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19. Sudden Death, Ironically
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Pope never let down. He worked obsessively. Clearly this was what he considered the ideal life—performing the boss totally, sedentarily, smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. It was too good to miss even a few days for recreation. For all the medical stories the Enquirer ran, Pope didn’t trust doctors. He didn’t have his first physical exam until he was forty-five.1 And his editors knew better than to propose a story on the dangers of smoking. Months before his fatal heart attack Pope was diagnosed at the hospital that was also his favorite charity, JFK Medical Center, with severe, advanced heart disease. He had checked in after suffering chest pains. “Surgery was recommended,” said a doctor familiar with Pope’s medical history.2 But Pope refused an angiogram and checked himself out of the hospital. “This was a sick man who was known to avoid doctors and physicals,” said the doctor. “Look, when Mr. Pope, a powerful man and a benefactor of the hospital, checks himself out, well, he checks himself out. But he was apprised of his condition.”3 Pope did give up smoking, but too late. Several months later he died of his first heart attack, a massive one, on October 2, 1988, at sixty-one. But he couldn’t give up the deepest addiction of all, the National Enquirer. A month 226 SUDDENDEATH,IRONICALLY NINETEEN SUDDEN DEATH, IRONICALLY 227 after his sixtieth birthday Pope told a reporter, “If you took this away from me, I’d probably die.”4 On the Sunday morning Pope died, the New York Times carried Alfred Kazin’s review of Dorothy Gallagher’s book, All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca. The book made it clear that the prime suspect in the murder by contract of Tresca in 1943 was his fascist archenemy, Generoso Pope Sr. “After an admirably close and careful review of all the evidence, Ms. Gallagher says that the instrument was most probably Frank Garofalo, who as far back as 1934 had tried, as Generoso’s agent, to silence Tresca,” Kazin This formal portrait of Pope was taken at the 1987 charity ball he sponsored for JFK Memorial Hospital, where he would be declared dead on arrival in 1988. (Photo by Alan Zlotky / Palm Beach Post) [34.226.141.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:51 GMT) THE GODFATHER OF TABLOID 228 wrote. “She believes that the continuing tension between Pope and Tresca led to Pope’s loss of face and thus to Garofalo’s discredit as an enforcer of Pope’s will.”5 The prominent review beginning on page 3 of the book section was quite unusual for a modestly published academic book by a scholarly writer, and it was also unusual for a heavyweight like Kazin to review such a book. So it seems likely there was a certain buzz regarding Gallagher’s book, which sought to resuscitate the charismatic Tresca, who was passionately left wing without being a communist. Did Pope read the New York Times book review? He certainly liked to be kept informed, and the Sunday edition of the New York Times was available in Palm Beach County Saturday evening. If Pope had any social connections from the old days in New York (Roy Cohn had died of AIDS two years before ), it’s plausible someone would have called him about the review, though he remained alienated from his brothers and mother. Could Pope have read the review on the day he died? Could the exhuming of these secrets, so long buried , have stressed him to the point that, combined with his heart disease, it brought on his fatal heart attack? That would certainly be a cosmic irony, since Gallagher also makes it clear that she believes Pope Sr.’s political connections shielded him from the consequences of a murder by contract. The public will never know unless Lois Pope knows and chooses to tell. But the timing of the review and the fatal heart attack is at the very least a poignant irony. There were other ironies in Pope’s death—one being that the purveyor of junk medical science ignored sound medical advice. Another was the fact that Pope expired in a special rescue vehicle he had donated to JFK Medical Center , sometime during the twenty or thirty minutes it took to get from his Manalapan house to the hospital. The new $7 million DeBakey Cardiac Care SUDDEN DEATH...