Grim Reader: This week in death 6/26/09
by Michael Schaffer
JUNE 26, 2009 TAGS:
News of Michael Jackson’s death broke just as Grim Reader’s deadline passed. And though the death already dominates the global newsmedia, Grim Reader waits until actual obits eclipse breaking-news death coverage. He’ll have full coverage of the Jackson Obitosophere next week.
The ongoing upheaval in Iran this month raises major questions about news in the age of social networking. With most foreign reporters banned from filing stories, much of what we know about the protests against the clerical regime comes via Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. How much of the reporting represents the wishful thinking of democracy activists? Just who is qualified to separate rumor from fact?
The most graphic of the amateur videos — the one that shows a young woman dying on a Tehran street, blood pouring from her mouth — raises similar questions for the Obitosphere. The images of Neda Agha-Soltan ricocheted around the world within hours of her death, turning her into a martyr of the revolution. But who was this woman democracy advocates called “Angel of Freedom?” Reporting out an actual obituary was no easy task.
CNN, which gave the video-driven story big play, crafted what it could from an interview with a single friend: Neda was the second of three friends, studied philosophy and religion, was more spiritual than religious. In an especially heartbreaking detail, the story reports she had recently purchased a piano, but the instrument had yet to be delivered. In the Los Angeles Times, reporter Borzou Daragahi visits Agha-Soltan’s family, who had been forbidden from holding a memorial service. “Travel was her passion, and with her friends she saved up enough money for package tours to Dubai, Turkey and Thailand,” he reports. “But she was never an activist…. She began attending the mass protests only because she was outraged by the election results.”
Rather than crafting a full story, the Times of London simply compiles a list of apparently verified facts, including the detail that Agha-Soltan was engaged to a photojournalist she had met on the trip to Turkey. All the accounts mention that she took singing lessons, but the New York Times’ Nazila Fathi takes time to note how brave this was. Because women in Iran are forbidden from singing publicly, Fathi writes, the lessons were taken “underground.” Agha-Soltan’s music teacher was with her when she was killed.
With even President Obama citing her story, it is easy to get carried away in the outrage. That’s why Grim Reaper was glad to see at least one observer reminding the media that basic details — including just who killed her — remain unknown. (Iranian hardliners, for instance, are implausibly arguing that it was a BBC setup.). “Neda is mythology, not fact,” says XX Factor’s Hanna Rosin. “Myths get created even in real time; read the contemporaneous deathbed stories of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington…. The street protesters need a sympathetic face, and Neda is ideal. But let’s just report it for what it is.”
--
The second high-profile obit of the week also concerned someone who, recently, had become as famous for her death as for her life: Farrah Fawcett, the Charlie’s Angels star who publicly battled anal cancer. Had Fawcett been hit by a truck two years ago, the obits would have focused on “her appearance on bedroom posters” (Washington Post) that “bewitched a generation of men” (New York Times). But her high-profile ailment, captured by a TV documentary and tabloids that ran increasingly gaunt pictures tracking her decline, was perhaps fitting. The Los Angeles Times explains that she was one of the first celebs to be as famous for personal dramas — a drug-addicted son; an abusive boyfriend; romances with Lee Majors and Ryan O’Neal — as on-screen talents.
As it happens, the much-expected death meant that all the papers had obituaries ready to run within moments of her death. (Some may even have jumped the gun: According to Gawker, the New York Daily News posted its story before Fawcett actually died.) The Guardian’s piece tactfully notes that Fawcett “was not, by any stretch of the imagination, one of the great tragediennes of the age,” but goes on to describe her post-1970s embrace of meatier roles, snagging three Emmy nominations, including one for her star turn in The Burning Bed, a TV movie about spousal abuse. The British paper also unearths a great Fawcett quote about the popularity of Charlie’s Angels: “When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”
Inevitably, the Fawcett stories all come back to the poster — a shot of Fawcett in a wet bathing suit that sold a reported 12 million copies. Still, Grim Reader can’t help but quibble with the Los Angeles Times’ first-paragraph description of the image: “A swimsuit poster that showcased her feathery mane.” Grim Reader may have been too young to understand sex appeal back in 1977, but he’s pretty sure it wasn’t her hair that those 12 million buyers were ogling.
