PASSING FAME

How can it already be ten years since Douglas Adams died? I find it almost impossible to believe that an entire decade has passed since I got up on that promising Saturday morning to hear that almost unbelievable news from the previous day which quite ruined my weekend and the weekend of many of his fans and also (of course, lest we forget) totally devastated his friends and family. Ten whole years since that creative cornerstone of my (admittedly limited) life as a consumer of literature had been cruelly excised by an excess of exercise, having lived his entire life in a less than half century span, ruled by only one monarch, and dying at an age which made him only a couple of years older than I am now. Ten whole years from a sad morning on a planet that would still have a World Trade Center standing in the heart of New York for another four months, which is a story for another day and a tragic demonstration of humanity’s capacity for cruelty that, I suppose, as a proponent of all that was best about our potential, at least he was not around to experience.

Apparently that same sad anniversary date of May the 11th 2011 also marked the thirtieth anniversary of the passing of the legendary Bob Marley which presumably goes to show that iconic figures should really be careful as we approach the mid point between the spring and summer equinoxes. I truly wish sometimes that some of them could live forever (or at least outlive me…) as their loss is something that becomes ever more difficult to bear. I mean I know that it’s inevitable, and we all have to go sometime, but when someone has spent their entire professional life giving other people happiness, it always seems such a great shame when they are snatched away far too young, although how we even define “too young” any more is something of a mystery. Would any of us feel ‘cheated’ if we didn’t reach seventy, or eighty or the now mythical status of a century? Some centurions really don’t look like they’re having much of a life, do they, but maybe it’s better to be here than not to be here…?

Still, when it comes to those public figures that we respect and admire, we can never really know how they behaved in the privacy of their personal lives (if anyone still grasps that particular concept any more…). Some of the great and the good turn out to be real disappointments when the ‘kiss-and-tell’ stories start to come out about them. I wonder in the end whether any of that really matters? I can still enjoy the work of Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers despite all the biographies I’ve read telling me what utter swines they could be in their home lives. Maybe this is why I’m not a fan of the tabloids or the celebrity magazines. I don’t want too much information about the real person behind the mystique. If it comes to the crunch I rather suspect that I would prefer to have the “Hollywood Greats” exist in the form of their almost legendary public lifestyles like they were portrayed to us back in the 1950s than the “flawed mortals who got lucky” stuff that we are exposed to nowadays.

Meanwhile, I suppose that I do get rather ridiculously and excessively moved by the slipping from this mortal coil of many of those in the public eye, all of whom wouldn’t have known me if I walked up to them and accosted them with a fresh herring (Although if I had done that… No. That way madness lies…), but I guess that it only goes to show how much people we’ve never even met do become part of our lives. Rather more frequently that I would really have liked in recent months I have had to pause for a moment in my pathetically pointless bloggery and raise one of my metaphorical glasses to the memory of some obscure performer or commentator or other whom many of my loyal readers might not have even been aware of just because they had played a large and unconscious part in the shaping of what turned out to be me. Some of those names might not have meant much to a lot of people, but, over the years, they had meant a hell of a lot to me.

A few years ago I tried to bludgeon the editor of one of the magazines that I regularly read into instigating a monthly award of some kind to recognise those figures who I regarded as being “International Treasures” or even (at the risk of immediately jinxing them) “Living Legends” but to no avail. Perhaps people in publishing are more savvy about such things and know that the minute you’ve gone to press with these things, the sad news will inevitably be announced that suddenly makes your publication seem a tad insensitive. You can tell how long ago it was that I wrote that letter because Patrick McGoohan was one of the names I mentioned and he has since slipped away. It had started to trouble me that some of the great figures of my own childhood, people like Patrick MacNee, Diana Rigg, Honor Blackman, Roger Moore, Clint Eastwood, William Shatner, the mighty Tom Baker and so many others were getting to a rather great age and I hadn’t ever had or taken the opportunity to thank them for their work and tell them quite how much I, as an insignificant little potato growing up on the battered edges of a northern city, had had my pathetic little life enriched and made happier by the work they were doing.

