Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Bobby Riggs

  Robert Larimore Riggs, American tennis champion and braggart male chauvinist, died on October 25th 1995, aged 77

  When Bobby Riggs was 55 he said, in a remark mischievously designed to upset feminists, “Even an old man like me, with one foot in the grave, could beat any woman player.” Margaret Court, an Australian aged 29 and the world’s best woman player, took him on. And was beaten. Billie Jean King, an American amazon of the tennis court, and the world’s number two woman player, stepped forward. This was serious. The honour of women was at stake, and perhaps democracy, freedom, the whole damn thing.

  In the run-up to the Riggs–King game in 1973 America appeared to lose interest in anything else. If the Russians had invaded no one would have noticed. This was the Battle of the Sexes. Mr Riggs arrived at the court in a rickshaw drawn by six women. “When I get through with Billie she might just go home and start raising a family,” he said. “That’s where women should be, barefoot and pregnant. Then they can’t get out.”

  The game was watched at a Houston stadium by more than 30,000 people, a gate for a tennis match that has never been surpassed, and by millions on television. Miss King won. Women rejoiced, bras were burnt. It was that sort of time.

  Some say Mr Riggs lost deliberately. He did not dislike women; rather he may have been too fond of them. He may have regarded the whole battle of the sexes as a joke. He denied this, although in his denial – “the most disheartening experience of my life” – he may have been protesting too much. Whatever the truth, the professed anti-feminist had actually done feminism a good turn. The much-publicised match “was such madness”, said Miss King, but it “helped put women’s tennis on the map”. It “slew the beast of male chauvinism”, she claimed, perhaps optimistically. As for Bobby Riggs, he had gained far more fame from the match than he had simply as a tennis star.

  Bobby Riggs first came to prominence when he won the Wimbledon crown in 1939. He arrived as an outsider and won not only the men’s singles, but added the men’s doubles and the mixed doubles as well. To this day no one else has won the triple title on a first visit to the world’s supreme festival of tennis. Mr Riggs never returned to Wimbledon. During the second world war Wimbledon was suspended, and, anyway, Mr Riggs was in the American navy. Later he turned professional, while Wimbledon was (for a time) open only to amateurs. He became professional champion in America three times.

  He continued to play tennis until shortly before he died. His claim, which no one disputed, was that he was always the best player in the world against anyone his own age, from his teens to his 70s. If he seemed to be a braggart, he was of a variety that might have been played by Woody Allen; slightly undersized at 1.65 metres (5ft 5in) and having occasional trouble with his toupee. Like Mr Allen, he was a recognisable American symbol, the little guy who astonished everyone by taking on the big guy. In a famous match he beat Don Budge, then the biggest guy, certainly physically, in American tennis. “No one could believe a little runt like me had a chance,” said Bobby Riggs. Some of his fancy for ballyhoo he probably owed to his father, a preacher who delivered a message of fire and brimstone to congregations in the American South. If Mr Riggs had a sin it was a love of gambling. When he arrived at Wimbledon he had the audacity to make a 200–1 bet on himself to win the triple. Later, he would upset traditionalists by taking bets on himself while handicapped in various bizarre ways: wearing handcuffs, carrying an umbrella or wearing wellington boots. In one doubles game his partner was a donkey. He always won these stunts and enriched himself considerably. “Millionaires are the salt of the earth,” he remarked.

  He was simply an excellent player, although, compared with today’s stylists, an old-fashioned one. Not for him the power smash of a Sampras. His favourite shot was the lob, sent high across the net to land with cruise-missile-like precision just short of the baseline, and often unplayable. His casualness was, of course, deceptive. He took pleasure from scoffing at those who took tennis over-seriously. It was, after all, no more than a game of bat and ball. But his manner hid a zealot. He had been playing tennis since he was 12. In his autobiography he wrote, “Nobody gets to the top who has not played for at least ten years, 300 days a year, six hours a day.” But he was a prodigy as well. When playing

  golf, for which he had no special training, he successfully called on the inborn sense of judgment, or whatever, that lifts an athlete into greatness. “I want to be remembered as a winner,” he said. More likely, he will be remembered, though mostly affectionately, for the match he lost.

