Grim Reader: This week in death 6/5/09
by Michael Schaffer
JUNE 5, 2009 TAGS:
The biggest news from the week in death concerns the passing of someone who should have died nearly a century earlier: Millvina Dean, the last of the 705 survivors of the Titanic. Just 9 weeks old when the ship sank, Dean was carried to safety in a canvas mail sack. The shipwreck’s place in popular history almost guaranteed that Dean’s death would draw major media attention. But it also presented her obituarists with a challenge: How to describe the ensuing 97 years of an otherwise unremarkable life?
The answer: as briefly as possible. Instead, the obits told the story of her rescue — something she had no influence over — and then discussed the celebrity she achieved thanks to the renewed Titanic fascination of the late 20th century, which was similarly beyond her control.
London’s Times has the most florid account of how Dean, “a babe in arms” was lowered to safety. Her father had sold his London pub and was relocating the family to the Midwest (the Washington Post says Wichita; everyone else says Kansas City), where Dean’s father was planning to run a tobacco shop. They’d actually intended to cross by a different ship, notes the Los Angeles Times, but were booked on the Titanic after a national coal strike caused a cancellation. The elder Dean went down with the ship; his wife and children survived.
Alone among the obituaries, the New York Times’ version — penned by London bureau chief John F. Burns, who interviewed her last month — plays up the most controversial aspect of the calamity: class. Steerage passengers like Dean’s father died in much larger numbers than those traveling above. Dean believed this was no accident. In the sort of reference you don’t often see in an American newspaper, Burns quotes Dean citing Rudyard Kipling to make her point: “What do they say? ‘Judy O’Grady and the colonel’s lady are sisters under the skin.’ That’s the way it should have been that night, but it wasn’t.”
The accounts say little about the next 75 or so years. Dean went to secretarial school and quietly worked for an engineering firm until her 1972 retirement. But when the wreck was discovered in the 1980s, it spurred a new pop-culture fascination, culminating in the 1997 blockbuster film Titanic. Dean became a media darling. Though glamorous, the attention didn’t pay the bills: The obits all paint a sad picture of her late years, when Dean sold memorabilia to make ends meet. This spring, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio pitched in to help pay her nursing home bills. But she never saw their movie about the disaster, saying the event was too sad.
--
By contrast, the most talked-about death of the week led to few obits. Most media treated the murder of late-term abortion provider George Tiller as a news story. His hometown Wichita Eagle, though, offers a formal obituary alongside its blanket coverage of the killing. The piece quotes friends and allies in the pro-choice camp, including a woman who traveled from Washington, D.C., to Kansas to undergo an abortion in her 28th week, having learned that her malformed fetus would die shortly after birth.
The piece also offers details of Tiller’s life away from the abortion wars: After his parents, sister and brother-in-law were killed in a plane crash, the former Navy surgeon returned to Wichita to care for his late sister’s 1-year-old child. Among other things, he served as the doctor for the Wichita Wings, an indoor-soccer team. Bizarrely, the story doesn’t quote any of the critics of Tiller, one of only three doctors in the country who performed an abortion procedure that pro-life activists call barbaric.
--
Elsewhere in the Obitosphere, American outlets all highlight another person associated with perilous journeys: Paul Haney, the voice of NASA’s “Mission Control.” In the Washington Post, Becky Krystal quotes his best-remembered bit of play-by-play, where he exclaimed “We got it! We've got it!” as Apollo 8 emerged from the dark side of the moon after the first successful lunar orbit. Naturally, the government-centric Post also has the best blow-by-blow of the bureaucratic tussle that led to Haney’s departure before he got to narrate the moon landing: Haney, a former journalist, clashed with bosses over more media access to NASA.
--
Grim Reader’s inner 10-year-old was thrilled with the Los Angeles Times obit for wrestler John “the Golden Greek” Tolos. Like the Saturday morning play-by-play announcers of our youth, the paper opts to guilelessly accept the sport’s alternative reality. A headline calls Tolos a “notorious wrestling villain” and a straightforward lede references his “dastardly antics.” By contrast, a wrestling expert at least nods to the sport’s less-than-genuine essence: Tolos “played the role” of a bad guy, he says. But the absence of persnickety journalistic questions about athletic legitimacy amidst descriptions of “flying knee drops from the ropes onto foes who were sprawled out on the mat” may well represent the greatest tribute of all.
