Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  In 1978, Herbert Simon was awarded the Nobel prize for economics. What for many people would be regarded as the culmination of a life’s work, Mr Simon took almost casually, a diversion. The Swedish judges at the presentation ceremony were a touch hurt to hear that artificial intelligence had been his central interest, rather than economics, although of course he was interested in that discipline too. But to those who knew him such versatility was no great surprise. He dabbled in many things, usually with great accomplishment. What he called “social science” took a hold on him, but he could probably have made a career as a pianist or a painter.

  His parents were German immigrants who, like many before them, had settled in Milwaukee. While still at university he had a part-time job with Milwaukee’s local authority and became interested in how the administration made budget decisions, or choices as Mr Simon preferred to call them. Years later “Administrative Behaviour” was the subject of his doctorate, and later still the dissertation was turned into a book of the same name, probably the best known of Mr Simon’s 20

  books. It was his ideas on decision-making, especially in business, that caught the eye of the Nobel judges.

  Like many economic theories, Mr Simon’s seems obvious once you know it. In taking a decision, he said, no business could process satisfactorily all the “zillion things” affecting the marketing of a product, in the hope that the right answer for maximising profit would pop out at the end.

  That was classical economic theory, he said, but it was “a ridiculous view of what goes on”. Rather, a business tried to make a decision that was “good enough”. He called his theory “bounded rationality” and invented a name to describe it: “satisficing”, a composition of the words satisfy and suffice. Not all economists agreed with Mr Simon, “But they are mistaken,” he said.

  His views on economics tied in withhis ideas on artificial intelligence. Even a computer displayed its intelligence by making choices, he said. Like a human, a chess computer would analyse the consequences of a move, but it would do better than even a grandmaster, who would be unlikely to see beyond eight moves ahead. But what about insight? Or indeed wisdom and creativity? Mr Simon tended to be dismissive of such vague human terms. His computers had created drawings, which he was happy to display in his office, and music, which musicians said had aesthetic interest. They had made choices, as a human artist or musician would.

  For many people, artificial intelligence suggests Hal, the worryingly clever human-like computer which rebelled in the film 2001. Although Mr Simon sometimes seemed to suggest that a Hal was just around the corner, he was not going to be drawn into comparisons with science fiction. His strictly scientific aims, he said, were limited to using computers to understand how humans think, and as an aid to human thinking. What about the soul? No one, he said, would tell him what the soul was. When someone did, he said thoughtfully, he would program one.

  Frank Sinatra

  Francis Albert Sinatra, the voice of an era, died on May 14th 1998, aged 82

  The story goes that Frank Sinatra asked John Paul II to hear his confession. The pope declined, despite Mr Sinatra’s promise to see him right. The story may have been made up, perhaps by Mr Sinatra’s own publicists; little that is reported about showbiz can be taken on trust. But it sounds right. Frank Sinatra liked to say he dealt only with the best, and the best could be bought or intimidated like anyone else. The great singer would give his greatest performance, this time to God, recounting how the ten commandments, the seven deadly sins, had been broken: his way.

  Mr Sinatra did meet a predecessor of John Paul at a reception in Rome. This pope did not seem to have heard of him before and politely inquired what operas he had sung in. Such ignorance; but it has no doubt been shared this past week by many in the world’s younger generations, baffled by the huge headlines and the yards of articles about Mr Sinatra in newspapers, and the hours about him on television. Who was this octogenarian getting all the attention? That was the immortal Ol’ Blue Eyes, darling. Newspapers and television are mostly run by the middle-aged middle class, and Frank Sinatra was part of their youth.

  Go back to the 1960s and 1970s. There were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, of course, twanging their guitars and shouting themselves hoarse, and Elvis lewdly rotating his pelvis. But the Sinatra light baritone backed by a thousand strings was preferred by those who still liked to dance cheek to cheek. The words were often banal, but don’t laugh; lose yourself; it’s schmaltz that makes the world go round. Al Jolson produced the same effect, and in the 1920s was an idol too, down on his knees crying for “Mammy”. It seems unlikely that Jolson and Sinatra were faking it. Much has been made of Frank Sinatra’s short temper, his intolerance of criticism, his links with gangsters, but this may only prove a point. “Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality,” wrote Carl Jung.

