When I first became obsessed, I was writing celebrity obituaries for magazines. I’d find celebrities on the brink of death, being carried off in stretchers on the cover of the Enquirer. That was my cue, “Bob Hope Near Death!” or “Johnny Cash’s Last Words (‘Wait for Me, June’).” I’d go into a frenzy, hurrying to finish the obituary so it would be ready to publish as soon as he exhaled his last breath, racing against time. I researched the stricken one’s filmography, discography, romantic history, turn-ons and turn-offs—everything!—with hyperventilant speed, then wrote these long, detailed, passionately felt tributes…at which point the near-dead celebrity, like the old dog who had a can of cat food waved under his nose, would spring back to life.
I tried to be discreet. There were guessing games on the sidewalk and in the playground I frequented in my town: Who was old enough, sick enough, famous enough for these mysterious obits, my neighbors wondered, but I wouldn’t tell. My celebrities would be plastered over the tabloids, frail, ghostly old men and women being spirited in and out of the hospital. Anyone could have seen me leaving the library or the video store with stacks of old movies, racking up overdue fines on stacks of old books. I smuggled biographical booty into my darkened house. Some of the movies flickering on my screen were so old and dated they might have been early talkies. Some of the tapes and CDs I played sounded scratchy, as if they had been recorded under a freeway. I carefully hit the mute button when the telephone rang.
I woke up tense every morning: Did my subject die yet? The answer, every morning, was no. Maybe that’s what I loved most, that emotional ratcheting-up, writing something charged with a sense of urgency and tragedy, in a secret bubble of time. Celebrity reporting is usually a feeble exercise in dressing up someone’s canned answers, but this was infused with drama. By the time I finished writing, I was a true fan. I knew what the world would lose when it lost each of them.
I might have known someone like Elizabeth Taylor would survive the dire predictions of the tabloids. In one of her old photographs, she sports a fresh tracheotomy scar and grins over her premature obituary (“The best reviews I ever had”). I wrote a tribute to her forty years after that tracheotomy saved her from death by viral pneumonia, and after a host of other physical maladies had failed to fell her: a brain tumor, three hip replacements, multiple broken backs, more pneumonia. It seemed, in her late sixties, that her terrible health and all those years of pills and booze would finally catch up with her. Instead, she recovered and made a TV movie, These Old Broads. The first million-dollar actress dusted herself off and went back to work, flashing her exquisite world-class jewels, then tossing them on a sink cluttered with dried squirts of toothpaste and old lipsticked liquor glasses. If you hear she died, don’t believe it. By now, I suspect, she’s immortal.
I kept Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn and Bob Hope and Johnny Cash in a mournful file in my drawer. There was something eerie about my failure to pick goners. Maybe I had special powers, a reverse jinx? This is proof we are doing God’s work, my editor said stoically. I was collecting stories about the failing Princess Margaret when he called up to bark, Drop everything, Brando’s dying! Marlon Brando had just collapsed on a movie set and been lugged to the hospital, seventy-something, massive, and massively unhealthy. I plunged myself into all things Brando, from the wildly erratic films to the 1,118-page biography full of minutiae like Brando’s friends’ reactions to the antics of his horny pet raccoon, Russell.
Would I have liked to meet Marlon Brando? No, thanks. I didn’t want to be toyed with by a celebrity who was famous for, among other things, toying with reporters. I never had a desire to meet Brando or his raccoon, and after wallowing in his oeuvre, including a memorable day at the Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan, viewing clips of him feverishly playing the bongos, I was relieved to be hiding behind an obituary.
But dead, or near death, and from a distance? I loved him. I loved studying him. I developed real sympathy for the guy. I saw him as a hurt child, imprisoned by the circumstances of his childhood. His mother and father were at war for his soul—the sensitive (drunken) mother, the brutish (drunken) father—and he internalized both of them. He was gorgeous in his younger years, and hugely talented, but contemptuous of the fame and flattery they brought him. Ya still like me, ya losers? he seemed to be saying each time he gained another fifty pounds, or wasted himself in a bad film, or mooned the tourists. He was his own worst enemy, so contrary that whatever I found to say about him, the opposite also seemed true. Anyway, I had time. Brando, true to form, had recovered in spite of himself, and gone on to appear as a criminal drag-queen in The Heist, wearing lurid makeup, a dress, and, according to indiscreet coworkers, a sophisticated earpiece that delivered his lines to him seconds before he delivered them to the camera. Instead of dying, he was busily adding strange chapters to his life, while I watched the leaves fall and the snow melt and the new baby deer run across the highway.
