OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread

Subject: OBIT: Marilyn Monroe
From: GUEST,Someone who likes it hot
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 08:21 PM

OK, I think we get your point. If you feel a need to post a number of obituaries, please put them all in the same thread. Thanks.
-Joe Offer-

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August 6, 1962

OBITUARY
Brilliant Stardom and Personal Tragedy Punctuated the Life of Marilyn Monroe
First Scene Put Her in Limelight

Actress Enjoyed Immense Popularity but Said She Was Seldom Happy
The life of Marilyn Monroe, the golden girl of the movies, ended as it began, in misery and tragedy.
Her death at the age of 36 closed an incredibly glamorous career and capped a series of somber events that began with her birth as an unwanted, illegitimate baby and went on and on, illuminated during the last dozen years by the lightning of fame.
Her public life was in dazzling contrast to her private life.
The first man to see her on the screen, the man who made her screen test, felt the almost universal reaction as he ran the wordless scene. In it, she walked, sat down and lit a cigarette.

Recalled 'Lush Stars'
"I got a cold chill," he said. "This girl had something I hadn't seen since silent pictures. This is the first girl who looked like one of those lush stars of the silent era. Every frame of the test radiated sex."

Billy Wilder, the director, called it "flesh impact."
"Flesh impact is rare," he said. "Three I remember who had it were Clara Bow, Jean Harlow and Rita Hayworth. Such girls have flesh which photographs like flesh. You feel you can reach out and touch it."

Fans paid $200,000,000 to see her project this quality. No sex symbol of the era other than Brigitte Bardot could match her popularity. Toward the end, she also convinced critics and the public that she could act.
During the years of her greatest success, she saw two of her marriages end in divorce. She suffered at least two miscarriages and was never able to have a child. Her emotional insecurity deepened; her many illnesses came upon her more frequently.

Dismissed From Picture
In 1961, she was twice admitted to hospitals in New York for psychiatric observation and rest. She was dismissed in June by Twentieth Century-Fox after being absent all but five days during seven weeks of shooting "Something's Got to Give."
"It's something that Marilyn no longer can control," one of her studio chiefs confided. "Sure she's sick. She believes she's sick. She may even have a fever, but it's a sickness of the mind. Only a psychiatrist can help her now."
In her last interview, published in the Aug. 3 issue of Life magazine, she told Richard Meryman, an associate editor:
"I was never used to being happy, so that wasn't something I ever took for granted."
Considering her background, this was a statement of exquisite restraint.

She was born in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926. The name on the birth record is Norma Jean Mortenson, the surname of the man who fathered her, then abandoned her mother. She later took her mother's last name, Baker.

Family Tragedies
Both her maternal grandparents and her mother were committed to mental institutions. Her uncle killed himself. Her father died in a motorcycle accident three years after her birth.
Her childhood has been described as "Oliver Twist in girl's clothing."
During her mother's stays in asylums, she was farmed out to twelve sets of foster parents. Two families were religious fanatics; one gave her empty whisky bottles to play with instead of dolls.
At another stage, she lived in a drought area with a family of seven. She spent two years in a Los Angeles orphanage, wearing a uniform she detested.
By the time she was 9 years old, Norma Jean had begun to stammer--an affliction rare among females.
Her dream since childhood had been to be a movie star, and she succeeded beyond her wildest imaginings. The conviction of her mother's best friend was borne out; she had told the little girl, day after day:
"Don't worry. You're going to be a beautiful girl when you get big. You're going to be a movie star. Oh, I feel it in my bones."
Nunnally Johnson, the producer and writer, understood that Miss Monroe was something special. Marilyn, he said, was "a phenomenon of nature, like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon.
"You can't talk to it. It can't talk to you. All you can do is stand back and be awed by it," he said.
This figure in the minds of millions was difficult to analyze statistically. Her dimensions--37-23- 37--were voluptuous but not extraordinary. She stood 5 feet 5 1/2 inches tall. She had soft blonde hair, wide, dreamy, gray-blue eyes. She spoke in a high baby voice that was little more than a breathless whisper.

