Literotica Cemetary

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

Body Building icon Ben Weider dies. October 17, 2008

MONTREAL (AP) -- Ben Weider, the Canadian who helped turn bodybuilding into a worldwide sport and who was instrumental in launching Arnold Schwarzenegger's career in the United States, has died. He was 85.

Weider died Friday after being taken to a hospital in Montreal, family spokeswoman Charlotte Parker in Los Angeles said Saturday. The cause of his death wasn't immediately known. Parker said Weider hadn't been ill.

"He did work out every day until his death," she said.

Weider and his brother, Joe, turned their love of bodybuilding into a billion-dollar business that includes nutritional supplements, gyms and magazines such as "Muscle & Fitness."

In 1946, Weider and his brother co-founded the International Brotherhood of Body Builders, which sanctions thousands of amateur and professional bodybuilding competitions around the world.

Weider was president of the organization until he resigned in 2006.

In 1968, the Weiders brought Schwarzenegger, a then-unknown Austrian bodybuilder, to California.

"Without them having done that, I mean I wouldn't have known how to come over here. I sure didn't have the money. So that was a very important kind of stepping stone for me," Schwarzenegger told The Associated Press.

Schwarzenegger, in Capitol Park in Sacramento, Calif., for the annual Firefighters' Memorial on Saturday, said that the two had been friends ever since, working together to build the sport of bodybuilding all over the world.

"Ben's responsibility was always to run the federation and he built the federation from literally nothing to a federation that is literally now all over the world, where every country has organized bodybuilding championships. ... It's all because of his work and his brother's work," said Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger, who became a movie star and governor of California, also recalled Weider's preoccupation with Napoleon.

"He was a fanatic about Napoleon," Schwarzenegger told the AP. "He was the number one expert on Napoleon, his history."

Weider, a self-taught but noted Napoleonic scholar, co-wrote a 1982 book called "The Murder of Napoleon" that argued, on the basis of hair samples, that Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic. However, a recent Italian study found high arsenic levels in hair samples throughout Napoleon's life, suggesting he had picked it up from the environment. Other researchers have concluded that the original autopsy results were correct and Napoleon died of stomach cancer.

"He wrote books on Napoleon, has written screenplays, he actually wanted Jack Nicholson at one point to play Napoleon in a movie. So he was a very interesting guy," Schwarzenegger said.

Weider won the French Legion of Honor for his investigative work into Napoleon's death.

He died less than a week before a new permanent gallery of his Napoleonic artifacts was set to open at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

The funeral will be held on Monday in Montreal.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Actress Edie Adams, Ernie Kovacs' widow, dead at 81

October 17, 2008
LOS ANGELES - Edie Adams, the Tony award-winning actress and singer who was perhaps best known to a generation of television viewers as the seductive commercial spokeswoman for Muriel Cigars, has died. She was 81.

Adams, the widow of legendary comedian Ernie Kovacs, died Wednesday at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley of complications from pneumonia and cancer, according to her son Josh Mills.

The sultry redhead (and sometimes blonde) won a Tony in 1956 for her portrayal of Daisy Mae in the musical version of Al Capp's cartoon "Li'l Abner" and was an accomplished film actress. Her credits included "The Apartment" with Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray; "Lover Come Back" with Doris Day and Rock Hudson; "The Best Man" with Cliff Robertson; and "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," the Stanley Kramer production with a who's who of outstanding comedians and comedic actors.

But it was the seductive line as a spokeswoman for Muriel Cigars - "Why don't you pick one up and smoke it sometime?" - from the late 1950s that brought her lasting fame.

Adams studied singing and piano at the Juilliard School in New York. Doors opened for her after she was booked on Arthur Godfrey's "Talent Scouts." Although she lost the competition, a television director who was watching the show liked what he saw and signed her in July 1951 to become the featured singer on a show originating from Philadelphia that starred Kovacs.

Unrehearsed and uninhibited, the Kovacs show was live television at its best and most unpredictable. It soon moved to New York to become a morning show for CBS called "Kovacs Unlimited." Adams sang and acted as the straight man for Kovacs.

A few years later, she was billed as Edith Adams and played Daisy Mae in the Johnny Mercer/Gene de Paul musical "Li'l Abner," that also featured Stubby Kaye and Julie Newmar. It became a great commercial hit on Broadway.

Kovacs and Adams eloped to Mexico City and married in 1954. He died in an auto accident in Los Angeles in 1962.

Adams eventually married photographer Martin Mills and had a son. That marriage ended in divorce as did her third marriage, to jazz trumpeter Pete Candoli, who died in January.

Her daughter Mia Kovacs died in an automobile accident in 1982, also in Los Angeles.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Dee Dee Warwick, Dionne's Sister, Dies

ORANGE, N.J. (Oct. 20) - Soul singer Dee Dee Warwick, who herself was a highly accomplished soul singer who gained acclaim both solo as well as with her sister Dionne, has died at the age of 63 after being in poor health for months.

Warwick died Saturday at a nursing home in Essex County, said Kevin Sasaki, a family spokesman. She had been in failing health in recent months, he said, and her sister was with her when she died.

Warwick had several hits on the soul and R&B charts in the 1960s and 70s, including "Foolish Fool," "She Didn't Know (She Kept on Talking)" and a version of "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" that was later covered by Diana Ross and The Supremes.

Warwick also was a two-time Grammy Award nominee and sang backup for Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and others before starting her solo career.
Warwick was the niece of gospel singer Cissy Houston and a cousin of Whitney Houston.

Born in Newark, Warwick was a teenager when she began singing with her older sister in the late 1950s. The two performed as The Gospelaires and also collaborated and sang with the Drinkard Singers, a long-running gospel group that also featured some of the Warwicks' aunts and uncles and was managed by their mother.

Most recently, Warwick provided background vocals for her sister's recent one-woman autobiographical show, "My Music & Me," which played to sold-out crowds in Europe this year. She also performed on the title song from Dionne Warwick's gospel album, "Why We Sing," released January 2008.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Tom Tresh, Yankees stalwart in 1960s, dies at 71

October 17, 2008

Tom Tresh was one of the last young Yankees stars to join and extend the dynasty. He was the Rookie of the Year and a World Series hero in 1962, played in two more World Series, and then, like Yankee Stadium and the pinstripes, stayed during the downturn as a reminder of better times.

Tresh died Wednesday of a heart attack at his home in Venice, Fla., a little more than two months after he appeared at the final Oldtimers Day at the old Stadium. He was 71.

The son of a big-league catcher - Mike Tresh played for the White Sox - the switch-hitting Tresh debuted in 1961 with a club still considered one of the greatest of all time. He played 111 games at shortstop in 1962 while Tony Kubek was in the Army, before moving to the outfield later that season. Tresh, the last Yankees rookie to get the starting role at shortstop until Derek Jeter in 1996, made the All-Star Game in a stellar season that produced 20 home runs and 93 runs batted in.

His three-run home run in Game 5 of the 1962 World Series against the Giants still is considered the turning point of that championship, the final one until 1977. Leftfielder Tresh also made a pivotal catch to preserve a 1-0 victory in Game 7.

