TEENA MARIE, 1980s R&B HITMAKER
By BEN SISARIO
Published: December 27, 2010
Teena Marie, a singer whose funky hits in the 1980s, like “Lovergirl” and “Square Biz,” made her one of the few white performers to consistently find success on the rhythm-and-blues charts, died on Sunday at her home in Pasadena, Calif. She was 54.
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Teena Marie in an undated photograph.
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Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
Teena Marie performing in 2009.
The cause was not immediately known, but The Associated Press reported that the authorities said she appeared to have died of natural causes.
Born Mary Christine Brockert in Santa Monica, Calif., on March 5, 1956, she grew up in a predominantly black area of nearby Venice, Calif., and began singing and acting while still a child. At age 8, she tap-danced for Jed Clampett on an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” under the name Tina Marie Brockert.
After graduating from high school and briefly attending Santa Monica College, she signed with Motown Records and became of protégée of Rick James, then one of the label’s biggest new stars. Teena Marie’s first album, “Wild and Peaceful,” with James as a producer and the chief songwriter — and his Stone City Band backing her up — was released on Motown’s Gordy imprint in 1979.
“I’m Just a Sucker for Your Love,” her duet with James from that album, went to No. 8 on the R&B singles chart. The two began a tempestuous love affair. Another duet, “Fire and Desire,” appeared on James’s hit album from 1981, “Street Songs.” James died in 2004.
Through the 1980s, Teena Marie developed a style that folded bits of rap (as on the 1981 hit “Square Biz”) and rock (“You So Heavy,” from 1986, has a scorching guitar solo by Stevie Ray Vaughan) into danceable, funk-driven pop.
From the start, race was ambiguous in her music. She was not pictured on the cover of “Wild and Peaceful,” which was promoted to black radio stations. With an earthy voice that pierced with power in its high registers, she was highly credible as an R&B singer, and many listeners learned that she was white only when they saw her portrait on the cover of her second album, “Lady T,” in 1980.
“I still have people coming up to me 26 years later and looking at me and all of a sudden going, ‘I didn’t know you were white!’ ” she said in an interview on National Public Radio in 2006.
But she was embraced by the R&B audience, and some of her songs have become ingrained in black musical culture. Her 1988 song “Ooo La La La” was sampled and reconfigured by the Fugees as “Fu-Gee-La” in 1996 on their second album, “The Score.”
For many of her fellow musicians, Teena Marie’s biggest accomplishment was made offstage. Her lawsuit against Motown in the early 1980s, for nonpayment of royalties, resulted in a clarification of California law — known in the music industry as the Brockert Initiative or the Teena Marie Law — that made it much more difficult for record companies to keep an act under an exclusive contract. After leaving Motown, she signed with Epic and reached her commercial peak. Her 1984 song “Lovergirl” — featuring her impassioned squeal in the chorus, “I just want to be your lover girl/I just want to rock your world” — went to No. 4 on Billboard’s pop chart and became her biggest seller.
In the 1990s, Teena Marie’s career slowed as she raised a daughter, Alia Rose, who survives her. But she continued to release music. She was nominated for a 2005 Grammy Award for best female R&B vocal performance, for her song “I’m Still in Love” — she lost to Alicia Keys — and released her most recent album, “Congo Square,” on the revived Stax label in 2009.
Although Teena Marie’s race was hidden from the public at the very beginning of her career, she was always forthright about the black influences in her music. In an interview with Essence.com last year, she suggested that the content of the music mattered more than the singer’s color.
“Over all my race hasn’t been a problem,” she said. “I’m a black artist with white skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what’s in your own soul.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 29, 2010
An obituary on Tuesday about the singer Teena Marie referred incorrectly to the Fugees’ album “The Score,” on which they sampled and reconfigured her 1988 song “Ooo La La La.” It was their second album, not their first.
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BUD GREENSPAN, OLYMPIC FILMMAKER
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: December 26, 2010
Bud Greenspan, who disdained scandals to write, produce and direct uplifting documentaries about Olympic athletes facing triumph and tragedy, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.
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Harry How/Getty Images
Bud Greenspan, left, with the skiing champion Jean-Claude Killy in 2002 at a celebration honoring Winter Olympians.
