FOREWORD
You first read them with your morning coffee, or on the subway, or waiting for the computer to boot up—always while you were moving headlong into another day of busy and ordinary life. And yet they stuck, to the mind and heart. During the last half of the 1990 s, the obits became a must-read for thousands of New Yorkers who let the latest doings of Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani wait a few minutes, until they had found out what Charles McCartney (“Known for Travels with Goats”) and Angelo Zuccotti (“Artist of the Velvet Rope”) had been up to all their lives. Of an art that stretches from Milton to the webmasters of Good Bye!, the on-line “Journal of Contemporary Obituaries,” Robert McG. Thomas Jr. (1939–2000) was the modern and too shortlived American master.
A lover of the far-fetched and the overlooked, he reveled in making sure that even in the Newspaper of Record, the last could be first. Assigned to the obits desk in 1995, after a long Times career that took him from copyboy up through the sports and society sections, the burly six-foot-four Thomas was ready to escort a parade of eccentrics and unknowns through a needle’s eye toward improbable fame and, for all one knows, heaven. His send-offs were funny, stylish and unfailingly soulful. He could be a New Orleans jazz band or a hushed friar as occasion demanded and always, unbelievably enough, on the pages of The New York Times .
Luckily enough, the paper—in particular, editor Marvin Siegel—realized what it had in Thomas. “They learned to assign him the disenfranchised,” says Bill Brink, his friend and onetime colleague on the sports desk. The paper also let him rearrange the obituary’s hitherto rigid formulae and put him to work more often on deadline than in advance. “If they didn’t give him something until three o’clock, they’d have something great by eight,” says Brink.
“Philip O’Connor, an incorrigible, flamboyant and decidedly self-absorbed British eccentric who turned a fulsomely frank account of his abject childhood and misspent youth into a rollicking literary sensation in 1958, died on Friday at his home near Uzes in southern France.” Every lead was the subject’s life. Thomas had to keep syntax steady and see things whole, get the corpse across the Styx and into the reader’s field of vision—to say nothing of his weekday-morning attention span. In a genre that requires cramming, he never seems rushed. He could get things done with the confident simplicity of Trollope. “Mr. Anderson, a bachelor, was rich as well as lonely”—thus is an ex-slave and old soldier readied for his marriage to Miss Daisy Graham, the subject of the first piece in this collection. (It’s no wonder Thomas did Maurice Sagoff proud on March 29,1998, commemorating the art of another compressor who had reduced the plot of Crime and Punishment to twenty short lines of verse.)
Thomas had dozens of playful tricks that, in the end, the Times ’s editors decided could safely be used upon the obscure departed if not the living luminaries of the A section. If they hadn’t been dead already, Thomas might have killed some of his subjects with his puns; and he could parody with the best. About Anne Hummert, the creator of over a dozen soap operas, he asked: “Can a career woman who sacrificed her leisure to keep a nation of enthralled housewives glued to their radios for the better part of two decades survive a heart-wrenching regimen of producing as many as 90 cliff-hanging episodes a week to live a full, rich and long life?” Beautifully alert to verbs—“Hal Lipset, a storied San Francisco sleuth who helped elevate, or rather reduce, electronic surveillance to a miniature art”—Thomas wrote as if he’d never heard of an exclamation point, let alone thought of using one. In his hands, irony was not the allpervasive, self-congratulatory thing it is today. He loved it for its funny, cosmic consolations: Sidney Korshak, the lawyer-fixer, “became so valuable to the mob and its corrupt union allies that lower-level mobsters were ordered never to approach him, lest they tarnish his reputation for trust and integrity.”
In an era of bloated life-writing, Thomas restored the biographical essay. Try to cut almost any of the pieces in this volume and you’ll be cutting, in more than one sense, into bone. One doubts, however, that this grand obituarist would have made a good book-length biographer. Like Hal Lipset, the electronic eavesdropper, Thomas was a natural miniaturist. Full-blown biography would have required him to situate, evaluate and categorize—to take the long, chronological view when he was so much inclined to the shapely, enthusiastic burst. Besides, he probably never would have finished the book. A literary agent once approached him to do a life of Jack Kerouac, and “the way he reacted was typical,” recalls Bill Brink, now the Times ’s deputy sports editor. “He went out and bought fifteen books by and about Kerouac. He plunged in and then never got around to the proposal.”
