BOB CREAMER (1922-2012): A GENTLE GIANT OF JOURNALISM
July 19th, 2012
How many times over the past two years did I say to my wife,
“I have to get up to Saratoga to see Bob Creamer?” Once we had it arranged and
it wasn’t convenient for me, and another time the reverse prevailed, and I never
made it.
Creamer, 90, died Wednesday night, and I hadn’t seen him in
three decades, though we have talked. I’m in London until Aug. 13, and now I
can’t even go his funeral. That’s how it works far too often.
Robert
Creamer was one of those gentle giants in the world of journalism, not because
of his size (though he was tall) but because he made a difference without ever
calling attention to himself. Without Bob, chances are I would’ve remained
toiling in obscurity, never getting the chance to work at one of the great
magazines of the world. I’m not suggesting that would’ve been a loss for
journalism, but it sure as hell would’ve been a loss for me.
Back in the
1970s Bob was the “outside text editor” for Sports Illustrated. That meant he
handled copy from freelance schlubs like myself. SI was a different publication
back then, thick, huge, diverse, as likely to do a long story on, say, Bengal
tigers as the Cincinnati Bengals. The editors looked for long stories and
treasured the idea that they could find a nobody and get him read by a few
million people. And trust me—as a guy covering high school football, soccer and
wrestling at the Bethlehem (Pa.) Globe-Times—I was a nobody.
After I
submitted a few freelance ideas, having been encouraged by another giant, the
late Jerry Tax (I did make it to Jerry’s memorial), thus did I come under the
care and attention of Creamer.
“Bob Creamer?” I said to Tax. “I’m
supposed to write to Bob Creamer?” Had I been on more familiar terms with Jerry,
I would’ve said, Bob Fuckin Creamer? Bob was an SI legend, having been there
since the inception of the magazine in 1954. He was also the author of Babe, one
of those books that every sports writer who cared about being literate had to
read. Today, 40 years after he wrote it, in graceful and eminently readable
prose, Babe still appears on best-sports-book-lists.
Bob prepared the
freelance contracts in careful English—using a typewriter of course, even after
the world had gone computer—acceptances and rejections always done with grace.
Once in a while he’d stick in an encouraging note, and one day he called to
invite me to New York to have lunch.
“Only come in if you’re coming in
anyway,” he said. “Don’t make a special trip.”
Like I wouldn’t have
crawled on my knees all the way to Port Authority.
On the appointed date,
we met at the Algonquin—of course we did, for Bob was an Algonquin kind of
guy—and there was someone else at the table.
“I asked Bud Greenspan to
come along,” Bob said as he greeted me at the door. “Hope you don’t
mind.”
I knew Greenspan as the Olympic filmmaking legend.
Had I
been a religious man, it was like having lunch at the Heaven’s Gate Luncheonette
with Jesus Chris and, oh, yes, he also decided to bring along the apostle
Paul.
Bob didn’t have to do any of that. He didn’t have to invite me to
lunch and ask Bud Greenspan to come along, and treat me as somebody, and give me
encouragement, and help me negotiate the halls of power at SI, an intimidating
place then and now but especially then. And when I got a fulltime job at SI in
1981, I stopped in his office and thanked him.
“You did it yourself,” he
said. “Now go do a good job.”
I’m not going to go into one of these
screeds about how civility died when the likes of Bob Creamer retired, got old
and died.
But civility sure as hell took a blow.
And damn … I wish
I would’ve made it to Saratoga.
http://www.jackmccallum.net/2012/07/19/bob-creamer-1922-2012-a-gentle-giant-of-journalism/#.UAgfiPV62uI
In 2004, contestants on “Jeopardy!” were stumped by the clue “He was the comedy
partner of Al Franken.”
Tom Davis, that comedy partner, sighed as he
watched. He was so inured to being second fiddle to Mr. Franken, now a
Democratic senator from Minnesota, that he called himself Sonny to Mr. Franken’s
Cher.
But the fact is that Mr. Davis helped shape Mr. Franken’s comedy,
and vice versa, from the time they entertained students with rebellious,
razor-edged humor at high school assemblies in Minnesota.
In 1975, Mr.
Davis, brilliant at improvisational comedy, and Mr. Franken, a whiz at plotting
funny sequences, became two of the first writers on a new show called “Saturday
Night Live,” which has lasted 37 years. (The two should actually be called one
of the show’s first writers: they accepted a single salary of $350 a week. Each,
singly, was called “the guys.”)
Mr. Davis never lost the quirky,
original voice that helped shape the show, and in his last months he referred to
death as “deanimation.” He deanimated on Thursday at his home in Hudson, N.Y.,
at age 59. The cause was throat and neck cancer, his wife, Mimi Raleigh, said.
With Mr. Franken and others, Mr. Davis helped create the clan of
extraterrestrials known as the Coneheads, who attributed their peculiarities to
having come from France. He and Dan Aykroyd collaborated on Mr. Aykroyd’s
impersonation of Julia Child, in which the television chef cuts herself and
bleeds to death after grabbing a phone to dial 911, only to find it’s a prop.
Her last words: “Bon appétit!”
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Aykroyd
spoke of Mr. Davis’s “massive contribution” to the show, characterizing him as
“very disciplined” and able to herd less focused writers toward something
concrete. “There was no frivolous waste of time,” he said.
