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!
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).
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 »
The December death parade
Though I cannot, in good conscience, view his 2009 deathlist until mine is officially posted on January 1, I will thank Gavin for the always welcome praise and promotion in his deathlist preface. It did get me nostalgic for the days when I’d blog about every C, D, E-lister the second they hit the morgue. (Ah, the delights of working a desk job.) Furthermore, it got me pondering what an interesting month December has been for death-watchers. Three phenomena in particular are worth noting:
