Working the Dead Beat Read Online Free Page B

— 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?
    â€œNot 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