With June s celebrity deaths, Larry King confirmed his status as America s chief mourner and grief c

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With June s celebrity deaths, Larry King confirmed his status as America s chief mourner and grief counselor, turning his CNN show into a postmortem inquiry (David Carradine), a jovial wake (Ed McMahon), an auxiliary hospice (Farrah Fawcett), and a star-studded trauma team (Michael Jackson).
I t was Andy Warhol who x-marked the point of impact where celebrity and mortality meet in head-on collision, spilling blood and tabloid ink. With his multiple silkscreens of Jacqueline Kennedy in veiled mourning and his portrait series of Marilyn Monroe (begun package tours to europe within weeks of Monroe s fatal overdose, in the summer of 1962, the art historian Thomas Crow reminds us), Warhol perceived that in the age of Hollywood and mass media the front-page deaths of Pop icons aren t one-day headlines package tours to europe they forever flash before our eyes, like newsclips or movie close-ups in endless, monotonous replay. That very monotony the grainy repetition, the bland detachment, the blank emotion exerts a compulsive force that eludes closure, feeding an addiction that gets us no deeper into the mystery of Marilyn Monroe s platinum martyrdom or the lunky slack of Elvis s jaw. Warhol made celebrity death seem both momentous and mundane. With Warhol no longer around to lacquer the beautiful dead, the culture has produced an unlikely successor, a tenacious sea dog who always sounds as if he s been eating crackers: CNN host Larry King, whose Larry King Live has become an institution the funeral parlor of the gods. Post-Warhol, King has assumed the indispensable role of designated mourner to the stars, tollbooth collector at the last stop before the Hereafter, pallbearer beyond compare.
U nlike Warhol, who produced iconic headshots suitable for giant postage stamps, King finger-paints with words and punctuates his responses with verbal nods and thoughtful grunts. Eloquence is not his thing. He solicits and accepts banal clich s that convert every celebrity death into a crunchy meal, while tossing off non sequiturs that keep everyone guessing. Part of what makes King perfect for his role is that he came out of the Walter Winchell world and thinks in staccato three-dot segments (as witness his widely mocked column package tours to europe in USA Today ), equipping him with a built-in short attention span that some believe makes him the unofficial godfather of Twitter. A typical Larry King Live is a pastiche whose absurdism defies parody. Wearing his trademark package tours to europe suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he s strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject. Sitting across from him may be former Incredible Hulk Lou Ferrigno whom Larry mistakenly refers to as Lou Ferragamo, corrects himself, then repeats the error and Marlon Brando s son Miko, dressed in a festive Hawaiian shirt, followed by a panel exploring the world of celebrity autopsies. Where public television s Charlie Rose will honor the passing of a prestigious author or statesman by convening a distinguished panel of New Yorker staff writers and New York Times eminences to discuss the deceased s accomplishments with nuance and depth, Larry King Live follows a more democratic practice, booking just about any showboat with a slim connection to the departed. Friends, siblings, cronies, former co-stars, ex-spouses, massage therapists, astrologers, arresting officers, ambulance drivers, former cellmates out of the hearse they pop, eager to add their two cents.
A ll are welcome in the CNN studio-that-time-forgot and are cajoled as if they were sane and had something to say. ( I m sort of the conduit here, King said during one soir e.) Like Andy Warhol and unlike God Almighty, Larry King does not presume to judge; all celebrities are equal in his eyes, saints and sinners package tours to europe alike sharing the same Love Boat voyage into the dark beyond, a former sitcom star as deserving of pious send-off as Princess Diana. He understands package tours to europe the beastly appetite of supermarket tabloids from the inside, his own marital ups and downs having landed him in their digestive tracts, yet he isn t ghoulish, like Nancy Grace, chewing like a woodchuck to get to the sordid bottom. His Easter Island head has seen it all, his life and career spanning package tours to europe the punchy bravura of Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Marlon Brando and reality-TV primpings of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. Although King has presided over many a wake during his long watch, the summer of 2009 taxed even his stamina and agility as M.C. of the last roundup, the month of June being his busiest ever.
