For Celebs, Is Death a True
'Triple' Threat?
By David Montgomery
Washington Post - Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Rarely since Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big
Bopper crashed and died more or less simultaneously in an Iowa cornfield on
Feb. 3, 1959, has the Celebrity Death Rule of Three fulfilled itself with such
swift efficacy.
That's the old rule that celebrities die in threes. Between
Ed McMahon's passing on June 23 and Michael Jackson's death on June 25, less
than three days elapsed. Farrah Fawcett also died on
the 25th.
Even in the face of such powerful evidence for the triplicity of bold-face morbidity, skeptics denied it. They blogged with learned-sounding
certainty about how celebrity deaths, like all human demises, occur with random
frequency. The skeptics were met with equal cogency by those who
maintain that whenever a famous person dies, two more face imminent doom.
Some of this conversation took place at the Web site
Threes.com -- a space devoted to the essential three-ness of the universe --
where a poster named Fletch said that after Fawcett succumbed, he and his lunchmates wondered who would be next. A poster named Brian
retorted that the "celebrity death rule of three" has "all the
scientific rigor of Alanis Morissette's
'Ironic.' "
Over at the site Polls Boutique -- dedicated to the
essential pollability of the universes -- 57.75
percent of respondents answered "yes" to the question, "Do
celebrities die in threes?" Sample comment: "I used to not think so,
but now with the deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett,
and Michael Jackson so close together, I don't know."
"People are dropping every day, unfortunately,"
says Michael Scott Eck, administrator of Threes.com, also known as the Book of
Threes. "We want completion, we want to have the
tragedy be finished. To put it into three-ness is to complete it."
Eck says we're wired to organize messy reality into threes.
There are trinities everywhere, holy and otherwise. Time is past, present and
future. There are three states of matter, three dimensions. Triangulation is
how we get our bearings. So finding patterns in death is how we master our own
mortality, says Eck, and three is the essential pattern.
Fine -- but how then to explain the death of David Carradine? He was found hanged June 4 in Bangkok in a reported
case of autoerotic asphyxiation, but that's not all that needs explaining.
Under the rule of three, he could have been No. 1, making McMahon No. 2 and
Fawcett No. 3.
Or was Carradine No. 3 in a
previous trinity of death? Or is Jackson No. 1 in a new series? Who's next?
Surely there will be another dead celebrity. There always
is.
Much depends, however, on which departed souls count as
celebrities, and on how much time may elapse between deaths in a valid triplet.
Fawcett and Jackson weren't the only people to die on June
25. So did Sky Saxon. He was the singer and bass player for the psychedelic
band the Seeds, which had a '60s hit with "Pushin'
Too Hard."
Is Saxon a celebrity? If so, he, Fawcett and Jackson make
three in one day. Then we could put McMahon and Carradine
together with, say, Koko Taylor, the blues musician,
who died June 3. Another three.
But if Saxon is not famous enough to qualify for the rule of
three, then how sad: dead and dissed.
Once a couple of celebrities die, there is
great pressure to elevate another dearly departed to the pantheon. So
this week folks are mentioning Billy Mays in the same breath as Carradine, McMahon, Fawcett and Jackson.
Billy Mays? He's the great pitchman
who starred in commercials for cleaning products, and he died Sunday.
If we count Saxon and Mays with the more famous four, that makes six, which is two fulfilled rules of three.
See? We could also sub in Gale Storm, former star of the golden oldy TV sitcom "My Little Margie," who died
Saturday.
Or maybe Mays, Storm and Fred Travalena,
the comedian, who died Sunday, have observed a B-List Celebrity Death Rule of
Three.
There are notable defunct doubles waiting to resolve into
perfect dead triplets: The passing this year of Dom DeLuise
and Dom DiMaggio could be interpreted as an omen for sort-of-famous Doms. And the deaths of David Herbert Donald and John Hope
Franklin could give pause to accomplished historians who go by three names. Two
members of Lynyrd Skynyrd
died earlier this year. Who's next?
Maybe such pairs simply obey their own mystical pattern.
Marilyn Johnson, author of "The Dead Beat," a book about the
"pleasures of obituaries," posits that deaths don't come in threes, they come in twos, going back at least as far as
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th
anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Coincidence? You decide.
"It is more than coincidence. . . . It's supernatural,"
Johnson writes. "I thrilled recently to a pair of obituaries for Paul Winchell,
the voice of Tigger in 'Pooh,' and John Fiedler, the
voice of Piglet in 'Pooh'; the two had gone silent a day apart. I keep them
next to my clip from October 25th, 1986, the day the New York Times ran side-by-side
obituaries for the scientist who isolated Vitamin C and the scientist who
isolated Vitamin K."
The pattern's the thing.
Theresa Lazenby-Jones and her
17-year-old son, Kenneth Jones, were at home last week grieving Jackson's death
when they were struck by the coincidence of two such famous people as Fawcett
and Jackson dying on the same day. Or was it coincidence?
Jones got on the computer to do some research, and mother
and son were blown away by all the celebrities who have died on the 25th of a
month in recent years: Bea Arthur (April 2009), Dan Seals (March 2009), Eartha Kitt (December 2008),
James Brown (December 2006), Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes (April 2002), Aaliyah (August 2001).
"This is like kind of crazy," Jones says.
"It's just strange," says Lazenby-Jones.
Along with the apparent lethality of the 25th, she also
respects in the rule of three. It applies to her family, too. She recently has
buried an uncle, an aunt and a cousin.
"It's a saying in our family," she says.
"When somebody dies, it's always in threes."