A Hospital Waiting Room, Circa 1983

Do normal people re-watch Terms of Endearment, like, for fun? Well, at any rate I do. And it really is the gift that keeps on giving. Exhibit A:

In Memoriam

Of the many ways we could categorize the actors and actresses who were on Family Ties and are no longer living, here are a few: the grandparents; the guest stars who carried an episode; the scene stealers; the ones who were more voice than body; those who died too young and those who were older. Of course there is some overlap, and of course more than 30 years after the show began, there are more departed than I have room to mention here. Here are a few profiles and highlights:

The Grandparents

                     

(Clockwise from top left: John Randolph, Anne Seymour, Dick Sargent, and Priscilla Morrill). Only Morrill, who played Elyse's mother, appeared in more than one episode, but the others turned in memorable performances, particularly Randolph as Steven's conservative father. He delivers both great smiles like the one above and a stinging rebuke of Steven's '60s ways. Seymour's long career stretched back to 1944 and included appearances on The Motorola Television Hour, The United States Steel Hour, and The Alcoa Hour - affiliations the character Alex would have no doubt admired. Sargent came out late in life, in 1991, just three years before his death from prostrate cancer.

The Guest Star

(Clockwise from top left: Jack Somack, River Phoenix, Brownie McGhee, and Mason Adams). If you're of a certain age, Phoenix is the one who stops you in your tracks; he shows up in that argyle sweater to tutor Alex in Advanced Non-Euclidean Geometry in season four. He's a 13 year-old math whiz, a graduate student already, and he falls for Jennifer only to discover that she, like, actually likes 13 year-old things and not attending tenure parties. Neither Phoenix nor Somack are given much to do in their roles - Somack plays a sweet small business owner and Alex's boss in season one - but they are fun to watch. In contrast, the show revolves around Adams and McGhee when they guest star in seasons five and six, respectively. McGhee was a blues musician with a long career who had started acting in the late '70s, and he plays a musician-turned-bus driver who Alex convinces to come out of retirement for a performance. Adams is one of Alex's economics professors; you may know him from Lou Grant. I'll write more about his performance when I post about recommended episodes, but for now I'll just say that the portrait he paints of higher ed in 1986 feels alternately eerily prescient and like a beautiful object lifted from a time capsule.

The Scene Stealers
(Left: Mary Jackson; below, Ron Karabatsos and Anne Ramsey). Jackson sells the Keatons a gun in season one after their home is robbed; (they decide to get rid of it by the end of the episode, which is titled charmingly, "Have Gun, Will Unravel"). Ramsey you might recognize from Goonies; she's yet another nanny/housekeeper candidate. She thought the advertised salary was a "misprint" and lambasts germs during her interview. Karabatsos is the plumber who lends his truck to Steven during the two-part "Birth of a Keaton" episode where Elyse goes into labor at PBS during a pledge drive - and a blizzard. He's a genial, bearish presence during all the stress.

More Voice than Body
We never see Bill in the season three episode where Alex and his friend James (played by Jeffrey Joseph, still very much alive!) work at a student help hotline, but we hear him loud and clear: he's looking for a reason to live. Alex and James are new to the hotline and scramble trying to help the suicidal Bill. There are a lot of moments like the one pictured, where they look at speakers, and it's a testament to the script and Sam Whipple's voice that we feel as captivated as Alex and James. Whipple actually shows up in the next episode, but his role is far more minor in the flesh than it is as the confused, vulnerable, but ultimately hopeful Bill. Whipple himself died of cancer at 41.




There are better images of Meg Wyllie in the season five episode where Alex meets with a psychiatrist to talk about the death of his friend, Greg. But we quickly learn that her power is in her voice. The lights come up behind that window and we simultaneously hear Wyllie's chirping, prodding voice saying, "I'll bet Alex knows the answer." We're in his memory of being seven years old with his teacher's voice repeating "Alex knows, Alex knows" separating him from his classmates socially, putting pressure on him to succeed. Wyllie's back is turned to us most of the time; she does so much with just her voice. Her scenes in this episode reminded me of The Geranium on the Windowsill Just Died But Teacher You Went Right On, published in 1971, around the time Alex would have been seven. (If I'm remembering correctly, Albert Cullum dedicates his book to "all those who died in the arms of compulsory education."Alex, of course, survived).