Tresh became a full-time leftfielder in 1963 and was an All-Star that season. He homered against Sandy Koufax in Game 1 of the 1963 World Series. He was the first to tie a World Series game with a home run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, doing that against Bob Gibson and the Cardinals in Game 5 in 1964.

Like his friend Mickey Mantle and the franchise in general, Tresh was slowed by injuries during a decline through the 1960s. Still, he was a loyal member of the team, doing everything from switching positions to minding his spirited contemporary, Joe Pepitone.

"This hurts. He was my roommate for six years of my life, my hitting instructor and my best friend," Pepitone said. "He let me be me, but he was also the guy who kept me in at night. Tommy was a constant in my life and a calming influence. ...He was like my brother. When I had personal issues, he was always the person on the team I would turn to. "

Tresh finished his career in Detroit, his hometown. But he always was at home at Yankee Stadium. He was a mainstay at Oldtimers Day, a symbol of some great Yankees teams.

"Tommy was a great teammate," Yogi Berra said in a statement. "He did everything well as a ballplayer and was an easy guy to manage. He was a good man and great friend."

Survivors include his wife, Sandra; daughters Michelle Nestor, of Rochester, Mich.; Heidi Liddle, of Kalamazoo, Mich.; and Kami Tresh, of Royal Oak, Mich.; a son, Michael, of Grand Rapids, Mich.; stepsons Greg Searles, of Venice, Fla., and Luke Sandel, of Okemos, Mich.; and a sister, Barbara McConnell, of Venice.

 

[blueyz22]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/alltherage/2008/10/sultan-of-sarto.html

Sultan of sartorial sass passes: "Mr. Blackwell" is dead.

"Mr. Blackwell" -- the man who launched a thousand bitchy fashion critics -- died Sunday. I can't help but wonder what you wear to his funeral? After all, Blackwell, who also designed dresses during the '60s and '70s, was known for his serrated critiques and "worst dressed" lists. He started penning the roster in 1960, and everyone from Sophia Loren to Jackie Onassis to Glenn Close got named at some point.

He said Lindsay Lohan went "from adorable to deplorable." Madonna was deemed, "The Bare-Bottomed Bore of Babylon." For a fascinating look at his life and perhaps the failures that prompted him to deride the red carpet, check out this obit from the L.A. Times. Did you know that Mr. Blackwell started off as a child actor? Or that he modeled for "True Detective" magazine and posed as a crazed rapist for one spread?

What strikes me most is the fact that he ruined the red carpet by dismissing originality. Everyone blames stylists for making actresses wear staid, safe bets to awards shows. And, of course, many of the stylists and stars are now contractually bound to certain designers and reap big bucks for their loyalty. But it's the countless, snarky and often unqualified fashion critics -- from Joan Rivers to Us Weekly's fashion police -- who make the red carpet a blood-soaked runway.

-- Monica Corcoran

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Comedy Matriarch Estelle Reiner Dies

AP
LOS ANGELES (Oct. 30) - Estelle Reiner, who uttered the famous line, "I'll have what she's having," after watching Meg Ryan fake an orgasm in the movie "When Harry Met Sally," has died. She was 94.

Reiner, the wife of actor-director Carl Reiner and mother of actor-director Rob Reiner, died of old age Saturday at her home in Beverly Hills, her nephew George Shapiro said Wednesday.

Besides a handful of movie roles, Reiner was a painter and late in life became a jazz singer. During the Vietnam War, she was one of the organizers of the group Another Mother For Peace, something Rob Reiner has said helped inspire his own political activism.

"She was the most loving, family oriented person, beside her own artistic skills," Shapiro said. "She had the same passion in her artwork, in her singing or in preparing a meal for her family.

"And look at all the laughs she gave everybody," he added. "She was a natural actress."

In "When Harry Met Sally," Ryan and Billy Crystal are sitting in a restaurant, arguing over whether women can realistically fake orgasms when Ryan demonstrates that they can.

After her vocal display, Reiner, seated at another table, quickly says, "I'll have what she's having."

The 1989 film was directed by her son. In a 1996 interview, he told The Associated Press his mother had also helped design Another Mother For Peace's famous anti-war poster, "War is Not Healthy For Children and Other Living Things." The group was founded in the 1960s by 15 Beverly Hills mothers who joined together to protest the war.

Reiner had small roles in several other movies, including "The Man With Two Brains," which her husband directed, and "Fatso," directed by her friend, the late Anne Bancroft.

Born Estelle Lebost in the New York City borough of the Bronx, she married Reiner on Christmas Eve in 1943 while he was on Army leave and she was drafting blueprints for a defense contractor, according to a paid obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

Reiner was 65 when she began a career as a jazz singer. Over the next 28 years, she recorded seven albums and performed in clubs in New York and Los Angeles.

Besides her husband and son, Shapiro is survived by another son, Lucas; a daughter, Annie, and five grandchildren.

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

Studs Terkel dies at 96

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Terkel dies at 96

Studs Terkel, the ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked to call the "non-celebrated," died Friday. He was 96.

Dan Terkell said his father died at home, and described his death as "peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted."

"My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life," Terkell said in a statement issued through his father's colleague and close friend Thom Clark.

He was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its "carbuncles and warts," as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go." He was a cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and "never met a picket line or petition I didn't like."

"A lot of people feel, 'What can I do, (it's) hopeless,'" Terkel told The Associated Press in 2003. "Well, through all these years there have been the people I'm talking about, whom we call activists ... who give us hope and through them we have hope."

The tougher the subject, the harder Terkel took it on. He put out an oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession," and, in 1995, "Coming of Age," recollections of men and women 70 and older.

He cared about what divided us, and what united us: death — in his 2001 "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith," and hope, in his 2003 "Hope Dies Last."

Terkel won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for "The Good War," remembrances of World War II; contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in "Division Street: America," 1966; limned the Depression in "Hard Times," 1970; and chronicled how people feel about their jobs in "Working," 1974.

"When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch? When Caesar conquered Gall, was there not even a cook in the army? And here's the big one, when the Armada sank, you read that King Philip wept. Were there no other tears?" Terkel said upon receiving an honorary National Book Award medal in 1997. "And that's what I believe oral history is about. It's about those who shed those other tears, who on rare occasions of triumph laugh that other laugh."

Andre Schiffrin — Terkel's longtime editor, publisher and close friend who gave Terkel the idea for many of his books — said Terkel "had been in bad shape in recent weeks and he really felt that his life had come to an end. But he was as engaged as ever. He was a big fan of (Democratic presidential candidate Barack) Obama and he said one of the things that kept him going was that he wanted to see the results of the election."

For his oral histories, Terkel interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and sifted. "What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands," he wrote in his memoir. "Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust."

Said Schiffrin: "He liked to tell the story of an interview with a woman in a public housing unit in Chicago. At the end of the interview, the woman said, `My goodness, I didn't know I felt that way.' That was his genius."

Terkel would joke that his obsession with tape recording was equaled by only one other man, a certain former president of the United States: "Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians. I tape, therefore I am."

He also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out," and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.

