Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Eddie Albert, the versatile stage, screen and television actor who co-starred as the Park Avenue lawyer who sought happiness down on the farm in the popular 1960s sitcom “Green Acres,” has died. He was 99.

Albert, an outspoken environmentalist and humanitarian activist, died Thursday night of pneumonia at his home in Pacific Palisades, said his son, Edward Laurence Albert. According to his son, Albert was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease about 10 years ago but still lived an active, full and happy life and remained at his home throughout.

In an acting career that spanned more than six decades, the blond, blue-eyed Albert was initially typecast as what has been described as an amiable fellow with a “cornfed grin.” As Gregory Peck’s news photographer pal in “Roman Holiday” (1953), Albert earned the first of his two Academy Award nominations for best supporting actor.

His second Oscar nomination came two decades later playing Cybill Shepherd’s wealthy, exasperated father in “The Heartbreak Kid,” the 1972 Neil Simon-Elaine May comedy. Among Albert’s nearly 100 film credits — a mix of comedies, dramas and musicals — are “Oklahoma!,” “I’ll Cry Tomorrow,” “Teahouse of the August Moon,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Joker Is Wild,” “Beloved Infidel,” “The Young Doctors,” “The Longest Day,” “Captain Newman, M.D.” and “Escape to Witch Mountain.”

Albert, who scored critically acclaimed dramatic performances on live television in the 1950s, was particularly memorable when he turned his good-guy screen image on its head — as he did playing the sadistic warden in director Robert Aldrich’s 1974 comedy-drama “The Longest Yard,” starring Burt Reynolds.

“There’s no actor working today who can be as truly malignant as Eddie Albert,” Aldrich told TV Guide in 1975. “He plays heavies exactly the way they are in real life. Slick and sophisticated.”

At the time, Albert was co-starring as a retired bunco officer opposite Robert Wagner as his former con-man son in “Switch,” a private-eye drama that ran for three seasons on CBS.

But he is best remembered for “Green Acres,” which aired on CBS from 1965 to 1971 and continues to have an afterlife on cable TV. In it, Albert played Oliver Wendell Douglas, a successful Manhattan lawyer who satisfies his longing to get closer to nature by giving up his law practice and buying — sight unseen — a run-down 160-acre farm near the fictional town of Hooterville. Eva Gabor co-starred as his malaprop-dropping socialite wife, Lisa.

A spinoff of “Petticoat Junction,” “Green Acres” featured a zany cast of hayseed characters, including Mr. Haney (Pat Buttram), the con man who sold the tumbledown farm to the big-city couple.

Albert previously had turned down series offers, including “My Three Sons” and “Mister Ed,” unwilling to forgo his movie career for a medium he said was “geared to mediocrity.”

But then his agent told him the concept of the proposed CBS comedy series: A city slicker comes to the country to escape the frustrations of city living.

“I said, ‘Swell; that’s me. Everyone gets tired of the rat race. Everyone would like to chuck it all and grow some carrots. It’s basic. Sign me,’ ” Albert told TV Guide. “I knew it would be successful. Had to be. It’s about the atavistic urge, and people have been getting a charge out of that ever since Aristophanes wrote about the plebs and the city folk.”

Of course, the ancient Greek playwright didn’t create characters such as pig farmer Fred Ziffel (Hank Patterson), whose scene-stealing pet pig, Arnold, watched television.
See more Eddie Albert memorabilia at eBay.com

LA Times
Vivian Liberto Distin, the first wife of Johnny Cash and the woman he pledged to remain faithful to in the song “I Walk the Line,” died Tuesday at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura. She was 71.

Distin died of complications from surgery for lung cancer, said Danny Kahn, manager of singer Rosanne Cash, the oldest of the couple’s four daughters.

The pair met at a roller-skating rink in San Antonio three weeks before the Air Force sent Cash to Germany in 1950. While he was overseas, they exchanged more than 10,000 pages of love letters that Distin was using as the basis for an autobiography tentatively titled “I Walked the Line,” said her coauthor, Ann Sharpsteen. The book is scheduled to be published next year.

“Vivian saw the women fans just swooning over Johnny when he toured with Elvis…. Periodically she would ask him, ‘Honey, what do you think about those women?’ He always told her, ‘You don’t have a thing to worry about. I always walk the line,’ ” Sharpsteen said.

That would not always be the case. The marriage ended after 13 years, and Cash openly acknowledged one of the reasons.

“My first marriage was in trouble when I lived in California, and I have to take blame for that — because no woman can live with a man who’s strung out on amphetamines,” he told Penthouse magazine in 1975.

It didn’t help that she was home taking care of the children while he was an entertainer who traveled all the time, said Cash’s longtime manager, Lou Robin.

Still, Sharpsteen said, “Vivian believed in her heart of hearts that if Johnny had never gotten involved in drugs, they would have remain married.”

Distin recalled scratching down the lyrics to “I Walk the Line” as they came to Cash while they were driving around or at home in their living room, Sharpsteen said.

