Working the Dead Beat (4 page)

“Never speak ill of the dead” is an aphorism attributed to Chilon of Sparta, a sixth-century
BCE
Greek sage and civic leader who is said to have encouraged the rise of militarism in Sparta. Essentially he was saying that the dead can no longer harm the living or defend themselves against criticism, so it is better to ignore their faults and remember their virtues. That is a fine sentiment, especially as proclaimed by a politician eager to ensure his own legacy, but it doesn't apply to obituary writers. We stand apart from the family and friends of the deceased because we are journalists, not eulogists.

In my view there is no such thing as an uninteresting life, but there are plenty of badly researched and written accounts. The difference between humdrum and compelling rests in documenting weaknesses, celebrating strengths, and placing people's lives in the context of what else was happening here and abroad. (“Did they serve in the Second World War?” is a question I always ask when I look at the resumés of people born in the early decades of the twentieth century. If yes, where? If not, why? I'm not interested in ridiculing decisions made long ago but rather in seeking an understanding of how a pivotal event of the past century affected my subject.) My goal is to make my subjects breathe one more time on the page, and that means a portrait that includes shadow as well as light, or “warts and all,” as Oliver Cromwell allegedly said to court painter Sir Peter Lely back in the seventeenth century.

Nevertheless, writing about the dead means observing and sometimes even sharing the grief of those they have left to mourn, as the euphemism has it. “Dead people can't sue” may be a legal truism in most jurisdictions, but that doesn't mean the departed and their survivors don't deserve respect. An obituary writer often dwells in the slippery territory between the blunt truth and the subtle reference. Nothing is omitted, but unflattering traits aren't shouted out in neon headlines either.

Denounce the practice as burying the lede, if you will, but I think delivering the facts in a tactful way is important at a distressing and sad time. Besides, canny readers delight in deciphering the code and learning that somebody described as “restlessly romantic” was probably a chronic philanderer, or a person “who enjoyed a drink or three before dinner” was a borderline alcoholic.

There is a delicate balance between telling the truth and respecting the grief of family and friends. How much life is too much information in an obituary? That is the eternal question. I have evolved a working rule: if the information can be documented and it had a fundamental impact on my subject's life, I include it, however unseemly.

The family of entertainer Jack Duffy pleaded with me to expunge his alcoholism from my proposed obituary. I refused because it was true and had been widely reported, and he himself had spoken publicly about the binge drinking that threatened to ruin his career and end his life. A ringer for Frank Sinatra, Duffy was a skinny, sad-faced crooner who toured with Tommy Dorsey's band in the late 1940s, singing lead vocals and doing sardonic imitations of his look-a-like heartthrob. His career spanned nearly sixty years of Canadian and American radio, television, and film, including a long stint on
Party Game
, a TV variety showed based on the old parlour game charades.

While touring with the revue
Spring Thaw
in the mid-1960s, Duffy met a petite red-haired actress named Marylyn Stuart. They became a couple both professionally and romantically. By the time they were performing at Expo 67 in Montreal, Duffy was such a serious alcoholic that a doctor gave him a death sentence and told him not to marry Stuart if he truly loved her, because otherwise he would merely be saddling her with his problems. The message penetrated, and that summer, when everybody else was celebrating Canada's centennial, Duffy was drying out.

He put the cap on the bottle and kept it there until he died at age eighty-one on May 19, 2008. Duffy's sobriety was an accomplishment that said something about him as a person, and so it needed to be included in his obituary. What his family feared was a headline that blared “Former Drunk Also Sang and Acted.” In the end they were happy about the frankness of the obituary because the tough parts were presented in the context of a redeemed life.

Not everybody is as reasonable as the Duffy family. I have suffered the wrath of family and friends who feel they have the right to dictate the terms and conditions of what I write. I have learned that the most innocuous detail — at least to me — can be a trigger unleashing pent-up grief camouflaged as rage. The anger is misplaced, for I am only the messenger. It is far easier for the grief-stricken to get mad at me for allegedly speaking ill of the dead than it is for them to blame a loved one for leaving them alone and bereft.

Obituary writers constantly walk a tightrope between assessing a life and respecting the feelings of the bereaved. This is most poignant when it comes to people who “die suddenly,” as the family death notices say, from no apparent cause — the traditional euphemism for suicide. When I read those words, I always check the person's age and scan the list of charities for clues as to what really happened. I haven't written about too many suicides, but one I will always remember is the death of poet Richard Outram.

