PETER C. MARZIO, HOUSTON MUEUM OF FINE ARTS DIRECTOR
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: December 11, 2010
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Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Peter C. Marzio at the Audrey Jones Beck Building at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which was founded in 1900.
Mr. Marzio became the director of the Houston museum in 1982, after serving as the director and chief executive of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. He proved to be a dynamic force, equally adept at raising money, attracting important donations and identifying new artistic territory for the museum to explore in its exhibitions and acquisitions.
Under his leadership, the museum added a sculpture garden designed by Isamu Noguchi in 1986; a center devoted to European decorative arts on a four-and-a-half-acre estate donated by Harris Masterson III and his wife, Carroll Sterling Masterson, in 1991; and the Audrey Jones Beck Building, designed by Rafael Moneo, in 2000, to house much of its permanent collection.
At his death, Mr. Marzio was planning a third building dedicated to arts movements in the Americas, Europe and Asia.
The museum, which was founded in 1900, received several important donations while Mr. Marzio was director, notably Alfred C. Glassell Jr.’s collection of African, pre-Columbian and Indonesian gold; Ms. Beck’s gift of 46 Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings; and the oil heiress Caroline Wiess Law’s bequest of more than $400 million and works by de Kooning, Picasso, Arshile Gorky and others.
Mr. Marzio was intent on diversifying and expanding the museum’s commitment to artists outside the European and North American mainstream. He created new departments of Asian and Latin American art and established a new research institution, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas.
The broadening focus of the museum was reflected in pioneering exhibitions like “Hispanic Art in the United States: 30 Contemporary Painters and Sculptors,” which opened in 1987 and traveled to museums around the country, including the Brooklyn Museum in 1989.
Although his name inevitably appeared on the short list of candidates when vacancies appeared at top museums in other cities, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Mr. Marzio stayed put in Houston. Under his leadership, the museum’s attendance increased to 1.6 million visitors annually from 300,000; membership to more than 40,000 from 7,000; the operating budget to $52 million from $5 million; and the endowment to more than $1 billion from $25 million. The museum’s permanent collection more than tripled in size, to 63,000 works from 20,000.
Peter Cort Marzio was born on May 8, 1943, on Governors Island, off Manhattan. The first member of his working-class Italian family to finish high school, he won a football scholarship to Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa., where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965. After earning a doctorate in history at the University of Chicago in 1969, he taught at the University of Maryland and was a research assistant to the historian Daniel J. Boorstin on his book “The Americans: The Democratic Experience,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
After serving as a curator of prints and chairman of the cultural history department at the Smithsonian Institution, Mr. Marzio was named the Corcoran director in 1978. From 1997 to 2000, he was chairman of the Federal Council on Arts and Humanities.
He was married with two children, but the family declined to provide information about survivors.
Mr. Marzio was the author of “Rube Goldberg: His Life and Works” (1973) and two standard works on the history of drawing and lithography in the United States: “The Art Crusade: An Analysis of American Drawing Manuals, 1820-1860” (1976), and “The Democratic Art” (1979).
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JOHN E. DU PONT, HEIR WHO KILLED AN OLMPIAN
By JERÉ LONGMAN
Published: December 9, 2010
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Chris Gardner/Associated Press
John E. du Pont at his 1997 trial for a wrestler’s shooting death.
Mr. du Pont was found unresponsive in his cell at Laurel Highlands State Prison near Somerset, Pa., a prison spokeswoman told The Associated Press.
“He had had some illnesses, so we are considering it natural,” Susan McNaughton, the spokeswoman, told The A.P., adding that the Somerset County coroner would make the final determination of the cause of death.
In 1997, Mr. du Pont was found guilty but mentally ill in the shooting death the previous year of Dave Schultz, 36, who had won a gold medal in freestyle wrestling at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and was training for the 1996 Atlanta Games. Mr. du Pont was sentenced to 13 to 30 years in prison.
The shooting occurred at Mr. du Pont’s estate in Newtown Square, Pa., west of Philadelphia, where Mr. Schultz lived and trained. After the shooting, Mr. du Pont barricaded himself inside his home for two days but was taken into custody when he left his mansion to fix a boiler that the police had shut off.