Heavy Fan Mail
Fans wrote her 5,000 letters a week, at least a dozen of them proposing marriage. The Communists denounced her as a capitalist trick to make the American people forget how miserable they were. In Turkey a young man took leave of his senses while watching "How to Marry a Millionaire" and slashed his wrists.
There were other symbols of success. She married two American male idols--one an athlete, one an intellectual.
Her second husband was Joe DiMaggio, the baseball player. Her third and last was the Pulitzer- Prize winning playwright, Arthur Miller.
She was 16 when she married for the first time. The bridegroom was James Dougherty, 21, an aircraft worker.
Mr. Dougherty said after their divorce four years later, in 1946, that she had been a "wonderful" housekeeper.
Her two successive divorces came in 1954, when she split with Mr. DiMaggio after only nine months, and in 1960, after a four-year marriage to Mr. Miller.
She became famous with her first featured role of any prominence in "The Asphalt Jungle," issued in 1950.
Her appearance was brief but unforgettable. From the instant she moved onto the screen with that extraordinary walk of hers, people asked themselves: "Who's that blonde?"
In 1952 it was revealed that Miss Monroe had been the subject of a widely distributed nude calendar photograph shot while she was a notably unsuccessful starlet.

Revealed Her Wit
It created a scandal, but it was her reaction to the scandal that was remembered. She told interviewers that she was not ashamed and had needed the money to pay her rent.
She also revealed her sense of humor. When asked by a woman journalist, "You mean you didn't have anything on?" she replied breathlessly:
"Oh yes, I had the radio on."
One of her most exasperating quirks was her tardiness. She was, during the years of her fame, anywhere from one to twenty-four hours late for appointments. Until lately, she managed to get away with it.
Her dilatory nature and sicknesses added nearly $1,000,000 to the budget of "Let's Make Love." The late Jerry Wald, head of her studio, simply commented:
"True, she's not punctual. She can't help it, but I'm not sad about it," he said, "I can get a dozen beautiful blondes who will show up promptly in make-up at 4 A.M. each morning, but they are not Marilyn Monroe."
The tardiness, the lack of responsibility and the fears began to show more and more through the glamorous patina as Miss Monroe's career waxed.
Speaking of her career and her fame in the Life interview, she said, wistfully:
"It might be kind of a relief to be finished. It's sort of like I don't know what kind of a yard dash you're running, but then you're at the finish line and you sort of sigh--you've made it! But you never have--you have to start all over again."

Subject: ADD: Goodbye Norma Jean (Elton John)
From: catspaw49
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 08:53 PM

GOODBYE NORMA JEAN

Goodbye Norma Jean, though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself, while those around you crawled
They crawled out of the woodwork and they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill and they made you change your name

And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in
And I would have liked to known you but I was just kid
Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did

Loneliness was tough, the toughest role you ever played
Hollywood created a superstar and pain was the price you paid
Even when you died, the press still hounded you
All the papers had to say, was Marilyn was found in the nude

And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in
And I would have liked to known you but I was just kid
Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did

Goodbye Norma Jean, though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself, while those around you crawled
Goodbye Norma Jean,from the young man in the twenty-second row
Who sees you as something more than sexual, more than just our Marilyn Monroe

And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in
And I would have liked to known you but I was just kid
Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did

**********************************************************

Best song the little SOB ever wrote and I really hated it when he modified it for Diana.

Spaw

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: Joe Offer
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 09:22 PM

