In the fall of 2011 I reluctantly wrote about another friend, Richard Landon, the director of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. I wasn’t prepared to sanitize the facts of his personal life while paying tribute to his professional accomplishments. “Even in his younger years, Landon had the appearance of a man who had been up far too late the night before, doing things that were probably best forgotten,” I wrote. “His sartorial style was ramshackle, but his conversation was discursive and replete with fascinating tales of his exploits as a collector of literary treasures. He loved to smoke and drink, especially at the same time, although he rarely had a drink before noon. His capacity, which was prodigious, was exceeded only by the strength of his friendship with colleagues, competitors, collectors, patrons, researchers, and booksellers.
“On the personal front, he was uncommonly successful with women, even to the surprise of his own mother. He was married twice and had a long-time relationship with a British antiquarian bookseller that was as good as a marriage. His soulmate, however, both romantically and intellectually, was Marie Korey, the rare books librarian he met at a conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1976, and married in 1990. They shared a passion for books and a mutual appreciation that extended to completing each other’s sentences.”
This time, though, friends and family recognized the man they knew in the portrait I had drawn in the obituary. How to explain the radically different reactions five years apart? Time and gender are insufficient. It all comes down, I think, to grief and how it affects different mourners. I can empathize with their outrage, but I can’t muffle what I write in anticipation of hurt feelings. I’m writing for readers, not the family.
The trend to unfettered obituaries can be attributed to yet another Canadian, Conrad Black, back in his media baron days. In 1985 Black bought the Daily Telegraph, among other papers. His main newspaper rival was Rupert Murdoch, who had acquired the Times in 1981 from another Canadian mogul, Ken Thomson, second Lord Thomson of Fleet. Thomson had put the paper up for sale after a disastrous strike that saw the Times shut down for nearly a calendar year — from December 1978 to November 1979.
During the strike, a deeply eccentric man named Hugh Massingberd, an editor at Burke’s Peerage, the publication that keeps track of who has what title and has been awarded which gong — sort of like a manual for champion dog breeders — approached Bill Deedes, editor of the Daily Telegraph, and suggested he should hire him to improve its “cenotaph” obituaries while the Times was shut down. Massingberd’s proposal was rejected on the grounds that it was “rather bad form” to exploit the absence of “Another Newspaper” in that way. Let me tell you, those old-boy rules no longer apply in today’s cut-throat journalism.
So Massingberd stayed at Burke’s Peerage, doing valuable genealogical research for the job that would eventually make him famous. After Black appointed the war correspondent and historian Max Hastings editor of the Daily Telegraph, he in turn hired Massingberd — or “Massivesnob,” as he was called in the satirical magazine Private Eye — as obituaries editor.
From his arrival in July 1986 until he had to resign the post in 1994 after a heart attack and a quadruple bypass, Massingberd “dedicated myself to the chronicling of what people were really like through informal anecdote, description and character sketch rather than merely trot[ting] out the bald curriculum vitae,” as he explained in the introduction to The Daily Telegraph Book of Obituaries: A Celebration of Eccentric Lives. In the process, Massingberd revolutionized the obituarist’s craft.
Besides having worked at Burke’s Peerage, Massingberd was an expert on country houses and a huge fan of John Aubrey, the gossipy seventeenth-century chronicler of the rich, the capricious, and the devious whom I talked about earlier in the “Builders” chapter. Aubrey’s twentieth-century biographer and editor Anthony Powell aptly described his Brief Lives as “that extraordinary jumble of biography from which later historians have plundered so much of their picturesque detail.”
Unweighted by the cenotaph tradition so beloved by the Times, Massingberd was able to start afresh at the Daily Telegraph. He made the new obituary page much more egalitarian, eccentric, and lively. One of my favourites, from January 1987, was for a former car salesman named Charles Gordon, who had become the twelfth Marquess of Huntly on the death of his great-uncle in 1937. After the failure of his first marriage in 1965, Lord Huntly, then sixty-nine, married a nurse more than forty years his junior. When asked about his choice of a bride, he apparently replied: “I’m a very fit man. I walk my dog every day. I don’t have to wear spectacles. I still have my own teeth. Why should I marry some dried-up old bag?”