The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Nancy Beffa, his companion and business partner.
Mr. Greenspan’s filmmaking style was consistently familiar; it was cinematic comfort food for those who believe in the Olympics as an inspiring, almost spiritual athletic gathering. He unapologetically glorified athletes for overcoming injuries, failures and obstacles with a straightforward storytelling style intended to strike emotional chords.
“I’ve been criticized for having rose-colored glasses,” he told The New York Times in 1996. “I say if that’s true, what’s so bad? I’m not good at hurting people.”
From “16 Days of Glory,” about the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, to the upcoming documentary about the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, his films consisted of profiles of athletes — some stars, some unknowns — bracketed by the opening and closing ceremonies. The athletes told their stories, accompanied by stentorian narration.
One day during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Mr. Greenspan was watching the footage of a four-woman rowing race when he saw a potential episode unexpectedly unfold: one of the Russian crew members’ oars broke, and their race was over.
“How many times do you see four Russians cry?” he said. “This is an asterisk in anyone’s reporting.” But it was a story he felt compelled to follow.
He was a distinctive figure, whose dark-rimmed glasses were usually perched on his shaved head. His attire came in seasonal varieties: a safari jacket over a polo shirt and a beige corduroy sport coat over a turtleneck.
He preferred to let others cover cheating and scandals. In his film about the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, he ignored Ben Johnson, who won the 100-meter race in world-record time, in favor of Calvin Smith, who got the bronze medal after Johnson’s gold was stripped when he tested positive for taking an anabolic steroid.
For Mr. Greenspan’s film about the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, he skipped the sordid pre-Olympic attack on the figure skater Nancy Kerrigan by people associated with a rival skater, Tonya Harding, to focus on the gold medalist in figure skating, Oksana Baiul. “I’m the lone survivor of idealism,” he told The Times in 1998. “I might be from another century.”
Mr. Greenspan, whose given name was Jonah, was born on Sept. 18, 1926, and grew up in Manhattan. His father, Benjamin, was a New York City magistrate, a city marshal and an assistant corporation counsel; his mother, Rachel, earned a law degree after her four children were grown.
He attended New York University while working at WMGM Radio (known at other times as WHN), served as an Army intelligence officer late in World War II and then returned to the station, where he became its sports director at age 21.
He made additional money as an extra in the Metropolitan Opera chorus, where he was a spear carrier who was told never to sing. In the chorus, he met another extra, John Davis, an African-American baritone and heavyweight weight lifter who went on to win gold medals at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics.
Mr. Davis, who felt unappreciated for his achievements in a sport that received little acclaim, was the subject of Mr. Greenspan’s first film, a 15-minute documentary, “The Strongest Man in the World.”
Mr. Greenspan sold the film for $35,000 to the United States Information Agency, which was looking to respond to Soviet propaganda about the way blacks were treated in the United States. “I thought, ‘This is a good business,’” he told The Los Angeles Times.
But it was not yet a career. He directed commercials for an advertising agency — he hired his mother as an extra — even while filming “Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin” in the 1960s. That film became part of his 22-hour, 1976 series, “The Olympiad,” and led to his making the official Olympic film 10 times. He made three others as an independent.
He formed Cappy Productions, which was named for his wife, Cappy Petrash Greenspan, who received an Emmy Award as executive producer of “The Olympiad.” She died in 1983.
The Greenspans never had children. He is survived by Ms. Beffa, who was also the executive producer and director of the films made by Cappy Productions, and his sister, Sarah Rosenberg.
Mr. Greenspan, an eight-time Emmy Award winner, often distilled his view of the Olympics into an incident from the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City. He was shooting the marathon, which was won by an Ethiopian, Mamo Wolde. But what mesmerized him was John Stephen Akhwari of Tanzania, who arrived at the stadium long after the early finishers, limping around the track, his bloodied right leg bandaged because of a fall. When Mr. Greenspan asked him why he continued to the end, Mr. Akhwari was incredulous at such a question. “My country did not send me 5,000 miles to start the race,” Mr. Greenspan often recalled him saying. “My country sent me 5,000 miles to finish the race.”
