LENS


Celebrities, such as the recently deceased Michael Jackson, sometimes seem more alive after they have died. Death becomes just another chapter in a vivid career, often a profitable chapter.

As Bob Greene wrote in The Times, Mr. Jackson may follow in the footsteps of Elvis Presley, whose death at age 42 barely affected his marketability. It was widely reported that Mr. Presley’s longtime manager Colonel Tom Parker said, in the hours after his client died, “This changes nothing.”

Mr. Presley in death became an enormous earner. And this lesson was not lost on Michael Jackson’s father, who within three days of his son’s death told an interviewer: “Right now, he’s bigger than ever.”

The news of death does, indeed, work in strange ways on the public mind. Sometimes, as with the “king of pop,” the fact never truly takes hold; sometimes, when celebrities outlive their notoriety, the public is too quick to relegate them to the afterlife. Even when the person is a genuine king.

Many associate Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany with the World War I era only. So when Wilhelm died on June 4, 1941, the news that he had been still alive was, for some, the most startling and bemusing part of his death. In his Page 1 New York Times obituary in 1941, Guido Enderis captured the king’s odd fate: “With the renunciation of his throne as King of Prussia and German Emperor, William II disappeared into the oblivion of privacy.”

Millvina Dean also spent the bulk of her life in the “oblivion of privacy” working as an assistant and secretary in small businesses in Southhampton, England. She never drew attention to herself as the last survivor of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

When Ms. Dean died in May at 97 The Times’s John Burns wrote a substantial 1,115-word obituary about her rather unremarkable life. Ms. Dean rarely talked about her past, Mr. Burns reported.

“Nobody knew about me and the Titanic, to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either,” she told Mr. Burns.

Only after the discovery of the wreck in 1985 did the world again become aware of her existence. But at her death she was in a nursing home, struggling to pay the cost of her care. Her life in the public’s consciousness was twice shocking: once because she lived, and once because she still lived.

Of course, with Twitter and Facebook, a death can feverishly spread through the public’s mind, regardless of that person’s true fate.

In the same week that Mr. Jackson died, the Web became a petri dish of false death reports about various celebrities, including Jeff Goldblum, the actor.

But a death by tweet does have the benefit of making others appreciate the life they thought they had lost, as Mr. Goldblum told Monica Corcoran of The Times. “People came back into my life that I had been out of touch with,” he said. “They called to say ‘I was very upset and I’m glad you’re alive,’ and so it’s been a sort of reunion for me.”

Apparently, there is life after cyberdeath.


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