ROGER EBERT | 1942-2013
A CRITIC FOR THE COMMON MAN
In 1975 Roger Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize. More Photos »
Roger Ebert, the popular film critic and television co-host who along with his fellow reviewer and sometime sparring partner Gene Siskel could lift or sink the fortunes of a movie with their trademark thumbs up or thumbs down, died on Thursday in Chicago. He was 70.
His death was announced by The Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for more than 40 years. No cause was specified, but he had suffered from cancer and related health problems since 2002.
It would not be a stretch to say that Mr. Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw.
President Obama reacted to Mr. Ebert’s death with a statement that said, in part: “For a generation of Americans — especially Chicagoans — Roger was the movies. When he didn’t like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive — capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical.”
Mr. Ebert’s struggle with cancer gave him an altogether different public image — as someone who refused to surrender to illness. Though he had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak (a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his jaw, and he was fed through a tube for years) and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook on meals that could be made with a rice cooker.
“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was,” he told Esquire magazine in 2010. “All is well. I am as I should be.”
In recent years, Mr. Ebert became a prolific presence on Facebook and Twitter, on which he had more than 800,000 followers, and was a blogger as well.
He fired tweets with machine-gun rapidity, on topics both profound and prosaic. He commented on pro football, his captions for The New Yorker cartoon contest, an old pub he once frequented, James Joyce short stories and untold numbers of movies and television shows, to which he linked. “Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star,” went one tweet.
He swore he would not become addicted to Twitter, but emphatically did. But Mr. Ebert — whose handle was @ebertchicago — never tweeted during a movie.
Mr. Ebert liked to say his approach — dryly witty, occasionally sarcastic, sometimes quirky in his opinions — reflected the working newspaper reporter he had been, not a formal student of film. His tastes ran from the classics to boldly independent cinema to cartoons, and his put-downs could be withering.
“I will one day be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of ‘The Brown Bunny,’ ” he wrote.
His thumbs-up-or-down approach drew scorn from some critics, who said it trivialized film criticism. Speaking to Playboy magazine in 1991, Mr. Ebert agreed that his television program at the time was “not a high-level, in-depth film-criticism show.” But he argued that it demonstrated to younger viewers that one can bring standards of judgment to movies, that “it’s O.K. to have an opinion.”
In 1975 he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, for his Sun-Times reviews. His columns were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad, and he wrote more than 15 books, many by skillfully recycling his columns. In 2005 he became the first film critic to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“In the century or so that there has been such a thing as film criticism, no other critic has ever occupied the space held by Roger Ebert,” Mick LaSalle, movie critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in 2010. “Others as influential as Ebert have not been as esteemed. Others as esteemed as Ebert have not had the same direct and widespread influence. And no one, but no one, has enjoyed the same fame.”
With Mr. Siskel, Mr. Ebert popularized television film criticism. Their collaboration began in 1975. Mr. Ebert was asked to appear on WTTW, the public broadcasting station in Chicago, as co-host of a new movie-review program. He was intrigued, but then taken aback when told that Mr. Siskel, the film critic of The Chicago Tribune, would be his partner.
“The answer was at the tip of my tongue: no,” Mr. Ebert told Time magazine in 1987.
As for Mr. Siskel, he said he initially had no desire to team up with “the most hated guy in my life.”
But the pairing worked. The show, originally titled “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You,” was a public television hit. It evolved into “Sneak Previews,” which went national when the Public Broadcasting Service began syndicating it in 1978. It eventually attracted more viewers than any other entertainment series in the history of public television.
Multimedia
Slide Show
Roger Ebert Is Remembered on Twitter, a Place Where He Found a New Voice
By MEKADO MURPHY and MICHAEL ROSTON
Late in his life, Roger Ebert reinforced his place as a major cultural force with a strong presence on Twitter, where over 800,000 users subscribed to his updates.
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Seeing its commercial potential, Tribune Entertainment acquired the show in 1982 and syndicated it under the title “Movie Views.” In 1986 Mr. Ebert and Mr. Siskel signed a contract with Buena Vista Television to syndicate the program as “Siskel and Ebert at the Movies.” Most people knew the two as intellectually engaged, sweater-wearing, often contentious men sitting in cozy armchairs ad-libbing about a film’s strengths and weaknesses. Mr. Ebert was the larger one with the owlish eyeglasses, Mr. Siskel the taller one who was losing his hair. For all their combativeness, however, they actually agreed on a movie’s worth much more often than they differed.
“We liked each other; we even loved each other,” Mr. Ebert told Television Week in 2005. “And we also had days when we hated each other.”
They even hugged, in 1985, when they appeared on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson.
A typical Siskel and Ebert program reviewed five films. Either Mr. Ebert or Mr. Siskel would introduce a clip and then give his opinion. Then the other would weigh in. Their disagreements were more entertaining than their agreements, complete with knitted brows, are-you-serious head-shaking and gentle (or not) barbs. Mr. Siskel once taunted Mr. Ebert about his weight: “Has your application for a ZIP code come through yet?” Mr. Ebert came back with a dart about Mr. Siskel’s receding hairline: “The only things the astronauts saw from outer space were Three Mile Island and your forehead.”
Finally, the denouement, harking back to the Roman Colosseum: both thumbs up, both down or, in a split decision, one of each. Mr. Ebert said that he was the one who had come up with the all-or-nothing gestures, and that Mr. Siskel had thought of trademarking them.
