STAR-CROSSED

How Linda Goodman brought astrology to the masses.

- By Rachel Syme

Despite her success, Goodman's life was defined by enormous tragedy.

The astrologer Linda Goodman died in the season of Libra, on October 21, 1995, at Penrose Hospital, in Colorado Springs. The cause, according to her obituary in the Times, was complications of diabetes, and she was survived by two sons, one daughter, and two grandchildren. These were immutable facts—as true and observable as the autumn constellations on the night that Goodman died (Pegasus, the winged horse, and Cassiopeia, the arrogant queen, among others) or the dazzling peak, that same evening, of the Orionid meteor shower. What was less certain, at least at the time, was how old Goodman had lived to be. For nearly three decades—ever since she made the leap from private citizen to national celebrity, in 1968, with the blockbuster success of her first book, “Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs”—she took great pains to hide her age from the public. She never revealed it in interviews and, although she published six books during her lifetime, together spanning thousands of pages, she never once committed her birth date to paper. She did share that she was born under the sign of Aries, but she kept the year secret; the writer of her Times obituary could estimate only that she was “about 70.”

Goodman’s decision to remain publicly ageless was, perhaps, a pragmatic one. When “Sun Signs” came out, and became the first astrology text to hit the Times’ bestseller list, Goodman was in her forties. She may have thought it advantageous to present herself as a New Age ingénue—one who could speak directly to the baby boomers then flocking to esoteric diversions—rather than as an elder from the Greatest Generation. Or it was in service to vanity: Goodman was a former beauty queen, with thick chestnut hair and vulpine eyes, and she preferred to style herself in the youthful boho fashion of chunky necklaces and high-vibrational pastel colors.