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- in Music
Grammys Snubs and Surprises: Bad Bunny, Rosalía, Zach Bryan and Abba
Source: Music – nytimes.com More
- in Television
How an LAPD Officer Helped Les Moonves Fight an Assault Complaint
A captain in the department, who had moonlighted as a security guard for CBS, disclosed to the network information about a confidential complaint made in 2017 against the C.E.O.When the New York attorney general’s office announced this week that the former CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves and CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, had agreed to pay $9.75 million after a state investigation found that they had concealed allegations of sexual misconduct against him, the news was accompanied by another revelation. The account from the office of Letitia James also made public how Mr. Moonves, who stepped down from CBS in 2018 after multiple misconduct allegations, and other network officials worked with a captain in the Los Angeles Police Department to suppress details of a formal sexual assault complaint against the entertainment titan. The complaint was filed with the department in 2017 by Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb, who had worked with Mr. Moonves decades earlier.The L.A.P.D. said this week that it had begun an investigation into the now retired captain’s conduct. But the circumstances surrounding the officer’s actions and Mr. Moonves’s eventual downfall, much of which has not previously been detailed publicly, highlight the powerful entertainment industry’s attempting to use any means at its disposal, including relationships with law enforcement, to try and keep allegations of misconduct quiet. And that can be especially true when the allegations involve a “V.I.P.,” as the Los Angeles police described Mr. Moonves in a referral to the county district attorney regarding the accusation, which was viewed by The New York Times.This account is based on numerous interviews, including with Ms. Golden-Gottlieb and Gil Schwartz, the former head of corporate communications for CBS; confidential notes of interviews of Mr. Moonves by CBS lawyers; a person directly familiar with how Ms. Golden-Gottlieb’s complaint was handled by the police; and documents obtained by the New York attorney general’s office. It is detailed in a forthcoming book by these two reporters, “Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy,” to be published by Penguin Press in February. The L.A.P.D. declined to comment for this article.In November 2017, a month after sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein exploded into public view, Ms. Golden-Gottlieb was watching late-night TV at her home in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles. Ms. Golden-Gottlieb, then 82, was a veteran television producer who had given up her entertainment career years earlier to teach special-needs children.“For those of you tuning in to see my interview with Louis C.K. tonight, I have some bad news,” Stephen Colbert said that night on CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Louis C.K. had canceled his appearance after The New York Times published an article in which five women described him committing acts of sexual misconduct.For Ms. Golden-Gottlieb, the revelation was the latest painful reminder of her time at Lorimar in the 1980s, when she was in charge of sitcom development. She had her own stories to tell, and as she sat on her sofa in front of the television, she decided to take action that very night — not by calling a reporter but by filing a police complaint.At first, Ms. Golden-Gottlieb did not know where to go, but she quickly found the address for the Hollywood police station, just south of Sunset Boulevard on North Wilcox.Ms. Golden-Gottlieb told the officer on duty that she had worked with Mr. Moonves while she was at Lorimar and he was the younger, fast-rising head of movies for television. One day in 1986, she said, Mr. Moonves invited her to lunch. They got in his car, and he drove her not to a restaurant, as she was expecting, but to a secluded area. There he parked, unzipped his pants, grabbed her head and forced it onto his erect penis until he ejaculated.Two years later, she said she was in his office when Mr. Moonves excused himself to get a glass of wine. When he returned, his pants were down. She ran from the room.The next day, he berated her, then threw her against a wall. She fell to the floor and couldn’t get up. She lay there crying.That was the story she told the police. She requested confidential treatment, but her complaint did not stay confidential for long.The desk officers working that night had no idea who Mr. Moonves was. But, according to a person directly familiar with how the complaint was handled, a senior watch commander recognized Mr. Moonves’s name and alerted Cory Palka, a veteran police captain for the precinct, because there was a notification protocol regarding celebrities.Mr. Palka moonlighted as a security officer for CBS and worked for the network at the Grammy Awards show from 2008 to 2014. He knew and liked Mr. Moonves. Not long after Ms. Golden-Gottlieb’s visit to the police station, Mr. Palka called Ian Metrose, the head of special events for CBS, and left a message.