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      in Music

      Sue Thompson, Who Sang of ‘Norman’ and Sad Movies, Dies at 96

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      She started out a country singer, but she found fame and pop-chart success in the early 1960s with catchy novelty songs, as well as the occasional ballad.Sue Thompson, who after more than a decade of moderate success as a country singer found pop stardom in the early 1960s with hook-laden novelty hits like “Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)” and “Norman,” died on Thursday at the home of her daughter and caregiver, Julie Jennings, in Pahrump, Nev. She was 96.Her son, Greg Penny, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.With a clear, somewhat girlish voice that brought sass to humorous ditties but that could also be used to good effect on a ballad, Ms. Thompson was part of a wave of female vocalists, like Connie Francis and Brenda Lee, who had hits in the late 1950s and early ’60s.Her breakthrough came when she was paired with the songwriter John D. Loudermilk, who wrote her first big hit, “Sad Movies,” a done-me-wrong tune about a woman who goes to a movie alone when her boyfriend says he has to work late, only to see him walk in with her best friend on his arm.The song cracked the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the fall of 1961, and before long she was back in the Top 10 with another Loudermilk song, “Norman,” in which she turned that rather unglamorous male name into an earworm. (“Norman, Norman my love,” Ms. Thompson cooed in the chorus, surrounding the name with oohs and hmms.)Mr. Loudermilk also wrote an elopement novelty, “James (Hold the Ladder Steady),” which did moderately well for Ms. Thompson in 1962. That year she also showed what she could do with a ballad, having modest success with “Have a Good Time,” a song, by Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, Tony Bennett recorded a decade earlier.The British Invasion soon eclipsed this kind of light fare, but Ms. Thompson had one more pop success, in 1964, with Mr. Loudermilk’s “Paper Tiger.”In 1966 she traveled to Vietnam to entertain the troops. Because she was accompanied by only a trio, she could go to more remote bases than bigger U.S.O. acts, exposing her to greater danger.“Tonight we are at Can Tho, a huge American air base,” she wrote to her parents. “You can see the fighting (flashes from guns), hear the mortars, etc.”“We’re fairly secure most of the time,” she continued, “but must be aware that things can pop right in our midst.”The trip left her shaken.“A heartbreaking — and heartwarming — experience,” she wrote. “I will never be the same. I saw and learned unbelievable things.”Mr. Penny said that his mother was ill for weeks afterward, and that she long suspected that she had been exposed to Agent Orange. She underwent a sort of awakening, he said, becoming a vegetarian and developing an interest in spiritual traditions, Eastern as well as Western.Despite becoming ill after the first trip, she went on other tours to entertain troops, including one the next year on which Mr. Penny, just a boy, accompanied her. They traveled to Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and elsewhere. Vietnam had also been on the itinerary, but that part of the trip never happened.“I remember getting the communication while we were on the road in Okinawa,” Mr. Penny said in a phone interview. “They said it was just too dangerous.”When Ms. Thompson returned to performing stateside, she also returned to country music, releasing a number of records — including a string recorded with Don Gibson — and leaving behind the little-girl sound of her hits.“I don’t want to be ‘itty bitty’ anymore,” she told The Times of San Mateo, Calif., in 1974. “I want to project love and convey a more mature sound and a more meaningful message.” Country music, she said, was a better vehicle for that because “country fans pay more attention to what is being said in a song.”Ms. Thompson performing at a Country Music Association luncheon in New York in 1963.PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesEva Sue McKee (she picked her stage name out of a phone book) was born on July 19, 1925, in Nevada, Mo. Her father, Vurl, was a laborer, and her mother, Pearl Ova (Fields) McKee, was a nurse. In 1937, during the Depression, her parents moved to California to escape the Dust Bowl, settling north of Sacramento. When she was in high school the family moved again, to San Jose.As a child Ms. Thompson was entranced by Gene Autry, and she grew up envisioning herself as a singing cowgirl. Her mother found her a secondhand guitar for her seventh birthday, and she performed at every opportunity as she went through high school.In 1944 she married Tom Gamboa, and while he fought in World War II, she had their daughter, Ms. Jennings. She also worked in a defense factory, Mr. Penny said.Her wartime marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but her singing career soon began in earnest. Ms. Thompson won a talent show at a San Jose theater, which led to appearances on local radio and television programs, including those of Dude Martin, a radio star in the Bay Area who had a Western swing band, Dude Martin’s Roundup Gang.In the early 1950s she became the lead vocalist on a TV show that Mr. Martin had introduced in the Los Angeles market, and she cut several records with his band, including, in 1952, one of the first versions of the ballad “You Belong to Me.” Later that year it became a hit for Jo Stafford, and in the 1960s it was covered by the Duprees.Ms. Thompson and Mr. Martin married in December 1952, but they divorced a year later, and Ms. Thompson soon married another Western swing star with his own local TV show, Hank Penny. That marriage ended in divorce in 1963, but the two continued to perform together occasionally for decades.The country records Ms. Thompson made on the Mercury label in the 1950s never gained much traction, but that changed when she signed with Hickory early in 1961. “Angel, Angel,” another ballad by the Bryants, garnered some attention — Billboard compared it to the Brenda Lee hit “I Want to Be Wanted” — and then came “Sad Movies.”That breakthrough hit was something of an accident. In a 2010 interview on the South Australian radio show “The Doo Wop Corner,” Ms. Thompson said she recorded it only after another singer had decided not to.“I inherited the song,” she said, “and I was really happy and excited when it turned out to be such a hit for me.”Even before her pop hits Ms. Thompson was a familiar sight on stages in Nashville and Nevada as well as on the country fair circuit, and the hits made her even more in demand in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Reno, Nev., and elsewhere. Gravitating between country and pop came easily.“Most popular songs actually are country-and-western songs with a modern instrumental background,” she told The Reno Gazette-Journal in 1963.Ms. Thompson said her favorite among the songs she recorded was “You Belong to Me.” About a decade ago, when she was in her 80s, Greg Penny, a record producer who has worked with Elton John and other top stars, recorded her singing the song to a guitar accompaniment. Carmen Kaye, host of “The Doo Wop Corner,” gave the demo its radio premiere during the 2010 interview, Ms. Thompson still sounding sweet and clear.Her fourth husband, Ted Serna, whom she had known in high school and married in 1993, died in 2013. In addition to Ms. Jennings and Mr. Penny, she is survived by eight grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.Ms. Jennings, in a phone interview, told about a time when her mother, on tour in Vietnam, asked to visit soldiers in the infirmary who couldn’t come to her stage show. One badly injured young man, when introduced to her, said, “I don’t give a darn who’s here; I just want my mama.” Ms. Thompson sat with him for a long while, asking all about his mother, helping him conjure good memories.“Three years later,” Ms. Jennings said, “my mother was working in Hawaii, and he brought his mother in there and introduced her to my mom.” More

