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      in Television

      Billie Hayes, Memorable Witch on ‘H.R. Pufnstuf,’ Dies at 96

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      Ms. Hayes had quite a cackle, and it served her well in a number of witchy roles, beginning in 1969 on a short-lived but much remembered TV series.Billie Hayes, who rode a memorable cackle to kiddie-TV fame, playing a witch named Witchiepoo in the short-lived but much remembered 1969 series “H.R. Pufnstuf,” died on April 29 in Los Angeles. She was 96.News of her death was posted on her website.Ms. Hayes had built a moderately successful stage career and had portrayed Mammy Yokum in the 1959 film version of “Li’l Abner” (reprising a role she had played on Broadway) when she was cast as Witchiepoo.“H.R. Pufnstuf” was the first of a string of children’s shows made by the brothers Sid and Marty Krofft in the 1970s — trippy, slapdash-looking affairs that contrasted noticeably with the carefully pitched messages of “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which were born in the same era. Krofft shows tended toward the bizarre: “Lidsville,” for instance, which also starred Ms. Hayes (as well as Charles Nelson Reilly), involved a land of living hats.Few of the shows lasted long — “Pufnstuf” survived only 17 episodes — but they made an impression.“The Kroffts dished up a swirl of psychedelia, vaudeville and cheesy production values that might be described as brown acid for the toddler soul,” Emily Nussbaum wrote in The New York Times in 2004, when TV Land broadcast a marathon of Krofft creations.“Pufnstuf” was a sort of comic sendup of “The Wizard of Oz,” with Witchiepoo pursuing a talking flute possessed by a boy named Jimmy (Jack Wild) in much the way Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West craves Dorothy’s ruby slippers.The red wig and elaborate makeup Ms. Hayes wore made her a striking figure, but witchy ineptitude kept Witchiepoo from being too scary. In 1970 she played the character in a film version, called simply “Pufnstuf,” in a cast that also included Martha Raye as a character named Boss Witch and Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas as one named Witch Hazel.For years afterward the role made Ms. Hayes popular among casting directors in search of a witch. In 1971 she played one in an episode of the sitcom “Bewitched” in which she was ultimately bested by Samantha, the series’ star witch, played by Elizabeth Montgomery. In 1985 she was the voice of the witch Orgoch in the animated Disney film “The Black Cauldron.” She was the voice of a cackling witch in “Shrek Forever After” in 2010.Perhaps most memorably, in 1976 the comedian Paul Lynde, with whom she had first worked decades earlier, managed to pair her and Ms. Hamilton in a running sketch on “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special,” which also featured appearances by Betty White, Donny and Marie Osmond and the rock group Kiss, and which has taken on a sort of kitschy fame.“The two witches bookend Mr. Lynde as they cackle their way through the hardcover editions of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘The Exorcist,’ call ‘The Sound of Music’ a real horror movie and play Witches’ Monopoly, a board game in which contestants can either buy a property or blow it up,” The New York Times wrote in 2007 when a DVD of that television rarity was released.Ms. Hayes played other roles in her somewhat sporadic career, including providing the voices for characters on “The Brothers Flub,” “Transformers: Rescue Bots” and other animated shows. But Witchiepoo was the one that stuck in people’s heads. In 2003 Inside TV ranked her No. 3 on its list of Top 10 witches in TV history, behind only Ms. Montgomery and Catherine Hicks, who played Amanda Tucker on the 1980s series “Tucker’s Witch.”Ms. Hayes at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, Calif., at a party celebrating the release of “H.R. Pufnstuf” on DVD in 2004.Stephen Shugerman/Getty ImagesBillie Armstrong Brosch was born on Aug. 5, 1924, in Du Quoin, Ill. Her father, Charles, was a coal miner, and her mother, Marie (Armstrong) Brosch, was an administrator for the Perry County General Assistance Office.She began performing as a child and continued to do so after leaving high school early, performing in Chicago and with U.S.O. shows. (An agent at the start of her professional career suggested that “Brosch” was not an ear-friendly name for a performer.)She eventually secured a role in a touring show called “What’s New” with Mr. Lynde. In 1956 Mr. Lynde wrote and directed sketches for a Broadway revue called “New Faces of 1956,” and Ms. Hayes found herself as one of those new faces — along with a young British actress named Maggie Smith.Ms. Hayes said her commitment to “New Faces,” which ran for 220 performances, kept her from accepting an offer to originate the role of Mammy Yokum in “Li’l Abner,” a musical based on Al Capp’s comic strip characters, when it opened on Broadway in November 1956, but she later stepped into the part, replacing Charlotte Rae. She won the role in the 1959 film version.Ms. Hayes was also president of Pet Hope, an animal care organization. She leaves no immediate survivors.In a 1969 interview with the Dallas-area broadcaster Bobbie Wygant, Ms. Hayes noted that, though Witchiepoo was the villain of “Pufnstuf,” she received a lot of fan mail from children seeking her help with kid-size problems.“I’m the Ann Landers of the witch world,” she said.“I don’t know why they pick the witch to write to,” she said, “unless they figure either she’s so dumb she’ll give me a funny answer or she’s so smart I’ll get out of trouble.” More

