warner et al. Indeed, Grim Reader was fascinated with the way the non-gossip obits introduced the subject. The Times went with a reference to a media-saturated culture: “Her life was played out in print: miles of newspaper and magazine articles, a galaxy of photographs and a shelf of biographies, each one painting a different portrait.” The Associated Press winks at the personal life in its lede, which introduces “screen legend Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed film goddess whose sultry screen life was often upstaged by her stormy personal life.” (In the story below, the film comes first.)
Grim Reader prefers the Washington Post’s opener, which similarly goes for the whole shebang: “Elizabeth Taylor, a voluptuous violet-eyed actress who lived a life of luster and anguish and spent more than six decades as one of the world's most visible women for her two Academy Awards, eight marriages, ravaging illnesses and work in AIDS philanthropy, died Wednesday at age 79.” Whew!
*
There are certain conventions the Obitosphere follows when covering the death of a Washington mandarin, and Warren Christopher’s obits serve as a good example. The obits, for instance, are steeped in words like “legacy” and “testament to,” which Grim Reader suspects editors delete from coverage of lesser figures. There are the assertions of the dearly departed’s long tenure in power circles, usually measured in presidencies: “Over the course of nearly four decades, Christopher served three Democratic presidents,” says Politico. There are the boilerplate pieces of praise from political leaders, the same folks whose condolence statements about scientists and jazz singers rarely make it into the obit pages: The Boston Globe quotes President Obama praising Christopher as a “resolute pursuer of peace.’’ There are those choice words -- “impassive and courtly,” according to the Wall Street Journal; “an image of discretion and unflappability,” per the Washington Post -- that can be almost impossible to dramatize. And then there are the efforts to do just that: The Post’s obit includes an apocryphal-sounding story about Christopher, on a stopover in Ireland, ordering an Irish coffee decaf and sans alcohol.
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Most of the coverage does the standard CV-recitation: He was a deputy attorney general under LBJ; a troubleshooter who handled Panama Canal Treaty and Iran hostage negotiations for Jimmy Carter; and Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state. The last of those Washington stints wasn’t a failure, but included few conspicuous successes, a legacy that Grim Reader had to read very closely to suss out beneath all the establishmentarian praise. “Even friends and associates, to whom he was known as Chris or sometimes as ‘the Cardinal,’ said they could not discern a guiding geopolitical philosophy, regarding him as more a consummate tactician than as a conceptualizer,” says the New York Times, which does not overtly connect this to the Clinton administration’s initially dithering response to Balkans genocide.
When he wasn’t being a Washington insider, Christopher was also the quintessential mandarin back home in Los Angeles, where he worked at the city’s top law firm. The Los Angeles Times, unsurprisingly, has the best coverage of the work he did on a commission investigating the Rodney King beating. In short order, the commission recommended an overhaul of the Police Department and the ouster of its chief, Daryl Gates. “The unity of the commission — which included members selected by Gates and his main antagonist, Mayor Tom Bradley — was in large measure a testament to its self-effacing chairman and his quiet diplomacy,” the paper reports.
*
The Telegraph remembers Leslie Collier as one of the less heralded people responsible for eradicating smallpox. A vaccine against the deadly disease existed, but had to be kept refrigerated -- making difficult the penetration of rural, non-electrified areas. Collier helped figure out how to freeze-dry the contagion without losing effectiveness. “This was a pivotal development in the effort to eradicate the disease because it eliminated the cumbersome necessity to establish and maintain a ‘cold chain’ to protect the vaccine,” the obit explains. He later made contributions to understanding trachoma, a disease that caused blindness and had affected 400 million people. ...
And elsewhere in science, James Elliot gets recognized as the scientist who discovered rings around the planet Uranus -- bumping Saturn from its previous perch as the only ringed planet. Uranus’ rings can’t be spied from Earth, but Elliot used a technique called “stellar occultation,” which measures the change in a star’s brightness when it sneaks behind a planet. Voyager 2 later sent home images of the rings. But while the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times obits are dominated by his discoveries -- he also first detected an atmosphere on Pluto -- the hometown Boston Globe also spends lots of energy on Elliot’s reputation as a mentor, especially to young women in the sciences.
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Less of a gift to human inquiry: Dorothy Young, who’d been the scantily-clad assistant to Harry Houdini during his 1920s on-stage escapes from, among other things, a tank full of water into which he was dumped with his feet in stocks. “Although Dorothy Young knew how he escaped, she never revealed his secret,” the Telegraph says, depriving the world of knowledge for the rest of her 103 years. After Houdini’s death, she formed a dance act with her husband-to-be, who turned out to be an heir. She later became a philanthropist.