--
Obituarists were less euphemistic about another person who was famous for being famous: Ed McMahon, who for 30 years laughed along with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. “The king of the sidekicks,” announced the Chicago Tribune. “The best second banana ever,” declared the Washington Post’s Tom Shales. “The faithful Tonto to Carson’s wry Lone Ranger,” said the New York Times’ Richard Severo. At least the Philadelphia Inquirer’s send-off ran under a headline that hinted at some of his other accomplishments. Of course, those were no great shakes: “Ed McMahon, host, sidekick and pitchman, dies at 86,” it reads.
Especially detailed obits appeared in Los Angeles. Variety describes how the son of a carnival barker made his way into show-biz, a good enough actor to wind up — in the Hollywood publication’s inimitable lingo — “in demand as a thesp in film, TV and legit productions” before landing on Carson’s couch. The Los Angeles Times also goes high in its piece with what might have been a sad little addendum: McMahon’s 2007 default on a $4.7 million mortgage after an injury prevented him from working. “If you spend more money than you make, you know what happens,” the face of the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes was quoted as saying.
--
Most major papers give big play to the death of Jerri Nielsen Fitzgerald, the doctor who performed cancer treatment on herself, with assistance from airdropped chemotheraphy equipment and satellite links to oncologists, during the winter she spent as the only physician on Antarctica. The breast cancer had returned.
As a pair of philandering American pols made headlines this week, Grim Reader was drawn to the obits for Hortensia Bussi, widow of slain Chilean leader Salvador Allende. Bussi had been a nonpolitical first lady, and her socialist husband’s infidelity was so open that he gave his politically active girlfriend her own office. But after Augusto Pinochet’s coup killed Allende and sent the girlfiend into Cuban exile, Bussi, who fled to Mexico, emerged. “As Allende's widow, she became a famous campaigner for human rights as well as a symbol that helped to unify Chile's fractious exiles, an immense diaspora spread all over the world,” writes the Guardian. Bussi’s travels rarely included the United States, which frequently denied her visas. That attitude apparently extends to her death: While United Kingdom papers ran long obituaries, American ones ran wire copy.
The Dallas Morning News also picks up a great local obituary of ex-FBI agent James W. Bookhout. During his career, Bookhout interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald, rounded up suspected Nazi spies, and worked on the case of kidnapped Texas socialite Amanda Dealey.
Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Times has a great write-up about John Houghtaling, inventor of the vibrating Magic Fingers bed. Along with in-room televisions, the beds were the first motel amenities to go mainstream, at their peak collecting $2 million a month for coin-operated bed-shaking. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, the Charleston Post and Courier has a beautiful obit for 97-year-old blacksmith Philip Simmons, which doubles as an encomium for what was once a common craft. “When he began, blacksmiths were sort of like car mechanics of their day, making horseshoes and other practical items,” writes Robert Behre. “By the time he laid his hammer down a few years ago, blacksmithing was seen as more of an art form.
--
Architecture is a funny form of art, because it’s one where ordinary citizens have to live for years with the results. Thus an obituary for a major architect represents a balance between assessments from colleagues in the often mysterious profession, and a sense of what regular folks think.
This week’s obituaries for Arthur Erickson offer a case study in different ways to do that. In Washington, where Erickson’s Canadian Embassy building is a much-maligned hulk just off the mall, the Post devotes the top half of its obituary to the local structure, noting that Forbes once listed it as one of the world’s 10 ugliest buildings. In Los Angeles, where his California Plaza towers occupy a similarly unpopular perch, the Times relegates the local angle to a small piece of a long, complicated career. That may be appropriate, from an architectural-history point of view. But if Grim Reaper were an Angelino, he’d be wondering right now just what was behind those “faceless and alienating” buildings down the road.