Mr. Siskel died of a brain tumor in 1999 at 53. Afterward, the show was renamed “Roger Ebert & the Movies” and began rotating co-hosts as a way of auditioning them. In September 2000 Richard Roeper, a fellow Sun-Times columnist, became the permanent co-host and the show was renamed “Ebert & Roeper.” Mr. Ebert left the show in 2006 because of his illness, and Mr. Roeper left in 2008.
Mr. Ebert believed a great film should seem new at every watching; he said he had seen “Citizen Kane,” his favorite, scores of times. His credo in judging a film’s value was a simple one: “Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions never lie to you.”
Roger Joseph Ebert, an only child, was born on June 18, 1942, in Urbana, Ill., to Walter Ebert and the former Annabel Stumm. The first movie he saw was the 1937 Marx Brothers comedy, “A Day at the Races,” at the Princess Theater in Urbana.
“It was part of a double feature shown with five cartoons, and you got four and a half hours of solid entertainment for exactly nine cents,” Mr. Ebert once recalled.
He was barely old enough to write when he started his journalistic career, publishing The Washington Street News in his basement and delivering copies to a dozen neighborhood houses. He worked at his grade school newspaper, edited his high school paper and by age 15 was earning 75 cents an hour covering high school sports for The News-Gazette in Champaign. He went to many movies and found time to publish a science fiction magazine called Stymie. In 1958 he won a statewide speaking contest for simulating radio broadcasts.
In 1964 Mr. Ebert graduated as a journalism major from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was editor of The Daily Illini. He also served as president of the United States Student Press Association.
He did graduate study in English at the University of Cape Town under a Rotary International Fellowship. He then became a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Chicago but left to become a feature writer at The Sun-Times.
Though his knowledge of film was limited, he was named the paper’s first movie critic in 1967, when he was 24; newspapers at the time wanted young film critics to speak to the young audiences being attracted to movies like “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde” as well as films by directors of the French New Wave, including François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
Mr. Ebert got some firsthand moviemaking experience by writing the screenplay for the 1970 movie “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” for Russ Meyer, a director known for his campy B-movies featuring busty women. Panned by fellow critics (“gratuitously violent,” Mr. Siskel said), the film seemed a point of pride for Mr. Ebert, who was paid $15,000 and never tired of talking about it. He wrote a half-dozen more screenplays for Mr. Meyer, at least one of which was produced: “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” (1979).
As a critic, Mr. Ebert quickly gained traction. In 1970 Time magazine called him “a cultural resource of the community.” In 1973 the Chicago Newspaper Guild cited him as “ushering in a new era of criticism in Chicago.”
Mr. Ebert spoke out against the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system, saying it lurched between being too restrictive and too lenient. He criticized Hollywood for not supporting documentaries and relying too much on digital effects and what he called gimmicks, like 3-D.
He revived his television career in January 2011 with a new film-review program on public television. Using a computer-generated facsimile of his own voice, he discussed classic, overlooked and new films while co-hosts handled the “thumbs” judgments.
Mr. Ebert’s books included the “Great Movies” essay collections, a memoir, “Life Itself,” and a book of reviews titled “I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.” He also wrote a book about being a pedestrian in his favorite city: “The Perfect London Walk.”
In July 1992 Mr. Ebert married Chaz Hammelsmith, who survives him.
Since 1999 he had been host of a film festival in Champaign, Ill., known as Ebertfest. Until 2008, it was called Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival because it showed movies Mr. Ebert thought critics, distributors or audiences had overlooked.
Just two days before his death, Mr. Ebert announced he intended to write reviews only of films he wanted to review. He said he would recruit others to do the rest, saying he was taking “a leave of presence.”
Mr. Ebert — who said he saw 500 films a year and reviewed half of them — was once asked what movie he thought was shown over and over again in heaven, and what snack would be free of charge and calories there.
“ ‘Citizen Kane’ and vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream,” he answered.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 4, 2013
An earlier version of this article misidentified a movie critic for The San Francisco Chronicle. He is Mick LaSalle, not Mike LaSalle.
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LAWRENCE MCKIVER, A SINGER IN LONG TRADITION
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: April 1, 2013
Lawrence McKiver, a founder and the longtime lead singer of theMcIntosh County Shouters, a Georgia group representing the last community in America to perform the traditional ring shout — a centuries-old black form of ecstatic worship that marries singing, percussion and movement — died on March 25 on St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 97.
Margo Newmark Rosenbaum
Lawrence McKiver leading a ring shout — a form of worship that combines singing, percussion and movement — in 1983.
His death, at a nursing home there, was confirmed by a cousin, Carletha Sullivan.
The ring shout, rooted in the ritual dances of West Africa and forged by the Atlantic slave trade, is believed to be the oldest surviving African-American performance tradition of any kind. Centered in the Gullah-Geechee region of the coastal South, it differs from traditional black religious music in repertory, style and execution.
“The shouters, historically, had a separate body of songs that were used expressly and exclusively for the ring shout,” Art Rosenbaum, the author of “Shout Because You’re Free” (1998), a book about the tradition, said in an interview on Friday. “They are not the spirituals or gospel songs or hymns or jubilees that you’d hear in the church.”
Mr. McKiver, the Shouters’ last original member, appeared with the group until he was in his mid-80s and was widely acknowledged as the ring shout’s chief custodian.
