The Morgue 2008

[Mother_Theresa]

Another sad, screwed up Hollywood family.

[quote] Christian Brando, 49, dies of pneumonia

Christian Brando, the troubled son of actor Marlon Brando, who made headlines in 1990 when he was arrested in the shooting death of his half-sister’s boyfriend, died early Saturday. He was 49.

Brando died from complications of pneumonia at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, said David J. Seeley, an attorney for Marlon Brando’s estate.

The legal proceedings against Brando for the killing of Dag Drollet caused a firestorm of media attention. His legendary actor father used his estate near Coldwater Canyon to post the $2 million bond for his son and later offered rambling and emotional testimony pleading for leniency for the oldest of his nine children.

Christian Brando, then 32, eventually pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of the 26-year-old Drollet, Cheyenne Brando’s lover and the father of her unborn child. Brando was given a 10-year prison sentence but ended up serving nearly five years at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. He was also sentenced to three years probation.

Years later, the younger Brando would be called to court in another high-profile legal case, the civil trial of Robert Blake in the murder of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley. . .

Christian Brando was born in Los Angeles on May 11, 1958. His mother was Marlon Brando’s first wife, the Calcutta-born actress Anna Kashfi. But Christian was still a toddler when the couple separated and divorced. A protracted custody battle ensued.

Kashfi was initially awarded custody of her son, but that order was removed five years later when a judge declared that her “reliance on drugs and alcohol” contributed to an uncontrollable temper. The court ordered that Christian, then 6, live with the actor’s older sister. By 1972, Marlon Brando – who by that time had married twice more and had three more children – was granted custody of Christian, who was raised by nannies and sent to boarding school in Ojai.

But while the actor was out of the country filming “Last Tango in Paris,” Kashfi allegedly kidnapped Christian and took him to Baja. The boy was eventually found living in a tent and ill with bronchitis.

Kashfi continued to press for custody but gave up her struggle in 1974 when her ex-husband pledged that she would get reasonable visitation rights with her son.

As for Christian, he dropped out of school in 11th grade and began drinking and using LSD, tried a variety of jobs including welder and tree trimmer and lived for a time in Alaska, piloting a barge for a fish processor during the summers. But he mostly lived for years with his father in Brando’s hilltop estate. . .

In pleading for a reduced sentence for his son, the elder Brando took the stand in the Santa Monica courthouse and said: “I think that perhaps I failed as a father.”

“I’m certain that there were things that I could have done differently, had I known better at the time,” the elder Brando said, at times choking back tears. “But I didn’t.”

While in prison, Christian Brando completed his high school equivalency degree and worked in a vocational education machine shop.

His father died at 80 on July 1, 2004. In 1995, Cheyenne hanged herself at her mother’s home outside Papeete, the French Polynesian capital on the island of Tahiti. She was 25. Cheyenne was the daughter of Brando and Tarita Teriipaia, who were married after appearing together in the 1962 film “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Cheyenne’s son, Tuki, was being raised in Tahiti by Drollet’s parents.

In 2005, Christian Brando was called to testify in Blake’s civil trial. However, Brando, who was briefly romantically involved with Bakley, invoked the 5th Amendment and refused to answer questions about his relationship with her. He was fined $1,000 for contempt of court. When Bakley had a baby girl in June 2000, she named her Christian Shannon Brando and led Brando to believe he was the father. A paternity test later established that Blake was the father and the baby’s name was changed to Rose Sophia Lenore Blake. . .[/quote]
link

Going to court with Dad in child custody matter in 1972.

1990 booking photo after being arrested for the murder of his half-sister’s boyfriend.

Dad helping him out at his murder trial.

Going to court in 2005 when called to testify in connection with the murdered wife of Robert Blake.

RIP

[anon38216271]

May he rest in peace. And it was not his fault that Hollywood is fugged up.

[Taffy]

@cfimages

Suharto’s got to be at the top of the list of next to go.

CNN is broadcasting reports that he has just died.

[Chewycorns]

@Taffy

[quote=“cfimages”]Suharto’s got to be at the top of the list of next to go.

CNN is broadcasting reports that he has just died.[/quote]

Yip. I think the article below is a good summury of his legacy.

@Reuters

Suharto leaves legacy of stability in region

As Indonesia’s former autocratic president Suharto lay gasping for life this month, authoritarian figures from neighbouring countries hurried to his bedside to whisper words of encouragement.

