Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Over the next decades, Mr Hofmann took an awful lot of lsd. He ingested it listening to Mozart and looking at red roses. He learned not to take it when tired, or with amphetamines (a very bad trip). As head of the natural products division at Sandoz, he revelled in its potential for psychiatry. Though he also developed derivatives of ergot that helped circulation and respiration, and had a drawerful of useful pharmaceuticals to his name, it was lsd that filled him with “the joy of fatherhood”. And the sense it had given him, of union with nature and of the spiritual basis of all creation, convinced him that he had found a sacrament for the modern age: the antidote to the ennui caused by consumerism, industrialisation and the vanishing of the divine from human life.

  It proved disastrous for him that Timothy Leary at Harvard had the same idea. When

  the professor told his students in the 1960s that lsd was the route to the divine, the true self and (not least) great sex, use of the drug became an epidemic. People ingested it, in impure forms, from sugar cubes and blotting paper. They blamed it for accidents, murders and wild attempts to fly. The media flowered in psychedelic shades of orange, purple, yellow and green, and in the melting shapes and dizzying circles of a world gone almost mad. Mr Hofmann in 1971 met Leary in the snack bar at Lausanne station; he found him a charmer, but because of his carelessness lsd had by then been banned in most countries, and production and research had been stopped. They never resumed.

  Mr Hofmann turned his chemist’s attention to other things: the Mexican magic mushroom, whose active compounds he synthesised into little white pills, and the lsd-like properties of the seeds of the blue morning-glory flower. He continued his self-experiments with both of them – noting that on his mushroom trip his very German doctor became an Aztec priest who seemed about to slice his chest open with an obsidian knife. He loved his work, but still mournedthe disappearance of his “problem child”. lsd, treated with respect, could have powerfully instructed men and women in the glories of the spiritual dimension of life. But they had abused it, so it had given them terrors instead.

  Without it, however, Mr Hofmann knew it was still possible to get to the same place. As a child, wandering in May on a forest path above Baden in a year he had forgotten, he had suddenly been filled with such a sense of the radiance and oneness of creation that he thought the vision would last for ever. “Miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality” had ambushed him elsewhere, too: the wind in a field of yellow chrysanthemums, leaves in the sunlit garden after a shower of rain. When he had drunk lsd in solution on that fateful April afternoon he had recovered those insights, but had not surpassed them. His advice to would-be trippers, therefore, was simple. “Go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes!”

  Bob Hope

  Leslie Townes (Bob) Hope, comedian, died on July 27th 2003, aged 100

  The song most associated with Bob Hope was “Thanks for the Memory”, which he first sang in a film called “The Big Broadcast” in 1938. He made it his theme tune, adapting its originally bittersweet words to the needs of the time. So in the second world war he was introducing his act with, “Thanks to our brave allies / You gallant Russian bear / You British everywhere…” As Russians became less gallant and British influence shrank, the words were changed. Topicality was always one of his strengths. But Bob Hope himself seemed to remain the same.

  He belonged to a period that retains a persistent nostalgia sustained in the memory mainly by old films on television: a period, say, from the 1930s when he was building his career, followed by the war years when he made The Road to Morocco with Bing Crosby, the best of the “Road” series, and touring the world to raise the spirits of millions of American soldiers as they prepared for combat; and after the war making numerous films, mostly duds, saved only by his brilliance.

  So, he had a notably creative period of perhaps 20 years, from age 30 to 50, although he worked on into old age. Ask a teenager about Bob Hope and it is quite likely, and understandably, that the response will be a shake of the head. The Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper that tries to please the young as well as its loyal readership of old fogies, devoted six pages to George Harrison, a Beatle (Obituary, December 8th 2001), but allocated a mere two pages to Bob Hope. But mention Woody Allen to a teenager; no problem. It would be unfair to say that he is a copy of Bob Hope, but he is one of a generation of comedians who learnt from him. He once said, “When my mother took me to see “The Road to Morocco” I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.” His idea of a “weekend of pure pleasure”, he said, would be to watch half a dozen Bob Hope films. He “combined a thin story with great jokes”. The jokes were indeed often good. Bob Hope said he was the first comedian to admit that he employed a team of scriptwriters to keep him supplied with new material. “Other comedians fostered the illusion that all those funny sayings came right out of their own skulls.” But it was the way the jokes were told that mattered.

