Farewell

Posted by: thebuzz16 on: 09/04/2010

In: Friends
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"I peaked at five!" -Cammie King Conlon

Cammie King Conlon was my friend! I met her twelve years ago at my Malibu Retreat. She was the embodiment of the trite description, "a classy lady." She was charming, kind, humble, funny, amiable and everything that can be good in human beings.

Cammie was always the star of our talent night. She didn’t sing, dance or play a musical instrument, but she knew how to entertain. One year she read David Sedaris’ Christmas explanation of Santa Claus and his elves, another year she did I’m Still Here from Follies and, my personal favorite was the year she spoke/sang Take Back Your Mink from Guys and Dolls. We all loved Cammie at Malibu.

In 2008 my friend, Janet, and I were Program co-chairs for the International Womens’ Conference. One of our jobs was to choose speakers for the conference. Cammie was one of our choices and she opened the conference on Thursday with a great talk in which she said she thought she was supposed to share, "…what I was like, what happened and what I wore…" Many of our friends from Malibu gathered in SLC for that conference because we had invited another friend from that group to speak also. We had a great weekend and celebrated our friends and enjoyed the speakers and the dinners and the sightseeing. It was one of those once in a lifetime times when the combination of people are in the right place and the stars align and all is right in the world.

On Wednesday Cammie left us. She died of lung cancer after four recurrences and threee remissions. The world noticed the death of our friend because as a child of four she was chosen to play Bonnie Blue Butler in Gone With The Wind. In her 2009 memoir Bonnie Blue Butler: A Gone With The Wind Memoir, Cammie jokes that her career peaked at the age of 5. She did the voice of Faline in Bambi and lived a non theatrical life from then on. That Memoir is delightful and for many years Cammie traveled extensively to recollect filming the classic and sign autographs for thousands of GWTW fans, who are known as Windies.

Goodbye, sweet Cammie, I will miss you.