Gone With or Without fanfare

[Lzcutter]

Here's a really nice article about Davy Jones and the influence of the Monkees:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/h ... ood-297757

[RedRiver]

Nice. Say goodbye to yet another chunk of my childhood.

[moira finnie]

Leonardo Cimino, a character actor with a strikingly ascetic look, has died at 94. Below is his obituary from The New York Times:

Leonardo Cimino Dies at 94; Distinctive Actor
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK

Leonardo Cimino, who once thought his singular appearance would make an acting career improbable but who ended up spending more than 60 years as an in-demand character actor whose roles included gangsters, grandfathers, the pope, Vincent van Gogh and “Scary German Guy,” died on March 3 at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 94.

The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his wife, Sharon Powers, said.

Mr. Cimino studied acting, directing and modern dance at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. But he thought that his looks — he was slight of build and had a distinctively thin face — might make it hard to win steady roles when he was trying to choose a profession in the 1940s. Those looks, however, turned out to be his greatest asset.

“He doesn’t look like anybody else,” Ms. Powers said. “If you want a Leo Cimino, you want a Leo Cimino.”

He was taking dance classes with Martha Graham when José Ferrer, who was directing and starring in a 1946 revival of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” asked if he would play a part. Mr. Cimino became a regular under Ferrer, which eventually led to more roles.

On Broadway Mr. Cimino was in the 1962 adaptation of E. M. Forster’s “Passage to India” and a 1985 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” among other parts. Off Broadway he performed Shakespeare with the Public Theater, notably a 1975 performance as Egeon in “The Comedy of Errors” alongside Ted Danson and Danny DeVito. He also starred as Vincent van Gogh in “Vincent” at the Cricket Theater in 1959.

“Leonardo Cimino’s van Gogh is a small, lively, appealing figure — appealing because he does not ask for pity,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times.

He won an Obie Award for his performance as the disturbed and morose Smerdyakov in a 1958 production of “The Brothers Karamazov.”

On television, he appeared in the original version of the science-fiction mini-series “V” and in shows like “Naked City,” “Kojak” and “Law & Order.” His many movies included “Dune,” “The Freshman” and “Moonstruck.” He played the pope in the 1982 film “Monsignor” and the aforementioned “Scary German Guy” in “The Monster Squad.”

Leonardo Anthony Cimino was born in Manhattan on Nov. 4, 1917, to Andrea Cimino, a tailor, and his wife, Leonilda. He began playing the violin as a child, and studied at Juilliard as a teenager.

He landed with the second wave at Normandy during World War II.

Other than his wife, Mr. Cimino has no immediate survivors.

When Mr. Cimino was dabbling in dance, he spent a few months as a substitute teacher, filling in for Sidney Lumet at the High School for the Performing Arts.

His final role was in 2007 alongside Ethan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney in the film “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” Mr. Lumet’s last film.

[Lzcutter]

Sad evening for all of us who love American music.

American Legend Earl Scruggs has passed away at 88:

From the Huffington Post:

It is impossible to overstate the importance of Earl Scruggs to American music. A pioneering banjo player who helped create modern country music, his sound is instantly recognizable and as intrinsically wrapped in the tapestry of the genre as Johnny Cash's baritone or Hank Williams' heartbreak.

Scruggs passed away Wednesday morning at 88 of natural causes. The legacy he helped build with bandleader Bill Monroe, guitarist Lester Flatt and the rest of the Blue Grass Boys was evident all around Nashville, where he died in an area hospital. His string-bending, mind-blowing way of picking helped transform a regional sound into a national passion.

"It's not just bluegrass, it's American music," bluegrass fan turned country star Dierks Bentley said. "There's 17- or 18-year-old kids turning on today's country music and hearing that banjo and they have no idea where that came from. That sound has probably always been there for them and they don't realize someone invented that three-finger roll style of playing. You hear it everywhere."

Country music has transcended its regional roots, become a billion-dollar music and tourist enterprise, and evolved far beyond the classic sound Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys blasted out over the radio on The Grand Ole Opry on Dec. 8, 1945. Though he would eventually influence American culture in wide-ranging ways, Scruggs had no way of knowing this as he nervously prepared for his first show with Monroe. The 21-year-old wasn't sure how his new picking style would go over.

