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      Robert Kalfin, Founder of an Adventurous Theater, Dies at 89

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      For two decades, his Chelsea Theater Center was on the cutting edge with productions that could be challenging, baffling or, sometimes, Broadway bound.Robert Kalfin, the driving force behind the Chelsea Theater Center, which for two decades beginning in 1965 presented adventurous plays that were sometimes too innovative for the theatergoing public and sometimes successful enough that they transferred to Broadway, died on Sept. 20 at a hospice center in Quiogue, a hamlet in Southampton, N.Y. He was 89.Philip Himberg, a longtime friend, said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Kalfin directed countless plays in a career that began in his mid-20s and continued into his 80s. In 1965, he started the nonprofit Chelsea Theater Center and became its founding artistic director, with David Long as managing director and George Bari as production manager.They set up shop in St. Peter’s Church in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, though a strip dance in one of its early offerings got the group tossed out of that church and forced it to move to another. Those were two of several locations it would use over the years, only some of which were in Chelsea.Mr. Kalfin thought the commercial theaters of the day were limited and unimaginative, and he strove to broaden the theatrical landscape.“The mission statement, which I came up with, which was very useful, was ‘We will do whatever nobody else is doing and what we think people ought to see,’” he said in an interview in 2014 for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project. “That gave me great leeway.”The Chelsea achieved particular prominence once it moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1968. Its productions there were attention-getting, to say the least. A 1969 staging of “Slave Ship,” written by Amiri Baraka (who was then known as LeRoi Jones) and directed by Gilbert Moses, took on racism, leaving Clive Barnes of The New York Times rattled.“The play is set in the hold of a ship and the conscience of a nation,” Mr. Barnes wrote in his review.“The play ends with the symbolic destruction of white America,” he added. “Whitey is got — Black Panther banners are unfurled. This scared and horrified me. I am whitey.”In 1971, The Times wrote an article about Mr. Kalfin’s troupe that carried the headline “America’s Most Exciting New Theater?” Its productions for the rest of that decade cemented its stature as one of the scene’s leading innovators.In 1973, the Chelsea revived the Leonard Bernstein operetta “Candide,” which had failed on Broadway in the 1950s, and gave it a new book, by Hugh Wheeler. Harold Prince directed, and the result was a smash in Brooklyn that became the group’s first transfer to Broadway, where it ran for almost two years.Another great success was “Strider,” Mark Rozovsky’s play with music based on a Tolstoy story about a piebald horse that is tormented because of its appearance. Mr. Kalfin first saw it in Leningrad, and in 1979 he staged an English-language version at the Westside Theater on West 43rd Street. It drew a strong review from Mel Gussow in The Times.“We are transported by the ingenuousness and the originality of the show,” he wrote. “Looking closely, we even notice a grittiness that might have been appreciated by Brecht and Weill. The play works on two levels, as a kind of Tolstoyan ‘Black Beauty’ — downbeat but finally inspirational — and as a valid commentary on the injustices of civilization.”That show, directed by Mr. Kalfin and Lynne Gannaway, transferred to Broadway and ran there for six months.By then Mr. Kalfin was seeing a change in theater audiences, one that his company had helped bring about.“There’s a whole new generation of theatergoers, and they have become elitist in a very positive way,” he told The Times that November as “Strider” was beginning its Broadway run. “I think they’re bored to death with television, and they’re more demanding of theater now because they’re so hungry for nourishment.”A scene from the Chelsea Theater Center’s production of Amiri Baraka’s “Slave Ship” in 1969. The play’s ending, the Times critic Clive Barnes wrote, “scared and horrified me.”Deidi von Schaewen, via BAM Hamm ArchivesRobert Zangwill Kalfin was born on April 22, 1933, in the Bronx. His father, Alfred, was a real estate developer, and his mother, Hilda Shulman Kalfin, was a teacher.His childhood memories were of being taken not to the theater but to the Metropolitan Opera, where he and his parents generally ended up in the cheap seats, high up and off to the side.“My father would hold onto the back of my pants while I leaned over trying to see center stage,” he said in the oral history.He studied music at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts). As a theater major at Alfred University in central New York, he became part of an ambitious department that was staging Bertolt Brecht and other European writers and experimenting with unusual settings — he was in a production of “Androcles and the Lion” that was staged in a gymnasium transformed to look like a Roman arena.He earned his master’s degree in 1957 at the Yale School of Drama and settled into odd jobs in New York, working for a time in the shipping department at WOR-TV and as a production assistant on a children’s television show in Newark, N.J., that starred a chimpanzee.He directed his first Off Broadway production, “The Golem,” in 1959, at St. Mark’s Playhouse. His other early efforts included “The Good Soldier Schweik” in 1963, which didn’t go well — a producer interfered so intrusively that Mr. Kalfin withdrew before opening night and sought unsuccessfully to stop the production from opening. When it did, William Glover of The Associated Press called it “one of the season’s worst plays.”Mr. Kalfin, right, with Michael David, left, the executive director of the Chelsea Theater Center, and Burl Hash, the production director, in 1973.Manuel Guevaza Jr.At the Chelsea, Mr. Kalfin sometimes left audiences and critics scratching their heads. That was the case with a 1970 musical called “Tarot,” which he staged in Brooklyn. As the credits read, it was conceived by The Rubber Duck and directed jointly by “Mr. Duck” (as The Times called him, tongue in cheek) and Mr. Kalfin.Mr. Barnes hated it. “Pretentiousness is rioting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,” his review began. Yet the Chelsea was respected enough by then that even in that pan, Mr. Barnes felt compelled to note that the group was facing one of its frequent financial crises at the time, and that “it simply must not be allowed to die.”The group did peter out in the mid-1980s, swamped with debt. Before it did, its other notable successes included “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story of a Jewish girl who passes as a boy; Mr. Kalfin had it adapted for the stage by Leah Napolin and directed it. It opened in Brooklyn in December 1974.It was a tough road to opening night. Mr. Kalfin clashed with Tovah Feldshuh, who played the title character, and withstood complaints from Orthodox Jewish leaders; he also had to strike a deal with Barbra Streisand, who owned the rights to the Singer story, which she would turn into a film in 1983. But the play moved to Broadway, where it ran for 223 performances.Mr. Bari, Mr. Kalfin’s life partner, died in 2013. Mr. Kalfin, who had lived in East Hampton, N.Y., leaves no immediate survivors.After the Chelsea gave up the ghost, Mr. Kalfin continued to direct in New York and in regional houses; he was still working until recently. One of his post-Chelsea projects in New York was directing a Yiddish version of “Yentl” produced by the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater in 2002. Eleanor Reissa played the title role.“Even though he’d directed maybe a hundred shows, every time was like the first,” Ms. Reissa, who had worked with Mr. Kalfin on other shows as well, said by email. “Wide eyed and wide hearted always, infectious joyfulness.” More

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      Douglas Kirkland, Who Took Portraits of Movie Stars, Dies at 88

