Olivia de Havilland

Olivia de Havilland, Classic Hollywood Star, Dies at Age 104

 The Gone With The Wind co-star was one of the last surviving links to a bygone era.

No one was better at falling apart elegantly than Olivia de Havilland. We tend to think of de Havilland (who died on Saturday at age 104) in her Oscar-nominated role as the good-hearted but frail Melanie in Gone with the Wind, taking to her chambers while Vivien Leigh’s brash Scarlett took on the dirty work of survival. But there was also her Oscar-winning turn in The Heiress, in which her high-society spinster character pined away for a stealthy cad. Or her descent into institutionalized madness in The Snake Pit. Even late in life, in glossy dross like Airport ’77, there was a nobility in her deterioration, as if St. Peter might compensate her with a third Academy Award statuette if she just succumbed one time to a ridiculous, horrible air disaster.

De Havilland was not always the regal sufferer. She was actually a fun, vibrant foil to Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, Four’s a Crowd, and seven other movies. Still, just a year after 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, her indelible turn in the most popular movie of all time sealed her image forever.
Offscreen, de Havilland was gracious as well. She was too discreet to say much about her lifelong feud with her sister, fellow golden-age star Joan Fontaine—at least, until the eve of her 100th birthday, when she opened up about their difficult relationship in the pages of Vanity Fair.
A year younger, Fontaine nonetheless managed to do nearly everything first, from getting married to winning her Oscar (for 1941’s Suspicion, beating de Havilland, who was nominated that year for Hold Back the Dawn), to becoming a mother, to dying (at 96, in 2013). The two often vied for the same roles as well. Fontaine had once auditioned to play Melanie; in fact, Fontaine claimed, it was she who suggested to the filmmakers that her sister was dowdy enough for the part. Meanwhile, de Havilland had sought to play the nameless female lead in Rebecca, a role that proved to be Fontaine’s big break. When de Havilland finally won her first Oscar, for 1946’s To Each His Own, Fontaine waited in the wings to congratulate her sister, but de Havilland reportedly snubbed her and walked away.

“Our biggest problem was that we had to share a room,” de Havilland told Vanity Fair in 2016 with a sigh, elaborating that the trouble between them stemmed from Fontaine’s apparent desire to have what de Havilland had: “I suppose the way I saw it then was that I wanted Hollywood as my domain, and I wanted San Francisco society to be hers. I thought San Francisco was superior, I really did—the art, the opera, the clubs, the balls. I thought the sophistication Joan gained from her time in Japan made her perfectly suited for high society. But she wasn’t the slightest bit interested. ‘I want to do what you are doing’ was her mantra.”
The steel beneath de Havilland’s delicate façade was apparent, not just in movies or in her relationship with Fontaine. After Gone with the Wind, she chafed at the ingénue parts Warner Bros. kept foisting on her. Each time she objected, the studio would issue a suspension, and then demanded that she make up that time—in total, six months—after her seven-year contract was up. Instead, she sued the studio and won, setting a precedent that benefitted all entertainers signed to similar long-term show business contracts. The battle kept her off the screen for three years, but her first role upon her return was unwed mother Jody Norris in To Each His Own. The performance earned de Havilland her first of three Oscar nominations in the next three years and the first of her two best-actress victories. (She’d be nominated again for 1948’s The Snake Pit and 1949’s The Heiress, winning for the latter.)
The sisters came by their talent naturally; their mother, Lillian, was a stage actress before she married and moved to Tokyo, where the girls were born, and where her husband, Walter, practiced patent law. De Havilland was not yet three, in 1919, when Lillian, due to a rocky marriage and for the sake of her sickly daughters’ health, moved with her girls to Saratoga, California. Walter and Lillian divorced in 1925; once the divorce was final, Lillian married department-store owner George Fontaine. De Havilland took to acting as a teen and was just out of high school when she got to understudy Gloria Stuart as Hermia in Max Reinhardt’s 1934 Hollywood Bowl production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Taking over for Stuart after she left for a film role, de Havilland earned glowing reviews and signed with Warner Bros. when Reinhardt adapted the production to the screen.
Over the years, de Havilland was linked romantically to Howard Hughes, James Stewart, and John Huston. (Never to Flynn, though; despite their obvious chemistry, they never acted upon their mutual attraction.) She was married twice, to author/screenwriter Marcus Goodrich, and to Paris Match editor Pierre Galante; each marriage produced one child before ending in divorce.
De Havilland settled in Paris when she married Galante in 1955, and despite occasional visits to Hollywood over the next three decades for film and TV appearances, she lived there for the rest of her life. She made headlines only rarely in her twilight years—most recently, when she tried to sue Ryan Murphy and the FX network for defamation over its series Feud: Betty and Joan, which featured de Havilland as a character (played by Catherine Zeta Jones).
The “FX series puts words in the mouth of Miss de Havilland which are inaccurate and contrary to the reputation she has built over an 80-year professional life, specifically refusing to engage in gossip mongering about other actors in order to generate media attention for herself,” her lawyers claimed—honing specifically on the fictionalized de Havilland describing Fontaine by using the word “bitch.” Ultimately, a California appeals court ruled to toss the suit on the grounds of the First Amendment.
For all her accomplishments, de Havilland will be best remembered for that epic she made when she was 22. Seven decades later, she was still justifiably proud of Gone with the Wind, a movie she had watched often and still found suspenseful every time. “But you know,” she said in a 2010 Evening Standard interview, “you never really need to watch the films you made again. They stay inside you, always with you.”
-Vanity Fair

Regis Philbin

Regis Philbin, the affable talk show host and a fixture of the small screen for decades, has died at 88.
"We are deeply saddened to share that our beloved Regis Philbin passed away last night of natural causes, one month shy of his 89th birthday," his family told NPR in a statement.
"His family and friends are forever grateful for the time we got to spend with him – for his warmth, his legendary sense of humor, and his singular ability to make every day into something worth talking about," they said. "We thank his fans and admirers for their incredible support over his 60-year career and ask for privacy as we mourn his loss."
With his larger-than-life persona, Philbin cultivated an air of informality on his talk shows, well known for the amusing banter he shared with his co-hosts. Although the Philbin of television seemingly oozed charisma, he suffered in his youth from a lack of self-confidence. "I missed so many opportunities along the way to do what I wanted to do because I didn't have the confidence to tell myself, much less anybody else, 'Yes, this is the business I wanted to be a part of,' " he told Fresh Air in 2011.