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      in Movies

      How Lip-Syncing Got Real

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      Not long ago, lip-syncing was the domain of subversive drag queens, or pop stars that the media saw as talentless. Now it’s how scrappy amateurs get famous.Sally ThurerFor several weeks, Netflix has been insisting that I watch its gender-swapped remake of the ’90s teen romantic comedy “She’s All That.” This version — naturally, “He’s All That” — stars Tanner Buchanan as the high school outcast who needs to be whipped into prom-king shape and Addison Rae as the popular girl who does the whipping. It is Rae’s first movie, but she is ubiquitous on TikTok, where her central mode of performance is breezily dancing and lip-syncing to clips of rap songs and ephemeral bits of internet video. When I finally relented and cued up Netflix, I realized that I’d never heard her actual voice.It’s not a good movie. The bubbly charm that vaulted Rae from her Louisiana bedroom to TikTok fame fizzles on a studio set. As the resuscitated plot wheezes through its paces, Rae seems to be struggling to keep up. But the meta story interested me. Rae’s trajectory recalls the arc of “Singin’ in the Rain,” the classic musical about a silent-film star who stumbles in the jump to talkies. In that movie, the star masks her horrible voice by lip-syncing to a sweet-sounding actress hiding behind the curtain. The difference is that Addison Rae became famous by overtly co-opting other people’s sounds. And it is her world, TikTok, that represents the thrilling emerging medium.Acting as if you are singing when you are not singing — lip-syncing has been an object of American popular fascination for a century. Not too long ago, it could even prompt a pop-cultural panic. Framed as a weapon of talentless pop stars and their cynical handlers, it came to represent the height of crass media manipulation. But now the opposite feels true: Lip-syncing has been refashioned as a tool of the appealingly scrappy amateur. Addison Rae can don a crop top, perkily mouth along to a lyric about Percocet and be anointed Hollywood’s new girl next door.

      @addisonre HES ALL THAT NETFLIX FRIDAY ♬ original sound – Tristen🧃 How did we get here? Lip-syncing was so ubiquitous in early musicals that in 1952, “Singin’ in the Rain” relied on it even as it critiqued it: Debbie Reynolds, playing the actress who sings for the star, was herself partially dubbed with the voice of the unheralded singer Betty Noyes. But while films were using lip-syncing to build pitch-perfect Hollywood numbers, drag performers were doing it out of sly necessity. As Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez detail in “Legendary Children,” their cultural history of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” drag shows were criminalized in early 20th-century America, and evading harassment meant performing at underground clubs and house parties where live music was often out of reach. While movie musicals hoped their lip-syncing created a naturalistic illusion, drag leaned into the artifice, building a commentary on the source material by challenging its gender norms.In mainstream spaces, that artifice has been eyed with suspicion, wrapped up not just in homophobia but also a fear of technology, which might threaten to reprogram the essence of human culture itself. As the Christian Science Monitor asked in 1990, “Is advancing technology leading us into a musical world where nothing is ‘real’?” Occasionally, that tension builds into a culture-wide authenticity crisis.In the early ’90s, the German pop duo Milli Vanilli scandalized the record industry by lip-syncing to uncredited studio singers, Pavarotti was sued for lip-syncing to himself at an Italian concert, and state lawmakers introduced a flurry of bills attempting to regulate dubbing. The pattern repeated itself in 2004, when Ashlee Simpson was pilloried for her lip-sync fail on “Saturday Night Live,” an online petition begged Britney Spears to actually sing on tour, and Elton John said that lip-syncing artists “should be shot.” Finally, in 2013, the controversy reached the Capitol, as journalists grilled Beyoncé about singing with a prerecorded track at Barack Obama’s second inauguration. This time, when she explained that she was a perfectionist using an approved industry tactic, the press actually applauded.Lip-syncing has since swept American culture both high and low. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” busted drag performance out of gay clubs and cabarets and into America’s living rooms. Along the way, it made campy spectacle into a mainstream vehicle for telling personal truths, and fashioned drag queens into, as my colleague Shane O’Neill has put it, the cultural avatars of being yourself. (So successful was the show that it was swiftly co-opted into heterosexual cringe, via the celebrity reality competition “Lip Sync Battle.”)It is now perfectly acceptable for pop stars to lip-sync in live performances, as long as they supply a fantastical enough show in return. This spring, lip-syncing even ascended to the opera: In Opera Philadelphia’s short film “The Island We Made,” the “Drag Race” winner Sasha Velour appears as a spacey maternal spirit, channeling the singer Eliza Bagg’s voice through her glittery red lips. And this fall, you can take a Zoom lip-syncing course with the performance scholar M.B Boucai, integrating the psychological gesture technique of Michael Chekhov and the mime tradition of Jacques Lecoq.Even as lip-syncing reaches new artistic heights, TikTok has democratized it, encouraging its billion global users to casually sing along. The app accommodates performance styles as disparate as Rae executing basic cheerleading moves and a girl mouthing the Counting Crows’ “Shrek 2” track “Accidentally in Love” over youthful images of the Unabomber. On a crowdsourced app, it makes sense for the central creative feature to have a low barrier to entry. Just as Instagram made everyone a hipster photographer with its vintage filters, TikTok turns its audience into experimental mash-up artists, with self-conscious nods to artifice baked into the experience.Besides, as our experience grows increasingly mediated, we’ve come to appreciate the skills of the people who do the mediating. Much of TikTok’s charm derives from its lo-fi aesthetic, its janky green-screen effects and shaky hand-held shots. There is no longer some suspicious Hollywood power broker pulling the strings. (Or if there is, he has swooped in later, after the TikToker is already internet famous.) The app has taken all of the hallmarks of Hollywood manipulation — dubbing, but also airbrushing and C.G.I. — and put them in the user’s hands, where they have employed them in hypnotic, surprising, occasionally beautiful ways.In the drag tradition, lip-syncing freed the body of the physical demands of singing, cracking open stunning new visual possibilities. Lip-syncing on TikTok is less about testing the limits of the body than exploring the boundaries of the phone. Some of the app’s most interesting content is made by young people broadcasting from under their parents’ roofs, and in a sense they are practicing their own kind of clandestine burlesque, playing with their identities amid nondescript backgrounds The tech may be new, but the performances are as pure as singing into a hairbrush.Addison Rae is not a standout lip-syncer, but that is not the point of her. A drag queen lip-syncs with spectacular effort and razor-sharp precision, but Rae telegraphs the opposite, wearing the practice with a flirtatious lightness and evincing the middling technique of an amateur. Her following on the app (84.6 million) feels unjustified by her skill set, but her approachability is part of the appeal. Perhaps you could be her, if you were born with superior tooth enamel and a preternatural awareness of your most flattering angles. Which is not to say that the actual job of TikTok star is easy: When Rae failed to post for a week in 2020, internet headlines speculated that she was pregnant, or dead.Rae’s earliest TikToks are staged in carpeted rooms featuring bare walls and inert ceiling fans, but as she rose in popularity, her backgrounds grew increasingly glamorous — Hollywood group house, infinity pool, Kardashian inner sanctum. The early frisson of her videos, which played off a girl next door unexpectedly surfing the cultural currents to stardom, has dimmed. Now that the self-reinforcing TikTok algorithm has ensured her hegemony on the app, she is swiftly invading more traditional entertainment spheres. You can find her on YouTube, where she sings the brief yet tedious pop single “Obsessed”; at Sephora, where she sells her branded makeup line; and now on Netflix, which has signed her to a multi-picture deal.Boucai, the Zoom instructor, told me that lip-syncing accesses a transgressive remixing tradition developed among marginalized communities: “It’s a way of being able to perform yourself through what you can’t be — through the impossibility of what you can’t be.” Drag rests on heightening and exposing the contradictions of identity, and the best TikTok material does the same. But the app also serves up a buffet of content that only smooths those contradictions into unnerving new forms.In a piece for Wired documenting the evolution of digital blackface on TikTok, Jason Parham observed that Black culture “works like an accelerant” on the app, driving the popularity of white creators who virtually port Black sounds through their own bodies. Here the casualness of a lip-syncing performance becomes discomfiting: For a white creator, Black culture can be assumed and shrugged off with the ease of a costume change.Speaking of bad makeovers: “He’s All That” should represent Rae’s debut as a fully formed star persona, no longer borrowing other people’s cultural expressions but staking a claim to her own. Instead she looks stilted, vacant, lost. A cleverer remake of “She’s All That” (itself a take on “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady”) might have taken a lip-syncing TikTok star and refashioned her into someone who had something to say, maybe with the help of a disciplinarian drag mother. Instead we have Rae, just going through the motions. Through figures like her, lip-syncing has finally become not a scandal, or a triumph, but a bore. More

