Grim Reader, Jan. 8, 2010: Casey Johnson, Willie Mitchell and Deborah Howell
by Michael Schaffer
JANUARY 8, 2010 TAGS:
It’s easy to dismiss the likes of Paris Hilton, but in the 21st century media environment her new model of celebrity, one devoid of achievement, is hard to ignore: There’s a vast infrastructure of reality programming, web gossip and online gawking that covers its every mood. And the old media, inevitably, follows suit.
And now that they’ve been around long enough to start dying on us, we’re also embracing a different sort of obituary for these different sorts of celebrities. Last year’s coverage of Brittany Murphy and DJ AM — the stories driven by websites like TMZ.com, the public mourning happening in the virtual space of Facebook — represented a sample of the Hilton-generation Obitosphere. But the actress and the DJ had at least once been known for their work. Not so Casey Johnson, the Johnson & Johnson heiress who died in Los Angeles this week at age 30.
To be sure, Johnson rated coverage by the major obit players, who inevitably referred to her as a “socialite,” referenced her “Hollywood party scene” troubles, and responsibly cited sources like the New York Jets (Johnson’s dad owns the team) and the LAPD (they’re investigating) in reporting on the officially uncertain cause of death.
But the real coverage of Johnson’s death — and the life that preceded it — took place online, where readers did not need to be brought up to speed on subjects like the travails of Johnson’s reality-star girlfriend/fiancée Tila Tequila, Johnson’s breaking-and-entering arrest at the home of fellow socialite Jasmine Lennard, or Johnson’s drug-related estrangement from her family. It’s not obituary as narrative life story; it’s obituary as train wreck: “how a billionaire socialite wound up in bed with a hardknock stripper, filming soft-core porn on a webcam,” as a Gawker tick-tock has it.
For a piece that actually tries to present a Johnson bio, The Daily Beast has a write-up with some of the detail the old-line obit pages ignore: Johnson got her first Chanel bag at age 10; she quickly dropped out of Brown “because the school would not allow her toy poodle Zoe to live in the dorm with her.” But Grim Reader’s favorite piece is by Gawker’s Azaria Jagger, who analyzes Johnson as a pop-cultural product. “In her relatively short life, Casey embodied a number of romantic, moneyed archetypes,” Jagger writes. Johnson went from the smartie (a la Gossip Girl’s Serena van der Woodsen) to New York publicist’s intern (she worked for the infamous Lizzie Grubman) to “a lonely Grey Gardens dame,” drugged up in Hollywood. Along the way, Johnson “came to define the generational divide between the Jackie Onassis-cast socialites of yore and the nipple-slipping Paris Hiltons of today.”
*
Elsewhere in the Obitosphere this week, there’s a fair amount of attention to James von Brunn, the white supremacist who opened fire last year at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Disappointingly, most obits don’t go far beyond the museum attack, though the Washington Post’s piece at least mentions that von Brunn did jail time in the ’80s after showing up at the Federal Reserve with a gun. Grim Reader would love to know where he was born, how he became a nut, and various other details. It’s not like the stuff is unknowable, either: Significantly more detail made it online in the days following the museum attack last June.
Producer Willie Mitchell gets a nice obit from the Washington Post. In addition to the standard recitation of hits and jobs, Terence McArdle goes into detail about his recording of Al Green’s first hit, “Tired of Being Alone.” The song’s “greatest accomplishment was to blend the gritty sound of Stax with the sweeter, polished delivery of Motown Records in Detroit.” A nice piece of detail: Mitchell used to keep track of his studio’s microphones, claiming that “number nine — the microphone used with Green — had a particularly warm, breathy quality.” For reaction from other soul celebs, see the lengthy piece in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
Jeanette Scola Trapani was 4 years old when San Francisco was leveled by the 1906 earthquake and fire. At her death this week, at age 107, she was believed to be the disaster’s oldest living survivor. The San Francisco Chronicle offers a quick tour of the life she went on to lead: Married in 1929 to a man in the beverage business, she lived in Southern California for years before returning to the Bay Area in 1976.
