
Photo: 1940 Ford Siebert hearse converted to a delivery sedan, $49,000 on Hemmings.com
Queen of the Dead—dateline July 25, 2011
• July 22 saw the death of the first Bond Girl, Linda Christian, 87. Her career was pretty unremarkable; movies like Tarzan and the Mermaids, The Happy Time, Slaves of Babylon, Athena, The VIPs, and Meet Peter Voss. But in 1954, she played Valerie Mathis in a TV adaptation of Casino Royale, making her the first Bond Girl (to Barry Nelson’s James Bond). Christian was married to actors Tyrone Power (from 1949-56) and Edmond Purdom (from 1962-63).
• No one was surprised by the death on July 23 of poor Amy Winehouse, who joined what Kurt Cobain’s mother called “that stupid club,” of rock stars who died at 27. To me, the saddest part of this was her dad, Mitch Winehouse, who was just restarting his own singing career, on his daughter’s coattails. After giving up the show business to raise his family, Mitch was just now cutting his first album, and was appearing at New York’s Blue Note café. He told the Timeslast week, “she said: ‘You know what, Dad? You have to make an album.’ I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ And she said, ‘No, you have a great voice, this is terrific.’ We were thinking about it, and, as is well documented, she went through a very bad period, and we put it on the back burner. Then she got better, and we decided to give it a go.”
• Borders, the 40-year-old book chain, announced on July 18 that it would be closing all 399 stores nationwide, putting 10,700 people out of work. Borders was always kind of the low-end K-Mart of bookstores, but any port in a storm. When I moved to New York 30 years ago, I had Scribner’s, Doubleday, the great Gotham Book Mart to choose from—all gone. Amazon, Barnes and Noble (itself with one foot in the grave) and now e-books have pretty much written the death certificate for bookstores.
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