Working the Dead Beat (3 page)

Whitman heard the sorry news from his wife, who also worked at the
Times
. That is so often how I hear about a death too — not from my wife, of course, but from a friend or family member.
Is it true?
That is always my first reaction before my heart starts thudding and I scroll through my electronic Rolodex for somebody who can confirm or deny the news.

Instead of hitting the phones, Whitman, according to journalist Gay Talese's account in
Esquire
magazine, “broke into a cool sweat, slipped out of the City Room,” and went to lunch upstairs in the
nyt
cafeteria. “But soon he felt a soft rap on his shoulder. It was one of the metropolitan editor's assistants asking: Will you be down soon, Alden?”

Rather like being told that the time has come for your execution. The chilly equivalent of that tap has happened to me dozens of times. I'm sure I can't prove this scientifically, but I'm convinced that noteworthy people always die late in the afternoon — or at least that's when I hear about their demise.

Certainly that's what happened when documentary filmmaker Allan King died of a malignant brain tumour on June 15, 2009. I had seen several of his films, including
Warrendale
,
A Married Couple
, and
Dying at Grace
, but I knew little about his life. The more I found out while researching and writing simultaneously to create a full-page obituary in a couple of hours, the more I realized that King's early life had been bleaker than a Victorian melodrama. What fascinated me was the way he had channelled the deprivations of his childhood into a fascination with other people's lives — not to ridicule or exploit his subjects, but to empathize with the frailties of the human condition.

King was born Allan Winton in Vancouver on February 6, 1930, the elder child of an alcoholic father. His parents separated when he was six; his mother became destitute and had to put her children into foster care. She was allowed to visit them only once a month, until she found a job that paid well enough for her to reclaim them. As a teenager he discovered film: watching it, programming it at the Vancouver Film Society, and eventually making his own gritty documentaries in the early days of
CBC
Television in Vancouver. The films always coincided, however subtly, with the emotional traumas of his own life, from his first documentary,
Skid Row
(about alcoholics like his own father who lived in flophouses on Vancouver's Eastside), to
A Married Couple
(about the disintegration of a marriage) to one of his last and most poignant films,
Dying at Grace
(portraits of people in palliative care at a Salvation Army hospital in Toronto). I suppose I could have rebelled and said: “Call the film critics; they know his work better than I do.” But then I wouldn't have learned the outlines of the life of a cinéma-vérité pioneer who influenced a generation of filmmakers and whose work was heralded by, among others, Jean Renoir.

Knowing the pressure of writing an obituary on deadline, I can empathize with Whitman's sweat and urge to flee before facing the inevitable. What I don't share is the “occupational astigmatism,” as Talese put it, that caused Whitman to cross people off his list so definitively once the advance was filed. Having written their lives, he began thinking of his subjects in the past tense — literally. Because they were deceased on paper, they were dead in reality, at least as far as he was concerned.

I've never had such overweening pride of authorship that I have wished my subject would drop dead, and soon, so that I could see my masterpiece in print. On the contrary, my subjects become like relatives — the close kind. I know them so well by the time I have written about them that I hope they will live forever. I take comfort from seeing them resting quietly in my advance queue, knowing that at least the groundwork is there. No matter when they die, I invariably rewrite and revise until an editor gives me the electronic equivalent of the tap on the shoulder that interrupted Whitman's lunch.

Myth Number Four: The Dying Don't Want to Talk about Their Lives

WHEN I WAS
offered the job as obituary writer, I was asked if I would be willing to interview politicians and other significant Canadians before writing advance obituaries. I can remember agreeing and then asking what the typical approach was in requesting an interview with, say, Brian Mulroney. “Oh, you just say you're preparing an interview for the files,” was the reply.

So that is what I did the first time I wrote an advance. I phoned Hamilton Southam, a prominent but aged cultural figure. He agreed to see me, we settled into his den, and we had an absorbing discussion about his life as a journalist, veteran, diplomat, founder of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and key figure in establishing the Canadian War Museum, among many other cultural initiatives. I became more and more uneasy as the interview continued, realizing that I was there under ambiguous circumstances.

