Massimo Vignelli, Visionary Designer Who Untangled the Subway, Dies at 83

Samples of some of his classic work

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Ann B. Davis - Brady Bunch's Alice Dead at 88
 

Emmy Award-winning actress Ann B. Davis has died at the age of 88, TMZ reports. The Brady Bunch and Bob Cummings Show alum passed away following a severe fall in her home.

She won two Emmys, in 1958 and 1959 for her role as Schultzy on The Bob Cummings Show, but Davis is best known for her portrayal of Alice, the Brady's wacky housekeeper on The Brady Bunch, which aired from 1969 to 1974.

Davis also appeared in the films A Man Called Peter, All Hands on Deck, and Lover Come Back before retiring in 1976. She also reprised her most famous role in numerous Brady Bunch reunion specials, including 1981's The Brady Brides, 1988's A Very Brady Christmas, and 1995's The Brady Bunch Movie.

https://celebrity.yahoo.com/news/ann...lkA1ZJUDM3Nl8x

Chester Nez
 

LAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — The last of the 29 Navajos who developed a code that stumped the Japanese during World War II has died.

Chester Nez, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, died Wednesday morning of kidney failure, said Judy Avila, who helped Nez write his memoirs. He was 93.

Before hundreds of men from the Navajo Nation became Code Talkers, 29 Navajos were recruited to develop the code based on the then-unwritten Navajo language. Nez was in 10th grade when he enlisted, keeping his decision a secret from his family and lying about his age, as did many others.

"It's one of the greatest parts of history that we used our own native language during World War II," Nez told The Associated Press in 2009. "We're very proud of it."

Of the 250 Navajos who showed up at Fort Defiance — then a U.S. Army base — 29 were selected to join the first all-Native American unit of Marines. They were inducted in May 1942. Nez became part of the 382nd Platoon.

Using Navajo words for red soil, war chief, clan, braided hair, beads, ant and hummingbird, for example, they came up with a glossary of more than 200 terms that later was expanded and an alphabet.

Nez has said he was concerned the code wouldn't work. At the time, few non-Navajos spoke the language. Even Navajos who did couldn't understand the code. It proved impenetrable.

The Navajos trained in radio communications were walking copies of the code. Each message read aloud by a Code Talker was immediately destroyed.

"The Japanese did everything in their power to break the code but they never did," Nez said in 2010.

After World War II, Nez volunteered to serve two more years during the Korean War. He retired in 1974 after a 25-year career as a painter at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albuquerque.

Nez was eager to tell his family about his role as a Code Talker, Avila said, but he couldn't. The mission wasn't declassified until 1968.

The accolades came much later, and the Code Talkers now are widely celebrated. The original group received Congressional Gold Medals in 2001, and a movie based on the Code Talkers was released the following year. They have appeared on television and in parades and routinely are asked to speak to veterans groups and students.

Nez threw the opening pitch at a 2004 Major League Baseball game and offered a blessing for the presidential campaign of John Kerry. In 2012, he received a bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas, where he abandoned his studies in fine arts after money from his GI Bill ran out.



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Don Zimmer
 

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Don Zimmer, a popular fixture in professional baseball for 66 years as a manager, player, coach and executive, died Wednesday. He was 83.

Zimmer was still working for the Tampa Bay Rays as a senior adviser. He had been in a rehabilitation center in Florida after having heart surgery in mid-April.

After starting as a minor league infielder in 1949, Zimmer went on to have one of the longest-lasting careers in baseball history.

Zimmer played for the only Brooklyn Dodgers team to win the World Series, played for the original New York Mets, nearly managed the Boston Red Sox to a championship in the 1970s and was Joe Torre's right-hand man with the New York Yankees' most recent dynasty.

Along the way, Zimmer played for Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel and coached Derek Jeter — quite a span, by any major league measure.

Zimmer spent time in a lot of uniforms. He played for the Dodgers, Mets, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati and Washington. He managed San Diego, Boston, Texas and the Cubs.


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Karen DeCrow Lawyer, Writer, former NOW President and Famous Syracuse Feminist
 

Karen DeCrow, who was president of the National Organization for Women during the 1970s, a turbulent period in which she helped lead campaigns for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and against sex discrimination in education and sports, died on Friday at her home in Jamesville, N.Y., a suburb of Syracuse. She was 76.

The cause was melanoma, said her longtime friend Rowena Malamud, who is president of the Greater Syracuse chapter of NOW. Ms. DeCrow was the group’s current vice president.

Ms. DeCrow was a writer, a lawyer and a tireless campaigner for women’s rights. Her causes were national but also local. In the early 1970s, she represented a 7-year-old girl who wanted to play Little League baseball but was being denied.

“Over my dead body will girls ever play Little League baseball,” a coach told her at the time. “If one of them ever struck out a boy, he would be psychologically scarred for life.”

The girl played, but Ms. DeCrow was not done with sports. As president of NOW from 1974 to 1977, she fought off pressure from the National Collegiate Athletic Association to limit the reach of Title IX, the federal law passed in 1972 that bans sex discrimination in educational institutions that receive federal money. The law, which was strengthened in 1975 to ensure equal access to sports, has been widely credited with revolutionizing women’s athletics.

“I just hope all that playing and practicing won’t keep women out of the library, studying, learning, getting ready to take advantage of Title VII, the really important federal law, the one that prohibits job discrimination,” Ms. DeCrow told The New York Times in 1997.

Not all of her campaigns were successful. The Equal Rights Amendment, which would make discrimination against women unconstitutional, has yet to pass, but not for lack of effort by Ms. DeCrow. During the 1970s and ’80s, she crisscrossed the United States in support of it and had scores of debates with Phyllis Schlafly, one of its most prominent opponents.

Ms. DeCrow was born Karen Lipschultz on Dec. 18, 1937, in Chicago, the oldest of two daughters of a businessman and a former ballet dancer who stopped working outside the home after she married. Ms. DeCrow attended Chicago public schools. As a teenager, she sent short stories to top magazines, hoping to be published. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1959 with a degree in journalism.

