Obit. Page #9

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Jon Pareles is a veteran music writer for the Times.

He's been writing about pop and rock

for a couple decades now.

He knew so much,

it was in his head already, in effect.

There was probably a loud curse on my side,

and then I basically stared into the computer

and emerged three hours later with a lot less hair

and a finished story.

I'm sure I put on some of his music,

which I tend to do, to just remember and listen

and hear the live person that I'm writing about.

With someone like Michael Jackson,

you've been thinking about him all your life, basically.

He's such a major figure.

He's always going through a critic's mind,

because people are always trying to be him,

people are always trying to learn from him.

So in a way it's been percolating

along the background anyway, and when you have to write

the sudden three-hour Michael Jackson appraisal,

you can just sort of open the floodgates

and there it is.

That's the thing about artists,

they have a hold on our subconscious.

They're talking to us, they're changing the way we see.

They're helping figure out how we react to the world,

how we react to it rhythmically,

how we think about love.

I always think about the stilled voice,

the fingers that don't move anymore,

the fact that you're not gonna hear anything more

that they could've said.

Art makes you immortal.

Art makes you a permanent part of somebody's consciousness.

You don't think that that person

is a physical being like you,

susceptible to aging, susceptible to disease,

susceptible to all the millions of conditions

that our bodies are sensitive to.

You have that perfect image.

You don't want to think of them as perishable.

Those are the ones that cause us the big problems

when they're too young to, um...

too young to really do an advance,

because you think they're gonna be around for a long time.

And yet when they go, they've accomplished so much

that it's front page news,

and you really have to scramble,

you know, to get it done on deadline.

There's no way to predict.

Once in a while we'll get word that someone is ailing

so that'll get our attention,

and we'll make sure we have something ready.

But often we don't-- we just don't know,

or you have a Robin Williams out of the blue,

or a Michael Jackson, you know...

Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

That was a Sunday morning, and that gave us a good,

you know, a few hours to get this thing ready,

but we still had to cobble together the life

of Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a matter of hours.

You know, the websites just light up.

We get emails from people saying,

"Why haven't you-- where's the obit?"

And someone died ten minutes ago,

and we don't have anything ready yet, so...

I mean, we're only human.

Those are the nightmares,

and those are the things that keep me awake.

It's like, okay, so now I have to--

I have to really watch.

I have to watch all the sports world

and the theater world

and the scientific world, et cetera about, you know--

and be ready to be surprised and getting word in email.

I've sat and watched television,

and I'll see a bulletin, you know,

and I'll go, "Oh, God."

So there's a tremendous amount of pressure

to be as prepared as you can,

knowing that you'll never be prepared.

We have about 1,700 advances now,

and it keeps growing.

And that's-- I'm very proud of that,

that despite all the constraints getting them done,

we're still building up this pile.

The standard essentially is if someone is

by all appearances doing okay--healthy,

and they're still in the thick of their lives,

and they're still making whatever they're making--

we don't do them then.

We wait till they're almost--

essentially when their body of work is done.

Then we can take it all as a whole

and sort of make an assessment about it.

The downside of that is that you then

don't do some very important famous people

and, you know, buses come along and airplanes go down,

and you can't-- you have to take that gamble,

because there are too many others

who are in their 80s and 90s--

or even late 70s, who can say--

that we have to do first.

So it's a kind of, you know, triage.

You do the ones you really need to do,

and then you hope some of these other important people,

who are sort of in the middle of their careers, hang on.

Don't go yet.

I've got a bunch of them on file,

I mean, a bunch of really popular,

popular people on file.

They're gettin' up there, so it's not...

It's top secret?

No, I'll tell you who-- Stephen Sondheim,

Mort Sahl, Valerie Harper, who else have I done?

Meadowlark Lemon.

Who's Meadowlark Lemon-- he was maybe the most famous

of the Harlem Globetrotters.

- How are you? - Good, good, yourself?

No, but let me take a look.

I don't know--what I have to do is blow it up,

'cause I can't really see it.

Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute.

We're actually pulling a couple advances today.

We've got, um, Jane Fonda, who obviously everyone knows.

I certainly hope we won't need it anytime soon,

but always better to have these things prepared.

This is the key to the kingdom

of two drawers of advance obits.

Historically, if a reporter said,

"Hey, I'm interviewing Irving Berlin next week,

and I'd like to see his advance before I talk to him."

Verboten, they don't show it.

The only people who can see 'em are us in the morgue,

and the obit editors.

It looks like everyone's dead!

I don't know-- Roy Rogers, definitely dead.

William Rogers I think is dead.

Rostropovich?

I don't know.

The great George Seldes.

We also have this advance obit on tape."

As in, computer tape.

So try reading it now.

Oh, yeah, here he is-- Ronald Reagan.

So this is the second one, this is the first one.

And we started it pretty early, but with Reagan,

I bet you they didn't have an advance on him.

And remember, his assassination attempt

was only a month and a half into his presidency,

so they were probably really scrambling.

I can bet you that they had nothin'.

They probably had nothin'.

And whether they voted for him or not,

they probably were prayin' that guy survived,

because they had nothin'.

So, you know, kind of the serendipity

of going through this kind of collection

is that you just find the craziest stuff.

We got word that this aviatrix, Elinor Smith, died.

She was this pilot in the 1920s and the 1930s.

So, we pulled her clip file.

As you can tell, there's lots of Smiths.

Okay, Elinor Smith.

And it says clearly "Advance Obit."

So I said, "Wow, that's kinda wild.

Like, we still had a...

we had an advance on her?"

Okay, there it is.

Elinor Smith.

Obit written by Leo Kieren, June 15, 1931.

Since she was this stunt pilot, this aviatrix,

they didn't think that she'd live.

She was in high school at the time.

She was maybe 16 or 17 or somethin' like that.

And she was a big deal because the Times always,

you know, was big writing about Lindbergh

and the Byrd expeditions--

flying and barnstorming and stunt pilots.

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