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      in Theater

      'Moulin Rouge! The Musical' Wins Tony for Best Musical

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      “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” the lavish stage production about a nightclub in turn-of-the-century Paris, won a Tony Award for best musical on Sunday, notching its 10th win of the night, the biggest haul of any show.Adapted from Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film, “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” opened on Broadway in July 2019, months before the first whispers about Covid-19, and had more than seven months of performances before the shutdown.“It feels a little odd to me to be talking about one show that’s best musical,” Carmen Pavlovic, a producer of the show, said as she accepted the award. “I feel that every show of last season deserves to be thought of as the best musical. The shows that opened, the shows that closed — not to return — the shows that nearly opened, and of course the shows that paused and are fortunate enough to be reborn.”The musical — which centers on the romance between Christian, who is new to Paris, and Satine, a cabaret performer and star of the Moulin Rouge — features dozens of pop songs, from 1980s Tina Turner to 2008 Beyoncé. After an 18-month hiatus, it reopened at the Al Hirschfeld Theater on Friday.The show won nine Tonys earlier in the night, including best choreography, best direction of a musical, and best lead actor and featured actor in a musical.During the pandemic, the show’s Tony-nominated lead actress, Karen Olivo, quit the show, saying that she was disappointed by Broadway’s lack of response to recently published allegations that the powerful producer Scott Rudin had long been abusive toward staff members. Olivo was replaced by Natalie Mendoza, who appeared in the original film version.Just four new musicals were eligible for this award, and one of them, “The Lightning Thief,” was shut out by nominators. More

