DENISE JEFFERSON, DIRECTOR OF THE ALVIN AILEY SCHOOL
Denise Jefferson, left, with Jill Biden at a rehearsal of Ailey School dancers in 2009.
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: July 20, 2010
Denise Jefferson, an internationally known dance educator who as the longtime director of the Ailey School oversaw the training of generations of world-class performers, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 65 and a Manhattan resident.
The cause was ovarian cancer, according to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, of which the Ailey School is the official training academy.
A member of the Ailey School faculty since 1974, Ms. Jefferson was its director from 1984 until her death.
With Judith Jamison, the company’s artistic director, and Sylvia Waters, the artistic director of Ailey II, its junior ensemble, Ms. Jefferson was one of the triumvirate charged with continuing the work of Mr. Ailey, the dancer and choreographer who founded the company in 1958 and ran it until his death in 1989.
Under Ms. Jefferson’s stewardship, the school, which Mr. Ailey established in 1969 with 125 pupils, grew to comprise a student body of more than 3,500 dancers from around the world and a faculty of 75. At the school, located with the company on West 55th Street, students can study a wide range of dance styles, from modern to jazz to classical ballet.
Many have gone on to careers with the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, Ballet National de España and the Ailey company itself, among other troupes. (Nearly 90 percent of its current dancers were trained at the Ailey School, according to the company.)
Ms. Jefferson was also known for helping create an unusual degree program, run jointly by the Ailey School and Fordham University, in which dancers can earn a bachelor of fine arts at the university’s Lincoln Center campus.
Begun by Ms. Jefferson and Edward J. Bristow, then a Fordham dean, the program, which admitted its first students in 1998, is believed be the first association of its kind between a dance organization and a traditional liberal arts college. Ms. Jefferson directed the program until her death.
Denise Adele Jefferson was born on Nov. 1, 1944, in Chicago. At 8, she began ballet studies with Edna McRae, a noted teacher there. Though she became a skilled dancer, Ms. Jefferson did not plan on a career as a ballerina, for an elemental reason: as she told Dance magazine in 1999, “I had never seen anyone who wasn’t white in a ballet company.”
Before long, however, she discovered the world of modern dance. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in French from Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and a master’s in French from New York University, Ms. Jefferson received a scholarship to the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. She began her professional career with the Pearl Lang Dance Company.
Ms. Jefferson’s marriage to John Roy Harper II ended in divorce. She is survived by her mother, Irma Jefferson; her sister, Margo Jefferson, a former book and theater critic for The New York Times; and a daughter, Francesca Harper, a dancer, choreographer and singer.
Though Ms. Jefferson confessed in interviews to having been somewhat shy onstage, she appeared to have had no trouble drawing out her students.
“The individual is unique and special, and we are here to celebrate that and help the dancers discover that,” she told The Christian Science Monitor in 1992. “We believe you can’t be a dancer if your spirit is restrained and cut off. You must touch that special thing inside.”
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PAULO MOURA, A FORCE IN BRAZILIAN MUSIC
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: July 18, 2010
Paulo Moura, a virtuoso instrumentalist and a composer, arranger and orchestrator of numerous styles of Brazilian popular music, died on July 12 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 77.
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Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Paulo Moura, who played the clarinet and the saxophone.
Mr. Moura’s death was announced on his Web site, paulomoura.com. According to reports in the Brazilian news media, the cause was lymphoma.
A master of both the clarinet and the saxophone, Mr. Moura was known for his versatility, playing and writing music that ranged in style from jazz, chorinho, samba and bossa nova to classical. His first solo recording, released in 1956, was a version of Paganini’s “Moto Perpetuo,” and late in his career he wrote, performed and conducted “Urban Fantasy for Saxophone and Symphonic Orchestra.”
In 1992 Mr. Moura won a prize as best soloist at the Mozart Festival in Moscow, and in 2000 he was awarded a Latin Grammy for the recording “Pixinguinha,” live performances of a collection of songs associated with the composer of that same name, who is considered the father of Brazilian popular music.
Mr. Moura had a long connection to the great Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. During the bossa nova boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mr. Moura played with Jobim and other luminaries of the genre, among them Sergio Mendes. As a member of the group Bossa Rio, which also included Mr. Mendes, he participated in a bossa nova night at Carnegie Hall in November 1962, and played on the American saxophonist Cannonball Adderley’s album “Cannonball’s Bossa Nova” that same year.
More recently he released a CD called “Paulo Moura Visits Gershwin and Jobim” and toured internationally with other Brazilian artists as part of the show “Homage to Jobim.”