Citing Mr. Akhwari’s courage, Mr. Greenspan told The San Francisco Chronicle, “Sometimes the essence of the Olympic Games can be found in people who don’t stand on the victory podium.”
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AGATHE VON TRAPP, ELDEST OF TRAPP SINGERS
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 29, 2010
HAGERSTOWN, Md. (The Associated Press) — Agathe von Trapp, a member of the singing family whose escape from Nazi-occupied Austria was the basis for “The Sound of Music,” died in Towson, Md., on Tuesday. She was 97.
She died in a hospice after suffering congestive heart failure in November, said her longtime friend Mary Louise Kane, with whom she ran a kindergarten at the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic parish in Glyndon, Md., until 1993.
Ms. von Trapp was the oldest daughter of Capt. Georg Ritter von Trapp, an Austrian naval officer. She and her brothers and sisters performed as the Trapp Family Singers; their story (and that of the captain’s second wife, a former nun) was the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music,” which ran on Broadway from 1959 to 1963, and the 1965 film version, starring Julie Andrews, which won the Academy Award for best picture.
There was no character named Agathe von Trapp in “The Sound of Music,” but the character Liesl, played by Lauri Peters on Broadway and Charmian Carr in the movie, was loosely based on her.
In 2003 Ms. von Trapp published a book, “Memories Before and After ‘The Sound of Music,’ ”which told her version of her family’s story. In an interview with The AARP Bulletin in 2010, she said she wrote the book because she saw the movie and thought it was “a very nice story, but it is not our story.”
“If they hadn’t used our name,” she added, “I would probably have enjoyed it.”
Agathe von Trapp’s death leaves four surviving members of the Trapp Family Singers.
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GERALDINE DOYLE, AN ICONIC FACE OF WORLD WAR II
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: December 29, 2010
Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who was believed to be the unwitting model for the “We Can Do It!” poster of a woman flexing her biceps in a factory during World War II — an image that later became a symbol for the American feminist movement — died on Sunday in Lansing, Mich. She was 86.
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The cause was complications of arthritis, said her daughter Stephanie Gregg.
Mrs. Doyle was unaware of the poster’s existence until 1982, when, while thumbing through a magazine, she saw a photograph of it and recognized herself. Her daughter said that the face on the poster was her mother’s, but that the muscles were not.
“She didn’t have big, muscular arms,” Mrs. Gregg said. “She was 5-foot-10 and very slender. She was a glamour girl. The arched eyebrows, the beautiful lips, the shape of the face — that’s her.”
In 1942, when she was 17, Geraldine Hoff took a job as a metal presser at a factory near her home in Inkster, Mich., near Detroit, to aid the war effort, Mrs. Gregg said. One day, a United Press photographer came in to shoot images of working women.
The resulting poster, designed by the graphic artist J.Howard Miller, was used in a Westinghouse Company campaign to deter strikes and absenteeism. It was not widely seen until the early 1980s, when it was embraced by feminists.
She quit the factory job after about two weeks because she learned that another woman had damaged her hands while using the metal presser, and she feared that such an injury would prevent her from playing the cello, her daughter said.
At one of her next jobs, at a soda fountain, she met her husband, Leo H. Doyle, a dental student. They had been married for 66 years when he died this year.
In addition to Mrs. Gregg, she is survived by four other children, 18 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren.
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BILLY TAYLOR, JAZZ PIANIST
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: December 29, 2010
Billy Taylor, a pianist and composer who was also an eloquent spokesman and advocate for jazz as well as a familiar presence for many years on television and radio, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Billy Taylor in 2001 with children from Intermediate School 176.
The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Kim Taylor-Thompson.
Dr. Taylor, as he preferred to be called (he earned a doctorate in music education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975), was a living refutation of the stereotype of jazz musicians as unschooled, unsophisticated and inarticulate, an image that was prevalent when he began his career in the 1940s, and that he did as much as any other musician to erase.
Dr. Taylor probably had a higher profile on television than any other jazz musician of his generation. He had a long run as a cultural correspondent on the CBS News program “Sunday Morning” and was the musical director of David Frost’s syndicated nighttime talk show from 1969 to 1972.
