Bruce Weber

Especially significant was that women, for the first time, took to the activity, relishing the freedom it gave them from the restrictions of a homebound existence. Corsets and billowy skirts even gave way to bloomers so that women could ride comfortably. The bicycle was very much a part of the early women’s movement.

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling,” the suffragist Susan B. Anthony said in an 1896 interview in The New York World with the pioneering journalist Nellie Bly. “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

If ever there was an avatar of these combined social trends, “of free, untrammeled womanhood,” it was Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, a Latvian immigrant who in June 1894, at about age 23, cycled away from her Boston home, leaving a husband and three small children, for a journey around the world. Though Thomas Stevens, an Englishman, had circumnavigated the globe on a high-wheeler several years earlier, no woman had tried such a feat.

Keeping her husband and family a secret for most of her journey, she called herself Annie Londonderry and agreed, in exchange for $100, to attach an advertisement to her bicycle for the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Co. of New Hampshire. Her bicycle and her person became a rolling billboard, the first of many moneymaking schemes she would come up with to finance her travels.

Along the way, she signed and sold souvenirs, gave exhibitions of bicycling and delivered lectures to often sizable crowds, whom she had alerted to her presence by sending telegrams to local newspapers in advance of her arrival.

She delighted crowds with tales of her adventures that reporters dutifully reported — tall tales, many of them. One was that she had been waylaid by bandits in France, another that she had hunted Bengal tigers in India, and still another that she had traveled to the front lines of the Sino-Japanese War, where she was shot in the shoulder. She claimed, at various times, to be a Harvard medical student, a lawyer, an orphan, the founder of a newspaper and an accountant. With her gift for self-invention and self-promotion, there was as much P.T. Barnum in her as there was Susan B. Anthony.

Her audacious trip was completed in September 1895, her return to Boston reported on in The New York Times in straightforward fashion. She arrived with a broken arm, having pedaled for hundreds of miles with the injury, which she said was from a fall.

But the journey was not everything it appeared to be. Details were shrouded in uncertainty, largely owing to Kopchovsky’s penchant for hyperbolizing.

Indeed, it’s most likely true that she circumnavigated the globe with a bicycle rather than entirely on one; the evidence is strong that from western Europe through the Middle East, the subcontinent and Asia, from Marseilles to Yokohama, she traveled mostly by steamship.

The first leg of her trip took her from Boston to Chicago, and the last, from San Francisco to Chicago, via El Paso, were accomplished — for the most part, it seems — on two wheels, and thus it is a reasonable claim that she was the first female cyclist to cross the American continent.

In any case her journey was a pioneering one in the history of women’s athletics, in which she cycled thousands of miles.

She was a novice cyclist when she set out, and her first vehicle was a poor one, a clunky tank of a machine weighing 42 pounds. (Most bicycles today weigh 21 to 29 pounds.) She did not discard skirts in favor of bloomers or men’s pants for several months. The roads were often unpaved, and it took her three months to make it first to New York and then to Chicago. By then it was late September, too late in the year to begin a ride across the Great Plains.

Kopchovsky considered abandoning her journey, but with a new bicycle weighing less than half the first one, she instead reversed course, returned to New York (whether she cycled the whole way is doubtful) and took a steamship to Europe. There she rode (with an interval of train travel) with great fanfare from Paris to Marseilles. When she departed on shipboard, bound for Alexandria, Egypt, on Jan. 20, 1895, a crowd of thousands — including a drum and bugle corps and a phalanx of local cyclists — showed up to see her off.

Kopchovsky’s celebrity, though it lingered through the completion of her trip, was short-lived, and her adventure would probably have remained obscure were it not for Peter Zheutlin, a journalist and cycling hobbyist who, decades after her death, became intrigued by what little he knew of Kopchovsky, his great-grandfather’s sister. For his book “Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride” (2007), he scoured newspaper archives from around the world, dug up family relics and plumbed the memory of Kopchovsky’s only survivor, a granddaughter.

Kopchovsky was born Annie Cohen in Latvia in 1870 or 1871, the daughter of Levi and Beatrice Cohen. The family moved to the United States in 1875, settling in Boston. In 1888, she married Max Kopchovsky, a peddler, and by 1892 they had two daughters and a son.

Among the more remarkable aspects of Kopchovsky’s story is that she chose to leave her family to pursue her quixotic quest.

Ostensibly she undertook the trip to settle a bet between Boston businessmen on whether women were as physically capable as men. It was a story she told at every stop, explaining to reporter after reporter that she was to receive $10,000 if she finished her journey in 15 months, in addition to the $5,000 she earned above her expenses along the way. She claimed in the end to have settled the bet and earned her money. But Zheutlin’s reporting cast that story in doubt, and he concluded that there were no such businessmen, nor was there any such wager.

She returned to her family when the trip was complete, and never again, evidently, made bicycling an important part of her life. She wrote a highly suspect account of her journey that appeared in The New York Sunday World in October 1895 under the byline Nellie Bly Jr.

She and her husband had a fourth child in 1897, and Kopchovsky left home again for a time and worked as a saleswoman in Ukiah, California, about 115 miles north of San Francisco. When she returned, she and her husband lived in the Bronx and operated a small clothing business, employing 20 people. The business was destroyed by a fire in the 1920s, Zheutlin wrote, and Kopchovsky used the insurance money to start another business in Manhattan, called Grace Strap &amp; Novelty, “with a man named Feldman she met at a Horn &amp; Hardart restaurant.”

Kopchovsky died of a stroke on Nov. 11, 1947. Her husband had died the previous year.

In his book, Zheutlin wrote that Kopchovsky had made her journey out of a desire for fame, excitement and the independence that her conventional societal role had denied her. She loved telling stories, she loved having a story to tell, and she loved representing women as being just as entrepreneurial as men.

“Truly there is no way to measure the impact of her adventure on the larger struggle for women’s equality — to know how many women it inspired or empowered,” Zheutlin wrote. “But Annie’s journey epitomized perfectly the confluence of the women’s movement and the bicycle craze and is, therefore, a small but revealing chapter in the story of women at the turn of the century.”

This article originally appeared in

Overlooked No More: Annie Londonderry, Who Traveled the World by Bicycle

The decade before the 20th century began saw an explosion in bicycle sales and cycling in general. The so-called “safety bicycle,” with wheels of equal size and a chain mechanism that allowed pedaling to drive the back wheel, along with the arrival of the pneumatic tire, had transformed cycling from an acrobatic and somewhat perilous enterprise into a pleasurable, less hazardous and even utilitarian recreation. Bicycles were mass produced as men increasingly used them to commute to work.

