Death Beat: the Art of Advanced Obituaries
By Adam Bernstein Posted Tue, Feb 12 2008
As he was dying from lung cancer, Joseph Yeardley “J.Y.” Smith grabbed my shoulder and drew me close to his hospice bed. He was a former Marine – Korean War vintage – and his voice quivered in near anger. I leaned in. “Don't let them screw with my Castro obituary,” he said.
This was a dying man's wish when the dying man was an obituary writer. Smith, who died in January 2006, is getting more front-page stories in The Washington Post than some writers still on the payroll. Smith's byline is likely to appear for years to come because of his passion for writing advance obituaries, prepared stories that are essential if a newspaper is going to do justice to a complicated life.
In the last year, Smith had front-page bylines for Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet and U.S. President Gerald R. Ford. The editors added a tagline at the end of his stories noting Smith's own death.
The New York Times now offers the same courtesy to alert readers, notably after the arts critic Vincent Canby, who died in 2000, appeared to resurrect himself in 2003 and file the obituary for comic entertainer Bob Hope.
Some British newspapers avoid the ghoulish issue altogether by Never using bylines on obits. Of course, that practice also masks the fact that sometimes a handful of staff writers are behind an obit if the subject lives long enough to warrant revision.
“The best earner on Fleet Street for years was the Queen Mother
obituary update,” said Nigel Starck, the author “Life After Death,” a book exploring how the obituary developed in Great Britain, the United States and Australia. “She lived to be 101.”
The nearest equivalent in the United States is arguably the South
Carolina newspaper deathwatch for Sen. J. Strom Thurmond, the onetime Dixiecrat-turned-Democrat-turned Republican, who died at 100 in 2003. Thurmond was reputed to have outlived several writers assigned to his obituary and joked as late as 1999 that any advancer was a “waste of effort because I am going to live for a long time.”
If nothing else, Thurmond proved the obit writers' joke: The
minute you are armed with an advancer, you automatically bestow another decade of life on the subject.
The Washington Post, where I am deputy to the obituaries editor, has more than 100 advance obituaries prepared for major figures. Other newspapers claim to have thousands in various states of readiness. Most large dailies, including the Post, must spend a great deal of time weighing who needs an advance obituary. Limited staff and the strong news flow on any given day make it nearly impossible for a paper to be ready every time a big news death occurs.
The quality British newspapers – the Times of London, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent – are particularly effective about getting their far-flung correspondents or freelancers to contribute to the obituary page in advance. Writing for their pages is far more about prestige than income – a sign of being a recognized authority on a topic.
The Times of London's advance file dated at least to the mid-19th century, when editor John Thadeus Delane insisted on a 48,000-word obituary for the first Duke of Wellington. Delane was fond of explaining the urgency of an advance file by saying, “Wellington's death will be the only topic.”
New York Times reporter Alden Whitman (1913-1990), who specialized in the advance obit, credits then-managing editor Clifton Daniel for starting a tradition of interviewing subjects specifically for their advance obits.
“We interview people about everything else, why shouldn't we
interview them for their obituaries,” Daniel asked, according to Whitman's book of profiles “Come to Judgment.”
By far the most exciting recent development in advance obituaries has come from the New York Times. Last year, the paper learned to harness video technology and came up with a celebrated taped interview of the dying syndicated humor columnist Art Buchwald. When Buchwald died in January, viewers of the Times's Web site could call up a video that began with the humorist announcing with apparent glee: “Hi, I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died!”
Inspired by the Times, the Miami Herald recently decided to solicit what its obit writer, Elinor J. Brecher, calls “pre-bits” video and audio recollections also made in advance of one's death. Brecher said she has three commitments from widely known Floridians, including a former U.S. congressman, that would involve sit-down interviews like the Times conducted with Buchwald. The hope is the subjects, knowing the video will not be seen until after their deaths, will reveal information they otherwise would not dare in life.