Copied from a deleted thread.
-Joe Offer-

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OBIT: Alexander Graham Bell

31-Aug-01 - 08:16 PM (#539367) Subject: Alexander Graham Bell From: GUEST,Phone Friend August 3, 1922 OBITUARY Dr. Bell, Inventor of Telephone, Dies Sudden End, Due to Anemia, Comes in Seventy-Sixth Year at His Nova Scotia Home Notables Pay Him Tribute Lived to See Speech Reproduced Across the World--Pioneered in Aeronautics By THE NEW YORK TIMES Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, died at 2 o'clock this morning at Beinn Breagh, his estate near Baddeck. Although the inventor, who was in his seventy-sixth year, had been in failing health for several months, he had not been confined to bed, and the end was unexpected. Late yesterday afternoon, however, his condition, brought about by progressive anemia, became serious, and Dr. Ker of Washington, a cousin of Mrs. Bell, a house guest and a Sydney physician, attended him. With Mr. Bell when he died were Mrs. Bell, a daughter, Mrs. Marion Hubbard Fairchild, and her husband, David G. Fairchild of Washington. The inventor leaves another daughter, Mrs. Elise M. Grosvenor, wife of Gilbert Grosvenor of Washington, who now is with her husband in Brazil. At Sunset on Friday, on the crest of Beinn Breach Mountain, the body of Dr. Bell will be buried at a spot chosen by the inventor himself. The grave of the venerable scientist, the immensity of whose life work was attested by scores of Telegrams which came today to the Bell estate from the world's prominent figures, is at a point overlooking the town of Baddeck, Cape Breton. The sweeping vista from the mountain top, so admired by Dr. Bell, stretches far over the Bras d'Or Lakes. Sunset, chosen as the moment when the body will be committed to the sturdy hills, gilds the waters of the lakes until they are really what their name means--"the lakes of the arm of gold." Dr. Bell asked to be buried in the countryside where he had spent the major portion of the last thirty-five years of his life. The inventor came to Cape Breton forty years ago, and five years later purchased the Beinn Breagh estate. His last experiments, dealing with flying boats, were made on Bras d'Or Lake. American specialists who were rushing to the bedside of Dr. Bell were today returning to the United States. They were told of his death while aboard fast trains bound for Baddeck, and, being too late, turned back. Alexander Graham Bell lived to see the telephonic instrument over which he talked a distance of twenty feet in 1876 used, with improvements, for the transmission of speech across the continent, and more than that, for the transmission of speech across the Atlantic and from Washington to Honolulu without wires. The little instrument he patented less than fifty years ago, scorned then as a joke, was when he died the basis for 13,000,000 telephones used in every civilized country in the world. The Bell basic patent, the famed No. 174,465, which he received on his twenty-ninth birthday and which was sustained in a historic court fight, has been called the most valuable patent ever issued. Although the inventor of many contrivances which he regarded with as much tenderness and to which he attached as much importance as the telephone, a business world which he confessed he was often unable to understand made it assured that he would go down in history as the man who made the telephone. He was an inventor of the gramophone, and for nearly twenty years was engaged in aeronautics. Associated with Glenn H. Curtiss and others, whose names are now known wherever airplanes fly, he pinned his faith in the efficacy for aviation of the tetrahedral cell, which never achieved the success he saw for it in aviation, but as a by-product of his study he established an important new principle in architecture. Up to the time of his death Dr. Bell took the deepest interest in aviation. Upon his return from a tour of the European countries in 1909 he reported that the continental nations were far ahead of America in aviation and urged that steps by taken to keep apace of them. He predicted in 1916 that the great war would be won in the air. It was always a theory of his that flying machines could make ever so much more speed at great heights, in rarefied atmosphere, and he often said that the transatlantic flight would be some time made in one day, a prediction which he lived to see fulfilled. A Teacher of Deaf Mutes The inventor of the telephone was born in Edinburgh, on March 3, 1847. Means of communication had been a hobby in the Bell family long before Alexander was born. His grandfather was the inventor of a device for overcoming stammering and his father perfected a system of visible speech for deaf mutes. When Alexander was about 15 years old he made an artificial skull of guttapercha and India rubber that would pronounce weird tones when blown into by a hand bellows. At the age of 16 he became, like his father, a teacher of elocution and instructor of deaf mutes. When young Bell was 22 years old he was threatened with tuberculosis, which had caused the death of his two brothers, and the Bell family migrated to Brantford, Canada. Soon after he came to America, at a meeting with Sir Charles Wheatstone, the English inventor, Bell got the ambition to perfect a musical or multiple telegraph. His father, in an address in Boston one day not long after, mentioned his son's success in teaching deaf mutes, which led the Boston Board of Education to offer the younger Bell $500 to introduce his system in the newly opened school for deaf mutes there. He was then 24 years old, and quickly gained prominence for his teaching methods. He was soon named a professor in Boston University. But teaching interfered with his