Lately, more and more bits of my past seem to have been melting away like ice cubes in a glass of very fine whisky (or in the case of my life, possibly more like the own-brand supermarket stuff if truth be told…), but all those great names that formed such a strong part of the social infrastructure of my life seem to be slipping away from us more and more frequently. I guess that it’s just a sign that I’m getting older. “Our ’Enry” Cooper, “Whispering Ted” Lowe and Professor Richard Holmes all drifted out of our lives over the same weekend recently and more and more of the bricks that built and supported the edifice that I like to think of as “me” seems to be crumbling away. Sidney Lumet, Farley Granger, Seve Ballesteros and all those others who so frequently popped up in our news programmes or on our movie screens seem to all be fading into history before our very eyes, and the living, breathing, real parts of our own histories seem to be transferred to mere memory and library facsimile along with them.

Also recently, the last combat veteran of the First World War has finally passed into history and the terrible stories of life in the trenches has now passed out of living memory with him, leaving only the historians to keep their memory alive and to tell their story to future generations and hopefully discourage anyone else from making the same bloody mistakes.

Naturally, and whether this is right or wrong of course is debateable, certain sad passings tend to shake society more to the core than others. The assassinations of international figures like Mahatma Gandhi are always going to be more noticed and affect more people than the deaths of so-called “ordinary” people simply because of their high profile. The murders of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, and that of Martin Luther King all shook the world in the 1960s just as much as the accident that caused the death of Princess Diana did in the 1990s. Iconic status seems assured for the young and talented if they leave us too soon. Well known and much loved media figures like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley have all gained huge status and importance that might not have happened if they had lived, although I wonder quite what any of them would have made of the legends and merchandising industries that grew up in their memories. What would James Dean have thought of someone managing to copyright his ‘stance’, for example?

Perhaps it is the high profile of these people and the sense of disbelief that they can possibly be snatched away so easily that causes all those conspiracy theories to brew up. It’s easier to believe in their indestructibility than to accept that any one of us who has become so important to so many can just be snuffed out in the blink of an eye. At least for them their immortality in some form is assured (although it is rather cruel of nature to make it so we can never be aware of the effect our passing might have) although, if it came to a straight choice, I’m sure they would all have given much of that away to have had a few more years of living instead.

Equally, there are an awful lot of famous faces that fail to move me at all when they finally leave us, even if it can still come as a shock to many. It doesn’t make them any less important, of course it doesn’t, it just means that I wasn’t as aware of them and what they did. I’m sure that when those old “Hollywood Greats” pass on, sometimes decades after they were last in the spotlight, those who remember them as contemporaries, or remember fantasising over their youth and beauty are just as heartbroken at that bright star being snuffed out as the rest of us remain indifferent to the loss of someone we’d assumed had already gone years ago.

Then there are those public figures for whom few seem to feel the need to mourn their passing. The wicked instigator of those World Trade Center attacks was also consigned to oblivion recently and few mourned his loss, although the jubilant stance taken by a few seems to have at least become a source of regret and shame for some. When a notorious British child killer finally died in prison in the early years of this century there were few to mark her passing and her ashes were anonymously scattered in a local park that still feared the vandalism and bad feeling such an act might bring. Nevertheless, both these wicked people were still as much in the public thoughts in death as in life, and still bore the brand of  a kind of fame we prefer to term ‘notoriety’.

I suppose that it does really depend mostly on how much someone’s work was admired by you as to how much the loss of someone you’ve rarely (if ever) met affects you. Maybe it’s a sign of getting older and more sentimental that I seem to be getting more and more emotional about these things and yet I can still remain more cold in my reaction to some of the things going on that actually do directly involve me. Perhaps it’s just one of those safety mechanisms that we all have. Many people have stated quite openly that they had wept buckets at the funeral of Diana but not at the loss of one of their own family, and there are many, many cases where the loss of a beloved pet has caused the locked floodgates of someone’s grief to be opened.

I know that I shouldn’t dwell. I know that it only depresses everyone, especially me, and there should be much happier things to think and talk about on a lovely spring morning, but ten years is a long time, and yet sometimes it seems like barely a moment ago.

So long, and thanks again…