Mahathir Mohamad, the 82-year-old former prime minister of Malaysia whose time in office overlapped Suharto’s for nearly two decades, visited on Jan. 14, as did the Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, 61.

A day earlier, Singapore’s founding father and first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, 84, was at Suharto’s bedside.

Suharto’s death, which came on Sunday, marks the passing of an era in Southeast Asia.

Suharto, Mahathir and Lee were in power when countries in the region were growing so strongly they were being touted by the World Bank as the “East Asia Miracle”, an achievement in which individual liberty took a back seat to economic development.

They can thank Suharto, 86, for being instrumental in bringing the stability that allowed the region to grow.

“Why are all these old guys rushing to his bedside? He brought stability to Indonesia and he brought stability to the neighbourhood and that’s something for which they are very thankful,” Michael Vatikiotis, author of “Indonesian Politics Under Suharto”, said before the strongman’s death.

“And it’s unquestioned he brought that stability. You can argue the corruption and repression, but you can’t argue about that,” Vatikiotis said.

CONFRONTATION

Suharto’s 32 years as president of the world’s fourth-most populous country, a key supplier of primary commodities and straddling strategic sea lanes, was a mostly placid era of growth and political stability that came at a cost of brutal suppression of dissent and almost unprecedented corruption.

Things were far different when Suharto came to power after crushing a botched coup in 1965 blamed on the communist party.
Sukarno, Indonesia’s mercurial first president, had declared a “Confrontation” against Malaysia in 1964, which then included Singapore along with the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak.

[b]Sukarno believed all of Borneo belonged to Indonesia and announced his intention to arm a million leftist peasants and workers to do battle with Malaysia. This was at the height of the Vietnam War when Washington feared nations of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes to a communist juggernaut.

In the months after the abortive coup, Suharto set about destroying the communist party as a political force.

Bloody purges saw up to 500,000 alleged communists and sympathisers killed in one of history’s worst massacres. While much of the killing was done by militias and vigilante groups, at the least Suharto’s army did little to stop it.[/b]
He then opened Indonesia up to Western aid and investment.

Gen. Suharto had conducted secret negotiations to end Confrontation, deeply unpopular with the army, even before Sukarno was edged from power in 1966.

[b]The formal end to Confrontation in August of that year paved the way for the birth of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as a staunch bulwark against communism.

Today, headquartered in Jakarta, it encompasses 10 nations with a combined population of 500 million and seeks to become an EU-style community that would have diplomatic and economic heft in a globalised world.

That was almost unimaginable four decades ago.[/b]
Suharto, Mahathir and Lee were among East Asia’s first generation of post-independence leaders who espoused “Asian Values”. Individual liberties and human rights were subordinate to “consensual” politics and economic well-being.

These leaders saw themselves as nation-builders, throwing off the legacy of colonialism, trying to keep multi-ethnic countries from tearing apart at the seams, while creating the institutions of a modern nation state.

But while Singapore under Lee became a paragon of good governance and transparency, Suharto’s Indonesia became one of the world’s most corrupt countries.

The president parcelled out projects and contracts to friends and family so shamelessly it was an important factor in the 1998 student-led uprising during the Asian financial crisis.

The anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International in 2004 ranked Suharto at the top of a dubious table of kleptocrats, estimating he and his family had salted away up to $35 billion. Suharto has dismissed that as pure fiction.

Suharto was admitted to hospital on Jan. 4 suffering from anaemia and low blood pressure due to heart, lung and kidney problems. At times after that his health improved to the point where doctors suggested he might be able to go home.

But that was not to be.

On Sunday morning, his doctors said Suharto had suffered from multiple organ failure, and within hours of that news they announced his death.

reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSP84074

[jdsmith]

Gordon B. Hinckley, the longest-serving president of the Mormon church who presided over one of the greatest periods of expansion in its history, died Sunday, a church spokesman said. He was 97.

Hinckley was preceded in death by his wife, Marjorie Pay Hinckley, whom he married in 1937. She died April 6, 2004.

Wow. Married for 70 years? :bravo:

[Chewycorns]

[quote=“jdsmith”]
Wow. Married for 70 years? :bravo:[/quote]

Mormons believe in “celestial marriage.” If a Mormom receives this ceremony (and I’m sure as the head of LDS, he did), their marriage lasts beyond the grave and through eternity.