Feeling that he lacked the talent to make it in showbiz, after his graduation from Notre Dame he spent two years serving in the Navy. On his last day, a major in the Marines asked Philbin what he wanted to do with his life.
"I told him, 'What I'd like to do is go into television but I don't know if I have any talent or what I could do,' and he got very angry. ... He said, 'Well, what do you mean? Don't you know you can have anything you want in this life if you only want it bad enough? Do you want it?' And I said, 'Major, I'm not sure.' And he boomed at me, 'Do you want this?!' And I snapped to and gave him a salute and said, 'Yes, yes I want this.' "
The major, Philbin recounted, told Philbin to drive to Hollywood. "And that's what I did."
Philbin began his television career as an NBC page for The Tonight Show in the 1950s. He worked as a newscast broadcaster for several years, before getting his first big break in 1967, when he became the sidekick to Joey Bishop on The Joey Bishop Show. From there, he went on to host local morning shows.
His biggest stroke of luck might have come when Kathie Lee Gifford joined him in 1985 as co-host of ABC's The Morning Show in New York City. The pair was so successful, that Live with Regis and Kathie Lee was nationally syndicated three years later. With impressive ratings, it was a mainstay on American television through the '90s.
In 1999, Philbin took on another role — the inaugural host of ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. He continued regularly hosting the show until 2002, making his famous question — "Is that your final answer?" — a national catchphrase.
Meanwhile, Philbin was continuing his daily job as host of Live. After Gifford left the show in 2000, Philbin went through several guest co-hosts, before soap opera actress Kelly Ripa was chosen as his permanent partner in 2001. They worked together for about a decade, before Philbin stepped down from the show in 2011 at the age of 80.
By that point, he held the Guinness World Record for the most hours spent in front of a television camera.
-NPR

Literary Pick (**)

Suicide Club
-Rachel Heng

Reading Rainbow Theme Song

Literary Pick (****)

A Tale for the Time Being
by Ruth Ozeki

I love how Japanese novels seem to be so low-key and relaxing to read, that's why it has become my favorite genre other than biographies.
Because of this novel I enjoyed independently learning about the Japanese tsunami flotsam debris (about 1.5 million tons) washing ashore the Canadian coast due to the 9.0 earthquake that occurred in 2011 and killed nearly 20,000 people. Many strange items were found in the debris in BC, including a Harley Davidson bike which was offered to be returned to it's owner Yokoyama, but instead he donated it to the Harley Davidson Museum in Milwaukee USA as a memorial to all those who lost their lives. A football was also found and traced back to a student who had lost every single belonging. Other items such as a fishing boat, a row boat were also found. Japan reportedly gave B.C. 1 million dollars to help with the cleanup.
The novel tells of how a couple living in Canada find the diary of a young girl who is contemplating suicide, and the journey begins to find who the author of this diary is in hopes of saving her.

The Greatest American Hero

Sit, Ubu, sit

Hugh Downs

Hugh Downs, Longtime ‘20/20,’ ‘Today’ Anchor, Dies at 99 

Hugh Downs, anchorman for the ABC news program “20/20” and, before that, NBC’s “The Today Show,” died Wednesday in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 99.
Downs’ career in broadcasting spanned more than half a century. And despite his assertion “I am not a talent, I am a personality,” Downs proved a first-rate interviewer and journalist time and again. His personality was ingratiating and low-key; well into his 70s, his pleasant demeanor made him a welcome guest in the nation’s living rooms. With Barbara Walters, his co-host on both “Today” and “20/20,” he formed one of the most complementary partnerships in television news programming.
Prior to “Today,” Downs made a name for himself as emcee of the quizshow “Concentration” and as sage in residence on the Jack Paar “Tonight Show.”
After early work in radio and TV, Downs moved to New York in 1954 to join Arlene Francis on NBC’s “Home” show, clocking in some 900 hours on the program. In 1956 he became the announcer for “Caesar’s Hour,” starring Sid Caesar, and the following year joined “The Tonight Show.” He also supervised science programming for the NBC network. In 1958 he also became host of the daytime series “Concentration,” a gig he held for several years concurrent with his “Today Show” activities.