Before the advent of blogs and online newspapers, Massingberd made obituaries interactive because he encouraged his contributors to write about a subject’s less salubrious traits and escapades in a thinly veiled code that discerning readers could decipher to their private delectation. And since the obituaries were unsigned, obituarists could unsheathe their literary knives on friends, rivals, and foes without public accountability — although readers delighted in guessing who had written what.
Early on, Massingberd began gathering the best obituaries from the newspaper and publishing them in book form. That gave them a second life and a much wider readership. The series, which has carried on under Massingberd’s successors, includes A Celebration of Eccentric Lives: Rogues, Entertainers, Sports Figures and even Canada from Afar: The Telegraph Book of Canadian Obituaries, edited by David Twiston Davies, with an introduction by Conrad Black.
The same month that Massingberd arrived at the Daily Telegraph, an Oxford antiquarian bookseller named James Fergusson was hired to be the obituaries editor of an about-to-be-launched newspaper called the Independent. Fergusson took his inspiration, or so he wrote in “Last Words” in the London Library Magazine in 2010, from the Gentleman’s Magazine, which “with its monthly lists of the interesting dead” was “a democratic calendar of curious anecdotes,” and from the “timeless authority” of The Dictionary of National Biography. Founded in 1882 by Sir Leslie Stephen, father of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, the dnb was “a monument of original scholarship” and “one of the great achievements of the Victorian age.”
Fergusson insisted that all obituaries in the Independent must carry bylines. Even now the argument rages between the “accountability” of signed obituaries in the Independent and the Guardian and the “objectivity” of anonymous ones in the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Economist. Unlike Massingberd, who loved military types — “the moustaches,” as he called them — eccentrics, and scoundrels, Fergusson wanted the obscure and the overlooked on his pages: “We relished difficult academics, untranslated poets, untranslatable graffiti artists, Aboriginal dream-painters, Scotland’s greatest potato collector, Britain’s oldest working ploughman; and we led the field in commemorating a generation scythed down by the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s.” In a barely veiled swipe at Massingberd, Fergusson pointed out: “We aimed our obituaries not at the readership of clubby coevals, speakers of code, and partners in euphemism, but at a larger, younger audience.”
Besides bylines, Fergusson introduced two other innovations during his tenure (1986–2007) that are now standard on obituary pages: the use of archival and news photographs that illustrated the personality of the subject rather than the airbrushed head-and-shoulders coffin shots that were typical of the time, and a sidebar summarizing vital statistics, including birth and death dates.
The obituary upheavals of 1986 remain legendary. At the Times, acting obituaries editor John Grigg — noted historian, author of a celebrated three-volume biography of David Lloyd George, former Lord Altrincham, and failed Conservative candidate — emphatically put paid to the tradition of de mortuis nil nisi bonum in a sexually explicit beyond-the-grave condemnation of Sir Robert Helpmann, the Australian dancer, choreographer, and director who played the child-catcher in the film Chitty Chitty
Bang Bang. After Helpmann died at age seventy-seven on September 28, 1986, the Times ran an unsigned obituary that described him as “a homosexual of the proselytising kind, [who] could turn young men on the borderline his way.”
The Daily Telegraph topped that less than five months later when they published a derisive (if hilarious) obituary of Liberace, the flamboyant American pianist and entertainer, who died at sixty-seven in February 1987, after a precipitous weight loss. His long-time manager, Seymour Heller, blamed a watermelon-only diet for Liberace’s alarmingly gaunt appearance before he disappeared from public view. But other sources, including the pianist’s biographer, Darden Asbury Pyron, say he died of complications from HIV/AIDS. (Incidentally, one of the big differences between British and North American obits is cause of death. The Brits often ignore it; the Americans dwell on it. It is said that when Massingberd, who resisted putting death details in obits — including Liberace’s — was finally forced to comply, he retaliated with the tale of a man who died when his penile implant exploded.)