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      in Movies

      Norman Lloyd, Veteran Hollywood Hyphenate, Is Dead at 106

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      In his long career as an actor, producer and director, he worked with some of the best-known names in show business, even if his own was barely recognized.He was the young actor who moved the audience as Cinna the poet in Orson Welles’s 1937 theatrical production of “Julius Caesar.”He was the chilly fascist sympathizer who kept audiences on the edge of their seats as he dangled from the Statue of Liberty in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 film “Saboteur.”And he was the kindly Dr. Auschlander on the popular 1980s hospital drama “St. Elsewhere.”His face was recognizable to generations of people. But his name? Well, just consider this: When a filmmaker decided to make a documentary about him, he ended up titling it “Who Is Norman Lloyd?”Mr. Lloyd, who died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles at 106, carved out a successful career over seven decades as an actor, producer and director, working with some of the best-known names in the business — even if his own was barely recognized.His death was confirmed by the producer Dean Hargrove, a longtime friend.In addition to acting under Welles and Hitchcock, Mr. Lloyd worked with Charlie Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht, John Houseman and Jean Renoir. He became good friends with Hitchcock and a frequent tennis partner of Chaplin’s. And he had stories to tell about all of them.“He is a fount of stage and movie lore, full of juice at the age of 93,” The New Yorker wrote when “Who Is Norman Lloyd?” was released in 2007.When Mr. Lloyd spoke, he did so with the sort of delivery that suggested an upper-crust upbringing and impeccable schooling. As it happened, he was born in Jersey City, N.J., on Nov. 8, 1914, and the only social climbing his family did was to move to Brooklyn. The aristocratic voice came later, when it was suggested that he take elocution lessons to erase his accent.“He sounds like he was born in London,” a friend, Peter Bart, the editorial director at Variety, once said. “It’s not an affectation. It’s just the way he sounds.”Mr. Lloyd began performing when he was very young, appearing before ladies’ clubs, he told The Star-Ledger of Newark in 2007. “‘Father, Get the Hammer. There’s a Fly on Baby’s Head’ — that was my big number,” he recalled dryly. “So you can imagine what that act was like.”But the young man was set on an actor’s path, and eventually he began working under Welles at the Mercury Theater in New York. The pay was poor, but it was the Depression, and he was better off than many of the people who crammed the theater in search of a cheap diversion. Mr. Lloyd’s performance as Cinna, in a version of “Julius Caesar” that Welles set in Mussolini’s Italy, brought him acclaim.“By many accounts, the most electrifying moment in ‘Caesar’ was the brief scene in which Cinna the Poet is mistaken for one of the conspirators and is set upon by the mob,” Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2015 in an article about Welles.When Welles moved to Los Angeles in 1940 to make films, the young Mr. Lloyd went with him.Welles’s first movie project fell through, however, and Mr. Lloyd, who was expecting a baby with his wife, Peggy, a fellow performer, decided to look for work elsewhere. Welles’s next project went better: It was “Citizen Kane.”But while Mr. Lloyd missed a chance to have a role in that classic film, he did manage to get cast by Hitchcock in “Saboteur.” His role was a big one: Fry, a fifth columnist bent on attacking American targets during World War II.At the film’s climax, he topples over the edge of the Statue of Liberty’s torch and dangles as the film’s hero (Robert Cummings) tries to pull him to safety by his sleeve. (If a spoiler can be forgiven after all these years, Fry’s fate is less like that of Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint as they perch on Mount Rushmore in another Hitchcock film, “North by Northwest,” than that of King Kong on the Empire State Building.)Other roles followed, including in Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” (1945), Chaplin’s “Limelight” (1952) and Jean Renoir’s Hollywood movie “The Southerner” (1945). But Mr. Lloyd gradually began to turn to producing and directing.During the Hollywood blacklist period, his work dried up because of his past associations with leftist performers. He credited Hitchcock with reviving his career by insisting that he be allowed to hire Mr. Lloyd to produce and direct episodes of his television shows, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.”Mr. Lloyd took whatever work he could get until almost the end of his life. He had roles in an episode of “Modern Family” in 2010 and in the 2015 Judd Apatow movie “Trainwreck.” He also continued to spend a lot of time on the tennis court.Mr. Lloyd “still plays tennis and still follows the serve to the net, which is daunting,” Mr. Bart said in an interview when his friend was well into his 90s.In 2014, the year he turned 100, the Los Angeles City Council proclaimed Nov. 8, his birthday, “Norman Lloyd Day.”Peggy Lloyd, who was born Margaret Hirsdansky and who was married to Mr. Lloyd for 75 years, died in 2011. She and Mr. Lloyd had met when they co-starred in a play called “Crime,” directed by Elia Kazan.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Matthew Sussman, who directed the documentary about Mr. Lloyd, said its title came late in the game, as he was telling acquaintances what he was working on.“That would be the question,” he said, “almost every time: ‘Who is Norman Lloyd?’”Neil Vigdor contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      Bill McCreary Dies at 87; Blazed Trail for Black Journalists on TV