A resident of Bolden, a tiny community about 50 miles south of Savannah, he had long helped perpetuate dozens of its traditional shout songs — including “Kneebone Bend,” “Move, Daniel,” “I Want to Die Like Weepin’ Mary” and “Hold the Baby” — whose subject matter can range from the devout to the secular and from the joyous to the apocalyptic.
With the founding of the McIntosh County Shouters in 1980, Mr. McKiver introduced the ring shout to wide audiences throughout the country.
Despite its name, the ring shout entails little shouting. That word refers not to the singing but to the movement: small, deliberate steps in a counterclockwise ring. (“Shout” has been said to be a Gullah survival of the Afro-Arabic word “saut,” the name of a ritual dance around the Kaaba, a sacred site in Mecca.)
Mr. McKiver was the Shouters’ songster, as the lead singer is known. A shout typically begins with the songster singing the opening lines; other singers, known as basers, reply in call-and-response fashion. The group’s “stick man” beats a syncopated rhythm on the floor with a tree branch or broomstick as other members clap contrasting rhythms.
The circular steps for which shouting is known are by no means dancing. To avoid even the faint appearance of dance (considered sinful in some Christian traditions), shouters may neither cross their feet nor lift them high. The result — a low, measured step that is sometimes described as a shuffle — is shouting’s visual hallmark.
On the plantations of the antebellum South, where it took on elements of Christianity, the ring shout flourished covertly for generations of slaves.
“They were just doing something to keep their mind off the past tense,” Mr. McKiver said, speaking in the local dialect, in an oral history in Mr. Rosenbaum’s book. “It was their happiness. They didn’t sing it for nothing at all sad.”
After the Civil War, the tradition endured in pockets where freed slaves had settled. By the mid-20th century, however, as Gullah-Geechee communities were increasingly swept aside by gentrification, the ring shout was presumed dead.
But in 1980 two folklorists, Fred C. Fussell and George Mitchell, were astonished to find it still being performed — a robust modern link in a chain stretching back generations — in Bolden, a coastal area in McIntosh County, Ga.
In Bolden (or Briar Patch, as the community is also known), ring shouting was, then as now, a vital adjunct to worship at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church. It was typically performed there on New Year’s Eve, also called Watch Night, to shout out the old year and shout in the new.
The folklorists encouraged the people of Bolden to take the shout public; under Mr. McKiver’s stewardship, a touring group, the McIntosh County Shouters, was assembled.
Over the years, the group (typically four men and five women, all related by birth or marriage) has performed at City Center in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington and the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., as well as on many college campuses.
It can be heard on recordings, including “Slave Shout Songs From the Coast of Georgia,” released on the Folkways label in 1984, and in “Unchained Memories,” a 2003 HBO documentary built around slave narratives.
In 1993, the McIntosh County Shouters were awarded a National Heritage Fellowshipby the National Endowment for the Arts.
Lawrence McKiver was born in Bolden in April 1915. (The family name is sometimes spelled McIver.) His mother, the former Charlotte Evans, was a shouter, as were his maternal grandparents, Amy and London Jenkins, slaves who were the wellspring of most of the shouts performed by the community today.
Mr. McKiver was educated in local segregated schools and served in the Army during World War II. Afterward he spent much of his working life as a shrimper, a job in which, he said, he “hauled till my hands be so sore till blood come out.”
Performing with the Shouters, Mr. McKiver took pains to explain to audiences the messages from slave to slave that were encoded in the lyrics of some songs.
Introducing “Move, Daniel,” for instance, he would say that “Daniel was not the Daniel of the Bible, but was a slave that had stolen some meat from the master’s smokehouse,” Mr. Rosenbaum recalled on Friday. “And the words of the shout — ‘Move, Daniel/Go the other way, Daniel’ — he understood to be instructions to Daniel about how to flee from the master’s whip.”
Mr. McKiver’s wife, the former Anna Mae Palmer, whom he married in 1934, died in 1962. Survivors include a daughter, Renelda Nelson; a son, Ricky Scott; five grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and a great-great-grandchild.
The ring shout, which is believed to have survived in Bolden because of the community’s stability — its young people tended to settle there — seems destined to endure: Mr. McKiver’s cousin Ms. Sullivan is a member of the Shouters, as are her daughter and grandson, the group’s current stick man.
This continuity is due in no small part to Mr. McKiver’s influence.
“I know I’m the one that got the songs alive today,” he told Mr. Rosenbaum. “And I don’t mind talking with a person on my heritage. I can bravely talk about my heritage, because my people come over the rough side of the mountain. Understand?”
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MILO O’SHEA, IRISH CHARACTER ACTOR
Published: April 3, 2013
Milo O’Shea, an Irish character actor — recognizable by his black bushy eyebrows, tumble of white hair and impish smile — whose films included “Ulysses,” “Barbarella” and “The Verdict,” died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by James Deenihan, the arts minister ofIreland. The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said a friend, Turlough McConnell.
In addition to his scores of film roles, Mr. O’Shea appeared on American sitcoms like “The Golden Girls,” “Cheers” and “Frasier” and played the chief justice of the Supreme Court on “The West Wing.” He was twice nominated for Tony Awards.