A spokesman, Rick Miramontez, said Prince, who lived in Manhattan, had been on his way home from his residence in Switzerland when he died in Iceland after a brief illness.

Prince began working in the theater in the halcyon days of Broadway, when Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein were its songwriting kings, the stage musical was a robust American art form (not to mention an affordable entertainment option) and theater songs were staples of the airwaves.

His contributions were prolific, persisting through challenging eras — when rock ′n’ roll threatened to make show music irrelevant, when the decline of Times Square discouraged Broadway attendance, when the arrival of popular British musicals like “Phantom” pushed aside their American counterparts, and when corporations like Disney entered the Broadway sweepstakes and miniaturized the impact of the independent producer.

Prince’s singularly significant role in shaping the Broadway musical during the second half of the 20th century was attested to by the Tony award for lifetime achievement he received in 2006.

That was his 21st Tony, a number far surpassing that of anyone else in multiple categories. His count began with the 1955 best musical, “The Pajama Game,” which Prince co-produced with Frederick Brisson and Robert E. Griffith; it reached 20 in 1995 for his direction of an extravagant revival of “Show Boat,” the landmark 1927 musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein 2d adapted from Edna Ferber’s novel about life on a Mississippi steamship.

Often considered the foundation of the modern musical for its character development and melding of score and story, “Show Boat” was a fitting valedictory — though not quite his final show — for a man who helped expand the possibilities of narrative in the musical theater form.

Prince was known, especially in the first decades of his theater life, as a fiendish workaholic; at one point, in 1960, three shows that he produced were appearing on Broadway at the same time.

He was known, too, for his collaborations with a murderer’s row of creative talents, among them choreographers Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Michael Bennett and Susan Stroman, designers Boris Aronson, Eugene Lee, Patricia Zipprodt and Florence Klotz, and composers Leonard Bernstein, John Kander, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Sondheim was Prince’s most frequent confederate and Webber his most profit-generating, with their work together on “Evita,” about the opportunistic Argentine populist Eva Peron, and on “The Phantom of the Opera,” which Prince directed in London and on Broadway.

Prince was attracted to provocative material — he took on political prisoners and gay persecution in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and anti-Semitism in “Parade” (1998) — that pushed the musical in an audience-challenging, as opposed to simply audience-pleasing, direction.

A showman of an old-fashioned stripe with an amalgam of skills and experience in both the business and the art of the theater, he began as a high-energy producer, motivated more by the efficient deployment of resources than by artistic vision or idiosyncrasy. But he grew into a formidable director with a commanding leadership style and strong ideas about what a show should look and sound like.

His productions were often large in every sense, their emotional resonance heightened by grandiose or otherwise audacious performances (Patti LuPone in “Evita,” Elaine Stritch in “Company”) and dazzling, opulent design; think of the swooping chandelier in “Phantom” or the Rube Goldberg-esque human-flesh-to-meat-pie mechanism in “Sweeney Todd.”

‘A Visual Imagination’

“The two things that characterize him most are energy and impatience,” Sondheim said in an interview for this obituary in 2016. At the time, Prince, at 89, was preparing to direct Bernstein’s “Candide” (a show he directed on Broadway in 1982) for New York City Opera. “He trained as a stage manager,” Sondheim added, “and he learned the business from the ground up, so he knows how to order a pair of shoes, which many producers don’t.”

He continued: “A visual imagination is, if not his greatest strength, then one of them. He sees things visually first, and he knows what a show looks like in his head before he takes it on. In a certain sense, if Hal had his druthers, he’d direct operas only. His heroes are directors like Max Reinhardt” — the influential Austrian-born director from the first half of the 20th century — “the ones who pulled out all the stops.”

As both a producer and a director, Prince was a nurturer of unproved talent. Tom Bosley, for instance, later known as Howard Cunningham on the nostalgic television sitcom “Happy Days,” won a Tony in his first starring role in 1959 as the titular mayor of New York, La Guardia, in “Fiorello!”. Liza Minnelli made her first Broadway appearance — and won a Tony — as the title character in “Flora, the Red Menace,” a 1965 politically inflected musical set in 1935 about a spunky fashion designer who falls for a Communist. Produced by Prince and directed by George Abbott, “Flora” also featured the first Broadway score by the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, who later wrote “Chicago” and two shows produced and directed by Prince: “Zorba” and “Cabaret.”

A featured actor in “Cabaret,” Joel Grey, was a largely unknown nightclub performer with few theater credits when Prince hired him in 1966 for what turned out to be a career-defining role: the arch, leering MC of the bawdy Kit Kat Club in Weimar-era Berlin.

“Cabaret” was pivotal in Prince’s career, the first of his directorial efforts (after four others) to be a hit. Based on stories by Christopher Isherwood and John van Druten’s play “I Am a Camera,” it told the melancholy love story of Sally Bowles, a flighty, British expatriate singer, and a visiting American writer played out against the backdrop of rising Nazi menace. (In the 1972 film version, directed by Fosse, Sally, played by Minnelli, was an American.)

It was Prince, the producer as well as the director, who originated the idea for “Cabaret,” which became known for, among other things, its strikingly layered atmospherics: the winking tawdriness and hint of societal mayhem in its score and its choreography (by Ronald Field), and especially in its scenic design, a mirrored set by Aronson that reflected the audience back on itself and implicated it in the high concept of a population allowing itself to be co-opted. The show won eight Tonys, including two for Prince.

“Cabaret” was a turning point in the musical theater form at a time when the relevance of Broadway was at a low ebb. Times Square, the center of Manhattan’s — and hence the country’s — theater district, had begun its slide into forbidding disrepair. Rock ′n’ roll was in ascendance, taking over the airwaves and displacing show music as the soundtrack of American popular culture. And forces like the anti-war movement, civil rights, the sexual revolution and mind-expanding drugs had created a countercultural moment that made it easy for audiences — especially younger ones — to reject an art form associated with previous generations and a sunny acceptance of the status quo.

The ‘Concept Musical’ Dawns

“Cabaret” was among the first of the so-called concept musicals — shows organized around ideas rather than the telling of a pure story. It was a herald for a new era in the musical and a new strain in Prince’s work, one that became especially evident in his shows with Sondheim, which explored darker, more harrowing elements of the human experience than had generally been portrayed on the musical stage.