The pages that follow are full of wit and without a trace of snideness. When Thomas needs to debunk—say, the claim that Walter J. Kuron flew in the Red Baron’s flight wing—he does the job with an almost regretful gentleness. He never condescends, especially to the kind. The Mormons who sew mittens for people with AIDS are “elderly volunteers for whom the familiar act of knitting or crocheting became a way to relate to a baffling world beyond their experience.” And the Reverend Louis A. Saunders is celebrated as a fellow artist of concision for “one of the briefest eulogies ever: ‘Mrs. Oswald tells me that her son, Lee Harvey, was a good boy and that she loved him. And today, Lord, we commit his spirit to Your divine care.’”
Thomas loved oddball information for its own sake, but one shouldn’t ignore the casual, inductive education so many of these pieces provide without even trying. An obit for R. V. Patwardhan, the Manhattan Hindu priest who modified the incendiary portion of his faith’s wedding ceremony to conform to New York’s fire laws, brings to life the beginnings of a whole community prior to a sea change in immigration law. Similarly, Thomas’s treatment of Sydney Guilaroff, “Stylist to the Stars,” shows him playing both the white and black keys with a lovely lack of strain; a man, a milieu and an era are unrolled in twelve harmonious bars.
Thomas did not need a subject’s life to be “crowded with incident,” as Lady Bracknell once put it. He was more intrigued by accident—Edward Lowe’s now legendarily fortuitous discovery of Kitty Litter, or the way Fred Feldman became a helicopter traffic reporter. He was especially pleased if the unexpected occurrence had led the subject into a lifetime of doing what he loved. Versatility did not impress RMcGT Jr.; being steadily tickled by something did: Milton Rubincam’s genealogy; Toots Barger’s championship duckpins-playing; Francine Katzenbogen’s cats. Thomas loved charming inanities—the state sport of Maryland is jousting, not duckpins—and people who are, above all, harmless, a human condition far rarer than one might think.
The photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt once told me that he didn’t like “gruesome” pictures, but the sunniness of his art proved no impediment to his becoming one of the twentiethcentury’s most vivid chroniclers. Thomas, too, didn’t relish unpleasant subject matter: his obituary of Nguyen Ngoc Loan, famous for executing a Viet Cong prisoner with a shot to the head in exactly the kind of photo Eisie disliked, is wisely included here, even though the piece is not one of Thomas’best. A reader can tell that his heart isn’t in it.
He was better let loose upon the odd and the humble. His best, most talked-about obits, in the sort of paradox he relished, gave relief from the 1990 s culture of celebrity. In fact, if Thomas had come upon the same epitaph that Hawthorne once spotted in the Lillington churchyard—
Poorly lived,
And poorly died,
Poorly buried,
And no one cried
—I suspect he would have taken the words as a challenge to his profession and, perhaps, his soul.
“He singlehandedly humanized the paper,” says Michael T. Kaufman, another friend and Times colleague, to whom fell the truly unenviable task of writing an obituary for Thomas himself.
He is survived by everyone he ever wrote about. If you still can’t take it with you, you can now—thanks to his fan and posthumous editor, Chris Calhoun—take up, once more, with several dozen personalities that Thomas, on deadline, brought to life. “He was a bon vivant,” remembers Bill Brink, “who would literally grab people in the elevators or lobby to get them to go to dinner. We’d start out as a twosome and end up as five.” At the restaurant, “he’d put together the most eclectic table arrangements, pretty young girls next to grizzled newspapermen.” Like his ultimate employer, Death, he was a great leveler.
Reader, consider yourself grabbed. You’re off to a marvelous party, and Robert McG. Thomas Jr. is still the life of it.
T HOMASM ALLON