Grim Reader, Sept. 11, 2009: Army Archerd, Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy and Nancy Talbot
by Michael Schaffer
SEPTEMBER 11, 2009 TAGS:
Just about any city in America has someone like Army Archerd: a local institution who exists somewhere between trade journalism and the company-town establishment, becoming a pillar of local industry even as he politely chronicles it. In Houston, such a person would move in a world of oil men; in Hartford, he’d schmooze insurance-biz heavyweights. But Archerd worked in Hollywood, a rare example of a company town whose business draws obsessive interest around the world. Thus when the veteran Variety columnist died this week, his life story made it onto obituary pages that would probably ignore even the best-loved writer for Insurance Journal or the Oil & Gas Journal.
Among Archerd’s non-Hollywood obituarists, the focus is on his role in the entertainment industry and his place in journalistic history. The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Miller describes Archerd as “Hollywood’s sunniest stargazer,” noting that “his daily column was a closely parsed industry bible of Hollywood’s comings and goings, deals, hits and bombs.” For those less attuned to such comings and goings, he writes, “Mr. Archerd was best known as the guy in the tuxedo who lobbed softball questions at stars on the red carpet at the annual Academy Awards ceremony.”
It wasn’t all softballs. The major-media obits all mention, the Los Angeles Times in its lead paragraph, Archerd’s greatest scoop: In 1985, he broke the news that Rock Hudson had AIDS, a story that helped de-stigmatize the disease and, according to the New York Times, “exposed the two-faced attitude toward homosexuality that was prevalent in Hollywood and elsewhere at the time.” The obits also battle for anecdotes to describe the hard-boiled prose and shoe-leather work ethic of what the Washington Post calls “one of the last ‘three-dot’ columnists, stringing together observations and news nuggets separated by three-dot ellipses.” Among the revelations: Archerd, who never used stringers, had the phone numbers of every hospital nurses’ station in Los Angeles.
Closer to home, Hollywood rags mourn Archerd less as a journalist than a Tinseltown establishment. Archerd’s column “provided a community bulletin board, detailing new deals, reporting from film sets and awards shows, and chronicling the births, deaths and hospitalizations of showbiz denizens,” Variety notes, quoting a big-time screenwriter as saying, “There will always be three iconic moments in the Hollywood life. Seeing your name for the first time on a movie poster, seeing it on a billboard, and when you see it for the first time in Army Archerd’s column.” The trade journal even has a page of tributes from stars — demonstrating Archerd’s establishmentarian cred even as it undercuts the assertion, repeated skeptically in the Los Angeles Times, that “he didn’t consider himself part of the crowd he covered.” The crowd, apparently, disagrees.
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Hollywood’s sorrow doesn’t come close to matching the mourning for Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, Chief Minister of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Ever since Reddy’s death last week in a helicopter crash, India’s press featured accounts of over-the-top grief, including multiple suicides and heart attack fatalities of heartbroken constituents. The papers are all over the place on the death toll: Using numbers from Reddy’s political party, Cacutta’s Telegraph reports that “344 people had died of shock and despair or committed suicide.” The Times of India, meanwhile, places the number at a comparatively low 67. With some critics blaming TV stations for repeating suicide stories in a way that might encourage copycats, Reddy’s son Jaganmohan has spoken out. “I request you not to commit suicide,” he tells supporters.
Though major American and English papers featured brief items on Reddy’s death, Grim Reader hasn’t been able to find any formal obits on this side of the ocean that might explain his popularity. The short version, from the Indian press: Reddy, who led a state that has been an epicenter of India’s high-tech boom, was seen as a fighter for poor rural residents who feel left out of the prosperity.
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Also in South Asia, the New York Times has a number of deeply sad write-ups about Sultan Munadi, the kidnapped Afghan interpreter who was killed during a commando mission that freed Times reporter Stephen Farrell. Munadi was “an Afghan striver,” writes David Rohde, while several colleagues add their own reminiscences on the paper’s war blog. The main obit piece is sweet enough, but given the personal relationship between Munadi and the people who are writing about his death, Grim Reader wishes Rohde could have dropped the old-fashioned reference to “this reporter” and instead referred to his own involvement via the first-person singular.