“Since the concept musical was still in a formative stage, this was a schizophrenic show,” the critic and Broadway historian Martin Gottfried later wrote. “One half of it was an orthodox musical play whose story unfolded in dramatic scenes with duly integrated book songs. The other half, however, startled and changed Broadway.”

The arc of Prince’s career was unusual, but it began like many show business careers did, with good fortune and a lift from an old hand. In his case the mentor was the great producer-director-writer George Abbott, for whom Prince worked in the late 1940s as an office assistant and later on shows Abbott directed.

Prince was an assistant stage manager on a 1949 Abbott presentation, the musical “Touch and Go.” And after a stint in the Army, he was the stage manager for “Wonderful Town” (1953), the Tony-winning musical, directed by Abbott, about a pair of sisters arriving in New York from Ohio. It starred Rosalind Russell and featured music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

When Prince and Griffith, another stage manager in the Abbott stable, acquired the rights to a novel, “7½ Cents,” by Richard Bissell, Abbott and Robbins shared the directing chores for the show that emerged from the book, “The Pajama Game,” a romantic comedy set amid a labor dispute at a pajama factory. And when Prince and his fellow fledgling producers fell short in raising the money for the show — because neither they nor the choreographer, Bob Fosse, the composer, Richard Adler, nor one of the chorus girls, Shirley MacLaine, were as yet bankable names — Abbott kicked in the needed cash.

From there followed a remarkable string of musicals presided over by the Prince-Griffith producing team, among them the baseball fantasy story “Damn Yankees”; “New Girl in Town,” an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s lusty drama “Anna Christie”; and “Fiorello!,” the admiring stage bio of the Roosevelt-era three-term mayor of New York. All were directed by Abbott and each ran more than a year.

“I was grateful,” Prince told the reporter Rex Reed for an article in The New York Times in 1968, “but I still wanted to be a director, not just a fellow with a lot of bumbling enthusiasm who said, ‘Yeah’ and ‘Swell’ or ‘Great’ a lot. I was not creative, not an artist. I was doing interviews about box-office grosses. I didn’t want to be a business man. I am a good one, but only by default. I didn’t get into the business to keep books.”

By then Prince’s precocity and success were notable enough to have been lampooned: Bissell did so in “Say, Darling,” based on his “7½ Cents” experience on Broadway, and the book was adapted for the stage in 1958, produced by Jule Styne and Lester Osterman Jr. and directed by Abe Burrows. Robert Morse played the character based on Prince, presenting a caricature of the man himself — excitable, phone-obsessed, overly mannered, generally unpleasant.

“When I saw it I was furious,” Prince said. “But I was that way. I see it now. I was so nervous, so desperate for success.”

Teaming With Sondheim

Prince and Sondheim, whose mentor was Hammerstein, met in 1949 at the Broadway opening of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific,” and their friendship and aspirations ran parallel throughout the 1950s. Sondheim has said that the only autobiographical song he ever wrote was “Opening Doors,” from “Merrily We Roll Along,” a 1981 flop directed by Prince that was their final Broadway collaboration; the song, about two young men and a young woman looking to make their mark in New York City, was based, Sondheim acknowledged, on himself, Prince and their friend Mary Rodgers, daughter of Richard Rodgers.

The relationship between the two men became a professional one with “West Side Story” (1957), the now-famous urban adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet.” At the time, Sondheim was a still young Broadway lyricist working with venerable partners — composer Leonard Bernstein, book writer Arthur Laurents and director Jerome Robbins — when he called his friend Prince to complain that the show was in trouble. Their producer, Cheryl Crawford, had dropped the project, Sondheim said.

Prince and Griffith took over the show, which ended up as a striking departure from the conventional book musicals of the day, with its tragic events, adventurous, modern score and the use of choreography (by Robbins) to propel the narrative. A harbinger of later developments in the stage musical, “West Side Story” was a landmark Broadway production, though it won only two Tony Awards, one for Robbins’ choreography and the other for Oliver Smith’s scenic design. (“The Music Man” was best musical.)

Few working partners have made such a mark on the theater as Prince and Sondheim. Prince produced “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962), a hit farce set in ancient Rome that starred Zero Mostel and was the first Broadway show for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics. In the 1970s and ′80s they collaborated, generally to critical praise but infrequent audience favor, on some of Broadway’s most ambitious and serious musicals.

The more successful shows included “Company” (1970), a mordant reflection on loneliness about a single man and his married friends; “Follies” (1972), an equally mordant reflection on aging and regret about the reunion of a musical revue company; “A Little Night Music” (1973), a period romantic comedy set in turn-of-the-20th-century Sweden, based on the Ingmar Bergman film “Smiles of a Summer Night”; and “Sweeney Todd” (1979), perhaps Sondheim’s most ambitious work, an operatic grand guignol that told a lurid (though occasionally very funny) tale of vengeance. The title character is a murderous barber whose affectionate co-conspirator is a shop owner who stuffs her meat pies with Todd’s ground-up victims.

By then some critics had begun to find Prince’s directorial strokes overblown, his productions heavy-handed in theme and design. In a Times essay in 1982 with the headline “What Ails Today’s Broadway Musical?,” Frank Rich took issue with three of Prince’s efforts. In Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures,” (1976), about the American-influenced modernization of Japan, and Lloyd Webber’s “Evita,” which opened just a few months after “Sweeney Todd,” Prince indulged “in superficial seriousness,” Rich wrote.

Of “Sweeney Todd” itself, he wrote that the production, its eight Tony Awards notwithstanding, was wildly out of proportion to the material, an opinion that Sondheim has acknowledged he shared and whose validity has been underscored by subsequent, more modest productions.

“By inflating a Dickensian tale to cosmic proportions, the enormous production seemed to imply that the audience were guilty of the Victorian injustices that led to Sweeney’s murderous acts of revenge,” Rich wrote. “Might not the hero’s tragedy have better stood simply and intimately on its own?”

Prince would go on to direct two of his biggest successes, “Phantom” and “Showboat,” in the more-is-more mode that he had helped create and that came to represent a Broadway era characterized by spectacle.

