Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  He was generous with his wealth. With his death the Packard Foundation’s endowment will grow to $6.6 billion, making it America’s third largest charity. He and Mr Hewlett gave Stanford more than $300m. Sharing his wealth with the region that made him great may partially account for his revered status with even the most jaundiced young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But there is more to it than that. The days of civility and organic growth may be gone in the industry hothouse, but the geeks still know solid technology, well made. David Packard set the tone of Silicon Valley by valuing nothing higher than a good machine. n

  Kerry Packer

  Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer, tycoon and transformer of cricket, died on December 26th 2005, aged 68

  BEFORE 1977, the words “cricket” and “commerce” had never been put together. The game belonged to gentlemen and players; sponsorship and long-term contracts were unheard of; the pay was poor. When a young man donned his whites, he was expected to symbolise fair play and national glory, not to earn a decent living. As for the game itself, though it had excitements, the pace of five-day matches could be glacial. The sight of small white figures endlessly regrouping, wandering about, pondering the light, all seen from one fixed angle, made poor spectator sport and even worse television.

  So thought Kerry Packer. He was no expert; a huge, brawling, bull-shouldered man, he had been a heavyweight boxer at school and preferred a good game of polo, when he could find a pony strong enough to take him. But as the owner of Channel Nine, Australia’s biggest and most successful commercial television network, he wanted to broadcast cricket to the nation, and make it lively. In 1976 he offered the Australian Cricket Board A$1.5m ($1.8m), seven times the usual fee, for exclusive rights to national and international games (“There’s a little bit of the whore in all of us, gentlemen. What’s your price?”). Astonishingly, they turned him down. So off strode Mr Packer to redesign cricket as he thought it should be.

  In World Series Cricket, which ran for two seasons before the ACB caved in, the players wore pink and yellow, and the ball was white. Matches were sometimes played by floodlights at night, to get world audiences. They were often also finished in a day, compressing the action to unbelievable heights of tension and speed. Cameras were put at both ends of the pitch, so that with each ball the batsman could be seen reacting; microphones were fitted on the stumps, to catch the sweet thwack of leather on willow and the thunder of the bowler’s feet. Top-rank players, including Tony Greig, then captain of England, and various South Africans, banned from the world game during apartheid, were poached for Mr Packer’s teams, where they were treated to good pay and proper contracts. Mr Packer also took the cricketing authorities to court for restraint of trade. The game, though shellshocked, was modernised and professionalised, and has never looked back.

  Swashbuckling ruthlessness typified Mr Packer’s life. He was an iconoclast, a playboy and a man with an impressive instinct for when to buy, when to sell and when to get nasty. His father, Sir Frank Packer, had amassed an empire that included two TV stations, five radio stations, the Sydney Daily Telegraph, nine provincial papers and 60% of the country’s magazines. The son, shrewdly building on that basis, rapidly came to dominate Australia physically, financially and commercially.

  In 1972, two years before he became chairman, Mr Packer persuaded his father to sell the Telegraph to the family’s great rival, Rupert Murdoch. He himself, convinced that the future lay with television, not newspapers, pumped the money into Channel Nine. In 1987, at the top of the market, he sold the network to Alan Bond, a financier, for an unheard-of A$1 billion; three years later, he bought it

  back for a quarter of the price. “You only get one Alan Bond in your life,” he said happily. But 1987 had been a great year; that October, Mr Packer had liquidated his stock holdings just before the market crashed.

  He died Australia’s richest man, with a fortune of A$7 billion. This was not bad going for a second son with no obvious ability, publicly called “Boofhead” by his father, who had lost two years’ schooling with polio and whose first job in the firm had been to shovel newspapers on to the loading machine.

  His money was funnelled into ski resorts, casinos, polo ponies, diamond mines, cattle stations, oil, engineering works and vast tracts of land in Queensland and New South Wales. Millionswere given, sometimes secretly, to charity; millions were also spread over gambling tables in London and Las Vegas. (Though Mr Packer preferred to stay at home, no Australian casino could handle his wagers.) A three-week losing streak in London was said to have cost him A$28m but, overall, he came up lucky. Life was one big gamble, and a massive heart attack in 1990 had convinced him that “fucking nothing” lay on the other side.

