Photo: A model of a 1959 Cadillac hearse listed on EBay at $599.99.
Queen of the Dead—dateline December 12, 2011
• For all its youthquake aura, Laugh-In had a lot of middle-aged folks in its cast: the delightfully camp and nelly Alan Sues (“Uncle Al, the Kiddie’s Pal”), 85, died on December 1. Sues hit his stride in the Off-Broadway revue The Mad Show, and you might also remember him as the sullen son on “The Masks” episode of The Twilight Zone (trivia bonus: the man who played the vengeful grandpa in that episode, Robert Keith, was once married to HOLLYWOOD sign-jumping actress Peg Entwistle!). Sues kept working post-Laugh-In, but nothing high-profile: commercials, regional theater. I would have paid a lot of money to have seen Alan Sues and JoAnne Worley do Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? Maybe with and Henry Gibson and Goldie Hawn as Nick and Honey.
• Too sad: Andrew Ali Aga Khan Embiricos, 25, a web consultant for Universal Music Group and sales executive for Virgin Atlantic Airways, committed suicide in his New York apartment on December 4. Embiricos was better known as a grandson of Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan, and son of Princess Yasmin Aga Khan (such a good daughter, was that Princess Yasmin!). According to his website, Embiricos also founded a charity group that provided clothing to homeless people, and worked with Fernando Santangelo Design, “creating working design models for multimillion-dollar projects and often consulted directly with Fernando Santangelo, the chief interior decorator.” Embiricos “was a strikingly handsome, personable guy who radiated charm no matter what crisis he was weathering,” wrote gossip columnist Michael Musto. He was also quite ill—physically, I mean—so I give him a total pass on the suicide if that was the case. But poor Princess Yasmin.
• A ridiculously old dog named Pusuke died on December 5, in Japan: he was 26, or, as Wikipedia annoyingly avers, “186 dog years.” That “dog years” nonsense is right up there with “and her hair turned white overnight” for annoying the wee out of me. As the invaluable nonsense-skewering website Snopes points out, 18-month-old dogs are adults and capable of reproducing, whereas 10-year-old children are (we hope) not. And while many dogs live to be 15, very few people live to be 105. So the next time someone pulls that “in dog years” banana oil on you, give ‘em the Bronx cheer. Oh, and as for Pusuke: cute doggie!
• Marguerite “Daisy” d’Harcourt, the Baronne de Cabrol, died on November 17, aged 96. She married the Baron de Cabrol de Moute in 1937, and for the next generation or two they gave some of the most fabulous parties in the western hemisphere (many of them, it must be added, to benefit charities). The Telegraph enticingly drops this gold nugget about her parties: “Daisy herself was frequently in costume — as the wife of Louis XIV, as a tree, and on another occasion as a plate.” She became close to those dreadful Windsors, as well as the much more charming Rothschilds, and Daisy was chased around more than one foyer by Duff Cooper. She once literally jumped ship (a long dull cruise given by Stavros Niarchos), complaining, “Nobody can eat caviar for eight days in a row.” She once told The Independent of a lunch with Rasputin’s assassin, Prince Youssoupov: “He told me all about the assassination, and said that afterwards he was haunted by Rasputin’s ghost. For years he could not stop drawing awful ghoulish faces.” With a hint of understatement, she said in the late 1990s, widowed and in a very comfortable retirement, “We really were very lucky. Life just isn’t like that any more.”
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