Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Arthur Pomposello, Impresario for a Cabaret Swan Song, Dies at 85

      by

      He was the host at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel during an improbable resurgence of cabaret from the 1980s to the early 2000s. He died of complications of Covid-19.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Arthur Pomposello, the host of the Oak Room, the cabaret supper club in the Algonquin Hotel, practiced the arts of theatricality and discretion.A dark-haired former model in a tuxedo, he parted a red curtain to allow guests inside. He glided onstage and introduced Andrea Marcovicci, for decades the Oak Room’s main attraction, as “our songbird.” He gossiped with journalists about what he called “my cabaret,” and in return the papers gave him labels like “a loquacious fixture.”But Mr. Pomposello could also work quietly. “This is cabaret,” he whispered to loud customers. “We don’t talk here.” He rearranged the tables, making light crowds appear livelier and making big crowds fit.Inspectors would check to see if the small-capacity room exceeded legal limits.“He would show them the kitchen or show them the upstairs — ‘Oh, come right this way,’” Ms. Marcovicci recalled. “They’d never see the room when it had 110 people in it. Never.”Mr. Pomposello died on May 6 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85. The cause was complications of Covid-19, his son Sean said.When Mr. Pomposello started at the Algonquin as a bartender, in 1980, you could still feel transported to the hotel’s famed past as a daily gathering place for writers. He once entered the lobby and noticed Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut sharing a drink. The next instant, Eudora Welty walked in.Cabaret turned a profit for only a select few, but Mr. Pomposello kept his perch at the Oak Room under several different owners of the Algonquin.Jack Manning/The New York TimesIn the middle to late 1980s, as figures like Michael Feinstein and Harry Connick Jr. launched their careers from the Oak Room, Mr. Pomposello’s responsibilities grew. He booked talent and managed the finances, keeping his perch under several different owners of the Algonquin.“I’ve not lost a penny in nine years,” he told The New York Times in 1998.When he saw his son Sean, he raved about visits from faded stars whose glow had never dimmed for Mr. Pomposello. The Nicholas brothers, tap-dancers who rose to fame in the 1930s, turned heads the night they arrived, Mr. Pomposello said.Sean recently looked through his father’s address book to invite people to the wake. “I can’t find too many friends,” Sean said. “I find a lot of cabaret stars, some of whom are no longer alive.”Arthur Pomposello was born on Nov. 19, 1935, in Harlem and grew up in the Bronx. His father, Arthur, played jazz guitar under his nickname, Scotty Bond. His mother, Concetta (Bellafatto) Pomposello, was a homemaker who went to work at the pocketbook counter in Bloomingdale’s after she and Scotty divorced, when their son was a teenager.Arthur dreamed of becoming a movie star and spent summers in Los Angeles. When that didn’t work out, he went to Michigan State University. He graduated with a degree in hotel management.Back in New York, he worked at a succession of hotels, including Hampshire House, and restaurants, including Café des Artistes. He modeled and found modest acting work. He cooked up entrepreneurial schemes like “Pompie’s Pushers,” models selling authentic Italian food from handcarts. Nothing took — until the Oak Room. Mr. Pomposello stayed until a dispute with management in 2002.Mr. Pomposello married Eunice Mahoney, a telephone operator, in 1958. They divorced in 1979. That same year he married Alicia Cirino, a bunny at the New York Playboy Club. She died of heart failure in 2007.In addition to his son Sean, Mr. Pomposello is survived by two more children from his first marriage, Peri Kish-Pomposello and Chris Pomposello, and five grandchildren. A son from his second marriage, Adam, died in an accident in 2008.After he left the Oak Room, Mr. Pomposello worked as a night concierge at the Plaza Hotel until the pandemic last spring, when he was 84. Mr. Pomposello never stopped hoping to find a new venue of his own. In 2015 and 2016, he organized several performances at restaurants of an act he called “Pompie’s Place,” which featured jazz and blues singers and Mr. Pomposello himself as the impresario of an imaginary club.The discovery of a new restaurant or a theater with a large lobby set his gears turning, Sean Pomposello said: “He’d get this wistful look in his face, looking around the place, and thinking about how he’s going to book cabaret.” More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Rahul Vohra, Indian Actor and Video Blogger, Dies at 35

