March 6, 2011 · 4:31 PM
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IN REMEMBRANCE: 3-6-2011

JANE RUSSELL, VOLUPTUOUS STAR OF WESTERNS

By ANITA GATES

Published: February 28, 2011

Jane Russell, the voluptuous actress at the center of one of the most highly publicized censorship episodes in movie history, the long-delayed release of the 1940s western “The Outlaw,” died on Monday at her home in Santa Maria, Calif. She was 89.

March 1, 2011

RKO, via Associated Press

Jane Russell made her screen debut in Howard Hughes’s 1943 film “The Outlaw.” More Photos »

Multimedia
March 1, 2011

Paramount Pictures, via Reuters

Jane Russell with Bob Hope. More Photos »

The cause was a respiratory-related illness, her daughter-in-law, Etta Waterfield, said.

Ms. Russell was 19 and working in a doctor’s office when Howard Hughes, returning to movie production after his aviation successes, cast her as the tempestuous Rio McDonald, Sheriff Pat Garrett’s girlfriend, in “The Outlaw,” which he directed.

A movie poster — which showed a sultry Ms. Russell in a cleavage-revealing blouse falling off one shoulder as she reclined in a haystack and held a gun — quickly became notorious and seemed to fuel movie censors’ determination to prevent the film’s release because of scenes that, by 1940s standards, revealed too much of the star’s breasts. The Roman Catholic Church was one of the movie’s vocal opponents.

Although the film had its premiere and ran for nine weeks in San Francisco in 1943, it did not open in New York until 1947 and was not given a complete national release until 1950. Critics were generally unimpressed by its quality, but it made Ms. Russell a star. The specially engineered bra that Hughes was said to have designed for his 38D leading lady took its place in cinematic history, although Ms. Russell always contended that she never actually wore it.

She went on to make some two dozen feature films, all but a handful of them between 1948 and 1957 and many of them westerns.

In the western comedy “The Paleface” (1948), she played Calamity Jane opposite Bob Hope, with whom she also starred in “Son of Paleface,” the 1952 sequel. In the musical comedy that she called her favorite film, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), she starred with Marilyn Monroe as one of two ambitious showgirls. Her numbers included “Two Little Girls From Little Rock,” one of several duets with Monroe, and the comic lament “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” Two years later she starred with Jeanne Crain in “Gentlemen Marry Brunettes,” a sequel of sorts, set in Paris.

A number of her movies were musicals, and singing became a large part of her career. She first appeared in Las Vegas in 1957 and was performing in musical shows at small venues as recently as 2008. Although she did considerable stage acting over the years, her sole Broadway appearance was in 1971 in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Company,” in which she replaced Elaine Stritch as the tough-talking character who sings “The Ladies Who Lunch.”

Ms. Russell was best known in the 1970s and ’80s as the television spokeswoman in commercials for Playtex bras, which she promoted as ideal for “full-figured gals” like her.

Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell was born on June 21, 1921, in Bemidji, Minn., the daughter of Roy and Geraldine Russell. Her mother had been an aspiring actress and a model. “The Girl in the Blue Hat,” a portrait of her by the watercolorist Mary B. Titcomb, once hung in the White House, bought by President Woodrow Wilson.

When Jane was 9 months old, before her four brothers were born, her father moved the family to Southern California to take a job as an office manager. He died when Jane was in her teens.

After high school, Jane took acting classes at Max Reinhardt’s theater workshop and with Maria Ouspenskaya. She did some modeling for a photographer friend but was working in a chiropodist’s office when a photo of her found its way to Hughes’s casting people.

In 1943 she married her high school sweetheart, Bob Waterfield, a U.C.L.A. football player who became the star quarterback of the Los Angeles Rams. They adopted a daughter, Tracy, and two sons, Thomas and Robert. (After a botched abortion before her marriage, Ms. Russell was unable to have children. She later became an outspoken opponent of abortion and an advocate of adoption, founding the World Adoption International Fund in the 1950s.)

She and Mr. Waterfield divorced in 1967 after 24 years of marriage. The following year she married Roger Barrett, an actor, who died of a heart attack three months after the wedding.

In 1974, John Calvin Peoples, a real estate broker and retired Air Force lieutenant, became her third husband, and they were together until his death, in 1999. Ms. Russell had had previous problems with alcohol, but they became worse after she was widowed again; her grown children insisted that she undergo rehabilitation at the age of 79.

She also turned to conservative politics in her later years.

“These days I’m a teetotal, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded, conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist,” she told an Australian newspaper, The Daily Mail, in 2003. Bigotry, she added, “just means you don’t have an open mind.”

By the time she married Mr. Peoples, her acting career was all but over. After appearing in three movies in the mid-1960s, she had a small role in her last film, “Darker Than Amber,” a 1970 action drama starring Rod Taylor. She did relatively little television, but her final screen role was in a 1986 episode of the NBC police drama “Hunter.”