The Young  

(From top to bottom, left to right: Bridgette Andersen, Diana Bellamy, Bibi Besch, and Stephen Lee). The line between "young" and not, when it comes to death, can get subjective after a certain age, so to throw my subjective two cents in, I feel like anyone younger than 70 can count as "young." Andersen, who played kid-Mallory in a season one flashback, reportedly died of a drug overdose at age 21. (She's possibly best known for Savannah Smiles, a movie I loved as a kid). Besch (who plays Jennifer's steely high school principal in season six) was 56; Bellamy was 57 (she plays a warm, encouraging therapist who leads a group that Alex and his girlfriend Lauren attend). Both women died of cancer. Stephen Lee was Jennifer's aggrieved manager at Chicken Heaven, a fast food restaurant; Jennifer's friend and co-worker wreaks havoc, including spraying water all over the prep area and Lee, the boss. Lee died just a few weeks ago of a heart attack; he was 59.

The Older Ones



Doris Belack (left) had acting credits that included the film Tootsie and TV that ranged from The Patty Duke Show to Law & Order (she had a recurring role as a judge). On Family Ties she was Mallory's boss at a clothing store. Julie Harris (right) also had credits that went back to the 1940s; she played Mallory's older college classmate who Mallory discriminates against because of her age. (We'd call Harris's character "non-traditional" now, though demographically she's becoming far more traditional). 

John Ingle (below left) is the justice of the peace who nearly marries Mallory and Nick in season five. Alex rushes in to break up the wedding but interrupts another young couple by accident; they decide to listen to him anyway. Ingle delivers his best lines with gusto: "This is a first for me: two marriages wiped out with one objection. A nuptial double play." He shakes Alex's hand and says, "Congratulations." His screen career began relatively late, in the early '80s, but he worked prolifically until his death in 2012. 

Peter Schrum plays the real deal Santa Claus in season six; (Alex has a job playing Santa at the mall). Like Ingle, he began acting later in life and continued almost until his death in 2003.

 


Richard Kuss (left) plays a man whose wife has had a heart attack, and he's one of the people who befriends the Keatons when Steven suffers a heart attack himself and undergoes surgery in season seven. He had been acting since the 1950s.

Finally, season seven's "Get Me to the Living Room on Time," features Andy befriending a couple at a retirement home during a class visit. The couple (played by Douglas Seale and Marie Denn, below right) decide to marry in the Keatons' living room. In addition to screen work, Seale acted on the stage and did voice work; one of his last roles was to voice the Sultan in the movie Aladdin. Denn had appeared on The Brady Brunch, The Rockford Files, and other TV shows and movies. The wedding episode is full of great old actors, including Joshua Shelley (below left) as a jokey resident at the retirement home. After a career that began in the late 1940s, this was one of his last roles; he died the next year, in 1990.

Greg and Trudy, I Hardly Knew Ye

It's the ordinary things we miss about the dead: hemming a skirt...

…or singing along to "Light My Fire."

If Family Ties and other shows had a phenomenon opposite the recurring-actor, different character one, it was probably the episodes that dealt with death. Here characters are introduced only to die - as with Mallory's beloved Aunt Trudy - or are never actually introduced in life - as with Greg, Alex's friend who dies in a car accident; (the episode opens with the family returning from his funeral -  we see Greg only as Alex imagines and remembers him).

Just as the choice to bring back an actor for a different part now can seem strange (no matter how great the actor), these death episodes can seem strange for how they ask us to care about people we've never met. Not to sound crass, but why not kill off one of Alex's friends whom we actually knew? I mean, I'm not suggesting anything extreme - I don't think they should have killed Skippy Handelman, the next door neighbor - but why not one of the four or five guys who had recurring same-actor, same-character parts? Maybe because only one or two of those characters had a close relationship with Alex; maybe because audiences weren't expected to remember story lines across seasons; or maybe simply because those actors had moved on to other roles. Whatever the reason, we have no ties to Aunt Trudy or Greg, and we're only given a few details: she loved to dance, he loved the Cleveland Indians (only one of those loves would probably be written for a character, now).

