Celebrities cope with rumors of death that just won’t die

Kirk Baird

Friday, April 7, 2000 | 8:51 a.m.

Abe Vigoda lives.

An odd statement, sure, but one that is sometimes necessary to make when talking about Vigoda. Ever since a People magazine article erroneously reported his death in 1982 the veteran actor, perhaps best known as Det. Phil Fish in the ABC sitcoms "Barney Miller" and "Fish," has been plagued by rumors of his demise.

"It just happened this morning," Vigoda said during a recent phone interview from his home in New York City. "I was in a coffee shop with a friend and a gentleman came up to me and said 'You know, you look just like Abe Vigoda. But of course he's dead.' I said 'No, it's me. I am Abe Vigoda.' "

The belief of Vigoda's passing has become so widespread, in fact, that it made ABC's prime-time savior, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," in the form of a question: "Of these five celebrities, which one is not dead?" with Vigoda, of course, being the correct answer. (The contestant, incidentally, properly answered the question, presumably without a life line.)

Although it may be a bit jarring to the actor to see his living status in question, in an odd sort of way it's flattering: Abe Vigoda has become a symbol for a national obsession that combines society's passion for all things celebrity with its fascination with the morbid. The result is a cross-pollination of pop culture with the macabre that fits neatly into a five-word question: Are they dead or alive?

Of course, such queries are bound to cause disputes among those who seek answers, and what better place to find them than the Internet, itself an electronic encyclopedia of useless trivia and perverse facts?

And to that end, the Internet has responded with the Dead People Server (www.dpsinfo.com/), a one-stop website where people can learn if that famous person is alive and functioning or has rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

The site, a treasure trove of facts about the living/not-living, divides itself into three main categories -- dead, newly dead or might plausibly be dead -- and includes a "Quash Those Death Rumors" page for celebrities such as Vigoda. For those listed -- everyone from the well known (Ronald Reagan and Bob Hope) to the more obscure (anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss and computer scientist Admiral Grace Hopper) -- there is a date of birth, why they are included in the list (what they did to become famous) and a date of death, if applicable.

Maintained by Laurie Mann, a 43-year-old technical writer in Pittsburgh, the site was started in 1994 by a friend of Mann's as a sort of bar joke. Shortly thereafter she learned about the Web page and seized the opportunity to take over when its ownership became available three years later.

"I was semi-employed at the time, working on another website, and wasn't making lots of money," she said in a phone interview. "I thought this would be kind of fun."

Since then DPS has grown from 50 entries to 2,000, and averages 3,000 to 4,000 visitors a day. But not all of those visitors are friendly, with some claiming she's anti-religious or too irreverent about the subject matter.

"I know there are parts of my site that offend people, but you can't always worry about who you may or may not be offending," she said. "It's basically a trivia site. It's not meant to be a morbid game."

A lot of the site' s popularity is simply curiosity, Mann said.

"We see these celebrities on TV all the time and somehow we get attached to them," she said. "Then we lose track of them, and suddenly we're talking among friends and wondering whatever happened to that person."

When a definitive answer cannot be reached, the thoughts then turn morbid, with the inevitable conclusion being, "I think they're dead." And although fascination with life's ultimate conclusion for the famous may be a recent trend, the obsession with death is nothing new.

"We try to avoid (death) as much as possible, and we've become morbidly fascinated by it," said UNLV professor of sociology Andy Fontana, who teaches a course on death and dying.

In fact, he said, humans have always been fascinated with death. Only now that society has become so scientifically oriented, where issues are explained and rationalized in newspapers and on television, a longing to solve the mysteries of death has developed. Consequently, we turn to various alternatives to fuel our imaginations.

"We make legends out of dead heroes, people still see Elvis Presley, he's not really dead, he's come back," Fontana said. "James Dean, Jim Morrison -- anybody who's famous we create some mystery around them."

He lives!

But there's no mystery behind the Bob Hope "death." Just an over-eager news service, some bumbling bureaucrats and a media proven susceptible to error.

