New York Times, Sunday, August 17, 2014, REVIEW section, Page SR8:
A MINOR but talented actress named Arlene Martel died on Tuesday at age 78. Aficionados of small-screen science fiction and fantasy remember this exotic-looking woman as a creepy morgue attendant (and an equally creepy airline stewardess) in “Twenty Two,” a 1961 segment of “The Twilight Zone.”
Three years later she co-starred with Robert Culp in “Demon With a Glass Hand.” Written by Harlan Ellison, this episode of “The Outer Limits” on TV won an award from the Writers Guild of America.
Ms. Martel’s real immortality came when she played T’Pring, the consort of Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock in “Amok Time,” a classic 1967 “Star Trek” episode. Her portrayal of a flawlessly logical, slyly manipulative and utterly lovely Vulcan endeared her to a galaxy of geeky fans.
In a sluggish news cycle, Ms. Martel’s death would have garnered its share of headlines. But in the past few days, her departure has gone virtually unnoticed outside Hollywood. For it occurred smack amid the deaths of Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall. As of Friday, not even The Los Angeles Times had taken note.
It is a cruel thing, this wheel of obituary fortune. You can never be assured that your passage to eternal bliss will get the attention it deserves.
That’s especially true if you leave at approximately the same time as a more outsize figure. On Sept. 28, 1970, the fatal heart attack of President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt pretty much trumped the expiration that day of the novelist John Dos Passos.
The world was still reeling from the baffling death of Elvis Presley on Aug. 16, 1977, when Groucho Marx left us three days later. Guess who got more ink? As Woody Allen put it in a letter to Time magazine, “Is it my imagination, or were you guys a little skimpy with the Groucho Marx obituary?”
More than a generation later, the death of Farrah Fawcett in 2009 had barely begun to be dissected on cable news when the cardiac arrest of Michael Jackson all but wiped her off the screen.
Then there is the holiday pre-emption problem. The actors Charles Durning and Jack Klugman both died on Christmas Eve, 2012. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf followed them three days later. The three were accorded informative and respectful write-ups. But to my recollection, they rather got lost in the Yuletide shuffle. Admittedly, the death of Harry S. Truman on Dec. 26, 1972, generated plenty of discussion, even as everyone was trading partridges in pear trees.
Of course, the editorial caprice of the Grim Reaper can cut both ways. On Sept. 14, 1982, President-elect Bashir Gemayel of Lebanon was killed in a bomb blast. Given the carnage engulfing Beirut at the time, his assassination initially grabbed attention from the sad news about Grace Kelly, the actress and princess of Monaco, done in the same day by a car crash on the Riviera. But nearly 32 years later, Gemayel is a dim memory in our collective consciousness while the princess remains an icon.
For that matter, you never know when a news void may elevate you posthumously.
For many years, I worked at a magazine where one of my duties was recording the departures of the noteworthy. During a certain week in April 2008, no boldface names seemed to be dying. So I settled on Werner Groebli, the acrobatic skater who was Frick of the ice-skating team Frick & Frack. (Yes, there were really a Frick and a Frack.) I also composed a few paragraphs about Joy Page, the stepdaughter of the movie producer Jack Warner. In “Casablanca,” she had played the heartbroken bankrupt Bulgarian bride Annina, whose honor was preserved when she was rescued by Lauren Bacall’s future husband, Humphrey Bogart.
My editor was dubious when I pitched these footnote personalities. But when he read my précis of their eventful lives, he agreed that they were worth writing about.
It is so often unfair, this arbitrary lack of attention paid when some of us die. But it is, perhaps, commensurate with the judgment of the fates — coincidental, impartial and thus consistent with the fickleness of life itself.