Outram had both a tragic and a transcendent life. Born in Oshawa, Ontario, on April 9, 1930, he studied at the University of Toronto under philosopher Emil Fackenheim and literary critic Northrop Frye, two illustrious scholars who greatly influenced the way Outram saw the world. After earning an honours degree in English and philosophy in 1953, he went to England, where he found work as a stagehand at the
BBC
. It was in London that he began writing poetry and where he met the Canadian artist Barbara Howard, the woman who would share his life and his artistic vocation.

They returned to Canada, married, and had a baby daughter, Sarah, who died a day after her birth, a grief that Outram expressed in several poems. He kept his day job as a stagehand until he turned sixty, consciously spending his days at physical labour and his evenings exercising his imagination and his literary sensibilities. Although Outram never achieved glory or celebrity as a poet, he had a coterie of devoted readers who admired his acute sense of the natural world, his rhyming, and the metaphysical coherence of his work. The typographical designer Allan Fleming (who created the CN and Ontario Hydro logos, among many other projects) designed and published Outram's first chapbook,
Eight Poems
.

After Howard died unexpectedly in 2002 during a routine operation, Outram was devastated. For nearly three years Outram staggered on alone. Then, on a bitterly cold winter night in January 2005, after consuming a quantity of pills and drink, he settled down on the side porch of his house in Port Hope, Ontario, and in a grand Blakean gesture allowed himself to die alone under the night sky. “The two of them fed each other beautifully and with enormous intensity. They were the closing of the couplet,” writer Barry Callaghan observed. “So, what are you going to do with a one-line couplet? He really was his work and his love for her.” Outram's suicide was a gentle but determined act of wilful hypothermia, a death that in the telling said much more about Outram as a romantic and a poet than the weasel expression “died suddenly” could possibly convey.

Suicide has always been with us, but as the population ages a new way of dying — doctor-assisted suicide or hastened death — is going to become a much more pressing issue, not only for society but for those who write about people who end their lives when and how they choose, should the state allow them to do so.

IT IS NOT
only the way we die, but how we deal with death that is changing. Uploads on social networking and video-sharing websites, streaming coverage of funerals for the ordinary person as well as for public figures, provide an emotional platform for friends, families, and even strangers to deliver heartfelt (and sometimes mawkish) messages about the departed. These sites, which can turn ordinary people into celebrities, aren't restricted to mourners. Recently I received an e-mail request from the sales manager of an entrepreneurial legacy website. He wanted me to write a story about his company, which offers people the opportunity to record virtual final messages so they can be delivered in the future to family and friends, turning the expression “voice from beyond the grave” into a dubious reality. Ghoulishness aside — and some of these sites offer maudlin deathbed scenes worthy of the fictional tales of Charles Dickens — they pose a challenge to traditional media outlets.

The Internet is the greatest boon and the trickiest pitfall for the contemporary obituary writer. It offers you anything and everything, everywhere and all the time. There are few filters unless you are searching a legitimate journalistic or scholarly site. The urge to be first with the news encourages journalists to relax standards and accept Twitter feeds as gospel without double-sourcing to ensure that the news of a celebrity's death is fact and not rumour. “Is it accurate?” is the question you have to keep asking as you wade through a swamp of information. Being first is useless if you are wrong.

If we journalists are to maintain our lead in preparing dispassionate, authoritative obituaries of recently departed notables — and by that I mean biographical essays that set a life in context, pay tribute to achievements, and account for failures and faults — then we too must embrace the new technology. But there's a huge caveat: we can't abandon traditional journalistic standards in a rush to compete with streaming funerals, mydeathspace.com, or
The Blog of Death
.

In writing about the fifty people I have selected for this book, I have tried to cover a range of occupations, achievements, locations, and aspirations. Most of all I wanted to write about individuals whose stories moved me and whose lives said something larger about the country and our collective history. The past is a different country, but if we don't know its geography we can't map our way into the future. In recounting the achievements and the vulnerabilities of my fifty subjects, I hope I have conveyed an abiding sense of their humanity.

 

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“This Is Bigger Than Bush”

I
T WAS JUST
before six p.m. on November 30, 2004. I had written an obituary of Phyllis Mailing, a mezzo-soprano and avant-garde musician. A former wife of composer R. Murray Schafer, she premiered many significant musical pieces, inspired several composers, and for decades taught aspiring vocalists at Simon Fraser University. I had filed my piece, the page had been edited, and I was thinking of slipping out of the newsroom and heading home.

My phone rang. I debated letting it go to voice mail, but something compelled me to pick up the receiver. The female voice on the other end was hoarse. “Sandra,” was all she said.

