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Irwin Held: Recently Dead

June 19, 2013 at 12:17 pm

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Irwin Held, who owned the controversial beer-and-burger dive Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica Boulevard from 1970 to 1999, died Monday from a kidney ailment at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87. The restaurant opened in 1927 and in its early heyday serviced the likes of Lana Turner and Clark Gable and, in later years, Janis Joplin (said to have eaten her last meal there) and Jim Morrison were frequenters. It was also memorialized as a full-scale museum installation by artist Ed Kienholz. When Held took over the ownership, he inherited a sign over the bar that read “Fagots Stay Out,” a warning posted by the Beanery’s previous owner, John “Barney” Anthony, who had put it up after police in the 1940s raided his restrooms for then-illegal homosexual activity. Urged to remove the sign, Held held out, despite prolonged picketing and other protests by the LGBT community and others. ”He was just one of those guys who didn’t like being told what to do with his business,” said the Beanery’s current co-owner, David Houston. “He was very old-school, and this was a freedom issue.” (Held allowed smoking at the Beanery even after smoking was banned in bars.) When West Hollywood incorporated in November, 1984, an anti-discrimination ordinance was passed and, facing a fine of $500 a day, Held reluctantly removed the sign two months later, and stopped handing out matchbooks with the hateful Fagots Stay Out slogan.”For the first time in my life, I know how MacArthur must have felt at Corregidor,” he told the Los Angeles Times, referring to General Douglas MacArthur’s 1942 retreat from Japanese troops in the Philippines. (via latimes)

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Celebrity Hairdresser Kenneth Battelle: Recently Dead

May 14, 2013 at 4:34 pm

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Iconic hairdresser Kenneth Battelle, whose name was synonymous with the big helmets of hair that society dames wore for decades, died on Sunday at his home in Wappingers Falls, NY, two years after he cut his last head of hair. He was 86. Battelle, known as just Kenneth – no “Mr. Kenneth,” please — was the hairstylist of choice for both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. He was responsable, in fact, for Jackie’s iconic bouffant, which he created “to lengthen her head and balance her broad cheekbones.” He used some hair spray, but allowed a few wisps to fall away to make her look less “set.” For that he was nicknamed Secretary of Grooming. He began his career at the Starlet Beauty Bar, opposite the Greyhound bus station in Syracuse, New York, where prostitutes made up much of the clientele. His bob cut there became ragingly popular. From there he moved to New York, where he soon got a job with Helena Rubinstein. After opening his own salon in 1963, he was dubbed the first celebrity hairdresser, styling the hair of Brooke Astor, Lee Radziwill, Katharine Graham, Judy Garland and Audrey Hepburn among others. Lucille Ball called him “God.” In 1961, Vogue magazine said that “almost every famous female head in the world has gone or will go” to Kenneth. The New York Times noted: “His contribution to his craft — he insisted that it was neither a profession nor an art — was to persuade women to rely less on permanents, bleaches and hair spray in favor of a more romantic look. He advanced the use of rollers to create natural-looking waves,” often making his own rollers out of lucite when the size he wanted didn’t exist. “But Mr. Battelle never saw himself as anything more than a hard-working servant, a word he liked to use. ‘What I do,’ he said, ‘is only a shampoo away from being nothing.’” Says Wikipedia: “For a while Kenneth enjoyed the celebrity lifestyle, being considered equivalent to an A-list celebrity. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2003, Kenneth stated that although he used to enjoy attending social events, a headline in a mid-1960s issue of the New York Journal-American reading “Pickle Queen goes to Yacht Party With Hairdresser” upset him and led to his decision to avoid going out with his clients again.

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Taylor Mead: Recently Dead

May 9, 2013 at 10:12 am

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Poet, underground movie star, and “beloved icon of the downtown New York art scene since the ’60s“ Taylor Mead died in Colorado yesterday after suffering a stroke. He was 88. This comes just a month after accepting a settlement from his landlord Ben Shaoul to vacate the Lower East Side tenement building he called home for three decades. Mead had fled to Denver to live with family, but told friends he longed to return to downtown Manhattan. From Wikipedia: “Born in Detroit, Michigan, Mead appeared in Ron Rice’s beat classic The Flower Thief (1960), in which he ‘traipses with an elfin glee through a lost San Francisco of smoke-stuffed North Beach cafes…’” making him, as The Village Voice noted, “the first underground movie star.” Taylor, of course, is most famous for appearing in countless Andy Warhol films, including Taylor Mead’s Ass, a film that consisted of, as Art Forum famously described it, ‘seventy-six seriocomic minutes of this poet/actor’s buttocks absorbing light, attention, debris.’” Ah, the ’60s. He was also the subject of the 2005 documentary Excavating Taylor Mead (left). The New York Times today described Taylor as a Warhol “superstar,” Beat poet, stray-cat feeder, and the sweet face and voice of an era, saying that with his death “he takes a large slice of Lower Manhattan’s cultural history with him.” And of course I say this every time an icon passes, but we will not see the likes of him again. It’s very sad day, indeed.