Mr. du Pont was a great-great-grandson of and one of more than 1,000 descendants of the industrialist E. I. du Pont, who in 1802 built gunpowder mills in Delaware that evolved into the family’s giant chemical corporation.
John Eleuthère du Pont was born Nov. 22, 1938, in Philadelphia and lived a lavish and eccentric lifestyle. He built the Delaware Museum of Natural History to house his renowned collections of 66,000 birds and two million seashells. And on his rolling 800-acre estate, he built a $600,000 training center for pentathletes, swimmers and wrestlers, who competed under his sponsorship as Team Foxcatcher.
On occasion, Mr. du Pont ferried athletes to competitions in his helicopter. But his behavior changed from unconventional to troubling over the years, athletes who had trained with him said at the time of the shooting.
Mike Gostigian, a former Olympic pentathlete who knew him from childhood, said in 1996 that Mr. du Pont’s personality seemed to grow more erratic after three incidents in the 1980s: an automobile accident that curbed his vigorous life as a sportsman, a brief marriage that failed and the death of his mother, Jean Austin du Pont.
Shortly after the shooting of Mr. Schultz, friends and relatives of Mr. du Pont said he had abused drugs and alcohol. They also described a man whose behavior had grown extremely strange. At the 1995 world wrestling championships in Atlanta, Mr. du Pont wore an orange jumpsuit and asked to be introduced as the Dalai Lama. By early 1996, he had begun to grow more isolated and delusional, acquaintances said.
“Dave was the person closest to John,” Mr. Gostigian said at the time, referring to Mr. Shultz. “He was a calming influence, a confidant. But Dave wasn’t a yes man. If John said he saw things coming out of the walls, Dave said nothing was coming out of the walls. I think John might have harbored some delusional fear of him.”
After the shooting, some wrestlers who had trained at Foxcatcher said they blamed themselves for not demanding that Mr. du Pont seek professional help, fearing they would lose his sponsorship money.
“People saw it coming; no one did a damn thing about it,” Kurt Angle, who won a gold medal in freestyle wrestling at the Atlanta Olympics, said at the time.
On Thursday, Mr. Schultz’s father, Philip, told The A.P. that in many ways “John du Pont died for me the day he took my son’s life.”
“So,” he added, “the fact that he’s officially gone is almost a moot point. I did forgive the man for what he did. I never forgave the act.”
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DON MEREDITH, COWBOYS QUARTERBACK AND COSELL’S BROADCAST FOIL
By DOUGLAS MARTIN and BILL CARTER
Published: December 6, 2010
Don Meredith, a former star quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys who helped change the perception of professional football with the easy Texas charm and provocative wit he brought to its first prime-time telecasts on Monday nights, died on Sunday in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 72.
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United Press International
Don Meredith was a Dallas Cowboys quarterback for nine years.
Mr. Meredith always thought of himself as the small-town kid from Mount Vernon, Tex., where his parents, Jeff and Hazel, owned a dry goods store and where his mother swung a tire so he could practice throwing a football at a moving target. He spent much of his life backing away from the nickname Dandy Don, particularly during his secluded later decades in New Mexico.
As a boy, Mr. Meredith dreamed of playing in the Cotton Bowl, 100 miles to the southwest in Dallas, and that was where he played many home games in high school, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and in the pros. He set passing records for the Cowboys that still stand, including the one for most yards in a game, 460, set on Nov. 10, 1963, against San Francisco.
But it was his sparkling, fun-loving personality that seemed to define him. As a quarterback he sometimes irked the buttoned-down Cowboys coach, Tom Landry, by breaking into a country tune in the huddle, and as one of the first two color commentator on ABC’s “Monday Night Football” he made his down-home ribbing of the loquacious Howard Cosell, one of his two broadcasting partners, a hallmark of the show.
Their spirited banter helped make “Monday Night Football” one of the most popular programs on television, one that soon took its place in the television pantheon, alongside classics like “M*A*S*H,” in terms of longevity, ratings and cultural influence. The weekly clash between an opinionated intellectual and a freewheeling spirit drew women to watch football games and caused restaurants and movie theaters to report lower traffic during broadcasts.
“I’d just wait for Howard to make a mistake,” Mr. Meredith said in an interview with Sports Illustrated in 2000. “Didn’t usually take too long.”
