JANE WHITE, ACTRESS AND SINGER WHO REBELLED AGAINST RACIAL STRAIGHTJACKETING
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: August 7, 2011
Jane White, an actress who made her reputation in the 1960s and ’70s in Shakespearean and classical Greek drama in New York but who felt hampered by the racial attitudes of casting directors toward light-skinned black performers like herself, died on July 24 at her home in Greenwich Village. She was 88.
Richard Termine for The New York Times
Jane White, in 2005.
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Photofest
Jane White in 1959 as Queen Aggravain in “Once Upon a Mattress,” her first major Broadway role.
The cause was cancer, said Joan K. Harris, her friend and executor.
Ms. White, who also employed a rich mezzo-soprano voice as a sometime cabaret singer, spoke openly about the peculiar racial challenge she faced in the 1960s: though roles for black performers were increasing, casting agents were continuing to think mainly in terms of “black” parts and “white” parts.
“I’ve just always been too ‘white’ to be ‘black’ and too ‘black’ to be ‘white,’ which, you know, gets to you after a while, particularly when the roles keep passing you by,” she told an interviewer in 1968.
In her first major Broadway role, in 1959, as Queen Aggravain (to a young Carol Burnett’s princess) in “Once Upon a Mattress,” Ms. White was asked to lighten her complexion — or “white up” in the terminology of the day — so as not to confuse the audience with what a production staff member called her “Mediterranean” looks.
She rebelled against such racial straitjacketing — and escaped her limbo status — by choosing roles that transcended, or at least predated, the American race problem.
She played the shrewish Kate in “The Taming of the Shrew” at the 1960 New York Shakespeare Festival and Helen of Troy in a 1963 production of “The Trojan Women,” directed by Michael Cacoyannis, who died on July 25. A pair of roles in the 1965 Shakespeare Festival — Volumnia, the mother of the title character in “Coriolanus” and the princess in “Love’s Labor’s Lost” — earned her an Obie.
Ms. White never achieved the stardom she hoped for and believed she deserved. One issue — the larger one — was a paucity of roles for black actors, period, no matter the shade or hue of their skin, she told The New York Times in 1968. “We have one Sidney Poitier and one Diana Sands, and bang! — the door closes,” she said.
The situation became only more complicated for mixed-race actors like herself, she said. As she wrote in a 1992 essay, light-skinned actors of her time were still routinely dismissed as too white for black parts. They had to lighten their complexions for white parts and, in the case of light-skinned women appearing opposite black men, darken their appearance lest the black man “seem to be involved with a white girl — horrors!”
In the 1968 Times interview, Ms. White vented her frustration. “I don’t want to be disguised anymore,” she said.
Jane White was born in Harlem on Oct. 30, 1922, the first child of Leah Gladys Powell, whose heritage was black, white and Cherokee, and Walter Francis White, who identified himself as black but who calculated that he was only 1/64 African-American. A younger brother, Walter Jr., died in 1975.
Ms. White’s father, a civil rights advocate whose blue eyes and light skin helped him cross the color line to investigate lynchings in the 1920s in the South, served as executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. from 1931 to 1955. Ms. White graduated from Smith College in 1944.
Paul Robeson, the legendary actor and singer, who was a friend of her father’s, helped Ms. White get her first stage role the next year, as the lead in Lillian Smith’s “Strange Fruit,” a short-lived Broadway play about a doomed interracial love affair. The play received mixed reviews, but Eleanor Roosevelt, in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” praised Ms. White’s acting for its “restraint and beauty.”
Her father’s prominence, like the complexion she inherited from him, was a mixed blessing, Ms. White said. It was nice having Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall among her family’s friends. It was also the touchstone for her worst anxieties as an ambitious black artist.