“Hey, Ian, it’s Cory Palka,” he said in the message, which was included in the attorney general’s report. “I know we haven’t talked in a while. I am a captain at L.A.P.D. Hollywood. Somebody walked in the station about a couple hours ago and made allegations against your boss regarding a sexual assault. It’s confidential, as you know, but call me, and I can give you some of the details and let you know what the allegation is before it goes to the media or gets out. So, all right, talk to you after a while. Bye.”Mr. Metrose promptly alerted his boss, Mr. Schwartz, who recalled in a later interview that he was shocked. Reporters from several outlets, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, had been calling him about rumors involving possible allegations against Mr. Moonves. But Mr. Moonves had earlier assured Mr. Schwartz that CBS had nothing to worry about.Earlier that month, Mr. Schwartz heard that Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker, whose reporting had helped bring down Mr. Weinstein, was making calls about Mr. Moonves. Mr. Schwartz braced himself for more. But he heard nothing. But a police report was a reportable fact. Mr. Schwartz told Mr. Metrose to get a copy, and Mr. Palka obliged, even though the report was marked “confidential” in three places. (Mr. Schwartz died in 2020, and Ms. Golden-Gottlieb in 2022. Mr. Palka did not respond to a message left on his cellphone on Thursday. CBS declined to comment and also said Mr. Metrose declined to comment.)The incidents in the report were too old to prosecute Mr. Moonves, but Ms. Golden-Gottlieb’s allegations were graphic. If the contents of a formal police complaint became public, it could be a public relations nightmare for CBS, especially in the early days of the #MeToo movement. It was a Saturday, but Mr. Schwartz called Mr. Moonves, who was at his eight-year-old son’s soccer game.Mr. Schwartz outlined the allegations.“That’s preposterous,” Mr. Moonves responded, according to Mr. Schwartz’s recollection of the conversation.“Do you know the woman?” Mr. Schwartz asked.Mr. Moonves told Mr. Schwartz that he did, that he’d had consensual sex a few times with Ms. Golden-Gottlieb and that they had been “friendly before, during and after.”Mr. Schwartz didn’t want to hear much more, in case he got calls from reporters. That way he could honestly say he didn’t know anything.Mr. Schwartz assured Mr. Moonves that he didn’t see any immediate threat. The incidents were so old that the case would never be brought to court. None of them happened while Mr. Moonves was at CBS. Still, there was always the risk that the allegations could become public. Mr. Schwartz told Mr. Moonves that he had better notify a CBS board member so that there would be no surprises.Leslie Moonves resigned from CBS in 2018 after multiple women made allegations of sexual misconduct against him.Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Moonves promised he would, though he did not do so until much later, when questioned by a lawyer representing directors on the board. A spokesman for Mr. Moonves declined to comment this week.Mr. Schwartz drafted a response to potential media inquiries. If asked, he would confirm that CBS was aware of a police investigation of Mr. Moonves, say that the CBS board had been notified and nothing more. Mr. Schwartz alerted his press team over the weekend, sending an email to one: “Watch for messages and don’t miss any please. Will explain later. I wouldn’t bother you if this wasn’t serious.”Time passed, and no reporters brought it up. Mr. Schwartz heard from numerous people who were contacted by reporters who had heard more rumors about Mr. Moonves, but none had offered any concrete allegations. But Mr. Moonves wasn’t taking any chances. Without telling Mr. Schwartz, he hired Blair Berk, a criminal defense lawyer. Ms. Berk got in touch with Mr. Palka and asked him about the police report. On Nov. 15, Mr. Palka texted Mr. Metrose and Ms. Berk to say he’d “make contact & admonish the accuser tomorrow about refraining from going to the media and maintaining ‘her’ confidentiality.”He added that they would “be the first and only point of contact” regarding the investigation. Ms. Berk did not respond to a request for comment this week.Ten days later, Mr. Moonves arranged to meet with Mr. Palka and Mr. Metrose at a Westlake Village restaurant and vineyard. Mr. Moonves stressed that he wanted the investigation closed, and they discussed contacting other public officials.But that proved unnecessary. On Nov. 30, according to the attorney general’s report, Mr. Metrose told Mr. Moonves that he had heard from Mr. Palka that they could stop worrying: “It’s a definite reject,” Mr. Metrose said, adding that there were no witnesses or corroborative evidence.In the police referral to the Los Angeles County district attorney, Ms. Golden-Gottlieb was identified only as Jane Doe. Mr. Moonves was formally designated as a “V.I.P.” The assistant district attorney reviewing the matter noted, “The applicable statutes of limitation have expired as to all three incidents.”That was the end of it, or so it seemed.Less than a year later, Mr. Farrow reported in The New Yorker on several allegations against Mr. Moonves, including from Ms. Golden-Gottlieb. On Sept. 9, 2018, in his second of two articles on Mr. Moonves, Mr. Farrow revealed the existence of the police report. That same day, Mr. Moonves resigned from CBS.Mr. Palka wrote Mr. Metrose shortly after: “I’m so sorry to hear this news Ian. Sickens me. We worked so hard to try to avoid this day. I am so completely sad.”Two days later, he wrote Mr. Moonves directly: “Les -I’m deeply sorry that this has happened. I will always stand with, by and pledge my allegiance to you. You have embodied leadership, class and the highest of character through all of this. With upmost respect.” More
