Milestones

DIED. Stephen Barry, 38, personal valet to Prince Charles until 1982, when he left his post of twelve years amid reports that he had been forced out by the Princess; of pneumonia, complicated by the AIDS virus; in London. Two volumes of his memoirs, Royal Service and Royal Secrets, unpublished in Britain in deference to the palace, appeared in the U.S., where they sold briskly despite their tame content.

DIED. Rudolf Flesch, 75, unambiguous champion of plain English; of congestive heart failure; in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Vienna-born, he emigrated to the U.S. at 27 and wrote more than 20 books about language and learning, most notably the 1955 best seller Why Johnny Can't Read, which attacked the flash-card school of reading instruction and sparked a resurgence of the more traditional phonetic method of sounding out words syllable by syllable. A readability test devised by Flesch spurred a generation of journalists to write short, uncomplicated sentences but caused critics to complain that his tenets shackled richness and complexity.

DIED. Robert Six, 79, high-flying founder of Continental Airlines who bought into a three-plane mail service in 1936 and built it into a major carrier, which, in the early '70s, squeezed out the industry's highest revenues per employee; in Beverly Hills. One of the last scarf-and-goggles airline pioneers, he introduced discount fares in 1962, predicted that deregulation would mean the end of good service and watched Continental decline until it was taken over by Texas Air shortly after his retirement in 1982.

DIED. Cheryl Crawford, 84, innovative Broadway producer and co-founder of the influential Group Theatre and Actors Studio; of complications from a fall; in New York City. A tight-lipped woman in a man's world, Crawford staged more than 100 plays--among them Waiting for Lefty (1935), Porgy and Bess (1942) and Mother Courage (1963)--that helped charge American theater with a social conscience as well as the intensely psychological style of Method acting.

DIED. Hal B. Wallis, 88, wide-scoped film-maker who rose from the ranks at Warner Bros. to become one of Hollywood's most durable, successful producers and whose more than 400 movies included lame-brained vehicles for Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis as well as such classics as Little Caesar (1930), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), The Rainmaker (1956) and True Grit (1969); of complications from diabetes; in Rancho Mirage, Calif. A moviemaker without eccentricities who could cut a deal as deftly as he cut a film, Wallis hid under his phlegmatic manner a keen intelligence and an uncanny eye for talent. Among his discoveries: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Shirley MacLaine.