The first time was for his debut performance on Broadway, in the 1968 production of “Staircase,” in which he and Eli Wallach played gay, middle-aged hairdressers in a relationship not much different from many troubled heterosexual marriages. The play, while not commercially successful, came to be regarded as one of the first serious depictions of homosexuality on Broadway.
That same year he played the kindly Friar Laurence in Franco Zeffirelli’s resplendent film adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” and the mad scientist Durand Durand in Roger Vadim’s “Barbarella,” a science-fiction fantasy set in the far future, in which he tries to make the comely astronaut Barbarella (Jane Fonda) die of pleasure.
A decade later a group of rock musicians in Birmingham, England, named their new band Duran Duran — dropping the final d’s — in honor of Mr. O’Shea’s character. A popular nightclub where the group played was called Barbarella’s. When Duran Duran made a concert video in 1984, “Arena (An Absurd Notion),” Mr. O’Shea appeared in it dressed as his “Barbarella” character.
Mr. O’Shea first attained wide visibility as Leopold Bloom in Joseph Strick’s movie “Ulysses” (1967), based on the James Joyce novel. “Milo O’Shea is perfect as a fortyish, black-haired Bloom, bright-eyed when fun and lust are rising, flaccid and pathetic when rebuffed,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.
In 1981, on Broadway, he played a duplicitous, charming, Mercedes-driving priest in “Mass Appeal,” receiving his second Tony nomination.
On television he was at the center of events in the 1992 episode of “Cheers” in which Woody, the bartender (Woody Harrelson), marries his girlfriend, Kelly (Jackie Swanson). He played an anti-marriage minister who could perform the ceremony only if drunk. He succeeded.
In the 1982 film “The Verdict,” starring Paul Newman as a washed-up lawyer, Mr. O’Shea played a biased judge.
Milo O’Shea was born in Dublin on June 2, 1926. His father was in a professional singing duo, and his mother was a harpist and ballet dancer. They both encouraged him to pursue his dream of acting.
At 10 he starred in a radio adaptation of “Oliver Twist.” By 17 he was a full-time actor in a touring company. Two years later he joined one of Ireland’s major theatrical troupes and performed in plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen and Molière.
He then came to the United States and found work in regional theater. But after strained finances forced him to work as an elevator operator at the Waldorf-Astoria, he returned to Ireland. He had success there and in England, and rode the wave of his “Ulysses” success to return to Manhattan, where he lived for many years.
Mr. O’Shea’s first marriage, to Maureen Toal, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Kitty Sullivan; his sons, Colm and Steven; and three grandchildren.
Mr. O’Shea once said he hoped to be known as more than “the Irishman with the eyebrows.” But he allowed that it didn’t really matter if he was.
“If you’re thinking about your eyebrows when you’re acting,” he said, “you’re not acting properly.”
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RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA, SCREENWRITER
By ANITA GATES
Published: April 3, 2013
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the German-born screenwriter and novelist who, as the writing member of the Merchant Ivory filmmaking team, won two Academy Awards for adaptations of genteel, class-conscious E. M. Forster novels, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.
Pacesetter Productions Ltd., via Everett Collection
The Merchant Ivory filmmaking team: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, with James Ivory, left, and Ismail Merchant, in 1984.
James Ivory, the director with whom she collaborated, said the cause was complications of a pulmonary condition.
Mrs. Jhabvala (pronounced JOB-vahla) was already well established as an author when she began her screenwriting career with the producer Ismail Merchant and Mr. Ivory. Her 1975 novel, “Heat and Dust,” about an Englishwoman exploring a family scandal in India, received the Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary honor. She wrote the screenplay for the Merchant Ivory version in 1983 as well.
Over four decades, beginning in 1963, Mrs. Jhabvala made 22 films with Mr. Merchant and Mr. Ivory, all examining culture in one way or another, often one that has vanished. Their first film to attract wide attention was “The Europeans” (1979), based on a Henry James novel set in mid-19th-century New England. Their successful “Room With a View” (1986), based on Forster’s novel about a sheltered young Englishwoman who has a life-changing experience on holiday in Italy, brought Mrs. Jhabvala the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.
History repeated itself when she won the same award for Merchant Ivory’s “Howards End” (1992), from a Forster book in which shifting Edwardian social classes cross paths with sometimes cruel results. The team’s collaborations — lush and literate, often adapted from classic novels — became something of a brand. Visually, a Merchant Ivory film promised “period-perfect costumes and settings” (as The Los Angeles Times wrote); “rich production values and an exquisite attention to detail” (The Minneapolis Star Tribune); or simply “taste” (The Chicago Tribune).
The casts were top-shelf and largely British, laden with stars like Maggie Smith, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Helena Bonham Carter and Vanessa Redgrave. For “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” (1990), based on the Evan S. Connell novels, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, spouses in real life, were recruited for the title roles.
But Mrs. Jhabvala’s writing was essential. She contributed sophisticated dialogue and a sharp eye for the nuances of class and ethnicity, Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. He also echoed a frequent complaint about Merchant Ivory productions, however, finding in them an “antique-shop sensibility and Anglo-European snob appeal.”
Mr. Merchant, who died in 2005, was Indian, and Mr. Ivory is American, but Mrs. Jhabvala brought a combination of cultural backgrounds to their film collaborations, which also included “The Remains of the Day” (1993), based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, and adaptations of two more Henry James novels, “The Golden Bowl” (2000) and “The Bostonians” (1984).
