Andrew Wyeth, one of the most popular and also most lambasted artists in the history of American art, a reclusive linchpin in a colorful family dynasty of artists whose precise realist views of hardscrabble rural life became icons of national culture and sparked endless debates about the nature of modern art, died Friday at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa. He was 91.
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Andrew Wyeth in Chadds Ford, Pa., 1997. More Photos >
Kirk C. Wilkinson
Andrew Wyeth in 1963 at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa. He was one of the country’s most popular artists
He died in his sleep, said Hillary Holland, a spokeswoman for the Brandywine River Museum, The Associated Press reported.
Wyeth gave America a prim and flinty view of Puritan rectitude, starchily sentimental, through parched gray and brown pictures of spooky frame houses, desiccated fields, deserted beaches, circling buzzards and craggy-faced New Englanders. A virtual Rorschach test for American culture during the better part of the last century, Wyeth split public opinion as vigorously as, and probably even more so than, any other American painter including the other modern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth’s was rural.
Because of his popularity, a bad sign to many art world insiders, Wyeth came to represent middle-class values and ideals that modernism claimed to reject, so that arguments about his work extended beyond painting to societal splits along class, geographical and educational lines. One art historian, in response to a 1977 survey in Art News magazine about the most underrated and overrated artists of the century, nominated Wyeth for both categories.
Art critics mostly heaped abuse on his work, saying he gave realism a bad name. Supporters said he spoke to the silent majority who jammed his exhibitions. “In today’s scrambled-egg school of art, Wyeth stands out as a wild-eyed radical,” one journalist wrote in 1963, speaking for the masses. “For the people he paints wear their noses in the usual place, and the weathered barns and bare-limbed trees in his starkly simple landscapes are more real than reality.”
John Updike took up the same cause 25 years later: “In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, the scorn was simple gallery politics; but resistance to Wyeth remains curiously stiff in an art world that has no trouble making room for Photorealists like Richard Estes and Philip Pearlstein and graduates of commercial art like Wayne Thiebaud, Andy Warhol, and for that matter, Edward Hopper.”
A minority opinion within the art world always tried to reconcile Wyeth with mainstream modernism. It was occasionally argued, among other things, that his work had an abstract component and was linked to the gestural style of artists like Kline, de Kooning and Pollock, for whom Wyeth expressed general disdain. It is true that especially some of the early watercolors of the 30’s and 40’s, in a looser style, inclined toward abstraction.
Contrary to what detractors and some supporters said, his style vacillated over the years, which suited neither those who wanted to say he stayed in a rut his whole career nor those who championed him as a model, as one art historian put it, “of continuity and permanence in the face of instabilities and uncertainties of modern life.”
Wyeth remained a polarizing figure even as the traditional 20th century distinction between abstraction and avant-gardism on the one hand and realism and conservatism on the other came to seem woefully inadequate and false. The only indisputable truth was that his art existed within a diverse American context that encompassed illustrators like his father, N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell, and also landscape painters like John Marin, Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt and Fitz Hugh Lane.
One picture encapsulated his fame. “Christina’s World” became an American icon like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” or Whistler’s portrait of his mother or Emmanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Wyeth said he thought the work was “a complete flat tire” when he originally sent it off to the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan in 1948. The Museum of Modern Art bought it for $1,800.
Wyeth had seen Christina Olson, crippled from the waist down, dragging herself across a Maine field, “like a crab on a New England shore,” he recalled. To him she was a model of dignity who refused to use a wheelchair and preferred to live in squalor rather than be beholden to anyone. It was dignity of a particularly dour, hardened, misanthropic sort, to which Wyeth throughout his career seemed to gravitate. Olson is shown in the picture from the back. She was 55 at the time. (She died 20 years later, having become a frequent subject in his art; her death made the national news thanks to Wyeth’s popularity.)
It is impossible to tell her age in the painting or what she looks like, the ambiguity adding to the overall mystery. So does the house, which Wyeth called a dry-bone skeleton of a building, a symbol during the Depression of the American pastoral dream in a minor key, the house’s whitewash of paint long gone, its shingles warped, the place isolated against a blank sky. As popular paintings go, “Christina’s World” is remarkable for being so dark and humorless, yet the public seemed to focus less on its gothic and morose quality and more on the way Wyeth painted each blade of grass, a mechanical and unremarkable kind of realism that was distinctive if only for going against the rising tide of abstraction in America in the late 1940’s.
“Oftentimes people will like a picture I paint because it’s maybe the sun hitting on the side of a window and they can enjoy it purely for itself,” Wyeth once said. “It reminds them of some afternoon. But for me, behind that picture could be a night of moonlight when I’ve been in some house in Maine, a night of some terrible tension, or I had this strange mood. Maybe it was Halloween. It’s all there, hiding behind the realistic side.”
He also said: “I think the great weakness in most of my work is subject matter. There’s too much of it.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/arts/design/17wyeth.html?ref=obituaries
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FROM THE ARCHIVES:
WYETH’S BLACK MODELS
For six decades, Andrew Wyeth has been making portraits of his African American friends and neighbors. Now the series is touring for the first time—but only in the South
by Mary Lynn Kotz
In 1999 Andrew Wyeth painted a nude portrait of a handsome, lithe black woman named Senna Moore. When he discovered that he had already done a watercolor of the model on the reverse side of the paper, he decided to call the new image BODY . . . (recto) and the older one . . . AND SOUL (verso) . On seeing the works, Betsy James Wyeth, wife of the 82-year-old painter, was immediately inspired to pull from their collection 30 paintings and drawings that her husband had made over the years of their African American friends and neighbors in Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania. She had them installed in the Brandywine River Museum, which houses works by three generations of Wyeths, along with other American and regional artists.
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“I’d go over to paint H. F. Dupont in the morning. I’d have to be let into Winterthur [the Dupont mansion, now a museum] by guards, and be ‘received.’ Then, in the afternoon, I’d walk over to Ben Loper’s house in the community,” recalls Wyeth, “and would be so much more relaxed, so much more natural.” The Loper portrait, A Crow Flew By—the words uttered by the subject as Wyeth painted him in 1950—is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and numbers among the 74 paintings, watercolors, and drawings in the traveling exhibition “Andrew Wyeth: Close Friends,” which debuted at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, where it can be seen through the 13th of this month.
