Grim Reader, Oct. 16, 2009: Bruce Wasserstein, Al Martino and Judge William Wayne Justice
by Michael Schaffer
OCTOBER 16, 2009 TAGS:
The crisis of 2009 was supposed to be the end, once and for all, of America’s love affair with bankers. As the collapse rubbished middle-class 401(k)s and emptied federal coffers, optimists promised it would also re-order our national priorities. We’d go back to celebrating inventors and engineers — and we’d start to see the so-called Lords of Finance for the greaseballs they really are. So far, Wall Street’s antagonists can’t be cheered by evidence from one corner of our culture: the Obitosphere, which this week gives major play to the sudden death of Bruce Wasserstein, CEO of Lazard and classic example of how mergers and acquisitions could turn deal-makers into celebrities.
The American obits all cast the Brooklyn-born banker as a genius. But for all the promises of a cultural re-alignment, there’s little judgmental language about how such geniuses have earned their keep. “An inventive and forceful banker,” declares the Washington Post’s lede. The New York Times goes with the assertion that Wasserstein “reshaped the mergers and acquisitions business into a high art.” Other obits liken him to a “chess grandmaster,” “the most gifted deal maker in recent Wall Street history,” and a “magnate who helped create the image of the modern Wall Street investment banker.”
There are a few reasons why Wasserstein’s obits lack the anti-banking spleen of 2009. For one thing, as a New York socialite who became a media baron — a very good one, too — he represented more than a vulgarian to the New York-based media employees who write his obits. The brother of the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein was no mere tycoon. In The Daily Beast, Wall Street chronicler William D. Cohan notes another reason: Wasserstein’s reputation survived 2008. He “showed the rest of Wall Street that business can be done profitably and relatively risk-free, without bringing down the capitalist system and costing taxpayers $12 trillion and counting,” Cohan writes. “Lazard has never taken a dime of TARP funds nor taxed our system in any way.”
All the same, a glance across the Atlantic suggests there are other ways obit writers can go: London’s Times — a Rupert Murdoch paper, no less — manages to call Wasserstein a “barbarian” with a “fearsome reputation” and a “bruising personality” who forced society “to accept that overt hostility had a legitimate, and inevitable, role to play in financial market activity.” And that’s in just the first two paragraphs!
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Speaking of hostility’s role in market activity, This Week in Death also features the passing of Al Martino, the crooner best known for his role as singer Johnny Fontane in The Godfather. On screen, Martino’s movie character wins a starring film role only after mob minions menace the producer. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer obituary, the singer’s real life was also tied up with organized crime. The South Philly-bred singer “recalled that his contract was bought by mobsters, and that when he tried to terminate the relationship, he was beaten, after which he moved to England for several years,” explains the obit, citing an old Inquirer interview. No specifics ensue.
The threats go mostly unmentioned elsewhere. But other obits do get into an old pop-culture question: Was the Fontane character really based on Frank Sinatra? Yes, “loosely,” says the New York Times. Not so, says the Guardian, explaining that “research” (it’s unclear whose) “has disclosed that it was not Sinatra who brought in the mafia, but Martino’s near namesake, Dean Martin, another Italian-American singer enjoying his first hit records.” Eschewing Hollywood Lore, the Independent downplays the 1972 movie and focuses instead on 1950s chart-toppers like “Here in My Heart,” where “Martino soared to the top of his range for a thrilling top E, equalling anything his friend, Mario Lanza, had done.”
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A pair of civil rights figures also pops up in the Obitosphere this week. Federal Judge William Wayne Justice helped change the face of Texas — not always to the pleasure of its conservative citizens or their political leaders — by improving prisons and desegregating schools, among other rulings. Justice was “a courageous sentinel for the rights of some of the most powerless Texans,” says the Dallas Morning News, while the Houston Chronicle notes that the jurist was once called “the real governor of Texas.” Oddly, the Texas papers do a significantly worse job than out-of-town media when it comes to recalling just how unpopular his opinions were. Justice “defined the concept of activist judge,” writes the New York Times, becoming so hated for his desegregation rulings that beauticians refused his wife service.
