Grim Reader, Oct. 21, 2011: Muammar el-Qaddafi, Sue Mengers and Michel Peissel
by Michael Schaffer
OCTOBER 21, 2011 TAGS:
Greetings, Obit readers! THIS WEEK IN DEATH: All the attention focuses on Colonel Qaddafi, whose quirks and terrors make him a fabulous obit subject. But there’s also stellar coverage in the Obitsophere of famously foul-mouthed Hollywood super-agent Sue Mengers, Unix inventor Dennis Ritchie, and Norman Corwin, perhaps the last exemplar of radio’s golden age. Plus: A cell phone pioneer, a celebrated costume designer and the richest man in Cincinnati. Let’s turn to the obits:
THE COLONEL: Muammar el-Qaddafi’s death remained a matter of some uncertainly as Grim Reader’s deadline neared. But his obits had clearly been in the can for a while: Ever since the Libyan strongman refused to surrender after being forced from Tripoli, it was pretty clear how things would end. The New York Times’ take is lengthy -- around 4,000 words -- and magisterial, capturing his quirkiness and his brutality. On the one hand: the man in the Gilbert and Sullivan-style uniform surrounded himself with an all-female bodyguard squad who wore red nail polish, high heels and submachine guns; the son of illiterate bedouins anointed himself with titles like “the king of kings of Africa” and “the king of cultures;” and the nationalist who overthrew a tribal monarchy based his rule on a kooky self-sufficiency philosophy that at one point prompted him to require all Libyans to raise their own chickens. On the other: He staged public kangaroo courts in soccer stadiums where a dissident would be “interrogated, often urinating in fear as he begged for his life while the crowd howled for execution;” he funded terrorist groups like the Irish Republican Army and Abu Nidal; and his bombings ranged from taking out Libyan cities to the infamous downing of a Pan Am jetliner over Scotland. Qaddafi made nice with the West after 9/11 (the obits quote from his creepy love notes to Condoleezza Rice), but continued to lash out, as when he blamed the CIA for an HIV outbreak (unsanitary hospital conditions were the likely culprit). The Times’ piece is nicely nuanced about his impact on Libya: His taking control of the oil business helped build roads and enormously boost life expectancy. But his no-government philosophy left the country a basket case. “In the crowning paradox, he preached a ‘revolutionary’ utopia of people power but ran a one-man dictatorship that fueled the revolution against him,” says the Associated Press. The Guardian, meanwhile, offers two obits: The traditional one does an especially nice job of depicting the strongman’s early years in a country that had traditionally been a Middle Eastern afterthought, as well as plumbing his psychiatric makeup: “In this narcissism and self-aggrandisement, he was at least in some measure the child,” the story declares. A second piece, though, takes the form of an obit for his zany cult of personality
HOLLYWOOD POWER WOMAN: Sue Mengers was “Hollywood’s first female super-agent” says Variety. Hollywood-based outlets cover the agent’s passing like the death of a royal. Deadline’s Nikki Finke notes that, unlike the female agents of yore, Mengers had a whole stable of clients, rather than just one (which, once upon a time, tended to be a man the agent was in love with). The Los Angeles Times explains how upon moving to California she built her profile by hosting parties, refusing to invite “anyone who wasn’t successful.” But mainly the obits focus on her personal style: “Blond, chain-smoking, and as utterly charming as she could be terrifying, Mengers was a veritable Rosalind Russell-type of broad in the cutthroat world of agenting,” says the Daily Beast, while Finke describes “eyes framed in huge tinted glasses, with a soft breathy voice and the mouth of a stevedore.” Several outlets recall one of her legendary quips, reassuring client Barbra Streisand thusly following the Manson family’s killing of Sharon Tate: “Don’t worry, honey, stars aren’t being murdered, only featured players.”
UNIX INVENTOR: “If you are reading today's Independent on a PC, Mac, smartphone or tablet computer, it is Dennis Ritchie whom you can thank for his role in bringing you much of the technology that made possible these devices and the software which runs on them,” explains an obit in the British paper. Ritchie developed C, the language that underlies Microsoft’s windows, as well as the Unix operating system that enabled the move from room-sized computers to desktops and beyond. SIGN OF THE TIMES: In lieu of ponderous expert quotes, the Wall Street Journal obit grabs a great insight from a tweet: "If [Steve] Jobs was a master architect of skyscrapers, it was Ritchie and his collaborators who invented steel," wrote James Grimmelman, a Microsoft programmer turned NYU professor.
