Three and a half years after he survived 9/11, Stephen Miller, now the obituary editor of the New York Sun, finds me in line outside the Majestic Theater, a block from the Times building in the middle of Manhattan, waiting for the doors to open for Arthur Miller’s memorial service. Steve (no relation to Arthur) is nearly forty-three. He wears cool shades, khakis, a pair of bud earphones in his ears, a messenger bag slung over his shoulder. He has dimples and flashes them frequently. He didn’t have a cell phone on 9/11, and he doesn’t carry one now.
He has curbed his humor and suppressed his more mischievous impulses to work for the Sun, a weekday newspaper founded by two conservative editors from the Jewish Daily Forward. He’s gone legit, or anyway, mainstream. He writes substantive obits of Johnny Carson and Artie Shaw, does the occasional tribute to a conservative billionaire, and has his fun with the oddballs, the rare-books dealer who discovered that Louisa May Alcott wrote stories about hashish and murder before she settled down to Little Women, the B-movie star who retired to the B-life:
Although it turns out she was hardly the South American bombshell she was publicized to be, Acquanetta went on to live in the shadow of her years of demistardom, a kitschy celebrity in her new hometown of Scottsdale, Ariz., where she appeared for years on local television ads for a car dealer and raised money for local charities. She said her name meant “burning fire and deep water.”
He doesn’t try to cover everyone of importance who dies. Instead, he focuses on one obit a day, and fills in with obits he picks up from the Daily Telegraph, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, or the wires, though he misses altogether people who, like Arthur Miller, die too late for Friday’s paper and too early for Monday’s. A story about Miller’s memorial service will be a nice way to catch up.
Is there any better entertainment in New York than a celebrity’s memorial service? It’s no secret; the public is welcome. A notice appears on the obits page of the Times telling you when the doors will open and who has promised to speak or perform, to lower the curtain on a public life and stage a personal tribute: people you’ve heard of, telling stories you’ve never heard. Like obituaries, memorial services are a garden of emotion, with laughs cropping up behind the tears. It is the ultimate theatrical experience, united with your fellows in appreciation of someone unforgettable.
And that’s not to mention the production values. Here in this city, the sound quality is excellent, the pianist performs professionally in the theater. The photographs projected on the giant screen are first-rate. The short montage of film clips rivals those shown at the Academy Awards. Every so often, someone like Estelle Parsons takes the stage to give a dramatic reading. The seats? Well, they’re on Broadway, plush velvet, banked for quality sightlines. And—awesome detail—the whole experience is free.
It is a gorgeous day in May. In the long line for public mourners, people are sunning their faces, grazing through newspapers, chatting each other up, but the line of invited guests enters first; by the time we climb the opulent staircase inside and find seats, the orchestra is half-filled with Arthur Miller’s friends, relatives, and colleagues. Like the other voyeurs, we settle in the back, on the aisle, and get up half a dozen times for others as the theater fills—aging men in suits or jeans, women with tousled gray hair in sweatpants and sneakers. We have a few minutes to study the program, studded with famous names. “Bill Coffin?” Miller says with a laugh. “William Sloane Coffin? He’s almost dead himself.” When the lights go down, everything but the stage becomes very dark. Only the emergency exit lights on the aisle floors are lit. Miller meant to bring a flashlight but forgot, and we begin the comedy of trying to identify the parade of speakers and performers who appear under the huge black-and-white projected image of the deeply etched face of Arthur Miller, “a giant of the theater” and “one of the great American playwrights,” as Marilyn Berger called him in the New York Times.
“Who’s that?” hisses Miller, referring to a man who looks like either an accountant or an older actor who plays one. “Don’t know,” I hiss back. The accountant-man is saying, “I read Arthur Miller’s obituaries. Just about everybody got it right, except the New Criterion, which was so happy he had died,” and the lefty crowd mutters its disapproval. Miller and I have both been taking notes in the dark. He leans into the aisle and steadies the program under the exit light. “Albee!” he says in amazement. By this time the playwright Edward Albee is leaving the stage after some closing inanity: “Some playwrights matter. Arthur mattered—a lot.” We have to forgive him his relative lack of eloquence. At the bottom of the Times’s obit page, next to the announcement of the Miller memorial, was a brief obituary of Jonathan Thomas, a sculptor who died of bladder cancer, according to “his partner, the playwright Edward Albee.” Albee’s lover had died just a week ago.
