Grim Reader, Oct. 15, 2010: Joan Sutherland, Leona Gage and Patricia Herzog
by Michael Schaffer
OCTOBER 15, 2010 TAGS:
The Obitosphere falls all over itself this week in describing the brilliance of mezzo-soprano Joan Sutherland. Sutherland was “the queen of bel canto” (Wall Street Journal), “whose mastery of tone, astonishing range, and vocal control” (Associated Press) “created a legacy of recordings that remain unassailed benchmarks in the field” (Washington Post). Everyone notes that Sutherland’s Italian admirers dubbed her “La Stupenda,” though the Associated Press helpfully notes that the Germans called her “Koloraturawunder” and the English dubbed her “The Incomparable.”
Obit writers, though, can’t help but comparing. And as a result, Sutherland’s obits are as dominated by what she wasn’t — a prima donna-ish prima donna — as they are by her singing exploits.
The basic arc: Born in unlikely circumstances (an “Australian tailor’s daughter,” leads the Los Angeles Times, while the United Kingdon’s Telegraph goes high with word that Sutherland embodied all of her homeland’s “national virtues – stoicism, humility, good humour and sheer ordinariness”). Studying in Europe thanks to singing-contest prize money. Arriving on the world stage with a single performance of Lucia di Lammermoor that all the obits struggle to describe. But Sutherland, the send-offs all note, never forgot who she was. “A generous colleague and notably non-neurotic,” the Washington Post says, quoting Sutherland’s friend and fellow diva Marilyn Horne reminiscing about her serving dinner backstage at an opera. A “simple, friendly woman, happiest in a dressing room with a magazine and her knitting,” a music-watcher describes her in the Guardian.
Is Grim Reader the only one a little put off by this? Yes, we get it: Divas are supposed to be, well, divas — so there’s something loveable about a down-to-earth star. (Specific contrasts with the temperamental Maria Callas abound.) All the same, especially when combined with the allusions to her plain-Jane appearance (the Telegraph describes the “characteristic square jaw of her native Australia”), the huzzahs over Sutherland’s non-bitchy status seem to reinforce a bunch of stereotypes that have nothing to do with why she was famous.
It’s actually a week full of female stereotypes on the obit pages. In the United Kingdom, writer Claire Rayner is remembered as “the nation’s best-loved agony aunt” by the Independent, which uses a term found in all her obits. Rayner was a columnist and self-help author, but was most famous for pulpy fiction sagas set in historical periods. The fare earned her a down-market reputation, but the Independent’s obit argues, with some nicely worded faint praise, that this assessment was misplaced: “Although she was not a member of any smart literary set, her storytelling ability was phenomenal, and many is the sneering reader who picked up one of her novels only to find herself propping her eyelids open at three in the morning to reach the end,” the piece says.
The Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press, meanwhile, both catch the death of Leona Gage, who was named Miss USA in 1957, only to have the tiara confiscated after officials learned she’d been married and had two children. The Los Angeles Times plays up the pathos, noting that the Texas-born beauty queen had been married at 14, had both kids by 16, and desperately needed money when she entered the competition. The Associated Press plays up the scandal, quoting her post-pageant fibs to reporters (“I want to wait until I’m 26 before I become seriously interested in the opposite sex,” she said) while declaring that Gage “took advantage of the attention” to get TV interviews. Both note that her subsequent life was a sad one, with six failed marriages and loss of custody over her children.
The Los Angeles Times also has a nice piece on Patricia Herzog, an attorney who broke ground in divorce law “by arguing that a wife who put her husband through medical school deserved to share in his future earnings after they divorced.” Herzog argued that the husband’s medical degree, in such a case, was joint property just like a house. The state legislature ultimately settled the case for her by passing a law giving spouses a cut of the enhanced earning power from a degree they might have helped pay for — a less lucrative solution for her client, but a big change all the same. Herzog, incidentally, was married for 44 years, the obit says.
