Pro wrestling legend Steve "Dr. Death" Williams dead at age 49
By Jason Powell Dec 30, 2009 - 12:28 PM



Pro wrestling great Steve "Dr. Death" Williams died on Tuesday night at age 49. He has been battling cancer in recent years. Williams held numerous wrestling titles in North America and Japan throughout his career. He achieved All-American status as a football player at the University of Oklahoma.

Arnold Stang, a character actor whose bespectacled, owlish face and nasal urban twang gave him a singular and recognizable persona, whether on radio or television, in the movies or in advertisements, or even in cartoons, died on Sunday in Newton, Mass. He was 91 and lived in Needham, Mass.

The cause was pneumonia, said his son, David.

Mr. Stang considered himself a dramatic actor who could play serious roles. But even he was aware that with his signature heavy glasses and a manner that could be eagerly solicitous, despondently whiny or dare-you-to-hit-me pugnacious, his forte was comedy.

Like Wally Cox, who was a friend, and Don Knotts, Mr. Stang was a natural for roles requiring a milquetoast, a pest or a nerd. At 5 foot 3 and never much more than 100 pounds, he once said of himself, “I look like a frightened chipmunk who’s been out in the rain too long.” And in a story he frequently told, after an auto accident in 1959 that left him needing extensive plastic surgery, he said to the doctor, “For God’s sake, don’t make me look pretty.”

His memorable moments as an actor were oddly varied signposts of popular culture. He was the spokesman for Chunky, the candy bar, in the 1950s, delivering the slogan: “Chunky! What a chunk o’ chocolate!”

In Otto Preminger’s 1955 film about drug addiction, “The Man With the Golden Arm,” he played Frank Sinatra’s pal Sparrow in a performance that is often cited as a precursor of Dustin Hoffman’s turn as Ratso Rizzo in “Midnight Cowboy.”

On “Top Cat,” the animated television series of the early 1960s, he was the voice of T. C., a k a Top Cat himself, the leader of a mischievous cat gang. (The character was based on Phil Silvers’s Sergeant Bilko.)

He was one of two gas station attendants (Marvin Kaplan was the other) who witness the destruction of their station by Jonathan Winters in the 1963 lunatic film comedy “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”

Most sources indicate that Mr. Stang was born in Chelsea, Mass., in 1925, but according to his family, though he had relatives in Chelsea, he was born in Manhattan on Sept. 28, 1918. His father was a lawyer until the 1929 stock market crash and earned a living afterward as a salesman.

The Chelsea story was one Mr. Stang perpetuated himself; he told interviewers that he got his first job in radio in 1934 at age 9 after he wrote to “Let’s Pretend,” a New York children’s radio show, and asked for an audition. Told he could audition when he was next in New York, he took the bus from Boston, alone, the following Saturday and was hired.

“We were married 60 years and I never managed to get him to correct that,” his wife, JoAnne Stang, said in an interview Monday.

The truth, Ms. Stang said, was that her husband grew up mostly in Brooklyn and graduated from New Utrecht High School. He wrote the note asking for an audition from Brooklyn, and he was older than 9.

He began his show business career as a teenager — his first radio appearances were on the shows “The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour” and “Let’s Pretend” — and he went on to perform on dozens of radio programs in the 1930s and ’40s, including soap operas, mysteries and comedies, and was often called on to play more than one role.

He was probably best known at the time for “The Goldbergs,” the long-running family series set in Bronx on which he played the character Seymour Fingerhood, the teenage neighbor to the title family, and later as a sidekick to stars like Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny and especially Milton Berle.

Mr. Stang was a regular on “The Henry Morgan Show,” a showcase for Morgan’s astringent satire, often playing a complaining, goofball New Yorker named Gerard who traded banter and one-liners with the host. After Berle moved his radio show to television, Mr. Stang appeared from 1953 to 1955, bringing along his character, Francis, a pain-in-the-neck stagehand who bugged the star relentlessly.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1949 (Wally Cox, a skilled goldsmith, made their wedding rings, she said), and his son, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Stang is survived by a daughter, Deborah Stang, of Brighton, Mass., and two granddaughters.