In New Jersey, obits remember attorney Raymond Brown, who went from being one of the first black officers in the newly integrated U.S. Army to being a top civil rights lawyer to being someone whose courtroom chops made him attractive to less noble defendants, like crooked pols, accused spies, and tabloid figures. “Ray Brown’s client list reads like a Who’s Who of historical New Jersey figures,” says the Star-Ledger. “Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, Mario ‘Dr. X’ Jascalevich, bookmaker Joseph ‘News boy’ Moriarty and cop-killer Joanne Chesimard.”
In the music world, on the other hand, death visited all sorts of different genres: Los Angeles punk-scene promoter Brendan Mullen “created an underground space that became a crucible for musicians and fans who felt alienated from mainstream society,” while helping launch the Go-Gos, X, and the Dickies, according to the L.A. Times. … As singer for the noisy psychedelic band Blue Cheer, Dickie Peterson “adopted the only possible vocal strategy: he opened his mouth wide and emitted primal sounds at top volume,” says the New York Times. … Producer Shelby Singleton recorded albums for singers like Brook Benton and Jeannie C. Reilly — a degree of racial integration that remains rare. But, says the Guardian, his greatest legacy will be buying Sun Studios in 1969 and then distributing its back catalogue of Elvis, Johnny Cash et. al. around the world. “In this way, the Sun sound has remained part of the soundtrack of successive generations.”
And there’s also hefty coverage for Irish pop singer Stephen Gately, who died suddenly at age 33. After years fronting the group Boyzone, whose primary audience was smitten teenage girls, Gately came out as gay a decade ago. At the time, it was controversial: The entrepreneur who assembled the group said he wouldn’t have picked Gately had he known, because “it wasn’t cool then to have a gay guy in a band.” Things change: The other members of Boyzone, which reunited last year, planned to stay in the church with Gately’s dead body overnight, telling the media their old mate hated to be alone.
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From the world of letters, the Obitosphere notes mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky, a prolific mystery writer whose characters included a Sarasota P.I., a Chicago cop, and a Moscow police inspector. … The New York Times gives a lengthy obit to Nan Robertson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for writing a gripping magazine story about Toxic Shock. She also chronicled a sex-discrimination suit by female Times employees and wrote of her own alcohol battles while on the paper’s payroll. … And The Independent has a belated obit for a guy who didn’t write himself but caught the fancy of one who did: Mattei Radev, who escapes Communist Bulgaria and eventually ran in the same arty London circle as E.M. Forster, “whose ardour sought to ruffle his cool Slavic surface.” The paper cites recently discovered letters demonstrating Forster’s “huge attraction to Radev” and “Radev’s retreats into tactical silence.” “The evidence suggests that they would have been passionate lovers were it fulfilled in earthly reality,” the obit says.
The New York Times also catches the death of Charlotte Turgeon, who published French cookbooks for Americans well before her college classmate Julia Child. Turgeon may be best-known for the first English translation of the French cooking bible, Larousse Gastronomique. “Julia wanted to communicate how wonderful French cuisine was,” the obit says, paraphrasing Turgeon, “while she herself had a far more practical purpose.” … Grim Reader suspects Turgeon didn’t sample the recipes of Ben Ali, proprietor of a legendary D.C. greasy spoon. Located in a historically black part of the racially polarized capital, Ben’s Chili Bowl was a mecca for pols looking to schmooze with “the people.” The city’s own tourism folks, eager to highlight genuine hometown landmarks alongside the national monuments, raised its profile even further. It worked: Ali’s death was remarked upon by media on three continents.
Finally, it seems to be career week in the Obitosphere — a period when all sorts of unlikely job descriptions pop up in obit headlines. Among Grim Reader’s favorites: “Harem Expert” (Istanbul architect Mualla Anhegger-Eyüboglu); “lepidopterist” (moth scholar Gaden Robinson); “Zen abbot and photographer” (Catskill mountains monk John D. Loori); and celebrity camera repairman (New York photo store operator Marty Forscher).