In Washington, there are plenty of obits for Carla Cohen, the founder of a local bookstore that managed to keep thriving even as bookselling crumbled. Obits in the Washington Post and the New York Times are an example of why: The description of her store sounds more like that of a social club than a retailer -- “a buzzing community hub where readers gather each evening to hear talks by top-shelf authors,” says the Post. Of course, the fact that Cohen’s Politics and Prose traded in words, and particularly words about current events, also explains the adulation. GR, who has spent a small fortune in Cohen’s wonderful store over the years, suspects an equally beloved auto-parts retailer wouldn’t garner such nicely placed obits.
In music this week, it’s a royal exit: Albertina Walker is remembered by the Washington Post as “a Grammy Award-winning singer who was crowned the queen of gospel during a career that spanned more than 60 albums and six decades.” GR has been closely reading obits long enough to think that Walker is actually the fifth or sixth music queen who’s died this year, and kind of wishes writers would keep this metaphor in quotes, or at least not extend it by suggesting that someone literally put a crown on the head of Walker, a Mahalia Jackson protégé. GR much prefers the lede in Walker’s hometown Chicago Tribune: When “Walker sang in church,” writes critic Howard Reich, “you believed the stained glass windows surely would shatter.”
Soul Singer Solomon Burke, meanwhile, was “the King of Rock and Soul.” The obits all go big on how big he was — “a bear of a man whose weight easily exceeded 400 pounds,” says the Wall Street Journal, though others put it at 300 pounds. The Telegraph revels in other sorts of dysfunction: Burke, its obit reads, “had most of the standard accoutrements of the soul musician – a warm, throaty bass voice, numerous children by different women and a penchant for snacking on whole roasted chickens.” If they’d been going for full stereotype cliché, they might also have noted his almost biblical circumstances of his birth “on the second floor of a house on Mount Vernon Street near 30th, in West Philadelphia, to the sounds of drums and horns from church services below,” according to his hometown Philadelphia Daily News.
The Los Angeles Times calls Hwag Jang Yop the most senior North Korean to ever defect. Did he pay the price for it? Yop died the same day as this week’s massive Pyongyang military parade, of what the paper describes as “a suspected heart attack” and “apparent natural causes.” The obit casts Yop as the standard tragic defector, alone, afraid, and speaking truth against his old patrons. South Korean media aren’t so sure, with opposition pols noting he never rejected the North’s self-reliance ideology.
Also this week, there are obits for Maurice Allais, a Nobel-winning economist. The New York Times has a thoughtful explanation of some of Allais’ work on market failure. But the Associated Press lede goes straight to why we should care, labeling him a Cassandra: “an early critic of shortcomings in the worldwide financial system that led to the latest crisis.” … Beaujolais wines were considered swill until Marcel Lapierre became what the San Francisco Chronicle calls “the public face of the Beaujolais revolution,” restoring his birthplace’s reputation as “a serious wine region” (and sparking all those irritating Beaujolais Nouveau come-ons, too). … And the Washington Post manages to get three whole paragraphs into its obit for Virginia vintner/Montessori school founder Dirgham Salahi before noting his real claim to fame: He’s the father of White House party-crasher/Real Houswives hubby Tareq Salahi. Alas, reality-TV antics populate the elder Salahi’s obit, too.
“Screenwriter became gunrunner,” reads a Los Angeles Times headline. It sounds like a movie review, but it turns out to be the story of Bill Norton, a writer of Westerns and low-budget schlock. An ex-Communist — he refused to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee and wound up working for the park service for 11 years, banished from Hollywood — Norton in 1985 “retired from show business and rededicated himself to the leftist ideals of his youth,” the piece reads. “He began aiding rebel groups in Central America by procuring guns for them. Later, he and his wife, Eleanor, moved to Ireland, where they became involved with an offshoot of the Irish Republican Army.” GR likes Martin Sheen for the role.