Mr. Stang landed on Broadway three times, the last being a revival of “The Front Page” in 1969. He was a regular on the 1960s comedy “Broadside,” a short-lived, distaff version of “McHale’s Navy,” and was a guest star on numerous series, including “Bonanza,” “Batman” and “The Cosby show.”

He was also the voice of many cartoon characters, including Nurtle the Turtle in the 1965 film “Pinocchio in Outer Space.” Other film credits include Otto Preminger’s 1968 gangster comedy “Skidoo,” with Jackie Gleason; “Hercules in New York” (1970), a comedy with Arnold Schwarzenegger; and “Dennis the Menace” (1993), with Walter Matthau.

“He loved the cartoons, and he liked doing commercials, too,” Ms. Stang said of her husband. “But most of all, he loved radio. It offered him such a span of roles.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/arts/television/22stang.html

'Mister Ed' actress Connie Hines dies at age 78
Published Dec 23, 12:56 AM EST


BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Actress Connie Hines, who played Wilbur's wife on the popular 1960s television show "Mister Ed" has died. She was 78.

Her "Mister Ed" co-star Alan Young told the Los Angeles Times that Hines died Friday at her Beverly Hills home from complications of heart problems.

Hines was best known for portraying Carol Post on the show that featured a talking horse. She wrote a section about her career in Young's 2007 book "Mister Ed and Me and More."

Born in Massachusetts, Hines also appeared in the 1960 film "Thunder in Carolina" and TV shows that included "The Millionaire," "Johnny Ringo" and "Riverboat."

Hines was married twice, the last time to Lee Savin, an entertainment lawyer and producer who died in 1995.

Date Posted: Tuesday, December 22, 12:58:45pm
In reply to: Dead at 76 's message, "Donald Pickering, Actor" on Tuesday, December 22, 12:52:03pm

---

...English actor Donald Pickering.
Donald Pickering
(b. 15 November 1933 - d. 19th December 2009)

Pickering has appeared in many television, film and radio roles.
His television appearances include several roles in Doctor Who,
The Pallisers, The House of Eliott, Watson in the 1980 series
"Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson", Yes, Prime Minister Bittas Empire
and Executive Stress. Was nominated for Broadway's 1971 Tony Award
as Best Supporting or Featured Actor (Dramatic) for "Conduct Unbecoming."

Longtime South Florida actor Clarence Thomas, whose work in films, TV and on the stage inspired a generation of younger black performers, died Sunday at age 75 in a Kendall nursing home.

Thomas, the first African-American Florida branch president of Screen Actors Guild (2000-'02), had been in poor health for much of the past decade, said actor John Archie, a protégé and frequent stage co-star.

``He has given service in so many ways to this community and the acting community,'' Archie said. ``He was a wonderful actor, a fine man. He had an incredible mind.''

The two met on an acting assignment just after Archie had graduated high school. ``He was a dear friend. How? By giving me the best advice, by supporting me and letting me know I could achieve and do well in the business. He was just there for me.''

SCREEN CREDITS

Among Thomas' big-screen credits: Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974), Cocoon (1985) and Rosewood (1997). He also was in several TV movies and series, including Miami Vice and American Playhouse.

In South Florida, he was known for many stage performances, including his final theatrical production, A Lesson Before Dying, starring Archie at GableStage in 2002.

Thomas was a public school teacher until his mid-40s, when the job began to interfere with his part-time acting career. He acted most of his adult life, about 40 years, but never won big acting awards or made a fortune, Archie said. ``People outside the business don't understand,'' he said. ``All they know is movie stars. They don't understand the guy sitting next to them works in all kinds of media and doesn't have any money.''

Thomas, who was born in Arkansas and raised in Chicago, was married 56 years to the former Barbara Jones of Hialeah. They met when both attended Knoxville College in Tennessee. The Thomases, who had no children, moved to South Florida about a year after they graduated. Since the 1960s, they lived in the same home in Richmond Heights, said Eva Cofield, a family friend.



latimes.com
OBITUARIES
Movie stills photographer Bob Willoughby dies at 82
He created enduring images of stars and jazz musicians.
By Valerie J. Nelson


December 22, 2009


Bob Willoughby, who created iconic portraits of his muse, Audrey
Hepburn, and dozens of other celebrities as one of the first still
photographers assigned to capture life on Hollywood film sets, has died.
He was 82.