But Rich was writing on the heels of one of Prince’s most calamitous failures, “A Doll’s Life,” a musical sequel to “A Doll’s House,” Henrik Ibsen’s domestic drama of a woman’s revolt against the stultifying expectations of womanhood. With book and lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden and a score by Larry Grossman, huge sets and grandiose sound amplification, it closed after five performances, a victim of its outsize self-importance.

“How one wishes that this director,” Rich wrote of Prince, “who did so much to destroy the clichés of musical staging that existed on Broadway when he began his career, would once again leap ahead of the fray. His innovations of the 1960s and early ′70s have now become as calcified as the conventions he once helped to overthrow.”

A Comfortable Upbringing

Prince was born Harold Smith Jr. in Manhattan on Jan. 30, 1928, to Harold Sr. and Blanche (Stern) Smith. His parents divorced, and by the early 1930s his mother had remarried, to Milton Prince, a stockbroker. In a 1989 biography by Carol Ilson, “Harold Prince: A Director’s Journey,” Prince is quoted as saying that he had never liked his father and that they hadn’t seen each other much, though his father had had a long life; even so, into the early part of his career he was known as Harold Smith Prince.

His upbringing was affluent; his mother was an ardent theatergoer, and Prince recalled being taken as a boy to the Mercury Theater’s production of “Julius Caesar,” a polemical adaptation aimed at the time at rising European fascism, with Orson Welles as Brutus. Aspiring to be a playwright, Hal attended private school in Manhattan and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was active in the Penn Players, a still-extant student theater group. He ran the university radio station, directed one of his own plays and acted in a production of “Pride and Prejudice,” a theatrical adaptation of the Jane Austen classic.

After graduating, he returned to New York, where he eventually found work in Abbott’s office doing odd jobs, including some writing for Abbott’s television projects. The Army interrupted his early career for two years, a European hiatus that he judged afterward to have been beneficial.

“I was an ambitious and nervous fellow, and it slowed me down; it made me more rational, less nervous, more adult,” Prince said in a 1964 interview, though it was decades before he shook his reputation as a detail-obsessed control freak. His son, Charles, an orchestra conductor, was asked as a boy what his father did. “He works late and makes money,” the boy replied.

Prince married Judy Chaplin, daughter of the composer and lyricist Saul Chaplin, in 1962. In addition to her and to Charles Prince, he is survived by a daughter, Daisy Prince, a theater director; and three grandchildren.

At Thanksgiving 1960, the Griffith-Prince production team had three Broadway musicals running simultaneously: “Fiorello!,” “West Side Story” and “Tenderloin,” about an 1890s social reformer in a New York City red light district, with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, who also wrote “Fiorello!” But in June 1961, shortly after “Tenderloin” closed at a loss and a play they produced, “A Call on Kuprin,” shut down after just 12 performances, Griffith died, and Prince was on his own.

His career as a solo producer began with a comedy, “Take Her, She’s Mine,” about the conventional parents of a precocious young woman, written by Henry and Phoebe Ephron and based, at least in part, on their daughter Nora, the future writer and filmmaker.

The show ran for more than a year, but Abbott was the director, and Prince was still laboring in his shadow. His first attempt at directing, “A Family Affair,” a 1962 musical about squabbles over wedding plans, was short-lived. Then came “Forum,” directed by Abbott, a show with big troubles on the road that Prince produced reluctantly but that was famously saved from oblivion by a new opening number written by Sondheim, “Comedy Tonight.”

“One quality Hal has is he refuses to accept defeat,” Sondheim said in the 2016 interview. “When we opened ‘Funny Thing’ in Washington and it got scathing reviews, we played to 50 people in a 1,200-seat auditorium. Almost any other producer would have closed it. Hal was willing to go ahead and take a chance on it. It wasn’t even that he loved the show that much, but once he was there, it was his baby, and he fought for it.”

Prince wore his dual hat for the first time in 1963, producing and directing “She Loves Me,” a frothy romantic comedy based on a Hungarian play that became a 1940 Hollywood film, “The Shop Around the Corner.” (Nora Ephron adapted it much later for her film “You’ve Got Mail,” making it a New York story.) “She Loves Me” didn’t make money, but critics praised it.

A Record With ‘Fiddler’

Prince’s next project was “Fiddler on the Roof,” based on stories by Sholom Aleichem. Produced by Prince, directed and choreographed by Robbins, with music by Bock and Harnick and a book by Joseph Stein, it won nine Tonys and ran for nearly eight years — more than 3,200 performances — the longest run in Broadway history at the time.

Prince’s astonishingly long résumé includes off-Broadway shows — he directed “Diamonds,” a 1984 baseball-themed revue, and “The Petrified Prince,” a historical fantasy with a score by Michael John LaChuisa — and a handful of operas, beginning in 1976 with his staging of “Ashmedai” by Joseph Tal and including Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” in 1989, both for New York City Opera.

In the 1970s, he was an artistic director of the New Phoenix Repertory Company, which presented several nonmusical revivals on Broadway, including O’Neill’s “The Great God Brown” and Friedrich Durrenmatt’s “The Visit,” both of which he directed. He produced “Side by Side by Sondheim,” a 1977 revue, and “On the Twentieth Century,” a Comden and Green musical with a Cy Coleman score; and co-produced and directed “Hollywood Arms” (2002), based on a memoir by Carol Burnett.

His penultimate Broadway project was “Lovemusik” (2007), a musical based on the letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, with a book by Alfred Uhry, with songs by Weill and others.

Prince was given a Kennedy Center Honors award in 1994 and a National Medal of Arts in 2000. Perhaps the tribute he most coveted, however, nearly didn’t happen and ended in disappointment. An elaborate musical retrospective of his career, “Prince of Broadway,” directed by Prince himself along with Susan Stroman, was presented in Japan in 2015, but it struggled at first to find sufficient financing for a Broadway opening. It took place at last in August 2017. Critics were cool to the production, which skated across the narrative of Prince’s career without offering much introspection, and it closed in just over two months. It was his last Broadway production.

It wasn’t Prince’s only brush with musical failure. His flops included “It’s a Bird ... It’s a Plane ... It’s Superman,” in the 1960s, and “Grind” and “Roza” in the 1980s. But no failure was perhaps so poignant as “We Roll Along.” Written by Sondheim with a book by George Furth (who also wrote “Follies”), “Merrily” is a show business story that rewinds the lives of its three main characters, from success and bitterness back to the innocence and aspirations of youth. It was criticized for, among other things, its unpleasant tone and Prince’s decision to have youthful actors play the roles throughout, even at the start, when the characters are older.