Ms. White told friends that her dilemma was summed up one day in 1959 when she took a cab, already “whitened” to audition for “Once Upon a Mattress.” “ ‘What if this cabdriver recognizes me?’ she asked herself,” said Jane Klain, a friend, recounting the story. “ ‘The daughter of Walter White. In white-face. What am I doing?’ ”
In 1965 Ms. White and her husband, Alfredo Viazzi, an Italian writer and restaurateur, left for Italy in search of a less stressful life. They returned to New York in 1968.
She played many more stage roles after that, had recurring parts in soap operas, was cast in the movie “Beloved,” made cameo appearances in spoken-part roles at the Metropolitan Opera and performed as a cabaret singer at Alfredo’s Settebello, the restaurant in the Village that she and her husband opened in 1976. Mr. Viazzi died in 1987.
Ms. White never reconciled herself to being less than a star. “Why didn’t I just go away and do something else?” she asked in an essay for the women’s history archives at Smith College in 1992.
Then she answered her own question. “I’m only 69. There’s still time, if my legs hold out.” And if nothing else, bringing humanity to the stage makes a difference in the world, she added, “in black face or white face.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 10, 2011
An obituary on Monday about Jane White, a light-skinned black actress who complained that she was sometimes asked to lighten her complexion to play certain roles, paraphrased incorrectly from comments by Jane Klain, a friend, who described the time Ms. White wore such makeup during a cab ride. Ms. Klain said that the actress was on her way to audition for “Once Upon a Mattress” — not that she was on her way to a performance of the acclaimed musical. (She went on to originate the role of Queen Aggravain in the musical.)
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CHARLES L. GITTENS, FIRST BLACK SECRET SERVICE SPECIAL AGENT
By: Jenée Desmond-Harris | Posted: August 10, 2011
Charles L. Gittens, the first African American to serve as a Secret Service agent, died late last month, the Associated Press reports. He was 82 years old. Gittens joined the service in 1956 and in 1971 was promoted to lead the Washington bureau, the second-most-important Secret Service office in the United States.
As the special agent in charge of field operations in the city, he was a key part of the personal security detail surrounding Gerald Ford.
He then spent 10 years working in New York, where, in addition to providing protection, he was charged with investigating cases involving counterfeit currency and forged federal government checks and bonds.
Gittens spoke Spanish fluently and was moved to Puerto Rico as the island’s senior agent. In 1969 he accompanied Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York on his visit as presidential emissary to Latin America and the Caribbean republics.
Once appointed to Washington, Gittens led a staff of 100 and encouraged the enlistment of black agents, visiting universities with recruiting teams. At the time, only 37 of the Secret Service’s 1,200 agents were black.
By his retirement in 1979, Gittens had become deputy assistant director of the Office of Inspection, overseeing all the Secret Service field offices. Subsequently he worked for the Department of Justice, where, as deputy director of the Office of Special Investigations, he helped hunt down war criminals living in the United States.
When asked about the chances of being shot as a Secret Service agent, Gittens said he was “a hell of a lot safer being a Secret Service man that I would be driving cabs in either New York or Chicago.”
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FRANCESCO QUINN, ACTOR IN ‘PLATOON’
Published: August 10, 2011
Francesco Quinn, a television and film actor who appeared in Oliver Stone’s searing 1986 Vietnam War film, “Platoon,”, died on Friday in Malibu, Calif. The son of the actor Anthony Quinn, he was 48.
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Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times
Francesco Quinn in 2008.
Mr. Quinn collapsed on a street near his home, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said. His agent, Arlene Thornton, said the cause was believed to be a heart attack.
Mr. Quinn was perhaps best known for his supporting role in “Platoon” as Rhah, a raspy-voiced character who takes heroin from dead Vietnamese and tries to help new recruits in their first big battle.
In “The Tonto Woman,” a Western based on an Elmore Leonard story that became a 2008 Academy Award nominee for best live-action short, Mr. Quinn played a Mexican gunslinger.