"I'd heard The Grand Ole Opry and there was tremendous excitement for me just to be on The Grand Ole Opry," Scruggs recalled during a 2010 interview at Ryman Auditorium, where that "big bang" moment occurred. "I just didn't know if or how well I'd be accepted because there'd never been anybody to play banjo like me here. There was Stringbean and Grandpa Jones. Most of them were comedians."

There was nothing jokey about the way Scruggs attacked his "fancy five-string banjo," as Opry announcer George D. Hayes called it. In a performance broadcast to much of the country but unfortunately lost to history, he scorched the earth and instantly changed country music. With Monroe on mandolin and Flatt on guitar, the pace was a real jolt to attendees and radio listeners far away, and in some ways the speed and volume he laid down predicted the power of electric music.

Tut Taylor, a friend of the Scruggs family who heard that first performance on the radio in his Georgia home, called it an unbelievably raucous moment "a lot like some of the rock `n' roll things they had, you know. But this was a new sound. It was a pretty sound and a welcome sound."

Scruggs' use of three fingers – in place of the limited clawhammer style once prevalent – elevated the banjo from a part of the rhythm section – or a even a comedian's prop – to a lead instrument that was as versatile as the guitar and far more flashy.

His string-bending and lead runs became known worldwide as "the Scruggs picking style" and the versatility it allowed has helped popularize the banjo beyond the traditional bluegrass and country forms. Today the banjo can be found in almost any genre, largely due to the way he freed its players to experiment and find new space.

That was exactly what Ralph Stanley had in mind when he first heard Scruggs lay it down. A legendary banjo player in his own right, Stanley said in a 2011 interview that he was inspired by Scruggs when he first heard him over the radio after returning home from military service in Germany.

"I wasn't doing any playing," Stanley said. "When I got discharged I began listening to Bill and Earl was with him. I already had a banjo at that time, but of course I wanted to do the three-finger roll. I knew Earl was the best, but I didn't want to sound like him. I wanted to do that style, but I wanted to sound the way I felt and that's what I tried to do."

Country great Porter Wagoner probably summed up Scruggs' importance best of all: "I always felt like Earl was to the five-string banjo what Babe Ruth was to baseball. He is the best there ever was, and the best there ever will be."

News of Scruggs' passing quickly spread around the music world and over Twitter. Bentley and bluegrassers like Sam Bush and Jon Randall Stewart celebrated him at the Tin Pan South gathering of songwriters in Nashville and Eddie Stubbs dedicated the night to him on WSM, the home of the Grand Ole Opry. On the Internet, actor and accomplished banjo player Steve Martin called Scruggs, with whom he collaborated in 2001 on "Earl Scruggs and Friends," "the most important banjo player who ever lived." Hank Williams Jr. sent prayers to the Scruggs family and Charlie Daniels tweeted, "He meant a lot to me. Nobody will ever play a five string banjo like Earl."

Neil Portnow, president and CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences said in a statement the four-time Grammy winner and lifetime achievement award recipient "leaves an indelible legacy that will be remembered for generations to come."

Flowers will be placed on his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Thursday morning.

Scruggs earned that star when he and Flatt weaved themselves into the fabric of American culture in the 1950s and `60s.

Flatt and Scruggs teamed as a bluegrass act after leaving Monroe from the late 1940s until breaking up in 1969 in a dispute over whether their music should experiment or stick to tradition. Flatt died in 1979.

They were best known for their 1949 recording "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," played in the 1967 movie "Bonnie and Clyde," and "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" from "The Beverly Hillbillies," the popular TV series that debuted in 1962. Jerry Scoggins did the singing. For many viewers, the endlessly hummable theme song was their first introduction to country music.

Flatt and Scruggs' popularity grew, and they even became a focal point of the folk music revival on college campuses. Scruggs' wife, Louise, was their manager and was credited with cannily guiding their career as well as boosting interest in country music.

Later, as rock `n' roll threatened country music's popularity, Flatt and Scruggs became symbols of traditional country music.

In the 1982 interview, Scruggs said "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Beverly Hillbillies" broadened the scope of bluegrass and country music "more than anything I can put my finger on. Both were hits in so many countries."

After the breakup with Flatt, Scruggs used three of his sons in The Earl Scruggs Revue. The group played on bills with rock acts such as Steppenwolf and James Taylor. Sometimes they played festivals before 40,000 people.