Her children survive her, as do 8 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Ms. Russell was very public about her religious convictions. She organized Bible study groups in Hollywood and wrote about having experienced speaking in tongues. In her memoir, “My Path and My Detours” (1985), she described the strength she drew from Christianity.

A higher power was always there, she wrote, “telling me that if I could just hold tough a little longer, I’d find myself around one more dark corner, see one more spot of light and have one more drop of pure joy in this journey called life.”

SOURCE

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REV. PETER J. GOMES, A LEADING VOICE AGAINST INTOLERANCE

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Published: March 1, 2011

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, a Harvard minister, theologian and author who announced that he was gay a generation ago and became one of America’s most prominent spiritual voices against intolerance, died on Monday in Boston. He was 68.

March 2, 2011

Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes in 2007.

The cause was complications of a stroke, Harvard said. His death, which was first reported by The Harvard Crimson, was confirmed by Emily Lemiska, a spokeswoman at Massachusetts General Hospital, where Mr. Gomes had recently been treated. He lived in Cambridge and Plymouth, Mass.

One can read into the Bible almost any interpretation of morality, Mr. Gomes liked to say after coming out, for its passages had been used to defend slavery and the liberation of slaves, to support racism, anti-Semitism and patriotism, to enshrine a dominance of men over women, and to condemn homosexuality as immoral.

He was a thundering black Baptist preacher and for much of his life a conservative Republican celebrity who wrote books about the Pilgrims, published volumes of sermons and presided at weddings and funerals of the rich and famous. He gave the benediction at President Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration and delivered the National Cathedral sermon at the inauguration of Reagan’s successor, George Bush.

At Harvard, Mr. Gomes was the Plummer professor of Christian morals at the School of Divinity and the Pusey minister of Memorial Church, a nondenominational center of Christian life on campus. For decades, he was among the first and the last to address undergraduates, greeting arriving freshmen with a sermon on hallowed traditions and advising graduating seniors about the world beyond the sheltering Harvard Yard.

Then, in 1991, he appeared before an angry crowd of students, faculty members and administrators protesting homophobic articles in a conservative campus magazine whose distribution had led to a spate of harassment and slurs against gay men and lesbians on campus. Mr. Gomes, putting his reputation and career on the line, announced that he was “a Christian who happens as well to be gay.”

When the cheers faded, there were expressions of surprise from the Establishment, and a few calls for his resignation, which were ignored. The announcement changed little in Mr. Gomes’s private life; he had never married and said he was celibate by choice. But it was a turning point for him professionally.

“I now have an unambiguous vocation — a mission — to address the religious causes and roots of homophobia,” he told The Washington Post months later. “I will devote the rest of my life to addressing the ‘religious case’ against gays.”

He was true to his word. His sermons and lectures, always well attended, were packed in Cambridge and around the country as he embarked on a campaign to rebut literal and fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible. He also wrote extensively on intolerance.

“Religious fundamentalism is dangerous because it cannot accept ambiguity and diversity and is therefore inherently intolerant,” he declared in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times in 1992. “Such intolerance, in the name of virtue, is ruthless and uses political power to destroy what it cannot convert.”

In his 1996 best seller, “The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart,” Mr. Gomes urged believers to grasp the spirit, not the letter, of scriptural passages that he said had been misused to defend racism, anti-Semitism and sexism, and to attack homosexuality and abortion. He offered interpretations that he said transcended the narrow context of modern prejudices.

“The Bible alone is the most dangerous thing I can think of,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “You need an ongoing context and a community of interpretation to keep the Bible current and to keep yourself honest. Forget the thought that the Bible is an absolute pronouncement.”

But Mr. Gomes also defended the Bible from critics on the left who called it corrupt because passages had been used to oppress people. “The Bible isn’t a single book, it isn’t a single historical or philosophical or theological treatise,” he told The Seattle Gay News in 1996. “It has 66 books in it. It is a library.”

Peter John Gomes (rhymes with homes) was born in Boston on May 22, 1942, the only child of Peter Lobo and Orissa White Gomes. His father, born in the Cape Verde Islands off Africa’s west coast, was a cranberry bog worker. His mother was a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music. Peter grew up in Plymouth with literature, piano lessons and expectations that he would become a minister. He was active in the Baptist Church and preached his first sermon at 12.

He worked as a houseman to help pay for his education. After graduation from Plymouth High School in 1961, he attended Bates College in Lewiston, Me., a coeducational liberal arts institution founded by abolitionists in 1855. He majored in history and received a bachelor’s degree in 1965; he then earned a bachelor of divinity degree at Harvard in 1968 and was ordained a Baptist minister.

After two years teaching Western civilization at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he returned to Harvard in 1970 as assistant minister of Memorial Church. His first book, “History of the Pilgrim Society, 1820-1970,” was published in 1971. “The Books of the Pilgrims,” written with Lawrence D. Geller, appeared four years later. In 1974 he was named Plummer professor and Pusey minister.

In clerical collar and vestments, Mr. Gomes was a figure of homiletic power in the pulpit, hammering out the cadences in a rich baritone that The New Yorker called a blend of James Earl Jones and John Houseman. In class, he was a New England patrician: the broad shoulders, the high forehead and spectacles that tilted up when he held his head high, the watch chain at the vest and a handkerchief fluffed at the breast pocket.

