Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Pee Wee Ellis, James Brown’s Partner in Funk, Dies at 80

      by

      As musical director for the bands behind Mr. Brown and also Van Morrison, Mr. Ellis helped forge new hybrids, meshing pop, jazz, R&B and more.Alfred (Pee Wee) Ellis, a saxophonist, arranger and composer who fused jazz, funk and soul as the musical director for James Brown and Van Morrison, died on Thursday. He was 80.The cause was “complications with his heart,” his Facebook page said. It did not say where he died; he lived in Dorset County, England.Mr. Ellis also performed, arranged and recorded extensively with his own jazz groups, in funk bands with fellow James Brown alumni and as a sideman for a broad array of musicians in jazz, R&B, pop, rock and African music. And his association with Mr. Morrison stretched across two decades.Mr. Ellis shared credit with Mr. Brown for writing 26 songs performed by Mr. Brown, including “Cold Sweat” and “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”He had a collaborative temperament that allowed him to get along with demanding performers like Mr. Brown, Mr. Morrison, Esther Phillips and the rock drummer Ginger Baker. “I’m not hard to get along with — and I’m a good mediator,” he said in a 2020 interview with The American magazine. “All their problems were their problems, not mine.”Alfred James Ellis was born on April 21, 1941, in Bradenton, Fla. He started playing piano, clarinet and saxophone as a youth, joining the marching band in junior high school. The family moved to Lubbock, Texas, in 1949 after his mother had married Ezell Ellis, who managed local musicians. Those musicians gave Alfred, who was a skinny child, his nickname, Pee Wee.Ezell Ellis was stabbed to death in a Texas club in 1955; a white woman had insisted on dancing with him, and the killer was infuriated at seeing an interracial couple.The family moved to Rochester, N.Y., when Alfred was a teenager, and he played jazz in high school groups and in clubs. He also spent time in New York City and studied at the Manhattan School of Music. He made his first recordings as a sideman.One day, in 1957, he was retrieving his saxophone from a repair shop when he ran into the jazz titan Sonny Rollins on Broadway and boldly asked him for lessons. Mr. Rollins agreed, and Mr. Ellis began making weekly trips to New York City to study with him. In a 2014 interview for the magazine Neon Nettle, Mr. Ellis likened working with Mr. Rollins to being “a sponge in deep water.”After high school he moved to Miami and became a full-time musician. Members of Mr. Brown’s band saw him performing at a motel there in 1965, and soon afterward he was hired to join the band. In a few months Mr. Ellis had become Mr. Brown’s musical director, writing arrangements and teaching them to the band.Mr. Brown in 2010. He made more than a dozen albums as a bandleader.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesAfter a show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Mr. Brown summoned Mr. Ellis with an idea for a bass line. Then, in the band bus on the way to Cincinnati, Mr. Ellis constructed the rest of the music for what became “Cold Sweat,” a syncopated vamp with a two-note horn line that echoed Miles Davis’s “So What.”Fiercely polyrhythmic and untethered from blues or pop-song forms, the song became a cornerstone of funk. “‘Cold Sweat’ deeply affected the musicians I knew,” the producer Jerry Wexler said in the liner notes to “Star Time,” a James Brown boxed set. “It just freaked them out. For a time, no one could get a handle on what to do next.”Mr. Brown and Mr. Ellis wrote “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” another funk milestone, in response to the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the subsequent summer of racial unrest.“It was a music that heralded a new attitude,” Mr. Ellis said in a 2020 interview with Jazzwise magazine, “a new and distinctive Black culture, of street culture finding confidence and popularity outside and alongside the establishment. Sweeping into mainstream consciousness during the civil rights movement was unlike anything people had heard, and its positive energy united a new generation making them proud of their music, fashion and political tastes.”But relentless touring and recording with the James Brown band was grueling, and as the 1960s ended Mr. Ellis decided to return to jazz. In the 1970s he arranged and conducted the music for full albums by George Benson and Johnny Hammond; he also recorded with Esther Phillips, Leon Thomas, Hank Crawford, Shirley Scott, Sonny Stitt and Dave Liebman. He released his first full album as a leader, “Home in the Country,” in 1977.Mr. Ellis was invited to do horn arrangements for Van Morrison’s 1979 album, “Into the Music,” starting a lasting relationship. He appeared on Mr. Morrison’s albums for the next 20 years, and had stints as the musical director for Mr. Morrison in the 1980s and 1990s.In the ’90s and 2000s Mr. Ellis rejoined the saxophonist Maceo Parker and the trombonist Fred Wesley, bandmates from his years with Mr. Brown, to perform and make albums under various names, including the J.B. Horns and the J.B.’s Reunion.He led his own group, the Pee Wee Ellis Assembly, and made more than a dozen jazz albums as a leader. His touring projects included a stint in the 2010s with a quartet led by Mr. Baker, the drummer from Cream, and “Still Black Still Proud,” a James Brown tribute featuring African musicians.He also played sessions for, among many others, De La Soul, 10,000 Maniacs, Walter Wolfman Washington, Poncho Sanchez, Oumou Sangaré, Toumani Diabaté, Cheikh Lo and Ali Farka Touré. (Information on his survivors was not immediately available.)Mr. Ellis told The American that he was happiest when collaborating. “Part of the magic,” he said, “is joining forces and making something happen from nowhere.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Bobby Zarem, ‘Superflack’ and Maker of Stars, Dies at 84