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      He was hired at what became the Fox flagship station in New York in 1967, when there were few Black faces on the air, and became an Emmy-winning anchor.Bill McCreary, an Emmy Award-winning reporter who was one of the first Black television journalists in New York, and whose perspective helped fill a noticeable gap in local public affairs reporting, died on April 4 in Brooklyn. He was 87.The cause was a neurological disease he had for many years, said O’Kellon McCreary, his wife of 62 years and only immediate survivor.His death, which had not been made public earlier by his family, was announced this week by WNYW, the flagship station of the Fox television network. He was hired in 1967 when the station, Channel 5, was owned by Metromedia and known as WNEW, and he remained a familiar on-air presence until he retired in 2000.As a co-anchor, Mr. McCreary helped build the station’s 10 O’Clock News into a ratings powerhouse. He became the managing editor and anchor of the weekly program “Black News” in 1970 and of “The McCreary Report” in 1978, when he was also named a vice president of Fox 5 News.As the civil rights movement exploded on television screens, a demand also grew for Black journalists to be seen and heard. Mr. McCreary, Bob Teague on WNBC, and Gil Noble and Melba Tolliver of WABC were among the few seen on local newscasts in New York at the time.“There was no such thing as ethnic television, because none of us were on TV,” Mr. McCreary told The Daily News of New York in 1997. “So it happens that along came the inner-city thing, places like Bed-Stuy and Harlem, and the news directors suddenly realized, ‘Hey, we don’t have any connections in these Black communities.’ There were less than a handful of us on television back then.”William McKinley McCreary was born on Aug. 8, 1933, in Blackville, S.C., to Simon and Ollie McCreary. He moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan as an infant with his mother, who became a teacher’s assistant.A graduate of Seward Park High School and Baruch College in Manhattan, he served in the Army from 1953 to 1955. His first broadcasting jobs were in radio, as an announcer at WWRL in Queens and a general-assignment reporter and news director at WLIB in Manhattan.He began reporting for WNEW on March 13, 1967, the first day of the station’s nightly newscast.He won a local Emmy for “Black News” and shared an Emmy for anchoring with John Roland on the 10 O’Clock News — a program preceded every night (as it still is) by the somber signature intonation “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”Mr. McCreary and Dr. Gerald Deas of Kings County Hospital and SUNY Downstate Medical Center shared a commendation from the Food and Drug Administration for alerting the public, on “The McCreary Report” in the 1970s, to the dangers of consuming Argo brand starch. In 1987, Mr. McCreary was given the N.A.A.C.P.’s Black Heritage Award.Among the figures he interviewed over the course of his career were Rosa Parks, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela.“Unlike a lot of TV journalists today, Bill gave you the news, not his opinions,” his former colleague Judy Licht said by email. “Straight and to the point, you never knew where he stood on any issue.”He was also a mentor to a generation of Black journalists. Cheryl Wills, an award-winning reporter for the news channel NY1 who met Mr. McCreary when she was a production assistant at Fox 5, said: “Black newscasters were frowned upon for telling the truth about discrimination and other societal ills in urban America. Bill McCreary told the unvarnished truth, and that’s what set him apart. He told it with tremendous dignity and integrity.” More

