Mickey Rooney's Death Makes Me Think of Ava Gardner

When I heard this morning that Mickey Rooney had died, my first thought was back to THIS  2013 article in Vanity Fair, excerpting a newly published book about Ava Gardner, to whom Rooney was once married (one of his eight wives). She had collaborated extensively on the book in life, back in the 1980s. It was intended to be her memoirs.  But it was never published, until now.

Here's just some of what she said about Mickey Rooney. (I'm not copying the most vulgar, prurient and profane parts. But you can read those in the article itself, if you want.)

She was a 19 year-old starlet when she met him. "I still didn’t know that he was the biggest wolf on the lot. He was catnip to the ladies. He knew it, too. The little sod was not above admiring himself in the mirror. All five foot two of him! He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy films—Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on. Can we say that—Andy Hard-on?”

 “A week or so after we got back from our honeymoon, I woke up in the middle of the night with the most god-awful pain in my stomach. Mickey drove me to the Presbyterian Hospital. Like everybody in my family, I had a misplaced appendix. In those days you stayed in hospital for three weeks after even a minor operation. So I came home, and the first night I found evidence that Mick had been screwing somebody in our bed.”

Edwin P. Wilson: CIA Agent, Flamboyant Con Man/Arms Dealer

As I've noted before, I'm always intrigued by the under-reported epilogues to famous stories. 

A reference in THIS article from the New York Post yesterday caught my eye. Its focus is on the debauched life of deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. ("Sex dungeon!") But a passing reference suggests that former CIA operative Edwin P. Wilson once ran a murder-for-hire squad for Gaddafi.

I first heard of Edwin P. Wilson when I read a 1986 book about him titled "Manhunt" by Peter Maas, which profiled him as a former CIA agent/con man who had 'gone rogue' and gotten involved in big money arms dealing with the Libyans while leaving business associates with the impression that he still worked for the CIA. He was arrested in 1982, and ultimately sentenced to over 50 years in prison.  That's where the story had ended for him, I assumed.

But it didn't end there, apparently.  Wilson died in September 2012 in Seattle at the age of 84, a free man. According to his New York Times obituary, in the end he served only 22 years of his 52 year sentence and, after a successful jailhouse appeal ("they framed a guilty man"), was released in 2004. 

His obit calls him 'the spy who lived it up.' "He showered minks on his mistress, whom he called 'Wonder Woman.' He owned three private planes and bragged that he knew flight attendants on the Concorde by name. His preferred habitat was a hall of mirrors. His business empire existed as a cover for espionage, but it also made him a lot of money."

For such a flamboyant character, the last years of his life following his 2004 release apparently passed anticlimactically. "Since then he had lived in Seattle on a monthly Social Security check of $1,080. He died of complications from heart-valve replacement surgery, his nephew Scott Wilson said."

Kurt Cobain: 20 Years Later

I can still remember where I was when I first heard that Kurt Cobain had shot and killed himself 20 years ago today. With the benefit of hindsight, the fact that an indie band like Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard charts back then doesn't seem so much like a music revolution, as part of a temporary fad for 'grunge.'

Nonetheless, THIS article from CNBC suggests that Cobain's estate is worth over $450M today, in part because Nirvana's music has apparently had more staying power than that of other acts.  They sold 350,000 albums in 2013, and 900,000 singles. An emphasis of this article is the delicate, and sometimes subjective, balance between commercializing Cobain's music and image without undercutting his anti-corporate, anti-celebrity persona.

Below is the new TV commercial for Bavaria beer referenced in this CNBC article, the premise of which is that Kurt Cobain, along with other dead celebrities including Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Tupac Shakur, are all secretly hiding out together on a desert island. (I'm not sure that any of them would've loved this.)

"Mad Libs" Creator Has Died

Do you remember "Mad Libs"?  If so, you may want to watch THIS 30 second clip from the NBC Nightly News last night.  It's a short obituary for their co-creator, who has just died.

Unklikely Art Collector Has Died

I remember seeing retired postal worker Herbert Vogel and his wife, Brooklyn librarian Dorothy, profiled on 60 Minutes years ago.  Despite having very modest incomes and living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, they amassed over a lifetime an astonishing collection of modern art by identifying talented new artists early and buying their works cheaply, keeping all 5,000 pieces in their rent-controlled, 1 bedroom apartment.