Scruggs will always be remembered for his willingness to innovate, but he wasn't always accepted for it. In "The Big Book of Bluegrass," Scruggs discussed the breakup with Flatt and how his need to experiment drove a rift between them. Later in 1985, he and Flatt were inducted together in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

"It wasn't a bad feeling toward each other as much as it was that I felt I was depriving myself of something," Scruggs said. "By that, I mean that I love bluegrass music, and I still like to play it, but I do like to mix in some other music for my own personal satisfaction, because if I don't, I can get a little bogged down and a little depressed."

In 2005, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" was selected for the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry of works of unusual merit. The following year, the 1972 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," on which Scruggs was one of many famous guest performers, joined the list, too.

Scruggs had been fairly active in the 2000s, returning to a limited touring schedule after frail health in the 1990s. In 1996, Scruggs suffered a heart attack in the recovery room of a hospital shortly after hip-replacement surgery. He also was hospitalized late last year, but seemed in good health during a few appearances with his sons in 2010 and 2011, though he had given up the banjo for the guitar by then.

Scruggs' funeral arrangements are incomplete. He's survived by two sons, Gary and Randy. Louise, his wife of 57 years, died in 2006. He often talked of her, recounting how their eyes had met while she watched him perform at the Ryman, and friends noted a sense of melancholy in Scruggs over his final years.

Bentley attended Scruggs' birthday party in January and had a chance to pick one more song in a circle with the legend. He even snapped a picture with his 3-year-old daughter, something he says he'll cherish forever.

"I think Earl was ready to go see Louise," Bentley said. "I think he was ready to go. But we're lucky. We've got a lifetime of his music that's recorded to listen to and he's in a better place."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/2 ... 86946.html

[JackFavell]

Oh, this IS sad news. I will really miss him. His music has cheered me ever since I was a little girl and saw him first with Lester Flatt on the Beverly Hillbillies = always my favorite part of the show. It was a treat when they appeared.


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[RedRiver]

I've been a fan of bluegrass banjo as long as I can remember. Before BONNIE AND CLYDE; maybe even before THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, though that's cutting it close. All I know is there was never a time when I wasn't enthralled by the sound. When Flatt and Scruggs became mainstream icons, I thought, It's about time! The fact that I grew up in Kentucky, about thirty miles from Bill Monroe's birthplace, didn't hurt. But not all natives of The Bluegrass State appreciate its trademark music. It just got to me.

My college roommate learned Scruggs style picking. We went to see Newgrass Revival every time they came to town. He had a FLATT AND SCRUGGS AT CARNEGIE HALL album he delighted in showing our more...cultured friends! I'm not a musician myself. But I've known a few. I'm pretty sure they're in mourning right about now.

"Pearl! Pearl! Pearl!
Don't marry up with Earl!"

[moira finnie]

Warren Stevens has died at age 92. He had a remarkably long career, and my first memory of him is as the icy, Howard Hughes-like figure in The Barefoot Contessa who believed he could buy and sell people is just as vivid today as it once was when he was a utility character actor in many Hollywood films of the fifties. It was very interesting to learn that he was among the talented people who created the original stage production of Sidney Kingsley's Detective Story in the late '40s.


March 30, 2012
Warren Stevens, Busy Character Actor, Dies at 92
By DENNIS HEVESI

Warren Stevens, a lanky, square-jawed actor with swept-back hair and a husky voice whose face became familiar through his more than 100 roles on television and in movies over six decades, died on Tuesday at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 92.

The cause was chronic lung disease, his publicist, Dale Olson, said.

Mr. Stevens, who first made his mark on the Broadway stage in the 1940s, became a versatile and ubiquitous presence on television in the ’50s. He played three different characters on episodes of “Have Gun, Will Travel” between 1957 and 1963; three different characters on “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” between 1965 and 1967; four characters on “Bonanza” between 1965 and 1970; and four on “Ironside” between 1967 and 1975.

While Mr. Stevens would make appearances on dozens of other television series, perhaps his best-known role was in the classic 1956 science fiction movie “Forbidden Planet.” He played the ill-fated Doc Ostrow, who perishes at the hand of a mysterious force on the planet Altair IV, 16 light years from Earth, after his spaceship arrives to search for a long-lost colony.

In 1952, he had a supporting role as a reporter in the movie “Deadline, U.S.A.,” in which Humphrey Bogart played the managing editor of a big-city newspaper seeking to dissuade its owners from selling it simply to free up their capital. Mr. Stevens was among the cast members who gave “conspicuously flavorsome and good” performances, Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.