The storytelling problems were never adequately solved, and it closed after just 16 performances in 1981. (An off-Broadway revival was mounted this year at the Laura Pels Theater.) Sondheim and Prince never worked together on Broadway again, though more than 20 years later they collaborated on another troublesome musical — its various titles included “Wise Guys,” “Bounce” and “Road Show” — that never made it to Broadway.

Sondheim denied that there had been a falling out.

“The show was a failure,” he said. “We were both bitter about the experience, and there was a lot of Broadway bitchery, but the show failed because people didn’t like it.”

“If there’s a burning plane, I want Hal to be the pilot. He’s just great faced with difficulties, and he’s a terrific leader. I watched him after ‘Pacific Overtures’ had been massacred by critics. And he had to address the cast, give them courage, even though he was hurting just as much.

“I thought, This is a captain!”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/theater/hal-prince-dead.html" id="10cdaf2b-cdc9-3d06-a2c5-c067a73c8259">The New York Times</a>.

Hal Prince, Giant of Broadway and Reaper of Tonys, Dies at 91

Hal Prince, the Broadway royal and prodigious Tony winner who was the producer or director, or both, of many of the theater’s most enduring musicals, including “Damn Yankees,” “West Side Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Cabaret,” “Sweeney Todd” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” the longest-running show in Broadway history, died Wednesday in Reykjavik, Iceland. He was 91.

He had experienced heart and renal failure and had recently broken his hip, said his daughter, Sally Jenkins, a sports columnist for The Washington Post.

Jenkins was among a cadre of Sports Illustrated writers — including Roy Blount Jr., Mark Kram and Frank Deford — recruited by André Laguerre, the managing editor who oversaw the magazine’s emergence as a leader in literate, and occasionally literary, sports journalism as well as a powerhouse in the Time Inc. stable. Jenkins joined the magazine in 1962.

A Texan with a good old boy’s pride in country common sense over urban sophistication, Jenkins brought a Southern wiseacre erudition to the pages of a magazine not exactly used to the arch or earthy or impolitic remark. Opinionated, more than occasionally snarky, he wrote with an open appreciation of athletes and coaches, bars, pretty women and chicken-fried steak, replete with clever put-downs and outlandish metaphors.

His main beats were golf and college football, sports he grew up with in Fort Worth.

“The devoted golfer is an anguished soul who has learned a lot about putting just the way an avalanche victim has learned a lot about snow,” Jenkins wrote in an article for the magazine that earned him a full-time job there. “He knows he has used straight shafts, curved shafts, shiny shafts, dull shafts, glass shafts, oak shafts and Great Uncle Clyde’s World War I saber, which he found in the attic. Attached to these shafts have been putter heads made of large lumps of lead (‘weight makes the ball roll true,’ salesmen explain) and slivers of aluminum (‘lightness makes the ball roll true,’ salesmen explain) as well as every other substance harder than a marshmallow. He knows he has tried 41 different stances, inspired by everyone from the club pro to Fred Astaire in ‘Flying Down to Rio’ and as many different strokes. Still, he knows he is hopelessly trapped. He can’t putt, and he never will, and the only thing left for him to do is bury his head in the dirt and live the rest of his life like a radish.”

Jenkins was fond of toying with racial, ethnic, national and social stereotypes in a distinctly non-PC manner, and was especially defiant in doing so outside the stricture of magazine journalism, particularly in “Semi-Tough,” his first and best-known novel, published in 1972.

Set in the week leading up to an all-New York Super Bowl in which the Giants are to face the Jets, the novel is a pouring out of Billy Clyde’s observations and attitudes — brash, cynical, boastful, charming, shrewd, rip-snortingly vulgar and often hilarious — as he speaks into a tape recorder for the purpose of publishing a book.

What results is a hyperbolic, first-person report on a world whose lexicon involves all manner of stereotype and slur and whose concerns are more or less confined to food, drink, drugs, money, sex, digestive excretions and football. Often cited as among the funniest sports books ever written, it came in at No. 7 on Sports Illustrated’s 2002 list of the top 100 sports books of all time.

“I loved it,” David Halberstam wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “I read it aloud to my wife, who does not like football one bit, and she loved it. It is outrageous. It mocks contemporary American mores. It mocks Madison Avenue; it mocks racial attitudes; it mocks writers like me; and it even mocks sports writers for Sports Illustrated like Dan Jenkins.”

“Semi-Tough” was adapted for a 1978 movie that starred Burt Reynolds as Billy Clyde Puckett.

Dan Thomas Jenkins was born in Fort Worth on Dec. 2, 1928, although many sources list the year as 1929. His father, E.T. Jenkins Jr., known as Bud, was a salesman, a gambler and evidently a charmer who left the family when Dan was a toddler, though he showed up now and then to take his son to sporting events.

In a 2014 book, “His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir,” Jenkins expressed a fondness for his father, as well as for his mother, Catherine (O’Hern) Jenkins, whom he described with arch affection as a self-indulgent character who sold antiques and remodeled houses “and ultimately invented the migraine headache.”

From the age of 2, Jenkins grew up — contentedly, he wrote, despite the Depression — in the home of his father’s parents. He became the first member of the family to go to college, — at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he played on the golf team. One of his early heroes, golfer Ben Hogan, also lived in Fort Worth, and Hogan became something of a mentor, admired by Jenkins for his work ethic, perseverance (Hogan returned to championship golf after nearly being killed in a car accident in 1949) and devotion to excellence.

Jenkins got his first job in journalism in the mid-1950s, at The Fort Worth Press, hired by Blackie Sherrod, a writer and editor who would himself become celebrated in Texas as a Southern Damon Runyon. Jenkins succeeded Sherrod, whom he cited as an influence, as sports editor before landing at Sports Illustrated.

Jenkins’ first two marriages ended in divorce. In 1959, he married June Burrage, whom he had known while growing up in Fort Worth. She survives him. In addition to his daughter, his survivors include his sons Marty and Dan Jr., a granddaughter and a great-granddaughter.

Jenkins plumbed the homey if earthy wisdom of Fort Worth in a number of books after “Semi-Tough,” including the novels “Dead Solid Perfect” (1974), about a professional golfer in the swaggering Billy Clyde mold, and “Baja Oklahoma” (1981), about a feisty waitress and single mother with aspirations to be a country singer; both became television movies.