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Jeanne Cooper: Recently Dead

May 8, 2013 at 3:25 pm

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Soap opera legend Jeanne Cooper, who for nearly four decades played grande dame Katherine Chancellor on The Young and the Restless, died this morning after “a long uphill battle for an undisclosed illness,” according to her son, actor Corbin Bernsen. She was 84. Cooper joined the soap opera six months after it debuted in March 1973, and eventually earned 11 Daytime Emmy nominations and a trophy for best actress in 2008. In 1984, Cooper’s real-life facelift was televised on the show as her character underwent the surgery at the same time, and is considered a revolutionary milestone in daytime television. ”It opened up reconstructive surgery for so many people, youngsters getting things done,” she said. “To this day, people will come up to me and say, ‘Thank you so much for doing that. My mom or I had something done, and not just cosmetic surgery.’ That was an incredible experience in my life.” Now watch this priceless ’80s-era clip from the show featuring Jeanne and the incomparable Deven Green Brenda Dickson. Read more at Fox and Wikipedia.

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Ray Harryhausen: Recently Dead

May 7, 2013 at 2:08 pm

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recently dead Ray Harryhausen Ray Harryhausen, the longtime master of stop-motion animation in the movies, died today at London’s Hammersmith Hospital, where he had been receiving treatment for about a week. He was 92. The cause of his death was not immediately known, but his passing was “gentle and quiet,” said his biographer and friend Tony Dalton. Harryhausen, the great-grandson of African explorer David Livingstone, is the wizard behind the amazing and exciting effects in 1955′s It Came from Beneath the Sea, 1963′s Jason and the Argonauts (that skeleton fight!!), 1956′s Earth vs the Flying Saucers, and 1981′s Clash of the Titans, among others. Harryhausen made 17 movies in his career. George Lucas, who borrowed some of Harryhausen’s techniques for Star Wars, said, “I had seen some other fantasy films before, but none of them had the kind of awe that Ray Harryhausen’s movies had.” Science fiction author Ray Bradbury, a longtime friend and admirer, once remarked: “Harryhausen stands alone as a technician, as an artist and as a dreamer. He breathed life into mythological creatures he constructed with his own hands.”  Harryhausen sculpted characters from three to 15 inches tall and photographed them one frame at a time in continuous poses, creating the illusion of motion. In today’s movies, such effects are achieved digitally. Though Harryhausen admired the quality of modern digital effects, he stuck to the old-fashioned way of creating fantasy. “I don’t think you want to make it quite real. Stop motion, to me, gives that added value of a dream world,” he said. [Fun fact: To save time and work, in the movie It Came from Beneath the Sea, he gave the giant octopus only six tentacles instead of eight.]

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Chris Kelly: Recently Dead

May 2, 2013 at 6:51 am

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Chris Kelly, half of the ’90s kid rap duo Kris Kross, who made one of the decade’s most memorable songs with “Jump,” died yesterday at the Atlanta Medical Center after being discovered unresponsive at home. He was 34. Authorities are unsure as to the cause of death and no autopsy has been performed, but police say it appears to be a drug overdose. [Update: After paramedics took him to the hospital, a woman who identified herself as Kelly's friend told an investigator that Kelly had taken a mixture of heroin and cocaine Tuesday night, and that she had brought Kelly home "to recover from his drug use," according to a police report.] Kelly, known as “Mac Daddy,” and Chris Smith, known as “Daddy Mac,” were introduced to the music world in 1992 by music producer and rapper Jermaine Dupri after he discovered the two 13-year-olds in an Atlanta mall. The duo wore their clothes backwards as a gimmick, which became a fad among their fans for a while. “Jump,” which was written by Dupri, jumped off their multiplatinum 1992 debut album Totally Krossed Out and became a #1 hit in the United States and around the world, and one of the most popular of that year. On his networking site, Jermaine Dupri wrote, “To the world, Chris was Mac Daddy, but to me, he was a son I never had.” When he learned of Kelly’s death, Michael Skolnik, editor in chief of the hip hop site Global Grind said, ”I’m wearing my clothes backwards to work tomorrow.” 

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