Among his more than 40 films, Mr. Stevens also had roles in “The Barefoot Contessa,” “Gunpoint,” “Madigan,” “Red Skies of Montana” and “Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell.”

His more than 60 television roles over the years included appearances (and sometimes recurring roles) on “Return to Peyton Place,” “The Twilight Zone,” “M*A*S*H,” “Rawhide,” “The Man From U.N.C.L.E” and “Gunsmoke.”

In recent years, he appeared with Lou Diamond Phillips, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Majors in the 2004 western “The Trail to Hope Rose” on the Hallmark Channel and in a 2006 episode of “ER.”

Warren Albert Stevens was born on Nov. 2, 1919, in Clarks Summit, Pa. By his early 20s, he was acting in summer stock in Virginia.

After serving as a pilot in the Army Air Forces during World War II, he came to New York and joined the Actors Studio. He soon had roles on Broadway in “Galileo,” “Sundown Beach” and “The Smile of the World,” and in radio soap operas including “The Aldrich Family.”

His break came in 1949 in the Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley’s “Detective Story,” a gritty account of the inner workings of a New York City police precinct that starred Ralph Bellamy. Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times that “as a decent young man horrified to find himself a common criminal, Warren Stevens gives a fine, reticent performance.” That performance led to a film contract with 20th Century Fox.

Mr. Stevens is survived by his wife of 43 years, the former Barbara Fletcher, and their two sons, Adam and Mathew; and a son, Laurence, from a previous marriage, to Susan Huntington.

[moira finnie]

Warren Stevens has died at age 92. He had a remarkably long career, and my first memory of him is as the icy, Howard Hughes-like figure in The Barefoot Contessa who believed he could buy and sell people. That chilly glance of his seems just as vivid today as it once was when he was a utility character actor in many Hollywood films of the fifties. It was very interesting to learn that he was among the talented people who created the original stage production of Sidney Kingsley's Detective Story in the late '40s in this obit from The New York Times.

March 30, 2012
Warren Stevens, Busy Character Actor, Dies at 92
By DENNIS HEVESI

Warren Stevens, a lanky, square-jawed actor with swept-back hair and a husky voice whose face became familiar through his more than 100 roles on television and in movies over six decades, died on Tuesday at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 92.

The cause was chronic lung disease, his publicist, Dale Olson, said.

Mr. Stevens, who first made his mark on the Broadway stage in the 1940s, became a versatile and ubiquitous presence on television in the ’50s. He played three different characters on episodes of “Have Gun, Will Travel” between 1957 and 1963; three different characters on “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” between 1965 and 1967; four characters on “Bonanza” between 1965 and 1970; and four on “Ironside” between 1967 and 1975.

While Mr. Stevens would make appearances on dozens of other television series, perhaps his best-known role was in the classic 1956 science fiction movie “Forbidden Planet.” He played the ill-fated Doc Ostrow, who perishes at the hand of a mysterious force on the planet Altair IV, 16 light years from Earth, after his spaceship arrives to search for a long-lost colony.

In 1952, he had a supporting role as a reporter in the movie “Deadline, U.S.A.,” in which Humphrey Bogart played the managing editor of a big-city newspaper seeking to dissuade its owners from selling it simply to free up their capital. Mr. Stevens was among the cast members who gave “conspicuously flavorsome and good” performances, Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.

Among his more than 40 films, Mr. Stevens also had roles in “The Barefoot Contessa,” “Gunpoint,” “Madigan,” “Red Skies of Montana” and “Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell.”

His more than 60 television roles over the years included appearances (and sometimes recurring roles) on “Return to Peyton Place,” “The Twilight Zone,” “M*A*S*H,” “Rawhide,” “The Man From U.N.C.L.E” and “Gunsmoke.”

In recent years, he appeared with Lou Diamond Phillips, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Majors in the 2004 western “The Trail to Hope Rose” on the Hallmark Channel and in a 2006 episode of “ER.”

Warren Albert Stevens was born on Nov. 2, 1919, in Clarks Summit, Pa. By his early 20s, he was acting in summer stock in Virginia.

After serving as a pilot in the Army Air Forces during World War II, he came to New York and joined the Actors Studio. He soon had roles on Broadway in “Galileo,” “Sundown Beach” and “The Smile of the World,” and in radio soap operas including “The Aldrich Family.”