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      His many memorable shots included one of his earliest assignments and probably his most famous: Marilyn Monroe in bed, wrapped in a silk sheet.Douglas Kirkland, a photojournalist and portraitist whose subjects included Marilyn Monroe wrapped in a silk sheet and Coco Chanel at work in her Paris atelier, died on Oct. 2 at his home in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 88.Francoise (Kemmel-Coulter) Kirkland, his wife and manager, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.For more than 60 years, Mr. Kirkland was a leading celebrity photographer, first for Look and Life magazines and then as a freelancer for various magazines, Hollywood studios and advertising agencies. Courteous and exuberant — he was no annoying paparazzo — Mr. Kirkland was welcomed into stars’ homes and hotel rooms and onto movie sets.The tall, dashing Mr. Kirkland “had this magical quality,” said Karen Mullarkey, who worked with Mr. Kirkland as director of photography at New York and Newsweek magazines. “He had this way of making people comfortable — he was so enthusiastic.” For an issue of New York, she recalled, she brought the model Kathy Ireland a bunch of peonies, and as he photographed Ms. Ireland, Ms. Mullarkey heard him saying: “Caress them! Kiss them! They’re your boyfriend!”“I am new with this magazine,” Mr. Kirkland recalled telling Elizabeth Taylor, whom he was assigned to shoot for Look. “Can you imagine what it would mean to me if you let me photograph you?”Douglas KirklandIn 1961, a year after joining Look, Mr. Kirkland had two dramatic encounters. For the first, he accompanied Jack Hamilton, a reporter, to Las Vegas for an interview with Elizabeth Taylor, then one of the biggest stars in the world. When the three met, Ms. Taylor said that she would talk but not sit for pictures.After the interview, Mr. Kirkland recalled to the website Vintage News Daily in 2021, he tried to persuade her to pose for him. He held her hand and said: “I am new with this magazine. Can you imagine what it would mean to me if you let me photograph you?”“I did not let go of her hand; she wore jungle gardenia perfume which I could smell later on,” he continued. “She thought for a while and said, ‘Come back tomorrow at 8 p.m.’”Mr. Kirkland perched himself on a balcony to photograph Marilyn Monroe.Douglas KirklandHiding everything but her face in the sheet and hugging the pillow, she was, it seemed, directing herself.Douglas KirklandThe result — a picture of Ms. Taylor in a yellow jacket, wearing spectacular diamond earrings — appeared on the cover of Look’s Aug. 15, 1961, issue.Later that year, Look sent Mr. Kirkland to Los Angeles to photograph Ms. Monroe. They met at her house, where she told him what she wanted for the shoot: a white silk sheet, Frank Sinatra records and Dom Perignon Champagne.When they met at a studio four days later, she slipped out of a robe and got into a bed, swaddled herself in a sheet and posed for Mr. Kirkland, who for part of the shoot perched himself in a balcony above her. She was, it seemed, directing, herself, with what looked like joy. She hugged the pillow, hid everything but her face in the sheet and turned her back to the camera.“I had everything technically right,” Mr. Kirkland said in an interview with “CBS This Morning” in 2012. “My Hasselblad — click, click, click — but it was Marilyn Monroe who really created these images.”Ann-Margret in Las Vegas in 1971.Douglas KirklandHe recalled that shoot in the 2020 documentary “That Click: The Legendary Photography of Douglas Kirkland,” directed by Luca Severi: “What the pillow represents is what she would like to be doing to a man, and I could have been in there and been the pillow. But I chose to keep taking pictures, because that’s how Douglas Kirkland really, bottom line, is.”Look used only one of the Monroe pictures, inside the magazine, but Mr. Kirkland collected many of them in a 2012 book, “With Marilyn: An Evening/1961.” His other books of photographs include “Light Years: 3 Decades Photography Among the Stars” (1989), “Icons” (1993) and “Legends” (1999).At Look and Life, and then as an on-set photographer, Mr. Kirkland shot pictures during the production of more than 100 films, including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Sophie’s Choice,” “Rain Man” and several Baz Luhrmann films, starting with “Moulin Rouge!” in 2001. Mr. Luhrmann said in “That Click” that Mr. Kirkland’s photography “captures the romance of cinema.”Sophia Loren in Rome in 1972.Douglas KirklandHis career started at a time when his subjects were accessible to journalists, and it continued into a time when stars and their handlers exerted greater power over the media. “In the ’60s, there was an idea of letting the camera be revealing of truth,” he told The New York Times in 1990. “Today, it’s more like ‘Entertainment Tonight.’”Douglas Morley Kirkland was born on Aug. 16, 1934, in Toronto and raised from age 3 in Fort Erie, Ontario. His father, Morley, owned a shop where he made men’s made-to-measure clothing, and his mother, Evelyn (Reid) Kirkland, kept the books in the store.He took his first picture with a Brownie camera as a young child: his family standing at the front door of their home on Christmas Day. By 14, he was photographing weddings. After high school, he studied at the New York Institute of Photography and then returned to Canada, where he worked for two local newspapers, and then moved to Richmond, Va., to work as a commercial photographer.In 1962, Mr. Kirkland spent three weeks with the designer Coco Chanel in Paris.Douglas KirklandWhile there, he wrote three letters to the influential fashion photographer Irving Penn, seeking a job. In 1957, Mr. Penn hired him as his assistant.“I was paid $50 a week, and even in those days in New York it was not too simple,” he said in an interview with the American Society of Media Photographers in 2017. “But I was with Penn and I was quickly learning.”In 1960 he joined Look. He stayed there until the magazine folded in 1971, when he was hired by Life, where he remained until it stopped weekly publication the next year. For the rest of his career he was a freelancer, working for Time, Paris Match, Sports Illustrated, Town & Country and other magazines.He received the American Society of Cinematographers’ Presidents Award in 2011 for his photographic work on film sets. The next year, he was commissioned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create a series of official portraits of the Oscar nominees in the four acting categories, among them George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.One of them, Michelle Williams, had been nominated for playing Ms. Monroe in “My Week with Marilyn.” In the documentary “That Click,” she said that being photographed by the same man who had photographed Ms. Monroe a half-century earlier had been a moving experience.“Never could I have imagined this sort of circumstance,” she said.Mr. Kirkland with examples of his work at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles in 2009.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Kirkland is survived by his son, Mark, and his daughters, Karen Kirkland and Lisa Kirkland Gadway, from his marriage to Marian Perry, which ended in divorce; five grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.In August 1962, Mr. Kirkland spent three weeks with Coco Chanel in Paris for Look. At first she was wary of him, permitting him to shoot only the outfits she had designed but not her. But after he showed her his first set of prints, she backed off, letting him observe her at work — always in a hat and usually surrounded by her staff. On his last day there, she suggested that they take a ride to the Palace of Versailles. He took one last picture of her, walking alone in the palace’s gardens.“It was chilly and had started to rain, even though it was August, so I gave her my raincoat,” Mr. Kirkland told The Guardian in 2015. “She put it over her shoulders and it looked almost like a fashionable cape. She said that she often liked to go there because it gave her an opportunity to get lost in time while being surrounded by the magnitude of old French culture.” More

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      Anton Fier, Drummer Who Left Stamp on a Downtown Scene, Dies at 66