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      in Music

      Martin Bookspan, Cultured Voice of Lincoln Center Telecasts, Dies at 94

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      The longtime announcer for “Live From Lincoln Center,” he said he wanted his audience “to become involved, to love what they’re hearing.”Martin Bookspan, who parlayed a childhood grounding in classical music into a career as the announcer for the “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts and the radio broadcasts of the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, died on April 29 at his home in Aventura, Fla. He was 94.The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter Rachel Sobel said.Mr. Bookspan started violin lessons when he was 6, but he realized by the time he entered college that he would never be the next Fritz Kreisler or Jascha Heifetz. After an early career behind the scenes at radio stations in Boston and New York, he established himself as a stalwart of “Live From Lincoln Center,” the PBS program that became America’s premier source of classical music on broadcast television. He joined the program when it went on the air in 1976.“Live From Lincoln Center” was, for him, not that different from radio — he was heard but not seen. He would open the broadcast, then hand off to on-camera hosts like Beverly Sills, Dick Cavett or Hugh Downs.“The camera was never on Marty,” said John Goberman, the program’s longtime executive producer. But, he added, Mr. Bookspan “was more than just the announcer. The comfortable and familiar part of every broadcast was Marty Bookspan.”Mr. Bookspan’s voice “didn’t sound like a lion,” Mr. Goberman said. “He spoke in a very straightforward, friendly, conversational way.” The Palm Beach Post, describing Mr. Bookspan’s voice after an interview in 1994, said: “Even on the telephone, it’s a voice that resonates with the rarefied air of high culture, the sort of voice you might hear on a public-television pledge drive. But it’s not so stuffy that you couldn’t imagine it delivering the play-by-play of your favorite team.”Mr. Bookspan himself said, “If I have a technique, it’s the technique of the sportscaster.”“As sportscasters make the game come alive, I hope I have made concerts come alive,” he explained in 2006, as he prepared to leave “Live From Lincoln Center” after 30 years. “I want the audience to become involved, to love what they’re hearing.”By then, the “Live From Lincoln Center” audience was accustomed to hearing his preconcert warm-ups and his postconcert signoffs. With a well-dressed crowd in the audience and big-name performers on the stage, the proceedings had a touch of glamour, but not necessarily for Mr. Bookspan. He and his microphone were sometimes installed in dressing rooms, closets — even, at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, in what had been a women’s restroom. He was connected to the stage through his headphones and a video monitor.The soprano Renée Fleming and the conductor Louis Langrée on opening night of the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2005, which was broadcast on “Live From Lincoln Center.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesMartin Bookspan was born on July 30, 1926, in Boston. His father, Simon, was a dry goods salesman who later switched to selling insurance; his mother, Martha (Schwartz) Bookspan was a homemaker. Simon Bookspan was passionate about Jewish liturgical music and took his son to hear prominent cantors.At Harvard, Martin majored not in music but in German literature. He graduated cum laude in 1947.He was also heard on the campus radio station, where he conducted his first important interview in 1944. His guest was the composer Aaron Copland, who revealed that he was considering writing a piece for the choreographer Martha Graham. It turned out to be the ballet “Appalachian Spring.”In his future broadcast career, Mr. Bookspan would interview more than 1,000 performers and composers, from the conductor Maurice Abravanel to the composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.After working as the music director at WBMS, a classical-music station in Boston, he joined the staff of the Boston Symphony in 1954 as its radio, television and recordings coordinator. In 1956, he moved to New York to become the director of recorded music at WQXR, then owned by The New York Times.At WQXR, he hired John Corigliano, at the time a fledgling composer, as an assistant. He proved to be a concerned boss.Mr. Corigliano called in sick one summer morning. “I should’ve known better, because Marty was so considerate, he called later in the afternoon,” Mr. Corigliano, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2001, said in an interview. “I went off to the beach. Marty called, and my roommate answered the phone. Marty said, ‘How is John feeling?’ My roommate said, ‘Oh, he’s great. He’s at the beach.’“The next day I walked in. There’s Marty. I approached him slowly and said, ‘I’ll never do it again.’”Mr. Bookspan left WQXR in 1967 and joined the music licensing agency ASCAP as coordinator of symphonic and concert activities. He was later vice president and director of artists and repertoire for the Moss Music Group, an artists’ management agency. He was also an adjunct professor of music at New York University.In the 1960s and ’70s, he was an arts critic for several television stations, including WABC and WPIX in New York and WNAC (now WHDH) in Boston. He was a host of “The Eternal Light,” an NBC program produced with the Jewish Theological Seminary, and, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the announcer for the CBS soap opera “The Guiding Light.”He also wrote reviews of recordings for The New York Times (on open-reel tapes in the 1960s and compact discs in the 1990s). He wrote several books, including “101 Masterpieces of Music and Their Composers” (1968) and, with Ross Yockey, biographies of the conductors André Previn and Zubin Mehta. He handled radio broadcasts for the Boston Symphony and later for the New York Philharmonic.His wife, Janet Bookspan, died in 2008. Besides Ms. Sobel, he is survived by a son, David; another daughter, Deborah Margol; six grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.The tenor Jan Peerce called Mr. Bookspan’s knowledge of music “encyclopedic,” and it served him well when he had to ad-lib.One night in 1959, he was the announcer for a Boston Symphony broadcast that featured the pianist Rudolf Serkin playing Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Mr. Bookspan did his usual introduction before Serkin and the conductor Charles Munch made their way across the stage. Mr. Bookspan told The Berkshire Eagle in March that once they plunged in, “I did the one thing that I learned I should never do again: I left my broadcast booth.”With Serkin “flailing away with a vengeance, pounding the pedals for all they were worth, caught up in the work and oblivious to all else” — as Mr. Bookspan recalled in a different interview — he headed to the green room to chat with Aaron Copland, who was on hand for the concert.Suddenly, in the second movement of the Brahms, there was silence.“I ran across the backstage and up the stairs, and en route picked up the news that there was a problem with the piano,” he told The Eagle. “I got to the microphone and huffed and puffed my way through, reporting, ‘There was a problem with the piano’ and that ‘as soon as I catch my breath, I’ll tell you what’s going on.’”Mr. Bookspan talked nonstop for more than 15 minutes until the piano had been fixed and Serkin and the orchestra started playing again. More