She struggled to find appealing work after college, finally accepting a job as fashion editor at Golf Digest, though she had little interest in fashion or golf. She went on to work for other magazines and for publishing houses.

In 1967, after a brief first marriage, she was living in Syracuse with her second husband, Roger DeCrow, a computer scientist, and working in a small publishing house when she and some of her female colleagues realized that they were being paid less than their male counterparts. She decided to join the nascent group NOW and then formed a chapter in Syracuse and became president of it.

“I wasn’t a feminist,” she told The Times in 1975. “I just wanted more money.” By 1968, she was serving on the board of the national group.

As president she served without pay, the last NOW president to do so. “I joined NOW on an issue of pay,” she said. “Of course, now I don’t get any pay at all.”

Ms. DeCrow ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Syracuse in 1969 while attending the Syracuse University School of Law in her early 30s. She graduated in 1972, the only woman in her class, she told interviewers.

In 1988 Ms. DeCrow was a co-founder of World Women Watch, dedicated to combating sex discrimination worldwide. In 2009 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

For several years, Ms. DeCrow wrote for The Syracuse Post-Standard and its website. She published several books, including two in the early 1970s, “The Young Woman’s Guide to Liberation” and “Sexist Justice — How Legal Sexism Affects You.”

In 2008, she told The Syracuse Post-Standard that she was cautiously pleased with the progress women had made.

“I am lucky enough to have been involved in a movement that really moved,” she said. “But then, are we done? No, we’re not done.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/ny...t-76.html?_r=0

Ruby Dee
 

NEW YORK (AP) - Her long career brought her an Oscar nomination at age 83 for best supporting actress for her role in the 2007 film "American Gangster." She also won an Emmy and was nominated for several others. Age didn't slow her down.

"I think you mustn't tell your body, you mustn't tell your soul, 'I'm going to retire,'" Dee told The Associated Press in 2001. "You may be changing your life emphasis, but there's still things that you have in mind to do that now seems the right time to do. I really don't believe in retiring as long as you can breathe."

Since meeting on Broadway in 1946, she and her late husband were frequent collaborators. Their partnership rivaled the achievements of other celebrated performing couples, such as Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.

But they were more than a performing couple. They were also activists who fought for civil rights, particularly for blacks.

"We used the arts as part of our struggle," she said at an appearance in Jackson, Miss., in 2006. "Ossie said he knew he had to conduct himself differently with skill and thought."

In 1998, the pair celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and an even longer association in show business with the publication of a dual autobiography, "With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together."

Davis died in February 2005. At his funeral, his widow sat near his coffin as former President Clinton led an array of famous mourners, including Harry Belafonte and Spike Lee.

Davis and Dee met in 1945 when she auditioned for the Broadway play "Jeb," starring Davis (both were cast in it). In December 1948, on a day off from rehearsals from another play, "The Smile of the World," Davis and Dee took a bus to New Jersey to get married. They already were so close that "it felt almost like an appointment we finally got around to keeping," Dee wrote in "In This Life Together."

They shared billing in 11 stage productions and five movies during long parallel careers. Dee's fifth film, "No Way Out" with Sidney Poitier in 1950, was her husband's first. Along with film, stage and television, their richly honored careers extended to a radio show, "The Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Story Hour," that featutred a mix of black themes. Davis directed one of their joint film appearances, "Countdown at Kusini" (1976).

Like her husband, Dee was active in civil rights issues and efforts to promote the cause of blacks in the entertainment industry. As young performers, they found themselves caught up the growing debate over social and racial justice in the United States. The couple's push for social justice was lifelong: In 1999, the couple was arrested while protesting the shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, by New York City police.

They were friends with baseball star Jackie Robinson and his wife, Rachel - Dee played her, opposite Robinson himself, in the 1950 movie, "The Jackie Robin son Story" - and with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. Dee and Davis served as masters of ceremonies for the historic 1963 March on Washington and she spoke at both the funerals for King and Malcom X.

Among her best-known films was "A Raisin in the Sun," in 1961, the classic play that explored racial discrimination and black frustration. On television, she was a leading cast member on the soap operas such in the 1950s and '60s, a rare sight for a black actress in the 1950s and 60s.

As she aged, her career did not ebb. Dee was the voice of wisdom and reason as Mother Sister in Spike Lee's 1989 film, "Do the Right Thing," alongside her husband. She won an Emmy as supporting actress in a miniseries or special for 1990's "Decoration Day."

She won a National Medal of the Arts in 1995 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild in 2000. In 2004, she and Davis received Kennedy Center Honors. Another honor came in 2007, after Davis' d eath, when the recording of their memoir won a Grammy for best spoken word album, a category that includes audio books.

The role that brought her an Oscar nomination at age 83 was as the mother of Denzel Washington's title character in Ridley Scott's crime drama "American Gangster."

Born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland to parents who soon split, Dee moved to Harlem as an infant with a brother and two sisters, living with relatives and neighbors. She graduated from highly competitive Hunter High School in 1939 and enrolled at Hunter College. "I wanted to be an actor but the chances for success did not look promising," she wrote in their joint autobiography.

But in 1940 she got a part in a Harlem production of a new play, "On Strivers Row," which she later called "one giant step" to becoming a person and a performer.

In 1965, she became the first black woman to play lead roles at the American Shakespeare Festival. She won an Obie Award for the title role i n Athol Fugard's "Boesman and Lena" and a Drama Desk Award for her role in "Wedding Band."

Most recently, Dee performed her one-woman stage show, "My One Good Nerve: A Visit With Ruby Dee," in theaters across the country. The show was a compilation of some of the short stories, humor and poetry in her book of the same title.


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Chuck Noll
 

PITTSBURGH (AP) - Chuck Noll, the Hall of Fame coach who won a record four Super Bowl titles with the Pittsburgh Steelers, died Friday night at his home. He was 82.