It is the first public overview of the artist’s depictions of the people and sites in a small African American community in Chadd’s Ford, which had been known as “Little Africa” and originated as a Quaker stop on the Underground Railroad. As a child, Wyeth played with the descendants of those men and women who settled in the region, and throughout his adult life, he painted them. His sensuous depictions of Moore, who began posing for him in 1997, bring to mind the nude images of the blonde Helga Testorf, a German neighbor Wyeth secretly painted between 1971 and 1985. “I’m involved with the people I paint,” he says. “They become my friends.”
The show grew out of a visit to the Brandywine museum by Kim Sessums, a physician, sculptor, and collector from Brookhaven, Mississippi. In 1996 Sessums had made a portrait bust of Wyeth, and he sent a picture to the artist for approval. Wyeth responded by inviting him to come to Chadd’s Ford and “get it right.” In the end, the painter was pleased with the sculpture, and Sessums, inspired by their many conversations, wrote an essay on Wyeth’s African American pictures, exploring the relationship between the painter and the painted. “Betsy Wyeth was astonished at how uncannily the essay coincided with their small exhibition,” says Sessums, “and invited me to see it.”
Sessums approached R. Andrew Maass, director of the Mississippi Museum of Art, with the idea of organizing a more complete exhibition, bringing in works from major institutions and private collections. “Without a doubt, we wanted that show,” says Maass. “There is no way the museum could let such an opportunity pass by.” The Wyeths were pleased by the proposal but stipulated that the exhibition must travel to areas in the Deep South with large African American populations. After its Jackson run, the show will be on view at the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina (from June 6 through August 26), and the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia (from September 15 through December 31). “We’ve had requests from museums in New York, Washington State, Illinois, all over the country,” says René Paul Barilleaux, the chief curator of the Mississippi Museum and co-organizer—with the Wyeths and Mary Landa, their curator—of the exhibition. “But the Wyeths wanted the show to stay in the South.”
At the time Wyeth was making many of the paintings, Mississippi’s officially segregationist society would not have permitted them to be exhibited in the state’s art museum. But since passage of the civil-rights laws in the 1960s, race relations in Mississippi have slowly improved. Thirty years after civil-rights leader Medgar Evers was slain, his murderer was finally convicted, and as the Wyeth show opened, the Mississippi attorney general was working on a new murder trial for the 12 men accused of killing civil-rights workers Andrew Schwerner, Michael Goodman, and James Chaney outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964. And today museum audiences are often racially diverse. “Art reflects what’s happening in the society, and museums can be agents of social change,” says Maass. “The concerns today are not those of the ’60s or ’70s, when whites would object to the show—or even that blacks would object to a white, male painter being the presenter of black images.” Instead, Maass has been worried, he says, about reaction to the nude portraits, which Wyeth began to paint in the 1930s, with a woman named Evelyn Smith as his model. “The black community here takes a proprietary interest in protecting black women from their historic abuse by white men,” he explains.
The last gallery in the Mississippi show is devoted to Wyeth’s images of Senna Moore. In one, she stands naked, nymphlike in a hollow tree; in another, she is sensually wrapped in a sheer black caftan. In And Bells on Her Toes (1997), she looks like a Nubian queen, with her hair braided and bejeweled, and in The Privy (1995), Wyeth shows her as a country girl darting nude from an outhouse toward a building nearly hidden by a large haystack that recalls the grassy foreground of his famous Christina’s World. Her nipples are bright red, the only spot of color in the work.
“I have no problem with these images having been painted by a white man. It is good for us to have that,” says James Powell, director of the Museum of African American and African Art in Jackson. “Maybe it will encourage others to create and exhibit African American art. I saw style, sophistication, exquisite beauty, and craftsmanship.”
Gwendolyn Magee, an African American fiber artist from Jackson, admits that before she saw the show, she had concerns about “the extent to which Wyeth may have exploited these people.” But, she says, “I found his work showed such respect for his subjects, and explored their personality and character. The way, for example, he painted Mother Archie’s church, from a variety of angles, at different times of the year, over a period of years.” The “Little Africa” community was situated around the church, an octagonal building that was formerly a Quaker schoolhouse. When he was only 16, Wyeth painted Burial at Archies, a haunting graveside scene in the stony, snow-covered churchyard. “Wyeth’s paintings’ subdued palette and meticulous realism are warmed by an intimacy with the subjects that is revealing and rewarding,” writes local art critic Sherry Lucas in the Clarion Ledger, a Jackson daily.
For the show, Wyeth provides a short biography of his cast of characters, many of whom are no longer living. And Betsy James Wyeth writes in her introduction in the accompanying catalogue (jointly published by the Mississippi Museum of Art and the University of Washington Press) of the “everlasting warmth and affection” the Wyeths feel for them. The book’s text consists of brief captions in which Andrew Wyeth comments on the subject, circumstance, and experience of creating the images. “They were easy friendships,” he says of his relationships with his models. “They posed whenever I asked them to. How pure it seemed, to be able to paint where they lived. It was not studio painting.” In Chester County (1962), for instance, Tom Clark, an elderly black man, is shown upstairs in his bedroom. Bald with a white stubble beard and strikingly high cheekbones, he is depicted in profile, seated in a wooden armchair beside a quilt-covered bed. “What struck me,” writes Andrew in the book, “was that faded blue wall and the way the stovepipe became almost a crown.”
Recently, the Wyeths laid out and examined more than 50 watercolor and pencil drawings of the late Tom Clark. “He welcomed me so easily. I painted him in every angle—seated, lying down, bending over. I lived with him for almost a month,” Wyeth says. “He would cook for me.” The artist gave a study he did for That Gentleman (1960), which also features Clark, to the actor Morgan Freeman, who was so moved by the “Little Africa” images that he volunteered to narrate the show’s accompanying audio guide without pay.
The modeling fees Wyeth’s subjects earned were no doubt particularly appreciated during the hard days of the Depression. The artist also gave each of them one or more working drawings of their portraits. “I’m just sorry,” he says, “that they didn’t live to see the book.”
Mary Lynn Kotz is a contributing editor of ARTnews.