“I used to rehearse by day at the Municipal Theater and play live at night on TV Excelsior,” Mr. Moura recalled years later when asked how he came to be involved with bossa nova. “The bus would leave Ipanema for downtown and pass through Copacabana, and sometimes I would get off the bus midway so as to be able to meet up with colleagues” like Mr. Mendes and Jobim.
Paulo Moura was born in the interior of the state of São Paulo on July 15, 1932, one of 10 brothers and sisters who were taught to play different instruments by their father, a saxophone and clarinet player, with the idea of forming a family orchestra. As a teenager he moved to Rio de Janeiro to enroll in the National School of Music, and he soon began playing in nightclubs and on radio stations there.
By the late ’50s, Mr. Moura had also won a spot as lead clarinetist in the orchestra of the Municipal Theater in Rio; he played a Debussy rhapsody at his audition. But at the same time he was working as an accompanist to visiting American artists like Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis Jr. That dual situation persisted until 1978, when he decided to quit the orchestra and dedicate himself exclusively to a solo career.
Over the next 30 years he made numerous recordings. The last, issued in July 2009, was “AfroBossaNova,” a collaboration with his fellow Brazilian musician Armandinho. Mr. Moura also wrote the soundtracks for several Brazilian films and television series, occasionally appearing as an actor, and arranged music for Milton Nascimento, Elis Regina, João Bosco and other singers. In addition, for two years in the 1980s he served as director of the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio.
Mr. Moura’s survivors include his wife, Halina Grynberg, a psychoanalyst who also served as his business manager, and two sons, Pedro and Domingos.
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DANIEL SCHORR, AGGRESSIVE JOURNALIST
By ROBERT D. HERSHEY Jr.
Published: July 23, 2010
Daniel Schorr, whose aggressive reporting over 70 years as a respected broadcast and print journalist brought him into conflict with censors, the Nixon administration and network superiors, died on Friday in Washington. He was 93.
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Associated Press
Daniel Schorr in 1957 when he was a CBS foreign correspondent.
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Bob Daugherty/Associated Press
Daniel Schorr, flanked by his lawyer, Joseph A. Califano Jr., and his wife, Lisbeth, before the House ethics committee in 1976.
His death was announced by NPR, where he had been a commentator for the last 25 years. A spokeswoman, Anna Christopher, said he died at a Washington hospital after a short illness. He lived in Washington.
Mr. Schorr, a protégé of Edward R. Murrow at CBS News, initially made his mark at CBS as a foreign correspondent, notably in the Soviet Union. He opened the network’s Moscow bureau in 1955 and persuaded the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev to sit for his first television interview, with “Face the Nation.” At the end of 1957, Mr. Schorr went home for the holidays and was denied readmission to the Soviet Union after repeatedly defying Soviet censors.
At CBS, Mr. Schorr won three Emmy Awards for his coverage of the Watergate scandal and took pride in his often blunt reporting on the administration. In one instance he hurriedly began broadcasting after acquiring a copy of Nixon’s notorious “enemies list” only to discover in reading the names aloud that his was No. 17.
Nixon was so angered by Mr. Schorr’s reporting that he was said to have ordered the F.B.I. to investigate him.
“I consider my presence on the enemies list,” he said in a 2009 interview with The Gazette of Montgomery County, Md., “a greater tribute than the Emmys list.”
But his 23-year career at CBS was cut short in 1976 when he obtained a copy of a suppressed House of Representatives committee report on highly dubious activities by the Central Intelligence Agency.
He showed a draft on television and discussed its contents, but when neither of CBS’s book subsidiaries was willing to publish the document, produced by the House Select Committee on Intelligence under Otis G. Pike, a New York Democrat, Mr. Schorr provided it — anonymously, he vainly hoped — to The Village Voice.
Many of his colleagues criticized him when he remained silent in the face of false suspicions that another CBS correspondent, Lesley Stahl, had given the report to The Voice.
After Mr. Schorr subsequently admitted that it was he who had leaked the document, there were threats requiring police protection and investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress. When the House ethics committee demanded to know Mr. Schorr’s source, he refused to reveal it, risking a contempt citation. When questioned by the committee, he cited First Amendment protections in refusing to “betray a confidential source.” The committee voted 6 to 5 against a citation.
By then CBS had relieved Mr. Schorr of his reporting duties, and he ultimately resigned. Editorial and public opinion swung in his favor — Mr. Schorr was seen as a beleaguered, principled reporter — and he became popular on the lecture circuit. But what he called his “love-hate affair” with CBS News was over.
