Free Republic

In London fifty years ago today - June 22nd 1969 - a nightclub manager Mickey Deans walked into the bathroom of his rented house in a Belgravia mews and found his wife of three months dead. Judy Garland was just forty-seven. The cause of death was an accidental - or, as the English coroner put it, "incautious" - overdose of barbiturates. Talent requires a certain managerial competence, which is why Frank Sinatra died at eighty-two owing Capitol Records an album and his pal Judy died a little over half that age and leaving an estate worth $40,000. We shall have...

I don’t like to plug, honestly, but my anthology Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade includes an essay written twelve years ago, upon the death of Washington Post proprietor Kay Graham. Excerpt: The media’s sense of proportion is never more out of whack than when bidding farewell to one of its own, but even so the passing of Katharine Graham set impressive new standards of risibility: “The Most Powerful Woman In America,” “The Most Powerful Woman In The World,” “America’s Queen,” “Kay’s Amazing Grace,” “Oh, Kay,” “Special Kay”… No “Kay, Why?”, funnily enough, though the question is certainly worth asking...