In 1999, a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, picked "Working" as No. 54 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction. And in 2006, the Library of Congress announced that a radio interview he did with author James Baldwin in September 1962 was selected for the National Recording Registry of sound recordings worthy of preservation. Terkel's other interview subjects included Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan.

Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from "a national Alzheimer's disease" that made government the perceived enemy. In a 1992 interview with the AP, he advocated "pressure from below, from the grass roots. That means the people who live and work in cities — that used to be called the working class, although now everyone says middle class."

Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.

"It was those loners — argumentative ones, deceptively quite ones, the talkers and the walkers — who, always engaged in something outside themselves, unintentionally became my mentors," Terkel wrote in "Touch and Go."

He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.

Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment in radio with one of his beloved "alphabet agencies" from the New Deal, the WPA Writers Project.

His early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, "Studs' Place," a program of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real place, and would go looking for it in Chicago.

"People were never put down," Terkel recalled in the 1995 book "The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961." "The stories were about little aspects of their lives. There was no audience and no canned laughter. ... It was one of the most exhilarating times of my life."

The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.

As his editor sponsored elaborate parties to celebrate his 95th birthday and the release of his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go," Terkel reflected on a career spent writing about those who rarely heard their stories told.

"My discovery was people needed to be needed by others, need to count; that's the word," he said in an interview with the AP.

He also joked about his long life: "Curiosity did not kill this cat."

In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called him Louis, not Studs. "Ida was a far better person than I, that's the reality of it," Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.

"She had a certain empathy I lack. And she was more politically active than I. ... Did she play a tremendous role in my life? Yeah, you could say so."

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Explorer, Deep Sea Pioneer Dead at 86

(Nov. 1) - Jacques Piccard, a scientist and underwater explorer who plunged deeper beneath the ocean than any other man, died Saturday, his son's company said. He was 86.

Piccard died at his Lake Geneva home in Switzerland, the company Solar Impulse said.

Exploration ran in the Piccard family. Jacques' physicist father, Auguste, was the first man to take a balloon into the stratosphere and his son, Bertrand, was the first man to fly a balloon nonstop around the world.

Jacques Piccard helped his father invent the bathyscaphe, a vessel that allows humans to descend to great depths.

On Jan. 23, 1960, he and U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh took the vessel into the Pacific's Mariana Trench and dove to a depth of 35,800 feet — nearly seven miles (11 kilometers) below sea level. It remains the deepest dive ever carried out.

"By far the most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole," Piccard said of the dive. "We were astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all."

Solar Impulse said the discovery of living organisms at such a depth played a key role in the prohibition of nuclear waste dumping in ocean trenches.
After the dive, Piccard continued to research the deep seas and worked for NASA.

He also built four mid-depth submarines — or mesoscaphes — including the first tourist submarine. During the Swiss National Exhibition in 1964, he took 33,000 passengers into the depths of Lake Geneva. He continued taking high school children into the lake well into his 70s.

Born in Brussels in 1922, Piccard was nine years old when his father took his balloon into the stratosphere.

He studied in Switzerland and worked as a university teacher of economics, but abandoned his teaching to help his father design the bathyscaphe.
Auguste Piccard's great bathyscaphe, the Trieste, made several descents in the Atlantic Ocean, but its greatest moment came after it was acquired and redesigned by the U.S. Navy.

In April 1999, when Bertrand Piccard completed a round-the-world balloon trip with Briton Brian Jones, his team drew on Jacques' experiences of traveling in the waters of the Gulf Stream to work out how best to use the jet stream to speed the balloon around the world.

They also made use of some of the ideas used by grandfather Auguste in his pioneering flights, including the notion of only partially inflating the balloon at takeoff to allow for the expansion of the gases at higher altitudes, and the use of an airtight capsule.

Bertrand continues to work on pioneering projects. His Solar Impulse project aims to fly a solar-powered airplane around the world.

Jacques "passed on to me a sense of curiosity, a desire to mistrust dogmas and common assumptions, a belief in free will, and confidence in the face of the unknown," Bertrand Piccard said in a statement Saturday.

 

[HB1965]

Gerard Damiano

'Deep Throat' director Gerard Damiano dies at 80

MIAMI (AP) — Gerard Damiano, director of the pioneering pornographic film that lent its name to the Watergate scandal whistle-blower known as Deep Throat, has died. He was 80.
Damiano died Saturday at a Fort Myers hospital, his son, Gerard Damiano Jr., said Monday. He had suffered a stroke in September.

"He was a filmmaker and an artist and we thought of him as such," the younger Damiano said. "Even though we weren't allowed to see his movies, we knew he was a moviemaker, and we were proud of that."

Damiano's Deep Throat was a mainstream box-office success and helped launch the modern hardcore adult-entertainment industry. Shot in six days for just $25,000, the 1972 flick became a cultural must-see for Americans who had just lived through the sexual liberation of the 1960s.

The film's title also became associated with one of the most famous anonymous sources in journalism.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: New York | Navy | Washington Post | Richard Nixon | Times Square | Fort Myers | Watergate | Bob Woodward | Carl Bernstein | Deep Throat | W. Mark Felt
While investigating the Watergate scandal, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used it as a nickname for their source, former FBI official W. Mark Felt. Information from Felt helped bring down Richard Nixon's presidency.

Born in New York in 1928, Damiano worked as a hairdresser, spent time in the Navy and directed several adult films. The younger Damiano said he would often accompany his father on film sets as a child, but would be ushered out during "nitty-gritty" scenes.

"We weren't allowed to see certain parts of it," the son said. "But my parents always felt that it was nothing to be ashamed of, what he did."

After Deep Throat opened in Times Square, attention from media critics and outraged conservatives — including repeated legal challenges — helped turn it into a hit.

"My father never dreamed that it would get that kind of attention," the younger Damiano said.

But despite the attention, the son said the film was not his father's favorite.

"He was fond of it for what it was, but in terms of filmmaking, he would never call it a great film," he said.

Gerard Damiano is survived by his son and daughter. No formal services are planned.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

[Denae]

Perhaps I didn't go back far enough on the thread, but I didn't see an obit for Mr. Hillerman.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 28, 2008
Tony Hillerman, Novelist, Dies at 83
By MARILYN STASIO
Tony Hillerman, a former newspaperman whose evocative mystery novels set among the Navajos of the Southwest took the American detective story in new directions and made him a best-selling author, died Sunday in Albuquerque, where he lived. He was 83.

The cause was pulmonary failure, his family said. A daughter, Anne Hillerman, said her father had survived two heart attacks and operations for prostate and bladder cancer, The Associated Press reported.

In the world of mystery fiction, Mr. Hillerman was that rare figure: a best-selling author who was adored by fans, admired by fellow authors and respected by critics. Though the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with an avowed purpose: to instill in his readers a respect for Native American culture.

His stories, while steeped in contemporary crime, often describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world. The books are instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals to incest taboos.

“It’s always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures,” Mr. Hillerman once told Publishers Weekly. “I think it’s important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways.”

Mr. Hillerman was not the first mystery writer to set a story on Indian land or to introduce a Native American detective to crime literature. (Manly Wade Wellman, for one, had done so.) But beginning with “The Blessing Way” in 1970, the 18 novels that Mr. Hillerman set on Southwest Indian reservations, featuring Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, gave the traditional genre hero a new dimension.

