Dead plan
August 2005, Zembla
For some people, the grim reaper brings his own paparazzi. Obituary writers -- the scribes who write the first draft of history -- hide under the dark cloak just next to his scythe. Their snapshots are often brutal and accurate, lives described in all their glory and vainglory; they are immortality in print. The obituary page is where news ends and history begins. And andrew losowsky is dying to get on it
Everyone wants to be immortal. I'm not interested in being filled with formaldehyde and frozen next to the pork chops. I don't want to be famous in my lifetime: life is temporary, and fame fleeting. I want to be known in death.
There are two choices: you can live forever by not dying (the title's still to be claimed), or be remembered. And where better to be remembered than on the obituaries page - society's memory of important events and of those who caused them. A place on it is your insurance policy against the vultures of time. Death, taxes and obituaries - these, unlike diamonds, really are forever.
The only problem is, how am I going to do it? As the The New York Times' former obituaries editor Alden Williams (now deceased) once put it, "Death, the cliché assures us, is the great leveller. But it obviously levels some a great deal more than others."
The most obvious way of achieving my aim is to do something noteworthy. As Ian Brunskill, obit editor of The Times, said in an interview a few years ago: "Obituaries are usually reserved for holders of the Victoria and George Crosses, heads of state, stars of the entertainment world. Then there are the distinguished professional careers, usually, but not always, British, which we will try to cover in some way if we can: clergy, diplomats, civil servants, scientists, academics, seniors officers in the armed services."
I could sit down and write a major symphony, cure cancer, marry a royal or star in a soap opera.
But these are just means to an end, and there's no guarantee of success. This is not very encouraging. As a writer of no fixed publication, my chances of being chosen from the masses seem slim. And anyway, my ambitions don't stretch to improving humanity - I merely wish to persuade people that I did, in print.
And so to Plan B: befriend someone at national newspaper, perhaps an intern or a secretary, charm them giddy beyond all reason, and get them to slide a carefully crafted, completely false obituary into the newspaper when the time comes. If I plan my death carefully for a slow news day when the editor's on holiday and the deputy's off sick, perhaps nobody will notice until it's too late.
First, I'll need a ready-made obituary. I pick up the telephone. I need to find someone who gives good dead.
"Yes, well, we do occasionally get asked by people to write for them," replies C. Claiborne Ray to my enquiry. She's the obituary desk editor of The New York Times, and speaks in a clipped, efficient tone. "But we would never do obituaries for hire. It would be against our policy. If you want to pay, you can be mentioned in the paid death notices, though the cost is rather high. Some people's still stretch to columns and columns."
No thanks, Claiborne - newspapers don't archive the classifieds. Her reply is echoed by several obituary desks. Then, a lucky break - one kindly editor points me to the International Association of Obituarists. Their annual conference is about to take place. And not in New Mexico as it has always been until now, but in Bath, England.
Mid-June this year, in the Francis Hotel in Queen Square, Bath. I quietly slip into the small function room. I stare at the backs of the heads of around thirty journalists from around the world, the force of history gleaming in their biros. The founder of the Association, Carolyn Gilbert, begins with a cheery cry of "Hello y'all!" She is very Texan, and a fan rather than a practitioner, of the art. She started the association in 1999, after finding that no such group existed. Membership totals more than one hundred, mostly obituary writers and editors from the major newspapers.
As discussions begin on obituaries in Israel and Spain, on truculent relatives and on accidentally publishing the not-dead, and I suddenly feel a rush of inspiration. I snatch up my notepad.
Andrew Losowsky, explorer, writer, scholar and renowned lovemaker, has died at the ripe old age of [INSERT HERE] surrounded by his family, friends and a pack of self-tamed meerkats on the Caribbean island of Tsikniti. "When shall we see his like again," wailed the villagers, who had come to know him only as 'Papa'. When indeed?
I look up as a lively Australian academic talks us through some recent obit history. 1986, it seems, was a good year for British immortality. Two things happened: Hugh Massingberd became obituaries editor of the Daily Telegraph, and James Fergusson directed the page for the launch of The Independent.
Together, they helped transform the genre. Believing in wit and understatement, in the power of obituary and its egalitarianism, they wielded their word processors mercilessly, filling their pages with gangland bosses, reprobates and incredible characters from around the globe. Remarkable lives leapt daily from the page. (Ill health forced Massingberd - who is at the conference - to hand over to successors. Fergusson - who isn't here - is still in place, thought to be the world's longest-serving obits editor.)