Willoughby died Friday of cancer at his home in Vence, France, said
Claire Willoughby, a daughter-in-law.


The rise of Life and Look magazines created a demand for more than
routine photo stills from movie sets and led to a career for Willoughby
that spanned three decades.


It took off in 1954 when Warner Bros. asked him to photograph Judy
Garland's final scene on the set of "A Star Is Born." His portrait of
the freckle-faced star became his first Life cover.


Over the next 20 years, he made now-classic photos on the sets of about
100 films, including the 1960s movies "The Graduate," "My Fair Lady,"
"Rosemary's Baby" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"


Writing in 1974 in The Times, entertainment critic Charles Champlin
called Willoughby one of the finest movie-set photographers and said his
work was impressive "as photojournalism becomes salon art."


Director Sydney Pollack, who died last year, paid homage to Willoughby
in the photographer's 2003 book, "The Star Makers": "Sometimes a
filmmaker gets a look at a single photograph taken on his own set and
sees the 'soul' of his film right there. It's rare, but it happens, and
did so to me in 1969, the first time I looked at work Bob had done
during the filming of 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?' "


He made himself seem invisible, Willoughby later said, by blending in
with the movie crew, once he realized they were invisible to the actors.


In turn, he revealed "actors and actresses as themselves, not merely as
characters they played," the Times of London reported in 2003.


Willoughby turned his lens on many of the era's movie legends, including
Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and Elizabeth Taylor.
William Holden, Jack Lemmon and Hepburn were "special people" whom he
saw socially, the photographer once said.


He became the go-to photographer for Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, the
raucous group of Las Vegas nightclub entertainers. One of Willoughby's
most famous Rat Pack pictures features most of the group in front of the
Sands Hotel sign when they were making the 1960 film "Ocean's Eleven."


On an earlier Sinatra film set, "The Man With the Golden Arm" (1955),
director Otto Preminger tried to tell Willoughby how to take his
photographs. Sinatra was stunned when the relatively young photographer
dared to tell Preminger: "You look after your job and I'll look after
mine," Willoughby recounted in 2002 in London's Sunday Express.


Willoughby's shots of Sinatra singing at a recording session for the
film are now regarded as classics.


The photographer was closest to Hepburn, whom he met in 1953 at
Paramount Studios when she was on the cusp of stardom for "Roman
Holiday" and he was an established magazine photographer.


While setting up his equipment, he found his eyes constantly "drifting
back to that face," he later wrote, which had a "smile that God designed
to melt mortal men's hearts."


Magazines snapped up his photographs of Hepburn on movie sets. After
shooting her a number of times, he became close enough to follow Hepburn
home.


The resulting images were the subject of a 2008 Life book, "Remembering
Audrey," which features candid portraits.


According to a Los Angeles Times review of the book, the most striking
images were taken off the clock, such as Hepburn napping at home with a
fawn in her lap.


"I was there to make the women look as beautiful, the men as handsome
and the movies as interesting as possible," Willoughby said in 2003 in
the Times of London. "Beyond that, I photographed what appealed and was
exciting to me."


An only child, Willoughby was born June 30, 1927, in Los Angeles. His
parents divorced before he was born, and his mother, Nettie, raised him.


When he was 12, his father gave him a complicated camera that Willoughby
set out to master. He studied cinema at USC and design with filmmaker
Saul Bass at the Kann Institute of Art in Los Angeles while apprenticing
with a number of Hollywood photographers.


A jazz fan, Willoughby made portraits of such famous musicians as Billie
Holiday, Chet Baker and Cole Porter.


On an airplane flight, Willoughby met his future wife, the Scottish-born
Dorothy, a stewardess, in 1959. They married six weeks later.


They had four children and lived in Pacific Palisades until 1972, when
they decided they wanted to finish raising their family in southern
Ireland, where they bought a castle.


The move was great for his lifestyle, Willoughby once said, but not for
his career.


He worked on only five more films, but his photographs continued to be
exhibited in museums throughout the world. He also published more than
15 books.


