The byline Robert D. McFadden has been one of the most distinguished in the history of The New York Times, one that has been affixed to hundreds upon hundreds of exactingly reported and artfully composed pieces since he joined the newspaper 63 years ago, beginning a Times career remarkable not just for its craftsmanship and productivity but also for its longevity. He retired on Sunday at 87.
Bob first achieved distinction as a “rewrite man,” a reporter who would take on some of the biggest breaking-news stories of the day — a jetliner crash, a historic blackout, the destruction of the World Trade Center — without ever leaving his newsroom desk.
Reporters in the field covering an event would feed him reams of information, and he would take it all down, a telephone receiver shouldered against one ear, his fingers flying across the keys of a typewriter and later a computer keyboard. Then he’d funnel the information — it could never be too much — into a sweeping account full of detail, color, voices and drama. His rewrite prowess was recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.
But Bob had a second act in store: as an obituary writer. For the last decade or more he chronicled hundreds of consequential lives, some famous and some less so. But even there he was singular — because his mission was not to write about people after they died, the usual sequence, but while those subjects still lived. He wrote their obituaries in advance, each deeply researched, thoroughly reported and fluidly written. Then he’d file them away — sometimes for years — until they were finally needed, when death came knocking.
These were luminous portraits — always framing people against the broader historical canvas in which they lived, but never losing sight of the granular and often revealing details that complete the picture, that render any life as unlike any other.
We on the Obituaries Desk had a name for such an obituary: “a McFadden.”
And we haven’t seen the last one yet. Mr. McFadden may have left The Times, but his byline has stayed behind. He retired with more than 250 advance obituaries still in the pipeline, each awaiting its day.
Here is a sampling of the “McFaddens” that have gone to press.
March 1, 2024
Iris Apfel, Eye-Catcher With a Kaleidoscopic Wardrobe
She was tallish and thin, with a short crop of silver hair and scarlet gashes on lips and fingernails, a little old lady among the models at Fashion Week and an authentic Noo Yawk haggler at a shop in Harlem or a souk in Tunisia. Many called her gaudy, kooky, bizarre, even vulgar in get-ups like a cape of gold-tipped duck feathers and thigh-high fuchsia satin Yves Saint Laurent boots.
Jan. 14, 2024
Joyce Randolph, Last of the ‘Honeymooners’
In an age when status symbols in a gritty Brooklyn tenement were telephones, television sets and refrigerators, the Kramdens had none on a bus driver’s $62 a week. Reflecting America’s working-class experience, they struggled for a better life, shared disappointments and had fun, even if there was no uranium mine in Asbury Park and no market for glow-in-the-dark wallpaper, no-cal pizza or “KramMar’s Delicious Mystery Appetizer,” which turned out to be dog food.
Sept. 12, 2022
William Klein, Photographed the Energy of City Life
Exterior. Daylight. Two boys in a doorway. The older, 11 or 12, holds a revolver aimed at your left eye. He is snarling, ready to kill you. The younger, maybe 8, has the face of an angel. It is a grainy black-and-white photograph, staged circa 1954, titled “Gun 1, New York.”
The visual artist William Klein called it a self-portrait. He was both boys, he said. One grew up angry on the streets of New York and was capable of anything. The other, sensitive and intelligent, settled in Paris as a young man and devoted himself to one artistic pursuit after another.
July 25, 2020
Regis Philbin, TV’s Enduring Everyman
In a world of annoyances, Mr. Philbin was the indignant Everyman, under siege from all sides — by the damned computers, the horrible traffic, the inconsiderate people who were always late. There was no soap in the men’s room. Hailing a cab was hopeless. Losing a wallet in a rental car? Fuhgeddaboudit! Even his own family was down on him for buying a chain saw!
And was it possible, he wondered, to ask ever so softly in a crowded pharmacy where to find the Fleet enemas without the clerk practically shouting: “Whaddaya want, buddy? A Fleet enema?”
Dec. 27, 2019
Don Imus, Radio Host Who Pushed Boundaries
Grizzled, irascible, foulmouthed, an outrageous, confrontational growler with a buckram face, a battered cowboy hat and a gun on his hip, he spent decades on the air doing pranks and parodies that were often brutish, tasteless or obscene and sometimes racist, sexist or homophobic — all while surviving alcoholism, cocaine addiction, repeated firings and a nearly fatal fall from a horse.
June 17, 2019
Gloria Vanderbilt, Built a Fashion Empire
To millions of women (and men) who wore her jeans, blouses, scarves, shoes, jewelry and perfumes, who saw her alabaster face, jet-black hair and slim figure in magazines, and who watched her move across a television screen and proclaim that her svelte jeans “really hug your derrière,” Ms. Vanderbilt was an alluring, faintly naughty fashion diva in the 1970s.
But behind the flair and the practiced, throaty whisper — a plummy voice redolent of Miss Porter’s School and summers in Newport — there were hints of a little girl from the 1930s who stuttered terribly, too shy and miserable to express her feelings, and of a tumultuous American life chronicled faithfully in the gossip columns: every twist of her Hollywood affairs, her loneliness, bursts of creativity and the blow of witnessing the suicide of a son.
March 27, 2017
Roger Wilkins, Champion of Civil Rights
Beyond attending a segregated elementary school as a boy and being arrested once in a protest against apartheid, Mr. Wilkins had little personal experience with discrimination. He waged war against racism from above the barricades — with political influence, jawboning, court injunctions, philanthropic grants, legislative proposals, and commentaries on radio and television and in newspapers, magazines and books.