Joe Leaphorn, grizzled and a bit cynical, has a logical mind and a passion for order that reflects his upbringing in the Navajo Way. His code of behavior is dictated by a belief in the harmonious patterns of life that link man to the natural world. But he is not a religious fundamentalist; he is a skeptic who holds a master’s degree in anthropology.

Jim Chee, younger and more idealistic than Leaphorn, seeks a more spiritual connection to Navajo tradition. Over several books he studies to become a hataalii, or singing medicine man. This ambition creates friction between the religious faith he professes and the secular rules of criminal justice he is sworn to uphold. Chee first appears in “People of Darkness” (1980), Mr. Hillerman’s fourth novel in the series.

Leaphorn and Chee appear in separate novels in Mr. Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police series. Each story challenges one or the other officer with a crime that seems to be entangled in the spirit world but that is also rooted in the reservation life that Mr. Hillerman knew so well.

When murder is the crime, Native Americans find it easier to attribute the killing to witches, a superstition that horrifies the rational Leaphorn but one that makes sense to Chee. Chee sees witchcraft metaphorically, “in people who had turned deliberately and with malice from the beauty of the Navajo Way” — “in those who sold whisky to children, in those who bought videocassette recorders while their relatives were hungry, in the knife fights in a Gallup alley, in beaten wives and abandoned children.”

Mr. Hillerman first brought Leaphorn and Chee together on the same case in “Skinwalkers” (1986), a novel that allows for illuminating interplay between these two different representatives of Navajo culture.

In the story the officers investigate three murders linked only by pellets of bone associated with the murder weapons. Is this an indication that the killings are the work of skinwalkers, witches who can fly and take the shapes of dogs, wolves or other animals?

Leaphorn hates witchcraft and holds superstition, unemployment and whisky responsible for much of his people’s suffering. But Chee knows the power of forces that the science of the white man cannot explain. The detectives blend their disparate views of the world to solve the case.

Mr. Hillerman wrote with intimate knowledge of the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni tribes; he grew up with people very much like them. “I recognized kindred spirits” in the Navajo, he wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1986. “Country boys. Folks among whom I felt at ease.”

Anthony Grove Hillerman was born on May 27, 1925, in Sacred Heart, Okla., to August Alfred Hillerman, a farmer and shopkeeper, and his wife, Lucy Grove. The town was in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and the family’s circumstances were so mean that Mr. Hillerman would later joke that “the Joads were the ones who had enough money to move to California.”

“In Sacred Heart, being a storyteller was a good thing to be,” he said of his country village, which was 35 miles from the nearest library. Growing up on territorial lands of the Potawatomi Tribe, he went to St. Mary’s Academy, a school for Indian girls run by the Sisters of Mercy, and attended high school with Potawatomi children. He said he owed much of the veracity of his stories to his friendships.

“I cross-examine my Navajo friends and shamelessly hang around trading posts, police substations, rodeos, rug auctions and sheep dippings,” he wrote of his research methods.

After attending Oklahoma A&M College, Mr. Hillerman enlisted in the Army in World War II. During two years of combat in Europe, he said, his company of 212 riflemen shrank to 8 as its members fought their way through France. In 1945, in a raid behind German lines, he stepped on a mine. His left leg was shattered, and he was severely burned. He never regained full vision in his left eye.

He returned from Europe in 1945 with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart and enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, where he met and married Marie Unzner, a Phi Beta Kappa student in bacteriology, and took up journalism. He went on to find jobs as a crime reporter for The Borger News-Herald in the Texas Panhandle; city editor of The Morning Press-Constitution in Lawton, Okla.; a political reporter in Oklahoma City; bureau manager in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for United Press International; and executive editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican.

By the mid-1960s Mr. Hillerman and his wife had one child and had adopted five more. He was almost 40 and had put in 17 years as a newspaperman. But he was becoming restless.

“The yen builds to work in something more malleable than hard fact, an urge grows to try to deal with the meaning of all this,” he wrote.

So with his wife’s support he quit The New Mexican and took his family to Albuquerque, where he enrolled at the University of New Mexico. He earned his master’s degree in 1966, joined the journalism faculty and later became chairman of the department. Fascinated with Native American culture, he also became something of an authority on the Southwest.

In the late 1960s, he said, he began to “practice” writing by working on a mystery, drawing on an earlier encounter he had had with a group of Navajos on horseback and in face paint and feathers in Crownpoint, N.M. They had been holding a Navajo Enemy Way ceremony for a soldier, a curing ritual that exorcises all traces of the enemy from those returning from battle. Mr. Hillerman had himself just returned from the war after a long convalescence.

He was so moved by the ceremony and so stirred by the rugged landscape that he resolved to live there. The experience became the basis for “The Blessing Way” (1970).

He spent three years writing the novel and sent the manuscript to Joan Kahn, a respected mystery editor at Harper & Row, now HarperCollins. She published it after he complied with her suggestion — that he expand the role of a secondary character, the Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn.

He departed from Indian themes for his second novel, “The Fly on the Wall” (1971), a political story of big-city corruption. But he was already yearning to get back to the country where all his other novels are set, the vast tribal lands that straddle northeast Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.

There he would “collect” sensory impressions — “the way the wind sounds down there,” he wrote, “the nature of echoes, the smell of sage and wet sand, how the sky looks atop a tunnel of stone, the booming of thunder bouncing from one cliff to another.”

In a Hillerman mystery violent crime disrupts the harmonious Navajo world. “Everything is connected,” Jim Chee reflects in “The Ghostway” (1984). “The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.”

Some critics found Mr. Hillerman’s writing humorless, moralizing and too reverential toward the Native American characters he favored. But even his detractors usually praised the ingenuity of his plots.

His third book, “Dance Hall of the Dead” (1973), won the 1974 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery novel, given by the Mystery Writers of America. In 1991 the group gave him its highest honor, its Grandmaster Award, after he had solidified the Navajo Tribal Police series with “A Thief of Time” (his own favorite novel), “Talking God” and “Coyote Waits.” His last book in the series, “The Shape Shifter,” was published by HarperCollins in 2006. Mr. Hillerman also wrote children’s and nonfiction books, including a memoir and a celebration of the Southwest called "Hillerman Country," with photographs by his brother, Barney.

Besides his daughter Anne, Mr. Hillerman is survived by his wife, Marie; their five other children, Dan, Tony Jr., Steve, Monica Atwell and Janet Grado; a sister, Mary Margaret Chambers; and 10 grandchildren.

For all the recognition he received, Mr. Hillerman once said, he was most gladdened by the status of Special Friend of the Dineh (the Navajo people) conferred on him in 1987 by the Navajo Nation. He was also proud that his books were taught at reservation schools and colleges.

“Good reviews delight me when I get them,” he said. “But I am far more delighted by being voted the most popular author by the students of St. Catherine Indian school, and even more by middle-aged Navajos who tell me that reading my mysteries revived their children’s interest in the Navajo Way.”