      by

      As a spirited impresario of public relations, he promoted entertainers, films and the “I Love New York” tourism campaign.Bobby Zarem, the exuberant press agent who fulfilled his childhood fantasies by catching rising stars and promoting them to stellar careers, died early Sunday morning at his home in Savannah, Ga. He was 84.His death was confirmed by Bill Augustin, a longtime colleague, who said the cause was complications of lung cancer.A gregarious and ingratiating Yale graduate, Mr. Zarem lasted barely 18 months on Wall Street before stumbling into a career as an indefatigable show business promoter.A largely affable Barnum, he cannily cultivated a symbiotic bond with reporters, greeted favored guests at his parties by obsequiously dropping to his knees and kissing their hands, and gushed with joyful benevolence one moment only to unleash a vitriolic but lyrical X-rated tirade the next, prompted by a perceived slight or an underling’s lapse.Mr. Zarem’s clients included (in alphabetical order) Alan Alda, Ann-Margret, Woody Allen, Michael Caine, Cher, Michael Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, Sophia Loren, Jack Nicholson, Diana Ross, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.He publicized the films “Tommy” (by staging a gala party in a Midtown Manhattan subway station) and “Saturday Night Fever” (after stealing stills of the production from the studio, which expected the movie to flop and neglected to distribute photographs of John Travolta), as well as “Rambo,” “Dances With Wolves” and “Pumping Iron,” the 1977 documentary about bodybuilding, which starred Mr. Schwarzenegger. For that film, Mr. Zarem arranged a meeting with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that helped elevate Mr. Schwarzenegger to global superstardom.Mr. Zarem with Michael Douglas in 2010. Mr. Douglas was one of Mr. Zarem’s many celebrity clients.Dave Allocca/Starpix/ShutterstockHe also played a role in initiating the “I Love New York” tourism campaign — although just how much of a role is unclear; he was one of a number of people who claimed credit for originating the slogan (the logo was designed by Milton Glaser).He was hired by William S. Doyle, the state’s deputy commerce commissioner, and said he recruited the Wells Rich Greene advertising agency to produce a television advertising campaign starring Broadway celebrities.He also promoted his own birthplace, transforming John Behrendt’s true-crime book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1994) into a tourism magnet for Savannah. He helped launch a film festival there in 1998 and retired there in 2010.Judy Klemesrud of The New York Times called him “Super Flack.” Spy magazine characterized him as “preternaturally energetic.” Marion Meade wrote in her biography “The Unruly Life of Woody Allen” (2000) that Mr. Zarem was “fueled by an inexhaustible tank of hot air.”And Hal Erickson, likening him to the fading publicist he inspired who was played by Al Pacino in the film “People I Know,” wrote in his book “Any Resemblance to Actual Persons” (2017) that Mr. Zarem “never worried about getting into heaven as long as he could get his people into print.”Like his theatrical clients, Mr. Zarem could deftly switch roles: from the choleric control freak grappling with the last-minute glitches in staging an event to the chivalrous host greeting every guest like a best friend.He wanted badly to be liked, but he could develop a grudge when he wasn’t.Mr. Zarem feuded venomously with the columnist Liz Smith in the 1980s after he discovered that she was writing a separate syndicated column under a pseudonym, Robin Adams Sloan, that denigrated his clients.In contrast to many of his less gregarious colleagues, Mr. Zarem’s own boldfaced name punctuated gossip columns nearly as frequently as his clients’.But despite his personal visibility, Mr. Zarem insisted in an interview with The New York Times in 2001 that his career “was for a long time hurt because I didn’t promote myself.”“People don’t know half of what I’ve done because I’m not a bragger,” he had told The Times four years earlier. He added, though, that while most of his competitors were “handlers or caterers,” he himself had “elevated publicity to an art form.”He regularly dined at Elaine’s on the Upper East Side (where he said he introduced Mia Farrow to Woody Allen), helped organize an annual Oscar-night gala (“Almost everybody here is somebody,” he said at one event), and, in an era of antiseptic tweets, was known for sending personalized handwritten notes.Endowed with a discerning eye that could identify potential stars, Mr. Zarem delivered on his boyhood dreams.“I sit here now,” he said in an interview with South magazine in 2017, “and I realize that everything I fantasized about became real.”Robert Myron Zarem was born on Sept. 30, 1936, in Savannah, the youngest of three sons in an Orthodox Jewish family. His father, Harry, owned a wholesale shoe company. His mother, Rose (Gold) Zarem, was a pianist.“I’ve had major identity problems all my life because I’m obsessed with meeting stars,” he told The Times in 1997When he was 8, he said, he and a friend cut Sunday-school classes to collect an autograph from the tempestuous actress Tallulah Bankhead, who was staying at a Savannah hotel.They planned and executed an elaborate subterfuge — learning her room number from a bellhop who worked for Bobby’s father; walking up eight flights to avoid the elevator operator; knocking on the door and refusing to be cowed when she shrieked, “Go away! I don’t sign autographs”; and then sneaking in behind a maid’s breakfast cart, prompting Miss Bankhead to lob a newspaper at them.Many years later, as a prominent publicist, he encountered Miss Bankhead and made one more fruitless effort. He was equally unsuccessful. “I still don’t sign autographs,” she said.He would continue to collect them, though. Before his father died of cancer when Bobby was 13, he would accompany him when he came to New York for treatment at a New York hospital. They would stay at the Waldorf Astoria, where Bobby would forage for famous guests.After his father died, he told Hamptons magazine, “I was scared to get close to anybody out of fear that that person, too, would disappear.”Despite a lifelong struggle with attention deficit disorder that made reading demanding, he followed his two older brothers to Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and then to Yale, where he graduated in 1958. (Danny Zarem, a fashion retailer, died in 2013. Dr. Harvey Zarem, a plastic surgeon, died in 2015. No immediate family members survive.)After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science, he worked for the United States Trust Company in New York; served briefly in the Air National Guard; was hired by Columbia Artists Management; and, starting in 1968, discovered his gift as a publicist while working for the producer Joseph E. Levine.In 1969 he went to work for Rogers & Cowan, the public relations firm, where his client roster included Dustin Hoffman. He opened his own agency, Zarem Inc., in 1974.Mr. Zarem, a workaholic, never married and didn’t drink, although he smoked marijuana to relax. He cultivated a devil-may-care style in untucked shirts and New Balance sneakers, but that style belied a fierce temper.The publicist Peggy Siegal, who once worked for him, swore that Mr. Zarem lobbed a typewriter at her when she erred in taking a phone message. (He responded that he wouldn’t have missed at such short range.) Mr. Schwarzenegger recalled in his 2012 memoir, “Total Recall,” that Mr. Zarem “always talked like he was completely confused and the world was coming to an end.”He bemoaned the current state of public relations, he told New York magazine in 2010, because the warp speed of digital media pre-empted what to a pro like him was a fine-tuned battle plan of leaks and exclusive stories.About the state of the art as he practiced it, Mr. Zarem noted, “Nobody knows what a press agent does, and if you’re smart, you keep it that way.”He claimed that he had gained self-awareness after more than three decades of analysis with Dr. Samuel Lowy, a psychiatrist who specialized in interpreting dreams. Mr. Zarem concluded that he promoted other people to magnify his own self-image.“I think that’s why I did what I did,” he told Hamptons magazine. “Not feeling that I had anything to communicate, I felt that if I made the rest of the world accept Dustin Hoffman and Ann-Margret and Cher, and all these people, then I would be accepted.”In retrospect, he said, he saw his role in the “I Love New York” campaign as a breakthrough.“My therapist once told me, ‘Anyone who saved the single greatest metropolis can’t be that screwed up,’” Mr. Zarem said. “For the first time in my life, I don’t feel the need to jump out a window if someone cancels dinner on me. Now I know who and what I am.” More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      George Mraz, Consummate Jazz Bassist, Dies at 77