      by

      His YouTube posts dissected issues of Indian life, especially gender inequality. He died of complications of Covid-19 after lamenting his hospital treatment.Rahul Vohra began his acting career in the theater and later worked in low-budget films and television ads. But he was fascinated by the role technology played in shaping conversations about society, so he turned to video blogging.After he and Jyoti Tiwari married in December, she joined him in producing short, scripted videos in Hindi about issues like gender disparity, rising gas prices and the difficulties of working from home during the pandemic. Several have received more than 1 million views, and Mr. Vohra swiftly became one of India’s most popular YouTube stars.In one video, titled “Story of a Woman,” he asks for a cup of tea from his wife, who is played by an actress and is seen lost in thought after a long day of housework.“I am not a robot,” she says.“You only stay at home; what else do you do?” Mr. Vohra asks. She challenges him to do household chores for a day, telling him that then he would understand what she had meant. After accepting the challenge, he’s soon seen struggling and tiring within hours.“Even if I am sick, I had to do this work every day,” the wife says. “In reverse I ask for nothing, just a bit of respect and love.”Mr. Vohra died of complications of Covid-19 on May 9 at a hospital in New Delhi, Ms. Tiwari said. He was 35.He had fallen ill in New Delhi’s second wave of the pandemic, when much of the country’s health care system was overwhelmed. He found himself making desperate calls to his wife from his hospital bed, telling her that he feared he would die. She called the hospital for help but received little attention, she said. He was eventually moved to another hospital and died there.His videos struck a chord with young and middle-class Indians. “There was something about him which touched the lives of people,” a friend, Ankur Seth, said. “He spread positivity around even in dark times.”Rahul Vohra was born into a middle-class family in New Delhi on Jan. 27, 1986. His father, Suresh Vohra, works in a manufacturing firm, and his mother, Bimla Vohra, is a homemaker. Along with his wife and parents, he is survived by a sister, Neeru Vohra.Mr. Vohra received a degree in commerce from Delhi University. A talented performer from a young age, he was then offered a place at the prestigious Asmita Theater Group school in New Delhi.Two days after he died, Ms. Tiwari, 29, a writer for YouTube videos, found on her husband’s phone a video of him struggling to breathe and complaining about the poor quality of medical care at the hospital where he had initially been admitted. She posted it on Instagram with the hashtag #justiceforirahulvohra.“This is extremely valuable right now,” he said in the video, referring to his oxygen mask. “Without it patients get giddy and suffer.”In another post the day before he died, on his Facebook page, he wrote, “I would have lived had I received better treatment.” He tagged Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been severely criticized for his handling of the pandemic.“My Rahul has left us, everyone knows that but, no one knows how he left us,” Ms. Tiwari wrote on Instagram. “I hope my husband will get justice.” More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Mary Ahern, Who Produced Early TV and Then Preserved It, Dies at 98

      by

      Ms. Ahern was a key behind-the-scenes figure in the landmark series “Omnibus” before becoming the Paley Center for Media’s first curator.Mary V. Ahern, who was an important behind-the-scenes figure on the cultural magazine show “Omnibus” and other early television programs, then helped preserve those and similar touchstones of television history as the Paley Center for Media’s first curator, died on May 1 at a care center in Peabody, Mass. She was 98.Her niece Joan Curry said the cause was cancer.Ms. Ahern spent much of her career working with Robert Saudek, an Emmy Award-winning producer whom The New York Times once described as “alchemist in chief of what is often recalled as the golden age of television.” Mr. Saudek, who died in 1997, created “Omnibus” in 1952, when television was new. Ms. Ahern was his valued right hand, as she had been earlier when he worked in radio.“Omnibus” was hosted by Alistair Cooke, who at the time was known primarily from radio, and it cast an incredibly wide net as it explored what could be done on the new medium and whether anyone would watch it.Orson Welles, Yul Brynner, Ethel Barrymore, James Dean and other famous or soon-to-be-famous actors appeared in staged dramas. William Inge and other playwrights unveiled new works. Gene Kelly tap-danced with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. There was a segment that explained what an X-ray was. One particularly inspired episode put children’s toys to the adult test: Professional musicians jammed on kiddie instruments, and a professional chef tried to make a dinner for six using a tiny toy oven.At the time, television job titles and duties were less rigidly defined than they are now, but Ms. Ahern was essentially a producer on some episodes, a script writer on others, lead researcher or editor or supervisor on still others, and sometimes all those at once.She was pivotal in bringing Leonard Bernstein to the program, meeting over lunch with him and Paul Feigay, another “Omnibus” producer, who had worked with Mr. Bernstein on the 1944 musical “On the Town.” She and Mr. Feigay showed Mr. Bernstein some Beethoven sketchbooks that had come their way that were filled with the composer’s notes from his writing of the Fifth Symphony, including an assortment of rejected ideas.