She was joined on obit pages this week by an even luckier suvivor: Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized to have been in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the day each city was bombed. An engineer, Yamaguchi was on business in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Burned badly in the American nuclear attack, he made it home to Nagasaki three days later and was “explaining his injuries to his boss, when the same white light filled the room,” according to the Independent’s piece. The obits are only slightly more expansive on the life that Yamaguchi’s survival made possible: He became a teacher and eventually went back to work for Mitsubishi, says the New York Times. But after his son died of cancer in 1995 — Yamaguchi blamed the blasts’ radioactive fallout — he became an anti-nuclear campaigner, penning a memoir and addressing the United Nations.
The Times of London and the Wall Street Journal both have nice obits for Freya von Moltke, the last survivor from a circle of anti-Nazi militants in Hitler’s Germany. Von Moltke’s husband was executed following the unsuccessful 1944 assassination attempt against the Fuhrer. The Times, in particular, plays the relationship between the von Moltkes as a dashing love story, with the husband during the war sending home from Berlin letters that denounced the regime, and the wife — herself a lawyer — hiding them in beehives on their Silesian estate. After the war, she got an American officer’s help to dig them up while Soviet troops were billeted on the property, which is itself now part of Poland. Von Moltke moved to South Africa after the war, but couldn’t stand apartheid and eventually wound up living in Vermont.
Overseas this week there are obits for former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, who helped restore democracy to the most populous Muslim nation. The Economist’s obit makes him sound like a great guy: “For a Muslim ulama, or priest-scholar, his appetite for smut was remarkable,” the magazine writes, explaining his guffaws when a Japanese prime minister accidentally congratulated him on his “erection.” “Mr. Wahid was committed to pluralism, liberalism, democracy and tolerance,” the obit concludes, though it also says his presidency declined into “chaos.”… Everyone remembers Leon Yao Liang, the Chinese bishop who served 28 years for refusing to renounce his allegiance to Rome in favor of a government-controlled Catholic Church. Yao didn’t let up after his release: In 2006, he was again held in isolation, blamed for a conflict between the government and underground churches. His death, back on Dec. 30, was only announced several days later by the authorities. … That wasn’t a problem for singer Sandro, who the obits all refer to as “the Argentine Elvis.” “Argentina is coming to terms with the news that the national treasure who brought the swinging Sixties to much of South America had died at the age of 64,” writes the Independent, adopting a suitably bleak tone. Grim Reader has yet to see a Sandro obit that doesn’t include the word “sensual.”
Back home, it was another big week for pioneers in the Obitosphere: Among the mourned are golfer Bill Powell, “the only African-American to build, own and operate a golf course in the United States.” With even the PGA officially segregated until 1961, Powell built his course a year before Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. … Also departed is stand-up comedian Jean Carroll, “widely credited with having blazed the trail for legions of female stand-up comics who came after her, including Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Lily Tomlin,” according to the New York Times. “Genteel by today’s standards, Ms. Carroll’s humor was radical in its day — radical, that is, in the hands of a lone woman with a microphone in front of her and an audience at her command,” explains the paper’s Margalit Fox.
Finally, journalists always do a good job of remembering their own, and the pieces this week about former Saint Paul Pioneer Press editor Deborah Howell are a good example. Howell — who went on to be the Washington Post’s ombudsman and a major figure in the business of opining about the news business — gets respectful treatment as one of the first women to lead a big-city daily. But she also has a legion of old colleagues who can get themselves published outside the formal obits. Their reminiscences of tough-love editing offer a taste of the ritual rookie-intimidation (and purple language) that so many established reporters look back on so fondly. The New York Times’ David Carr, once rejected for a job after Howell found an error in an article, offers this unsuitable-for-the-New York Times quotation from the ensuing conversation: “You (redacted) the middle name of the publisher of our newspaper in that (redacted) story you wrote the other day. I have no idea how you could be so (redacted) stupid, but I’m putting your application on the spike.” Carr, naturally, remembers it as a key learning moment. He headlines his piece, “The editor everyone should have.”