NY Times
Ludmilla Nikitina Shapiro, a Russian-born journalist and photographer who with her husband amassed a collection of Soviet-era political porcelain considered the most comprehensive in North America, died on May 8 in Madison, Wis., where she lived. She was 91.

Mrs. Shapiro’s death was announced by her granddaughter, Alexandra Corten.

Over six decades, Mrs. Shapiro and her husband, Henry, built their collection through donations, by scouring consignment shops and by occasional gentle larceny. (Mrs. Shapiro once lifted a cigarette holder from the Kremlin.) The collection was acquired in 1989 by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York…

The Shapiros started their collection in 1933, purely by chance.

“Henry and I were eating lunch at a skating rink, and the coffee spoons were chained to the water heaters on the table so they could not be stolen,” Mrs. Shapiro said in 1992. “The plates had inscriptions on them: ‘Stolen From the Moscow State Eating Enterprise.’

“I said, ‘Well, then let’s do what they invite us to do.’ So we stole it.”

Soviet Collectables at eBay
Soviet Revolutionary Ceramics

Coming in to you from Far and Away direct from the Old Country ODD Intergalactic HQ. We’re here to renew our Kundalini energies by OM’ing at the Gallarus Oratory. Its the intense pressure of writing a daily blog don’t cha’ know. Earlier we checked into our Clocháns along Slea Head Drive and expect to take a wee dip in the Atlantic at the stunning Slea Head beach. Do have a care as the waves here can be a bit of boom, bam, like slamming a door
. Dinner with Ryan’s Daughter at 8pm sharp.

We OM’ed long and hard about unhooking Hooterville from the memory tree as a tribute to the great Eddie Albert, but we found that subject too padded for our gaze today. Instead lets relate a story we heard: word has it that Eddie and one Burl Ives were living together way back when in Hollyweird. Burl came home one day and told Eddie about a family just out of the Dust Bowl and living in a train car. The man plays a mean guitar said Burl.

Eddie is said to have replied as: “Well, we have a big place here, why don’t you invite them to stay with us?”. Next day Eddie came home to hear sounds of a guitar in the house. He found big pitchers of milk and a mess of chicken in the kitchen and two children running all around. The man came up to Eddie and introduced himself: “Hello Mr. Albert. Thank you for having us. My name is Woodie Guthrie.”

True. True.

Froggy went a courtin’
and we’ve added a few ends and odds over a the ol’ country store. Stay safe, steal the silverware and thanks for reading and supporting ODD.

NY Times
Dr. Keiiti Aki, a seismologist whose penetrating studies of the behavior and origins of earthquakes contributed to a deeper understanding of natural disasters, died May 17 on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean. He was 75. The cause was a brain hemorrhage suffered after a fall, said a close friend, John K. McRaney of the Southern California Earthquake Center, where Dr. Aki had been a director.

In a career that spanned the earth sciences, Dr. Aki, a resident of Réunion, east of Madagascar, was interested in applying methods of quantitative analysis to shape theories in seismology. He was widely known for his concept of the “seismic moment,” which he developed in the 1960’s as a means of measuring the magnitude of earthquakes.

While studying a huge earthquake that struck Niigata, Japan, in 1964, Dr. Aki devised a calculation that considers the area affected by an earthquake, the rigidity of the underlying rock and the distance the rocks slip. The result - the seismic moment - is a measure of the energy released by an earthquake, and is used in addition to the moment magnitude scale, now the standard measurement announced to the public after disasters like the earthquake-generated tsunamis in December.

NY Times
Ruth Laredo, a pianist equally at home in chamber music and solo works who was known for landmark recordings of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, died on Wednesday at her apartment in New York. She was 67. Ms. Laredo, who played her last concert on May 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had cancer and died in her sleep, said her manager, James Murtha.

The concert was one of a series she had given for 17 years at the Met called “Concerts With Commentary,” in which Ms. Laredo played and spoke engagingly about music. The series had become an important part of the New York concert scene, where she was a frequent presence.

Just two days after the attack on the World Trade Center, Ms. Laredo celebrated the 25th anniversary of her Alice Tully Hall debut with a recital there. It was the opening concert of the 2001 Lincoln Center season, and Ms. Laredo addressed the audience beforehand, saying: “It was important for me to play. Great music gives us spiritual sustenance and gives us hope. It is in that spirit that I play tonight.”

Ms. Laredo was a pianist in the Romantic mold, a dynamic performer concerned with texture and color. In recent years, Mr. Murtha said, her career as a soloist with orchestras had waned, but she was comfortable with a mix of recitals, chamber concerts and accompanying duties.

When she was first on the rise, in the 1970’s, Ms. Laredo was a relative rarity as a female piano soloist, particularly in the technically demanding and muscular works of Rachmaninoff. There were only a few others - Gina Bachauer, Myra Hess and later Alicia de Larrocha, for example.

“Every time we did interviews in those early days, she was asked how does it feel to be a woman pianist,” Mr. Murtha said. “She wanted to be a pianist, period.”

