Wednesday, October 1, 2014

A00065 - Mary Ellen Moore-Richard, Lakota Memoirist

Mary Ellen Moore-Richard, American Indian Memoirist, Dies at 58

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: March 3, 2013

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Mary Ellen Moore-Richard, who was a member of the American Indian Movement during its militant actions of the 1970s and who, under the name Mary Crow Dog, later wrote a well-received memoir, “Lakota Woman,” died on Feb. 14 in Crystal Lake, Nev. She was 58.

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Mary Ellen Moore-Richard joined the American Indian Movement, a sometimes violent civil rights group that led well-publicized protests.

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HarperCollins Publishers

Ms. Moore-Richard wrote the memoir "Lakota Woman" with Richard Erdoes.

Her death was announced by Rooks Funeral Chapel in Mission, S.D.

Ms. Moore-Richard grew up poor on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota in the late 1950s and ’60s. She was known throughout her life by several names, including Mary Brave Bird and Mary Crow Dog, a reflection of her complex family life and racial identity. Her father, Bill Moore, who was of mostly white descent, left when she was a baby, and she was sometimes mocked and called iyeska — half-breed — as a child.

“Always I waited for the summer, for the prairie sun, the Badlands sun, to tan me and make me into a real skin,” she wrote in “Lakota Woman,” which was written with the journalist and author Richard Erdoes and published in 1990. In 1994, Jane Fonda Films produced a television movie for TNT based on the book.

Ms. Moore-Richard wrote that her stepfather had taught her to drink when she was 10.

“The little settlements we lived in — He Dog, Upper Cut Meat, Parmelee, St. Francis, Belvidere — were places without hope where bodies and souls were being destroyed bit by bit,” she wrote. “Schools left many of us almost illiterate. We were not taught any skills. The land was leased to white ranchers. Jobs were almost nonexistent on the reservation, and outside the res, whites did not hire Indians if they could help it.”

She attended the St. Francis Boarding School on the reservation and, like generations of American Indians, was instructed to practice Christianity and not to speak her native Sioux language. As a teenager, she published a newspaper describing abuse and misconduct at the school, and the school, run by Roman Catholic priests and nuns, punished her for doing so, she said. Some of her school experiences are described in a chapter of her book called “Civilize Them With a Stick.”

By her late teens, Ms. Moore-Richard had joined the American Indian Movement, also known as AIM, a sometimes violent civil rights group that led well-publicized protests, including one in which demonstrators occupied the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington in 1972.

Ms. Moore-Richard, who married one of the group’s leaders, Leonard Crow Dog, gave birth to their first child during AIM’s violent two-month occupation of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which began in February 1973.

Violence on the reservation continued long after the occupation; her close friend and fellow AIM member Anna Mae Pictou Aquash was found dead in 1976.

“The police said that she had died of exposure, but there was a .38-caliber slug in her head,” Ms. Moore-Richard wrote in 1990.

In 2004, an AIM member, Arlo Looking Cloud, was convicted of killing Ms. Aquash. Prosecutors said AIM members believed that Ms. Aquash had been spying on AIM for the F.B.I.

In 1993, Ms. Moore-Richard and Mr. Erdoes wrote a sequel to their first book, called“Ohitika Woman.”

Mary Ellen Moore-Richard was born in Pine Ridge on Sept. 26, 1954. Survivors include four sons, Robert He Crow, Francisco Olguin, Henry Crow Dog and Leonard Crow Dog Jr.; two daughters, Jennifer Crow Dog and Summer Rose Olguin; her mother, Emily Smith; two brothers, Robert Joe Moore and Michael Smith; and two sisters, Kathleen Moore and Barbara Moore.

Ms. Moore-Richard was a regular presence on the set of the TNT film in 1994. In an interview at the time with The Los Angeles Times, she said AIM should be more appreciated by American Indians.

“Before AIM came, people didn’t have their long hair, people didn’t have their Indian pride,” she said. “Everybody was assimilated. These people still put AIM people down, but now they are having sun dances. Before, nobody did it because everybody was Catholic and nobody knew about the Indian ways until the AIM people came. Now they are a lot better off, but they still don’t recognize the movement.”