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      in Music

      The Surveillance Apparatus That Surrounded Britney Spears

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      An account by a former employee of the security team hired by Ms. Spears’s father created the most detailed portrait yet of the singer’s life under 13 years of conservatorship.Britney Spears’s father and the security firm he hired to protect her ran an intense surveillance apparatus that monitored her communications and secretly captured audio recordings from her bedroom, including her interactions and conversations with her boyfriend and children, according to a former employee of the security firm.Alex Vlasov, the employee, supported his claims with emails, text messages and audio recordings he was privy to in his nine years as an executive assistant and operations and cybersecurity manager for Black Box, the security firm. He came forward for a new documentary by The New York Times, “Controlling Britney Spears,” which was released on Friday.Recording conversations in a private place and mirroring text messages without the consent of both parties can be a violation of the law. It is unclear if the court overseeing Ms. Spears’s conservatorship was aware of or had approved the surveillance. Mr. Vlasov’s account, and his trove of materials, create the most detailed portrait yet of what Ms. Spears’s life has been like under the conservatorship for the past 13 years. Mr. Vlasov said the relentless surveillance operation had helped several people linked to the conservatorship — primarily her father, James P. Spears — control nearly every aspect of her life.“It really reminded me of somebody that was in prison,” said Mr. Vlasov, 30. “And security was put in a position to be the prison guards essentially.”In response to detailed questions from The Times, a lawyer for Mr. Spears issued a statement: “All of his actions were well within the parameters of the authority conferred upon him by the court. His actions were done with the knowledge and consent of Britney, her court-appointed attorney, and/or the court. Jamie’s record as conservator — and the court’s approval of his actions — speak for themselves.”Alex Vlasov, a former employee of Black Box Security, decided to share his information after hearing Ms. Spears’s speech to the court in June. He said a surveillance operation had helped several people linked to the conservatorship control nearly every aspect of Ms. Spears’s life.Victor Tadashi SuarezEdan Yemini, the chief executive and founder of Black Box Security, also did not respond to detailed questions. In a statement, his lawyer said, “Mr. Yemini and Black Box have always conducted themselves within professional, ethical and legal bounds, and they are particularly proud of their work in keeping Ms. Spears safe for many years.”Ms. Spears’s lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, said in a statement: “Any unauthorized intercepting or monitoring of Britney’s communications — especially attorney-client communications, which are a sacrosanct part of the legal system — would represent a shameful violation of her privacy rights and a striking example of the deprivation of her civil liberties.”“Placing a listening device in Britney’s bedroom would be particularly inexcusable and disgraceful, and corroborates so much of her compelling, poignant testimony,” Mr. Rosengart said. “These actions must be fully and aggressively investigated.”Mr. Vlasov said his superiors had often told him that the severe surveillance measures were necessary to properly protect Ms. Spears and that she wanted to be in the conservatorship. He said he had felt compelled to share his information after hearing Ms. Spears’s comments to the court in June, when she excoriated the judicial system, her conservators and her managers. She called the arrangement abusive.Ms. Spears’s father, who is known as Jamie, was appointed conservator in 2008, shortly after Ms. Spears was twice taken to the hospital by ambulance for involuntary psychiatric evaluations amid a series of public struggles and concerns around her mental health and potential substance abuse. He was given broad control over her life and her estate, including the power to retain round-the-clock security for Ms. Spears.Mr. Spears and others involved in the conservatorship have insisted that it was a smooth-running operation that worked in the best interest of his daughter. But in the wake of Ms. Spears’s comments in court in June, the judge authorized her to choose her own lawyer, Mr. Rosengart, for the first time. Mr. Rosengart swiftly filed to remove Mr. Spears as the conservator of the singer’s estate. After consistently arguing that there were no grounds for his removal, Mr. Spears abruptly asked the court on Sept. 7 to consider whether to terminate the conservatorship entirely.Mr. Rosengart’s and Mr. Spears’s requests are expected to be considered at a hearing scheduled for Sept. 29.The security companyThe security team’s role has long been a mystery.Mr. Yemini, the Black Box Security founder, was born in Israel, and is described on a company website as having a background in the Israeli Special Forces. The Spears account helped Black Box grow from a tiny operation to a prominent player in the celebrity security industry. It counts the Kardashians, Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey among its clients.Mr. Vlasov joined Black Box in 2012 as a 21-year-old college student, excited by the opportunity to master the security industry. He started as Mr. Yemini’s assistant and grew into a role that encompassed wide responsibilities over operations and digital management. “I did everything from write his messages, write his emails, to be on all phone conversations in order to take notes for him,” Mr. Vlasov said. “I was the only person at Black Box that knew everything, really.”He generally worked at Black Box’s office in the Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles and seldom saw Ms. Spears in person, he said. But through the surveillance apparatus and his close work with Mr. Yemini and his colleagues, Mr. Vlasov said, he had a uniquely comprehensive view of her life.Edan Yemini with Ms. Spears in 2009. Mr. Yemini is the chief executive and founder of Black Box Security.AlamyMr. Vlasov said that Ms. Spears’s phone had been monitored using a clever tech setup: The iCloud account on her phone was mirrored on an iPad and later on an iPod. Mr. Yemini would have Mr. Vlasov encrypt Ms. Spears’s digital communications captured on the iPad and the iPod to send to Mr. Spears and Robin Greenhill, an employee of Tri Star Sports & Entertainment Group, the former business manager for the singer’s estate.This arrangement allowed them to monitor all text messages, FaceTime calls, notes, browser history and photographs.“Her own phone and her own private conversations were used so often to control her,” Mr. Vlasov said.In response to questions about the surveillance operation, a lawyer for Tri Star Sports & Entertainment Group said: “These allegations are not true. Ms. Greenhill was only involved in Ms. Spears’ security to the extent Ms. Spears requested her involvement, as well as Tri Star’s role of issuing the payments to the security company.” The lawyer did not respond to follow-up questions specifically asking whether Ms. Greenhill had ever received copies of or reports on the contents of Ms. Spears’s text communications.Mr. Vlasov said the reason Mr. Yemini had given for monitoring Ms. Spears’s phone was to protect her from harm and bad influences. But Mr. Spears monitored his daughter’s text-message conversations with her mother, her boyfriend, her close friends and even her court-appointed lawyer, according to screenshots of messages provided to The Times.Mr. Vlasov’s accounts of how Ms. Spears’s life was controlled by the security team were confirmed by others with firsthand knowledge of the conservatorship who requested anonymity. They said Ms. Spears essentially could not leave her home without the presence of security personnel, who would inform Mr. Yemini, Mr. Spears and Ms. Greenhill of the singer’s movements via group chat.Ms. Spears with her father in 2013. As part of the conservatorship, Mr. Spears was given broad control over his daughter’s life and her estate, including the power to retain round-the-clock security.RS-Jack/X17online.comAs conservator of the estate, Mr. Spears controls his 39-year-old daughter’s nearly $60 million fortune and has the authority to employ workers for her.Mr. Vlasov said Mr. Yemini and another Black Box employee had once given him a portable USB drive and asked him to delete the audio recordings on it.