But Grim Reader especially liked one job that’s no longer available: queen of Libya. The Times of London has a great piece on the life of Fatima al-Sanussi, the first and last queen of the country, who died 40 years after her late husband’s overthrow by Colonel Gaddafi. The piece traces Libya’s rise from one of the world’s oldest countries to an oil power, and chronicles the queen’s own halting efforts to wrestle its tradition-bound populace towards modernity. There’s also some nice detail on her efforts to return home, including this nugget: “Two years ago, however, she was able to recover ownership of her house in Tripoli. Since the revolution it had been rented from the Libyan Government by the Foreign Office to serve as the British Ambassador’s residence.”
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
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 American obits all cast the Brooklyn-born banker as a genius. But for all the promises of a cultural re-alignment, there’s little judgmental language about how such geniuses have earned their keep. “An inventive and forceful banker,” declares the Washington Post’s lede. The New York Times goes with the assertion that Wasserstein “reshaped the mergers and acquisitions business into a high art.” Other obits liken him to a “chess grandmaster,” “the most gifted deal maker in recent Wall Street history,” and a “magnate who helped create the image of the modern Wall Street investment banker.”There are a few reasons why Wasserstein’s obits lack the anti-banking spleen of 2009. For one thing, as a New York socialite who became a media baron — a very good one, too — he represented more than a vulgarian to the New York-based media employees who write his obits. The brother of the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein was no mere tycoon. In The Daily Beast, Wall Street chronicler William D. Cohan notes another reason: Wasserstein’s reputation survived 2008. He “showed the rest of Wall Street that business can be done profitably and relatively risk-free, without bringing down the capitalist system and costing taxpayers $12 trillion and counting,” Cohan writes. “Lazard has never taken a dime of TARP funds nor taxed our system in any way.”
All the same, a glance across the Atlantic suggests there are other ways obit writers can go: London’s Times — a Rupert Murdoch paper, no less — manages to call Wasserstein a “barbarian” with a “fearsome reputation” and a “bruising personality” who forced society “to accept that overt hostility had a legitimate, and inevitable, role to play in financial market activity.” And that’s in just the first two paragraphs!
--
Speaking of hostility’s role in market activity, This Week in Death also features the passing of Al Martino, the crooner best known for his role as singer Johnny Fontane in The Godfather. On screen, Martino’s movie character wins a starring film role only after mob minions menace the producer. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer obituary, the singer’s real life was also tied up with organized crime. The South Philly-bred singer “recalled that his contract was bought by mobsters, and that when he tried to terminate the relationship, he was beaten, after which he moved to England for several years,” explains the obit, citing an old Inquirer interview. No specifics ensue.The threats go mostly unmentioned elsewhere. But other obits do get into an old pop-culture question: Was the Fontane character really based on Frank Sinatra? Yes, “loosely,” says the New York Times. Not so, says the Guardian, explaining that “research” (it’s unclear whose) “has disclosed that it was not Sinatra who brought in the mafia, but Martino’s near namesake, Dean Martin, another Italian-American singer enjoying his first hit records.” Eschewing Hollywood Lore, the Independent downplays the 1972 movie and focuses instead on 1950s chart-toppers like “Here in My Heart,” where “Martino soared to the top of his range for a thrilling top E, equalling anything his friend, Mario Lanza, had done.”
--
A pair of civil rights figures also pops up in the Obitosphere this week. Federal Judge William Wayne Justice helped change the face of Texas — not always to the pleasure of its conservative citizens or their political leaders — by improving prisons and desegregating schools, among other rulings. Justice was “a courageous sentinel for the rights of some of the most powerless Texans,” says the Dallas Morning News, while the Houston Chronicle notes that the jurist was once called “the real governor of Texas.” Oddly, the Texas papers do a significantly worse job than out-of-town media when it comes to recalling just how unpopular his opinions were. Justice “defined the concept of activist judge,” writes the New York Times, becoming so hated for his desegregation rulings that beauticians refused his wife service.
In New Jersey, obits remember attorney Raymond Brown, who went from being one of the first black officers in the newly integrated U.S. Army to being a top civil rights lawyer to being someone whose courtroom chops made him attractive to less noble defendants, like crooked pols, accused spies, and tabloid figures. “Ray Brown’s client list reads like a Who’s Who of historical New Jersey figures,” says the Star-Ledger. “Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, Mario ‘Dr. X’ Jascalevich, bookmaker Joseph ‘News boy’ Moriarty and cop-killer Joanne Chesimard.”
