When a star from decades past dies, it’s a poignant reminder

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In an obvious attempt to attract a younger audience, CBC Radio broadcasts a program about popular culture called Commotion. When I listen to it, most of the time (probably 90 percent of the time) I have no idea who or what is being talked about, but I don’t care. My time caring about popular culture ended a long time ago.

But like everyone who grew up in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, there was a time when I did care. Passionately. When the actors and musicians I knew from film, television and records were as much a part of my life as the people I actually knew.

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I never stopped to think about them that way because, like the people I really knew, they were always there. In movies, on television, in the press. Everywhere. Until the day they weren’t. “You don’t know what you’ve got until you lose it,” Joni Mitchell sang. She’s still here, but for how long?

What makes the news of their deaths especially painful is knowing that many of these once-immortals are as unknown to today’s culture as their idols are to me. How can that be, I wonder? How is it possible that there are adults (people in their 20s, 30s and 40s) who don’t know who Julie Christie, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Nicholson, Diana Ross, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty are?

Yes, I know intellectually that it is the same for all generations. Thanks to reruns and the Late Show, I always knew who Bing Crosby, Patti Page, Lana Turner, Tyrone Power and Humphrey Bogart were, but I also knew that his fame had passed. He was barely walking when Tyrone Power and Humphrey Bogart died.

The only exceptions were Katharine Hepburn, who became more famous, exalted and beloved as she grew older, and Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, whose legends were indestructible.

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But for me, Mick Jagger, Robert Redford, Cher, Dustin Hoffman, Carole King, Carly Simon, Goldie Hawn and James Taylor defined her age. My age. They were living, breathing, seemingly real characters in my world. In my psyche, in my heart. That’s why, for me, its stars will always shine as brightly today as they did 30, 40, or even 50 years ago.

Some artists never die. They live for what happens forever: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky; Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie; Leonardo, Michelangelo, Picasso, Matisse; Judy Garland, Lucille Ball, Walt Disney, Elvis Presley. Among many more.

From my generation, who knows? I guess the Beatles, Sidney Poitier, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda. The only thing I’m sure of is that I won’t be around to find out.

Among them, only John Lennon, George Harrison, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman are dead, but many lesser lights have also gone out. Lights that time forgets with each passing year. The cast of Bewitched, Bonanza, Mission Impossible and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Burgess Meredith, Penny Marshall, Roy Scheider, and Madeline Kahn. Mama Cass, Keith Moon, Davey Jones, Karen Carpenter and even, in a slightly woozy way, Pee-wee Herman.

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Therefore, for years now, the most moving moment of any Academy Awards telecast has been the commemorative moment. The way we were montage of actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, costume designers, studio heads and composers who died the previous year.

Sometimes their inclusion is a surprise. This year Ryan O’Neal was that surprise. The star (in case you forgot) of Peyton Place, Love Story, What’s Up Doc?, Paper Moon, Barry Lyndon, Nickelodeon, and The Main Event, as well as Farrah Fawcett’s longtime lover. Remember her? After her death on December 8, he was buried next to her in Los Angeles. I didn’t find out until Oscar night, and when I found out, I was shocked. Honestly. I thought, “How is it possible that Ryan O’Neal is no longer in the world?”

You would think that increasing familiarity with that feeling would make it easier to bear. It is not like this. If anything, it makes it harder because it reminds me that nothing is sadder and more unstoppable than the passage of time. Yours and mine.

Nicholas Read is the author of a dozen books on animals and nature and a former reporter for the Vancouver Sun.

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