Finally we said our goodbyes and he turned to me and asked the perfectly obvious question: “When will the piece appear?

“Not sure,” I mumbled. “I'll be in touch.”

And a good thing too, as Southam lived for three more years. Within that time I added another civic accomplishment and a romantic wrinkle to his story. But it didn't end there. Southam died in 2008 on Canada Day, a national celebration that he had pioneered back in the late 1970s. As a death date it was pleasingly symbolic for a ninety-one-year-old man who had devoted his life to Canadian life and culture. Alas, the holiday meant that there were few people on the news desk; consequently, Southam's demise slipped under the radar and, even though I had a long obit waiting in the morgue, we were a day late in reporting his death.

That conversation with Southam was the first and last time I relied on the “piece for the files” ruse to get an interview. The deception still makes me cringe. From then on I resolved to tell the truth, however difficult. Novelist Tom Rachman has a variation on that scenario in his chapter about obituary writer Arthur Gopal in
The Imperfectionists
. Sent to interview Gerda Erzberger, a terminally ill Austrian intellectual who has been championed and then dumped by feminist activists, he arrives, notebook and tape recorder in hand, to interview her for a “profile” for the paper, although the only newsworthy thing about her is her approaching demise. She has no time for subterfuge and pinions him with a direct question: “‘So can I assume,' she asks, half turned toward the kitchen, ‘that you're writing my obituary?'”

As Rachman's character learns, people who are elderly or ill know full well that their lives are coming to an end. They are thinking about their impending deaths and interested in reflecting on their lives. Sometimes they have things they want to say, especially if they trust you to keep their confidences until after they are dead.

In my experience, it is the people around the dying — the dear friends, close colleagues, and devoted family members — who are squeamish, not the person who is actually dying. Still, there is nothing worse than going on a fishing expedition for biographical facts with somebody who is ill. I research the life to figure out the themes and the questions that I want to ask, then I make the phone call. I introduce myself and say that I would like an interview to talk about their significant contribution to Canadian life, explaining that while I hope the obituary may not be needed any time soon, I want to do the best job possible by preparing in advance.

I let this sink in and then I make sure I promise that nothing said to me will be printed before “such time as it may be necessary.” (So far nobody has confessed to stealing the Crown Jewels or to other misdemeanours that would put my vow of confidentiality into conflict with the laws of the land or the news imperatives of my employers, but I am cognizant of the ethical dilemmas such a disclosure would present.) Another long pause, and then I explain that in my experience the only people who die are the ones I haven't written about. Besides, I conclude, I update every five years. When I made that pretty speech several years ago to politician Flora MacDonald, who was then in her late seventies, she retorted: “You'll have to do that, because my mother lived well past a hundred.”

By chance, in 2005 I was in the audience for one of William Hutt's farewell performances at the Stratford Festival. He was Prospero in
The Tempest
, a role he had first played on that stage more than forty years earlier. Looking like a haggard bloodhound after a fruitless hunt for a rabbit, he delivered his final lines: “As you from crimes would pardon'd be / Let your indulgence set me free.” I was haunted by the poignancy with which he stood alone on the stage, garbed in a white bedsheet of a robe and holding a bouquet of red roses, while the waves of applause and love lapped over him. When I heard nearly two years later that Hutt was suffering from leukemia, I phoned and asked him for an interview for an eventual obituary.

“I will be happy to talk with you, but my days are short,” he said, in a voice that was commanding yet courtly. “I am looking on my demise as a project, and I am the project manager.” He had already chosen a cemetery plot and decided on his epitaph: “Soldier and Actor.”

Ten days later I rang his Stratford doorbell. Wearing a loose brown patterned shirt over casual trousers and with terribly swollen ankles showing above a pair of moccasins, Hutt sat in a wing chair beside a window. He was attached to a portable oxygen tank and did not rise to greet me — an indication from an unfailingly courteous man that his strength was failing. His face had a waxy pallor and, having smoked for sixty years before he finally butted out, he was often racked with coughing spells. But his conversation was thoughtful and engaging.