"It's just journalism," states the Daily Telegraph's current obits editor, Andrew McKie, a flamboyant Scot with an impressive bar tab. The Telegraph's obituaries remain among the most highly regarded in the world, and McKie is rapidly becoming a legend in his own death notes. The conference is on a break and I've quietly cornered him for a chat. A Guinness is smoothly placed in front of him as he continues. "The perfect kind of writer for an obituary is a good writer. We have more facts per square inch in our section than in any other part of the paper. We have a team of three on the desk at any one time, and we work very hard at it. We also try to get writers who had previously interviewed the deceased on some other engagement. The most important thing is factual accuracy, and so far our fan mail outweighs our complaints pile by ten to one.
"We publish around a thousand obituaries every year, writing perhaps three or four times that number. And then we look at the claims of ten times more. But you never know who you'll be writing about next. God is our commissioning editor."
"But what about the living?" I enquire, as casually as I can. Could one, theoretically, if one had some obscure reason to do so, write obituaries for them?
"Actually, only sixty per cent of our time is spent researching and writing about the dead," he answers, wiping froth from his upper lip. "The rest is spent chasing the not-dead."
This is good. It turns out that the Telegraph has files on around seven thousand people who are very much alive. Some are fully-prepared obituaries, others mere cuttings of information, ready for when the time comes. The New York Times has two thousand pre-baked obituaries ready to reheat, The Times of London four and a half thousand. Every year since 1937, a journalist at The Times was paid to update the Queen Mother's stock obituary, until she died 65 years later - making it one of the most expensive collaborations of all time when it was finally allowed to run. When Bob Hope's obituary eventually appeared, most of the journalists credited with it composition had already passed away.
Losowsky met with a noble end, attempting to break his own world record for geriatric waterskiing from a helicopter while juggling flaming clubs. Relatives remarked that this was how he would have wanted to go.
My notebook at the conference fills with facts. The word 'obituary' comes from the Latin obitus, 'a going to'. The first English obituary as we know it appeared in The Newes in 1663. The art remains principally (though not exclusively) an Anglo-Saxon one. It's more of a first-world concern - countries with high death rates are less likely to see the appeal of a page dedicated to the eccentricities of the fallen. The Spanish word for obituary is necrológica. American newspapers have more paid-for death notices and feature more local personalities. There's one obituary writer in the whole of Israel. One man writes obituaries for every person executed in Texas, and then puts them on his website. Toronto's Globe and Mail spends a long time choosing its pictures.
Early obituaries went into some detail not just about the manner of death ("burst a blood vessel pulling on a new boot" -- Gentleman's Magazine circa 1770), but also the condition of the posthumous body ("no putrefaction, in a good state"). Traditionally, as in Hollywood, gore is dropped in times of war or disaster. These days, manner of death tends to be glossed over unless relevant; sometimes it becomes the reason for the obit itself, as with the man who died when his early-stage penile implant imploded. A well-known financier's obit in the Telegraph intriguingly read "shot dead while wearing a rubber suit."
For the better part of thirty years, Losowsky had been unknown in the world, until his discovery of the lost city of Ug, then revived its lost musical tradition in a single weekend. But fame had little effect, as he remained as he had been before: ambitious, convivial in the company of friends and very clear about the finer things in life.
Hugh Massingberd heads to the front and informs us that the key skills of obituary writing in Britain are carefully applied irony and "the art of understatement". In the hands of a subtle writer, a life can be damned through faint praise. He goes on to explain the hidden codes in his texts: "convivial" meant he was talking about a drunkard. Anyone who "might be judged not always to have upheld the highest ethical standards" was a dirty crook. If they "didn't suffer fools gladly" then they were unpopular, "a raconteur" was a deathly bore, "no discernible exponent of human rights" meant Nazi, and if they "relished physical contact" then they were also a sadist.
"After denying his homosexuality in the High Court in London," Massingberd wrote in one famous obituary, "Liberace won damages and an apology... He was unmarried."
Sometimes, the obits read as brutal character assassinations of the corpse. Indeed, libel is for the living, and the obits editor is generally safe.
If modesty is a fault, Losowsky should have been removed from the game. He consistently underplayed his role in the survival of the giant panda, the election of Pope Benedict XIII, and the invention of Neoprene. "Anyone would have done the same," he would often say with a wink. "Give me a dog, a stout stick and a clove of nutmeg, and I'll show you what I can really do."
Back on the internet, I find genuine encouragement. In 2002, The Independent printed the obituary of a biographer and occasional obituarist called Michael De-La-Noy. The piece was credited to the man himself. He completed it on the day he suffered his final stroke. The newspaper labelled it an auto-obituary, deeming it sufficiently well-written to include, and printed alongside it a further obituary that filled the gaps De-La-Noy had subtly left.
He's not the only one to do this - the sci-fi writer Robert Forward penned one for himself ("The intelligent pattern of protoplasm that had been Robert L Forward ceased coherent operation on September 21, 2002"), and, following the premature printing of Soho boozehound Jeffrey Bernard's obit, he wrote to the newspaper in question, asking whether he might "add a few words to your otherwise excellent obituary..."