      by

      For half a century, he was in constant demand, backing big names like Oscar Peterson as well as countless up-and-coming performers.George Mraz, a sought-after jazz bassist whose deft, versatile work anchored the recordings and performances of generations of artists, from Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie more than 50 years ago to Cyrus Chestnut and Joe Lovano in this century, died on Sept. 16 in Prague. He was 77.His wife, the pianist Camilla Mraz, posted news of his death on Facebook. She did not give a cause, though a GoFundMe page was established in 2016 to assist Mr. Mraz with expenses related to pancreatic cancer.Mr. Mraz came to the United States from what was then Czechoslovakia in 1968 to attend Berklee School of Music (now Berklee College of Music) in Boston. While studying there, he was also playing at Lennie’s on the Turnpike and other local nightclubs, catching the ear of some of jazz’s biggest names. In 1969, Gillespie invited him to join his group in New York; soon after that, Peterson made him part of his trio.He toured with Peterson for two years and then established himself in New York. He spent six years with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra (later the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra) in its famed Monday-night slot at the Village Vanguard. He became what’s known in the music world as a first-call player — the first person you’d call if you wanted a top-notch bassist for a club date or a recording session. It was a status he held for decades, appearing on scores of albums and playing with name musicians as well as with up-and-coming ones.“Mraz’s wonderful sense of harmony and penchant for subtle surprises won him work with the likes of Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and Stan Getz more than two decades ago,” The Boston Herald wrote in 2000, when Mr. Mraz was appearing at the Regattabar in Cambridge, Mass., as part of the quartet Grand Slam. “He has remained as in-demand as almost any bassist in jazz, particularly among piano players.” (One of his longest and most fruitful collaborations was with the pianist Tommy Flanagan.)By then, he had also become a bandleader. He recorded several albums under his name, including “Jazz” (1996) and the Duke Ellington tribute “Duke’s Place” (1999).“He played so beautifully, with so much command of the instrument,” Billy Drummond, the drummer on “Duke’s Place,” said by email. “It was captivating to see and hear, and I always looked forward to playing with him.”Mr. Drummond cited a passage from his liner notes for “Duke’s Place” to convey just how captivating Mr. Mraz could be.“I remember vividly playing with him years ago with the pianist Steve Kuhn,” he wrote in those notes, “and George’s bass solos had me so transfixed that I found myself forgetting to come back in to play.”Mr. Mraz at Birdland in New York in 2012. As an accompanist, he was expert at complementing whoever was front and center, Alan NahigianJiri Mraz — “George” was an Americanization — was born on Sept. 9, 1944, in Pisek, in what is now the Czech Republic. When he was 12 or 13, he stumbled on Louis Armstrong on a Voice of America broadcast.“I couldn’t figure out the music,” he told Bass Musician magazine in 2009, “and wondered how someone with a voice like Satchmo’s got away with singing like that. The music made me feel good, and I liked it better than a lot of other things I had heard. That’s when I started looking into jazz.”He studied at the Prague Conservatory, graduating in 1966, and was playing with top jazz groups in his country while a teenager. When the Soviet Union cracked down on liberalization in Prague in the summer of 1968, he was out of the country, playing at a jazz club in Munich. That fall, he accepted a scholarship to Berklee. It was almost a quarter-century before he was able to return to his homeland to perform.He became an American citizen in 1975.As an accompanist, Mr. Mraz was expert at complementing whoever was front and center, as in 1982 when he backed the singer Carol Sloane at the club Village West.“She uses vibrato to give each song a rhythmic pulse, and she knowingly savors every curve she adds to a melody,” Jon Pareles wrote in a review in The New York Times. “Mr. Mraz’s warm, legato bass lines gave her plenty to swing on.”Mr. Mraz was schooled in classical music and would practice it as a conservatory student, but he said he rarely practiced jazz while a student or in later years. “Mostly I learned everything on the bandstand,” he said.He had a knack for accommodating a variety of players and their demands. “There are so many different styles to consider, and I always just try to just fit with what’s happening musically around me,” he told Bass Musician. “It’s a very natural thing for me.”The collapse of the Soviet Union gave Mr. Mraz a chance to return to his home country, and to step to the fore as bandleader.“It’s not easy to decide how to put a band together,” he told The Boston Globe in 1999. “But I needed a group when I went to Prague in 1991, for the first time in 25 years, to play at a festival.”His approach as bandleader was laid back.“You can never tell people exactly what to do,” he said. “So you just try to find a way to work your concepts into the music, as well as their concepts, and just let them do what they do.”A full list of Mr. Mraz’s survivors was not immediately available.When not playing music, Mr. Mraz would sometimes pursue his hobby, fly fishing, in the rivers and streams of upstate New York.“I catch mostly trout and throw most of them back, though I keep one or two a year just to assure myself I’m not completely crazy,” he told The Globe. “The biggest I’ve caught was two feet long, and I let him go — he was too beautiful.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Jay Sandrich, Emmy-Winning Sitcom Director, Is Dead at 89