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      He worked with everyone from the Feelies to Herbie Hancock to Laurie Anderson, as well as leading the indie-rock supergroup the Golden Palominos. But there was a troubled side.Even at his musical peak in the 1980s, Anton Fier, a drummer, producer and bandleader who brought power and precision to his work with acts as diverse as the Feelies, Herbie Hancock, Laurie Anderson and his own star-studded ensemble, the Golden Palominos, seemed to glimpse a dark end for himself.The film and music critic Glenn Kenny, in an email, remembered running into Mr. Fier in the mid-1980s at the Hoboken, N.J., nightclub Maxwell’s, then a cauldron of indie rock, and querying him about alarming details on the sleeve of the Palominos’ album “Visions of Excess.”The rear cover featured a photograph of Mr. Fier, visibly drunk, quaffing a cocktail at a rock club. With it was an acknowledgment that read, “For Jim Gordon and Bonzo,” a reference to the Derek and the Dominos drummer who murdered his own mother during a psychotic episode, and to John Bonham, the Led Zeppelin drummer who died at 32 after consuming some 40 shots of vodka.Mr. Fier seemed to be hinting at his own grisly demise. “I don’t care,” Mr. Kenny recalled him saying. “I’m not going to live to be 35.”With anyone else, the episode might fit a familiar narrative — the self-destructive rocker in a death spiral. But throughout his life, friends said, Mr. Fier always resisted easy categorization.He was a punk-rock provocateur who could extemporize, seemingly for hours, about free-jazz pioneers and Ghanaian percussion luminaries; an artist with big ambitions and a web of platinum connections, but also a loner who shunned interviews and self-promotion; a prickly contrarian who seemed to revel in confrontation, but who was also known among friends for a kind, generous spirit.“Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop, with a hard exterior and a soft core,” the singer-songwriter Lianne Smith, a close friend who worked with him, said in a phone interview.Little wonder, then, that his death on Sept. 14 at 66 — confirmed by a cremation notice from a service in Basel, Switzerland — left as many questions as answers. The cause was rumored to be voluntary assisted dying, the location said to be in Switzerland, and suicide itself did not seem out of the question. Plagued by money troubles and waning career prospects, he had openly discussed the topic among friends in recent years. But where? When? How?He had certainly fallen on hard times. Dogged by money woes, lacking musical inspiration and, after injuring his wrists, hindered in playing drums to his own high standards, he had lost his only outlet. “He had a lot of pressures and a lot of anxieties,” Ms. Smith said. “But when he played music, he was a complete human being.”Mr. Fier in 1987. “Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop,” a friend and fellow musician said, “with a hard exterior and a soft core.”Rick McGinnisAnton John Fier III was born on June 20, 1956, in Cleveland, to Anton J. Fier Jr., an electrician and former Marine, and Ruthe Marie Fier. His parents split up when he was young, and Mr. Fier, who was known as Tony in his school days, endured a difficult relationship with his stepfather, a polka musician, he later told friends.Turning to music, he worked in a record store as a teenager and eventually drummed his way into the Cleveland proto-punk scene, recording with a version of the Styrenes and playing on the seminal 1978 EP “Datapanik in the Year Zero” by Pere Ubu, the conceptual band that calls its genre “avant garage.”Soon after, Mr. Fier followed his musical dreams to New York, where he brokered his encyclopedic knowledge of music into a job at the SoHo Music Gallery, a record store catering to the downtown music cognoscenti. There, he seemed more interested in chatting about records than selling them.Mr. Kenny recalled, “I remember walking in one day and these two cats” — Mr. Fier and the experimental saxophonist John Zorn, a fellow clerk — “were sitting up front talking about Charlie Parker, treating browsers like they were minor inconveniences.”Mr. Fier did more than talk about music. A gifted and ferocious drummer, he got his big break in 1978 when he answered an ad in The Village Voice placed by the Feelies, a cerebral indie group from New Jersey that The Voice had recently called the best underground band in New York. The group was looking for a drummer.“We asked the people who called what they thought of Moe Tucker,” Glenn Mercer, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, said, referring to the Velvet Underground’s drummer. “We were thinking in terms of very simple, primitive drumming. I think he was the only one that even knew who she was.”With a bookish air and a subversive sensibility, Mr. Fier fit the ethos of the band. His explosive drumming helped fuel the group’s first album, “Crazy Rhythms,” which the critic Robert Christgau later described as “exciting in a disturbingly abstract way, or maybe disturbing in an excitingly abstract way.”But Mr. Fier’s personality proved explosive as well, making his tenure with the band a short one. As the Feelies pulled up to a gig at one club, where the line was around the block, he gushed about how thrilled he was to be in the band. After a raucous set that had the packed house cheering, his mood inexplicably turned.“When the show was over, he was like, ‘You guys are so controlling, I can’t believe it,” Mr. Mercer recalled Mr. Fier saying. “Just like that, a 180.”Mr. Fier with the Golden Palominos in 2012.Christopher Gregory for The New York TimesEven so, Mr. Fier’s career continued to flourish. He joined the Lounge Lizards, John Lurie’s avant-jazz combo, for their first album, released in 1981, before Mr. Lurie rose to fame as an archetype of New York cool with his roles in Jim Jarmusch’s indie films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law.”His career rose to new heights in the mid-1980s: He toured with the jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock following Mr. Hancock’s 1984 pop-funk crossover hit “Rockit,” and played on Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed 1984 album, “Mister Heartbreak.”By that point his musical ambitions could not be contained behind the drum kit, so Mr. Fier formed the Golden Palominos, an ever-evolving indie-rock supergroup that attracted a parade of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, John Lydon and Richard Thompson, through the rest of the 1980s and into the ’90s.“The band revolved around anyone Anton liked at the time,” Syd Straw, the iconoclastic singer-songwriter who got her start with the group, said by phone. “He had pretty bizarre social skills, but he was a magnet for brainy musicians. I think that he was, at heart, an amazing casting director.”In whatever musical role, Mr. Fier was exacting. “He never ‘settled,’’’ Chris Stamey, a founder of the indie band the dB’s who performed with the Palominos, recalled in an email. “And this could be unsettling at times. But we all wanted to see that blissful smile when something finally met his high standards.”Through the 2000s and early 2010s, Mr. Fier began to focus more on producing, working on albums by Ms. Smith, Julia Brown and the guitarist Jim Campilongo, although he did continue to perform with a highly regarded combo headed by the singer, guitarist and bassist Tony Scherr, a former Lounge Lizard.He also quit alcohol, a habit that had grown prodigious, particularly since the hard-partying Hancock tour, Mr. Stamey said.Hounded by creditors, however, Mr. Fier drifted further and further off the grid, avoiding even banks. He seemed to conclude, in eerily analytical fashion, that life was no longer worth living. Ms. Smith said he told her that he wanted to “fly to Thailand, have a wonderful vacation, take a lot of drugs and walk into the ocean.”The pandemic seemed only to deepen his despair. Without work or family (his only marriage, in 1976, lasted less than a year), he began researching his options. Last fall, Mr. Stamey recalled, Mr. Fier told him that he had been burned when he paid $900 over the internet for a veterinary tranquilizer, which he had decided “was the most peaceful way to go.”A few months ago, Mr. Fier texted his friend J.P. Olsen, a filmmaker and musician who had recently moved to Indiana, asking him for his new address. Mr. Fier had some boxes he wanted to send him. On Sept. 21, word began circulating that he was dead, apparently from an assisted suicide in Switzerland. Four days later, Mr. Olsen received the boxes, which were filled with piles of Mr. Fier’s clothes.And on Oct. 1, Nicky Skopelitis, a Palominos guitarist and the executor of Mr. Fier’s estate, received the cremation notice, dated Sept. 14, along with Mr. Fier’s remains.Questions about his last days linger. But in a way, friends said, that seems fitting for a man who was only too comfortable with loose ends.Two years ago, Mr. Stamey urged Mr. Fier to write a memoir, to pull him out of his funk. Mr. Fier’s response, Mr. Stamey recalled, was curt: “He said that he wanted to be the only one who didn’t write a book.” More