They could have made millions on their amazing art collection, but instead sold nothing and donated their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Herbert Vogel has now died at the age of 89.  You can watch his 1 minute obituary on the CBS Evening News last night HERE.

His New York Times obituary added this bit of color to their story:

"Their style was to make friends with the young, often little-known artists who were making the new art. Thus they bypassed galleries, a practice some in the art world later criticized as cheating the system. They bought on credit and were slow to pay. They had no car, took no vacations and ate TV dinners; a night out was a trip to the nearby Chinese restaurant. They sometimes did cat-sitting in exchange for art."

Astronaut Sally Ride's Death: Unreported Details

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space when she was part of the crew of the Space Shuttle 'Challenger' in 1983.  She died yesterday in California after a battle with pancreatic cancer at the young age of 61. You can watch her 2 minute obituary from the NBC Nightly News last night HERE.

Two notable aspects go unreported in this story, however.

Despite being married at the time of her groundbreaking 1983 Space Shuttle mission, she divorced her husband in 1987.  From 1985 until her death, her female partner was childhood friend Dr. Tam E. O'Shaughnessy, also making Ride arguably the first lesbian in space.

I remember Sally Ride's mission to space being widely celebrated at the time as a groundbreaking victory for women.  But in fact she was not the first woman in space. Much less trumpeted during the Cold War was that the first woman in space was actually a Soviet cosmonaut named Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, who piloted the Vostok 6 into space in 1963, twenty years before Sally Ride.  Tereshkova is still alive and is now 75 years old.

Profile of "60 Minutes" Mike Wallace Last Night

I watched THIS one hour profile on CBS last night of legendary "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace, who died in April at the age of 93, and really enjoyed it.

I loved "60 Minutes" for many decades, dating back to the 1970s when I first saw Mike Wallace using hidden cameras to expose corrupt auto mechanics and small-time con men.  The spectacle of one adult confronting another on TV, calling them a liar and a fraud to their face and proving it with video footage while the target sweats and squirms, was a compelling revelation to me as an elementary school kid.

Despite my long-time love of the show, I thought that this profile of Mike Wallace last night highlighted (and maybe even celebrated) some of its worst tendencies from a journalistic standpoint.

"He was one of the true giants of television," host Steve Kroft begins. "His reporting style and interviewing technique influenced generations of journalists."  But then just 2 minutes later, Kroft asks Wallace fawningly in a vintage TV interview, "I've never seen a situation in an interview where you did not dominate, in terms of personality, force of personality," to which Wallace responds nonchalantly, "Thank you. That's very flattering, I guess."

Is that really a proper goal for a reporter, especially such a prominent and influential one: to personally "dominate" every moment in every interview in every story?  That also suggests the central role of self-serving, selective editing during the production of "60 Minutes" stories.

A mere 12 minutes into the show, a further clip from this same interview shows Steve Kroft saying to Wallace, "This is what some people say about you: that you're a grandstander, that you're the most important person in the story, that you're more important than the story sometimes." Wallace answers, "I've got to plead guilty, I suppose."

The Death of Evel Knievel

Legendary motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel died on this date back in 2007.  You can read an excellent obituary published at the time in The Economist HERE.

Given his reputation for debauched and rude behavior, on hindsight it's perhaps most surprising how financially important the line of Evel Knievel toys was to him (and to the Ideal toy company) in the 1970s, and how central they remain to his legacy today.

The Creator of "Batman" Died On This Date

The creator of Batman, Bob Kane, died on this date in 1998 at the age of 83. 

I met Bob Kane once and wrote about it HERE.

Gunther Gebel-Williams Died 10 Years Ago

Gunther Gebel-Williams died ten years ago now, on July 19, 2001. I had forgotten about him, to be honest, until I took my young daughter to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus last week. It was much smaller than the version I remember seeing as a kid in the late 1970s in Washington, D.C. Back then, animal trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams was the star attraction.

His brief obituary in the New York Times HERE began as follows, "Gunther Gebel-Williams, who taught lions to ride on the backs of skittish horses, leopards to jump through flaming hoops held by the gleaming teeth of tigers, and elephants to take calm, leisurely walks through roaring traffic in the nation's busiest cities, died yesterday at his home in Venice, Fla. He was 66... Mr. Gebel-Williams, who for many years was the unrivaled star of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, had surgery to remove a cancerous brain tumor in July 2000."