In 1960, when Paar walked off “The Tonight Show” in a dispute with network censors, Downs stepped in and saved the day, winning NBC’s admiration in the process. He was rewarded with the anchor spot of the “Today” show in 1962, replacing John Chancellor. He remained for nine years, reaching 12 million homes every morning for two hours.
During that period he also reported and narrated news documentaries and specials such as “The American Wilderness,” the Emmy-winning “The Everglades,” “The Ice People,” “The Great Barrier Reef,” “Survival on the Prairie” and “The First Americans.”
Downs left “Today” in 1971 to pursue other interests, consulting, teaching and writing work. In 1978 he joined ABC, hosting “20/20,” the network’s newsmagazine show. He also did a great deal of reporting, particularly in the early years, on medical breakthroughs and did adventure news segments.
He hosted PBS’ “Live From Lincoln Center” series from 1990-96. He also narrated a number of highly praised news specials including 1990’s “Depression: Beyond the Darkness”; 1988’s “The Poisoning of America,” which won him a second Emmy; “Growing Old in America”; and “The National Cholesterol Test.” He won additional Emmys for hosting PBS’ “Over Easy,” “Live From Lincoln Center: Yo Yo Ma in Concert” and a 1989 interview with Patty Duke on her manic depression.
The Guinness Book of World Records certified in 1985 that Downs had clocked the greatest number of hours on network commercial television (he lost the record for most hours on all forms of TV to Regis Philbin in 2004).
He won numerous awards for his communications and charitable work and served on a number of boards including as chairman of the board of governors of the National Space Society.
In 1960 Downs published his autobiography “Yours Truly, Hugh Downs”; later came “On Camera: My 10,000 Hours on Television.” Other published works include compiled science articles called “Rings Around Tomorrow,” sailing reminiscence “A Shoal of Stars” and several books on aging. He also published a collection of essays based on his 10-minute NBC radio broadcasts, “Perspective.”
Downs retired from TV journalism work in 1999.
Hugh Malcolm Downs was born in Akron, Ohio. He completed only one year of college at Bluffton in Ohio before his family’s Depression-strapped finances forced him to enter the job market. In 1939, after a long search, he landed a spot as an announcer on small Lima, Ohio, station WLOK — at $7.50 a week. Within a year he was program director and earning a princely $25 a week.
He soon moved on to WWJ in Detroit while studying at Wayne U. He would later attend Columbia U. and get a post-Master’s degree in gerontology from Hunter College.
During the war he was drafted into the Army and assigned to the 123rd Infantry. He was part of an experimental basic training program that condensed 13 weeks into four. Like many of his colleagues, he collapsed from exhaustion, was hospitalized and given a medical discharge.
In 1943 he joined NBC station WMAQ in Chicago as an announcer, interviewer and DJ. He broke into television as the announcer for Fran Allison and Burr Tillstrom’s “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” show out of Chicago.
Downs’ wife, Ruth, died in 2017.

-Variety

Jerry Stiller

Comedian Jerry Stiller, actor Ben Stiller's father, dies at 92

Comedian who formed a popular duo with his wife, Anne Meara, has died of natural causes 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The comedian Jerry Stiller has died at the age of 92. His death was announced on Monday on Twitter by the actor Ben Stiller, who called him “a great dad and grandfather, and the most dedicated husband”.
Jerry Stiller enjoyed a long career on stage and screen, often accompanied by his wife, Anne Meara, with whom he formed a popular comedy act. They met in 1953, married the following year and regularly teamed up for improv sketches, performing in Las Vegas nightclubs and on The Ed Sullivan Show and other TV programmes, often in character as the squabbling spouses Mary Elizabeth Doyle and Hershey Horowitz, playing upon their Irish Catholic and Jewish cultures. In 2010, they took their act online, performing from the front room of their New York apartment. Meara died in 2015.
Stiller was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and attended Seward Park high school, whose alumni included Tony Curtis and Zero Mostel. After decades of performing, he enjoyed a new streak of popularity when he was cast as the usually irate Frank Costanza, father to George Costanza, in the sitcom Seinfeld.
He played Frank from 1993 to 1998, and received an Emmy nomination in 1997. One of Frank’s most memorable scenes was in the 1995 episode The Fusilli Jerry where, after a fight with Kramer, he is pushed on to a piece of dried pasta art that leads him to let out a thunderous cry. Next came a part in the TV show The King of Queens, playing another cantankerous dad, Arthur Spooner, from 1998 to 2007. In 2001, he was nominated for a Grammy award for best spoken word album for Married to Laughter: A Love Story Featuring Anne Meara.

Stiller’s many films included Airport 1975 and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. He appeared in two versions of Hairspray: as the father of Ricki Lake’s character in John Waters’ 1988 original and, in the 2007 movie of the musical, as dress-shop owner Mr Pinky.
He appeared opposite Ben in several films, including The Heartbreak Kid, where they played father and son, and Zoolander, where he played the gold lamé-clad Maury Ballstein. Stiller told the New York Post that he bought Ben a Super 8 film camera when he was 10. “I just wanted to get him off my back. He went down and started filming movies on the street with his friends.”
He is also survived by his daughter, the actor Amy Stiller.
-The Guardian

Bill Withers

Bill Withers, the mellifluous vocalist behind "Lean on Me," "Lovely Day" and "Ain't No Sunshine," has died at age 81. 

Bill Withers, the soul legend who penned timeless songs like “Lean on Me,” “Lovely Day,” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” died Monday from heart complications in Los Angeles. He was 81.

“We are devastated by the loss of our beloved, devoted husband and father,” his family said in a statement. “A solitary man with a heart driven to connect to the world at large, with his poetry and music, he spoke honestly to people and connected them to each other. As private a life as he lived close to intimate family and friends, his music forever belongs to the world. In this difficult time, we pray his music offers comfort and entertainment as fans hold tight to loved ones.”

The three-time Grammy winner released just eight albums before walking away from the spotlight in 1985, but he left an incredible mark on the music community and the world at large. Songs like “Lean On Me,” “Grandma’s Hands,” “Use Me,” “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and “Lovely Day” are embedded in the culture and have been covered countless times. While many of Withers’ biggest songs were recorded in the Seventies, they have proven to be timeless hits. “Lean on Me” emerged once again in recent weeks as an anthem of hope and solidarity in the time of COVID-19.