Ruth Laredo dared embrace the power and range of Rachmaninov. When she was preparing for her Rachmaninov records she discovered why so many Rachmaninov pieces were never played publicly: “They’re hard” was her succinct remark. Keiiti Aki dared to explain the power and range of earthquakes, seismic waves and his concept called a seismic moment. We all witnessed the terrifying power and range of earthquakes late last year.

Well, OK, under extreme cross-examination we admit that Rachmaninov does not cause earthquakes. But word has it that Tesla built an earthquake machine. And we’ve heard that sheep’s bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes. Do these two items make up for our outrageous initial claim? No! HELP! Best get I and I the Ex-Jackson Lawyer team now! (Do you suppose being an ex-Jackson lawyer is a plus on your resume?)

Since this is a travel weekend for many of all y’all we have another suggestion after playing around at TripAdvisor.com again. Since earthquakes are on the ticket we thought a nice trip to Coalinga, California would be in order. Book now for the upcoming earthquake season.

NY Times
Ismail Merchant, whose filmmaking collaboration with James Ivory created a genre of films with visually sumptuous settings that told literate tales of individuals trying to adapt to shifting societal values, died yesterday in a London hospital. He was 68. Mr. Merchant’s New York office said that the cause was undetermined, but that he had had surgery for abdominal ulcers on Tuesday.

The Indian-born Mr. Merchant’s carnival-barker personality contrasted dramatically with the artist’s reserve of the Oregon-reared Mr. Ivory, but as producer and director respectively they achieved a personal and professional partnership that endured 44 years and produced award-winning films including “A Room With a View,” “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day.”

Impulsive, scheming and devoted to the deal in pushing his influence behind the scenes, Mr. Merchant was so unfailingly ingratiating up front that the actor Simon Callow once said the phrase “to curry favor” was invented for Mr. Merchant.

At his death, he and Mr. Ivory were in London shooting “The White Countess,” from a script by Kazuo Ishiguro, starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, and Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave. Among the other notable films he produced were “Shakespeare Wallah,” “The Europeans,” “Quartet,” “Heat and Dust,” “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” “Jefferson in Paris” and “The Golden Bowl.”

A Merchant-Ivory film set was always something of a family affair, with Mr. Merchant a more frequent visitor than producers generally are and the same crew members returning for service over decades. Once on the scene, Mr. Merchant was just as likely to be fetching tea for a company member or making one of his celebrated curries for the cast as pitching a fit about cost overruns or schedule snafus. Mr. Merchant traveled frequently between Europe and an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, but he and Mr. Ivory centered their life in a 14-room manor house in Claverack, N.Y., built in 1805 and filled with enough elegant furniture, prints and paintings to be a setting for a Merchant-Ivory film.

Born in 1936 in what was then Bombay, Mr. Merchant moved to New York in 1958 and earned a master’s in business administration at New York University. His first film was a theatrical short, “The Creation of Woman,” which was a United States entry in the 1961 Cannes International Film Festival. En route to the festival, Mr. Merchant met Mr. Ivory, and they formed a partnership to make English-language features in India for the international market. Mr. Ivory survives him, as do four sisters: Saherbanu Kabadia and Ruksana Khan, both of Mumbai; Sahida Retiwala of Bergenfield, N.J.; and Rashida Bootwala of Pune, India.

The first Merchant-Ivory project was “The Householder,” based on a book by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, an author who grew up in Britain and married an Indian. She then became the team’s writing collaborator in an agreement signed on a napkin in a Manhattan restaurant in 1963.

ODDthanks to reader Get2Feet for catching a mistake made in yesterday’s blog. Seems our infinite number of monkeys suffered severe IBM Selectric jams and thus it was we told you the horse Hollywood Dun It was a champion RACING horse when if fact the word should have been REINING. And yes, there is a BIG difference much as you might find between Saddam’s knickers and vibrating knickers.

Now that wasn’t the only thing we ODDly wondered about after yesterday…Did Dorothy say “Oh my!” or “Oh! My!”? We’d ask ol’ Dorothy, but she is a tad mum on the subject and we are rather deaf since a large bore rifle incident and therefore cannot quite catch the nuance. But Dorothy and monkey mayhem make us think of Kansas and that lead us for some reason to the Flat Earth Society. Get your Nikes and purple capes at the border.

In the real news half of the Merchant-Ivory film team has faded from the scene. Ismail Merchant was born in Bombay, India, but migrated to New York and attended New York University. Mr. Merchant met James Ivory while Mr. Merchant was on his way to the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. The rest is pure Bollywood. And Mr. Merchant’s death at 68 seems far too soon a passing.

Tourism Aside: if considering you are a visit to Bombay (or Mumbai) we ODDfellows have found the user reviews section over at Trip Advisor well worth the time.

And speaking of trips without lysergic acid diethylamide did you catch that education affects sleep quality? ODDly we gather that well educated women should marry not so well educated men - that way both will get insomnia free sleep. This Irish Health article makes no mention of how Guinness plays into the study however.

C’est tout. We need some time today to get our personal ad together - how do you abbreviate ‘well educated’?

Red-faced, we remain