In fact, the whole act was planned, by Mr. Cosell. “You wear the white hat, I’ll wear the black hat,” he said to Mr. Meredith in a rehearsal before the premiere of “Monday Night Football” on Sept. 21, 1970.
Mr. Meredith offered a taste of his breezy, even risqué, humor in that first broadcast. In talking about the Cleveland Browns receiver Fair Hooker, Mr. Meredith said, “Fair Hooker — I haven’t met one yet.”
He later referred to President Richard M. Nixon as Tricky Dick and made what seemed to be a joke about his own marijuana use at a Denver Broncos game. “Welcome to Mile High Stadium — and I really am,” he said.
Frank Gifford replaced Keith Jackson as the play-by-play announcer — and straight man of the crew — in the broadcast’s second year, and many announcing-team combinations followed over the next decades. ESPN now broadcasts Monday night games.
Joseph Donald Meredith was born on April 10, 1938. In high school, he acted in school plays, scored 52 points in a basketball tournament game, graduated second in his class and won a statewide contest for identifying shrubs. He was an all-American quarterback for two years at Southern Methodist, after turning down Bear Bryant’s entreaties to go to Texas A&M, where Mr. Bryant coached before he became an Alabama legend.
The Cowboys coveted the local hero and signed him to a personal-services contract before the N.F.L. had even granted Dallas a franchise. The Chicago Bears drafted him, and the Cowboys traded future draft picks to get him.
In an interview with The New York Post in 1966, Mr. Meredith said he assumed he would supplant Johnny Unitas as the league’s pre-eminent quarterback in about a year, but Coach Landry thought quarterbacks should ideally have around five years of seasoning before starting. Mr. Meredith mainly sat on the bench the first three years.
As he sat, he grimly regretted not becoming a lawyer or preacher. “It was two years before Landry even spoke to me,” he said.
He got his chance to start at quarterback in 1963, and he succeeded by almost any standard. He was named to three Pro Bowls and in 1966 was named the N.F.L.’s most valuable player. But he sustained many injuries and bickered with Mr. Landry about play-calling. Mr. Landry ended up calling plays.
Dallas fans began booing him after the Cowboys were unsuccessful in the playoffs, losing by inches and seconds to the Green Bay Packers in 1966 and 1967. He retired after nine seasons in 1969 at 31, saying he was eager to try other fields.
But the road to his future was paved after the second loss to Green Bay in an epic battle called the Ice Bowl. Wearing a blood-stained uniform, Mr. Meredith poured out his heart in a postgame interview. CBS was flooded with mail about this soulful, articulate, apparently real-life cowboy.
The interviewer was Mr. Gifford, who recommended Mr. Meredith to Roone Arledge of ABC, who was then planning to bring pro football to prime-time TV. Mr. Arledge wanted a former player with lots of personality.
But Mr. Meredith had already agreed to work for CBS’s football coverage. He met Mr. Arledge for lunch and, scribbling contract terms on napkins, agreed to join “Monday Night Football” for $30,000. Mr. Arledge grumbled that the lunch cost him $10,000.
“It’s the best $10,000 you’ll ever spend,” Mr. Meredith said.
He left the show after the 1973 season for NBC, which promised movies as well as work on N.F.L. coverage.
It met another condition as well: no one would call him Dandy Don. Mr. Meredith returned to the Monday show in 1977 and stayed until ABC’s coverage of the 1985 Super Bowl.
After acting in movies and television, Mr. Meredith receded into a quiet life in Santa Fe, writing, painting, golfing and acting in a stage production of “The Odd Couple.” He played Oscar. Mr. Gifford was Felix.
He is survived by his wife, Susan; his brother, Jack; and his three children.
For many Americans, their most abiding memory of Mr. Meredith was how he suddenly burst into a Willie Nelson song when he decided a game’s fate was conclusively decided. “Turn out the lights,” he’d sing, “the party’s over.”
Correction: December 10, 2010
An obituary on Tuesday about Don Meredith, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and “Monday Night Football” announcer, misstated the years that the Cowboys lost to the Green Bay Packers in the N.F.L. championship game. The games were played in 1966 and 1967 — not 1967 and 1968.