“He’s the last African-American Everyman,” Questlove told Rolling Stone in 2015. “Jordan’s vertical jump has to be higher than everyone. Michael Jackson has to defy gravity. On the other side of the coin, we’re often viewed as primitive animals. We rarely land in the middle. Bill Withers is the closest thing black people have to a Bruce Springsteen.”

Withers was born July 4th, 1938, and grew up in Slab Fork, West Virginia, in the final years of the Great Depression. He was the youngest of six kids and struggled to fit in, largely due to his speech impediment. “When you stutter,” he told Rolling Stone, “people tend to disregard you.” He also had to endure incredible racism in the Jim Crow South. “One of the first things I learned, when I was around four,” he said, “was that if you make a mistake and go into a white women’s bathroom, they’re going to kill your father.”

He joined the Navy after high school and worked as a milkman in Santa Clara County, California, after he left the service. He later worked at an aircraft-parts factory. Music played a small role in his life until he visited a nightclub in Oakland where Lou Rawls was booked to perform. “He was late, and the manager was pacing back and forth,” Withers said. “I remember him saying, ‘I’m paying this guy $2,000 a week, and he can’t show up on time.’ I was making $3 an hour, looking for friendly women, but nobody found me interesting. Then Rawls walked in, and all these women are talking to him.”
That was all it took. He soon bought a cheap guitar at a pawn shop, taught himself to play, and began writing songs between shifts at the factory. A demo tape got into the hands of Clarence Avant, an executive at Sussex Records, and Withers was soon called into the studio to record an album with producer Booker T. Jones, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Stephen Stills on guitar. One of the first songs they cut, “Ain’t No Sunshine,” was a tale of lost love that Withers wrote after watching the 1962 Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie Days of Wine and Roses on television.

The album they recorded at that session, 1971’s Just As I Am, became an enormous hit and turned Withers into a star overnight. He followed it up with 1972’s Still Bill, which became an even bigger hit thanks to the leadoff single, “Lean on Me.”
Withers wrote the song shortly after learning to play the piano, but didn’t think much of it. His label disagreed, and it became a worldwide smash. “I try not to be too analytical about it because it wouldn’t be magic anymore,” Withers told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I didn’t change fingers; I just went one, two, three, four, up and down the piano. Lot of children come up and say, ‘That’s the first song I learned to play,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Don’t congratulate yourself; that’s pretty easy.’ You could make a tool and play that.”

But fame didn’t agree with him. He hated life on the road, his marriage to TV star Denise Nicholas became fodder for the tabloids, and his distrust of businessmen made him unwilling to work with a manager. “Early on, I had a manager for a couple of months, and it felt like getting a gasoline enema,” he said. “Nobody had my interest at heart. I felt like a pawn. I like being my own man.”
He was able to assert his independence and craft his own music on Sussex, but things grew complicated once the tiny label started to go bankrupt. He was working on a new album when he learned Sussex no longer had the ability to pay him. In a moment of rage, he erased the entire album. “I was socialized in the military,” he said. “When some guy is smushing my face down, it doesn’t go down well. Since I was self-contained and had no manager, my solution was to erase the album. I don’t even know which one it was, but it’s gone.”

When Sussex Records finally went bankrupt in 1975, he moved over to Columbia Records. It only added to his misery. “I met my A&R guy, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘I don’t like your music or any black music, period,’” Withers said. “I am proud of myself because I did not hit him. I met another executive who was looking at a photo of the Four Tops in a magazine. He actually said to me, ‘Look at these ugly niggers.’”
He recorded five records for Columbia and scored radio hits with “Lovely Day” and “Just the Two of Us,” but his heart was no longer in the work. During one particular low point, the label asked him to record a cover of Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto.” When he refused, relations with the label grew even more sour. “I was not allowed in the studio,” he said. “People say my career was 15 years, but it was eight years. I was not allowed in the studio from 1978 through 1985.”
His final album was 1985’s Watching You Watching Me. “They made me record that album at some guy’s home studio,” he said. “This stark-naked five-year-old girl was running around the house, and they said to her, ‘We’re busy. Go play with Bill.’ Now, I’m this big black guy and they’re sending a little naked white girl over to play with me! I said, ‘I gotta get out of here. I can’t take this shit!’”

The album was a commercial disappointment, and he retired from recording and even performing live, though in 2004 he made a rare exception for the 40th birthday party of Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores. “His wife kept calling,” he said. “She said it was only for 150 people, but I kept refusing. Then the [money] got so high that my nose started to bleed.”
The private gig found Withers and his band performing around 10 songs, with the crowd joining in for “Lean on Me.” It would be his last concert. Smart real-estate investments and royalties from his old records meant that money was rarely a problem. A comeback tour could have netted him a fortune, but he simply had no interest. “What else do I need to buy?” he asked Rolling Stone. “I’m just so fortunate. I’ve got a nice wife, man, who treats me like gold. I don’t deserve her. My wife dotes on me. I’m very pleased with my life how it is. This business came to me in my thirties. I was socialized as a regular guy. I never felt like I owned it or it owned me.”

As the decades ticked by, many fans forgot that Withers was even alive, which he found hysterical. “One Sunday morning I was at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles,” he told Rolling Stone. “These church ladies were sitting in the booth next to mine. They were talking about this Bill Withers song they sang in church that morning. I got up on my elbow, leaned into their booth and said, ‘Ladies, it’s odd you should mention that because I’m Bill Withers.’ This lady said, ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You’re too light-skinned to be Bill Withers!’”
In 2015, he made a rare public appearance when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “I still have to process this,” he said shortly after learning the news. “You know that Billy Joel line, ‘Hot funk, cool punk, even if it’s old junk, it’s still rock & roll to me?’ I’m happy to represent the old-junk category.”
Looking back decades later, Withers was still amazed at his success at a relatively late age in his life. “Imagine 40,000 people at a stadium watching a football game,” he told Rolling Stone. “About 10,000 of them think they can play quarterback. Three of them probably could. I guess I was one of those three.”