  Was that then the secret of Frank Sinatra’s success, a listenable voice and a reputation for roughness? His longevity must have helped. He was born in a slum district of New Jersey to Italian immigrants (father a fireman, mother a nurse) and had a first-generation American’s determination to succeed. He never willingly retired and had to be carried off the stage in 1994 when he collapsed in the middle of singing “My Way”.

  Other singers had their moment of fame and were quickly gone, but he endured. When Mr Sinatra was making his first records with the swing bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, the foremost pop singer in America was Bing Crosby. He seemed unsurpassable in popular esteem. He had an easy and wholesome style. Pope John Paul would have had no problem with Crosby. Frank Sinatra sang the same ballads, but made them sound sexier. Crosby, you felt, would be happy with a kiss; Sinatra sought possession of the whole body. Cole Porter demanded to know why he sang so many of his songs if he did not like the way they were written. But Frank Sinatra had captured the public’s new mood for licentiousness rather than mere romance, and received the reward of fame and money.

  You could not get away from him. There were dozens of films, most of them forgettable. According to Billy Wilder, afilm director, Frank Sinatra had talent but did not have the discipline to be a great actor. He had a fleshy private life that was remarkable even for Hollywood. There were many affairs and four marriages. A reporter asked him what he looked for in a woman. “A sense of humour,” he said. His fourth wife, Barbara, had been married to one of the Marx brothers.

  It was not much fun for the reporters whose job it was to follow him around. They were, he said, “a bunch of hags”, and the women were “hookers”. Frank Sinatra needed continuous publicity to stay ahead, but loathed the stories he could not control. People were only mildly interested in accounts of his concerts for charity. They were absorbed by his appearance before a commission investigating his links with organised crime, which he denied. “Bugsy Siegel? He’s a gangster?” They were incredulous about a report that he washed his hands obsessively, especially when an obliging newspaper pointed to a reference in Macbeth: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” After that he was called Lady Macbeth, at least behind his back.

  There was an unpleasant side to Frank Sinatra, and more dirt will probably come out now that he is beyond the protection of libel laws and the mob. More important though, much more than this, may be that he characterised an era. It was a less gentle time than Crosby’s, but not that different. Frank Sinatra sang about a mating game in which men and women played their timeless roles. Today’s pop singers, with their hermaphrodite looks, their taste for drugs and violence, suggest a darker era. Or so it may seem to the middle-aged who write about them.

  Anna Nicole Smith

  Anna Nicole Smith, a peculiarly modern celebrity, died on February 8th 2007, aged 39

  NAMES were a problem for Anna Nicole Smith. She was born Vickie Lynn Hogan, but never liked it. At high school, before she was kicked out for fighting, she went by Nikki Hart. As a model for Guess jeans in 1992 she was called “Anna Nicole”, and settled for that; later she acquired the
title “Gold-digger”, though she indignantly rebuffed it. “Vickie always wanted a different name,” her aunt said. The name she really wanted, from childhood onwards, was Marilyn Monroe.

  Yet all this was somewhat beside the point; because what you saw first, on meeting Ms Smith, were the Breasts. There were only two of them, but they made a whole frontage: huge, compelling, pneumatic. They burst out of tight red dresses – preferably red – or teased among feather boas, or flanked a dizzying cleavage that plunged to tantalising depths. These were celebrated, American breasts, engineered by silicon to be as broad and bountiful as the prairie. With them, a girl from nowhere – or from Houston, Texas – could do anything. The body behind them waxed and waned, sometimes stout as a stevedore’s and sometimes almost waif-like, matching the little-girl voice; but the Breasts remained. “Everything I have”, Ms Smith admitted, “is because of them.”