After moving to France a decade ago, the couple lived quietly in a home
largely absent of celebrity photographs but full of art and ancient
artifacts.


Willoughby, a short, cherubic man who had been called "a leprechaun with
a Leica," told the London Times: "I never wanted Hollywood for myself. I
was just about my family and my work."

Dark Star is a low budget sci-fi comedy concerning 4-5 guys who have been in space way too long. Dan O'Bannon multi-tasked on Dark Star, acting, scripting, production design, editing, all sorts. So compelling were his computer graphics (really animation) that George Lucas hired him for similar chores on Star Wars. One incident concerns a comic beachball alien that escapes into the gizzards of the ship causing mayhem. O'Bannon revisited this scene and that begat the Alien franchise.

O'Bannon cornered the market for a while in scripting movies from the novels of Philip K. Dick, Total Recall and Screamers. Although O'Bannon and Carpenter fell out, Carpenter always mentioned an O'Bannon directed USC short concerning a bathroom suicide as being something special, O'Bannon finally got to direct a feature with the hilarious Return of the Living Dead.

Dan O'Bannon, one of a kind. RIP

latimes.com
Jennifer Jones, Oscar-winning actress, dies at 90
Discovered by future husband David O. Selznick, Jones won the Academy Award for 1943's 'The Song of Bernadette.' She also was married to industrialist and art collector Norton Simon.
By Claudia Luther

10:13 AM PST, December 17, 2009

Jennifer Jones, the actress who won an Academy Award for her luminous performance in the 1943 film "The Song of Bernadette" and who was married to two legendary men -- producer David O. Selznick and industrialist and art collector Norton Simon -- died today. She was 90.

Jones died of natural causes at her home in Malibu, according to Leslie C. Denk, a spokeswoman for the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena.

Jones oversaw the museum following Simon's death in 1993, but she was best known for her movie career.

In all, she starred in more than two dozen films, playing opposite such A-list actors as William Holden, Joseph Cotten and Gregory Peck.

In addition to her best-actress win for "Bernadette," Jones was nominated for an Academy Award for leading roles in three other films: "Love Letters" (1945), a soaper in which an amnesiac is cured through the love of a man, played by Cotten; the western epic "Duel in the Sun" (1946), with Peck; and "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" (1955), in which she played Dr. Han Suyin opposite Holden. She also was nominated as best supporting actress for "Since You Went Away" (1944), in which she starred with her first husband, Robert Walker.

The tall, sensitive Jones might never have risen to stardom but for Selznick, who was the first to see something special in the beautiful "big-eyed girl" who showed up in his New York office to test -- although not very well -- for the part of Claudia in the 1943 film of the same name. (Dorothy McGuire won the role.) After seeing her second test, he decided she was "the best sure-fire female star to come along since Leigh and Bergman" --referring to Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman, both then under contract to the producer.

He found the young actress a new name and began grooming her for stardom, finding Jones her first big role in "Bernadette" and, afterward, producing or choosing most of her films. He endlessly pestered Hollywood with his memos about her makeup, her camera angles, her costumes. She was his protégé, his obsession, his crusade, eventually his lover and, finally, his wife.

His adoration of her, said film critic David Thomson, shaped the rest of his life and fueled "one of the great gossip-column melodramas of the time."

"She was an ardent young actress before she met Selznick," Thomson wrote in his "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film." "But it is hard now to be sure whether we would know her if his great wind had not picked her up like a leaf."

Jones was born Phylis Isley in Tulsa, Okla., on March 2, 1919, the daughter of the owners and stars of Isley Stock Co., a tent show that toured the Midwest. She became interested in acting during her school years and eventually studied at Northwestern University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.

It was at the academy that she met Walker, whom she married in 1939 and with whom she had two sons, Robert Walker Jr. and Michael Walker.

After several failed attempts to break into Hollywood, the two actors settled in New York City, and finally Jones got her chance for a screen test with Selznick.

By that time, Selznick was almost 40 and had already produced the epic "Gone With the Wind" and a string of popular and important films, including "David Copperfield," "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Rebecca." He was looking for another "GWTW" -- and another star to discover.

"It was a sudden fusion of supply and demand. She needed his help, he desperately needed to give it to her," Selznick's secretary, Frances Inglis, would later tell Thomson, who is also author of "Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick" (1992).