[kk]

Odd, I was just finishing up watching Oliver Stone’s Nixon on DVD last night and one of the scenes in the movie I really enjoy is where Nixon and Kissinger go to meet Mao in China. Their communication is of course aided by Mao’s interpreter. Great scene. Anyway, the real life interpreter, Zhang Hanzhi, died yesterday at 73.

[quote]Chairman Mao’s English tutor/interpreter dies

Reuters

2008-01-28 12:54 AM

The debonair Chinese diplomat who tutored Chairman Mao in English has died, ending an eventful life that began as an abandoned child and brought her next to Mao and U.S. President Richard Nixon as they shared toasts and jokes.

Zhang Hanzhi died on Saturday aged 73 after an unspecified lung ailment, the Beijing News reported yesterday, citing her daughter.

Zhang will receive a funeral at Babaoshan, the cemetery for the Communist Party’s elite, in a mark of her status as a diplomat closely involved in talks between China and the United States over normalizing relations in the 1970s.

She was born in Shanghai in 1935, the illegitimate daughter of a shop assistant and a powerful businessman. She was adopted by a lawyer, Zhang Shizhao, an official in the Nationalist government who shifted his loyalties to the Communists who took power in 1949.

Zhang was teaching English at a Beijing university in late 1963, when she accompanied her father to a birthday dinner for Mao Zedong, the Communist Party’s all-powerful leader.

Mao asked her to be his English tutor, and Zhang was launched on a life as his teacher, interpreter and confidante.

“The Chairman wanted the lessons to start the following day! I was dumfounded. I was to teach the great leader whom over a billion people worshipped as their god,” Zhang recounted in Time magazine in 1999.

The lessons ended abruptly and Zhang endured the turmoil of Mao’s radical Cultural Revolution until the early 1970s, when Mao summoned her to work in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as he explored opening ties with the United States.

Zhang attended Mao’s and Premier Zhou Enlai’s talks with Nixon and his key foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger. Later she joined China’s delegation to the United Nations.

She scandalized officials by divorcing her then husband and then marrying Qiao Guanhua, the head of China’s U.N. delegation who became foreign minister in the 1970s.

In recent years, Zhang ? always elegantly dressed - enjoyed a burst of national celebrity after she published several bestselling memoirs of her times near the apex of power.[/quote]

[Jaboney]

@Chewycorns

[quote=“Taffy”][quote=“cfimages”]Suharto’s got to be at the top of the list of next to go.

CNN is broadcasting reports that he has just died.[/quote]

Yip. I think the article below is a good summury of his legacy.[/quote]
Right. A better summary can be heard in this Democracy Now podcast.

[TainanCowboy]

And so ends the ‘Year of Living Dangerously’…

Shameless plug for, IMO, a great movie.

[Chewycorns]

Margaret Truman, the only child of former President Harry S. Truman who became a concert singer, actress, radio and TV personality and mystery writer, died Tuesday. She was 83.

@CNN

Truman, known as Margaret Truman Daniel in private life, died at a Chicago assisted living facility following a brief illness, according to a statement from the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence. She had been at the facility for the past several weeks and was on a respirator, the library said.

Her father’s succession to the presidency in 1945 thrust her into the national spotlight while a college junior.

“I feel that I’ve lived several different lives and that was one of them,” she said in 1980. "Some of it was fun, but most of it was not. It was a great view of history being made.

“The only thing I ever missed about the White House was having a car and driver,” she once said.

Her singing career attracted the barbs of music critics – even the embarrassment of having her father threaten one reviewer. But she found a fulfilling professional and personal life in New York City where she met her husband, journalist Clifton Daniel, who later became managing editor of The New York Times. They married in 1956.

She published her first book, an autobiography titled “Souvenir,” in 1956. She said it was “hard work” and told reporters: “One writing job is enough.”

But then she did a book on White House pets in 1969, and later more, one a biography of her father. The idea of doing a mystery called “Murder in the White House” came “out of nowhere,” she said.

That 1980 title was followed by mysteries set in the Supreme Court, the Smithsonian, Embassy Row, the FBI, Georgetown, the CIA, Kennedy Center, the National Cathedral and the Pentagon.

By that time she was a grandmother and sang only in her church choir.

“I’ve had three or four different careers,” she told an interviewer in 1989. “I consider being a wife and mother a career. I have great respect for women – both those who go out and do their thing and those who stay at home. I think those who stay at home have a lot more courage than those who go out and get a job.”