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      Kitten Natividad, Movie Star in Russ Meyer’s Bawdy World, Dies at 74

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      She was top-billed in his final feature, “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.” She was also his paramour and, he said, his favorite leading lady.Kitten Natividad, who brought audacity and ample physical attributes to some of the final films of Russ Meyer, whose over-the-top sexploitation movies acquired a certain cachet in some quarters and influenced John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and other directors, died on Sept. 24 in Los Angeles. She was 74.Eva Natividad Garcia, her sister, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.Ms. Natividad had little film experience and was working as a go-go dancer and stripper when, in the mid-1970s, she met Mr. Meyer, who was by then near the end of his notorious filmmaking career.In the 1960s Mr. Meyer, who died in 2004, became known for outlandish films like “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and “Vixen,” most of which featured absurd plots and insatiable naked women with large breasts.According to Jimmy McDonough’s “Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film” (2005), Mr. Meyer was already editing his 1976 feature, “Up!,” when he decided to add a part for a dancer who had been suggested to him by an actress from one of his earlier films. He asked Roger Ebert, the film critic, who was one of the writers of “Up!,” to throw together some dialogue for a character he named the Greek Chorus.“It doesn’t matter what she says,” Mr. Ebert recalled Mr. Meyer saying. “She just has to say something. And it should sound kinda poetic.”The newcomer was Ms. Natividad, and what Mr. Ebert wrote for her paraphrased the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle.“Armed with Ebert’s lofty gobbledygook,” Mr. McDonough wrote, “Meyer took the New Girl out in the woods, stripped her down, and made her recite all this complex, arcane narration while she hung from trees and hid in bushes.”Mr. Meyer also fell for Ms. Natividad, who was married at the time, and they began a relationship that lasted for the rest of the 1970s. And he made her the star of his next movie, which would be his final feature film: “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” (1979).The movie is often described as Mr. Meyer’s riff on “Our Town” — for instance, it employed an onscreen narrator named “The Man From Small Town U.S.A.” Ms. Natividad plays a woman whose husband’s preoccupation with anal sex leaves her sexually frustrated.Ms. Natividad had little film experience when she met Mr. Meyer. It didn’t matter.via Siouxzan PerryCritics didn’t have much good to say about the movie, which Mr. Meyer wrote with Mr. Ebert.Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Ebert’s television partner on the film review show then known as “Sneak Previews,” wrote that Mr. Meyer’s “Vixen,” released in 1968, had been “an enjoyable nudie film because it featured the first joyfully aggressive woman we’d seen in a skin flick.” But he added, “Meyer hasn’t grown up in 10 years; if anything, he’s deteriorated.”“Beneath the Valley” would be Meyer’s last hurrah, but it held a special place in his heart. In a 1999 interview with Pop Cult magazine, he called Ms. Natividad his favorite leading lady.“She could just go and go and go,” he said. “It was just marvelous. You really had to measure up to this girl, or you caught hell.”Mr. McDonough said that Mr. Meyer had “met his match in Kitten Natividad.”“Meyer’s productions were mercenary boot camps, with the woman inevitably in an adversarial role,” Mr. McDonough said by email. “And in 1979’s ‘Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,’ Meyer puts Kitten through the usual insane challenges, perching her buck naked atop mountains, in rivers at the bottom of canyons, and shot from below a metal bed frame (sans mattress) while she bounced vigorously atop metal bedsprings.“She blew through Meyer’s challenges like a marathon runner, always a wide, gung-ho smile across her face, and try as he might, Meyer could not vanquish her. That movie is a dazzling, obsessive tribute to Natividad.”Ms. Natividad in 2011. In her later years, she had small parts in mainstream movies like “Airplane!”Brian Cahn/Zuma Press, via AlamyFrancisca Isabel Natividad (she later used the first name Francesca) was born on Feb. 13, 1948, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua to Juan and Delia Davalos Natividad. In 2018, when she received the Legend of the Year award from the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, she told an audience that when she was growing up along the U.S. border, she would gather other children and make clandestine trips to a disreputable stretch of road where they would peek in on strip shows.“When I looked in there and I saw these beautiful women with the big breasts, the red lipstick, the big hairdos,” she said, “I wanted to grow up to be just like them.”Her mother later moved the family to the United States, and at 14 Ms. Natividad worked as a house cleaner for the actress Stella Stevens, getting a taste of the Hollywood crowd.She got a job as a key punch operator, but when she learned that a neighbor who worked as a stripper was making twice as much as she was, she changed careers, taking her first job as a go-go dancer in 1969 and soon moving to stripping. When an agency urged her to adopt a stage name, she chose “Kitten,” she said, because she was considered the shyest among the dancers she worked with.In 1973 she won the Miss Nude Universe title in San Bernardino, Calif.She was dancing at the Classic Cat, a club in Hollywood, when a fellow dancer, Shari Eubank, who had starred in the 1975 Meyer film “Supervixens,” suggested she introduce herself to the director. She is said to have done so by poking him in the back with her bare breasts.That got her into “Up!,” which she once described this way: “I’ll skip over the plot, which had something to do with Hitler’s daughter and sadomasochism. The film starts with me perched in a tree, nude.”Mr. Meyer paid for her to have breast augmentation, replacing an earlier enhancement. He also paid for a voice coach to help her lose her Mexican accent. (Her dialogue in “Up!” was dubbed.)When she and Mr. Meyer were together, he would revel in the attention her body and her bubbly personality brought. In 2004 Ms. Natividad joined three other Meyer favorites in a round-table discussion for The New York Times; one of them, Erica Gavin, the star of “Vixen,” recalled the couple’s entrance at her birthday party.“Kitten walked in first,” she said. “Russ loved to walk behind Kitten, because then he could see all the reactions after she passed people. She was wearing a nude-colored chiffon sheer outfit with no underwear at all.”After Mr. Meyer’s career died out, Ms. Natividad appeared in numerous other movies, including some hard-core pornography, and had small parts in “Airplane!” (1980), “My Tutor” (1983) and a few other mainstream films. She had a double mastectomy in 1999 as part of treatment for breast cancer.In the 2004 round table, Ms. Natividad reflected on her career.“I’m proud to be a Russ Meyer girl,” she said. “There are lots of beautiful women with great bodies and even bigger boobs than ours, but they didn’t get to be Russ Meyer girls. We are very, very special.”Ms. Natividad was married and divorced three times. In addition to her sister and her mother, she is survived by six half siblings, Teresa Natividad, Amelia Natividad, Diana Ramirez, Victor Ramirez, John Natividad and Estella Ramirez.Mr. McDonough, in his email, said he first saw Ms. Natividad at Show World in Manhattan, where her act consisted of splashing around naked in a baby pool while the song “Rubber Ducky” blared from the loudspeaker. Then, for a few dollars more, she’d pose for Polaroids.“Somehow Kitten made it all seem innocent,” he said. “She possessed a ferociously positive spirit, and that light always blasted through, no matter how tawdry the circumstances.” More

