THE DEAD BEAT: LOST SOULS, LUCKY STIFFS AND THE PERVERSE PLEASURES OF OBITUARIES, by Marilyn Johnson, HarperCollins, 244 pages, $24.95.
"The Dead Beat" is that irresistible book designed for the person who skips the headlines or the sports pages and goes right to the obituaries in the daily newspaper.
Marilyn Johnson, a journalist who has written obituaries for Princess Diana, Jacqueline Onassis and Katharine Hepburn, among others, has made a meticulous search for the best obituaries she could find, and published them here — along with information about the people who wrote them.
Johnson is struck, for instance, by the fact that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, second and third presidents of the United States, died on July 4, exactly 50 years after they signed the Declaration of Independence. The obituary in The New York American said, "Emphatically may we say, with a Boston paper, had the horses and the chariot of fire descended to take up the patriarchs, it might have been more wonderful, but not more glorious. . . . It cannot all be chance."
Johnson is also impressed that Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox and Watergate counsel Sam Dash died on the same day; that the same was true of Lawrence Welk's trumpeter as well as his accordion
player; that the queen of the Netherlands and the king of the frozen french fry went out together; that the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists died the same day as the lead guitarist in the rock group Blasters.
She further notes that death does something interesting to many people — it enhances their life contributions. She points out that Hunter S. Thompson in January 2005 was "a curiosity, an old writer who had made a splash as a gonzo journalist then removed himself to a bunker in Aspen, where he fired automatic weapons for amusement."
But when he killed himself a month later, at age 67, he was suddenly hailed as "a pioneer journalist and stylistic genius who had acted as the conscience of his generation."
When musician Artie Shaw died, he was praised as "a trumpeter who named the zoot suit with the reet pleat, the reave sleeve, the ripe stripe, the stuff cuff, and the drape shape that was the stage rage during the boogie-woogie rhyme time of the early 1940s."
Johnson singles out Amy Martinez Starke of the Portland Oregonian as an especially good obit writer. About Ursula King, a woman who loved horses, Starke wrote, "It had always been her dream to get a black stallion, and she finally got one in 1987, at the end of her breeding career: a black colt, a 16-hand true-black Egyptian breed Arabian named Nite Magic. Her bed was by the window, so she could see Nite Magic in his pen, and he stood at the fence and stared at her. But she couldn't ride him."
To Johnson, the best obit is a short story, "an act of reverence, a contemplation of this life that sparked and died, but also an act of defiance, a fist waved at God or the stars. And what else, really, do we have besides the story?"
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com