Finally, this column usually focuses on the occasionally divergent ways big obits play the deaths of famous people. But every now and then, a comparatively obscure person’s passing goes viral and makes it onto GR’s radar screen. Such was the case when a Facebook pal pointed us to John DeVore’s essay about the recent death of his sister, Wendy Yvonne Parker. “Her long-distance laughs were like the ringing bells of a buoy bobbing with the waves in the sea and guiding me to shore,” he writes. Check out the whole beautiful thing 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.
Obit writers, though, can’t help but comparing. And as a result, Sutherland’s obits are as dominated by what she wasn’t — a prima donna-ish prima donna — as they are by her singing exploits. The basic arc: Born in unlikely circumstances (an “Australian tailor’s daughter,” leads the Los Angeles Times, while the United Kingdon’s Telegraph goes high with word that Sutherland embodied all of her homeland’s “national virtues – stoicism, humility, good humour and sheer ordinariness”). Studying in Europe thanks to singing-contest prize money. Arriving on the world stage with a single performance of Lucia di Lammermoor that all the obits struggle to describe. But Sutherland, the send-offs all note, never forgot who she was. “A generous colleague and notably non-neurotic,” the Washington Post says, quoting Sutherland’s friend and fellow diva Marilyn Horne reminiscing about her serving dinner backstage at an opera. A “simple, friendly woman, happiest in a dressing room with a magazine and her knitting,” a music-watcher describes her in the Guardian.
Is Grim Reader the only one a little put off by this? Yes, we get it: Divas are supposed to be, well, divas — so there’s something loveable about a down-to-earth star. (Specific contrasts with the temperamental Maria Callas abound.) All the same, especially when combined with the allusions to her plain-Jane appearance (the Telegraph describes the “characteristic square jaw of her native Australia”), the huzzahs over Sutherland’s non-bitchy status seem to reinforce a bunch of stereotypes that have nothing to do with why she was famous.
It’s actually a week full of female stereotypes on the obit pages. In the United Kingdom, writer Claire Rayner is remembered as “the nation’s best-loved agony aunt” by the Independent, which uses a term found in all her obits. Rayner was a columnist and self-help author, but was most famous for pulpy fiction sagas set in historical periods. The fare earned her a down-market reputation, but the Independent’s obit argues, with some nicely worded faint praise, that this assessment was misplaced: “Although she was not a member of any smart literary set, her storytelling ability was phenomenal, and many is the sneering reader who picked up one of her novels only to find herself propping her eyelids open at three in the morning to reach the end,” the piece says.
The Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press, meanwhile, both catch the death of Leona Gage, who was named Miss USA in 1957, only to have the tiara confiscated after officials learned she’d been married and had two children. The Los Angeles Times plays up the pathos, noting that the Texas-born beauty queen had been married at 14, had both kids by 16, and desperately needed money when she entered the competition. The Associated Press plays up the scandal, quoting her post-pageant fibs to reporters (“I want to wait until I’m 26 before I become seriously interested in the opposite sex,” she said) while declaring that Gage “took advantage of the attention” to get TV interviews. Both note that her subsequent life was a sad one, with six failed marriages and loss of custody over her children.
The Los Angeles Times also has a nice piece on Patricia Herzog, an attorney who broke ground in divorce law “by arguing that a wife who put her husband through medical school deserved to share in his future earnings after they divorced.” Herzog argued that the husband’s medical degree, in such a case, was joint property just like a house. The state legislature ultimately settled the case for her by passing a law giving spouses a cut of the enhanced earning power from a degree they might have helped pay for — a less lucrative solution for her client, but a big change all the same. Herzog, incidentally, was married for 44 years, the obit says.
