And then there’s more…
Yesterday, TVOne was airing a daylong Good Times marathon (counting down the viewer-voted top episodes and whatnot). Good Times was, of course, a spinoff of Arthur’s Maude, and the sparring scenes between Arthur and the late Esther Rolle dug right into the uncomfortable, and often unacknowledged, racial tensions boiling beneath the Friedan-Steinem feminist movement. Sadly, Rolle scenes have been uniformly omitted from Arthur’s memorial clip packages, though they contain some of both actresses’ finest (and most subversive) work. (I do love hearing the Maude theme song though, my pick for the all-time greatest TV theme: a Donny Hathaway vocal and a cheeky line about Joan of Arc’s death.)
Speaking of Maude, let us not forget that I’m banking on another of Arthur’s Maude co-stars dying this year. No, not Bill Macy (who was born a mere five days after Arthur). But Conrad Bain, number six on my deathlist. Here’s to hoping Maude stars become as hot a Reaper target as Golden Girls seem to be!
Thank you for being a goddess
I usually take pleasure in celebrity death, especially the unexpected ones. But it is with misty eyes and a sunken heart that I admit the following: Bea Arthur has died. I am still in disbelief. Yes, she was 86. Yet her passing still comes as a shock. Arthur is the second Golden Girl to die in the past year. Unlike Estelle Getty, whose demise was slow and relatively public, Arthur’s fatal battle with cancer was an amazingly well-contained secret. In retrospect, she did look alarmingly ill at her Television Hall of Fame induction this past December, as the below photos demonstrate.
One Foote in the Grave
I’ve got some Idol to watch and some Rilo Kiley to listen to, so I’ll be brief. While Ed McMahon rots his way to his 86th birthday, the dormant death game is livening up, thanks to Paul Harvey and, today, playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote, the man who adapted Harper Lee’s legendary novel into a legendary film (arguably the greatest film adaptation of a great American novel). Foote was 92 and not on my deathlist, so his death would not be particularly interesting, except for its arrival on the heels of To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan, whose death went grossly underreported back in December. Could a Harper Lee death later this year secure a novelist-screenwriter-director trifecta? I guess we’ll never really know until we climb inside her orthopedic shoes and walk around in them.
Hey, while I’m on the death game topic, I would like to point out that we’re into March now, and not one of my thirty 2009 deathlist hopefuls has died. This is the first time since 2002 that I didn’t score at least one kill in the first two months of the year: I got Nedra Volz in 2003, Jack Paar in 2004, Philip Johnson in 2005, Lou Rawls in 2006, Art Buchwald in 2007, and Earl Butz in 2008. Anybody who knows me (and pity those who don’t if they’re reading this entry) knows that the success and prosperity of my deathlist (and celebrity death in general) is inextricably linked to my personal success and prosperity. And since, from a personal contentment standpoint, 2009 is looking to be my worst year since 2006, so may I be sitting on my worst deathlist since 2006′s shameful two-name showing (Rawls and P.W. Botha, if you’re curious). I took some risks on this year’s deathlist (like omitting Swayze and Kennedy) and, like the risks I’ve taken in the somewhat more mature facets of life, I doubt they’ll pay off. (And I’ll note right here that I did initially list Ed McMahon, but in a fit of impulsivity, bumped him for Merle Haggard. Fuck.)
Course, this could be a quirk of the death game itself. Of the Top 50 names on 2009 Stiffs.com ballots, only one (former Attorney General Griffin Bell) has thus far bitten the dust. Expand that to the top 100, and you’re still only at three, adding Ricardo Montalban and Paul Harvey. In short, January and February have produced few major celebrity deaths, and even fewer predictable ones.
Hopefully, this weekend, I’ll get to what the hell happened to my 2008 wrap-up (here’s a hint: it won’t materialize in any notable fashion), if I’m not blogging about the aforementioned McMahon error or the first all-white Top 12 in American Idol history (which is looking increasingly possible).
753 celebrity death prognosticators could be wrong!
In what is sort of a Pazz & Jop for deathlisters, Stiffs.com has tallied up its most popular deathlist names for 2009. Unsurprisingly, the Kennedy-Swayze double whammy is the landslide pack-leader. Neither made my 09 list, because it’s too easy and obvious, and I frankly don’t expect both to drop this year. Maybe one of the two—probably Swayze, given recent events. If I recall correctly (Stiffs unfortunately does not archive these lists), the number one name on this list hasn’t actually died since Pope John Paul II in 2005. Hell, nobody in the 2008 Top Ten died last year, and only two of the 2009 Top Ten (and three of the Top 30) made my 2009 list. Here’s how the names on my 2009 Top Shelf list stack up against the 753 Stiffs ballots (list ranking in parentheses, followed by total ballots).
Burying another Hager…and the rag deep in your face
The TV Land Awards strike again!