  “Did you have breast augmentation?” asked Larry King redundantly, bow tie a-quiver, when she appeared on his show. “Up or down?” “Both.” “Aren’t there downsides to it?” Yes, Ms Smith said; they hurt her back. But, she might have added, it did no harm to flaunt them in gentleman’s clubs in Houston in the half-dark, where ancient oil tycoons would try to grapple them. One such withered specimen, with a twinkle in his rheumy eye, made the attempt in October 1991; three years later, she married him.

  J. Howard Marshall was not the first. That was Billy Wayne Smith, whom she married when she was 17 and he was 16, he the cook and she a waitress at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken in Mexia, Texas. They had a son, but the marriage didn’t last. To make ends meet, Ms Smith worked at Wal-Mart, danced topless and slipped naked photos of herself in the post to Playboy, hoping to be noticed. She was. By the time she and Marshall tied the knot at the White Dove drive-thru Wedding Chapel – he 89, she 26, the Breasts barely contained in white satin – Ms Smith had become Playboy’s Playmate of the Year 1993. In her questionnaire she confirmed she wanted to be the new Marilyn, and in a dozen ways, from the blonde curled hair to the bright red lips to the gorgeous pouts and poses, she was.

  She acted too, though it was the Breasts that stole every scene, full in Leslie Nielsen’s astonished face in “Naked Gun 33 1/3”. The spotlight loved her, but unlike Marilyn she was not favoured by high-flying politicians; there was always too much of the tabloid queen about her, besides her tendency to start slurring and stumbling and writhing, as if on something illegal, in the presence of a microphone. Her fame came, in the end, from being in court.

  The case of Marshall v Marshall, a label suitably Dickensian, started almost as soon as Marshall died in 1995. It had been

  a brief, strange marriage, with Ms Smith hardly ever at home. Each evening she would telephone him after seven, his bedtime; he called her his “sleeping pill”. Outsiders imagined that she was simply waiting for his money. But when his will was read, he had left her nothing.

  She was sure this was wrong. While alive, he had given her cars, a little ranch and $50,000 a month; orally, she claimed, he had also promised her half of his estate of $1.6 billion. Without it, she was bankrupt. Over a decade various courts found for her, then against her. In 2004 an appeals court ruled that Ms Smith should get nothing. But in 2006 the Supreme Court, no less, said she could go on fighting.

  By then her life revolved round the case. She told Larry King she did nothing else, and her reality TV show, which ran from 2002 to 2004, suggested the same. The show followed her to the dentist and to the lingerie shop; trailed Bobby Trendy, her decorator, as he continually redesigned her bedroom; and watched as she gave Prozac to her poodle, the oversexed Sugar Pie. Her lawyer, Howard Stern, was so constantly in the frame that in 2006 she married him, on the catamaran Margaritaville off the Bahamas, before tumbling fetchingly in herwhite veil into the surf.

  Americans watched and enjoyed it all; and were also aware, like gawkers driving past the scene of an accident, that they might at any moment witness something awful. The story of poor-girl-makes-good was never quite straight, the fame never without its tawdry side, the money never reliably there, the behaviour rarely unembarrassing. In later years, Ms Smith was seen more and more in black. She often looked beautiful in it, but seldom happy.

  Within three days last September she had a daughter, Dannielynn, by no certain father, and lost her son Daniel, at 20, to an accidental overdose of methadone and anti-depressants. Five months later she was dead herself, of causes still unknown, after collapsing in her hotel room at an Indian casino in Hollywood, Florida. She was far from the real Hollywood; yet not so far, in her young, lonely death, from the great name she had most longed to be.

  Marie Smith

  Marie Smith, the last speaker of the Eyak language, died on January 21st 2008, aged 89

  BEYOND the town of Cordova, on Prince William Sound in south-eastern Alaska, the Copper River delta branches out in silt and swamp into the gulf. Marie Smith, growing up there, knew there was a particular word in Eyak, her language, for the silky, gummy mud that squished between her toes. It was c’a. The driftwood she found on the shore, ’u’l, acquired a different name if it had a proper shape and was not a broken, tangled mass. If she got lost among the flat, winding creeks her panicky thoughts were not of north, south, east or west, but of “upriver”, “downstream”, and the tribes, Eskimo and Tlingit, who lived on either side. And if they asked her name it was not Marie but Udachkuqax*a’a’ch, “a sound that calls people from afar”.