      by

      Acclaimed for his work on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Cosby Show,” he also made a crucial casting decision about “The Golden Girls.”Jay Sandrich, a prolific sitcom director who won Emmy Awards for the two series he worked on most often, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Cosby Show,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.The cause was dementia, his wife, Linda Sandrich, said.Mr. Sandrich did not think of himself as funny, but he knew how to guide a cast of comic actors through half-hour episodes. He understood the mechanics of directing (move the cameras, not the actors) and knew how to make scenes work.“Sitcom directors have a reputation as traffic cops because it’s a writers’ medium,” James Burrows, whose directing credits include “Cheers,” “Frasier” and “Will & Grace,” and who considered Mr. Sandrich a mentor, said by phone. “But Jay taught me to speak up and say what I thought so that you’re contributing to the show, not just parroting what everybody wants.”By 1970, Mr. Sandrich was a sitcom veteran, but he did not believe he had done “anything great”; his credits at that point included “He & She,” “That Girl,” “The Ghost & Mrs. Muir” and, perhaps most notably, “Get Smart.” Then, after another director dropped out, he was asked to direct the pilot episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”When the cast gathered for a run-through in front of an audience, nothing worked.“It was a disaster,” he told the Television Academy in an interview in 2001. “I don’t think we got six laughs.”Afterward, he told the cast to trust the material and keep rehearsing. By the time the episode was taped, the performances had sharpened and the laughs had been found.The cast of “The Golden Girls,” from left: Rue McClanahan, Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty and Betty White. It was Mr. Sandrich who suggested that Ms. McClanahan play the role originally intended for Ms. White, and vice versa.Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesReferring to a moment in the scene where Mary Richards, played by Ms. Moore, is interviewing for a television news job with Lou Grant, played by Ed Asner (who died last month), he said, “Ed, I remember, when he said, ‘You’ve got spunk — I hate spunk,’ he did it so loud” that the audience gasped. “He had found the perfect level.”Over the next seven years, Mr. Sandrich directed 118 more episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” including the series finale, and won two Emmys for his work on the show. He also directed other series under the banner of Ms. Moore’s company, MTM Enterprises, including “Rhoda,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Phyllis” and “Lou Grant.”In the late 1970s, he directed 53 episodes of “Soap,” Susan Harris’s parody of soap operas. In 1980 he directed the movie “Seems Like Old Times,” written by Neil Simon and starring Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. It was a hit, grossing $44 million — about $139 million in today’s dollars — but he never made another feature film.Jay Henry Sandrich was born on Feb. 24, 1932, in Los Angeles. His father, Mark, was a director whose films included the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical “Top Hat.” His mother, Freda (Wirtschalter) Sandrich, was a homemaker.As a child, Jay saw snow falling for the first time — on the set of “Holiday Inn” (1942), with Astaire and Bing Crosby, which his father was directing. It was an exciting sight, even if the snow was plastic.Goldie Hawn in “Seems Like Old Times” (1980), the only feature film Mr. Sandrich directed.Columbia Pictures, via Getty ImagesAfter graduating in 1953 from U.C.L.A., where he studied theater arts and film, he joined the Army and shot training films for the Signal Corps.Following his discharge, he wrote to W. Argyle Nelson, the head of production at Desilu Productions — Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s production company — and he was hired as a second assistant director, working on “I Love Lucy,” “Our Miss Brooks” and “December Bride.” He later discovered that he had gotten the job because Mr. Nelson had been an assistant to his father on a film years earlier. Mr. Sandrich went on to become an assistant director on “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour,” the successor to “I Love Lucy,” from 1957 to 1959.He had similar positions on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and on “Make Room for Daddy,” starring Danny Thomas, where he started his directingcareer.“I remember waking up in the middle of the night,” fearful before directing his first episodes of “Daddy,” he told the Television Academy. “I was so scared. Nobody was going to listen to me.”People listened to him for the next 40 years.In the 1980s, he directed 100 episodes of “The Cosby Show,” for which he won two Emmys. In 1985, he directed the pilot for “The Golden Girls,” and he played a critical role in casting Betty White as Rose, the naïve character, and Rue McClanahan as the libidinous Blanche, the opposite of what had been originally planned — in part because Ms. White had already played a similar role, Sue Ann Nivens, on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”“Jay Sandrich, in his genius, said if Betty plays another man-hungry, they’ll think it’s Sue Ann revisited. So let’s make her Rose,” Ms. White said at a 2006 “Golden Girls” reunion in Los Angeles staged by the Paley Center. She added, gesturing to Ms. McClanahan, “They got a real neighborhood nymphomaniac to play Blanche.”Mr. Sandrich at an Academy of Television Arts and Sciences panel discussion in Los Angeles in 2013. His TV career began in the 1950s and continued into the 21st century. Frank Micelotta/Invision for Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, via Associated PressMr. Sandrich continued to work into the 21st century. His last assignment was an episode of “Two and a Half Men” in 2003.He married Linda Silverstein in 1984. In addition to her, he is survived by his daughter, Wendy Steiner; his sons, Eric and Tony; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Nina Kramer ended in divorce.Mr. Sandrich’s association with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” ended when the series itself did, in 1977. He later recalled that as the cast rehearsed the last episode, Mr. Asner’s emotional line, “I treasure you people,” caused tears to stream from Mr. Asner’s eyes.And when Ms. Moore talked about how much her co-workers meant to her, Mr. Sandrich said, “My only direction to her was to hold off crying as long as you can.”“If you see the show,” he added, “you see the tears well up and I started crying and the audience started crying.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Cliff Freeman, Adman Who Asked, ‘Where’s the Beef?,’ Dies at 80