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      Lloyd Price, ‘Personality’ Hitmaker, Is Dead at 88

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      His “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” was a rhythm-and-blues smash that hooked white listeners in 1952, anticipating the rise of rock ’n’ roll. Even bigger records would follow.Lloyd Price, who provided some of the seeds for what became rock ’n’ roll with his New Orleans rhythm-and-blues hit “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1952 and later had major pop hits with “Personality” and “Stagger Lee,” died on Monday at an extended-care center in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 88. The cause was complications of diabetes, said Jeffrey Madoff, the writer and producer of “Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical,” a stage show scheduled to open next year in Pennsylvania.Nicknamed Mr. Personality after his most recognizable hit, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart in 1959, Mr. Price found success with Black and white audiences alike. He was a prolific songwriter as well as a gifted singer — a combination that was relatively uncommon at the time — and his songs were covered by many others. Among the artists who recorded versions of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” were Elvis Presley and Paul McCartney.He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.Mr. Price found success early: He was still in his teens when he recorded “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” its title an exclamation borrowed from a local disc jockey, for Specialty Records, an independent label founded by Art Rupe. On that session, recorded in New Orleans, he was accompanied by a band, led by the local musician and songwriter Dave Bartholomew, that included the pianist Fats Domino.“Lawdy Miss Clawdy” topped the Billboard R&B chart for seven weeks and introduced Mr. Price’s emotionally direct vocal style and infectious New Orleans beat to white listeners years before the term “rock ’n’ roll” was in wide use. Mr. Rupe later recalled, “That was the first Black record that wasn’t intended to be a white record — it became a white record, versus the previous Black records which were designed for the white market.”Mr. Price’s career was interrupted by Army service, and by the mid-1950s other Black artists, among them Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Mr. Domino, were achieving comparable crossover success. Mr. Price made up for lost time with huge pop hits of his own.Mr. Price in concert at the Apollo Theater in Manhattan, probably in the mid-1960s.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives-Getty ImagesAlong with his successful music career, Mr. Price had an entrepreneurial streak: He founded record labels, managed other performers, owned nightclubs, promoted boxing matches, ventured into real estate and even promised to champion the sweet potato with his company Lloyd Price Icon Food Brands.But the songs came first. “Music brings my soul more joy than anything else does, or can,” he once said. “It makes my heart beat faster with excitement; and my love for music has never changed! If you love music, you know what I’m talking about.”Lloyd Price, a self-described “country boy,” was born on March 9, 1933, in Kenner, La., one of 11 children — eight boys and three girls — of Beatrice and Louis Price, who owned the Fish ’n’ Fry Restaurant. As a child, Lloyd sang in the gospel choir at his family’s church, picking up trumpet and piano along the way while also working at the family business.A high school dropout, Mr. Price started his first band, the Blue Boys, at age 18. To the dismay of his parents, he also got a job at a New Orleans nightclub, but he quit at their insistence to work construction.His breakout success with Specialty Records came to an end when he was drafted in 1953, leaving the label to focus instead on Little Richard and Larry Williams, Mr. Price’s onetime chauffeur.After returning to civilian life in 1954, Mr. Price founded his own record company, KRC, with two partners. The label did not make much of an impact, but one single he released on KRC, the ballad “Just Because,” was leased to ABC-Paramount Records and reached the Top 40 pop chart in 1957. Mr. Price was then signed directly to ABC-Paramount and soon had his greatest success with the song “Stagger Lee.” His upbeat take on a folk song that had been recorded numerous times since the 1920s, it reached No. 1 on both the pop and R&B charts in 1959.Mr. Price’s crossover success did not come without some compromise. Dick Clark, the producer and host of the immensely popular television show “American Bandstand,” decided that the lyrics of “Stagger Lee,” which involved gambling and ended with a fatal barroom shooting, were too violent for his show. Mr. Price, ever the savvy businessman, recorded a new version in which the song’s rivals are fighting over a woman and make up at the end: “Stagger Lee and Billy never fuss or fight no more.” (The cleaned-up version was not released commercially at the time, but it was included many years later on a compilation album.)That same year, “Personality” became almost as big a hit, certifying Mr. Price as a bona fide rock ’n’ roll star. In 1962, he set out on his own again, starting Double L Records with Harold Logan (who had also been a partner in his earlier label), with a roster that included a young Wilson Pickett. Mr. Price and Mr. Logan opened a nightclub, the Turntable, on the former site of the celebrated jazz club Birdland in Midtown Manhattan in 1968. Mr. Logan was murdered in 1969.Mr. Price reached the Top 40 for the last time with a version of the standard “Misty” in 1963, but by that time his star in the music world was fading. He wisely dipped into other arenas, including a partnership with Don King to help promote Muhammad Ali’s “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 and “Thrilla in Manila” against Joe Frazier in the Philippines the next year. Concurrently with the Zaire fight, he helped promote a music festival with a lineup that included James Brown and B.B. King. He lived in Nigeria from 1979 to 1983.Mr. Price is survived by his wife, Jackie Battle; three daughters, Lori Price, D’Juana Price and December Thompson; two sons, Lloyd Price Jr. and Paris Thompson; a sister, Rose Moore; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.In the 1980s, Mr. Price invested in real estate — he backed the construction of homes in the Bronx — and ran a limousine company. By 2007, at the age of 74, he was talking up his Miss Clawdy line of sweet-potato products to The Wall Street Journal. “It’s going to do things,” he said. “It’s going to bring attention back to the sweet potato.” His company also sold organic cereals and energy bars.There was always music in the background. Mr. Price helped organize oldies tours, on which he shared the bill with other early rhythm-and-blues acts like Little Richard and Ben E. King, throughout the ’90s and into the 21st century.Mr. Price released his last album, “This Is Rock and Roll,” in 2017. He published an autobiography, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy: The True King of the 50’s,” written with William E. Waller, in 2009, and a collection of essays, provocatively titled “sumdumhonky,” in 2015.Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      in Movies