His break came in 1949 in the Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley’s “Detective Story,” a gritty account of the inner workings of a New York City police precinct that starred Ralph Bellamy. Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times that “as a decent young man horrified to find himself a common criminal, Warren Stevens gives a fine, reticent performance.” That performance led to a film contract with 20th Century Fox.

Mr. Stevens is survived by his wife of 43 years, the former Barbara Fletcher, and their two sons, Adam and Mathew; and a son, Laurence, from a previous marriage, to Susan Huntington.

[Rita Hayworth]

Thanks for informing us about Warren Stevens ... Moira.

After serving as a pilot in the Army Air Forces during World War II, he came to New York and joined the Actors Studio. He soon had roles on Broadway in “Galileo,” “Sundown Beach” and “The Smile of the World,” and in radio soap operas including “The Aldrich Family.”

Above is from Moira.

This is from me, I have an uncle who also served as a pilot in the Army Air Forces during World War II and he (my Uncle) was good friends and they served together briefly before my Uncle got transferred to another Air Group (he served three Air Groups) and remained friends for life. My cousin has all his photographs and he often spoke of him highly. I met him once back in the early sixties when he did an episode on the The Man from U.N.C.L.E. television series.

He was extremely likable and an easy Man to understand. I love to listen about his time that he spent with my Uncle during WWII and doesn't like to talk about his job as an actor ... but rather talk about the present than the past. My whole family adores his humble attitude about life and we wished him the best in what he does and I often catch him on television more than in movies. But, anyway he's will be missed and I bet my cousin will send me an e-mail about him. My Uncle passed away 10 years ago. My Uncle would been 91 a year younger than Warren.

I will try to jar my memory bank in the next few days to share more about Mr. Stevens. He was a very friendly and down to earth gentlemen that loves his family and friends.

He considered my Uncle a dear friend that has a passion for flying.

[moira finnie]

Thanks so much for sharing that memory of your uncle's friend, kingme. It's good to read that Mr. Stevens was such a talented and dedicated actor, he could play guys who were nothing like he seems to have been in real life. I really appreciate your adding this to this thread. I did find an interesting video about the reunion of the cast of the groundbreaking Forbidden Planet, with Warren Stevens among the talented attendees, including Anne Francis, Richard Anderson, and Earl Holliman. This can be seen here

[Lzcutter]

I don't think there was a western series or a cop/lawyer series that Warren Stevens didn't guest star on at some point in the 1960s-1970s.

You knew when you saw his name in the credits it would be worth watching.

[moira finnie]

Mike Wallace has died at 93.



Probably best remembered by most for his "gotcha" interviews, his adversarial style of reportage on 60 Minutes was a mix of righteous anger, bemusement at the sight of scurrying scoundrels, and what he described as his "tough but fair" approach to his job. Interesting to me are the interviews I remember best from this landmark program that concerned Wallace's personal struggles with depression, his loss of his eldest son Peter at only 19 in a hiking accident in Greece, and his talks with somewhat surprising and usually guarded subjects such as Leonard Bernstein, Nancy Reagan and Barbra Streisand, who uncharacteristically seemed disarmed by him.

Those relatively brief exposés and interviews set a standard in their day, but in recent years his early interview program Night Beat, which allowed for a long, more leisurely and sometimes quite tough and occasionally tender grilling of his subjects, have become available to a new generation. Revealing a natural curiosity that helped to fuel his relatively untrained but instinctive approach to reporting, many of these shows can be seen in full at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin at the link below:

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/f ... s/wallace/

From The New York Times on April 8, 2012:

April 8, 2012
Mike Wallace, CBS Pioneer of ‘60 Minutes,’ Dies at 93
By TIM WEINER

Mike Wallace, the CBS reporter who became one of America’s best-known broadcast journalists as an interrogator of the famous and infamous on “60 Minutes,” died on Saturday. He was 93.

On its Web site, CBS said Mr. Wallace died at a care facility in New Canaan, Conn., where he had lived in recent years. Mr. Wallace, who received a pacemaker more than 20 years ago, had a long history of cardiac care and underwent triple bypass heart surgery in January 2008.