Stateside, a trio of businesswomen makes the obit pages. Everyone pauses to remember Nancy Talbot, who with her late husband co-founded a chain that would eventually grow to 600 Talbots stores nationwide. There’s an especially nice write-up in the Boston Globe, Talbot’s hometown paper for much of her life. “Red and orange were Nancy Talbot’s favorite colors, family and friends knew,” it opens. “By extension, so, too, did shoppers who used catalogs to sample the clothes she sold, and those who passed through the bright red door of Talbots.” Least surprising news: The preppy boutique was the favorite store of Barbara Bush, wife of the first President Bush.
In Chicago, meanwhile, the Tribune mourns Esther Schulman, matriarch of the Eli’s Cheesecake empire. Schulman and her husband—that would be Eli—opened a grill in 1948. A succession of locally beloved restaurants later, they sell and ship 18,000 cheesecakes and deserts daily.
And in New York, the Times writes up food writer and inventor Sylvia Schur, the woman who brought the world Clamato, cranapple juice, and Metrecal. Like Julia Child, whose hit biopic is currently in theaters, and Sheila Lukins, whose obits ran just a week ago, Schur was a former food editor for Parade. But while Child and Lukins remain icons, Schur opened a firm called Creative Food Services that did writing and product-development for many of the big food firms that gourmands despise. Perhaps as a result, her death got far less Obitosphere attention. Still, she did stuff for the snobs, too: Schur’s firm helped introduce Danish blue cheese and New Zealand lamb into the U.S. market, and helped develop the menu for the Four Seasons.
There’s interesting historical news in the Washington Post’s piece on the death of ex-CIA agent Christopher Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s biggest Cold War exploit: He led an effort to raise a Soviet sub that had sunk in the Pacific, commissioning a ship that masqueraded as a Howard Hughes-owned mining vessel. “The recovery effort, which began in 1974, did not go well,” Patricia Sullivan writes. “The submarine split while it was being raised, and the Glomar’s crew expected a nuclear explosion when the falling sub and its weaponry hit the ocean floor. No explosion occurred.” Did you know there was nearly a nuclear catastrophe near Hawaii that year? Neither did Grim Reader. Fitzgerald’s career also features spy satellites and a near-capture during the Iranian hostage crisis.
Elswhere in the Obitosphere, there are obits for Louis Rosen, one of the developers of the A-Bomb. Grim Reader’s favorite headline is the muscular one atop the UPI piece: “Atom-Smasher Louis Rosen Dies at 91,” it reads. … Several outlets remember Wycliffe Johnson, who helped popularize and modernize Jamaican dancehall music. In Jamaica, Johnson was popular enough that the island media’s headlines refer to him only by his nickname, Steely. … And there are a couple pieces on Buddy Blattner, a veteran baseball broadcaster remembered as the straight man alongside the frequently incoherent Dizzy Dean. Both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times pick up on an old quote from Blattner: “People liked [Dean] giving everything but the score but wanted me to restore sanity.”
Overseas, the Independent has a write-up on Israeli journalist and artist Amos Keinan. The piece opens with a quote from Keinan’s wife. It’s the sort of quote Grim Reader hopes Mrs. Grim Reader never utters in the presence of an obituary writer: “He was an overbearing and unbearable man, and he was unpleasant to live with; but he was a poet.” … In the Guardian, there’s a glowing tribute to Nigerian human-rights crusader Gani Fawehinmi, who for 40 years “played the role of national gadfly, constantly provoking over-mighty rulers, especially military ones, and defending their victims.” … And the Associated Press covers the death of Italian game-show host Mike Bongiorno, who is remembered as a living symbol of Italian TV. “Politicians, intellectuals and even the soccer team he rooted for sent condolences,” the story says. One difference between Bongiorno and, say, Alex Trebek: It’s a good bet Umberto Eco never wrote an essay on Trebek.