Noll transformed the Steelers from a long-standing joke into one of the NFL's pre-eminent powers, becoming the only coach to win four Super Bowls. He was a demanding figure who did not make close friends with his players, yet was a successful and motivating leader.

The Steelers won the four Super Bowls over six seasons (1974, 1975, 1978 and 1979), an unprecedented run that made Pittsburgh one of the NFL's marquee franchises, one that breathed life into a struggling, blue-collar city.

Noll's 16-8 record in postseason play remains one of the best in league history. He retired in 1991 with a 209-156-1 record in 23 seasons, after inheriting a team that had never won a postseason game. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993.

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Casey Kasem
 

Casey Kasem, the smooth-voiced radio broadcaster who became the king of the top 40 countdown, has died at age 82.


Kasem's "American Top 40" began on July 4, 1970, in Los Angeles. The No. 1 song on his list then was "Mama Told Me Not to Come," by Three Dog Night.

The show continued in varying forms — and for varying syndicators — until his retirement in 2009. In his signoff, he would tell viewers: "And don't forget: keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars."

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Tony Gwynn
 

AN DIEGO (AP) - Tony Gwynn, the Hall of Famer with a sweet left-handed swing who spent his entire 20-year career with the Padres and was one of the game's greatest hitters, died of cancer Monday. He was 54.

Gwynn, a craftsman at the plate and winner of eight batting titles, was nicknamed "Mr. Padre" and was one of the most beloved athletes in San Diego.

In a rarity in pro sports, Gwynn played his whole career with the Padres, choosing to stay rather than leaving for bigger paychecks elsewhere. His terrific hand-eye coordination made him one of the game's greatest contact hitters. He had 3,141 hits, a career .338 average and won eight NL batting titles. He excelled at hitting singles the other way, through the "5.5 hole" between third base and shortstop.

Gwynn played in the Padres' only two World Series and was a 15-time All-Star.

He homered off the facade at Yankee Stadium off San Diego native David Wells in Game 1 of the 1998 World Series and scored the winning run in the 1994 All-Star Game. He was hitting .394 when a players' strike ended the 1994 season, denying him a shot at becoming the first player to hit .400 since San Diego native Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941.

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R.I.P. Gerry Goffin
 

for many years he filled out lives with great lyrics to the great music written by Carol King. Many songs were written by greats the Whitney Houston, and many others.

Many of his words either soothed us during sad times in our lives with relationships or gave us joy and smiles

Stephanie Kwolek
 

Stephanie L. Kwolek, a DuPont chemist who invented the technology behind Kevlar, a virtually bulletproof fiber that has saved thousands of lives, died on Wednesday in Wilmington, Del. She was 90.

The research that led to Kevlar began in the early 1960s, when women were a rarity in industrial chemistry. Ms. Kwolek was part of a team at DuPont’s research laboratory in Wilmington that was trying to develop a lightweight fiber that would be strong enough to replace the steel used in radial tires.

Kevlar is probably best known for use in body armor, particularly bulletproof vests. A DuPont spokeswoman estimated that since the 1970s, 3,000 police officers have been saved from bullet wounds through the use of equipment reinforced with Kevlar, which is far stronger and lighter than steel.

The product has found its way into all corners of the modern world. It has been used in car tires, boots for firefighters, hockey sticks, cut-resistant gloves, fiber-optic cables, fire-resistant mattresses, armored limousines and even canoes. It is used in building materials, making them bomb-resistant. Safe rooms have been built with Kevlar to protect a building’s occupants during hurricanes. Kevlar has been used to reinforce overtaxed bridges.

Ms. Kwolek was the recipient of many honors, including the Lemelson-M.I.T. Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes the nation’s most talented inventors and innovators. In 1995, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in North Canton, Ohio. In 2003, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y.

She was also inducted, in 2004, into the Plastics Hall of Fame at the National Plastics Center and Museum in Leominster, Mass. There, her plaque hangs alongside those of innovators like Earl Tupper, the creator of Tupperware.

After retirement, Ms. Kwolek tutored high school students in chemistry, paying particular attention to grooming young women for work in the sciences.

Her achievements have become familiar to an even younger generation as well. In 2013, her story, told in 48 pages, became one in a series of children’s books about inventors and innovative ideas. The book, by Edwin Brit Wyckoff, is titled “The Woman Who Invented the Thread That Stops the Bullets: The Genius of Stephanie Kwolek.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/bu...t-90.html?_r=0

Actor Eli Wallach
 

Eli Wallach, a gravelly voiced character actor who appeared alongside such giants as Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Al Pacino in The Godfather: Part III, died Tuesday. He was 98.

The son of Polish Jews, Mr. Wallach was in constant demand to play nearly every kind of ethnic character on stage and screen in a career that spanned seven decades. He initially burst to prominence on Broadway, where he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of a prideful and buffoonish Sicilian named Mangiacavallo in Tennessee Williams’s “The Rose Tattoo” (1951).

Mr. Wallach became one of the busiest character actors in Hollywood, with more than 150 credits in films and on television. He portrayed a Cambodian warlord in “Lord Jim” (1965), based on a Joseph Conrad novel; the Shah of Khwarezm opposite Omar Sharif in the title role of “Genghis Khan” (1965); and a candy-loving mobster in “The Godfather: Part III” (1990).

Reviewers singled out Mr. Wallach for praise as a villain in “The Magnificent Seven” (1960), a high-profile Hollywood remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” that featured Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson.

Mr. Wallach also had a pivotal role in Italian director Sergio Leone’s violent “spaghetti western” “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966). His character, Tuco, was the “Ugly.”

Mr. Wallach’s other movie highlights included a psychopathic hit man in Don Siegel’s “The Lineup” (1958) and a sad-eyed widower who elicits more sympathy than attraction from divorcee Marilyn Monroe in “The Misfits” (1961).