In Washington, there are plenty of obits for Carla Cohen, the founder of a local bookstore that managed to keep thriving even as bookselling crumbled. Obits in the Washington Post and the New York Times are an example of why: The description of her store sounds more like that of a social club than a retailer -- “a buzzing community hub where readers gather each evening to hear talks by top-shelf authors,” says the Post. Of course, the fact that Cohen’s Politics and Prose traded in words, and particularly words about current events, also explains the adulation. GR, who has spent a small fortune in Cohen’s wonderful store over the years, suspects an equally beloved auto-parts retailer wouldn’t garner such nicely placed obits.In music this week, it’s a royal exit: Albertina Walker is remembered by the Washington Post as “a Grammy Award-winning singer who was crowned the queen of gospel during a career that spanned more than 60 albums and six decades.” GR has been closely reading obits long enough to think that Walker is actually the fifth or sixth music queen who’s died this year, and kind of wishes writers would keep this metaphor in quotes, or at least not extend it by suggesting that someone literally put a crown on the head of Walker, a Mahalia Jackson protégé. GR much prefers the lede in Walker’s hometown Chicago Tribune: When “Walker sang in church,” writes critic Howard Reich, “you believed the stained glass windows surely would shatter.”
Soul Singer Solomon Burke, meanwhile, was “the King of Rock and Soul.” The obits all go big on how big he was — “a bear of a man whose weight easily exceeded 400 pounds,” says the Wall Street Journal, though others put it at 300 pounds. The Telegraph revels in other sorts of dysfunction: Burke, its obit reads, “had most of the standard accoutrements of the soul musician – a warm, throaty bass voice, numerous children by different women and a penchant for snacking on whole roasted chickens.” If they’d been going for full stereotype cliché, they might also have noted his almost biblical circumstances of his birth “on the second floor of a house on Mount Vernon Street near 30th, in West Philadelphia, to the sounds of drums and horns from church services below,” according to his hometown Philadelphia Daily News.
The Los Angeles Times calls Hwag Jang Yop the most senior North Korean to ever defect. Did he pay the price for it? Yop died the same day as this week’s massive Pyongyang military parade, of what the paper describes as “a suspected heart attack” and “apparent natural causes.” The obit casts Yop as the standard tragic defector, alone, afraid, and speaking truth against his old patrons. South Korean media aren’t so sure, with opposition pols noting he never rejected the North’s self-reliance ideology.
Also this week, there are obits for Maurice Allais, a Nobel-winning economist. The New York Times has a thoughtful explanation of some of Allais’ work on market failure. But the Associated Press lede goes straight to why we should care, labeling him a Cassandra: “an early critic of shortcomings in the worldwide financial system that led to the latest crisis.” … Beaujolais wines were considered swill until Marcel Lapierre became what the San Francisco Chronicle calls “the public face of the Beaujolais revolution,” restoring his birthplace’s reputation as “a serious wine region” (and sparking all those irritating Beaujolais Nouveau come-ons, too). … And the Washington Post manages to get three whole paragraphs into its obit for Virginia vintner/Montessori school founder Dirgham Salahi before noting his real claim to fame: He’s the father of White House party-crasher/Real Houswives hubby Tareq Salahi. Alas, reality-TV antics populate the elder Salahi’s obit, too.
“Screenwriter became gunrunner,” reads a Los Angeles Times headline. It sounds like a movie review, but it turns out to be the story of Bill Norton, a writer of Westerns and low-budget schlock. An ex-Communist — he refused to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee and wound up working for the park service for 11 years, banished from Hollywood — Norton in 1985 “retired from show business and rededicated himself to the leftist ideals of his youth,” the piece reads. “He began aiding rebel groups in Central America by procuring guns for them. Later, he and his wife, Eleanor, moved to Ireland, where they became involved with an offshoot of the Irish Republican Army.” GR likes Martin Sheen for the role. Finally, this column usually focuses on the occasionally divergent ways big obits play the deaths of famous people. But every now and then, a comparatively obscure person’s passing goes viral and makes it onto GR’s radar screen. Such was the case when a Facebook pal pointed us to John DeVore’s essay about the recent death of his sister, Wendy Yvonne Parker. “Her long-distance laughs were like the ringing bells of a buoy bobbing with the waves in the sea and guiding me to shore,” he writes. Check out the whole beautiful thing 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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