Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Lakwena expressed these war-rules through Alice twice a day, at seven in the morning and seven at night, as she sat in a white robe on a fold-up chair in the middle of the camp. He made her repeat the 20 Holy Spirit Safety Precautions: no walking-sticks on the battlefield, no hiding behind anthills, no smoking, and each man to have “two testicles, neither more nor less”. Round Alice stood three charcoal stoves on which little wire replicas of enemy weapons were heated until they glowed and then waved above the soldiers’ headsto immunise them. Something worked, for in several encounters the NRA soldiers, faced by rampant hymn-singers, dropped their weapons and ran away.

  Alice revealed a little about Lakwena. He was an Italian army captain, drowned in the Nile in the first world war, who spoke 74 languages, including Latin. He had taken possession of her so violently in January 1985 that she ran amok and could not hear or speak. Sometimes, to discipline her, he would make her ill or order that she should be beaten six times with a stick. But he shared her body with other spirits: Wrong Element, a loud-mouthed American; Franko from Zaire; several Koreans and Arabs; and an Acholi nurse, Nyaker, whose voice was so thin that the soldiers could not understand it. They never knew, they said, whether Alice was a spirit or a person from one day to the next.

  Gradually, however, she seemed to resolve into an ordinary wilful woman. As the HSMF marched south towards Kampala in the late summer of 1987, the influence of the spirits and Alice’s own power seemed alike to be fading. The bullets no longer bounced off, and the enemy didn’t run away. At Jinja, not far from the capital, the HSMF was smashed by artillery fire, and Alice fled on a bicycle.

  The remnants of her soldiers – mustered under Joseph Kony, an ex-altar boy who claimed to be her cousin – metamorphosed into the horrifyingly violent Lord’s Resistance Army, which continues to kill, rape, pillage and abduct children in today’s Uganda. Alice settled in a refugee camp in Kenya, a greying barfly drinking gin and Coke. Lakwena returned to the Nile, and the Nile flows on.

  Hedy Lamarr

  Hedy Lamarr, a brain as well as a body, died on January 19th 2000, aged 86

  When Hedy Lamarr arrived in Hollywood she was seen as a rare and desirable acquisition: a genuine decadent, a temptress to send male pulses racing, and create envy in women’s hearts. Home-grown temptresses had been tried with only varying success. An American houri is a contradiction. In the 1920s Theda Bara (an anagram of Arab Death) had done her vampish best to sully the minds of clean-living Americans, and had been much attacked from the pulpits of the mid-west, but her seductive powers had diminished when it emerged that her real name was Goodman and she had been born in Cincinnati. Miss Lamarr, though, was from deepest Europe, from Vienna. Not only was she disturbingly beautiful, but in a European film, “Ecstasy”, she had appeared in the nude. She was the real thing.

  Sadly, none of her American films turned out to be memorable. She was starred with many of the biggest names in the Hollywood repertory company, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracey, Victor Mature, John Garfield, and so on. All her films made money, some a lot. Women were sufficiently envious of her to copy her hairstyle, with its central parting. But male pulses remained normal. Men left the cinema no more discontented with their women than they previously were. Hollywood was careless of her talent. Once she was put in a comedy, as a foil to Bob Hope, another time in a western. Yet, although her last forgettable film was made back in the 1950s, Hedy Lamarr’s name has retained a lingering association with the timeless idea of the femme fatale, a reason for writing about her.

  Sexual attraction was not just a matter of looks, Miss Lamarr said. “Any girl can be glamorous – all you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” You should have a brain as well as a body, she said. She was an admirer of Mata Hari, a spy in the first world war, who was both a seductress and a military expert. Louis B. Mayer, a Hollywood boss, was charmed by Miss Lamarr’s talk as well as her looks when he first met her in London. He got her to change her name from Hedy Kiesler, and gave her a seven-year contract to work for MGM. But on the way to Hollywood some of her allure was seemingly mislaid.