Finally, the Los Angeles Times has a fun piece on Albert Gordon, a lawyer who battled for gay rights. A straight man, Gordon joined the cause after his twin sons came out as gay. The obit provides some absurd flashbacks to the bad old days in Los Angeles: “One of Gordon’s most memorable cases stemmed from a notorious raid on a gay bathhouse on Melrose Avenue in 1975, when scores of Los Angeles police officers broke up a mock slave auction staged as part of the entertainment for a gay community fundraiser. Apparently not amused by the gimmick, the police treated the event as actual human slave trafficking, a felony, and arrested 40 participants. Gordon helped win their release.” He raised money for the fight, naturally, by putting himself on the block in another mock slave auction.
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
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.
Among Archerd’s non-Hollywood obituarists, the focus is on his role in the entertainment industry and his place in journalistic history. The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Miller describes Archerd as “Hollywood’s sunniest stargazer,” noting that “his daily column was a closely parsed industry bible of Hollywood’s comings and goings, deals, hits and bombs.” For those less attuned to such comings and goings, he writes, “Mr. Archerd was best known as the guy in the tuxedo who lobbed softball questions at stars on the red carpet at the annual Academy Awards ceremony.” It wasn’t all softballs. The major-media obits all mention, the Los Angeles Times in its lead paragraph, Archerd’s greatest scoop: In 1985, he broke the news that Rock Hudson had AIDS, a story that helped de-stigmatize the disease and, according to the New York Times, “exposed the two-faced attitude toward homosexuality that was prevalent in Hollywood and elsewhere at the time.” The obits also battle for anecdotes to describe the hard-boiled prose and shoe-leather work ethic of what the Washington Post calls “one of the last ‘three-dot’ columnists, stringing together observations and news nuggets separated by three-dot ellipses.” Among the revelations: Archerd, who never used stringers, had the phone numbers of every hospital nurses’ station in Los Angeles.
Closer to home, Hollywood rags mourn Archerd less as a journalist than a Tinseltown establishment. Archerd’s column “provided a community bulletin board, detailing new deals, reporting from film sets and awards shows, and chronicling the births, deaths and hospitalizations of showbiz denizens,” Variety notes, quoting a big-time screenwriter as saying, “There will always be three iconic moments in the Hollywood life. Seeing your name for the first time on a movie poster, seeing it on a billboard, and when you see it for the first time in Army Archerd’s column.” The trade journal even has a page of tributes from stars — demonstrating Archerd’s establishmentarian cred even as it undercuts the assertion, repeated skeptically in the Los Angeles Times, that “he didn’t consider himself part of the crowd he covered.” The crowd, apparently, disagrees.
--
Hollywood’s sorrow doesn’t come close to matching the mourning for Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, Chief Minister of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Ever since Reddy’s death last week in a helicopter crash, India’s press featured accounts of over-the-top grief, including multiple suicides and heart attack fatalities of heartbroken constituents. The papers are all over the place on the death toll: Using numbers from Reddy’s political party, Cacutta’s Telegraph reports that “344 people had died of shock and despair or committed suicide.” The Times of India, meanwhile, places the number at a comparatively low 67. With some critics blaming TV stations for repeating suicide stories in a way that might encourage copycats, Reddy’s son Jaganmohan has spoken out. “I request you not to commit suicide,” he tells supporters.Though major American and English papers featured brief items on Reddy’s death, Grim Reader hasn’t been able to find any formal obits on this side of the ocean that might explain his popularity. The short version, from the Indian press: Reddy, who led a state that has been an epicenter of India’s high-tech boom, was seen as a fighter for poor rural residents who feel left out of the prosperity.
--
Also in South Asia, the New York Times has a number of deeply sad write-ups about Sultan Munadi, the kidnapped Afghan interpreter who was killed during a commando mission that freed Times reporter Stephen Farrell. Munadi was “an Afghan striver,” writes David Rohde, while several colleagues add their own reminiscences on the paper’s war blog. The main obit piece is sweet enough, but given the personal relationship between Munadi and the people who are writing about his death, Grim Reader wishes Rohde could have dropped the old-fashioned reference to “this reporter” and instead referred to his own involvement via the first-person singular.
Stateside, a trio of businesswomen makes the obit pages. Everyone pauses to remember Nancy Talbot, who with her late husband co-founded a chain that would eventually grow to 600 Talbots stores nationwide. There’s an especially nice write-up in the Boston Globe, Talbot’s hometown paper for much of her life. “Red and orange were Nancy Talbot’s favorite colors, family and friends knew,” it opens. “By extension, so, too, did shoppers who used catalogs to sample the clothes she sold, and those who passed through the bright red door of Talbots.” Least surprising news: The preppy boutique was the favorite store of Barbara Bush, wife of the first President Bush.