  Upriver out of town stretched the taiga, rising steadily to the Chugach mountains and covered with black spruce. The spruce was an Eyak dictionary in itself, from lis, the neat, conical tree, to Ge.c, its wiry root, useful for baskets; from Gahdg, its blue-green, flattened needles, which could be brewed up for beer or tea, to sihx, its resin, from which came pitch to make canoes watertight. The Eyak were fishermen who, thousands of years before, were thought to have crossed the Bering Strait in their boats. Marie’s father still fished for a living, as did most of the men in Cordova. Where the neighbouring Athapaskan tribes, who had crossed the strait on snowshoes, had dozens of terms for the condition of ice and snow, Eyak vocabulary was rich with particular words for black abalone, red abalone, ribbon weed and tubular kelp, drag nets and dipping nets and different sizes of rope. One word, demexch, meant a soft and treacherous spot in the ice over a body of water: a bad place to walk on, but possibly a good one to squat beside with a fishing line or a spear.

  This universe of words and observations was already fading when Marie was young. In 1933 there were 38 Eyak-speakers left, and white people with their grim faces and intrusive microphones, as they always appeared to her, were already coming to sweep up the remnants of the language. At home her mother donned a kushsl, or apron, to make cakes in an ’isxah, or round mixing bowl; but at school “barbarous” Eyak was forbidden. It went unheard, too, in the salmon factory where Marie worked after fourth grade, canning in industrial quantities the noble fish her people had hunted with respect, naming not only every part of it but the separate stems and shoots of the red salmonberries they ate with the dried roe.

  As the spoken language died, so did the stories of tricky Creator-Raven and the magical loon, of giant animals and tiny homunculi with fish-spears no bigger than a matchstick. People forgot why “hat” was the same word as “hammer”, or why the word for a leaf, kultahl, was also the word for a feather, as though deciduous trees and birds shared one organic life. They lost the sense that lumped apples, beads and pills together as round, foreign, possibly deceiving things. They neglected the taboo that kept fish and animals separate, and would not let fish-skin and animal hide be sewn in the same coat; and they could not remember exactly why they built little wooden huts over gravestones, as if to give more comfortable shelter to the dead.

  Mrs Smith herself seemed cavalier about the language for a time. She married a white Oregonian, William Smith, and brought up nine children, telling them odd Eyak words but finding they were not interested. Eyak became a language for talking to
herself, or to God. Only when her last surviving older sister died, in the 1990s, did she realise that she was the last of the line. From that moment she became an activist, a tiny figure with a determined jaw and a colourful beaded hat, campaigning to stop clear-cutting in the forest (where Eyak split-log lodges decayed among the blueberries) and to get Eyak bones decently buried. She was the chief of her nation, as well as its only full-blooded member.

  She drank too much, but gave it up; she smoked too much, coughing her way through interviews in a room full of statuettes of the Pillsbury Doughboy, in which she said her spirit would live when she was dead. Most outsiders were told to buzz off. But one scholar, Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, showed such love for Eyak, painstakingly recording its every suffix and prefix and glottal stop and nasalisation, that sheworked happily with him to compile a grammar and a dictionary; and Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker was allowed to talk when she brought fresh halibut as a tribute. Without those two visitors, almost nothing would have been known of her.

  As a child she had longed to be a pilot, flying boat-planes between the islands of the Sound. An impossible dream, she was told, because she was a girl. As an old woman, she said she believed that Eyak might be resurrected in future. Just as impossible, scoffed the experts: in an age where perhaps half the planet’s languages will disappear over the next century, killed by urban migration or the internet or the triumphal march of English, Eyak has no chance. For Mrs Smith, however, the death of Eyak meant the not-to-be-imagined disappearance of the world.