  Moving from her native environment was probably what went wrong for Miss Lamarr, as it can do for any animal. Even Marlene Dietrich, for all of her success in America, never repeated the sensuality she brought to “The Blue Angel”, made in Germany in 1930. Greta Garbo retained the persona she had brought from Sweden, but it was her air of mystery that made her so watchable, rather than her sexuality. Sex was Hollywood’s main product, but the movie bosses decreed, confusingly, that it should be wholesome. The film community might live in a sink of waywardness, but none of that got on to the screen. In “White Cargo”, made in 1942, Miss Lamarr gamely said she set out to be “a memorable nymphomaniac”. But there was no sympathy for five-syllable words in MGM, and the sexiest thing about “White Cargo” was its title.

  She often thought of returning to her native Austria, but never did. In 1938 the Germans had taken over Austria and her

  father, a doctor, and her mother, a pianist, had left the country. “Ecstasy”, made in 1932 when she was 18, remains the film she is most remembered by. Today it seems inoffensive, but it was condemned by the pope and banned in a number of countries, including the United States. Miss Lamarr’s fans have traced a number of earlier films she made in Berlin.

  Fritz Mandl, a Viennese arms maker who became the first of her six husbands, tried, fortunately without success, to buy up all copies of “Ecstasy”. He objected to all the world seeing his wife running naked through a wood, swimming in a pool and seemingly enjoying making love. Miss Lamarr easily fell in love. Like Miss Dietrich she said, “I can’t help it.” Granting her a divorce from one of her husbands, the judge advised her that she should spend more than a month getting to know afuture spouse.

  She was defensive about all her marriages, and her affairs. “I did what I did for love,” she said. “I’m a hell of a nice dame.” She sued a writer who, she said, had written about her in “an obscene, shocking, scandalous, naughty, wanton” way, but the case went against her. As a result of this and other litigation, the millions of dollars she had earned in Hollywood were dissipated as lawyers’ fees, and in later years she had little money.

  As it happens, Miss Lamarr might have made a second fortune out of an idea she developed with George Antheil, a composer she met in 1940 at a party in Hollywood. Applying their knowledge of musical harmony they devised a technology for military communications. In 1942 they were granted an American patent for the invention. The army was not interested, the patent eventually expired and the couple never profited. Today, though, a development of the invention, known as spread-spectrum technology, is being used in a wide range of electronic products, including mobile phones. Engineers reckon the concept is, so to speak, just beautiful.

  Morris Lapidus

  Morris Lapidus, architect of make-believe, died on January 18th 2001, aged 98

  When the Fontainebleau was opened in Miami, its architect, Morris Lapidus, proudly spoke of it as “the world’s most pretentious hotel”. Pretentious? He quickly corrected the slip of the tongue: “flamboyant” was what he meant, of course. Yet a lexicographer might note that in its original Anglo-French meaning, of make-believe, pretentious was the precise word to describe Mr Lapidus’s style. He wanted the mostly ordinary holidaymakers who stepped into his hotels to feel that they were entering a wonderland. “I wanted people to walk in and drop dead,” he said. “I wanted them to say, ‘My God, this is luxury.’” Until Mr Lapidus built the Fontainebleau and other baroque hotels in Miami Beach in the 1950s, “luxury” had implied a quiet understatement.

  If the hotel were modern it would tend to reflect the minimalist movement in architecture. To Mies van der Rohe’s dictum, “less is more”, Morris Lapidus responded, “Too much is never enough”, which became the title of his autobiography. He believed in the virtues of vulgarity: lots of colour, lots of curves, lots of surprises. He put live alligators in a pool in the lobby of one ho
tel, so that guests would “know they were in Florida”. He thought about having monkeys swinging from trapezes, but decided they might damage the chandeliers. There were jokes, some of them witty: replicas of classical statues playing golf, or using the phone. Laughter is a background noise in a Lapidus foyer. He saw his hotels as theatres with the guests taking on roles as actors. You could pretend to be famous. Some guests were. Some scenes in the James Bond movie Goldfinger were filmed in the Fontainebleau.