Mr. Quinn’s television credits include guest roles on “Criminal Minds,” “ER,” “CSI: Miami,” “JAG,” “24” and “The Shield.” In 1990, he played a young Santiago, the fisherman, in the television adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea.” The old Santiago was played by his father, who died in 2001. Mr. Quinn also appeared in the CBS soap opera “The Young and the Restless” from 1999 to 2001.
Francesco Daniele Quinn was born in Rome on March 22, 1963. His mother was Jolanda Addolori, an Italian wardrobe assistant whom his father met on the set of the movie “Barabbas” and later married. Francesco Quinn is survived by his wife, the former Valentina Castellani; and three children. His first marriage ended in divorce.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 11, 2011
A photograph with an earlier version was removed because of questions about whether it showed Mr. Quinn or a fellow cast member from “Platoon,” Ivan Kane.
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JANI LANE, WARRANT’S LEAD SINGER
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Published: August 12, 2011
Jani Lane, the flaxen-haired former lead singer for the heavy metal band Warrant who wrote its 1990 hit “Cherry Pie“ and other anthems, was found dead on Thursday in a hotel room near his home in Los Angeles. He was 47.
Marty Temme/WireImage
Jani Lane performing with Warrant in the 1990s.
The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said it had not yet determined a cause, but Mr. Lane’s manager, Obi Steinman, said the death was alcohol-related. Mr. Lane had struggled with alcohol, he said.
Warrant exemplified the hair metal scene of the late 1980s and early ’90s, and Mr. Lane was its keening frontman. The band’s first album, “Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich,” went double platinum after its release in 1989 on the strength of power-chord-heavy tracks like “Down Boys“ and saccharine ballads like “Heaven,” both written by Mr. Lane.
Warrant is probably best known for the title track on 1990’s “Cherry Pie,” which also went double platinum, selling more than two million copies. The song, a campy, misogynistic tale of a sexual liaison interrupted by a livid father, still resonates with fans today, as does its accompanying video featuring a scantily clad model.
Mr. Lane, however, had mixed feelings about the song. He wrote it in one night after the president of Columbia Records asked him for a song like Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator.”
“I could shoot myself in the head for writing that song,” he said on the VH1 documentary “Heavy: The Story of Metal,” inserting a bleeped expletive.
But he later said in a radio interview in Kalamazoo, Mich., that he was “happy as a clam to have written a song that is still being played and still dug by so many people.”
Mr. Lane was born John Kennedy Oswald on Feb. 1, 1964 in Akron, Ohio. (His parents named him after President John F. Kennedy, undeterred by the fact that they shared the last name of the suspect in the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald.) Mr. Lane wrote on his Web site that his parents soon changed his name to John Patrick.
Mr. Lane got his first drum kit at age 6, began playing in clubs at 11 and was performing professionally in a band by 15 while also playing the guitar and piano as well as sports in high school. After high school he moved to Florida, played drums and sang with a cover band. In 1985 he moved to Los Angeles, where he formed a band called Plain Jane and became its lead singer, adopting the name Jani Lane. Plain Jane opened for acts like Guns ’n’ Roses but never got a record deal. He joined Warrant after its founder, Erik Turner, asked him to rehearse with the band.
Mr. Lane left the band in 2003 and released a solo album, “Back Down to One,” then played off and on with the band in subsequent years.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. His first wife was Bobbie Brown, the model who performed in the “Cherry Pie” video.
He is survived by his wife, Kimberly; a brother, Eric; three sisters, Marcine Williams, Michelle Robinson and Victoria Oswald; a daughter from his first marriage, Taylar Lane; a daughter from his second marriage, Madison Lane; and two stepdaughters, Ryan and Brittany.
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RUDOLPH BRAZDA, WHO SURVIVED PINK TRIANGLE
Published: August 5, 2011
Rudolf Brazda, believed to be the last surviving man to wear the pink triangle — the emblem sewn onto the striped uniforms of the thousands of homosexuals sent to Nazi concentration camps, most of them to their deaths — died on Wednesday in Bantzenheim, in Alsace, France. He was 98.
