In 1897, American poet EA Robinson wrote an eponymous poem about a man called Richard Cory.
The protagonist was a rich, influential guy who had everything and left ordinary people envious of his success. Then, one day, without any public warning, Cory committed suicide.
That might have been that. But in the Sixties, the American singer-songwriter Paul Simon, who was deeply influenced by such poets as Robinson and Emily Dickinson was inspired by the poem to write a song along the same theme, also called Richard Cory.
At first the song attracted little attention but when he re-recorded it with Art Garfunkel and put it out on an album that also contained his break-out hit, The Sound Of Silence
, millions of people heard the song and the themes first raised by Robinson reached a whole new audience.
I remember the song from my schooldays — perhaps you’ve heard it too.
“The papers print his picture almost everywhere he goes.
Richard Cory at the opera, Richard Cory at a show
And the rumours of his parties and the orgies on his yacht
Oh, he surely must be happy with everything he has got.”
Like the poem, the song surprises us with its denouement.
“So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read
Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head.”
Both the Robinson poem and the Paul Simon song were taken as comments on how wealth, power and being born into a good family could not buy you happiness — and that ordinary people were often happier than the rich even if they didn’t realise it themselves.
Then, in the 1970s, during the historic tour of America with his band Wings, Paul McCartney took to including Richard Cory in his live shows. He got Denny Laine, one of his sideman, to sing it and made one important change to his lyric. In the Simon and Garfunkel song, the narrator says, “I wish that I could be Richard Cory.” In the live Wings’ version, the line became “I wish that I could be John Denver”.
"Fame and success are not all they are cracked to be. So let’s not expend negative energy envying those we only see from afar because we don’t really know what life is like for them." |
The line brought the house down every night because, at that stage, Denver was the biggest recording star in the US. For the Wings, the song was not about power, it was showbiz. We think that rock stars are successful and happy, the song suggested, but actually that is almost always because we don’t know what is really happening in their lives. In some ways, many people suggested, McCartney was making an oblique reference to The Beatles and even to himself.
I thought back to the Wings’ version when, a decade or two later, Denver’s career went into a downward spiral, he began drinking too much and he finally crashed his private plane killing himself. And I thought of the song again last week, when I read about Robin Williams’ suicide.
I did not know much about Robin Williams. I’d always admired his work from his days on TV’s Mork and Mindy, to his movies (Good Morning Vietnam, Dead Poets Society etc) to his last hilarious TV series (The Crazy Ones
). And I’d seen him on talk shows where he nearly always made me laugh with his mastery of voices and accents and his brilliant comic timing. He was, by any standards, an incredible talent.
In fact, one the criticisms of Mrs Doubtfire, in which he had to pretend to be a woman nanny in order to be close to his kids, was that the character he played (who did voices for animated films) would never have been unemployed in real life because he was so good at what he did (his wife wants to divorce him because he doesn’t take his career seriously). And when Disney test-screened the Alladin cartoon movie, the word went out to increase the role of the genie (voiced by Williams) because that’s the best part of the picture.
So why would somebody who made people laugh so much be so sad himself? It turns out now, that he was suffering from depression and that all the humour he demonstrated in public was a performance. He was actually a sad and unhappy man.
In some ways, it is the Richard Cory story all over again. And in some ways, it is like that old Smokey Robinson song, Tears Of A Clown, about how jokers tend to cry in private.
But it also reminded me of how little we really know about the private lives of those who entertain us so well. Who expected Marilyn Monroe to commit suicide? Or Sid Vicious for that matter? For many rock stars, a dependency on drugs and alcohol is just another way of finding a means to move ahead with the day despite unhappiness and pressure. The list of those who died before they were 30 is a long and tragic one: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and scores more.
So while I mourn the tragic passing of Robin Williams, a man who made so many of us laugh for so long, my mind also goes back to Robinson (and to Simon and McCartney). Fame and success are not all they are cracked to be. So let’s not expend negative energy envying those we only see from afar (as the songs says “I curse the life I’m living, I curse my poverty, and I wish that I could be Richard Cory”) because we don’t really know what life is like for them.
So let’s just be grateful for what we’ve got. God’s been kind. And envy is a waste of time and energy.
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