I had been planning a post on a number of what I considered to be surprising suicides in recent years among celebrities whom I had regarded in my youth as having especially enviable sex lives. The post hit something of a speedbump when I discovered that one of my main subjects actually had not killed himself and was still alive, though it was true that he had gone through some dark times, and even his days of success didn't sound as though they had been as great as I had once imagined them. But as I had a short list of names already drawn up I thought I would at leave make a few comments on these and see if I could find any connecting theme among them.
0. Corey Feldman. Yes, he is still alive. When I was contemplating this post, I had been certain that Corey Feldman had killed himself. The other Corey, Corey Haim, with whom Corey Feldman frequently worked and is always associated, did die at age 38, evidently as the result of years of heavy drug use, in addition to other personal problems. Though not technically a suicide, it would certainly appear that his premature death was the result in part of a history of extreme self-destructive behavior. I don't actually remember Corey Haim very much. I don't recall a ton about Corey Feldman either, although I remember, or at some point became convinced that I remembered, reading a magazine article around 1988 in which the interviewer, showing up at Feldman's residence to interview him, had to wait on a couch for several minutes while Feldman finished up a shower he was taking with a couple of babes. Since I was getting nothing in the way of love at the time and was conscious of my life slipping away by the hour much more strongly than I am conscious of it doing so now, this article, which was probably either complete nonsense or at least misleading in its suggestion of constant, overabundant casual heterosexual activity, really bothered me more than the innumerable other similarly-themed articles I read at the time did. For years afterwards, in moments of especial anger or frustration related to my love life, the image of a teenaged Corey Feldman nonchalantly enjoying a shower with multiple women would rise to the forefront of my consciousness and induce murderous feelings in me (No, I was not well). So when, in my mind, I got the idea that Corey Feldman had actually had a terrible life, been abused and so on (this apparently did happen) and killed himself, I felt kind of bad about it, since my imagination had built up this image of him as a perpetually snide, swaggering ass, emblematic of the kind of guy that I was never going to become, but most felt that I needed to. (One question I am curious about is why my mind appears to be so receptive to absorbing fake news related to Corey Feldman).
Reading about the Feldman--Haim saga is to go deep into the "Hollywood is a completely depraved cesspool of abomination and abuse, well beyond run of the mill sexual harassment and into serious criminal activity (allegedly) and I can never watch a movie or TV show again" viewpoint of the entertainment industry. It's really sordid, though perhaps these guys had it especially bad. I can't bring myself go into the details here. You can easily find them on the internet.
1. Steve Bing. Steve Bing inherited $600 million dollars when he was 18 and set up as a man about town and sometime film producer in Hollywood. He enjoyed beautiful women, parties and drugs in what I would certainly assume to be the expected excess of a young man in his situation, and came across as a big jerk* in media accounts, which regularly reported on his doings in the 90s. I had enough philosophy in my possession to know that this was perhaps not exactly the model of life one should aspire to, but then on the other hand I did want to party with desirable women too, and generally failed to achieve that even on my modest scale, so the news articles had a certain pull for me. However, in spite of all the money and girls and cars and Hollywood houses and good times, he was possessed of desires that eluded him, among these a greater degree of success in the film industry, as well as to be regarded by the serious world as having some combination of substance and respectability. Always a generous donor to Democratic political causes, Bill Clinton befriended him and Bing donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation over the years. On June 22, 2020, down to his last $300,000 and after years of depression and drug addiction, he leapt to his death from the roof of a 27 story building in Los Angeles.
I got to say, I had not exactly been following his decline, so I was floored when I read about it.
*To me. Apparently by Hollywood standards he was considered to be a rather nice guy. This is a pretty good article giving the basics of the Steve Bing story.
2. Michael Hutchence. I hadn't realized he killed himself way back in 1997. I thought it was somewhat more recent.
I didn't really hate him, and I didn't know anything about his personal life at the time. Like many celebrities, and probably most musicians, in the 80s and 90s, he indulged in drugs and alcohol to an extent that was unremarkable at the time but would be shocking in a successful person today. I only mention him here for the rather silly reason that when I was in high school several girls pointed him out as a man possessed of what they would consider acceptable attractiveness, and as he was quite exceptionally good-looking in a way that was obvious even to a man, I rather despaired of my prospects for love at that time. That such a person could be depressed even as his youth and hold on fame started to fade was unfathomable to me, especially as that that point he could still have re-invented himself and found some way to come to terms with aging, not having achieved indisputable greatness as an artist, or whatever other disappointments he had.
3. Chris Cornell. Again, I was never a fan or followed his career that closely--my taste never ran to any of the early 90s Seattle music. One thing that this list calls to mind is that in 1991, before the internet, we couldn't easily (and therefore, blissfully, I think, were not expected to) fact check everything we read to be sure that we were not carrying around our own false narrative of a story, and that you would read an article or glean an item of information about some public figure or story in passing and an idea would set itself in your mind for years. I read something around this time about Chris Cornell that impressed upon me that he was another one of those hostile long-haired Generation X Seattle people who were appearing in such profusion at that time, was a prodigious physical specimen who was even among that crowd especially irresistible to women, possessed of rippling muscles and a male organ of a size notable enough to be remarked upon in news stories. So it was again quite a shock to me when I heard that this person in particular had killed himself, apparently after years of depression, because naturally I imagine that people whose entire personae are the complete opposite of me must be so pleased with themselves and enamored of life that they could never falter or grow weary of it. He had adolescent children, too. It's hard to know what our lives look like to others of a reasonable degree of intelligence, perhaps we would be more pleased with them. I guess I have never been truly depressed or mentally ill. I always imagined I must come to such a pass someday, and maybe it still will, but I confess myself surprised at how long it has held off.