Immediately I knew two things: the voice belonged to Elsa Franklin, the long-standing producer, confidante, and publicist for Pierre Berton, and that she was calling with bad news.

“He's died, hasn't he,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied.

I was sad for her, for his family, for all of us, but what I also felt was the shock of knowing my day was only beginning, even though I had already done a full and productive shift. Fortunately I had been working on Berton's obituary and it was more or less finished — not to my satisfaction, of course, but it had a beginning and a middle and now I could write its inevitable end. But it was way past deadline and my piece on Berton was too long to fit on the obituary page.

I sent an electronic note to my section editor. He responded the way editors always do. He decided that maybe it was time to read my piece. He pulled it up on his screen and then he informed his superiors that Berton was dead.

Here is what happens when somebody significant dies: You no longer own the file. Everybody wants a piece of it because journalists are like baying hounds that have caught a whiff of fox. That's another reason to prepare in advance. Invariably you will end up jockeying for position in what amounts to an editorial scrum, but you have the advantage of reworking and updating an existing piece rather than staring frantically into a blank screen seeking inspiration.

Of course, the 24/7 news cycle of the Internet has made all of these machinations even more frenzied. Journalist Christopher Hitchens was only the latest in a long list of celebrities who fell into that category when he died of cancer of the esophagus on December 15, 2011. Prince Philip fought off the Grim Reaper late in that same month, but I can tell you that I mentally reviewed his file while I stirred the gravy for my family's Christmas turkey.

Nobody in this mortal coil can accurately predict who will be the next to die, although there are several Internet sites that do their best to shine klieg lights on ailing celebrities. Mostly I find the notion of death watches offensive, especially when they involve sound trucks and camera crews camped outside a hospital like a Greek chorus waiting for its cue to move onto centre stage.

Still, I have to do my job. So I often wish close family or friends would give me a warning when somebody is nearing the end, on the understanding that I will quietly prepare the obituary for when it is “needed,” as the euphemism has it. Otherwise, the tension ramps up and I worry even when I am on vacation — especially when I am on vacation — that one of my subjects will die before I have finished researching and writing his or her life. A couple of years ago I drove across the country with my husband; every morning I was a wreck until I had scoured the local newspaper or browsed the Web to check on the health of Nelson Mandela, one of the people on my to-do list. He's still with us.

It's easy enough to man the phone lines and collect quotes about the enormity of the loss, but that, as I've said before, makes for a reaction piece, not an obituary. I want to capture the life of my subjects, and that involves finding out where they went to school, their mother's maiden name, and who and why they married. It requires hours, even days, of research and writing.

Sometimes the timing is eerily close between drafting an obituary and a subject's death, almost as though he or she were patiently waiting for me to finish typing. For example, the call announcing the death of Beland Honderich, former publisher of the
Toronto Star
, came in one hour after I had saved and closed his file on my computer. More often, though, people die unexpectedly, or when you have set aside a half-written obituary of a living subject to work on somebody who is actually dead.

The other inevitability about death is that editors — the still mostly men who decide what goes on the front page — are only interested in the top six paragraphs of your story. The rest, or what is often called the “turn,” is left to copy editors. But the senior editors want their paws on the lede and the “nut,” the summary paragraph that gives readers the gist of your story in a nutshell. They were happy enough with my Berton lede, but there was a complication. You can't turn from the front page to another section of the paper, so either Berton had to reside in a secondary part of the paper or two pages of national and foreign news had to be dumped to accommodate the passing of Mr. Canada.

His death wasn't the only front-page contender that day. U.S. president George W. Bush was arriving from Washington for his first state visit to Canada, a visit that was scheduled to last only until the next day. Space on the front page had been reserved for the Ottawa bureau to file late accounts of Bush's dinner with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

(Of course, whatever I might have been planning to do that evening was also shelved. My friends have become used to a frenzied call or email from me cancelling lunch or dinner or the movies with the terse message “Somebody's died. I can't make it.” In the early days of my tenure on the dead beat, people often responded to this message with condolences on my loss, assuming I was in deep mourning over a sudden death in my own family.)

Warily I went to the news desk to see what nightmare awaited me and my long but incomplete obituary. As I approached, I saw seven or eight men standing in a circle in earnest conversation, weighing the merits of George W. Bush versus Pierre Berton and the next day's front page. Elsa Franklin may have called me first, but I wasn't the only one on her media list. We had an advantage, but not a big one. Suddenly the front-page editor looked up and exclaimed: “This is bigger than Bush.” There was a moment's silence as everybody looked at him. Then slowly, beginning with the editor-in-chief, several heads nodded sagely.

