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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Column: Nothing strange about mourning the death of a celebrity

Chris Jones Chicago Tribune

Did any celebrity in the history of the world ever die as well as David Bowie?

We certainly have had ample recent opportunity in the last week or two to compare the exits of other famous actors and musicians: the actors Alan Rickman, Brian Bedford and Dan Haggerty; Glenn Frey of the Eagles; Dale Griffin of Mott the Hoople; the incomparable Otis Clay. And that’s an incomplete list.

The baby boomers have seemed especially mortal in recent days, with the headlines full of rockers not making it into the fullness of the retirement years. Some of us had been counting on these guys to change the culture of the retirement homes that await us – ensuring that we could at least enjoy the irony of sitting there and dozing off to “Hotel California.” But, symbolically at least, these deaths also seemed to raise the specter that boomers were never meant to retire at all.

Maybe for this hard-livin’ generation, the live shows, and the price they extract from the stars putting them on, just come to an end one day.

Some ink has been wasted on why so many of these artists have died in such rapid succession – death knows no chronological rule book and every obituary editor knows deaths always come in twos. Or threes. Or whatever else we claim to know about that which we actually know so little. More ink was wasted on why the deaths of these celebrities caused such widespread grief from those who, it was said, lacked personal relationships with the departed.

That is no surprise. I surely felt a personal connection when I watched Bedford work. And Bowie? Well, he provided a soundtrack to my life. Sure, I knew him.

All you can do in the face of all this loss is keep your sense of humor. This perhaps explains why a satirical piece proclaiming the “death” (at age 66) of the Muppets drummer known as Animal enjoyed such traction on social media. The announcement, made by the satirical Irish website Waterford Whispers News, came replete with quotes from surviving members of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem (“Although he had already been diagnosed with threadbaring syndrome, you would have never known he was sick,” said Fozzie Bear.) Animal, we read, was a rocker to the end.

I could tell you plenty about Animal’s personality, actually. I feel like I know him. Great actors and musicians – and great puppeteers – communicate with intimacy. There’s no need to feel strange about being unable to focus on anything other than Bowie’s death on Jan. 10. Half of Great Britain, which had lost its Elvis, felt the same.

Of course, we did not really know Bowie in the personal sense – if you look back at much of the media coverage in the aftermath of his death, you will read accounts of him walking around New York in relative anonymity, an extraordinary man perceived, if perceived at all, as a slightly more intimidating version of an ordinary dude, no more complex in gait or demeanor than any other denizen of the East Village. In the New York Times, the playwright John Guare was quoted describing Bowie’s incredible “cloak of invisibility.”

“He just eradicated himself,” Guare said of Bowie.

Not unlike Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s anonymity – to paraphrase the great Shakespearean Michael Pennington – has always looked to me like a deliberate act of obfuscation. Otherwise there would be more. He just did not want there to be more. This Elizabethan self-eradication, surely, was a conscious artistic act. To help his plays.

But I digress.

Or maybe I do not digress.

The Man From Stratford knew a thing or two about shuffling off our mortal coil. Similarly, Bowie’s death had a lot to teach us.

Profound was Bowie’s sense of detachment from his own celebrity. Heck, maybe even unique. Thus he was able to create a separate character – David Bowie – allowing him to live as David Robert Jones in relative quiet. David Bowie was the performance-art project of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, whose name, of course, was David Robert Jones.

Very few celebrities can do this, although Jennifer Lawrence is showing some promise. Maybe she’ll turn out to be a Kentucky version of Bowie. Maybe not. But she has an innate sense of separation. I thought the same of Taylor Swift a year or two ago, but now I’m not sure. You have to be in it for the long haul.

If you go to see Terry Teachout’s play about Louis Armstrong, “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” you can see that separation in the great trumpeter of the 20th century, a man who always called himself “Louis,” even as he tacitly went along with the Frenchified pronunciation “Louie” for his public persona. His announcer would say one thing, Armstrong another. Many African-American musicians became familiar with the obfuscation of self.

Most stars, alas, are too ego-involved in their own professional success to effect such a separation. In fact, many famous actors and musicians, and the gossip industry that supports them, go to enormous lengths to insist that they and their personas are one and the same – the endless array of click-bait gotchas usually focus on revelations of inconsistency.

How shocking.

But because Bowie had this profound understanding of what celebrity should be in our age of relative enlightenment – a narrative construction – he was able to write and compose the ending precisely to his specifications. He did not just release one last record or perform a farewell concert. He died.

And, unlike the way most of us go, Bowie did not exit as if he had not been expecting the curtain to come down, or denying its approach. Think back to those other celebrity deaths – did any of them say anything in public about their own finality? Did any of the others get to write their own denouement? They had to leave it to other people.

Not Bowie. Bowie wrote, composed and filmed his own end, much as Shakespeare seemed to do in “The Tempest,” actually. And in so doing he was able to offer his fans and lovers a sense of completion – and we all need a sense of completion – while buying his real self some honest-to-God privacy.

It takes guts to go that way. But being as we all are the stuff of dreams, here for a flicker, our exits messy and painful, it’s not a bad project to undertake.