The Front-Page NYTimes Obit for My H.S. Classmate—and the Meaning of Celebrity

This piece ran in the newspapers in August, 2025.

An obituary on the front page of the New York Times grabbed my attention. It was for the only member of my high school class who will ever get an obit on the front page of the New York Times.

It got me thinking about celebrity, and fame.

My classmate hadn’t done anything like perform the first heart transplant or come home with five Olympic gold meadows, or been elected to the Senate. She had become a celebrity by being part of the entertainment world. Like a movie star.

She’s Loni Anderson, who became famous for being the star of a successful TV show (WKRP in Cincinnati), then for a poster that showed off her beauty and sexiness, and then later for marrying Burt Reynolds, a major cultural icon. (The nastiness of their break-up kept her in the tabloids for years.)

(About that poster: I’d preferred the beauty she had in high school — raven hair instead of bleached blond, a more graceful and less voluptuous figure. But I thought I understood: she’d made herself into what she had to be to become a celebrity.)

Her celebrity status had a visible impact on the members of the Alexander Ramsey High School class of 1963. At a couple of our reunions, everybody was all a-twitter about the possibility that Loni would show up. She’d sent in her money, it was reported, and so people kept their eyes peeled for Loni coming through the door: a Somebody who gets the attention of the Big World, coming to spend an evening with the rest of us comparative Nobodies, whose existence isn’t even known beyond a small, human-sized circle.

(A friend of mine once analyzed American culture in terms of our being divided between a few Somebodies and a great many Nobodies. There are over 330 million of us, and there’s just not room for nearly that many to be granted life on the Mount Olympus of “fame.” And that scarcity is hard on a lot of people in America—a country whose politics and economy are both built on competition, winners and losers.

(And I think of that famous line in On the Waterfront when Marlon Brando’s character laments how “I coulda BEEN SOMEBODY. I coulda been a contender.”)

I wasn’t atwitter about whether Loni would show up, but neither was I immune to the feeling about celebrity that made me feel more connected with her than with other classmates with whom I’d not had much relationship. I’d always liked Loni, in a vague way, from the 8th grade on. But she was surrounded by a vibe that kept a distance, and that made one feel that when she dated, she dated older guys who offered something more exciting, more adult.

When she finally did show up for our 50th, I was happy to see her, and happy for the class whose wish had finally come true. (She didn’t look quite natural, but one could still see the beauty.) Having celebrity around added juice to the occasion. And when she came over to me to tell me how grateful she was to my (late) mother who, as her teacher, had encouraged her to develop herself as an actress, my gratification had an charge to it that went beyond what I felt when other classmates had likewise expressed their appreciation of my mother as their teacher. (It came, after all, from a celebrity.)

Celebrity makes a person more “important.” And the desire to be important is not confined to celebrities.

I feel sadness that Loni has died. Evidently she had a long-term struggle against some unidentified medical problem that finally claimed her life. Which is a reminder that gaining celebrity does not solve life’s problems.
And that reminder is a big part, I believe, of the appeal of those celebrity-gossip magazines, that would pounce on something like the Burt-Reynolds/Loni-Anderson break up to reassure people that there’s a limit to how much we should envy people who become important celebrities.

If all my wishes came true, my obituary would appear like Loni’s did, on the New York Times’ front page. My parents were both ambitious for fame, in different forms, and that desire was woven into the fabric of my motivational structure.

But there’s a part of me that recognizes that the essential action is at the human level: not the relationship with the hundreds of millions of people who make up the big world, but on the scale of the relationship with the immediate people and realities of our lives.