Ruth Prawer was born on May 7, 1927, in Cologne, Germany, the daughter of Marcus Prawer, a Jewish lawyer who had immigrated there from Poland, and the former Eleanora Cohn. The family fled Hitler in 1939, when Ruth was 12. Unable to acquire visas for the United States, they settled in London instead. In 1948 Marcus Prawer committed suicide, having established that the entire family he had left behind in Poland had died in Nazi camps.
Ruth studied English literature at Queen Mary College, University of London, and received her degree in 1951. That year she married Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian architect, and moved with him to Delhi, where she spent the next quarter-century as a privileged, somewhat reclusive housewife raising three daughters and writing novels about the new culture in which she found herself. Many readers assumed she was Indian.
After she wrote her first book, about a young Indian woman from a good family who falls in love with the wrong man, she sent the manuscript to her mother, who circulated it to British publishers. It was published there in 1955 as “To Whom She Will” and in the United States the next year as “Amrita.” It was followed by “The Nature of Passion” (1956) and “Esmond in India” (1957).
Once Mrs. Jhabvala had an American agent, her short stories began appearing in The New Yorker. Critics praised her satiric voice and compared her to Jane Austen, among others.
She continued to write fiction long after her film career had made her famous, shifting her focus gradually to the immigrant experience and European exiles in America. Her 12th and most recent novel, “My Nine Lives” (2004), posited several alternative paths her life might have taken, in New York, London, Delhi and elsewhere.
Her last short-story collection, “A Lovesong for India,” was published in 2012, and her last story for The New Yorker appeared in its March 25 issue. The story, “The Judge’s Will,” tells of a long-married woman in Delhi dealing with the news, and presence, of her husband’s longtime mistress.
It was her fiction that had brought Mr. Merchant and Mr. Ivory to her door. In the early 1960s, when the two men had made only a handful of films together, they approached Mrs. Jhabvala to write a screenplay based on her novel “The Householder,”about the trials of a young Indian husband. The film, made in India in black and white, was released in the United States in 1963. She shared writing credit with Mr. Ivory for a few of the team’s early films, including “Shakespeare Wallah” (1965), “The Guru”(1969) and “Bombay Talkie” (1970).
In the 1970s Mrs. Jhabvala moved to New York, where, as she wrote in her 1979 essay “Disinheritance,” she felt a connection to her early years.
“I met the people I went to school with in Cologne, with exactly the same background as my own, same heritage, same parentage,” she wrote. “Now here they were living in New York, as Americans, in old West Side apartments.”
Her marriage endured, with Mrs. Jhabvala spending several months a year in India and her husband paying her long visits in New York until he retired and they were able to reunite full time.
The last film the three Merchant Ivory principals made together was “Le Divorce”(2003), a contemporary story about Americans in Paris based on Diane Johnson’s novel. After Mr. Merchant’s death, Mrs. Jhabvala and Mr. Ivory worked together on“The City of Your Final Destination” (2009), another literary adaptation, of the Peter Cameron novel, set on an estate in Uruguay inhabited by Europeans, played by Laura Linney and Mr. Hopkins.
Holding dual British and American citizenship, she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for her service to literature, in 1998.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughters, Renana Jhabvala, Firoza Jhabvala and Ava Jhabvala Wood; and six grandchildren.
In the end, Mrs. Jhabvala lived in New York longer than in any other place, but that didn’t mean she saw the city as home.
“Once a refugee, always a refugee,” she told The Guardian in 2005. “I can’t ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don’t give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you’re living in.”
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 3, 2013
An earlier version of this article incorrectly credited Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as a screenwriter on “Maurice”; Kit Heskit-Harvey collaborated with the director James Ivory as screenwriters for that 1987 film, which was adapted from the E. M. Forster novel. It also referred incorrectly to school where she studied English literature. It is Queen Mary College, University of London, not St. Mary College.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 4, 2013
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the name of Britain’s highest literary honor at the time Ms. Jhabvala received it. It was the Booker Prize, not the Man Booker Prize.
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JACK PARDEE, TEXAS A & M STAR AND N.F.L. COACH
Published: April 2, 2013
Jack Pardee, a survivor of Coach Bear Bryant’s merciless “Junction Boys” training camp at Texas A&M who went on to become an All-Pro linebacker and a coach of the year in the N.F.L., died on Monday in suburban Denver. He was 76.
The cause was gallbladder cancer, said the University of Houston, where Pardee oversaw a high-powered offense as head football coach in the late 1980s. Pardee, who had retired to a ranch in Gause, Tex., died at a hospice in Centennial, Colo., which he had entered to be near family members.
Pardee was an outstanding fullback and linebacker at Texas A&M and was named to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1986.
He played at linebacker for 15 seasons in the National Football League , with the Los Angeles Rams and the Washington Redskins. He was named a first-team All-Pro and Pro Bowl player with the Rams in 1963.
He later coached the Chicago Bears and the Washington Redskins, and his many coaching stops included three Texas teams: the Houston Gamblers of the United States Football League, the University of Houston and the N.F.L.’s Houston Oilers, whom he took to the playoffs four consecutive times in the early 1990s.
But Pardee especially endeared himself to Texas football fans for his part in a storied chapter of the state’s football history.
When Bryant arrived from the University of Kentucky to become the coach at Texas A&M in 1954, he was determined to mold a team that could endure almost anything.