The Daily Telegraph obituary quotes liberally from a “particularly venomous” review of a performance Liberace gave in 1956 at the London Palladium. “He reeks with emetic language that can only make grown men long for a quiet corner, an aspidistra, a handkerchief, and the old heave-ho,” was one of the milder comments. “He is the summit of sex, the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter, and everything that he, she, and it can ever want.” After denying his homosexuality in the High Court in London — at a time when consensual sex between adult males was a crime — Liberace won damages in a libel suit in 1959.
By the time Liberace died, three decades later, the law and sexual mores had changed. Besides, Liberace and his beloved mother were no longer around to be offended, so repeating the once libellous review, although hardly respectful, was fair game. The final line of the obituary was a typically coded message to readers of the Daily Telegraph. It consisted of a one-sentence paragraph: “He was unmarried.”
Massingberd was inordinately fond of rogues. Here is a passage from the obituary for Ronnie Kray, who with his twin brother, Reggie, “formed one of the most notorious criminal partnerships of modern times.” Describing them as “criminal entrepreneurs,” the obituarist wrote: “Amateur boxing champions, they eschewed the traditional razor as ineffective and, besides employing the knife, cutlass, and broken bottle, developed an early affection for guns.”
Ronnie Kray, a “paranoid schizophrenic” and “compulsive fantasist” who loved his nickname “the Colonel” and behaved as if he “were directing a film of his own life,” was “in thrall to his twin, who was drawn to violence and saw killing as the ultimate proof of manhood.” As Kray himself once said, “We never hurt innocent people. The men we killed were other villains,” as though that made it all right. The obituary recounts a long list of blood-curdling crimes before concluding: “While in Broadmoor, Ronnie Kray married twice; neither marriage was consummated.”
Of course, obituarists were in anecdote heaven when Massingberd himself died from cancer at age sixty on Christmas Day 2007. The Guardian quoted him as saying that the best remedy for depression was the thought of singing “patriotic songs in drag before an appreciative audience.” The New York Times offered a short lexicon of his prize euphemisms, such as “gave colourful accounts of his exploits” for a habitual liar, and included quotes from pet obituaries, including the 1988 notice for London restaurateur Peter Langan. “Often he would pass out amid the cutlery before doing any damage, but occasionally he would cruise menacingly beneath the tables, biting unwary customers’ ankles.”
True to the style Massingberd had made famous, the Daily Telegraph described its “invariably strapped for cash” former obituaries editor as “a valiant trencherman.” Over the years this “tall, slim and notably handsome youth with hollowed-out cheeks” had transmogrified into an “impressively corpulent presence whose moon face lit up with Pickwickian benevolence.” Along with the biographical details about his several books on subjects ranging from country houses to the genealogy of the landed gentry to his self-effacing memoir, Daydream Believer, the obituary incorporated several oft-repeated gems from the half-dozen anthologies that Massingberd had edited, including a reference to the sixth Earl of Carnarvon as a “relentless raconteur and most uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man.”
Massingberd deserves full credit for turning obituaries into entertainment. The competition that ensued among obit editors in the quality British papers was a bonanza for readers, who delighted in comparing notes about the meanings of coy or barbed references and in guessing which anonymous friend was sending up a recently departed worthy. The best obituaries had always been informative and thought-provoking, but suddenly they had become fun, even outrageous reading, especially if it wasn’t your loved one who was being skewered.
Irreverent send-offs created a new audience: obituary groupies. American journalist Marilyn Johnson wrote a bestselling book in 2006 called The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, not as a writer of obits but as a fan. In a chapter titled “I Walk the Dead Beat,” she describes the thrill she felt when she read obituaries on two successive days of Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger, and John Fiedler, the voice of Piglet, in the Disney cartoon Winnie the Pooh, noting as she clipped that “the two had gone silent a day apart.” It reminded her of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: “the second and third presidents of the United States died in harmony on July 4, exactly fifty years after they adopted the Declaration of Independence.” I don’t know what you do with curious coincidences like these, but people have collected much stranger things than obituaries, so go for it, I say.