      by

      His humorous touch was evident in commercials for Wendy’s, Little Caesars, Fox Sports and many other clients. “We have to win with wit,” he once said.Cliff Freeman, the award-winning copywriter and creative director behind many witty television commercials, most memorably the one for Wendy’s in which a gravelly-voiced old woman shouts, “Where’s the beef?,” at the sight of a puny hamburger patty in an oversized bun, died on Sept. 5 at his home in Manhattan. He was 80.The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Susan (Kellner) Freeman, said.In a career of nearly 40 years, Mr. Freeman’s antic sense of humor made brands stand out — first at the advertising agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample and then, starting in 1987, at his own small agency, Cliff Freeman & Partners.“Cliff has consistently done some of the funniest, smartest ads on TV,” Jim Patterson, the chairman of J. Walter Thompson’s North American operations, told The Tampa Bay Times in 2005. Mr. Freeman’s work, he added, “is always fresh and original.”For the candy bars Almond Joy and Mounds, Mr. Freeman coined the song lyrics “Sometimes you feel like a nut/Sometimes you don’t.” For Little Caesars, he scripted (and voiced) the toga-clad Roman gnome who declares, “Pizza! Pizza!” and “Cheeser! Cheeser!”For Philips, Mr. Freeman’s “Time to change your light bulb” campaign featured a commercial in which a man inadvertently flirts with a burly workman in an elevator, instead of the beautiful woman he thought was beside him before the lights went out.And for Outpost.com, an online computer retailer looking to raise its profile, gerbils (not real ones) were fired from a cannon, aimed at the second “o” in an Outpost sign.“Almost all our clients are Davids up against Goliaths,” Mr. Freeman told New York magazine in 1993. “We have to win with wit.”From left, Elizabeth Shaw, Mildred Lane and Clara Peller in what was probably Mr. Freeman’s best-known commercial: the 1989 spot for Wendy’s in which Ms. Peller asks, “Where’s the beef?”Cliff Freeman and CompanyIn 1984, Wendy’s was looking to differentiate its burger, the modestly named Single, from McDonald’s Big Mac and Burger King’s Whopper. Research found that the Wendy’s Single patty was larger than the patties of the Big Mac and Whopper.Working with the director Joe Sedelmaier, Mr. Freeman created separate commercials, one with three old women and one with three old men, scrutinizing the fluffy hamburger bun before seeing the tiny patty inside. The breakout version was the one with the women, specifically the squawky octogenarian Clara Peller, who demands to know where the beef is.“It went viral globally before the term was coined,” Dan Dahlen, the former director of national advertising for Wendy’s International, said in a phone interview. “And as we got into the election, Walter Mondale turned to Gary Hart” — during a debate among candidates for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination — “and asked, ‘Where’s the beef?’”Mr. Freeman was still at Dancer Fitzgerald a year later when he wrote another popular Wendy’s commercial, which promoted the chain’s breadth of food choices by parodying the lack of choices in Soviet society. In a faux Russian fashion show, a heavyset woman struts on a runway, modeling the same shapeless dress for day wear, evening wear (accessorized with a flashlight) and swimwear (with a beach ball).Mr. Freeman said it was his favorite ad, in part because of the response.“The entire Russian government protested it,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2003. “How much more reaction can you get than that?”In 1985, Mr. Freeman wrote another popular Wendy’s commercial, which promoted the chain’s breadth of choices by parodying the lack of them in a faux Soviet fashion show. “The entire Russian government protested it,” he said proudly.Freeman and CompanyClifford Lee Freeman was born on Feb. 14, 1941, in Vicksburg, Miss., outside Jackson, and moved with his family to St. Petersburg, Fla., when he was 6. His father, James, and his mother, Lillian (Pennebaker) Freeman, owned a dairy business and motels.After graduating from Florida State University in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in advertising, Mr. Freeman joined Liller Neal Battle & Lindsey, an Atlanta agency. He moved to McCann Erickson in 1968 and, two years later, to Dancer Fitzgerald, where he worked for 17 years.The Little Caesars pizza chain was one of the first accounts Mr. Freeman won after starting his own agency, and it remained a signature client for 11 years as it fought for market share against competitors like Pizza Hut and Domino’s.“Well, you know, pizza is a fun product,” Mr. Freeman told Luerzer’s Archive, an industry magazine, in a 1998 interview. “Everyone sits around and eats pizza together, so you’ve got to have fun when you advertise it. You certainly can’t treat it seriously.”One ad Mr. Freeman devised emphasized the stretchiness of pizza cheese, to slapstick effect (a baby goes on a wild ride in her high chair throughout the house while holding onto a slice). In another, a goofy worker for an unnamed rival chain tries to impress a customer by contorting a pizza box, origami-style, into the shape of a pterodactyl (underscoring its offering of just a pizza and a box, compared with Little Caesars’s two pizzas for one low price).Those commercials helped lift sales of Little Caesars 138 percent from 1988 to 1993. Nonetheless, after sales flattened and Little Caesars considered changing ad agencies, Mr. Freeman ended his firm’s association with the chain in 1998.Over the years, Mr. Freeman’s agency won many Clio Awards for advertising excellence. It won for commercials created for clients like Little Caesars, Philips and Outpost.com, and for a series of ads for Fox Sports’ National Hockey League coverage that demonstrated how basketball, bowling, billiards and golf would be better if they were played more physically, like hockey.Neal Tiles, a marketing executive for Fox Sports, told The New York Times in 1998 that it had chosen Mr. Freeman’s agency because it took “creative risks in a strategic way” on so many campaigns.But Cliff Freeman & Partners lasted only 11 more years. Amid a recession, executive turmoil and client departures, it shut down in 2009.In addition to his wife, Mr. Freeman is survived by his son, Scott; his sister, Chase McEwen; and his brother, Hunter. His marriage to Ann Angell ended in divorce.Mr. Freeman was well aware that markets like fast food were hypercompetitive, but he tried not to take his work too seriously; success, he maintained, often required a humorous touch.“I think when you’re slamming the competition, people find it kind of hard to take unless you do it in a way that is really fun,” he told Luerzer’s Archive. “Then they are able to accept it.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Roger Michell, Director of ‘Notting Hill,’ Is Dead at 65

