Richard Sandomir

His death was confirmed by a family spokeswoman.

Conner thrived as an artist from the late 1940s to the early ’60s, when magazines still prized illustrations for short stories and advertising agencies on Madison Avenue valued artwork over photography to pitch clients’ products.

Conner’s illustrations, largely in gouache, appeared in major magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook and Woman’s Day, and in ads for United Air Lines, Armco Steel, Blue Bell denim and many other companies.

Conner said he wanted to tell a story in all of his work. But he had a pragmatic assessment of its ultimate value. “You don’t give a damn whether it’s hanging on the wall or is put into the trash afterward,” he told The Telegraph in 2015.

The stories he told for advertisers were largely upbeat ones about prosperous, mostly suburban life in the 1950s.

A smiling boy hangs upside down from a tree limb wearing Blue Bell overalls while his sister, also in overalls, rakes leaves below. Another happy boy in a hospital is helped in his recovery by air-conditioning equipment manufactured by Carrier. And a family of four enjoys a day on the verdant grass surrounding an atomic plant made by American Machine &amp; Foundry.

Conner found greater artistic freedom in magazines, whose editors needed him to heighten the impact of the fiction they published.

For “Let’s Take a Trip Up the Nile,” a short story in a 1950 issue of This Week, he depicted a man kneeling before a woman on the landing of a fire escape. Composed like a movie scene, it showed the couple (was he proposing? apologizing?) from a high angle, probably from the floor above them.

For “Veni, Vidi, Video,” a 1949 story in Collier’s about a man trying to woo a woman by purchasing a television set, Conner captured the novelty of the infant medium’s arrival in a home. Again, he used a high angle to set his scene: About two dozen people (and a dog) crowd into a living room, nearly all of them standing transfixed by a boxing match on the screen.

“He’s the only guy with a television, so all the neighbors came to see the game,” Conner said in an interview with Channel 4 in Britain in 2015 when an exhibition of his work that had opened at the Museum of the City of New York came to the House of Illustration in London.

Many of his paintings were for women’s magazines, where he invariably portrayed women as beautiful, sophisticated and fashionable.

“He was alert to changing necklines, styles and glove lengths,” Sarah Henry, deputy director and chief curator of the Museum of the City of New York, said in a phone interview. “His women were powerful figures; he was sympathetic to them and he made them the center of the stories. They definitely weren’t props.”

Conner also had a noirish side, which suited the crime stories he illustrated. For a 1954 yarn in This Week, he captured the shooting of a police officer in a jewelry store. In shades of black, blue and white, he showed the officer clutching his chest after being struck by a bullet; a wisp of smoke snaking out of the killer’s gun; and a frightened little boy watching outside the shop.

McCauley Conner was born on Nov. 12, 1913, in Newport, New Jersey. His parents, Ross and Maud, owned a general store. A shy youngster, Mac admired the work of Norman Rockwell and found it easy to express himself by drawing people, which led him to take a correspondence course in illustration.

Conner sold his first cover illustration to The Saturday Evening Post while still in his teens and later graduated from what the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts). He also studied under the renowned illustrator Harvey Dunn at the Grand Central School of Art, located in the Manhattan terminal of the same name.

“He didn’t like pretty pictures,” Conner said of Dunn, in the Telegraph interview. “He wanted them to tell a story. He was direct — ‘Is that a red dress? Well make it red, dammit!’”

While in the Navy, Conner painted signs and illustrated training materials.

He found enough regular work after the war that he and two partners were able to start a studio in 1950. Their company, Neeley Associates, provided illustrations to magazine publishers and advertising agencies from a team of artists.

Conner’s advertising and magazine work continued for about another decade, until photography became a more favored alternative to illustrations. He shifted to painting cover images for romance novels and eventually shifted again, to illustrating children’s books, including “Dorothy and the Misfit Chimp” (2014), written by Paul Dalio, a step-grandson.

In addition to Dalio, Conner is survived by a stepdaughter, Barbara Dalio; a stepson, Louis Gabaldoni; three other step-grandsons; and three step-greatgrandchildren. His wife, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Conner, an artist who was known as Gerta and whose grandmother founded the Whitney Museum, died in 2009. A cousin, Gloria Vanderbilt, died earlier this year.

Conner was nearing his 101st birthday in 2014 when the exhibition of his work at the Museum of the City of New York opened.

Henry said the exhibition explored “an important moment in American media history,” adding, “It was the heyday of pictorial magazines and Madison Avenue — and how they shaped the way Americans looked at themselves.”

The exhibition opened during the run of “Mad Men,” the hit television series about advertising executives set mainly in the 1960s. The exhibition linked Conner to the show by calling him an “original Mad Man,” although he had never held a job at an ad agency. (He did say, however, that he enjoyed Manhattan during that time, working late and often drinking at the Stork Club.)

When his show moved on to the Delaware Art Museum, in Wilmington in 2017, he reflected on what his younger self had done.