  Questions were often asked about the small amounts of tax his companies paid. Mr Packer brushed that off. Canberra was already spending his money so badly that it deserved to get no more. One government commission strayed close to linking him to organised crime, but the attorney-general cleared him. Politicians on both left and right were afraid of him and gave him what he wanted. A rare rebuff, when media cross-ownership laws blocked his designs on the rival Fairfax newspaper empire in 1991, left him furious.

  Yet he was not particularly interventionist. His most brutal moment probably came in 1962, when he was sent by his father, with a few mates, to rough up the owner of a Sydney publishing house who was refusing to sell. He was busy trashing the office when Rupert Murdoch, also with a few mates, turned up to fight him. Almost as good as cricket, Packer-style. n

  Maurice Papon

  Maurice Papon, collaborator, died on February 17th 2007, aged 96

  AMONG the ranks of the French civil service, it would be hard to find a more perfect example than Maurice Papon. Well informed, elegant yet self-effacing, he had the confidence of a man who had passed with smooth diligence through some of the best lycées in Paris. In his prefectures, with the tricolour furled behind his desk, instructions were carried out to the letter and correct form was followed. Un fonctionnaire, as the tag went, est fait pour fonctionner: the purpose of a bureaucrat is simply to do his job.

  The Germans who occupied Bordeaux found Mr Papon easy to work with. The secretary-general of the prefecture of the Gironde, as he became in 1942, proved courteous and pleasant, an admirable officer of the Vichy regime that had been set up, in ostensible neutrality, to govern France alongside the Nazis. Occasionally, on delicate issues, he would hide behind his boss, the prefect; but in general he was dependable and “correct”. He could be relied on not merely to do what Vichy and Berlin asked, but even to go further.

  And he was a busy man, in charge of traffic, petrol rationing, requisitions and Jewish questions. These were two: status (identity, parentage, whether baptised) and Aryanisation (transfer of their property to non-Jews). Mr Papon had to arrange the seizure of Jewish shops, lands and jewellery across the whole region, their valuation and their sale by auction. In July 1942, in a first report, he noted that he had “dejudaised” 204 businesses, while 493 others were “in the process of dejudaisation”.

  That summer he also received other orders. He was to round up a “sufficient number” of Jews and send them to a staging camp at Drancy, in northern France. And he was to make such convoys regular. This meant ordering arrests, arranging police escorts and organising express trains that would not stop at stations. He managed it with his usual competence. Between 1942 and 1944 1,690 Jews were shipped out of Bordeaux, including 223 children. Most ended up in Auschwitz.

  Had he known they would? No, he insisted later, nor did he have any inkling of the Nazis’ broader plans. He had certain fears about Drancy. But people had to understand that he was not a free agent. There was a German imperium in force; Vichy was subject to it and he, after 1940, obedient to Vichy. With the coming of the Nazis numbers of civil servants had been sidelined or silenced, but he had a job to do, and “desertion was not in his ideology”. There was a duty to survive, to keep things running, to avoid gratuitous provocation that m
ight make a bad case worse. In Bordeaux he resisted in his own way, he said: taking names off arrest-lists, tipping off families in advance, sheltering a rabbi in his house. Why, he even chartered the city trams to spare the very young or old the walk to the station, and booked passenger trains, not goods wagons, to make their journey comfortable.

  These self-justifications came out at Mr Papon’s trial, one of only two of French officials who collaborated with the Nazis in their crimes against humanity. Hundreds more might have been charged, including

  all those who worked for him. But once the Vichy leaders had been executed for treason after the Liberation, a different imperative prevailed: to keep France united, to avoid recriminations and to draw a veil over the past. In this new version of history all Frenchmen had resisted, including those who were now intent on quietly protecting each other. In his mind Mr Papon, too, had spent the Occupation fighting.

