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