A00064 - Bonnie Franklin, 'One Day at a Time' Star

Bonnie Franklin, Steadfast Mom on ‘One Day at a Time,’ Dies at 69

CBS, via Photofest

Bonnie Franklin, left, with Valerie Bertinelli in a 1979 episode of 'One Day at a Time."

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: March 1, 2013

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Bonnie Franklin, whose portrayal of a pert but determined Ann Romano on the television show “One Day at a Time” in the 1970s and ’80s spun laughter out of the tribulations of a divorced woman juggling parenting, career, love life and feminist convictions, died on Friday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 69.

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Bonnie Franklin

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, family members said. They had announced the diagnosis in September.

Ms. Franklin also acted on the stage and in movies and for years sang and danced in a nightclub act. But she was most widely known in the role of Ann Romano, one of the first independent women to be portrayed on TV wrestling with issues like sexual harassment, rape and menopause. Ms. Franklin — green-eyed, red-haired, button-nosed and 5-foot-3 — brought a buoyant comic touch to the part.

Some saw the show as helping feminism enter the mainstream.

“I know it’s just a television show, and I don’t think that I am changing the way the world is structured,” Ms. Franklin told The Washington Post in 1980, but she allowed that “sometimes we strike chords that do make people think a bit.”

“One Day at a Time” ran from December 1975 to May 1984, and its ratings ranked in the top 20 in eight of those seasons and in the top 10 in four. Ms. Franklin was nominated for an Emmy Award and twice for a Golden Globe.

The show’s topicality fell squarely in the tradition of its developer, Norman Lear, who had gained renown for introducing political and social commentary to situation comedy with “All in the Family” and other shows. Its co-creator was Whitney Blake, a former sitcom star who, as a single mother, had reared the future actress Meredith Baxter.

Like Archie and Edith Bunker in “All in the Family,” Ann and her daughters, Julie and Barbara Cooper (Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli), used comedy in the service of grappling with serious and thorny real-world matters.

As a divorced mother who had reverted to her maiden name and relocated to Indianapolis, Ann fought her deadbeat ex-husband for child support, for example. Or she dealt with a daughter deciding whether to remain a virgin.

Some story lines continued for up to four weeks, as when Julie, to Ann’s consternation, dated a man more than twice her age. In one plot twist Ann’s fiancé is killed by a drunken driver. Later she marries her son-in-law’s divorced father.

Comic relief came from the frequent visits of the building superintendent, Dwayne Schneider (Pat Harrington). But Ms. Franklin was said to have pushed the producers toward greater realism, urging them to take on issues like teenage pregnancy and avoid letting the show lapse into comic shtick.

In her 2009 memoir, “High on Arrival,” Ms. Phillips, who had come to the show after gaining notice in the 1973 George Lucas film “American Graffiti,” said that Ms. Franklin did not want “One Day at a Time” to be “sitcom fluff.”

“She wanted it to deal honestly with the struggles and truths of raising two teenagers as a single mother," Ms. Phillips wrote.

By the time the show ended in 1984, Ann’s daughters had grown and married; Ann herself had remarried and become a grandmother.

In interviews. Ms. Franklin said she had refused to do anything that might diminish her character’s integrity. In particular, she said, it was important for Ann not to rely on a man to make decisions. But each year she found herself fighting the same fights.

“And I’m not working with insensitive men,” she told The Boston Globe in 1981. “But the men who produce and write the show still don’t believe me when I present them with the women’s point of view.

“After seven years,” she continued, “I just want to say, ‘C’mon guys, I’m an intelligent person, why don’t you just trust me?’ I’m so tired of fighting. But you can’t give up.”

Bonnie Gail Franklin was born in Santa Monica, Calif., on Jan. 6, 1944, one of five children. Her father was an investment banker while her mother pushed her children toward the performing arts. The family later moved to Beverly Hills, where Ms. Franklin graduated from Beverly Hills High School.

An excellent tap dancer by 9, she performed on “The Colgate Comedy Hour” in 1953. The next year, she played Susan Cratchit on “A Christmas Carol” on the CBS variety show “Shower of Stars.” In 1956 she had uncredited roles in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Wrong Man” and the comedy “The Kettles in the Ozarks.” She turned down an offer to be a Mouseketeer on Disney’s “Mickey Mouse Club” television show.