Still, within these limitations Justine Bateman and Michael J. Fox give heartfelt portraits of grief. He won the Emmy, in part for emotional scenes not previously given to his character. But I was actually more moved by a moment in a scene where he is visited by Greg's ghost, who starts to leave so Alex can study. Alex pulls Greg to a chair and pushes his textbooks off the kitchen table. His movements may seem dramatic, but his tone is almost matter-of-fact. "This is meaningless," he says. What's the point of studying, he wonders, when he could die at 21 like his friend?

Justine Bateman's funeral home scene is Emmy-worthy too; she gives an impromptu eulogy where she yells, sobs, and laughs, and each of those emotions - and the speed with which she cycles through and back to them - feel true.

The Aunt Trudy story is in some ways more poignant because the actress who played her, Edith Atwater, had a long career and died the following year. I want to write a post about the actors and actresses on this show who have since died, but my mother is flying in to visit tomorrow, and so it'll be a little while before I write again. In the meantime, if there's something from Family Ties, The Grapes of Wrath or another long-ago-and-far-away work you'd like me to post about when I come back, let me know!

Twenty Years after the Band

Tonight I watched "The Normal Heart," the HBO movie based on Larry Kramer's play. It brought back a lot of memories, namely reading And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic in 1994 when I was 14.

Kramer is a pivotal character in Randy Shilts's comprehensive masterwork of journalism, and one of the many names I carried around on my tongue as an impassioned ninth grader. Others included Cleve Jones, Anthony Fauci, Gaetan Dugas. I wasn't discriminating in my enthusiasm; I talked about the activists, the doctors, and so-called Patient Zero with equal intensity. It was the first book I had read where I memorized information eagerly, of my own volition, the way some kids memorize baseball card stats, and I went around talking about Factor VIII and Kaposi's sarcoma to anyone who would listen. A lot has faded, but enough has remained that when I was watching an episode of Veep recently, and the vice president introduced her assistant as Gary Walsh, I thought, Really? You gave him the same last name? Walsh was a psychotherapist described in Shilts's book, and he died in those early years.

When it was all going on (Shilts's book focuses on 1980-85), I was a little kid in North Dakota; born in 1979, I was totally unaware of the medical fear and bravery, political stonewalling and activism, and all the other facets that played out and on and on, especially in major American cities. In 1994, when I truly became aware, it was already an old disease in some ways; Life and Time were naming it as the cause of death in their year-end issues with photos of the famous who had died. I had saved the issues from 1992 and 1993, and I taped the men from those years to my bedroom walls alongside a painting my brother had done of a cheeseburger and fries, alongside my poster for the film It's a Wonderful Life. My room became even stranger than before, a fangirl-shrine-museum for Rudolf Nureyev, Arthur Ashe, Tony Perkins, Denholm Elliott, and others. I went further back in time and taped up Roy Cohn's obituary, even though he was a known asshole. And I taped up Randy's.

When I finished his book, in January or February of 1994, I wrote Randy Shilts a letter to thank him for his work and to ask how I could help, but instead of hearing from him, his assistant wrote back: he was too sick to reply himself. Shortly later he died; my father handed me his obituary one day when I came home from school. I was stunned, blinking back tears. "People with AIDS die," he told me. "They die." Maybe he was merely trying for directness, honesty; maybe my attachment to these faces, the display of gay men in my bedroom, irritated him. Either way, I had to get out of the house. I went for a walk. The roads were lined with pristine snow, making the sudden sight of a squirrel's crushed body all the more vivid and jarring. Of course it wasn't just a dead animal; it felt significant, and I went home and wrote a bad poem about the whole thing.

Back then I wasn't allowed to volunteer at the Southeastern Connecticut AIDS Project (SECAP) because I was a minor, so I wore a red ribbon until that felt flimsy, and then I took it off and did nothing at all. Soon another phrase entered my vocabulary: protease inhibitors. AIDS, while still deadly, ceased to be the same kind of disease, and sentences like the ones my father uttered became relics of a particular time. 

"The Normal Heart" is good and sad. It reminded me of a time when I was passionate and single-minded and young and sheltered enough not to know anything of the true fight. It reminded me of those names, of the people who did the living and fighting and dying. I didn't know what to do with these feelings, so for now I'm just writing, again.