And then there's Barbara Cartland, who, shortly before her time was up, sent a 46-page pamphlet to all of the obituary desks, wrapped in pink ribbon and entitled "How I Want To Be Remembered".
From one auto-obituarist to another, Barbara, the ribbon was a bit much.
They say you can judge a lot about a man by his bookshelf, and Losowsky was no exception. It was often remarked at his thrice-monthly parties how incredible it was that he could read so many languages. He always laughed and said that he just looked at the pictures. Everyone would laugh along with him. After a few drinks, one of his illegitimate daughters would whisper to others that this was in fact true.
"Everyone has something to uncover," Andrew McKie tells me. "I ring people who knew them, call around - the information is always out there. I look for something quirky and interesting, not just another Who's Who. I want to know if they never ate soup or if they wore pink socks every day. And why."
One of the great obituary writers, Robert McG Thomas at The New York Times, made an art of finding these eccentricities, and developed his own style to match. His own obituary appeared in 2000, the last in a book of his best work called 52 McGs. Here are some highlights:
"J. Edward Day, the wisecracking Cabinet officer who gave the nation the five-digit ZIP code, died on Tuesday. He was 82 and lived in Chevy Chase, Md 20815."
"Hal Lipset, the sleuth who helped elevate, or rather reduce, electronic surveillance to a miniature art, died on Monday."
"Can a career woman who sacrificed her leisure to keep a nation of enthralled housewives glued to their radios, survive the regimen of producing up to 90 episodes a week to live a rich and long life? No need to stay tuned or wait for a toothpaste commercial. It can now be revealed that, when she died in bed on July 5, the woman widely credited with inventing the soap opera was a 91-year-old multimillionaire."
One of the pieces that made Hugh Massingberd famous in his field began thus:
"Denisa, Lady Newborough, who has died aged 79, was many things: wire-walker, nightclub girl, nude dancer, airpilot. She only refused to be two things - a whore and a spy - 'and there were attempts to make me both,' she once wrote."
The piece goes on to say that she spoke 14 languages, designed a hat covered in half-smoked cigarettes, and that her many admirers included Kings of Spain and Hitler. "By conventional standards, her morality matched her flaming red hair but she remained as proud of one as the other," the piece ends.
Styles vary from publication to publication. Popped Clogs, a very-occasional UK-based email newsletter, includes a text message tribute with each obituary. They call it their "textimonial".
BOB HOPE_gudbI bb hOp_u wr brn in eltm_wrkd wth bng crsby_& drthy lmor_& dId in clifrnia_hw mny pEpl cn bOst th@?_nun nw
American fanzine Goodbye! (now deceased) was run along similar lines. Created by Steve Miller, now obits editor of The New York Sun, it declared that "vital statistics are for census reports and tax returns", and decided that taboos were for cowards. Miller started as a cub reporter in charge of obituaries on a local paper, and got so bored with it that he started putting in articles about friends of his that a) weren't true (he made one a patriotic scout master) and b) concerned friends of
his who weren't actually dead.
His own magazine took an equally cavalier approach. The late founder of Wendy's Restaurants, for example, was noted as making claims about his business that "were harder to swallow than his mediocre fries". This was topped by an entirely fictional obituary of Gene Kelly. Bored of the extensive coverage that the real obituaries were getting, the magazine revealed that "Kelly was killed performing what he described as 'one last mission', a perilous airborne assault on a heretofore secret Finnish centre for offensive intercontinental nuclear dental research."
In one of Bath's finest internet cafeterias, I type up my own eulogy, print it out several times and hang around after the conference has ended, hoping for an unobserved moment with an obituary editor's briefcase. As I hover on the edges, waiting for my moment, I'm reminded of an online service I'd come across in my research.
"As revealing as a videotaped colonoscopy!" promises www.fakenewspapers.com. "We insert your own, personally-written obituary into the middle-right side of a mock newspaper page with a dozen or so others. It could be inserted into a regular newspaper or just mailed to those in-laws in Ohio who you'd rather stop sending Christmas cards to."
"Customers who order this also often order C-68!", which turns out to be 'fake your own death in a car crash'.
Perhaps it'll be the nearest I get. No briefcases are left unattended, and everyone is listening to Uri, Israel's only obituary writer, who is telling a joke that begins "The Pope and Bill Clinton die and go to heaven..."
I leave and buy a ticket for London, printouts in hand. Soho's pubs must be filled with malleable young interns, and I intend to work my way through them until I reach my goal. I have nothing to lose, and a finely crafted immortal legacy to maintain. If I succeed, you'll probably read about it in the papers.
Ultimately he will live on in his achievements, his artwork, his invention of the Mindblower cocktail and the remarkable lawsuits that followed. We shall not, as they still chant on the beaches of Tsikniti, see his like again.
(ends)