--
The week’s entertainment-industry obits also include the passing of pioneering Chicago blueswoman Koko Taylor and the late-breaking news of “Kung Fu” star David Carradine’s apparent suicide in Bangkok. TV Guide’s obit contains the best run-down of Carradine’s on-camera CV, and finds a nice way of combining a respectful send-off with the acknowledgment that the late lamented wasn’t exactly Laurence Olivier: “He appeared in more than his share of pulpy action thrillers,” the magazine declared, noting that he also appeared in some higher-brow fare.
--
David Margolick pens a sweet, sad tribute to a master of that dying form, the letter to the editor. Cy Shain, who lived in San Francisco, had 39 letters published on the New York Times’ famously selective letters page over the last decade. In an age when close newspaper readers are vanishing and calm political argument is rare, Margolick writes, Shane stood out. Of course, Margolick had to write his piece for The Nation. “The Times has not acknowledged that one of its more reliable voices has been silenced,” he concludes. “Even all those gentle pronouncements and well-mannered jabs on the letters page couldn't win Cy Shain the ultimate Times encomium: an obituary.”
--
Though he’s supposed to cover the world of actual obits of actual people, Grim Reader can’t help but cheer the General Motors send-off that Stephen Miller, obituary writer for the Wall Street Journal, wrote in the Daily Beast this week. “Like most 101-year-olds, General Motors was beleaguered by health problems for many years — in this case including legacy health-care costs that imposed crippling long-term obligation,” Miller begins, walking the reader through the bankrupt firm’s century of highs and lows. (Full disclosure: Grim Reader also contributes to the Daily Beast, though he’s never met Miller.)
--
Grim Reader was baffled by some of the coverage of Danny La Rue, the drag performer who died at 81. The obits from the British press were magnificent: “Beneath huge headdresses and decked out in sequin-studded gowns, La Rue in his heyday would don specially-designed creations of beaded pink lace and tulle with trains of ostrich feathers up to 20 feet long,” recalls the Telegraph. “What La Rue achieved was to replace a traditionally derisive mocking of women – which showed them as faintly grotesque – with glitter and elegance,” explains The Guardian. The Independent even has some good-natured fun with La Rue’s sexuality, labeling him “the queen of drag.”
But while the British papers all note that the performer was pre-deceased by Jack Hanson, his companion of 40 years — the Telegraph includes a heart-rending description of the devoutly Catholic, avowedly monogamous La Rue being “hysterical with grief” after Hanson’s death — the New York Times and the Associated Press don’t mention Hanson at all. The result lets readers imagine that La Rue led a lonely life. Given the ongoing politics of same-sex marriage, the omission of the news that an archetypal gay performer lived a life of domestic stability is especially disappointing. What a drag.
Michael Schaffer contributes regularly to Obit. His book, One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry was published March 31.
The answer: as briefly as possible. Instead, the obits told the story of her rescue — something she had no influence over — and then discussed the celebrity she achieved thanks to the renewed Titanic fascination of the late 20th century, which was similarly beyond her control.London’s Times has the most florid account of how Dean, “a babe in arms” was lowered to safety. Her father had sold his London pub and was relocating the family to the Midwest (the Washington Post says Wichita; everyone else says Kansas City), where Dean’s father was planning to run a tobacco shop. They’d actually intended to cross by a different ship, notes the Los Angeles Times, but were booked on the Titanic after a national coal strike caused a cancellation. The elder Dean went down with the ship; his wife and children survived.
Alone among the obituaries, the New York Times’ version — penned by London bureau chief John F. Burns, who interviewed her last month — plays up the most controversial aspect of the calamity: class. Steerage passengers like Dean’s father died in much larger numbers than those traveling above. Dean believed this was no accident. In the sort of reference you don’t often see in an American newspaper, Burns quotes Dean citing Rudyard Kipling to make her point: “What do they say? ‘Judy O’Grady and the colonel’s lady are sisters under the skin.’ That’s the way it should have been that night, but it wasn’t.”
The accounts say little about the next 75 or so years. Dean went to secretarial school and quietly worked for an engineering firm until her 1972 retirement. But when the wreck was discovered in the 1980s, it spurred a new pop-culture fascination, culminating in the 1997 blockbuster film Titanic. Dean became a media darling. Though glamorous, the attention didn’t pay the bills: The obits all paint a sad picture of her late years, when Dean sold memorabilia to make ends meet. This spring, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio pitched in to help pay her nursing home bills. But she never saw their movie about the disaster, saying the event was too sad.
--
By contrast, the most talked-about death of the week led to few obits. Most media treated the murder of late-term abortion provider George Tiller as a news story. His hometown Wichita Eagle, though, offers a formal obituary alongside its blanket coverage of the killing. The piece quotes friends and allies in the pro-choice camp, including a woman who traveled from Washington, D.C., to Kansas to undergo an abortion in her 28th week, having learned that her malformed fetus would die shortly after birth.
The piece also offers details of Tiller’s life away from the abortion wars: After his parents, sister and brother-in-law were killed in a plane crash, the former Navy surgeon returned to Wichita to care for his late sister’s 1-year-old child. Among other things, he served as the doctor for the Wichita Wings, an indoor-soccer team. Bizarrely, the story doesn’t quote any of the critics of Tiller, one of only three doctors in the country who performed an abortion procedure that pro-life activists call barbaric.
--
Elsewhere in the Obitosphere, American outlets all highlight another person associated with perilous journeys: Paul Haney, the voice of NASA’s “Mission Control.” In the Washington Post, Becky Krystal quotes his best-remembered bit of play-by-play, where he exclaimed “We got it! We've got it!” as Apollo 8 emerged from the dark side of the moon after the first successful lunar orbit. Naturally, the government-centric Post also has the best blow-by-blow of the bureaucratic tussle that led to Haney’s departure before he got to narrate the moon landing: Haney, a former journalist, clashed with bosses over more media access to NASA.
--
Grim Reader’s inner 10-year-old was thrilled with the Los Angeles Times obit for wrestler John “the Golden Greek” Tolos. Like the Saturday morning play-by-play announcers of our youth, the paper opts to guilelessly accept the sport’s alternative reality. A headline calls Tolos a “notorious wrestling villain” and a straightforward lede references his “dastardly antics.” By contrast, a wrestling expert at least nods to the sport’s less-than-genuine essence: Tolos “played the role” of a bad guy, he says. But the absence of persnickety journalistic questions about athletic legitimacy amidst descriptions of “flying knee drops from the ropes onto foes who were sprawled out on the mat” may well represent the greatest tribute of all.--
The week’s entertainment-industry obits also include the passing of pioneering Chicago blueswoman Koko Taylor and the late-breaking news of “Kung Fu” star David Carradine’s apparent suicide in Bangkok. TV Guide’s obit contains the best run-down of Carradine’s on-camera CV, and finds a nice way of combining a respectful send-off with the acknowledgment that the late lamented wasn’t exactly Laurence Olivier: “He appeared in more than his share of pulpy action thrillers,” the magazine declared, noting that he also appeared in some higher-brow fare.
--
David Margolick pens a sweet, sad tribute to a master of that dying form, the letter to the editor. Cy Shain, who lived in San Francisco, had 39 letters published on the New York Times’ famously selective letters page over the last decade. In an age when close newspaper readers are vanishing and calm political argument is rare, Margolick writes, Shane stood out. Of course, Margolick had to write his piece for The Nation. “The Times has not acknowledged that one of its more reliable voices has been silenced,” he concludes. “Even all those gentle pronouncements and well-mannered jabs on the letters page couldn't win Cy Shain the ultimate Times encomium: an obituary.”
--
Though he’s supposed to cover the world of actual obits of actual people, Grim Reader can’t help but cheer the General Motors send-off that Stephen Miller, obituary writer for the Wall Street Journal, wrote in the Daily Beast this week. “Like most 101-year-olds, General Motors was beleaguered by health problems for many years — in this case including legacy health-care costs that imposed crippling long-term obligation,” Miller begins, walking the reader through the bankrupt firm’s century of highs and lows. (Full disclosure: Grim Reader also contributes to the Daily Beast, though he’s never met Miller.)
--
Grim Reader was baffled by some of the coverage of Danny La Rue, the drag performer who died at 81. The obits from the British press were magnificent: “Beneath huge headdresses and decked out in sequin-studded gowns, La Rue in his heyday would don specially-designed creations of beaded pink lace and tulle with trains of ostrich feathers up to 20 feet long,” recalls the Telegraph. “What La Rue achieved was to replace a traditionally derisive mocking of women – which showed them as faintly grotesque – with glitter and elegance,” explains The Guardian. The Independent even has some good-natured fun with La Rue’s sexuality, labeling him “the queen of drag.”But while the British papers all note that the performer was pre-deceased by Jack Hanson, his companion of 40 years — the Telegraph includes a heart-rending description of the devoutly Catholic, avowedly monogamous La Rue being “hysterical with grief” after Hanson’s death — the New York Times and the Associated Press don’t mention Hanson at all. The result lets readers imagine that La Rue led a lonely life. Given the ongoing politics of same-sex marriage, the omission of the news that an archetypal gay performer lived a life of domestic stability is especially disappointing. What a drag.
Michael Schaffer contributes regularly to Obit. His book, One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry was published March 31.
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