inventing and he gave up all but two of his pupils. One of these was Mabel Hubbard of a wealthy family. She had lost her speech and hearing when a baby and Bell took the most acute interest in enabling her to hear. She later became Mrs. Bell. Works Three Years on Telephone Bell spent the following three years working, mostly at night, in a cellar in Salem, Mass. Gardiner G. Hubbard, his future father-in-law, and Thomas Sanders, helped him financially while he worked on his theory that speech could be reproduced by means of an electrically charged wire. His first success came while he was testing his instruments in new quarters in Boston. Thomas A. Watson, Bell's assistant, had struck a clock spring at one end of a wire and Bell heard the sound in another room. For forty weeks he worked on his instruments, and on March 10, 1876, Watson, who was working in another room, was started to hear Bell's voice say: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." On his twenty-ninth birthday Bell received his patent. At the Centennial in Philadelphia he gave the first public demonstration of his instrument. He had not intended to go to the exposition. He was poor and had planned to take up his teaching again. In June he went to the railroad station one day to see Miss Hubbard off for Philadelphia. She had believed he was going with her. As he put her on the train and it moved off without him, she burst into tears. Seeing this, Bell rushed ahead and caught the train, without baggage or ticket. An exhibition on a Sunday afternoon was promised to him. When the hour arrived it was hot, and the judges were tired. It looked as if there would be no demonstration for Bell, when Dom Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil, appeared, and shook Mr. Bell by the hand. He had heard some of the young man's lectures. Bell made ready for the demonstration. A wire had been strung along the room. Bell took the transmitter, and Dom Pedro placed the receiver to his ear. "My God, it talks!" he exclaimed. The Lord Kelvin took the receiver. "It does speak," he said. "It is the most wonderful thing I have seen in America." The judges then took turns listening, and the demonstration lasted until 10 o'clock that night. The instrument was the centre of interest for scientists the rest of the exposition. The commercial development of the telephone dated from that day in Philadelphia. His Other Inventions While Alexander Graham Bell will be best remembered as the inventor of the telephone, a claim he sustained through many legal contests, he also became noted for other inventions. With Sumner Tainter he invented the gramophone. He invented a new method of lithography, a photophone, and an induction balance. He invented the telephone probe, which was used to locate the bullet that killed President Garfield. He spent fifteen years and more than $200,000 in testing his tetrahedral kite, which he believed would be the basis for aviation. The inventor was the recipient of many honors in this country and abroad. The French Government conferred on him the decoration of the Legion of Honor, the French Academy bestowed on him the Volta prize of 50,000f., the Society of Arts in London in 1902 gave him the Albert medal, and the University of Wurzburg, Bavaria, gave him a Ph. D. Dr. Bell regarded the summit of his career as reached when in January of 1915 he and his old associate, Mr. Watson, talked to one another over the telephone from San Francisco to New York. It was nearly two years later that by a combination of telephonic and wireless telegraphy instruments the engineers of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company sent speech across the Atlantic. In 1915 Dr. Bell said that he looked forward to the day when men would communicate their thoughts by wire without the spoken word. "The possibilities of further achievement by the use of electricity are inconceivable," he said. "Men can do nearly everything else by electricity already, and I can imagine them with coils of wire about their heads coming together for communication of thought by induction." In April of 1916 he declared that land and sea power would become secondary to air power. He expressed then the opinion that the airplane would be more valuable as a fighting machine than the Zeppelin and urged that the United States build a strong aerial fleet. The inventor's last few years were spent in energetic efforts to materialize new dreams and in seeing wider and wider applications of his greatest one. In December, 1920, he was in London when that city talked by wireless with Geneva. That same year he perfected a device for cooling houses. Always he kept working at something, more often than not a something far afield from his earlier interests. The telephone, in fact, had palled on him. There had piled up 3,000 patents atop his original basic one, and meantime he had put in some of his hardest years trying to develop flying. It was on his seventy-fifth birthday that he disclosed that he would not have a telephone in his own study, and that there was no telephone in the Cocoanut Grove home of his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Fairchild, in the Miami suburb where he was spending the Winter working toward fresh inventions. Dr. Bell went abroad the last time two years ago, paying a farewell visit to his native Edinburgh, and returning to say that he had found himself a stranger in a strange land, and that he was glad to get back to America, where he had lived most of his life. Throughout his life Dr. Bell maintained his interest in deaf mutes. He founded the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, and contributed $250,000 to its support. He was a member of many of the leading American societies of learning.