A reporter with the presence of a performer, Mr. Wallace went head to head with chiefs of state, celebrities and con artists for more than 50 years, living for when “you forget the lights, the cameras, everything else, and you’re really talking to each other,” he said in an interview with The New York Times videotaped in July 2006 and released on his death as part of the online feature “Last Word.”

Mr. Wallace created enough such moments to become a paragon of television journalism in the heyday of network news. As he grilled his subjects, he said, he walked “a fine line between sadism and intellectual curiosity.”

His success often lay in the questions he hurled, not the answers he received.

“Perjury,” he said, in his staccato style, to President Richard M. Nixon’s right-hand man, John D. Ehrlichman, while interviewing him during the Watergate affair. “Plans to audit tax returns for political retaliation. Theft of psychiatric records. Spying by undercover agents. Conspiracy to obstruct justice. All of this by the law-and-order administration of Richard Nixon.”

Mr. Ehrlichman paused and said, “Is there a question in there somewhere?”

No, Mr. Wallace later conceded. But it was riveting television.

Both the style and the substance of his work drew criticism. CBS paid Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman $100,000 for exclusive (if inconclusive) interviews with Mr. Wallace in 1975. Critics called it checkbook journalism, and Mr. Wallace conceded later that was “a bad idea.”

For a 1976 report on Medicaid fraud, the show’s producers set up a simulated health clinic in Chicago. Was the use of deceit to expose deceit justified? Hidden cameras and ambush interviews were all part of the game, Mr. Wallace said, though he abandoned those techniques in later years, when they became clichés and no longer good television.

Some subjects were unfazed by Mr. Wallace’s unblinking stare. When he sat down with the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, in 1979, he said that President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt “calls you, Imam — forgive me, his words, not mine — a lunatic.” The translator blanched, but the Ayatollah responded, calmly calling Sadat a heretic.

“Forgive me” was a favorite Wallace phrase, the caress before the garrote. “As soon as you hear that,” he told The Times, “you realize the nasty question’s about to come.”

Mr. Wallace invented his hard-boiled persona on a program called “Night Beat.” Television was black and white, and so was the discourse, when the show went on in 1956, weeknights at 11, on the New York affiliate of the short-lived DuMont television network.

“We had lighting that was warts-and-all close-ups,” he remembered. The camera closed in tighter and tighter on the guests. The smoke from Mr. Wallace’s cigarette swirled between him and his quarry. Sweat beaded on his subject’s brows.

“I was asking tough questions,” he said. “And I had found my bliss.” He had become Mike Wallace.

“All of a sudden,” he said, “I was no longer anonymous.” He was “the fiery prosecutor, the righteous and wrathful D.A. determined to rid Gotham City of its undesirables,” in the words of Michael J. Arlen, The New Yorker’s television critic.

“Night Beat” moved to ABC in 1957 as a half-hour, coast-to-coast, prime-time program, renamed “The Mike Wallace Interview.” ABC, then the perennial loser among the major networks, promoted him as “the Terrible Torquemada of the TV Inquisition.”

Mr. Wallace’s career path meandered after ABC canceled “The Mike Wallace Interview” in 1958. He had done entertainment shows and quiz shows and cigarette commercials. He had acted onstage. But he resolved to become a real journalist after a harrowing journey to recover the body of his firstborn son, Peter, who died at 19 in a mountain-climbing accident in Greece in 1962.

“He was going to be a writer,” Mr. Wallace said in the interview with The Times. “And so I said, ‘I’m going to do something that would make Peter proud.’ ”

Forging a Career Path

He set his sights on CBS News and joined the network as a special correspondent. He was soon anchoring “The CBS Morning News With Mike Wallace” and reporting from Vietnam. Then he caught the eye of Richard Nixon.

Running for president, Nixon offered Mr. Wallace a job as his press secretary shortly before the 1968 primaries began. “I thought very, very seriously about it,” Mr. Wallace told The Times. “I regarded him with great respect. He was savvy, smart, hard working.”

But Mr. Wallace turned Nixon down, saying that putting a happy face on bad news was not his cup of tea.

Only months later “60 Minutes” made its debut, at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 1968.

It was something new on the air: a “newsmagazine,” usually three substantial pieces of about 15 minutes each — a near-eternity on television. Mr. Wallace and Harry Reasoner were the first co-hosts, one fierce, one folksy.

The show was the brainchild of Don Hewitt, a producer who was “in bad odor at CBS News at the time,” Mr. Wallace said in the interview.