Well educated and well spoken, he came across, Ben Ratliff wrote in The New York Times in a review of a 1996 nightclub performance, as “a genial professor,” which he was: he taught jazz courses at Long Island University, the Manhattan School of Music and elsewhere. But he was also a compelling performer and a master of the difficult art of making jazz accessible without watering it down.
His “greatest asset,” Mr. Ratliff wrote, “is a sense of jazz as entertainment, and he’s not going to be obscure about it.”
A pianist with impeccable technique and an elegant, almost self-effacing style, Dr. Taylor worked with some of the biggest names in jazz early in his career and later led a trio that worked regularly in New York nightclubs and recorded many albums. But he left his mark on jazz less as a musician than as a proselytizer, spreading the gospel of jazz as a serious art form in high school and college lectures, on radio and television, on government panels and foundation boards.
He also helped bring jazz to predominantly black neighborhoods with Jazzmobile, an organization he founded in 1965 to present free outdoor concerts by nationally known musicians at street corners and housing projects throughout New York City.
“I knew that jazz was not as familiar to young blacks as James Brown and the soul thing,” he told Barbara Campbell of The Times in 1971. “If you say to a young guy in Harlem, Duke Ellington is great, he’s going to be skeptical until he has seen him on 127th Street.”
William Edward Taylor Jr. was born in Greenville, N.C., on July 24, 1921, and grew up in Washington. His father, William, was a dentist; his mother, Antoinette, was a schoolteacher. He had his first piano lesson at 7 and later studied music at what is now Virginia State University. Shortly after moving to New York in 1943 — within two days of his arrival, he later recalled — he began working with the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, and he remained a fixture on that celebrated nightclub row for many years.
Dr. Taylor had the technique, the knowledge and the temperament to straddle the old and the new; his adaptability made him a popular sideman with both swing and bebop musicians and led to his being hired in 1949 as the house pianist at Birdland.
In 1951 he formed his own trio, which was soon working at clubs like the Copacabana in New York and the London House in Chicago. Within a few years he was lecturing about jazz at music schools and writing articles about it for DownBeat, Saturday Review and other publications. He later had a long-running concert-lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He also became one of the few jazz musicians to establish a successful separate career in radio and television. In 1958 he was the musical director of an NBC television show, “The Subject Is Jazz.” A year later the Harlem radio station WLIB hired him as a disc jockey; in 1962 he moved to WNEW, but he returned to WLIB in 1964 as both disc jockey and program director, and remained in those positions until 1969. He was later a founding partner of Inner City Broadcasting, which bought WLIB in 1971.
Commercial radio became increasingly inhospitable to jazz in the 1960s, but Dr. Taylor found a home at National Public Radio, where he was a familiar voice for more than two decades, first as host of “Jazz Alive” in the late ’70s and most recently on “Billy Taylor’s Jazz at the Kennedy Center.” That series, on which he introduced live performances and interviewed the performers, made its debut in the fall of 1994 and remained in production until the fall of 2002.
In 1968 Dr. Taylor was appointed to New York City’s new Cultural Council, along with Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and other prominent figures in the arts. He later held similar positions on both the state and federal level and until recently was an adviser to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
In 1980 he was a member of an advisory panel that called for greater support for jazz from the National Endowment for the Arts. Many of the panel’s proposals were eventually enacted, and Dr. Taylor became a beneficiary of the endowment in 1988, when he received a $20,000 Jazz Masters award. He was also given a National Medal of Arts in 1992.
Dr. Taylor wrote more than 300 compositions. They ranged in scope and style from “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” a simple 16-bar gospel tune written with Dick Dallas that became one of the unofficial anthems of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, to the ambitious “Suite for Jazz Piano and Orchestra” (1973).
In addition to his daughter, Dr. Taylor is survived by his wife, Theodora. A son, Duane, died in 1988.
As much energy as his other activities required, Dr. Taylor never lost his enthusiasm for performing — or his frustration with audiences that, as he saw it, missed the point. “Most people say, ‘Hey, let’s go to the nightclub and have a few drinks, and maybe we’ll even listen to the music,’ ” he once said. “It’s a lack of understanding of the musicians and of the discipline involved.
“This is not to say that playing jazz is all frowning and no fun at all. But because you make it look easy doesn’t mean you didn’t spend eight hours a day practicing the piano.”