Michael Schaffer, a regular contributor to Obit, is the author of One Nation Under Dog about culture and the American pet industry.
The ongoing upheaval in Iran this month raises major questions about news in the age of social networking. With most foreign reporters banned from filing stories, much of what we know about the protests against the clerical regime comes via Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. How much of the reporting represents the wishful thinking of democracy activists? Just who is qualified to separate rumor from fact? The most graphic of the amateur videos — the one that shows a young woman dying on a Tehran street, blood pouring from her mouth — raises similar questions for the Obitosphere. The images of Neda Agha-Soltan ricocheted around the world within hours of her death, turning her into a martyr of the revolution. But who was this woman democracy advocates called “Angel of Freedom?” Reporting out an actual obituary was no easy task.
CNN, which gave the video-driven story big play, crafted what it could from an interview with a single friend: Neda was the second of three friends, studied philosophy and religion, was more spiritual than religious. In an especially heartbreaking detail, the story reports she had recently purchased a piano, but the instrument had yet to be delivered. In the Los Angeles Times, reporter Borzou Daragahi visits Agha-Soltan’s family, who had been forbidden from holding a memorial service. “Travel was her passion, and with her friends she saved up enough money for package tours to Dubai, Turkey and Thailand,” he reports. “But she was never an activist…. She began attending the mass protests only because she was outraged by the election results.”
Rather than crafting a full story, the Times of London simply compiles a list of apparently verified facts, including the detail that Agha-Soltan was engaged to a photojournalist she had met on the trip to Turkey. All the accounts mention that she took singing lessons, but the New York Times’ Nazila Fathi takes time to note how brave this was. Because women in Iran are forbidden from singing publicly, Fathi writes, the lessons were taken “underground.” Agha-Soltan’s music teacher was with her when she was killed.
With even President Obama citing her story, it is easy to get carried away in the outrage. That’s why Grim Reaper was glad to see at least one observer reminding the media that basic details — including just who killed her — remain unknown. (Iranian hardliners, for instance, are implausibly arguing that it was a BBC setup.). “Neda is mythology, not fact,” says XX Factor’s Hanna Rosin. “Myths get created even in real time; read the contemporaneous deathbed stories of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington…. The street protesters need a sympathetic face, and Neda is ideal. But let’s just report it for what it is.”
--
The second high-profile obit of the week also concerned someone who, recently, had become as famous for her death as for her life: Farrah Fawcett, the Charlie’s Angels star who publicly battled anal cancer. Had Fawcett been hit by a truck two years ago, the obits would have focused on “her appearance on bedroom posters” (Washington Post) that “bewitched a generation of men” (New York Times). But her high-profile ailment, captured by a TV documentary and tabloids that ran increasingly gaunt pictures tracking her decline, was perhaps fitting. The Los Angeles Times explains that she was one of the first celebs to be as famous for personal dramas — a drug-addicted son; an abusive boyfriend; romances with Lee Majors and Ryan O’Neal — as on-screen talents.
As it happens, the much-expected death meant that all the papers had obituaries ready to run within moments of her death. (Some may even have jumped the gun: According to Gawker, the New York Daily News posted its story before Fawcett actually died.) The Guardian’s piece tactfully notes that Fawcett “was not, by any stretch of the imagination, one of the great tragediennes of the age,” but goes on to describe her post-1970s embrace of meatier roles, snagging three Emmy nominations, including one for her star turn in The Burning Bed, a TV movie about spousal abuse. The British paper also unearths a great Fawcett quote about the popularity of Charlie’s Angels: “When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”Inevitably, the Fawcett stories all come back to the poster — a shot of Fawcett in a wet bathing suit that sold a reported 12 million copies. Still, Grim Reader can’t help but quibble with the Los Angeles Times’ first-paragraph description of the image: “A swimsuit poster that showcased her feathery mane.” Grim Reader may have been too young to understand sex appeal back in 1977, but he’s pretty sure it wasn’t her hair that those 12 million buyers were ogling.
