Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Wallace, David Levine, Greta Waitz, Duke Snider, David Nelson (brother of Rick, son of
Ozzie and Harriet), George Blanda, David Carradine, David Broder (a lot of Davids, for
some reason), Jimmy Dean (the country singer and breakfast sausage maven), Peter Falk
(a.k.a. Columbo), and Marilyn Chambers (the porn star who was also the Ivory Snow
girl).
Then there's the matter of advance obits, writing about the dead while they're still
living—the future dead, as it were. We do a lot of that, too, an element of our macabre
enterprise that seems to tickle people as especially macabre, though it's a purely prag-
matic thing. Let's say Jesse Jackson or Barbra Streisand dies in the middle of the after-
noon one day; you just can't research and write a thorough obit for someone like that in
time for the next day's paper. (Actually, you need to be faster than ever now; word of the
deaths of well-known people finds its way to the web before it gets to the funeral home.)
The nightmare that my boss, the obits editor Bill McDonald, lives with is the sudden
and unexpected demise of someone famous and accomplished—think Michael Jackson
or Tim Russert—who isn't in our advance file. So he's become a mortality troubleshooter,
keeping close tabs on the waning lives of celebrities in dozens of wide-ranging fields
and assigning writers to their not-yet-complete life stories. In a way, Bill is journalism's
equivalent of an actuary, though he'd be the first to tell you that there's no real science
involved, and there's no formula for deciding when to assign an advance. It's just guess-
work. Frances Reid, a ninety-five-year-old soap opera actress, actually died while I was
working on her advance—good call, Bill!—but I've written about thirty others that are
just sitting there waiting for the moment they're released from journalistic limbo: Yogi
Stritch, and Russell Johnson, who played the Professor on
Gilligan's Island
, are among
them. The
Times
doesn't like to be public about the names, but really, what's the big
secret? Like these people don't know they're going to die? I don't even see the problem
with showing people their obits. Let them request changes, insist on them, even. Gener-
ally that's anathema in journalism, but in this case it'll make them feel better, and how
are they going to know when it turns out you've ignored them? (I'm joking.)
Anyway, we've got advances on hand that are five, ten, even fifteen years old and that
are going to need rewriting or at least updating when the time comes, and every now
and then we print one posthumously, where the writer died before the subject did. Mel
Gussow on Elizabeth Taylor, for instance, just a few months ago. (This is nothing I aspire
to, just to be clear.)
How healthy it is to think about death in this quotidian way—as an unexceptional
reality for someone or other, and therefore nothing to be too glum or concerned
about—I'm uncertain. Every so often it has happened that, as a reporter, I'd met the sub-