BLACKFEET BATTLER: Elouise Cobell, treasurer of the Blackfoot tribe, “tenaciously pursued a lawsuit that accused the federal government of cheating Native Americans out of more than a century's worth of royalties, resulting in a record $3.4-billion settlement,” says the Los Angeles Times. Cobell tributes appear all over the country, with top pols from Montana to D.C. vying to praise her. In an editorial, the Seattle Times calls Cobell -- who lived in Seattle during her one break from Montana -- a “genuine American hero.” She also won a MacArthur “genius” grant for her advocacy.
CELL PHONE PIONEER: Robert Galvin took the reins from his father and led Motorola for 30 years. But the obits all lead with just one innovation: the cell phone. Galvin “led the company as it pioneered the cellular phone,” says the Chicago Tribune. He “built Motorola Inc. into an international electronics giant that unleashed the cellphone,” says the Wall Street Journal and “put palm-sized telephones into pockets and purses everywhere,” says the Washington Post. Well, not exactly: The DynaTac phone weighed about two pounds and looked like a brick. Grim Reader would have liked to hear more about Six Sigma, a quality control program he instituted after getting one too many complaint letters in the 1980s. The Post, one of the few outlets to mention it, says it lowered the product-defect rate to three per million -- a perfection rate of 99.9997 percent.
CUBAN DISSIDENT: Laura Pollan “founded the opposition group Ladies in White and for nearly a decade staged weekly protest marches with other wives of political prisoners to press for their release,” explains the Associated Press. Pollan was an unknown high school teacher who already had a penchant for wearing white when her husband was locked up in 2003. After the marches gained attention, the government accused her group of being paid by foreigners. By 2010, all the husbands had been freed.
COSTUME DESIGNER TO THE STARS: “For 60 years,” says the Guardian, “Ray Aghayan guaranteed that difficult divas would arrive on screens and stages projecting perfection. Glamour was so much his habitat that he supervised over a dozen Oscar shows.” The obit -- which is far better than the CV-recitations in other outlets -- traces his career from his native Tehran (his first client “was even more terrifying than Barbra Streisand: Princess Fawzia of Egypt, first wife of the last Shah”) to Hollywood, where his tasks, among other things, included stage outfits for Diana Ross and a gown for Carol Channing that featured 80 pounds of crystal and a scarf so heavy that she damaged the scenery by flinging it over a shoulder. NEW VOCABULARY WORD: Aghayan designed the outfits that “defrumped” Judy Garland, the obit says. All of the coverage notes that he was life partners with even more famous costume man, Bob Mackie, who survives him.
EXPLORER LOVED TIBET: Not many people get to be called an “explorer” in these GPS-enabled days. But that’s the word that pops up in the lede of the New York Times obituary for Michel Peissel, a Frenchman whose feats of Indiana Jones-style derring-do -- finding unrecorded Mayan ruins, rowing a Viking longboat from the Baltic to the Black Sea -- led him back time and again to Tibet, where he learned the language, publishing multiple books about its unknown corners. GOING NATIVE: Peissel was so committed to the Tibetan cause that he blasted the Dalai Lama for not standing up enough against the Chinese.
FUGITIVE COMPOSER: Pete Rugolo was the chief arranger for Stan Kenton’s progressive jazz band and was the guy who signed Miles Davis to a record deal for Birth of the Cool. But most ordinary shmoes like Grim Reader know him as the man who composed the theme to The Fugitive, among other Hollywood fare. That distinction appears in the lede to obits in stateside outlets like the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. It’s not mentioned until the second to last paragraph of the Independent’s higher-brow write-up.
RADIO DRAMATIST: Everyone notes that Norman Corwin, 101, was known as “the poet laureate of radio.” Corwin was the top producer of radio dramas in the pre-television days. Corwin made everything from lighthearted Christmas comedies to documentary fare about the Fascist conquest of Ethiopia, but it was a broadcast about the end of WWII that, according to the Los Angeles Times, Carl Sandburg once called one of America’s greatest poems: "Take a bow, G.I. Take a bow, little guy. The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of this afternoon." The obits say little about his life after the golden age of radio, noting that he dabbled in TV and film and taught at the University of Southern California until he turned 100.