“Lenny had never seen these sketches at all,” Ms. Ahern said in an oral history recorded by Ron Simon in 2017 for the Television Academy Foundation. As they were leaving the lunch, she said, he was struck with an idea.“I remember coming out on Fifth Avenue with Lenny,” she recounted, “and he said, ‘You know what I could do?’ — because he knew the score, of course, backwards; he’d conducted the Beethoven Fifth many times. He said, ‘I could look at where he would have put those sketches and why he rejected them.’ And that was the first program we did on Bernstein.”That episode, broadcast in November 1954, is regarded as a classic early example of television that both entertains and enlightens. Mr. Bernstein, Howard Taubman wrote in The Times, “made vividly clear how Beethoven fought his way to the right phrase.”The episode’s success led to a series of appearances on the program by Mr. Bernstein, on subjects including opera, Bach and the art of conducting. A Bernstein episode on musical comedy in 1956 included among the cast an unknown singer named Carol Burnett, making one of her first television appearances.But Mr. Bernstein’s television talks weren’t improvised; one of Ms. Ahern’s tasks was working over his proposed scripts, which were full of musical terms of art, to make them more friendly to the general viewer.“He knew so much,” she said. “What he didn’t realize is — and I was the perfect foil for that — that people did not know what he knew.”Leonard Bernstein on the television program “Omnibus” in 1956. Ms. Ahern played a pivotal role in bringing Mr. Bernstein to the program.Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images“Omnibus,” which began on CBS, moved to ABC and then NBC before finishing its run in 1961 after more than 150 episodes, most of which — these being TV’s early days — were broadcast live. By then Mr. Saudek had formed his own production company and Ms. Ahern had joined him there, where she continued to be a key figure in numerous productions.In the mid-1970s William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS, decided to create the Museum of Broadcasting, dedicated to preserving TV and radio history, and brought in Mr. Saudek to be its first president. Ms. Ahern became curator of the new museum, which opened in 1976 and is now the Paley Center for Media.“That title makes me feel I should have jars with old bones,” she told The Times in 1977, but in fact it made her a foundational figure in documenting and preserving important programs, old TV commercials and assorted broadcasting oddities. Later, from 1986 to 1989, she did similar work as an acquisitions specialist at the Library of Congress.Mary Virginia Ahern was born on Oct. 15, 1922, in Cambridge, Mass. Her father, Thomas, was in real estate and insurance, and her mother, Nora, was a teacher.Ms. Ahern enrolled at Radcliffe College to study anthropology but switched to literature, graduating in 1942. Then, during World War II, she served for three years in the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service.“She supervised the inspection of gas masks and was assigned to the procurement of flame throwers and other deadly weapons,” The Times wrote in a 1959 article about her. “One of her associates has noted that this was an incongruous occupation for a gentle, retiring young woman who had majored in American literature at college. But, he added: ‘I’m sure she was good at it. She knows how to get to the essence of any problem.’”After the war, Ms. Ahern enrolled in a management training course at the Harvard Business School (which was not yet admitting women to its master’s program).“They had internships, which were novel in those days,” she said in the oral history, “and I had an internship to what was the brand-new American Broadcasting Company, in the public affairs department.”The head of that department was Mr. Saudek.Ms. Ahern being interviewed for the Television Academy Foundation in 2017.The Television Academy Foundation InterviewsThey worked together on radio documentaries, taking on weighty subjects like the Marshall Plan and urban slums. In the early 1950s, when the Ford Foundation set itself the task of developing TV programs that would inform and enlighten, it hired Mr. Saudek, by then an ABC vice president, as director of what it called the TV-Radio Workshop. He brought along Ms. Ahern, and she helped him start “Omnibus.” Few women were working as producers at the time.Programs Ms. Ahern worked on after “Omnibus” included the mid-1960s anthology documentary series “Profiles in Courage,” a Saudek production, for which she wrote and edited scripts. In the 1970s she worked with Mr. Bernstein again as one of the producers of his “Norton Lectures” series for PBS. In the 1980s, Ms. Ahern was credited with greatly expanding the Library of Congress’s radio and TV holdings, particularly by acquiring countless programs from the NBC archives.In addition to Ms. Curry, Ms. Ahern is survived by two other nieces, Mary H. Ahern and Sharon A. Ahern.Ms. Ahern’s long association with Mr. Bernstein included traveling to the Soviet Union in 1959 to oversee the filming of “Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in Moscow,” which Mr. Saudek’s company was making for CBS. The Times wrote about her behind-the-scenes role, not only for the Bernstein special, but also for many other programs, saying she “has investigated and become proficient in such diverse subjects as jet aircraft, burlesque and sea horses.”Among the problems she had to solve in Moscow, the article said, was how to translate the title of Aaron Copland’s “Billy the Kid,” which was on the program, into Russian. She consulted a teacher in Kiev.“The closest equivalent the adviser could offer,” the newspaper said, “was ‘Fellow Billy.’” More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Paul Mooney, Trailblazing Comedian, Dies at 79