  Amalia Rodrigues

  Amalia Rodrigues, Portugal’s queen of fado, died on October 6th 1999, aged 79

  When Amalia Rodrigues died last week, the government of Portugal declared three days of national mourning. Political activity in the country’s general election campaign came to a halt. The president was the chief mourner at the singer’s state funeral. It was a singular expression of national grief and in some ways a peculiar one.

  Entertainers, however famous, rarely, if ever, depart in such ceremony. It did not happen to Maria Callas, perhaps the most celebrated opera singer of recent times, when she died in 1977; or to Frank Sinatra, who died in 1998. There was some sadness, certainly; a lot of reminiscences, of course; but life went on largely uninterrupted in Greece and America. The sanctifying of Amalia Rodrigues may say something about the nature of the Portuguese as well as about what the prime minister called “the voice of the country’s soul”.

  She was known simply as Amalia. The diminution of her name was itself a reflection of her fame (as was Britain’s Diana, or Di, whose death in 1997 also briefly interrupted the life of her country). Her style of singing is called fado, the Portuguese word for fate. “I have so much sadness in me,” Amalia said. “I am a pessimist, a nihilist. Everything that fado demands in a singer I have in me.”

  Amalia’s message of fatalism seems to have echoed a mood among her admirers. Portugal is still among the least modern of European countries, though it has been modernising rapidly of late. It expects its economy to grow by about 3% this year, compared with an average of only 1.9% growth for the rest of the euro area. But GDP does not change a country’s sentiment overnight. Portugal was the first European country in modern times to carve out a great trading empire. Go almost anywhere in the world and you find traces of Portuguese architecture, language and genes. Generation by generation, the once-rich Portuguese have seen their empire slowly vanish, and not very gracefully. East Timor is still formally Portuguese. “I sing of tragedy,” Amalia said, “of things past.”

  Amalia Rodrigues was never sure of her exact birthday. Her grandmother said it was in the cherry season, so she assumed she was born in early summer. Other details of her childhood were also obscure. Some accounts said her father was a shoemaker; others that he was a musician. The story that as a teenager she sold fruit on the docks of Lisbon, capturing the hearts of her customers with her singing, was willingly believed by those who adored her. The adoration was put to the test in 1974 when Portugal emerged from half a century of dictatorship. Amalia’s critics said she had benefited from the patronage of the most enduring of Europe’s fascist regimes.

  “I always sang fado without thinking of politics,” Amalia responded angrily. It was a claim impossible to contradict. Yet fado, with its melancholy fatalism, was an appropriate accompaniment to the thinking of the Portuguese leader, António de Oliveira Salazar. Not for him the ruthless urgency of Hitler. Rather, in his corporate state he wanted to preserve Portugal as a rural and religious society where industrialisation and other modernising

  influences would be excluded. He kept Portugal out of the second world war. It was too wearisome.

  Fado was the music of Portuguese tradition. If it had any foreign ingredients they were from Africa, but these were acceptable: huge areas of Africa had been Portuguese. And here was Amalia, the queen of fado, clad all in black, her throbbing voice accompanied by two guitarists, her head thrown back, her ey
es closed. She was the essence of sadness, bearing the memories of two marriages; both unhappy. When Salazar heard “O Grito” (“The Cry”) he allowed himself a tear.

  Unsurprisingly, the Portugal that followed the dictatorship wanted cheering up, as well as modernising. The question of whether Amalia had been a supporter of the old regime became irrelevant. Fado itself fell out of fashion. Rock was the music of democracy.

  Amalia, however, had built up other audiences abroad. The Brazilians, whose language is Portuguese, flocked to see her dozen or so films. A six-week tour to Rio and other cities had to be expanded to three months. In the United States record collectors said that her songs, with their four-line stanzas, were like the blues, andshe did indeed make some recordings with a jazz saxophonist, Don Byas. Italians claimed to see links between fado and opera. The French said Amalia reminded them of Edith Piaf, who sang nostalgically of the tragedies in her life. A fado song given the English title “April in Portugal” became a hit in several countries.