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ELIZABETH EDWARDS (1949-2010): A POLITICAL LIFE FILLED WITH CRUEL REVERSALS
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Published: December 7, 2010
Elizabeth Edwards, who as the wife of former Senator John Edwards gave America an intimate look at a candidate’s marriage by sharing his quest for the 2008 presidential nomination as she struggled with incurable cancer and, secretly, with his infidelity, died Tuesday morning at her home in Chapel Hill, N.C. She was 61.
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Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Elizabeth and John Edwards in 2007. They separated this year after he admitted to fathering a child in an extramarital affair. More Photos »
Her family confirmed the death, saying Mrs. Edwards was surrounded by relatives when she died. A family friend said Mr. Edwards was present. On Monday, two family friends said that Mrs. Edwards’s cancer had spread to her liver and that doctors had advised against further medical treatment.
Mrs. Edwards posted a Facebook message to friends on Monday, saying, “I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces — my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope.” She added: “The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that.”
In a life of idyllic successes and crushing reverses, Mrs. Edwards was an accomplished lawyer, the mother of four children and the wife of a wealthy, handsome senator with sights on the White House. But their 16-year-old son was killed in a car crash, cancer struck her at age 55, the political dreams died and, within months, her husband admitted to having had an extramarital affair with a campaign videographer.
The scandal over the affair faded after his disclosure in 2008. But in 2009, Mrs. Edwards resurrected it in a new book and interviews and television appearances, telling how her husband had misrepresented the infidelity to her, rocked their marriage and spurned her advice to abandon his run for the presidency, a decision in which she ultimately acquiesced.
Last January, on the eve of new disclosures in a book by a former political aide, Mr. Edwards admitted he had fathered a child with the videographer. Soon afterward, he and Mrs. Edwards separated legally.
Mrs. Edwards, a savvy political adviser who took on major roles in her husband’s two campaigns for the White House, learned she had a breast tumor the size of a half-dollar on the day after Election Day 2004, when the Democratic ticket — Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Mr. Edwards, his running mate from North Carolina — lost to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Radiation and chemotherapy appeared to put the cancer into remission. In a best-selling memoir, “Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers” (Broadway Books, 2006), Mrs. Edwards chronicled her fight for survival. But in March 2007, with her husband again chasing a presidential nomination, this time against Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards disclosed that her cancer had returned.
They said it was malignant and in an advanced stage, having spread beyond the breast and lymph nodes into her ribs, hip bones and lungs. It was treatable but “no longer curable,” Mr. Edwards explained. But he said he would continue his bid for the presidency, and Mrs. Edwards said that she, too, would go on with the campaign. “I don’t expect my life to be significantly different,” she declared.
Mrs. Edwards had always been a dominant figure in her husband’s political life. Often called his closest adviser and surrogate, she reviewed his television advertisements and major speeches, helped pick his lieutenants, joined internal debates over tactics and strategy, and sometimes dressed down, or even forced out, campaign aides she thought had failed her husband.
A scathing portrait of Mrs. Edwards’s political role, based mainly on unnamed sources, was presented in “Game Change,” a book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin published last January. “The nearly universal assessment” among campaign aides, they wrote, “was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.”
Mrs. Edwards’s advanced cancer made her a riveting figure, at times overshadowing the candidate himself. In 2007, she was often mobbed by crowds that saw her as courageous. Inevitably, there were questions about putting their marriage on display. People wondered about their values, or whether they were in denial about the cancer. Some accused them of cynically using her illness for political gain.
But Mr. and Mrs. Edwards were undeterred. While she took a yellow chemotherapy pill once a day, her stamina seemed high, she often carried her own bags and put in 16-hour days, and she showed no signs of the disease: her hair was full, her skin color was robust, and she bustled with energy.
Political consultants said American voters yearned for authenticity and character in a candidate, and thought Mr. Edwards had a singular opportunity. But his aides worried, with some justification, that Mrs. Edwards on a podium was too compelling for his good. At a luncheon in Cleveland, some comments from the audience sounded like paeans to her.
“I came to feel the inspiration you exude,” said a woman bald from months of chemotherapy and radiation. Another cancer patient called Mrs. Edwards “my angel, my idol, my everything.”
Mr. Edwards pitched himself as a populist, up from hardscrabble mill towns to success as lawyer. He stuck to a script of living wages, cuts in greenhouse gases and a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, with health care as a signature issue.