Another novel, “You Gotta Play Hurt” (1991), a sendup of the sports writer’s life, tells of a cantankerous Fort Worthian and the stuffy, big time magazine he works for. Jenkins wrote it after leaving Sports Illustrated in the 1980s in a dispute with the managing editor at the time, Gilbert Rogin.

He went on to write for Playboy and was a senior writer for Golf Digest, where in 2014 he created a squall with a parody of an interview with Tiger Woods in which he portrayed Woods as being arrogant and spoiled. In a response on The Players Tribune website, Woods called the article “a grudge-fueled piece of character assassination.”

“Journalistically and ethically,” he wrote, “can you sink any lower?”

Jenkins’ other books include “Limo,” a 1976 novel written with Bud Shrake, an old pal from Fort Worth who also wrote for Sports Illustrated; it satirizes network television by depicting the creation of a show that prefigures today’s reality programming.

None of Jenkins’ subsequent novels had the impact of his first. This was partly because the bawdy audacity that characterized “Semi-Tough” seemed less audacious in later books, and partly because the characters espousing the attitudes and employing the language favored by Billy Clyde and friends struck many readers as much less appealing as public attitudes changed.

Jenkins openly lamented this societal swivel. His characters spoke bitterly of it in his later novels, and his memoir, though full of vintage Jenkins phrase-turning and storytelling about the good old days of sports and sports writing, is spiked with a sour loathing of what he called political correctness; the book, echoing the opening of “Semi-Tough,” contains some ill-humored and offensive remarks about Asians.

As Times book critic Dwight Garner noted in his review of the memoir, “His anti-PC campaign is where his geezer routine crosses over into something worse.”

“Now this writer is going to be partly remembered for this stuff,” he added, “which is a shame.”

It’s a shame, Garner wrote, because of how generous Jenkins was.

“I woke up with a smile on my face every morning during the two or three days I spent reading ‘His Ownself,'” he wrote. The book, he said, is “one of those books that reminds you that good stories happen only to people who can tell them.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/obituaries/dan-jenkins-dead.html" id="4213bd3b-84e4-3af7-a77a-f635820e0ee0">The New York Times</a>.

Dan Jenkins, a sports writer whose rollicking irreverence enlivened Sports Illustrated’s pages for nearly 25 years and animated several novels, including “Semi-Tough,” a sendup of the steroidal appetites, attitudes and hype in pro football that became a classic of sports lit, died Thursday in Fort Worth, Texas. He was 90.

Dan Jenkins, Sports Illustrated Writer Known for Irreverent Prose, Dies at 90

Jenkins was fond of toying with racial, ethnic, national and social stereotypes in a distinctly non-PC manner, and was especially defiant in doing so outside the stricture of magazine journalism. “Semi-Tough” his first and best-known novel, published in 1972, announced its distaste for the conventions of polite language in its opening pages.

“I guess by now there can’t be too many people anywhere who don’t know about Billy Clyde Puckett, the humminest sumbitch that ever carried a football,” the book begins, narrated by Puckett himself, a star running back for the New York Giants and a Fort Worth native. “Maybe you could find some communist chinks someplace who don’t know about me, but surely everybody in America does if they happen to keep up with pro football, which is what I think everybody in America does. That and jack around with somebody else’s wife or husband.”

Dan Jenkins, 90, Chronicler of Sports in Raucous Prose, Dies

<h1>Jim Bouton, a pitcher of modest achievement but a celebrated iconoclast who left a lasting mark on baseball as the author of “Ball Four,” a raunchy, shrewd, irreverent — and best-selling — player’s diary that tainted the game’s wholesome image, died Wednesday at his home in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He was 80.</h1>

He died after a long struggle with vascular dementia, said his wife, Paula Kurman. Bouton had a stroke in 2012 and in 2017 revealed he had a brain disease called cerebral amyloid angiopathy.

When it was published in 1970, “Ball Four,” which reported on the selfishness, dopiness, childishness and mean-spiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy’s game very well, was viewed by many readers, approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the so-called sanctity of the clubhouse.

But the book, which was Bouton’s account of the 1969 baseball season, seven years after his big-league debut with the New York Yankees, had a larger narrative — namely his attempt, at age 30, to salvage a once-promising career by developing the game’s most peculiar and least predictable pitch: the knuckleball.

The pitch, which is optimally delivered with no spin, requires finesse, fingertip strength and a good deal of luck; without spin, the ball is subject to the air currents on the way to the plate, causing it to move erratically, making it difficult for the hitter (not to mention the catcher and the umpire) to track, and just as difficult for the pitcher to control.

In the book, the pitch becomes an apt metaphor for Bouton’s view of himself as an eccentric fellow in a baseball society of conservative go-alongs, stubbornly following his own path and yet dependent on the whimsy of outside forces.

In the 1969 season, Bouton played for an American League expansion team, the Seattle Pilots (now the Milwaukee Brewers), who demoted him for a time to the minor league affiliate in Vancouver and eventually traded him to the Houston Astros, then in the National League. The book, originally published with the subtitle “My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Major Leagues,” was, in many ways, a chronicle of the insecurities of an athlete, a one-time star, approaching the end of the line.

“Not only did I have some tenderness in my elbow today, but Sal told me I’ll be pitching in the exhibition game Sunday,” Bouton wrote early in spring training, referring to the Seattle pitching coach, Sal Maglie. “The tenderness will go away, but how am I going to pitch on Sunday? I’m not ready. I haven’t pitched to spots yet. I haven’t thrown any curveballs at all. My fingers aren’t strong enough to throw the knuckleball right. I’ve gone back to taking two baseballs and squeezing them in my hand to try to strengthen my fingers and increase the grip.”

Some astute reviewers recognized the ardor and the poignant tension in Bouton’s tale; in The New Yorker, for instance, Roger Angell described “Ball Four” as “a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost inside, along with an even more rewarding inside view of an ironic and courageous mind. And, very likely, the funniest book of the year.”

But for most readers Bouton’s personal predicament was overwhelmed by what he revealed about life in the major leagues.

In Bouton’s telling, players routinely cheated on their wives on road trips, devised intricate plans to peek under women’s skirts or spy on them through hotel windows, spoke in casual vulgarities, drank to excess and swallowed amphetamines as if they were M&amp;Ms.;

Mickey Mantle played hung over and was cruel to children seeking his autograph, he wrote. Carl Yastrzemski was a loafer. Whitey Ford illicitly scuffed or muddied the baseball, and his catcher, Elston Howard, helped him do it. Most coaches were knotheads who dispensed the obvious as wisdom when they weren’t contradicting themselves, and general managers were astonishingly penurious and dishonest in dealing with players over their contracts.

