This is why British newspaper obituaries are the best.
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
[via Andrew Sullivan]
And yet, the best part ever is the ending paragraph. Short and sweet, as nonpolitical as one can imagine (lol).
“He never married.”
Too funny.
I read this obit in the Economist and thought of your post here. So I ran back to the computer. The first two paragraphs are priceless. The obit is of Alan George Heywood Melly, jazzman and writer, died on July 5th, aged 80.
Now enjoy…..
Among his many unguilty pleasures—Marlboro Lights, Irish whiskey, bacon and eggs, blue jokes, smoke-filled dives where the music wandered on till four in the morning, voracious sex with good-looking men and women—George Melly especially liked to fish. The man famous for red, green and cream striped suits, red fedoras and a huge, rude, laughing mouth could often be found quite still, thigh-deep in the Usk or the Teifi, preparing to cast as soon as a bold trout tickled the surface of the water. And the singer whose party piece, when touring with John Chilton and the Feetwarmers, was to scamper round the stage and groom the clarinettist’s head during his rendition of “Organ Grinder Bluesâ€, would admit that his thoughts on the river bank were of poppies, midges, Magritte and clouds.
And sex. This had been his driving force since his first schoolboy fumbles at Stowe, first rampantly homosexual, then generously heterosexual, among anchor chains and on Hampstead Heath, in the backs of vans and in glorious pulsating piles on the floors of stately homes. And there was, he confessed (being the most shockingly confessional of writers), sheer orgiastic pleasure in the tug of a bloody great fish, the line screaming off the reel, the catch leaping from the water in a shower of diamonds, the net sliding under it and the fish laid, beautifully marked, on the grass. Phew! Time for a ciggie.