Milestones

By By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, ELIZABETH L. BLAND, Leslie-Bernard Joseph, Logan Orlando, Julie Rawe, Elspeth Reeve

ACKNOWLEDGED. BY PRINCE ALBERT II, 47, unmarried only son and successor to the late Prince Rainier III of Monaco; a son, ALEXANDRE, now 22 months, from his relationship with former Air France flight attendant Nicole Coste; in a statement released by the Prince's Paris-based lawyer. Though the boy will inherit a substantial chunk of the billionaire Prince's fortune--half if he is sole heir--he is not in line for the throne, which under Monaco's law requires "direct and legitimate" descendants.

DIED. EVAN HUNTER, 78, author who, under the pen name Ed McBain, defined the genre of the gritty, graphic police procedural novel; of cancer of the larynx; in Weston, Conn. Under his real name, he wrote the acclaimed 1954 novel The Blackboard Jungle and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, but none approached the popularity of his 87th Precinct series, which, beginning with 1956's Cop Hater, followed the personal and professional lives of a team of utterly human cops solving brutal crimes and paved the way for countless crime writers and hit TV shows like Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue.

DIED. JUNE HAVER, 79, wholesome actress of such 1940s film musicals as The Dolly Sisters and Look for the Silver Lining, promoted briefly as the next Betty Grable; in Los Angeles. A tumultuous personal life led her in 1953 to join a convent briefly, before returning to Hollywood and marrying actor Fred MacMurray in 1954. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1991.

DIED. JAMES STOCKDALE, 81, candid, self-deprecating Navy vice admiral who earned the Medal of Honor for his rare courage in Vietnam and later ran for Vice President with Ross Perot; after a battle with Alzheimer's; in Coronado, Calif. After leading the first U.S. air strike into North Vietnam in 1964, he was captured and imprisoned the following year at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton." As the senior officer, he was singled out by captors, who brutalized him repeatedly over 71/2 years and held him in solitary confinement for four years. Inspiring fellow POWS, including Senator John McCain, with the motto Unity over Self, he disfigured his face to ensure he would not be used in a propaganda film, slit his wrists to show he would rather die than submit and created a secret POW communications system. According to his citation, his defiance led the North Vietnamese to reduce their use of torture, deciding that it was ineffective.

DIED. HANK STRAM, 82, innovative football coach and winner of more games than anyone in the history of the American Football League (AFL); of complications from diabetes; in Covington, La. He took the Kansas City Chiefs to the first Super Bowl, where the upstart AFL champs were trounced by the mighty Green Bay Packers. Three years later, he led the Chiefs to an upset victory over the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV, helping to cement the legitimacy of the fledgling AFL.

DIED. L. PATRICK GRAY, 88, onetime Nixon loyalist and acting director of the FBI during Watergate, who expressed "total shock" at the disclosure that his former deputy W. Mark Felt was the secret journalistic source Deep Throat; of pancreatic cancer; in Atlantic Beach, Fla. Tapped by Nixon in May 1972, after the death of J. Edgar Hoover, he testified during his 1973 Senate confirmation hearings that he had been turning over FBI files on the Watergate probe to the White House. That prompted Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman to suggest famously that Gray be left to "twist slowly, slowly in the wind." In April 1973, after conceding he had destroyed papers unrelated to the scandal but belonging to Watergate operative E. Howard Hunt, he was forced to resign.

DIED. GAYLORD NELSON, 89, three-term Democratic Senator from Wisconsin who in 1970 founded the still annual April 22 celebration of Earth Day, which sparked a decade of environmental legislation; in Kensington, Md.

DIED. ERNEST LEHMAN, 89, protean Hollywood screenwriter; in Los Angeles. Though in the 1960s he specialized in adapting stage works such as West Side Story, The Sound of Music and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he achieved his greatest glory the previous decade, when he used his background in publicity to craft two glorious Broadway vipers, J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), for the film Sweet Smell of Success, and wrote Alfred Hitchcock's smartest, snazziest caper, North by Northwest. In 2001 he became the first screenwriter to be awarded an honorary Oscar.

DIED. CLAUDE SIMON, 91, leading figure in France's "nouveau roman," or new novel, literary movement; author of such acclaimed, stylistically challenging novels as La Route Des Flandres (The Flanders Road) in 1960; and winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize for literature; in Paris.

DIED. CHRISTOPHER FRY, 97, wry British playwright of the 1940s and '50s who, along with T.S. Eliot, was responsible for a brief, midcentury revival of verse drama; in Chichester, England. While celebrated for plays like The Lady's Not for Burning, he reached his biggest audience when he was hired by director William Wyler as a script doctor and did a rewrite for the epic 1959 film Ben-Hur.