After attending Smith College in Massachusetts, Ms. Franklin transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she graduated with a major in English in 1966. Her marriage to Ronald Sossi, a playwright, ended in divorce in 1970.

She had her breakthrough as a performer the same year, when she was nominated for a Tony for her 10-minute song-and-dance performance on Broadway as a chorus gypsy in “Applause,” which starred Lauren Bacall.

Ms. Franklin also acted in episodes of other television shows as well as in regional theater and movies, mainly ones made for television, notably playing Margaret Sanger, the women’s rights and birth-control advocate, in “Portrait of a Rebel: The Remarkable Mrs. Sanger,” a 1980 movie on CBS. On the Sanger set, she met the movie’s executive producer, Marvin Minoff. They were married for 29 years before his death in 2009.

Ms. Franklin is survived by her mother, Claire Franklin, and her stepchildren Jed and Julie Minoff.

Twenty-four years after her Sanger portrayal, Ms. Franklin spoke to hundreds of thousands of women at an abortion rights march in Washington.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

A00063 - Sylvia Smith, Memoirist of the Life Banal

Sylvia Smith, Memoirist of the Life Banal, Dies at 67

Rex USA

Sylvia Smith, whose badly written, boring memoirs of her life as a secretary became huge hits in Britain and elsewhere.

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: March 2, 2013

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Sylvia Smith — who dropped out of high school at 15, never married, lived most of her life in London rooming houses, never had a great adventure or suffered a great misfortune, and never read books by most accounts — began writing her memoirs in her late 40s, when illness and a government disability pension had allowed her to quit the last of a long series of secretarial jobs, most of them as a temp.

It was an unlikely foundation for a literary career. Just as unlikely was the literary stir she created with her first book, “Misadventures,” published in 2001 when she was 55 after years of work and hundreds of rejection letters.

The book, a plainly written, deadpan chronicle of an ordinary life, seemed to push the allowable boundaries of ordinary, entering an edge-of-space world where critics quarrel over literary metaphysics. Reading “Misadventures,” they were divided over whether they saw a bad joke or a kind of outsider-art masterpiece in a passage like this:

“Early in December, Carol asked me, ‘What day is Christmas?’ I replied, ‘I don’t know.’ The following morning she told me, ‘Christmas Day is on the 25th of December.’ I replied, ‘I know that, but I thought you meant what day of the week.’ She didn’t believe me.”

In another passage, Ms. Smith described training as a hair dresser. She liked it well enough. Then one day she “got put off when I was shampooing an old lady’s hair and my fingernails got caught in a growth.”

One critic said the “unremitting banality” of “Misadventures” had put “another nail in the coffin of our cultural life.” In the other camp, reviewers said Ms. Smith had written an existential classic, a work of dry, mordant wit that pricked the fakery in most celebrity-memoir writing.

Comparisons were drawn with George and Weedon Grossmith’s deadpan comic masterpiece, “The Diary of a Nobody,” and with Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” Though not quite a best seller, “Misadventures” nevertheless sold about 15,000 copies.

Ms. Smith, who died on Feb. 23 in a hospital outside London, at 67, said she had intended her books simply to be “hysterically funny” She often laughed out loud while writing them, she said, and never gave a thought to existential philosophy.

“I just liked writing books and wanted to get published,” she said.

She published two more memoirs, “Appleby House” (2003) and “My Holidays” (2004). She had completed a fourth installment of her memoirs, still unpublished, and started on a fifth when she became too ill to keep working a few months ago, said Caroline Dawnay, her literary agent. The cause of death was pulmonary disease, she added.

Ms. Dawnay had come to know Ms. Smith through Jeremy Lewis, an author of literary biographies, who in the 1990s was employed part time by a London publishing house as a reader. He was skimming through unsolicited manuscripts one day, he recalled in an e-mail on Thursday, when he plucked Ms. Smith’s from “the slush pile” and started reading.

“It was a fairly unwholesome-looking document,” Mr. Lewis wrote, “yellowing and dog-eared and bashed out on an old manual typewriter, and I assumed I would read a few pages at most and give it a quick heave-ho.

“To my amazement,” he wrote, “I found myself gripped by this simply written, blow-by-blow account of what was, by most standards, a numbingly tedious everyday life.”