He ruminated about his departure in a 2001 memoir, “Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism” (Pocket Books): “Washed away by one controversial leak too many? Undone by a reporting style that proved indigestible to a network worried about affiliates and regulations? Unable to adapt myself to corporate tugs on the reins? Unwilling to exempt my own network from my investigative reporting?”
His conclusion: “All of that, I guess.”
Interviewed in 2008 for this obituary, Mr. Schorr continued to refuse to identify his source for the Pike committee report.
At 60, Mr. Schorr endured a brief and disappointing stint as a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley — he found the students most interested in his celebrity, he said — and became a freelance writer. The Des Moines Register and Tribune engaged him to write a column, but after two years the paper’s syndicate did not renew his contract.
Then, after he narrated some public television specials and offered twice-a-week commentaries for the Independent Television News Association, an executive of the association introduced him in 1979 to Ted Turner, the swashbuckling Southerner who was in the process of creating CNN, the first cable news network.
The two met in a hotel penthouse in Las Vegas, and, after a brief discussion, Mr. Schorr became the fledgling network’s first employee, as a senior news analyst.
After consulting his business agent and lawyer, Mr. Schorr drafted an agreement in the hotel lobby, insisting that “no demand will be made upon him that would compromise his professional ethics and responsibilities.” As Mr. Schorr recalled, Mr. Turner scrawled his signature with scarcely a glance.
The cable news venture, initially on a shoestring, took off, and the unlikely pair got along well. Mr. Turner defended Mr. Schorr when Senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona Republican, wanted him fired. Goldwater had held a grudge since 1964, when Mr. Schorr, while at CBS, reported on the enthusiasm of right-wing Germans for Goldwater as he secured the presidential nomination that year. Mr. Schorr noted that a planned postconvention Goldwater trip mainly involved time at an American military recreation center in Berchtesgaden, site of a favorite Hitler retreat.
Mr. Schorr and Mr. Turner eventually fell out over a CNN plan to team John Connally, the former Texas governor and Nixon Treasury secretary, with Mr. Schorr as commentators at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas.
It was improper, Mr. Schorr said, to mix a politician with a journalist, and he invoked for the first time the 1979 agreement allowing him to veto assignments. The network asked him to drop that right in early 1985, and when he refused, he was told to take leave until his contract expired that May. He soon joined NPR as a commentator, a position he held until his death. He could be heard as recently as July 10, on “Weekend Edition,” discussing the news of the week.
Born in the Bronx on Aug. 31, 1916, to parents who had emigrated from what is now Belarus, Daniel Louis Schorr had an unhappy childhood. He said that in writing his memoir he had come to realize that “being poor, fat, Jewish, fatherless” had made him feel like an outsider, and that he had “achieved identity” through his journalism.
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J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Mr. Schorr in 2005 at an NPR studio in Washington.
He got his first scoop, which earned him $5, when he was 12. A woman fell or jumped from the roof of the apartment house where he lived, and he called the police, interviewed them about the victim and then called The Bronx Home News, which paid for news tips.
Mr. Schorr attended the City College of New York and contributed articles to New York City news organizations while he was a student there. After graduation he worked for The Jewish Daily Bulletin and then the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Growing restive and with Europe at war, Mr. Schorr took a job with Aneta, the news agency of the Netherlands East Indies. He was drafted into the Army in 1943 and, after completing his service, returned to Aneta, in the Netherlands. He became fluent in Dutch.
In 1952 he returned to the United States and won a three-day tryout on the city desk of The New York Times. On the final day, he was assigned to cover the signing at City Hall of the first contracts for federal aid to help private slum-clearing efforts. He was expected to write a few paragraphs.
Instead he interviewed Robert Moses, the New York urban planning czar, who invited him to lunch and showed him some prospective slum-clearing sites, including one near Columbus Circle in Manhattan. The site turned out to be where Lincoln Center would rise. His editors, who had not known of the project, had him write a full-length article.
Impressed, The Times offered him a job but suggested he return to the Netherlands for a few weeks while details were worked out. In early February 1953, that country was devastated by a severe storm, and Mr. Schorr’s dispatches so impressed Murrow, one of the most respected broadcast journalists working then, that he cabled him — Mr. Schorr recalled the exact words more than a half-century later — asking, “Would you at all consider joining the staff of CBS News with an initial assignment in Washington?”
Mr. Schorr still preferred The Times, but when he didn’t hear further, he inquired and learned that the offer had been withdrawn. As Mr. Schorr told the story, an editor later sheepishly explained that the paper was concerned that too many Jewish bylines might jeopardize its coverage of the Mideast.
