Obit Writing: Getting to the Heart of Things

Read obits for writer Norman Mailer; Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan; philanthropists Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley; Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles, celebrity Anna Nicole Smith and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Norman Mailer, pugilist of American letters, died on November 10th, aged 84.

Mailer was brave. That was his virtue of virtues. In the 1950s he disdained "the stench of fear that has come out of every pore of American life...a collective failure of nerve." He smelled fear in the dark, rotting jungle mud where he had fought as a soldier in the Philippines, in the blood, shit and slobber of the Chicago stockyards, but also at Washington parties, among his own stupid bouts of tongue-tiedness and circumlocution, as "the hard gemlike flame of bourbon" burned through him. At such points he would be rescued by the wild man Mailer, a creature "who would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast."

Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, died on July 22nd, aged 92.

They put out a red carpet for Mohammed Zahir Shah when he returned home, after 29 years of exile, in April 2002. As he stepped into the bright sun at Kabul airport, flanked by 50 Italian bodyguards, Pushtun elders struggled to touch him and kiss his hand. He whispered that he was glad to see them. And all was as it should have been.

Yet where the red carpet ran out into the dust, things were not so well. The airport was half destroyed. Since no public announcement had been made of the king's coming, the streets beyond were empty. No flags waved. Up in the hills the royal palaces lay mostly in ruins, bombed repeatedly in the wars which, since 1979, had seen Afghanistan ravaged first by Soviet invaders, then by iconoclastic Taliban rulers and then by an American war of revenge. Zahir Shah's monument to his father, a mausoleum of blue tile and white marble, had been ransacked to its brick core and covered with graffiti. That night, servants ushered him to a four-poster bed in a richly painted room with bullet holes in the window-frames.

Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley, grandes dames of New York, died on August 13th and 20th respectively, aged 105 and 87.

The concept of richesse oblige has various dimensions. The bottom line is that those who have come into oodles of money should give some of it back; the second-to-bottom line is that they should cut a certain style while doing so. Both Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley, who died within a few days of each other, gave millions of dollars away. And their similarities ended there.

...

The arrogance of big money, Mrs Astor wrote once, "is one of the most unappealing of characteristics." Mrs Helmsley, though fun to her friends, was arrogance personified: "Rhymes with rich," was Newsweek's caption for her portrait on its cover. "We don't pay taxes," she was said to have told a housekeeper once; "only the little people pay taxes." Mrs Astor, a gentle soul, was upset when her first father-in-law, a colonel, yelled at his secretaries. Mrs Helmsley believed staff existed to be barked at, slapped and called fags if appropriate; two of them sued her for firing them because they were gay. On visits to underprivileged areas Mrs Astor, gloved and immaculate because this was what the ordinary person expected of the rich, would happily sip from a paper cup and praise the hot-dog mustard on her paper plate. At the sight of a paper-cup-carrier in any of her reception areas, Mrs Helmsley would get her doormen to throw the offender out.

Momofuku Ando, inventor of instant noodles, died on January 5th, aged 96.

For centuries men and women have turned to the east for the secret of life, health and happiness. But Momofuku Ando taught that there is no need to climb half-naked up a mountain peak, or meditate for hours on a prayer-mat, or knot one's legs round one's neck while intoning "Om" through the higher nasal passages. One should simply

Peel off lid.
Pour boiling water.
Steep for three minutes.
Stir well and serve.

Nothing was easier.

Anna Nicole Smith, a peculiarly modern celebrity, died on February 8th, aged 39.

Names were a problem for Anna Nicole Smith. She was born Vickie Lynn Hogan, but never liked it. At high school, before she was kicked out for fighting, she went by Nikki Hart. As a model for Guess jeans in 1992 she was called "Anna Nicole," and settled for that; later she acquired the title "Gold-digger," though she indignantly rebuffed it. "Vickie always wanted a different name," her aunt said. The name she really wanted, from childhood onwards, was Marilyn Monroe.

Yet all this was somewhat beside the point; because what you saw first, on meeting Ms. Smith, were the Breasts. There were only two of them, but they made a whole frontage: huge, compelling, pneumatic. They burst out of tight red dresses—preferably red—or teased among feather boas, or flanked a dizzying cleavage that plunged to tantalising depths. These were celebrated, American breasts, engineered by silicon to be as broad and bountiful as the prairie. With them, a girl from nowhere—or from Houston, Texas—could do anything. The body behind them waxed and waned, sometimes stout as a stevedore's and sometimes almost waif-like, matching the little-girl voice; but the Breasts remained. "Everything I have", Ms. Smith admitted, "is because of them."

Karlheinz Stockhausen, seeker of new sounds, died on December 5th, aged 79.

Other children had teddy bears and dolls; but Karlheinz Stockhausen had a little wooden hammer. As he toddled round the run-down family farm in the hills near Cologne, he would hit things with it to see what sound they made. Each note, he established young, sent him a different message. No plink or plunk was quite the same as any other.

Most folk at his premieres in the 1950s and 1960s might have wished he had never discovered that.