-Rolling Stone

At Seventeen

Janis Ian - At Seventeen (Live, 1976)

RIP

Kirk Douglas, ‘Spartacus’ Actor and Hollywood Icon, Dead at 103

“Kirk’s life was well lived, and he leaves a legacy in film that will endure for generations to come,” son Michael says

Kirk Douglas, the beloved actor whose roles in 'Spartacus,' 'Lust for Life' and 'Champion' made him a Hollywood icon, has died at age 103.

Kirk Douglas, the epitome of old-school Hollywood star power whose intense performances conveyed his characters’ fiery and sometimes conflicted core, died Wednesday at the age of 103.
“It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103,” his son Michael said in a statement (via People). “To the world, he was a legend, an actor from the golden age of movies who lived well into his golden years, a humanitarian whose commitment to justice and the causes he believed in set a standard for all of us to aspire to. But to me and my brothers, Joel and Peter, he was simply Dad, to Catherine, a wonderful father-in-law, to his grandchildren and great-grandchild their loving grandfather, and to his wife, Anne, a wonderful husband.
“Kirk’s life was well lived, and he leaves a legacy in film that will endure for generations to come, and a history as a renowned philanthropist who worked to aid the public and bring peace to the planet,” Michael added. “Let me end with the words I told him on his last birthday and which will always remain true. Dad, I love you so much, and I am so proud to be your son.”


Three times nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, Douglas was one of American cinema’s finest tough guys; his muscular jaw and mischievous eyes able to suggest formidable men who might have dark secrets beneath their handsome surface. In movies as varied The Bad and the Beautiful, Spartacus, and Lust for Life, Douglas reveled in film acting’s sheer combustibility, delivering portrayals that were models of physicality and brute force. He was also among the first actors to segue into producing as a means to exert more creative control, helping to launch his son Michael’s career when he gave him the rights to the book-turned-play One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which earned a Best Picture Academy Award in 1975. “I never had any intentions of being a movie star,” Douglas said in 1957. “I never thought I was the type. My only aim was to become a stage actor…[S]omeone had asked me to come to Hollywood, so I thought I’d take a chance.”
Born Issur Danielovitch in December 1916 to Jewish immigrants, Douglas grew up in upstate New York, dreaming of acting as an escape from a small-town community rife with anti-Semitism. “I wanted to be an actor ever since I was a kid in the second grade,” he recalled in his Nineties. “I did a play, and my mother made a black apron, and I played a shoemaker. And my father, who never interested himself in what I was doing, was in the back, and I didn’t know it. After the performance, he gave me my first Oscar: an ice cream cone. I’ve never forgotten that.”
Attending St. Lawrence University, Douglas would befriend fellow aspiring actor Karl Malden and then move on to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he met Lauren Bacall. His career was temporarily stalled by World War II — Douglas joined the Navy in 1941 after failing the Air Force’s psychological test — but was given a medical discharge in 1944. Upon returning to civilian life, Douglas snagged theater work, including the role of a soldier in 1945’s The Wind Is Ninety, which attracted the attention of film producer Hal B. Willis, who gave him a screen test and brought him to Hollywood. Indeed, Douglas’ first film role came in a Willis production, 1946’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.
Three years later, Douglas starred in Champion, about an amoral, ambitious boxer. The role landed him his first Academy Award nomination and cemented his persona as a bruising onscreen presence not to be taken lightly. The actor’s uncompromising demeanor was reflected offscreen as well: In 1955, he formed his own production company, Bryna Productions, named after his beloved mother. Douglas’ aim was to find material that spoke to his passions, rather than being at the mercy of others to determine his career destiny. “The impact of television brought enormous changes in the Hollywood studios, with fewer and fewer films being produced,” Douglas once recalled. “Many stars found themselves unemployed and I wasn’t about to let it happen to me.…It was a matter of survival. It still is.”

Douglas’ survival instincts translated into his performances during the 1950s. Whether playing an unscrupulous journalist in Billy Wilder’s acidic character portrait Ace in the Hole or a soulless producer in The Bad and the Beautiful (the latter netting him his second Oscar nomination), the actor brought unsettling amounts of intensity to characters whose moral rot shone all over their face. But he was just as eloquent playing the hero: His portrayal in Paths of Glory (1957) of a principled World War I French colonel defending the honor of three of his soldiers during a rigged court proceeding is a stunning display of righteous decency. (It also began a friendship with then-rising director Stanley Kubrick, whom Douglas would bring on board to helm 1960’s Spartacus.)

 

Kirk Douglas as Spartacus Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images 

Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, became arguably his finest performance and certainly his most blistering. The film remains one of the most vivid portraits of artistry ever committed to screen, with Douglas pouring his soul out to play the troubled, brilliant painter, a role that would earn him his third Oscar nomination. “I don’t think I’d be much of an actor without vanity,” he confessed to biographer Tony Thomas. “I was terribly disappointed not to win [an Oscar], especially for Lust for Life. I really thought I had a chance with that one.…However, I don’t want to appear ungrateful. I’ve been very lucky. Few people manage to do what they want in life. I have.”
Douglas continued to work steadily through the Sixties and Seventies, but his next great achievement might have been pursuing the rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey’s anti-authoritarian 1962 novel about a rebel instigating an uprising at a mental institution. Douglas turned the book into a Broadway play in which he was the star, but after years of frustration in which no Hollywood studio would consider adapting the work for the screen, he gave the rights to his son Michael. The eventual movie version, which starred Jack Nicholson, won five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor. In an ironic twist, Douglas’ son had an Academy Award before he did. (Kirk would eventually receive an Honorary Oscar in 1996.)