“I had them tell me what was on it,” Mr. Vlasov said. “They seemed very nervous and said that it was extremely sensitive, that nobody can ever know about this and that’s why I need to delete everything on it, so there’s no record of it. That raised so many red flags with me and I did not want to be complicit in whatever they were involved in, so I kept a copy, because I don’t want to delete evidence.”The drive, he discovered, contained audio recordings from a device that was secretly placed in Ms. Spears’s bedroom — more than 180 hours of recordings. Mr. Vlasov said he had thought the timing was curious because some of the recordings were made around the time that a court investigator visited Ms. Spears to perform a periodic review in September 2016.The New York Times reviewed the recordings to confirm their authenticity.When asked why he had continued working with Black Box despite harboring so many concerns, Mr. Vlasov said he had feared the amount of power Mr. Yemini and others had, and the possibility that they could damage his job prospects in the industry.After Ms. Spears’s impassioned remarks to the court in June, Mr. Vlasov said, his mind-set changed.Choosing to leave Black Box in April was the best decision of his life, he said, and he believes going public is the right thing to do. “I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but I’ve never regretted it,” he said.‘She did not want to be there’Ms. Spears spent time at a mental health treatment facility in 2019 — a stay that appears to have been a turning point in the conservatorship. Who exactly sent her there, for what reason and whether she went on her own volition are in dispute.Mr. Spears and others involved with the conservatorship have said that she consented to go to the facility and that she was aware that no one could force her to stay. Conservators are not allowed to force a conservatee into a mental health treatment facility against their will.“She did not want to be there,” Mr. Vlasov said. “I heard this from multiple people, including Robin and Jamie themselves when they would talk on the phone to Edan. I overheard multiple conversations where they knew Britney didn’t want to be there.”The Times obtained text messages that Ms. Spears had sent from the facility that said she felt she was there involuntarily and that she could not leave, noting that security personnel were at the door at all times. Ms. Spears told a judge later in 2019 that she had felt she was forced into the facility, according to a transcript of the closed-door hearing. She repeated that claim to the court publicly in June.Mr. Vlasov shared digital communication that showed how Ms. Spears, while in the facility, had tried to hire a new lawyer to replace her court-appointed lawyer — and that Mr. Spears and others had monitored that effort.Ms. Spears with Robin Greenhill, an employee of Tri Star Sports & Entertainment Group. Mr. Vlasov said that Ms. Spears’s phone had been monitored using a clever tech setup: The iCloud account on her phone was mirrored on an iPad and an iPod.AlamyThe prospective lawyer asked Ms. Spears if he could come talk to her. Ms. Spears responded that she didn’t think the security personnel would let her see him. “They will say no for sure to me seeing a new lawyer on my side,” she said, and proposed that he tell the security personnel that he was a plumber instead. The lawyer declined that plan. “You have to be approved by the court before I hire you, but I don’t understand how can I know I want to hire you unless I meet with you first?” Ms. Spears wrote.“Yes, it’s a Catch-22 situation,” the lawyer said.In a text message sent a week after the initial exchange with the lawyer, Ms. Spears said that Mr. Spears had taken away her phone after finding out that she had been talking to a lawyer.The lawyer confirmed to The Times that the correspondence provided by Mr. Vlasov was accurate.Mr. Vlasov recalled that “one of the biggest ‘aha,’ red-flag moments” in his tenure at Black Box had happened in August 2020, when Ms. Spears’s court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, sent an email to Mr. Spears’s lawyers and Mr. Yemini asking for written confirmation that Ms. Spears’s new phone was not being monitored.“Ethically, I need to get written confirmation that no one other than my client can access her calls, voice-mail messages or texts directly or indirectly,” Mr. Ingham wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The Times.Geraldine Wyle, a lawyer for Mr. Spears, responded: “Jamie confirms that he has no access to her calls, voice-mail messages, or texts.”Ms. Spears in Paris for her “Piece of Me” tour in 2018. The following year, the singer spent time at a mental health treatment facility — a stay that appears to have been a turning point in the conservatorship.Marc Piasecki/Getty ImagesIn response to questions from The Times about the exchange, Ms. Wyle said, “Mr. Spears’ actions have always been proper, and in strict conformity with the law, and the orders of the Los Angeles Superior Court.”Mr. Ingham did not respond to requests for comment.Mr. Spears was particularly interested in Ms. Spears’s boyfriends, Mr. Vlasov said. The security team tailed her boyfriends in a continuing effort to look for incriminating behavior or other evidence that they might be a bad influence on Ms. Spears, he said.“There was an obsession with the men in Britney’s life,” Mr. Vlasov said.Her boyfriends were required to sign strict nondisclosure agreements, Mr. Vlasov said. An agreement signed in 2020 by her boyfriend at the time, Sam Asghari, who is now her fiancé, technically forbade him to post on social media about Ms. Spears without Mr. Spears’s prior written approval.In a confidential report by a court investigator that was obtained by The Times, the investigator wrote in 2016 that Ms. Spears had told her that she could not befriend people, especially men, without her father’s approval and that the men she wanted to date were “followed by private investigators to make sure their behaviors are acceptable to her father.”Mr. Vlasov said that Black Box Security had billed more than $100,000 in 2014 for investigating and surveilling Ms. Spears’s boyfriend at the time. The boyfriend, David Lucado, told The Times that he had been aware at the time that he was being followed by private investigators, and he said he had called 911 twice because of dangerous tailing situations. He said he believed he might have been more of a target because he was encouraging Ms. Spears to understand her legal rights under the conservatorship.‘Free Britney’ draws attentionAnother object of intense interest among those controlling Ms. Spears’s life, Mr. Vlasov said, was the so-called Free Britney movement, a growing cohort of fans that in recent years has brought heightened attention to the conservatorship case. Black Box Security sent investigators to infiltrate the group at a rally in April 2019 and to develop dossiers on some of the more active participants.“Undercover investigators were placed within the crowds to talk to fans to ID them, to document who they were,” Mr. Vlasov said. “It was all under the umbrella of ‘this is for Britney’s protection.’” He shared surveillance photographs with The Times that corresponded to photos posted by Free Britney participants that day.Megan Radford, a member of the so-called Free Britney movement, was classified as “a high risk due to her creation and sharing of information.”via Megan RadfordBlack Box prepared a “threat assessment report” dated July 2020 that included background information on several fans within the movement, including people who had popular podcasts and social media accounts like “Britney’s Gram,” “Eat, Pray, Britney,” “Lawyers for Britney” and Diet Prada. One activist, described as a young mother in Oklahoma, Megan Radford, was classified as “a high risk due to her creation and sharing of information.”An email from August 2020 sent by Mr. Yemini discussed the possibility of surveilling Kevin Wu, a fan who runs the prominent Twitter account Free Britney L.A.“They were extremely nervous, because they had zero control over the Free Britney movement and what’s going to come out of it,” Mr. Vlasov said.The fees for surveilling Ms. Spears’s boyfriend and the Free Britney participants, Mr. Vlasov said, were billed to Ms. Spears’s estate. More