Starck, the obituary historian, defines a news obituary as a notice of death that contains an appraisal of a life. He said the first news obituary he could document appeared in the 1620s in a British publication called the True Relation. Its subject was Capt. Andrew Shilling of the East India Co., who was killed in combat against the Portuguese.
By the mid-19th century, the obituary form became well-established and had “quite a bit of clout with some prestige attached to it,” Starck said. Establishment newspapers contained richly lyrical, often ornate obituaries about major figures of the day, from Queen Victoria of England to American bard Walt Whitman.
By the 1920s, a preference emerged for rat-a-tat newspaper prose that effectively buried the eloquent obituary form at most dailies. And as a result, Starck said, obituaries attracted a reputation as a practice ground for freshman journalists and punishment for the newsroom's drunks.
“The whole image of the paper changed to a quick, ephemeral fix, and the languid-style obit did not seem to suit that,” he said. “So the prestige of the job went to pot until the obit revival of the 1980s.”
He was referring to a series of mischievous-minded London obituary editors – among them, James Ferguson of the new Independent newspaper and Hugh Massingberd of the Daily Telegraph. They ditched the starchy emphasis on burying leaders in politics, law and military and included more dead pop culture figures such as rock stars and Hollywood starlets. They also urged a witty, anecdotal approach that did not shy from noting a subject's alcoholism, sexual eccentricities or inter-personal skills that veered to the fascist.
Such flamboyant and often startling stories have developed a fan base among many writers and editors in the United States. It certainly had an influence on how I approach obituaries and makes for more human portraits of those who deserve advance treatment.
Consider the case of Edward von Kloberg III, a flamboyant lobbyist and public relations man for dictators and despots, among them Saddam Hussein of Iraq; Samuel K. Doe of Liberia; Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania; Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Zaire; and, in a figurative coup of his own, the man who overthrew Mobutu and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Kloberg, 63, who killed himself in May 2005, called me a few months earlier to have lunch and discuss his life for an obituary. He was ailing with cancer, diabetes and the inner-ear condition known as Meniere's disease. He wanted me to get his legacy right.
The only ground rule, I said, was that I did not care to hear how
“misunderstood” he was, that there was no point in wasting time if he was just trying to spin me. So we spent a pleasant lunch and many phone calls afterward in which he admitted that ethical behavior had rarely been a priority during his career. He said he was “utterly fascinated” by Hussein and returned to Capitol Hill to “propagandize why they were gassing the Kurds.” The reason given, he said, was to prevent Arab fundamentalism from spreading in the Persian Gulf.
“That's pretty awful, isn't it?” he said in an interview. “That's what you had to do for the overall point.”
Most of the time, time-pressured obit writers do not have the luxury of speaking to their subjects. That does not stop image-conscious people from seeking out the obit editors.
Ian Brunskill, obituaries editor of the Times of London, said he is often approached at parties with “with varying degrees of subtlety. It's a bit like admitting you're a doctor or lawyer at a party. You get a catalogue of medical or legal complaints. You clearly get people angling.”
He said prolific romance novelist Barbara Cartland sent in two advance obituaries she had prepared, the second an enormous revision just before her death ay 98 in 2000. He used neither, and instead opted for a critical look at her life and career. The first paragraph noted the “dashing vulgarity” of her prose.
As for talking to the subjects themselves, Brunskill said: “I tend not to encourage it, though I leave it to the author. What's the effect likely to be? Either the subject will be horrified or delighted and tell you stories you have to spend hours checking. It's a minefield.”
Brunskill regularly reviews his advance file, which includes one of
President George W. Bush that has undergone two major revisions and a few smaller ones as political conditions change.
That sense of capturing the prevailing spirit of the person is the great challenge for obituary writers, as it is for any journalist.
“It's a definitive summing up,” Brunskill said, “and within the constraints of the journalism, an attempt to freeze an authoritative journalistic narrative that will endure.”