In Chicago, meanwhile, the Tribune mourns Esther Schulman, matriarch of the Eli’s Cheesecake empire. Schulman and her husband—that would be Eli—opened a grill in 1948. A succession of locally beloved restaurants later, they sell and ship 18,000 cheesecakes and deserts daily.And in New York, the Times writes up food writer and inventor Sylvia Schur, the woman who brought the world Clamato, cranapple juice, and Metrecal. Like Julia Child, whose hit biopic is currently in theaters, and Sheila Lukins, whose obits ran just a week ago, Schur was a former food editor for Parade. But while Child and Lukins remain icons, Schur opened a firm called Creative Food Services that did writing and product-development for many of the big food firms that gourmands despise. Perhaps as a result, her death got far less Obitosphere attention. Still, she did stuff for the snobs, too: Schur’s firm helped introduce Danish blue cheese and New Zealand lamb into the U.S. market, and helped develop the menu for the Four Seasons.
There’s interesting historical news in the Washington Post’s piece on the death of ex-CIA agent Christopher Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s biggest Cold War exploit: He led an effort to raise a Soviet sub that had sunk in the Pacific, commissioning a ship that masqueraded as a Howard Hughes-owned mining vessel. “The recovery effort, which began in 1974, did not go well,” Patricia Sullivan writes. “The submarine split while it was being raised, and the Glomar’s crew expected a nuclear explosion when the falling sub and its weaponry hit the ocean floor. No explosion occurred.” Did you know there was nearly a nuclear catastrophe near Hawaii that year? Neither did Grim Reader. Fitzgerald’s career also features spy satellites and a near-capture during the Iranian hostage crisis.
Elswhere in the Obitosphere, there are obits for Louis Rosen, one of the developers of the A-Bomb. Grim Reader’s favorite headline is the muscular one atop the UPI piece: “Atom-Smasher Louis Rosen Dies at 91,” it reads. … Several outlets remember Wycliffe Johnson, who helped popularize and modernize Jamaican dancehall music. In Jamaica, Johnson was popular enough that the island media’s headlines refer to him only by his nickname, Steely. … And there are a couple pieces on Buddy Blattner, a veteran baseball broadcaster remembered as the straight man alongside the frequently incoherent Dizzy Dean. Both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times pick up on an old quote from Blattner: “People liked [Dean] giving everything but the score but wanted me to restore sanity.”
Overseas, the Independent has a write-up on Israeli journalist and artist Amos Keinan. The piece opens with a quote from Keinan’s wife. It’s the sort of quote Grim Reader hopes Mrs. Grim Reader never utters in the presence of an obituary writer: “He was an overbearing and unbearable man, and he was unpleasant to live with; but he was a poet.” … In the Guardian, there’s a glowing tribute to Nigerian human-rights crusader Gani Fawehinmi, who for 40 years “played the role of national gadfly, constantly provoking over-mighty rulers, especially military ones, and defending their victims.” … And the Associated Press covers the death of Italian game-show host Mike Bongiorno, who is remembered as a living symbol of Italian TV. “Politicians, intellectuals and even the soccer team he rooted for sent condolences,” the story says. One difference between Bongiorno and, say, Alex Trebek: It’s a good bet Umberto Eco never wrote an essay on Trebek.Finally, the Los Angeles Times has a fun piece on Albert Gordon, a lawyer who battled for gay rights. A straight man, Gordon joined the cause after his twin sons came out as gay. The obit provides some absurd flashbacks to the bad old days in Los Angeles: “One of Gordon’s most memorable cases stemmed from a notorious raid on a gay bathhouse on Melrose Avenue in 1975, when scores of Los Angeles police officers broke up a mock slave auction staged as part of the entertainment for a gay community fundraiser. Apparently not amused by the gimmick, the police treated the event as actual human slave trafficking, a felony, and arrested 40 participants. Gordon helped win their release.” He raised money for the fight, naturally, by putting himself on the block in another mock slave auction.
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
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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