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LEONARD E.B. ANDREWS, BUYER OF ANDREW WYETH ART
Leonard E. B. Andrews, who rocked the art world when he bought 240 previously unknown Andrew Wyeth works depicting a mysterious, sometimes nude woman known as Helga — and then rocked it again when he sold them three years later at a big profit — died on Jan. 2 at his home in Malvern, Pa. He was 83.
The cause was prostate cancer, said Kathleen Jamieson, president of the National Arts Program, which runs art exhibitions for aspiring artists and which was started by Mr. Andrews.
Mr. Andrews did stints as a banker, credit-card pioneer and broker and put out a temporary newspaper when unions struck nine New York newspapers in 1962 and 1963.
He made his fortune publishing expensive newsletters on subjects like bankruptcy, asbestos and Iranian assets. For seven years he wrote a daily column of inspirational thoughts for The Daily News called “Ponder This.”
But Mr. Andrews’s celebrity came from his purchase in 1986 of a large cache of paintings and drawings by Mr. Wyeth, who died on Friday. When he sold them at a profit of perhaps 600 percent, he poured the money into the art program he had started to help municipal employees and other amateurs exhibit their art. It now has 85 shows in 44 states.
Mr. Wyeth had largely kept the Helga pictures a secret. When Art & Antiques magazine disclosed their existence, and reported that Mr. Wyeth’s wife, Betsy, had said the works represented “love,” the pictures made a splash. “Helga” was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and the art was shown at the National Gallery of Art, which seldom exhibits work by living artists.
Enthusiasm fizzled slightly when it became known that the model, Helga Testorf, had long lived near Mr. Wyeth and that Mrs. Wyeth had denied suspecting a sexual relationship.
Mr. Andrews played the role of the unknown collector and casual friend of Mr. Wyeth who had just happened to allow Mr. Andrews to see the Helga work. He snapped them up for an estimated $6 million.
“I knew it was a national treasure,” Mr. Andrews said.
Leonard Edward Bryant Andrews, an only child, was born on March 31, 1925, in Nacogdoches, Tex. His mother was a painter and sculptor.
At 17 he volunteered for the Army and served as a bomber pilot in World War II. He then attended Southern Methodist University and flew a bomber in the Korean War.
After working for a bank in Dallas, Mr. Andrews joined the Uni-Serv Corporation, an early credit-card company. When printers stuck New York City newspapers in 1962, he proposed soliciting advertising from Uni-Serv customers to publish a paper during the strike, according to Editor & Publisher.
The resulting paper, The New York Standard, with Mr. Andrews as associate publisher, was the largest of several such strike papers. It produced 67 issues with a peak circulation exceeding 400,000.
Mr. Andrews later worked as a grocery-chain executive and in the underwriting department of an investment firm. He said the idea for a newsletter business came to him in 1970 as he ate breakfast at a cafe in the French Pyrenees and read about the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Transportation Company.
He began by chasing details of the Penn Central case in a regular newsletter, then added other big bankruptcies. Later came yet more newsletters on topics of business distress like asbestos litigation. He charged large sums: $1,100 annually for the bankruptcy roundup. He sold the company in 1985.
Mr. Andrews left no immediate survivors. He described himself as a private man. In 1990, he had a short marriage to Patsy Pope, a San Francisco socialite, who published reports said was his third wife.
In 1989 Mr. Andrews bought 290 more Wyeth works on paper, including drawings for Mr. Wyeth’s most famous painting, “Christina’s World.”
“Andy called to congratulate me,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. “He says I now have more Wyeths than anyone in the world, whatever that means.”
In November 1989 Mr. Andrews sold them all to an unidentified Japanese buyer for $40 million to $50 million. In turn, that buyer sold them to another unidentified buyer in 2005.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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PEDRO AGUILAR, INVENTIVE MAMBO DANCER
Pedro Aguilar, whose innovative style of mambo dancing made him a legend at the Palladium ballroom in Manhattan and a one-man encyclopedia of Latin dance, died Tuesday in Miami. He was 81 and lived in Hallandale, Fla.
The cause was heart failure, said Barbara Craddock, his dance partner for the past 11 years.
Mr. Aguilar, known as Cuban Pete, translated his footwork as a boxer and his childhood tap-dance training into a rhythmically complex, visually arresting dancing style that electrified audiences at the Palladium, the premier showcase for Latin music in the 1940s and 1950s. By his own count he invented 100 signature foot, torso and hand movements with names like the Porpoise, the Shimmy Shimmy and the Prayer.
“He had an impeccable sense of timing that allowed him to dance inside the music,” said Ms. Craddock, who first saw Mr. Aguilar dance in the 1950s. “He painted a picture of the music with his feet.”
Mr. Aguilar was born in Puerto Rico and moved to the United States with his mother at 3. While staying with an uncle in Washington, he was taught tap dancing by a maid who reasoned that if she could hear him tapping out steps on a box, he was not getting into mischief. His mother later taught him the danzón and the bolero.
His parents’ turbulent marriage made his childhood difficult. After he rejoined them in Manhattan, he and his siblings were placed in an orphanage and later put into foster care, from which he emerged, as he put it, “an angry young man” who worked out his rage in the boxing ring.
Encouraged by the former Cuban boxer and singer Miguelito Valdez, he entered a dance contest at the Palladium in 1950 and won the top prize, $1,000. After the bandleaders Tito Puente and Machito helped him master the mambo’s tricky clave rhythm, he went on to win dozens of contests and lasting fame as the mambo craze swept the country. His partner was Millie Donay, who would later become his first wife.
One night the bandleader Noro Morales introduced Mr. Aguilar from the stage of the Conga Room as “Cuban Pete, King of the Latin Beat,” a reference to a hit record by Desi Arnaz, who was in the audience. The name stuck.
Mr. Aguilar made a career as a dancer, teacher and choreographer, working for Warner Brothers for many years. As a consultant on the 1992 film “The Mambo Kings,” he taught Antonio Banderas to mambo. He collaborated with Edward Villella on the ballet “Mambo No. 2 a.m.,” which had its premiere with the Miami City Ballet in 2000.
He is survived by his sisters, Socorra Blackman, Chickie Masdeu and Yvette Masdeu; his brother, David Masdeu; his daughters, Denise Gerard and Petrina Aguilar; his son, Sean Peter Aguilar; and two grandchildren.