      by

      A comic writer and performer, he was known for his boundary-pushing routines about racism and social justice and for his work with Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle.Paul Mooney, the boundary-pushing comedian and comedy writer who made his views on race, racism and social justice abundantly clear as Richard Pryor’s longtime behind-the-scenes partner, a contributor to “In Living Color” and a performer and writer on “Chappelle’s Show,” died on Wednesday at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 79.The cause was a heart attack, said Cassandra Williams, his publicist. Mr. Mooney was found to have prostate cancer in 2014.If you knew Mr. Pryor’s work, you probably knew Mr. Mooney’s words. The two worked together on the short-lived 1977 variety series “The Richard Pryor Show”; “Pryor’s Place” (1984), Mr. Pryor’s unlikely attempt at a children’s show; television specials; the album and film “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip” (1982); the autobiographical film “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling” (1986), which Mr. Pryor starred in and directed; and Mr. Pryor’s 1975 appearance as host on “Saturday Night Live.” That episode included a now-famous escalating-racial-insults job-interview sketch with Chevy Chase, written by Mr. Mooney.In an interview with The New York Times after Mr. Pryor’s death in 2005 at 65, Mr. Mooney described himself as Mr. Pryor’s “Black writer.”As a writer on “In Living Color,” Keenen Ivory Wayans’s hit sketch comedy show that had its premiere on Fox in 1990 with a predominantly Black cast, Mr. Mooney was the inspiration for and co-creator of Homey D. Clown, a less than jovial circus-costumed character who was forced to interact with children (part of his parole agreement) and usually ended up frightening them.As a writer and performer on “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000s, Mr. Mooney played Negrodamus, a turbaned mystic who foretold the future (Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political prospects, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver’s marriage), appeared as the expert in “Ask a Black Dude” and reviewed movies alongside white female critics. Discussing “Gone With the Wind,” he revealed that Hattie McDaniel, who played the enslaved character known as Mammy, had been reincarnated as Oprah Winfrey — for the money.Mr. Mooney’s film roles included the singer Sam Cooke in “The Buddy Holly Story” (1978) and Junebug, an old-school stand-up comedian with equal amounts of dignity, integrity and genius, in “Bamboozled” (2000), Spike Lee’s dark farce about a television network bringing back the minstrel-show genre.On “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000s, Mr. Mooney played Negrodamus, a turbaned mystic who foretold the future.Comedy CentralPaul Mooney was born Paul Gladney on Aug. 4, 1941, in Shreveport, La., to George Gladney and LaVoya Ealy, who were both teenagers. When Paul was 7, he moved with his mother and her parents to Oakland, where he was largely raised by his grandmother, Aimay Ealy.Although some reports said he had taken his stage surname from the Hollywood actor Paul Muni, he corrected that in his 2007 memoir, “White Is the New Black.” His family loved nicknames, he wrote, and his grandmother just started calling him Mooney when he was a child.Paul was 14 when he and his mother moved to nearby Berkeley. There, at a local movie theater, he won his first “hambone” contest, performing an African-American stomping dance that involves slapping and patting the body like a drum. It was then that he realized that he loved applause — and prize money.He had his first taste of fame when he became a teenage regular on a local dance-party television show. After the Army (he was drafted and served in Germany), he came home to all kinds of sales jobs and, even more, to a future in entertainment. He did his first stand-up comedy (alongside friends who were folk singers), created a Black improvisational group called the Yankee Doodle Bedbugs, and joined the noted improv group the Second City. He also took a job for a while as ringmaster of the traveling Gatti-Charles Circus, which, he said, just called for looking good and telling jokes.Mr. Mooney and Richard Pryor (seated) attended the premiere of Spike Lee’s concert film “The Original Kings of Comedy” in Los Angeles in 2000. With them were, from left, Walter Latham, one of the film’s producers, along with Cedric the Entertainer, Steve Harvey, Mr. Lee and D.L. Hughley.Fred Prouser/ReutersHe met Mr. Pryor in the late 1960s at a party, and they soon discovered that their personal lives were antithetical. “Pryor was a self-loathing, drug-addicted genius, Mooney an industrious teetotaler, but they bonded over laughs and a distrust of the white Hollywood power structure,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2010.Mr. Mooney continued his comedy career after Mr. Pryor’s death, preserving his routines in documentaries and DVDs like “The Godfather of Comedy” (2012) and “Jesus Is Black — So Was Cleopatra — Know Your History” (2007).In “Jesus Is Black,” his three sons — Shane (whose mother was Yvonne Carothers, whom Mr. Pryor married in 1973) and Daryl and Dwayne (twin sons from an earlier relationship) — appeared as themselves. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Mooney had strong opinions, even about himself.“Whatever that thing is that white people like in Blacks, I don’t have it,” he wrote in his memoir. “Maybe it’s my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don’t have it.”Marie Fazio contributed reporting. More

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Dr. Aaron Stern, Who Enforced the Movie Ratings Code, Dies at 96

