Category: people

The widow of Levi’s Jeans mogul Walter A. Haas, Jr., she led the family foundation in giving more than $364 million to such Bay Area organizations as SF-MOMA, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (she underwrote the restoration of Crissy Field), and the San Francisco Symphony (she funded the series Keeping Score: MTT on Music).

Elizabeth Zimmer: “Clear from childhood that she was something of a changeling – a boy trapped in a girl’s body – she managed to turn a difficult upbringing into a difficult adulthood, while producing reams of work in several genres.”

It was a long road to the studio. “Some days Mr. Ayers is fine; some days not. Some days he wants companionship; other days he needs to be alone. As for the CD, he’d back off one day, calling it a terrible idea. And then he’d be ready to roll the next day. Finally, a few weeks ago, it all seemed to be coming together.”

“It is not quite as baroque as the passionate music for which the conductor … is famous. But the sword created by Chanel Fine Jewelry to mark the American-born musician’s entry into the Académie des Beaux-Arts – the highest French cultural honor – includes another of his passions: flowers.”

The veteran West End musical theatre star rejects the movement to create more roles for older actresses. “As an audience member myself, watching a film, let’s say, I don’t want to see a lot of old people waffling on really. I want to see youth and beauty, because, like any art form, you want it to be beautiful and wonderful, and to inspire you.”

“In a funny way, in retrospect, should artists have all these things, marriages and children?” the painter asks. “It’s a big bloody question anyway. Possibly not. A lot of artists don’t.”

“Mr. Huneck shot himself, his wife, Gwen, said. She said he had been despondent over having had to lay off most of the employees of his art business [last month]. A largely self-taught carver, Mr. Huneck achieved a level of success that comes to few outsider artists.”

To the citizens of Cornish, NH and nearby towns where J.D. Salinger lived, shopped and went to the movies, the author was no recluse. He went to church suppers, visited the general store and chat amiably with his neighbors’ children. So they guarded him as one of their own, and cheerfully misdirected nosy fanboys and journalists who came to town to bother him.

“I have about 1,700 species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate. It’s like a park, organized into collections. I have an Italian formal garden, a Japanese garden with a Japanese bridge, and two labyrinths. … The struggle to shape a big park is like making a symphony.”

“[When] the news came this week … it was hard to know how to react. How can you grieve for a writer who has been, for all practical purposes, dead for half a century – one defined by his refusal to publish or even to appear in public?”