 

[HB1965]

Hillerman's books are great. Very informative about the Native American culture

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Oscar-Winning Producer John Daly Dies

LOS ANGELES (Nov. 2) - John Daly, the British-born producer of 13 Oscar-winning movies including "Platoon" and "The Last Emperor" who helped launch the careers of many A-list directors and actors, has died. He was 71.

Daly, who was chairman of Film and Music Entertainment Inc., died Friday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after struggling with cancer, said his daughter, Jenny Daly.

Over a career that spanned four decades, Daly helped to produce films that earned 13 Oscars for Best Picture and 21 Oscar nominations, as well as numerous Golden Globes and other awards.

Daly's companies boosted the career starts of seminal directors such as Oliver Stone ("Platoon," ''Salvador"), Bernardo Bertolucci ("The Last Emperor") and Robert Altman ("Images"), as well as actors Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves and Julia Roberts.

"John was truly a giant in the industry who changed filmmaking for the better," said Lawrence Lotman, chief financial officer and acting chief executive officer of Film and Music Entertainment Inc., in a statement.
Born in London, Daly joined with British actor David Hemmings in 1967 to form Hemdale, a company that managed rock bands such as Yes and Black Sabbath.

Hemdale later became a leading independent film producer and distributor in Great Britain with movies such as "Tommy," according to a biography issued by Film and Music Entertainment Inc.

Under Daly's stewardship, Hemdale produced more than 100 films that grossed more than $1.5 billion.

Since 2003, Daly had been at the helm of Film and Music Entertainment Inc. In 2004, he produced, co-wrote and directed "The Aryan Couple," starring Martin Landau, which received awards at film festivals around the world.
He is survived by three sons, Michael, Julian and Timothy, and one daughter.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Obama's grandmother dies

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The day before the presidential election, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign announced that his grandmother, the woman he called "Toot" who helped raised him, had died in her apartment in Honolulu.

Aides said Obama was in his hotel room Monday morning in Jacksonville, Fla., doing brief interviews with radio stations in battleground states, when he learned she had died after a long battle with cancer.

He was described as stoic upon hearing that she had died and told aides that he was grateful that he had a chance to say goodbye in person when he recently suspended his campaign for two days to return to Hawaii.

Madelyn Dunham, 86, who had been gravely ill, was a rock of stability as Obama was growing up, giving him the American roots that would ground his teenage years as well as his career in politics.

Obama's campaign said she died late Sunday.

The candidate and his campaign had hoped that Dunham would live long enough to see the outcome of the election, a race she had closely followed by television.

Speaking after news of his grandmother's death had been made public, Obama said Monday that the evening marked a "bittersweet" moment for him.

"She has gone home," he said. "She died peacefully in her sleep with my sister at her side, and so there is great joy as well as tears."

In a rare 2004 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Dunham, who called her grandson "Bear,"said she and her husband offered their grandson a greater sense of normalcy. "I suppose I provided stability in his life," she said.

"She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength and humility," Obama and his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, said in a joint statement released by his campaign. "She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances."

The Obama family thanked those who had sent flowers, gifts and prayers.

"It brought our grandmother and us great comfort," the statement said. "Our grandmother was a private woman, and we will respect her wish for a small private ceremony to be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, we ask that you make a donation to any worthy organization in search of a cure for cancer."

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Michael Crichton dies of cancer at 66

Michael Crichton -- whose books were made into films including "The Andromeda Strain," "Jurassic Park" and "Twister" -- died Tuesday. He was 66.

The author died "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," according to his Web site.

Despite his illness, a statement on MichaelCrichton.net said Crichton died "unexpectedly" in Los Angeles.

The "in memoriam" posting added: "While the world knew him as a great storyteller that challenged our preconceived notions about the world around us -- and entertained us all while doing so -- his wife Sherri, daughter Taylor, family and friends knew Michael Crichton as a devoted husband, loving father and generous friend who inspired each of us to strive to see the wonders of our world through new eyes. He did this with a wry sense of humor that those who were privileged to know him personally will never forget.

"Through his books, Michael Crichton served as an inspiration to students of all ages, challenged scientists in many fields, and illuminated the mysteries of the world in a way we could all understand.

"He will be profoundly missed by those whose lives he touched, but he leaves behind the greatest gifts of a thirst for knowledge, the desire to understand, and the wisdom to use our minds to better our world.

"Michael's family respectfully asks for privacy during this difficult time. A private funeral service is expected, but no further details will be released to the public."

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Jimi Hendrix's drummer, Mitch Mitchell

Mitch Mitchell, the hall-of-fame drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the legendary Seattle guitarist's most important musical collaborator, was found dead this morning in his Portland hotel room.

Mitchell, 61, who played with Hendrix at the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival and helped shape such songs as "Voodoo Child" and "Purple Haze," apparently died of natural causes, the Multnomah County Medical Examiner said. Mitchell was found dead at appoximately 3 a.m. in his room at the Benson Hotel in downtown Portland.

Sgt. Brian Schmautz, a Portland police spokesman, said an employee at the upscale hotel called police after discovering Mitchell's body. "It was natural causes," Schmautz said, "so we weren't involved beyond that."

Calls to the Benson for further information have not been returned.

An examination to determine an exact cause of death is scheduled for later this afternoon, officials said.

Mitchell was touring with the Experience Hendrix Tour, which appeared on Nov. 7 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, the last stop on a West Coast portion of the tour.

Mitchell pioneered a lead style of drumming which would later become known as fusion, allowing him and Hendrix to feed off each other in concert. The pair also recorded several tracks on their own before bringing in bassist Noel Redding to finish the songs. Redding died at the age of 57 in 2003. Hendrix died after a drug overdose in 1970.

Mitchell was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame as part of the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1993. According to Eddie Kramer's book "Hendrix: Setting the Record Straight," Hendrix's manager relegated both Mitchell and Redding to the status of paid employees. They had limited ownership in future revenues and song rights. In the 1970's, according to the book, Mitchell was forced to sell a prized Hendrix guitar. Later, he reportedly sold his small legal claim to future Hendrix record sales for about $200,000.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

South African musical legend Miriam Makeba dies

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) — Miriam Makeba, the South African singer who wooed the world with her sultry voice but was banned from her own country for more than 30 years under apartheid, died after collapsing on stage in Italy. She was 76.

In her dazzling career, Makeba performed with musical legends from around the world — jazz maestros Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon — and sang for world leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela.

"Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us," Mandela said in a statement.

He said it was "fitting" that her last moments were spent on stage.

The Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno, near the southern city of Naples, said Makeba died early Monday of a heart attack.

Makeba collapsed on stage Sunday night after singing one of her most famous hits "Pata Pata," her family said in a statement. Her grandson, Nelson Lumumba Lee, was with her as well as her longtime friend, Italian promoter Roberto Meglioli.

"Whilst this great lady was alive she would say: 'I will sing until the last day of my life'," the statement said.

The death of "Mama Africa," as she was known, plunged South Africa into shock and mourning.

"One of the greatest songstresses of our time has ceased to sing," Foreign Affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma said in a statement.

"Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid and colonialism through the art of song."

Makeba wrote in her 1987 memoirs that friends and relatives who first encouraged her to perform compared her voice to that of a nightingale. With her distinctive style combining jazz with folk with South African township rhythms, she was often called "The Empress of African Song."