- in Music
Christine Farnon, ‘Guiding Light’ of the Grammys, Dies at 97
Present at the creation, she guarded the awards’ independence and integrity but “never received the recognition she deserves,” one record producer wrote.Christine Farnon, a quiet force behind the Grammy Awards who was credited with shepherding the event from a private black-tie affair to a telecast seen by tens of millions, died on Oct. 24 in Los Angeles. She was 97.The death was confirmed by her daughter, Joanna Shipley.The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which hosts the Grammys, was conceived partly in Ms. Farnon’s kitchen in Hollywood Hills. That was one place where her husband, Dennis Farnon, a musician who became a music producer and record executive at Capitol and RCA Records, met with other musicians and music executives in founding the Recording Academy. While they deliberated, Ms. Farnon took notes.She was eventually promoted from unpaid volunteer to paid staff member, the first, and from local to national executive. She organized the first Grammy ceremony, on May 4, 1959, which included a black-tie dinner with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin at the Grand Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. She remained with the organization until 1992.The Recording Academy is the music industry equivalent of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which puts on the Oscars, and it similarly performs a number of professional functions. But it’s best known for its annual awards ceremony.Bill Ivey, who held high-level positions with the Recording Academy, including president, for more than 20 years, and who later ran the National Endowment for the Arts, said in a phone interview that the Recording Academy’s history could be defined by a division into “two eras.” There was Ms. Farnon’s tenure, when the Grammys were a fledgling event, and there was everything that came afterward, with the Grammys now the music industry standard for achievement.In the early years, “Chris was the person who internalized the values of an artist-driven academy and created a set of rules that were applied vigorously,” Mr. Ivey said.She ensured that voting privileges for Grammy Awards were restricted to those who had substantial credits as musicians, and that the same criteria were applied to presenters of the awards on TV. To honor all nominees, she fought successfully for the presenters to say, “The Grammy goes to…,” and not, “The winner is…,” arguing that the former phrase better captured excellence among equals.Ms. Farnon was just as watchful about how Grammys were used outside the ceremony itself. She scrutinized the backgrounds of movie scenes for any unauthorized appearances of Grammy trophies. When she heard that Willie Nelson was in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, she made sure that he knew that his Grammy trophies were technically owned by the Recording Academy and thus could not be seized as his. Mr. Nelson kept his trophies, Mr. Ivey said.As the Grammys became more prominent, record companies and television producers sought to exert greater influence on the awards show, but Ms. Farnon stood firm in trying to protect the Grammys’ independence.“She built an asset that was incredibly valued because it was very legitimate,” Mr. Ivey said. “It was the kind of leadership that succeeded by tapping the brakes more than by pushing on the throttle.”Pierre Cossette, the producer who first persuaded television executives to broadcast the Grammys, described Ms. Farnon similarly in a 2003 memoir, “Another Day in Showbiz,” writing, “Christine has never received the recognition she deserves for everything she did to make the Grammy Awards show the huge success that it has become.”Toward the end of her tenure, in 1984, the Grammys attracted its largest-ever audience, more than 51 million viewers, according to Billboard.When she retired, Ms. Farnon became the first woman to receive a Trustees Award, the highest honor the ceremony bestowed on non-performers. A tribute to her in the program book for that year’s ceremony was titled “The Recording Academy’s Guiding Light.”Christine Helen Miller was born on June 24, 1925, in Chicago. Her father, John, was a businessman, and her mother, Caroline (Caspar) Miller, was a homemaker.The family moved to Los Angeles when Christine was a teenager. She graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1941 and attended a public business school in the city.She and Mr. Farnon divorced in 1960. Her daughter is her sole survivor.When she received the Trustees Award, Ms. Farnon retained her characteristic modesty.“I thank God for staying so close to this wonderful organization through the years,” she said, “and for being such a good listener.” More
- in Theater
Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Is Dead at 82
She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,” she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More
- in Music
Jody Miller, Singer of ‘Queen of the House’ and More, Dies at 80