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      ‘Controlling Britney Spears’ Reveals New Details of Her Life Under Conservatorship

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      A new documentary by The New York Times features interviews with key insiders and people with firsthand information about how the conservatorship controlled the pop star’s life.The New York Times Presents/FX/Hulu‘Controlling Britney Spears’Producer/Director Samantha StarkSupervising Producer Liz DayWatch on Friday, Sept. 24, at 10 p.m. on FX or stream it on Hulu.Britney Spears expressed strong objections in June to the court-sanctioned conservatorship, which was largely led by her father, that controlled her life. But how the conservatorship worked had never been fully understood.Now, after her impassioned speech to a Los Angeles court over the summer, key insiders have come forward to talk publicly for the first time about what they saw. They provide the most detailed account yet of Spears’s life under the unusual legal arrangement that, for the past 13 years, stripped away many of her rights.A new documentary by The New York Times, “Controlling Britney Spears,” reveals a portrait of an intense surveillance apparatus that monitored every move the pop star made. This new film, by the makers of the Emmy-nominated “Framing Britney Spears,” features exclusive interviews with members of Spears’s inner circle who had intimate knowledge of her life under the conservatorship.“It really reminded me of somebody that was in prison,” said a former employee of the security firm hired by Spears’s father to protect her. “And security was put in a position to be the prison guards essentially.”Watch our documentary on Friday, Sept. 24, at 10 p.m. ET on FX or stream it on Hulu.Courtesy of Felicia CulottaSenior Producer Rachel AbramsProducer Timothy MoranDirector of Photography Victor Tadashi SuarezVideo Editors Lousine Shamamian, Pierre Takal, Diana DeCilio, Geoff O’Brien“The New York Times Presents” is a series of documentaries representing the unparalleled journalism and insight of The New York Times, bringing viewers close to the essential stories of our time. More

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      Britney Spears: End Conservatorship, but Remove My Father First

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      The singer’s lawyer requested the installation of a temporary conservator, citing her need to negotiate a prenuptial agreement and ongoing “anguish and harm.”Britney Spears supports the prompt and complete termination this fall of the conservatorship that has overseen her finances and personal life since 2008, a lawyer for the singer said in a court filing on Wednesday, but she wants her father removed from the legal arrangement first.In a supplemental petition filed a week before the next scheduled hearing in the case, Mathew S. Rosengart, a lawyer for Ms. Spears, reiterated his previous calls for the immediate resignation or suspension of James P. Spears as the conservator of her estate, even as Ms. Spears pursues the dissolution of the guardianship and an investigation into her father’s conduct while in charge.“While the entire conservatorship is promptly wound down and formally terminated, it is clear that Mr. Spears cannot be permitted to hold a position of control over his daughter for another day,” Mr. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor who took over as Ms. Spears’s representative in July, wrote. “Every day Mr. Spears clings to his post is another day of anguish and harm to his daughter.”The filing follows a surprise turnaround by Mr. Spears earlier this month, when he asked the Los Angeles probate court to “seriously consider whether this conservatorship is no longer required” after more than a decade of asserting that the unique arrangement was in his daughter’s best interest. Previously, in August, lawyers for Mr. Spears said he planned to step down as conservator “when the time is right,” arguing that there were “no urgent circumstances justifying Mr. Spears’ immediate suspension.”In June, in her first detailed public comments on the conservatorship, Ms. Spears, 39, called it abusive and said she wanted to end the arrangement without having to undergo additional psychiatric evaluations.But Mr. Rosengart said on Wednesday that while Ms. Spears “fully consents” to terminating the conservatorship, the singer “rejects her father’s recounting of history and maintains that the Termination Petition was motivated by Mr. Spears’s apparent self-interest” — namely, rehabilitating his reputation, avoiding suspension and impeding Ms. Spears’s ability “to further investigate and examine his conduct since 2008.”Mr. Rosengart called for “a temporary, short-term conservator to replace Mr. Spears’s until the conservatorship is completely and inevitably terminated this fall.”Mr. Rosengart had previously requested that a certified public accountant in California, Jason Rubin, be named conservator of Ms. Spears’s estate. But on Wednesday, the lawyer withdrew that nomination and suggested another individual, John Zabel, take over from Mr. Spears on a temporary basis instead.He said Ms. Spears’s current personal conservator, Jodi Montgomery, backed both the eventual termination of the conservatorship — “subject to proper transition and asset protection” — and “the immediate and necessary suspension of Mr. Spears, by no later than September 29,” the date of the next status hearing.The lawyer also cited the singer’s recent engagement to be married, noting that Mr. Spears’s current role as conservator of the estate “would impede the ability to negotiate and consummate” a prenuptial agreement.Lawyers for Mr. Spears did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Additionally, Mr. Rosengart called for a future hearing on outstanding accounting and financial issues regarding the conservatorship, arguing that mismanagement of Ms. Spears’s estate by her father was “evident and ongoing.” The lawyer said that Mr. Spears had been served a request for discovery and a sworn deposition in August, before he filed to end the conservatorship.Mr. Rosengart cited Mr. Spears’s potential “unwarranted commissions from his daughter’s work, totaling millions of dollars”; a salary larger than Ms. Spears’s, “including for apparently-unused ‘office’ space”; his failure to negotiate or to obtain a contract with the singer’s previous business manager; and “potential self-dealing” in connection with the estate’s assets.Liz Day contributed reporting. More

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      Barbara Campbell Cooke, 85, Widow of the Slain Sam Cooke, Is Dead