  Extravagance is now so commonplace that Mr Lapidus’s wild designs may no longer seem extreme. But they predated the Disney theme parks and the follies of Las Vegas. The guests at his hotels had seen such glamour only in films; and, like the old movie palaces, with their deep carpets and plastic finery, they provided a brief escape from the humdrum realities of everyday life. Showy Miami, best viewed through rhinestone sunglasses, was right for him. Others soon played his tune. Go there now and even the motels, with such names as Tangiers and Suez, seem exotic.

  Morris Lapidus’s hotels were loved by, or at least charmed, almost everyone except writers on architecture, who saw them as a blasphemous assault on the holy writ of austere functionality. “Pornography of architecture,” was one of the milder comments. Mr Lapidus said that during much of his long career his work was never published in an architectural journal, except to abuse it. “I was anathema,” he said. No one, though, doubted his acumen. He had a resemblance to another memorable American character, Sam Goldwyn, whose solecisms (“Never make predictions, especially about the future”) concealed a brilliant Hollywood film-maker. Both men were born in eastern Europe, Goldwyn in Poland, Lapidus in Russia.

  Growing up in Brooklyn, the big treat for Morris was a trip to Coney Island. What he called the “whirling, twisting, colourful” lights were to reappear in Miami Beach. But contracts to design hotels do not come to young architects just out of college. Mr Lapidus spent some 20 years designing shops, small and big, attracting customers by using colour, light and “sweeping, curving” interiors. In the Fontainebleau, the first of several hundred hotels he designed, he incorporated “all the things I had learned from my store work. When I got into hotels, I had to think, what am I selling now? I was selling a good time.”

  Mr Lapidus was sometimes asked who were his own favourite architects. He would surprise questioners by mentioning Frank Lloyd Wright, an American traditionalist, and Le Corbusier, a Swiss-born architect famous for his massive box-like blocks of flats. But Mr Lapidus admired workmanship, whatever the architectural genre, just as a fashion designer such as John Galliano is praised for his painstaking craftsmanship however you view his crazy clothes. Mr Lapidus was a craftsman. One contribution he made to architecture that hotel users are grateful for is the short corridor. He recalled that when he was a young architect travelling a lot from town to town, at the end of a weary day he always seemed to have a long walk to find his hotel room. The hotels he designed are shaped to end those long walks.

  In 1990, when Morris Lapidus was 88 and thinking of retiring, and a bit depressed that his life’s work had gone unnoticed, he was suddenly discovered in Europe. His work, a critic noted, expressed the spirit of Main Street America. A Swiss publisher produced a tome entitled

  Morris Lapidus: The Architect of the American Dream. Mr Lapidus was invited to the Netherlands for an exhibition about his work. American critics swallowed their pride and conceded that he had indeed had an influence. Last year he was named an “American original” at a ceremony at the White House in Washington. Some architects, Mr Lapidus noted, were starting to round the corners of their buildings. It was all quite pretentious, in a make-believe sort of way.

  Alan de Lastic

  Alan Basil de Lastic, India’s “conscience”, died on June 20th 2000, aged 70

  The Christian missionaries who accompanied European armies to India were largely unsuccessful in converting the multitudes to the teachings of Jesus. The Portuguese in Goa, the French in Pondicherry and the British all over the subcontinent found that Hindus and Muslims and other adherents to strong religions were mostly content with their own perceived paths to the Divine. Today, nearly 500 years after the first missionaries arrived, Christians account for fewer than 3% of India’s one billion people. Nevertheless, some Indians, Hindus especially, are displeased that there are any Christians in the country at all. Last November, during Pope Paul II’s visit to India, he was asked by a Hindu group to apologise for the atrocities committed by early Roman Catholic priests who, it is now conceded, were overzealous in their proselytising methods.

