Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  What he brought to Club Med was a seemingly boundless energy. Chain-smoking kept him going on 15-hour working days. His enthusiasm for making Club Med “the laboratory of the modern holiday” was its driving force. He was skilful at getting countries to surrender their finest beaches for new resorts in return for electricity and other infrastructure, and persuading bankers to finance them. He made the brand famous. According to a survey, 78% of Americans had heard of Club Med, and in Europe an astonishing 88%. He brought quality to the much-derided development of “mass tourism”.

  He was less at ease when asked by his critics about the morality of planting self-contained expensive “pleasure domes” in poor countries where the visitors never ventured out, not even to a local restaurant. When some wanted to see local ceremonies Mr Trigano would bring in actors to stage them. He believed his duty was to protect his gentils membres from possible local hostility, but for them it was not quite the same as seeing the country. A guest at even an ordinary local hotel might well feel more of a sense of adventure.

  It may be that Mr Trigano eventually became bored with tourism. He was captivated by new developments in technology. Years ago, when computers were still a novelty, he installed them in some of his holiday villages, to the surprise of guests who still believed that Club Med meant the simple life. Mr Trigano claimed, not wholly convincingly, that the distinction between work and leisure was breaking down. He personally rarely took

  a holiday. He passed his enthusiasm for new technology to François Mitterrand. Back in the 1980s the French president got computers into every school in the country.

  After a revolt by shareholders of Club Med in 1997 Mr Trigano and his son Serge, who had become chief executive, stood down from management. Philippe Bourgignon, who had revived Disney’s sickly theme park near Paris, took over, with a promise to return Club Med to health. After all the problems there would be a happy ending. Spoken like a Disney.

  Pierre Trudeau

  Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau died on September 28th 2000, aged 80

  Reminiscing about his early life, Pierre Trudeau told of exploring in southern Iraq where, so it is believed, civilisation began. Three rather uncivilised Arabs waylaid him and demanded money. He pointed to his torn shirt and pleaded for money from them. They were startled at the reversal of roles; and were angered when he seized a dagger from one man’s belt, pretending to examine it. As they began to haul him away, “I recited poetry, performed drama, started a speech.” The robbers “feared madness”, Mr Trudeau said, “and beat an anxious retreat.”

  For many Canadians, the story, although perhaps embellished in the telling, summed up their view of him: his daring, the power of his oratory, his originality in dealing with a problem. As the Arabs had soon decided, and the Canadians came to learn, he was an original. There was nothing more original than the simple facts of his political career. He became a member of parliament in 1965 and three years later he was prime minister.

  He had some luck. More than half of Canada’s population was under 30. In the 1960s, looking cool and toying with a red rose were political assets lacking in Mr Trudeau’s rivals. Gays commended his argument for decriminalising homosexuality, that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation”. The 14 previous Canadian prime ministers had been worthy rather than hip. One of them criticised him publicly for wearing sandals in parliament. Commentators spoke of Trudeaumania, just as the pop world went dizzy with Beatlemania.

  Even so, to rise so swiftly to the top job and then to keep it almost continuously for nearly 16 years required more than luck. Neither can his success be explained by saying he was an able politician. Aiming for “a just society”, however sincerely expressed, is hardly original. Pierre Trudeau “overflowed his office”, a commentator said. Whether he was arguing a case with passion, kissing beautiful women or canoeing some remote river, he was daring Canadians to be venturesome, to shed caution.

  He was a rich man’s son. His father owned a chain of petrol stations, and much else. Pierre was brought up fluent in both English and French, a big asset for a politician in bilingual Canada. But politics lay in the distant future. The Trudeau who became a visionary in his own country and a performer on the world stage seems to have been parochial as a young man. He dismissed the second world war as a squabble between the big powers, although he later regretted “missing one of the major events of the century”. He gained a law degree and had a spell at Harvard. He travelled to Europe and to exotic places, such as southern Iraq. With his mind seemingly broadened, he returned to Canada appalled at the narrow nationalism in his native French-speaking Quebec, and the authoritarianism of the province’s government.