Mr. Wallach performed in more than two dozen Broadway shows since the 1940s — several opposite his wife, actress Anne Jackson. He earned a reputation as a skilled interpreter of modern playwrights, including the absurdist Eugene Ionesco (“Rhinoceros”) and the comic writer Murray Schisgal (“Luv”). He was an early member of the Actors Studio, a workshop in New York founded by director Elia Kazan, producer Cheryl Crawford and other prominent theatrical figures.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...e59_story.html

Sen. Howard Baker Jr.
 

Howard Baker's question sliced to the core of Watergate: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

Repeated over and again in the senator's mild Tennessee drawl, those words guided Americans through the tangle of Watergate characters and charges playing daily on TV to focus squarely on Richard Nixon and his role in the cover-up.

Baker's famous question has been dusted off for potential White House scandals big and small ever since.

Baker, who later became Senate majority leader, chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and one of the GOP's elder statesmen, died Thursday. He was 88.

Baker emerged as an unlikely star of the Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973.

When chosen as vice chairman — and therefore leading Republican — of the Senate special committee, he was a Nixon ally who thought the allegations couldn't possibly be true. Democrats feared he would serve as the White House's "mole" in the investigation of the break-in at Democratic headquarters and other crimes perpetrated in service to Nixon's re-election.

"I believed that it was a political ploy of the Democrats, that it would come to nothing," Baker told The Associated Press in 1992. "But a few weeks into that, it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than I thought, and more to it than I liked."

He said Watergate became "the greatest disillusionment" of his political career.

Baker's intense but restrained style of interrogating former White House aides played well on camera. A youthful-looking, side-burned 47-year-old, his brainy charm inspired a raft of love notes sent to his Senate office; a women's magazine proclaimed him "studly." He was mentioned frequently as presidential material.

By the time Nixon resigned in 1974, Baker was a household name with a reputation for fairness and smarts that stuck throughout a long political career.

Howard Henry Baker Jr. had a fine political pedigree — his father was a congressman from Huntsville, Tenn., and his father-in-law a prominent senator from Illinois. Over the years, his name would be knocked about for big Washington jobs including vice presidential candidate, Supreme Court justice and CIA director. But his focus remained on the Senate and, at times, the White House.

In 18 years as a moderate Republican senator, he was known for plain speaking and plain dealing. He had a talent for brokering compromise, leading some to dub him "the Great Conciliator."

Baker was minority leader when the Reagan landslide swept Republicans into control of the chamber in 1980 Reagan, and he became the first Republican majority leader in decades.

Putting aside his own reservations about Reagan's economic proposals, Baker played a key role in passage of legislation synonymous with the "Reagan Revolution" — major tax and spending cuts combined with a military buildup.

Baker considered his years as Senate majority leader, 1981 to 1985, the high point of his career. He called it "the second-best job in town, only second to the presidency."

He made a fleeting bid for that best job in 1980, and left the Senate with an eye to another presidential run in 1988. Instead, he ended up in the White House as Reagan's chief of staff.

Reagan needed him to put things in order after ousting chief of staff Donald Regan amid scandal over the administration's secret moves to trade arms for hostages in Iran and divert the profits to Nicaraguan rebels — another of history's what-did-the-president-know moments.

The Reagan White House weathered Iran-Contra. But Baker lost his last chance at the presidency.

President George H.W. Bush sent Baker to Moscow in 1991 to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev before a summit; George W. Bush named him ambassador to Japan in 2001.

An accomplished amateur photographer, Baker carried a camera wherever he went. But he didn't take any photos during the Watergate hearings.

"I felt that it was beneath the dignity of the event," he said years later. "It turned out the event had no dignity and I should have taken pictures."

http://news.yahoo.com/sen-baker-quer...-politics.html

Meshach Taylor
 

Meshach Taylor, who played a lovable ex-convict surrounded by boisterous Southern belles on the sitcom "Designing Women" and appeared in numerous other TV and film roles, died of cancer at age 67, his agent said Sunday.

Taylor got an Emmy nod for his portrayal of Anthony Bouvier on "Designing Women" from 1986 to 1993. Then he costarred for four seasons on another successful comedy, "Dave's World," as the best friend of a newspaper humor columnist played by the series' star, Harry Anderson.

Other series included the cult favorite "Buffalo Bill" and the popular Nickelodeon comedy "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide."

Taylor's movie roles included a flamboyant window dresser in the 1987 comedy-romance "Mannequin" as well as "Damien: Omen II."

He guested on many series including "Hannah Montana," ''The Unit," ''Hill Street Blues," ''Barney Miller," ''Lou Grant," ''The Drew Carey Show," and, in an episode that aired in January, "Criminal Minds," which stars Joe Montegna, with whom Taylor performed early in his career as a fellow member of Chicago's Organic Theater Company. Taylor also had been a member of that city's Goodman Theatre.

The Boston-born Taylor started acting in community shows in New Orleans, where his father was dean of students at Dillard University. He continued doing roles in Indianapolis after his father moved to Indiana University as dean of the college of arts and sciences.

After college, Taylor got a job at an Indianapolis radio station, where he rose from a "flunky job" to Statehouse reporter, he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 1989.

"It was interesting for a while," he said. "But once you get involved in Indiana politics you see what a yawn it is."

Resuming his acting pursuit, he set up a black arts theater to keep kids off the street, then joined the national touring company of "Hair." His acting career was launched.

After "Hair," he became a part of the burgeoning theater world in Chicago, where he stayed until 1979 before heading for Los Angeles.

Taylor played the assistant director in "Buffalo Bill," the short-lived NBC sitcom about an arrogant and self-centered talk show host played by Dabney Coleman. It lasted just one season, 1983-84, disappointing its small but fervent following.

Seemingly his gig on "Designing Women" could have been even more short-lived. It was initially a one-shot.

"It was for the Thanksgiving show, about halfway through the first season," Taylor said. But producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason told him if the character clicked with audiences he could stay.

It did. He spun comic gold with co-stars Jean Smart, Dixie Carter, Annie Potts and Delta Burke, and never left.

