HOST: Death may not be proud, to cop a line, but few important folks are too proud that they don't want an obit in "The New York Times"...or on "All Things Considered." Both the "Times" and National Public Radio take obits seriously. While usually buried in the back pages and last minutes, these are tributes, records of a life. Other papers and broadcasters tend to take the words of others, the press releases and wire service accounts. But NPR and "The New York Times" fine tune the obit into art. Karen Michel reports.
Karen Michel1: There are death notices, and there are obits. Anyone can have a death notice, as long as there's someone alive to pay for it. Very few people rate an obit. It used to be that heads of state, college presidents, and clerics.--.all presumably male.--.would get in the paper. Not any more. Now, you've got to have done something special -- especially to get into one of the coveted few slots in "The New York Times." For the past 10 months, Claiborne Ray has been the coordinator of the obits.
Claiborne Ray: Today I have Two really good ones: I have the dead Nobel prize winner and the dead advertising executive. It's a fantastic way to spend the day. You just never know what you're going to get.
Karen Michel: That advertising exec was the guy who came up with the super-fast-talking character who haunted the TV commercials for some time. Who knew who was the guy behind the idea that drove us nuts and got us shopping? For that matter, before reading her obit, who knew that Sylvia Weinberger was the queen of chopped liver?
Bob Thomas: I invented a word in this.
Bob Thomas: Sylvia Weinberger, who used a sprinkling of matzoh meal, a pinch of salt, and a dollop of schmaltzmanship to turn chopped liver into a commercial success, died at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale. She was 89 and had lived in Boca Raton.
Karen Michel: Bob Thomas, whose byline is Robert McG Thomas, Jr., writes obits full time. Over the past three or four years, he's written hundreds. And he's getting tired of it. After all, there's no slow news day for him. People are always dying. Occasionally, Thomas writes about the living: It's called doing an advance obit.
Bob Thomas: Did Ayatollah Khomeni's obit three times and the sonofabitch wouldn't die.
Karen Michel: "The New York Times" has about 500 advance obits on file...on people ranging from the Queen Mother to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and people you may have thought were already dead, like Bob Hope. Obit coordinator Claiborne Ray finds herself always trying to anticipate death.
Claiborne Ray: I remember seeing Rex Harrison in a play about six months before he died and I was there with my pediatrician , an older woman herself, and she took one look at Rex Harison and said, "Oh, I don't like his color; he'll be dead in six months.
Karen Michel: Several floors above Pell's cubicle, Marvin Siegel, who calls himself the overseer of the obits, makes sure the advances get assigned and certain standards are met. His office and holds dozens of bulging beige file folders of clippings for each person who's not dead yet and who the "Times" will tell us about when they do go. Siegel, editor of "The Last Word: 'The New York Times' Book of Obituaries and Farewells," claims there's nothing ghoulish about writing obits and no real mystery, or art, to doing them well.
Marvin Siegel: It's very little about death and much more about life; you're really writing about a life, you're evoking a time and place and series of accomplishments or failures, so the person is very much alive when you're writing and when reporting and when reading. Death, in a odd way, is just a peg for the story.
Bob Thomas: I get alot of letters from people who say I can't believe I'm writing a fan letter to the obit writer.
Karen Michel: The fan letters come, sometimes, from people who can't believe there's humor on the obit page. In Bob Thomas's writing, there usually is.
Bob Thomas: Rudolf Walter Wanderone, the charming, slick-talking pool hustler who labored largely in obscurity until he reinvented himself in the 1960's by claiming to be Minnesota Fats, died at his home in Nashville. He was 82 or perhaps 95. With Fats, who insisted he was the prototype of the fictional character portrayed by Jackie Gleason in the movie, The Hustler, the only certainty was that you could never know for sure.
Karen Michel: At National Public Radio, the tone of the obits is different. Here there's a more emotional tone.
Karen Michel: National Public Radio, with fewer than 50 advance obits, has shelves of audio taped interviews, and stacks of muscians' cds in anticipation of the time of death and broadcast of the obit. Tom Cole, a longtime editor on the cultural desk, has both overseen and done a number of what NPR usually calls tributes or appreciations. Cole's favorite is one he did on guitarist Danny Gatton.
Tom Cole: What is the art of the obit?
Karen Michel: Tom Cole
Tom Cole: By the end we want the audience to feel that the person is as important as you felt they were. The art, to be completely crass, is to want to go through the piece and at the end leave the listner with a tear in the eye.
Karen Michel: I've done a couple of obits for NPR. Doing them does leave me crying. Sometimes it's from the pain of the phone being slammed in my ear when a friend of the still living gets irate thati asked about someone who's merely...old...or ill. Other times, the tears flow from imagining them dead. When I finish an obit for NPR, I feel as if the person has already died, and mourn them. But, when I read one of Bob Thomas's tales of a centenarian female horse racing expert chasing after much younger men, or the inventor of Kitty Litter I appreciate their life...and their chopped liver.
About a life, you're evoking a time and place and series of accomplishments or failures, so the person is very much alive when you're writing and when reporting and when reading. Death, in a odd way, is just a peg for the story.
On the Mediawith Brian Lehrer airs on Sunday at 4pm and 10pm on Radio New York, AM820.
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