In the music world, on the other hand, death visited all sorts of different genres: Los Angeles punk-scene promoter Brendan Mullen “created an underground space that became a crucible for musicians and fans who felt alienated from mainstream society,” while helping launch the Go-Gos, X, and the Dickies, according to the L.A. Times. … As singer for the noisy psychedelic band Blue Cheer, Dickie Peterson “adopted the only possible vocal strategy: he opened his mouth wide and emitted primal sounds at top volume,” says the New York Times. … Producer Shelby Singleton recorded albums for singers like Brook Benton and Jeannie C. Reilly — a degree of racial integration that remains rare. But, says the Guardian, his greatest legacy will be buying Sun Studios in 1969 and then distributing its back catalogue of Elvis, Johnny Cash et. al. around the world. “In this way, the Sun sound has remained part of the soundtrack of successive generations.”And there’s also hefty coverage for Irish pop singer Stephen Gately, who died suddenly at age 33. After years fronting the group Boyzone, whose primary audience was smitten teenage girls, Gately came out as gay a decade ago. At the time, it was controversial: The entrepreneur who assembled the group said he wouldn’t have picked Gately had he known, because “it wasn’t cool then to have a gay guy in a band.” Things change: The other members of Boyzone, which reunited last year, planned to stay in the church with Gately’s dead body overnight, telling the media their old mate hated to be alone.
--
From the world of letters, the Obitosphere notes mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky, a prolific mystery writer whose characters included a Sarasota P.I., a Chicago cop, and a Moscow police inspector. … The New York Times gives a lengthy obit to Nan Robertson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for writing a gripping magazine story about Toxic Shock. She also chronicled a sex-discrimination suit by female Times employees and wrote of her own alcohol battles while on the paper’s payroll. … And The Independent has a belated obit for a guy who didn’t write himself but caught the fancy of one who did: Mattei Radev, who escapes Communist Bulgaria and eventually ran in the same arty London circle as E.M. Forster, “whose ardour sought to ruffle his cool Slavic surface.” The paper cites recently discovered letters demonstrating Forster’s “huge attraction to Radev” and “Radev’s retreats into tactical silence.” “The evidence suggests that they would have been passionate lovers were it fulfilled in earthly reality,” the obit says.
The New York Times also catches the death of Charlotte Turgeon, who published French cookbooks for Americans well before her college classmate Julia Child. Turgeon may be best-known for the first English translation of the French cooking bible, Larousse Gastronomique. “Julia wanted to communicate how wonderful French cuisine was,” the obit says, paraphrasing Turgeon, “while she herself had a far more practical purpose.” … Grim Reader suspects Turgeon didn’t sample the recipes of Ben Ali, proprietor of a legendary D.C. greasy spoon. Located in a historically black part of the racially polarized capital, Ben’s Chili Bowl was a mecca for pols looking to schmooze with “the people.” The city’s own tourism folks, eager to highlight genuine hometown landmarks alongside the national monuments, raised its profile even further. It worked: Ali’s death was remarked upon by media on three continents.
Finally, it seems to be career week in the Obitosphere — a period when all sorts of unlikely job descriptions pop up in obit headlines. Among Grim Reader’s favorites: “Harem Expert” (Istanbul architect Mualla Anhegger-Eyüboglu); “lepidopterist” (moth scholar Gaden Robinson); “Zen abbot and photographer” (Catskill mountains monk John D. Loori); and celebrity camera repairman (New York photo store operator Marty Forscher).
But Grim Reader especially liked one job that’s no longer available: queen of Libya. The Times of London has a great piece on the life of Fatima al-Sanussi, the first and last queen of the country, who died 40 years after her late husband’s overthrow by Colonel Gaddafi. The piece traces Libya’s rise from one of the world’s oldest countries to an oil power, and chronicles the queen’s own halting efforts to wrestle its tradition-bound populace towards modernity. There’s also some nice detail on her efforts to return home, including this nugget: “Two years ago, however, she was able to recover ownership of her house in Tripoli. Since the revolution it had been rented from the Libyan Government by the Foreign Office to serve as the British Ambassador’s residence.”
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
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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