Mr. Davis was
present at the creation of Irwin Mainway (played by Mr. Aykroyd), head of a
company that made “Bag o’ Glass” and other dangerous toys. He midwifed Theodoric
of York, a medieval barber-surgeon played by the guest host Steve Martin, who
believed bloodletting cured everything. A famous sketch about a drunken
President Richard M. Nixon stumbling around the White House conversing with past
presidents’ portraits and spouting anti-Semitism? Mr. Davis and Mr. Franken
wrote it.
They flirted with the margins of taste: a sketch about the
Holocaust was rejected, but others about child abuse and the murder of lesbians
made it onto the air.
In the early years of “Saturday Night Live,” Mr.
Davis and Mr. Franken also appeared as a comic duo. One routine was “The Brain
Tumor Comedian,” in which Mr. Franken, his head bandaged, tried to tell jokes
but kept forgetting the punch line. Mr. Davis fought tears as he implored the
audience to applaud.
Mr. Davis shared three Emmys for his writing on the
show and another for “The Paul Simon Special” in 1977.
Thomas James
Davis was born in Minneapolis on Aug. 13, 1952, and attended the private Blake
School, where he and Mr. Franken bonded over comedians like Jack Benny and Bob
and Ray. Their announcements of school events at the morning assembly were
peppered with sarcasm, and soon they were performing at a local comedy club.
After graduating, Mr. Franken headed for Harvard, while Mr. Davis chose
the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., because, he said, he had
heard that it had a foreign study program in India, where he hoped to smoke
opium. (They did, and he did.)
After a year of college, Mr. Davis
returned to Minneapolis to work in improvisational comedy. And after Mr. Franken
graduated from Harvard, the two convened in Los Angeles to do stand-up and
caught the attention of Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live.” He
summoned them to New York, where he negotiated with the writers’ union to offer
the two a single apprentice job.
In a recent interview, Senator Franken
said he and Mr. Davis had complemented each other, Mr. Davis bringing his
improvisational experience to the act while Mr. Franken was adept at structuring
a routine. Mr. Davis’s humor had a sardonic, even cynical, sting, he said, but
retained “sweetness and a Minnesota outlook.”
Mr. Davis lived a
defiantly unconventional life. In his 2009 memoir, “Thirty-Nine Years of
Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL From Someone Who Was There,” he
wrote that he first did LSD while watching “2001: A Space Odyssey” at a
Minneapolis drive-in. At the peak of the Vietnam War, he decided to join the
Marines, he said, then decided against it after undergoing a revolution in
consciousness at a Jimi Hendrix concert.
Mr. Davis worked for “Saturday
Night Live” from 1975 to 1980, and again from 1986 to 1994. In addition to
writing, he produced shows in his second stint. He also collaborated with Mr.
Aykroyd and Bonnie and Terry Turner to write “Coneheads” (1993). (The “Conehead”
characters, he wrote in his memoir, were inspired by a trip Mr. Davis and Mr.
Aykroyd took to Easter Island, famous for its towering stone statues.) With Mr.
Franken he starred in the film “One More Saturday Night” (1986).
Mr.
Davis retired in the mid-1990s but returned to “SNL” as a writer as recently as
2003.
He and Mr. Franken were so close that Mr. Franken named his
daughter Thomasin Davis. But the two broke up as a team in 1990 as Mr. Franken
tired of his friend’s drug abuse. They reconciled a decade later, and Mr. Davis
obliged his friend by publishing his all-too-candid autobiography only after
Senator Franken was elected. In his book, Mr. Davis wrote, “I love Al as I do my
brother, whom I also don’t see very much.”
In addition to his wife and
his brother, Robert, Mr. Davis is survived by his mother, Jean Davis.
In
his last two years, Mr. Davis helped a friend write a book about Owsley Stanley,
famed for handling sound for the Grateful Dead and supplying the group with LSD.
He searched out objects like old barn doors and stones with which to make large
sculptures. And he worked with Mr. Aykroyd on a script for a possible
“Ghostbusters III” film.
As in his comedy, Mr. Davis said, “I’m
improvising.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/arts/television/tom-davis-saturday-night-live-comedy-writer-dies-at-59.html
Welsh actress Angharad Rees has died after a long battle with cancer, her family
has said.
Ms Rees, who starred in BBC drama series Poldark in the 1970s,
was 63.
In a statement, her family said they were "deeply saddened" and
the actress, who also enjoyed an extensive theatre career, would be "greatly
missed".
"Angharad passed away peacefully today with her family at her
bedside in London, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer," her family
said.
Ms Rees was married to the late Dynasty actor Christopher Cazenove
for more than 20 years and they had two sons together, Linford and Rhys, 35.
Linford, the elder of the two, died in a car crash on the M11 in Essex
in 1999 aged 25.
In 1994 the Cardiff-born actress divorced Cazenove and
went on to marry David McAlpine in 2005, with whom she lived in
London.
Arts supporter
Ms Rees played Demelza in Poldark, a
costume drama based on the novels written by Winston Graham and first broadcast
in the UK between 1975 and 1977.
She also had a role in cult classic Jack
the Ripper film Hands Of The Ripper and on stage she appeared in A Winter's
Tale, Richard II and Romeo And Juliet.
In addition to her acting success,
she also founded an eponymously titled jewellery design company based in
Knightsbridge, with her pieces featured in the film Elizabeth, The Golden Age.
Her family said she remained an active supporter of the arts and was an
honorary fellow of Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff.
Her
funeral will be private but there are plans for a service in celebration of her
life which will be announced at a later date.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18940018