I slid Brando into the drawer with the others. There they slept for several more years, while the magazines I wrote them for either lost interest or, like Life, died.
Then Hepburn, Hope, and Cash all decided to go in one summer’s glorious, staccato burst: Hepburn in late June at ninety-six; Hope in late July at one hundred. Cash, a mere seventy-one, hailed the chariot in mid-September. I felt my adrenaline surge each time. No matter how many times you imagine the moment, you still can’t believe it—there’s a whoosh of energy that leaves the planet. They’re history.
Brando, typically perverse, followed a year later.
Anyway, I was not, after all, writing obituaries, as I learned after a few months of disciplined reading. I was writing tributes, literary set pieces that if I’d been lucky would have appeared entombed in the pages of a magazine, along with many glossy photos of the dead star. I read such stories now, after a couple of years dining on newspapers, and I can’t believe how fussy they are. I tried to assemble the facts and write something truthful, as far as I knew, but the 200th time I lifted one up and studied it from all angles, I began to notice some of the life had been written out of it. You know how water is? It gets funky if it sits around. It needs to be part of some flowing stream or churning ocean.
I haven’t become a purist, but I’ve lost my taste for the studied tribute. The New York Times in its Sunday magazine runs a roundup of tributes at the end of each year. These tributes are a big production. No workhorse prose on short deadline by one of the regulars for these; not even an advance by someone especially graceful. These are the hors d’oeuvres of literature, written by a literary name, and displayed with one spectacular photo apiece. The magazine is a keeper, designed to sit in a pile of glossy detritus on the floor by your bed for at least a year, until the next one comes along. I admire these memorial issues hugely; I turn down the corners of my favorites and study the writers’ styles. Life, my old home base, used to publish a similar issue in December each year: a theory dressed up in anecdotes and quotes, glittering slivers of details, and sentences that sound like voice-overs at the end of a classy documentary. There’s nothing wrong with them, except a bit too much self-consciousness, but I rarely finish reading the whole issue. All those weighty thoughts, hot air in hushed tones.
And, come to think of it, I don’t love those long advance obits of the mighty that have been sitting around the morgue and end up running hundreds of inches in the newspaper, either. I can’t put my finger on a reason. The prose just seems dead, stuck in heavy, industrial boots, with tons of information shoehorned in. When the great one finally dies, this obit is sent into the big boxing ring of the newsstand to try to knock out the competition. It’s a far cry from the slippery puddles of mercury that spill off the desk of the regular obit writers a few minutes before deadline, the lives of the not-so-famous or the famous who take us by surprise when they die. That pressure, and the compression that results, that comes on the heels of death—particularly the shocking death—charges the prose with electricity. There’s a living mind trying to capture an essence even as it’s being whisked away. Wait a second! the instant obit writer begs. Tell me what she loved. What made him say, There was my life before this, and my life after. Why she got off the train in Chicago…
Joe Holley’s ’04 obit of a man named Kenneth Edelle Foster in the Washington Post could only have been written on deadline.
Mr. Foster was working in his office in the Hoffman Building in Alexandria on Sept. 11 when he got word that a plane had hit the Pentagon, where his wife, Sandra Nadine Hill, had worked for 25 years. He jumped into his truck and raced toward the billowing black cloud he could see in the distance, going the wrong way on Interstate 95.
He ended up spending nearly two days and nights helping rescue efforts while desperately searching for his wife. Because he wasn’t supposed to be there, a woman gave him T-shirts from the Salvation Army and the Red Cross to wear so he could blend in with the rescuers.
After surviving a deep depression, including a suicide attempt by Russian roulette, Holley writes, Foster sought therapy, moved to Texas, and set up a scholarship named for his wife. He died at fifty-one of pulmonary fibrosis and congestive heart disease. The obit ends:
“He could have got over his physical ailments, I believe,” his mother said, “but he just didn’t want to live. He died of a broken heart. We all know that.”
I’ve read last lines like that before and rolled my eyes, but this was earned, this swift, rough aftershock of an obit from 9/11. Nobody would have written an advance obit of a fifty-one-year-old man, a civilian army policy analyst. Saved as an end-of-the-year tribute, it would have read as too neat and too pathetic, a ponderous tragedy. It was meant to be the infusion of one man’s sorry end into the cradle of the news obit, with just enough there to tell his story. I don’t care if the verbs aren’t perfect and not every clause sings. I’d take it any day over a full-throated tribute to Bob Hope.