      by

      He was a New York psychiatrist who went to Hollywood to help lay down guidelines for sex and violence in films. Not everyone was pleased.Dr. Aaron Stern, a psychiatrist who as head of Hollywood’s movie rating board in the early 1970s established himself as filmgoers’ sentry against carnal imagery and violence, died on April 13 in Manhattan. He was 96.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his stepdaughter Jennifer Klein.An author, professor and management consultant who had always been intrigued by corporate ladder-climbing, he jousted with egocentric studio executives, producers, directors and actors — providing ample grist for his 1979 book, “Me: The Narcissistic American.”From 1971 to 1974, Dr. Stern was the director of the self-policing Classification and Rating Administration of the Motion Picture Association of America, which had been founded only a few years earlier. It replaced the rigidly moralistic Production Code imposed in the early 1930s and censoriously administered by Will H. Hays, a Presbyterian deacon and former national Republican Party chairman.The new ratings board, which was struggling to gain credibility when it began, graded films by letter to let moviegoers know in advance how much violence, sexuality and foul language to expect on the screen.The board’s decision that a film merited a rating of R, or restricted, might lure more adults, but would immediately eliminate the pool of unchaperoned moviegoers under 17; an X rating would bar anyone under 17 altogether.Dr. Stern recast the PG (parental guidance) category to include a warning that “some material might not be suitable for pre-teenagers.” He also tried, but failed, to abolish the X rating — on the grounds, he told The Los Angeles Times in 1972, that it wasn’t the job of the Motion Picture Association to keep people out of theaters. (The X rating was changed to NC-17 in 1990, but its meaning remained unchanged.)Not until last year, with the release of “Three Christs,” a movie about hospitalized patients who believed they were Jesus, did Dr. Stern receive a screen credit (he was one of the film’s 17 producers). But the lack of onscreen recognition belied the power he wielded as director of the board, which privately screened films and then voted on which letter rating to impose.Even some critics gave the new letter-coded classification the benefit of the doubt in the early 1970s, agreeing that its decisions, in contrast to those of the old Production Code, were becoming more grounded in sociology than theology. Still, two young members of the rating board, appointed under a one-year fellowship, wrote a scathing critique of its methodology that was published in The New York Times in 1972.They accused Dr. Stern of megalomaniacal meddling, editing scripts before filming and cropping scenes afterward, and of tolerating gratuitous violence but being puritanical about sex. They claimed, among other things, that he had warned Ernest Lehman, the director of “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1972), that focusing on masturbation in the film version of Philip Roth’s novel risked an X rating.“You can have a love scene, but as soon as you start to unbutton or unzip you must cut,” Dr. Stern was quoted as saying in The Hollywood Reporter about sex in movies.The Times article prompted letters praising Dr. Stern from several directors, including Mr. Lehman, who said that Dr. Stern’s advice had actually improved his final cut of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” To which The Times film critic Vincent Canby sniffed, “If Mr. Lehman was really influenced by Dr. Stern’s advice two years ago, then he should sue the doctor for malpractice.”Dr. Stern argued that the rating system, while imperfect, served several goals. Among other things, he said, it fended off even more restrictive definitions of obscenity by Congress, the courts and localities; and it warned people away from what they might find intrusive as mores evolved and society became more accepting.“Social growth should make the rating system more and more obsolete,” he told The Los Angeles Times.Members of the movie rating board privately screened films and then voted on which letter rating to impose. An R rating might lure more adults, but would immediately eliminate the pool of unchaperoned moviegoers under 17.Motion Picture Association of AmericaAaron Stern was born on March 26, 1925, in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Benjamin Israel Stern, was a carpenter, and his mother, Anna (Fishader) Stern, was a homemaker. Raised in Bensonhurst and Sheepshead Bay, he was the youngest of three children and the only one born in the United States.After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1947, he earned a master’s degree in psychological services and a doctorate in child development from Columbia University, and a medical degree from the State University of New York’s Downstate Health Sciences University.In addition to his stepdaughter Ms. Klein, he is survived by his wife, Betty Lee (Baum) Stern; two children, Debra Marrone and Scott Stern, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; two other stepchildren, Lauren Rosenkranz and Jonathan Otto; and 13 grandchildren.Dr. Stern was introduced to Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association, by a neighbor in Great Neck, N.Y., Robert Benjamin, an executive at United Artists. He initially began reviewing films for the association and was recruited by Mr. Valenti to run the ratings administration in mid-1971.He left there early in 1974 to join Columbia Pictures Industries and eventually returned from Los Angeles to New York, where he revived his private practice. He also taught at Yale, Columbia, New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, and he served as chief operating officer of Tiger Management, a hedge fund, and a trustee of the Robertson Foundation.A veteran educator at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Dr. Stern, with his wife, donated $5 million in 2019 to endow a professorship and fellowship at Weill Cornell Medicine to treat patients with pathological personality disorders. The gift was in gratitude for the care he had received during a medical emergency.Dr. Stern had been interested in narcissism even before he went to Hollywood, but his experience there proved inspirational.In “Me: The Narcissistic American,” he wrote that babies are born narcissistic, unconcerned about whom they awaken in the middle of the night, and need to be disciplined as they mature to take others into account.“When narcissism is for survival, as with the infant and the founding of a country,” he wrote, “it is not as destructive as when one is established, successful and affluent.”In 1981, Mr. Valenti told The Times that he had “made a mistake of putting a psychiatrist in charge” of the ratings system. Dr. Stern replied, “I am at a loss to respond to that.”But he had acknowledged, when he still held the job, “There’s no way to sit in this chair and be loved.” He was constantly second-guessed.Why give “The Exorcist” (1973) an R rating? (“I think it’s a great film,” he told the director, William Friedkin. “I’m not going to ask you to cut a frame.”) Why originally give Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) an X for a ménage à trois filmed in high speed? (“If we did that, any hard-core pornographer could speed up his scenes and legitimately ask for an R on the same basis.”) Later, as a private $1,000-a-day consultant, he helped edit Mr. Friedkin’s “Cruising” (1980), about a serial killer of gay men, to gain an R instead of an X.“You can only rate the explicit elements on the screen — never the morality or the thought issues behind it,” Dr. Stern said in 1972. “That is the province of religion, leaders, critics and each individual.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Franco Battiato, Pop Singer and Versatile Composer, Dies at 76