Mary Margaret Truman was born February 17, 1924, in Independence. She was the only child of Bess and Harry Truman, who was a county judge at the time.

For a few years after her father was elected to the Senate in 1934, she split her school year between Independence and a private girls’ school in Washington, D.C. She later attended George Washington University. She also had taken voice lessons, at the urging of a church choir leader. After graduation, she used the political limelight to launch her singing career.

“I wanted to establish myself as an individual capable of standing on my merit, to experience the satisfaction of achievement,” she explained.

She made her professional singing debut with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1947 and gave her first Carnegie Hall concert two years later. Critics generally praised her poise but were less impressed with her vocal talent.

When Washington Post critic Paul Hume wrote after a 1950 concert that she “is extremely attractive on the stage … (but) cannot sing very well. She is flat a good deal of the time,” her father fired off a note on White House stationery scolding Hume for a “lousy review.”

“I have never met you, but if I do you’ll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below,” the president wrote.

The note made Page One news – but was not the sort of publicity an aspiring artist seeks. Years later she was able to laugh about it: “I thought it was funny. Sold tickets.”

She soon turned more to radio and television, where she made regular guest appearances with Jimmy Durante and Milton Berle.

On radio, she was co-host, with Mike Wallace, of a daily talk show on the NBC network and had her own nationally syndicated interview program for eight years. She also worked with Fred Allen and Tallulah Bankhead.

Her stage career began in 1954, about the time she quit the concert stage.

“I learned my comedy timing from Fred Allen and Goody (Goodman) Ace,” she recalled. “You couldn’t do better than that. I’d still rather hear an audience laugh than do a serious play.”

Throughout her 20s, reporters were constantly asking about marriage prospects, but she said she was pursuing her career for the time being.

When she met Clifton Daniel at a dinner party in 1955, he was working in New York after a decade as a foreign correspondent. It was not until a month before their wedding in April 1956 that their romance became public.

“We had a lot in common,” he wrote in a 1984 memoir. “We were the kind of people who wouldn’t marry anybody our mothers wouldn’t approve of: a couple of citified small-towners, puritans among the fleshpots.”

She and Daniel had four sons; he died in February 2000. Son William died in September 2000 when he was hit by a taxi; he was 41.

She was honorary co-chair of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, the nonprofit partner of her father’s presidential library, and a governing board member of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Health issues had prevented her from visiting the library in recent years, but she remained actively interested in its operations, said Michael Devine, director of the library.

[Chewycorns]

[quote=“TainanCowboy”]And so ends the ‘Year of Living Dangerously’…

Shameless plug for, IMO, a great movie.[/quote]

Yeah, a great movie indeed, but one movie you definitely don’t want to watch (like Platoon) if you are trying to quite smoking.

[Funk500]

Jeremy Beadle UK entertainer and apparent all round good bloke.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7217342.stm

I’ve never got over how much he looked like Zhang Fei

Exhibit A J Beadle

Exhibit B Zhang Fei

[Chewycorns]

Two of the best agriculture sectretaries the US ever had in my opinion were Henry A. Wallace and Earl Butz --Wallace, for expanding the role of government in agriculture during the depression and Butz for his free market policies during the 1970s. Earl Butz, a former U.S. secretary of agriculture who was popular among farmers in his native Indiana but controversial in Washington, died Saturday in Washington. He was 98.

@IndyStar

Born in Albion in Noble County, raised in Indiana and a Purdue University graduate, Butz spent a lifetime in agriculture, including his tenure on the Purdue faculty and his five years as agriculture secretary.

“Not many farmers can name the current secretary of agriculture, but back then every farmer knew Earl’s name,” Randy Woodson, dean of Purdue’s School of Agriculture, said. “He will be remembered as helping farmers compete on a global stage and as a great leader for agriculture.”

It was in 1976 when Butz made his biggest gaffe, a derogatory racial joke in a private conversation. The joke was made public, and Butz decided to resign as agriculture secretary.

“He certainly was one of the most politically incorrect politicians any of us have ever known,” said John Hardin, a Purdue trustee. “He understood what it meant to be a good teacher and spoke incredibly funny. You always wanted to hear what he had to say next.”

Hardin said Butz understood agriculture and was able to make others understand, too.
“We are all in his debt, and I hope we smile for a great Hoosier who did so much for this state,” he said.