There is one place to read obituary tributes with that vital spark. Hold on—I’m walking up Ninth Avenue, squeezing past a messy corner of trash barrel, news kiosk, souvenirs spilling from little holes in the wall, on the way back to the Times’s building from my elegant lunch with Chuck Strum. It’s an afterthought. We can hardly hear each other in the traffic and street noise. Besides the Times, who runs your favorite obits? He doesn’t say anything for a minute. Maybe he doesn’t hear. No, he’s considering while we pick our way to clear sidewalk. As soon as he thinks of it, his face relaxes into a smile. The Economist! he says.
I didn’t even know what it was when I started my research, “more newspaper than magazine,” as one critic wrote; an influential weekly, Time with a supersonic thrust and a history that went back to 1843; a British publication with half its circulation in the United States. Its articles are anonymously written and smart, worth a dozen consultants, they say. And every week, on one beautiful page, a single character is sent off in memorable style, an obit dressed lightly in essay form: “Canaan Banana, clergyman, politician and rapist,” or Janet Frame, the New Zealand novelist who was “a chronicler of mental turmoil,” or Filiberto Ojeda Rios, Puerto Rican revolutionary.
The magazine, smart and alert as it is, had noticed the revival of obits in the London newspapers. Robert Cottrell, a journalist from the foreign department of the Independent, carried the bug for good obits with him when he became feature editor of the Economist in the early nineties. He ran a wonderful piece in late 1994 about the phenomenon of obits as entertainment that, he wrote me, “helped to persuade many of my colleagues that the subject was worth exploring.” (The piece ran anonymously but was written by Martin Vander Weyer, who contributed obits of business figures to the Daily Telegraph.) By the mid-nineties, Cottrell and his anonymous contributors were in stylish competition with the London dailies.
Cottrell was replaced on the beat by the novelist Keith Colquhoun. “Keith made a name for the Economist obituaries; he’d take people who were almost unknown and had done something like invent a new sort of flower poem, and then he’d talk about flower poets for most of the obit. Beautiful little pieces, not really an obit of that person.” So spoke Colquhoun’s replacement, the biographer Ann Wroe. About 80 percent of the dazzling obits that have appeared in the Economist since late 2003 are written by Wroe; she edits the rest of the print-edition obits (the American team that runs the Economist’s website run both their own obits and obits from the magazine).
I got all this on the fly. “I am writing this from a hotel in Bratislava,” Cottrell’s email read, and Wroe was run ragged trying to track down some of her earlier pieces. “Weirdly enough, we have no run of the printed issue anywhere in the building!” she wrote in exasperation.
Wroe looks like (and is) a sensible Englishwoman of fifty-four. She wears sensible shoes, a dark skirt just past her knees, and a tucked-in blouse, and unfussed-over gray hair frames her long and lovely face. But she’s lit by the fire of her passions. She’s worked at the Economist for almost thirty years (in an office building off Piccadilly—“You can’t miss it. It’s on the street that ends in a palace”), but honestly, she says, it won’t merit but a line in her own obit. “I really haven’t been here. I’ve been elsewhere, thinking, writing my books.” She has four eclectic books to her credit, and the windowsill of her cramped, shared office is stacked with research on Percy Bysshe Shelley, her latest subject. She talks about writing obituaries with the ardor of a mystic.
“I like to get into the mind, into the shoes of the person I’m writing about. I like to get as far as it’s possible to get into somebody else…almost a merging of the character. You’re only dealing with them for two or three days, but it’s very intense. To see through all the information to the essence, to that moment in a life that’s the key or the facet of the personality that is the key to the whole person. To try and see the world.”
She chooses a subject by Monday morning, after consulting the New York Times, Nexis, and the Blog of Death, a weblog that posts tributes to the recent dead, and by Wednesday, Wroe has handed in her piece. “The picture is terribly important in the obit, I always find. Sometimes I can’t start to do it until I know what the picture is.” The visual inspiration and the speed with which these obits are written might explain why they have an immediacy and spirit not often found in magazines. She seldom falls back on advance obits. “We have almost none in stock. We have about four. I try to get them out of people in advance, but journalists are bad about that deadline, and some of them say, I won’t know what to say till it happens. I’ve been trying to get Maggie Thatcher out of the political editor, because she is somebody who, if she died on a Thursday morning, we would have to remake the whole paper, for goodness sake—and he won’t do it.