      by

      Though hugely popular as a singer-songwriter in Italy, he never stopped experimenting. He composed for movies, opera and ballet, directed films and painted.Franco Battiato, one of Italy’s most prominent singer-songwriters, who expressed esoteric ideas in catchy lyrics and, ever an eclectic artist, also composed operas and movie soundtracks, directed films and painted, died on Tuesday at his home in Milo, Sicily. He was 76.His manager, Francesco Cattini, confirmed the death. He did not give a cause but said Mr. Battiato had been ill for a long time.In a career of nearly 60 years, Mr. Battiato explored a variety of musical genres with an eye toward innovation. His works included experimental electronic music, symphonic compositions and ballets in addition to pop songs. Mystical and spiritual qualities permeated much of his work.President Sergio Mattarella, in a statement, called him “a cultured and refined artist who charmed a vast public, even beyond national borders, with his unmistakable musical style — a product of intense studying and feverish experimentation.”Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, referred to one of Mr. Battiato’s lyrics on Twitter: “How hard it is to find the dawn within nightfall. (Franco Battiato, R.I.P.)”Mr. Battiato began his career performing in a cabaret in Milan. He reached a wider audience in the 1960s, when he appeared on a variety show on national television. His “La Voce del Padrone” (“The Master’s Voice”), released in 1981, is said to have been the first pop album by an Italian musician to sell one million copies.Despite his commercial success, Mr. Battiato continued experimenting. He composed music that mixed historical, social, ethnic and mystical themes; he wrote lyrics in Italian dialects and foreign languages.“He had a vast musical and literary culture that was mostly self-taught,” Mr. Cattini said. “He did not like repeating himself, and that made him unique.”His lyrics included references to “Euclidean Jesuits,” Ming dynasty emperors and the whirling dervishes of Sufism, a mystical form of Islam.“Speaking of the Sufis in Italy in the 1980s was like talking about aliens,” said Giuseppe Pollicelli, one of the directors of “Temporary Road,” a 2013 documentary about Mr. Battiato. “But people got it, and loved it.”He added, “He had a magic touch in channeling complex topics through songs that were easy to listen to, memorize and internalize, even if people could not always decrypt the meaning.”Mr. Battiato’s 1991 pop song “Povera Patria” (“Poor Homeland”), a lament about an Italy crushed by the abuse of power and governed by “perfect and useless buffoons,” became a hit, and some of its lyrics entered everyday language in Italy.The next year, after the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Battiato performed with the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad as a gesture of solidarity, sitting on the floor and singing in Arabic and Italian.“He wasn’t interested in politics, but in people,” Mr. Cattini said.He was also a painter. In a 2012 video interview, Mr. Battiato explained that he had always had a restless curiosity and, frustrated by his lack of drawing skills, had decided to learn how to paint. His artwork, initially signed with the pseudonym Süphan Barzani, was exhibited in galleries in Italy, Sweden and the United States. He drew the covers of two of his albums and of the libretto for his second opera, “Gilgamesh,” written in 1992. (His first was “Genesis,” in 1987.)His soundtracks for Italian movies include one for “A Violent Life” (1990), about the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini; he also composed music for ballets staged at the Maggio Musicale theater in Florence. And as a filmmaker he was named “best new director” by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists in 2004 for his “Lost Love,” about a boy’s journey from Sicily to Milan in the 1950s.Francesco Battiato was born on March 23, 1945, in Jonia, a coastal town in eastern Sicily. His father, Salvatore, was a wine merchant; his mother, Grazia (Patti) Battiato, was a homemaker. He attended high school in Acireale, Sicily, and moved to Milan when he was 19 to try to make a living in music.He is survived by his older brother, Michele.After living in Milan for years, Mr. Battiato moved in the late 1980s to a villa in Milo, north of the eastern coastal city of Catania, tucked between the volcano Etna and the Mediterranean. He had spent most of his time there since then. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Charles Grodin, Star of ‘Beethoven’ and ‘Heartbreak Kid,’ Dies at 86

