Classic stars' deaths remind us that time passes swiftly
Growing familiarity with sense of loss doesn't soothe it, writes Nicholas Read.
In an obvious attempt to attract a younger audience, CBC Radio airs a program about popular culture called Commotion. When I listen to it, most of the time — probably 90 per cent of the time — I have no idea whom or what is being talked about, but I don't care. My time for caring about popular culture ended long ago.
But just like everyone who grew up in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, there was a time when I did care. Passionately. When the actors and musicians I knew from films, TV and records were as much a part of the fabric of my life as the people I actually knew.
I never paused to think of them that way because, just like the people I actually knew, they were always there. In films, on TV, in the press. Everywhere. Until the day they weren't. “You don't know what you've got till it's gone,” sang Joni Mitchell. She's still here, but for how long?
What makes news of their deaths especially painful is knowing that so many of these onetime immortals are as unfamiliar to today's culturati as their idols are to me. How can that be?, I ask myself. How is it possible that there are adults — people in their 20s, 30s, even 40s — who don't know who Julie Christie, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Nicholson, Diana Ross, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty are?
Yes, I know intellectually that it's the same for every generation. Thanks to reruns and the Late Show, I always knew who Bing Crosby, Patti Page, Lana Turner, Tyrone Power and Humphrey Bogart were, but I also knew their fame had passed. I was barely walking when Tyrone Power and Humphrey Bogart died.
The only exceptions were Katharine Hepburn — who grew more famous, exalted and beloved the older she got — and Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, whose legends were indestructible.
But for me, Mick Jagger, Robert Redford, Cher, Dustin Hoffman, Carole King, Carly Simon, Goldie Hawn and James Taylor defined their age. My age. They were living, breathing, seemingly real characters in my world. In my psyche, in my heart. So for me their stars will always glitter as brightly today as they did 30, 40, even 50 years ago.
Some artists never die. They live for what passes for forever: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky; Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie; Leonardo, Michelangelo, Picasso, Matisse; Judy Garland, Lucille Ball, Walt Disney, Elvis Presley. Among so many more.
From my generation, who knows? I'd guess the Beatles, Sidney Poitier, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda. All I'm certain of is I won't be around to find out.
Among them only John Lennon, George Harrison, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman are dead, but so many lesser lights have been snuffed too. Lights that time is forgetting with each passing year. The cast of Bewitched, Bonanza, Mission Impossible and the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Burgess Meredith, Penny Marshall, Roy Scheider and Madeline Kahn. Mama Cass, Keith Moon, Davey Jones, Karen Carpenter and even, in a queasy kind of way, Pee-wee Herman.
Thus, for years now, the most poignant moment of any Academy Awards broadcast is the memorial moment. The way we were montage of actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, costume designers, studio heads and composers who died the previous year.
Sometimes their inclusion is a surprise. This year Ryan O'Neal was that surprise. The star — in case you've forgotten — of Peyton Place, Love Story, What's Up Doc?, Paper Moon, Barry Lyndon, Nickelodeon and The Main Event, as well as the longtime paramour of Farrah Fawcett. Remember her? After he died on Dec. 8, he was buried next to her in Los Angeles. I didn't know that until Oscar night, and when I found out, I was shocked. Honestly. I thought, “How can Ryan O'Neal not be in the world anymore?”
You'd think the growing familiarity of that feeling would make it easier to bear. It doesn't. If anything, it makes it harder because it reminds me that nothing is sadder and more unstoppable than the passage of time. Theirs and mine.