“We did an obit of an Indian bandit a while ago, one of my favorites; it was done by our Delhi correspondent. And this guy was the biggest bandit India has ever known—he killed four hundred people and five hundred elephants—and we got quite a lot of letters saying, You must not write about this man. He’s no good. You must only write obituaries of people who are worthy. This is a fairly prevailing sentiment, actually.
“We’re not very reverent in our obits. They have a tradition of that in England. I think the best obits are the ones in the Daily Telegraph. They set the standard. Their obits of minor aristocrats and war heroes are the greatest. There have been some classics where you have a dissolute person who has done nothing good in his life and has just been crazy—and he’ll be treated with the most wonderful seriousness. Sometimes the Telegraph will do an obit, and I’ll just think, there’s nothing more to be said about a person. I would like to have done it myself, but no, it can’t be done any better than that.
“It’s a writerly job. It does need very good writing, this page. That sounds awfully boastful, but it’s a form of literature.”
Wroe calls the book about Shelley she’s writing in the evenings and on weekends “an alternative biography. I’m trying to write about him as a poet, not as a man. And the narrative drive of the book is the progress of his soul out of the body. It’s mind-blowing—I just don’t know if my mind is good enough.” It’s one of those things she attempts “just to see if it’s possible. I got very keen on biography because I wanted to change it. I wanted to stretch the form. I think of it as a way of capturing souls.”
There is in her intensity and language something Catholic (and, in fact, among her other jobs, she writes a regular column for a Catholic newsletter). Also, she’s at home with guilt. “I did an obituary on Nigel Nicolson. He was allowed to see his mother for half an hour a day. And she would talk to him but she was still sitting at her desk with her pen in her hand, and she would only turn around slightly to talk to him. And I thought, that’s me. I’ve caught myself doing that. The boys [she has three sons with her husband, an actor] come in and lie on the floor, and I do chat, but I’ve still got my pen in my hand…”
But guilt doesn’t stop her from reveling in her work and its riskier challenges. “I do, I have fun!” she enthuses. She relishes the writing assignments that involve a walk on the dark side, particularly with writers like Hunter S. Thompson. The photo that inspired his obit is a shocker: Thompson leers as he points the business end of a pistol at the photographer. Readers look directly into the barrel.
There were always way too many guns around at Hunter S. Thompson’s farm in Woody Creek: .44 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, black snubnosed Colt Pythons with bevelled cylinders, .22 calibre mounted machine guns. He also kept explosives, to blow the legs off pool tables or to pack in a barrel for target practice. His quiet bourgeois neighbours near Aspen, Colorado, complained that he rocked the foundations of their houses.
Explosions were his speciality. Indeed, writing and shooting were much the same.
Wroe ends the obit with a quote from Thompson about Hemingway’s suicide, in which Thompson sympathizes with the old writer’s despairing thoughts as he lost control of his world: “…finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun,” Thompson had written.
Writerly, without a lot of hollow bullshit—that’s the secret. One of the best things about Wroe, a shopkeeper’s daughter who studied at Oxford, is her lack of pretense. She’s amused that I can’t figure out what class people are from in England. Did I notice the man who just poked his head in the office? He had a nice suit, I thought. She laughed and told me anyone else here could look at him and see baronial estates, titles, hunting dogs, the whole palette of “upper” life. “Also, they’re taller than we are,” she said. Wroe envies Americans’ lack of pretension. Her favorite thing is to fly to the U.S., rent a car, and head west, a rubbish country-and-western station on the radio. “You can’t imagine how liberating that is.” I imagine her speeding over the Appalachians to the tune of “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy,” stretching the boundaries of her personal biography.
Wroe signs a copy of her book Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man for me before I leave. Almost nothing is known about the man who condemned Jesus to crucifixion, so Wroe wrote the story of his times, weighing his myth as it has been constructed through the ages. Working with only scraps of evidence, she pieced together a cohesive, dramatic story. No one, for instance, knows Pilate’s first name (Pontius is a reference to his tribe, not his given name). With the poetic delicacy that distinguishes her obituaries in the Economist, Wroe wrote, “his mother bending over his cradle would have whispered a name that history has rubbed away.”