But many voters were alienated by his 2002 vote for the Iraq war. Falling behind Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton in polls, he lost the primary in South Carolina, where he was born, and quit the race in late January 2008. He later endorsed Mr. Obama.
Any lingering hopes for his political future were shattered in August 2008, when he admitted to ABC News that he had had an affair in 2006 with Rielle Hunter, a 42-year-old woman hired to make campaign videos. He denied being the father of her infant daughter, even offering to take a paternity test, and insisted that the affair had occurred when his wife’s cancer was in remission and that it was over before he announced his presidential campaign on Dec. 28, 2006. He also said he had not given hush money to Ms. Hunter, although his campaign had paid her $114,000 for videos.
Mrs. Edwards at the time issued a statement supporting her husband. “Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now,” she said, “when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him.”
But in May 2009, she raised the matter again in interviews and television appearances, including one on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and in a second memoir, “Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities” (Broadway Books, 2009).
In the book, she related his admission of infidelity. By his account, she wrote, “on only one night had he violated his vows to me.” She grew ill and angry and later tried to make herself believe it had lasted only one night. “It turned out that a single time was not all it was,” she said.
She said that she had urged him to end his campaign, “to protect our family from this woman, from his act,” but that he had refused, and she ended up supporting him, keeping silent about the affair as the campaign continued for a year and a half.
“Being sick meant a number of things to me,” she told Ms. Winfrey. “One is that my life is going to be less long, and I didn’t want to spend it fighting.”
Asked by Ms. Winfrey whether she still loved him, Mrs. Edwards replied, “You know, that’s a complicated question.”
The couple’s separation, and Mr. Edwards’s admission that he had fathered a child with Ms. Hunter, came on the eve of the publication of “The Politician” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), a tell-all book by Andrew Young, a former campaign aide who had originally said that he was the father of the child, who was born in 2007.
Mrs. Edwards was born Mary Elizabeth Anania on July 3, 1949, in Jacksonville, Fla., the daughter of Vincent J. and Elizabeth Thweatt Anania. Her father was a Navy pilot, and the family moved often in America and abroad.
She attended Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va., then transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned a bachelor’s degree in English. She enrolled in the university’s law school, where in 1974 she met Mr. Edwards, four years her junior and the son of a textile worker.
After graduating, they were married in July 1977 and began legal careers. In the next two decades, he became a multimillionaire, mostly by winning medical malpractice cases. Her career was low key, in bankruptcy and public service law. Elizabeth preferred her middle name and used her maiden name professionally.
They were not very interested in politics. After the birth of Wade, in 1979, and Catharine, known as Cate, in 1982, they embraced parenthood, he coaching soccer, she joining parent-teacher groups and arranging her work schedule to spend afternoons with the children.
But the storybook family was shattered on April 4, 1996, when Wade, a high school junior, was killed in a car accident driving to the Edwardses’ beach house. Devastated, the parents stopped working. For months, Mrs. Edwards read her son’s textbooks aloud at his grave and spent sleepless nights in online bereavement groups or staring at a weather channel.
Eventually, the couple decided to change their lives. In Wade’s name, they established a foundation, created a computer learning lab at his high school and organized scholarships and essay awards. Elizabeth changed her surname to Edwards, began fertility treatments and had two more children — Emma Claire, in 1998, and John, known as Jack, in 2000.
Mr. Edwards went into politics, ran for the Senate in 1998 and handily defeated Lauch Faircloth, the Republican incumbent. Mr. Edwards served one term, deciding to run for president in 2004 rather than for re-election to the Senate. He fell short, but Senator Kerry, who won the nomination, picked him to run for vice president.
Mrs. Edwards soon became her husband’s most valued adviser, a role undiminished by her illness. “I trust her more than I trust anybody in the world,” Mr. Edwards said a month before abandoning his presidential race. “She’s herself, and fearless. I don’t think she’s intimidated by or afraid of anything.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 7, 2010
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the timing of Elizabeth Edwards’s diagnosis. She learned she had a breast tumor the size of a half-dollar on the day after Election Day 2004, not Election Day. An earlier version of this obituary also misstated John Edwards’s tenure in the Senate. He served a full six-year term; he did not resign when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.
Ann
