SHAW HAD BEEN IN DECLINING HEALTH and apparently died of natural causes, his attorney and longtime friend Eddie Ezor said.
Among his other hits, some with his big band and some with his quartet, the Gramercy Five: "Frenesi," "Dancing in the Dark," "Nightmare," "Back Bay Shuffle," "Accent-tchu-ate the Positive," "Traffic Jam," "They Say," "Moonglow," "Stardust," "Thanks for Ev'rything," "Summit Ridge Drive" and "My Little Nest of Heavenly Blue."
He composed some of his songs, such as "Interlude in B-flat," a 1935 work that featured an unusual combination of clarinet and strings.
Another famous roster, his wives, included actresses Lana Turner (wife No. 3, 1940), Ava Gardner (No. 5, 1945), Evelyn Keyes (No. 8, 1957) and novelist Kathleen Winsor, author of the 1944 best-seller "Forever Amber" (No. 6, 1946).
The marriage to Keyes, best known for playing the middle of the three O'Hara sisters in "Gone With the Wind," lasted the longest, until 1985, but they led separate lives for much of that time.
"I like her very much and she likes me, but we've found it about impossible to live together," he said in a 1973 interview.
After his first burst of stardom, his good looks made Hollywood come calling. It was while filming "Dancing Coed," in 1939, that he met Turner. In 1940, he appeared in another musical, "Second Chorus," and got two Acad emy Award nominations for his musical contributions - for best score and best song, "Love of My Life."
A volatile and superbly intelligent man, Mr. Shaw hated the loss of privacy that stardom brought, had little use for signing autographs and once caused an uproar by calling jitterbugging fans "morons." He later said he was just referring to the rowdy ones.
"I could never understand why people wanted to dance to my music," he once said. "I made it good enough to listen to."
He chafed at having to play "Begin the Beguine" ad nauseam, hoping audiences would be more willing to accept new material.
He retired from performing several times - putting down his clarinet for good in the mid-1950s. After that, he lived in Spain for a time, operated a farm, and turned to literature full-time. He was a voracious reader since childhood, and had already produced a well-received autobiography, "The Trouble With Cinderella," in 1952.
"I did all you can do with a clarinet," he said. "Any more would have been less."
He put out two collections of short fiction, "I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!" and "The Best of Intentions." He spent years working on a voluminous autobiographical novel tracing the rise of a young jazz musician, whom he called Albie Snow.
"I've lived for a long time and I've learned a few things that I'm passing on," he said.
Artie Shaw was born Arthur Arshawsky on May 23, 1910, in New York City; his immigrant parents struggled to earn a living in the clothing business.
He began his professional career while still in his teens, at first playing saxophone, then switching to clarinet to take advantage of a job opportunity.
By the time he was in his early 20s, he was a highly paid member of a CBS radio orchestra. After the first of his many retirements from the music business, he returned to New York and began assembling his first orchestra. "Begin the Beguine" and fame followed not long afterward.
He enlisted in the Navy during WWII and wound up spending most of his time leading a band, giving shows for the troops.
An outspoken liberal, Mr. Shaw was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953 when it was investigating Communist influence in entertainment. For once, Mr. Shaw was contrite, telling committee members he had attended a couple of Communist meetings after the war because of his interest in social justice and world peace - but had never joined the party or given it any money.
"I hate to admit that I was a dupe, but I guess I was," he said. Committee members responded with sympathy, one telling him to go out and use his talent "to fight for true Americanism."
His only musical activity in recent years was conducting a revival band he organized in the early 1980s, featuring arrangements Mr. Shaw's bands had used in the past. He did not play his clarinet.
Mr. Shaw was often asked about his supposed rivalry with fellow clarinetist Goodman. He said: "Benny, who was every bit as dedicated as I was, wanted to be an instrumentalist - he was a superb technician - while I wanted to be a musician. I think my mind was more complex than his."
HE WAS A MAN of many mysteries and paradoxes... terrorist, statesman, autocrat and peacemaker.
Top Palestinian officials flew in to check on their leader while Arafat's 41-year-old wife, Suha, publicly accused them of trying to usurp his powers. Ordinary Palestinians prayed for his well-being, but expressed deep frustration over his failure to improve their lives.
Arafat's failure to groom a successor complicated his passing, raising the danger of factional conflict among Palestinians.
A visual constant in his checkered keffiyeh headdress, Arafat kept the Palestinians' cause at the center of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But he fell short of creating a Palestinian state, and, along with other secular Arab leaders of his generation, he saw his influence weakened by the rise of radical Islam in recent years.
Revered by his own people, Arafat was reviled by others. He was accused of secretly fomenting attacks on Isra-elis while proclaiming brotherhood and claiming to have put terrorism aside. Many Israelis felt the paunchy 5-ft., 2-inch Palestinian's real goal remained the destruction of the Jewish state.
Arafat became one of the world's most familiar faces after addressing the U.N. General Assembly in New York in 1974, when he entered the chamber wearing a holster and carrying a sprig. "Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun," he said. "Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."
Two decades later, he shook hands at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on a peace deal that formally recognized Israel's right to exist while granting the Palestinians limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The pact led to the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for Arafat, Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.
But the accord quickly unraveled amid mutual suspicions plus accusations of treaty violations, and a new round of violence that erupted in the fall of 2000 has killed some 4,000 people, three-quarters of them Palestinian.
The Israeli and U.S. governments said Arafat deserved much of the blame for the derailing of the peace process. Even many of his own people began whispering against Arafat, expressing disgruntlement over corruption, law-lessness and a bad economy in the Palestinian areas.
A resilient survivor of war with Israel, assassination attempts and even a plane crash, Arafat was born Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat Al-Qudwa on Aug. 4, 1929, the fifth of seven children of a Palestinian merchant killed in the 1948 war over Israel's creation. There is disagreement whether he was born in Gaza or in Cairo, Egypt.
Educated as an engineer in Egypt, Arafat served in the Egyptian army and then started a contracting company in Kuwait. It was there that he founded the Fatah movement, which became the core of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
After the Arabs' humbling defeat by Israel in the six-day war of 1967, the PLO thrust itself on the world's front pages by sending its gunmen out to hijack airplanes, machine gun airports and seize Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics.
"As long as the world saw Palestinians as no more than refugees standing in line for U.N. rations, it was not likely to respect them. Now that the Palestinians carry rifles the situation has changed," Arafat explained.
SALINGER DIED SATURDAY FROM HEART FAILURE following surgery last week at a hospital in Cavaillon to implant a pacemaker, his wife, Nicole "Poppy" Salinger, told The Associated Press Sunday in a telephone interview.
MRS SALINGER SPOKE FROM LE THON, near Avignon in the Provence region, where the couple had moved four years ago to run a bed-and-breakfast inn.
"He was very upset because he thought Bush was not fit to be president. He said he would leave if Bush became president and he did," Mrs. Salinger said.
He did the same in 1968 after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, she said. "He said, 'They're killing all the Ken-nedys, and he left," she said.
The cultured and outspoken Salinger rose from the ranks of newspaper journalism to become press secretary to John F. Kennedy and eventually a trusted member of the family's inner circle. He and Jacqueline Kennedy Onas-sis stayed in contact for many years following her husband's assassination, Mrs. Salinger said.
Salinger, who also served as press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, said Kennedy was a "special man" who surrounded himself with advisers who "believed in each other" and in a common mission.
"There was no barrier on the president's door," Salinger wrote in McCall's magazine in 1988. "Any of his dozen principal staffers could see him when they wanted to. They didn't need permission from a chief of staff to gain access."
A longtime print journalist, Salinger switched to television reporting after he joined ABC in 1977. In the years following he worked as the network's Paris bureau chief, chief foreign correspondent and senior editor in London.
He had left the network by 1997, when he became a prominent backer of the theory that TWA Flight 800, which crashed off Long Island in 1996 on a flight to Paris, was accidentally brought down by a Navy missile.
Salinger had said at the time that a government document showed the Navy was testing missiles off the coast of New York and had been told planes would be flying higher than 21,000 feet. The Navy was unaware that Flight 800 was flying at 13,000 feet because another commercial plane was flying above it, he said.
The National Transportation Safety Board found no evidence of a missile strike. It concluded that Flight 800 was destroyed by a center fuel tank explosion, probably caused by a spark from a short-circuit in the wiring that igni-ted vapors in the tank.
Salinger's oldest son, Stephen, said his father's health had declined noticeably when he last saw him at his home in France four weeks ago.
Although his eyes twinkled at a gift of his favorite Punch Punch Cuban cigars, "his vocabulary was limited to only a few words," Stephen Salinger said from his home in Los Angeles. "That was OK, because among the few words he could still remember and words every son wants to hear. He said 'I love you.'"
"It's the first time in my life I wasn't going to receive a prognosis on the upcoming election," Stephen Salinger said.
Mrs. Salinger said her husband suffered from aphasia and was not able to speak, but otherwise was very aware of his surroundings and recognized and enjoyed the company of his friends and family.
Born on June 14, 1925, in San Francisco, Pierre Emil George Salinger first worked on the editorial staff of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1942 to 1943. He resigned from the newspaper to enlist in the Navy, where he com-manded a sub chaser in the Pacific during World War II. He was honorably discharged with the rank of lieutenant in 1946.
Salinger, who graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1947, returned to the Chronicle after the war be-fore leaving to join Collier's Magazine as a contributing editor in 1955. Two years later, he joined Kennedy's sena-torial staff and served as his press officer in the 1960 presidential campaign.
Kennedy, Salinger said, "was not a perfect man. For all his loftiness of purpose, he did not take himself that seriously. He had no great vision of himself as a political or intellectual giant."
But Salinger said Kennedy learned from his mistakes, citing private correspondence between Kennedy and Sovi-et leader Nikita Krushchev that he said showed "two leaders of confrontational powers groping toward understanding."
Once while he was press secretary, a journalist asked him directly about Kennedy's sex life, Salinger said in a '93 Washingtonian interview.
"I gave him a 1960s answer, not a 1990s answer: 'Look, he's the president of the United States. He's got to work 14 to 16 hours a day. He's got to run foreign and domestic policy. If he's got time for mistresses after all that, what the hell difference does it make?' The reporter laughed and walked out. That was the end of the story. For sure, I couldn't get away with that in the '90s."
After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Salinger served under President Johnson before being ap-pointed to complete the term of Senator Clair Engle, D-Calif., who died in office. But Salinger lost his 1964 bid to keep the job to one-time Hollywood song-and-dance man George Murphy.
After his political career, Salinger worked as a correspondent for the French news magazine L'Express and later for ABC.
Salinger, whose mother was French, lived some 19 years in Paris, although he later made his home in New York. In 1978, the French awarded him the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, France's highest civilian honor, for increas-ing understanding between the two nations.
He is survived by his fourth wife, Nicole, and two sons, Stephen and Gregory. He had two other children who died, his wife said.
Salinger's wish was to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery following Mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Washington, DC, his wife said.
REEVE FELL INTO A COMA Saturday after going into cardiac arrest while at his New York home Wesley Combs, his publicist, told The Associated Press by phone from Washington, DC, on Sunday night.
"On behalf of my entire family, I want to thank Northern Westchester Hospital for the excellent care they provided to my husband," Dana Reeve, Christopher's wife, said in a statement. "I also want to thank his personal staff of nurses and aides, as well as the millions of fans from around the world who have supported and loved my hus-band over the years."
Reeve broke his neck in May 1995 when he was thrown from his horse during an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Virginia.
PASSIONATE ADVOCATE... Enduring months of therapy to allow him to breathe for longer and longer periods with-out a respirator, Reeve emerged to lobby Congress for better insurance protection against catastrophic injury and to move an Academy Award audience to tears with a call for more films about social issues.
He returned to directing, and even returned to acting in a 1998 production of "Rear Window," a modern update of the Hitchcock thriller about a man in a wheelchair who becomes convinced a neighbor has been murdered. Reeve won a Screen Actors Guild award for best actor in a television movie or miniseries.
"I was worried that only acting with my voice and my face, I might not be able to communicate effectively enough to tell the story," Reeve said. "But I was surprised to find that if I really concentrated, and just let the thoughts happen, that they would read on my face. With so many close-ups, I knew that my every thought would count."
In his public appearances, he was as handsome as ever, his blue eyes bright and his voice clear.
"Hollywood needs to do more," he said in the March 1996 Oscar awards appearance. "Let's continue to take risks. Let's tackle the issues. In many ways our film community can do it better than anyone else. There is no challenge, artistic or otherwise, that we can't meet."
SYMBOL OF RECOVERY... In 2000, Reeve was able to move his index finger, and a specialized workout regimen made his legs and arms stronger. He also regained sensation in other parts of his body.
Reeve's support of stem cell research helped it emerge as a major campaign issue between President Bush and John Kerry. His name was even mentioned by Kerry earlier this month during the second presidential debate.
As for the strain of traveling to Hollywood, Reeve said: "I refuse to allow a disability to determine how I live my life. I don't mean to be reckless, but setting a goal that seems a bit daunting actually is very helpful toward recovery."
His athletic, 6-foot-4-inch frame and love of adventure made him a natural, if largely unknown, choice for the title role in the first "Superman" movie in 1978. He insisted on performing his own stunts.
Although he reprised the role three times, Reeve often worried about being typecast as an action hero.
"Look, I've flown, I've become evil, loved, stopped and turned the world backward, I've faced my peers, I've befriended children and small animals and I've rescued cats from trees," Reeve told the Los Angeles Times in 1983, just before the release of the third "Superman" movie. "What else is there left for Superman to do that hasn't been done?"
ESCAPING THE CAPE... Though he owed his fame to it, Reeve made a concerted effort to, as he often put it, "escape the cape." He played an embittered, crippled Vietnam veteran in the 1980 Broadway play "Fifth of July," a lovestruck time-traveler in the 1980 movie "Somewhere in Time," and an aspiring playwright in the 1982 suspense thriller "Deathtrap."
"After the first 'Superman,' I had the compulsion to do parts that were really weird," Reeve told The Associated Press in 1987. "That freaked people out. I've passed that."
More recent films included John Carpenter's "Village of the Damned," and the HBO movies "Above Suspicion" and "In the Gloaming," which he directed. Among his other film credits are "The Remains of the Day," "The Aviator," and "Morning Glory."
Yet Reeve always will be known to movie fans as the strapping, boyishly handsome stage veteran whose charm and humor brought a new dimension to the characters of Superman and his alter-ego, Clark Kent. The film co-starred Margot Kidder as Lois Lane.
Reeve said in public appearances promoting the "Superman" films, he tried to get children to better themselves.
"They should be looking for Superman's qualities -- courage, determination, modesty, humor -- in themselves rather than passively sitting back, gaping slack-jawed at this terrific guy in boots," Reeve said.
CHILD STAR... Reeve was born Sept. 25, 1952, in New York City, son of a novelist and a newspaper reporter. He in around 10 when he made his first stage appearance -- in Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Yeoman of the Guard" at McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ.
He starred in virtually all of the theatrical productions at the exclusive Princeton Day School. By age 16, he had joined the actors' union.
After graduating from Cornell University in 1974, he landed a part as coldhearted bigamist Ben Harper on the television soap opera "Love of Life." He also performed frequently on stage, winning his first Broadway role as the grandson of a character played by Katharine Hepburn in "A Matter of Gravity."
Reeve's first movie role was a minor one in the submarine disaster movie "Gray Lady Down," released in 1978. "Superman" soon followed. Reeve was selected for the title role from among about 200 aspirants.
DEVISTATING RIDING INJURY... Active in many sports, Reeve owned several horses and competed in equestrian events regularly. Witnesses to the May 1995 accident said Reeve's horse had cleared two of 15 fences during the jumping event and stopped abruptly at the third, flinging the actor headlong to the ground.
Doctors said he fractured the top two vertebrae in his neck and damaged his spinal cord. When he finally was released from a rehabilitation institute in December 1995, he thanked staffed members "who have set the stage for my continued journey." He underwent further rehabilitation at his home in upstate New York.
While filming "Superman" in London, Reeve met modeling agency co-founder Gae Exton, and the two began a relationship that lasted several years. The couple had two sons, but were never wed.
Reeve later married Dana Morosini; they had one son, Will II. His wife became his frequent spokeswoman after the accident.
Reeve also is survived by his mother, Barbara Johnson; his father, Franklin Reeve; his brother, Benjamin Reeve; and his two children from his relationship with Exton, Matthew, 25, and Alexandra, 21.
A few months after the accident, he told interviewer Barbara Walters that he considered suicide in the first dark days after he was injured. Although he quickly overcame such thoughts when he saw his children. "I could see how much they needed me and wanted me... and how lucky we all are and that my brain is on straight."
DANGERFIELD, who became a pop culture hit in his middle age with a string of broad film comedies starting with "Caddyshack" in 1980, died at the UCLA Medical Center, where he had undergone heart valve replacement sur- gery on August 25th, spokesman Kevin Sasaki said.
Dangerfield suffered a stroke following the surgery in August and "developed infectious and abdominal complications from which he did not recover," Sasaki said.
During the past week, the entertainer emerged from a coma he had slipped into sometime after the operation, according to his wife, Joan. "When Rodney emerged, he kissed me, squeezed my hand, and smiled for the doctors," Joan Dangerfield said in a statement.
A native of New York's Long Island, Dangerfield had endured a series of health problems in recent years. Last spring, he underwent brain surgery.
A month later, Dangerfield greeted reporters at the hospital dressed in a sports shirt and Bermuda shorts, and declared, "My brain is OK. I feel like a new man." Later, responding to a medical question, he answered, "Ask me about things I'm familiar with, like drugs or prostitution."
TWO STARTS AT SHOWBIZ... Born Jacob Cohen in Babylon, New York, in 1921, Dangerfield began writing jokes as a teenager, struggling as a comic and singing waiter in the "Borscht Belt" resorts of the Catskill Mountains under the name of Jack Roy in the 1940s.
Leaving show business to earn a living as a house painter and aluminum siding salesman, he returned to the comedy circuit about a decade later, this time as Rodney Dangerfield.
He eventually opened a New York City nightclub and became a nationally recognized act with comedy albums and numerous TV appearances. Along the way he is credited with helping give a start to an impressive array of once-obscure talents who went on to become stars, among them Carrey, Seinfeld, Roseanne and the late Sam Kinison.
Moving easily from nightclubs to TV to commercials to film, Dangerfield remained popular well past the peak of his career in the 1980s, forever tugging at his tie and drawing big laughs with his catch phrase "I can't get no respect."
Dangerfield made his film debut in the 1971 low-budget comedy "The Projectionist," playing the dual supporting roles of a tyrannical cinema manager and a serial villain, The Bat.
But his big-screen breakout came in a string of rowdy comedies in the 1980s -- "Caddyshack," "Easy Money" and "Back to School." His movie appearances generally have mirrored his stand-up comedy persona, with Dangerfield playing boisterous, casually ribald characters with a rapid-fire patter of one-liners.
His later film roles included the coach of a girl's soccer team in "Ladybugs" (1992), an abusive father in Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" (1994), a tabloid TV show reporter in "Meet Wally Sparks" (1997) and a wannabe opera star in "The 4th Tenor" (2002).
"AS ONE of the original seven Mercury astronauts, Gordon Cooper was one of the faces of America's fledgling space program," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said. "He truly portrayed the right stuff, and he helped to gain the backing and enthusiasm of the American public, so critical for the spirit of exploration. My thoughts and prayers are with Gordon's family during this difficult time."
Born March 6, 1927, in Shawnee, Okla., Cooper was selected as a Mercury astronaut in April 1959. The astronauts became heroes in the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
On May 15, 1963, Cooper piloted the Faith 7 spacecraft on a 22-orbit mission that concluded Project Mercury's operational phase. He flew for 34 hours and 20 minutes.
Two years later, he served as command pilot of the Gemini 5 mission, during which he and Charles Conrad established a space endurance record by traveling more than 3.3 million miles in 190 hours, 56 minutes.
The flight proved that humans could survive in a weightless state for the length of a trip to the moon. It also helped test a new power source for future flights — fuel cells.
Cooper joined the Marines during World War II and transferred to the Air Force in 1949. He earned a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1956.
He then flew numerous flights as a test pilot in the Flight Test Division at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.
During a reunion of surviving Mercury astronauts in 1995, Cooper displayed that cocksure attitude that helped to make the astronauts heroes to a generation of American youngsters in the early 1960s.
When asked who was the greatest fighter pilot he ever saw, Cooper enthusiastically answered, "You're looking at him!"
NASA officials also remembered his contributions.
"Gordon Cooper's legacy is permanently woven into the fabric of the Kennedy Space Center as a Mercury Seven astronaut," Kennedy Space Center Director Jim Kennedy said. "His achievements helped build the foundation of success for human space flight that NASA and KSC have benefited from for the past four decades."
THE ACTRESS' HUSBAND Robert Brandt and her daughters, actresses Kelly Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis, were at their mother's side when she died Sunday at her Beverly Hills home, said Heidi Schaeffer, a spokeswoman for Jamie Lee Curtis.
The stunning blonde enjoyed a long and distinguished career, appearing in such films as the 1962 political thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" and in Orson Welles' 1958 film noir classic "Touch of Evil."
But she gained her most lasting fame in "Psycho" as the embezzling office worker who is stabbed to death in the shower by cross-dressing madman Anthony Perkins. The role earned her an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress.
Hitchcock compiled the shower sequence in 70-odd takes of two and three seconds each, for which Leigh spent seven days in the shower. Rumors circulated that she was nude, but she wore a flesh-colored moleskin.
Although tame by today's standards, the scene was shocking for the time for its brutality.
NO MORE SHOWERS... Leigh wrote in her 1995 book "Psycho: Behind the Scenes in the Classic Thriller" that the filming was easy until the last 20 seconds when she had to express total horror as her character was being slashed to death.
She often said she hadn't been able to take a shower since the movie. "It's not a hype, not something I thought would be good for publicity," she insisted. "Honest to gosh, it's true."
Leigh's entry into films occurred in cliche fashion. Born Jeanette Helen Morrison in Merced, Calif., on July 6, 1927, she was a college student when retired star Norma Shearer saw her photograph at a ski resort. Shearer recommended the teenager to talent agent Lew Wasserman, who negotiated a contract at MGM for $50 a week.
Dubbed Janet Leigh, she starred in 1947 at 19 in her first movie, "The Romance of Rosy Ridge" opposite Van Johnson. Her salary rose to $150 a week. She became one of the busiest stars at MGM, appearing in six movies in 1949.
Among her many films: "Act of Violence" (with Van Heflin), "Little Women," "Holiday Affair" (Robert Mitchum), "Strictly Dishonorable" (Ezio Pinza), "The Naked Spur" (James Stewart), "Living It Up" (Martin and Lewis), "Jet Pilot" (John Wayne), "Bye Bye Birdie" (Dick Van Dyke), "Safari" (Victor Mature).
THE IDEAL COUPLE... Leigh had been married twice before coming to Hollywood: to John K. Carlyle, 1942, annulled; and Stanley Reames, 1946-1948, divorced. In 1951 she married Tony Curtis when their stardoms were at a peak. Both their studios, MGM and Universal, expressed concerns that their immense popularity with teenagers would be hindered if they were married.
Aided by a splurge of fan magazine publicity, their appeal rose. They appeared in four films together, including "Houdini" and "The Vikings." The "ideal couple" divorced in 1963. In her 1984 autobiography, "There Really Was a Hollywood," she refrained from criticizing Curtis.
"Tony and I had a wonderful time together; it was an exciting, glamorous period in Hollywood," she said in an interview. "A lot of great things happened, most of all, two beautiful children (Kelly Curtis, Jamie Lee Curtis)." Leigh's 1964 marriage to businessman Brandt was longer lasting.
Leigh appeared with Jamie Lee in the 1980 thriller "The Fog" and made occasional television appearances in her later years.
"Touch of Evil" was "a great experience," she said in 1984, but she was disappointed with the end result: "Univeral just couldn't understand it, so they recut it. Gone was the undisciplined but brilliant film Orson had made."
She wrote in her autobiography that "The Manchurian Candidate" was "a dynamite film," though she had worried about working with Frank Sinatra: "I had heard that Frank was known for unconventional work habits, and I was apprehensive, especially in view of our friendship. I needn't have been. My experience with him revealed his absolute professionalism."
RAMONE, born John Cummings but known by the surname adopted by each of the punk group's members, died in his sleep and surrounded by friends, according to his family. The guitarist had been battling prostate cancer for about five years, and took a turn for the worse in June when he was hospitalized with an infection.
Inducted last year into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Ramones had to wait until most of their membership had died to be hailed by mainstream pop culture as a pioneering force. With Johnny's death, only one member of the original quartet, drummer Tommy Ramone, is still alive.
With songs such as "I Wanna Be Sedated," "Sheena is a Punk Rocker," "Blitzkrieg Bop," "Judy Is a Punk," and "Beat on the Brat," the Ramones created an underground sensation in the summer of 1974 with their residency at CBGB, a scruffy club in lower Manhattan. Their fashion was bowl haircuts and ripped jeans, and their musical pedigree was equally tattered.
The band's self-titled 1976 album, recorded for less than $7,000, was a definitive work, with 14 almost cartoonish songs they raced through in less than 30 minutes. The band toured incessantly, and their 1976 foray through Europe influenced much of the U.K. rock scene.
The band had started, famously, as a group of glue-sniffing delinquents who saw in music their only chance to escape a dead-end life. With Dee Dee, Joey, and Tommy, the youngsters somehow exuded both urban fatalism and pure rock optimism. The band got its name from an alias that Paul McCartney had used to reserve hotel rooms under during the Beatles years.
Punk rock surged in popularity and the band continued to tour, but the headlines went more often to acts such as the Clash, who added complexity to the searing energy of the genre. The Ramones were a popular concert act, but their albums would come and go with little commercial impact.
By the 1990s, the hipness of the band and the success of the newer generations of artists who revered it led to a widening appreciation. In 1992, Spin magazine cited the band as one of the top seven rock acts of all time. Last year, an album of Ramones song covers was released featuring some of the top bands in rock, including U2 and Metallica .
Along with his wife, Linda Cummings, Johnny Ramone was surrounded at his death by friends Eddie and Jill McCor- mack, Rob and Sherrie Zombie and others. Other friends who gathered at his Los Angeles home included Lisa Presley, Pete Yorn, Vincent Gallo, and Talia Shire.
He is survived by his wife and his mother, Estelle Cummings.
CHILD DIED at 2:50 AM today at her home in an assisted living center in Montecito, a coastal town nearly 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles, Phila- delphia Cousins, her niece, said.
"She passed away in her sleep," Cousins said. "She was with family and friends..."
With her warbling voice, tall stature and penchant for decadent French fare, Child swooped on to the American food scene just in time. Her many cookbooks and television shows saved America from frozen TV dinners and recipes with canned mushroom soup.
The wave of food appreciation and gourmet cooking she started continues to influence eating today.
The appeal of The French Chef, her popular, no-frills PBS television show in the 1960s, was based on her "charm, lack of pretension and endearing klutziness," according to Washington Post Book World.
Her tendency to drop pans and cut herself was endearing but it was also born of necessity; the show was on such a low budget they could only afford to film scenes once.
In addition to winning an Emmy and a plethora of culinary awards, Child received two ultimate career honors. One was when The New York Times called her first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), a "master- piece;" the second when Dan Akyroyd spoofed her on Saturday Night Live. Child found his sketch hilarious.
She also helped found both the International Association of Culinary Professionals and the American Institute of Wine and Food.
Child had a refreshing down-to-earth candor that translated to how she cooked and taught: "You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces — just good food from fresh
The future chef was born Julia McWilliams on Aug. 15, 1912, in Pasadena, Calif. Her mother was a free-spirited Smith College alumna and her father an aristocratic, conservative Republican farm consultant. Child, her brother and sister were all unusually tall and athletic. Though the expectation was that Child would be a wife and mother, she attended Smith, where she was a C student.
Child moved to New York City, where she wrote ad copy. When World War II began, Child joined the Office of Strategic Services — precursor to the CIA — and was eventually sent to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
Though not much more than a glorified file clerk, in 1944, she helped the OSS cook up a shark repellant to protect the Navy's boats. Child also soon met her husband-to-be, artist, poet, gourmand and OSS cartographer Paul Child.
They married in 1946, relocated to China, and Paul introduced her to Chinese cuisine.
Child often said that her initial interest in food came from always being hungry. It wasn't until they moved to France, though, and had their first meal in Rouen, that Child found her life's true passion. "I just couldn't get over it," she once told ABC News. "I'd never eaten that way."
She soon enrolled in classes at Paris' Cordon Bleu culinary school, the only woman in her class. She supplemented her education with lessons from France's great chefs. She was also motivated by a desire to cook well for her sophisticated husband.
As a student in Paris, Child met two other kindred cooks and they spent the next nine years putting together the definitive French cookbook for Americans. The book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was a best-seller and critical hit, lauded for its helpful photographs, exquisite attention to detail and demystifying fine dining for the masses.
An infamously late bloomer, Child's first book was not published until she was 49. She did not appear on air until she was 50. In 1966, Time magazine put her on the cover, calling her "Our Lady of the Ladle."
By the late 1970s, Child was a cultural icon, appearing on television writing books and articles and a cooking column for the Boston Globe.
Then the 90s hit and, as Child told The New York Times, "nutrition has reared its ugly head." This didn't bode well for Child, whose recipes were laden with butter, salt and cream. She soon earned the title Queen of Cholesterol.
Not one to be put down, though, Child rallied against the food police, insisting that everything was fine in moderation. Her secret to a long life, she often said, was "red meat and gin."
"Now we're eating all this fat-free, fake stuff, and we're getting fat anyway because we're not satisfied," she once told People.
But Child did stay on top of the times, making concessions for shorter preparation times and lighter ingredients.
‘BON APPETIT!’... Child's "meat and gin" ethos fared her well, except for a mastectomy in 1968 due to breast cancer (the cancer never returned), her health was good. Her husband, though, had a series of strokes in 1989 and died in 1994. The two never had children.
Child, who served as a frequent culinary contributor to ABC News' Good Morning America from 1980 to 2000, con- tinued to work well into her 80s and early 90s. In 1993, she became the first woman inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame. When she gave up her Boston home and retired to Santa Barbara in 2001, she donated most of her kitchen to the Smithsonian Institution.
At her 90th birthday party in 2002, a guest held up an issue of the National Enquirer with a headline: "Most Guys Would Rather Marry Julia Child than Sexy Pamela Lee."
"Even me, an old stubborn French chef, I've learned from Julia," said fellow television chef Jaques Pepin. "She has the ability to meander through the whole fad and fashion of food and go right to the truth."
Child's verve for life came through in many moments. When "StarChefs.com" asked what advice she would give young cookbook authors, she said: "Be fun. Be helpful. Be generous."
Asked by ABC for her eating and living advice, she said "No seconds, a little bit of everything, no snacking and have a good time. I think if you follow that, you're going to be healthy and wealthy and wise."
Child's usual television sign-off became a part of the American vernacular and it also expressed her way of life: "Bon Appetit!"
ADAIR, who boasted that none of his employees ever suffered a serious injury fighting the dangerous fires, died on Saturday evening of natural causes at a Houston hospital, his daughter, Robyn Adair, told The Associated Press.
ADAIR FOUNDED RED ADAIR CO Inc. in 1959 and is credited with fighting over 2,000 land and offshore oil well fires, in-
"Retire? I don’t know what that word means," he told reporters at the time. "As long as a man is able to work and he’s productive out there and he feels good — keep at it. I’ve got too many of my friends that retired and went home and got on a rocking chair, and about a year and a half later, I’m always going to the cemetery."
Adair, who finally did retire in 1994 and sold his company, was instrumental in expediting the shipment of crucial supplies and equipment into Kuwait by testifying before the Gulf Pollution Task Force and meeting with then-President George H.W. Bush about the logistics of the firefighting operation.
THREE YEARS WORK DONE IN NINE MONTHS... Thanks in part to Adair’s expertise, a firefighting operation expected to last three to five years was completed in nine months, saving millions of barrels of oil and stopping an intercontinental air pollution disaster.
Adair barely changed his hectic pace as he continued to pursue his specialty. His concession to later years was an occasional mid-afternoon nap as a crew boss watched over operations. His hearing had deteriorated somewhat because of years of standing amid thundering well fires.
"It scares you: all the noise, the rattling, the shaking," Adair once said, describing a blowout. "But the look on everybody’s face when you’re finished and packing, it is the best smile in the world; and there is nobody hurt, and the well’s under control."
Adair spent a lifetime using explosives, drilling mud and concrete to control and cap wild well fires.
PORTRAYED BY JOHN WAYNE... His death-defying feats included battling the July 1988's explosion of the Piper Alpha platform that killed 167 men in the North Sea.
His daring and his reputation for having never met a blowout he couldn’t cap earned him the nickname "Hellfighter." In inspired the title of a 1968 movie based on Adair’s life, "The Hellfighters," in which John Wayne played him.
"That’s one of the best honors in the world, to have the Duke play you in a movie," Adair said.
Adair, who said he never showed fear in life, joked in 1991 that the hereafter would be no different.
"I’ve done made a deal with the devil," Adair said. "He said he’s going to give me an air-conditioned place when I go down there, if I go there, so I won’t put all the fires out."
JAMES DIED IN HIS SLEEP at his residence near Universal City, said publicist Sujata Murthy. James lived alone and was found dead by his personal assistant, who notified police, she said.
Publicist Maureen O’Connor, speaking on behalf of James’ three children, said they believed he died of heart failure.
"He passed away peacefully in his sleep," O’Connor said.
‘HE MADE A LOT OF PEOPLE HAPPY’... "I think he was really fantastic, he was a creator," singer Little Richard told MSNBC.
"He made a lot of people happy, he made a lot of friends and a lot of people got famous through his music," he said, referring to sampling by hip-hop artists such as MC Hammer, who used the "Super Freak" bass line in his hit "U Can’t Touch This."
The song earned James and MC Hammer the Grammy for best R&B song in 1990.
"Today the world mourns a musician and performer of the funkiest kind," said Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. "Grammy winner Rick James was a singer, songwriter and producer whose performances were always as dynamic as his personality. The ‘Super Freak’ of funk will be missed."
James was honored in June by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers with the Rhythm and Soul Heritage Award. Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. presented the award.
"His creative abilities, his instincts about music and production were just awesome," Gordy said Friday, calling James "a pioneer who took Motown in a whole new direction."
TROUBLED LIFE... With long hair elaborately styled in braids or Jheri curls, James had hit songs and albums from the 1970s into the ’80s, but by the following decade his fame began to fade as he became embroiled in drugs as well as legal problems and health troubles.
James was convicted in 1993 of assaulting two women. The first case occurred in 1991, when prosecutors said James and his girlfriend tied a woman to a chair, burned her with a hot crack pipe and forced her to perform sex acts during a cocaine binge at his West Hollywood home. He was free on bail when the second assault occurred in 1992 in James’ hotel room.
James served more than two years in Folsom Prison (in California).
In 1997, he released a new album, but a year later he suffered a stroke while performing at Denver’s Mammoth Events Center, derailing a comeback tour.
In 1998 he also underwent hip replacement surgery.
He had lately enjoyed a bit of a revival among a younger generation. Dave Chappelle recently portrayed James as violent and arrogant in a series of darkly humorous skits on his Comedy Central show. James himself also appeared on the "Chappelle’s Show" skits, which have become often-quoted cult hits.
UNIQUE VISION... James was born James A. Johnson Jr. in Buffalo, N.Y. He had long been reported to have been born in 1952, but according to his Web site and police he was born on Feb. 1, 1948.
James went to work for Motown in the 1970s and got the chance to record an album, "Come and Get It," which was released in 1978 and produced the hit "You and I." He followed with "Bustin’ out of L Seven," which had hits with the single "Bustin’ Out" and "Mary Jane," and another popular LP, "Fire it Up."
His hits in 1980 included the album "Garden of Love" and the singles "Fool on the Street," "Love Gun," "Come into My Life," and "Big Time." The following year came the well-received album "Street Songs" and the hits "Give it to Me Baby" and "Super Freak."
After a decade at Motown, James left the label as the sexually graphic themes of his music conflicted with the company’s conservative approach to pop music.
"They never totally understood what I was trying to do, where I was trying to come from with my music," he said in a 1988 interview with The Associated Press. "For the whole 10 years, it was a constant battle in me trying to acquaint them with what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it."
‘BAD BOY’ PERSONA... At the time he said he had freed himself from a cocaine addiction that threatened his life.
"There was a bad period in my life some years ago when I got into a serious cocaine habit; $10,000 to $15,000 a week," he said. "I didn’t really see it. My lawyers and my accountants and friends really saw it before I did. They saw that my usage of coke was getting to be a million-dollar-a-year habit. I didn’t see it until I went into 'rehab' and I didn’t understand it until I got out."
James said he got caught up in living the "bad boy" persona he had cultivated.
"There was a time where I was just trying to live the image wholeheartedly; I wasn’t thinking about the person, James Johnson," he said. "I mean, Rick James was just a man-made image, the image I created. Just trying to live Rick James almost killed me."
James also had his own girl group, The Mary Jane Girls. The foursome had a huge smash in the James-penned hit, "All Night Long."
He also provided hits for other stars and worked with some of them, most notably R&B songstress Teena Marie, with whom he recorded the sultry classic "Fire and Desire."
He even recorded a duet with Smokey Robinson, "Ebony Eyes," and made The Temptations contemporary with the song "Standing on the Top" in the early ’80s.
James was not married, Murthy said. He is survived by daughter Ty, sons Rick Jr. and Tazman, and granddaughters Jasmine and Charisma.
BRANDO DIED OF LUNG FAILURE Thursday evening at UCLA Medical Center, said Roxanne Moster, a spokeswoman for the medical center. She didn't give details.
BRANDO, whose frequent unpredictable behavior made him equally fascinating off the screen, was acclaimed the greatest actor of his generation. ; Those directly influenced were the generation that followed, among them Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson.
Brando was the unforgettable embodiment of the brutish Stanley Kowalski of "A Streetcar Named Desire," the mixed up Terry Malloy of "On the Waterfront" (which won him his first Oscar) and the wily Corleone of "The Godfather."
But his private life may best be defined by a line from "The Wild One," in which Brando, playing a motorcycle gang leader, is asked what he's rebelling against.
"Whaddya got?" was his reply.
His image was a studio's nightmare. Millions of words were written about his weight, his many romances and three marriages, his tireless - and, for some, tiresome - support of the American Indian and other causes, his battles with film producers and directors, his refuge on a Tahitian isle.
His most infamous act of rebellion was his refusal in 1973 to accept the best actor Oscar for "The Godfather." Instead, he sent a woman who called herself Sasheen Littlefeather to read a diatribe about Hollywood's treat-ment of Native Americans. That 'speech' was roundly booed.
Brando's private life turned tragic years later with his son's conviction for killing the boyfriend of his half sister, Cheyenne Brando, in 1990. Five years later, Cheyenne committed suicide, still depressed over the killing.
Still, the ceaseless spotlight never made him conform.
"I am myself," he once declared, "and if I have to hit my head against a brick wall to remain true to myself, I will do it."
Nothing could diminish his reputation as an actor of startling power and invention.
Starting with Kowalski in the stage version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" and a startling series of screen port-rayals, Brando changed the nature of American acting.
He was schooled at the Actors Studio in New York, learning Method acting in which the performers closely identify with the role of the character they portray. He created a naturalism that was sometimes derided for its mumb- ling, grungy attitudes. But audiences were electrified, and a new generation of actors adopted his style.
Marlon Brando Jr. came from the American heartland, born in Omaha, Neb., on April 3, 1924. His father was a distant, conservative man of French, English and Irish stock; the original family name was Brandeau.
His mother, the former Dorothy Pennebaker, was small, willowy, compassionate and filled with creative energy. Her ambitions often were unrealized, and she underwent periods of problem drinking. She had given birth to two daughters, Frances and Jocelyn, before Marlon was born.
He grew up a pudgy, mischievous boy who was called Bud to distinguish him from his father. Jocelyn was charged with getting Bud to kindergarten, a difficult task. She solved it by leading him on a leash.
Young Marlon became exposed to the theater through his mother, a leader and occasional actress in the Omaha Community Playhouse. When a leading man dropped out of a play, she pleaded with a young neighbor just home from college to take the role. Henry Fonda reluctantly agreed.
The lives of Dorothy Brando and her children were upset when the father was transferred to Evanston, IL, when Bud was 6. The family later moved to Santa Ana, Calif., and finally to Libertyville, Ill.
Bud was constantly being reprimanded for misbehavior at school, infuriating his father. The boy also displayed a talent for playacting, both in elaborate pranks and in plays and recitations. He proved a skilled pantomimist, especially in his depiction of the death of John Dillinger.
His exasperated father sent the boy to military school in an effort to instill discipline. He was expelled. Unable to join the war because of 4-F status, Brando at 19 moved to New York and stayed with his sister Frances, an art student.
Jocelyn Brando studied acting with Stella Adler, and Marlon decided to join her. It changed his life. After a week with the young man, Adler declared: "Within a year, Marlon Brando will be the best young actor in the American theater."
It took longer. He appeared in such plays as "I Remember Mama,""A Flag is Born" (a Jewish pageant with Paul Muni) and "Truckline Cafe." The latter was directed by Elia Kazan, who would remember him for "A Streetcar Named Desire" in 1947.
The Tennessee Williams play made Brando famous, and his first signs of discomfort emerged. The press made much of his motorcycle, leather jackets and T-shirts, his bongo drum playing. He hated the clamor of fans and suffered through interviews.
The image of Stanley seemed to have fallen on Brando, and he once protested to an interviewer: "Kowalski was always right, and never afraid. He never wondered, he never doubted. His ego was very secure. And he had the kind of brutal aggressiveness that I hate. I'm afraid of it. I detest the character."
Brando suffered through the tedium of his two-year contract with "Streetcar," and he never appeared in another play. For his first film he declined several big studio offers and joined independent Stanley Kramer for "The Men" in 1950. To research the story of paraplegic war veterans, he spent a month in a Veterans Administration hospital.
His impact on screen acting was demonstrated by Academy nominations as best actor in four successive years: as Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951); as the Mexican revolutionary in "Viva Zapata!" (1952); as Marc Anthony in "Julius Caesar" (1953); and as Terry Malloy in "On the Waterfront" (1954).
Although he remained in Hollywood, he refused to be part of it.
"Hollywood is ruled by fear and love of money," he told a reporter. "But it can't rule me because I'm not afraid of anything and I don't love money."
His films after "Waterfront" failed to challenge his unique talent. Most were commercial enterprises: "Desiree," "Guys and Dolls," "The Teahouse of the August Moon,""Sayonara,""The Young Lions." He tried directing himself in a Western, "One-eyed Jacks," going wildly over budget.
A remake of "Mutiny on the Bounty" in 1962, with Brando as Fletcher Christian, seemed to bolster his reputation as a difficult star. He was blamed for a change in directors and a runaway budget though he disclaimed responsibility for either.
The "Bounty" experience affected Brando's life in a profound way: He fell in love with Tahiti and its people. Tahitian beauty Tarita who appeared in the film became his third wife and mother of two of his children. He bought an island, Tetiaroa, which he intended to make part environmental laboratory and part resort.
Although he remained a leading star, Brando's career waned in the '60s with a series of failures. He was impressive, however, in several movies, among them the comedy "Bedtime Story" and the John Huston drama "Reflections in a Golden Eye."
His box office power seemed finished until Francis Ford Coppola chose him to play Mafia leader Corleone in "The Godfather" in 1972. The film was an overwhelming critical and commercial success and Brando's jowly, raspy- voiced Don became one of the screen's most unforgettable characters.
"I don't think the film is about the Mafia at all," Brando told Newsweek. "I think it is about the corporate mind. In a way, the Mafia is the best example of capitalists we have."
The actor followed with "Last Tango in Paris." One of his greatest performances was overshadowed by an uproar over the erotic nature of the Bernardo Bertolucci film.
In his memoir, "Songs My Mother Taught Me," Brando wrote of being emotionally drained by "Last Tango," an improvised film that included several autobiographical speeches.
Most of his later films were undistinguished. One hundred pounds heavier, he hired himself out at huge salaries for such commercial enterprises as "Superman" and "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery."
He was more effective as the insane army officer in Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" and parodying his "Godfather" role in the hit comedy "The Freshman."
His crusades for civil rights, the American Indian and other causes kept him in the public eye throughout his career. So did his romances and marriages. He married actress Anna Kashfi in 1957, believing her to be East Indian. She was revealed to from Wales, and they separated a year later.
In 1960 he married a Mexican actress, Movita, who had appeared in the first "Mutiny on the Bounty." They were divorced after he met Tarita. All three wives were pregnant when he married them. He had nine children.
In May 1990, Brando's first son, Christian, shot and killed Dag Drollet, 26, the Tahitian lover of Christian's half sister Cheyenne, at the family's hilltop home above Beverly Hills. Christian, 31, claimed the shooting was accidental.
After a heavily publicized trial, Christian was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and use of a gun. He was sentenced to 10 years.
Before the sentencing, Marlon Brando delivered an hour of rambling testimony in which he said he and his ex-wife had failed Christian. He commented softly to members of the Drollet family: "I'm sorry... If I could trade places with Dag, I would. I'm prepared for the consequences."
Afterward, Drollet's father said he thought Marlon Brando was acting and his son was "getting away with murder." The tragedy was compounded in 1995, when Cheyenne committed suicide. She was 25.
CHARLES DIED of acute liver disease at his Beverly Hills home Thursday at 11:35 AM, surrounded by family and friends, said spokesman Jerry Digney.
He put his stamp on it all with a deep, warm voice roughened by heartbreak from a hardscrabble childhood in the segregated South. Smiling and swaying behind the piano, grunts and moans peppering his songs, Charles’ appeal spanned generations.
His health deteriorated rapidly over the past year, after he had hip replacement surgery and was diagnosed with a failing liver. The Grammy winner’s last public appearance was alongside Clint Eastwood on April 30, when the city of Los Angeles designated the singer’s studios, built 40 years ago, as a historic landmark.
"Ray Charles was a man we particularly admired both as a friend and as an artist. We had a great time recently reminiscing together and we will all miss him very much," Eastwood said Thursday. He filmed Charles extensively for a segment in the 2003 documentary "The Blues."
Aretha Franklin called Charles "the voice of a lifetime."
"He was a fabulous man, full of humor and wit," she said in a statement. "A giant of an artist, and of course, he introduced the world to secular soul singing."
Billy Joel, a fellow piano man, said many artists tried to emulate Charles, "among them myself, Rod Stewart, Joe Cocker, Steve Winwood and countless others. Ray Charles defined rhythm and blues, soul, and authentic rock ’n’ roll."
"People remember the big hits and the visual image of him, but they forget what an innovator he was in the 50's as a jazz musician," said country music singer Marty Stuart. "He made inroads for all of us when he did ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You.’ It took country music to places it hadn’t been before."
"I lost one of my best friends and I will miss him a lot," Willie Nelson said in a statement. "Last month or so, we got together and recorded ‘It Was a Very Good Year,’ by Frank Sinatra. It was great hanging out with him for a day."
Bruce Hornsby, another singer and piano player, recalled hearing Charles perform at a tribute to Elton John about a year ago. Charles was feeble, and was walked to the electric piano, but backstage he held artists like Brian Wilson, Diana Krall, Norah Jones and John Mayer in thrall.
"When he started singing, that was it," Hornsby said. "Everyone else was playing for second."
Charles won nine of his 12 Grammy Awards between 1960 and 1966, including the best R&B recording three con-secutive years ("Hit the Road Jack," "I Can’t Stop Loving You" and "Busted")
AN AMERICAN STANDARD... His versions of other songs are also well known, including "Makin’ Whoopee" and a stirring "America the Beautiful." Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell wrote "Georgia on My Mind" in 1931, but it didn’t become Georgia’s official state song until 1979, long after Charles turned it into an American standard.
"I was born with music inside me. That’s the only explanation I know of," Charles said in his 1978 autobiography, "Brother Ray." "Music was one of my parts ... Like my blood. It was a force already with me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me, like food or water."
Charles considered Martin Luther King Jr. a friend and once refused to play to segregated audiences in South Africa. But politics didn’t take.
He was happiest playing music, teaming with such disparate musicians as Chaka Khan and Eric Clapton. Pepsi tapped him for TV spots around a powerfully simple "uh huh" theme, and he appeared in movies including "The Blues Brothers."
"The way I see it, we’re actors, but musical ones," he once told The Associated Press. "We’re doing it with notes, and lyrics with notes, telling a story. I can take an audience and get ’em into a frenzy so they’ll almost riot, and yet I can sit there so you can almost hear a pin drop."
Charles was no angel. His womanizing was legendary, and he struggled with a heroin addiction for nearly 20 years before quitting cold turkey in 1965 after an arrest at the Boston airport. Yet there was a sense of humor about even that — he released both "I Don’t Need No Doctor" and "Let’s Go Get Stoned" in 1966.
He later became reluctant to talk about the drug use, fearing it would taint how people thought of his work.
"I’ve known times where I’ve felt terrible, but once I get to the stage and the band starts with the music, I don’t know why but it’s like you have pain and take an aspirin, and you don’t feel it no more," he once said.
Ray Charles Robinson was born Sept. 23, 1930, in Albany, Ga. His father, Bailey Robinson, was a mechanic and a handyman, and his mother, Aretha, stacked boards in a sawmill. His family moved to Greenville, Fla., when Charles was an infant.
"Talk about poor," Charles once said. "We were on the bottom of the ladder."
TRAGEDY EARLY IN LIFE... Charles saw his brother drown in the tub his mother used to do laundry when he was about 5 as the family struggled through poverty at the height of the Depression. His sight was gone two years later. Glaucoma is often mentioned as a cause, though Charles said nothing was ever diagnosed.
Charles began dabbling in music at 3, encouraged by a cafe owner who played the piano. The knowledge was basic, but it made him more prepared for music classes when he was sent away, heartbroken, to the state-supported St. Augustine School for the Deaf and the Blind.
His early influences were myriad: Chopin and Sibelius, country and western stars he heard on the Grand Ole Opry, the powerhouse big bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, jazz greats Art Tatum and Artie Shaw.
By the time he was 15 his parents were dead and Charles had graduated from St. Augustine. He wound up playing gigs in black dance halls — the so-called chitlin’ circuit — and exposed himself to a variety of music, including hillbilly (he learned to yodel) before moving to Seattle.
He dropped his last name in deference to boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, patterned himself for a time after Nat "King" Cole and formed a group that backed rhythm ’n’ blues singer Ruth Brown. It was in Seattle’s red light district were he met a young Quincy Jones, showing the future producer and composer how to write music. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
THE BIRTH OF SOUL MUSIC... Charles developed quickly in those early days. Atlantic Records purchased his contract from Swingtime Records in 1952, and two years later he recorded "I Got a Woman," a raw mixture of gospel and rhythm ’n’ blues, pioneering what was later called soul. Soon, he was being called "The Genius" and was playing at Carnegie Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival.
His first big hit was 1959’s "What’d I Say," a song built off a simple piano riff with suggestive moaning from the Raeletts. Some U.S. radio stations banned the song, but Charles was on his way to stardom.
Producer Wexler, who recorded "What’d I Say," said he has worked with only three geniuses in the music busi-ness: Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Charles.
"In each case they brought something new to the table," Wexler told the San Jose Mercury News in 1994. Charles "had this blasphemous idea of taking gospel songs and putting the devil’s words to them."
Charles was one of the legends receiving Kennedy Center Honors in 1986, cited as "one of the most respected singers of his generation ... the pioneer who broke down barriers between secular and sacred styles, between black and white pop."
His last Grammy came in 1993 for "A Song for You," but he never dropped out of the music scene. He continued to tour and long treasured time for chess. He once told the Los Angeles Times: "I’m not Spassky, but I’ll make it interesting for you."
"Music’s been around a long time, and there’s going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead," he told The Washington Post in 1983. "I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it’s a big record, that’s the frosting on the cake, but music’s the main meal."
Charles, who was divorced twice and single since 1952, was survived by 12 children, 20 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. A memorial service was planned for next week at Los Angeles’ First AME Church, with burial afterward at Inglewood Cemetery.
RANDALL, WHO DEVELOPED PNEUMONIA after undergoing heart bypass surgery in December, died in his sleep Mon-day night at NYU Medical Center, according to his publicity firm, Springer Associates.
"Tony Randall’s passion for live theatre was unmatched," Jed Bernstein, the president of the League of American Theatres and Producers, said in a statement. "He was a vociferous advocate for the proposition that serious plays are the lifeblood of our culture."
Randall joked in September about how he envisioned his funeral: President Bush and Vice President Cheney would show up to pay their respects, but they’d be turned away because his family knows he didn’t like them. During a speech to the National Funeral Directors Association, he said funerals should be planned as a celebration of life and "a touch of humor doesn’t hurt a bit."
LOVABLE FUSSBUDGET... Randall won an Emmy for playing Unger opposite Jack Klugman’s Oscar Madison on the sitcom based on Neil Simon’s play and movie. The show ran from 1970-75, but Randall won after it had been can-celed, prompting him to quip at the awards ceremony: "I’m so happy I won. Now if I only had a job."
The show’s charm sprang from Randall’s chemistry and conflict with Oscar, the sloppy sportswriter he’s forced to share an apartment with after both men get divorced.
Before that, Randall was best-known as the fussbudget pal in several Rock Hudson-Doris Day movies, including 1959’s "Pillow Talk" and 1961’s "Lover Come Back."
The actor became a fixture on David Letterman’s late-night talk shows, appearing a record 70 times on the "Late Show" alone. He made fun of his own prim image by taking part in Letterman’s wacky antics, including allowing himself to be covered in mud.
And in 1993, when Conan O’Brien took over the time slot at NBC that Letterman had vacated for a new show at CBS, Randall was a guest on O’Brien’s debut episode.
After "The Odd Couple," Randall had two short-lived sitcoms, one of which was "The Tony Randall Show," in which he played a stuffy Philadelphia judge, from 1976-78.
From 1981-83, he played the title role in the sitcom "Love, Sidney," as a single, middle-aged commercial artist helping a female friend care for her young daughter.
The show was based on a TV movie in which Sidney was gay; in the TV show, the character’s orientation was im-plied, but never specified. This occurred more than a decade before the much-hyped coming-out on "Ellen" in 1997, which made Ellen DeGeneres’ character the first openly gay central figure on a network series.
For all his television work, Randall got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1998.
DEVOTION TO THEATER... In an effort to bring classic theater back to Broadway, Randall founded, and he was artistic director of the nonprofit National Actors Theatre in 1991, using $1 million of his own money and $2 million from corporations and foundations. ; The company’s first production was a revival of Arthur Miller’s classic "The Crucible," starring Martin Sheen and Michael York, which hadn’t been staged on Broadway in 40 years.
The next year, Randall’s production of Ibsen’s "The Master Builder" didn’t exactly draw raves. AP Drama Critic Michael Kuchwara called it "deadly earnest — and dull."
Subsequent performances included "Night Must Fall," "The Gin Game" and "The Sunshine Boys," in which Randall reunited with Klugman, in 1998. Randall also starred in his company’s staging of "M. Butterfly."
The actor also was socially active, lobbying against smoking in public places, marching in Washington against apartheid in the ’80s, and helping raise money for AIDS research in the ’90s.
Born Leonard Rosenberg on Feb. 26, 1920, Randall was drawn as a teenager to roadshows that came through his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
"One night, the entire town turned out to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo perform Swan Lake and Shehere-zade," he wrote. "I — and most of the audience — had never seen a ballet before. We stood and cheered, thinking it was a ’once in a lifetime’ event."
Randall attended Northwestern University before heading to New York at 19, where he made his stage debut in 1941 in "The Circle of Chalk."
After Army service during WWII from 1942-46, he returned to New York, where he appeared on radio and early television. He got his start in movies in 1957.
He was married to his college sweetheart, Florence Randall, for 54 years until she died of cancer in 1992.
"I saw her in a bank — I never saw another girl in my life. She was gorgeous, the most beautiful girl I ever saw," Randall said in a TV interview in 1995.
Later that year, he married Heather Harlan, who was 50 years his junior. Randall met her through his National Actors Theatre; former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani performed the ceremony.
Randall is survived by his second wife — who made him a father for the first time at age 77 — and their two child-ren, 7-year-old Julia Laurette and 5-year-old Jefferson Salvini.
KING, who also was host of the New York Friars Club’s celebrity roasts, which had recently returned to television on Comedy Central, died at a Manhattan hospital, said a son, Robert King.
"He always talked about the annoyances of life," Stiller said. "He was like a 'Jewish Will Rogers' ."
King played supporting roles in more than 20 films including "Bye Bye Braverman," "I, the Jury," "The Anderson Tapes," "Lovesick," "Bonfire of the Vanities," "Casino," and "Rush Hour 2." He also produced several films, including "Memories of Me," "Wolfen" and "Cattle Annie and Little Britches," and the 1997 television series "The College of Comedy With Alan King."
He said he was working strip joints and seedy nightclubs in the early 1950s when he had a revelation while watch-ing a performance by another young comedian, Danny Thomas.
"Danny actually talked to his audience," he recalled in a 1991 interview. "And I realized I never talked to my audience. I talked at ’em, around ’em and over ’em, but not to ’em. I felt the response they had for him. I said to myself, ’This guy is doing something, and I better start doing it."’
King, who until then had been using worn out one-liners, found his new material at home, after his wife persuaded him to forsake his native Manhattan, believing the suburban atmosphere of the Forest Hills sections of Queens would provide a better environment for their children.
Soon he was joking of visions of people moving from the city to the suburbs "in covered wagons, with mink stoles hanging out the back."
His rantings about suburbia, just as America was embracing it, struck a chord with the public and soon he was ap-pearing regularly on the Sullivan show, Garry Moore’s variety show and "The Tonight Show."
Bookings poured in, and he toured with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra, played New York’s showcase Paramount theater and top nightclubs around the country.
He also worked as the opening act for such music stars as Lena Horne, Billy Eckstine, Patti Page and Judy Garland, who he joined in a command performance in London for Queen Elizabeth.
After that show he was introduced to the queen and, when she asked "How do you do, Mr. King?" he said he re-plied: "How do you do, Mrs. Queen?"
"She stared at me, and then Prince Philip laughed," he recalled. ; "Thank God Prince Philip laughed."
King appeared in a handful of films in the late 1950s, including "The Girl He Left Behind," "Miracle in the Rain" and "Hit the Deck," although he didn’t care for his roles. "I was always the sergeant from Brooklyn named Kowalski," he once complained.
He also appeared on Broadway in "Guys and Dolls" and "The Impossible Years," and produced the Broadway plays "The Lion in Winter" and "Something Different."
He wrote the humor books "Anyone Who Owns His Own Home Deserves One" (1962) and "Help! I’m a Prisoner in a Chinese Bakery" (1964).
Born Irwin Alan Kniberg, he grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in Brooklyn.
"Both of them were tough neighborhoods, but I was a pretty tough kid," he recalled in 1964. "I had an answer for everything... I fought back with humor."
He married Jeanette Sprung in 1947 and they had three children, Robert, Andrew and Elaine Ray. When King was at the height of his career, he faced one son’s drug addiction and said he realized he had neglected his family.
"It’s not easy being a father," he said, "but I’ve been allowed a comeback."
He spent more time at home and his son conquered his addiction. "Now everyone kisses," he said. "We show our affections."
USTINOV, who became a U N goodwill ambassador, died of heart failure late Sunday in a Swiss clinic at Genolier, near his home in a mountain village overlooking Lake Geneva, close friend Leon Davico told The Associated Press.
One of his best-loved roles was as the Chinese sleuth in the "Charlie Chan" series. Ustinov won Hollywood Oscars for the role of Batiatus, owner of the gladiator school in "Spartacus" (1960), and as Arthur Simpson, an English small-time black marketeer in Turkey who gets caught up in a jewel heist in "Topkapi" (1965).
Michael Winner, who directed Ustinov in the 1988 movie "Appointment With Death," described the actor as a "marvelous man, a great wit, a great raconteur, a man of the world." "He was a very good actor but he wasn't used as an actor as much as he should have been because he became famous as Peter Ustinov," Winner told The Associated Press in a phone interview.
Ustinov played sleuth Hercule Poirot in Winner's adaptation of the Agatha Christie story.
"He was forever imitating people and telling jokes, so he sometimes forgot to learn the lines, which was annoy-ing," Winner said. "I always enjoyed being with him."
Born in London on April 16, 1921, the only son of a Russian artist mother and a journalist father, Ustinov claimed also to have Swiss, Ethiopian, Italian and French blood -- everything except English.
His imposing figure, variously described as resembling a teddy bear and a giant panda, began 12 pounds at birth and stayed with him throughout his career.
Ustinov was performing by age 3, mimicking politicians of the day when his parents invited Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie for dinner.
He was educated at the prestigious Westminster School, but hated it and left at 16. He made his stage debut in London in 1940, when he was 19. Ustinov turned producer at 21, presenting "Squaring the Circle" shortly before he entering the British army in 1942.
If his plays had a continuing theme, it was a celebration of the little man bucking the system. One of his most successful was "The Love of Four Colonels" which ran for two years in London's West End.
Davico, who was starting his career with UNICEF, asked Ustinov to join the U.N. children's agency as a goodwill ambassador after seeing the play.
"He was not just a writer and actor. He was someone who really tried to help," Davico said. "He was not only the funniest person I've ever met, but the most intelligent. He was an attentive citizen of the world."
Ustinov later became a staunch advocate for UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Ustinov's long service as a goodwill ambassador with the United Nations led U N Secretary General Kofi Annan to joke that Ustinov was the man to take over from him.
In a movie career lasting some 60 years, Ustinov appeared in roles ranging from Emperor Nero to Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. He won Academy Awards for supporting actor in the films "Spartacus" and "Topkapi" in the 1960s.
More recently he was the voice of Babar the Elephant, played the role of a doctor in the film "Lorenzo's Oil", and in 1999 appeared as the Walrus to Pete Postlethwaite's Carpenter in a multimillion-dollar TV movie version of Alice in Wonderland.
BERRY DIED on Friday at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Cntr after suffering a seizure at his home nearby, his wife, Gertrude Filip Berry, told the Los Angeles Times. ; His health had been precarious since he suffered brain damage and partial paralysis in a 1966 car accident.
Torrence could not be reached for comment on Mr. Berry's death.
Steeped in the surf, sun, and sand culture of Southern California youth of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mr. Berry delighted in spinning lyrics about a hot-rod-racing grandma in "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena" or driving a "woody" to "Surf City," where he envisioned "two girls for every boy." He joined Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys to co-write the lyrics for several Jan and Dean hits, including "Dead Man's Curve," "Drag City," "Surf City," and "New Girl in School."
"Jan and Brian influenced each other so much they had one of the most important friendships in popular music, particularly in developing the West Coast Sound," said Mark Moore, who is writing a biography of Mr. Berry. He said Wilson learned about producing records from Mr. Berry, and Mr. Berry gained insight on harmony from Wilson.
The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean even performed on each other's records, according to the "New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll," until their respective record companies objected. Jan and Dean's meteoric career might have soared higher if not for the April 12, 1966, accident in which Mr. Berry's silver Corvette Sting Ray hit a parked truck at 90 mph in Beverly Hills after he came off Sunset Boulevard only a few blocks from the legendary "Dead Man's Curve" of their song. Mr. Berry was severely injured, and his three passengers were killed.
Although the accident, which put Mr. Berry in a coma for 10 months, initially left him unable to talk and walk, through determination he regained the ability to walk and to speak slowly.
Mr. Berry's right hand and arm remained paralyzed, reducing his instrumental repertoire from ukulele, guitar, and most other instruments to one-handed piano. He had difficulty remembering lyrics he had written, and backstage would go over them repeatedly while listening to a Walkman.
But he resumed performing with Torrence in the late 1970s after a 1978 television movie, "Dead Man's Curve," renewed interest in Jan and Dean. The duo split briefly in 1981 when Mr. Berry developed a cocaine habit - another handicap he overcame and talked openly about.
In 1998, Mr. Berry recorded a solo CD, "Second Wave."
Known for his remarkable intelligence (his IQ reportedly was 180), Mr. Berry handled his musical career while earning a degree in zoology at UCLA. The accident halted his plans to become a medical doctor.
"I talked to him like two days ago. J.J. was in a great place," said Mark Goodman, a longtime friend who also worked with Mr. Jackson as a "VJ" when MTV started in 1981. "It's incredible, so incredibly sad it happened like this."
In a statement, MTV said Mr. Jackson's love of music and good humor helped set the tone for the cable music network in its formative years.
"He was a big part of the channel's success, and we are sure he is in the music section of heaven, with lots of
Mr. Jackson's career in broadcasting began in radio. He first gained prominence while working at WBCN in Boston in the late 1960s, then moved in 1971 to Los Angeles where he took on the afternoon radio slot at KLOS.
In the late 1970s, he worked as a music reporter for KABC-TV, then it was off to New York and MTV, where his musical knowledge, hewn over years in radio, helped ease his transition to a new format for music, Goodman said.
After five years at MTV, Mr. Jackson returned to radio in Los Angeles, including a stint hosting a nationally syndicated show on the Westwood One Radio Network. Most recently, he was working at Los Angeles' KTWV.
Goodman said Mr. Jackson had been divorced for some time and had a daughter and two grandchild- ren in the Bahamas. _________________
WINFIELD HAD BEEN IN ILL health, suffering from diabe-tes, said his agent, Michael Livingston.
The tall, imposing Winfield was the third black man to receive an Academy Award nomination for best actor when he was honored for his performance as Nathan Lee Morgan, the loving sharecropper father in the 1972 classic "Sounder." He lost the Oscar to Marlon Brando's performance in "The Godfather."
Last year, Winfield had a cameo in the ABC remake of the period piece set in the South in the 1930s. It was to be his last film role.
Cast mainly in character roles, Winfield consistently worked in film, television, and theater, receiving an Emmy in 1995 for his role as a federal judge on "Picket Fences." He had previously received Emmy nominations for his performance as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1978 miniseries "King" and another in 1979 for "Roots: the Next Generation."
Paul Edward Winfield was born in Los Angeles on May 22, 1941. His mother, Lois Beatrice, was a union organizer in the garment industry; his stepfather, Clarence Winfield, was a construction worker.
Winfield won a music scholarship to Yale University, but he accepted a scholarship in drama to the University of Oregon instead because, he said, he thought "college was scary enough without going to a rich one." He later attended several West Coast universities and left UCLA six credits short of his degree in 1964, when he was cast in a professional production of LeRoi Jones' "The Dutchman and the Toilet."
Guest-starring roles soon followed on TV's "Room 222" and "Julia," in which he played Diahann Carroll's boyfriend.
His "Sounder" leading lady, Cicely Tyson, also became his off-screen paramour. ; The two lived together for 18 months.
"I was extremely competitive," Winfield once said in explaining their parting. "I was hostile to the attention she was getting, even though it was due."
In 1975, he moved to San Francisco, and later reunited with Tyson for "King" and "A Hero Ain't Nothing But a sandwich."
Moving back to Los Angeles in the 1980s, he appeared in films such as "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" and starred on stage in Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov plays. He starred opposite Denzel Washington in Ron Milner's play "Checkmates" in Los Angeles, and repeated his role in the 1988 Broadway production.
The 1990s began on a high note with a juicy role as a judge in the 1990 hit "Presumed Innocent." He appeared on stage in Los Angeles opposite Carroll in "Love Letters" and won the Emmy for his role on "Picket Fences."
Winfield, who never married, is survived by a sister, Patricia Wilson of Las Vegas
PAAR DIED AT HIS GREENWICH, Connecticut, home as a result of a long illness, said Stephen Wells, Paar’s son-in-law. Paar’s wife of more than 60 years, Miriam, and his daughter, Randy, were by his side, Wells said.
Johnny Carson took over "The Tonight Show" in 1962. Paar had a prime-time talk show for three more seasons, then retired from television in 1965. Carson was at his Malibu, Calif., home when he got word of Paar’s death. In a statement, he said he was "very saddened to hear of his passing. He was a unique personality who brought a new dimension to late night television." Paar had taken over the flagging NBC late-night slot in July 1957; Steve Allen had departed some months earlier. Allen’s show was a variety show; Paar’s a talk show. LATE-NIGHT TALK PIONEER... "Like being chosen as a kamikaze pilot," Paar wrote in "I Kid You Not," a memoir. "But I felt sure that people would enjoy good, frank and amusing talk." They did. Viewers loved this cherubic wiseguy, someone once referred to as "like Peter Pan, if Peter Pan had been written by Mickey Spillane." Soon, everyone was staying up to watch Paar, then talking about his show the next day. Even youngsters sent to bed before Paar came on parroted his jaunty catch phrase, "I kid you not," with which he regularly certified his flow of self-revealing stories. Just why he walked away from such a breakthrough career at age 47 would become an enduring source of conjecture, possibly even for Paar. His explanation would have to suffice: that he was tired and ready to do other things. But off the air, as on, he never stopped doing the thing he did best: talk. "The only time I’m nervous or scared is when I’m NOT talking," he told The Associated Press in 1997. "When I’m talking, I know that I do it well." What he accomplished with the spoken word — not only his words but those he wooed from fellow raconteurs like Peter Ustinov, Elsa Maxwell, Hans Conreid and Genevieve — proved irresistible to his audience. FROM PUNCH TO PICKLED... Paar also played host to Muhammad Ali when he was still known as Cassius Clay, to a pleasantly pickled Judy Garland, and to the outrageous pianist-composer Oscar Levant. Entertainers Paar championed included Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett, Woody Allen and Bill Cosby. Paar’s circle of guests included leading politicians. During the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy made a triumphant appearance — so much so, that a few days after the election, Paar got a letter from Joseph P. Kennedy, the proud father, gushing, "I don’t know anybody who did more, indirectly, to have Jack elected than your own good self." But Paar was a show all by himself, just talking about himself. "I’m against psychiatry — for me, anyway," he told viewers. "I haven’t got any troubles I can’t tell standing up." A man of boundless curiosity and interests, he was charming, gracious and famously sentimental: He could shed tears, as he put it, just from "taking the Coca-Cola bottles back to the A&P." He could also be volatile, pettish and confounding. And never so much as in February 1960, when, making headlines, he emotionally told his thunderstruck audience that he was leaving his show. It was the night after a skittish NBC executive had judged obscene, and edited out, a story by Paar where the initials "W.C." were mistaken for "wayside chapel" instead of "water closet." A month later, the network managed to lure Paar back. Returning on the night of March 7, he was greeted with generous applause as he stepped before the cameras. Then he began his monologue on a typically cheeky note: "As I was saying, before I was interrupted ... " BORN TO ENTERTAIN... Born in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, Jack Harold Paar left school at 16 for a job as a radio announcer, and soon found success on various stations as a comic-disc jockey. Then, in the U.S. Army special services during World War II, he entertained troops in the South Pacific as a standup comedian. His specialty was poking fun at officers for an appreciative audience of enlisted men. ("I don’t care what you think of the colonel," he would chide, "stop using your thumbs when you salute.") In 1947, a magazine poll chose him as "the most promising star of tomorrow," but as the 1950s wore on, he had scored only as a temporary replacement on radio for Jack Benny and Arthur Godfrey, as a failed B-movie actor and a shortlived daytime TV personality. Then, within weeks of his "Tonight" debut, he was being hailed as "one of America’s most popular indoor pastimes." The talkfest came to an end in 1965. By then Paar had traded in his "Tonight Show" desk for a Friday prime-time hour. But he had made no secret that his third season of "The Jack Paar Program" would be his last. With little fanfare and — against all odds — no tears, he signed off with his June 25 show. "I have been — forgive me — I have been a success," Paar could declare three decades later, still exhibiting his blend of modesty and brashness. Then he added puckishly, "I’m as amazed as you are." Wells said Paar was hospitalized after suffering a stroke last year. Viewers came to know daughter Randy as a youngster thanks to Paar’s family-oriented tales and globe-spanning "home movies."
Carson was at his Malibu, Calif., home when he got word of Paar’s death. In a statement, he said he was "very saddened to hear of his passing. He was a unique personality who brought a new dimension to late night television."
Paar had taken over the flagging NBC late-night slot in July 1957; Steve Allen had departed some months earlier. Allen’s show was a variety show; Paar’s a talk show.
LATE-NIGHT TALK PIONEER... "Like being chosen as a kamikaze pilot," Paar wrote in "I Kid You Not," a memoir. "But I felt sure that people would enjoy good, frank and amusing talk."
They did. Viewers loved this cherubic wiseguy, someone once referred to as "like Peter Pan, if Peter Pan had been written by Mickey Spillane."
Soon, everyone was staying up to watch Paar, then talking about his show the next day. Even youngsters sent to bed before Paar came on parroted his jaunty catch phrase, "I kid you not," with which he regularly certified his flow of self-revealing stories.
Just why he walked away from such a breakthrough career at age 47 would become an enduring source of conjecture, possibly even for Paar. His explanation would have to suffice: that he was tired and ready to do other things.
But off the air, as on, he never stopped doing the thing he did best: talk.
"The only time I’m nervous or scared is when I’m NOT talking," he told The Associated Press in 1997. "When I’m talking, I know that I do it well."
What he accomplished with the spoken word — not only his words but those he wooed from fellow raconteurs like Peter Ustinov, Elsa Maxwell, Hans Conreid and Genevieve — proved irresistible to his audience.
FROM PUNCH TO PICKLED... Paar also played host to Muhammad Ali when he was still known as Cassius Clay, to a pleasantly pickled Judy Garland, and to the outrageous pianist-composer Oscar Levant. Entertainers Paar championed included Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett, Woody Allen and Bill Cosby.
Paar’s circle of guests included leading politicians. During the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy made a triumphant appearance — so much so, that a few days after the election, Paar got a letter from Joseph P. Kennedy, the proud father, gushing, "I don’t know anybody who did more, indirectly, to have Jack elected than your own good self."
But Paar was a show all by himself, just talking about himself. "I’m against psychiatry — for me, anyway," he told viewers. "I haven’t got any troubles I can’t tell standing up."
A man of boundless curiosity and interests, he was charming, gracious and famously sentimental: He could shed tears, as he put it, just from "taking the Coca-Cola bottles back to the A&P."
He could also be volatile, pettish and confounding. And never so much as in February 1960, when, making headlines, he emotionally told his thunderstruck audience that he was leaving his show. It was the night after a skittish NBC executive had judged obscene, and edited out, a story by Paar where the initials "W.C." were mistaken for "wayside chapel" instead of "water closet."
A month later, the network managed to lure Paar back. Returning on the night of March 7, he was greeted with generous applause as he stepped before the cameras. Then he began his monologue on a typically cheeky note: "As I was saying, before I was interrupted ... "
BORN TO ENTERTAIN... Born in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, Jack Harold Paar left school at 16 for a job as a radio announcer, and soon found success on various stations as a comic-disc jockey.
Then, in the U.S. Army special services during World War II, he entertained troops in the South Pacific as a standup comedian. His specialty was poking fun at officers for an appreciative audience of enlisted men. ("I don’t care what you think of the colonel," he would chide, "stop using your thumbs when you salute.")
In 1947, a magazine poll chose him as "the most promising star of tomorrow," but as the 1950s wore on, he had scored only as a temporary replacement on radio for Jack Benny and Arthur Godfrey, as a failed B-movie actor and a shortlived daytime TV personality.
Then, within weeks of his "Tonight" debut, he was being hailed as "one of America’s most popular indoor pastimes."
The talkfest came to an end in 1965. By then Paar had traded in his "Tonight Show" desk for a Friday prime-time hour. But he had made no secret that his third season of "The Jack Paar Program" would be his last. With little fanfare and — against all odds — no tears, he signed off with his June 25 show.
"I have been — forgive me — I have been a success," Paar could declare three decades later, still exhibiting his blend of modesty and brashness. Then he added puckishly, "I’m as amazed as you are."
Wells said Paar was hospitalized after suffering a stroke last year. Viewers came to know daughter Randy as a youngster thanks to Paar’s family-oriented tales and globe-spanning "home movies."
"CAPTAIN KANGAROO", a children's show, featured a large mustached, bowl-haircut Keeshan entertaining youngsters with his gentle, whimsical humor. Among the show's other characters were the puppets Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose, as well as Dancing Bear and Mr. Green Jeans.
The format was simplicity itself: Keeshan would wander through the Treasure House, wearing his distinctive big-pocketed coat, and talk with Brannum and the puppets. He'd meet with guests, tell stories, and generally entertain.
Shows were frequently interrupted with silliness, such as hundreds of ping-pong balls dropping from the ceiling or Mr. Moose's knock-knock jokes.
But the mainstay was the grandfatherly Keeshan.
"I was impressed with the potential positive relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, so I chose an elderly character," Keeshan said, according to the AP.
In a statement issued by his son Michael, Keeshan's family said: "Our father, grandfather and friend was as passionate for his family as he was for America's children. He was largely a private man living an often public life as an advocate for all that our nation's children deserve."
"Captain Kangaroo" aired in the early mornings on CBS until 1985, when the network cancelled the show to expand its morning news program.
Keeshan was named Broadcaster of the Year in 1979 by the International Radio and Television Society and was inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1998. He also spent five years as the silent Clarabell the Clown on "The Howdy Doody Show."
Keeshan was closely involved with health and child-care issues, serving on several boards and working to provide child care to the children of large corporations.
When Fred Rogers, the gentle host of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," died last year, Keeshan recalled how they often spoke about the state of children's programming, according to the AP.
"I don't think it's any secret that Fred and I were not very happy with the way children's television had gone," Keeshan said.
Born in 1927 in suburban Long Island, the future Captain Kangaroo grew up in Forest Hills, New York, and was an NBC page for his last year of high school during World War II. He joined the Marines after graduation.
He returned to his page job after his discharge from the Marines, and attended Fordham University.
Keeshan is survived by three children and six grandchildren.
Mr. Gambling worked at New York area radio station WOR, 710-AM, until his retirement in 1991.
"John A. had a feel for the people," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday. "People instinctively liked him."
Bob Bruno, vice president and general manager of WOR, called Gambling "a professional right down to the heels of his shoes."
"He had real star power," Bruno said on the air Friday. "When John came into a room, heads turned and you got those whispers. He had that presence. He was that kind of star."
Mr. Gambling began hosting the news and talk show in 1959, taking over from his father, John B. Gambling, who started the program in 1925.
"You could always turn on the radio and find old John, young John, or in-between John," John A. Gambling said in a 1990 interview with The Associated Press.
The show was known for its quiet dignity in a market increasingly dominated by shock jocks.
It held the designation "world's longest-running radio show" in the Guinness Book of World Rec-ords and was credited with providing the first heli-copter traffic report and school closings.
When Mr. Gambling retired in 1991, he called his tenure as host "a wonderful bunch of years."
"Well, I'm going to miss a lot of things, except getting up early in the morning," he said in a conversation on the air with Mayor David Dinkins.
The youngest of the three John Gamblings, John R., became the show's primary host in 1991 and was with WOR until 2000, when the station decided not to renew his contract.
John R. Gambling then moved to WABC, 770-AM, where he currently hosts "The John Gambling Show" and Bloomberg's weekly radio show, which was conducted Friday by Monica Crowley.
The funeral will be held in Florida, and a memorial service in New York will be held in the coming weeks, said John R. Gambling.
Click to visit: W O R - 7 1 0 A M New York City ________________________-
Sound track: Dion's "Abraham, Martin and John" (1968)