  Bob Hope was much praised for his timing. You could write a thesis about timing. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs are beautifully timed, capturing the telling moment. Michael Vaughan, England’s present cricketing hope, has match-winning timing, judging to the instant when to send a hurtling ball soaring to the boundary. Bob Hope had this kind of gift. Perhaps there is a gene for it. It takes nerve to hold your audience in suspense for microseconds until you judge it is ready for the punchline. For Bob Hope the talent always seemed to flow easily, even on occasions when he was not on stage. “I feel very humble,” he said to President Kennedy when he was being presented with a gold medal for “services to his country”. Then the follow-through that sent laughter through the White House: “But I think I have the strength of character to fight it.” Bob Hope’s material was not hurtful or obscene. That style had to wait for a later generation of comedians.

  Even a good gene has to be encouraged. He was born in England, the fifth of seven sons of a hard-up stonemason who brought his family to America when Bob was five and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. There seems to have been little formal schooling. While in his teens he made a start in showbusiness in what the Americans call vaudeville and the British call variety, an overcrowded profession with some 20,000 performers in competition, many of them ambitious “foreigners” like Bob Hope. At one time he was doing four shows a day, followed by a stint at a nightclub. In “The Cat and the Canary”, a film he made later, a character asks him if big, empty houses scared him. In a line that Bob Hope may have written himself he replies, “Not me. I was in vaudeville.”

  Whatever the size of the audience, being a stand-up comedian, alone on the stage in front of an audience that may or may not be friendly, with only a microphone to hold on to, is agony if you flop, and ecstasy if it likes you. That was his schooling. Broadway and the movies were to follow. It should be said that there were others who had the same

  polished timing, notably Jack Benny. It was a fortunate time for American audiences, with great entertainers, gifted songwriters and novelists such as Ernest Hemingway who were breaking new ground.

  Bob Hope never won an Oscar, although he was awarded several honorary ones. He received 54 honorary degrees, while some 500 towns presented him with their keys. Britain made him an honorary knight. He stayed married to one woman for 69 years, and they lived in the same house for 60 years. They adopted four children. He made loads of money, invested it wisely and gave much away to charity. Almost no one had a bad word to say about him. Marlon Brando once grumbled that Bob Hope would go to the opening of a phone booth in a petrol station as long as he could play to a camera and three people. He was, Brando said, a junkie for applause. But isn’t everyone?

  Ulrich Inderbinen

  Ulrich Inderbinen, the world’s oldest mountain guide, died on June 14th 2004, aged 103

  THE Matterhorn in Switzerland, with its bent, jagged peak and steep glacial ridges, is frequently climbed these days. As on many popular yet difficult mountains, ropes and ladders are fixed permanently into the rock and ice
, and huts line the route to the summit. But the Matterhorn has long had a reputation for deadliness – half the members of the first group to climb it, in 1865, perished on the descent – and it remains one of the world’s most dangerous peaks. Crowds make it more so, as novice climbers are tempted by its fame.

  This awesome mountain was a hugely important place in Ulrich Inderbinen’s life. He was born in 1900 in Zermatt, at the mountain’s foot: a remote village of only 750 people, with tourism a small but burgeoning industry. Mr Inderbinen rarely left the region of his birth, and was 20 before he took the train to the nearest town. To make up for it, he climbed out of the valley quite often – almost daily for nearly 70 years. He scaled all 14,700 feet of the Matterhorn more than 370 times, though he is said to have lost track of the exact number.