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      Loretta Lynn, Country Music Star and Symbol of Rural Resilience, Dies at 90

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      Her powerful voice, playful lyrics and topical songs were a model for generations of country singers and songwriters. So was her life story.NASHVILLE — Loretta Lynn, the country singer whose plucky songs and inspiring life story made her one of the most beloved American musical performers of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tenn. She was 90.Her family said in a statement that she died in her sleep at her ranch, which had turned Hurricane Mills, about 70 miles west of Nashville, into a tourist destination.Ms. Lynn built her stardom not only on her music, but also on her image as a symbol of rural pride and determination. Her story was carved out of Kentucky coal country, from hardscrabble beginnings in Butcher Hollow (which her songs made famous as Butcher Holler).She became a wife at 15, a mother at 16 and a grandmother in her early 30s, married to a womanizing sometime bootlegger who managed her to stardom. That story made her autobiography, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” a best seller and the grist for an Oscar-winning movie adaptation of the same name.Her voice was unmistakable, with its Kentucky drawl, its tensely coiled vibrato and its deep reserves of power. “She’s louder than most, and she’s gonna sing higher than you think she will,” said John Carter Cash, who produced Ms. Lynn’s final recordings. “With Loretta you just turn on the mic, stand back and hold on.”Ms. Lynn performing at the Grand Ole Opry in the 1960s. She got her start in the music business at a time when male artists dominated the country airwaves. Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesHer songwriting made her a model for generations of country songwriters. Her music was rooted in the verities of honky-tonk country and the Appalachian songs she had grown up singing, and her lyrics were lean and direct, with nuggets of wordplay: “She’s got everything it takes/To take everything you’ve got,” she sang in “Everything It Takes,” one of her many songs about cheating, released in 2016.Ms. Lynn got her start in the music business at a time when male artists dominated the country airwaves. She nevertheless became a voice for ordinary women, recording three-minute morality plays in the 1960s and ’70s — many written by her, some written by others — that spoke to the changing mores of women throughout America.In “Hey Loretta,” a wry 1973 hit about walking out on rural drudgery written by the cartoonist Shel Silverstein, she sang, “You can feed the chickens and you can milk the cow/This woman’s liberation, honey, is gonna start right now.” Silverstein also wrote the beleaguered housewife’s lament “One’s on the Way,” a No. 1 country hit for Ms. Lynn in 1971.“Loretta always just said exactly what she was going through right then in her music, and that’s why it resonates with us,” the country singer Miranda Lambert, one of countless younger performers influenced by Ms. Lynn, said in a 2016 PBS “American Masters” documentary, “Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl.”Jack White, the singer and guitarist of the White Stripes, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004, the year he produced Ms. Lynn’s Grammy-winning album “Van Lear Rose,” that she “was breaking down barriers for women at the right time.” Her songs, Mr. White said, had a message: “This is how women live. This is what women are thinking.” And Ms. Lynn, he added, was taking these strides “in the country realm, where a lot of women weren’t able to do what they wanted.”Ms. Lynn in 1972 with her husband, Oliver V. Lynn Jr., who was also known as Doolittle, Doo or Mooney. They had a long but tempestuous marriage. Gary Settle/The New York TimesShe drew much of her material from her marriage to Oliver Vanetta Lynn Jr., who was also known as Doolittle, Doo or Mooney, the last of these nicknames a nod to his practice of selling bootleg whiskey.Ms. Lynn’s 1966 hit “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man)” was based on a confrontation she had with one of her husband’s mistresses; her 1968 single “Fist City” was born of a similar incident. The inspiration for “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” in 1966, were those times when Mr. Lynn, his libido roused after a night out, would stumble home expecting to satisfy it.“Doo would always try to figure out which line was for him, and 90 percent of the time every line in there was for him,” Ms. Lynn told the weekly Nashville Scene in 2000. “Those songs was true to life. We fought hard, and we loved hard.” The marriage lasted 48 years, until Mr. Lynn died of congestive heart failure in 1996.His drinking and womanizing notwithstanding, Mr. Lynn was one of his wife’s greatest sources of musical encouragement, certainly early in their marriage, after they moved from Kentucky to Custer, Wash., in the late 1940s. Impressed by how well she sang while doing chores at home, he bought her a guitar and a copy of Country Song Roundup, a popular magazine that included the words and chords to the latest jukebox hits.‘I Fought Back’Mr. Lynn went on to manage his wife’s career, insisting that she perform in honky-tonks and at radio stations even before she was convinced of her musical gifts. Ms. Lynn’s dependence on her husband made him as much a father figure as a spouse to her, even though he was less than six years her senior. He used the term “spanking” to describe the times he hit her. It was not until the couple moved to Nashville in the early 1960s, and Ms. Lynn befriended Patsy Cline there, that she began to stand up to her husband.“After I met Patsy, life got better for me because I fought back,” Ms. Lynn told Nashville Scene. “Before that, I just took it. I had to. I was 3,000 miles away from my mom and dad and had four little kids. There wasn’t nothin’ I could do about it. But later on, I started speakin’ my mind when things weren’t right.”Ms. Lynn’s growing assertiveness coincided with the first stirrings of the modern women’s movement. She rejected the feminist tag in interviews, but many of her songs, including the 1978 hit “We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” were fiery expressions of female resolve. In that song she sang:Well, I don’t want a wall to paint, but I’m a-gonna have my say.From now on, lover-boy, it’s 50-50, all the way.Up to now I’ve been an object made for pleasin’ you.Times have changed and I’m demanding satisfaction too.Ms. Lynn’s sexual politics had already taken an emphatic turn with “The Pill” (1975), a riotous celebration of reproductive freedom written by Lorene Allen, Don McHan and T.D. Bayless. Outspoken records like that and “Rated X,” about the double standards facing divorced women, might not have been as popular with country music’s conservative-leaning audience had they not been tempered by Ms. Lynn’s playful way with a lyric. In “Rated X,” a No. 1 country hit in 1972, she wrote, “The women all look at you like you’re bad, and the men all hope