Her reflection-free narratives had a convincing authority, he added. “She created a world that was — to her admirers, at least — credible, self-contained and self-sufficient.” He took the manuscript to Ms. Dawnay, who shopped it around for two years before finding a publisher, Canongate, willing to accept it.

After “Misadventures,” the publisher brought out “Appleby House,” which Ms. Smith had written first, then consigned to a closet after repeated rejections.

Sylvia Smith, Memoirist of the Life Banal, Dies at 67

Published: March 2, 2013

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(Page 2 of 2)

As in all her books, “Appleby House” — the title comes from a rooming house she lived in during the 1980s — chronicles her life with detachment and thoroughness, like a bookkeeper keeping a ledger of lives’ loose ends: the marital histories of friends, lists of gifts from Christmases past, a roster of people who had aged badly since she had last seen them at the pub, the names of childhood pets in the order of their deaths.

“There was a single bed against the far wall,” she writes of her room, “and everything was shabbily furnished in either red or white, with the walls, wardrobe, wall cupboard, bedside chest of drawers and fridge in white, and two armchairs, the carpet and curtains in red.”

On her first meeting with the owners: “He looked much younger than her, but I was later to find he simply looked younger than his years.”

On comforting a neighbor who had lost her job: “As I couldn’t help her, I said, ‘Sit down. I’ll make you a cup of tea.’ ”

About apportioning her visits to her parents, who were separated: “I would visit my father every other Sunday, as he lived alone. I would see my mother the last Saturday of each month — she shared a flat with her sister.”

Sylvia Smith was born on May 2, 1945, “in a hospital in Walthamstow, six days before the end of the Second World War,” she wrote in “Misadventures.” “I grew up an only child, as my elder brother, who was born the year before me, died of convulsions when he was 3 days old.”

Her father, Reginald, was a wire worker who made fireplace grates; her mother, Lilian, worked in a factory. Ms. Smith had no known survivors.

Her literary celebrity was short-lived, and not very lucrative. After a round of television appearances and interviews, the public gradually accepted that she was neither a publisher’s gimmick nor a literary hoaxer but rather exactly who she said she was — a former office temp who wanted to be a writer — and the debate over her work died down.

For a time, however, Ms. Smith was able to enjoy the life of an author. In September 2001, she and her agent visited New York to promote her books. She was interviewed and feted. But perhaps as an omen of her literary eclipse, she found the level of interest in her work disappointing and became eager to return home. She booked a flight for Sept. 12. Her plans, however, were postponed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Something always goes wrong when I go on holiday,” she told Ms. Dawnay.

A00062 - Yoshiko 'Shirley' Yamaguchi, Political Actress

Yoshiko ‘Shirley’ Yamaguchi, actress, dies at 94

By Megan McDonough September 15

Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi was a singer, actress and politician whose life was a series of incarnations.

Born to Japanese parents in Manchuria, Ms. Yamaguchi masqueraded as a Chinese actress under the name Li Xianglan in Japanese propaganda films during World War II. (She became a star in Japan, where her name was pronounced Ri Koran.)

After the war, she narrowly avoided treason charges and execution by firing squad in China. Then, as Shirley Yamaguchi — a name she chose because of Shirley Temple — she appeared in a handful of American films and on Broadway. Decades later, as Yoshiko Otaka, she reinvented herself as a TV presenter and served in the Japanese parliament.

She died Sept. 7 in Tokyo. She was 94. Her family announced the death, but did not cite a specific cause.

A rising star during the 1930s and 1940s, Ms. Yamaguchi acted in romantic melodramas produced by the Japanese-funded Manchuria Cinema Association.

She was typically cast as a beautiful Manchurian woman who falls in love with a handsome Japanese hero, usually a seaman, soldier or patriot. Her movie-star looks and fluency in Mandarin transformed her into the film company’s most popular star.

Although she revealed to the film company her true nationality, they promoted her to Japanese audiences as a Chinese national, using her characters to portray a false sense of pan-Asian unity and to advocate the Japanese cause.

“I was a Chinese manufactured by Japanese hands,” Ms. Yamaguchi wrote in her 1987 autobiography, “Half My Life as Ri Koran.” She said that she knew little of the Japanese propaganda efforts and was purposely kept in the dark about the atrocities committed by the Japanese military on Chinese civilians, including the 1937 Nanking massacre.