  Mr Inderbinen thought the Matterhorn “the most beautiful mountain in the world”. Although it was only one of many mountains he climbed over the course of the 20th century, guiding innumerable clients up and down with inexhaustible good cheer, no other so engrossed him. On his first ascent, at the age of 20, he went with his sister Martha and a friend of hers. The girls wore long skirts and their ordinary shoes, and the lanterns they were carrying kept blowing out. Since none of them knew the route, they followed scratch-marks made by previous climbers on the rocks. On his last ascent, bent double under his ropes at the age of almost 90, he conquered the mountain in four hours.

  Mr Inderbinen met life with the same equanimity as the mountains, his dry wit punctuating his monumental energy. When asked if he ever got bored, climbing the same peaks again and again, he replied, “Only when the clients walk too slowly.” When one journalist pointed out an enthusiastic review from an American client in the 1930s, Mr Inderbinen replied: “Perhaps he did not know any other guides.”

  But rivalry was by no means absent from Mr Inderbinen’s life. As a young guide, he would walk for four hours each morning to catch visitors disembarking from the train above Zermatt. He took up ski-racing at 82 when he realised that, with no other competitors in his age-group, he could win every race – which he did. Until almost the end of the century he continued to take climbers up easier local peaks, proving to other guides how sure he still was. For his 95th birthday he was given an ice-axe as a present, which he put to good use. One of Mr Inderbinen’s few regrets was his family’s veto of an attempt to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa, when he was 92.

  Mr Inderbinen might have been a farmer like his parents. Much of his early life was spent herding cows and picking edelweiss for tourists. He did not get his first skis, made from local larch, until he was 20. But he eventually chose mountain-guiding in emulation of his uncle Moritz, a famous guide when Mr Inderbinen was a child.

  At first, business was slow. Between customers, Mr Inderbinen had to cut trees and shovel snow. Then came the second world war, with no visitors at all. For a while Mr Inderbinen served in the ski patrol of the Swiss army. He would glide in the mountains above Zermatt, often alone and often at night, forbidden even to switch on a torch. Whether or not he truly helped the war effort, it was a billet that suited him exactly.

  His chosen profession allowed for a bit more camaraderie in peacetime.Indeed, the profession of a guide entailed a paradoxical combination of solitude amongst the high glaciers and sociability among his fellow mountaineers. And once visitors poured back to Zermatt, he began to be in demand. Unusually in the climbing business, he sought fame through service – guiding others safely up mountains, rather than conquering them for himself.

  Mr Inderbinen’s life was notably harmonious. He had no car, telephone or even bicycle, and chopped his own firewood deep into old age. He made his living on his feet or his skis, proceeding steadily; he did not believe, he said, in doing anything hastily, on the slopes or elsewhere. (This, however, was not always true; he gave up mountain-guiding, at 97, when he realised he had taken ten minutes longer than he should have done to decend the Breithorn.) He built his house with his own hands, finishing it in 1935, and lived in it for the rest of his life. He knew what he wanted, and had it close by. Especially, he wanted those particular mountains.

  George Mallory, a British mountaineer who tried to conquer Everest and died on it, famously said he wanted to climb the peak “because it is there”. Mallory crystallised a romantic vision of the mountaineer, chasing after dreams on ice-wrapped summits far from home and hearth. Ulrich Inderbinen could not have been more different. He went up mountains not because they were there, but because he was. He died gently, in his bed. And though he may not have been the first to climb the Matterhorn, he seems to have climbed it best.

  Steve Irwin

  Steve Irwin, crocodile hunter, died on September 4th 2006, aged 44

  SOME of his fans thought he was dead long since. Bitten by a venomous snake that had left the real Steve Irwin out in the bush-grass, dead as a maggot. Chomped in half by a croc as he gave it a loving hug. Paralysed by some spider that had crept into those teeny-tiny shorts and sunk its fangs into him. Pricked by a beetle that had burrowed into his ear, into his brain. But “Nah!” he would cry, jumping up and waving his arms: “I’m still here, mate.”