In 2003, asked by the Puerto Rico Herald to explain his mambo style, Mr. Aguilar said: “I feel it. Whatever is inside me, I let it go. Sometimes I am hypnotized by what I am doing.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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RICARDO MONTALBAN, STAR OF ‘FANTASY ISLAND’ AND ‘CORINTHIAN LEATHER’ COMMERCIALS
MGM, via Photofest
Before “Fantasy Island”: Ricardo Montalbán and Esther Williams in the film “On an Island With You” (1948).
Ricardo Montalbán, one of Hollywood’s first Latino leading men, who had a long career as a television and movie actor but whose lingering fame perhaps owes most to a less august role as the debonair concierge of “Fantasy Island,” died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 88.
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ABC, via Photofest
Mr. Montalbán, right, as Mr. Roarke, his signature role on “Fantasy Island,” with Hervé Villechaize as Tattoo.
His death was announced by Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti, who represents the Hollywood district where Mr. Montalbán lived and where a theater is named for him, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Garcetti did not give a cause, the Associated Press said.
Every week on “Fantasy Island,” a fairy tale of wish fulfillment and exotic luxury that was shown on ABC from 1978 to 1984, a planeload of visitors with unachieved dreams flew in to a remote resort somewhere in the Pacific and were greeted by their dream facilitators, the sleek and suavely welcoming Mr. Roarke, played by Mr. Montalbán, and his assistant, an irrepressibly spirited dwarf named Tattoo, played by Hervé Villechaize. They became one of television’s most legendary odd couples.
Though Mr. Roarke became Mr. Montalbán’s signature role, it was a mere bump in the timeline of a career that spanned decades, media and genres. Mr. Montalbán embodied stereotypes, fought them and transcended them in his years in show business. His entire reputation, both as smooth Latin seducer and parodist of a smooth Latin seducer, was capsulized in a television advertisement from the mid-1970s in which he served as pitchman for the Cordoba, a luxury car being introduced by Chrysler. He purred over the automobile’s assets, including the seats, upholstered, he said, in “soft, Corinthian leather,” a phrase that became a campy giggle-inducer, especially after it became known that there is no such thing as Corinthian leather, from Corinth or anywhere else: the description was just a marketing invention.
Ricardo Gonzalo Pedro Montalbán y Merino was born in Mexico City on Nov. 25, 1920, and moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to live with his older brother Carlos, who was pursuing a career in show business. The brothers traveled to New York in 1940, and Ricardo landed a bit part in “Her Cardboard Lover,” a play starring Tallulah Bankhead.
The next year Mr. Montalbán returned to Mexico, where his mother was dying. He made a dozen Spanish-language films in Mexico, becoming a star. In 1944 he married Georgiana Young, the half-sister of the film actress Loretta Young. The couple went on to raise four children in Los Angeles: Mark, Victor, Laura and Anita. Georgiana Young died in 2007.
Mr. Montalbán made his Hollywood debut in 1947 in “Fiesta,” a musical in which he was cast as an aspiring toreador with a twin sister, improbably played by the movie’s star, Esther Williams. They also starred together a year later in “On an Island With You.” The next year he was signed as a contract player for MGM, and specialized in Latin-lover roles, perfecting if not defining the stereotype. He played opposite Cyd Charisse (“Mark of the Renegade”), Shelley Winters (“My Man and I”) and Pier Angeli (“Sombrero”), among others. A 1953 film in which he starred with Lana Turner was actually called “Latin Lovers.”
Like other minority actors of the time, Mr. Montalbán, with his dark good looks and his Spanish accent, seemed to be a kind of racial utility player. This was the era of the western, and he repeatedly played American Indians, including a Blackfoot war chief in “Across the Wide Missouri.” He appeared as an ancient Babylonian in “The Queen of Babylon” and as a Japanese Kabuki actor in “Sayonara.” In the Broadway musical “Jamaica,” set on a mythical Caribbean island, he starred opposite Lena Horne in a cast that was, aside from himself, entirely African-American. For his performance he was nominated for a Tony in 1958.
As a performer Mr. Montalbán was fluid and broad, the kind of actor who could telegraph his intent with intelligence and humor. His ability to move easily between comedy and drama kept him busy long after his beefcake appeal began to fade. Throughout the ’50s and ’60s Mr. Montalbán worked constantly, mostly in television, including performances on his sister-in-law’s series, “The Loretta Young Show.”
In 1971, troubled by the way he was asked to portray Mexicans, he helped to found Nosotros, an advocacy group for Latinos working in the movie and television industry. As president of the organization, he later said: “I put my career aside and dedicated my heart and soul for over a year and a half to this new organization, going to radio and television to talk about it, talking to directors, producers, writers. I received tremendous support, but there were also some negative repercussions. I was accused of being a militant and as a result I lost jobs.”
In 1967, during the first season of “Star Trek,” he was a guest star as Khan Noonien Singh, a tyrannical superhuman villain; he reprised the role in the 1982 “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” giving a performance that was gleefully and confidently weird.
“With his fierce profile, long white hair, manful décolletage and Space Age jewelry, Mr. Montalbán looks like either the world’s oldest rock star or its hippest Indian chief,” Janet Maslin wrote, reviewing the film in The New York Times. “Either way, he looks terrific.”
In recent years Mr. Montalbán found work in children’s entertainment, appearing in “Spy Kids” movies, and providing the voice of characters on the television series “Dora the Explorer” and in the 2006 film “The Ant Bully,” in which he plays the leader of an ant colony’s ant council.
“I always had Ricardo Montalbán in my head,” John A. Davis, the director and writer of “The Ant Bully,” said in an interview. “I don’t know why, but I just always heard that voice because he’s so noble and powerful and strong.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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‘FANTASY ISLAND” (How can I ever forget Tattoo’s immortal line: “The plane! The plane!”)
Then there is the Chrsyler “Cordoba” commercial. It’s funny. When I heard that Ricardo had passed away, the first image that came to mind was that car commercial. I could not remember the commercial, but, after all these years, I can still hear, as if yesterday, Ricardo’s smooth, silky voice saying: “Soft, Corinthian leather.“
Rest in peace, Ricardo.