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Gérard Bohrer
Rudolf Brazda was interned at Buchenwald for 3 years.
His death was confirmed by the Lesbian and Gay Federation of Germany.
Mr. Brazda, who was born in Germany, had lived in France since the Buchenwald camp, near Weimar, Germany, was liberated by American forces in April 1945. He had been imprisoned there for three years.
It was only after May 27, 2008, when the German National Monument to the Homosexual Victims of the Nazi Regime was unveiled in Berlin’s Tiergarten park — opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — that Mr. Brazda became known as probably the last gay survivor of the camps. Until he notified German officials after the unveiling, the Lesbian and Gay Federation believed there were no other pink-triangle survivors.
In a statement on Thursday, Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a French organization that commemorates the Nazi persecution of gay people, said that Mr. Brazda “was very likely the last victim and the last witness” to the persecution.
“It will now be the task of historians to keep this memory alive,” the statement said, “a task that they are just beginning to undertake.”
One of those historians is Gerard Koskovich, curator of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender History Museum in San Francisco and an author with Roberto Malini and Steed Gamero of “A Different Holocaust” (2006).
Pointing out that only men were interned, Mr. Koskovich said, “The Nazi persecution represented the apogee of anti-gay persecution, the most extreme instance of state-sponsored homophobia in the 20th century.”
During the 12-year Nazi regime, he said, up to 100,000 men were identified in police records as homosexuals, with about 50,000 convicted of violating Paragraph 175, a section of the German criminal code that outlawed male homosexual acts. There was no law outlawing female homosexual acts, he said. Citing research by Rüdiger Lautmann, a German sociologist, Mr. Koskovich said that 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were interned in the camps and that about 60 percent of them died there, most within a year.
“The experience of homosexual men under the Nazi regime was one of extreme persecution, but not genocide,” Mr. Koskovich said, when compared with the “relentless effort to identify all Jewish people and ultimately exterminate them.”
Still, the conditions in the camps were murderous, said Edward J. Phillips, the director of exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Men sent to the camps under Section 175 were usually put to forced labor under the cruelest conditions — underfed, long hours, exposure to the elements and brutal treatment by labor brigade leaders,” Mr. Phillips said. “We know of instances where gay prisoners and their pink triangles were used for guards’ target practices.”
Two books have been written about Mr. Brazda. In one, “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” (2010), by Jean-Luc Schwab, Mr. Brazda recalled how dehumanizing the incarceration was. “Seeing people die became such an everyday thing, it left you feeling practically indifferent,” he is quoted as saying. “Now, every time I think back on those terrible times, I cry. But back then, just like everyone in the camps, I had hardened myself so I could survive.”
Rudolf Brazda was born on June 26, 1913, in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz to a family of Czech origin. His parents, Emil and Anna Erneker Brazda, both worked in the coal mining industry. Rudolf became a roofer. Before he was sent to the camp, he was arrested twice for violations of Paragraph 175.
After the war, Mr. Brazda moved to Alsace. There he met Edouard Mayer, his partner until Mr. Mayer’s death in 2003. He has no immediate survivors.
“Having emerged from anonymity,” the book “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” says of Mr. Brazda, “he looks at the social evolution for homosexuals over his nearly 100 years of life: ‘I have known it all, from the basest repression to the grand emancipation of today.’ ”
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NANCY WAKE, PROUD SPY AND NAZI FOE
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: August 13, 2011
Nancy Wake did not like killing people. But in wartime, she once told an interviewer, “I don’t see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas.”
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Adam Butler/Associated Press
Nancy Wake, a French Resistance hero of World War II, in 2004.
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Australia War Memorial, via European Pressphoto Agency
Ms. Wake, in an undated photo.
Ms. Wake, a onetime freelance journalist whose life careered along a path that Hemingway might have sketched, from impoverished childhood to high-society hostess in the south of France to decorated heroine of the French Resistance during World War II, died last Sunday in London. She was 98.