Outwardly, he was a successful, popular Black man with more white acquaintances than Black friends. The second of his three wives was white.
A lean, intense, soft-spoken intellectual, he grew up in a genteel middle-class family. The customs, attitudes and social currencies of everyday Black life “evolved away from me,” he said in a memoir.
“I didn’t know how to talk, to banter, to move my body,” he said.
Feb. 18, 2017
Norma McCorvey, ‘Roe’ in Roe v. Wade
At the heart of it all, Ms. McCorvey — known as Jane Roe in the court papers — became an almost mythological figure to millions of Americans, more a symbol of what they believed in than who she was: a young Dallas woman lifted by chance into a national spotlight she never sought and tried for years to avoid, then pulled by the forces of politics to one side of the abortion conflict, then by religion to the other.
Aug. 7, 2015
Frances Oldham Kelsey, Saved U.S. Babies From Thalidomide
The sedative was Kevadon, and the application to market it in America reached the new medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration in September 1960. The drug had already been sold to pregnant women in Europe for morning sickness, and the application seemed routine, ready for the rubber stamp.
But some data on the drug’s safety troubled Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a former family doctor and teacher in South Dakota who had just taken the F.D.A. job in Washington, reviewing requests to license new drugs. She asked the manufacturer, the William S. Merrell Company of Cincinnati, for more information.
Thus began a fateful test of wills. Merrell responded. Dr. Kelsey wanted more. Merrell complained to Dr. Kelsey’s bosses, calling her a petty bureaucrat. She persisted. On it went. But by late 1961, the terrible evidence was pouring in. The drug — better known by its generic name, thalidomide — was causing thousands of babies in Europe, Britain, Canada and the Middle East to be born with flipperlike arms and legs and other defects.
April 29, 2015
Jean Nidetch, a Founder of Weight Watchers
She never ate dessert in public. But at night, by the dim light of the refrigerator, she gorged on goodies. Then one day in 1961, Jean Nidetch, a 214-pound Queens housewife with a 44-inch waist and an addiction to cookies by the box, ran into a neighbor at the supermarket.
“Oh, Jean, you look so good!” the neighbor said. “When are you due?”
That was it. Mrs. Nidetch, who had tried many times to subdue her compulsive eating — dieting, losing weight, then gaining it all back again — had to do something.
She shed 72 pounds and helped found Weight Watchers, the organization that turned the drab, frustrating diet into a quasi-religious quest, with membership commitments, eating systems, inspirational meetings and cookbooks, food products and motivational success stories to reinforce the frail will.
Sept. 4, 2014
Joan Rivers, a Comic Stiletto Quick to Skewer
Vivacious even as a nipped-and-tucked octogenarian, flitting from coast to coast and stage to studio in a whirl of live and taped shows, publicity stunts and cosmetic surgery visits, Ms. Rivers evolved from a sassy, self-deprecating performer early in her career into a coarser assassin, slashing at celebrities and others with a rapier wit that some critics called comic genius in the bloodletting vein of [Lenny] Bruce. Others called it downright vicious. But if she turned off the scowlers, she left millions in stitches.
March 28, 2014
Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., Vietnam P.O.W. Told of Torture
The prisoner of war had been tortured for 10 months and beaten repeatedly by his North Vietnamese captors in recent days, and there were threats of more if he did not respond properly when the propaganda broadcast began. Haggard but gritty, Cmdr. Jeremiah A. Denton Jr. slumped in a chair before the television cameras.
Pretending to be blinded by the spotlights, he began blinking — seemingly random spasms and tics. He answered interrogators’ questions with a trace of defiance, knowing he would be beaten again and again, but hoping that America would detect his secret message in Morse code.
March 30, 2013
Bob Turley, a Pitcher With a Blazing Fastball
Bob Turley, a Cy Young Award-winning right-handed pitcher whose blazing fastball bored in on baffled hitters like a dissolving aspirin and lifted the Yankees to a come-from-behind victory over the Milwaukee Braves in the 1958 World Series, died on Saturday in Atlanta. He was 82.
Jan. 6, 2011
Donald J. Tyson, Food Tycoon
Mr. Tyson grew up on a farm with squawking chickens and became one of the world’s richest men, a down-home billionaire who dressed in khaki uniforms like his workers, with “Don” and the Tyson logo stitched over the shirt pockets. He looked like a farmer down at the feed co-op: a short, stocky man with a paunch and a round, weather-beaten face, a baldish pate and a gray chin-strap beard.
Nov. 17, 2010
Baby Marie Osborne, Silent-Film Child Star
They called her Baby Marie Osborne, and in silent films nearly a century ago she was America’s little sweetheart, a precocious, chauffeured, $1,000-a-week prodigy who could turn on the tears or a sunshine smile and break your heart. She had sparkling eyes and dimpled arms. She also had a lisp, but no matter.
March 2, 2009
Paul Harvey, Homespun Radio Voice of Middle America
Like Walter Winchell and Gabriel Heatter before him, he personalized the radio news with his right-wing opinions, but laced them with his own trademarks: a hypnotic timbre, extended pauses for effect, heart-warming tales of average Americans and folksy observations that evoked the heartland, family values and the old-fashioned plain talk one heard around the dinner table on Sunday.
“Hello, Americans,” he barked. “This is Paul Harvey! Stand byyy for Newwws!”
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