HOT OBITS

( lives well done )

[hotobits]

Jocelyne Wildenstein (1940 or 1945-Dec. 31, 2024)

"When Ms. Wildenstein, escorted by two bodyguards, surprised her husband at the townhouse — where he was in bed with his 21-year-old girlfriend — he brandished a gun. The bodyguards called the police, and Mr. Wildenstein spent the night in jail.

"Their acrimonious divorce then played out histrionically in the tabloids, which breathlessly noted the couple’s excesses: Their monthly expenditures of $1 million. The $350,000 Chanel dress she’d bought for a New Year’s Eve party. Her yearly phone bill of $60,000. The $80,000 he reportedly paid a fashion photographer to create a portfolio for a young Russian model with whom he was having an affair. Their East 64th Street townhouse, home to 10 Bonnard paintings, a black leopard, a lynx and a sand shark that lived in a wall-size tank. Their 66,000-acre African ranch and game preserve, where two tigers lived in a bulletproof glass cave overlooking a pool. The his-and-hers plastic surgeries (eye lifts, apparently). And, most notably, her own metamorphosis from a delicate-featured young woman into an otherworldly being with catlike eyes, at a cost estimated to be $2 million."

Full NYT Obit

[hotobits]

Richard Simmons (1948-2024)

"He transformed exercise and healthy eating into a realm of cross-dressing skits, squealing exhortations, sequined tank tops, teeny-weeny short shorts and saucy repartee. He preached not musclebound pride but the joie de vivre of self-love."

Full NY Times obit

[hotobits]

Elsa Peretti, Star Designer of Elegant Jewelry, Dies at 80

NYT: “After arriving in New York in the late 1960s, Ms. Peretti was an immediate hit as a runway model for designers like Halston, Issey Miyake and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo. One day she decided that she wanted to try her hand at designing a piece of jewelry, inspired by something she had seen at a flea market.”

The Washington Post: “Peretti partied with Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, and Elizabeth Taylor, and by her own admission spent years subsisting on ‘little more than caviar, cocaine, vodka, and cigarettes.’” 

[hotobits]

Peter Beard, Wildlife Photographer on the Wild Side, Dies at 82

Peter Beard, a New York photographer, artist and naturalist to whom the word “wild” was roundly applied, both for his death-defying photographs of African wildlife and for his own much-publicized days — decades, really — as an amorous, bibulous, pharmaceutically inclined man about town, was found dead in the woods on Sunday, almost three weeks after he disappeared from his home in Montauk on the East End of Long Island. He was 82.

Full New York Times Obit

[justjaynemansfield]

A rare picture of Jayne Mansfield and Orson Bean during the Broadway stage production of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?.

[hotobits]

Orson Bean, Free-Spirited Actor of Stage and Screen, Dies at 91

In his dropout years, as he recalled in a memoir, he experimented with psychedelic drugs, communal sex and other excursions into self-discovery. His peripatetic family collected driftwood and books, and at night read aloud to one another. When he had to, Mr. Bean scratched out a living by making commercials and doing voice-overs for animated films.

By 1980, he was bored with inactivity. Moving back into the public spotlight, he reappeared in television movies, soap operas, game shows and episodic series. Over the next three decades, he took recurring roles in “Murder, She Wrote,” “Normal, Ohio” and “Desperate Housewives.” He also appeared in many movies, notably “Being John Malkovich” (1999), in which he played the eccentric owner of a mysterious company.

Full NYT Obit

[hotobits]

Robert Evans, a Maverick Producer of Hollywood Classics, Dies at 89

If a screenwriter had invented Robert Evans, the script would have been tossed on the rejection pile as too tall a tale. But Mr. Evans, who died on Saturday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., was living proof that, at least in Hollywood, truth can still be stranger than fiction.

In a world full of big lives, he lived one of the biggest: boardroom fights, tabloid romances, tennis with Henry Kissinger, even a murder trial.

Full NYT Obit

[hotobits]

Scotty Bowers, Who Wrote of Providing Sex to Stars, Dies at 96

“My operation — if you want to call it that — was not a prostitution ring,” he wrote. “I was simply providing a service to those who wanted it and, as recorded history has shown, throughout the ages there has always been a need for good, old-fashioned, high-quality sex.”