Others of Note
Bob Welch--70s singer of such classics as "Sentimental Lady" and "Ebony Eyes" (which I think is a pretty good song), early member of Fleetwood Mac, shot himself at age 66 due, it appears, to increasing physical debilitation and chronic pain. In vintage video clips from his heyday, Welch strikes one instantly as a man who wholeheartedly embraced the party anywhere, anytime, with anyone, and with any pleasure inducing substance at one's disposal ethos of the era, so it does not stun me that when faced with the prospect of years of discomfort or perhaps even paralysis that he might especially not care to go through with that. Physical decline with no hope of ever being restored to one's former health is not appealing for anyone to contemplate. I wonder if it is even more difficult for men who have known something, or a great deal more than something, of the hedonistic life. I don't know. I'm interested now in moving on with my post and not dragging out the question.
Joseph Brooks, composer, wrote the song "You Light Up My Life"--I wrote about this guy when he killed himself 10 years ago at age 73 while awaiting trial for raping or sexually assaulting eleven women who had come to his New York apartment thinking they were auditioning for movie roles. I admit I think about this story quite a lot, because the particular crimes he was charged with took place when he was 68-71 years old, in the mid to late 2000s, and my imagination immediately run to, what kind of stuff must this guy have been getting away with during the 50 years up until then? I'm sure he had multitudes of willing partners, or at least that could not allege that he had committed a crime against them. I have very little in the way either of creative or social life, so thinking about people who do takes up a lot of my idle time.
Baseball Nicknames
Back in April the Baseball Reference page made an announcement that henceforward they are going to discontinue the practice of identifying certain old players--most of whom played well over a hundred years ago--by nicknames now considered insensitive, the main offenders being Dummy (primarily used for deaf players, of whom there were quite a few in the 1880s-1900s era), Chief (often given to players of Native American descent, who were again seemingly more common in this era than they are today), and the unfortunate Nig, which I presume was given to players of a certain swarthy complexion. None of the various Nigs achieved much lasting fame beyond their own era, but a couple of the Dummys (Taylor and especially Hoy), as well as numerous of the Chiefs (in particular Bender, a Hall of Fame pitcher, and Meyers, the catcher on the great Giants teams of the 1910s) figured prominently in much of the baseball literature I grew up reading in the 1970s and 80s. Given that all the players involved are long dead, our interpretation of how offensive or damaging these nicknames were have more to do with how we want to be, or at least think about ourselves, going forward (which includes trying to shed ourselves of some of the guilt, or responsibility, for things we believe to have been wrong by refusing to be a party to them anymore). Though seeing as the entire system of organized professional baseball infamously banned black players altogether for 70-80 years, this concern about a few once prevalent nicknames within that overall structure seems rather minor and unnecessary. Why acknowledge and take an interest in this shameful period at all or the players who participated in it? Well, the obvious answer is that, like a lot of things, it is still a part of our history, and it is still interesting to a lot of people. The profusion of nicknames are a part of that interest of these earlier eras. They make the period more vivid than it would be otherwise.
William Ellsworth "Dummy" Hoy, who among other accomplishments stole 596 bases during his baseball career, was cited on numerous occasions in the famous oral history of turn of the 20th century baseball, The Glory of Their Times, which was published in the mid-1960s. He appears to have been well liked. Several of the players interviewed mentioned his then recent death in 1961 at age 99, and the story was also recounted more than once of the doorbell system at his house, which consisted of pulling a lever to send a leaden ball crashing to the floor, which caused enough of a reverberation to alert Hoy and his wife, who was also deaf, that visitors were come.
Connie Mack (his manager with the A's) was noted in the histories as always calling his star pitcher Chief Bender by his given name of Charles, which would seem to indicate that no one else in the baseball community at least regularly did so.
Chief Meyers, whose actual first name I would not know without looking it up (it was John) was one of the subjects interviewed for The Glory of Their Times, and his was one of the more memorable segments, both because he was in general a thoughtful person and because of his reminiscences of the great Giants teams of the years prior to World War I, featuring John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and numerous other great players and notable personalities. Meyers had gone to Dartmouth (which I thought was famous for its longstanding tradition of admitting American Indian students, more than other places at least--their nickname used to be the Indians--but I see this is disputed now), though he did not graduate.
The one person who was famous in this era for taking offense at his nickname was the pugnacious 1890s third baseman turned legendary manager John McGraw, who was called "Muggsy" but apparently not to his face. Baseball Reference, as far as I can tell, respected his distaste for this appellation and does not list it on his page.
Richie Ashburn, who starred for the Phillies in the 50s and was one of the team's broadcasters through the entirety of my life until I was around 27, was, like many blond players of his era, nicknamed "Whitey", and the name carried over somewhat into his broadcasting career, but not by everyone. Though Ashburn was by all appearances an affable midwesterner, it did strike me that everyone who called him Whitey had been around the game for a while. His longtime broadcasting partner Harry Kalas would address him thus, and Mike Schmidt did, and Tug McGraw, and Pete Rose, and Larry Bowa, and later on Daulton and Curt Schilling and people like that would have, but I don't recall younger or fringe players doing it. Even the harsh or negative nicknames, even, I think, the various "Chief", ethnic type nicknames signify some degree of camaraderie or membership in the fraternity, especially if the bearer stays around for a long time (the dispensers usually don't want to waste a good nickname on someone whose presence is likely to be too fleeting). This ability to jest and, for some, to suffer jests to some degree in turn is to me an obvious part of a certain type of traditional male social development, one that happens, in my opinion, to have accounted for much that is of interest in the world, but it seems lost on a great many people now....