The first African woman to win a Grammy award, Makeba started singing in Sophiatown, a cosmopolitan neighborhood of Johannesburg that was a cultural hotspot in the 1950s before its black residents were forcibly removed by the apartheid government.

She then teamed up with South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela — later her first husband — and her rise to international prominence started when she starred in the anti-apartheid documentary "Come Back, Africa" in 1959.

When she tried to fly home for her mother's funeral the following year, she discovered her passport had been revoked. It was 30 years before she was allowed to return.

In 1963, Makeba appeared before the U.N. Special Committee on Apartheid to call for an international boycott of South Africa. The South African government responded by banning her records, including hits like "Pata Pata," "The Click Song" ("Qongqothwane" in Xhosa), and "Malaika."

Makeba received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording in 1966 together with Belafonte for "An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba." The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid.

Thanks to her close relationship with Belafonte, she received star status in the United States and performed for President Kennedy at his birthday party in 1962. But she fell briefly out of favor when she married black power activist Stokely Carmichael — later known as Kwame Ture — and moved to Guinea in the late 1960s.

Besides working with Simone and Gillespie, she also appeared with Paul Simon at his "Graceland" concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.

After three decades abroad, Makeba was invited back to South Africa by Mandela, the anti-apartheid icon, shortly after his release from prison in 1990 as white racist rule crumbled.

"It was like a revival," she said about going home. "My music having been banned for so long, that people still felt the same way about me was too much for me. I just went home and I cried."

Makeba courted controversy by lending support to dictators such as Togo's Gnassingbe Eyadema and Felix Houphouet-Boigny from Ivory Coast, performing at political campaigns for the veteran leaders even as they were violently suppressing the movements for democracy that swept West Africa in the early 90s.

Makeba announced her retirement three years ago, but despite a series of farewell concerts she never stopped performing. When she turned 75 last year, she said she would sing for as long as possible.

Makeba is survived by her grandchildren, Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Monique Lee, and her great-grandchildren Lindelani, Ayanda and Kwame.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Michael Higgins, an Actor Popular on New York Stages, Dies at 88

Michael Higgins, an Obie-winning actor who was for decades a familiar presence on New York stages, died on Nov. 5 in Manhattan. He was 88 and lived in Manhattan.

His death, at Beth Israel Hospital, was from heart failure, his daughter, Deirdre, said.

Mr. Higgins was best known for the role of Frank Strang, the father of the disturbed youth who blinds horses, in the original Broadway production of “Equus.” The play, by Peter Shaffer, opened at the Plymouth Theater in 1974.

Writing in The New York Times that year, Walter Kerr called Mr. Higgins “excellent as a father turned ashen.” The production also starred Peter Firth as the youth, Alan Strang; Frances Sternhagen as Alan’s mother; and Anthony Hopkins as his psychiatrist.

Among Mr. Higgins’s other Broadway credits are “Romeo and Juliet” (1951), with Olivia de Havilland; “The Lark,” by Jean Anouilh (1955), with Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer; and “The Iceman Cometh,” by Eugene O’Neill (1973), with James Earl Jones. His many Off Broadway roles include Antony opposite Colleen Dewhurst’s Cleopatra at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1963.

Mr. Higgins received two Obies, the Off Broadway theater award presented annually by The Village Voice. The first, in 1958, was for his performance as John Proctor in “The Crucible,” by Arthur Miller; the second, in 1980, was for the role of the father in David Mamet’s “Reunion.”

Michael Patrick Higgins was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 20, 1920. His father, an insurance salesman and poet, instilled in him early a love of Shakespeare. As a teenager, Michael worked to lose his Brooklyn accent to prepare for a career in the theater. In World War II, he served with the Army in Italy, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. After the war, Mr. Higgins made his Broadway debut in “Antigone” (1946), starring Katharine Cornell.

Besides his daughter, Deirdre Higgins, Mr. Higgins is survived by his wife, the former Elizabeth Lee Goodwin; two sons, Sean and Christopher; two brothers, Hugh and Thomas; two sisters, Marie Higgins and Anna Karlya; and four grandchildren.

His film credits include “The Stepford Wives” (1975), “The Seduction of Joe Tynan”(1979) and “Fort Apache, the Bronx” (1981).

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Co-Founder of Slinky Company Dies

AP
(Nov. 22) - Betty James, who co-founded the company that made the Slinky and beat the odds as a single mother in the late 1950s to become a successful executive, has died. She was 90.

She died Thursday, said a spokeswoman for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

In 1945, James and her husband Richard, the creator of the Slinky, founded James Spring & Wire Company. When her husband left for Bolivia to join a religious cult in 1960, James took over the company, then named James Industries, and managed it for decades.

Initially, James would leave her six children with a caregiver from Sunday through Thursday while she oversaw operations in Philadelphia. But in 1965, she moved the company to her hometown of Hollidaysburg, where although it was sold in 1998 to Michigan-based POOF Products Inc., it remains today.

"She was an icon in the community because of that business," Blair County Commissioner Diane Meling said. "What kid didn't grow up with a Slinky?"
Hundreds of millions of Slinkys have been sold worldwide. James explained the classic toy's success in a 1995 interview with The Associated Press.

"I think really it's the simplicity of it," she said. "There's nothing to wind up; it doesn't take batteries. I think also the price helps. More children can play with it than a $40 or $60 toy."

On its Web site, the Hall of Fame praises James for commitment and perseverance that "allowed children the world over the opportunity to relish the ingenuity and pure fun of a Slinky."

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Pit Martin Dies in Snowmobile Accident

Former N.H.L. star Hubert Jacques “Pit” Martin died Sunday after his snowmobile plunged into an icy lake, Quebec provincial police said Monday.

Martin, who would have turned 65 on Dec. 9, was driving along with a friend on Lake Kanasuta in northwestern Quebec near his Rouyn-Noranda home when the ice cracked and they both plunged into the freezing water. His friend survived but was unable to save Martin even with the help of another man who stopped to render assistance.

“He was a great little player, very competitive,” former Toronto Maple Leafs goalie Johnny Bower told the Canwest News Service. “I remembered he lit the lamp quite a few times behind me. He was a good, clean player. A good faceoff man. It’s terrible to lose a great player like that that way. My condolences go out to his family.”

Martin played 1,101 N.H.L. regular-season games in his 17-year career with Detroit, Boston, Chicago and Vancouver, scoring 324 goals and adding 485 assists; 11 of his seasons were spent with the Blackhawks. In 100 Stanley Cup playoff games, he notched 27 goals and 31 assists.

He was awarded the Bill Masterton Trophy, the league’s honor for dedication and perseverance, in 1969-70.

Pit Martin was selected to play in four N.H.L All-Star Games and was part of one of the biggest trades in league history when he was traded to Chicago by Boston with Jack Norris and Gilles Marotte for Phil Esposito, Ken Hodge and Fred Stanfield on May 15, 1967. It turned out to be a good deal for the Hawks, but a better one for Boston, who won two Stanley Cup championships in 1970 and 1972.

The Hawks with Martin went to the Cup final in 1971 and 1973 but lost both times to Montreal, in seven games the first time and in six games two years later.