  In Portugal fado and Amalia gradually made a comeback. Amalia showed that she was really a democrat at heart by recording “Grandola Vila Morena”, the song that had swept the country when the dictatorship ended. The socialist government presented her with the country’s highest decoration, the Order of Santiago. She was giving concerts up to a year ago, and every one was sold out. “The sadder the song, the more the Portuguese like it,” she said. In this new time of change, pessimism was back in fashion. For Amalia, it was the happiest of endings.

  Andres Rodriguez

  Andres Rodriguez, Paraguay’s unexpected liberator, died on April 21st 1997, aged 73

  Of the countries of Latin America none has had a more melancholy history than Paraguay. For nearly 180 years from 1811, when the country became independent from Spain, it had a succession of dictators, some bad, some very bad. One allowed no newspapers or schools. Another confiscated half the country. When Alfredo Stroessner was overthrown in 1989 it was assumed that Andres Rodriguez, the general who organised the coup against his old master, would be a dictator too. To many people’s astonishment, in Paraguay and abroad, he freed political prisoners, ended the ban on opposition political parties, lifted newspaper censorship, reached an accord with his critics in the Roman Catholic church, and successfully stood for president in what was acclaimed as the cleanest dirty election in the country’s history. What Mr Rodriguez started eight years ago is growing, albeit slowly, into a stable democracy.

  It would be difficult to ascribe Mr Rodriguez’s actions to a change of heart. In the view of many Paraguayans he had no heart. He had been the army’s second in command, after Mr Stroessner, and an unswerving servant of the police state that crushed its critics and was a haven for all kinds of undesirables from Nazi fugitives to drug smugglers. Mr Rodriguez was even part of the Stroessner family: his daughter had married one of the dictator’s sons.

  But Mr Stroessner had been in power for 34 years and was thought to be ailing. His inner circle, which had taken on the character of a medieval court, was endlessly in dispute over who should succeed him. Mr Rodriguez set out to settle the matter. Putting family sentiment aside, he tried to arrest Mr Stroessner at the home of his mistress. But the dictator, getting wind of the coup, had abandoned that agreeable lodging for his palace stronghold in Asuncion, the capital. All through the night of February 3rd 1989 the Stroessner forces fought the Rodriguez forces tooth and claw. The palace guards were loyal, but Mr Rodriguez had tanks. Some 500 soldiers died before Mr Stroessner surrendered and was exiled to Brazil, where he still lives, aged 84.

  The country that Andres Rodriguez took over was a mess. Its largely criminal economy based on smuggling had benefited some individuals enormously but not the country. Discontent with Stronismo, as Paraguayans called it, was shared by groups as diverse as landless peasants and poorly-paid doctors. Some two-thirds of Paraguay’s 4m people were said to be short of food.

  The United States, ever scenting an opportunity in Latin America, whispered that perhaps dictatorship, with its corruption and all that, was going out of fashion. Dictator fatigue was setting in. Paraguay’s neighbours, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, had all dumped their military leaders in recent years. Why not try democracy, Mr Rodriguez? Discover human rights. Get popular.

  Mr Rodriguez stepped down as president in 1993 after piloting through a new constitution that looks impeccably democratic. The current president, serving a five-year term, is Juan Carlos Wasmosy, a civil engineer. Paraguay is less

  of a smugglers’ Shangri-la now that it is a member of Mercosur, a trading block that includes Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Public and private monopolies are being broken up and sold off. The contraband barons that thrived under Mr Stroessner’s protection are turning to legitimate trade.

  Mr Rodriguez long ago stepped out of his general’s uniform and anyway had grown too fat for a soldier. The popularity he gained as a born-again democrat mostly stayed with him. As a politician he turned out to have a jovial streak. Paraguayans appreciated his weakness for horse racing. Only the ungrateful questioned how a farmer’s son, whose top salary in the army was $500 a month, managed to become one of the richest men in Paraguay, building a home that was modelled on a French château. There were persistent stories that he was involved inrunning cocaine from Bolivia to Europe. Mr Rodriguez took the precaution of becoming a senator, which gave him immunity from any legal proceedings.