NYT obituary, Out feature, Documentary trailer

[hotobits]

Gloria Vanderbilt Dies at 95; Built a Fashion Empire

“I’m not knocking inherited money,” she told The New York Times in 1985, “but the money I’ve made has a reality to me that inherited money doesn’t have. As the Billie Holiday song goes, ‘Mama may have and Papa may have, but God bless the child that’s got his own.’”

[undr]

[hotobits]

Ninalee Allen Craig, at the Center of a Famous Photograph, Dies at 90

“I told her to walk by the second time, ‘as if it’s killing you but you’re going to make it,’” [photographer Ruth Orkin] said.

For the rest of her life [Ninalee Allen Craig] insisted that she had been enjoying herself and had not felt harassed.

[sweetheartsandcharacters]

[hotobits]

Milos Forman, 86, Dies; Won Oscars for ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ and ‘Amadeus’

Mr. Forman came to the United States from what was then Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s as a rebellious young filmmaker whose satirical bent had been little welcomed at home in the wake of the 1968 Soviet invasion.

Just a few years later, Mr. Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” — an adaptation of Ken Kesey’s tragicomic novel of revolt and repression in a mental institution — won five Oscars, including those for best director and best picture.

[midmarauder]

[hotobits]

Sam Shepard, Actor and Pulitzer-Winning Playwright, Is Dead at 73

In Mr. Shepard’s plays, the only undeniable truth is that of the mirage. From early pieces like “Chicago” (1965), written when he was in his early 20s and staged in the margins of Off Off Broadway, to late works like “Heartless” (2012), he presented a world in which nothing is fixed.

That includes any comforting notions of family, home, material success and even individual identity. “To me, a strong sense of self isn’t believing in a lot,” Mr. Shepard said in a 1994 interview with The New York Times. “Some people might define it that way, saying, ‘He has a very strong sense of himself.’ But it’s a complete lie.”

[hotobits]

Frances Gabe, Creator of the Only Self-Cleaning Home, Dies at 101

More than half a century ago, incensed by the housecleaning that was a woman’s chronic lot, Ms. Gabe began to dream of a house that would see to its own hygiene: tenderly washing, rinsing and drying itself at the touch of a button.

“She had an adversarial relationship with all her neighbors and she didn’t do anything to discourage it.”

Perhaps it was the cement mixer residing permanently in Ms. Gabe’s yard that inflamed the neighbors so. (It was essential to her house-building enterprise.) Perhaps it was the series of snarling Great Danes she kept. Perhaps it was her penchant, at least in her younger days, for doing her yard work in the nude.

[mudwerks]

[hotobits]

Mary Tyler Moore, Who Incarnated the Modern Woman on TV, Dies at 80

Ms. Moore faced more than her share of private sorrow, and she went on to more serious fare, including an Oscar-nominated role in the 1980 film “Ordinary People” as a frosty, resentful mother whose son has died. But she was most indelibly known as the incomparably spunky Mary Richards on the CBS hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” 

[thefilmstage]

[hotobits]

Carrie Fisher, Child of Hollywood and ‘Star Wars’ Royalty, Dies at 60

Ms. Fisher established Princess Leia as a damsel who could very much deal with her own distress, whether facing down the villainy of the dreaded Darth Vader or the romantic interests of the roguish smuggler Han Solo.

[90sand2000forever]

[hotobits]

George Michael, Pop Superstar, Is Dead at 53

“I never minded being thought of as a pop star,” Mr. Michael told GQ in 2004. “People have always thought I wanted to be seen as a serious musician, but I didn’t, I just wanted people to know that I was absolutely serious about pop music.”

[polniaczek]

[hotobits]

Zsa Zsa Gabor, Actress Famous for Her Glamour (and Her Marriages), Dies at 99

Married at least eight times, calling everyone “Dahlink,” flaunting a diamonds-and-furs lifestyle and abetted by gossip columnists and tabloid headline writers, Ms. Gabor played the coifed platinum femme fatale in plunging necklines in dozens of film and television roles, many of them cameos as herself.

[brandonousley]

[hotobits]

With Sharon Jones' death, the music world loses a rare talent — and a refreshing personality

“I just want to sell some records, want to do it for the band. Because I know what's going to happen. When I go away from here,” she said, using her euphemism for death, “that's when I'm going to sell millions. When I’m gone, they’ll say she was a good singer. I want them to say she is a good singer."