CINCINNATI MONEYBAGS: Billionaire Carl Lindner’s obits tell a mixed story. On the one hand, he built his family’s business from a small dairy store into a vast network of corporations ranging from financial and insurance concerns to builders to the banana titan Chiquita. On the other, he was “one of Michael Milken’s earliest and most prominent junk-bond players” in the 1980s, and was denounced as a “ruthless takeover artist,” according to the Associated Press. To its great credit, the Cincinnati Enquirer avoids the tendency to say only nice things about a city’s leading philanthropist (Lindner once owned the Cincinnati Reds) and paints both sides of the story, including Lindner’s epic legal battle with the paper over its reporting on his banana firm. Take a read here.
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.
THE COLONEL: Muammar el-Qaddafi’s death remained a matter of some uncertainly as Grim Reader’s deadline neared. But his obits had clearly been in the can for a while: Ever since the Libyan strongman refused to surrender after being forced from Tripoli, it was pretty clear how things would end. The New York Times’ take is lengthy -- around 4,000 words -- and magisterial, capturing his quirkiness and his brutality. On the one hand: the man in the Gilbert and Sullivan-style uniform surrounded himself with an all-female bodyguard squad who wore red nail polish, high heels and submachine guns; the son of illiterate bedouins anointed himself with titles like “the king of kings of Africa” and “the king of cultures;” and the nationalist who overthrew a tribal monarchy based his rule on a kooky self-sufficiency philosophy that at one point prompted him to require all Libyans to raise their own chickens. On the other: He staged public kangaroo courts in soccer stadiums where a dissident would be “interrogated, often urinating in fear as he begged for his life while the crowd howled for execution;” he funded terrorist groups like the Irish Republican Army and Abu Nidal; and his bombings ranged from taking out Libyan cities to the infamous downing of a Pan Am jetliner over Scotland. Qaddafi made nice with the West after 9/11 (the obits quote from his creepy love notes to Condoleezza Rice), but continued to lash out, as when he blamed the CIA for an HIV outbreak (unsanitary hospital conditions were the likely culprit). The Times’ piece is nicely nuanced about his impact on Libya: His taking control of the oil business helped build roads and enormously boost life expectancy. But his no-government philosophy left the country a basket case. “In the crowning paradox, he preached a ‘revolutionary’ utopia of people power but ran a one-man dictatorship that fueled the revolution against him,” says the Associated Press. The Guardian, meanwhile, offers two obits: The traditional one does an especially nice job of depicting the strongman’s early years in a country that had traditionally been a Middle Eastern afterthought, as well as plumbing his psychiatric makeup: “In this narcissism and self-aggrandisement, he was at least in some measure the child,” the story declares. A second piece, though, takes the form of an obit for his zany cult of personalityHOLLYWOOD POWER WOMAN: Sue Mengers was “Hollywood’s first female super-agent” says Variety. Hollywood-based outlets cover the agent’s passing like the death of a royal. Deadline’s Nikki Finke notes that, unlike the female agents of yore, Mengers had a whole stable of clients, rather than just one (which, once upon a time, tended to be a man the agent was in love with). The Los Angeles Times explains how upon moving to California she built her profile by hosting parties, refusing to invite “anyone who wasn’t successful.” But mainly the obits focus on her personal style: “Blond, chain-smoking, and as utterly charming as she could be terrifying, Mengers was a veritable Rosalind Russell-type of broad in the cutthroat world of agenting,” says the Daily Beast, while Finke describes “eyes framed in huge tinted glasses, with a soft breathy voice and the mouth of a stevedore.” Several outlets recall one of her legendary quips, reassuring client Barbra Streisand thusly following the Manson family’s killing of Sharon Tate: “Don’t worry, honey, stars aren’t being murdered, only featured players.”UNIX INVENTOR: “If you are reading today's Independent on a PC, Mac, smartphone or tablet computer, it is Dennis Ritchie whom you can thank for his role in bringing you much of the technology that made possible these devices and the software which runs on them,” explains an obit in the British paper. Ritchie developed C, the language that underlies Microsoft’s windows, as well as the Unix operating system that enabled the move from room-sized computers to desktops and beyond. SIGN OF THE TIMES: In lieu of ponderous expert quotes, the Wall Street Journal obit grabs a great insight from a tweet: "If [Steve] Jobs was a master architect of skyscrapers, it was Ritchie and his collaborators who invented steel," wrote James Grimmelman, a Microsoft programmer turned NYU professor.
BLACKFEET BATTLER: Elouise Cobell, treasurer of the Blackfoot tribe, “tenaciously pursued a lawsuit that accused the federal government of cheating Native Americans out of more than a century's worth of royalties, resulting in a record $3.4-billion settlement,” says the Los Angeles Times. Cobell tributes appear all over the country, with top pols from Montana to D.C. vying to praise her. In an editorial, the Seattle Times calls Cobell -- who lived in Seattle during her one break from Montana -- a “genuine American hero.” She also won a MacArthur “genius” grant for her advocacy.