      by

      A familiar face who was especially adept at deadpan comedy, he also appeared on Broadway in “Same Time, Next Year,” wrote books and had his own talk show.Charles Grodin, the versatile actor familiar from “Same Time, Next Year” on Broadway, popular movies like “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Midnight Run” and “Beethoven” and numerous television appearances, died on Tuesday at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 86.His son, Nicholas, said the cause was bone marrow cancer.With a great sense of deadpan comedy and the kind of Everyman good looks that lend themselves to playing businessmen or curmudgeonly fathers, Mr. Grodin found plenty of work as a supporting player and the occasional lead. He also had his own talk show for a time in the 1990s and was a frequent guest on the talk shows of others, making 36 appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and more than 40 on David Letterman’s NBC and CBS shows combined.Mr. Grodin with his co-star, Ellen Burstyn, and his director, Gene Saks, in 1975 at the first rehearsal for the Broadway comedy “Same Time, Next Year.” The play was a hit and a turning point in Mr. Grodin’s career.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesMr. Grodin was a writer as well, with a number of plays and books to his credit. Though he never won a prestige acting award, he did win a writing Emmy for a 1977 Paul Simon television special, sharing it with Mr. Simon and six others.Mr. Grodin, who dropped out of the University of Miami to pursue acting, had managed to land a smattering of stage and television roles when, in 1962, he received his first big break, landing a part in a Broadway comedy called “Tchin-Tchin,” which starred Anthony Quinn and Margaret Leighton.“Walter Kerr called me impeccable,” Mr. Grodin wrote years later, recalling a review of the show that appeared in The New York Times. “It took a trip to the dictionary to understand he meant more than clean.”Another Broadway appearance came in 1964 in “Absence of a Cello.” Mr. Grodin’s next two Broadway credits were as a director, of “Lovers and Other Strangers” in 1968 and “Thieves” in 1974. Then, in 1975, came a breakthrough Broadway role opposite Ellen Burstyn in Bernard Slade’s “Same Time, Next Year,” a durable two-hander about a man and woman, each married to someone else, who meet once a year in the same inn room.“The play needs actors of grace, depth and accomplishment, and has found them in Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin,” Clive Barnes wrote in a rave in The Times. “Miss Burstyn is so real, so lovely and so womanly that a man wants to hug her, and you hardly notice the exquisite finesse of her acting. It is underplaying of sheer virtuosity. Mr. Grodin is every bit her equal — a monument to male insecurity, gorgeously inept, and the kind of masculine dunderhead that every decent man aspires to be.”The show ran for three and a half years, with an ever-changing cast; the two original stars left after seven months. Mr. Grodin by that point was in demand in Hollywood. (Ms. Burstyn reprised the role in a 1978 film adaptation, but this time opposite Alan Alda in the Grodin role.)Mr. Grodin with Eddie Albert and Cybill Shepherd in the comic romance “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972), one of his best-known films.20th Century-FoxMr. Grodin had already appeared in Mike Nichols’s “Catch-22” in 1970 and had turned in one of his better-known film performances in the 1972 comic romance “The Heartbreak Kid,” in which he played a self-absorbed sporting goods salesman who marries in haste, immediately loses interest in his bride (Jeannie Berlin), and falls in love with another woman (Cybill Shepherd) on his honeymoon. (Elaine May, Mr. Nichols’s longtime comedy partner and Ms. Berlin’s mother, directed.)In 1978 he had a supporting role in the Warren Beatty vehicle “Heaven Can Wait.” Another signature role was in the action comedy “Midnight Run” in 1988, in which Mr. Grodin played an accountant who has embezzled a fortune from the mob and is being pursued by a bounty hunter, played by Robert De Niro.Though Mr. Grodin acted opposite stars like Mr. De Niro and Mr. Beatty, what may have been his best-known role found him working with a dog. The film was “Beethoven,” a family-friendly hit in 1992, and the dog was a St. Bernard. Mr. Grodin played a cranky father who did not exactly warm to the new household pet. In one memorable scene, he crawls into bed with what he thinks is his wife and is enjoying having the back of his neck licked until he realizes that the dog, not the wife, is his bedmate.“You’ve ruined my life,” he growls at the beast. “You’ve ruined my furniture. You’ve ruined my clothes. My family likes you more than they like me. Why? All you do is drool and shed and eat.”The next year he reprised the role in “Beethoven’s 2nd.” If he was frequently upstaged by the title character in these films, he took it in stride.“I don’t complain when the editor chooses my worst take because it’s the dog’s best take,” he told The Kansas City Star when the sequel came out.Charles Sidney Grodin was born on April 21, 1935, in Pittsburgh. His father, Ted, was a merchant who dealt in sewing notions, and his mother, Lena (Singer) Grodin, was a homemaker.He grew up in Pittsburgh and tried the University of Pittsburgh, thinking he might want to be a journalist. But he soon rejected that idea.“I imagined that someday an editor might tell me to ask someone who had lost a loved one how they felt,” he wrote in a 2011 essay for Backstage magazine. “I see that all the time on the news now. Not for me.”He often said that the 1951 movie “A Place in the Sun,” which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, caused him to shift his focus to acting.“It was two things,” he told the Television Academy Foundation in an oral history. “One is I think I developed an overwhelming crush on Elizabeth Taylor. And two, Montgomery Clift made acting look like, ‘Gee, well that looks pretty easy — just a guy talking.’”Mr. Grodin had a signature role in “Midnight Run” (1988), in which he played an accountant who has embezzled a fortune from the mob and Robert De Niro played the bounty hunter who pursued him.City Light FilmsAfter six months at the University of Miami, he worked at the Pittsburgh Playhouse for a year and a half, then found his way to New York. From 1956 to 1959 he studied with Uta Hagen, though he often found himself questioning her methods, which he said annoyed her.Mr. Grodin made guest appearances on “Shane,” “The Virginian” and other 1960s TV series before landing his first significant film role, as an obstetrician, in the 1968 horror hit “Rosemary’s Baby.”In 1976 he played an unlikable oilman in a remake of “King Kong,” with some reluctance.“I wanted to play the love interest with Jessica Lange,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the guy responsible for the death of the most beloved animal outside of Bambi. But they wanted me for the bad guy.”By popular demand, his character meets a gruesome end.“The only thing they changed after the first screening, I was told, is when Kong got loose and tried to step on me and kill me and missed,” he said. “The audience was so disappointed that they had to recut it.”Mr. Grodin in 2000, not long after his CNBC talk show ended its run. “They brought me in there to be a humorist,” he said, “but pretty quickly I got caught up in social issues.”Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesMr. Grodin showed a different side in the mid-1990s when he hosted “The Charles Grodin Show” on the cable channel CNBC.“They brought me in there to be a humorist,” he said in the oral history, “but pretty quickly I got caught up in social issues, and the show became just as much that, if not dominantly that. Some people like it better when you’re funny, and some people prefer that you’re taking cameras up to prisons and trying to help people who shouldn’t be in prison.”Nicholas Grodin said his father had particularly been proud of his work for the Innocence Project, the prison justice organization, and related causes, and his work for groups that help homeless people.After his talk show ended in 1998, Mr. Grodin largely stepped away from show business for a dozen years. Then he began to take roles again, including a recurring one on “Louie,” the comedian Louis C.K.’s series.Mr. Grodin wrote several memoirs full of anecdotes from his career, including “It Would Be So Nice if You Weren’t Here: My Journey Through Show Business” (1989) and “We’re Ready for You, Mr. Grodin: Behind the Scenes at Talk Shows, Movies and Elsewhere” (1994).His first marriage, to Julie Ferguson, ended in divorce. In 1983 he married Elissa Durwood, who survives him, along with his son, who is from his second marriage; a daughter from his first marriage, the comedian Marion Grodin; and a granddaughter.After more than a decade away from show business, Mr. Grodin began to take roles again. He’s seen here in his recurring role as a doctor in a 2014 episode of the comedian Louis C.K.’s series “Louie.”K.C. Bailey/FXA 1985 anecdote Mr. Grodin related on Mr. Letterman’s show was typical of the breath of fresh, if offbeat, air he brought to those appearances. He told Mr. Letterman that he had been gratified when, walking through the lobby on his way to the studio, the crowd that had lined up to get into the show burst into applause.“I turned around to smile,” he said, “and they weren’t applauding me. There was a duck in a tuxedo walking by, and they were applauding the duck.“But,” he added, “for the moment that I thought they were applauding me, it was a lovely, lovely moment.”He offered no explanation for the presence of the duck. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Jack Terricloth, Punk Rocker With a Cabaret Air, Dies at 50