"The Song of Bernadette," a 20th Century Fox film directed by Henry King, was the vehicle Selznick picked to introduce Jones to the American public.

It was, everyone agreed, perfect casting. Jones, who was Catholic and had gone to a convent school, had the kind of wide-eyed innocence that made her believable as Bernadette Soubirous, the French peasant girl who saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in a grotto.

"I cried all the way through 'Bernadette' because Jennifer was so moving and because I realized then I had lost the award," said Ingrid Bergman, who was Oscar-nominated for her role in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" the same year Jones won.

At the time, Jones was a wife and mother, but even that tame image was not what the studio wanted for the actress it had playing a virginal mystic. For months, Jones was asked to hide her family life and present herself as a real-life Bernadette.

That changed after Selznick arranged for Jones and Walker to play opposite each other in Jones' second starring film, the World War II tear-jerker, "Since You Went Away." To promote that film, publicity stories were churned out about "Mr and Mrs. Cinderella" and their contented home life with their children.

By then, however, the relationship was a sham, and it was difficult for them to perform the love scenes. The film's director, John Cromwell, said that on two occasions Jones' "emotional upsets caused her to flee the set in tears."

The couple divorced in 1945. Walker, who had starred in "See Here, Private Hargrove" and opposite Judy Garland in "The Clock," died in 1951.

In 1948, Selznick divorced his wife, Irene Mayer, daughter of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer. Selznick, 47, and Jones, 30, were married in 1949 on a yacht off the Italian Riviera.

More than 30 years later, Jones told the Washington Post of her relationship with Selznick: "I felt appreciated right from the beginning. I felt totally at ease. I don't know whether that's love at first sight."

But she said the stories of Selznick's domination were overblown.

"I had good roles, and I had David to guide me," Jones said.

Selznick's "Duel in the Sun" (1946), a western, earned Jones one of her best-actress Oscar nominations.

Selznick intended "Duel" as a sweeping epic in the tradition of his greatest triumph, "Gone With the Wind."

But the 1946 film, in which Jones played a woman of mixed race caught between two brothers (Peck and Cotten), ran into publicity problems when the Catholic Church issued a statement saying the story "tends to throw audience sympathy on the side of sin" and that Jones "is unduly, if not indecently, exposed." The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood removed posters of her that showed cleavage, and much was made of the difference between Jones' role in "Duel" and her role as the innocent in "Bernadette."

"Duel," although a box-office hit, today is remembered with some humor by critics. Thomson dubbed it "a masterpiece of the primitive," and Leonard Maltin, writing in his movie guide, called "Duel" a "big, brawling, engrossing, often stupid sex-Western."

Among Jones' other major roles were "Portrait of Jennie" (1948) and, in the 1950s, "Carrie," "Beat the Devil," "Ruby Gentry," "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," "Good Morning, Miss Dove," "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" and "A Farewell to Arms." She played Nicole Diver in 1962's "Tender Is the Night."

"Talented, charming Jennifer was the most insecure actress I ever worked with," actress Joan Fontaine, who played Jones' sister, Baby, in "Tender Is the Night," wrote in her 1978 autobiography," No Bed of Roses." "Despite her Academy Award for 'Song of Bernadette,' I felt that acting was a torture for her."

Starting in the mid-1960s, Jones went through a bleak period. Her film career was on the wane and, in 1965, Selznick died.

Two years later, on the day her good friend Charles Bickford died at the age of 78, Jones attempted suicide. She was found by sheriff's deputies in the surf at the base of a 400-foot cliff in Malibu, where she had collapsed after taking sleeping pills and, it appeared from evidence at the scene, drinking wine.

"I don't think I wanted to die," she told the Washington Post several years later. "These accidents happen."

Jones' penultimate film, "Angel, Angel, Down We Go" (1969), was so bad that film historian Edward Margulies, co-author of "Bad Movies We Love," referred to the film in labeling Jones "the true standout" among former Oscar winners who "slid into grade-Z trash" in their later careers.

Jones' final film role was a supporting role as Fred Astaire's love interest in the 1974 film "The Towering Inferno."