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PATRICK MCGOOHAN, STAR OF ‘THE PRISONER’
Patrick McGoohan, a multifaceted actor who spun television legend by creating and starring in the 1960s program “The Prisoner,” a mysterious allegory about a mysterious man in a mysterious seaside village that became a cult classic, died on Jan. 13 in Los Angeles. He was 80.
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ITC, via WNYC
Patrick McGoohan in the mysterious title role of “The Prisoner,” a 1960s television series.
His death was announced on the Web site of Six of One — the Prisoner Official Appreciation Society, netreach.net/~sixofone, of which Mr. McGoohan was the honorary president for 32 years. His agent, Sharif Ali, said Mr. McGoohan had died suddenly after a brief illness.
Mr. McGoohan’s career ranged from success on the stages of London’s West End to starring in a popular spy series called “Secret Agent” in the United States. He was critically praised for his King Edward I in Mel Gibson’s 1995 film “Braveheart” and won Emmys as a guest star on “Colombo” in 1975 and 1990.
But it was as the lead character in “The Prisoner,” identified only as No. 6, that he struck a remarkable chord with audiences, one that has continued to reverberate in re-runs, festivals, university courses, doctoral theses and a quarterly magazine — all on the strength of just 17 episodes. The show’s legions of interpreters have perceived elements of the cold war, mob mentality, mind control and more in the show.
Broadcast on CBS in 1968 and 1969, “The Prisoner” tells the story of an unnamed spy who resigns his position and is then gassed in his apartment as he packs his bags. He wakes up in the Village, a resortlike community that is actually a high-tech prison. In each episode, No. 6 struggles with the camp authority figure, No. 2, who pressures him to say why he resigned. No. 2 is played by a different actor each time.
At the beginning of each episode, No. 6 declares: “I am not a number. I am a free man.”
“The Prisoner” remains “one of the most enigmatic and fascinating series ever produced for television” the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago said on its Web site, adding that some critics believe it to be “television’s first masterpiece.”
A question that has long intrigued fans is whether “The Prisoner” grew directly out of “Danger Man,” as “Secret Agent” was known in Britain. “Danger Man” began in London in 1960, then ran briefly on CBS in 1961 as a half-hour show before becoming an hourlong show on CBS in the mid-1960s.
A 1964 episode had Mr. McGoohan’s character, John Drake, infiltrating a spy school in the middle of nowhere that the instructors had scant hope of leaving. Did Drake later materialize as No. 6?
Mr. McGoohan always said no, although three episodes of “Danger Man” were shot at the Hotel Portmeirion resort, a series of fantasy buildings on the Welsh seacoast, which he acknowledged was an inspiration for the Village. He said in 1977 that boredom with “Danger Man” had inspired him to create “The Prisoner,” for which he wrote and directed some episodes.
Patrick Joseph McGoohan was born on March 19, 1928, in Astoria, Queens. When he was 6 months old, his parents returned to their native Ireland, then to Sheffield, England, when farming proved unprofitable. He dropped out of school at 16 and took jobs where he could find them, like working on a chicken farm.
Aspiring to the theater, Mr. McGoohan started as a stagehand at the Sheffield Playhouse and worked his way up to leading man. He went on to become well-known for Ibsen and Shakespeare roles and earned praise for his performance in 1955 in a West End production of “Moby Dick Rehearsed,” written and directed by Orson Welles. In 1951, he married Joan Drummond, an actress. She survives him, along with three daughters, Catherine, Anne and Frances; five grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
In the 1950s, Mr. McGoohan did a series of films for the Rank Organization, a British movie company. By the time he was the popular star of “Danger Man,” Mr. McGoohan was the highest-paid television actor in Britain.
Mr. McGoohan’s many film roles included a doctor in David Cronenberg’s 1981 film “Scanners,” itself a cult classic. In 1977, he starred in the television series “Rafferty” as a retired Army doctor adjusting to civilian life. He appeared on Broadway only once, in 1985, as a British spy in Hugh Whitmore’s “Pack of Lies,” for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk award as best actor.
In 2000, Mr. McGoohan reprised his role as No. 6, at least in voice, in an episode of “The Simpsons.” Homer Simpson, as No. 5, stole No. 6’s boat and escaped.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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As a child, ‘The Prisoner” was one of my favourite shows, right up there with “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”, and “I Spy”.
Rest in peace, Patrick.
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TRAMMELL CROW, INNOVATIVE DEVELOPER
Mark Graham for The New York Times
Trammell Crow in 1996. His company went public in 1997.
Trammell Crow, who began his legendary business career as the teller behind the window H-to-M at the Mercantile National Bank in Dallas and rose to become one of America’s largest real estate developers and landlords, died Wednesday at his farm near Tyler, Tex.
He was 94.
The death was announced by Cynthia Pharr Lee, a family spokeswoman.
Forbes in 1971 and The Wall Street Journal in 1986 called Mr. Crow the largest landlord in the United States. The Journal said the company he founded was then the nation’s biggest developer.
Mr. Crow once had interests in nearly 300 million square feet of developed real estate, comprising 8,000 properties in more than 100 cities.
His projects, always done with partners, included the Dallas Market Center, the Peachtree Center in Atlanta and the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, and reached from Kansas City to Hong Kong to Brussels.
When Fortune magazine named him to the United States Business Hall of Fame in 1987, it called him “one of the most innovative developers in history.”
The traditional way of developing real estate was to use other people’s money to build a building, depreciate it, sell it and then deploy the profit to start the process all over again with another building. But Mr. Crow’s formula was to hold on.
“You can get rich selling real estate,” he often said, “but you can only get wealthy by owning it.”
William Bragg Ewald in his book “Trammel Crow: A Legacy of Real Estate Innovation” (2005) wrote that many landlords try to avoid tenants for fear they might ask for something, but that Mr. Crow aggressively pursued fixing tenants’ problems.
He signed customers to the shortest lease possible, saying this apparent sacrifice of long-term security allowed him to charge ever-higher rents.
Clinging to properties meant he needed deep-pocketed partners. He first recruited stalwarts of the Dallas establishment like the civic leader John Stemmons. As he expanded nationally, he enlisted backers like David Rockefeller and Winthrop Rockefeller.