Mr. Gomes spoke extensively in the United States and Britain. In 1979, Time magazine called him one of the nation’s best preachers. While much of his later life was occupied by scholarly questions of the Bible and homosexuality, he came to abhor the label “gay minister,” and pursued a much wider range of studies, on early American religions, Elizabethan Puritanism, church music and the African-American experience.

He also continued to write. Besides volumes of sermons, his books included “The Good Life: Truths that Last in Times of Need” (2002), “Strength for the Journey: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living” (2003) and “The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News” (2007).

In 2006, he became a Democrat and supported Deval Patrick, who was elected the first black governor of Massachusetts.

Michael Roston contributed reporting.

SOURCE

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ARNOST LUSTIG, WHO WROTE ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: March 5, 2011

Arnost Lustig, an acclaimed Czech author who drew on his own harrowing experiences as a teenager in World War II to produce novels and short stories laced with tales of young people who survive the Holocaust, died on Feb. 26 in Prague. He was 84.

March 6, 2011

Petra Ruzickova

The Czech writer Arnost Lustig in 2002, at the site of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt.

The embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington confirmed his death.

As a 15-year-old Jew, Mr. Lustig was sent in 1942 to Theresienstadt, the Nazi “show ghetto” in what is now the Czech Republic. Later he was transported to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. In 1945 he escaped from a train carrying him to Dachau, when the engine was destroyed by an American fighter bomber.

One of Mr. Lustig’s short stories begins with two young men fleeing from a train and hiding in the woods. After stealing bread from a farm, they are caught by a local militia and are about to be executed when the militiamen simply laugh and walk away. That story was the basis for the Czech director Jan Nimec’s first full-length feature film, “Diamonds of the Night,” in 1964.

A series of Mr. Lustig’s works was published in the United States under the title “Children of the Holocaust.” Reviewing the series for The New York Times in 1979, Ernst Pawel said that the “heroes and victims are children,” adding, “Mr. Lustig attempts to show not only how these youngsters died or survived, but how some of them managed to live, even to retain their humanity.”

Perhaps Mr. Lustig’s best-known work is the novel “A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova,” published in the United States in 1973. It tells of a group of Jewish American businessmen trapped in Nazi Germany who try to bribe their way out of the country. They befriend a local Jewish girl, Katerina, and try to pay her way to freedom. The Nazis keep tricking them, and all are killed in the camps.

“A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova” was one of the more than 20 books written by Mr. Lustig, who in 2004 was awarded a literary prize by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Four years later he received the Franz Kafka Prize, an international literary award presented by the Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague.

“In many people’s eyes, he was the greatest novelist of the Holocaust,” Charles R. Larson, a literature professor at American University in Washington, where Mr. Lustig taught for 31 years, said on Monday.

Arnost Lustig was born in Prague on Dec. 21, 1926. His father and many other members of his family were killed in the Holocaust; his mother and sister survived. After escaping from the transport train in 1945 and making his way through the woods, he returned to Prague and fought in the resistance movement.

After the war Mr. Lustig studied journalism at Charles University in Prague and later worked as a magazine editor, script writer and radio reporter. He covered the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. While in Israel he met his future wife, Vera Weislitzova, who later wrote a collection of poems, “Daughter of Olga and Leo,” about her family’s fate during the Holocaust. She died several years ago.

Mr. Lustig is survived by a son, Josef, and a daughter, Eva.

With his literary work gaining recognition starting in the late 1950s, Mr. Lustig became a prominent member of a restive group of writers and artists whose energies helped to foment the Prague Spring of 1968. He had a close friendship with Vaclav Havel, the playwright, leader of the dissidents and future president of a liberated Czechoslovakia.

The Lustigs were in Italy in August 1968, promoting the liberal policies of Czechoslovakia’s Communist leader, Alexander Dubcek, when Soviet forces invaded his country and crushed the reform movement. They decided not to return home, and in 1970 came to the United States, where Mr. Lustig became a visiting writer at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Three years later he accepted a professorship at American University.

After the fall of Communism in 1989, the Lustigs regularly returned to Prague, and in 1995 Mr. Lustig was named editor in chief of the Czech-language version of Playboy magazine. He held that post for two years, bringing essayists and fiction writers to its pages. The Lustigs moved back to Prague for good after Mr. Lustig retired from American University in 2004.

In 1995 a short story by Mr. Lustig was included in “Art From the Ashes,” a Holocaust anthology edited by Lawrence L. Langer. In that story he wrote of a concentration-camp inmate listening to the sounds of people being shot outside his barracks and knowing that falling snow was mingling with ashes from a crematorium.

“I felt the snow, the ashes and the silence around me,” he wrote. “I felt the urge to go outside, for which the guard would immediately shoot me before I got to the barbed wire. I wanted to touch with my lips a sliver of ash or snowflake.”

SOURCE

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

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