Dead Reckoning

The first thing I did after learning, three years ago, that my 97-year-old father had died was to write his obituary. I wanted the world to know who Robert Noah was, and I didn’t want to depend on the news judgment of the two publications likeliest to take note of his passing—the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Should these papers conclude his was a newsworthy death (which was far from certain), the likely reason would be that in the 1950s he’d got mixed up in a national scandal about rigged TV quiz shows. These shows, precursors to today’s game shows, scored huge prime-time ratings from an audience wholly unaware that the producers (at the prodding of sponsors) were feeding favored contestants the answers in advance. Dad had been executive producer of Twenty-One, the quiz show that made a national hero out of Charles Van Doren, assistant professor of English at Columbia and scion of a high-WASP literary family. Time magazine put Van Doren on its cover, and Robert Redford later made a movie about his rise and subsequent disgrace after it came out that the show was fixed. Explaining all that wasn’t a conversation I felt like having, so I didn’t notify either paper and wrote the obit myself. It mentioned the quiz scandals, of course—Dad had himself published an autobiographical novel about them in 1988—but not high up. Instead, I profiled the kind, witty, smart, generous, and (you’ll just have to take my word on this) highly principled person familiar to his family and others who knew him. Bob Noah had lived all but a smidgen of his life outside the news cycle. I saw no reason to return him to it. 

I bring up this personal history before delving into Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit, by the New York Times obituarist Sam Roberts, to demonstrate why, like a lot of dish about the Paper of Record and other leading news organizations, the trade secrets of the obituary pages don’t fascinate as much as they would have 30 or 40 years ago. These papers’ influence has dwindled, and even working journalists like me may choose other options. I posted my dad’s obit on Substack, and it reached pretty much all the people I wanted it to—his friends, my friends, and, eventually, more distant former colleagues who’d been out of touch and wondered whatever happened to Bob Noah. All they had to do was Google his name. 

Still, if you are indisputably notable, your departure from this vale of tears will get a Times write-up whether you seek one or not, and the Times remains the preeminent practitioner of the form. I was surprised to see Roberts so freely describe as a “criminal apologist” and “toady” one person whose advance obituary he has written and rewritten: Rudy Giuliani. I don’t dispute Roberts’s verdict, but wasn’t it kind of indiscreet to alert Giuliani—still living when this book was published—to what he’s in for? Roberts mentions Giuliani’s rewrites to show how far a reputation can fall over 25 years. Certainly, Giuliani’s plummeted from the commanding heights of “America’s Mayor” to “pathetic,” “disconsolate,” and so on—Roberts even mentions in Are They Dead Yet? (and, presumably, in the advance obit too) that Giuliani “philandered and drank.” Roberts’s Times editors likely would have preferred he choose someone already dead for his example, because the dead can’t sue for libel—except, I learned from this book, in Rhode Island, where the estate gets three months after a loved one’s demise to sue for defamation. Obituarists beware. 

Roberts likes to push the envelope. His book’s title derives from a story he proposed when he was deputy editor of the Times’s Sunday Week in Review section (which later evolved into the Sunday Opinion section). The idea was to write a collective profile of people everybody thought were dead who, it turned out, were still alive. Roberts queried the obituary staff first, and they all rejected the idea as tasteless. Eventually he persuaded Frank Bruni, then an ambitious young reporter on the paper’s metropolitan staff, to take a whack at it. Bruni interviewed multiple celebrities thought to be dead, starting with the actor Abe Vigoda, who in 1982 had been described by People magazine as “the late” Abe Vigoda, and proceeding to Bob Keeshan, star of the children’s TV show Captain Kangaroo, and the feminist activist and former House member Bella Abzug. (They’re all dead now.) Bruni pulled off this difficult assignment, but I wonder whether, three decades later, the Times still possesses sufficient clout to score interviews based on so insulting a premise.   