Best known for a 1965 homemaker’s reply to a hobo’s refrain, the Oklahoma native had a hit the same year with the very different “Home of the Brave.”Jody Miller, a versatile singer with a rich, resonant voice who won a Grammy Award for “Queen of the House,” a homemaker’s reply to a hobo’s refrain, and had her biggest hit with a teenage anthem, “Home of the Brave,” died on Oct. 6 at her home in Blanchard, Okla. She was 80.Her daughter, Robin Brooks, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Signed by Capitol Records as a folk singer, Ms. Miller released her first album in 1963 and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 the next year with the pop song “He Walks Like a Man.”Her career took off in 1965 when Capitol, seizing on the popularity of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” had her hastily record “Queen of the House,” which set distaff lyrics by Mary Taylor to Mr. Miller’s melody and finger-snapping rhythm.Where Mr. Miller (no relation to Ms. Miller, although they both grew up in Oklahoma) sang of “trailers for sale or rent; rooms to let, 50 cents,” Ms. Miller rhapsodized in a similarly carefree fashion about being “up every day at six; bacon and eggs to fix.”“I’ll get a maid someday,” she sang, “but till then I’m queen of the house.”The song was a crossover hit, reaching No. 5 on Billboard’s country chart and No. 12 on the Hot 100, and earned Ms. Miller the Grammy Award for best female country and western vocal performance in 1966. (Mr. Miller won five Grammys for “King of the Road” that year.)That accolade did not prevent some country radio stations from shunning another single she put out in 1965, “Home of the Brave,” an empathetic ode to a boy who is bullied and barred from school because he doesn’t wear his hair “like he wore it before,” has “funny clothes” and is “not like them and they can’t ignore it.”“Home of the brave, land of the free,” went the chorus of the song, written by the Brill Building stalwarts Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. “Why won’t you let him be what he wants to be?”Despite the opposition of some radio programmers to its anti-establishment theme, “Home of the Brave” became Ms. Miller’s best-selling U.S. single.“I loved that song,” she said in a 2020 interview for an Oklahoma State University oral history project. “Unfortunately, it got a bad rap.”Over time, Ms. Miller landed about 30 singles on the Billboard charts, 27 of them in the country category and several of those in the top five. In the 1970s she worked with the prominent Nashville producer Billy Sherrill, who guided her to another crossover hit with a cover of the Chiffons’ 1963 song “He’s So Fine,” which reached No. 5 on the country chart and No. 53 on the pop chart in 1971.Ms. Miller made her last major-label album in 1979, then mostly stayed in Oklahoma to raise her daughter and to help her husband, Monty Brooks, with his quarter-horse business. She resurfaced later with an album of patriotic material and then, after becoming a born-again Christian, sang gospel music.“I like to sing all kinds of songs, so I didn’t fit into a mold,” she told The Tulsa World in 2018.Ms. Miller at the Grammy Awards in 1966 with her fellow winners Johnny Mandel, left, and Herb Alpert. Her “Queen of the House” was named the year’s best female country vocal performance.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMyrna Joy Miller, the youngest of five sisters, was born on Nov. 29, 1941, in Phoenix, a stop on her family’s move from Oklahoma to Oakland, Calif., where her father, Johnny Bell Miller, a mechanic, had a job lined up. Her mother, Fay (Harper) Miller, was a homemaker.The family often played music and sang together. Johnny Miller was a skilled fiddler, and Myrna’s sister Patricia, whom she idolized, taught her to harmonize.Aware of their daughter’s talent, Myrna’s parents entered her in singing contests, and her father sneaked her into bars, where she would climb atop tables and, she said, “sing my heart out.” She became known as “the little girl with the big voice,” according to Hugh Foley’s book “Oklahoma Music Guide III.”The Millers eventually divorced, and when Myrna was 8 she was put on a bus to Blanchard, a small town just outside Oklahoma City, to live with her paternal grandmother.Two songs Ms. Miller heard growing up made her want to become a professional singer. One was Mario Lanza’s version of “La Donna è Mobile” from “Rigoletto.” The other was a No. 1 hit for Debbie Reynolds in 1957.“The day I knew I would devote my life to singing was the day I first heard Debbie Reynolds sing ‘Tammy,’” Ms. Miller wrote on her website.After graduating from Blanchard High School in 1959, she got a job as a secretary in Oklahoma City and moved into the Y.W.C.A., where she would practice the folk songs she learned at a local library.Her hopes of a recording career got a jump-start one night at a coffeehouse where she was the opening act for the singer Mike Settle. The popular folk trio the Limeliters came in to see Mr. Settle, but also caught Ms. Miller’s performance. Impressed, the group’s Lou Gottlieb urged her to move to California if she was serious about a singing career.She married her high school sweetheart, Mr. Brooks, in January 1962, and together they headed to Los Angeles. After arriving, they contacted the actor Dale Robertson, a fellow Oklahoman and a friend of Mr. Brooks’s family. He helped arrange an audition at Capitol Records, which quickly signed Ms. Miller and suggested that she change her first name.Her first record, “Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe,” was a collection of folk songs on which she was accompanied by session players like Glen Campbell and, she told the Oklahoma publication 405 magazine in 2012, an “unknown teenager” providing some of the backup vocals who later became known as Cher.The record’s timing was unfortunate.