Ever wonder what becomes of those brainiac kids who win the national spelling bee? The first of them, 1925 champ Frank Neuhauser, went on to become a D.C.-area patent lawyer, according to his Washington Post obit. Neuhauser won $500 (in gold), a new bike, and a trip to meet Calvin Coolidge after he correctly spelled “gladiolus.” Though Neuhauser went on to lead the American Intellectual Property Law Association, he didn’t give himself very good odds on repeating as champ against today’s hyper-competitive spelling bee kids: In one interview, he pronounced the words “too long.”
A couple of interesting obits from abroad. All the obits for South Africa’s Carel Boshoff note that he was a “white separatist” rather than a “white supremacist.” A theologian and true believer in apartheid, he also saw early that it was untenable. He bought an old ghost town in the sparsely populated Northern Cape and set up the whites-only colony of Oriana in the early 1990s, assuming vast numbers of Afrikaners would “give up the trappings of their ill-won wealth and start anew from scratch,” according to Foreign Policy. They didn’t. But, oddly, black South African pols did: Nelson Mandel came for tea in 1995; Jacob Zuma visited more recently, likening Boshoff’s Afrikaner pride to his own Zulu pride. “Orania became an accidental symbol not of racial reconciliation's unfeasibility, but of its robustness,” the magazine explains.
Sadder are the belated obits for Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian Pakistani politician who was the latest in a string of pro-tolerance pols to be murdered there. The Independent digs up passionate old quotes of Bhatti’s attesting to his commitment to the downtrodden minorities in the Muslim country. And then there’s this, from a statement he gave media shortly before being shot to death outside his mother’s house: "I will die to defend their rights," he said on the recording. "These threats and these warnings cannot change my opinions and principles." The New York Times reports that almost none of his cabinet colleagues showed up at the funeral.
In music this week, there are lots of obits for Pinetop Perkins, “one of the last old-school bluesmen” according to the Associated Press. Deep in his 90s when he won a Grammy three years ago, Perkins was the oldest person to ever win one of the awards. A Chicago Tribune obit does a nice job of tracing his rise from a Mississippi cotton farm: Perkins was a youthful guitar whiz when a woman swung a knife at him for a crime her husband had actually committed, cutting up an arm and thereby redirecting the youngster to piano. The best explanation of Perkins’ music, though, comes from abroad, where the Telegraph explains how his “boogie-woogie, or barrelhouse, is a kind of blues cousin to ragtime.” Though Perkins didn’t record under his own name until the 1970s, he earlier inspired the likes of Ike Turner during a 1950s tour.
Death comes in twos: session men. The Los Angeles Times has a nice obit for Ralph Mooney, the king of the “Bakersfield sound,” a “twangy and punchy California brand of country” that thrived just as Nashville was abandoning Mooney’s beloved steel guitar in favor of a more orchestral sound. A session musician for the likes of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, Mooney later spent 20 years playing alongside Waylon Jennings. … And the New York Times catches the death of another session guitarist, Melvin Sparks, an innovator during the soul jazz trend of the 1960s. The obit quotes him as saying he simply played “jazz over a funky beat.” He saw something of a revival during the 1990s acid-jazz craze.
Finally, the New York Times has a rollicking obit for Pierre de Beaumont, the “nominal nobleman and inveterate tinkerer who founded Brookstone,” the mall-based gift shop. Founded as a rare-tools catalogue, Brookstone today does $430 million in massage chairs, luggage, and novelty gifts. The truly memorable character in the piece is Beaumont’s French countess mother, from whom he inherited, among other things, the rights to the “Mutt and Jeff” comic strip, penned by her on-and-off husband. The obit also includes business insights such as the following: “In founding Brookstone, Mr. de Beaumont identified and closed a small but singular gap in the market. Where else could consumers find, all in one place, sought-after arcana like miniature anvils, wood-rot-cure kits and dental picks (prized by makers of model ships)?” Capitalism is wonderful, no?