But by then, Jones life had taken a turn for the better after having met Norton Simon.

The couple -- he recently divorced and she widowed for half a dozen years -- met in May 1971 at a reception in Los Angeles for a New York magazine editor. Simon was 64, and Jones was 52.

At that time, Jones had retreated from Hollywood and was raising her daughter by Selznick, Mary Jennifer, and working with the Manhattan Project, a group of Salvation Army residential treatment facilities for young people addicted to narcotics. Simon said later that, of course, he found Jones beautiful but that they connected because of her activism.

Simon by that time had severed his last managerial ties to his business empire and was one of the world's leading art collectors, mostly of old masters.

By the end of May, the couple had embarked on a trip to Paris together, stopping over in London, where they decided to get married. Their wedding was aboard a boat with a view of the white cliffs of Dover.

"It was very romantic," Simon told a reporter.

Jones said that she had considered museums boring until she met Simon. She changed her mind on a trip to Siena, Italy, with her husband.

"For the first time, I looked at paintings of the Madonna and child and saw them as abstracts, which Norton had been telling me they were all along," she told the Washington Post. "Suddenly the subject matter went away and I could see, for instance, that Matisse had been here."

Jones, in turn, opened Simon's mind to other cultures. According to Times arts reporter Suzanne Muchnic's 1998 biography of Simon, "Odd Man In," it was Jones, a longtime yoga practitioner, who persuaded Simon to take his first trip to India, where he was "smitten by the art of regions he had scarcely considered before." Simon became a major force in the Indian and Southeast Asian art market.

Jones eventually became an important part of Simon's art empire. When he became incapacitated by Guillain-Barré syndrome, he named his wife president of the Norton Simon Museum of Art. After his death in 1993, she became chairwoman of the Norton Simon Foundation Board, overseeing a $3-million renovation of the museum's interior, designed by museum trustee Frank Gehry, and the gardens, by landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power.

Jones herself was surprised at the many turns her life had taken.

"Actually," Jones told the Washington Post in 1977, "every time I stop to think about it, I'm really amazed. I think I've had an extraordinary life. And lots of times I can hardly believe it's me."

Jones is survived by her son Robert Walker Jr., eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Her son Michael Walker died in 2007. In 1975, her daughter with Selznick, Mary Jennifer, committed suicide. Services will be private.

news.obits@latimes.com

Luther is a former Times staff writer.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

TONY KENDALL, whose real name was Luciano Stella, died November 28 in Rome in a hospital in Trigoria, after a serious illness. He was born August 22, 1936, and had to his credit over 50 popular films from the sixties until the eighties after starting his career as a model and in fotoromanzi. He changed his name to Tony Kendall at the suggestion of Vittorio De Sica.

He made his debut in 1959, acting under his own name in “Femminie Tre Volte”, but then had to wait some years for a major role, in “Brennus Enemy of Rome”,1963, where he first used the Tony Kendall name. He was also known as a part of a double act with Brad Harris in several action movies, starting with “The Pirates of the Mississippi”. After the success of the Bond films and the German Jerry Cotton series, Kendall became a star in the seven films in which he played a private eye Joe Walker, aka Commissioner X, while Harris played his foil, police captain Tom Rowland.

Then, following the successful television series of “Batman”, Harris and Kendall were together again in “The Three Fantastic Superman”, 1967. Kendall’s work ranged across numerous genres, from horror to giallo, with his last appearances being in “On the Dark Continent” in 1993 and “Alex l’ariete” in 2000.


MIKE LeBELL, the promoter of the NWA Los Angeles territory during the 1960s and 1970s died this afternoon. He was 79 years old.

According to his former co-worker, Jeff Walton, Lebell died in Los Angeles, at 3:50 p.m., of apparent respiratory failure.

Just about every big name in professional wrestling passed through the Los Angeles office during Lebell's tenure, and its ties to the Japanese promotions were always strong.

The showcase arena for Lebell was The Grand Olympic Auditorium, which dates back to the 1932 Olympics in L.A. Sports Illustrated once dubbed the Olympic "an ancient, graying, high-ceiling fortress of boxing on South Grand Ave." Lebell's territory extended beyond the city as well, and encompassed much of southern California, including towns like Long Beach, San Bernadino, Ventura, and Pasedena.

