Why Farrah's farewell was dead unlucky

Published on Sunday 5 July 2009 21:56

FARRAH Fawcett was not a great actress. But she had an impact on popular culture out of all proportion to her acting ability. Posters of her sold in the millions.

She set the fashion for "big hair". And feminists and cultural historians now argue that she helped free female TV characters from the confines of wife, mother, girlfriend and secretary. She was no Meryl Streep, but she could get her lines right and deliver them with some sense of timing.

Her timing went right off at the end, however, when she died on the same day as Michael Jackson. "You'd figure the tributes and obituaries would flood the airwaves and front pages," wrote one US columnist. "Six hours and the newspapers' third section was all she got."

As a film journalist, I write a lot of obituaries. I can go weeks without writing any then two stars will die on the same day. It happened again last week when Mollie Sugden and Karl Malden both died on Wednesday.

Mollie Sugden was an almost iconic figure. As Mrs Slocombe, the pussy-obsessed sales assistant on Are You Being Served?, she was a national treasure, though it would be hard to argue that she impacted on western culture.

But she was probably better known to the average Briton than Karl Malden. He was not an icon, nor even, in the strict sense of the word, a star. But he and Marlon Brando pretty much invented modern screen acting in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront.

How does one weigh an internationally significant, Oscar-winning heavyweight against a post-modern totem of British kitsch? You pays your money, you takes your choice. It was a trickier choice than Jackson v Fawcett and some papers held one or other obituary over till the next day.

Obituary-writing is not an area of journalism that gets written about or even talked about much. It lacks the buzz of investigative reporting and bringing down a government, or the glamour of interviewing living stars.

When I tell people at social gatherings that I am a film journalist it is a real conversation-starter, because everyone knows so much about films and film stars. When I tell them I write obituaries, it has exactly the same effect because everyone knows so little about the processes involved.

In an Internet Q&A the New York Times obituary writer Bruce Weber wrote: "Readers (some of them) try to figure out what we have judged to be the relative importance of obituary subjects by the length of the obituary and its placement on the page, but to reach conclusions based on those two elements is to operate on incomplete information. Other factors: How much space is available on the page that day? How much new information about the subject is revealed in the obituary? How interesting is it to read?"

And he might well have added: who else has died? The deaths of Jackson and Fawcett have prompted some debate in the rarefied world of obituaries.

Some obituaries are written in advance, some are even drafted out by the subjects themselves. And it would be great if we could plan out in advance when to use them, with a careful balance of big ones and little ones, showbiz and politics, but death does not normally keep a schedule.

A relatively obscure politician or film actor might be the lead obituary on a quiet day, while on another day a more important figure might have to play second fiddle to someone who has shaped the world.

Timing affects not just the subject's place on the obits page and their presence or otherwise on the front page, but also the public perception of their death and perhaps even their life.

Mother Teresa died the day before Princess Diana's funeral. It was the day the Queen talked about her daughter-in-law on live TV, and consequently Mother Teresa got a lot less coverage than she would otherwise have got.

History is full of famous people who died on the same day. Shakespeare and Cervantes both died on April 23, 1616. In more recent times, writers Aldous Huxley and CS Lewis died on the same day in 1963. That was bad enough, but it was also the day JFK was shot.

I was amused to read an Internet article pointing out that the Big Bopper died on the same day as Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens and so his death was overshadowed by them. But that hardly counts, as they died in the same plane crash and all three deaths were covered together in news stories.

In my own field, Orson Welles and Yul Brynner died on the same day, so did Dudley Moore and Billy Wilder and the two great European directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman.

The most interesting double death comes from US history. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams worked on the Declaration of Independence together. However, they later became bitter rivals. Adams was the second president of the US, Jefferson the third. They both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4 1826.

But were they trying to outlast each other? Adams's final words were reputedly "Thomas Jefferson survives". Although Adams did not know it, Jefferson had died a few hours earlier. But in dying almost simultaneously they actually managed to create something that became a story in itself – it was even mentioned on the hit political drama series The West Wing.

Only a politician could spin his own death quite as effectively as that.

&#149 Brian Pendreigh is a freelance film journalist, author and consultant.