On June 5, 1998, an Associated Press article being prepared in the eventuality of Hope's death was inadvertently posted on the news service's website. When House Majority Leader Dick Armey read a copy of the article, he passed it along to Rep. Bob Stump of Arizona, who then announced the passing of the famed comedian on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Even though the article had been removed from the AP site by that time, after seeing the House proceedings live on C-SPAN, a few news groups had already picked up the story.

The story, however, was quickly quashed nationwide, with Hope very much alive at home and amused at the congressional gaffe.

Although many media sources -- including the Sun -- prepare obituaries months, even years, before a famous is person is deceased, it's a practice Fontana justifies as simply a precaution to avoid being "caught off-guard." Still, Fontana admits that the practice is perhaps a bit ghoulish. He likens it to the so-called "Dead Pools," a type of game where participants make a list of famous people they believe will die during the coming year, with the rewards being monetary, or simply the satisfaction of knowing you were correct. The pools can be played in offices or on the Internet, and anywhere else two or more people share a fascination for the famous.

But even as many people are ready to label the game "morbid," others such as Zachariah Love see it as something else: a kind of protest.

"Celebrities are sold to us like products," Love said from his home in Los Angeles. "They're marketed to people that we should care about them, and we do. I see this whole thing as a reminder that celebrities are not friends, they're not relatives."

Perhaps as a response to this belief, he co-founded Stiffs.com (www.stiffs.com), one of several celebrity Dead Pool websites where people can bet on what famous people they think will die in the coming months. The site offers two contests: the Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool, a yearlong tournament named after the late Republican party leader, with a $15 entrance fee and a $3,000 prize; and the Lee Jr., a six-month contest with a $5 entry fee and a $1,000 prize.

The rules for both are the same: Participants submit a list of 11 celebrities -- a lineup of 10 with one alternate -- they think will die before year's end. The person who guesses the most deaths wins.

It's proven to be a popular game, said Love, who serves as commissioner of the site. Stiffs.com, which began in 1990, is the largest contest of its kind on the Internet, with roughly 12,000 people participating in the two games. However, it's not the first such site.

The Death Game (http://members.aol.com/ggghostie/home.html) began in 1970 as a debate between two Syracuse University graduates over who would die first -- George Burns or Jack Benny (Benny "won" by 22 years). From there it expanded to a list of all celebrities and grew to include other friends as well. Although not open to the public, Web surfers can keep up with who's winning via a "Play-by-Play" chart, which chronicles the contest results back to 1971.

In addition to the Death game, according to the website there are other mentions of Dead Pools as well, including: literature -- "Bel-Ami," a novel by Guy de Maupassant published in 1885; newspapers -- an Albany (New York) Times-Union article ran on June 9, 1977, recalling a Dead Pool organized at a New York City newspaper in the 1930s; and film -- the last of the "Dirty Harry" films, 1988's "The Dead Pool," in which Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) investigates a list of dead celebrities on a list and those who created it.

Meet the participants

If it's so popular, then who actually plays the game?

People such as Ann Linderman, 45, an office assistant for the Las Vegas Clark County Library.

Linderman first learned about Dead Pools in a computer magazine article that listed Stiffs.com. When she went to the site she found herself intrigued and began keeping up with the comings and goings of famous people and how well she did in her predictions vs. those who were playing.

"It's sort of like playing a game show at home," Linderman said. "You always do well when you're playing along."

Eventually she decided to put her money where her predictions were and entered the Lee Atwater Invitational this year. She listed Reagan, Hope, Queen Elizabeth and many others "90 or above," as well as Kathie Lee Gifford ("I really loathe her") and has kept abreast of the obituary news to see how well she's doing.

So far, though, the results have not been good -- none of Linderman's selections have yielded any credited deaths.

"I know a lot of people who have not been in the best of health this year," Linderman said. "And looking at the entries, a lot of people based their list on that."

Thankfully for Vigoda, for those using health as a factor in their selection process, the 79-year-old is happy to report: Look to someone else. Vigoda said he's in good health and working in feature films (he most recently appeared in the 1998 NBC tele-movie, "Witness to the Mob").

But for those who will put him on their list anyway, and even for those who still think he's dead, Vigoda maintains a sense of humor.

"I'm flattered that people remember me and think of me," he said.

No matter his status among the living.

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