“I thought I was working for the good of the Manchurian people,” she told the Boston Globe in 1991. “I thought my films were simple romances.”

She garnered fan followings in China, Korea and Taiwan, but most notably in Japan; a 1941 Tokyo live performance in Tokyo reportedly produced a line of people that circled the venue 71 / 2 times.

The most controversial of her pictures was “China Nights” (1940). She portrayed a prideful Chinese war orphan whose ill will against the Japanese is changed when she is rescued by a Japanese military captain who later becomes her love interest.

In one memorable scene, she is brutally slapped across the face by her lover, the force of which knocks her into a wall. Instead of displaying anger, however, she interprets his actions as an expression of love.

“Forgive me!” cries the actress, “It didn’t hurt at all to be hit by you. I was happy, happy! I’ll be better, just watch. Please don’t give up on me. Forgive me. Forgive me!”

The disciplinary action was not well received in midland China and, after the war, the movie’s songs “The Suzhou Serenade” and “Fragrance of the Night” — sung by Ms. Yamaguchi — were banned.

At the end of World War II, Ms. Yamaguchi was charged with treason by the Chinese, arrested and interned in a Shanghai detention camp for nine months.

Her true citizenship was revealed when her parents, at the time under arrest in Beijing, were able to produce her birth certificate that proved she was a Japanese national and have a family friend smuggle it into Shanghai.

Yoshiko Yamaguchi was born on Feb. 12, 1920, in Fushun, Manchuria, which came under Japanese control.

Her father was educated in Beijing and taught Mandarin to employees of the South Manchuria Railway. His daughter, who was bilingual, was raised with the understanding that China was her “home country” and Japan was “her ancestral country,” she told The Washington Post in 1991.

“My father felt, we are the younger brother nation, China is the older brother,” Ms. Yamaguchi recalled.

At 13, she was taken in by a Chinese general, a family friend who she considered a “godfather” figure. He called her Li Xianglan, meaning “fragrant orchid.”

She would use that as her Chinese stage name. After starting in radio, she made her screen debut at 18 in the 1938 film “Honeymoon Express.”

After she was cleared of treason charges — the judge reportedly warned her to leave China or risk being lynched — she attempted to resurrect her film career in Japan. Under her birth name, she starred opposite Toshiro Mifune as a singer who becomes the subject of tabloid attention in “Scandal” (1950), directed by Akira Kurosawa.

A few years later, under the name Shirley Yamaguchi, she began acting in low-budget Hollywood films and was one of the first native Japanese actresses to have a leading role in American movies. Opposite Don Taylor, she played the Japanese wife of an American soldier in “Japanese War Bride” (1952), directed by King Vidor.

She was featured in the 1955 Samuel Fuller-directed film noir “House of Bamboo,” starring Robert Ryan and Robert Stack.

In 1956, she performed in a short-lived Broadway musical production of “Shangri-La,” based on a James Hilton novel. “Miss Yamaguchi has the flowing rhythms, the delicacy of manner and the artistic disciplines that bring ‘Shangri-La’ alive,” wrote the New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson.

That same year, her marriage to Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi ended in divorce. In 1958, she married Japanese diplomat Hiroshi Otaka, returned to Asia and retired from movies. Otaka died in 2001. A complete list of survivors could not be determined.

In 1969, Ms. Yamaguchi returned to show business as anchor of a popular Japanese afternoon television talk show, where she covered international conflicts in Vietnam and the Middle East.

She was elected to Japan’s upper parliament in 1974 and served as a member of the governing, conservative Liberal Democratic Party until 1992. As a politician, she worked to promote relations with China and other Asian countries.

“In every period of her life, she was the face of a very political arrangement,” said author Ian Buruma, who wrote a fictionalized account of Ms. Yamaguchi’s life, “The China Lover,” in 2008. “First, she was the face of the Japanese imperialism in China, then the face of Japanese reconciliation with the Americans, and lastly the face of Japanese reconciliation with China and the Third World. She lent her image to all these political changes.”

A musical “Ri Koran,” adapted from her autobiography, was produced in Tokyo in 1991, and a biopic, by Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda, is reportedly in the works.

Earlier in life, Ms. Yamaguchi wished to have her story depicted on the big screen.

“There is a plan to make a film of my life,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1989, “but it seems the Chinese don’t want to cooperate.”