It is an American story, certainly. But it is also a story, humanly and dis-humanly, universal. Italy’s largest newspaper, Corriere della Sera, has for days been devoting entire pages to the death in solitude, extreme loneliness, of one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed stars, Gene Hackman, and his wife.
The facts, if this is the case, are bare: in the Santa Fe mansion where the actor led a voluntarily withdrawn life, his lifeless body, that of his companion and one of the couple’s three dogs are found last Feb. 26. She, pianist Betty Arakawa, crushed by a virus transmitted by rats; he, sick with Alzaheimer’s, died a week later, abandoned to himself and perhaps unaware of anything.
The scene was discovered by maintenance workers at the villa grounds, not by neighbors, not by friends, who may have been gone, nor by the actor’s three children, who had not even looked for their father for months to say hello. Of course there are many such stories, even in our RSAs, parents left to their fate, sometimes not even treated well, a hindrance to those they brought into the world and who want to be in the world, but without them. And to think that the most fragile age of life should be protected in a mature democracy, by institutions in the public dimension and by people in the private one.
The Hollywood liturgy of rise, fame and decline only exacerbates the plot of a common, all-too-common tragedy. At the same time, the contrapasso of celebrity has a bitterness all its own, a kind of violent trait reversed by the lights of the star- system. Many times I have dealt in my program “Top secret” with the death of the famous , often American, actors and musicians, often young but not only. All the conspiracies and legends that have arisen about these ends have the flavor of an artificial (later to become artificial as intelligence) cultural ploy to reknit the broken threads of biology.
Gene Hackman’s passing reminds me, mutatis mutandis, of that of Marylin Monroe, on the night of August 4-5, 1962, at her home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. So many theories about that tragic night, but in every serious reconstruction appears the loneliness of the star, the many useless phone calls perhaps seeking some warmth before the end. The public’s love does not mirror that of reality. And there is really no love left in that death alone, there on the ground in Santa Fe.
The article The hidden face of fame comes from TheNewyorker.