“It’s good for the old ego, of course,” he told the museum in a video, referring to the exhibition. “You look around and see what you’ve accomplished over the years.”

He added: “I can’t even draw a line now. I can’t even draw a line. I look at this stuff and I say, ‘How the hell did that guy do it?’”

This article originally appeared in

Mac Conner, Illustrator for Ads and Magazines, Dies at 105

Mac Conner, a prodigious illustrator whose realistic, colorful and often dramatic paintings for major magazines and advertisers helped lend a distinctive look to postwar popular culture, died on Sept. 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 105.

The death was reported by the newspapers Ming Pao in Hong Kong and The Malay Mail in Kuala Lumpur. No other details were given.

Yao was called “the silver voice” in Shanghai, her music influenced by jazz and Chinese folk. She was not famous well beyond Asia, but at least two of her songs made an impact in the United States. An English-language version of one of her hits, “Rose, Rose, I Love You” (1940), was recorded by American singer Frankie Laine in 1951 and rose to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

And last year, “Ren Sheng Jiu Shi Xi” (or “Life Is Just a Play”), which she released in Hong Kong in 1959, was used on the soundtrack of Jon M. Chu’s romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), a movie about a New Yorker who travels to Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s wealthy family.

With her soft, high voice, Yao was long referred to as one of the seven great singing stars of Shanghai, along with her idol, Zhou Xuan, who was known as “the olden voice.” The music of Shanghai bore not only the rhythms of jazz but also global sounds like Cuban rumba and the Hawaiian steel guitar.

Yao thrived in that milieu, working at times with her brother, Yao Min, a leading songwriter with whom she also sang duets.

“They created a modern Chinese popular music that moved elegantly between swing, the blues, Hollywood standards and Chinese folk,” Andrew F. Jones, who teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email, “while incorporating traces of many other styles and sounds from the multinational soundscape of colonial-era Shanghai.”

She continued to record after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and during Japan’s occupation of Chinese cities through 1945. One number, “Congratulations” (1946), sung by Yao and her brother, became a familiar song to celebrate the Chinese New Year. But it was also a commentary on the defeat of Japan in World War II, Jones said.

“The song’s rather melancholy tone,” he wrote, “reflects both the exhaustion and misery wrought by eight years of Japanese occupation” and the distress that ensued over the social unrest and civil war that engulfed China in the wake of the Allied victory.

Yao (whose name was sometimes spelled Yao Lee) was born Sept. 3, 1922, and raised in Shanghai. As a girl in the early 1930s she listened to Zhou on the radio but was too poor to buy her records. Yao began singing on the radio at 13 — at least once on a program with Zhou — and signed her first contract, with Pathé Records, a part of EMI, three years later. She became a popular nightclub attraction.

“Big movie stars like Li Lihua would come every Sunday to watch me perform and request specific songs,” she recalled in an interview in 2013 with The Glass, a cultural magazine.

She married Huang Baoluo in the late 1940s but did not stay in Shanghai much longer. The Communist Party took power in 1949 and, fearing that she might have to endure reeducation by the new regime, she fled to Hong Kong with her husband the next year.

“I was so scared and very sad,” she told The Glass. “I thought my life, and career, were finished.”

They were not. The musical world of Shanghai was largely re-created in Hong Kong, which was then a British colony. EMI opened offices there and invited her and other Pathé artists to record. She also started working in the film industry, providing vocals that were lip-synced by actress Chung Ching in a series of pictures, including “Songs of the Peach Blossom River” (1956).

By then Yao had begun to emulate pop and country singer Patti Page by deepening her voice. She continued to sing into the mid-1960s. After her brother’s death, in 1967, she took an executive job at EMI.

Information about her survivors was not available.

Yao stopped making records, she said, because of the encroachment of modern studio technology.

Today, she said, “the singer needs only to sing to prerecorded music, and she can do as many takes as she wishes,” she lamented in an interview with the newspaper The Straits Times in Singapore in 1992.

“For me,” she added, “I could never do without a live band. Pretaped music kills all the spontaneity and feelings in me.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/music/yao-li-dead.html" id="30003daa-8bb7-33b8-a9a1-1fb22f6fd83e">The New York Times</a>.

Yao Li, a celebrated singer in Shanghai in the midst of war in the 1930s and ’40s, whose music remained popular after she moved to Hong Kong when China turned communist, died July 19. She was 96.

Yao Li, 'Silver Voice' of Shanghai, Dies at 96

Edith could never shake the awful sense that Juanita had received substandard care because her family was poor. She recalled that a doctor had visited Juanita just once during her illness while spending more time tending to better-off typhoid patients living nearby.

At that young age, Edith resolved to become a doctor who would find her reward in service, not wealth.

“I was going to particularly see those who did not have money and those who were less fortunate, who would get the kind of care that they needed,” she said as Dr. Edith Irby Jones in a 2006 oral history interview at the University of Arkansas.