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
Even the Weekly World News, normally home to bat boy and space alien sightings, gets into the act, running a straight obit that touches on ordinary tabloid subjects such as Taylor’s beauty, her eight marriages, her friendship with Michael Jackson and her work for AIDS. But other celeb publications are less obsessed -- a sign, perhaps, that the 79-year-old doesn’t have the pull she once did. Star and US Weekly, which aim at a younger demographic, offer traditional obits that fail to dominate other coverage. And, rather than assuming all readers are as up on Taylor’s romances as they were during the 1970s, People’s main obit offers a comparatively tasteful retrospective on “the iconic Hollywood star whose tumultuous romances and precarious health challenges often played out as larger-than-life Elizabethan dramas.” But of course, the tabs’ Elizabethan Liz is a different one from the actress who lives in the mainstream Obitosphere. Supermarket publications’ readers know a baroque story of loves, divorces, infidelity and secrets, and have a vague sense that the protagonist in those dramas was actually an actress once. The major outlets, by contrast, give us “the actress who dazzled generations of moviegoers,” in the New York Times’ words, citing Oscar performances in Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf well ahead of all that business with Burton, Todd, Henry Kissinger, Malcolm Forbes, John Warner et al. Indeed, Grim Reader was fascinated with the way the non-gossip obits introduced the subject. The Times went with a reference to a media-saturated culture: “Her life was played out in print: miles of newspaper and magazine articles, a galaxy of photographs and a shelf of biographies, each one painting a different portrait.” The Associated Press winks at the personal life in its lede, which introduces “screen legend Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed film goddess whose sultry screen life was often upstaged by her stormy personal life.” (In the story below, the film comes first.)
Grim Reader prefers the Washington Post’s opener, which similarly goes for the whole shebang: “Elizabeth Taylor, a voluptuous violet-eyed actress who lived a life of luster and anguish and spent more than six decades as one of the world's most visible women for her two Academy Awards, eight marriages, ravaging illnesses and work in AIDS philanthropy, died Wednesday at age 79.” Whew!
*
There are certain conventions the Obitosphere follows when covering the death of a Washington mandarin, and Warren Christopher’s obits serve as a good example. The obits, for instance, are steeped in words like “legacy” and “testament to,” which Grim Reader suspects editors delete from coverage of lesser figures. There are the assertions of the dearly departed’s long tenure in power circles, usually measured in presidencies: “Over the course of nearly four decades, Christopher served three Democratic presidents,” says Politico. There are the boilerplate pieces of praise from political leaders, the same folks whose condolence statements about scientists and jazz singers rarely make it into the obit pages: The Boston Globe quotes President Obama praising Christopher as a “resolute pursuer of peace.’’ There are those choice words -- “impassive and courtly,” according to the Wall Street Journal; “an image of discretion and unflappability,” per the Washington Post -- that can be almost impossible to dramatize. And then there are the efforts to do just that: The Post’s obit includes an apocryphal-sounding story about Christopher, on a stopover in Ireland, ordering an Irish coffee decaf and sans alcohol.
Most of the coverage does the standard CV-recitation: He was a deputy attorney general under LBJ; a troubleshooter who handled Panama Canal Treaty and Iran hostage negotiations for Jimmy Carter; and Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state. The last of those Washington stints wasn’t a failure, but included few conspicuous successes, a legacy that Grim Reader had to read very closely to suss out beneath all the establishmentarian praise. “Even friends and associates, to whom he was known as Chris or sometimes as ‘the Cardinal,’ said they could not discern a guiding geopolitical philosophy, regarding him as more a consummate tactician than as a conceptualizer,” says the New York Times, which does not overtly connect this to the Clinton administration’s initially dithering response to Balkans genocide.When he wasn’t being a Washington insider, Christopher was also the quintessential mandarin back home in Los Angeles, where he worked at the city’s top law firm. The Los Angeles Times, unsurprisingly, has the best coverage of the work he did on a commission investigating the Rodney King beating. In short order, the commission recommended an overhaul of the Police Department and the ouster of its chief, Daryl Gates. “The unity of the commission — which included members selected by Gates and his main antagonist, Mayor Tom Bradley — was in large measure a testament to its self-effacing chairman and his quiet diplomacy,” the paper reports.
*
The Telegraph remembers Leslie Collier as one of the less heralded people responsible for eradicating smallpox. A vaccine against the deadly disease existed, but had to be kept refrigerated -- making difficult the penetration of rural, non-electrified areas. Collier helped figure out how to freeze-dry the contagion without losing effectiveness. “This was a pivotal development in the effort to eradicate the disease because it eliminated the cumbersome necessity to establish and maintain a ‘cold chain’ to protect the vaccine,” the obit explains. He later made contributions to understanding trachoma, a disease that caused blindness and had affected 400 million people. ...
And elsewhere in science, James Elliot gets recognized as the scientist who discovered rings around the planet Uranus -- bumping Saturn from its previous perch as the only ringed planet. Uranus’ rings can’t be spied from Earth, but Elliot used a technique called “stellar occultation,” which measures the change in a star’s brightness when it sneaks behind a planet. Voyager 2 later sent home images of the rings. But while the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times obits are dominated by his discoveries -- he also first detected an atmosphere on Pluto -- the hometown Boston Globe also spends lots of energy on Elliot’s reputation as a mentor, especially to young women in the sciences.
