Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Critics wondered whether there was a general message in his films. Mr Bergman sometimes denied he had one. Yet he usually found a saving moment in the misery: a selfless communication, in word or gesture, between two human beings. At the end of “Wild Strawberries” the hero, an aged professor, is belatedly reconciled with his family and his past. As the scene was filmed, Mr Bergman noted, the old actor’s face “shone with secretive light as if reflected from another reality”. That secretive light, or hidden love, was just what the director had been searching for.

  Bip

  Bip, the world’s quietest clown, died on September 22nd 2007, older than he seemed

  WHEN the spotlight faded on Bip last week, leaving not even a hand or a flower illuminated, it caused only a sigh of surprise. Bip had tried many times to put an end to himself. He would cut his wrists with a blade, nicking and wincing away from it, in case his copious blood gushed over his pure white sailor’s trousers. He would shake out into his palm a handful of pills from a bottle, open his wide red mouth, and fail to swallow them. Stepping on a chair that wobbled under him, he would knot a noose round his scrawny neck, test it, yank it, gyrate his neck like a pigeon and step out into the void. Nothing worked. He went on living.

  That he should wish to die was also not surprising. Often he was kept, crouching or standing, in a small cage on the stage. One by one he ran his hands along the bars until, with all his strength, he pushed two apart and jumped nimbly out; but then, right ahead of him, behind him, all round him, he found his palms flattening against a wall of glass. Each cage was contained in another. His hands often became birds, flickering and fluttering out of his sleeves, and he made them fly swiftly from their prisons, laughing as they flew. But the bars soon closed again round him.

  Like all human beings, he dreamed; but his dreams were rarely successful. He hunted butterflies with a darting net, only to break their wings. He plucked flowers, then picked their petals out, and was surprised they died. When he tried to tame lions, they ate him, scorning the thin hoop he flourished in their direction. He walked against wind and made no progress. His black-ringed eyes and black-lined eyebrows registered sadness, wonder, perplexity and terror. But he did not know what malevolence was. He was, said the man who knew him best, a romantic, a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, and “alone in a fragile world filled with injustice and beauty”.

  To the naked eye Bip had only the clothes he stood up in: trousers, jacket, soft ballet shoes, striped jersey, and a crumpled opera-hat topped with a red flower. His lean limbs and white face were his only language. The spotlight played on him, and nothing else. Yet the silence around him was filled with chairs, tables, animals, trunks and escalators. It swarmed with lounging waiters, officious policemen, dog-walkers pulled to right and left of the path, old ladies knitting. Railway trains roared through, and Bip, bouncing and swaying in his seat, struggled to keep his suitcase from falling out of the rack. The sea flooded in, bringing a ship that could take Bip on his constant travels to America, to Japan and to Australia, and he staggered manfully up and down the pitching deck.

  He was born, some said, in the Paris acting school in 1947, bred by Jean-Louis Barrault in “Les Enfants du Paradis” and raised at the tiny Théâtre de Poche in Montparnasse. Others made him far older, dating from the Athenian drama and the Japanese noh plays, via the commedia dell’arte and Charlie Chaplin. Parts of all this went into the making of him, as well as the imaginings of the young Marcel Marceau, in Strasbourg in the 1930s, trying on his father’s long trousers and contorting his body to make his friends laugh. His name, Bip, came loosely from Dickens’s “Great Expectations”. His hat, flower and sailor-costume solidified over time.

  He never spoke. Mr Marceau’s father died in 1944 in Auschwitz, and Bip’s silence was a tribute to all those who had been silenced in the camps. It was a recollection, too, of the necessary muteness of resistance fighters caught by the Nazis, or quietly leading children across the Swiss border to safety, as Mr Marceau had done. In one of his acts, “Bip Remembers”, the sad-faced clown relived in mime the horrors of the war and stressed the necessity of love. In another, his hands became good and evil: evil clenched and jerky, good flowing and emollient, with good just winning.