CELL PHONE PIONEER: Robert Galvin took the reins from his father and led Motorola for 30 years. But the obits all lead with just one innovation: the cell phone. Galvin “led the company as it pioneered the cellular phone,” says the Chicago Tribune. He “built Motorola Inc. into an international electronics giant that unleashed the cellphone,” says the Wall Street Journal and “put palm-sized telephones into pockets and purses everywhere,” says the Washington Post. Well, not exactly: The DynaTac phone weighed about two pounds and looked like a brick. Grim Reader would have liked to hear more about Six Sigma, a quality control program he instituted after getting one too many complaint letters in the 1980s. The Post, one of the few outlets to mention it, says it lowered the product-defect rate to three per million -- a perfection rate of 99.9997 percent.CUBAN DISSIDENT: Laura Pollan “founded the opposition group Ladies in White and for nearly a decade staged weekly protest marches with other wives of political prisoners to press for their release,” explains the Associated Press. Pollan was an unknown high school teacher who already had a penchant for wearing white when her husband was locked up in 2003. After the marches gained attention, the government accused her group of being paid by foreigners. By 2010, all the husbands had been freed.
COSTUME DESIGNER TO THE STARS: “For 60 years,” says the Guardian, “Ray Aghayan guaranteed that difficult divas would arrive on screens and stages projecting perfection. Glamour was so much his habitat that he supervised over a dozen Oscar shows.” The obit -- which is far better than the CV-recitations in other outlets -- traces his career from his native Tehran (his first client “was even more terrifying than Barbra Streisand: Princess Fawzia of Egypt, first wife of the last Shah”) to Hollywood, where his tasks, among other things, included stage outfits for Diana Ross and a gown for Carol Channing that featured 80 pounds of crystal and a scarf so heavy that she damaged the scenery by flinging it over a shoulder. NEW VOCABULARY WORD: Aghayan designed the outfits that “defrumped” Judy Garland, the obit says. All of the coverage notes that he was life partners with even more famous costume man, Bob Mackie, who survives him.
EXPLORER LOVED TIBET: Not many people get to be called an “explorer” in these GPS-enabled days. But that’s the word that pops up in the lede of the New York Times obituary for Michel Peissel, a Frenchman whose feats of Indiana Jones-style derring-do -- finding unrecorded Mayan ruins, rowing a Viking longboat from the Baltic to the Black Sea -- led him back time and again to Tibet, where he learned the language, publishing multiple books about its unknown corners. GOING NATIVE: Peissel was so committed to the Tibetan cause that he blasted the Dalai Lama for not standing up enough against the Chinese.
FUGITIVE COMPOSER: Pete Rugolo was the chief arranger for Stan Kenton’s progressive jazz band and was the guy who signed Miles Davis to a record deal for Birth of the Cool. But most ordinary shmoes like Grim Reader know him as the man who composed the theme to The Fugitive, among other Hollywood fare. That distinction appears in the lede to obits in stateside outlets like the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. It’s not mentioned until the second to last paragraph of the Independent’s higher-brow write-up.RADIO DRAMATIST: Everyone notes that Norman Corwin, 101, was known as “the poet laureate of radio.” Corwin was the top producer of radio dramas in the pre-television days. Corwin made everything from lighthearted Christmas comedies to documentary fare about the Fascist conquest of Ethiopia, but it was a broadcast about the end of WWII that, according to the Los Angeles Times, Carl Sandburg once called one of America’s greatest poems: "Take a bow, G.I. Take a bow, little guy. The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of this afternoon." The obits say little about his life after the golden age of radio, noting that he dabbled in TV and film and taught at the University of Southern California until he turned 100.
CINCINNATI MONEYBAGS: Billionaire Carl Lindner’s obits tell a mixed story. On the one hand, he built his family’s business from a small dairy store into a vast network of corporations ranging from financial and insurance concerns to builders to the banana titan Chiquita. On the other, he was “one of Michael Milken’s earliest and most prominent junk-bond players” in the 1980s, and was denounced as a “ruthless takeover artist,” according to the Associated Press. To its great credit, the Cincinnati Enquirer avoids the tendency to say only nice things about a city’s leading philanthropist (Lindner once owned the Cincinnati Reds) and paints both sides of the story, including Lindner’s epic legal battle with the paper over its reporting on his banana firm. Take a read here.
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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