“He was unpredictable, difficult to work with, genius notions, a genuine adventurer, if you will, in television news at that time,“ Mr. Wallace said of Mr. Hewitt, who died in 2009.

The show, which moved to Sunday nights at 7 in 1970, was slow to catch on. Creative conflict marked its climb to the top of the heap in the 1970s. Mr. Wallace fought his fellow correspondents for stories and airtime.

“There would be blood on the floor,” Mr. Wallace said in the interview. He said he developed the “not necessarily undeserved reputation” of being prickly — he used a stronger word — and “of stealing stories from my colleagues,” who came to include Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Dan Rather and Diane Sawyer in the 1970s and early 1980s. “This was just competition,” he said. “Get the story. Get it first.”

Mr. Wallace and his teams of producers — who researched, reported and wrote the stories — took on American Nazis and nuclear power plants along with his patented brand of exposés.

The time was ripe for investigative television journalism. Watergate and its many seamy sideshows had made muckraking a respectable trade. By the late 1970s, “60 Minutes” was the top-rated show on Sundays. Five different years it was the No. 1 show on television, a run matched only by “All in the Family” and “The Cosby Show.” In 1977, it began a 23-year run in the top 10. No show of any kind has matched that. Mr. Wallace was rich and famous and a powerful figure in television news when his life took a stressful turn in 1982.

That year he anchored a “CBS Reports” documentary called “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.” It led to a $120 million libel suit filed by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the commander of American troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. At issue was the show’s assertion that General Westmoreland had deliberately falsified the “order of battle,” the estimate of the strength of the enemy.

The question turned on a decision that American military commanders made in 1967. The uniformed military said the enemy was no more than 300,000 strong, but intelligence analysts said the number could be half a million or more. If the analysts were correct, then there was no “light at the end of the tunnel,” the optimistic phrase General Westmoreland had used.

Documents declassified after the cold war showed that the general’s top aide had cited reasons of politics and public relations for insisting on the lower figure. The military was “stonewalling, obviously under orders” from General Westmoreland, a senior Central Intelligence Agency analyst cabled his headquarters; the “predetermined total” was “fixed on public-relations grounds.” The C.I.A. officially accepted the military’s invented figure of 299,000 enemy forces or fewer.

The documentary asserted that rather than a politically expedient lie, the struggle revealed a vast conspiracy to suppress the truth. The key theorist for that case, Sam Adams, a former C.I.A. analyst, was not only interviewed for the documentary but also received a consultant’s fee of $25,000. The show had arrived at something close to the truth, but it had used questionable means to that end.

After more than two years General Westmoreland abandoned his suit, CBS lost some of its reputation, and Mr. Wallace had a nervous breakdown.

He said at the time that he feared “the lawyers for the other side would employ the same techniques against me that I had employed on television.” Already on antidepressants, which gave him tremors, he had a waking nightmare sitting through the trial.

“I could see myself up there on the stand, six feet away from the jury, with my hands shaking, and dying to drink water,” he said in the interview with The Times. He imagined the jury thinking, “Well, that son of a b**** is obviously guilty as hell.”

He attempted suicide. “I was so low that I wanted to exit,” Mr. Wallace said. “And I took a bunch of pills, and they were sleeping pills. And at least they would put me to sleep, and maybe I wouldn’t wake up, and that was fine.”

Later in life he discussed his depression and advocated psychiatric and psycho-pharmaceutical treatment.

The despair and anger he felt over the documentary were outdone 13 years later when, as he put it in a memoir, “the corporate management of CBS emasculated a ‘60 Minutes’ documentary I had done just as we were preparing to put it on the air.”

The cutting involved a damning interview with Jeffrey Wigand, a chemist who had been director of research at Brown & Williamson, the tobacco company. The chemist said on camera that the nation’s tobacco executives had been lying when they swore under oath before Congress that they believed nicotine was not addictive. Among many complicating factors, one of those executives was the son of Laurence A. Tisch, the chairman of CBS at the time. The interview was not broadcast.

Mr. Wallace remained bitter at Mr. Tisch’s stewardship, which ended when he sold CBS in 1995, after dismissing many employees and dismantling some of its parts.

“We thought that he would be happy to be the inheritor of all of the — forgive me — glory of CBS and CBS News,” Mr. Wallace said. “And the glory was not as attractive to him as money. He began to tear apart CBS News.” (Mr. Tisch died in 2003.)