  No one doubts the fragility of the recently-won freedoms. Last year an army officers’ revolt against their loss of political power was quashed, but only, apparently, by diplomatic pressure from America and Brazil. The main political force remains the Colorado Party, which sustained Mr Stroessner through seven rigged elections, sometimes giving his supporters more than 100% of the vote by including the dead. Many in the party still have a nostalgia for the Stroessner era. “Decades of great government,” said a former minister without a trace of irony.

  Paraguay’s revitalised opposition parties believe that the Colorado Party’s grip on power can at last be ended. This hope will be tested at the next presidential election, due in May 1998. Still, whatever the result, the reforms started by Andres Rodriguez have made Paraguay a better place. Better to be a tinpot democracy than a tinpot dictatorship.

  Brother Roger

  Roger Schutz, founder of Taizé, died on August 16th 2005, aged 90

  DEEP quiet was what first drew Roger Schutz to Taizé. The young Swiss theology student, climbing off his bicycle one summer day in 1940 after riding a strenuous 70 miles north from Geneva, found himself in the wooded hills and valleys of la France profonde. A few sandstone houses, some unlived in, made up the village. The road was unsurfaced, and there was no telephone; the world did not come through here. No priest had been resident since the Revolution. He might have pushed on, but an old woman offered him a meal and pressed him to stay with them. “We are lonely,” she told him.

  This lost corner had not always been so silent. Ten minutes away lay the ruins of the great Benedictine abbey of Cluny, which had once been full of melody and chant sung to the glory of God. Taizé, on that same “inspired hill”, still echoed with what Shelley once called “the memory of music fled”. It was the ideal place for Brother Roger, as he soon became, to found an order whose religious life was based profoundly on the principles of music and silence.

  Establishing a monastic order is always a struggle, not least in the 20th century, and in wartime, and for a Protestant pastor’s son whose knowledge of the subject had been gained from his theology studies in Lausanne. He meant, at first, to be a writer. But his father’s mysticism infected him; he decided on the religious life, and burned his first published book in the fireplace of the broken-down house he bought in Taizé.

  In its first years, the house was mostly a hostel where Jewish refugees were offered soup and a bed on their way through to safety. Brother Roger, a classically trained musician brought up in a household of singing and piano-playing, wanted music at it
s centre, but not yet. Out of respect for his guests, he would go away and sing Divine Office in the woods, restoring sacred music to the landscape again.

  From these humble, almost naturalistic, beginnings sprang an extraordinary Christian revival. On the day Brother Roger died, 2,500 people were in the church in Taizé. More than 100,000 visitors now come each year, so many that they stay in tents on the surrounding slopes. The order itself has 120 monks, some in the monastery and some, as Brother Roger always wanted, living with the poor in the world, in the slums of Kolkata and Manila and New York. Taizé prayer-groups meet in every continent.

  Leaders of the established Christian churches – popes, metropolitans, archbishops of Canterbury – would visit with amazement. They could not understand how, as the world turned unremittingly secular and their own churches dwindled down to congregations of old women, one monastery in France could be crammed with the noisy, enthusiastic, back-packing young. Pope John Paul II called Taizé “a spring of water”. Little like it could be found in the Vatican’s gilded halls.

  Brother Roger, too, was perplexed by what had happened. His monastery had never recruited, advertised or sold itself. It was never – he insisted it should never be – a “movement”. He only knew that, from 1959 onwards, young people had started to

  come to Taizé, and the word had spread. Some said that he himself, a tiny man with a luminous, sweet smile, was the reason they came. He doubted it but, just in case it was true, granted few interviews and kept apart from the theological wranglings of the day. Taizé was, and always had been, resolutely ecumenical, taking brothers from all Christian sects and basing itself on love, reconciliation and forgiveness; there was much space for searching there, but none for dogmatism. Hence its attraction for the alienated souls of the modern age.