MARILYN JOHNSON

 

The New York Times comes
each morning and never fails to deliver news of the important dead. Every day is new; every day is fraught with significance. I arrange my cup of tea, prop up my slippers. Obituaries are history as it is happening. Whose time am I living in? Was he a success or a failure, lucky or doomed, older than I am or younger? Did she know how to live? I shake out the pages. Tell me the secret of a good life!

"If Marilyn Johnson had been meaner, I could have said she puts the bitch in obituary. Instead, she's written a warm, funny, appreciative book that, ironically enough, should live forever. But get it now."
"What a wonderful surprise--a charming, lyrical book about the men and women who write obituaries. The Dead Beat is sly, droll, and completely winning."

"A joyful book about obituaries? Absolutely! Marilyn Johnson pulls it off with death-defying grace, insight, charm, and wit. In the end, what a celebration of life."
"A beautifully written, funny and fascinating tour through the unexpectedly lively world of obituaries. Vital reading for anyone who knows a dead person or is likely to become one."

I used to write celebrity obituaries for magazines. I’d find celebrities on the brink of death, being carried off in stretchers on the cover of the Enquirer . That was my cue, “Bob Hope Near Death!” or “Johnny Cash’s Last Words (‘Wait for Me, June.’)” I’d go into a frenzy, racing to finish the obituary so it would be ready to publish as soon as he exhaled his last breath. I researched the stricken one’s filmography, discography, romantic history, turn ons and turn offs -- everything! –with hyperventilant speed, then wrote these long, detailed, passionately- felt tributes....at which point the near-dead celebrity, like the old dog who had a can of cat food waved under his nose, would spring back to life.

I tried to be discreet. There were guessing games on the sidewalk and in the playground I frequented in my town: Who was old enough, sick enough, famous enough for these mysterious obits? friends wondered, but I wouldn’t tell. My celebrities would be plastered over the tabloids, frail, ghostly old men and women being spirited in and out of the hospital. Anyone could have seen me leaving the library or the video store with stacks of old movies, racking up overdue fines on stacks of old books, smuggling biographical booty into my darkened house. But no one guessed.

I woke up tense every morning: did my subject die yet? The answer, every morning, was no. Maybe that’s what I loved most, that emotional ratcheting up, writing something charged with a sense of urgency and tragedy, in a secret bubble of time. Celebrity reporting is usually a feeble exercise in dressing up someone’s canned answers, but this was infused with drama. By the time I finished writing, I was a true fan. I knew what the world would lose when it lost each of them.

I might have known someone like Elizabeth Taylor would survive the dire predictions of the tabloids. In one of her old photographs, she sports a fresh tracheotomy scar and grins over her premature obituary (“The best reviews I ever had.”) I wrote a tribute to her 40 years after that tracheotomy saved her from death by viral pneumonia, and after a host of other physical maladies had failed to fell her: a brain tumor, three hip replacements, multiple broken backs, more pneumonia. It seemed, in her late sixties, that her terrible health and all those years of pills and booze would finally catch up with her. Instead, she recovered and made a T.V. movie, These Old Broads. The first million-dollar actress dusted herself off from another near-death experience and went back to work, flashing her exquisite world-class jewels then tossing them on a sink cluttered with dried squirts of toothpaste and old lipsticked liquor glasses. I suspect she’s immortal.

©2006, Marilyn Johnson