Logan Roy Is Dead. Long Live Logan Roy.
“It’s better than fashion week!” Samantha Jones squealed outside of Lexi Featherston’s funeral in the Sex and the City episode “Splat.” Like so much of Sex and the City, the line is silly, solipsistic—and deadly accurate. For a certain type of person, an A-list funeral is worth killing—or dying—for.
As is so often the case, the wealthy do funerals if not better, than certainly more memorably. After Logan Roy's shocking death on this week's episode of Succession—the fictional media mogul died on his private plane during a trip to Sweden—one can only wonder how the series will send him off. ("Let's grieve and whatever, but not do anything that restricts our freedom of movement," Kendall Roy said shortly after learning of his father's demise. "We'll get a funeral off the rack; we can do Reagan's with tweaks.")
In that, the Roy family’s service may not be all that different from the real-life funeral of philanthropist and Manhattan society doyenne Brooke Astor. Astor, as is increasingly the case, left behind detailed instructions for her service—written in 1992 and never updated before her passing in 2007 at 105. During that time, her three suggestions to read a passage aloud had all died, and her son and grandson became embroiled in an internecine war about her care and fortune.
Astor’s dictates may seem from another time (even in 2007), with her request of four hymns and steely clarification that the service not use the “new” Book of Common Prayer “but a real Episcopal service from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.” But in her carefully detailed planning, she was, as so often, ahead of the curve.
Events planner J. Ben Bourgeois shares that most of the funeral services he has worked on have been pre-planned by the deceased—and increasingly, they have moved away from religious services and become “celebration of life” events. And though Manhattan’s massive churches and cathedrals are still draws for the town’s wealthiest denizens, services are as apt to be held at the Temple of Dendur or Carnegie Hall as Saint Patrick’s.
As Bob Morris wrote in Town & Country in 2017, “Did you attend the memorial for photographer Bill Cunningham at Carnegie Hall last October, where Anna Wintour read a Lord Byron poem? Maybe the one at Lincoln Center for plastic surgeon Fredric Brandt, with the massive wall of white orchids? What about the service at the Hollywood Hills Cemetery for Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, which featured a tribute film and a special ‘live’ appearance by R2-D2? Then there was Garry Marshall’s memorial, where Bette Midler sang and the entire marching band from Northwestern, his alma mater, paraded through the Northridge Performing Arts Center.” As Bourgeois points out, “A celebration of life usually involves a joyful entertainer.”
Logan Roy will hardly be laid to rest to the squawk of a tuba, but Succession will likely wisely know what aspects of a New York City funeral to utilize to underline the family’s place within its hierarchy—like where it might take place. And for 100 years, nothing better exemplifies dying in New York than Frank E. Campbell, the de rigueur funeral home for Upper East Siders and celebrities ranging from Judy Garland (Liza Minnelli planned her service) to Robert F. Kennedy and Jackie Onassis. There, they promise no request will go unfulfilled, wrangling everything from a flock of doves to two pet Doberman pinschers that stood at attention at the foot of their master’s casket and began offering videotaping as an option even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zoom services aside, the best template for the shift to our current zest for celebrations of life (and potential for muted dramatics) may have been—unsurprisingly—the memorial service for Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum's Temple of Dendur. There, Lauren Bacall embraced Grace Mirabella while Anna Wintour—not long after taking over Mirabella’s former job as editor-in-chief of Vogue—glided past accompanied by Si Newhouse and Alexander Liberman.
Richard Avedon, George Plimpton, Oscar de la Renta, and C.Z. Guest all spoke to the assembled 450 guests, who were also treated to recordings of everything from the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” to an aria from Tosca sung by Maria Callas. And Jackie Onassis was seen, clutching a wet umbrella, wondering aloud if she could tuck it into a corner without someone stealing it. If only she’d had a ludicrously capacious bag of some kind for the event.
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