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.
And now that they’ve been around long enough to start dying on us, we’re also embracing a different sort of obituary for these different sorts of celebrities. Last year’s coverage of Brittany Murphy and DJ AM — the stories driven by websites like TMZ.com, the public mourning happening in the virtual space of Facebook — represented a sample of the Hilton-generation Obitosphere. But the actress and the DJ had at least once been known for their work. Not so Casey Johnson, the Johnson & Johnson heiress who died in Los Angeles this week at age 30. To be sure, Johnson rated coverage by the major obit players, who inevitably referred to her as a “socialite,” referenced her “Hollywood party scene” troubles, and responsibly cited sources like the New York Jets (Johnson’s dad owns the team) and the LAPD (they’re investigating) in reporting on the officially uncertain cause of death.
But the real coverage of Johnson’s death — and the life that preceded it — took place online, where readers did not need to be brought up to speed on subjects like the travails of Johnson’s reality-star girlfriend/fiancée Tila Tequila, Johnson’s breaking-and-entering arrest at the home of fellow socialite Jasmine Lennard, or Johnson’s drug-related estrangement from her family. It’s not obituary as narrative life story; it’s obituary as train wreck: “how a billionaire socialite wound up in bed with a hardknock stripper, filming soft-core porn on a webcam,” as a Gawker tick-tock has it.
For a piece that actually tries to present a Johnson bio, The Daily Beast has a write-up with some of the detail the old-line obit pages ignore: Johnson got her first Chanel bag at age 10; she quickly dropped out of Brown “because the school would not allow her toy poodle Zoe to live in the dorm with her.” But Grim Reader’s favorite piece is by Gawker’s Azaria Jagger, who analyzes Johnson as a pop-cultural product. “In her relatively short life, Casey embodied a number of romantic, moneyed archetypes,” Jagger writes. Johnson went from the smartie (a la Gossip Girl’s Serena van der Woodsen) to New York publicist’s intern (she worked for the infamous Lizzie Grubman) to “a lonely Grey Gardens dame,” drugged up in Hollywood. Along the way, Johnson “came to define the generational divide between the Jackie Onassis-cast socialites of yore and the nipple-slipping Paris Hiltons of today.”
*
Elsewhere in the Obitosphere this week, there’s a fair amount of attention to James von Brunn, the white supremacist who opened fire last year at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Disappointingly, most obits don’t go far beyond the museum attack, though the Washington Post’s piece at least mentions that von Brunn did jail time in the ’80s after showing up at the Federal Reserve with a gun. Grim Reader would love to know where he was born, how he became a nut, and various other details. It’s not like the stuff is unknowable, either: Significantly more detail made it online in the days following the museum attack last June.
Producer Willie Mitchell gets a nice obit from the Washington Post. In addition to the standard recitation of hits and jobs, Terence McArdle goes into detail about his recording of Al Green’s first hit, “Tired of Being Alone.” The song’s “greatest accomplishment was to blend the gritty sound of Stax with the sweeter, polished delivery of Motown Records in Detroit.” A nice piece of detail: Mitchell used to keep track of his studio’s microphones, claiming that “number nine — the microphone used with Green — had a particularly warm, breathy quality.” For reaction from other soul celebs, see the lengthy piece in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.Jeanette Scola Trapani was 4 years old when San Francisco was leveled by the 1906 earthquake and fire. At her death this week, at age 107, she was believed to be the disaster’s oldest living survivor. The San Francisco Chronicle offers a quick tour of the life she went on to lead: Married in 1929 to a man in the beverage business, she lived in Southern California for years before returning to the Bay Area in 1976.