you are.”Loretta Lynn in 1976, the year her memoir, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” was published. It became the basis of an Oscar-winning movie. Waring Abbott“I wrote about my heartaches, I wrote about everything,” she said in a 2016 interview with The Times. “But when you get to hear the song, you just grin.”Her most confrontational recordings of the ’70s, in fact, corresponded with her greatest popularity. In 1972, she became the first woman to be named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association. The next year, her picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek. She became a frequent guest on late-night talk shows and the spokeswoman for Crisco shortening. With the title of her 1971 hit “You’re Lookin’ at Country” as her calling card, Ms. Lynn, in her down-home dresses, came to embody rural resilience and self-respect.Loretta Webb was born in a cabin in Butcher Hollow on April 14, 1932, the second of eight children. Her parents, Melvin Theodore Webb and Clara Marie (Ramey) Webb, liked to decorate the cabin walls with magazine photos of movie stars. Loretta was named after Loretta Young.In “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1976), her memoir written with George Vecsey of The Times, Ms. Lynn noted that her mother, a woman of Cherokee and Scots-Irish descent, had taught her to sing antediluvian ballads and instructed her in rural storytelling. Ms. Lynn and her brothers and sisters often sang in church and at other social gatherings. Three of her siblings also pursued careers in music, notably Brenda Gail, who under the name Crystal Gayle became a star in her own right in the late 1970s with crossover hits like “Talking in Your Sleep” and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”Ms. Lynn quit singing in public when she married in 1948. Wanting to get away from Appalachia, she and her husband moved to Washington the next year, when Ms. Lynn, at 16, gave birth to Betty Sue, the first of the couple’s six children. Ms. Lynn in 1972, the year she became the first woman to be named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association. Gary Settle/The New York TimesIt was a decade before Ms. Lynn performed again. Not long after she did, though, she appeared on a Tacoma, Wash., television talent show hosted by Buck Owens, and attracted the attention of Norm Burley, an executive with Zero Records, a small label based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She signed with the company and recorded four original songs for it in 1960.Success in NashvilleOn the strength of the airplay received by the single “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” the Lynns moved to Nashville, where Ms. Lynn began recording demos for the Wilburn Brothers, a popular country singing duo who became her music publishers, and helped her obtain a deal with Decca Records. She made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry in September 1960. In 1962, “Success,” about the relationship between material wealth and happiness, became her first Top 10 single.Over the next 28 years, Ms. Lynn placed 77 singles on the country charts. More than 50 of them reached the Top 10, and 16 reached No. 1, including “After the Fire Is Gone,” the first in a series of steamy hit duets she made with Conway Twitty. Virtually all of her recordings were steeped in traditional country arrangements suited to Ms. Lynn’s perky backwoods drawl; most were produced by Owen Bradley, who likened her to “a female Hank Williams.”Ms. Lynn performing at the Bonnaroo Music and Art Festival in Tennessee in 2011.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMs. Lynn wrote fewer songs as the 1970s progressed but continued to tour and record. She also established her own booking agency, music publishing company and clothing line, as well as the tourist attraction Loretta Lynn’s Ranch, a 19th-century plantation house that she and her husband bought in the late 1960s. The Hurricane Mills complex includes campgrounds, a dude ranch, a motocross course, a music shed, a replica of the cabin where Ms. Lynn grew up, a simulated coal mine and museums.The Academy of Country Music named Ms. Lynn its artist of the decade for the 1970s just as “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the 1980 movie based on her autobiography, returned her Cinderella story to the forefront of the national consciousness. The film starred Sissy Spacek, who won an Academy Award, in the title role, and Tommy Lee Jones as Doolittle Lynn.Ms. Lynn was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988. Her second autobiography, “Still Woman Enough” (2002), picked up where “Coal Miner’s Daughter” had left off. She was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors the next year and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York in 2008. She received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2010. Three years later, President Barack Obama named Ms. Lynn a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.The strength of her influence in the music world was witnessed by “Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn,” a 2010 album featuring Kid Rock, Carrie Underwood, Lucinda Williams, the White Stripes and others. “Van Lear Rose” won two Grammy Awards and was ranked among the best albums of 2004, both in country music publications and in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone that cater to rock audiences.In 2007, Ms. Lynn quietly began a long-term recording project with the producer Mr. Carter Cash, Johnny Cash’s son, in the studio that had been Johnny Cash’s cabin outside Nashville. Working in the style of her ’60s and ’70s recordings, with seasoned Nashville musicians playing vintage instruments, she recorded more than 90 tracks: remakes of her past hits, Christmas and gospel songs, Appalachian songs from her childhood and a handful of new songs. The first album from those sessions, “Full Circle,” appeared in 2016, followed later that year by a Christmas album; “Wouldn’t It Be Great” was released in 2018 and “Still Woman Enough” in 2021.At her Tennessee plantation home in 2015.Kyle Dean reinford for The New York TimesIn 2020, Ms. Lynn published “Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust,” a book recalling her friendship with Patsy Cline.Survivors include a younger sister, the country singer Crystal Gayle; her daughters Patsy Lynn Russell, Peggy Lynn, Clara (Cissie) Marie Lynn; and her son Ernest; as well as 17 grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Betty Sue Lynn, and another son, Jack, died before her.She also leaves legions of admirers, women as well as men, who draw strength and encouragement from her irrepressible, down-to-earth music and spirit.“I’m proud I’ve got my own ideas, but I ain’t no better than nobody else,” she was quoted as saying in “Finding Her Voice” (1993), Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s comprehensive history of women in country music. “I’ve often wondered why I became so popular, and maybe that’s the reason. I think I reach people because I’m with ’em, not apart from ’em.” More

