Notable passages
Flashbacks on the main page of this blog have lately been taking us through my remembrances, nearly a dozen years ago now, of as many notable movie and other entertainment and pop-culture people as I was able to list who had passed on during 2006. I obviously had a lot more time and/or energy back then. Actually, it has more to do with the fact that I now spend more of my time writing books, and that’s probably a good tradeoff. After all, there are lots of places to read obituaries of and tributes to the recently deceased—but no one can write my books like I can. Still, I did always enjoy highlighting someone whose life was noteworthy in my eyes and may not have gotten a lot of attention elsewhere. Or maybe just to add my own personal note to someone’s life story. The best I can do these days is to occasionally take note, more or less at random, of a few passings now and then. That is what this is.
Some mini-obituaries kind of write themselves. Or rather, sometimes I find myself pre-writing them. Such is the case of Scotty Bowers, erstwhile sex facilitator to the stars. He passed away at the age of 96 on October 13. I pretty much did my summary of his life when I reviewed his book Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars seven years ago, so you would be advised to click the link and read that. Interestingly, that review has since been one of the biggest click-getters on this website, and it really got a lot of new clicks in the days after Bowers’s demise. (Another consistently clicked-on book review is the biography of Dark Shadows actor Louis Edmonds. Interestingly, though, the review I wrote of his castmate Grayson Hall’s biography, does not get clicked on nearly as much.)
Another obit pretty much already in the can is that of bigger-than-life Hollywood producer Robert Evans. I more or less covered him when I reviewed Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen’s documentary drawn from Evans’s autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture. If you would like that augmented, go find Barry Levinson’s very funny political satire Wag the Dog. Dustin Hoffmann based his producer character squarely on Evans.
Sy Tomashoff, who died on July 28 at the age of 96, was a production designer who won seven daytime Emmy awards. He worked on the soap operas Santa Barbara and Capitol before joining The Bold and the Beautiful where he worked for thirteen years. Not doubt, though, his biggest challenge was the nearly five years he spent on a daytime drama that required him to create the illusion of a massive Maine mansion in a fictional port town, a graveyard, woods and all kinds of other mysterious locations. And he had to do it all on a tiny budget and in a small New York studio. Yet those of us who watched Dark Shadows totally bought into the world he miraculously created. He got his degree in architecture after World War II during which he had been a rifleman under General George S. Patton. He was married for 67 years to Naomi.
On August 29 we lost Terrance Dicks at the age of 84. In 1968 he joined the BBC series Doctor Who as a script editor at the five-year mark, just in time to co-write the ten-part classic “The War Games,” which finished Patrick Troughton’s run as the second Doctor. Dicks helped revive the flagging show with the arrival of Sean Pertwee as the third Doctor. Shaping the series and its mythology for years to come, he introduced such important elements as the Time Lords; the Doctor’s nemesis, the Master; and such menaces as the Autons, the Sea Devils and the Green Death. His involvement continued through the 1980s and included penning the 20th-anniversary special “The Five Doctors” in which the time-traveling hero’s first five incarnations all met. He also wrote more than sixty novelizations based on the show’s screenplays, and he continued until recent times to be a public ambassador for the show.
The London-born actor Stephen Moore died on December 11 at the age of 81. He had a long career in which, on the stage, he played My Fair Lady’s Colonel Pickering and The History Boys’s lovable teacher Hector. “Moore’s languid and long-suffering tone of voice,” wrote the London Times in its obituary, “enabled him to carve out a niche as the modern epitome of the downtrodden father, forced to put up with children he does not understand and cannot control. This was seen most vividly when he played the fathers of Adrian Mole (aged 13¾) and Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager.” He also played Jeremy Irons’s stuffy cousin Jasper in TV’s Brideshead Revisisted. In this house, however, he will be remembered forever for a role in which he was heard but not seen. In the original radio and television versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he gave voice to Marvin the Paranoid Android. Never did a voice make such an impression and define a character so perfectly. We can still hear his depressed tones after being made to wait eons to catch up to this time-traveling companions: “[T]he first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”
Well before Brideshead Revisited and Downton Abbey, I began my anglophile telly compulsion as a teenager staying up nights watching the BBC’s Forsyte Saga on the Los Angeles PBS station by way of newly-arrived cable television. The Welshman who directed that series, James Cellan Jones, died after a stroke on August 30 at the age of 88. He did not think much of John Galsworthy’s novels but ultimately decided that “second-rate novels often make first-rate television.” The 26 episodes were originally broadcast in 1967. More literary adaptations followed, and he became the Beeb’s head of plays in 1976. He did not speak to Glenda Jackson for 15 years after he was forced by a Hollywood studio to direct her in his feature film Bequest to the Nation instead of his own choice, Elizabeth Taylor. At the film’s London premiere, he wound up eating popcorn in the theatre manager’s office instead of watching the movie because Princess Alexandra had already taken her seat and protocol dictated he could not brush past her to get to his. His son Rory is the BBC technology correspondent who sometimes intrudes on the Kermode & Mayo film podcast.
“Now it’s time to say goodbye to all our company…” Hearing those words sung by troupe of kids in mouse ears brings back all kinds of memories for baby boomers. The smallest and cutest of the bunch was blonde, curly-haired Karen, who was invariably paired with Cubby. At nine years old, Karen Pendleton was one of the nine original Mouseketeers and stayed with the original show through its entire run until 1959. That was the extent of her entertainment career. She chose to return to junior high school instead of signing a joint contract with Cubby O’Brien for Disney. In 1983 a car accident left her paralyzed from the waist down. She later earned a master’s degree in psychology from Cal State Fresno. She became an advocate for disability rights and worked as a counselor at a shelter for abused women. She died of a heart attack on October 6 at the age of 73 and is survived by her daughter and two grandchildren.
One of the pleasures of being a volunteer for the 2001 Irish Reels Film & Video Festival in Seattle was being able to screen and recommend films for the festival program. One that I recommended quite heartily was Frank Stapleton’s The Fifth Province. It was quirky and funny and knowing and very Irish. (The title is a fanciful reference to a virtual province in addition to the country’s traditional four provinces.) I knew little or nothing of the filmmaker, and sadly, as is too often the case, I got caught up only when he had shuffled off this mortal coil. A product of Churchtown in Dublin and Belvedere College, he was involved in social projects during his years with the Jesuits. He went on to film a number of documentaries and dramas with producer Catherine Tiernan. From there things get strange for me. He got married around the same time I did, and he and his wife bought an old Presbyterian manse in the west of Ireland with the intention of restoring it. I happen to know the manse well since it is the very village that my own wife is from and is a mere 14 miles from where I now live. He devoted himself to being a stay-at-home dad to his daughter, who was born not too awfully long after my own. In 2006 he completed an MA in film studies at the Huston Film School at the National University of Ireland Galway. By that time, however, his health was deteriorating and his filmmaking days had prematurely ended. Soon after his marriage, he had been diagnosed with hydrocephalus and then multiple sclerosis. At the age of only 57, he passed away on August 18.
-S.L., 6 November 2019
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