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Charlie Haden, one of the most influential bass players of his generation, has died after a prolonged illness, according to his family and his record label, ECM.

Full article

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/ar...ies-at-84.html

Lorin Maazel, an Intense and Enigmatic Conductor, Dies at 84
By ALLAN KOZINNJULY 13, 2014
Photo

Lorin Maazel conducted the New York Philharmonic in 2011.
Lorin Maazel, a former child prodigy who went on to become the music director of the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera and several other ensembles and companies around the world, and who was known for his incisive and sometimes extreme interpretations, died on Sunday at his home in Castleton, Va. He was 84.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Jenny Lawhorn, a spokeswoman for Mr. Maazel. In recent days, he had been rehearsing for the Castleton Festival, which takes place on his farm.

Mr. Maazel (pronounced mah-ZELL) was a study in contradictions, and he evoked strong feelings, favorable and otherwise, from musicians, administrators, critics and audiences.

He projected an image of an analytical intellectual — he had studied mathematics and philosophy in college, was fluent in six languages (French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, as well as English) and kept up with many subjects outside music — and his performances could seem coolly fastidious and emotionally distant. Yet such performances were regularly offset by others that were fiery and intensely personalized.


He was revered for the precision of his baton technique, and for his prodigious memory — he rarely used a score in performances — but when he was at his most interpretively idiosyncratic, he used his powers to distend phrases and reconfigure familiar balances in the service of an unusual inner vision.

“He is clearly a brilliant man,” John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times in 1979, “perhaps too brilliant to rest content with endless re-creations of the standard repertory. He is also, it would seem, a coldly defensive man, and perhaps that coldness coats his work with a layer of ice.

“The only trouble with this line of thinking is that it doesn’t take all the facts into account. Mr. Maazel, when he’s ‘on,’ has led some of the finest, most impassioned, most insightful performances in memory. When he’s good, he’s so good that he simply has to be counted among the great conductors of the day. Yet, enigmatically, it’s extremely difficult to predict just when he is going to be good or in what repertory.”

A Boy With a Baton

Perhaps because he grew up in the limelight, conducting orchestras from the age of 9, Mr. Maazel was self-assured, headstrong, and sometimes arrogant: When he took a new directorship, he often announced what he planned to change and why his approach was superior to what had come before. He knew what he wanted and how to get it, and if he encountered an immovable obstacle, he would walk away, also with a public explanation.

That was how he handled his brief term as general manager and artistic director at the Vienna State Opera, where he was the first American to wield such power.

“I am keen that this house again be led in the fashion of Mahler and Strauss,” he said at a news conference when his appointment was announced. “I have the full responsibility for the opera, and I have no intention of sharing that responsibility, though I may delegate it.” He added, “I will not hesitate to make changes, if I consider them necessary.”


He quickly transformed the house from a repertory company, where a different work was staged every night, to what he called a “block” system, in which groups of operas were played, with frequent repeats. He regarded this as more efficient and likely to produce better performances.

When the Viennese culture minister differed, and also complained about Mr. Maazel’s casting choices and argued that he was mainly interested in burnishing his own artistic profile, Mr. Maazel abruptly resigned, two years into a four-year term, and wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, deploring interference in the arts by government officials with no artistic background. (In September 2013, the company erected a bust of Mr. Maazel, by the sculptor Helmut Millionig. Mr. Maazel attended the unveiling ceremony.)

His tenures with the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic had their rough moments, too. The Cleveland musicians voted against hiring him to succeed the legendary George Szell, who had died in 1970, because they did not consider him sufficiently accomplished to fill Szell’s shoes. Mr. Maazel told The Times in 2002 that “the relationship remained more or less rocky to the end.”

In New York, Mr. Maazel quickly won over the Philharmonic musicians. But several critics, while happy that the orchestra had engaged an American music director for the first time since Leonard Bernstein gave up its podium in 1969, were disappointed that Mr. Maazel, 70 at the time, was of the same generation as his predecessor, Kurt Masur (then 73), and that his tastes in contemporary music seemed conservative. Eventually, many of them came to admire him.

Alan Gilbert, Mr. Maazel’s successor as music director of the Philharmonic, said Sunday, “Personally, I am grateful to him, not only for the brilliant state of the orchestra that I inherited from him, but for the support and encouragement he extended to me when I took over his responsibilities.”

Lorin Varencove Maazel was born in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on March 6, 1930, to a pair of American music students — Lincoln Maazel, a singer, and Marie Varencove Maazel, a pianist — who were studying there. He showed an aptitude for music early: When he was 5, by which time the family had moved to Los Angeles, he began studying the piano; at 7, he took up the violin.

One piece in his piano repertory was a reduction of Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony, and when he was 8, his father gave him a copy of the full orchestral score. Lorin studied it, along with a recording his father also bought him, and when he conducted a family ensemble in the work, his parents noted that he was adept at cues and balances. They took him to study with Vladimir Bakaleinikoff, then an associate conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

When Mr. Bakaleinikoff took a conducting job in Pittsburgh, the Maazels followed. They also sent young Lorin to music camp at Interlochen, Mich.

Olin Downes, a music critic for The Times, happened to be visiting the camp when Lorin, then 9, led the camp’s orchestra in a movement from Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. Mr. Downes, though generally skeptical of prodigies, wrote that the boy conducted “with a beat clean and firm, yet elastic and with a consistency of tempo that very occasionally was modified by a nuance absolutely in place and appropriate as it was employed.”


Toscanini and Lollipops

That summer, the Interlochen orchestra performed at the World’s Fair in New York, and Lorin conducted it twice. In 1940, just before his 10th birthday, he conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony as well, and when he was 11, in July 1941, Arturo Toscanini invited him to conduct the NBC Symphony in a concert — works by Wagner, Mendelssohn and Dika Newlin — broadcast nationally from Radio City Music Hall. The orchestra, outraged at the idea of being led by a child, greeted him at the first rehearsal with lollipops in their mouths. He won their respect the first time he stopped the rehearsal to point out a wrong note.

