Favorite obits of the week
Welcome to our second edition.
The first, if you recall, ran the gamut from journalists to a cosmonaut to a follower of Charles Manson. Think we’re eclectic? We try again this week.
TIFFANY (Mimi Wedell, actress)
If any of you are ‘Sex and the City’ fans, you will remember when Carrie realizes that the only inheritance that her friend Stanford was going to get from his grandmother was her collection of Chanel suits.
“I love my Stanford. He’s a very sweet boy. But you know, he is a fruit!”
Mimi Weddell, the former model, actress, “hat devotee” and Stanford’s fictional grandmother died on September 24 at the age of 94. From her obit in the New York Times, I can tell she was one fabulous broad.
“She was almost like a performance artist,” her daughter said. “She would walk down the street wearing a pith helmet. It could be embarrassing.”
ASHLEY (Marek Edelman, Polish resistance, WWII)
I chose the Independent’s obituary of Marek Edelman, the last surviving member of the courageous Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, because it includes the striking fact that Edelman later became an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights. This fact was omitted in Edelman’s obituary in the New York Times, and in the Associated Press obituary that ran in the Chicago Triune and other major U.S. newspapers.
I thought a lot during last fall’s election season about the end of the Vietnam era and Obama ushering in a new kind of collective psyche. While there are opportunities in that, the potential to forget the effect the violence and the fear had on the country is scary. Peg Mullen showed a lot of courage and as people of her generation die and we don’t hear the stories from Vietnam as much as we did when I was little, I think it’s really important to listen to her message.
CHRIS (Shelby Singleton, country music mogul)
Yes, I’m from southern Indiana, so it should be natural for me to highlight the passing of a country music man. But Shelby Singleton was a mogul whose foresight was weighed equally by his historical perspective, the latter of which manifested in his reissuing of much of Sun Records’ seminal 1950s catalog. His actions, in addition to his eye for talent, helped spur a new generation of music.
JAKE (Alan Bernheim, producer, agent)
Alan Bernheim was a long time Hollywood staple as a producer and literary agent, and is most well-known for his lawsuit against Paramount Pictures, which claimed that he and partner Art Buchwald came up with the idea for “Coming to America,” which later became an Eddie Murphy box office hit in 1988. Buchwald wrote and sold a
treatment to the studio in 1983 about an African prince visiting America to find a wife. Bernheim and Buchwald were each awared $825,000 from the lawsuit, proving that perhaps they were the inspiration for the fictional royal family of Zamunda.
IAN (Meleanie Hain, Baroness of Irony)
I like this one because of the irony in the lede.
“Meleanie Hain, the pistol-carrying Lebanon mom who received national attention for taking a loaded gun to her daughter’s soccer game, was shot to death Wednesday night with her husband in an apparent murder-suicide, police said.”
MING (Irving Penn, photographer)
I like Irving Penn’s obituary for three major reasons. One is Irving’s life itself. As a former photographer for Vogue Magazine, his experience was legendary for contemporaries and much of his work has still been owned by leading art museums, such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two is the lede of the story, which tells Irving’s accomplishments, including his significance in photography, his aesthetic perception and his representative work in just one sentence. The third is the photo with the text. It’s a piece of Irving’s work of Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and literary critic Francline du Plessix Gray, with Alexander and Tatiana Liberman. There’s a great shooting angle and lighting, and the pose and expression make for a fantastic work.
ALINA (Willy Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany)
This obit is from 1992 of Willy Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany in the 1970’s. The Daily Telegraph included it this week in its collection of memorable past obituaries. I like it because it not only recounts the really interesting history of German politics from World War II through reunification, but becasue of the British style of being very frank regarding the person’s shortcomings. For example. the obit recounts all the opposition that Brandt encountered for his socialist policies. Then out of nowhere, the obit goes back in time and identifies him as “the illegitimate son of a sales girl.” This might seem offensive but I think it works because it shows that he started with nothing and really became something.