We See Dead People 

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Gabe Kaplan: Annoying actor who tried too hard to be cute and cynical at the same time, he's known for being the Mr. Kotter who was welcomed back by, among others, John Travolta in the lame 70s TV show. Another imaginary car accident victim.

Diahann Carroll: Film, stage and TV actress and singer who was the first African American to star in her own television series (Julia, 1968), Carroll contracted breast cancer in 1998 and someone at CL thought she had died of it. Or could it be they can't believe someone could have survived being married to singer Vic Damone?

Janet Leigh: The popular actress of the 50s and 60s who became well-known for playing the showering knife attack victim in Psycho, she's also the mother of Jamie Lee Curtis. Maybe it's her famous death scene that led some of us to assume she had checked out of this vale of tears.

Buddy Hackett: The king of Vegas-style, overly lengthy jokes, surely this portly comedian's been dead for at least a decade. No? Talk about outta sight, outta mind. . .

Lester Maddox: Segregationist clown who achieved fame for threatening civil rights demonstrators at his Georgia restaurant with pick-ax handles, he parlayed his infamy into the Peach State's governorship. When his 80-umpteenth birthday was recently announced on NPR, we thought, "No way -- that jackass has to have been dead for years." But then we reflected further and mused, "Why in God's name is Lester Maddox being talked about on NPR?"

Mickey Rooney: Only frequent viewers of Turner Classic Movies would know he's still around, since he's always on the station rhapsodizing about the good ole days.

Isaac Hayes: The smooth buttered-soul voice of 70s blacksploitation, he wrote the soundtrack to Shaft, and now he provides the voice of Chef on South Park.

Doug Mayes: The area's first TV newscaster, on WBTV's Esso Report, and then later at WSOC-TV, Mayes was a mainstay of Carolinas television for decades. He's retired and relaxing these days, although he's not as completely relaxed as one of us thought.

Boy George: Androgynous frontperson for the 80s band Culture Club, he's now a permanent fixture on all VH1 specials. Someone thought he'd died a couple of years ago of, no, not a car wreck, but. . .you guessed it, a drug overdose.

Gallagher: Smarmy comedian who invented the "sledge-o-matic" to smash watermelons, and somehow convinced enough people that this was so funny he could base a whole career on it.

Bryan Adams: Canadian rocker didn't die in a plane crash, as someone here believed, but after the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves soundtrack, everything did go downhill. We don't miss him, we just thought he was dead.

Abe Vigoda: The poster child for any "I Thought He Was Dead" list. Every year for two decades now, we figured this Barney Miller stalwart had passed away, and every year the old coot proves us wrong.

Olivia de Havilland & Joan Fontaine: Amazingly, these incredibly competitive sisters, both Oscar-winning stars in their time, are both still living. Like Efrem Zimbalist, they're not bad folks or anything, you just can't believe they're still hanging in there.

Karl Malden: The consummate potato-nosed supporting actor (A Streetcar Named Desire, Patton, etc.) still pops up as an Academy spokesman, but that's about it.

Fay Wray: Yes, believe it or not, the King Kong scream queen is still with us, at the age of 95.

Michael J. Pollard: The Bonnie and Clyde henchman -- the sort of guy you assumed would have died of a drug overdose back in the 70s -- is actually quite the busy actor. . .in little-seen, straight-to-video flicks, anyway.

Ed Asner: Maybe it's because he seems like a hard-driven, Type A personality you'd expect to have fallen dead of a heart attack, but Ed "Lou Grant" Asner's continued presence in our physical realm just doesn't seem possible.

George Lindsey: He played Goober on The Andy Griffith Show and then scaled the heights of international mega-stardom on, umm, Hee Haw. And then he died of acute alcoholism, right? Well. . .no, not really, no matter what one of our staffers thought.

Cale Yarborough: This three-time NASCAR national champion and four-time winner of the Daytona 500 did not, repeat, did not die in a racing crash in California, as one editor thought. Yarborough, in fact, is now running the Cale Yarborough Executive Racing School in Florida.

Lou Holtz: Best known for his great coaching days at Notre Dame, not to mention his support of rightwing yahoos like Jesse Helms, we thought he'd slipped the bounds of earth several years ago. Imagine our surprise when he was announced as the new football coach for the University of South Carolina. Give him credit -- for a dead guy, he sure knows how to turn around a lifeless football program.