In the summer of 1942, and again in 1944, he led the New York Philharmonic in performances at Lewisohn Stadium. But when he turned 15, he put his baton aside and settled into his academic studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

He did not abandon music entirely. In 1946, he organized the Fine Arts Quartet of Pittsburgh, with which he was a violinist until 1950, and in 1948, he joined the violin section of the Pittsburgh Symphony. An invitation from the conductor Serge Koussevitzky to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in the summer of 1951 brought him back to the podium just before he headed off to Rome, on a Fulbright fellowship, to study Renaissance Italian music.

Mr. Maazel dated the start of his mature career to Christmas Eve 1953, when, still a student in Rome, he was invited to step in for an ailing conductor at the Teatro Bellini, in Catania. His success there led to engagements in Naples, Florence and elsewhere in Europe, and then in Japan, Australia and Latin America.


Lorin Maazel led the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 2009. Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
By 1960, he had conducted about 300 concerts with more than 20 European orchestras, and was sufficiently well regarded to win an invitation to conduct “Lohengrin” at Bayreuth, the German shrine that Wagner built to himself and his music. At 30, he was the youngest conductor, as well as the first American, to work there.

He was, however, virtually unknown (as an adult) in the United States. But in October 1962, he toured the country with the Orchestre Nationale de France, a Parisian radio orchestra with which he would enjoy a long relationship (he was music director from 1977 to 1991), and appeared as a guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic and at the Metropolitan Opera, where he led “Don Giovanni” and “Der Rosenkavalier.”

By the mid-1960s, he was also making recordings for two of Europe’s most prestigious labels, Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic. He eventually recorded for other labels as well, among them RCA Red Seal, CBS (later Sony Classical) and Erato.

Among the highlights of his discography are recordings he made for the film versions of “Don Giovanni” (directed by Joseph Losey) and “Carmen” (Francesco Rossi), as well as his cycles of the Beethoven, Mahler and Sibelius symphonies.

An Old-Fashioned Approach

Mr. Maazel’s first music directorship was that of the Deutsche Opera, in West Berlin, jointly with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, a position he held from 1965 until 1971, when he accepted the directorship of the Cleveland Orchestra, to begin in 1972.


In Cleveland, as in Berlin, Mr. Maazel took an old-fashioned approach to the job. Instead of conducting barely more than a dozen weeks of concerts and leaving the rest to guests, as was becoming the norm, Mr. Maazel spent most of his year in Cleveland. He recorded plentifully with the orchestra, and toured with it frequently. He gave up the directorship, becoming conductor emeritus, in 1982, the year he became general manager of the Vienna State Opera.

When the Vienna directorship went sour, in 1984, Mr. Maazel declared himself liberated, free to return to the far-flung guest conducting of his early years.

“I worked as a music administrator as well as a conductor of 20 years,” he told an interviewer in 1985, “and during that time, I devoted almost all my attention to the organizations I was working for — six years in Berlin, 10 in Cleveland, three in Vienna. I’ve conducted 132 orchestras, but in the last 20 years, I’ve not conducted more than seven or eight of them. So I’m having a lot of fun going around the world now, meeting people who’ve gotten to know me through records and television. I’m like a child let out of school.”

He could not, however, resist the siren song of another directorship. In 1984, he agreed to become a music consultant to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. A year later, the orchestra upgraded his title to music adviser and principal guest conductor, and in 1988, he became its music director. By the time he relinquished the post, in 1996, he had upgraded its performance standards, taken it around the world, and won a Grammy with the orchestra for a recording of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev works with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Even so, he maintained his freelance career, and was given to occasional spectacles, like the 1988 marathon in London, when he conducted all nine Beethoven symphonies in a single 10-and-a-half-hour concert. He repeated the feat in Tokyo at the end of 2010.

In 1989, he was on a short list of candidates to succeed Herbert von Karajan at the Berlin Philharmonic. When Claudio Abbado was chosen instead, Mr. Maazel insisted that he never had any intention of leaving his Pittsburgh orchestra, and canceled his Berlin dates — not, he said, in a fit of pique, but so that Mr. Abbado would have more time to whip the orchestra into shape.

He took over the Bavarian Radio Orchestra in 1991, at a salary reported to be around $3.8 million, at that point the highest paid to any conductor anywhere, and held its directorship until 2002, when he took over the New York Philharmonic.

(He gave the Philharmonic a price break: When he left that position, in 2009, his salary was reported as $3.3 million.)

In the 1990s, Mr. Maazel revived an interest in composing that had gripped him briefly in his youth, and which he explored rarely as an adult, apart from performing a short waltz in Cleveland in 1980, and his 70-minute orchestra-only reduction of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.

He took up a series of concerto commissions, writing “Music for Violoncello and Orchestra” for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1994; “Music for Flute and Orchestra” for James Galway, in 1995; and “Music for Violin and Orchestra,” in which he was the violin soloist, in 1997. He also set to work on an opera, “1984,” based on the Orwell book, with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy and Thomas Meehan. It had its premiere at Covent Garden in 2005, and was revived at La Scala, in Milan, in 2008.


Mr. Maazel celebrated his 70th birthday with a world tour in which he revisited many of the orchestras he had conducted over the decades. One stop was at the New York Philharmonic, which was negotiating with several conductors to succeed Mr. Masur as music director. Mr. Maazel threw his hat in the ring, and within a few weeks, he captured the post.

Among his accomplishments at the Philharmonic were the premieres of several major works, including John Adams’s “On the Transmigration of Souls” and scores by Poul Ruders, Melinda Wagner and Aaron Jay Kernis, and taking the orchestra to Pyongyang, North Korea.

When the plan to visit Pyongyang drew protests from those who objected to his performing for a brutal regime, Mr. Maazel wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the visit was about “bringing peoples and their cultures together on common ground, where the roots of peaceful interchange can imperceptibly but irrevocably take hold.”

