LIFE Farewell: Remembering the Friends we Lost in 2016

By The Editors of LIFE

Celebrating the people we lost in 2016, LIFE's commemorative collector's edition gives an intimate look back at the lives of David Bowie, Prince, Harper Lee, Patty Duke, and many more. Featuring exclusive personal tributes from Tom Brokaw on Nancy Reagan, Susan Lucci on the creator of All My Children, Travis Tritt on Glenn Frey, Billy Ray Cyrus on Merle Haggard, Leslie Stahl on Morley Safer, Ray Romano on Doris Roberts, Mel Brooks on Gene Wilder, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Muhammed Ali.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life
• Release date: Dec 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781683307099

Book preview

Langdon/Getty.

The Afterlife

By KOSTYA KENNEDY

Top row: The Eagles’ (with front man Glenn Frey) Their Greatest Hits; the smallpox pathogen that Donald Henderson eradicated; Elie Wiesel’s defining work. Middle row: Harper Lee’s classic; Arnold Palmer’s Arnold Palmer; Peter Schaffer’s Equus. Bottom row: Mount St. Helens, photographed by Gary Braasch; Prince’s Purple Rain; an André Courrèges–inspired miniskirt.

Fifty-five million people leave the earth each year, every one of them with a catalogue, large or small, of things left behind: Moments, thoughts, others somehow touched. The 60 humans collected in this Farewell edition of LIFE are but a statistical mote in the fathomless toll of 2016. Yet they’re much more than that, each memorialized for the outsized impression that he or she made on this particular, occasionally civilized, region of the earth. In their deaths we remember their public consequence.

We know from an old sage’s epitaph—well, it’s Jackie Robinson’s—that a life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives. So Harper Lee gave us Boo Radley (about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch) and Gene Wilder gave us Willy Wonka (in a top hat and velvet coat!) and Glenn Frey gave us, driving in our cars with the radio on, a peaceful, easy feeling. Sixty people is all, and yet a particular kind of tapestry too.

They sang and danced and protested and shook their fists. They created miniskirts! They threw baseballs and swatted hockey pucks. Donald Henderson eradicated smallpox. They took pictures of the changing planet and they made sad and funny movies. They talked to horses and the horses (okay, the horse) talked back. We were great pals, the late Alan Young once said of Mister Ed.

We weren’t pals with any of those remembered in these pages. We knew them, warmly even, only through the veil of their accomplishments. So at times we’ve engaged friends to tell more personal tales: Tom Brokaw recalling when Nancy Reagan whispered to him, Give me a little kiss. Or Simon Pegg summoning the callow vulnerability of Anton Yelchin on their first Star Trek set. Many among us may regret that we won’t see Doris Roberts originate another sitcom role, but few will miss her as intimately as a colleague such as Ray Romano does. It’s been seven hours and 15 days, Prince once sang, mourning a lost someone. In other words, eternity.

There can be an aura of inevitability around such a collection of tributes: the simple fact that the pageantry fades and people die. What’s far more interesting, though, is that they live.

NILE RODGERS REMEMBERS

David Bowie

ANDREW KENT

We first met at an after-hours club called the Continental in New York. I probably arrived there at around five or six in the morning. I walked in with Billy Idol and we both spotted him at the same time. Billy said, Bloody hell, it’s David effin’ Bowie! I walked over to David and started chatting with him. Within two seconds we just spiritually and artistically connected. I don’t remember speaking to anyone else the entire time.

We spent that whole morning talking about jazz artists. I think we were both surprised at the level of each other’s knowledge of the genre. David knew jazz damn near on the level of a musicologist. That night, we were both at career lows. Artistically speaking, both of our previous albums were rewarding, but they certainly weren’t rewarding by ’80s record-sales standards.

Producing Bowie’s Let’s Dance album was one of the greatest experiences of my life. It totally changed my life and it totally changed his. It was him and me against the world. We did it by ourselves, and he independently funded the project. It was the easiest record I’ve ever made. It took 17 days from start to finish. From the day we walked into the studio to day 17, the record was finished, mixed, and never touched again. We were on the same wavelength. I was charged with making a hit album, and I did.

Years later we did another album called Black Tie White Noise. Those songs were a little bit more challenging because I think David (and he sort of admitted it) suffered from a little bit of success remorse. Let’s Dance was so big that David felt he was almost defined by one album. It sold 7 million copies—way more than any of his other records. But his tremendous body of work spans the musical gamut.

I’ve been in the presence of artistic greats all my life, and David is in that rarefied league worthy of being called supergenius.

Let’s Dance. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues.

© SUKITA

POP CHAMELEON David Bowie—who died January 10 at 69—in his defining persona, Ziggy Stardust, in New York in 1973.

DENIS O’REGAN/GETTY

The protean artist’s more mainstream incarnation as MTV-friendly rock star during 1983’s Serious Moonlight tour.

Gordie Howe

The great Red Wing was known as Mr. Hockey

JAMES DRAKE/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

For the 2016–2017 season, the Detroit Red Wings have added patches that have the number 9 on them to their jerseys to honor Howe, who died at 88 on June 10 in Sylvania, Ohio. He was called "the