At the time, the reserve clause, a part of every contract that bound players nearly irrevocably to their teams, was still in effect; free agency, which multiplied the earning power of players by many orders of magnitude, was still in the future. Bouton signed a contract with Seattle for $22,000, and his account of the annual petty wrangling over three- and four-figure sums, discomforting at the time, seems incredible today when the major league minimum salary is $555,000 and players are earning an average of more than $4 million a year.

Overall, Bouton portrayed the game — its players, coaches, executives and most of the writers who covered them — as a world of amusing, foible-ridden, puerile conformity. Not surprisingly, the baseball establishment frowned on Bouton, his collaborating editor, Leonard Shecter, and the book.

The commissioner at the time, Bowie Kuhn, called Bouton in for a reprimand; some players shunned him for spilling the beans to players’ wives about what players did on road trips. (Bouton himself was no exception; his first wife, Bobbie, wrote her own book after their divorce.)

A few players, including Elston Howard, claimed Bouton was a liar. And many of an older sportswriting generation felt Bouton had done irreparable damage to the game out of his own self-importance and desperation.

“I feel sorry for Jim Bouton,” Dick Young wrote in the Daily News. “He is a social leper. His collaborator on the book, Leonard Shecter, is a social leper. People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better.”

In a follow-up book, “I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally,” which was largely about the reaction to “Ball Four,” Bouton thanked Young and Kuhn for stirring the controversy that made the book a success.

And a success it was, even though Bouton wasn’t the first athlete to publish an insider’s account of the professional sporting life. “Instant Replay” a personal chronicle of the 1967 National Football League season by Green Bay Packers guard Jerry Kramer, had preceded it. Bouton wasn’t even the first baseball player to keep and publish a diary; Jim Brosnan, who pitched for four major league teams, published “The Long Season” in 1960.

Still, not only was “Ball Four” an instant and enduring best seller, it also earned widespread recognition as a seminal text of sports literature: In 2002, Sports Illustrated placed it at No. 3 on its list of the top 100 sports books of all time. Perhaps more notable, in 1995, as the New York Public Library celebrated its centennial, it included “Ball Four” as the only sports book among 159 titles in its exhibit “Books of the Century.”

James Alan Bouton was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 8, 1939, to George Bouton, a business executive who was selling pressure cookers at the time, and the former Trudy Vischer. The family lived in the New Jersey suburbs Rochelle Park and Ridgewood until Jim was in his teens and his father took a job in Chicago.

Jim played American Legion ball — he threw a knuckleball from time to time even then — and graduated from Bloom High School in Chicago Heights, Illinois. He spent a year at Western Michigan University before he was signed by the Yankees in December 1958. He made it to the big leagues in 1962.

It was “Ball Four” that established Bouton’s public reputation as a rebellious flouter of baseball decorum, but he was an odd duck within the game from the beginning. His career had a strange arc. As a Yankee in the early 1960s, he enjoyed brief stardom as a hard-throwing right-hander with a fastball and curveball that he delivered straight overhand, a violent motion that caused him frequently to lose his hat, an idiosyncrasy that became a trademark.

Even as a young player, he had a pugnacious wit and a willingness to speak his liberal mind, most notably to reporters, whom other Yankees made a habit of disdaining, and on subjects like the war in Vietnam, student protests on campus and civil rights, which raised hackles of teammates and Yankees executives.

“After two or three years of playing with guys like Mantle and (Roger) Maris,” Bouton recalled in “I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally,” “I was no longer awed. I started to look at those guys as people and I didn’t like what I saw. They were fine as baseball heroes. As men they were not quite so successful. At the same time I guess I started to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Instead of being a funny rookie, I was a veteran wiseguy. I reached the point where I would argue to support my opinion and that didn’t go down too well either.”

Still, the first three seasons he pitched for Yankees pennant winners, as the team — with stars like Mantle and Maris and Ford — completed a streak of five American League titles in a row.

In 1963 he went 21-7, pitched a scoreless inning in the All-Star Game and, in the World Series, lost a 1-0 decision to Don Drysdale and the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 3 of the Dodgers’ sweep. In 1964, he was 18-13 and won two games against the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series (although the Yankees lost that Series, too).

Those were the glory days. Arm trouble bit him after that; he was 4-15 in 1965 as the Yankees slipped to sixth place. And by 1968 he was expendable; the Yankees sold him to the Seattle Angels, then a minor league team that would graduate (as the Pilots) to the big leagues the following year.

In addition to his wife, Bouton, who lived in western Massachusetts, is survived by two sons, Michael and David (who was adopted from Korea as a boy and was called Kyong Jo at the start of “Ball Four”); two stepchildren; and six grandchildren: Alexandria Bouton, Jack Bouton, Georgia Kurman, Annabel Kurman, Skyler van der Hoeven and Aspen van der Hoeven. A daughter, Laurie, was killed in a car crash in 1997.

The notoriety earned by “Ball Four” propelled Bouton to several other episodes in the public eye. For a time he was a sportscaster for network affiliates in New York. He was a delegate from New Jersey for George McGovern at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. He appeared as a crafty killer who gets his comeuppance in Robert Altman’s 1973 sardonic crime drama, “The Long Goodbye,” an updating of the Raymond Chandler novel starring Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe. And he appeared in a short-lived television series based on “Ball Four” — it lasted just five episodes in 1976.

With Eliot Asinof, best known as the author of “Eight Men Out,” an account of the Black Sox scandal of 1919, Bouton wrote “Strike Zone” (1994), a plot-heavy and melodramatic novel about an umpire on the horns of a moral quandary: He must decide whether to affect the outcome of a game in order to help a man who once saved his life and is now in trouble with gangsters.

Bouton also wrote a book, “Foul Ball” (2005), about his quixotic effort to save an old ballpark in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. That inspired him to help form and promote the Vintage Base Ball Federation, which organizes games played according to 19th century rules by baseball-fan versions of Civil War reenactors.

“Ball Four” was published during the 1970 season while Bouton was with the Astros, but he was having a poor year, and after being demoted to the minors, he retired.