He took more than 100 hopefuls, among them Pardee, a sophomore, to a parched, makeshift training camp at the western edge of Texas Hill Country, near the little town of Junction, some 115 miles northwest of San Antonio.
Beyond the prying eyes of administrators at the College Station campus, Bryant put the players through brutal drills in temperatures rising well beyond 100 degrees and denied them water or ice for much of the time.
After a 10-day ordeal, Pardee emerged among only 35 survivors, the others having gratefully taken bus tickets back to College Station. The story of that training camp was told by Jim Dent in his 1999 book, “The Junction Boys.” In 2003, ESPN presented a television movie based on those events, with Tom Berenger playing Bryant. Pardee reflected on his Junction Boys days when he visited Mineral Wells, Tex., in 2011 to speak to Texas A&M alumni.
“Coach Bryant wanted to find out who wanted to pay the price to not only play football, but to win,” Pardee was quoted saying by The Mineral Wells Index, the town newspaper. “He asked us how are we going to react after having been dazed or knocked out, or if the temperature is 110 and you are tired. He called that getting ready for the fourth quarter.”
That regimen, Pardee said, inspired him when he coped with surgery for life-threatening melanoma during his N.F.L. playing days.
“Coach Pardee was a genuine Texas legend,” Warren Moon, Pardee’s star quarterback with the Oilers, told The Houston Chronicle.
John Perry Pardee was born on April 19, 1936, in Exira, Iowa, but his family moved to Christoval, near San Angelo, Tex., when he was a youngster so his father, Earl, could receive treatment for rheumatoid arthritis in its mineral baths.
When a Texas A&M assistant named Willie Zapalac was recruiting in 1952, he was tipped off to Pardee by an alumnus of the university. The youngest of six children, Pardee had worked in oil fields since he was 14 to help support his family and developed a muscular body. He ran for more than 50 touchdowns that season, playing six-man football for his small high school.
At 6 feet 2 inches and 225 pounds, Pardee played three seasons for Texas A&M and was one of three captains on the 1956 team, which had a 9-0-1 record and was ranked No. 5 nationally in the Associated Press poll.
Pardee was selected by the Los Angeles Rams in the second round of the 1957 N.F.L. draft.
He played linebacker for the Rams from 1957 to 1964, sat out a season when he had surgery for a melanoma, played another five seasons with Los Angeles, then finished his playing career with the Redskins in 1971 and ’72.
He was the head coach of the Chicago Bears from 1975 to 1977, when he took them to the playoffs for the first time since they defeated the Giants in the 1963 N.F.L. championship game.
He coached the Redskins from 1978 to 1980, and while his teams never made the postseason, he was named the N.F.L.’s coach of the year by The A.P.in 1979, when the Redskins were 10-6.
Pardee oversaw a previously conceived offense known as the run and shoot, a creative passing attack, when he coached the Gamblers in the mid-1980s.
He used that offense at the University of Houston from 1987 to 1989. His last Cougars team was led by the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Andre Ware.
Pardee was named the coach of the Oilers (now the Tennessee Titans franchise) in 1990. Though they reached the postseason in his first four years, the Oilers traded Moon to the Minnesota Vikings before the 1994 season. They were 1-9 that year when Pardee was fired and replaced by Jeff Fisher.
Pardee is survived by his wife, Phyllis; 5 children; and 12 grandchildren.
In his talk in Mineral Wells, Pardee remarked that he was “very fortunate to get to play college football coming out of tiny Christoval.”
“I never thought about quitting,” he said of his time with the Junction Boys. “If I did, where would I go, Christoval? Hey, I worked hard to get out of there.”
In “The Junction Boys,” Dent wrote that the town of Junction had not grown much since the Texas A&M training camp days, but that plentiful rain had yielded abundant grass in what had been a drought-stricken region.
“Junction got a bad rap when we were there in the 1950s,” Pardee told him. “It’s really a beautiful place.”
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PATRICIA McCORMICK, A PIONEER IN THE BULLFIGHTING ARENA
By BRYAN MEALER
Published: April 6, 2013
During the 1950s, when young women from West Texas were typically expected to take care of the home, Patricia McCormick bucked social convention and became the first female professional bullfighter in North America. Ms. McCormick, who died in Del Rio on March 26, performed in hundreds of bullfights during her career as a torera, receiving top billing in stadiums from Mexico to South America. Rafael Solana, the bullfighting critic, once called her “the most courageous woman I have ever seen.”
Born in St. Louis in 1929, she was introduced to the sport during a vacation to Mexico City when she was 7 years old. For months afterward, she staged mock bullfights in her yard using neighborhood children as her bull substitutes.
When she was 13, her family relocated to West Texas, where her father was chief engineer at Cosden Petroleum in Big Spring. After graduation, Ms. McCormick attended what was then Texas Western College in El Paso, where she studied art and music. Once there, she began crossing the border into Juárez, where she rediscovered the bulls. She watched fights at the Plaza de Toros and became a student of the form, practicing technique in her dorm room.