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      They were teenage sweethearts, but their marriage turned tragic, and when she married the protégé singer Bobby Womack, the publicity was intense and the boos were loud.Their story started out as if lifted from one of his love songs. Sam Cooke was 18 and Barbara Campbell was only 13 when they met on the South Side of Chicago.Fifteen years later, Mr. Cooke, by then a pop superstar, was dead, murdered in a motel tryst gone awry. And only three months after his death, Barbara Campbell Cooke, his widow, would marry her husband’s protégé Bobby Womack, the gravelly-voiced soul singer and guitarist. Widely publicized, their union made them pariahs in their families, to much of the music community and to Mr. Cooke’s adoring fans.In her later years Ms. Cooke lived in relative obscurity, and when she died in April at 85, no public announcement was made, at her and her family’s wish. The death was recently confirmed by David Washington, a Detroit radio host who is close to the Cooke and Womack families. No cause was given.The Cookes’ life together and its aftermath were the stuff of Greek tragedy. Mr. Cooke, once a teenage gospel singer, was music royalty, a movie-star-handsome crooner of hits like “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World,” as well as the wrenching “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which would become a civil rights anthem.The son of a preacher, he took a firm stand in playing the American South, refusing to perform for segregated audiences. He was a canny businessman who retained the rights to his work and built a publishing and recording company to promote the work of others. He was a voracious reader, of everything from James Baldwin to William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” (Aretha Franklin, who as a young singer was often on tour with him, remembered buying the book just because he had it.)He was also a voracious womanizer. Mr. Cooke was 33 when he was shot by the manager of a $3-a-night motel in Los Angeles in December 1964 while chasing a prostitute who had stolen his clothes and money. Conspiracy theories still surround the death.Barbara was his teenage sweetheart but only one of many girlfriends. She had their daughter, Linda, when she was 17; three other women would also have daughters by Mr. Cooke.Barbara and Sam had married and divorced other people before marrying each other in Chicago in 1959, with Mr. Cooke’s disapproving father, the Rev. Charles Cook, performing the ceremony. The couple settled down in Los Angeles in a vine-covered Cape in the Hollywood area. (Mr. Cooke had added an “e” to his name at the start of his career.)The marriage was a hard bargain. Mr. Cooke, steely in his ambition and chronically unfaithful, went about his life while Ms. Cooke fended for herself. In his exhaustive biography “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke” (2005), Peter Guralnick noted how Ms. Cooke, whom he had interviewed at length, had tried to keep her end up, attempting to read James Baldwin at her husband’s prompting and joining a group of philanthropic African American women known as the Regalettes. And she had her own affairs, as she explained to Mr. Guralnick.In 1963, their third child, Vincent, drowned in their pool when he was 18 months old. A year later, Mr. Cooke was dead.When Mr. Cooke died, Ms. Cooke was still numb from grief over her son’s death and humiliated by the tawdry circumstances of her husband’s murder, she told Mr. Guralnick. She said she had welcomed the 19-year-old Mr. Womack into the house as a kind of protector. She was 29 at the time. At her urging, they married in early 1965.In his own memoir, “Bobby Womack: My Story” (2006), Mr. Womack likened Ms. Cooke’s proposal to a scene out of the “The Graduate,” the 1967 film in which a dazed and disillusioned young man is seduced by a friend of his parents. “If you promise to give me five years,” Ms. Cooke told Mr. Womack, by his account, “I will give you a lifetime. You know, whatever you need to do. I just need you to walk with me here.”Mr. Womack wrote of his new wife: “She could, and did, take a lot. She could endure.” He added: “She and Sam were a pair. They lived each other. They really did.”The marriage of Ms. Cooke and the soul-singer and guitarist Bobby Womack, a protégé of Sam Cooke’s, attracted wide publicity in 1965. Mr. Cooke had been murdered three months earlier. EBONY MediaBut it upset many people to see Mr. Womack, sometimes in Mr. Cooke’s clothes, squiring Mr. Cooke’s widow about. The couple received hate mail, including a package containing a baby doll in a coffin. At a Nancy Wilson concert, when Ms. Wilson introduced the couple sitting in the audience, the crowd booed. In his telling, Mr. Womack, goaded by his new wife, took to cocaine. He also began a sexual relationship with the Cookes’ daughter, Linda, by then a teenager. When Barbara found them in bed, she shot Mr. Womack, the bullet grazing his temple. (Ms. Cooke was not charged, according to Mr. Womack’s book.) They divorced in 1970.Years later, Linda Cooke married Mr. Womack’s brother Cecil, and the couple became a recording duo, Womack & Womack. Linda now goes by the name Zeriiya Zekkariyas, a nod to her African heritage.Ms. Cooke and Bobby Womack had a son, whom they named Vincent, after the Cookes’ drowned baby. Vincent Womack struggled with drugs and alcohol, his father wrote, and committed suicide in 1986 when he was 21.Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack’s brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”Barbara Campbell and her twin sister, Beverly, were born on Aug. 10, 1935, in Chicago. She attended Doolittle Elementary School. Mr. Cooke had graduated from high school when they met, but Barbara, a teenage mother, worked two jobs to support herself and her child.In 1986, when Mr. Cooke was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Ms. Cooke stood by Mr. Cooke’s father to accept the award on the singer’s behalf.“I think if Sam were able to be here tonight, he would be thrilled just to see me on this stage,” Mr. Cooke’s father declared. (The elder Mr. Cook had not initially been thrilled with his son’s transition from gospel to secular music.)Ms. Cooke is survived by Ms. Zekkariyas and another daughter, Tracey Cooke; her twin sister, Beverley Lopez; and a granddaughter.Family members and Mr. Guralnick declined to speak about Ms. Cooke’s life and death, citing her wish for privacy.But Ms. Cooke had the last words in Mr. Guralnick’s nearly 750-page biography. The author quoted her reminiscing about falling in love with Mr. Cooke, and he with her, and about their wandering through Chicago’s Ellis Park in the snow when they were teenagers.“We’d walk around the park and fantasize,” she told Mr. Guralnick. “We didn’t have a dime between us, but you’d have thought I was the princess and he was the prince. Every time a Cadillac went by, I’d say, ‘That’s our chauffeur. He’s coming to take us to our mansion.’”She added: “Everybody wants a happy ending. That’s the way I see it.” More

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      Sarah Dash, the ‘Glue’ of the Vocal Trio Labelle, Is Dead at 76

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      She brought her church-rooted soprano and high harmonies to the rock and funk powerhouse best known for the No. 1 hit “Lady Marmalade.”Sarah Dash, a founding member of the groundbreaking, million-selling vocal trio Labelle, died on Monday. She was 76.Her death was announced on social media by Patti LaBelle and Nona Hendryx, the other members of Labelle. They did not say where she died or what the cause was.Ms. Dash brought her church-rooted soprano and high harmonies to Labelle, which began as a 1960s girl group before reinventing itself as a socially aware, Afro-futuristic rock and funk powerhouse, costumed in glittery sci-fi outfits and singing about revolution as well as earthy romance. In 1974, Labelle had a No. 1 hit, “Lady Marmalade,” and performed the first concert by a pop group — and a Black group — at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.In Ms. LaBelle’s 1996 autobiography, “Don’t Block the Blessings,” she wrote, “It was perfect harmony, the way we sounded together, the way we fit together, the way we moved together.”Ms. Hendryx, speaking by phone on Monday, described Ms. Dash as “a little ball of energy.” She added that Ms. Dash had played a crucial role in Labelle’s vocal interplay.“Sarah was very meticulous about vocal parts,” Ms. Hendryx said. “Patti and I would just want to do whatever we wanted to do, and Sarah had really great ears and was really great with harmony. That was her strength. She was the glue.”Labelle reached its commercial peak with the 1974 album “Nightbirds,” produced by Allen Toussaint with a New Orleans backup band and featuring the hit single “Lady Marmalade.”Sarah Dash was born in Trenton, N.J., on Aug. 18, 1945, the seventh of 13 children of Abraham and Mary Elizabeth Dash. Her father was a pastor, her mother a nurse. She grew up singing in the Trenton Church of Christ choir and turned to secular music as a teenager. She met Ms. Hendryx when the two girls’ church choirs shared a bill, and invited her to join her in the Del-Capris, a local doo-wop quintet.In 1961, Ms. Dash and Ms. Hendryx joined Patricia Holte and Cynthia Birdsong, members of a Philadelphia group, the Ordettes, to form a quartet, which they named the Blue Belles. Because there was already another group called the Bluebells, Ms. Holte adopted the name Patti LaBelle and the group became Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles (sometimes spelled Blue Belles or Bluebells).Their first hit was not actually by them; “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman” was recorded by a Chicago girl group, the Starlets. But because of contractual complications, the single was credited to the Bluebelles, who performed it on tour and on television.The Bluebelles had minor hits of their own with gospel-charged versions of standard songs including “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Danny Boy,” and the group worked through the 1960s on the R&B circuit, recording on the Newtown, Cameo-Parkway and Atlantic labels. For years, they played three shows a night, up to 300 nights a year, at clubs and theaters; in New York City, they became known as the Sweethearts of the Apollo.Labelle performing on Cher’s television variety show in 1976. From left: Nona Hendryx, Ms. Dash and Patti LaBelle.CBS via Getty ImagesMs. Birdsong left the group to join the Supremes in 1967, but the trio persevered. In 1966, the group had performed on the BBC pop program “Ready, Steady, Go!,” and the members had stayed in contact with a producer from the show, Vicki Wickham. Ms. Wickham became their manager, along with the Who’s management team, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert.The Bluebelles metamorphosed into Labelle in 1970. Abandoning the formal gowns and wigs of a girl group for jeans, tie-dye and Afros, the group moved from the R&B circuit to rock clubs like the Bitter End in Manhattan.In 1971, Labelle released its self-titled debut album and collaborated with Laura Nyro on her album “Gonna Take a Miracle”; the group also opened for the Who on an arena tour. The trio’s 1972 album, “Moon Shadow,” started with the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”; its 1973 album, “Pressure Cookin’,” featured a medley of the Thunderclap Newman song “Something in the Air” and Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”Along with its sociopolitical messages, Labelle adopted a new look designed by Larry LeGaspi: “campy space costumes of channel-quilted metallic leather, disclike cowls and boots with stratospherically high stacked heels,” as Guy Trebay wrote in The New York Times. Labelle was at the forefront of glam-rock and Afro-Futurism.While Ms. LaBelle’s acrobatic voice often dominated Labelle’s arrangements, Ms. Dash was prominent in songs like “(Can I Speak to You Before You Go to) Hollywood.”Labelle reached its commercial peak with the 1974 album “Nightbirds,” produced by Allen Toussaint with a New Orleans backup band. Although most of its songs were written by Ms. Hendryx, its hit was by Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan: “Lady Marmalade,” a tale of a memorable New Orleans prostitute, with the refrain “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?”Labelle made two more albums, “Phoenix” and “Chameleon,” before breaking up in 1977, with its members pulling in different musical directions: disco for Ms. Dash and Ms. LaBelle, rock for Ms. Hendryx. They moved into solo careers, and Ms. Dash started hers with a hit in 1978: “Sinner Man,” from her solo album simply titled “Sarah Dash,” the first of four she made in the 1970s and ’80s. “Oo-La-La, Too Soon,” from her 1980 album “Oo-La-La, Sarah Dash,” was turned into a commercial jingle for Sasson jeans.Ms. Dash in performance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 2012. After Labelle broke up in 1977, she began her solo career in 1978 with a hit single, “Sinner Man.” Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesShe also recorded widely as a session singer — with Nile Rodgers, the Marshall Tucker Band, the O’Jays, Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones. She looked back on her career in the 1990s with one-woman shows and an autobiography, “A Dash of Diva.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Dash stayed in touch with the members of Labelle and appeared on solo albums by Ms. LaBelle and Ms. Hendryx. The trio had a club hit together in 1995 with “Turn It Out,” heard on the soundtrack of the movie “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.” In 2008, Labelle reunited for a full album, “Back to Now,” followed by a tour.Ms. Dash gave her final performance on Saturday night, two days before her death, when she joined Ms. LaBelle during a performance in Atlantic City.“Sarah Dash was an awesomely talented, beautiful and loving soul who blessed my life and the lives of so many others in more ways than I can say,” Ms. LaBelle posted on social media. “And I could always count on her to have my back!” More