Monday, Mar. 09, 1959
Born. To Jerry Lee Lewis, 23, rock-'n'-oll singer whose tour of Great Britain TIME, June 9) was cut short by public outrage ("Go home, baby snatcher! Go wheel your wife in a pram!"), and Myra .ewis, 14, his cousin and third wife: a ion, their first child; in Ferriday, La.
Born. To Janet Blair (real name: Martha Janet Lafferty), 38, actress (Sid Caesar's third TV wife, Eileen in the first ilm version of My Sister Eileen), and STick Mayo, 37, producer: their first child,
daughter; in Hollywood.
Died. Albert James ("Albie") Booth Jr., 51, Yale '32, 5-ft.7-in., 144-lb. football quarterback, dropkicker, All-America; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. Yale's Little Boy Blue scampered to fame against Army in 1929, outshining the great Chris Cagle, scoring three touchdowns and kicking three extra points as Yale overcame a 13-0 disadvantage to win 21-13. His playing career never left the high plane of its beginning. In his senior year Harvard entered the Yale game undefeated. After 57 minutes of hard, scoreless play, Captain Albie Booth took a snap from center, dropped the ball, sent it flying through the crossbars: Yale 3, Harvard 0. A football referee in recent years, he was a division manager for the National Dairy Products Co.
Died. Mack Gordon (real name: Morris Gittler), 54, jumbo (over 300 Ibs.) Hollywood lyricist (Chattanooga Choo Choo, Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?), longtime partner of the late Composer Harry Revel (TIME, Nov. 17); of a heart attack; in Manhattan.
Died. Abner ("Longie") Zwillman, 54, called by the FBI the "leader of the New Jersey underworld''; by his own hand (hanging) ; in his 20-room mansion in West Orange, N.J. Longie Zwillman, who once used the alias George Long, came out of Newark slums to become a rich and famed Jazz Age bootlegger, peer and sometime friend of the best names in the blue book of U.S. crime: Dutch Schultz. Louis (Lepke) Buchalter. Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Al Capone. In 1951 New York City's ex-Mayor William O'Dwyer linked him with the Brooklyn syndicate, Murder Inc. The US. Government indicted him in 1954 for income tax evasion. But Longie was no rap-rack (six months behind bars in his life): he lived in the white space around the letter of the law. Married to a handsome blonde Junior Leaguer, he was civic-minded, gave thousands to help the blind, financed soup kitchens. Recently he held an interest in the vending-machine business, was scheduled to appear before the McClellan committee. Also, the FBI has arrested several of his friends for bribing the jury that in 1956 failed to find Longie guilty of income tax evasion.
Died. Rene Lucien Belbenoit, 59, author of Dry Guillotine, a bestselling account of his experiences as a prisoner in France's penal-colony hellhole in French Guiana (with its infamous Devil's Island), and the source of much of the notoriety that forced France to close the penal colony in 1953; of heart disease; in Lucerne Valley, Calif. From the chateau of the Countess d'Entremeuse, Belbenoit stole a necklace in 1921, was shipped to French Guiana. He often tried to escape. On his second attempt, one of his fellow fugitives, a peg-legged man, was killed in a fight. The others ate his liver and good leg. On his successful fifth attempt (1935), the 90-lb. Belbenoit carried with him a 30-lb. oilskin package containing the notes that became Dry Guillotine. Eventually he was permitted to live in the U.S., settled in California's Mojave Desert as a storekeeper, became a U.S. citizen. At his death, he was completing a new book called An Anatomy of Justice.
Died. Maxwell Anderson, 70, playwright; following a stroke; in Stamford. Conn. When he was 33 and an editorial writer for the old New York World, he listened to a neighbor's wife reading a play written by her husband. "If that's a play, I can write one too," said Maxwell Anderson, and after that few seasons passed when one of his plays did not open on Broadway. In 1933 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Both Your Houses. In 1936 and 1937 he won Drama Critics' Awards for Winterset and High Tor, which did not shake his opinion that the critics were "the Jukes family of journalism." His first fame--and the flood of cash that enabled him to give up newspaper work--came in 1924 with What Price Glory. based on the World War1 experiences of his collaborator, Laurence Stallings. A prodigious variety of themes--many treated in blank verse--attracted him as his career progressed across high points such as Elizabeth the Queen, Valley Forge, Saturday's Children, Anne of the Thousand Days, Joan of Lorraine (starring Ingrid Bergman), The Bad Seed, Knickerbocker Holiday, a musical which included September Song. A founder of the producing group known as the Playwrights' Company, Anderson saw 33 of his plays produced on Broadway.
Died. Dmitry Zakharovich Manuilsky, 75, charter Bolshevik, witty, white-haired Ukrainian cynic, reportedly Stalin's "eye and ear" on the purge-bent Comintern, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian S.S.R. (1944-53), onetime Ukrainian representative at the U.N.; in Kiev. As early as 1934, Manuilsky called the Chinese Communists one of the "chief military detachments of the Communist International," flexingly said: "Communists in all countries have learned from Comrade Stalin how to fight and conquer. Under the banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin we will conquer the world."
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