  It was Mr Trudeau’s belief in a one-nation Canada, rejecting Quebec separatism, that persuaded him to give up a career as a lawyer and enter Parliament. In 1970, two years after he became prime minister, Quebec separatists kidnapped

  a British diplomat and a Canadian politician, who was later found murdered. Mr Trudeau put tanks on the streets of Montreal to counter what seemed to be an insurrection. His reputation as a champion of civil liberties suffered, but no one doubted where he stood about keeping Canada unified. His view prevailed in subsequent referendums over the status of Quebec. He towered above the nationalists with speeches that drowned their bid for independence. Keeping the country together was among his most important achievements, although even now the separatists are far from extinct.

  But a catalogue of his domestic reforms, however important to Canadians, would do little to explain why Pierre Trudeau was seen as an exciting politician by the world at large. It can’t just have been the gossip stuff, although his marriage, at 51, to a 22-year-old brightened a million televisionscreens. His admirers shared his agony when she humiliated him by becoming a rock groupie; and a worse agony when one of his three sons died in an avalanche. His foreign policy adventures interested a specialised audience. He made friends with Fidel Castro, opposed the Vietnam war, sniped at NATO, and generally upset the United States. Living next door, he said, was like “sleeping with an elephant”, affected by “every twitch and grunt”.

  What Mr Trudeau mostly gave to a grateful world was a certain style, all the more surprising coming from a Canadian, a species given to understatement. Canadians are urged by their present prime minister, Jean Chrétien, to be proud that the United Nations puts their country at the top of its “human development index”, based on a mix of statistics such as adult literacy, life expectancy and purchasing power. “Canada,” says Mr Chrétien, “is the best place in the world to live.” Perhaps it is. But pride in being Canadian arose less artificially in the nearly 16 years of the Trudeau government, and from the confidence and vitality Canada’s most unconventional prime minister spread about him.

  Galina Ulanova

  Galina Sergeyevna Ulanova, a Bolshoi legend, died on March 21st 1998, aged 88

  In his eulogy of Galina Ulanova, President Yeltsin said she had been a “symbol of conscience” for Russians. It is understandable that the head of state would wish to suggest that the Stalin period was redeemed a little by those with a conscience. And there were indeed a remarkable number of Russians who demonstrably stayed true to their beliefs despite the shadow of the gulag and judicial murder. Miss Ulanova does not appear to have been among this company. She was, though perhaps innocently, a redeemer of Stalinism.

  Important foreign visitors to Moscow would be offered a special treat: a good seat at the Bolshoi, where Galina Ulanova, the prima ballerina, was performing, perhaps in Swan Lake. As Miss Ulanova floated on to the stage to Tchaikovsky’s syrupy music, any misgivings the visitor might have felt about the regime would perhaps be appeased, at least for a time. Whatever you might say about communism, you had to give it full marks for culture, did you not? Would the visitor care to come back-stage after the performance? Miss Ulanova has always admired your country.

  The state was suitably grateful. Miss Ulanova was named a Hero of Socialist Labo
ur (twice) and received the Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s highest honour. She gained the Stalin Prize on four occasions. Her tours abroad took on the appearances of state visits. Ecstatic reviews were expected, and when a New York writer made a minor criticism of one of her performances, Pravda accused him and his newspaper of seeking to continue the cold war. She had an impregnable escort of minders, but there was never any suggestion that she would run away. In 1956 the aircraft bringing the Bolshoi troupe to Britain was diverted from Heathrow to an RAF station because of fog. Despite assurances from her minders that the capitalists were not trying to kidnap her, Miss Ulanova refused to leave the aircraft until she had received permission from high up in Moscow.