Undoubtedly his most important innovation, which he pioneered in 1948 on his first project, a Dallas warehouse, was to build buildings for which he had no tenants lined up in advance. He became, in his own words, “a confirmed gambler, a speculative builder.”
Trammell Crow, whose unusual first name was taken from a family surname, was born in Dallas on June 10, 1914. At 10, he began taking paying odd jobs until his father, a bookkeeper, forbade it. As the Depression deepened, the family needed the young man’s income, from jobs like plucking chickens and unloading boxcars.
After graduating from high school in 1932, he worked as a bank teller and studied accounting at night. He passed his C.P.A. exam in 1938 and joined Ernst & Ernst as an auditor. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he returned to Dallas in 1946.
He married Margaret Doggett in 1942. She survives him, as do his sons Robert, Howard, Harlan, Trammell S. and Stuart; his daughter, Lucy Billingsley; 16 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Mr. Crow managed his wife’s family’s grain elevator business in Dallas. He began winding it down while looking for better opportunities.
Rayovac, the battery maker, leased space in a warehouse. When it decided to move to larger quarters, Mr. Crow put together his first real estate deal. He got loans from an insurance company and a local bank to build a warehouse on land he had bought from Mr. Stemmons. He leased half the building to Rayovac and soon found a renter for the rest.
His business strategy was set. Mr. Crow and partners went on to build 50 warehouses in Dallas — and much else.
There were nonetheless plenty of the ups and downs that characterize the industry. In the 1970s, high interest rates, mounting debt and a glut of office space combined to hurt the company so badly that it sold off many properties. But it never stopped building new projects. By the 1980s, it claimed to be the biggest real estate developer in the country.
Mr. Crow stepped down as chief executive in 1977 but remained involved in deals. One that fell through was a plan for the Trammell Crow Company to be one of the developers of a wholesale computer and apparel mart from 40th to 42nd Street along Eighth Avenue as part of the redevelopment of Times Square. Mr. Crow made several trips to New York and personally steered the project before dropping out for undisclosed reasons.
Other partners also dropped out as the Times Square plan changed in almost every respect.
The Trammell Crow Company went public in 1997, and its shares began to trade on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2006, the company was sold to the CB Richard Ellis Group.
Mr. Crow was instrumental in bringing the Republican National Convention to Dallas in 1984. He and his wife were avid collectors of Asian art, for which they established a museum in Dallas.
Mr. Crow also came up with the idea for a bronze sculpture erected in 1995 on a downtown Dallas plaza of three cowboys and 70 six-foot-high longhorn steers. The local art community sneered. Cynics suggested he was really trying to forestall a new hotel on the site that could compete with one he owned nearby. The historically inclined groused that Dallas, unlike nearby Fort Worth, was never really a cow town.
“I have about 8 or 10 pieces from Rodin in my buildings here,” Mr. Crow said in an interview with The New York Times. “Under their sort of criticism, we shouldn’t have any sculpture from Rodin in Dallas. Rodin never even came to Dallas.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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DON GALLOWAY, A FAMILIAR ACTOR ON TELEVISION
Don Galloway, who played well-groomed, straight-arrow characters in myriad television shows and movies, most famously on the series “Ironside,” in which he was the sidekick of the wheelchair-bound detective played by Raymond Burr, died on Jan. 8 in Reno. He was 71.
His stepson, Robert Julian, announced the death to The Associated Press. Mr. Galloway’s first job in television was in 1962 on the soap opera “The Secret Storm,” and 23 years later he returned to daily daytime acting on “General Hospital.” He was also cast in a handful of movies — he played JoBeth Williams’s disdainful husband in “The Big Chill” — but made his name in prime time.
A slim man with the conventional good looks of a local news anchor, he spent eight seasons on “Ironside,” from 1967 to 1975, as the earnest and loyal investigator Sgt. Ed Brown. He also appeared in three dozen other series, including “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Love, American Style,” “Fantasy Island” “Hotel” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Dallas,” “MacGyver” and “Murder, She Wrote,” making him one of network television’s most familiar guest stars.
Mr. Galloway, a native of Kentucky, graduated from the University of Kentucky. After his acting career, he worked briefly for the sheriff’s department in San Bernardino County, Calif., and later moved to New Hampshire, where he wrote a column expressing libertarian views for The Manchester Union Leader. Mr. Galloway’s survivors include his wife, Linda Marie; two daughters from his first marriage, Tracy and Jennifer; two stepchildren, Sheila and Robert; three grandchildren; and a brother, Paul.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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DON GALLOWAY (AND THE CAST OF “IRONSIDE”) TRIBUTE:
Rest in peace, Don.
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HARLINGTON WOOD, JR., NEGOTIATOR DURING WOUNDED KNEE SIEGE
Harlington Wood Jr., a federal judge and former Justice Department official who was the government’s chief negotiator during the standoff with American Indian militants in South Dakota that became known as the siege of Wounded Knee, died Dec. 29 in Petersburg, Ill., near Springfield. He was 88.
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United Press International
Harlington Wood, former Justice Department official, emerged from a meeting with American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders.
The cause was complications of a stroke he had in 2002, said his wife, Cathryn.
It was in 1973 that Mr. Wood, then assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, found himself in the middle of a government face-off against a small band of its own citizens.
On Feb. 27, about 200 armed Indians, Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and members of an activist group, the American Indian Movement, took over the reservation hamlet of Wounded Knee, the site of a massacre in 1890 of 300 Sioux by American soldiers. Their idea was to draw attention to what they said was government mistreatment of Indians, corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal government complicity in discrimination.
United States marshals and American troops surrounded the town, and for 10 weeks the two sides traded sporadic fire. Two occupying Indians were killed.
On March 13, Mr. Wood became the first government official to enter Wounded Knee without a military escort. He met with the dissident leaders for two hours and pledged to return with a government proposal for a peace agreement. Five days later, after a trip to Washington, he did, bringing a proposal that was spurned by the occupying Indians and symbolically burned in front of reporters.
That was his last attempt at a negotiation. He became ill shortly afterward — “He used to say he came down with the Sioux flu,” his wife said — and his role was taken up by others. But he was often given credit as the icebreaker; his wedge into the intractable hostilities led to the agreement to end the occupation, which was signed May 6.