Better Late Than Never

"That's my boyfriend," I announced, pointing at the actor on the TV screen.

"Philip Seymour Hoffman is your boyfriend?" my friend laughed, incredulous.

The implication, unspoken, was that Hoffman was a weird choice. Unattractive. I don't remember what I said in response, but I don't think I defended him articulately.

Who was the friend? I can't remember, except I know it was a guy. What was the movie, even? Probably The Big Lebowski; there was a time there when it felt like I watched that film every five minutes, and even with Hoffman's small part, his presence was one of my favorite things about it. I loved his nervous laughter, his bared teeth, the way he pronounced the word "Dude."

Like a lot of people, I have felt surprised at how much his death has upset me. I had all these immediate, ridiculous reactions, such as, "But I never knew that he struggled with addiction!" and "But I never got to write anything for him!" One of my dear college friends, a longtime New Yorker, knew where he bought his coffee, but even though my parents lived in the city, I lived 3,000 miles away: Hoffman was not in my life on the boyfriend nor coffee-level, not even in 2007, during the height of my love. (The Savages, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and Charlie Wilson's War - every five minutes that year, he was brilliant in a completely different way). And I don't really have anything to add to the conversation about his great work or heroin addiction. But I do have something to say about his appearance.

I've read a lot of articles about him this past week, and even in some of the ones I've liked the most, such as Anthony Lane's tribute, I'm struck by how often the writers claim that Hoffman was unattractive. It's often presented as a qualification, an acknowledgment before moving on to his range or the humanity he brought to even the smallest roles: "He wasn't a handsome actor, but..." Lane, for instance, uses the word "unbeautiful." I know he just means "not George Clooney," "not Tom Cruise" when he writes that - not cast in romantic, hero roles. But still.

I'm here to argue with the central claim. He was beautiful. He was handsome. He was cute. It's a late defense, but I wanted to say it. (Even if it's not a thing that needs a name).

And I know I'm not alone. I know I'm not the only person who pointed at him on a screen and declared him mine, or who thrilled to see him on lists like this one. I originally read the 2007 New York magazine "Reasons to Love New York" list in my parents' living room in Forest Hills, and I remember how the period after each part of his name felt like a declaration of the self-evident. Of course he's in the top 5 reasons, that punctuation seemed to say.   

So maybe I shouldn't be surprised at how I, and so many of us, were so sad. Of course I miss him. Of course we miss him.

Once an Obit Writer...

At a restaurant during a recent family visit, my mother looked up from her salmon and said to me, "Maybe you should write my obituary."

"Mom," I said quickly, with a sternness that surprised me, "I don't want to talk about this now."

What brought this on? Not a known illness or the impending hereditary likelihood of one, but a conversation she'd had a week before with friends of a similar age (early to late-60s). My brother saved the moment by chiming in, "The headline could be 'Moderate Drinker Says Farewell.'"

We all laughed. "How do you remember that?" my mom asked him. It was the title of her last column for The Minot Daily News before we moved across the country when I was 7.

My mother wasn't that off base in asking me to write her obit; it was my first job, after all. When I was 17 and a senior in high school, I wrote obituaries on Sundays for a Connecticut newspaper. When I told her about my job, my best friend Sam said, not unkindly, "It sounds depressing." In contrast, she had a gig cleaning up our school's hardly-mobbed plaster cast museum. "It's the definition of 'sinecure,'" she joked. (Some of our friends were unabashed history or physics nerds; we were English nerds).

Obit writing could be depressing, but most of the time it was just fascinating to peer into - and arrange on a page - one version of the story of a person's life. And most of the time the departed were old enough that, from the perspective of a teenager, their deaths seemed timely; I remember a lot of WWII veterans.

Maybe it's the residual effect of losing two close friends, one of them Sam, by the time I was 23, but sometimes phrases for an obit or eulogy pop into my head. I'll be getting ready for work, and all of a sudden I'll think of something I want to say or write for a still-living friend or family member. The surprise - and depressing element - of the moment, like when my mother turned to me at dinner, makes me want to shake it off. But then I try to fight that reflex: as long as I don't dwell too long in farewell mode, it's good to pay attention. It's never too early for appreciation.