      by

      He was an accomplished theater director as well as a filmmaker. But he was best known for his blockbuster romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant.Roger Michell, the British theater and film director best known for “Notting Hill,” the wildly popular 1999 romantic comedy that somewhat overshadowed the rest of his extensive and diverse body of work, died on Wednesday. He was 65.His family announced his death in a statement released by his publicist. The statement did not say where he died or what the cause was.Mr. Michell’s first film, a 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel “Persuasion,” caught the eye of the screenwriter Richard Curtis, who had scored a major success with “Four Weddings and a Funeral” the year before. Mr. Curtis was looking for someone to direct his next screenplay, about a humble London bookseller who falls in love with a movie star.Though he found the idea of trying to match a blockbuster like “Four Weddings and a Funeral” to be daunting, Mr. Michell said yes immediately. He knew he wanted to cast Julia Roberts as the movie star, but he cast around for a male lead before settling on Hugh Grant, who had also starred in “Four Weddings.”“We toyed with the idea of casting someone else because of an anxiety about the film being seen as a retread, a sequel,” Mr. Michell told The Guardian in 1999. “Then we thought, ‘How ridiculous — we have the greatest actor in the world for this kind of material, wanting to do this film.’”Mr. Michell’s worries proved to be unwarranted: “Notting Hill” grossed $262 million worldwide, $6 million more than “Four Weddings” had. It was the top-grossing British film at the time (it has since been surpassed by the “Harry Potter” movies, among others), though Mr. Michell was ambivalent about its success.“Actually I sometimes wonder whether doing ‘Notting Hill’ was a bad thing,” he told The Birmingham Post in 2002, “because it was so successful, everybody is so surprised when I do anything different.”Julia Roberts, Huge Grant and Emma Chambers in Mr. Michell’s best-known movie, “Notting Hill” (1999).Clive Coote / Universal PicturesHe continued to notch critical and commercial successes. His next film was “Changing Lanes,” a big-budget thriller with Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson that did well at the box office, though most of his subsequent films were smaller productions, among them “The Mother” (2003), about a middle-aged woman’s affair with a younger man, and “Enduring Love” (2004), an adaptation of a novel by Ian McEwan. Both films starred Daniel Craig, one of the many actors who worked with Mr. Michell frequently.Mr. Michell was supposed to direct Mr. Craig as James Bond in “Quantum of Solace” (2008), but he backed out after he realized that the film had no script and was being rushed forward to meet the producers’ release date.He remained a popular director in London theater while continuing to work in film. He had a personal policy of directing only new plays, the exception being the work of Harold Pinter, his hero.“I have strong views about the kind of work I want to do,” he told The Financial Times in 2004. “That’s all that guides me. I don’t have any other kind of strategy. I’m ambitious — what else is there?”Mr. Michell was born on June 5, 1956, in Pretoria, South Africa, where his British father was stationed as a diplomat. As a child he moved around often; he lived in Damascus and Beirut, and he was in Prague to witness tanks rolling through during the city during the Soviet invasion of 1968.Mr. Michell’s first marriage, to the actress Kate Buffery, ended in divorce. He was separated from his second wife, the actress Anna Maxwell Martin. He is also survived by his children, Harry, Rosie, Maggie and Nancy.Mr. Michell studied English at the University of Cambridge. After graduating in 1977, he began working for a theater company in Brighton. A year later he got his first big break: a job as an assistant director at the Royal Theater Company in London.There he worked alongside old theater hands like the playwrights John Osborne and Samuel Beckett — whom he remembered, in a 2017 interview with The Sunday Star-Times, a New Zealand newspaper, as “the opposite of this sort of terrifying eagle presence that you might suspect from photographs.”He also worked with the next generation of directors and writers, including Danny Boyle, who would win an Academy Award for directing “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008), and Hanif Kureishi, an up-and-coming novelist and playwright.Mr. Michell and Mr. Kureishi later became collaborators. Mr. Michell directed a 1993 adaptation of Mr. Kureishi’s novel “The Buddha of Suburbia” (1990) as a BBC series, and Mr. Kureishi wrote the script for two of Mr. Michell’s films, “The Mother” and “Venus” (2006), starring Peter O’Toole.Mr. Michell’s most recent film is “The Duke,” a comedy about the 1961 theft of a painting of the Duke of Marlborough from the National Gallery in London, starring Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent. It was shown at film festivals in 2020 and is scheduled for general release next year.Although his success with “Notting Hill” vaulted him into the top ranks of English-language directors, Mr. Michell kept a low profile, preferring to let his actors and screenwriters shine — a quality that may explain why so many actors liked working with him.“As a species, stars are pretty frightening: they’re iconic and you’re not,” he said in the Guardian interview. “But like any other performers, they thrive on a good environment. Part of my job is to give the impression of enormous calm; it’s not necessarily how I feel.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      María Mendiola, Half of a Chart-Topping Disco Duo, Dies at 69

