By Sean McCaughan
I had never realized just how famous Michael Jackson was until he died. His death eclipsed an entire summer. Months of Billy Jean and Thriller and …..well, those are the only two songs I know. I’ve probably heard others. The moonwalk isn’t a song, is it? The pedophilia charges were mostly forgotten, and the love poured out.
That obsession obscured other important peoples’ deaths this summer; there was of course the vivacious Farrah Fawcett who died on the same day. Then Billy Mays, eternal tacky product pusher of Oxi-Clean, went towards the white lights with the help of another kind of white powder: cocaine. Frank McCourt, the man who made Irish destitution heartwarming with his book ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ also died. He was cremated.
It was a morbid summer, and that wasn’t nearly everyone.
David Carradine, the Kill Bill Kung-Fu daddy died too, in a very kinky way. There was Julius Shulman, an important photographer of California modernist architecture. Like the minimal lines of Modernism, he now too is a thing of the past. Walter Cronkite, the man for whom the term “news anchor” was invented, has left the desk.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver, mother of Ahhhhhhhhhhnold’s wife Maria Shriver, and sister of J.F.K., has also died. She founded the Special Olympics, devoting herself to the cause of mentally handicapped children. Brain cancer has ended Robert Novak’s life, just like he ended Valerie Plame’s career as a CIA spy because he didn’t like her husband’s politics. He was also the longest running political columnist in U.S. history. Les Paul, musical innovator, and inventor of the electric guitar and overdubbing, died. He was 94. Sky Saxon, lead singer for the Seeds, died at an unverifiable age because, well, apparently he just didn’t believe in it.
And more people kicked the bucket!
Farrah Fawcett
Charlie’s blondest Angel, achieved meteoric fame in her early career, rising from bit parts in The Dating Game and I Dream of Jeannie to become the central character in a hit TV show, Charlie’s Angels, because of a pin-up poster. With piles of wavy blond curls flowing over her shoulders, she appears young, naïve, and yet slightly dirty in a red one-piece bathing suit. It’s amazing to think that one poster could really make such a career but, in an age before computer imagery, it sold by some estimates as many as 12 million copies and made Farrah’s the sexy face of the ’70s.
Unable to bring more complexity to her sex symbol image, Farrah’s bright star waned over the years. She came back on the national consciousness recently for an uglier and sadder reason. Anal cancer had proved a difficult and very public battle, a publicity she encouraged, at last achieving her ‘comeback.’
It was anal cancer that killed her, a sad demise for a fallen angel.
Frank McCourt
Pulitzer Prize winning author Frank McCourt died on the July 19. His memoir, ‘Angela’s Ashes’ captivated me when I read it off of my mother’s pile of already finished books. It was sad, horribly sad, but also funny and didn’t seem to make the reader cringe as other stories of crippling poverty tend to do. This old man’s voice was so honest and magnificent that I must reprint a famous passage of it here:
“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived it all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood. The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood…People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”
He spent thirty years as an English teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York, having come to the States after his ‘Angela’s Ashes’ childhood, and after retiring finally relented to his nagging sensation that a writing teacher should write.
Billy Mays
Billy Mays was a pitchman extraordinaire. Selling a smorgasbord of gadgets that promised to revolutionize domestic life, his doodads claimed to do everything easier or solve problems you didn’t know you had. Mays’ piece de resistance was Oxi-Clean, made by the same people as some of his other somewhat well-known products, including Orange Glo, a wood polish. He also sold a pair of pinchers for grabbing ‘out of reach’ objects, a necktie with a business card pocket, ‘Mighty Putty’ sticky putty on steroids, and the Ding King, to get dings out of your car.
He died in his condo in Tampa on June 28 due to heart disease. Later, cocaine was also found in his blood along with a bevy of other drugs meant to treat hypertension, from which he suffered. Although he hadn’t been high when he died, he had used it very recently, and along with the other narcotics and his heart condition, the combination proved lethal.
Gidget
Two characters who died this summer are considered most famous for their catchphrases: Ed McMahon and Gidget the Taco Bell Chihuahua. “Yo quiero Taco Bell!” became a slogan of the ’90s, as this little champ took to the airwaves dressed in a sombrero and poncho. A tacky Mexican stereotype, she played the character of a male dog and was a hit. Gidget was taken off the air in 2000 because of accusations of cultural stereotyping amid rumors that the dog died. But in fact she lived nine more years, and died on July 22. She suffered a bad stroke and was euthanized.
Robert Rauschenberg
One of the most important artists of the last 50 years, Robert Rauschenberg died in May, perhaps slightly too early to be considered a summer death, but too important of a person not to be included. As an artist he sought to combine genres. His painting, “Canyan” had a stuffed bald eagle attached to the canvas. He become a link between Abstract Expressionist art of the 1950s and the later Pop Art movement, by combining abstract shapes and voids with readily identifiable imagery. The artist Jasper Johns once said that no artist invented more. Interestingly for dying so remarkably close to one another, Merce Cunningham was another major member of a force that along with Rauschenberg defined a new era of experimentation in American culture.
Ed McMahon
One of Hollywood’s greatest sidekicks, Ed McMahon died on June 23. His two immortal words “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” ring through the ages, as the oft-parodied introduction to the late show with Johnny Carson. This second Banana was a comedian in his own right, hosting ‘Star Search,’ and a pitchman, serving as a spokesman for everything from Budweiser to Mercedes. He once did a dog food commercial with Carson, who stood in for the dog who had run off. After lapping up Alpo dog food, Johnny got on his hind legs, nudged McMahon fondly, and tried to bite him.