She added, “And I was going to do it as much as I could and I was going to instill into others that they must do it, too.”

By the time of her death on July 15 in a Houston hospital, Jones, who was 91, had fulfilled her ambition. For a half-century, until she retired in 2013, she had devoted her career to treating lower-income patients in Houston’s Third Ward, making house calls and sometimes picking up patients in her van.

More than a local doctor, however, she also founded one hospital and co-owned another; did humanitarian work in Haiti, where a clinic was named for her; and became the first woman to lead a venerable medical association for black doctors.

Jones had stood out early as the first African American student admitted to the University of Arkansas Medical School in 1948. (It is now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.) She is widely believed to have been the first black student enrolled in any all-white medical school in the South — an educational milestone that preceded the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education by six years.

A photograph of Jones on her first day in medical school emphasizes how isolated she had been. Published in Ebony magazine, it shows her alone in a corridor as white students mill about, some looking at her.

But she was optimistic and confident, believing that most white people were fair-minded.

“I hope to make a record that will reflect to the honor of my race,” she said in an interview with The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, in 1948, “and that will obviously show that we only want to be accorded the rights deserved by human beings and good American citizens.”

She played down the impact segregation had on her at the medical school — she could not use the white students’ dining, bathroom and residential facilities, but some fellow students studied and ate with her at her off-campus apartment.

“She didn’t harp on the difficulties,” her daughter, Myra Jones Romain, said in a phone interview. “She’d say to me, ‘If you cry every time someone said something that hurt your feelings, you’d run out of tears.’ ”

While attending school, she joined three lawyers to form a group called the Freedom Four, which traveled to churches and homes around Arkansas, urging black people to get involved in the nascent civil rights movement.

“I was young and brave and fearless and felt that I had a cause for which to be concerned,” she told in the oral history interview.

After graduating from medical school in 1952, she started a general practice in Hot Springs, Arkansas, then, in 1959, moved to Houston, where she became the first black woman to be named a resident at Baylor College of Medicine Affiliated Hospitals. She later opened a practice in Houston, and didn’t wait for all her patients to come to her.

“She’d pick people up, and when I learned to drive, she’d say, ‘Pick up so and so,’ ” Romain said. “She was especially cognizant that the elderly were written off, not honored and often isolated.”

Jones expanded her work as a staff doctor for several hospitals around Houston; founded Mercy Hospital, a small facility, with several other African-American doctors, and became a part-owner of Park Plaza Hospital.

In 1985, Jones became the first woman elected president of the National Medical Association, an organization that has represented black physicians since 1895. During her year in office, she and a group of doctors from the NMA treated patients and trained physicians in Haiti. She helped found a clinic named for her in Vaudreuil, in the northern part of the country.

“Calling her a trailblazer underestimates her accomplishments,” Dr. Niva Lubin-Johnson, the NMA’s current president, said. “She chose to work in underserved areas and still did so many other things.”

Edith Mae Irby was born on Dec. 23, 1927, in Mayflower, Arkansas. The family lived on a farm, where Edith’s father, Robert, was a sharecropper; her mother, Mattie (Buice) Irby, was a domestic worker.

When Edith was about 3 years old, a horse her father had been riding was stung by a bee and kicked him in the chest, causing fatal injuries. The family was forced off the land because her father had left a small unpaid debt to the owner.

After moving to Conway, Edith contracted rheumatic fever, which prevented her from attending school for a year and gave her a lifelong heart murmur. She recovered, but witnessed her mother’s anguish at watching Juanita die and Robert nearly succumb to typhoid fever.

“I remember my mother putting her head on the table, weeping unreservedly, particularly when my brother was so very sick,” Jones said in the oral history interview.

The family moved to Hot Springs, where Edith went to segregated schools. A high school teacher helped her get a scholarship to historically black Knoxville College in Tennessee, where she studied physics, biology and chemistry.

That set the stage for her breaking the color barrier at the University of Arkansas Medical School in 1948. (The university had opened its doors to a black law student the year before.)

“When I applied and they accepted me, everybody made such a big thing of it, but I wasn’t surprised at all,” she told the Texas Medical Center’s women’s history project in 2014. “Because not only did the University of Arkansas accept me, every medical school I applied to accepted me.”

While attending medical school, she married James B. Jones, an educator who became a dean at Texas Southern University. He died in 1989.

Before she graduated, Jones gave a lecture to a sorority at Philander Smith College, in Little Rock, that moved one student, Joycelyn Elders, to become a doctor. Elders would go on to serve as the U.S. surgeon general in the 1990s.

“After that day,” Elders once said, “all I wanted to be was just like Dr. Irby.”

In addition to her daughter, who confirmed the death, Jones is survived by her sons, Gary and Keith; seven grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

Romain said that she was concerned about her mother’s health when she was still practicing into her mid-80s.