      Tawny Kitaen, Star of 1980s Music Videos, Dies at 59

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      Ms. Kitaen gained fame for her carefree spirit and sultry dancing in music videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt and her role in the movie “Bachelor Party.”Tawny Kitaen, an actress who gained fame in the 1980s for her roles in rock music videos and who starred with Tom Hanks in the movie “Bachelor Party,” died on Friday at her home in Newport Beach, Calif. She was 59.Ms. Kitaen’s death was confirmed by a daughter, Wynter Finley, who said the cause was not known.Ms. Kitaen became a mainstay on MTV in the 1980s when the network was at its peak cultural influence with music videos playing all day.With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the Whitesnake music video “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”Julie Kitaen was born on Aug. 5, 1961, in San Diego. She studied ballet and gymnastics until she was 15. After appearing in a Jack LaLanne commercial, and in television shows and movies, she gained wider exposure as Mr. Hanks’s fiancée in the 1984 comedy “Bachelor Party.”But it was her appearance in music videos that solidified her image in Generation X’s imagination as a free-spirited beauty having the time of her life.She once described working with Paula Abdul on the set of one video.Ms. Abdul, then a choreographer, asked her what she could do. Ms. Kitaen said she showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” She then left, Ms. Kitaen said.“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”She married the Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale in 1989 and the couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a major-league baseball pitcher. They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.Later, Ms. Kitaen appeared on reality shows and spoke openly about her struggles with addiction to cocaine and painkillers.In a 2010 interview with The Daily Pilot, she described her volunteer work at a shelter for women who had left abusive relationships and said she herself was a survivor of domestic violence. Ms. Kitaen said that after her divorce from Mr. Finley, she became involved with a man who was physically and verbally abusive.“You don’t want to tell anybody because you feel like a complete fool for staying — you protect them,” she said. “You do everything you can so other people don’t find out that he’s abusing you.”Michael Goldberg, Ms. Kitaen’s agent, said in recent years she appeared on various podcasts and radio shows and relished talking about her time as a figure in rock history.“People still love to hear those stories because the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle is something we all fantasize about, isn’t it?” he said. “And she lived it. And had so much to say about it.”Ms. Kitaen is survived by her two daughters and a brother and a sister. More

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      Anita Lane, Rocker Who Was More Than a Muse, Is Dead at 61