Official ‘Retirement’

Mr. Wallace officially retired from “60 Minutes” in 2006, after a 38-year run, at the age of 88. A few months later he was back on the program with an exclusive interview with the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

He won his 21st Emmy for the interview.

And he kept working. Only weeks before his 2008 bypass surgery, he interviewed the baseball star Roger Clemens as accusations swirled that Mr. Clemens had used performance-enhancing drugs. It was Mr. Wallace’s last appearance on television, CBS said.

Myron Leon Wallace was born in Brookline, Mass., on May 9, 1918, one of four children of Friedan and Zina Wallik, who had come to the United States from a Russian shtetl before the turn of the 20th century. (Friedan became Frank and Wallik became Wallace in the American melting pot.) His father started as a wholesale grocer and became an insurance broker.

Myron came out of Brookline High School with a B-minus average, worked his way through the University of Michigan, graduating in 1939. (Decades later he was deeply involved in two national programs for journalists based at the university: the Livingston Awards, given to talented reporters under 35, and the Knight-Wallace fellowships, a sabbatical for midcareer reporters; its seminars are held at Wallace House, which he purchased for the programs.)

After he graduated from college, he went almost immediately into radio, starting at $20 a week at a station with the call letters WOOD-WASH in Grand Rapids, Mich. (It was jointly owned by a furniture trade association, a lumber company and a laundry.) He went on to Detroit and Chicago stations as narrator and actor on shows like “The Lone Ranger,” acquiring “Mike” as his broadcast name.

In 1943 he enlisted in the Navy, did a tour of duty in the Pacific and wound up as a lieutenant junior grade in charge of radio entertainment at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station.

Mr. Wallace married his first wife, Norma Kaphan, in 1940; they were divorced in 1948. Besides Peter, who died in the mountain-climbing accident, they had a second son, Chris Wallace, the television journalist now at Fox News.

Mr. Wallace and his second wife, Buff Cobb, an actress, were married in 1949 and took to the air together, in a talk show called “Mike and Buff,” which appeared first on radio and then television. “We overdid the controversy pattern of the program,” she said after their divorce in 1954. “You get into a habit of bickering a little, and you carry it over into your personal lives.”

Ms. Cobb died in 2010.

His marriage to his third wife, Lorraine Perigord, which lasted 28 years, ended with her departure for Fiji. His fourth wife, Mary Yates, was the widow of one of his best friends — his “Night Beat” producer, Ted Yates, who died in 1967 while on assignment for NBC News during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Besides his wife and his son, Chris, Mr. Wallace is survived by a stepdaughter, Pauline Dora; two stepsons, Eames and Angus Yates; seven grandchildren, and four great grandchildren.

Mr. Wallace and Ms. Yates were married in 1986 and lived for a time in a Park Avenue duplex in Manhattan and in a bay-front house on Martha’s Vineyard, where their social circle included the novelist William Styron and the humorist Art Buchwald.

All three men “suffered depression simultaneously,” Mr. Wallace said in an interview in 2006, “so we walked around in the rain together on Martha’s Vineyard and consoled each other,” adding, “We named ourselves the Blues Brothers.” Mr. Styron died in 2006 and Mr. Buchwald in 2007.

Mr. Wallace said that Ms. Yates had saved his life when he came close to suicide before they married, and that their marriage had saved him afterward.

He also said that he had known since he was a child that he wanted to be on the air. He felt it was his calling. He said he wanted people to ask: “Who’s this guy, Myron Wallace?”

[MissGoddess]

The (original) 60 Minutes cast seems to have all died now. I've never seen "Night Beat", thanks for the links...I'm curious about it because the description in the NY Times obit makes it sound as though it might have been the basis for an episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show", where Rob (DVD) unwittingly is grilled by a hard boiled TV journalist into making his wife, Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) sound like a lunatic. I've always wondered what show might have been its inspiration.

[RedRiver]

Oddly, I best remember Mr. Wallace from radio. I listened to MIKE WALLACE AT LARGE in the 1970's. A brief, daily broadcast, it didn't attempt the depth of his TV work. But it was direct and pointed. And theatrical!

[CharlieT]

I remember Mike Wallace as the host and narrator of the original David Wolper Biography series from the early 60's. My history teacher during my sophomore year used these episodes to showcase the major movers in world history of the 20th century.