Howard Engle
To sue a tobacco company for giving you cancer originally struck many people as preposterous. Could a company be held liable for something you chose to do? They could, and to the extent that Engle, the leading plaintiff, and the others in the class action won the single largest settlement in American history: $145 billion. The tobacco companies had misinformed the public about the dangers of cigarettes, hid the facts, and knowingly addicted smokers (often for life). Engle was the perfect plaintiff. A lifelong smoker, he had originally been given them by street corner promoters and, he told the Miami Herald, tried “well over a hundred times” to quit. He was a pediatrician who lectured his young patients on the dangers of smoking, often using himself as an example.
David Carradine
Carradine was a cult actor famous for his martial artist roles. An icon of the “old Zen master” archetype, he earned his persona in the 1970s series “Kung Fu” where he played a martial artist in the old American west. Going on to play a myriad of roles, he was again a Kung Fu master as the title character in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.
But what’s fascinating about his death is that it turns out this cult figure Kung Fu badass was a pretty damn kinky boy. While filming a movie, David Carradine was found dead in his Bangkok hotel room, hanged in the closet, in a tangle of ropes going from around his neck to his penis. Although it’s being treated as suicide, there is little suspicion of that actually being the case, or murder for that matter. According to many people he was perfectly happy, successful and showed no outward signs of depression. Furthermore, there was no suicide note, and according to forensic pathologists his death met four of the five criteria for accidental death through autoerotic asphyxiation. Two of his ex-wives, Gail Jensen and Marina Anderson, reported sexual interests that included self bondage, with Anderson going so far as to say, in court documents during the divorce, that his practices were possibly life threatening. Basically, Carradine got his rocks off by suffocating himself for an enhanced orgasm. And this time, he went a bit too far.
Dash Snow
The New York Times calls his a “Terrible End for an Enfant Terrible,” a quote so seemingly perfect for Dash that I won’t attempt to challenge it. One of the top emerging artists of our time, Dash’s art was a promise that due to his own mistakes hadn’t yet blossomed. He wasn’t famous outside of New York, but he was known in the art world, and he was a legend among his peers. He was proof that the New York avant garde, the edgy artistic underground, was still alive….not yet clobbered by the sterilization and Mall-ification of modern Manhattan, and yet many were also skeptical of his work. Certainly the bratty rich kid factor detracted, and yet people still talked, a lot. Dash was a young member of the De Menil Family, French aristocrats and great art collectors whose museum in Houston is the Saatchi Gallery of the Midwest. His grandfather was a Buddhist scholar, and his aunt was Uma Thurman.
Dash ran away from home in his early teens, spent time in jail, and had been in rehab for a drug addiction. From a family of collectors, he was a creator. They were aristocrats, and he slummed it. They did great things with their lives, and yet he may follow the artistic stereotype and be his greatest only after death – a death that occurred from a drug overdose in an expensive hotel room at the Lafayette House in New York when he was 27 years old.
Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham began as a performer in the Martha Graham dance company in the 1940s, with which he presented his first solo show in 1944. An exquisite dancer, he left the company in the ’50s to form his own company. A prolific choreographer, Cunningham’s work bridged the unstable chasm between ballet and modern dance. He was notable for his unique choreography styles, encouraging the presence of chance and randomness in his work. He would often flip a coin to determine dance moves, and would choreograph the dancing completely separately from the music, which was often done by his partner in business and love, John Cage, an equally avant garde composer.
Charles Gwathmey
One of the “New York Five,” a group of modernist architects who followed Le Corbusier and reinterpreted his forms in increasingly complicated ways, Charles Gwathmey is known for his houses and sometimes controversial public buildings. His extension to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim is a simplistic backdrop to the drama of the great spiral, and in its minimalism enhances the composition. One of Gwathmey’s most recent works, a condo tower in New York’s East Village, is the focal point for the rather incoherent and stark Astor Place. Gwathmey uses the same sort of subtlety to a less successful effect, where instead of stealing the show like he probably should have, he celebrates the incongruity of the square with a simplistic yet slightly curious building.
Of course he was meticulous, and often complete genius. A house he designed for his parents in 1966 in east Long Island when he was only a 27-year-old architect is considered one of the most important of the 20th century, in its cubic minimalism. The Whig Hall at Princeton is also sufficiently genius. Here he took an historic building with major fire damage, sliced out the destroyed sections, using the original lines and registrations of the walls as cutting points, and inserted minimal, white, yet beautifully proportioned spaces that are visible from the outside.
We try to read symbolism and meaning into the coincidence of these deaths. So many people of significance died in the last few months, and yet they were all eclipsed by one of the few people famous enough to overshadow them all in the public eye. Why this summer? Why was the Grim Reaper on some celebrity kick? Will this summer be given a name, a twisted combination of The Day The Music Died, and The Summer of Love, but morbid and a little salacious – An exotic, mythically dangerous time to be famous. People will connect it with the Recession (capitol R) and create a cesspool of symbolism. But all this is fantasy. How can it be a pattern, how can they be connected in any way that wouldn’t be grabbing at straws? Connections may be there, but everyone is said to be separated by only six degrees, and celebrities even less.
They died, but Michael got the attention. Here’s to them!
Tags: Billy Mays • cancer • Charles Gwathmey • Dash Snow • David Carradine • death • Ed McMahon • Farrah Fawcett • Frank McCourt • Gidget • Howard Engle • Merce Cunningham • Robert Rauschenberg