We both recognize Daniel Day-Lewis, Miller’s son-in-law, who reads a funny story Miller wrote about delivering bagels and onion rolls by bicycle, hazardous work in winter. But who is the intense man who takes the stage and speaks rapidly about watching his mother playing Linda Loman in a community production of Death of a Salesman? Even though he was only six at the time, the man says Miller’s words made “my heart break and burst into flame.” Soon we realize he’s Tony Kushner, another great political playwright, who won a Tony and a Pulitzer for his pair of plays Angels in America. Kushner tells us he sat behind Miller during one Tony Awards ceremony and spent the entire evening gazing in wonder at the domed head in front of him, the source of all that great American drama. “I wanted to touch the head, but thought the owner might object.” The theater ripples with laughter.
There’s a professional gloss on the contents of the service, what you’d expect for a public figure, affectionate glimpses of Miller on walks or laughing and arguing at the dinner table, but no danger of falling into anything really personal or mawkish. Miller’s son doesn’t rhapsodize tearfully about a Little League coach who taught him to ride a bike; instead he reads his father’s defiant letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee in a steady voice. And Miller’s occasionally messy personal life has been edited: his third wife, Inge Morath, who died in 2002, is invoked frequently, but his first wife, mother of two of his children, is barely mentioned, and no one breathes a word about Marilyn Monroe, to whom he was married for almost five years, or Agnes Barley, the abstract painter fifty-five years his junior who lived with him at the end.
I realize spending a beautiful afternoon listening to this orchestrated fugue of sorrow and laughter for a departed literary figure is not everyone’s idea of entertainment. But on May 9, there’s no better place to read the complex layers of our culture than this memorial service on Broadway. Between odes to Miller the brilliant dramatist and Miller the stalwart leftist, speaker after speaker invokes the great line from Death of a Salesman—“Attention must be paid.” Nobody was more of a champion of the common man than Miller, who grew up in Brooklyn the son of a successful man ruined by the Depression. In fact, Miller’s account of the death of Willy Loman can be read as an elevated obit of a common man. George McGovern, who credits Miller with helping him win the Democratic nomination in the 1972 presidential election, saw a production when he was still in school, he says from the stage; he recalls an audience of grown men with heaving shoulders trying to stifle their sobs. The American “everyman” haunts us all. What a tragedy to slip into death without fanfare or tribute! Miller himself was quoted in an article published in the New York Times a few weeks after the play’s Broadway debut: “I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.” He described Willy Loman as a man who “was trying to write his name in ice on a summer day.”
The lights go up. We walk past the posters and paraphernalia for The Phantom of the Opera and into the sunshine, find a Ranch 1 on Eighth Avenue, and continue a conversation we started almost a year ago at the obits conference. We tend to circle back to the same topics, particularly the common-man obits, which have become increasingly popular around the country since 9/11. Willie Loman crops up now in Portland, San Jose, Denver, Cleveland, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., some well written, some full of clichés and naked appeals to sentiment. Steve Miller dismissed the work of one emotional obits writer as “lurid prose and ordinary people. I recognize there is a place for this sort of thing, that there’s a market for it, that many people I have respect for believe in this. But it ain’t me, babe.”
Miller’s own obits for the Sun attempt to cross the reportage of the New York Times with the Daily Telegraph’s wit and spin. He’s borrowed the Independent’s trick of putting the grind of the vital statistics in a separate box, and the London papers’ emphasis on striking photos to accompany the text. He’s always good for a cheesecake shot, babes from the forties, poses that are arty or funky—anything striking that doesn’t look like a high school yearbook photo—and this alone sets him apart from the Times with its old-fashioned layout and preponderance of head shots. Since the obits conference, he and Adam Bernstein, the Kid from the Washington Post, have been sharing sources and keeping up a running dialogue of wisecracks and breaking news (“It’s great. We both compete with the New York Times, but not with each other”). Amelia Rosner, the alt.obituaries maven, frequently alerts Miller to overlooked subjects. His inspirations are sophisticated and his colleagues run with the sardonic crowd.