“I had a World War I blanket my dad had given to me to keep warm, and I used that as my cape,” Ms. McCormick said in a 2007 documentary “The Texas Torera.” She left college and persuaded Alejandro del Hierro, a retired matador, to be her mentor. Ms. McCormick made her bullfighting debut on Sept. 9, 1951, in Juárez. The Big Spring Daily Herald reported that a bull trampled her twice and tossed her with its horns before she plunged the estoque between its shoulders. The crowd showered her with roses, and the judges awarded her the bull’s ear, signifying a superior performance. Over the next year, she honed her skills in the Mexican minor leagues, and in 1952 she was the first American woman to be invited to join Mexico’s matador union.
For the next 10 years she fought in stadiums, drawing thousands of fans. An international celebrity, she was the subject of profiles in Time magazine, Sports Illustrated and Look. Although her fights received top billing, Ms. McCormick could never shake the title of novillera, or apprentice fighter. Elevation to the highest rank required an alternativa ceremony and sponsorship by a male matador, and no one would do such a thing for a woman.
Though she faced the same dangers as her male counterparts, who marveled at the artistry of her cape work, the fact that she was a woman prevented her from achieving greater stardom in a sport dominated by men.
“Had she not been born a woman,” one of Mexico’s elite matadors told Sports Illustrated in 1963, “she might have been better than any of us.”
Ms. McCormick demanded to fight on equal terms with men. Over the years, she was gored six times. The worst was in September 1954 in Ciudad Acuña, Del Rio’s Mexican sister city. According to newspaper accounts, she turned her back while she was performing a quite, or pass, and the bull caught her in the thigh. “The horn went right up my stomach,” she told The Los Angeles Times in an interview in 1989. “The bull carried me around the ring for a minute, impaled on his horns.
“They gave me the last rites there. The doctor said, ‘Carry her across the border and let her die in her own country.’ ”
Ms. McCormick fought her last bullfight in San Antonio in 1962, before disappearing from the sport. She spent the next 40 years living quietly in California, mainly focused on her artwork and rarely mentioning her past.
In the early 2000s, she returned to Texas, moving to Midland. It was there, according to friends, that she fell into financial trouble and nearly became homeless. A sad fate might have befallen her had Gary Humphreys, a gun shop owner from Del Rio, not intervened.
Mr. Humphreys had a personal connection to Ms. McCormick; he was 9 years old in 1954 when she was rushed to the hospital in Del Rio after the near-fatal goring, and his mother’s best friend had been her nurse. Decades later, after seeing an old poster of Ms. McCormick in Ciudad Acuña , he spent eight months searching for her.
“Here was this legend who’d made such an impression on my childhood,” he said, “and she was about to go live in her car.”
Mr. Humphreys helped her financially and encouraged Ms. McCormick to take advantage of her fame. In 2006, Ciudad Acuña honored her at its annual Running Las Vacas event,
“Even though she’d been gone over 50 years, people still ran up and called her by name,” Mr. Humphreys said.
Ms. McCormick moved to Del Rio, and in the years that followed she enjoyed a small resurgence of fame.
In 2007, the Heritage Museum of Big Spring opened an exhibition on her life and career, and invited Ms. McCormick to demonstrate her cape work. People waited two hours in line to meet her.
Ms. McCormick died in a nursing home in Del Rio. She was 83. She is survived by one cousin, who said it was Ms. McCormick’s wish that her ashes be scattered over the Gulf of Mexico, between the two countries where she had spent her life.
Bryan Mealer, the author of “Muck City: Winning and Losing in Football’s Forgotten Town,” is working on a book about Big Spring.
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LILLY PULITZER, HEIRESS WHO GAVE ELITE CLOTHES TROPICAL SPLASH
By ERIC WILSON
Published: April 7, 2013
Lilly Pulitzer, the Palm Beach princess of prints who created an enduring fashion uniform for wealthy socialites and jet setters almost by accident, died on Sunday at her home in Florida. She was 81.
Slim Aarons/Getty Images.
Lilly Pulitzer, the fashion designer known for her tropical print dresses, in Palm Beach, Fla., circa 1955.
Her death was confirmed by the Lilly Pulitzer company, which provided no further details.
As the story goes, in its most romanticized version, Ms. Pulitzer’s fashion empire, famous for its tropical print shift dresses and lighthearted embrace of jarring color combinations like flamingo pink and apple green, was born out of necessity.
In 1959, after opening a juice stand among the citrus groves of Palm Beach, Ms. Pulitzer, an heiress herself who had married young into the wealthy publishing family, needed a dress that would camouflage the stains of orange and grapefruit spills. So she had one made, creating a look that proved to be so popular it would become a mark of membership for old-money families at play for more than five decades. Her vividly flowered housedresses became known, in the shorthand of the rich, simply as Lillys.
Of course, the story was more complicated — full of joie de vivre though not entirely happy at the beginning — but then the beauty of Lilly Pulitzer dresses was that they were designed to be something of a disguise. Made of plain cotton, constructed so simply that they could be recreated at home, the modestly priced dresses embodied the “Puritan ethics of balance and value,” as Laura Jacobs wrote in a Vanity Fair profile of Ms. Pulitzer in 2003. They were accessible to most, but really wearable only by the few who were so rich that they could afford to have bad taste. A minidress of green peacocks dancing with merry seashells is not for just anyone.
At its height in the 1960s and 1970s, Lilly Pulitzer, with its popular resort wear, had sales of more than $15 million, a store on Jobs Lane in Southampton, N.Y., and clients like Jacqueline Kennedy and C. Z. Guest. Revived by a licensing company two decades ago, after Ms. Pulitzer’s retirement, the label now has sales of roughly $75 million with modern takes on many of her original prints.