31-Aug-01 - 08:26 PM (#539373) Subject: RE: OBIT: Alexander Graham Bell From: Amos While I think you chose the wrong topic, I am glad you posted this; how faskinatink! Thanks! A

31-Aug-01 - 08:45 PM (#539379) Subject: RE: OBIT: Alexander Graham Bell From: Joe Offer Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this, too. It IS a fascinating story, which is more than you can say for the obituary of a 22-yr-old "R&B" singer who died this week, and for those who feel a need to express their "feelings" about the death of a celebrity. I don't like nastiness, and I don't like copycat threads - and I suppose there's a bit of each in this. Still, it's a damn fascinating story. -Joe Offer-

31-Aug-01 - 08:56 PM (#539382) Subject: RE: OBIT: Alexander Graham Bell From: Jon Freeman Thanks phone friend, whatever your motives, it turned out to be a great read. Even has a musical connection - the inventer of the telephone meeting the inventor of the English concertina! Jon

31-Aug-01 - 09:16 PM (#539392) Subject: RE: OBIT: Alexander Graham Bell From: john in hull Fascinating account.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: iamjohnne
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 09:27 PM

I think you guys are nuts.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: catspaw49
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 09:30 PM

LMAO....

Spaw

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: GUEST,Phone Friend Who Likes It Hot
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 09:38 PM

So Joe, I guess you have used your censorship powers to decide for all of us that a 22 year old singer with a name none of us can spell and few of us had ever heard of before is worthy of a big Mudcat thread all to herself while the inventor of the telephone and the great Norma Jean should be lumped together.

Pesonally, I think that both Bell and Monroe are more than worthy of their own threads.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 09:44 PM

Joe, how about having 1 generic Shatner thread? Spaw sexier and Shatner and Shatner concedes could easily merge...

Or is the move to silence someones protest?

Jon

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: GUEST,Shenandoah
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 09:50 PM

To call this censorship is ridiculous. Joe didn't delete anything written, he consolidated it.

I can't even figure out what the hell the point is this person is trying to make. Besides baiting Joe, that is. Which does seem to have worked.

Trouble following your own good advice tonight, Joe? ;-)

---

Ah, yes, sometimes, even I get peeved...
If I have offended the sensitivities of any of the descendants of Marilyn Monroe and Alexander Graham Bell, I am truly sorry.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: GUEST,Shenandoah
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 10:25 PM

Well, you damn well better be sorry Joe. I'm sending MM's ghost on over to give you what for.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: wysiwyg
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 11:00 PM

How about we all just go make some music till the shit quits flying?

Always an option. It's worked for me.

~Susan

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: GUEST
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 11:07 PM

Perhaps you can lead us in prayer circle for the betterment of Mudcat obit threads.

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: Banjer
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 11:11 PM

Only problem with that theory Susan, there has been so much shit flying lately that I'm running out of songs to play and can't learn new ones fast enough!!!

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: wysiwyg
Date: 01 Sep 01 - 12:30 AM

Whatcha been playin', Banjer?

~S~

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: Banjer
Date: 01 Sep 01 - 08:05 AM

Old Time gospel and working on some Steven Foster stuff. I guess 'What A Friend We Have In Jesus' and 'Hard Times' by Foster are my current favorites. 'Rosin The Beau' is another I like to play and several Civil War era songs such as 'Tramp, Tramp, Tramp', 'Battle Cry Of Freedom' and 'Marching Through Georgia'.

While we are on the subject I have been wondering about 'Tramp, Tramp, Tramp'. The tune is the same as 'Jesus Loves The Little Children', which was written first? I think that JLTLC was written after the turn of the century but haven't been able to find for sure. I have been working these tunes on both the banjo and also trying them on the lap dulcimer

(sorry for the thread creep)

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: 8_Pints
Date: 01 Sep 01 - 05:47 PM

I think the only reason to be upset would be if one's obituary were to appear here prematurely. *BG*

Bob vG

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: GUEST
Date: 04 Sep 01 - 04:09 PM

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: wysiwyg
Date: 04 Sep 01 - 05:34 PM

Banjer-- I dunno which one came first. I didn't even know they used the same melody! Love to hear more about your old-time gospel, since we do that stuff each week in church and I am always looking for more. Maybe we should creep over to PMs on that.

~Susan

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: The Shambles
Date: 04 Sep 01 - 06:39 PM

While this one is still 'up there' Announcement, a thread suggestion? is related but I was unaware of this thread, when I started the new one...

Subject: RE: OBIT: Generic Obituary Thread
From: M.Ted
Date: 05 Sep 01 - 01:44 AM

Banjer,

I Don't know the specifics on these two songs, but I do know that as a general thing, the Salvation Army and other evangelical/missionary organizations wrote religious lyrics to popular melodies of the time(late 19th Century)--it was a wonderfully effective way of spreading the message, because an enthusiastic crowd couldjoin in on a hymn instantly--of course the side effect has been that today, most of us think we are listening to religious music when we hear music from 19th century beer halls--