As a child in the 1970s, Gunther Gebel-Williams seemed almost like a super-hero, perhaps partly because he was so heavily promoted on television commercials when the circus came to town.  As I was watching the circus last week, I was struck by the total absence of any star power. In contrast, Gunther Gebel-Williams once featured in an American Express commercial that you can watch HERE.  Even better (but longer) is THIS 6 minute clip from his appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman.  It really gives you a feel for how the German-born performer was part Arnold Schwarzenegger and part Evel Knievel.

Yelena Bonner Has Died

If you're a certain age, you probably think of "Andrei Sakharov" when you hear the name Yelena Bonner. Yelena Bonner was a famous Soviet dissident who late in life married the nuclear physicist-turned-dissident Sakharov. I was astounded to read her obituary today HERE in The Economist. She died 10 days ago, apparently, at the age of 88. I had no idea she was still alive.  (Sakharov had died in 1989.)

I thought it was notable that, as an epilogue to her Cold War-era fame as a human rights campaigner and dissident in the Soviet Union, she ultimately had a falling out with each of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin as well.

Famous Last Words of Dead Celebrities

MSN.com posted an article detailing the last words of 33 deceased celebrities. I didn't think the article lived up to the promise of its headline, however, because many of the 'last words' cited are from public appearances the day before their death, or something similar.  But a few of them I thought were notable, including:

• Barry White:  "Leave me alone. I'm fine."
• John Lennon: "Yes, I am" (while sitting in a police car on the way to the hospital, after officers asked him if he was John Lennon).
• Joe DiMaggio: "I finally get to see Marilyn."
• Winston Churchill: "I'm bored with it all."

Leona Helmsley's Dog Has Died

You'd have to be a certain age to remember all the controversy sparked in the 1980s by Leona Helmsley, dubbed the so called "Queen of Mean." Even in death (in 2007) she sparked controversy by stipulating in her will that $12 million of her fortune be left to her dog. Her 'heiress' dog died earlier this week, prompting this interesting piece from Good Morning America examining how much of that money was spent on the dog over the last 4 years.

Creator of "Mad Libs" Has Died

Do you remember "Mad Libs"?  If you do, you may want to watch this obituary about their creator, who died recently, that aired on the NBC Nightly News last night. It includes a 2008 interview with him, where he explains how he stumbled on the original idea.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Dan Rostenkowski Has Died

Dan Rostenkowski, a democrat congressman from Chicago who was the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (before Charlie Rangel) from 1981-1994, died yesterday at the age of 82.  As noted in his New York Times obituary that you can read HERE, he was first elected to Congress in 1958 at the age of 30 and was its youngest member for many years.  But Rostenkowski is best remembered today for his spectacular fall from grace starting in 1994 when he was indicted on 17 counts of abusing the congressional payroll.  It all began with an investigation into abuses at the House post office. 




Rostenkowski was suspected of buying $22,000 worth of stamps with public money and then converting them into cash.  Then he was accused of, among other things, hiring 14 people on his congressional payroll who did little or no work, and of misusing his House expense account to bill Congress for $40,000 worth of furniture and crystal.


It was all relatively petty for the powerful Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.  Rostenkowski fought back against the charges and refused to resign. “I did not commit any crimes,” he told reporters. “My conscience is clear, and my 42-year record as an elected official is one I am proud to once again run on.”  It's amazing how familiar that sounds today in light of Charlie Rangel's impassioned defense against the charges against him and his 40 year career in Congress.


Rostenkowski subsequently lost his re-election bid. Two years later he negotiated a plea deal to the charges against him and served 15 months in federal prison.  What's not mentioned in this obit, however, is that, despite having been convicted of mail fraud, until his death Rostenkowski still received one of the highest Congressional pensions, over $100,000 per year. 

Mel Blanc Died On This Date

Legendary voice actor Mel Blanc, "The Man of a Thousand Voices," including those of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (to name just a few), died on this date in 1989. He was 81. In his later years, he was a popular recurring guest on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. You can watch a 2 minute clip HERE of one such appearance, wherein he tells Johnny, among other things, how he created the voice for Bugs Bunny.


Less notably perhaps, in later years he also provided the voice for Captain Caveman in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the same name, and for the robot Twiki on the late 1970s TV show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.


His grave stone reads simply, "That's All Folks."