  For almost four decades after the war he continued his steady upwards climb. He was prefect in Corsica, in Morocco and in Algeria; after 1958 he assumed charge of the Paris police, under orders from de Gaulle to “hold the city” against rioting Algerian nationalists. Those orders, as usual, were carried out with maximum efficiency; in one operation in 1961 up to 200 Algerians were killed, their bodies for days afterwards dragged out of the Seine. He had done his duty, Mr Papon said later. He had kept order. The Légion d’honneur was conferred on him, joining his treasured medal of the Resistance.

  By 1981, now deputy for Cher, he had reached the cabinet as budget minister. Punctiliously, he was going after the rich who were evading taxes. But at the same time the families of the Jews hehad deported were going after him. Lists and reports, carefully filed away, were discovered in corners of the town hall in Bordeaux. An article in Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical weekly, forced his resignation from government; 16 years of languid inquiries and technical hitches followed. His eventual trial, in 1997–98, was the longest in French history. It ended with a sentence of ten years in prison, of which he served three until ill health excused him.

  In court, assured as ever, he played the scapegoat. He felt no remorse, had no regrets. He had done his job. Most days, a walking affront to the self-delusion of France, he would appear with his yellow dossier underneath his arm. He would lay the papers out neatly before him, making constant notes. At one point, when a psychiatrist was called, he objected. He was not insane. Though perhaps, he added bitterly, he was mad to have stayed so long in the service of the state. n

  Rosa Parks

  Rosa Parks, a pioneer of civil rights, died on October 24th 2005, aged 92

  AS THE bus approached, she knew this particular driver was trouble. He had turned her off once before because, after paying her fare, she had refused to walk round the bus to get in by the back door. Rosa Parks knew better than to do that. While you walked round, the driver was quite capable of shutting the doors and driving off, leaving you stranded. So she had got in at the front and walked through to the back, like anybody else.

  Or not quite like anybody else. In Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s, as in much of the South, the first four rows of seats were for whites only. No more than four rows were needed, since few whites, and those poor ones, took the bus anyway. But whether they were filled or not, no black could sit there. Blacks sat at the back, in “Coloured”, where they belonged.

  Between the two worlds was a middle section. Blacks could sit there, but if a white needed their seat they were expected to vacate not one seat, but the whole row, in order to spare the white the embarrassment of sitting by a nigger. On December 1st 1955, Mrs Parks sat in that section. After three stops, a white needed a seat. The three other blacks in the row stood up meekly, but when the driver ordered Mrs Parks out, she said, firmly, “No”.

  In the mythology that came to gild this scene, Mrs Parks, who was 42, was said to have complained that her feet were tired. She herself denied it. Her job, as a seamstress in a department store, did not involve much standing. What had wearied her was drinking from black-only water-fountains, using black-only elevators, going to the back, standing aside, being demeaned in a hundred ways. She wanted no more of it. On December 5th, on the day she was convicted of violating a city ordinance and behaving in a disorderly manner, the young minister of the Dexter Street Baptist church in Montgomery, Martin Luther King, summed it up: “We are tired, tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression.”

  Mrs Parks had meant to do no more, she said, than show one rude bus-driver that blacks were being treated unfairly. She was not the first black ever to refuse to give up her seat. But her action had unprecedented consequences. King and other black leaders started a boycott of Montgomery’s buses; it lasted for 382 days, with blacks walking, cycling or going by mule instead. Other cities followed suit. Mrs Parks’s case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that bus segregation was illegal. Most important, a movement of non-violent protest had begun, with King as its extraordinary spokesman, which eventually recruited the courts, the president and Congress to the cause of equal rights. And Mrs Parks, small, pretty, bespectacled and soft-spoken, was seen as its instigator.

  Racism had tainted her life from the beginning. On her grandparents’ farm at Pine Level, in the Alabama wilds, she attended for a while a one-room school for blacks only; classes lasted only five months, to release the children for work in the fields. At night she sometimes heard lynchings, and the Klansmen riding. Once the body of a young black was found in the woods; no one knew who had killed him.