In Chicago, Martin was part of the “M.P.H. Line,” with Jim Pappin and Dennis Hull on the wings. After Bobby Hull jumped to the World Hockey Association in 1972, the M.P.H. Line carried the Hawks and Martin scored 10 goals, best on the team, in the ‘73 playoffs.

Martin wore No. 7 with the Hawks, and was instantly recognizable as one of the few players who wore a helmet in that era.

Former Red Wings teammate Marcel Pronovost told Canwest that the 5-foot-8, 165-pound Martin was typical of a type of player that every team had in the Original Six era. “He was very quick,” said Pronovost, who now scouts for the Devils. “He was a very clever player. There wasn’t an ounce of meanness in him. His game was finesse. He was similar to Henri Richard and Dave Keon. There was a whole group of guys like that in the league then.”

Hall of Fame N.H.L. linesman Matt Pavelich, who dropped the puck countless times on faceoffs with Martin, recalls him being a quiet, hard-working player.

“He wasn’t like Stan Mikita or Bobby Clarke,” Canwest quoted Pavelich of two notorious chatterboxes. “He just did his job. He had real good hands and he never backed down from anyone. He was small, but he wasn’t timid. He’d go right into the corners. I just remember him as a real nice guy.”

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Schoenfeld, Chairman of Shubert Organization, Dies

Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization, Broadway’s largest landlord, died at his Upper East Side home in Manhattan. He was 84.

Sam Rudy, a spokesman for the organization, said Schoenfeld died suddenly and didn’t disclose a cause of death. The Shubert Organization owns 17 of 39 Broadway theaters as well as a theater in Washington and another in Philadelphia. The company also has extensive real estate holdings not related to theater.

Schoenfeld was “a Broadway legend,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a press conference. Bloomberg saw Schoenfeld at the opening of the musical “Billy Elliot” at the Shubert’s Imperial Theatre earlier this month and he “was just beaming,” Bloomberg said. (The mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.)

Schoenfeld had been dominant in commercial theater for four decades. The Shubert Organization produced or booked such long- running hits as “A Chorus Line,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables.” More recently, it produced the revival of “Equus,” starring Daniel Radcliffe.

“I’m still not processing it,” said Rocco Landesman, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, a Shubert competitor. “He was as healthy as a horse. He was part of my daily life. We talked nearly every day.”

Schoenfeld, known around Shubert Alley as Gerry, was a champion of last season’s “Passing Strange,” a rock musical about a young musician’s coming of age in Berlin and Amsterdam. Although it was a commercial failure, Schoenfeld told Bloomberg News that taking on a risky, contemporary musical proved that he was “cutting edge.”

The puckish executive was chairman of the largest theatrical philanthropy, the Shubert Foundation. In the 12 months ending in May 2007 it gave away $16 million to nonprofit theater companies, with total assets of $314 million, according to its most recent tax return.

Shubert was formed by three brothers from Syracuse, New York, at the turn of the 20th century, and for a time was the most powerful company in live entertainment. It owned theaters, produced the shows that went in them and staffed them with talent Shubert had under contract. In the 1950s, the federal government instigated a suit that eventually broke up the Shubert empire by requiring the company divest many theaters.

The son of a fur coat maker, Schoenfeld was a young lawyer on the Shubert payroll who, with partner Bernard B. Jacobs, argued the company’s case. In the 1970s, Schoenfeld and Jacobs managed to take over what had been a family business. Schoenfeld was instrumental in the Shuberts’ efforts to clean up Times Square in the 1970s. Jacobs died in 1996 at 80.

Schoenfeld was born in New York City and attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. That informed his pragmatism and made him well-known as a street-smart competitor as well as a scrappy supporter of his shows.

Schoenfeld is survived by his wife of 58 years, Pat Schoenfeld, a daughter, Carrie Schoenfeld-Guglielmi, and two grandchildren. He already has a Broadway theater in his honor. In 2005, the Shuberts renamed two houses after Schoenfeld and Jacobs.

 

[GypsyLovergirl]

Odetta...

May she rest in peace.

You will be missed!

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Paul Benedict

December 5, 2008

Paul Benedict, the actor who played the eccentric English neighbor Harry Bentley on the sitcom "The Jeffersons," was found dead Monday at his home on Martha's Vineyard, Mass. He was 70.

Authorities were investigating the cause of death, said his brother, Charles.

Benedict's oversized jaw and angular features were partly attributed to acromegaly, a pituitary disorder that was first diagnosed by an endocrinologist who saw Benedict in a theatrical production.

He underwent medical treatment to prevent the disease from spreading while he continued to act -- and used his facial features for comic effect.

As an actor, Benedict built a career portraying loony characters in films such as "The Goodbye Girl" (1977), "The Man with Two Brains" (1983) and "The Addams Family" (1991). He also appeared in the Christopher Guest comedies "This Is Spinal Tap" (1984), "Waiting for Guffman" (1997) and "A Mighty Wind" (2003). On the PBS children's show "Sesame Street," Benedict was the Mad Painter who painted numbers everywhere.

But he was mainly known for his role as Bentley on "The Jeffersons," which ran on CBS from 1975 to 1985. He left in 1981 to pursue other projects but returned in 1983. Benedict later said he hadn't expected the show to last more than a season and only agreed to the part because producer Norman Lear kept asking him to reconsider.

The accented speech that he used even offstage led many to assume that Benedict was British, but in fact he was born Sept. 17, 1938, in Silver City, N.M. He was the youngest of six children; his father a doctor, his mother a journalist.

"When I was 5 years old, from the first time I went to the movies, I knew I wanted to be an actor," Benedict told The Times in 1992.

After growing up in Boston, Benedict attended the city's Suffolk University and began his acting career in the 1960s in the Theatre Company of Boston, performing alongside such future stars as Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino.

On Broadway, he appeared opposite Pacino in Eugene O'Neill's two-character play "Hughie" in 1996 and played the mayor in a 2000 revival of "The Music Man."

As a stage director, he was known for taking a work in progress or a new play and laboring with a playwright to infuse it with "intelligence, sympathy and warmth -- and of course, humor," The Times reported in 1992.

His breakthrough show as a director was "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune" in 1987, closely followed by "The Kathy & Mo Show: Parallel Lives" in 1989, both two-person sleepers that became off-Broadway hits.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Odetta left message of hope

May she rest in peace.

You will be missed!

Less than a week before she died, the city's much-loved singer Odetta urged her fans and admirers to keep the faith.

The Thanksgiving message, sent from the Lenox Hill Hospital bed where she died Tuesday of heart disease at 77, underscored her lifetime of commitment, in social activism and song, to what she called positive change.

"The world is trembling under the weight of many problems," she wrote, but she urged everyone to still give thanks for friends and community.

She was exhilarated, friends said yesterday, by the election victory of Barack Obama, whose ascension she considered the fruit of a half-century of activism in which she had played an unrelenting role.

She sang alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington, and she had hoped to return to sing at Obama's inauguration, according to her longtime manager, Doug Yeager.

She was known as a folk singer, though she recorded blues, rock, popular and classical music.