  Thousands of bits had been taken out of him by the animals he loved and provoked. One croc had “caved” his face, another had grabbed his hand and dragged him under. No worries: nothing poisonous had ever got him. Sure, he felt nervy when he “went in on” apex predators, but fear was good. It let him survive. Besides, if a poisonous snake didn’t bite him in the first 30 seconds, he knew it was a softie that would settle in his hands and slither round his neck like a tie. Only parrots he was scared of. They had this uncanny desire to peck him completely to death.

  For 169 episodes of “The Crocodile Hunter”, “Croc Files”, and “Croc Diaries”, watched by 500m people in 136 countries, Mr Irwin diced with death-by-animals. He got close, really close. His smooth blond face filled the screen, eyes goggling, tongue flicking out to kiss a flickering snake’s. Creep up to a sleeping mamba, tweak it by the tail. Crikey! Run a lawnmower at a croc, see it launch itself right into the air to seize him. Help! “There’s a cheetah. Wanna see that cheetah?” Steve would whip his camera from his little green back-pack and poke it practically into the creature’s mouth, scanning the molars. Aaarrrghhh! Better run! Danger, danger, danger.

  His excitement had been going at full tilt for years. As a toddler he put his foot deliberately on a large brown killer snake; it seemed to like it. At six he got 12 feet of scrub python for his birthday, and spent his days at the creek catching frogs for it. At nine his father, a naturalist who had started a reptile park on the Queensland coast, taught him to stalk crocs at night and lug them out of the water. He made a living from that for a time. While other young men were chundering and barracking in the bars of Brisbane he was up to his arse in a mangrove swamp, tormented by mozzies, roping rogue crocs single-handed for the Queensland government.

  Though he played the boofhead both onscreen and off, he was serious about wildlife. His clowning was to get interest going. He eventually owned not just his parents’ reptile park (turned into the Australia Zoo, “Where Crocs Rule!”) but 30,000 hectares in Australia, Vanuatu, Fiji and the United States, which he kept as natural reserves. He railed against the farming of animals for leather, fur or ivory and the culling of kangaroos by the Australian government: “You never save any wild animal by killing it.” He abominated his country’s determined land-clearing. In Timor-Leste, to local astonishment, he caught and penned up two crocodiles to stress that they should be respected.

  Could Mr Irwin himself be respected? Australia was divided. He did stupid things, such as feeding a chicken carcass to a crocodile while cradling, as tenderly as a six-pack of Castlemaine XXXX, his

  month-old baby son. (He never gave a rip, either; he had been “completely in control”.) To promoters of Australia as an urban, sophisticated, cosmopolitan place, he was a prancing horror, a big-booted oaf from the outback who reminded everyone
of the rough edges of Australian life. Even in the good cause of conservation he was loud, bloody loud, in his unmodulated Strine. And he was naive in a wide-eyed, right-wing way, almost genuflecting to John Howard as he called him “the greatest leader in the entire world”.

  A few wowsers yearned for a different face of Australia, such as Olivia Newton-John. But Mr Irwin won out. He loved his country with a passion, and people the world over took him as its exemplar. Americans raised on “Crocodile Dundee” now assumed that all Australian men could wrestle with tigers and anacondas while getting over cruciate-ligament surgery, as Stevie once showed them live on campus (“G’day LA!”) at the University of California. He brought tourists to Australia by the plane-load, though they half-dreaded what they would find there.

  He was filming again, diving off theGreat Barrier reef for a children’s TV series, when a stingray got him. It would probably have ignored him, floating quietly by, but Mr Irwin went over the top of it, almost on its back, observing. Its tail, venom-coated and serrated, pierced his chest and stopped his heart. He managed to pull the barb out, but not fast enough.

  He had always got away before, but it had often been a close-run thing. After the poking, joking and prodding would come a shot of Steve retreating, tumbling, shouting, hands up to his face, as the creature came after him. He was not that quick. He was human.