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      Ms. Lane was Nick Cave’s collaborator and girlfriend during his formative period and helped define his sound. She also made records of her own.Anita Lane, who collaborated with the Australian rocker Nick Cave on some of his most striking songs and made distinctive records of her own, applying her sometimes girly, sometimes sultry vocal style to lyrics that could be haunting, gloomy, sexual or tongue-in-cheek, died last month in Melbourne, Australia. She was 61.Her label, Mute Records, announced her death in a posting on its website on April 29 but did not say when she died or give the cause. She lived in Melbourne.Ms. Lane met Mr. Cave in 1977, when both were teenagers. She was his girlfriend during the period when he was coming to prominence with the band the Birthday Party and continued to write with him after he formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1984.“She was the smartest and most talented of all of us, by far,” Mr. Cave wrote in an emotional tribute on his website.She contributed lyrics to a number of Birthday Party and Bad Seeds songs, including the title track from the first Bad Seeds album, “From Her to Eternity” (1985), and she helped define Mr. Cave’s dark, intense style. Mr. Cave was particularly enamored of a song for which she wrote all the lyrics, “Stranger Than Kindness” (1986), so much so that he has continued to perform it and borrowed its title for an autobiographical book published last year that documented memorabilia from his career. It’s an abstract song (arranged by Blixa Bargeld) that seems to be about both passion and estrangement, and ends this way:Your sleeping hands journeyThey loiterStranger than kindnessYou hold me so carelessly closeTell me I’m dirtyI’m a strangerI’m a strangerI’m a stranger to kindnessMs. Lane was sometimes described with a particular term, which Mr. Cave commented on in his tribute. “Despised the concept of the muse but was everybody’s,” he wrote.Yet she sometimes made her way into the recording studio herself, releasing two albums, “Dirty Pearl” in 1993 and “Sex O’Clock” in 2001 (both produced largely by Mick Harvey, Mr. Cave’s Bad Seeds bandmate).“Dirty Pearl” compiled studio recordings she had made over 12 years in Berlin (where she lived for many years), London, Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. Shane Danielsen, reviewing it in The Sydney Morning Herald, called Ms. Lane “a highly distinctive vocalist, purring in a manner at once erotic and unsettling.”The British newspaper The Express, reviewing “Sex O’Clock,” said of Ms. Lane, “She’s groovy like a chic sixties chanteuse and funky like a seventies disco queen but still sounds dead modern, and the songs are redolent of lust and boudoirs.”Erik Jensen, reviewing the same record in the German publication Politiken, said, “As a counterbalance to the many half-naked Barbies of the time on MTV, Anita Lane’s mature seduction is a pleasure.”Anita Lane was born on March 18, 1960, in East Melbourne to Rowland and Pearl (Petts) Lane.According to Ian Johnston’s book “Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave” (1995), when she was 17 she talked her way into the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, lying about her age because she was too young. Mr. Cave too was studying art. A portrait she painted of him in 1977 is included in his “Stranger Than Kindness” book, along with her comment about him: that if he were hit by a bus, he would be compelled to write about it in his own blood before he died.She was 17 and he was 19 when they met. Punk rock had blossomed.“I guess everyone came to life out of punk rock, all that feeling that was going around at the time,” she said years later. “It was funny for us because we weren’t poor, working class or very upset. What were we? I don’t know.”She didn’t stick with art school long after meeting Mr. Cave, whose band at the time was called the Boys Next Door but soon became the Birthday Party. When the band left Melbourne to try London in the early 1980s, Ms. Lane soon joined Mr. Cave there. She contributed lyrics to some of the songs on the band’s debut album, “Prayers on Fire,” released in 1981.She also began turning up in Mr. Cave’s songs in other ways.“In ‘Six-Inch Gold Blade’ Cave narrated a violent tale of extreme sexual jealousy, desire and hatred combined in the brutal murder of a girl not too dissimilar in appearance to Anita Lane,” Mr. Johnston wrote in his biography. “Although his obsession with Anita had manifested itself in a number of earlier songs, ‘Six-Inch Gold Blade’ marked her first obvious appearance as a narrative character.”Such depictions didn’t bother Ms. Lane.“To other people it may have been really shocking,” she said, “but I liked the idea of how shocking it was.”The two would sometimes collaborate even after their romantic relationship ended in 1983. Ms. Lane also worked with other artists, especially Mr. Harvey. She contributed vocals to several tracks on his “Intoxicated Man,” a 1995 album reimagining songs by the French star Serge Gainsbourg. Four years earlier she and Barry Adamson released a single of “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” the Nancy Sinatra hit.Her record company said Ms. Lane is survived by a son with Johannes Beck, Raphael; and two sons with Andrea Libonati, Luciano and Carlito. More

