PRESERVED IN ASPIC

A Billy Joel song has been going through my mind incessantly in the past few days. Tragic circumstances prompted it.

The song is “Only the Good Die Young”. You know the hit from an old album about “Wake up, Virginia…” and the selfish “I might as well be the one”.

The truth is that it is not true. It is always tragic when young lives are snuffed out. Mountains not climbed. Careers not achieved. Parents and siblings and lovers deserted. And often, in tragedy, there has been no time for goodbyes. No so-called “closure”.

This melancholic mood has been, obviously, prompted by the death of my 3AW colleague and national cricket star David Hookes.

He died, senselessly, young. And a Sunday night hotel confrontation has changed a lot of lives. Hookes was only 48. His alleged, accused, assailant is less than half that.

The courts and the coroner will rule on all of this and that is not a territory where I want to go right now.

I have a crude expression for some people dying young. I have said in print and on radio that it has “preserved them in aspic”. I know it sounds cynical. But when somebody said that Princess Diana’s death was “a great career move” there was a touch of truth to it.

Think of it. The most famous woman in the world never got old. Never got crows’ feet. Never got a wrinkly neck or arthritic fingers. Her funeral was probably the most publicised outpouring of grief around the world in decades. More than Gandhi. More than Mother Teresa. The most mourned person in the world since – and probably more than – the boyish assassinated American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Speaking of Kennedy… think of his extra-marital girlfriend Marilyn Monroe. The sexiest actress in Hollywood history died in her thirties. Preserved in aspec. She lives forever like the nude calendar shot in Playboy or the last photo shoot behind a see-through chiffon scarf.

She never grew old. Never disintegrated in front of us. Unlike Elizabeth Taylor who now trails around with the grotesque, plastic surgery enhanced, Michael Jackson. It is a bizarre theory but if Taylor had died like Monroe, or the decapitated buxom blonde Jayne Mansfield or the young and handsome James Dean, the lasting memory of the violet-eyed Liz would have been different. Mae West ended her life looking like something out of Madame Taussard’s waxworks. Her much-publicised famous daily enemas obviously didn’t help her that much.

I interviewed her in her dotage. She reminded me of that joke about the woman who had had so many face-lifts that every time she sat down her mouth flew open. Imagine if Mae West, after whose breasts they named a life-jacket in World War Two, had died in her sexy, “come up and see me sometime”, period.

Imagine if Elvis Presley had passed on in some tragic manner while in his prime? Imagine if he had left us before the blimpish days in his too-tight sequinned jump suit, sweating profusely in Hawaii, when you could safely say “Elvis has eaten the building”.

There are others. John Lennon. Jimmy Hendrix. A lot of radio people are guilty, me included, of quoting the sick joke that if Karen Carpenter had eaten Momma Cass’s sandwich they would both be alive today. Cass fatally choked on her sandwich. Carpenter died of anorexia.

Death freezes these people in our minds. They do never grow old. They are snatched from us, usually tragically, at a painfully young age. We remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard of their deaths.

And because they went so young and so soon and so tragically we tend to gloss over any frailties or failings. Build up their strengths and ignore their deficiencies. Even though, sometimes at personal and professional cost, I have said, like a mantra, that “all history owes the dead is the truth”. If not, what’s the point about any of it.

This week at radio station 3AW I got into murky water, and came close to being fired, because I refused to toe the line about the David Hookes tragedy.

Last week, I upset some colleagues, because I had learned – not from family – that his life support system was about to be turned off. On that tragic, searing, Monday I interviewed the station’s general manager, Shane Healy, and put that news to him. He was not in a position to confirm it. I was. And I was not going to insult listeners by playing a game and insisting they should pray for our colleague when I knew it was over.

Similarly, this week, I had some colleagues calling for my sacking because, on the day of David’s funeral, I revealed that he and his wife had separated last year.

I was challenged as to why I announced it that day. Simple. That was the day I found out. As I said: All history owes the dead is the truth. Me included.

I told the station management: Hinch gets hit by a bus tonight and dies. You find a scandal about me tomorrow. Go with it. Be honest. We are not a bullshit station.

I would have, my colleagues would have, revealed something about Eddie McGuire, Sam Newman, Molly Meldrum. And have. And don’t forget Hooksey and his slash at the “hairy-backed sheila” in the Shane Warne affair.

I will not apologise to anybody about my Hookes comments. Journalistically, I have been ethical, factual, responsible.

A senior AW executive told me this week that my “head right but your heart was morally wrong”.

Don’t agree. But, in grief, we all make out own calls.

February 1, 2004

.©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2003