  His alter ego, who promoted him as Everyman all over the world, sometimes spoke for him. “Bip”, said Mr Marceau, “is a hero of our time. His gaze is turned not only towards heaven, but into the hearts of men.” Mr Marceau compiled his biography and painted his portrait, colouring him blue, rose and mauve as he walked through the city streets and sailed among the stars. He wrote a poem for him:

  A silent, fragile hand has drawn in space a white flower emptied of its blood.

  Soon it will open, blossom out.

  Soon, though faded, bloom again.

  Mr Marceau was garrulous and gregarious where Bip was not. He ran his own mime company for almost 60 years, staging mimodrames when they were completely out of fashion, and started an international school in Paris to teach his skills to others. No mime artist could touch him. Hollywood loved him. Mr Marceau gave interviews frequently, sometimes in Bip’s clothes, explaining him to the crowd: “If I do this, I feel that I am a bird. If I do this, I am a fish. And I feel that, if I do this, it’s like a song ... To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. Mime expresses ... the soul’s most secret aspiration.”

  Bip simply moved on the stage, bird, fish, song, wind, tempestuously without a word, until he too became invisible.

  Vere Bird

  Vere Cornwall Bird, who transformed Antigua, died on June 28th 1999, aged 89

  Proudly, the government of Antigua reports that its “offshore financial industry has grown by leaps and bounds”. The American State Department agrees but its enthusiasm for the country’s financial services is muted. Antigua, the department said in a report published in March, is “one of the most attractive centres in the Caribbean for money launderers”.

  Such comments were wounding to Vere Bird, who dominated Antiguan politics all his adult life. He considered himself pro-American, and allowed the United States to have military facilities on the island. What were the Americans grumbling about? Mr Bird’s favourite topic was Antigua’s transformation under his leadership from penury to relative prosperity. Antigua was a poor country with an economy based on an uncertain

  market in sugar. It now has a prosperous tourist industry and an even more prosperous financial industry, serviced by some 50 loosely regulated offshore banks. Mr Bird happily, and indeed truthfully, proclaimed that Antiguans have achieved the highest standard of living in the Caribbean. Life expectancy is about the same as western Europe’s. Secondary education is free. Unemployment is below 5%. Mr Bird denied that the government tolerated money laundering, just as he dismissed reports that the island is a base for drug smuggling and arms running and has become a favoured meeting place for Russian, Italian and Colombian gangsters involved in these profitable trades.

  The Antiguans believed him, or simply did not care where the money came from. Mr Bird won election after election and, allowing for such niceties as unlimited campaign money and with radio and television biased to the government, the ballots were tolerably free. When Mr Bird stood down as prime minister in 1994, his son Lester took over. Lester was re-elected with a big majority at a general election in March.

  When the British empire was being dismantled it was unsure what to do with its dozens of small islands like Antigua. Some in the Caribbean are so small that they have remained dependencies. But Antigua and its tiny sister island, Barbuda, with their combined population of 65,000, about that of a medium-sized town in Europe, were allowed to go it alone, bequeathed with a British-style parliament and a decent cricket ground. But whatever Britain’s misgivings about granting independence to this sandcastle, with all the privileges and status of a sovereign state, it had no doubt that Vere Bird was its natural leader.

  His towering height – getting on for seven feet – gave him a commanding presence in the
Salvation Army, which he joined as a drummer-boy, rising to be a captain, and which provided him with the rudiments of education. The Sally Ann, with its street rallies, also taught him public speaking. Mr Bird’s political speeches had the rhythm of forceful preaching, with frequent references to God. In 1951 he persuaded Antigua’s sugar workers to strike for more pay. The story goes that when a white planter asked what the strikers would eat, Vere Bird said, “We will eat cockles and the widdy-widdy bush. We will drink pond water.”

  The widdy-widdy is a weed once used to feed slaves. Whether the strikers survived on it is unclear, but the planters eventually caved in and Mr Bird’s reputation took wing. The same year, 1951, union representatives led by Mr Bird won all eight elected seats on thelocal legislature. The British nurtured him. He was made a minister in the colonial government, then chief minister. He became prime minister on independence in 1981 and his Antigua Labour Party won all subsequent general elections. The British declined to make Mr Bird a knight, an honour often handed out to successful people in former colonies. But Antigua made him a “sir” anyway.