In his later years, Douglas easily transitioned to the role of revered elder statesman, playing lovable rascals in lightweight comedies like Tough Guys (1986) and Oscar (1991), the former being the sixth and final film in which he’d co-star with his good friend Burt Lancaster, whose drive to become a producer in the 1950s inspired Douglas’ own pursuit of the same aspiration. In 1996, shortly before accepting his Honorary Oscar, Douglas suffered a stroke that severely impaired his speaking ability. He wrote about the experience in his memoir My Stroke of Luck with candor and dark humor: “The doctor’s words echoed in my mind: It’s just a minor stroke. Yeah, minor to you, major to me.”
As Douglas got older, his reputation was further burnished retroactively for his willingness to stand up to the 1950s Hollywood blacklist, fighting to get disgraced screenwriters credits on his pictures — particularly Dalton Trumbo, who had written Spartacus. “I’m very proud that Spartacus broke the blacklist, because that was very important,” Douglas once said with pride. In 1991, he received the Writers Guild of America’s Robert Meltzer Award for his commitment to ending the blacklist, and in 2012, he wrote a book, I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist, that highlighted his role in hiring Trumbo, an outspoken communist, for the swords-and-sandals epic. (That same year, journalists John Meroney and Sean Coons offered evidence arguing that Douglas overstated his importance in ending the Hollywood blacklist. Their contention was that the actor-producer wasn’t nearly as courageous as he claimed to be and that he actually threatened those who wouldn’t go along with his version of events.)
Nonetheless, Douglas leaves behind a legacy of indomitable performances and, more importantly, a bare-knuckle ruggedness rarely seen in today’s far tamer Hollywood. In a 1969 interview with Roger Ebert, Douglas proclaimed, “Being a star doesn’t really change you,” he said. “If you become a star, you don’t change — everybody else does. Personally, I keep forgetting I’m a star. And then people look at me and I’m reminded. But you just have to remember one thing: The best eventually go to the top. I think I’m in the best category, and I’ll stay at the top or I’ll do something else. I’m not for the bush leagues.”

 -Rolling Stone

Aloha Airlines Flight 243

On February 11, 1990 a movie was released in the USA called ‘Miracle Landing’. The film tells the story of Paradise Airlines Flight 243 flying from Honolulu to Hilo, which was involved in a terrifying explosive decompression when a large section of the forward roof blows off. After the pilots battle to keep the stricken jet in the air, the airliner eventually lands and the terrified passengers are safely evacuated. It is then discovered that one of the flight attendants was missing, after being sucked out of the aircraft during the explosion.

But ‘Miracle Landing’ was more than just a dramatic made-for-television movie. The on-screen portrayal of Paradise Airlines Flight 243 was taken from the real life events aboard Aloha Airlines Flight 243 on April 28, 1988.
It was the usual sunny Hawaiian day at Hilo International Airport (ITO), where Aloha Airlines Boeing 737-297 (N73711) ‘Queen Liliuokalani’, the 152nd Boeing 737 airframe to be built, was being readied for another island hop to Honolulu International Airport (HNL).

Aloha Airlines was formed in 1946 and plied the inter-island routes of the Hawaiian archipelago until its demise in 2008. The Hilo to Honolulu island hop was a popular flight and many of the passengers were regular travellers who knew the crew well. Looking after the 89 passengers that day was veteran Purser Clarabelle (CB) Lansing. Lansing had been flying for 37 years, becoming one of Aloha’s first flight attendants when she joined the airline after leaving high-school. CB was very popular, both with passengers and colleagues alike and had even appeared in adverts for the airline. “She was very personable. She reminds you of the top-of-the-line flight attendants you see on the major carriers” said Dale Randles a Honolulu resident who flew Aloha to Maui once a week. “She was very attractive, a beautiful woman. You could ask her anything and she’d answer your questions”. 

 Aloha Airlines staff pose with a retro-liveried 737 on the airlines 60th anniversary in 2006.


Helping Lansing in the cabin was Jane Sato-Tomita and Michelle Honda, who had been working for Aloha for 14 years. In the flight deck Captain Robert Schornsteiner was assisted by First Officer Madeline “Mimi” Tompkins and the pair were joined on the jump-seat by an FAA Air Traffic Controller. 

 

Passengers slowly began boarding and settled themselves in for the short flight. As one lady entered the jet through the forward door she noticed, what looked like, a large crack in the fuselage. Not wanting to cause a fuss she said nothing and took her seat.  

At 13:25 Hawaii–Aleutian Standard Time (HST), flight 243 took off from Hilo and soon reached its cruising altitude of 24,000 feet. In the cabin the flight attendants quickly got to work carrying out the inflight service. Michelle Honda had finished her duties and decided to grab some lunch. Lansing was known by her crew to be a pretty ‘by-the-book-person’ so rather than sitting with her colleagues in the galley, Honda returned to her crew station. “Because she (Lansing) adhered to the rules and regulations, I think it saved my life. We weren’t congregating. I was in my position. Jane was in hers.” Honda later explained.
From her seat, Honda spotted Lansing in a galley mirror, still out in the cabin collecting glasses. “I thought to myself, ‘Oh God’, and took out my little purple plastic bag. I didn’t look up. The guilt was there because I had been sitting down and I went down the aisle and turned around to face the aft so I wouldn’t have to meet her eyes”. 
And then, at around 13:48 HST it happened. The blast hit Honda on the left shoulder and pushed her to the ground. There were screams and then silence. 