She was joined on obit pages this week by an even luckier suvivor: Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized to have been in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the day each city was bombed. An engineer, Yamaguchi was on business in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Burned badly in the American nuclear attack, he made it home to Nagasaki three days later and was “explaining his injuries to his boss, when the same white light filled the room,” according to the Independent’s piece. The obits are only slightly more expansive on the life that Yamaguchi’s survival made possible: He became a teacher and eventually went back to work for Mitsubishi, says the New York Times. But after his son died of cancer in 1995 — Yamaguchi blamed the blasts’ radioactive fallout — he became an anti-nuclear campaigner, penning a memoir and addressing the United Nations.
The Times of London and the Wall Street Journal both have nice obits for Freya von Moltke, the last survivor from a circle of anti-Nazi militants in Hitler’s Germany. Von Moltke’s husband was executed following the unsuccessful 1944 assassination attempt against the Fuhrer. The Times, in particular, plays the relationship between the von Moltkes as a dashing love story, with the husband during the war sending home from Berlin letters that denounced the regime, and the wife — herself a lawyer — hiding them in beehives on their Silesian estate. After the war, she got an American officer’s help to dig them up while Soviet troops were billeted on the property, which is itself now part of Poland. Von Moltke moved to South Africa after the war, but couldn’t stand apartheid and eventually wound up living in Vermont.
Overseas this week there are obits for former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, who helped restore democracy to the most populous Muslim nation. The Economist’s obit makes him sound like a great guy: “For a Muslim ulama, or priest-scholar, his appetite for smut was remarkable,” the magazine writes, explaining his guffaws when a Japanese prime minister accidentally congratulated him on his “erection.” “Mr. Wahid was committed to pluralism, liberalism, democracy and tolerance,” the obit concludes, though it also says his presidency declined into “chaos.”… Everyone remembers Leon Yao Liang, the Chinese bishop who served 28 years for refusing to renounce his allegiance to Rome in favor of a government-controlled Catholic Church. Yao didn’t let up after his release: In 2006, he was again held in isolation, blamed for a conflict between the government and underground churches. His death, back on Dec. 30, was only announced several days later by the authorities. … That wasn’t a problem for singer Sandro, who the obits all refer to as “the Argentine Elvis.” “Argentina is coming to terms with the news that the national treasure who brought the swinging Sixties to much of South America had died at the age of 64,” writes the Independent, adopting a suitably bleak tone. Grim Reader has yet to see a Sandro obit that doesn’t include the word “sensual.” Back home, it was another big week for pioneers in the Obitosphere: Among the mourned are golfer Bill Powell, “the only African-American to build, own and operate a golf course in the United States.” With even the PGA officially segregated until 1961, Powell built his course a year before Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. … Also departed is stand-up comedian Jean Carroll, “widely credited with having blazed the trail for legions of female stand-up comics who came after her, including Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Lily Tomlin,” according to the New York Times. “Genteel by today’s standards, Ms. Carroll’s humor was radical in its day — radical, that is, in the hands of a lone woman with a microphone in front of her and an audience at her command,” explains the paper’s Margalit Fox.
Finally, journalists always do a good job of remembering their own, and the pieces this week about former Saint Paul Pioneer Press editor Deborah Howell are a good example. Howell — who went on to be the Washington Post’s ombudsman and a major figure in the business of opining about the news business — gets respectful treatment as one of the first women to lead a big-city daily. But she also has a legion of old colleagues who can get themselves published outside the formal obits. Their reminiscences of tough-love editing offer a taste of the ritual rookie-intimidation (and purple language) that so many established reporters look back on so fondly. The New York Times’ David Carr, once rejected for a job after Howell found an error in an article, offers this unsuitable-for-the-New York Times quotation from the ensuing conversation: “You (redacted) the middle name of the publisher of our newspaper in that (redacted) story you wrote the other day. I have no idea how you could be so (redacted) stupid, but I’m putting your application on the spike.” Carr, naturally, remembers it as a key learning moment. He headlines his piece, “The editor everyone should have.”
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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