  For her devoted admirers it was enough that Galina Ulanova was among the greatest dancers of classical ballet this century. She had brilliantly sustained a tradition from the tsarist days, when Russian ballet became unequalled in the world. Her mother was a dancer, her father a choreographer, and as a child she was placed in a ballet school. Miss Ulanova was seven at the time of the Russian revolution. As she grew into adolescence, she, like many young people, was excited by what seemed the promise of a modern, vibrant Russia. The aristocracy was finished. “Our audiences,” she was to say later, “are ordinary people.” In 1928 she joined Leningrad’s Mariinsky Theatre, where her mother had danced, and which was later to be called the Kirov (after Sergei Kirov, a popular communist leader much mourned by Stalin, but always thought to have been murdered on his orders).

  Miss Ulanova had rather a stocky figure, but such was her talent that on stage she seemed to be transformed. “As soon as she dances, a metamorphosis takes place,” said a critic. “With each part she has a different body, a new personality.” So in Giselle, her most famous role, she makes an idiotic

  story about a peasant girl who turns into a ghost seem entirely true.

  In 1944, on Stalin’s orders, she was brought to Moscow and to the Bolshoi. Although Leningrad was where the revolution started, Stalin never cared for it. He saw it as a rebellious city. In his great purges of the 1930s, members of the Leningrad party suffered most. Rebellion was in fact present in the Kirov, although it did not become evident until after Stalin’s death in 1953, with the gradual easing of repression in the Soviet Union.

  Two of the Kirov’s greatest stars defected to the west, Rudolf Nureyev in 1961 and Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974. Along with other discontents, they had become bored with the old ways. WhileSoviet ballet persisted, if brilliantly, with classical dance, in Europe and America dancers were finding new ways to tell stories, or even no stories at all, just abstractions, with new dance movements and modern music. In the Soviet Union experimental works by Shostakovich and Prokofiev were suppressed. Stalin seems to have liked only pretty music. Jazz, which plays a part in much modern ballet, was considered to be decadent. Tikhon Khrennikov, Stalin’s musical controller and one of his most abject acolytes, now aged 84, recalls that “nobody could say no to Stalin”. He draws a finger across his neck.

  As for Miss Ulanova, she was getting rapturous applause into middle age. But at 50 she gave up public dancing and spent much of the rest of her life teaching. The Bolshoi she leaves is in a poor way. Ballet is costly. In the Soviet days, a former Bolshoi manager recalled, there was unlimited cheap labour to man the workings of the theatre. If money was requested it would be available immediately. Democratic Russia’s struggling market economy has destroyed such uncommercial extravagance. The fabric of the theatre itself is crumbling. Well, you can’t have everything.

  Chiyo Uno

  Chiyo Uno, a passionate Japanese, died on June 10th 1996, aged 98

  The secret of a good life, Chiyo Uno said, is to do exactly what you want. In these enlightened days that remark does not sound particularly radical; it is no more than the sort of thing that any independent-minded woman might come out with. But Miss Uno said it in the late 1930s, in a Japan that was becoming increasingly intolerant of civilians it believed were undermining the country’s spirit in its war against China. Neither could she be dismissed contemptuously as a mere moga, or modem girl. Miss Uno had an audience. Her novel Confessions of Love, published in 1935, had been a popular success and had won the approval of intellectuals.

  Tokyo between the two world wars had similarities with Berlin. Something like the notorious nightlife of Weimar Germany existed in the ero-guro (erotic-grotesque) haunts of Japan. Miss Uno lived in a writers’ colony in Tokyo. Eventually, though, the pleasure domes gave way to the growing needs of war. In the 1940s, when Japan went to war with America and Britain, even Miss Uno abandoned her western-style dress, put on a kimono and allowed her bobbed hair to grow. Patriotism and the need to survive had by then engulfed every area of Japanese existence. But after the second world war she resumed what she called her “lust for life”.

  American ideas of individualism that arrived with the occupation forces made her feel less of an oddity. She founded a women’s magazine and wrote more books, one, triumphantly entitled “I Will Go On Living”, when she was 85. Her life story was serialised on television, and movies were made from her books. The Japanese establishment came to accept her, if not to like her, and the emperor was persuaded to name her “a person of cultural merit”.