      by

      “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” which she and a fellow ballet dancer recorded under the name Baccara, became one of the disco anthems of the 1970s.MADRID — María Mendiola, a member of the Spanish duo Baccara, whose “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” became one of the disco anthems of the 1970s, died here on Sept. 11. She was 69.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her family. They did not give the exact cause, but said that she had been dealing with a blood deficiency for two decades.Baccara, the duo of Ms. Mendiola and Mayte Mateos, achieved instant fame with “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” the first song they ever recorded, which was released in 1977 and went on to become the most successful disco song by a female duo. It sold about 18 million copies worldwide and topped the charts in Britain, Japan and several other countries.Ms. Mendiola and Ms. Mateos were dancers with the company of Spain’s national television broadcaster when they met. At the suggestion of Ms. Mendiola, who thought that their careers would last longer if they switched to singing, they left to form their own act, originally called Venus, which began performing in 1976. Their debut, at a club in Zaragoza, was short-lived: The management fired them for being “too elegant” — another way of saying that they refused to do lap dances for the club’s patrons.The duo appeared for the first time on television in 1977. Their breakthrough came that same year following a chance encounter with Leon Deane of RCA Records, who saw them perform in a hotel while he was on vacation in the Canary Islands and suggested that they visit RCA’s recording studios in Hamburg.RCA agreed to produce Baccara’s first album and included “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” an English-language song whose rights the label already owned, although it had not yet assigned it to any of its artists.Baccara spent four years with RCA and released four albums, including several other songs that ranked high on the international charts, although none matched the success of their first hit. The duo also toured worldwide, including in the Soviet Union. In performance, Ms. Mendiola always dressed in white and Ms. Mateos in black.But the two singers had a major fallout in 1980 over who should be the lead voice on their song “Sleepy Time Toy.” Ms. Mendiola filed a lawsuit to block the song, which had just been released and had to be withdrawn from the market.The singers continued their feud and stopped talking to each other, and the composer of most of their songs, Rolf Soja, decided to quit working with them. In 1981, Baccara released their final album with RCA, “Bad Boys”; coming at a time when the popularity of disco music was starting to wane, it was not a big success. RCA did not renew Baccara’s recording contract, and the two singers formalized their split.María Eugenia Martínez Mendiola was born on April 4, 1952, in Madrid. Her mother, Lola Mendiola, was a homemaker; her father, Emilio Martínez, was a police official at the Madrid airport.Ms. Mendiola studied at an Italian school in Madrid and trained to be a ballet dancer at the national school there before joining the Spanish state broadcaster’s dance troupe.Even though both singers were Spanish, Baccara represented Luxembourg in the 1978 Eurovision song contest, with a song about a holiday romance called “Parlez-Vous Français?” (Ms. Mendiola spoke five languages, including French.) Luxembourg’s entry finished seventh in the competition.After Baccara broke up, the two singers pursued separate careers. In 1981, Ms. Mendiola formed another duo, New Baccara, with another former ballet dancer, Marisa Pérez. While they never came close to matching the fame of the original Baccara, one of their songs, “Call Me Up,” was a hit in Spain in 1987 and also did well in Germany.Ms. Pérez ended her career in 2008 because of an illness, and a niece, Laura Mendiola, replaced her as Ms. Mendiola’s partner. In 2010, Ms. Mendiola formed a final partnership — Baccara Featuring María Mendiola — with another singer, Cristina Sevilla, who had previously collaborated for six years with Ms. Mateos. Their most recent single, “Gimme Your Love,” was released in 2018.Ms. Sevilla said that she had planned to continue with Ms. Mendiola, but that the pandemic had put their most recent concert projects on hold.“María was a powerful woman, who was always laughing even in the difficult moments,” Ms. Sevilla said. “Apart from being my partner, she was my real friend.”Ms. Mendiola is survived by a son, Jimmy Lim, and three grandchildren.“Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” had an unexpected revival, thanks to a Scottish soccer player, Andrew Considine, who had danced to the song at his bachelor party. Last year, a video of him and other players dancing to the song went viral, which inspired a cover version of the song by a Glasgow rock band, the Fratellis. The song also became an unofficial soccer anthem in Scotland, belted out by fans in the stadium during the recent European championships.While Scotland and soccer put Baccara back in the spotlight, Ms. Mendiola told the British news media that she wasn’t impressed by the Scottish version of the chart-topping song. It was, she said, “not my cup of tea.” More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Carmen Balthrop, Soprano Known for Joplin Opera Role, Dies at 73