The explosive decompression had torn off a large section of the roof, consisting of the entire top half of the aircraft skin extending from just behind the cockpit to the fore-wing area, a length of about 18.5 feet (5.6 m).
First Officer Tompkins was flying the aircraft when she suddenly heard a loud ‘whooshing’ sound and noticed pieces of grey insulation floating above the cabin. Captain Schornstheimer felt the aircraft roll to the left and right and the controls went loose. As he turned round to see what had happened he could see “blue sky where the first-class ceiling had been”.
As Honda lay on the floor her training told her that the aircraft was experiencing a rapid decompression. “There was a smoke-like vapour in all the debris flying around” Honda later explained. “Paper, fiberglass, asbestos. It was kind of white. That’s why I say blizzard, although it wasn’t cold.” 

Pictures taken of the inside of the cabin of N73711 after the accident show the extensive damage.

Terrified she grabbed hold of the metal bars under the passenger seats and held on for dear life. “My first concern was keeping my breathing shallow because I couldn’t get to an oxygen mask” she said. “You can pass out. I didn’t want to get to that point.” 

She realised that the aircraft was still flying and she had a job to do. “I remember being on the floor” she later told The Washington Post. “Crawling up the aisle rung by rung, telling people to put on life-vests. I remember looking up at people on my back and calling up and helping them take out the vests. One mother asked me to help her son. He was across the aisle in a B seat. He was scared, but he didn’t say anything. You could see it in his face. His eyes were searching. I think everybody had that look.”
Honda could barely move against the wind. “The passengers were reaching out and holding me as I went by and grabbed their arms. The closer you came to the hole, the more intense the wind was. I didn’t know if I would have stayed in the aircraft if I let go, and I wasn’t about to find out”. 

A bloodied seat highlighting the terrible injures some of the passengers sustained.

Her colleague Jane Sato-Tomita was knocked unconscious and lay bleeding in the aisle at the most exposed part of the jet. “The first time I saw her I thought she was dead. She was just on the borderline of the hole. Her head was split open in the back and she was under debris” Honda said. “My central thought was to get Jane to the back of the aircraft. I tried to move her and drag her back, but I couldn’t get her. I didn’t realise she was unconscious”. Instead she asked passengers seated around her to try and hold her down. 
The cabin itself had suffered extensive damage. Some of the oxygen masks had dropped but were not working. Two large ceiling panels had also come loose, landing on the heads of passengers which Honda managed to heave into the empty rows at the back off the plane.

Under the intense strain the floor had buckled, obscuring the view of the cockpit. Indeed one passenger even asked if it was still there. Until that moment, Honda had been meticulously working through her emergency checklist, she hadn’t even thought about the pilots and now the terrifying prospect that they had been ejected in the explosion dawned on her. 
“I guess that it is so ingrained that we takeoff and we land and our cockpit is there that I didn’t even think ‘Are they flying this?’ I assumed they were there as we were making turns” she said. Crawling to the rear, Honda tried to call the pilots but the inter phone cables has been severed in the explosion. She went back in to the aisle and for reasons she does not understand asked a man if he knew how to fly. 
“When they (passengers) had time to start asking questions, I felt there was a potential for hysteria” Honda said. “The man in the F seat, he was starting to look apprehensive after my not being able to talk to the cockpit.”
Then, in the distance the island of Maui loomed dead ahead. Honda explained “I first thought we were going to go straight into the head of Maui. This is when I saw the plane veering towards the right and I knew we were going to make a landing on Maui.”
In the flight deck Schornstheimer and Tompkins battled with the controls of the badly damaged jet and as they precariously descended towards Kahalui Airport (OGG), the number one engine failed due to the debris ingested following the decompression. 

Debris can clearly be seen around the #2 engine.

The blast had been so powerful that it had blown Honda’s shoes off. She later found them in the aisle, but her stockings were in shreds and her skirt and blouse were covered in blood. She would only open her eyes to tiny slits for fear of flying debris, which also pushed in to her throat every time she yelled a command. When she began to yell ‘Heads down!’ No sound came out. “I thought to myself ‘Voice commands? Yeah, right”. 
As the 737 descended lower, Honda crawled back up the aisle and lay next to the unconscious Sato-Tomita, “I grabbed her belt and her waist and held on to the metal retainer bars”.
The jet kissed the runway at 13:58 HST, just over ten minutes after the emergency had began. When they eventually came to a stop, Honda began yelling “We made it! We made it!”. An off-duty crew member called Amy Jones-Brown struggled free from her seat and began to help Honda with the evacuation. 

The scene on the ground was horrifying. Passengers seated near the hole were covered in blood after being battered and cut by flying debris. Honda recalled her anguish about an 84-year-old woman who sat so quietly in the front of the coach section when the flight had began and who was now fighting for her life with serious head injuries. 
Jane Sato-Tomita was seriously injured. Bleeding and disoriented she was evacuated off the 737 with the other passengers. Only now, once everyone had escaped did the horrifying realisation dawn on them that Lansing was gone. “Nobody saw her leave” Honda later emotionally told the press. 

A terrifying image showing the damaged caused by the decompression, as the emergency evacuation commenced. First Office Tompkins can be seen at door 1L

A couple seated in the first class section later studied a photo of Lansing and said she was the one serving them a drink when the roof of the plane blew off. Passenger William Flanigan explained “She (Lansing) was just handing my wife a drink. She had stopped and told us this was the last call. We were going to be descending. And then whoosh! She was gone. Their hands just touched when it happened.”
The subsequent investigation revealed that the 19 year old Boeing 737 had accumulated 35,496 flight hours prior to the accident, those hours included over 89,680 flight cycles (takeoffs and landings), owing to its use on short flights. This amounted to more than twice the number of cycles it was designed for. Fatigue cracking around the rivets was also discovered. The aircraft was basically an accident waiting to happen.

