Poignant and True

  While the late Anthony Bourdain was still the Executive Chef at Brasserie Les Halles, in midtown Manhattan, he’d see an older woman peer in the window most afternoons, but never come in.

One day he went out to ask why, and she said, it was because she couldn’t afford to eat there.

He then invited her in, and cooked for her. 

In 1946, when the famed American journalist and short-story writer, Damon Runyon,   died of cancer at the age of 66, his son, Damon Jr., by plane, scattered his father’s ashes over Broadway, the place he loved most.  

Clark Gable, dying at 59 of a heart attack in 1960, some say brought on by stress working with Marilyn Monroe on his final film, The Misfits, asked to be buried at Forest Lawn next to his third wife, the actress, Carole Lombard, who died at 33 in a plane crash in 1942, while selling war bonds. His last wife, Kay, honored the request.

Lucy Mercer, Franklin Roosevelt’s longtime love, didn’t attend his funeral in Hyde Park on April 15th, 1945, but afterwards, wanted to pay her respects. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had the last say, made sure she was allowed to, treated with the utmost regard, despite the circumstances. 

When the Marquis de Lafayette, came to America in 1824 on what he called his Farewell Tour, after he proudly laid the cornerstone at Bunker Hill, we presented him with a trowel filled with earth, as a memento to take home.

After he died in 1834 at 76 of pneumonia, and was  about to be buried alongside his beloved wife, Adrienne, in Paris’s Picpus Cemetery, their son, George Washington de Lafayette, threw it on top of the coffin as they lowered it into the ground, saying…

“My Father always said, he had two countries.”

In 1990, when the esteemed composer, Leonard Bernstein, passed away of pneumonia at 72, as his funeral cortege made its way across the Brooklyn Bridge en route to Greenwood Cemetery for burial, men doing work on the bridge, took off their hardhats and in reverent unison, screamed…

“GOOD BYE LENNY!!!”

His son, Alexander, said, “My father would have so loved that.”     

SB