  “Papa” Bird’s prestige as the man who gave Antiguans the dignity of independence to some extent protected him from criticism. At his funeral last week at the newly created National Heroes’ Cemetery, the opposition leader, a long-standing critic of government corruption, said that “history cannot but be kind” to Vere Bird. History may be less kind to Mr Bird’s family. As in Indonesia, where members of the Suharto family, rather than the former president, are getting most of the blame for corruption, in Antigua those under fire include some of Papa’s relations. As with the Suhartos, the Birds and Papa’s mistress, Cutie Francis, are sufficiently rich not to be too distressed if, as in Indonesia, the economy goes rotten. But ordinary Antiguans may not be spared. America is getting impatient with the dirty money of Latin American drug barons being laundered in the Caribbean. Since its warning shot in March, American banks have been told to apply “enhanced scrutiny” to their customers’ dealings in Antigua. Partly as a result of pressure from Britain, nine of Antigua’s offshore banks have been closed down. The mobsters, who value their privacy, are said to be leaving the Caribbean for more secluded Pacific islands. Papa’s Antigua may have little that is permanent, save, perhaps, the widdy-widdy bush.

  Jean Bédel Bokassa

  Jean Bédel Bokassa, a bad man in Africa, died on November 3rd 1996, aged 75

  It was impossible to caricature the African military dictator. He existed. There were two such dictators in the 1970s, ldi Amin Dada of Uganda, and Jean Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, renamed by him the Central African Empire. They were half criminal, half clown. In their wakes they left tales of fantastic self-aggrandisement and casual butchery.

  Both men were products of former imperial armies. They worshipped and they hated their colonial masters who had elevated them to command the “native” troops, but did not allow them to join the white officers for dinner. Mr Amin, who now lives quietly in Saudi Arabia, called himself Conqueror of the British Empire; Mr Bokassa believed he was Africa’s Napoleon. They wore saucer-sized medals. Mr Bokassa’s titles included that of Grand Master of Honour of the International Brotherhood of Knights of Stamp Collecting. The two men made a laughing stock of Africa when it needed understanding.

  In Mr Bokassa’s case the real scandal was that France backed him when he seized power in 1966 and indulged him for 14 years. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, president of France from 1974 to 1981, was a hunting companion of Mr Bokassa and called him “France’s best friend in Africa”. In the end, though, Mr Giscard d’Estaing (like France itself) was humiliated when Mr Bokassa disclosed that he had given him a gift of diamonds (which the president said he had sold for charity).

  Jean Bédel Bokassa was one of 12 children of the chief of a village not far from Bangui, then the administrative centre of the French colony of Ubangi-Shari. While Jean was a child, his father was murdered and his mother committed suicide. Some have suggested this shock was at the root of his psychopathic tendencies. Mr Bokassa joined the French army and fought in the second world war and then in Vietnam. He lived through the French defeat of Dien Bien Phu and rose to the rank of captain, making him the most senior soldier in the Central African Republic when it became independent in 1960. In January 1966, almost certainly with French assistance, Mr Bokassa overthrew the president, his cousin, and took power.

  In 1977 he crowned himself Bokassa the First in a ceremony of staggering opulence which mimicked the coronation of Napoleon. In the heat of the Bokassa stadium in Bangui, he wore ermine, diamonds and a golden olive wreath and, seated on a golden throne shaped like an eagle, placed a crown on his head.

  No African heads of state attended the ceremony but it was packed with western diplomats, and France helped foot the bill. He once said, “Everything around here is financed by the French government. We ask the French for money, get it and waste it.”

  The capriciousness of his rule made execution and death by starvation in jail commonplace. It was said that he once discovered his lion-keeper feeding the lions’ dinner to his own family. Mr Bokassa had him thrown to the lions but they, recognising their keeper, did not touch him. So Mr Bokassa fed the keeper to his crocodiles, which showed less discriminating taste.