But another, more harrowing hypothesis as to the planes catastrophic decompression, was put forward by pressure vessel engineer Matt Austin. He claimed that the aircrafts fuselage may have failed initially as intended, opening a ten-inch square vent. As the pressurised air in the cabin escaped at over 700 mph, CB Lansing became wedged in this hole instead of being thrown clear. This then created a seal which temporarily blocked the air from escaping; which in turn caused a surge of extreme air pressure back in to the plane – known as a fluid hammer or water hammer effect – causing further damage to the already fragile fuselage, before ripping it open like a tin can.

A bloodied imprint was found on the side of the fuselage, adding more weight to Matt Austin’s ‘fluid-hammer’ effect. 

Authorities searched for Lansing’s body for three days but it was never found. “She was a wonderful employee, a great lady. Our passengers loved her” Stephanie Ackerman, a spokeswoman for Aloha later said.  

Clarabelle ‘CB’ Lansing

 

Michelle Honda later described how, like many of us, one of her greatest fears was that she would panic in an emergency and forget her drills and procedures. However she remained so calm that she was even able to play down the severity of the incident to her 11-year old daughter. “I told her ‘Mommy’s got a mechanical and I’m not going to be home for a while.”
Michelle Honda, Jane Sato-Tomita and Amy Jones-Brown also went on to praise their passengers “A lot of attention has been focused on our efforts and the valiant efforts of the pilots, but we would also like to thank the passengers who helped keep us on the aircraft.”
The recollections after the accident became more painful for Honda. Speaking to The Washington Post she described the mental image of the man with the strip of fuselage stapled to his face, causing tears to well in her eyes. “He said could you take this off? I was trying to pull it away. But I realised the staples had stapled in to the side of his face and his face was being pulled by the staples. I told him I couldn’t help him. At that point, I figured from my first aid training to leave that kind of stuff in”.

Rep. Patricia Saiki, R-Hawaii, is flanked by Aloha Airlines flight attendants Amy Jones- Brown, left, and Michelle Honda during a ceremony on Capitol Hill Wednesday, June 22, 1988. The ceremony was held to pay tribute to C.B. Lasing.

 

Michelle Honda is a true heroine. Despite her own injuries and fears she crawled along the aircraft floor checking on passengers, making sure they were strapped in, wearing life-jackets and comforting the injured. Then on the ground she led a successful evacuation and even visited her passengers at the hospital twice to check on their progress. Her heroic efforts helped ensure that no passenger lost their lives that day. 
She later reacted to her praise with deep humility, declining the label of ‘hero’ and saying she was just ‘doing her job’ and this is why Michelle Honda, Clarabelle ‘CB’ Lansing, Jane Sato-Tomita, Amy Jones Brown, Captain Robert Schornsteiner and First Officer Madeline “Mimi” Tompkins join our ‘Angels Of The Sky’.

Gov. John Waihee poses with the crew of Aloha Airlines’ ill-fated flight 243 when they were presented with letters of commendation. From left to right – Captain Robert Schornsteiner, First Officer Madeline “Mimi” Tompkins, Jane Sato-Tomita, Gov. Waihee, Michelle Honda and Amy Jones-Brown.

Events like this make us remember why we do our job and serve as a reminder to the world that we are Aviation’s ‘First Responders’. We are onboard every flight to ensure safe passage of their journey. When tragedy strikes we are there to save lives. 
© confessionsofatrolleydolly.com by Dan Air
NB The quotes from Michelle Honda used for this article are taken from an interview in The Washington Post May 18, 1988 ‘A Flight Attendant’s Moments In The Maelstrom’

-Confessions Of a Trolley Dolly

Greensboro sit-in

Greensboro sit-in, act of nonviolent protest against a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, that began on February 1, 1960. Its success led to a wider sit-in movement, organized primarily by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), that spread throughout the South.

African American students (left to right: Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, William Smith, and Clarence Henderson) holding a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, February 2, 1960.© UPI/Bettmann/Corbis

The sit-in was organized by Ezell Blair, Jr. (later Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond—all African Americans and all students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. Influenced by the nonviolent protest techniques of Mohandas Gandhi and the Journey of Reconciliation (an antecedent of the Freedom Rides) organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, the four men executed a plan to draw attention to racial segregation in the private sector. Enlisting the aid of Ralph Johns, a local white businessman who was sympathetic to their cause, the students, who came to be dubbed the Greensboro Four, planned their social action in great detail.
On the afternoon of February 1, 1960, the Greensboro Four entered a Woolworth’s general merchandise store that had a dining area. The men bought small items and retained the receipt as proof of purchase, before sitting down at the store’s lunch counter. While blacks were allowed to patronize the dining area, they were relegated to a standing snack bar, as the lunch counter was designated for “whites only.” The Greensboro Four politely requested service at the counter, remaining seated while their orders were refused by the waitstaff. The lunch counter manager contacted the police, but Johns had already alerted the local media. The police arrived, only to declare that they could do nothing because the four men were paying customers of the store and had not taken any provocative actions. The media response, however, was immediate. A photo of the Greensboro Four appeared in local newspapers, and the protest quickly expanded.
The following day the Greensboro Four returned to the Woolworth’s lunch counter, accompanied by some 20 other black university students. The scene played out again February 3–4, with protestors filling virtually all the available seats and spilling out of the store and onto the sidewalk outside. Within weeks, national media coverage of the protest led to sit-ins being staged in cities across the country. Soon dining facilities across the South were being integrated, and by July 1960 the lunch counter at the Greensboro Woolworth’s was serving black patrons. The Greensboro sit-in provided a template for nonviolent resistance and marked an early success for the civil rights movement.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

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