“She was starting to get forgetful, and I’d tell her she needed to retire,” Romain said. “She’d fight me about it, and I’d say, ‘You can do anything you want.’ But she said, ‘All I’ve ever wanted to do in my life is practice medicine.’ ”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/obituaries/dr-edith-irby-jones-dead.html" id="f61d2197-adfa-3fa7-ad3c-539969c2577b">The New York Times</a>.

Edith Irby Jones, Pioneering Black Doctor in the South, Dies at 91

Edith Mae Irby was about 7 years old in the early 1930s when her older siblings contracted typhoid fever in their little house in Conway, Arkansas. Her brother Robert recovered, but her sister, Juanita, died.

Jones had stood out early as the first African-American student admitted to the University of Arkansas Medical School in 1948. (It is now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.) She is widely believed to have been the first black student enrolled in any medical school in the South — an educational milestone that preceded the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education by six years.

Her death, in a hospice, was confirmed by Heather Garrison, her granddaughter.

Wyman — whose work for Life, Look and other magazines went largely unheralded for decades — discovered what she called a “special kind of happiness” in photographing subjects like a little girl wearing curlers, a peddler hauling a block of ice from a horse-drawn cart and four boys holding dolls, pretending to be the plastic girls’ fathers.

“Taking pictures enabled me to hear the stories of the people I photographed,” she said in an essay for the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, one of her dealers, “which satisfied an immense curiosity to learn and understand the lives of others, lives different in experience and age from my own.”

She was 19 and working in Manhattan as a photo printer for the Acme Newspictures agency when she photographed several men in Manhattan’s garment district in April 1945. One held up a copy of The Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish-language newspaper, as the others read about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. The rich details of the well-dressed men’s clothing contrasted with the mysteriously hazy background, which seemed to suggest uncertainty for the United States after Roosevelt’s death.

Four months later, amid the celebration after Japan’s surrender ended World War II, Wyman came upon a group of ecstatic servicemen in Manhattan. A sailor tightly embraced a smiling woman — a picture that serves as a sort of bookend to Alfred Eisenstaedt’s better-known photograph, taken that day in Times Square, of a sailor kissing a nurse.

Wyman did not remain at Acme much longer. She had been the agency’s only female printer, and with men returning from the war, she was fired. She became a freelance photographer, selling pictures to magazines including Business Week, Fortune and Coronet. By 1948 she was in Los Angeles, working on assignments for Life.

She found street subjects there, as she had in New York and on other assignments in Chicago, St. Louis and Houston. But she also expanded her repertoire with Life to include the 1950 U.S. senatorial campaign between Richard M. Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wedding of a Marine about to be shipped to Korea, a young couple at the beach and Hollywood actors making movies.

She photographed James Cagney wielding a shotgun while shrouded in smoke as the psychotic killer Cody Jarrett in “White Heat” (1949); Elizabeth Taylor joyously dancing in “A Place in the Sun” (1951) with Montgomery Clift (only his right hand is visible); and Ronald Reagan with his chimpanzee co-star in “Bedtime for Bonzo” (1951).

“I used to walk around the set with him, holding his hand,” Wyman told The Journal News of White Plains in 1984, referring to Bonzo, the subject of a Life assignment. “You began to think of him as a big kid with hair, except he had a very powerful grip, not like a 5-year-old.”

Ida Dora Wyman was born on March 7, 1926, in Malden, Massachusetts, to Joseph and Rebecca (Michalow) Wyman, and moved as a child to the Bronx, where her parents, immigrants from Latvia, owned a small grocery store.

Her parents bought her a box camera when she was 14, and soon after that she began taking pictures of people and buildings in her neighborhood. At Walton High School she joined the camera club, honing her skills at taking and printing pictures.

After graduating in 1943, she found work at Acme, first in its mailroom and then as a printer. At lunch hour, she photographed nearby laborers and office workers with her Graflex Speed Graphic camera.

“Wearing the camera trumped my shyness,” she said in “Chords of Memory” (2014), a book of her photographs and text on which she collaborated with Melanie Herzog. “I wasn’t threatening and I wore saddle shoes and bobby socks.”

The six years featuring her most memorable work ended in 1951. By then she had married Simon Nathan, a photographer at Acme, who encouraged her to join the Photo League, a radical collective. Working there further inspired her to produce honest photographs that could effect social change. But when their first child, David, was born that year, she became a homemaker. Their daughter, Nancy, arrived three years later.

When she returned full time to photography in 1962, Wyman shifted her focus, working for Haskins Laboratories, a scientific research organization in Manhattan. Then, from 1968 to 1983, she was chief photographer at the department of pathology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. She then returned to freelancing for various commercial clients.

During that period she also graduated from Empire State College in Manhattan.

She stopped freelancing in 1990 because of the physical toll of carrying camera equipment, but by then recognition of her earlier work was starting to grow. Her photographs appeared in various group and solo exhibitions, mostly in New York City, and fine-art galleries were taking notice.