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      in Television

      Bob Abernethy, Longtime Host of PBS Show on Religion, Dies at 93

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      He conceived and produced “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and was its face for 20 years, after four decades as an NBC News correspondent.Bob Abernethy, who capped a four-decade career as an NBC News correspondent by injecting religion, one of the most under-covered subjects on television, into national programming with a weekly series that ran for 20 years on PBS, died on May 2 in Brunswick, Maine. He was 93.His death, at a heath care facility, was confirmed by his daughter Jane Montgomery Abernethy. The cause was Alzheimer’s dementia.The grandson of a Baptist minister in Washington whose congregation included President Warren G. Harding and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Mr. Abernethy had retired from NBC in 1994 after covering the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nascent space program and Congress.He was not ready to stop working, though. Armed with his deep faith, intellectual curiosity and a theology degree he had earned from Yale Divinity School during a one-year leave of absence in 1984, he persuaded WNET, the PBS station in New York, to produce “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” a half-hour nonsectarian series that Mr. Abernethy hosted and presided over as executive editor beginning in 1997.Within 10 years of its launch, the show — which Mr. Abernethy had described as “a news program, no preaching” — was airing on 250 public stations nationwide, winning some 200 industry awards. He and his collaborators went on to broadcast regularly until 2017, when he was 89.With the journalist William Bole, Mr. Abernethy edited “The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World,” (2007), an anthology of interview transcripts from the PBS program.“Nothing I have done has been as personally satisfying as founding and working on” the program, he wrote in the introduction to the book, adding, “The main reason for that is the many opportunities the show provides for sitting down with the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu — extraordinary men and women who speak as naturally about their faith and doubt and spiritual practices as they do about the weather.”Mr. Abernethy in an undated photo. He persuaded PBS to produce “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” becoming its host and executive producer.David HollowayOther guests included the Dalai Lama, President Jimmy Carter, the Rev. Billy Graham and Jonathan Sacks, at the time the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.The series covered a wide range of topics, including atheism, abortion, assisted suicide, sexual abuse by clergy and organ transplants.“Finding this line between sensitivity to the spiritual dimensions of a story on the one hand and objective, traditional skepticism is a constant struggle and a very appropriate one, but I think we’ve got it right,” Mr. Abernethy told The Washington Post in 2000. “This is a matter of good reporting. Unless you get the spiritual element of the story, you’re missing something very important. It’s like interviewing Babe Ruth and not asking about hitting.”When “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” was approaching the end of its run, Jerome Socolovsky, the editor in chief of Religion News Service, was rueful, telling the news service Current in 2016, “The media landscape will miss this crucial provider of video stories about religion that didn’t favor one or the other but gave viewers a full perspective on religious news developments.”Robert Gordon Abernethy was born on Nov. 5, 1927, in Geneva to Robert and Lois May (Jones) Abernethy. His father worked for the Y.M.C.A.’s international newspaper. After Bob was born, the couple returned to the United States. His father began to teach religion at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., but died of complications of appendicitis in 1930.Bob and his mother moved in with his paternal grandparents in Washington, where his grandfather was senior minister of Calvary Baptist Church. She taught piano at the National Cathedral School.After graduating from the Hill School, he enrolled in Princeton University but interrupted his studies to serve with the American occupying Army in postwar Japan, where he hosted a program for Armed Forces Radio. Returning to college, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from what is now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.Coming from a family of pastors, he felt “a certain amount of pressure on me to become a minister, too,” he told the website Resources for Christianity in 2013, “but I never heard a call.”Mr. Abernethy married Jean Montgomery in 1951; she died in 1980. In addition to their daughter, Jane, he is survived by his second wife, Marie (Grove) Abernethy, whom he married in 1984; their daughter, Elizabeth C. Abernethy; and four children from Ms. Abernethy’s first marriage. He had homes in Brunswick as well as in Washington and Jaffrey, N.H.Mr. Abernethy was a member of the United Church of Christ. His wife is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church.He joined NBC News after receiving his master’s from Princeton in 1952. Early on he wrote and hosted “Update,” a program for young people, and was later a Washington interviewer for the “Today” show. He anchored the evening news for KNBC in Los Angeles among other assignments.One posting was to Moscow, after he had completed his leave from NBC News to study theology in 1984. Before he left, he recalled: “I ran into a guy I had known who asked me, ‘What’s new?’ I said, ‘I took a year’s leave from NBC and went to divinity school. I got married and we had a baby. What’s new with you?’”He never stopped working. At his death, he was hoping to document the lives of homeless people through video interviews, for a future broadcast. More