Eclipsed, overshadowed 

The time between November 22 and December 8 is a light-deprived couple of weeks bookended by dates that still darken many memories – the murders of John Kennedy and John Lennon. It also brings to mind the analogy, Aldous Huxley is to John Kennedy as Darby Crash is to John Lennon.

Huxley died on November 22, 1963, and as his obit was being written it was already shunted to the back pages of newspapers around the world. The author of Brave New World became a footnote and it’s likely more print column inches were devoted to the Dallas police officer Oswald shot and killed that day than to Huxley. As a sub-footnote, Huxley was tripping on his way out, after his wife, at his request, injected him with LSD on his deathbed.

The musical footnote to Lennon’s death was L.A. punk rocker Darby Crash, who picked the night of December 7 to intentionally overdose on heroin. His death wasn’t reported until the next day and then forgotten. On the wall of the room where he died, he supposedly scrawled, “Here lies Darby Crash,” possibly trying to be helpful to whomever would find his body. Nobody added, “And why not?” to the epitaph (Spinal Tap reference).

There are several other instances covering the phenomena of celebrities dying on the same day (or very close). I’m introducing a superficial, simple and subjective scorecard to rank these coincidences in order of magnitude based on a couple of point systems: A score from 1-10 to rank an individual’s lifetime legacy, added to a similar system that guesses at potential achievements (the “what if” factor) had that person lived.

John Kennedy/Aldous Huxley (25 points): JFK gets a 9 for lifetime achievements, docked one point for his

Huxley

incomplete presidency. His what if factor, however, is off the charts with a 10 score. Vietnam. Civil rights. Nixon. World history would have been shaped much differently had he survived. Huxley gets a 4 for writing Brave New World, plus a potential score of 2. Had he lived, he would have become a William Burroughs aging hipster type, his portrait immortalized on head shop posters, followed by an album with Jimi Hendrix playing guitar behind him as Huxley reads from his writings about acid and mind expansion.

John Adams/Thomas Jefferson (20 points): Founding Fathers, the second and third presidents, and possibly the two most famous men of late 18^th Century America died within a few hours of each other. They each get a 10 for lifetime achievements, but since they each lived remarkably long lives for the time, Adams dying at age 90 and Jefferson surviving well into his eighties, each receives a zero for what if. The greater, spooky irony is that they died on July 4, 1826, the 50^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Jimmy Stewart/Robert Mitchum (19 points): Stewart and Mitchum died in 1997 within 24 hours of each other. Stewart gets a lifetime achievement score of 9 (5 Oscar nominations, one win) and the underrated Mitchum an 8. They each receive a 1 what if score as there was always the chance for one final, art-imitates-life role (see the 87-year old Gloria Stuart in Titanic and the dying John Wayne playing a dying gunfighter in The Shootist) that would leave everyone cheering, while wiping away a tear.

John Lennon/Darby Crash (17 points): John gets a 9 for lifetime achievement and a 6 for what if. Chances are he

Crash

would have kept making records that were mostly hit or miss; it’s the other stuff that makes his what if score high (and wistful). We missed the inevitable reunion with Paul (brokered by MTV in a two-hour special edition of Unplugged, then again at the 9/11 tribute concert): the Daily News photo of John, son Sean and Darryl Strawberry at Shea Stadium with the Strawberry Fields Forever headline: trolling Trump on Twitter. I gave Crash a couple of 1 scores. Even by the standards of early punk, his singing and his band the Germs were pretty miserable.

Michael Jackson/Farrah Fawcett (15 points): Jackson gets 8 lifetime achievement points, docked 2 notches for relying on an army of songwriters, producers and arrangers for his solo albums, although he was a marvelous dancer. After he died there was no discovery of a trove of unreleased recordings, just vague talk from insiders about how he was “heading in a new direction.” We’ll give him a charitable 4 what if score. Poor Farrah gets a 2 for Charlie’s Angels and a 1 what if score for a possible role that would have required her to wear glasses or a false nose, allowing Hollywood to hail her bravery.