For ninety minutes we had a frank and wide-ranging conversation about his disaffection with his parents, the war and his introduction to death before he had had a chance to know much about life, his bisexuality, and how he had found a home on stage at the Stratford Festival. Although completely lucid, he seemed to have transcended the quotidian world and was in a contemplative space I felt privileged to share.

Unlike so many young men who charge onto the battlefield deluded by visions of glory, Hutt was a pacifist. He had “no intention of shooting anybody” but he wanted to serve his country in the Second World War, so he enlisted in an ambulance unit as a corporal, thereby probably seeing more trauma and gore than the most gung-ho combatants. Just north of Monte Cassino, Italy, he volunteered to traverse a heavily mined and booby-trapped field, under constant mortar fire, to attend to wounded soldiers and to find a suitable site for a first-aid post. For his gallantry and initiative he was awarded the Military Medal in the field.

Hutt had no false modesty about his capacity as an actor. “I will leave the word ‘great' to history,” he said that afternoon, “but I do know that in some kind of way, my career as an actor has paralleled the growth of theatre in this country.” He said he had always been very practical as an actor, and that his decision to stay home rather than to chase fame in London and New York came from an “arrogant pride” in Canada. “I had no intention of leaving this country until I was invited. I wasn't going to beg.” And by doing so, he showed that it was possible to have both a stellar career here and attractive offers to work elsewhere.

Growing philosophical, he said there are three major stages in life: The first is adolescence, when things happen to your body and your mind. The second stage is when you are in your twenties and your parents become your friends rather than authority figures (the war had interrupted that process for him and left him divided from his parents). The third stage, the one he was entering, is death and wondering what that will be like. He wanted to go on living, but he wasn't afraid of death.

Sensing his fatigue, I turned off my tape recorder, put away my notebook, and walked across the room to shake his hand and make my goodbyes. “How are you going to use this?” he asked, locking my eyes with his and holding on to my outstretched hand. “By the time I write your obituary, in ten years' time,” I said with what I hoped was a disarming smile, “this moment we have shared will have evaporated.” He nodded, and then, after struggling to get up, he pulled my face down and kissed me on both cheeks, a farewell that only later I realized was permanent. Fewer than five days afterwards he died, to the shock of friends, colleagues, and this obituary writer.

How I wish now that I'd had a video camera in my journalist's toolkit that afternoon, so that the final interview with Canada's most majestic actor could have been captured for posterity. Would the magic connection that I felt with William Hutt that hot afternoon have been destroyed by cameras and technicians? I can't say for certain, but I don't think so. He was an actor, after all, and it is my experience that people forget about the tape recorder and the camera if the conversation is engaging.

Nothing is completely dispassionate in this world, but the process in which I, the journalist, interview and write an obituary of a significant Canadian figure comes closer to the ideal of objectivity than eulogies and tributes from family and friends that appear in print and on the Web.

Myth Number Five: Obituaries Don't Tell
the Real Truth

SOMEBODY ASKED ME
while I was in the final stages of writing this book if I had thought about including Clifford Olson, the murderer who abducted, tortured, and killed eleven children in British Columbia in a heinous nine-­month rampage in the early 1980s. Yes, I replied, but I couldn't because he died in September 2011, which was outside my time frame of the first decade of this century.

There was nothing good to say about Olson the habitual criminal, his revolting “cash for bodies” deal with authorities so families could recover the remains of their murdered children, or his prison-cell antics to negotiate a new trial, parole, and other concessions. But his diabolical behaviour both in and outside prison changed the justice system in Canada. Measures that we take for granted nowadays, such as victim impact statements at sentencing and parole board hearings, were nonexistent back then. Amber Alerts, the National Missing Children's Registry, and amendments to strengthen the Criminal Code with respect to sexual assault, child abduction, and sexual abuse have also become standard. Many of those changes came about because the families of Olson's victims, outraged and traumatized by the treatment they endured during his prosecution and incessant jailhouse appeals, petitioned and lobbied the justice system on behalf of their murdered children. That's why Olson's worth writing about.