      by

      After winning a vocal competition in 1975, she starred in “Treemonisha,” which ended up on Broadway. She also sang for a senator.The soprano Carmen Balthrop made her Metropolitan Opera debut on April 6, 1977. Thirteen days later she made an entirely different sort of debut, in a hearing room of the United States Senate.That day Ms. Balthrop, still early in a career that would take her to opera and concert stages all over the world, was one of a number of people testifying at a meeting of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in support of funding for the arts.It was a dreary and underattended meeting, with Senator Mark O. Hatfield, Republican of Oregon and the subcommittee chairman, the only member of the panel present. Dreary, that is, until Senator Hatfield, skeptical of the funding request, challenged Ms. Balthrop’s assertion that opera singers were a disciplined and hard-working lot.“He said, ‘Come on, are you really that disciplined?’” she told Knight-Ridder afterward. “And he said he’d like to hear some of the results. I said, ‘Why, certainly.’”She stood up and sang “Signore, ascolta” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”“He was delighted and declared a recess,” she said, “and later on, we got the money.”Ms. Balthrop, a noted Black star when opera was still early in its efforts to become more diverse, died on Sept. 5 at her home in Mitchellville, Md. She was 73.Her husband, Patrick A. Delaney, said the cause was cancer.Two years before that impromptu Senate performance, Ms. Balthrop’s career took off after she wowed audiences at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in April 1975, winning that competition. During the finals, she had sung that same “Turandot” excerpt, as well as “Che sento? O Dio!” from Handel’s “Julius Caesar,” performances that had been broadcast live on National Public Radio.“The announcement of Miss Balthrop’s victory brought cheers from the audience, which had clearly approved of her singing,” The New York Times reported.Later that year she landed perhaps her most prominent role, the title character in “Treemonisha,” Scott Joplin’s folk opera about an 18-year-old Black girl who is trying to lead her people to a better life. The opera, written before World War I, was not produced in Joplin’s lifetime, but in 1972 a version of it was staged in Atlanta, and three years later the Houston Grand Opera mounted a production with Ms. Balthrop in the lead.The opera was performed in Houston seven times as part of a free opera series, with thousands attending. At the final performance, the opera’s finale, “A Real Slow Drag,” was reprised three times for the enthusiastic crowd.That production moved to Broadway. At the time, Elizabeth McCann was managing director of Nederlander Productions, which brought the show to New York. (Ms. McCann died this month.) She told The Times that the ability of Ms. Balthrop, who was then 27, to portray a teenager was a large part of the reason.“Carmen Balthrop, who plays the title role, is just tremendous,” she said. “The part needs an enchanting and innocent girl with strength. How often do you get a combination like that?”Ms. Balthrop as Pamina in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.” She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the role in 1977.James Heffernan/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesCarmen Arlene Balthrop was born on May 14, 1948, in Washington. Her father, John, worked in the printing office of the Department of Justice, and her mother, Clementine (Jordan) Balthrop, was a homemaker.As Ms. Balthrop often told the story, she set her career goal early — when she was 8. Her father had a hobby: In the basement of the family home, he would tinker with radios and televisions. She had an assigned Saturday chore: to clean the house while her mother went to the market.“One Saturday I was running the vacuum cleaner, and I turned it off because I heard something very unusual coming from the basement,” where her father was testing a radio and speakers, she told “The Opera Diva Series,” a web interview program, in 2011.“I went to the top of the steps and I called out,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Daddy, what’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s opera.’”Specifically, it was the voice of Leontyne Price, the groundbreaking Black soprano.“Something was awakened in me,” Ms. Balthrop said, “and I began from that moment on to try to re-create that sound myself.”She graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington in 1967 and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland in 1971. The next year she received a master’s degree in music at the Catholic University of America.Her Met debut in 1977 was in “Die Zauberflöte,” in which she sang the role of Pamina. She performed with numerous other opera companies and symphonies, including Washington Opera, Deutsche Oper of Berlin and Opera Columbus in Ohio, where in 1999 she performed the title role in the world premiere of “Vanqui,” an opera about the travels of the souls of two slaves composed by Leslie Burrs and with a libretto by John A. Williams.Ms. Balthrop began a career as a teacher at the University of Maryland in 1985. She also filled administrative roles there, including coordinator of the voice and opera division.A marriage to Dorceal Duckens ended in divorce. In addition to Mr. Delaney, whom she married in 1985, Ms. Balthrop is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Nicole Mosley; her daughter with Mr. Delaney, Camille Delaney-McNeil; and three grandchildren.In a blog entry on the University of Maryland website, Ms. Balthrop once wrote of being surprised by Ms. Price, who turned up unexpectedly at a rehearsal when Ms. Balthrop was preparing to perform in San Francisco.“There was no one in the hall,” she wrote of their encounter. “I was standing there with the voice that inspired me to sing. Every time I think about it, I just well up, because I don’t think people get to meet their idols very often.” More