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ISABELLE CARO, ANOREXIC MODEL
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: December 30, 2010
Isabelle Caro, a French model and actress who became the international face of anorexia when she allowed her ravaged body to be photographed nude for an Italian advertising campaign to raise awareness about the disease, died on Nov. 17. She was 28.
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Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images
Isabelle Caro in March.
Her friends and family initially kept her death secret. Danièle Gouzard-Dubreuil-Prevot, Ms. Caro’s longtime acting instructor, informed The Associated Press on Wednesday that she died after returning to France from a job in Tokyo.
Though her anorexia was almost certainly a factor in her death, its exact role was not clear, and her weight at her death was not known. But Ms. Caro weighed only about 60 pounds when she posed, reclining and staring balefully over her right shoulder, for an advertising campaign for the Italian fashion label Nolita in 2007. She was 5 feet 4 inches tall and had battled anorexia since the age of 13.
The image, displayed on billboards and in newspapers as Fashion Week got under way that year in Milan, was shocking. Ms. Caro’s face was emaciated, her arms and legs mere sticks, her teeth seemingly too large for her mouth. In large letters, “No — Anorexia” ran across the top of the photograph.
The photo was taken by Oliviero Toscani, celebrated in the fashion industry for his Benetton campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s, which included such provocative images as a close-up of a man dying from AIDS and prisoners on death row.
The Nolita campaign came as the fashion industry was under a spotlight over anorexia, after a 21-year-old Brazilian model, Ana Carolina Reston, died from it in 2006.
“The idea was to shock people into awareness,” Ms. Caro said at the time. “I decided to do it to warn girls about the danger of diets and of fashion commandments.”
Some groups working with anorexics warned, however, that it did a disservice to those with the disorder. Fabiola De Clercq, the president of Italy’s Association for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, said that Ms. Caro should be in the hospital and pronounced the image “too crude.”
The ads were eventually banned by an Italian advertising watchdog agency, which determined that they exploited the illness.
The campaign gained Ms. Caro widespread attention in Europe and the United States. She subsequently served as a judge on the French version of the reality show “America’s Next Top Model” and worked periodically as a film and television actress.
Ms. Caro often spoke out about her anorexia and her efforts to recover, including an appearance on the VH1 reality series “The Price of Beauty,” starring Jessica Simpson.
Ms. Caro’s Facebook page said that she was born on Sept. 12, 1982. In her 2008 memoir, “The Little Girl Who Didn’t Want to Get Fat,” she described a tormented childhood dominated by the profound depression that gripped her mother, an artist, when Isabelle was 4. Obsessed with protecting Isabelle, her mother kept her out of school until the age of 11 and forbade her to play with other children, lest she pick up an illness. She often criticized her daughter for being too fat.
“She wanted me to be her little girl forever,” Ms. Caro told Italian Vanity Fair in 2007. “So as I started puberty I hated the idea that my body was going to change. I wanted to have the body of a child forever, to make my mother happy.”
As a result of her self-imposed diet, she would often lapse into comas and awake delirious, not knowing who she was. At one time, she survived on one square of chocolate a day with a cup of tea that she consumed a teaspoon at a time, to make it last.
Ms. Caro’s long struggle with her disease had alarming ups and downs. In 2006, when her weight dwindled to 55 pounds, she sank into a coma. After months in intensive care, she was advised by a psychologist to break free of her parents, and she moved to Marseille. She also began a blog documenting her struggle with anorexia.
“I still eat almost nothing, but I’ve stopped vomiting,” she said after her photo shoot for Nolita. “I have started to distinguish tastes of things. I have tried ice cream — it’s delicious.”
This March, she announced with pride that her weight had risen to 93 pounds.
The Swiss singer Vincent Bigler had been working with Ms. Caro on a video for a song he wrote about anorexia called “J’ai Fin,” a wordplay in French that means roughly “I am the end” but has the same pronunciation as “I am hungry.” He said he wrote the song after being so moved and worried by seeing Ms. Caro on television.
Mr. Toscani said that he had visited several hospitals in France, Italy and Germany to find the right model and chose Ms. Caro because she exhibited the classic physical characteristics of advanced anorexia and because her eyes were haunting.
Ann