Then began his broadcast career, which, in addition to his reporting on intelligence, the Soviet Union and the erection of the Berlin Wall, included coverage of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs and Watergate. He appeared frequently on “Face the Nation” and made a notable Nixon-era documentary about health care called “Don’t Get Sick in America.”
Mr. Schorr married when he returned to the United States at the age of 50. He and his wife, the former Lisbeth Bamberger, met on his beat when she worked at the Office of Economic Opportunity. She survives him, as do their son, Jonathan; their daughter, Lisa Kaplan; and one grandchild.
Despite decades of experience in the latest broadcast technology, Mr. Schorr shunned computers and word processors for years, sticking with electric typewriters into his 90s. But he had a Twitter account, and last December he posted this message there:
“Big day in my career. First time I composed my commentary for All Things Considered on my computer. Good-bye, typewriter.”
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CARL GORDON, A LATE-BLOOMING ACTOR
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: July 23, 2010
Carl Gordon, who four decades ago, nearing midlife and feeling trapped in a series of dispiriting jobs, heeded a surprising call and became a successful character actor on television and the stage, died on Tuesday at his home in Jetersville, Va. He was 78.“Roc,” a situation comedy about a working-class black family in Baltimore, broadcast on the Fox network for three seasons starting in 1991. In a highly unusual move, Seasons 2 and 3 were televised live, an approach to sitcoms that had been attempted rarely if at all since the 1950s.
Carl Gordon, who four decades ago, nearing midlife and feeling trapped in a series of dispiriting jobs, heeded a surprising call and became a successful character actor on television and the stage, died on Tuesday at his home in Jetersville, Va. He was 78.
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Carl Gordon on the set of the Fox Television show “ROC” in 1992.
The show starred Charles S. Dutton as Roc Emerson, a sanitation worker, and Mr. Gordon as his proud, irascible father, Andrew. So proud was Andrew Emerson that he seeded the family home with pictures of Malcolm X and maintained that a certain member of the Boston Celtics was far too good a basketball player to be a white man:
“Larry Bird was born and bred in Harlem,” Andrew declared in one episode. “His real name is Abdul Mustafa.”
On Broadway, Mr. Gordon originated the part of Doaker, the upright uncle in “The Piano Lesson” (1990), by August Wilson, one of two Pulitzer Prize-winning installments in the playwright’s 10-part cycle about black life. He reprised the role in the television adaptation, broadcast on CBS in 1995.
Rufus Carl Gordon Jr. was born on Jan. 20, 1932, in Goochland, Va.; he later jettisoned the “Rufus.” When he was a child his family moved to Brooklyn, where he grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. As a young man he spent four years in the Air Force, serving as an airplane mechanic during the Korean War.
Afterward, Mr. Gordon attended Brooklyn College but left to work before graduating. By his late 30s he had reached a low point. He was twice divorced and seemed consigned to unfulfilling jobs, including sheet-metal worker and department store stockroom clerk.
One night, as he recounted in interviews afterward, Mr. Gordon fell to his knees, weeping. “Lord, tell me what I need to do,” he said. From somewhere within him, an answer arose: “Try acting.”
To Mr. Gordon, the idea seemed preposterous: he had never considered acting and had barely been to the theater. But who was he to question the Lord? Before long, he had enrolled in the Gene Frankel Theater Workshop.
There, as The New York Times later wrote, Mr. Gordon was the oldest student, the only African-American and the only one without a college degree. But little by little, audition by audition, he built a career.
Mr. Gordon’s other screen work includes the film “The Brother From Another Planet” (1984), directed by John Sayles, and guest roles on “Law & Order” and “ER.”
Among his other Broadway credits are the musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” (1971), with book, music and lyrics by Melvin Van Peebles, and a 2003 revival of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” by Mr. Wilson, starring Mr. Dutton and Whoopi Goldberg. He also appeared in many productions by the Negro Ensemble Company.
Mr. Gordon is survived by his third wife, Jacqueline Alston-Gordon; a son, Rufus Carl III; five daughters, Gloria Gurley and Candise, Demethress, Yvette and Jasmine Gordon; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
When “Roc” went live, interviewers asked Mr. Gordon and his cast mates if they were daunted by the prospect. Not at all, they said, for most, like him, were veterans of the stage.
“It feels good,” Mr. Gordon told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1992. “It’s like going back to Broadway.”
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JAMES GAMMON, CHARACTER ACTOR
BRUCE WEBER
Published: July 19, 2010
James Gammon, a squint-eyed, froggy-voiced character actor who was best known as the manager in the baseball film comedy “Major League,” one of the rough-hewn American types — cowboys, rednecks and the alcoholic family patriarchs in the plays of Sam Shepard — that were his specialty, died Friday at his home in Costa Mesa, Calif. He was 70.