After he left the Philharmonic in 2009, Mr. Maazel set up the Castleton Festival, for classical music and opera, on the grounds of his farm in Virginia. He founded and directed the festival jointly with his wife, the German actress Dietlinde Turban Maazel, whom he married in 1986. Two previous marriages — to the composer Mimi Sandbank and the pianist Israela Margalit — ended in divorce.

His wife survives him, as do their two sons, Leslie and Orson Maazel, and daughter, Tara Maazel; and three daughters — Anjali Maazel, Daria Steketee and Fiona Maazel — and a son, Ilann Margalit Maazel, from his previous marriages.

Mr. Maazel’s life as a festival director did not diminish his wanderlust. He became music director of the Munich Philharmonic in 2010. And in a blog on his website, he noted that in 2013 — he was 83 — he conducted 102 concerts, performing 72 compositions in 28 cities in 16 countries. He added that he was looking forward to getting back in harness.

“Curiously, for someone who has a fairly good reputation for stick technique,” he told a reporter for The Times in 2002, “I don’t recognize stick technique per se. I don’t think I ever make the same motion twice in the same bar of music. The aim is to find a motion that responds to the need of a particular player at a particular moment. The player must be put at ease, so that he knows where he is and what is expected, and is free to concentrate on beauty of tone. There is no magic involved.”

Nadine Gordimer
 

JOHANNESBURG (AP) - Nadine Gordimer was first a writer of fiction and a defender of creativity and expression. But as a white South African who hated apartheid's dehumanization of blacks, she was also a determined political activist in the struggle to end white minority rule in her country.

Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991 for novels that explored the complex relationships and human cost of racial conflict in apartheid-era South Africa, died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Johannesburg on Sunday. She was 90 years old.

The author wrote 15 novels as well as several volumes of short stories, non-fiction and other works, and was published in 40 languages around the world, according to the family.

"She cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people, and its ongoing struggle to realize its new democracy," the family said. Her "proudest days" included winning the Nobel prize and testifying in the 1980s on behalf of a group of anti-apartheid activists who had been accused of treason, they said.

Per Wastberg, an author and member of the Nobel Prize-awarding Swedish Academy, said Gordimer's descriptions of the different faces of racism told the world about South Africa during apartheid.

"She concentrated on individuals, she portrayed humans of all kinds," said Wastberg, a close friend. "Many South African authors and artists went into exile, but she felt she had to be a witness to what was going on and also lend her voice to the black, silenced authors."

"Our country has lost an unmatched literary giant whose life's work was our mirror and an unending quest for humanity," South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress, said in a statement.

During apartheid, Gordimer praised Nelson Mandela, the prisoner who later became president, and accepted the decision of the main anti-apartheid movement to use violence against South Africa's white-led government.

"Having lived here for 65 years," she said, "I am well aware for how long black people refrained from violence. We white people are responsible for it."

Gordimer grew up in Springs town, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Britain and Lithuania. She began writing at age 9, and kept writing well into her 80s.

She said her first "adult story," published in a literary magazine when she was 15, grew out of her reaction as a young child to watching the casual humiliation of blacks. She recalled blacks being barred from touching clothes before buying in shops in her hometown, and police searching the maid's quarters at the Gordimer home for alcohol, which blacks were not allowed to possess.

That "began to make me think about the way we lived, and why we lived like that, and who were we," she said in a 2006 interview for the Nobel organization.

In the same interview, she bristled at the suggestion that confronting the human cost of apartheid made her a writer.

"If you're going to be a writer, you can make the death of canary important," said Gordimer, a small and elegant figure. "You can connect it to the whole chain of life, and the mystery of life. To me, what is the purpose of life? It is really to explain the mystery of life."

She said she resisted autobiography, asserting that journalistic research played no part in her creative process.

"Telling Times," a 2010 collection of her nonfiction writing dating to 1950, offers some glimpses of her own experience. She wrote in a 1963 essay of a meeting with a poet giving her an idea of a life beyond her small home town and her then aimless existence.

Gordimer's first novel, "The Lying Days," appeared in 1953, and she acknowledged that it had autobiographical elements. A New York Times reviewer compared it to Alan Paton's "Cry the Beloved Country," saying Gordimer's work "is the longer, the richer, intellectually the more exciting."

She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for "The Conservationist," a novel about a white South African who loses everything.

Among Gordimer's best-known novels is "Burger's Daughter," which appeared in 1979, three years after the Soweto student uprising brought the brutality of apartheid to the world's attention.

Some readers believe the family at its center is that of Bram Fischer, a lawyer who broke with his conservative Afrikaner roots to embrace socialism and fight apartheid. The story is salted with real events and names - including Fischer's. The main character is a young woman on the periphery of a famous family who must come to terms with her legacy and her homeland.

Her 1987 novel, "A Sport of Nature," prophesized the end of apartheid and included a liberation leader based on Mandela.

"Gordimer writes with intense immediacy about the extremely complicated personal and social relationships in her environment," the Nobel committee said on awarding the literature prize in 1991.

In her Nobel acceptance speech, Gordimer said that as a young artist, she agonized that she was cut off from "the world of ideas" by the isolation of apartheid. But she came to understand "that what we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place."

After the first all-race election in 1994, Gordimer wrote about the efforts of South Africa's new democracy to grapple with its racist legacy. She remained politically engaged, praising South Africa for the progress it had made, but expressing concern about alleged backsliding on freedom of expression.

"People died for our freedoms," Gordimer, who had had works banned by the apartheid government, told The Associated Press in a 2010 interview. "People spent years and years in prison, from the great Nelson Mandela down through many others."

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We Now Know How Archie Will Die
 

After nearly 75 years, a beloved comics mainstay is coming to an end.