Mr. Wood, known to friends as Woody, was born April 17, 1920, in Springfield, Ill., and was often described by colleagues as Lincolnesque in appearance and demeanor. His father was a lawyer and a county judge.
After graduating from law school at the University of Illinois, Mr. Wood joined his father’s practice. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him United States attorney for the Southern District of Illinois. He joined the Justice Department as director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys in 1969.
He served in Chicago on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1976 to 1992, appointed by President Gerald R. Ford; previously, he had been appointed by President Richard M. Nixon to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois.
Mr. Wood’s first marriage ended in divorce.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Alexa Wood, of Glen Ellen, Calif., and two grandchildren.
Like many Springfield natives, Mr. Wood was an Abraham Lincoln buff. Perhaps surprisingly, he was chosen, as an untrained amateur, to play Lincoln in a 1952 professional theatrical production in nearby New Salem, Ill. More surprisingly, the production was reviewed by Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, who wrote favorably of both it and its star.
“The part of Lincoln is played modestly and honestly by Harlington Wood Jr., a tall, loose-jointed young lawyer in Springfield,” Mr. Atkinson wrote, adding: “He seems to be using his voice unnaturally, striving after an effect that he does not entirely achieve. But according to historians in the neighborhood, his manner, his height, his weight and his appearance are remarkably authentic for the part; and his performance solves happily the greatest problem in a Lincoln play.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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DON CALLENDER, RESTAURANT/FOOD ENTREPRENEUR
LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Don Callender, an entrepreneur with a passion for pies who built the home-based baking business of his mother, Marie Callender, into a popular brand, died on Wednesday in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 81.
The cause was injuries he suffered in a fall in 2007, said his wife, Katy.
Marie Callender and her husband, Cal, set up a wholesale bakery in Long Beach in 1948.
Marie worked long hours producing pies to sell to restaurants.
The pies were popular, and Don Callender came up with the idea of opening a pie and coffee shop in Orange, Calif., in 1964. Named after his mother, Marie Callender’s Pie Shops Inc. was so popular that Don Callender opened two more stores in the region, at first selling only pies.
After experimenting with various recipes, he added hamburgers, ham sandwiches, chili and corn bread to the menu.
By the time Don Callender sold the company in 1986 to Ramada for a reported $80 million, the chain had grown to 120 locations nationwide. The restaurants are now a unit of Castle Harlan.
Marie Callender died in 1995.
Don Callender continued to work in the restaurant business until the end, starting Babe’s Barbecue and Brewhouse outlets in Southern California and a Jackalope Ranch restaurant in Indio, Calif., that opened the day after he died.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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CLAUDE BERRI, FRENCH FILMMAKER OF SWEEP AND CHARM
Claude Berri, who as a director, producer, screenwriter and actor was among the most influential figures in the French film industry over the past 40 years, died Monday in Paris. He was 74 and was described after his death by President Nicolas Sarkozy as “the great ambassador of French cinema” to the world.
The cause was a stroke, his agent, Dominique Segall, said in a statement. Mr. Berri had been admitted to the hospital on Saturday with a “cerebral vascular problem,” he said.
Mr. Berri was, by and large, a filmmaker of mainstream sensibility who favored stories of either quirky charm — many drawn from his own life — or grand sweep. His best known films as a director include “The Two of Us” (1967), which tells a story much like that of his own childhood during the Nazi occupation of France, in which a Jewish boy is schooled in Catholicism and sent off to live with an anti-Semitic old man; and the twin 1986 films “Jean de Florette” and “Manon des Sources” (“Manon of the Springs”), together an extravagant adaptation of a classic French novel set in Provence by Marcel Pagnol, “L’Eau des Collines” (“Water of the Hills”).
But he was probably more influential as a producer, working with directors like Milos Forman (“Valmont”), Roman Polanski (“Tess”) and Philippe de Broca (“L’Africain”).
With his penchant for lush cinematography and scoring and audience-pleasing plot resolution, Mr. Berri was often credited with melding the wry, oblique sensibility of French New Age cinema with the more commercial outlook of Hollywood. Often described as impulsive, imperious and driven, he nonetheless worked successfully with star performers like Yves Montand, Catherine Denueve, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart and Gérard Depardieu.
He did not get along with everyone, however. On the set of his 1997 film, “Lucie Aubrac,” based on the life of a heroine of the French resistance, he abruptly fired his lead actress, Juliette Binoche, for having too many opinions about how she should play the role.
“When a director is so possessive about his film it’s a nightmare,” Ms. Binoche said in an interview in The New York Times shortly after her dismissal. “You can’t work with someone like that.”
Mr. Berri’s early work as a director included several comedies in which he played himself or someone very much like him: a character, often named Claude, with a sentimental devotion to his parents and a goofy, Chaplin-esque weakness for women. Among these films were “Mazel Tov, ou Le Mariage,” (“Marry Me! Marry Me!”); “Le Sex Shop,” “Le Cinema de Papa,” and “Le Mâle du Siècle” (“Male of the Century”).
Mr. Berri was a contemporary and friend of François Truffaut, and his work was often compared, though not always favorably, to the Truffaut trilogy — “Les 400 Coups” (“The 400 Blows”); “Baisers Volés” (“Stolen Kisses”) and “Domicile Conjugal” (“Bed and Board”), which featured Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel.
Among Mr. Berri’s grander projects were “Germinal,” an adaptation of Zola’s 19th-century novel about exploited French coal miners, and “Uranus,” a brooding film about French collaborators during the war that probes the nature of their guilt. Both starred Mr. Depardieu.
At his death Mr. Berri was directing his 20th film, “Trésor” (“Treasure”), a marital comedy. “Berri was laughing all the time on the set,” Alain Chabat, who was starring in the film, said in an interview on Monday. He last saw Mr. Berri on Thursday, he said. Mr. Chabat described the director as “brilliant and curious, a very funny guy with incredible intuition,” who was nonetheless sure of his own mind and a bit of a martinet.
“He was very precise, very demanding on a set,” and “very honest,” Mr. Chabat said. “Sometimes his honesty would go too far.”