“By the time I cut my first LP with Capitol, folk music was on its way out,” she said. Thus began her pivot to pop and country and a career that took her to, among other places, Hawaii on a tour with the Beach Boys; television shows like “American Bandstand,” “Hullabaloo” and “Hee Haw”; and a 15-year run as a top draw in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.Her album of patriotic songs, recorded in 1987, found its way to Vice President George Bush, who invited her to sing at his campaign rallies when he ran for president the next year. When he was elected, she sang at an inaugural ball.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Miller is survived by two sisters, Carol Cooper and Vivian Cole, and two grandchildren. Her husband died in 2014.Ms. Miller’s final recording, “Wayfaring Stranger,” is to be released next month on what would have been her 81st birthday. A mix of country and gospel songs, it includes a new version of “Queen of the House” and the title song, a 19th-century spiritual that was part of her repertoire when she started out as a folk singer 60 years ago.Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More
- in Music
Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Dies at 82
She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Recording” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.That year, in the interview with The Times, she said that she thought music had the potential to be more emotionally powerful than other art forms, like dance or painting.“There’s something intangible and mysterious about music,” she said. “It can get you more; you can sob more. It’s got a stronger engine.”Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,’‘ she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More
- in Music
The Grammys Have a New Award: Songwriter of the Year
The honor is part of a slate of changes, including a best score soundtrack award for video games and a merit award for best song for social change.Coming to the Grammy Awards next year: a new prize for songwriter of the year.That award, given in recognition of “the written excellence, profession and art of songwriting,” is one of a handful of tweaks to the Grammy rules for the 65th annual ceremony.Four other new categories are coming, including best alternative music performance, Americana music performance, spoken word poetry album and score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media, the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys, announced Thursday. There will also be a new merit award for best song for social change, as chosen by a special committee.The biggest change is the songwriter award. Since the first Grammy ceremony in 1959, song of the year has been one of the most prestigious prizes, going to the composers of a single song. The first winners were Franco Migliacci and Domenico Modugno, for “Nel Blu, Dipinto di Blu” (better known as “Volare”), and the most recent prize went to Bruno Mars, Anderson .Paak and two collaborators for “Leave the Door Open.”In recent years songwriters have been lobbying the Recording Academy for greater recognition, which has come gradually. At the 60th annual Grammys in 2018, songwriters were added to the ballot for album of the year, though only if they contributed to at least 33 percent of an LP; for the 2022 show, that limit was eliminated, allowing any credited songwriter of new material to be nominated. (Samples don’t count, nor do the writers of old songs — hence Cole Porter’s omission this year for Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett’s album “Love for Sale.”) In 2021, the academy created a Songwriters and Composers Wing for its members.The new category, officially called songwriter of the year (non-classical) — though no classical counterpart exists — will go to a single songwriter or a team of writers for a given body of work. A similar approach has long been taken for producer of the year.“The intent with this new category is to recognize the professional songwriters who write songs for other artists to make a living,” said Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy. “This dedicated award highlights the importance of songwriting’s significant contribution to the musical process, and as a non-performing songwriter myself, I’m thrilled to see this award come to life.”Among the other changes this year is the establishment of “craft committees” in three classical categories. Teams of specialists will have the final say in who makes the ballot for producer of the year (classical), best engineered album (classical) and best contemporary classical composition. The change follows some grumbling in the classical world about last year’s nomination of Jon Batiste — the jazz bandleader and TV personality who won album of the year — for the contemporary composition prize. (The award went to Caroline Shaw.)The change is notable since last year the academy eliminated its controversial nominating committees, which acted as an invisible hand in dozens of categories, though craft committees were kept for categories like engineering and packaging that require special expertise.The new categories arrive after a series of reductions more than a decade ago. In 2011, for example, the academy dropped 31 categories, consolidating many separate male and female awards and cutting some in fields like classical and Latin. Two years earlier, the polka category — where annual submissions had dwindled to as few as 20 titles — was cut after a 24-year run.The latest Grammy ceremony, in April, had 86 categories. At the first one, there were 28. More
