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Do celebrities die in threes?
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July 2, 2009
Los Angeles - Rarely since Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper crashed and died more or less simultaneously in an Iowa cornfield on February 3, 1959, has the Celebrity Death Rule of Three fulfilled itself with such swift efficacy.
That's the old rule that celebrities die in threes. Between Ed McMahon's passing on June 23 and Michael Jackson's death on June 25, less than three days elapsed. Farrah Fawcett also died on the 25th.
Even in the face of such powerful evidence for the triplicity of bold-face morbidity, sceptics denied it. They were met with equal cogency by those who maintain that whenever a famous person dies, two more face imminent doom.
Some of this conversation took place at the website Threes.com - a space devoted to the essential three-ness of the universe - where a poster named Fletch said that after Fawcett succumbed, he and his lunchmates wondered who would be next.
A poster named Brian retorted that the "celebrity death rule of three" has "all the scientific rigor of Alanis Morissette's Ironic".
Over at the site Polls Boutique - dedicated to the essential pollability of the universes - 57.75 percent of respondents answered "yes" to the question: "do celebrities die in threes?"
Michael Scott Eck, administrator of Threes.com, also known as the Book of Threes, said: "We want completion, we want to have the tragedy be finished. To put it into three-ness is to complete it."
Eck says we're wired to organise messy reality into threes. There are trinities everywhere, holy and otherwise. Time is past, present and future. There are three states of matter, three dimensions. Triangulation is how we get our bearings.
Fine - but how then to explain the death of David Carradine? He was found hanged June 4 in Bangkok. Under the rule of three, he could have been No 1, making McMahon No 2 and Fawcett No 3.
Or was Carradine No 3 in a previous trinity of death? Or is Jackson No 1 in a new series? Who's next? Surely there will be another dead celebrity.
Fawcett and Jackson weren't the only people to die on June 25. So did Sky Saxon, the singer and bass player for the band the Seeds, which had a 1960s hit with Pushin' Too Hard.
And is Saxon even a celebrity?
Once a couple of celebrities die, there is great pressure to elevate another dearly departed to the pantheon.
Marilyn Johnson, author of The Dead Beat, a book about the "pleasures of obituaries", posits that deaths don't come in threes, they come in twos, going back at least as far as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Coincidence? You decide.
"It is more than coincidence. It's supernatural," Johnson writes. "I recently saw a pair of obituaries for Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger in Pooh, and John Fiedler, the voice of Piglet in Pooh, the two had gone silent a day apart. I keep them next to my clip from October 25, 1986, the day the New York Times ran side-by-side obituaries for the scientist who isolated Vitamin C and the scientist who isolated Vitamin K."
Theresa Lazenby-Jones and her son, Kenneth Jones, were grieving Jackson's death when they were struck by the coincidence of two such famous people as Fawcett and Jackson dying on the same day.
Jones did some research, and mother and son were blown away by all the celebrities who have died on the 25th of a month recently: Bea Arthur (April 2009), Dan Seals (March 2009), Eartha Kitt (December 2008), James Brown (December 2006), Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes (April 2002) and Aaliyah (August 2001).
Along with the apparent lethality of the 25th, Lazenby-Jones also respects the rule of three. It applies to her family, too. She recently had buried an uncle, an aunt and a cousin.
"It's a saying in our family," she says. "When somebody dies, it's always in threes." - Washington Post
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