  Her later schooling was cut short by the need to care for her sick grandmother. She took in sewing, learned typing, married young, but also got involved in black politics. In the Montgomery Voters’ League, she helped would-be voters weave their way through the Jim Crow tests designed to keep them from the ballot, and tried several times to register to vote herself. She also joined the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), becoming secretary of the Montgomery chapter in 1943. Long preparation, therefore, preceded her act of defiance.Yet life in the South became too hard for her after the boycott. Fired from her job, she left for Detroit in 1957, the destination in those days of thousands of other poor blacks. She was still no celebrity, and continued to take in sewing. Eventually, a local black congressman, John Conyers, hired her to manage his office. She raised funds for the NAACP, appeared at events alongside King, and slowly came to realise that she was an inspiration. In 1999 she was given a Congressional Gold Medal of Honour, the highest honour possible for an American civilian.

  As she grew older she was asked, often and almost obsessively, how much race relations had truly improved in America since the passing of the civil-rights laws. She thought there was still far to go. In 1994 she was beaten and robbed by a young black high on drugs and alcohol and fuelled, she supposed, by frustrations much like her own. Although he knew who she was, he said it made no difference to him.

  In 1987 she had founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development which, as one of its programmes, took children of different races round the country to learn about the civil-rights movement. They travelled by bus, naturally, sitting where they pleased. By this time, the famous green, white and yellow bus on which she herself had sat, unmoving, had become an exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. But Mrs Parks was well aware that the journey she had started that day was unfinished.

  Luciano Pavarotti

  Luciano Pavarotti, the world’s favourite tenor, died on September 6th 2007, aged 71

  HE REMEMBERED the moment it began, at four years old: jumping on the kitchen table, setting the lamp swinging, singing “La donna è mobile” to an audience of adoring women. His father sang, beautifully, as a tenor in the church in Modena; the soaring voices of Gigli and Caruso filled the house from the crackling gramophone; at the cinema Mario Lanza sang and young Luciano Pavarotti copied him, warbling and gesturing into the mirror. To sing was to be loved.
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  Football was still his chief obsession. Yet as his musical career unfolded, it crossed paths with the Beautiful Game. He performed in stadiums, in front of thousands. The final of the 1990 World Cup in Rome was marked by a concert with Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, “The Three Tenors”, who then sang together for 13 years. Pavarotti’s version of “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot”, the anthem of that World Cup, came to epitomise all the drama, glory and pain of football, with his three climactic “vinceros” at the end of the aria like a perfect free kick, rising, arching, landing sweetly on the very note, safe in the corner of the net.

  Pavarotti made it seem so easy. “Natural” and “effortless” were the words most often applied to that smooth, honeyed, gorgeous voice, which made skin break out in goose-bumps and raised the hairs on the back of the neck. Lasciare andare, pouring it forth. No matter that the singer was huge and almost immobile, his beard blackened with burnt cork and his face running with sweat mopped away with an enormous white handkerchief; the smile was ecstatic, and the voice was from heaven. His biggest break had come, in 1972, when he hit nine high Cs in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment”; he was dressed then like a fat toy soldier, patently unable to act, but the crowd adored him. He took 17 curtain calls and, by his death, held the world record for them.

  The easiness and naturalness were deceptive. He was terrified of the high notes, full of the usual performer’s superstitions: a bent nail kept in his pocket, and a quick cry of “Malocchio!” if anyone mentioned bad luck. Though his voice showed no strain, he could be seen rising on the balls of his feet in recital, using every sinew and nerve to produce the sound. Wherever he went, he made sure to surround himself with home comforts: espresso machines, prosciutto-slicers, bottles of Lambrusco, his blotter and pens laid out exactly as they would be on his desk in Modena, and a secretary – nubile, pretty, obliging – who would hold up cue cards for him in the wings and who, when needed, would warm his extra-marital bed.