The Eclipsed Celebrity Death Club

[Dave Monroe]

The Eclipsed Celebrity Death Club
6/26/09 at 2:15 PM


Poor Farrah Fawcett. A month ago, People magazine's Larry Hackett
admitted to the Times that she only had one remaining chance for some
friendly press: "At this point, Farrah has to die," he said. "It's the
only cover left for her." Needless to say, she's missed her chance.
Having vanished from the headlines after Michael Jackson's sudden
demise, Farrah is just the latest to join a peculiar group: the
Eclipsed Celebrity Death Club.

The classic ECD example is Groucho Marx, who passed away the same week
as Elvis Presley, and thus missed out on a good week's worth of TV
tributes. But the easiest way for a famous person to vanish from the
earth without so much as a blip is to follow a president of the United
States. Ray Charles caught barely a moment's coverage when he died in
2004, right in the middle of the weeklong blanket coverage of Ronald
Reagan's death and funeral. Same story for James Brown, who got some
press but definitely ran second to Gerald Ford. (The only person who
could square off against a dead head of state, it seems, was Mother
Teresa. When she died a few days after Princess Diana, a good deal of
the coverage tried to frame them as comparably angelic figures.) And
don't forget Alice Trillin—granted, not a worldwide celebrity, but a
beloved figure to her husband Calvin's thousands of New
Yorker-­reading fans. While awaiting a heart transplant, she died on
September 11, 2001, following the horrible deaths of thousands of New
Yorkers. Most of her husband's readers only learned about it many
months later, when he published About Alice.

The championship trophy for badly timed death, though, goes to a pair
of British writers. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, died
the same day as C.S. Lewis, who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia series.
Unfortunately for both of their legacies, that day was November 22,
1963, just as John Kennedy's motorcade passed the Texas School Book
Depository. Huxley, at least, made it interesting: At his request, his
wife shot him up with LSD a couple of hours before the end, and he
tripped his way out of this world. Which, if you're going to go to
your reward without anyone's noticing, is probably not a bad way to
end it all.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/06/the_eclipsed_celebrity_death_c.html?mid=daily-intel--20090626

Between Heaven and Hell
A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis &
Aldous Huxley
Expanded Edition
(paperback)
By Peter Kreeft

http://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=3480