“When people talk about the Photo League and Life magazine photographers, Ida’s name hasn’t often been in those conversations,” Sid Monroe, who with his wife, Michelle, owns Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Wyman’s lead representative since the mid-1990s, said in a phone interview. “But she was every bit as good as the better-known names.”

In 2014 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Watrous Gallery in Madison, where she had moved eight years earlier.

Martha Glowacki, the gallery’s former director and curator of the show, “The Chords of Memory,” said Wyman’s work was distinguished by her empathy.

“Unlike many street photographers,” Glowacki said, “she’d always introduce herself to her subjects and ask to take their photographs. If they said yes, she’d do it. She’d come and observe them again and again. She didn’t pose them. Because of that, she captured their genuine expressions. They weren’t looking furtively at her.”

In addition to her granddaughter, Wyman is survived by her son, her daughter and two great-grandsons. Her marriage to Nathan ended in divorce.

Wyman said the steady increase in attention to her early work when she was in her 70s and 80s surprised her.

“When I was making those pictures or doing assignments, I never dreamed they would have any value — or interest, even,” she told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 2007. “When you are shooting, you just want to get into print.

“It generated more work; the more you published, the more likely you were to get assignments. You wanted to get that credit line — that means a lot.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/ida-wyman-dead.html" id="a2c93a27-ff06-3aad-a6d4-669af2c05feb">The New York Times</a>.

Ida Wyman, a photographer who in the 1940s and ’50s roamed New York and other cities to capture compelling images of everyday people working, playing, idling, dancing or selling newspapers, died July 13 in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, near Madison. She was 93.

Ida Wyman, Whose Camera Captured Ordinary People, Dies at 93

<h1>Martin Charnin, the Broadway lyricist and director who conceived of turning the comic strip “Little Orphan Annie” into “Annie,” the hit musical whose title character vowed that “the sun’ll come out tomorrow,” died Saturday in a hospital in White Plains, New York. He was 84.</h1>

His daughter, Sasha Charnin Morrison, said the cause was a heart attack.

The story of a young girl in a Depression-era orphanage adopted by millionaire Daddy Warbucks, “Annie” was by far the most successful venture of Charnin’s career, opening in April 1977 and running for 2,377 performances — almost six years.

“Annie” went on to win seven Tony Awards in all, including for best musical, best score and best book. Dorothy Loudon, who played Miss Hannigan, the villainous child-hating matron of the orphanage, won for best actress.

The show also spawned two Broadway revivals, two stage sequels (neither of which made it to Broadway) and two films. Charnin, who was nominated for a Tony for his direction, directed 42 touring productions of the original musical.

“I’ve spent 23 years of my life with Annie,” he told talk show host Charlie Rose in 1993 before the second sequel, “Annie Warbucks,” opened off-Broadway. “Like all daughters, she’s taken care of me in my old age.”

Charnin’s dedication to “Annie” began in 1972, when he became excited at the musical comedy possibilities in “Little Orphan Annie,” the long-running comic strip created by Harold Gray in the 1920s. But when he approached his eventual collaborators, composer Charles Strouse and writer Thomas Meehan, they were not interested.

“I hated it because I had done a show called ‘It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman,’ and it closed in four months,” Strouse, who also wrote the music for “Bye Bye Birdie,” told Playbill in 2009.

For his part, Meehan insisted that he did not want to write the book for a musical that he would not want to see.

But Charnin’s pitch swayed them, and Annie — the indomitable, optimistic, redheaded girl whose anthem, “Tomorrow,” would become the show’s signature song — was on her way to the stage, with Andrea McArdle in the title role. (She was also nominated for a Tony.)

“Notice we don’t call our show ‘Little Orphan Annie,’ ” Charnin told The New York Times shortly before its Broadway opening. “We call it ‘Annie.’ We want to distinguish between Gray’s view and ours.”

He added that no words from the comic strip appeared in the musical.

Martin Jay Charnin was born Nov. 24, 1934, in New York City to William and Birdie (Blakeman) Charnin. He grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood. His father sang in the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera, and his mother was a secretary and homemaker.

After attending the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music &amp; Art and Performing Arts), he enrolled in the Cooper Union, where he studied painting. But after his second year there his focus shifted when he went to work for a summer theater in the Adirondacks, acting, writing sketches for a revue and painting scenery.

“I’d never acted in my life, but I started to act and sing,” he said in an interview in 1993 for the American Jewish Committee’s oral history of Jews in the theater. “I didn’t even know that I had a voice, but they had auditions, and I opened my mouth. I had sensational pitch and projection.”

He returned to college, graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree and set out to find acting work.

He answered an audition call in 1957 for actors to play juvenile delinquents in a Broadway musical initially called “Gangway” but later renamed “West Side Story.” With slicked-back hair and jeans, Charnin joined thousands of others lined up outside the theater.