Claude Berel Langmann — he changed his name as an adult for professional reasons, so it would sound more French — was born in Paris on July 1, 1934. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, placed their son in the care of a non-Jewish family during the occupation. They worked as furriers, and after the war young Claude, who had been an indifferent student, started his work life alongside them until he began taking acting classes.
His first film, a short called “Le Poulet” (“The Chicken”), made with loans from friends, was about a boy who tries to save a pet from becoming dinner by sneaking an egg into its nest every morning. He was wholly inexperienced as a director, but his instincts were sure; it received notice at the Venice Biennale and eventually made it to the United States, winning a 1965 Academy Award — his only one — for best short film.
The investment his friends made in “The Chicken” turned into a company, Renn Productions, that made dozens of films. In the late 1980s Mr. Berri sold half the company — then worth about $50 million — to support a new hobby, collecting contemporary art.
His collection eventually included works by Cy Twombly, Yves Klein and Robert Ryman and became one of the most important in France.
His survivors include two sons, Darius and Thomas, and a sister, Arlette.
Maïa de la Baume contributed reporting from Paris.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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Here are videos of two of my favourite Claude Berri films:
“JEAN DE FLORETTE”:
“MANON OF THE SPRING”:
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TOM O’HORGAN, CREATOR OF ‘HAIR’
Tom O’Horgan, a famously innovative director who brought a Downtown, countercultural sensibility to Uptown theater, most exuberantly in the 1968 hippie-celebration-cum-musical “Hair,” one of four shows he had on Broadway at the same time in 1971, died Sunday at his home in Venice, Fla. He was 84.
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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times, 2007
Tom O’Horgan in his museum-like Manhattan loft, which was known for parties and salons.
His death was announced by his friend Marc Cohen. No cause was given.
Mr. O’Horgan suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Mr. Cohen, who with his wife, Julia, had been caring for Mr. O’Horgan, said he had moved from Sarasota , Fla., to Venice, Fla., at Thanksgiving.
Mr. O’Horgan’s loft at 840 Broadway (at 13th Street) in Manhattan, which he left in 2007, was known for parties and salons attended by theatrical and artistic figures like Norman Mailer and Beverly Sills.
Among Mr. O’Horgan’s other Broadway plays were “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Lenny” and “Inner City.” His earlier work at La Mama Experimental Theater Club included challenging productions like “Futz!” “Tom Paine” and “The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria” that showcased Mr. O’Horgan’s wittily physical approach to theater.
As a composer, singer, actor, director and musician himself, Mr. O’Horgan espoused a concept of “total theater,” throwing together acrobatics, dance, pantomime and a riot of music that seemed like chaos to some members of the theatrical establishment. But to the younger generation and its fellow travelers, “Hair,” perhaps more than any other play of the 1960s, was the truest, most enduring expression of the hippie scene.
Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times in 1969 that the show exuded “a kind of radiant freshness.” He said that it seemed “as though the whole thing is swiftly, deftly, and dazzlingly being improvised before your eyes.”
Mr. O’Horgan, who was once called the “Busby Berkeley of the acid set” though he said he did not take drugs himself, would gladly have gone even further with “Hair,” which opened in 1968 and transformed a mildly successful off-Broadway musical into a Broadway hit. He proposed creating a hippie community of actors living right in the theater so that the audiences would see their laundry and garbage as they entered. It didn’t happen.
As it was, the director prepared actors by having them undress in slow motion, praying to God and Buddha and jostling one another. He had them deliver lines while being carried about or doing handstands. He said he thought of his work as “kinetic sculpture.”
Mr. O’Horgan is credited with discovering or helping discover the actors Frederic Forrest, Ben Vereen and Ron Perlman. He was nominated for a Tony in 1969 for best direction of a musical for “Hair”; won three Drama Desk Awards for his Off Broadway direction; and was named theatrical director of the year by Newsweek in 1968. A new Broadway production of “Hair” is scheduled to open on March 31 at the Al Hirschfeld Theater. Tom O’Horgan was born in Chicago on May 3, 1924. His father, who owned a suburban newspaper, was a frustrated actor who took his son to shows and concerts and built footlights and a wind machine for him. He grew up singing in churches and writing plays. At 12, the boy wrote an opera darkly titled “Doom of the Earth.”
Mr. O’Horgan studied at DePaul University in Chicago, where he learned to play dozens of instruments. After college, he played as a harpist with orchestras and performed with Second City, the Chicago improvisatory group. He moved to New York and began acting at places like Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village while supporting himself by performing in night clubs. His act was doing improvisational humor as he played the harp.
His first assignment for La Mama was to direct “The Maids,” by Jean Genet. Unlike the director of an off-Broadway production the year before, Mr. O’Horgan complied with the playwright’s instructions to cast men in the three female roles. He became a protégé of Ellen Stewart, La Mama’s founder and director, and by 1968 directed about 50 plays, films and happenings with the troupe.
He drew favorable notice when the troupe toured Europe. Elsa Gress, a Danish novelist and playwright, wrote in Drama Review in 1969, “In this period, Tom had occasion to realize his Renaissance idea of ‘the whole actor,’ or juggler, who could dance, sing, play instruments, stand on his left ear while acting, and incidentally say lines.”
Mr. O’Horgan, who amassed an impressive collection of musical unusual instruments at his 3,000-square-foot loft, left no immediate survivors; in the fall of 2007, he opened his museum-like space to the public for a sale of his instruments, theatrical memorabilia and art.
He never repeated his success on Broadway and in a 1993 interview with The Times spoke of his Broadway success as “an aberration of some sort.” He said he had been put on “an enemies list” by critics and other members of the theatrical establishment.
He seemed to wince when he remembered one legacy of “Hair” in the interview, saying, “Every play that opened in the next six months had to have an obligatory nude scene, no matter what, usually in the most tasteless possible fashion.”
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One of my Top 10 favourite musicals. How can I ever forget the songs: “Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In”, “Good Morning, Starshine” and the title song itself. . . .”Hair.” The opening credits. . . .is that Treat Williams wearing a shag style? And who can forget those two horses dancing and prancing with such precision? When the Moon is in the seventh hour, and Jupiter’s aligned with Mars. . . . .
Rest in peace, Claude.
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 
Ricardo Montalban epitomized the suave host image; i just recently found out he starred in the Wrath of Khan too, crazy