Wednesday's installment of Life With Archie will feature the death of Archie Andrews at the hands of an undisclosed stalker. What's more, he'll die taking a bullet for his gay best friend Kevin Keller, a senator who is pushing for tighter gun control laws. The narrative choice is one that will not let Archie go gentle into that good night, but instead has Archie bowing out with lasting impact and a social message.

"The way in which Archie dies is everything that you would expect of Archie," Jon Goldwater, Archie Comics publisher and co-CEO, told the Associated Press. "He dies heroically. He dies selflessly. He dies in the manner that epitomizes not only the best of Riverdale but the best of all of us. It's what Archie has come to represent over the past almost 75 years."

As well as being a sad loss for fans of Archie and the Riverdale universe, the choice is brimming with social commentary. Having Archie die by gunshot while protecting a gay friend who is fighting for stricter gun control laws is a clued-in, timely message. Fiction often puts queer characters in the firing line first and foremost, so for Keller to be saved and not a martyr for the cause highlights the importance of his anti-gun stance.

"We wanted to do something that was impactful that would really resonate with the world and bring home just how important Archie is to everyone. That's how we came up with the storyline of saving Kevin. He could have saved Betty. He could have saved Veronica. We get that, but metaphorically, by saiving Kevin, a new Riverdale is born," Goldwater told the AP.

Although Archie will not be the first comic book protagonist to bite the bullet, his death is different than, say, Peter Parker or Steve "Captain America" Rogers. Archie's death is not a publicity stunt and is not a choice the publishers can back away from.

"Archie is not a superhero like all the rest of the comic book characters," said Goldwater. "He's human. He's a person. When you wound him, he bleeds. He knows that. If anything, I think his death is more impactful because of that. We hope by showing how something so violent can happen to Archie, that we can — in some way — learn from him."

Rest in peace, Archie. For a 73-year-old icon, you look quite good.

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What a bummer.

Alice Coachman Davis
 

The first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal, Alice Coachman Davis, died early Monday in south Georgia. She was 90.

Davis won Olympic gold in the high jump at the 1948 games in London with an American and Olympic record of 1.68 meters (5.51 feet), according to USA Track and Field, the American governing body of the sport. Davis was inducted to the USA Track and Field Hall of fame in 1975, and was inducted to the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 2004.

"Going into the USOC Hall of Fame is as good as it gets," she told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview. "It's like Cooperstown, Springfield and Canton," she said, referring to the sites of other prominent Halls of Fame.

Davis was the only American woman to win a gold medal at the 1948 games. According to Olympic historian David Wallechinsky, Coachman was honored with a 175-mile motorcade in Georgia when she returned from London. However, the black and white audiences were segregated at her official ceremony in Albany.

Recollecting her career in the 2004 interview, Davis speculated that she could have won even more Olympic medals, but the Olympics weren't held in 1940 or 1944 because of World War II. She retired at age 25 after winning the gold medal in London.

"I know I would have won in 1944, at least," said Davis. "I was starting to peak then. It really feels good when Old Glory is raised and the National Anthem is played."

Davis attended Tuskegee University and also played basketball on a team that won three straight conference basketball titles. She won 25 national track and field championships — including 10 consecutive high jump titles — between 1939 and 1948, according to USA Track and Field.

Growing up in the deep South during the era of legal segregation, Davis had to overcome multiple challenges.

The New Georgia Encyclopedia says she was prohibited from using public sports facilities because of her race, so she used whatever equipment she could cobble together to practice her jumping.

"My dad did not want me to travel to Tuskegee and then up north to the Nationals," Davis told the AP. "He felt it was too dangerous. Life was very different for African-Americans at that time. But I came back and showed him my medal and talked about all the things I saw. He and my mom were very proud of me."

Davis won her first national high jump title at age 16 according to USA Track and Field, and worked as a school teacher and track coach after retiring. An elementary school in her home town is named in her honor and opened in August 1999 according to Dougherty County schools officials.

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Johnny Winter
 

Texas blues legend Johnny Winter, known for his lightning-fast blues guitar riffs, his striking long white hair and his collaborations with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and childhood hero Muddy Waters, has died. He was 70.

Winter was a leading light among the white blues guitar players, including Eric Clapton and the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, who followed in the footsteps of the earlier Chicago blues masters. Winter idolized Waters - and got a chance to produce some of the blues legend's more popular albums. Rolling Stone magazine named Winter one of the top 100 guitarists of all time.

Winter had been on an extensive tour this year that recently brought him to Europe. His last performance came Saturday at the Lovely Days Festival in Wiesen, Austria.

The tour, a documentary that premiered at the SXSW Festival exploring his music, youth and substance abuse battles, and a newly released four-CD set of recordings were all part of Winter's celebration of turning 70 this year.

John Dawson Winter III was born on Feb. 23, 1944, in Mississippi, but was raised in Beaumont, Texas. He was the older brother of Edgar Winter, also an albino, who rose to musical fame with the Edgar Winter Group.

Winter was one of the most popular live acts of the early 1970s, when his signature fast blues guitar solos attracted a wide following. But his addiction problems with heroin during that decade and later battles with alcohol and prescription medication, including methadone, also drew attention.

His career received a big boost early on when Rolling Stone singled him out as one of the best blues guitarists on the Texas scene. This helped secure a substantial recording contract from Columbia Records in 1969 that led to an appearance at the Woodstock Festival and gave him a wide following among college students and young blues fans.

Crowds were dazzled by the speed - and volume - of his guitar playing, which had its roots in urban blues but incorporated elements of rock 'n' roll.

Winters paid homage to Waters on "Tribute to Muddy," a song from his 1969 release "The Progressive Blues Experiment." He continued to pick up accolades, producing three Grammy Award-winning albums for Waters and recording with John Lee Hooker, which helped revive their careers.

Winter performed often with blues and rock singer Janis Joplin and the two became close during the 1960s.

Among the blues classics that Winter played during that era were "Rollin' and Tumblin'," "Bad Luck and Trouble" and "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl." He also teamed up with his brother Edgar for their 1976 live album "Together."

He was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1988.

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