Butz’s association with Purdue lasted more than seven decades. He received a bachelor’s degree in animal husbandry and agricultural economics in 1932, spent a year on the family farm, then returned to Purdue to earn a doctorate in agricultural economics in 1937, the first awarded by the university.

That same year, Butz joined the university’s department of agricultural economics and eventually headed it. In 1954, Butz took his first federal post, as assistant agriculture secretary under President Dwight Eisenhower from 1954 through 1957. Butz returned to Purdue as dean of agriculture from 1957 through 1967, then served as the university’s dean of continuing education through 1971.

Under President Richard Nixon, Butz took the agriculture secretary post, which brought him his greatest nationwide attention. He was known for free-market policies in an era when agriculture was controlled by the federal government.

During his five years in Washington, net farm income more than doubled over the previous 10 years, farm exports tripled, and 60 million acres of land in the United States, formerly held out of production by the government, was released.

“It was a pleasure working with Earl Butz when he was at Purdue University and as secretary of agriculture,” Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said in a statement. “In later years it was an honor to often have him in the audience when I was speaking in Tippecanoe County. I will miss those reunions.”

Before Nixon made his trip to China to rebuild relations with that country, Butz went to the Soviet Union in 1972 and reached an agreement to increase farm exports to the Soviets, part of his policy to increase farmers’ income by opening new markets.

That was a controversial move in the 1970s, but “the American farmer saw Earl as the great defender of American agriculture,” recalled Bob Thompson, an agricultural economist at Purdue.
Butz’s colorful language started to draw attention shortly after he was confirmed as agriculture secretary by the Senate, when he promised to “spend money like a drunken sailor” at the federal level to build up depressed farm prices.

He also suggested there would be more food for humans if people would stop feeding dogs and cats, and drew a rebuke from President Gerald Ford when he told a birth control joke, involving Pope Paul VI, in a mock Italian accent. At the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome, Butz made fun of the Pope’s opposition to “population control” by quipping, in a mock Italian accent: “He no playa the game, he no maka the rules.”

But his infamous gaffe consisted of an off-color joke about blacks, bathrooms and sex. The October 18, 1976 issue of Time reported the comment while obscuring its vulgarity:

Butz started by telling a dirty joke involving intercourse between a dog and a skunk. When the conversation turned to politics, Boone, a right-wing Republican, asked Butz why the party of Lincoln was not able to attract more blacks. The Secretary responded with a line so obscene and insulting to blacks that it forced him out of the Cabinet last week and jolted the whole Ford campaign. Butz said that “the only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight p - - - - , loose shoes and a warm place to s - - -.”

After some indecision, Dean used the line in Rolling Stone, attributing it to an unnamed Cabinet officer. But New Times magazine enterprisingly sleuthed out Butz’s identity by checking the itineraries of all Cabinet members.

That controversy led Butz to resign, saying, “This is the price I pay for a gross indiscretion in a private conversation,”

indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/a … TAINMENT01
bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= … 4&refer=us
answers.com/topic/earl-butz

[TainanCowboy]

RIP Mr. Butz

[kk]

Last man in iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photo dies

REDDING, California (AP) – Raymond Jacobs, believed to be the last surviving member of the group of Marines photographed during the original U.S. flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World War II, has died at age 82.

[Dragonbones]

Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, at age 91 or thereabouts.

[kk]

WWI vet dead at 108

TAMPA, Fla. - Harry Richard Landis, who enlisted in the Army in 1918 and was one of only two known surviving U.S. veterans of the First World War, has died. He was 108.

[anon38216271]

John McWethy, ABC newsman

[Huang_Guang_Chen]

[quote]Jaws star Roy Scheider dies at 75

Scheider was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the 1970s
US actor Roy Scheider, best known for playing the police chief in the Jaws movies, has died at the age of 75.
As well as starring in the first two shark thrillers, Scheider received two Oscar nominations during his career.

He was up for best supporting actor for The French Connection in 1972 and best actor for 1979’s All That Jazz.
[/quote]

[kk]

[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”][quote]Jaws star Roy Scheider dies at 75

Scheider was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the 1970s
US actor Roy Scheider, best known for playing the police chief in the Jaws movies, has died at the age of 75.
As well as starring in the first two shark thrillers, Scheider received two Oscar nominations during his career.

He was up for best supporting actor for The French Connection in 1972 and best actor for 1979’s All That Jazz.
[/quote][/quote]
I had no idea he was 75 already. Roy was truly great. He will be missed.