One matter about which Roberts protests too much is the low status of obituary writers. He calls it a “specious stereotype.” Obituaries are in fact among the most compelling stories you’ll encounter in your newspaper, and at the Times they’re unusually well-researched and elegantly written. Also, Roberts notes wryly, obituary writers enjoy the luxury of never having to dream up story ideas. Still, let’s face it, the obit staff is where aging or errant reporters often land. Roberts devotes a whole chapter to raging against novels, movies, and TV shows that portray the obit desk as a career dead end. But it sort of is. Roberts undermines his argument by relating that Alden Whitman (1913-1990), the Babe Ruth of Times obituary writers, labored in obscurity for years as a copy editor while battling a contempt of Congress charge for refusing to name Communist Party members to the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. When Whitman finally demanded he be given a writing job, the Times metropolitan editor A.M. Rosenthal assigned him to the obituary desk, where (in Roberts’s deft paraphrase of the Timesman David Halberstam) “his politics would not perturb the departed.” Another sign of low status, Roberts concedes, is that the Pulitzer Prizes have no category for obituaries, and no obituary has ever won one. The closest the form ever got was a local reporting Pulitzer awarded in 1961 to the New York Herald Tribune’s Sanche de Gramont (who later, as Ted Morgan, became a distinguished biographer) for writing up the onstage death of Leonard Warren, a Metropolitan Opera baritone, during a performance of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. Warren keeled over moments after singing the aria “Urna fatale del mio destino”—which translates to “Fatal urn of my destiny.”  

Morgan’s Pulitzer-winning piece was not an obituary because an obituary is supposed to chronicle the life, not the death. Sometimes the cause of death even goes unmentioned. But there’s a code an alert reader can crack. If someone died after “a long illness,” Roberts explains, that means cancer. If someone “died suddenly,” that means suicide. Stanley Walker, city editor of the Herald Tribune, decreed that if the deceased was a rich drunk his obituary should call him “a clubman and a philanthropist” because such a person was likely friends with the Herald Tribune’s wealthy lush of a publisher, Ogden Reid. Hugh Massingberd of the Daily Telegraph elevated such coding to an art form. Under Massingberd’s editorship, “powerful negotiator” meant “bully,” “gave colorful accounts of his exploits” meant “liar,” and writing that an Australian “worshipped at the altar of St. Agnes” was the tipoff that said Aussie “died from excessive drink.” (St. Agnes is a brandy distiller in Renmark, Australia.)  

At the Times, Roberts says, family members are more willing than in the past to state the cause of death, and obit reporters are required to ask. But they’re also advised to check official records, because family members often get it wrong. If somebody’s been sick for a long time, or is very old, the proximate cause of death is not likely to interest the bereaved. I, for example, could not tell you what my parents died of without consulting their death certificates. Both lived past 90. They got old, they declined, they died of old age. The Times stylebook doesn’t permit that diagnosis, but indirectly it acknowledges its legitimacy by directing that if the deceased was past 87 or so the reporter needn’t provide a cause of death.  

Sometimes the cause of death is too novel to ignore. It was not immediately apparent, when the actor David Carradine (1936-2009) died at 72, what killed him. The first guess was suicide, but further investigation revealed it to be autoerotic asphyxiation. That was an important news story because many innocents (myself included) had never heard of such a thing, and many asphyxiation practitioners (or the asphyxiation-curious) may not have known how dangerous this sexual practice can be. History will likely remember Carradine less as the star of TV’s Kung Fu than as the guy who showed that autoerotic asphyxiation can kill you. Similarly, Len Bias (1963-1986) will likely go down in history not as a star basketball player for the University of Maryland but as the guy who demonstrated, while celebrating his selection by the Celtics, that even an extremely fit person can drop dead from snorting cocaine.  

Strict adherents to the five-Ws news format—who, what, when, where, and why—might argue that when a person dies, only the death is news. That is, strictly speaking, the only new information. This was the reigning philosophy for obituaries from the 19th century well into the 20th. Thus, when the dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) died in France by strangulation from a long, flowing scarf that got tangled in the wheel of a sporting car, the Associated Press made its entire obituary about that, almost completely ignoring Duncan’s hugely significant influence on modern dance. We learned that Duncan said she feared “some quick accident might happen.” We learned that Duncan had previously been in multiple auto accidents, including one that killed her two young children. We learned that at a party four years earlier her husband had blackened both her eyes, and later committed suicide. But we didn’t learn anything about how she danced except that she once danced wrapped in a red silk flag, which was more a commentary on her politics than on her art. 