After a long day of auditions, he was hired to play Big Deal, a member of the Jets, who in the show face off against the Sharks, a rival gang.

Charnin played the role about 1,000 times through 1960 — but, he later recalled, he knew within two weeks of the musical’s opening that he did not want to stay an actor. Being in the company of its creators — composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and director and choreographer Jerome Robbins — had inspired him to move behind the scenes.

“I wanted desperately to be in a power position,” he said in the oral history.

By 1963 he had written the lyrics to his first musical, “Hot Spot,” with composer Mary Rodgers. (It had a brief Broadway run.) He then collaborated with her father, Richard Rodgers (whose celebrated previous lyricists had been Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II) on “Two by Two,” a musical about Noah’s ark starring Danny Kaye. It opened in 1970 and ran for 350 performances.

“As far as I was concerned, Noah was my father,” Charnin said in an interview in 1970 with The Daily News. “Stubborn, intractable, proud, warm and vulnerable.”

In 1973, he directed the short-lived “Nash at Nine,” a musical revue based on the light verse of Ogden Nash.

By then he had moved into television. He won an Emmy Award for producing “Annie, the Women in the Life” (1970), a musical special starring actress Anne Bancroft, and two more as the producer and co-director of “’S Wonderful, ’S Marvelous, ’S Gershwin” (1972), a tribute to the songs of George and Ira Gershwin.

“Annie” was Charnin’s next big project. For much of its gestation at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, it opened with the song “It’s the Hard-Knock Life,” featuring Annie and the other orphans, followed by a ballad, “Maybe,” sung by Annie.

But, as Charnin recalled, he and Strouse later flipped the order of the songs, to let “Maybe” immediately establish Annie’s desire to become part of a family. She sings:

So, maybe now this prayer’sThe last one of its kind.Won’t you please, come get your baby?Maybe.

Charnin reunited with Richard Rodgers for the musical “I Remember Mama” in 1979; directed and wrote the lyrics to “The First” (1981), a musical about Jackie Robinson, with music by Bob Brush; and directed a comedy revue starring Sid Caesar, which closed after five performances in 1989.

The next year, Charnin, Strouse and Meehan collaborated again on “Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge,” which opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington and quickly closed after dismal reviews. Four years later they teamed up for “Annie Warbucks,” about the search for a wife for Daddy Warbucks that would give Annie two parents.

As the second sequel, “Annie Warbucks,” staged at the Variety Arts Theater in the East Village in Manhattan, represented a course correction from the poorly received “Annie 2.”

“We told it from the point of view of the evil Miss Hannigan, and it was the wrong way to do it,” Charnin told Rose.

He returned regularly to direct the original “Annie,” most recently on a national tour from 2014-15.

Before his death, he had been working on a revue featuring songs by famous composers about New York City; it was to open in December at the Triad Theater on the Upper West Side. But it will not go on without him.

“I had met with Martin a few times,” Peter Martin, the theater’s owner, said in an email, “and we were scheduled to meet again this past Monday to go over budgets. But Martin was at the doctor’s office and not feeling well.”

In addition to his daughter, Charnin is survived by his wife, Shelly Burch Charnin, a singer and actress; a son, Randy; a stepdaughter, Dayna Bennett; two stepsons, Richard and Joel Bennett; three grandchildren; and his sister, Rena Mueller. His marriages to Lynn Ross, Genii Prior and Jade Hobson ended in divorce.

Charnin had no regrets that “Annie” was a far greater success than anything else he had done on Broadway.

“He was never looking for commercial success,” Charnin Morrison said. “He looked at it for how much he absolutely loved the business. He loved being in it — it was in his bloodstream.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/theater/martin-charnin-who-helped-create-annie-dies-at-84.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Martin Charnin, who helped create 'Annie,' dies at 84

His daughter, Sasha Charnin Morrison, said the cause was a heart attack.

The death was confirmed by Tom Prassis, the executor of his estate and an executive vice president of Sony Pictures Classics.

Barenholtz had been running the Elgin Theater in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan as a repertory and art-film house for two years when he decided, in late 1970, to show “El Topo,” Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal, bloody Spanish-language Western, at midnight on Sundays through Thursdays and 1 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

“I was told by the experts: ‘Who’s going to come to see a film at midnight? You’re out of your mind,’” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1995.

But something about “El Topo” — which had its U.S. premiere at the Elgin on Dec. 18, 1970 — suggested to Barenholtz that it would appeal to a young audience eager for a new type of late-night movie experience in a rundown theater where marijuana smoking was condoned. He was right. With little advertising but strong word-of-mouth, crowds soon filled the Elgin’s nearly 600 seats during the film’s exclusive run.

“Within two months, the limos lined up every night,” Barenholtz was quoted as saying by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum in their book “Midnight Movies” (1983). “It became a must-see item.”