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      in Theater

      Charles Fuller, Pulitzer Winner for ‘A Soldier’s Play,’ Dies at 83

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      He was the second Black playwright to win the award and later adapted the play into an Oscar-nominated film, “A Soldier’s Story.”Charles Fuller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” which finally made it to Broadway 38 years later, in a production that earned two Tony Awards, died on Monday in Toronto. He was 83.His wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, confirmed the death.Mr. Fuller was only the second Black playwright to win the Pulitzer for drama. (Charles Edward Gordone won in 1970 for “No Place to Be Somebody.”) His plays often examined racism and sometimes drew on his background as an Army veteran. Both of those elements were evident in “A Soldier’s Play,” which was Mr. Fuller’s reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and centered on the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for the culprit.The play was first staged in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company with a cast that included Denzel Washington. Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, called it “a relentless investigation into the complex, sometimes cryptic pathology of hate” and praised Mr. Fuller’s delineation of both the Black and the white characters.“Mr. Fuller demands that his Black characters find the courage to break out of their suicidal, fratricidal cycle,” Mr. Rich wrote, “just as he demands that whites end the injustices that have locked his Black characters into the nightmare.”Hollywood came calling. A 1984 film version, retitled “A Soldier’s Story” and directed by Norman Jewison, had a cast that included Mr. Washington, Howard E. Rollins Jr., David Alan Grier, Wings Hauser, Adolph Caesar and Patti LaBelle. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Fuller’s screenplay.Denzel Washington, left, and Charles Brown in 1981 in Mr. Fuller’s acclaimed play “A Soldier’s Play,” staged by the Negro Ensemble Company in New York.Bert AndrewsIn “A Soldier’s Play” and his other works, Mr. Fuller strove to serve up not idealized Black characters but ones who reflected reality.“In the ’60s and early ’70s, Black plays were directed at whites,” Mr. Fuller told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, when the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” was staged in San Diego. “They were primarily confrontational pieces, whose major concern was to address racism and white-Black relationships in this country. Now we are much more concerned with examining ourselves, with looking at our own situations — historically in many instances. We are seeing characters who are more complex, ones who have bad qualities as well as good ones.”“A Soldier’s Play,” he told The Times in 2020, drew in part on his upbringing in a tough neighborhood of North Philadelphia.“I grew up in a project in a neighborhood where people shot each other, where gangs fought each other,” he said. “Not white people — Black people, where the idea of who was the best, toughest, was part of life. We have a history that’s different than a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t cheat on each other, kill each other, love each other, marry each other, do all that, things that, really, people anywhere in the world do.”Kenny Leon (with microphone), who directed a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” on Broadway, addressed Mr. Fuller, third from left, onstage after a performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCharles H. Fuller Jr. was born on March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia. His father was a printer, and his mother, Lillian Teresa Fuller, was a homemaker and foster mother. He was a student at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia when he attended his first play, a production performed in Yiddish at the Walnut Theater.“I didn’t understand a word,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977, but somehow it sparked his interest in becoming a playwright.He studied for two years at Villanova University and then joined the Army, where his postings included Japan and South Korea. After four years, he returned to Philadelphia, taking night classes at LaSalle College (now University) while working as a city housing inspector.In 1968, he and some friends founded the Afro-American Arts Theater in Philadelphia, but they had no playwrights, so Mr. Fuller gave it a try.One result was his first staged play, “The Village: A Party,” about a racially mixed utopia, which was produced in 1968 at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.“What the evening proves,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in a review in The Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., “is that the theater is not Fuller’s bag.”But Mr. Fuller kept at it. In the 1970s he relocated to New York, where the Negro Ensemble Company in 1974 staged his drama “In the Deepest Part of Sleep” and opened its 10th-anniversary season in 1976 with another of his plays, “The Brownsville Raid,” based on a 1906 incident in Texas in which Black soldiers were accused of a shooting. Walter Kerr, writing in The Times, praised Mr. Fuller for not making the play a simple story of racial injustice.“Mr. Fuller is interested in human slipperiness, and his skill with self‐serving, only slightly shady evasions of duty helps turn the play into the interesting conundrum it is,” Mr. Kerr wrote.Although he set out as a playwright to examine difficult questions, Mr. Fuller did so with a certain degree of optimism about the future of the United States.“America has an opportunity, with all its technology, to develop the first sensible society in history,” he said in the 1977 interview with The Inquirer. “It could provide all its people with some rational way to live together while still glorying in their cultural diversity.”By the late 1980s, though, he had tired of New York and moved to Toronto, where he was living at his death. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, David; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.“A Soldier’s Play” was finally produced on Broadway in 2020 by the Roundabout Theater with a cast that included Mr. Grier and Blair Underwood. It was eligible to win the best-revival Tony even though it had never been produced on Broadway previously — the more familiar prerequisite for the category — because, under Tony rules, it was by 2020 considered “a classic.” Mr. Grier himself won a Tony for best actor in a featured role in a play.“It has been my greatest honor to perform his words on both stage and screen,” Mr. Grier said of Mr. Fuller on Twitter, adding that “his genius will be missed.” More

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      in Movies

      Sacheen Littlefeather, Activist Who Rejected Brando’s Oscar, Dies at 75

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      The actress was booed at the Academy Awards in 1973 after she refused the best actor award on Marlon Brando’s behalf in protest of Hollywood’s depictions of Native Americans.Sacheen Littlefeather, the Apache activist and actress who refused to accept the best actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando at the 1973 Oscars, drawing jeers onstage in an act that pierced through the facade of the awards show and highlighted her criticism of Hollywood for its depictions of Native Americans, has died. She was 75.Her death was announced on Sunday by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The cause of death was not immediately known.Her death came just weeks after the Academy apologized to Ms. Littlefeather for her treatment during the Oscars. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in August, Ms. Littlefeather said she was “stunned” by the apology. “I never thought I’d live to see the day I would be hearing this, experiencing this,” she said.When Ms. Littlefeather, then 26, held up her right hand that night inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles — clearly signaling to the award presenters, the audience and the millions watching on TV that she had no desire to ceremoniously accept the shiny golden statue — it marked one of the best-known disruptive moments in the history of the Oscars.“I beg at this time that I have not intruded upon this evening, and that we will, in the future, our hearts and our understandings, will meet with love and generosity,” Ms. Littlefeather said at the podium, having endured a chorus of boos and some cheers from the crowd.Donning a glimmering buckskin dress, moccasins and hair ties, her appearance at the 45th Academy Awards, at the age of 26, was the first time a Native American woman had stood onstage at the ceremony. But the backlash and criticism was immediate: The actor John Wayne was so unsettled that a show producer, Marty Pasetta, said security guards had to restrain him so that he would not storm the stage.Ms. Littlefeather and Mr. Brando had become friends through her neighbor, the director Francis Ford Coppola.Associated PressShe told The Hollywood Reporter in August: “When I was at the podium in 1973, I stood there alone.”Ms. Littlefeather, whose name at birth was Marie Cruz, was born on Nov. 14, 1946, in Salinas, Calif., to a father from the White Mountain Apache and Yaqui tribes in Arizona and a French-German-Dutch mother, according to her website. After high school, she took the name Sacheen Littlefeather to “reflect her natural heritage,” the site states.Her website said she participated in the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island, which began in 1969 in an act of defiance against a government that they said had long trampled on their rights.Her acting career began at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in the early 1970s. She would go on to play roles in films like “The Trial of Billy Jack” and “Winterhawk.”Ms. Littlefeather said in an interview with the Academy that she had been planning to watch the awards on television when she received a call the night before the ceremony from Mr. Brando, who had been nominated for his performance as Vito Corleone in “The Godfather.”The two had become friends through her neighbor, the director Francis Ford Coppola. Mr. Brando asked her to refuse the award on his behalf if he won and gave her a speech to read just in case.With only about 15 minutes left in the program, Ms. Littlefeather arrived at the ceremony with little information about how the night would work.A producer for the Oscars noticed the pages in Ms. Littlefeather’s hand and told her that she would be arrested if her comments lasted more than 60 seconds.Then, Mr. Brando won.In the speech, Ms. Littlefeather also brought attention to the federal government’s standoff with Native Americans at Wounded Knee.She later recalled that while she was giving the speech, she had “focused in on the mouths and the jaws that were dropping open in the audience, and there were quite a few.”The audience, she recalled, looked like a “sea of Clorox” because there were “very few people of color.”She said some audience members did the so-called “tomahawk chop” at her and that when she went to Mr. Brando’s house later, people shot at the doorway where she was standing.Last month, Ms. Littlefeather spoke at a program hosted by the Academy called “An Evening with Sacheen Littlefeather,” recalling how she had stood up for justice in the arts.“I didn’t represent myself,” she said. “I was representing all Indigenous voices out there, all Indigenous people, because we had never been heard in that way before.”And when she spoke those words, the audience erupted in applause.“I had to pay the price of admission, and that was OK,” she said. “Because those doors had to be open.”After learning that the Academy would formally apologize to her, Ms. Littlefeather said it felt “like a big cleanse.”“It feels like the sacred circle is completing itself,” she said, “before I go in this life.” More