      by

      As the devilishly smarmy vocalist and ringleader of the World/Inferno Friendship Society, he melded punk defiance with decadent theatricality.To old friends who met him backstage, he was Pete Ventantonio, a punk rocker from Bridgewater, N.J. On his records, he sometimes preferred whimsical credits like Marcello DiTerriclothia or Favorite Singer Who Goes With Everything.But to the fans who swarmed his concerts, he was Jack Terricloth: the crooning, bellowing, devilishly smarmy vocalist and ringleader of the World/Inferno Friendship Society, a band with an ever-changing lineup that melded punk defiance with the decadent theatricality of Weimar-era cabaret.Over more than 20 years, the group built a cultlike following with a rock sound embellished by piano, violin and a brass section. Its live shows — featuring Jack Terricloth in a dark suit and slicked-back hair, like a 1930s dandy — were key to the rise of the so-called punk cabaret movement in the mid-2000s, which also included Gogol Bordello and the Dresden Dolls.Although largely ignored by the mainstream music industry, World/Inferno, which was based in Brooklyn, made inroads with major arts institutions like the Public Theater in New York and the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., for one of Jack Terricloth’s signature projects: an exploration of the life of Peter Lorre, the goggle-eyed character actor known for movies like “Casablanca” and “M.”“I find Peter Lorre a strangely charismatic, extremely creepy person, which I think most punk rockers can identify with,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2009. “It’s the lure of the other. He’s the underdog, the outsider.”To fans and fellow musicians, Jack Terricloth was an inspirational if remote figure who preached what he considered the central philosophical lesson of rock ’n’ roll: the freedom to reject society’s programming and reinvent oneself anew.He was found dead on Wednesday at his apartment in Ridgewood, Queens. He was 50. His sister, Lisa Castano, said the cause was hypertensive cardiovascular disease.He born Peter James Ventantonio on June 11, 1970, and grew up in Bridgewater. His father, James Ventantonio, was a lawyer and municipal judge; his mother, Anita (Winkler) Ventantonio, was an elementary-school teacher.As a teenager, he was inspired by punk rock and by stars like David Bowie who created their own personas, said Mike Cavallaro, a childhood friend who played with him in the band Sticks and Stones in the 1980s and ’90s.By the mid-90s, as punk went mainstream, Peter began to conceptualize a genre offshoot that would incorporate theatrical presentation and a charismatic, world-weary frontman character. The World/Inferno Friendship Society’s first album, “The True Story of the Bridgewater Astral League,” in the style of a musical, was released in 1997.“We are a punk-rock band, and we play punk-rock shows, but our music couldn’t be more different,” he told The Times. “Kids see us and think: ‘Guys in suits and makeup at a hard-core show? Come on.’ But we always have them by the third song, and then we’re something they have to accept about the punk rock scene and about the world. We’ve now entered into the great dialogue that is our culture.”The album “Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s Twentieth Century” (2007) became the band’s biggest moment. It was adapted into a self-described “punk songspiel” of the same title, performed at rock clubs and in high-profile arts series like Peak Performances at Montclair State University in New Jersey.After its concerts, the group often mingled with its fans — who called themselves Infernites. Performances, like its elaborately staged annual Halloween shows, were embraced by both the audience and fellow musicians as communal rituals.“He made you feel that you were part of a secret society,” Franz Nicolay, who played keyboards in the band in the 2000s, said in an interview.In addition to his sister, Jack Terricloth is survived by his partner, Gina Rodriguez.The group’s self-mythologizing sometimes made its history murky. Even the name Jack Terricloth has various apocryphal origin stories. Mr. Cavallaro recalled his friend acquiring it from an old girlfriend. Others said he took the name to distinguish himself from another Pete during his early days in the New Jersey punk demimonde.The ultimate reason seemed to matter less than the act of self-reinvention, and his audience’s being in on the act.Early last year, the World/Inferno Friendship Society released an album, “All Borders Are Porous to Cats,” and, like artists everywhere, was grounded by the pandemic. Yet Jack Terricloth was determined to find a way to preserve its Halloween tradition for its biggest fans, said Bill Cashman, his friend and the group’s manager.So the band devised a scavenger hunt in which clues to the location of an outdoor performance were scattered throughout Brooklyn. About 50 to 60 fans made it to the show, on the roof of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.“It meant a lot to us to do that, even if we did it for a small amount of people,” Mr. Cashman said. “Just for the sake of doing our thing.” More