“El Topo” would have stayed at the Elgin past June 1971, but John Lennon, who had seen the film several times, persuaded the Beatles’ manager, Allen Klein, to buy the rights. Klein gave it a splashy official opening at a Times Square theater later that year. It flopped after a short run.

By then, other theaters had begun to copy Barenholtz’s formula — most notably the Waverly, in Greenwich Village, which showed George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” at midnight in 1971.

Barenholtz himself followed “El Topo” with lengthy midnight runs at the Elgin of John Waters’ gross-out classic “Pink Flamingos” (1972), and Perry Henzell’s “The Harder They Come” (1973), the story of an aspiring reggae singer played by Jimmy Cliff.

The cultish appeal of midnight movies expanded after Jim Sharman’s “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a camp spectacle that invites audience participation, opened at the Waverly in 1976. It soon became a national phenomenon.

What bound the midnight films was their originality.

“The movies were told in a way that was further out,” Barenholtz told The Times, “where you felt that if you showed it through the normal channels it would be impossible for it to get a normal audience.”

Ben Barenholtz was born Berl Bernholz on Oct. 5, 1935, into a Jewish family in Kovel, Poland, and grew up in the village of Kupichev, which is now part of Ukraine. His father, Aaron, was a timber merchant; his mother, Paula, was a homemaker. Their lives, and that of Berl’s older brother, Rubin, were roiled by the occupations of the Soviets in 1939 and the Germans in 1941.

As the Nazis, with help from Ukrainian nationalists, began to murder the local Jews in 1942, the Bernholzes fled their ghetto for the safety of a Polish farm family sheltering other Jews in a barn. For more than two years, the Bernholzes found safety at the farm and in various forest hideouts. But on March 15, 1943, Aaron Bernholz was killed by a Ukrainian nationalist as Berl sat next to him.

“My father’s last word to me was ‘Run,’” Barenholtz said in various accounts of his childhood.

He survived, lived in a refugee camp in Austria, and immigrated with his mother to New York in 1947. His brother, who is his only survivor, left for Palestine.

Barenholtz settled with his mother in Brooklyn and attended school for several years, but by age 15 he was spending a lot of time in bars and movie theaters. He served two years in the Army before entering the movie business around 1958 as assistant manager at the RKO Bushwick theater in Brooklyn. He left after about a year.

By now living in Greenwich Village, he led a knockabout existence as a house painter, bartender, carpenter and postal worker, and hung out with artists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline at the Cedar Tavern on University Place. In 1966 he became manager of the Village Theater, a revival house that showed classic, underground and cult films. (It later became the Fillmore East.)

Barenholtz moved on to the Elgin in 1968. While there he began distributing films, and he continued doing so after leaving in 1975. Among the films he distributed were Claude Chabrol’s “Just Before Nightfall,” Barbet Schroeder’s “Maîtresse” and Jean-Charles Tacchella’s “Cousin Cousine.”

In 1977, while running Libra Films, Barenholtz screened “Eraserhead,” David Lynch’s first feature; halfway through watching, he agreed to distribute it. Until a print of the film that satisfied Lynch was delivered, he stayed at Barenholtz’s apartment in Manhattan for two months.

“He said, ‘David, I’m not going to put any money into this thing because I won’t have to,’” Lynch recalled by phone. “‘I’ll open it up at the Cinema Village, and within two months there’s going to be lines around the block.’ And that’s what happened.”

“Eraserhead” ran at midnight at the Cinema Village on Friday and Saturday nights for a year, and then for nearly two years, also at midnight, at the Waverly.

“It paid my rent for 10 years,” Barenholtz told the podcast “Movie Geeks United!” in an interview in 2007.

Barenholtz was also a distributor of “The Return of the Secaucus Seven” (1979), director John Sayles’ first feature.

A few years later, he was approached by the producing and directing team of Joel and Ethan Coen about producing “Blood Simple” (1985), their debut feature. After the Coens raised the financing, he agreed to distribute it. He subsequently helped finance the Coens’ next film, “Raising Arizona,” and was an executive producer of two others, “Miller’s Crossing” (1990) and “Barton Fink” (1991).

“Our first two deals with Ben set an example and standard for integrity that we haven’t seen matched since,” Ethan Coen said at a tribute to Barenholtz at the 2010 Hamptons International Film Festival on Long Island.

Barenholtz was also a producer or executive producer of several other films, including Ulu Grosbard’s “Georgia” (1995) and Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), before he turned to directing. He made a documentary, “Wakaliwood” (2012), about a filmmaker in Uganda, and a self-financed feature, “Alina” (2017), about a Russian woman who leaves Moscow to search for her father in New York City.

“I’ll never be Kubrick,” he told The Times. “But I wasn’t afraid either.”

Prassis, Barenholtz’s executor, said in a phone interview that “Alina” had been intended as Barenholtz’s warm-up for a more personal film.

“It was going to be called ‘Aaron’ and it was about his father,” he said. “It was about Ben’s life during that time, his father’s death and the people who saved him.”