Less of a gift to human inquiry: Dorothy Young, who’d been the scantily-clad assistant to Harry Houdini during his 1920s on-stage escapes from, among other things, a tank full of water into which he was dumped with his feet in stocks. “Although Dorothy Young knew how he escaped, she never revealed his secret,” the Telegraph says, depriving the world of knowledge for the rest of her 103 years. After Houdini’s death, she formed a dance act with her husband-to-be, who turned out to be an heir. She later became a philanthropist.Ever wonder what becomes of those brainiac kids who win the national spelling bee? The first of them, 1925 champ Frank Neuhauser, went on to become a D.C.-area patent lawyer, according to his Washington Post obit. Neuhauser won $500 (in gold), a new bike, and a trip to meet Calvin Coolidge after he correctly spelled “gladiolus.” Though Neuhauser went on to lead the American Intellectual Property Law Association, he didn’t give himself very good odds on repeating as champ against today’s hyper-competitive spelling bee kids: In one interview, he pronounced the words “too long.”
A couple of interesting obits from abroad. All the obits for South Africa’s Carel Boshoff note that he was a “white separatist” rather than a “white supremacist.” A theologian and true believer in apartheid, he also saw early that it was untenable. He bought an old ghost town in the sparsely populated Northern Cape and set up the whites-only colony of Oriana in the early 1990s, assuming vast numbers of Afrikaners would “give up the trappings of their ill-won wealth and start anew from scratch,” according to Foreign Policy. They didn’t. But, oddly, black South African pols did: Nelson Mandel came for tea in 1995; Jacob Zuma visited more recently, likening Boshoff’s Afrikaner pride to his own Zulu pride. “Orania became an accidental symbol not of racial reconciliation's unfeasibility, but of its robustness,” the magazine explains.
Sadder are the belated obits for Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian Pakistani politician who was the latest in a string of pro-tolerance pols to be murdered there. The Independent digs up passionate old quotes of Bhatti’s attesting to his commitment to the downtrodden minorities in the Muslim country. And then there’s this, from a statement he gave media shortly before being shot to death outside his mother’s house: "I will die to defend their rights," he said on the recording. "These threats and these warnings cannot change my opinions and principles." The New York Times reports that almost none of his cabinet colleagues showed up at the funeral.
In music this week, there are lots of obits for Pinetop Perkins, “one of the last old-school bluesmen” according to the Associated Press. Deep in his 90s when he won a Grammy three years ago, Perkins was the oldest person to ever win one of the awards. A Chicago Tribune obit does a nice job of tracing his rise from a Mississippi cotton farm: Perkins was a youthful guitar whiz when a woman swung a knife at him for a crime her husband had actually committed, cutting up an arm and thereby redirecting the youngster to piano. The best explanation of Perkins’ music, though, comes from abroad, where the Telegraph explains how his “boogie-woogie, or barrelhouse, is a kind of blues cousin to ragtime.” Though Perkins didn’t record under his own name until the 1970s, he earlier inspired the likes of Ike Turner during a 1950s tour. Death comes in twos: session men. The Los Angeles Times has a nice obit for Ralph Mooney, the king of the “Bakersfield sound,” a “twangy and punchy California brand of country” that thrived just as Nashville was abandoning Mooney’s beloved steel guitar in favor of a more orchestral sound. A session musician for the likes of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, Mooney later spent 20 years playing alongside Waylon Jennings. … And the New York Times catches the death of another session guitarist, Melvin Sparks, an innovator during the soul jazz trend of the 1960s. The obit quotes him as saying he simply played “jazz over a funky beat.” He saw something of a revival during the 1990s acid-jazz craze.
Finally, the New York Times has a rollicking obit for Pierre de Beaumont, the “nominal nobleman and inveterate tinkerer who founded Brookstone,” the mall-based gift shop. Founded as a rare-tools catalogue, Brookstone today does $430 million in massage chairs, luggage, and novelty gifts. The truly memorable character in the piece is Beaumont’s French countess mother, from whom he inherited, among other things, the rights to the “Mutt and Jeff” comic strip, penned by her on-and-off husband. The obit also includes business insights such as the following: “In founding Brookstone, Mr. de Beaumont identified and closed a small but singular gap in the market. Where else could consumers find, all in one place, sought-after arcana like miniature anvils, wood-rot-cure kits and dental picks (prized by makers of model ships)?” Capitalism is wonderful, no?
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
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