Working the Dead Beat Read Online Free Page A

advance queue — a much more delicate term than morgue — whose accomplishments had faded into obscurity, and others who had gone through career moves or political campaigns that had resulted in dynamic lifestyle changes since the advances had been filed.
    Delving into our morgue was akin to winning an election and then being shown the empty coffers in the national treasury. But that shock was nothing compared to being knocked sideways by the tsunami of relief emanating from all the other reporters in the newsroom when they realized they were no longer on the hook for the advance obituaries they had postponed writing. As the official obituary writer, I had absolved them of that nerve-wracking burden.
    One of my colleagues in the arts section, for example, had been working on an obit of the significant and prolific poet Irving Layton for a decade. He continued to say that he was just writing up his notes for me until the day Layton died in 2006, at age ninety-three, after suffering from dementia for nearly a decade. That was a scramble, I can tell you. Layton, who had won a Governor General’s Literary Award in 1959 for his breakthrough collection, A Red Carpet for the Sun, had both a huge oeuvre and a Byzantine personal life that involved myriad wives, partners, feuds, and offspring.
    One of the best examples of writing obituaries under pressure comes from a profile of Alden Whitman, a legendary obituary writer and editor for the New York Times . As an editor, Whitman had broken the byline embargo and transformed the obituary from a news story into a biographical and literary essay, hence establishing standards he himself was forced to meet as a writer. The Times had an astounding two thousand obits in its morgue (today that figure is more like 1,300) but there wasn’t a word on Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, when he died suddenly in 1965 while on a trip to England. A huge obituary was required because Stevenson, a former governor of Illinois, had twice run for president against Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been John Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and was still in that office under Lyndon Johnson when he succumbed to a heart attack at age sixty-five. My chest tightens just thinking about it.
    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