Santa Monica Mirror: THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT FOR FUN AND PROFIT FRANK RICH

Now that the John F. Kennedy Jr. marathon is officially over, just in time for the new American Tragedy at Buckhead, this much is clear: After two weeks of wallowing in his life and death, we know no more about him than we did at the start. Nice guy. Unpretentious. Handsome. No genius, but smart enough. On the other hand, we learned far too much about those who exploited the accident that killed him, his wife and his sister-in-law as an opportunity for self-promotion and profiteering. With days of TV and pages of print to fill and no news to fill it with, they just couldn't stop countering the vacuum by talking rapturously about themselves.

At the high end, if we can call it that, were otherwise intelligent media hands eager to let us know, often in the first paragraph of their articles or TV visitations, that they were zero degrees of separation from the lofty celebrity to whom they paid ostentatiously lachrymose tribute. ``When he was thinking of launching George, we had lunch at a tiny Thai restaurant,'' confided Walter Isaacson in one of the two Time installments, accompanied by synergistic CNN cameo appearances invoking his palship with Kennedy. ``When my wife and I first had dinner with him some years ago, he talked to her about Egypt ...'' wrote Lance Morrow, also in Time.

Douglas Brinkley, the historian whom Slate magazine's David Plotz has now immortalized as "the William Ginsburg of the Kennedy death circus,'' told us in Newsweek of "lunches at New York's Century Club or EATS Cafe,'' while Jonathan Alter, two pages later, broke into the first person in his second sentence solely to advertise his intimacy with the Caroline Kennedy-Edwin Schlossberg nuptials. Tom Brokaw opened his TV Guide reminiscence with: "John and I didn't hang out a lot, but we ate dinner from time to time.'' Christopher Hitchens' air-kiss in Salon began: "At a cocktail party in the George Hotel in Washington about a year ago, I was talking to John Kennedy. ...''

Were these lyrical evocations of the departed prince (or icon, or whatever) an homage to "Camelot'' or Zagat?

Less palatable still were the out-and-out vultures, the hypocrites and the cluelessly tasteless. Bob Morris, a writer who was at Brown with Kennedy (but "didn't know him personally''), parlayed a single recent phone conversation with him into a CNN appearance, which he then spun off into a confessional for The New York Times about his guilt over it all. Mike Barnicle, the disgraced former Boston Globe columnist on the prowl in Hyannis for career rehabilitation, became Kennedy's most ardent and God-invoking eulogist on MSNBC - even though he had lambasted JFK Jr. in print less than two years ago for having "the body of Joe Piscopo and the brain of Sonny Bono.''

Barnicle's current newspaper boss, Mortimer Zuckerman of The New York Daily News, bad-mouthed George's advertising prospects on MSNBC while framed by a news bulletin announcing the discovery of Kennedy's corpse. On Fox the Rev. Jerry Falwell declared, "I'm admittedly much like John Kennedy Jr. in that all my life ... I've lived close to the edge.'' Also on Fox, the movie critic Michael Medved, backed by a shot of St. Thomas More Church, offered the esthetic insight that if Kennedy's cousin Patrick, a congressman, had been killed he wouldn't have merited so much TV coverage because he wasn't as good-looking.

In the wake of such spectacle, the media consciences Don Hewitt (of "60 Minutes'') and Steve Brill (of you-know-what) have both called for the press to be more respectful of the privacy of celebrities - though not until after "60 Minutes'' had done its Kennedy show and Brill had shared content-free reflections on his encounters with his famous fellow magazine publisher on "Larry King Live'' hours after the plane was reported missing. The invasion of celebrities' privacy is the least of the problem, anyway. What was most disturbing about the Kennedy miniseries was the shameless, unapologetic manufacturing and fictionalizing of news, and not just by the veteran fictionalizer Barnicle (whose report of a grief-stricken midnight sail by Teddy Kennedy had to be retracted by his network).

For starters, almost all of those who passed themselves off as Kennedy chums in print and on TV, often referring to him on a first-name basis, were imposters or grandstanders. Kennedy's friends, many of whom are not famous, say that of all the self-identified Kennedy acquaintances gabbing about him, the only ones actually in their circle were Christiane Amanpour and the ubiquitous John Perry Barlow, late of the Grateful Dead. That garrulous pair excepted, Kennedy's many real friends remained silent because, as one typically puts it, "We didn't violate his privacy in life, so why would we do it in death? We'd only want to speak up if his portrayal was inaccurate - but it's all been so glowing. Those who are now asking to be viewed for posterity as a first friend are asserting themselves the way they couldn't when John was alive.''

Not only were there falsified characters in this drama but invented plot lines - from the phantom flight instructor on the plane, to the fictive fairy-tale mansion the couple was allegedly building in New Canaan, Conn., to the bogus rivalry between Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton over the New York senatorial nomination, to the vilification of Lauren Bessette and her bosses at Morgan Stanley as the cause of the plane's tardy Friday evening departure. Such touches recalled the false leads of the All Monica orgy, as did the elaborate coverage of an event we couldn't see: The off-camera Manhattan memorial mass was presented as "live'' breaking news in the same manner as the off-camera grand-jury testimony of Bill Clinton, complete with static visuals and chatty color commentary.

The underlying premise driving the Kennedy coverage - that America was mourning at a degree to rival the aftermath of either Kennedy assassination - may also have been somewhat of a contrivance. Yes, most people were sad about these unnecessary deaths - who wouldn't be? Yes, those citizens who sincerely revere the Kennedy family were no doubt heartfelt in their public expressions of sorrow about this latest loss. But was the country grieving at a scale and intensity to suspend all other news for a week? Unsurprisingly, the Gallup Poll already shows that Americans over 60 were most affected, and that nearly 60 percent of the country found the coverage excessive, no doubt because they sensed they were being toyed with.

"This is the worst ‘John Garfield is still dead' story I've ever seen,'' says the screenwriter William Goldman, referring to the joke headline a reporter supposedly suggested to his editor back in 1952 when the tabloids were running out of angles to sustain the days-long coverage of the actor's death in mid-coitus. It's not likely to be the last, for marathon mourning is now a hit show-biz formula for generating ratings and newsstand sales, with conventions that have nothing to do with the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies commentators constantly cite but that are richly redolent of afternoon soaps: the treacly theme music, the cheesy greeting-card-art graphics, the New Age vocabulary of "closure,'' the ritualistically repeated slo-mo video clips (the 3-year-old John's salute, Princess Diana's departure from the Ritz). Though some cynics wonder if there is any celebrity left, short of an American president, whose missing plane could sustain this treatment, let us not forget the milking of the non-celebrity carnage of Columbine. "I think I'm going to start a Mourning Channel,'' says the mordant Hollywood satirist Larry Gelbart. "All death all the time.'' If so, he'll have competitors.

Now that this latest binge is over, it's hard not to feel empty and befogged. Marathon mourning does not mean that the dead will be better remembered. In England, where what British journalists have labeled "Diana fatigue'' is setting in, tickets for the permanent memorial at Althorp now go begging. The best that can be said of our latest epic cortege, perhaps, is that against all odds John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette and Lauren Bessette did not lose their dignity along with their lives. The same cannot be said of the living who made a spectacle of their deaths and grabbed the starring roles for themselves.

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