Stargazing writer ‘inventively funny’ about pop culture
Danish native skewered the entire celebrity scene, was loved in the newsroom
“If I were into being bored by organized insincerity I’d be following politics.” MALENE ARPE STARGAZING WRITER
Toronto Star entertainment writer Malene Arpe, who delighted readers with her wit and wry observations about celebrities and pop culture, died Thursday following a massive heart attack. She was 50.
The Denmark native was the voice of Stargazing, which appeared Sundays in the Star and as a blog on thestar.com. Both skewered celebrities, singers and entertainers as well as the tabloids that covered them.
Arpe is survived by her mother and her husband, Reed Forster.
She was an avid gardener who loved to cook, specializing in the cuisine of her homeland, and to splurge on meals at the city’s newest, hippest restaurants.
“I always hated it if Malene asked me to proofread her Stargazing pages because if I read them on Thursday or Friday at work, it meant I couldn’t read them Sunday morning in bed,” said Kathryn Laskaris, an editor in the Star’s Life and Entertainment department. “Inevitably, Malene’s captions always made me laugh out loud and spit out my coffee.”
“A highlight of my day was when Malene would stop by my desk for a chat about one of the TV shows we loved in common, The Walking Dead, say, or Game of Thrones,” said Debra Yeo, deputy entertainment editor. “It wasn’t just that Malene was funny, it was that she was so inventively funny. I just can’t imagine a world without that incisive sense of humour in it.”
Arpe did not reveal many personal details in her writing, but a 2006 story on political photo ops was a notable exception. She recalled playing with Lego as a child when her father, a conservative politician in Denmark, arrived with a reporter and photographer in tow. Arpe’s father encouraged her to colour, she said, while the photographer snapped away.
She joined the Star in 1999 from the now-defunct newspaper Eye Weekly, where she was the film editor and contributed to the satirical column “Rolling Eye.”
She was a copy editor and then deputy entertainment editor before returning to her first love, writing.
“I’ve never known someone like her,” said Jesse Wente, director of film programs at TIFF Bell Lightbox. “She gave me my first job as a film critic, was my first editor, but was always my friend first. Funny, smart, beautiful and beneath the Danish shell, deeply loving. I miss her terribly already.” She took over Stargazing in 2006. Business editor Doug Cudmore, who worked with Arpe during his tenure as entertainment editor, said she “was one of the people I respected the most in the newsroom, because she covered a beat where it would be easy to let principles slide, and she never did.
“No pointless cheesecake. No pics of people eating, because everyone looked ridiculous eating, and that wasn’t fair. No stars with their children; the kids didn’t ask for the exposure,” Cudmore added.
Alover of geek culture, Arpe reported from Comic-Con in 2006, where she purchased a shirt reading “Guns don’t kill people. Super villains kill people.” She returned the next year, writing that the event was “the only place in the world where the line to the men’s washroom is longer than the line to the women’s washroom.
Arpe’s disdain for false sincerity was evident in her writing. In 2008, she noted that American Idol judges were “being nice and giving semi-constructive advice.”
“If I were into being bored by organized insincerity I’d be following politics,” Arpe wrote.
Shree Paradkar, deputy editor of multimedia, said she didn’t initially take kindly to Arpe’s brusque manner. “Over time though, we realized we had many common pet peeves. Two-faced people topped that list.” Before long, “she was my morning catharsis.”
Feature writer Linda Diebel described herself as Arpe’s “biggest fan.”
“She saw the preposterousness and the lunacy in the world she covered and her take was always hilarious. Never mean,” Diebel added.
When Justin Bieber was in the midst of a public meltdown in 2013, he wrote on Twitter, “im only judged by one power and I serve him.”
Arpe wrote that she didn’t believe in God, adding, “I would like to think that if there is one, he/she would be more interested in the plight of the unfortunate than in someone who OWNS A BATMAN-THEMED MOTORCYCLE.”
In a 2008 interview posted on the website pinkmafia.ca, Arpe said her biggest regret was not attending university, which had “left (her) kinda stupid.” Her favourite decades of music were any in which Bob Dylan had released an album or Heidi Montag had not. And she would prefer going deaf to going blind, she said, citing her need to read and the pleasant sight of a shirtless David Beckham.
Arpe filed two stories for the Stargazing blog on Wednesday morning via email. “The final sentence in her email was, ‘Will be back in half an hour. . .’ When I meet her again, trust me, she will get it from me for breaking her promise like this,” Paradkar said.
Her final Stargazing feature will appear in Sunday’s newspaper.
Arpe had signed an organ-and-tissue donor card. To honour her wishes, there will be no memorial service. With files from Stephen Spencer Davis