"The only reason this territory survived was the density, the population, especially the Hispanics," explained former Los Angeles referee Art Williams, who admitted he was not a fan of Lebell personally. "We had some great workers here."


Headliners during Lebell's run up until 1982 included Mil Mascaras, Black Gordman, The Great Goliath, Freddie Blassie, John Tolos and The Destroyer (Dick Beyer).

In Blassie's autobiography, Lebell explained how the territory succeeded:

"Our territory extended as far as we could go south of L.A., and five miles this side of San Francisco. Along the way, we put on shows at little clubs. That was our backbone. If we drew $5,000 at the little club, my God, you could pay all the wrestlers like $75. At the end of the week, they'd wrestle at the Olympic, making $500, $800, maybe some $1,000. They were happier than hell.

The little clubs cost us nothing. In those days, it was like a joke. We paid $50 rent, and in most of the places, we built rings and left the rings there. That was about it.

One of the biggest wrestlers we had, Mil Mascaras, was a Mexican star, and he never wanted a guarantee. He'd wrestle for whatever. If we'd go to a little club, and we only had a $5,000 house, he'd take a hundred and a half and thank me for it."
Lebell is believed to be the first North American promoter to use closed-circuit television locations to broadcast the matches to the fans who couldn't get into the arena.

"We know for a fact that there are 10,000 people outside now who can't get in. These people live and die wrestling. If we told them there was going to be wrestling at 4 o'clock in the morning, they'd be here," Lebell said in an August 1971 interview with the Los Angeles Times after his first closed-circuit broadcast.

In the same interview in the Times, Lebell talked about the passion of his regulars.

"About three years ago." he said. "A lady slumped over in her chair next to her husband and they took her to the dressing room. She was dead. So now they had to tell her poor husband: 'Pardon me. sir. Could you come with me? Your wife has passed away.'

"'I will, I will,'" he said. 'Right after this fall.'"

Lebell's mother, Aileen Eaton, held the rights to promote in the Olympic Auditorium. "I just love this building," she said in a 1972 interview. "Do you know this is the only large building in the whole country that is built especially for boxing and wrestling? It's cozy. The employees are like one big family. It's a friendly place."

Eaton had two sons with Maurice LeBell, who had been paralyzed after a near drowning, and died in 1941: Mike, who the box office manager and the treasurer for Aileen Eaton Incorporated, and "Judo" Gene LeBell. "Judo" Gene helped with the promotion, often as a troubleshooting referee, while he carved out his own career in wrestling, judo and the movie industry.

Eaton, meanwhile, became a major boxing promoter both alongside and after her second husband, Cal Eaton, died. She would promote more than 10,000 bouts over the years, including the likes of Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier and George Foreman. Eaton, who died in 1987, was the first woman inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, in 2002.

In a 1967 Sports Illustrated profile, Eaton's business was featured, and her son's was mentioned as well. "Whether there is any truth or not in the line, Aileen Eaton is, as one manager put it, 'very unstupid.' Her weekly boxing shows gross close to $1 million each year, and her wrestling shows, directed by her son Mike, do better yet."

Struggling to survive until remarrying, Eaton sent her sons to the California Military Academy "on a trade deal. I handled the academy's advertising in exchange for room and board for the boys."

"Graduating from college, my choice was being an optometrist or promoting wrestling," Mike Lebell told Wrestling Revue magazine in 2003. "Of course, I chose wrestling, and am glad I did! Oh, there were many times I second-guessed myself along the way and wondered why I settled on such an unpredictable business, but overall, I wouldn't have done it any other way."

According to Walton, who served as a publicist, starting in 1969, Lebell was all business. "Mike never impressed me as really being that interested in wrestling. He was interested in filling seats," Walton wrote in his autobiography, Richmond 9-5171, A Wrestling Story

KCOP-TV, Channel 13, played a big part in the success of the Los Angeles territory, with its wide reach and charismatic host Dick Lane into the early 1970s.

Over the years, a number of other promoters tried to break into the Los Angeles territory. Johnny Doyle, who once promoted at the Hollywood Legion Stadium, was one of them, as was Verne Gagne. Ivan Koloff and Superstar Billy Graham teamed to briefly challenge Lebell as well.