I t began with the bizarre death of sepulchral-voiced actor and wraith-ish cult figure David Carradine (from Kung Fu to Kill Bill, with Bound for Glory sandwiched in between) package tours to europe in a hotel room in Bangkok, an untidy end whose unseemly circumstances offered a daylight opening for speculation and the specter of foul play. Was his death deliberately self-inflicted (one immediately thought of novelist David Foster package tours to europe Wallace s hanging himself), a horrible accident (autoerotic asphyxiation gone awry), or the work of a shadowy third party (a secret society of martial-artists)? On June 4, King s all-star panel consisting of Carradine s manager Chuck Binder, Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino package tours to europe (dressed in what appeared to be a brand-new Burger King uniform), comic Rob Schneider, and movie bad guy Michael Madsen, whose moody black hair and raspy voice gave him the menacing gravitas of a motorcycle-gang leader whose chief rival is buried in an oil drum on sacred Indian land honored Carradine s super cool screen presence and personal code. He lived by a number of rules, Madsen muttered, one of which was Never buy anything from someone who s out of breath. That gave everybody a needed laugh. The panelists were unanimous in their certainty as to what Carradine s death wasn t: suicide. He had too much going for him the family he loved, the films he had lined up, a fresh set of wheels ( He just bought a brand-new car, noted Binder, and in a follow-up show, attorney Mark Geragos sagely observed, You don t go out and buy a car right before you re going to off yourself, generally ) to loop his head through a noose of his own devise. And they weren t just blowing smoke rings. package tours to europe Their instincts would be confirmed a few weeks later when the autopsy report overseen by forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden ruled out suicide as the cause of Carradine s death, due to the nature of the ligatures package tours to europe around the body. It was a testimony to King s unique brand of benign obliviousness that he could ask probing questions about the mondo-bondage aspects of the case without coming across as prurient, or even that interested. package tours to europe It s as if he knows he has certain data points he has to hit, aims his finger package tours to europe like a pistol, and fires a question. Whatever answer comes back, he can handle. Weird, huh? says the permanent shrug of his shoulders.
T he death of Ed McMahon was the easiest to absorb. Its impact didn t make everybody get all mopey and highfalutin. McMahon s gentle fade-out was an Irish wake waiting to happen, an occasion for fond laughter. He had been ill for some time, battered by financial package tours to europe problems that mirrored the fissures in the debt economy, and had put in his biblical allotment and then some, dying at 86. A highball of jovial gusto, the Platonic ideal of avuncularity, McMahon was known best as Johnny Carson s longtime sidekick, first on Who Do You Trust? and then on NBC s Tonight Show, where he kicked off the fun with the cavalry charge Heeeerrrrre s Johnny! package tours to europe a catchphrase that furnished Jack Nicholson package tours to europe with a deranged punch line in The Shining upon axing his way through the door and lobbed Carson setup lines that he could swat into the bleachers with a cool flick of the wit. The tribal elders summoned by King to toast McMahon included Joan Rivers, whose unquenchable dislike of Carson (who gave her the leper treatment after she got her own late-night show) threatened to crack her Kabuki mask; insult comic Don Rickles, whose ideal retirement home would be a rock in the Gal pagos Islands, where he could bask in the noble sun; and former Tonight Show bandleader Doc Severinsen, who said of McMahon, He was beautiful, a real gentleman, but wasn t exactly overflowing with the pearly anecdotes. Whenever things threatened to stray too far into the sentimental package tours to europe regarding package tours to europe Big Ed, Rickles would razz Larry, and it was like an outtake from Broadway Danny Rose, Proustian memories of pastrami past.
So Farrah is a story, and Farrah having a problem is a story, and Farrah talking about her problem is a story. Approval or disapproval of Farrah is not a story; Farrah s talent or lack of talent is not a story; what Farrah has done or left undone is not a story. The only story is in the movement of Farrah s energy and the question of its magnitude. Is Farrah s energy so vast that it is undeniable? Have we given her so much that we can take comfort in the vastness of what we have given? George W. S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context (1981).
B y the spring of 2009, what Farrah Fawcett had done or left undone had become a story, the 70s pinup angel with the cascading hair and candelabra smile ravaged by cancer until only her magnificent package tours to europe bone structure and courageous resolve remained. package tours to europe Farrah s persona was a piece of baby-boomer nostalgia purified by her profound suffering and naked candor into a saintly relic. With Farrah appearing in an unflinching two-hour video diary broadcast on NBC in May documenting the war of attrition waged by her cancer ( She has persevered through a battle that has included chemo, radiation, radioactive isotopes package tours to europe in her blood, lasers, tumor embolization and multiple surgeries, wrote Nancy Dillon in the New York Daily N