“I designed collections around whatever struck my fancy … fruits, vegetables, politics or peacocks,” Ms. Pulitzer told The Associated Press in 2009. “It was a total change of life for me, but it made people happy.”
Lillian Lee McKim was born Nov. 10, 1931, in Roslyn, N.Y., the second of three daughters of Robert and Lillian McKim. Her mother, whose maiden name was Bostwick, was an heiress to the Standard Oil fortune and left her husband for the racing enthusiast Ogden Phipps in 1937.
Lilly and her sisters, Mimsy and Flossie, had a privileged upbringing, attending the Chapin School in New York and Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn. Lilly briefly attended college, but left to work as a nurse’s aide.
While on vacation in Palm Beach, she met Herbert Pulitzer Jr., known as Peter, a dashingly handsome grandson of the publisher Joseph Pulitzer, and shocked her family by eloping with him in 1952. The young couple settled among the citrus groves of the Pulitzer estate, holding wild parties and generally ignoring whatever was expected of them from their society peers.
They had had three children within five years, when Ms. Pulitzer suddenly returned to New York suffering from what was described as a nervous collapse and a marriage, she said, that was driving her crazy.
When she finally returned to Florida, she started selling fruit from her husband’s citrus groves, and then opened a juice stand on Worth Avenue with an acquaintance from New York, Laura Robbins, a former editor at Harper’s Bazaar, partly to keep herself busy. She told People magazine in 1982: “I went crazy. I was a namby-pamby; people always made decisions for me. The doctor said I should find something to do.”
According to the Vanity Fair profile, both women, while struggling with juice stains, struck on the idea of a patterned dress at the same time. They began selling the dresses at the juice stand, for $22.
“The line wasn’t very extensive,” Ms. Pulitzer told the magazine. “The bodies, one was sleeveless and one had a sleeve. I mean everybody, they had to have them. Whether they fit or not, who cared? Just get one, I want it, I have to wear it to dinner.”
While Ms. Pulitzer’s first marriage did not last — she divorced Mr. Pulitzer, again shocking their friends, and married Enrique Rousseau, who had worked for her first husband and then a hotel, in 1969 — the business took off.
At first, her dresses were seen almost exclusively in Palm Beach circles, and then globally when her wealthy friends began appearing in the designs in magazines. Jacqueline Kennedy, a classmate from Miss Porter’s, wore a Pulitzer dress while on vacation: “It was made from kitchen curtain material and people went crazy,” Ms. Pulitzer said. “They took off like Zingo.”
Ms. Pulitzer continued designing until 1984, when a series of
ill-timed expansions, combined with changing tastes toward more minimal designs, led the company to seek bankruptcy protection.
The label was revived in the 1990s by Sugartown Worldwide, which was acquired in 2010 by Oxford Industries in a deal valued as high as $80 million.
Although Ms. Pulitzer occasionally consulted with the company in recent years, once she retired, she threw out most of her archives and went on with her life, quite privately, in Palm Beach. Mr. Rousseau died of cancer in 1993. Details of her remaining survivors were not immediately available, but The Palm Beach Post said they include her three children from her first marriage, Liza, Minnie and Peter.
“Lilly the lady was so much more than Lilly the label,” Steven Stolman, a designer who consulted on a retrospective of Ms. Pulitzer’s work in 2008 at Parsons the New School for Design, said on Sunday. “In reality, her persona was far more colorful than the clothes. In so many aspects, she was a very reluctant fashion icon.”
Part of her reluctance to promote herself, she often said, came from her upbringing. She meticulously avoided personal publicity, as was once common to people of bottomless wealth, though she remained interested in the company. Mr. Stolman recalled her disappointment when he was unable to obtain a specific print she wanted for the exhibition, because the cost of obtaining it on the vintage market was outside his budget.
“A budget,” she told him, “how embarrassing.”
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
Douglas MacArthur, Army Commander, Dies at 84
(April 5 , 1964)
Igor Stravinsky, Composer, Dies at 88
(April 6, 1971)
Isaac Asimov, Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 72
(April 6, 1992)
P. T. Barnum, Great Showman, Dies at 80
(April 7, 1891)
Henry Ford, Automotive Pioneer, Dies at 83
(April 7, 1947)
Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Prodigious Artist, Dies at 91
(April 8, 1973)
Joe Louis, Heavyweight King, Dies at 66
(April 12, 1981)
Jean-Paul Sartre, French Philosopher, Dies at 74
(April 15, 1980)
Greta Garbo, Screen Icon, Dies at 84
(April 15, 1990)
Albert Einstein, Great Scientist, Dies at 76
(April 18, 1955)
John Maynard Keynes, Influential Economist, Dies at 63
(April 21, 1946)
Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President, Dies at 81
(April 22, 1994)
Cesar Chavez, Union Organizer, Dies at 66
(April 23, 1993)
Willa Cather, Novelist, Dies at 70
(April 24, 1947)
Ginger Rogers, Who Danced With Astaire, Dies at 83
(April 25, 1995)
Edward R. Murrow, CBS Broadcaster, Dies at 57
(April 27, 1965)
Frank Lloyd Wright, Famed Architect, Dies at 89
(April 29, 1959)
Adolf Hitler, Nazi Dictator, Dies at 56
(April 30, 1945)
Ann