“Yes, it is,” I said to myself, resisting the impulse to thrust my fist into the air in triumph. “A genuine Canadian champion has died, and thank God these hard-news guys have the sense to realize that cultural history is as significant as daily politics.”

And then the work began. The obituary page was called back and poor Phyllis Mailing, the avant-garde mezzo-soprano, had to give way to the greatest popularizer of our country's history. I wrote a news piece for the front section after calling a list of people for reaction to Berton's death, and then I polished and revised my obituary while the obituary page editor designed a stand-alone two-page spread on the expanded obituary pages. By nine p.m. the copy had been ripped from my hands, final revisions made, and the Send button pushed.

THE WORD
ICON
is not hyperbolic for the ten lives, including Berton's, in this section. They have all made an outsize impact on Canadian life and culture, from Arthur Erickson's monumental designs for buildings that rise out of the landscape to Oscar Peterson's virtuosity as a jazz musician to Pierre Trudeau's political leadership in preserving national unity and transforming Canada into a modern multicultural society. They begin with the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and end with the writer Mordecai Richler. Their lives encompass the emotional depth of Maureen Forrester's singular contralto, the urban activism of Jane Jacobs, and the searing power of hockey legend Maurice “The Rocket” Richard.

The public grief for Pierre Trudeau or Rocket Richard, who both died in 2000, (or for
NDP
leader Jack Layton, who died of cancer in August 2011, only three months after achieving Official Opposition status for his party in Parliament) was overwhelming, but these men, heroes to so many, each had a ceremonial lying-in-state followed by a public funeral. People could express themselves by lining up to pay tribute, signing a condolence book, and sharing the experience collectively with other mourners. The same release occurred when Oscar Peterson's music was played on radio and television and celebrated in a free public memorial concert.

The memorials for other icons in this chapter, including Berton, Mordecai Richler, and June Callwood, were private affairs, so mourners took to print and broadcast venues to remember them and to express their grief. The reaction to Berton's death from readers was staggering. You have no idea how many people wrote in with reminiscences about Mr. Canada, including variations on his famous recipe for roasting a turkey — by basting the bird with soy sauce, of all things. People felt Berton's loss keenly for the simple reason that he had taught us to revere the past the way the Group of Seven had shown us, with their broad, impressionistic strokes, how to appreciate the rugged, untamed landscape of the Canadian Shield.

Over his lifetime, Berton's heroic narrative style gave way to a different kind of storytelling — one that is regional, multicultural, and diverse — which I think was another reason to mark his passing. With his death we were also saying goodbye to an era of cultural nationalism and a monolithic narrative about our country. The past is no longer tidy. It is now a territory claimed by women, aboriginals, immigrants from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and other places around the world. Instead of a lone voice telling a heroic story about the past, we have a social and ethnic chorus that embraces both scholars and informed enthusiasts.

If the voices have changed, so have the stories. The writers who emerged after Berton's generation — the ones such as Margaret Atwood who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, or Michael Ondaatje, who arrived in the great waves of non-European immigration in the 1960s and 1970s — tended, if they wrote about the past, to do it in fiction and poetry. Partly that was because literary writing is not constrained by national borders and markets: the imagination does not speak to a local audience.

Print has long since been eclipsed as the primary storytelling conduit from writer to audience. Network television has demanded an increased role, with dedicated programming, such as the History Channel, and institutional boosters, such as the Historica-Dominion Institute and the National History Society, collecting and championing storytelling circles, groups, and vehicles. The Internet, with Wikipedia and specialty websites, homes in on all manner of arcane subjects and events.

Even as more people are telling their personal and collective stories, the tools that are available for researching the past have improved enormously. Researchers still dig their way through boxes of letters in public archives, but they are just as likely to be searching for online references in Wikipedia, the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
, or
The Canadian Encyclopedia
(pioneered by another lone voice, Mel Hurtig of Edmonton, and now part of the Historica-Dominion Institute). None of these tools was readily available when Berton began writing popular history half a century ago.

THE ICONS IN
this chapter stretch in time from the first decade of the previous century through the first decade of this one — a hundred years in which bloody wars were fought; men landed on the moon; and women won the vote, acquired the means to control their fertility, and found leadership roles outside the home. Their power to change minds and attitudes has had an enormous impact and has made us think about the contribution each made to our collective society. Their legacies endure.