In the war, she was credited with saving the lives of hundreds of Allied soldiers and downed airmen between 1940 and 1943 by escorting them through occupied France to safety in Spain.
She helped establish communication lines between the British military and the French Resistance in 1944 that were deemed crucial to weakening German strength in France in advance of the Allied invasion.
By her own account she once killed a German sentry with her bare hands, and ordered the execution of a woman she believed to be a German spy.
“I was not a very nice person,” Ms. Wake told an Australian newspaper in 2001. “And it didn’t put me off my breakfast.”
Ms. Wake received so many medals for her wartime service, she said, that she lived out her old age on the proceeds from their sale.
Britain and the United States awarded her their highest civilian honors. France gave her the Legion d’Honneur, the highest military honor it bestows.
She once described herself — as a young woman — as someone who loved nothing more than “a good drink” and handsome men, “especially French men.”
The German military described her as “la souris blanche,” or “the white mouse,” for her ability to elude capture.
Between 1940 and 1944 she had close calls but always managed to give her pursuers the slip, her biographer, Peter FitzSimons, said Monday in a radio interview in Australia.
In film documentaries and in her 1985 autobiography, “The White Mouse,” Ms. Wake said she underwent a kind of personal metamorphosis during the war, from the fun-loving girl of her youth to the Resistance fighter she became.
It began, she said, with a visit to Vienna in the mid-1930s as a freelance journalist. There, she saw roving Nazi gangs randomly beating Jewish men and women in the streets.
Those attacks made her promise herself that “if ever the opportunity arose, I would do everything I could” to stop the Nazi movement, she said. “My hatred of the Nazis was very, very deep.”
The opportunity arose.
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was born Aug. 30, 1912, in Wellington, New Zealand, the youngest of six children. Her father, a journalist, left the family shortly after moving them to Sydney, Australia.
Ms. Wake left home at 16, worked briefly as a nurse, and managed with the help of a small inheritance from an aunt to leave Australia at age 20. She traveled to London, New York and Paris, and decided Paris was the place that suited her best. She found work as a freelance journalist, and managed at the same time to live “Parisian nightlife to the full,” according to Mr. FitzSimons.
In 1936, she met a Marseilles industrialist named Henri Fiocca, whom she married and settled with in Marseilles three years later.
With the German invasion of France, Ms. Wake’s wealth and social standing gave her a certain cover as she began helping members of local Resistance groups.
She became a courier and then an escort for Allied soldiers and refugees trying to leave the country. “It was much easier for us, you know, to travel all over France,” she told an interviewer for Australian television. “A woman could get out of a lot of trouble that a man could not.”
In 1943, when occupation authorities became aware of her activities, she fled France. Her husband, who stayed behind, was later arrested and executed.
Ms. Wake found her way to England and was accepted for training by the British Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E., an intelligence group working with the French Resistance. In April 1944, when she was 31, she was among 39 women and 430 men who were parachuted into France to help with preparations for D-Day.
There she collected night parachute drops of weapons and ammunition and hid them in storage caches for the advancing allied armies, set up wireless communication with England and harassed the enemy.
“I was never afraid,” she said. “I was too busy to be afraid.”
By most accounts, Ms. Wake never figured out what to do with her life after the war.
“It’s dreadful because you’ve been so busy, and then it all just fizzles out,” she told an Australian newspaper in 1983.
She worked briefly for the British government, then returned to Australia and ran unsuccessfully for public office in the early 1950s. She married a retired Royal Air Force pilot, John Forward, in 1957. He died in 1997.
Ms. Wake returned to London in 2001.
Film and television producers have used Ms. Wake’s early life as the basis for various works, and she generally approved of them, except for those suggesting that she had love affairs during the war.
She did not have affairs, she insisted in a 1987 Australian documentary.
“And in my old age, I regret it,” she said. “But you see, if I had accommodated one man, the word would have spread around, and I would have had to accommodate the whole damn lot!”
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 