Quit Writing Obits? And Give Up Show Biz?

The other day, I helped bury a legend. It was an honor.

Truth is, I prepared the plot nearly seven years ago, when the legend went into the hospital with pneumonia. The editors looked down their list of prepared obituaries and said uh-oh, what if Gene Kelly doesn’t make it? We’re not prepared.

“Digger” must have been too busy. That was the nickname reporters had given the “biographics editor.” So the boss looked for a general assignment reporter who wasn’t doing anything too important. That was me. More than once, that was me.

This isn’t too morbid a subject, is it? You’re not surprised to read that, long before Eugene Curran Kelly died at home on Feb. 2 at the age of 83, this newspaper was ready. You know that news operations everywhere have scores of obits just waiting to be plugged with the subject’s age and cause of death, plus some reaction quotes. A colleague who left UPI 13 years ago still sees his obits come across the wire from time to time.

My experience is that civilians, and by that I mean non-journalists, are intrigued about this aspect of the news racket. What to insiders is a matter of routine often fascinates people not in the business. If the subject comes up, I tend to mention the fact that I’ve already written Elizabeth Taylor’s obituary.

The response is always, “Really?”

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Now Liz, of course, is a special case. First of all, she’s an icon for the ages, the queen of American popular culture. She won the Academy Award, but her greatest role (as the obit declares) was as herself.

Second, Liz isn’t that old. She does, however, have a long history of health problems. Several years ago, well before the Taylor-Fortensky nuptials, Liz was back in the hospital. The editors looked at the list and said uh-oh. . .

But “Really?” is often the reaction to any famous obit subject. Even if you’ve never met him or her, writing the obit is a tiny brush with whatever it was that made them noteworthy. Only on occasion is an obituary a sad story. You aren’t writing about their deaths. You’re writing about their remarkable lives--usually long and full. If the subjects are admirable figures, writing the obit means you don’t have to admire them from quite so afar.

I’ve been lucky that way. What’s not to like about Gene Kelly? Audrey Hepburn? Robert Penn Warren? I was a fan.

Kelly’s career peaked long before I was born. Funny, but my first memory of him was on TV in a dramatic role, as the cynical reporter in “Inherit the Wind,” based on the Scopes monkey trial. You have to achieve a certain maturity to be dazzled by his dancing, so that came later. And he seemed like such a nice guy.

It wasn’t until I did the research--pulling out old clips, reading “Current Biography”--that I learned just how extraordinary his life was: how he rose from giving dance lessons in his parents’ basement during the Depression to stardom, and wound up revolutionizing the art of dance within the cinema. In updating the obit, it was good to learn that Kelly, a widower, had remarried in 1990, and that his wife, Patricia, was at his bedside when, as his publicist put it, he “died peacefully in his sleep.”

Audrey Hepburn, too, was a star before I was born. At age 11, I saw “Wait Until Dark” and fell for the slender blind woman terrorized by those criminals. Remember knife-wielding Alan Arkin lunging from the darkness? She was so beautiful, and so vulnerable.

When Audrey Hepburn died of colon cancer in January 1993, she was only 63. Did any of her film roles measure up to the drama of her life? I had been vaguely aware that her wispy frame resulted from malnutrition during World War II. Now I learned that her family ate bread from a flour of crushed tulip bulbs.

And from a 1991 interview, I learned that as a young actress she was offered--and turned down--the lead in an adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

“I was exactly the same age as Anne Frank,” she said. “We were both 10 when war broke out. . . . I was given the book in Dutch, in galley form, in 1946 by a friend. I read it . . . and it destroyed me.

“I have memories. More than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. . . . We saw reprisals. We saw young men put against the wall and shot. . . . If you read the diary, I’ve marked one place where she says, ‘Five hostages shot today.’ That was the day my uncle was shot.”

Audrey Hepburn would eventually serve as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, or UNICEF, not just raising money but delivering food and medical supplies to Somalia, Ethiopia, Guatemala and Bangladesh.

Robert Penn Warren wasn’t a famous movie star. He was a Southern man of letters, selected by Congress in 1986 as the first poet laureate of the United States, not that he thought much of the honor.

“The people who create these posts don’t give a damn about poetry. They do it because it’s a nice thing to do. They think, ‘There’s a poet down the road; let’s make him a poet laureate.’ ”

My appreciation for Warren stemmed from “All the King’s Men.” Inspired by the tale of Louisiana Gov. Huey Long, it belongs on any short list of great American novels.

We weren’t prepared for Warren’s death in 1989. I was able to reach poet and novelist James Dickey, a friend of “Red” Warren and a fellow Southerner. I couldn’t keep myself from saying something like, “Gee, Mr. Dickey, I read ‘Deliverance’ in college and really liked it. And I got an A for my report!”

“Wah, thank you,” he drawled. “Ah do ah-preciate that.”

*

Only once did I, vulture-like, try to do interviews in anticipation of someone’s death--not of the subject, but of his associates. The people I called had the good taste not to comment. So the Gene Kelly obit was filed with a list of phone numbers to be called when the appropriate time came.

Perhaps I was too candid, clumsily using the word obituary. A colleague later suggested “retrospective” instead. Another colleague once told an aging television actor, who was indeed the subject, that she was merely “updating The Times’ files.”

The Taylor obit, or retrospective, needs plenty of updating. But no hurry. I wish Liz all the best. May her next marriage last for decades.

And as the years pass, maybe people will have forgotten about that tabloid journalist who got arrested parachuting into the Liz-Larry wedding at Michael Jackson’s Wonderland estate. Maybe his name will fade from memory. Still, somewhere hard-core Liz fans might see my byline and think: “Oh my God! Could that be the same Scott Harris?”

Once again, for the record: It’s just a coincidence. Really.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311. Please include a phone number.

When Audrey Hepburn died in January 1993, she was only 63. Did any of her film roles measure up to the drama of her life?