Miller is, as far as I can tell, allergic to sentiment. I’ve never seen him get sappy in print, not even when he was writing about surviving the burning towers. But though he says, “I like to write what I like to read, and frankly, I don’t like to read obits of average people,” he admires those average-people obits that are well done. “I don’t really recognize them as obits, but they’re awfully interesting. I think we’re all interested in the fact that there are different visions.” As for the emotional Portraits of Grief: “In some ways I thought they were silly or frivolous. I felt like they were too one-dimensional, too cheerful, too political,” but with several years’ perspective, he thinks they’ve aged well. “They seem like a semi-artistic act of mourning—not obituaries at all, but an attempt to put flowers on the graves.”
Though we are a block or so from falling in its literal shadow, the New York Times shadows all our conversations, the way New York City shadows Philadelphia. The small-circulation paper and the smaller city are obsessed with their mighty rivals, though Philadelphia barely exists to New Yorkers, and the Times ignores the Sun. (“Do you read the Sun?” I asked Strum. “I don’t have time,” he said curtly.) Miller, however, is a mosquito who enjoys nibbling the Times.
After our chicken Caesar salads, we linger by the subway he’ll take downtown to his office. I could stand on the street corner discussing the relative usefulness of various news data banks with him for hours (he’s a Proquest fan; I like Custom Newspapers). I try to imagine the contemporary history of obits if he hadn’t escaped death, if he were two hundred words in a Portrait instead of a contrary presence on the New York scene. It would have been hard to capture him in a Portrait, the tech guy who went home at night and wrote funny obits, and a mockery if he’d ended up the subject of our pity.
I linger at a newsstand before taking the train home. New York is the home of numerous newspapers: the Daily News, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Observer, Newsday. The Post takes potshots at the Times’s obits, and gleefully reports its errors (unearthed originally, one suspects, in the Times’s own corrections columns); when the Post runs the occasional obit of someone on staff, it reads like a note posted in the coffee room. The Daily News no longer runs obits. After the terrorist attacks, the Journal’s offices had been evacuated, yet its staff still managed to put out an award-winning paper on September 12 from a plant in New Jersey and a New York City apartment. The Wall Street Journal could do anything it wanted to, including putting out a first-rate obituary page. But it doesn’t.
Besides the New York Times, only Newsday runs interesting, full-blown obituaries. It reprints stories from wire services and other sources to cover the notable deaths, and each day it features a staff-written obituary of someone from Long Island that assesses the subject professionally and gives an intimate glimpse of his life. From JAMES JOSEPH FINNERTY, 81, SURGEON, PILOT, FISHERMAN:
A lover of words and literature, Finnerty often quoted sayings in French, Latin and Swedish, his son said, and never missed The New York Times or Newsday crosswords. He also loved to travel and cook, and “he made the best damn gravy,” Charles Finnerty said.
(by Indrani Sen, Newsday)
Two days after 9/11—days before the New York Times began its series—Newsday was running its own biographical portraits, called The Lost, “of people missing or presumed or confirmed dead in the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.” The short pieces sketched the individuals, put their presence on the scene of the terrorist attacks in context, and tried to impart the flavor of their lives: the young man who had run with the bulls in Spain, the couple on their way to Hawaii. One bio quoted the man’s brother: “…there is still hope he’s under the rubble, breathing.” Newsday’s collection of The Lost, with additional stories by other Tribune newspapers, is called American Lives: The Stories of the Men and Women Lost on September 11. It’s harder to find than Portraits: 9/11/01, and its stories have been edited and updated since they first appeared, but they have a familiar, heart-tugging ring.
[Brian] O’Flaherty likes to think that his friend [Dennis Cross] is in heaven, talking about firefighting with Cross’ father, who died of a heart attack after battling a major fire when Cross was 13. “He probably told his father all the new tactics they now use in the department,” O’Flaherty said. “They probably laugh at it all, because nothing has changed. The fireman still crawls into the building to put out the fire the same way as 50 years ago.”
[Karen Klitzman’s] family is contributing money to the fellowship fund and is asking friends and other family members to donate money as well. “Something more worthwhile has to come out of this horrible tragedy,” Donna [Klitzman, Karen’s twin] said.
Newsday was overshadowed by the Times in the aftermath of the disaster, and also when the awards were handed out. The Times swept up seven Pulitzer Prizes for 2001, including the one for A Nation Challenged, which included Portraits of Grief. Newsday was recognized by the Pulitzer Prize committee, but not for its 9/11 coverage and its improvised obituaries—for its classical music coverage.