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Joyce Rudolph/Paramount Pictures, via Photofest
James Gammon played the manager in “Major League.”
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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Mr. Gammon appeared in Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child” with Terry Kinney, for which he was nominated for a Tony.
The cause was cancer of the adrenal glands and the liver, said his wife, Nancy.
With a bushy mustache, large, weathered-looking features and a voice full of gravel, Mr. Gammon was a natural for roles that called for men with the experience of dusty roads, out-of-the-way saloons, physical work and family travails written on their faces. And he became a familiar presence on television and in the movies, lending a seeming authenticity to settings where the townsfolk wore 10-gallon hats or overalls — or both — and did a lot of spitting.
He began his career in the 1960s, appearing on “Gunsmoke,” “Bonanza,” “The Wild Wild West,” “The Virginian” and other television westerns; he made his movie debut in 1967, as a member of the chain gang in “Cool Hand Luke.” He appeared in projects in other genres — in a recurring role on the cop show “Nash Bridges,” he played Don Johnson’s father — but westerns and outlaw pictures were his bread and butter. He played a redneck murder victim in “Natural Born Killers” and the revered cattle rancher Charles Goodnight in the television mini-series based on Larry McMurtry’s novel “Streets of Laredo,” a follow-up to “Lonesome Dove.” He also appeared in “Cold Mountain” “Urban Cowboy” and “Appaloosa.”
“Major League” (1989) was the biggest hit of his career. In it he played Lou Brown, the flinty but paternalistic manager of the Cleveland Indians, who roar back from last place with a roster of misfits and improbably win the pennant. Though not the familiar rural milieu, it wasn’t exactly a stretch for him; Brown was essentially a good-guy sheriff in a baseball cap. (He reprised the role in “Major League II” in 1994.)
Mr. Gammon was a stage actor as well. He helped found the Met Theater in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and while performing there he was seen by a representative of the Public Theater in New York and subsequently cast in the role of the drunken, threatening, wishful patriarch of a dysfunctional farm family in Mr. Shepard’s play “Curse of the Starving Class,” which opened at the Public in 1978.
Mr. Gammon reprised the role at his own theater, where Mr. Shepard himself saw it. The two became friends and Mr. Gammon appeared in several other Shepard plays, including “A Lie of the Mind”; “Buried Child,” which appeared on Broadway and for which Mr. Gammon was nominated for a Tony Award; and “The Late Henry Moss,” in the role of a dissipated, destructive father that Mr. Shepard said was written with Mr. Gammon in mind.
“You’re probably aware of the notorious father figures in my plays, alcoholic Midwesterners who leave their families and get lost in the Southwestern desert,” Mr. Shepard said in a phone interview on Monday. “Jimmy had that familiarity about him with the way I grew up, the guys with the voice and the face and the whiskey. He definitely rang a bell with me.
“I’d never say I wrote something for him,” he added, speaking about “Henry Moss.” “But I had him rattling around when I was working on that play. And I knew the range and courage he had when I wrote the part.”
James Richard Gammon was born in Newman, Ill., on April 20, 1940. His father, Donald, was a musician; his mother, Doris, was a farm girl. When they divorced, young James lived with various relatives and as a teenager ended up in Orlando, Fla. He entered the entertainment business at an Orlando television station, where he became a director of locally produced fare. He also acted in community theater, and in his 20s he drove to Hollywood to find acting work.
Mr. Gammon’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Nancy Kapusta, whom he married in 1972, he is survived by a brother, Phillip, of Northridge, Calif.; a sister, Sandra Glaudell, of Ocala, Fla.; two daughters, Allison Mann of Costa Mesa and Amy Gammon of West Hollywood; and two grandchildren.
Mr. Gammon’s long list of credits in supporting roles is testament to what Mr. Shepard said was his self-image: that of a man with a lunch pail.
“This was a guy who could act circles around most other actors,” Mr. Shepard said, “and he never pretended to be other than a working kind of actor.”
When “The Late Henry Moss” was first produced at the Magic Theater in San Francisco in 2000, he recalled, it had a starry cast that included Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte and Cheech Marin.
“I mean, a bunch of notoriously famous guys,” Mr. Shepard said. “And every single one of them would come up to me, alone, and say, ‘Who’s that Jim Gammon guy? Where did he come from?’ ”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 21, 2010
A picture caption on Tuesday with an obituary about the actor James Gammon misstated part of the name of the play in which he was shown performing. It is “Buried Child,” not “Buried Children.” SOURCE
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 