  Was Chiyo Uno a feminist? Some American feminists might have doubts. A true feminist, in their judgment, campaigns for the social and political reforms that give women equal rights with men. Shidzue Kato, a Japanese woman who was jailed in 1937 for subversion and later became the country’s first female member of parliament, would be closer to their model. Miss Uno was not a politician, although she wrote what she called a “charter”. It proclaimed that a woman should have economic and “emotional” independence, two ideals that any feminist would approve of. But, more important, perhaps, she set an example, a wild and enviable one for the millions of Japanese women brought up to believe that their first duty is to serve men; a bad and irresponsible example in the eyes of Japanese husbands and fathers.

  Chiyo Uno had an early experience of what it meant to be brought up in a rigidly traditionalist society. While in her teens she was forced into an arranged marriage with a cousin. It lasted ten days. She was later married to Takeo Kitahara, a novelist. But it was her love affairs outside marriage that fascinated her public. Like Jean Rhys (1894−1979) and Anaïs Nin (1903−77) in Europe, she wrote of sex with candour and style.

  Her most famous affair was with Seiji Togo, a painter. She went to see him, she wrote, after reading that he had tried to commit suicide with his mistress, an admiral’s daughter. She thought he would make a character in a novel. The painter had a bloodstained bandage on his neck where he had tried to cut his throat. “It got me,” Miss Uno recalled. She moved in with him the same day. They lived together for five years, but she eventually decided that he was an idiot rather than a hero. His attempt to kill himself is fictionalised in the novel “Confessions of Love”. Chiyo Uno’s story may be the only humorous account in literature of a bungled suicide.

  This is a passage from the story: “When I decided to use the scalpels I had bought some popular medical books to make sure I did everything correctly. I was under the impression that I knew precisely where the artery was, but since I had been drinking to stir up my circulation I assumed that I only had to thrust the scalpel in where the blood was strong. But the place where the blood vessel was exposed and the blood pulsing was not the real carotid artery. The real artery, I was dumbfounded to discover later, was about an inch further in.” [1]

  Some critics, while admiring Miss Uno’s writing, frowned on an irreverent account of an attempted suicide. In Japan there is a culture of death. Yukio Mishima, a novelist who died in 1970, is respected, not so much these days for his writing, but because he committed ritual suicide. Television programmes about wartime

  suicide pilots compare them to cherry blossoms, beautiful but soon to die. Miss Uno would have none of this. Male fantasy, she said. “All deaths before the age of 100 are accident
al,” she said, “caused by carelessness or thoughtlessness.” Chiyo Uno died 18 months short of her century, but close enough to have made her point.

  1. “Confessions of Love”, by Chiyo Uno, translated by Phyllis Birnbaum. Peter Owen, 1990.

  Leo Valiani

  Leo Valiani, a maker of modern Italy, died on September 18th 1999, aged 90

  On the evening of April 25th 1945, Leo Valiani gave the order that Benito Mussolini should be killed. It was finito, he said later. In 1943 Italy had surrendered to the Allies, but Germany had taken control of the north of the country, and had set up a separate state with Mussolini as its leader. Now the Allies were advancing rapidly northwards and much of Mussolini’s “state” was controlled by the Italian resistance.

  On this April evening, Mussolini met resistance leaders on neutral ground, the archbishop’s palace in Milan. Mussolini wanted an agreement that would protect his followers and their families. Mr Valiani said that Mussolini was in no position to make terms, only to surrender, and the meeting would last one hour only. An angry Mussolini stormed out of the palace. Shortly afterwards he was shot dead while on his way to Switzerland.

  Accounts of Mussolini’s end are varied. In some stories, the resistance leaders prepared a death warrant signed by Mr Valiani and the sentence was duly carried out on the fleeing Mussolini. This would have given his execution a façade of legitimacy, but little that was lawful was happening in northern Italy in the last days of the second world war. What is clear is that, whether or not there was a formal death sentence, Mr Valiani brushed aside any talk among the resistance for clemency and insisted that Mussolini, having refused to surrender, should be executed without a trial. “Let’s end it,” he said.