"I'm called a folk singer because it's short and easy, I guess," she said in 1987. "I don't mind. But I'm really a song interpreter. We have all kinds of songs going on within us."

With a voice that could range from a whisper to a roar, she became a major influence on artists from Harry Belafonte to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. John Waters saluted her stature in "Hairspray" with a beatnik played by Pia Zadora who purred, "When I'm high, I am Odetta."

She was nominated for several Grammys and awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 1999.

Brought up in Los Angeles on popular and classical music, she also was drawn to topical folk songs and artists like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.

"I learned black history from music," she said, and one of her life missions was to pass along those lessons.

One of her last appearances was in October, when she sang from a wheelchair for tens of thousands in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

She was a familiar figure in many places around New York, where she lived for much of her life at 110th St. and Fifth Ave.

On the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, she gathered a group of children atthe Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and told them they needed to tell grownups war is wrong.

Even if no one seems to listen, she said, it's important to raise your voice, and she led them in "This Little Light of Mine."

Married once years ago and divorced, she is survived by a daughter, Michelle Esrick of New York, and a son, Boots Jaffre of Fort Collins, Colo.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

'Mrs. Doubtfire' Actor Dies at 77

http://www.theatermania.com/news/images/12291a.jpg

(Dec. 10) - Robert Prosky, a character actor with hundreds of credits on stage and screen including "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "Hill Street Blues," has died in a Washington hospital. He was 77.

His oldest son, Stefan Prosky, said the actor died Monday night of complications from a heart procedure.

"He went gracefully last night, not in pain," Stefan Prosky said Tuesday. "Everybody knows him as a fairly famous actor. My brothers and I know him as a marvelous father."

Prosky appeared in more than 200 plays on Broadway and with Arena Stage, a regional theater company in Washington. He appeared in 38 films and numerous television shows.

A native of Philadelphia, Prosky studied economics at Temple University and served in the U.S. Air Force.

On Broadway, Prosky's credits included "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "A View from the Bridge." He also completed a long run in Michael Frayn's play "Democracy."

More recently, Prosky appeared with two of his sons in Arthur Miller's play, "The Price," in Philadelphia. He planned to continue in a San Diego production of "The Price" this winter, Stefan Prosky said.

In the 1980s, Prosky spent three years on the NBC television series "Hill Street Blues" as a police sergeant. He later appeared as a priest on trial for murder in ABC's legal drama, "The Practice."

In "Mrs. Doubtfire," Prosky played the TV station owner who hired Robin Williams, who dressed as a nanny. His other film credits include "Dead Man Walking" and "The Natural."

Prosky spent most of his life in Washington and raised his three sons in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Nearby Arena Stage was close to his heart. He spent 22 years affiliated with the theater and a small company of players, appearing in more than 120 plays.

"Arena Stage is where I learned to be an actor," Prosky told The Associated Press in 2006.

Arena co-founder Zelda Fichandler said she has lost a part of her family.
"I don't know of another American actor who has played in so many plays in so many styles in so many places in so many roles, and played them all to the hilt," she said in a statement.

Prosky is survived by his wife, Ida Prosky, and three sons, Stefan Prosky of Washington, John Prosky of North Hollywood, Calif., and Andrew Prosky of New York. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.

Instead of flowers, the family is asking for donations to The Actors Fund or for people to "just go see a play," Stefan Prosky said.



Seen this remarkable actor on the NY stage. Thank you for some incredible memories, Mr. P.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Sunny von Bulow dead after 28 years in coma

NEW YORK (AP) — Martha "Sunny" von Bulow, an heiress who spent the last 28 years of her life in oblivion after what prosecutors alleged in a pair of sensational trials were two murder attempts by her husband, died at age 76.

She died at a nursing home in New York, her children said in a statement issued by family spokeswoman Maureen Connelly.

Sunny von Bulow was a personification of romantic notions about high society — a stunning heiress who brought her American millions to marriages with men who gave her honored old European names.

But she ended her days in a coma, showing no sign of awareness as she was visited by her children and tended around the clock by nurses.

In the 1980s, she was the offstage presence that haunted her husband's two sensational trials in Newport and Providence, R.I.

At the first trial, in 1982, Claus von Bulow was convicted of trying twice to kill her by injecting her with insulin at their estate in Newport, R.I. That verdict was thrown out on appeal, and he was acquitted at a second trial in 1985.

The murder case split Newport society, produced lurid headlines and was later made into the 1990 film, "Reversal of Fortune," starring Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons.

Claus von Bulow is now living in London, "mostly taking care of his grandchildren," said Alan Dershowitz, the defense lawyer who handled the appeal and won his acquittal at the second trial. He wrote the book "Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case," on which the movie was based.

Dershowitz said there was "overwhelming" evidence that her coma was self-induced — caused by a "large ingestion of drugs, and Claus had nothing to do with it," Dershowitz said.

"There are no winners in a case like this," he added.

Claus von Bulow's main accusers were his wife's children by a previous marriage to Austrian Prince Alfred von Auersperg — Princess Annie-Laurie "Ala" von Auersperg Isham and Prince Alexander von Auersperg. They renewed the charges against their stepfather in a civil lawsuit a month after his acquittal.

Two years later, Claus von Bulow agreed to give up any claims to his wife's estimated $25 million-to-$40 million fortune and to the $120,000-a-year income of a trust she set up for him. He also agreed to divorce her, leave the country and never profit from their story.

Sales of Sunny von Bulow's property brought $4.2 million from her oceanfront estate in Newport, $6.25 million from her 12-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and $11.5 million from the art and antiques from the homes.

Prosecutors contended that Claus von Bulow wanted to get rid of his wife to inherit a large chunk of her wealth and be free to marry a mistress. The defense countered by painting Sunny von Bulow, who suffered from low blood sugar, as an alcoholic and pill popper who drank herself into a coma.

Claus Von Bulow was accused of injecting his wife with insulin first in December 1979, causing a coma from which she revived. Prosecutors said he tried again a year later, on Dec. 21, 1980, and the 49-year-old heiress fell into what her children on Saturday called "a persistent vegetative state."

Her world was reduced to a private, guarded room in the Harkness Pavilion and later the McKeen Pavilion of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. She died at the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home, her family said.

Her doctor testified that the cost of maintaining her was $375,000 the first year, 1981.

No figures were available for the years that followed, but by the early 1990s, room charges were up to about $1,500 a day — $547,000 a year — plus $200,000 to $300,000 for round-the-clock private nursing.

She was born Martha Sharp Crawford aboard a railcar in Manassas, Va., on Sept. 1, 1932, daughter of utilities tycoon George Crawford, who died when she was 4.

Sunny, nicknamed for her disposition, was raised by her mother in New York City.

While touring Europe with her mother, she met Prince Alfred von Auersperg, who was younger, penniless and working as a tennis pro at an Austrian resort catering to rich Americans. They were married in 1957 and divorced eight years later after she returned alone to New York with their young son and daughter.

On June 6, 1966, she married von Bulow, who then quit his job as an aide to oilman J. Paul Getty. He could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday.

In addition to her two children from her first marriage, Sunny von Bulow is survived by Cosima Pavoncelli, a daughter from her marriage to von Bulow. Pavoncelli sided with her father during the trials.