I have viewed many episodes of Hee Haw in my 25 years, and I still can’t recall all that much about the Hager Twins. I know they were there, but on a stage with Junior Samples and Grandpa Jones and Buck Owens, there was nothing distinctive about them. Certainly nothing as distinctive as the fact that they died within a year of each other, which is now the case. It was announced today that Jon Hager was found dead, less than a year after his twin brother and performing partner Jim met a similar fate. For men who were only in their mid-sixties, this is an eerily close proximity. Jim Hager died of a heart attack, and Jon had reportedly been in failing health for years, failing health that his brother’s death couldn’t have helped. I can’t think of any famous twins, or even famous siblings, who died, completely separately (i.e. not in the same accident or something), within a matter of months. Even the Delany Sisters died four years apart, and they were both over 100!
The Mike Peters principle
Browsing Yahoo!’s Obituaries in the News page yesterday morning, I got all tingly with excitement, as I thought, on January 6, I had scored my deathlist kill of the year, albeit a bottom-shelver. Mike Peters had died. But alas, it was this guy, not the dude from The Alarm. I’m sure he’s huge in Connecticut, but this is why I specify who’s who in my annual deathlist entry. This Mike Peters was only a year older than the still-living Mike Peters who sang “Sixty-Eight Guns.” And in the grand tradition of Ron Carey and Robert Palmer (perhaps Michael Jackson), perhaps there’s more Mike Peters death news slated for 2009.
Who’s next?
Four men and a newbie
The history-and-death-obsessed ten-year-old I never quite outgrew will never forget the Nixon’s 1994 funeral, specifically the shot of the five living presidents grouped together, chronologically, looking all somber and mournful towards the man who lowered the bar for them. It was a moving, powerful image, the cumulation of 21 years without a presidential death, the sobering comedown after a ten-year span (1963-1973) that wiped out five presidents. While the above pic occurs under slightly more celebratory circumstances, it nonetheless evokes nostalgia for that stunning shot.
The deadly heather on the hill
Not much going on in the death game right now, aside from a four-time Commissioner Gordon, the Charlie Rose debacle, some forgotten attorney general, and another scientology casualty. So I’ll go ahead and note a shamefully overlooked (on this blog, at least) 2008 death trend, which in the New Year’s Eve/deathlist haze, completely slipped my radar. Namely, that the second and third-billed stars of the 1954 movie musical Brigadoon (an overrated and highly uneven film, to these eyes, with little value even as kitsch) both met their end last year: Van Johnson and Cyd Charisse.
New year, new deaths
I promise that, at some point, this blog will tackle issues beyond celebrity death. That point will not arrive tonight. Instead, I will announce four semi-major deaths that broke today, comprising the first four deaths of 2009. Although, and this is always a problem for deathwatchers and especially deathlisters, a couple of them technically occurred in 2008. This is a central dilemma when confronting death, especially this time of year. There is often a gap, usually a couple days, sometimes as much as two weeks, between the actual death and the announcement to the press. Factors such as time zone and area of the world can alter a death date. During this sensitive season, it can wreak havoc on maintaining a proper deathlist. Not for me though, as none of these four appear on my 2009 list:
Mystery writer Donald Westlake bailed at 75 yesterday, thus becoming a belated 2008 casualty. Bernie Hamilton, aka Captain Dobey on Starsky and Hutch, is another 2008er announced today. He died on Tuesday. While both were announced today, their death certificates and headstones will probably say 2008. Not so for college-enabling Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell and South African anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman: both count as the first legit 2009 celebrity deaths. And both are bigger names than Philip Agee and Johnny Grant, the first major deaths of the year that just closed, both occurring nearly a week into 2008.
Seriously. At some point, I’ll branch out beyond death. But the first celebrity death of the year is always an interesting distinction. It is the tenuous thread that connects such diffuse figures as Ray Walston, Shirley Chisholm, Sonny Bono and Lou Rawls.
Deathication 2009
Oh, it is on, motherfuckers!
It’s a brand new year, so let’s talk about death! Last year was my best deathlist since 2005 (if you go by names) and 2003 (if you go by points). Four of my top ten perished, including the top two (Bo Diddley and Charlton Heston, respectively), plus numbers six and seven (Earl Butz and Estelle Getty, resp.). Per usual, the lower shelves faired worse, adding only one more kill (Margaret Truman, number 4 on the middle shelf). And I had a couple of embarrassing ill-fated moves, picking Tony Martin instead of his wife, and Tom Kennedy instead of his older brother. Nevertheless, I still beat Gavin senseless, and made a respectable if unremarkable showing.
While it was not a remarkable year for my deathlist, 2008 was a pretty remarkable year for celebrity death: full of too-young holy-shit surprises (Ledger, Russert, Carlin, Mac, Hayes), and seismic names among the older folks (Newman, Heston, Buckley). Looking back, I cannot recall a year since I’ve followed the death game, not even the non-stop death feast of 2003, when so many stars died while they were still relevant. What’s surprising about 2008 is that death was not only fertile, but unpredictable: only one of stiffs.com’s top ten most popular 08 deathpool names ended up actually dying. And for such a productive year, 2008 eliminated relatively few nonagenarians. Hell, if we judged the year strictly on the 85+ crowd, it would have been mediocre, even disappointing. Instead, we’re saying farewell to an exciting, amazing year in death, and I hope 2009 continues rather than reverses this upswing. Read the rest of this entry »