Rod Serling Died On This Date

Rod Serling, who was perhaps most famous for creating and hosting The Twilight Zone TV show from 1959-1965, died on this date in 1975, after suffering three heart attacks in a matter of weeks.  He was a mere 50 years old.  That's him at left, coffee and cigarette in hand. Serling wrote the scripts to 92 of the 156 Twilight Zone episodes himself. It's less well known that he also co-wrote the script to the original 1968 Planet of the Apes film starring Charlton Heston.  It will come as little surprise that the "twist" ending with the Statue of Liberty was his idea. 




You can watch the 30 second intro to The Twilight Zone, narrated by Serling himself,  HERE. I liked The Twilight Zone a lot as a kid in the 1980s, when it aired perpetually as afternoon re-runs on local TV stations. But I always wished it had been filmed in color rather than in black & white. I didn't learn until years later that Rod Serling had actually hosted a sort of successor TV show in color called The Night Gallery, which ran on CBS from 1969 to 1973.  You can watch the 1 minute into HERE.  As you can see, the color actually diminishes greatly the other-worldly, even creepy atmosphere intended for the show, which had been so effectively created in black & white 10 years earlier.

Wernher Von Braun Died On This Date

Wehrner von Braun, the German-American rocket scientist who became the preeminent rocket engineer of the 20th century, died from pancreatic cancer on this date in 1977, at the surprisingly young age of 65. A lifelong advocate of manned space exploration, von Braun is best remembered in the United States for his critical role in the development of the Saturn V rockets that propelled the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon in 1969.  Somewhat less well known is that as a young man in Hitler's Germany he joined the Nazi party in 1937.  Von Braun never denied this, but explained that at the time he was the technical director of an Army Rocket Center at Peenemunde (despite being just 25 years old), and felt he would lose his position and have to abandon his childhood dream of building rockets if he failed to join. At the time, that rocket center was relatively inconsequential.  But by the end of World War II Hitler looked to Peenemunde to develop miracle weapons, like the V-1 and V-2 rockets that terrorized Britain, in a futile attempt to turn the tide of the war. 


At the end of the War von Braun and many of his team were spirited away to the United States to build America's fledging rocket program, which at the time was years behind that of the Germans.  These German scientists ultimately formed the core of the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, their Nazi pasts conveniently whitewashed.  After the Moon landing in 1969, von Braun, now a national hero, was moved to Washington, D.C. to become NASA's Deputy Associate Administrator For Planning. But he quit after just two years, frustrated by budget cuts. He died five years later.


In 1955, long before the Apollo program was envisioned, von Braun collaborated with Walt Disney to produce a series of films on space exploration.  Below is a fascinating 6 minute clip from one of these films in which von Braun, then just 43 years old and in the United States for less than a decade, presents at length his conceptual plans for a manned spaceship.  As you watch it, you'll be startled by how closely it presages not the Apollo lunar lander, but the Space Shuttle. 

Jean Arp Died On This Date in 1966

Who is Jean Arp (at left) you might well ask? He was a French artist who co-founded (with several others) the art movement known as "Dadaism" during World War I.  To its adherents, Dada-ist works were not art, but rather "anti-art," a rejection of what they saw as the "bourgeois" cultural and aesthetic values that had led the world to war. Among the most famous such works are Marcel Duchamp's "ready mades": ordinary, everyday things displayed, unaltered, as works of art.  You can watch a 2 minute interview of Duchamp from 1966 HERE, wherein he discusses at some length his most infamous ready made, "Fountain."   What  it is may surprise you. 


While I knew his name, I was less familiar with Jean Arp's work. It's more traditional than Duchamp's "ready mades," and in a more recognizably surrealist style. You can watch a 4 minute slideshow of Jean Arp's artwork set to dance music by clicking HERE.

John Wooden Has Died

Legendary college basketball coach John Wooden, who won ten NCCAA basketball championships at UCLA in a 12 year stretch from 1964 to 1975, has died. He was 99. You can read his New York Times obituary HERE. When I first arrived at UCLA in the late 1980s, he was still an actively revered figure on campus, and a regular presence.  You would never have guessed that he had retired more than a decade earlier, after the 1975 season. 


He was famous for all those championships, of course, and for having won a record 88 consecutive games at one point from 1971 to 1974.  But as he got further away from the game and as his former players aged into adulthood, another aspect of his legacy became much more prominent: the broader life lessons that he imbued in his players along the way.  Here are a few of his more famous sayings:

• Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are. 
• Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
• Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.
• If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over.
• Never mistake activity for achievement. 
• Be quick, but don't hurry.