Similarly, the lede of the New York Times obituary for Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), after some hasty preliminaries about “the loss of this talented writer,” quickly proceeded to the details of her medical chart: 

For a long time Miss Alcott had been ill, suffering from nervous prostration. Last Autumn she appeared to be improving and went to the Highlands to reside with Dr. Rhoda A. Lawrence. She drove from there into town to visit her father on Thursday last, and caught a cold, which on Saturday settled on the base of the brain and developed spinal meningitis.  

The Times obituary for Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) dedicated its first five paragraphs to medical details, leaving, Roberts writes, “nothing about the cause of death to the reader’s imagination.” Today, we care only about Roosevelt’s life. 

If the content of obituaries has gotten less clinical since the early 20th century, society’s idea of eminence has grown less lofty. Roberts cites a fascinating 2012 study by a team of sociologists at the University of South Carolina intended to document the rise of hedonism during the 20th century by tracking the increase in New York Times obituaries of sports and entertainment figures against the decrease in Times obituaries of religious leaders. The researchers’ metric was what one might call an “overrepresentation index,” arrived at by dividing the percentage of obituaries for people within a given profession by the percentage that profession represented of the overall workforce. If the numerator and denominator were the same, the Times obituaries would be perfectly representative of the national distribution of occupations. If the numerator was higher, the Times overrepresented that occupation in its obituaries, and if it was lower, it underrepresented it. 

In 1900 the most overrepresented occupation was the armed forces, which may have acquired its edge from being a uniquely dangerous line of work. (In 1900 American soldiers were putting down rebellions in the Philippines and China.) It was overrepresented by a factor of about 30. Preachers came in second (surely these were almost entirely white Protestant men of the cloth). The Times printed about 15 times as many obits of religious leaders as, proportionally, there were preachers in the workforce (or priests, rabbis, etc.). In third place were political leaders, with an overrepresentation index of about 14. To summarize: The Times obit page honored the nation’s soldiers most, followed by preachers, followed by prominent people in government. Show business and sports figures were also overrepresented, but their overrepresentation index was a much smaller six. 

Skipping ahead to 1950, the overrepresentation index for preachers has now climbed to 20, and religious leaders lead the pack. Soldiers have dropped to an overrepresentation index of about one and a half (even though the Korean War started that year; maybe that’s because only two generals died in that conflict). Second place in the overrepresentation derby now goes to actors and sports figures, who, since 1900, have risen from six to about nine. By 1975, though, preachers have dropped to fourth place, with an index of about eight, and in 2000 they’re very nearly zero, which means they’re underrepresented. In 1975 the most overrepresented group is writers, with an index of about 68, and they’re still leading in 2000, with an index of about 47. Show business and sports figures hold second place in both 1975 and 2000, but that’s a distant second—20 in 1975 and 31 in 2000. 

I reach a conclusion slightly different from the authors of the study. Yes, over the course of the 20th century society shifted its notion of eminence away from religious figures, and yes, to some extent entertainers and athletes took their place. But the group to whom the halo really passed was writers. You can call that a hedonistic shift in the sense that late-20th-century literary figures were seldom much interested in promoting virtue. But the shift away from the life of the spirit was also a shift toward the life of the mind. It was less a bread-and-circuses narrative of civilizational decline and fall than a republic-of-letters narrative.  

I doubt this trend held into the 21st century. The litterateurs who died around 2000 mostly participated in a rich midcentury literary culture that today is all but extinct, and the standing within the larger culture of the journalism sort of writer, like me, is shrinking by the hour. If I die next week, the Times may run an obit. But if, like my parents, I live a quarter century past my fast-approaching biblical threescore and ten—and if there still is a New York Times in the 2050s, which is hardly assured—then I doubt the Gray Lady will be much interested. Probably, though, my children will have other ways, as I did, to get the word out.  

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