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      Joe Bussard, Obsessive Collector of Rare Records, Dies at 86

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      His life revolved around his massive hoard of fragile 78 r.p.m. disks of jazz, blues, country and gospel music recorded between the 1920s and ’50s.Joe Bussard, who made it his life’s obsession to collect rare 78 r.p.m. records — some 15,000 of them, encompassing jazz, blues, country, jug band and gospel — and who spread his love for the music on radio and among visitors who joined him to listen to the fragile disks in his basement, died on Monday at his home in Frederick, Md., one floor above his hoard. He was 86.His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Susannah Anderson. She said the cause was pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 2019.“He basically lived the songs, breathed the songs and passed them on to as many people as he could,” John Tefteller, a rare-records dealer and auctioneer, said in a phone interview. “It was his life from morning to night. I consider him a national treasure.”And any fan of his treasures could come to his house and listen to his 78s.“Anybody who got ahold of him, he’d say, ‘Come on over,’” Ms. Anderson said.From his home near the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mr. Bussard (pronounced boo-SARD) drove the country roads of the South seeking 78s that had been languishing in people’s homes. He was selective about what he brought back to his basement. He loved jazz but detested any jazz recorded after the early 1930s. He loved country music but decreed that nothing good came after 1955. Nashville? He called it “Trashville.” Rock ’n’ roll? A cancer.“How can you listen to Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw when you’ve listened to Jelly Roll Morton?” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2001. “It’s like coming out of a mansion and living in a chicken coop.”One day, in the 1960s, Mr. Bussard was driving the streets of Tazwell, a small town in Virginia — the kind of place he often canvassed door to door, asking people if they had 78s — when he met an old man who said he had some 78s at the shotgun shack where he lived.From a dusty box under the man’s bed, Mr. Bussard found some good country records (Uncle Dave Macon, the Carter family) and then the sort of mind-blowing discoveries he craved: a 78 on the Black Patti label, which recorded jazz, blues and spirituals in the late 1920s.“‘Oh my Gahhd!’” he recalled thinking in the liner notes to his CD “Down in the Basement: Joe Bussard’s Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s” (2002). “It was all I could do to keep my hands from trembling.”“So I laid it down, you know, and said, ‘Oh, that’s nice,” he continued. “The old man says, ‘Oh, them, there’s a lot of them in there.’”There were 15 Black Patti records, and the old man, who didn’t care for them, asked for $10 for the bunch. Years later, Mr. Bussard said, he was offered $30,000 for one of them, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues” by Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull. He didn’t sell it.“When I leave this world,” he added, “I think I’m gonna have that record laying on top of me in my coffin.”Mr. Bussard with an early record by the country music star Jimmie Rodgers, a particular favorite.Ted Anthony/Associated PressMr. Bussard built his life around his records. After working in a supermarket and in his family’s farm supply business, he held no regular job after the late 1950s. He was supported by his wife, Esther (Keith) Bussard, a hairdresser, and his parents.“It’s like my mom and I were in one world, he was in another,” Susannah Anderson said in a phone interview. “It was hard. He was like an absent father, even though he was in the house.”In a profile of Mr. Bussard in Washington City Paper in 1999, his wife was quoted as saying that if she had not been a “born-again, spirit-filled Christian, who the day I married him made a commitment to God,” she “would have left long ago.”But, she added, she loved music as well (she blared bluegrass records in another part of the house while her husband blared his music from the basement), respected his collection and appreciated that he was “saving it for history.”Mr. Bussard found kinship in people like Ivy Sheppard, a disc jockey and 78 collector with whom he recorded radio programs for several stations including WAMU in Washington and WBCM in Bristol, Va., all built mostly around his rare records but also including some of hers. He recorded shows for a variety of stations over more than 40 years.Ms. Sheppard recalled that she and Mr. Bussard often talked for hours on the phone while listening to records. She described visiting his basement as “the greatest experience in the world.”She added, “I’m lost in this world without that crazy old man. He was my best friend.”Joseph Edward Bussard Jr. was born in Frederick on July 11, 1936. His father ran a farm supply business, and his mother, Viola (Culler) Bussard, was a homemaker.When he was 7 or 8, Joe began stocking up on records by Gene Autry, the star of western movies who was known as “the Singing Cowboy”; within a few years he heard the country singer Jimmie Rodgers and was smitten. When he couldn’t find any of Rodgers’s records at a local store, he began hunting for them, knocking on local doors until a woman gave him a box that contained two of Rodgers’s 78s.As a teenager, he began hosting a local radio show from his parents’ basement. When he got his driver’s license, he expanded his search for the records he loved — the 78s made of hard, brittle shellac resin, the format that preceded vinyl — while canvassing in Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina.It became an obsession, one that delighted him and made him dance and play air sax, air guitar and air banjo in his basement. (He also played the guitar and mandolin.)He made one last trip a month ago, to a flea market in Emmittsburg, Md., in search of 78s, but didn’t find any.“He had a lot of record hunting left in him,” Ms. Anderson said, adding that there were no plans, for now, to move the collection.Mr. Bussard in his basement in 1965. He not only collected 78s; he also built a studio there to make his own.Collection of Marshall WyattMr. Bussard not only collected 78s; he also built a basement studio in his parents’ house in the 1950s to make his own. Under his Fonotone label, he recorded artists like the Possum Holler Boys, a country and rockabilly band, and the Tennessee Mess Arounders, a blues group (he was a member of both), as well as the influential fingerstyle guitarist John Fahey. (He later moved his collection and his studio to the house he shared with his wife and daughter.)A five-CD collection containing 131 of Mr. Bussard’s 78s, “Fonotone Records: Frederick Maryland (1956-1969),” was released in 2005 by Dust-to-Digital and nominated for a Grammy Award for best boxed or special limited-edition package.In 2003, Mr. Bussard was the subject of a documentary, “Desperate Man Blues: Discovering the Roots of American Music,” directed by Edward Gillan.In addition to Ms. Anderson, he is survived by three granddaughters. His wife died in 1999.Once, in a little coal town in southwest Virginia, Mr. Bussard asked a gas station attendant where he could find records and was told to go to a nearby hardware store. When he got there, the owner guided him to a cache of 5,000 records, which had never been played.“The first one I pulled out was ‘Sobbin’ Blues,’ by King Oliver on Okeh, absolutely new, at least a $400 record,” he excitedly recalled in the Washington City Paper interview, referring to a record label founded in 1918. “The next one I pulled out was ‘Jackass Blues’ on Vocalion by the Dixie Syncopators.” He picked out four stacks of 78s and paid $100.“I was so high when I went out of that store,” he said, “I could have floated.” More