Bismarck supposedly said people should never watch the making of laws or of sausages. Believe me, the same is true of conferences. A few years ago I joined the Society of Professional Obituary Writers (SPOW) and went to its founding workshop in Portland, Oregon. The first time I googled the society’s acronym, I came up with “Sex Position of the Week,” but the back story of SPOW is almost as spicy; it is a tale of rivalry, power struggles, and journalistic standards that began in the late 1990s in a north Dallas bar.
Carolyn Gilbert, a high school English teacher turned consultant, was tossing back a few with a group of friends who, like her, were obit junkies, when it suddenly occurred to her that she should convene the first Great Obituary Writers’ Conference. (“I just said it as a lark,” she later told the New Yorker. “I’m not even sure what I meant — whether I meant great obituaries, great writers, or great conference.”)
The inaugural conference was held in Archer City, the hometown of Texas writer Larry McMurtry and the setting for his novel The Last Picture Show. Two years later, Gilbert expanded the group, forming the International Association of Obituarists and soliciting dues to support www.obitpage.com, a compendium of memorable obituaries, book reviews, and blurbs about upcoming conferences. She also found a new venue for the third GOWC: the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas — New Mexico, not Nevada — a restored Wild West saloon and hostelry that has provided locations for many films, including No Country for Old Men.
After that she attracted the weird, the wannabes, the professionals, and the curious to gatherings in places as diverse as Bath, England, and tiny Arthur, New York. In the early years, Australian obituary expert Nigel Starck was a mainstay, and American writer Marilyn Johnson came to conduct research for The Dead Beat. But there were also some arcane participants, such as EllynAnne Geisel, an “apron archeologist” and the author of Apronisms: Pocket Wisdom for Every Day, who talked — a lot — about the more than four hundred aprons she had collected.
Conference events featured gatherings in cemeteries, appearances by creatures dressed as the Grim Reaper, much quaffing of martinis, ritualized recitals of obit highlights, and even some transatlantic rivalry between Americans, who love to celebrate the quirks of ordinary people, and Brits, who specialize in mocking the foible
s of outlandish aristocrats. The fourth conference ended with a metaphorical drum roll. The news flash that Ronald Reagan had died of Alzheimer’s disease had obituary writers scrambling for their cellphones and laptops.
Zany and eccentric began to pale when the closing speaker at the conference in Alfred, in June 2007, was somebody Gilbert had met at the bar the night before. Tensions between professional journalists and obit junkies led to such radical notions as inviting celebrity speakers rather than oddballs, producing an agenda in advance of the gathering and sending out a call for papers. In other words, more like an academic conference than a backroom chat.
In the end, plans to hold the tenth GOWC in Toronto fell apart following a clash of wills and standards between Gilbert and the local convener, Colin Haskin, then obituaries editor of the Globe and Mail. The contretemps got so heated it actually became fodder for a column by journalist Alex Beam in the Boston Globe — a first for scribes on the dead beat.
“You must take a backseat entirely and allow us to run everything,” Haskin wrote to Gilbert. “You must give up all control, including the website, finances, attendance, fees, list of speakers,” he continued. “The tenth anniversary conference cannot proceed in the same manner as those in the past.” To which Gilbert retorted: “I am gobsmacked with your comments and innuendo . . . I am bewildered by your repeated demand for ‘control.’” As in a marriage gone sour, the two eventually began haggling over money and possessions, with Gilbert offering to sell Haskin the rights to the conference and its website for $200,000, an offer she later told Alex Beam was not “serious.” For his part, Haskin concluded that he “just didn’t trust Gilbert.”
Working the Dead Beat Page 25