  The pope on his trips abroad does not submit himself to rude questions by reporters. It fell to Alan de Lastic, archbishop of Delhi, and India’s leading Catholic, to make it clear that there would be no apology. “How far back in history are you going?” he demanded. Mr de Lastic said he was more concerned about atrocities being committed against Christians in India now. Over the past two years there have been more than 200 reports of attacks on Christians. Thirty churches have been bombed or otherwise damaged. Priests and nuns have been murdered. An Australian missionary and his two young sons were burned to death in his car in Orissa.

  Mr de Lastic said the government was not doing its duty to bring peace and justice to India. “We are told to fight against Pakistan and be careful about China,” he said, while the evils at home were being neglected. This was fierce stuff from a senior cleric of a conservative church. But Mr de Lastic was concerned with the earthly problems of his flock, as well as its spiritual needs. India is often lauded as the world’s largest democracy, but that grand description flatters a society that tolerates corruption and where life is cheap. Mr de Lastic founded a human rights group, the United Christian Forum, and, to the irritation of non-Christians, saw it as the conscience of the nation.

  Alan de Lastic was born in Burma when it was part of British India. He was partly Burmese, partly Irish and partly French: his paternal grandparents came from Bourg-Lastic, a town in central France. But he was, he said, wholly Indian. He studied marine engineering, and worked for a time in the shipyards of Calcutta. As mystics do, he felt a call to the priesthood. He was spotted as a potential star, and sent to Rome and Dublin for polish. Thereafter he rose rapidly in India’s Catholic hierarchy. Mother Teresa (Obituary, September 13th 1997) was a close friend. He was made bishop of Lucknow and, in 1990, archbishop of Delhi.

  The community he led, though relatively small, has been remarkably influential. India’s armed forces have had dozens of Christian generals, admirals and air marshals, members either of the Catholic church, or of the 40 or so other Christian denominations in India. Christian groups run thousands of schools and hospitals as well as business enterprises such as rural banks. Missionaries run most leper colonies: many Hindus regard the disease as a punishment for wrongdoing. One way and another, millions of non-Christians benefit from the work of the churches. Why are they being attacked in a country that claims to be tolerant of all religious belief?

  The attacks are usually blamed on members of a militant Hindu group known as Sangh Parivar, or United Family. The group warns Indians of the “sweet poison” of Christianity. It complains that Hindus are being converted against their will. Mr de Lastic said that what militant Hindus particularly objected to were Christian schools, especially those in rural areas. Many Hindus acknowledge that they are well run; so much so that they send their own children to them. But by accepting

  the poorest children as pupils, the Christians are seen as undermining India’s Hindu caste system, which remains rigid in many areas. The upper-caste feudal lords fear that, once educated, the previously docile local people would demand new rights and could no longer be treated as near-slave labour.

  The Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, told Mr de Lastic that “only lunatics can indulge in such acts”. But the government has been reluctant to condemn the lunatics publicly, dismissing the attacks as “isolated incidents” Mr Vajpayee is regarded as a moderate, but his government includes ferve
nt Hindu nationalists. Some have links with the Sangh Parivar, whose members may be influential in constituencies the government needs to nurse.

  Mr de Lastic died in a car crash in Poland. The vast congregation at his funeral in Delhi last week included representatives from just about every faith practised in the country. The president and a number of government ministers paid their respects. One said Alan de Lastic was “a great saint”. For a few hours lndia experienced religious harmony.

  Estée Lauder

  Estée Lauder, queen of cosmetics, died on April 24th 2004, at a mature age

  A NUMBER of newspapers thought Estée Lauder was 97 when she died. Others averred that she was 95. Most agreed that, until a broken hip slowed her down in 1994, she did not look her age, whatever that was. If anything, the hair had grown blonder and the skin tighter. Outrageous purple outfits, topped by natty hats, reproduced something of the glow of youth.

  Subservience to hard facts, such as time and decay, seldom held Mrs Lauder back. Her own background was a study in selective self-improvement. By changing her name, acquiring that dainty little lift of an accent aigu, she suggested to customers that her background might be aristocratic and even European. French and Italian blood was hinted at, as well as a convent education. Her father, a monarchist by her telling, felt undressed in the street on Sundays without a cane and gloves.