Ben Barenholtz, Midnight-Movie Innovator, Is Dead at 83

Ben Barenholtz, who began the midnight-movie phenomenon at his Manhattan theater in the 1970s and nurtured the movie careers of David Lynch and the Coen brothers, died June 27 at a hospital in Prague, where he had been living since last year. He was 83.

Ben Barenholtz, midnight-movie innovator, is dead at 83

His death was confirmed by Jen Dillon, a family spokeswoman, who said the cause appeared to have been cardiac arrest.

The Absolut campaign, appearing largely in upscale magazines, started in 1980 when Roux was the No. 2 executive at Carillon Importers, which marketed and distributed Absolut in America.

Conceived by the agency TBWA, the ads imbued Absolut with a sophisticated image. “I want to make a fashionable business out of the booze-peddler business,” Roux told W magazine in 1988.

TBWA used Absolut’s squat, transparent bottle as its muse, with ads like “Absolut Heaven,” which pictured the bottle with angel’s wings, and “Absolut Perfection,” which placed it under a halo.

The bottle served as model, adorned with decorations and garb, to describe states of mind like optimism, generosity, elegance and anticipation. The bottle’s shape was depicted in myriad creative ways, appearing as if carved into a computer chip (Absolut Intelligence), Central Park (Absolut Manhattan) and a golf course (Absolut 19th).

Roux, who became Carillon’s president in 1982, added to the campaign by commissioning Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Ed Ruscha and many other artists and photographers to reimagine the bottle in a long-running series of ads. Kurt Vonnegut drew himself playing with string — a nod to his novel “Cat’s Cradle” — with the bottle’s spout turned into a cat’s head.

Hiring Warhol — for $65,000 (about $157,000 today), a ceiling Roux would not exceed for any other artist — was a breakthrough in the campaign.

“I knew Andy Warhol very well,” Roux said in an interview with Chilled, a magazine about beer, wine and spirits. “He was a teetotaler; he didn’t drink. He made me believe he was using Absolut as a perfume.”

But Richard Lewis, TBWA’s former worldwide managing director of the Absolut brand, said the agency had initially opposed using the artists.

“Michel pushed us on that,” Lewis said in a telephone interview. “The agency was against because it wasn’t their idea, but more so because the brand was doing well, and they didn’t want to splinter the existing campaign. They weren’t ready to use an artistically driven bottle.”

Ultimately, Lewis said, the artist-created ads accelerated the campaign by attracting other artists, as well as Hollywood stars and others among the rich and famous, as Absolut consumers.

Lewis wrote a book about the campaign, “Absolut Book,” published in 1996.

“He was a very demanding fellow who loved anybody who had an idea,” William Tragos, a founder and former chairman and chief executive of TBWA, said of Roux in an interview. “So to our creative people he was an encourager. But at the same time, he was able to say, ‘That’s not good enough.’”

Roux used Absolut advertising as early as 1981 to court gay and lesbian consumers, believing they were trendsetters. In 1992, Carillon sponsored a 16-page portfolio of works by gay and lesbian artists in the gay periodical The Advocate. It included images of same-sex marriage, a gay-pride parade and the 1969 Stonewall uprising.

Michel Roux, a French-born liquor executive who used a distinctive and witty advertising campaign to turn Absolut, a little-known Swedish brand, into the top imported vodka in the United States, died on April 30 at his home in Palm Coast, Florida. He was 78.

Richard Sandomir

Articles written by the author

Mac Conner, Illustrator for Ads and Magazines, Dies at 105

Yao Li, 'Silver Voice' of Shanghai, Dies at 96

Edith Irby Jones, Pioneering Black Doctor in the South, Dies at 91

Edith Irby Jones, Pioneering Black Doctor in the South, Dies at 91

Ida Wyman, Whose Camera Captured Ordinary People, Dies at 93

Martin Charnin, who helped create 'Annie,' dies at 84

Ben Barenholtz, midnight-movie innovator, is dead at 83

Michel Roux, Whose Vodka Success Was Absolut, Is Dead at 78

Chris Albertson, Biographer of Bessie Smith, Is Dead at 87

Nurit Karlin, who found her voice in wordless cartoons, dies at 80

David winters, energetic dancer turned choreographer, dies at 80

Martin Kilson, Scholar and Racial Pathbreaker at Harvard, Dies at 88

John Singleton, 'Boyz N the Hood' Director, Dies at 51

John Singleton Is Dead; 'Boyz N the Hood' Director Was 51

Steve Golin Is Dead at 64; Producer Built a Small Hollywood Empire

Gary Stewart, Master of the Reissue Compilation, Dies at 62

Warren Adler, 'the war of the roses' author, is dead at 91

Stanley Plumly, Lyrical Poet Influenced by Keats, Dies at 79

Sam Pilafian, Tuba Maestro of multiple genres, dies at 69

Ed Westcott, a Singular Eye at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, Dies at 97