  Despite a series of spats with France, or at least with French ambassadors and ministers, Mr Bokassa remained broadly loyal to his old masters. He allowed France to retain its largest military base in Africa near Bangui, essential for protecting other Francophone territories in the region, including troublesome Chad from the Libyans. But in the end he became too much even for Paris. He began to flirt with Libya’s Colonel Qadaffi and in 1979 he ruled that schoolchildren should wear uniforms with his picture on. The children protested and Mr Bokassa had 200 of them thrown into jail, where, according to witnesses, he beat some of them to death.

  While he was visiting Libya in September 1979, 700 French paratroopers took over in Bangui and overthrew him,replacing him with the cousin he had deposed, David Dacko. Mr Bokassa was later to complain, “Every time we have a problem, the French have to come and meddle. Finally, you have to ask yourself, are we independent or are we not?”

  Mr Bokassa tried to go to his chateau in France but he was turned away by an embarrassed French government and went to the Ivory Coast. Later, France relented and allowed him in, but restricted his movements. In 1986 Mr Bokassa suddenly left France and arrived in Bangui demanding that he be allowed to vindicate himself. He had been tried in his absence and sentenced to death but now he was given a fresh trial on 14 charges, including murder, theft and cannibalism. The cannibalism was never proved but he was sentenced to death for murder. The sentence was commuted, and after seven years in prison he was pardoned and emerged to live quietly in Bangui, seemingly a changed man. He said he had renounced alcohol and women (he acknowledged paternity of 54 children). Born a Christian, converting to Islam, Mr Bokassa now returned to Christianity, perhaps in a search for forgiveness.

  Joseph Bonanno

  Joseph Bonanno, an American gangster, died on May 11th 2002, aged 97

  A discovery made by Joseph Bonanno when he was quite young was that in a democracy it is possible to construct a criminal organisation largely immune from the law. The American constitution with its constraints designed to protect citizens from unfair prosecution could also be used to shield criminals providing there was enough money available to employ clever lawyers to manipulate the system. Confident of his protection, Mr Bonanno assembled an empire of crime with a turnover of billions of dollars. Despite the best efforts of the state, Mr Bonanno was never convicted of a serious crime. The state’s successes were meagre. Mr Bonanno was once fined $450 on a minor charge and late in life was jailed for terms of eight and 14 months for refusing to answer questions, an offence deemed to be contempt of court. The FBI tried to track his every move,

  even searching Mr Bonanno’s dustbins for incriminating evidence. It ended up only looki
ng foolish.

  Al Capone, a gangster of America’s prohibition era, seems to have been Joseph Bonanno’s mentor, teaching him that, with money, you could get away with murder. Capone was jailed (for income tax evasion) in 1931, and Joseph Bonanno moved on. He had been born in Sicily and had links with the semi-feudal Sicilian families collectively known as the Mafia. When Benito Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922 he jailed many Mafia followers, accusing them, correctly, of gangsterism. Those that could get away fled to the United States. The Mafia flourished again in Italy only after the country surrendered in the second world war. By then Mr Bonanno’s American branch of the Mafia, consisting mainly of gangs run by Italian émigrés, was flourishing. Each had its speciality: drugs, prostitution, protection, gambling, whatever. Sometimes there were power struggles, and gangsters would murder each other, cheering up the FBI. Mr Bonanno rose in the 1960s to be the capo di tutti i capi, boss of bosses. He was said to have invented the “double coffin” in which the body of someone who had died naturally would conceal a murdered corpse. He was a careful man.

  If Joseph Bonanno had a weakness it was his desire for respectability. It was a difficult ambition, perhaps an impossible one. Mr Bonanno was a criminal. Everyone knew that, and criminals, even successful ones, are not respectable. Shakespeare, as always, put it rather well, noting that, however rich you were, the loss of a good name “makes me poor indeed”. Mr Bonanno was not a literary man, although he did once get someone to help him write a book about himself called, seemingly without irony, A Man of Honor. In reviewing his career he says: