Category: people

The playwright has died of liver cancer only a few months after announcing the diagnosis. “Radio Golf,” the last of the 10 plays that constitute Mr. Wilson’s majestic theatrical cycle, opened at the Yale Repertory Theater last spring and has subsequently been produced in Los Angeles. It was the concluding chapter in a spellbinding story that began more than two decades ago, when Mr. Wilson’s play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” had its debut at the same theater, in 1984, and announced the arrival of a major talent, fully matured.”

“He also is one of the last great feuding writers, since Truman Capote died and Norman Mailer appears to have mellowed. The three of them — but especially Vidal and Capote — engaged in savagely entertaining literary dust-ups, in lengthy battles rife with high-toned insults and sophisticated put-downs that those of us with lesser imaginations file away for later personal use.”

“James Dean has been dead for 50 years. That’s hard to imagine, just as it’s hard to imagine that he was ever alive, at least alive in the normal sense of occupying space and being in only one place at any given time. These mundane facts — life, death, time, space — are hard to reconcile with the whole Dean package, the talent, the legend and the iconography that have accumulated around his memory in the years since his fatal smash-up on Sept. 30, 1955.”

Some celebrities seem to be not only a product of their own personality, but of their surroundings as well, and never was a backdrop more important to a public figure than New York was to Truman Capote. “Perhaps he could have flourished only in the New York that was a city of literary ambition, the one after World War II, as his biographer, Gerald Clarke, contends. Perhaps he could have flourished in any New York, especially today’s, that prizes talent and a wink, as his friend Gay Talese, the author, contends. But what is clear is that he could not have become Truman Capote in any place but New York… Capote embodied a New York story of exile, triumph and disillusion.”

After 40 years on stage, Miriam Makeba is packing it in at the end of her current tour. “Makeba, aka Mama Africa, grew up in a Johannesburg township, was jailed as a baby along with her mother, was a servant for white families and graduated to jazz singing and immortality with numbers such as Malaika, Pata Pata and Africa is Where My Heart Lies.”

Edward Gunts wons properties in areas of Baltimore that he writers about architecture. The Sun has determined that Edward Gunts had “no nefarious intent to use his position for personal gain and did not consciously report or write any articles to enhance the value of the properties he owns. Still, it also is clear that Gunts should not be investing in Baltimore real estate while writing about architecture here. Gunts has agreed to comply with The Sun’s requests that he sell all of his properties by a specific date and not write about those two neighborhoods until then. Gunts will remain the newspaper’s architecture critic.”

It isn’t every network news anchor who could inspire a collection of America’s finest musicians to take to the stage of Carnegie Hall in celebration of his memory, but as has been abudantly clear since his death from lung cancer, Peter Jennings wasn’t just any anchor. A memorial to the Canadian-born journalist held at the famous venue yesterday drew 2,000 spectators. “Reflecting Jennings’ eclectic and wide-ranging taste, performers included cellist Yo-Yo Ma, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, violinist Natalie MacMaster, and the Gates of Praise choir.”

Among this year’s 25 MacArthur Genius awardees is conjductor Marin Alsop. “The 11 women and 14 men selected for their creativity and originality range in age from 33 to 66 and also include a violinmaker, a molecular biologist, a sculptor and a laser physicist. All the winners, known as fellows, receive annual checks for $100,000 for the next five years, no strings attached.”

Greta Garbo would have been 100 today, and you don’t have to look far to find the celebrations of America’s most elusive diva. “Few personalities are cultural signposts. But in her heyday, Garbo inspired Cole Porter, who sang of her munificent salary in You’re the Top. Madonna paid tribute to Garbo’s giving good face in Vogue. Even fewer personalities become adjectives; Garboesque has come to mean aloof, mysterious, remote… Garbo left the screen in her prime (like Marilyn Monroe, who died at 36), thus the popular image we have of her is radiant, forever young.”

“Stanley Burnshaw, a consummate man of letters who was not only a poet, critic, translator, editor, publisher and novelist, but also skilled at setting type by hand, died yesterday on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 99… Burnshaw roamed the peaks of the literary world, famously dueling with Wallace Stevens over poetry and politics; publishing and editing work by his friend Robert Frost; writing a biography of Frost; and publishing important books by Lionel Trilling.”