--
Obituarists were less euphemistic about another person who was famous for being famous: Ed McMahon, who for 30 years laughed along with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. “The king of the sidekicks,” announced the Chicago Tribune. “The best second banana ever,” declared the Washington Post’s Tom Shales. “The faithful Tonto to Carson’s wry Lone Ranger,” said the New York Times’ Richard Severo. At least the Philadelphia Inquirer’s send-off ran under a headline that hinted at some of his other accomplishments. Of course, those were no great shakes: “Ed McMahon, host, sidekick and pitchman, dies at 86,” it reads.
Especially detailed obits appeared in Los Angeles. Variety describes how the son of a carnival barker made his way into show-biz, a good enough actor to wind up — in the Hollywood publication’s inimitable lingo — “in demand as a thesp in film, TV and legit productions” before landing on Carson’s couch. The Los Angeles Times also goes high in its piece with what might have been a sad little addendum: McMahon’s 2007 default on a $4.7 million mortgage after an injury prevented him from working. “If you spend more money than you make, you know what happens,” the face of the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes was quoted as saying.
--
Most major papers give big play to the death of Jerri Nielsen Fitzgerald, the doctor who performed cancer treatment on herself, with assistance from airdropped chemotheraphy equipment and satellite links to oncologists, during the winter she spent as the only physician on Antarctica. The breast cancer had returned.
As a pair of philandering American pols made headlines this week, Grim Reader was drawn to the obits for Hortensia Bussi, widow of slain Chilean leader Salvador Allende. Bussi had been a nonpolitical first lady, and her socialist husband’s infidelity was so open that he gave his politically active girlfriend her own office. But after Augusto Pinochet’s coup killed Allende and sent the girlfiend into Cuban exile, Bussi, who fled to Mexico, emerged. “As Allende's widow, she became a famous campaigner for human rights as well as a symbol that helped to unify Chile's fractious exiles, an immense diaspora spread all over the world,” writes the Guardian. Bussi’s travels rarely included the United States, which frequently denied her visas. That attitude apparently extends to her death: While United Kingdom papers ran long obituaries, American ones ran wire copy.The Dallas Morning News also picks up a great local obituary of ex-FBI agent James W. Bookhout. During his career, Bookhout interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald, rounded up suspected Nazi spies, and worked on the case of kidnapped Texas socialite Amanda Dealey.
Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Times has a great write-up about John Houghtaling, inventor of the vibrating Magic Fingers bed. Along with in-room televisions, the beds were the first motel amenities to go mainstream, at their peak collecting $2 million a month for coin-operated bed-shaking. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, the Charleston Post and Courier has a beautiful obit for 97-year-old blacksmith Philip Simmons, which doubles as an encomium for what was once a common craft. “When he began, blacksmiths were sort of like car mechanics of their day, making horseshoes and other practical items,” writes Robert Behre. “By the time he laid his hammer down a few years ago, blacksmithing was seen as more of an art form.
--
Architecture is a funny form of art, because it’s one where ordinary citizens have to live for years with the results. Thus an obituary for a major architect represents a balance between assessments from colleagues in the often mysterious profession, and a sense of what regular folks think. This week’s obituaries for Arthur Erickson offer a case study in different ways to do that. In Washington, where Erickson’s Canadian Embassy building is a much-maligned hulk just off the mall, the Post devotes the top half of its obituary to the local structure, noting that Forbes once listed it as one of the world’s 10 ugliest buildings. In Los Angeles, where his California Plaza towers occupy a similarly unpopular perch, the Times relegates the local angle to a small piece of a long, complicated career. That may be appropriate, from an architectural-history point of view. But if Grim Reaper were an Angelino, he’d be wondering right now just what was behind those “faceless and alienating” buildings down the road.
Michael Schaffer, a regular contributor to Obit, is the author of One Nation Under Dog about culture and the American pet industry.
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