Lebell's best-known promotions were the 1971 show at the Los Angeles Coliseum, a stacked card headlined by the feud between Blassie and Tolos, and his involvement with the 1976 Muhammad Ali versus Antonio Inoki fight in Japan.

The Blassie-Tolos feud, started with the infamous "Monsel's powder" thrown by Tolos into Blassie's eyes, was kept running for months, with Blassie "hospitalized" and unable to wrestle. The promotion smartly kept them apart. Blassie would show up unexpectedly at shows, screaming for Tolos' head, his eyes still bandaged. "They never touched each other. They’d come close. You’d see cops coming and grabbing Blassie and straining to hold him back," said longtime L.A. office figure Jeff Walton. When Blassie and Tolos finally met, it resulted in a crowd of 25,847, paying $5-$7 for a live gate of $142,158.50. "The paper said it was 25,000 but it looked like 35,000 to 40,000," said Tolos. "It was a hell of a big, big, big card."

Newspaper reports of the Ali-Inoki battle have Lebell as a key figure. "Inoki's office said the rules were drawn up and approved by three men in New York -- Angelo Dundee, Ali's trainer; Vince McMahon, president of the World Wide Wrestling Federation, and Los Angeles promoter Mike LeBell," reads a 1976 Associated Press story.

However, in the 2003 interview with Wrestling Revue, Lebell said the crowning glory of his promotional days was a bout between Mil Mascaras and Black Gordman. "This match took us five months to prepare and sell. Gordman defeated Mascaras to begin the program. We then announced Hair vs. Mask and sold out the Olympic Auditorium in two days, and sold out five closed-circuit theatres."

Lebell closed his promotion in 1982, ceding the rights to the territory to Vince McMahon.

For the last two decades, Lebell sold videotapes of hard-to-find movies and events. "I've had a great run, it's a very relaxing business compared to wrestling," he told Wrestling Revue.

He had distanced himself far, far from the wrestling business. As well, Lebell and his brother, Gene, had been at odds for years and years, over a number of issues, with money being a major factor.

Few oldtimers see promoters through rose-coloured glasses. As the controller of the pursestrings, just about everyone believes that they were shortchanged financially or never used correctly. Mike Lebell was no exception.

The former ref Williams tried to explain. "Mascaras was a nice enough guy. His ego was strengthened by his association with Mike Lebell, who did not know how to handle wrestlers. Lebell had no business being in the business. He got into the business because his mother handed it to him," said Williams.

In his autobiography, Blassie was even more direct. "Even during the best of times, I was always waiting for him to put a hatchet in my back. I feel pretty confident saying that every wrestler in the territory felt the same way. Because of all the publicity we got in L.A., you'd wind up with the press clippings while he wound up with the money."


Former Yankees star Tommy Henrich dies at 96
PA Sports - December 01, 2009

NEW YORK — Former New York Yankees star Tommy Henrich has
died at 96.

The team said Henrich died Tuesday in Dayton, Ohio.

Henrich began playing for the Yankees in 1937 and finished in
1950, and won four World Series championships. The outfielder
was nicknamed “Old Reliable” because of his knack for getting
clutch hits.

Among his teammates were Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Whitey
Ford. Henrich hit .282 with 183 home runs.

Paul Naschy (born Jacinto Molina, September 6, 1934, Madrid – December 1, 2009, Madrid) was a Spanish movie actor, screenwriter, and director working primarily in horror films. His portrayal of numerous classic horror figures–the wolfman, a hunchback, Count Dracula, a mummy–have earned him recognition as a Spanish Lon Chaney. King Juan Carlos I presented Naschy with Spain’s Gold Medal Award for Fine Arts in 2001 in honor of his work.

Film director Koichi Saito died of pneumonia at a Tokyo hospital just after midnight on Friday night. He was 80 years old.

Saito made his directorial debut in 1967 with "Sasayaki no Joe." Some of his better known works are "Yakusoku" in 1972 (starring Keiko Kishi) and "Tsugaru Jongarabushi" in 1973 (starring Kyoko Enami).