But Bouton wasn’t kidding in “Ball Four” that it was miserable being unable to scratch the competitive itch. So he played semipro ball for several years and, attempting an unlikely comeback, persevered through stints with minor league teams in Durango, Mexico; Knoxville, Tennessee; Savannah, Georgia; and Portland, Oregon, where he became the first investor in Big League Chew, shredded bubble gum in a pouch, in emulation of chewing tobacco, invented by a bullpen-mate, Rob Nelson.

Finally, in September 1978, Ted Turner, then the owner of a then-hapless team, the Atlanta Braves, brought Bouton to his big-league roster, where, at the age of 39, eight years after his first retirement, he started five games and actually won one (he lost three others), pitching six innings and giving up no earned runs against the San Francisco Giants.

He finished his career (finally) with a record of 62-63 and a creditable cumulative ERA of 3.57. By then he had also proved the validity of the final line of “Ball Four,” perhaps the best-known and most resonant sentence in the book, an explanation of why he would put up with the frustration and lunacy he had written about, and a pithy encapsulation of the tug of sport on an athlete.

“You see,” he wrote, “you spend a good deal of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/sports/baseball/jim-bouton-dead-ball-four.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Jim Bouton, Author of Tell-All Baseball Memoir 'Ball Four,' Dies at 80

He died after a long struggle with vascular dementia, said his wife, Paula Kurman. Bouton had a stroke in 2012 and in 2017 revealed he had a brain disease called cerebral amyloid angiopathy.

Jim Bouton, author of tell-all Baseball memoir 'Ball Four,' dies at 80

His death was confirmed by his publicist, Howard Bragman.

With a sweetly cherubic face, a deceptively athletic physicality and an utter devotion to foolishness and slapstick, Conway was among Hollywood’s most enduringly popular clowns. The winner of six Emmy Awards and a member of the Television Academy Hall of Fame, he was a leading nonleading man, a vivid second banana whose deferential mien and skill as a collaborator made him most comfortable — and often funniest — in the shadow of a star.

For Conway, those stars were, most notably, Ernest Borgnine, with whom he appeared on the popular early-1960s series “McHale’s Navy,” and Carol Burnett, on whose comedy-variety show Conway was regularly featured from 1967 to 1978.

Conway’s career had a serendipitous beginning. After mustering out of the Army in the late 1950s, he was working for a television station in Cleveland, writing, directing and occasionally performing, creating characters for comedy spots on a show devoted to movies. Actress and comedian Rose Marie, best known for her later role as a comedy writer on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” happened to be passing through Cleveland and watched Conway work; she arranged for him to audition for Steve Allen, who was impressed. Conway made several appearances in sketches he wrote for himself on Allen’s prime-time variety show.

In an interview with the Archive of American Television in 2004, Conway recalled that when he was cast in “McHale’s Navy,” he was a novice actor.

“I had no professional training at all,” he said. “I had a sense of humor and had been in front of a microphone, but as far as doing movies or series work or anything like that, I had no idea.”

That show, broadcast from 1962 to 1966, concerned a PT boat crew in the South Pacific during World War II who, led by Lt. Cmdr. Quinton McHale (Borgnine), flouted Navy regulations at every turn and considered the war a chance to enjoy an island vacation. Conway played Ensign Charles Parker, an enthusiastic officer with a young career already blighted by mishap who is assigned by McHale’s superior officer and frustrated nemesis, Capt. Binghamton (Joe Flynn), to infiltrate McHale’s crew and report back on their transgressions.

Parker’s twin qualities of incompetence and sweet-temperedness end up making him more of an ally than an adversary, and the role allowed Conway to develop and deploy the arsenal of pratfalls, double takes, facial tics and other hyperbolic depictions of physical and emotional distress that served him for the rest of his career.

In 1967, Conway was cast in the title role of a western comedy series, “Rango,” about a Texas Ranger who, assigned to a desolate ranger station, manages to attract trouble where there hadn’t been any. It was the first of several shows starring Conway that did not last long, among them two variety series, “The Tim Conway Comedy Hour” (1970) and “The Tim Conway Show” (1980-81).

Conway was not unaware that as a headliner he wasn’t exactly money; he once had a vanity license plate reading “13 WKS.”

Conway reached the height of his supporting fame on “The Carol Burnett Show” with characters like Mr. Tudball, an office martinet with an awful toupee, a vaguely Scandinavian accent and a flummoxing secretary (Burnett); and the Old Man, who moved so slowly that he couldn’t perform in any of the occupations (sheriff, butcher, fireman) he found himself in.

His sketch work showed him to be a superb comic collaborator, especially with Burnett and Harvey Korman. He was also known for including ad-libs that forced his cast mates out of character into not entirely suppressed hysterics.

He won four Primetime Emmys (including one for writing) for his work on the Burnett show, which is widely considered one of the enduring high points of television comedy, screwball division, in league with “Your Show of Shows,” “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy.”

Conway was born Dec. 15, 1933, in Willoughby, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and grew up mostly in nearby Chagrin Falls.

His father, Daniel, was an Irish immigrant who worked as a groom, mostly for polo ponies. As a boy he dreamed of being a jockey. His mother, Sophia, was of Romanian descent, and the original given name on his birth certificate was Toma, which he has explained was a Romanian variation of Thomas; as he wrote in his 2013 memoir, “What’s So Funny? My Hilarious Life” (written with Jane Scovell), his birth certificate was later altered to read Thomas Daniel Conway. (Years later he changed his name so as not to be confused with British actor Tom Conway. “Steve Allen suggested I just dot the o,” he said.)

Athletic as a student at Chagrin Falls High School, he excelled at tumbling — a skill he later deployed to great effect in his comedy — and went on to study speech and dramatics at Bowling Green State University, after which he went into the Army and, as he once put it, “defended Seattle from 1956 to 1958.”

Conway’s film credits include two “McHale’s Navy” movies in the mid-1960s and a number of movies for children and families. He and Don Knotts played a pair of inept outlaws in the Disney films “The Apple Dumpling Gang” (1975) and its sequel, “The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again” (1979). The two teamed up again in “The Private Eyes” (1980), a Sherlock Holmes spoof that Conway also helped write.

But far more of his work was done for television, where Conway was nothing if not prolific as a guest star in recent decades. He won Emmys for guest appearances in 1996 on “Coach,” in which he played the peculiar gardener of the title character, a college football coach played by Craig T. Nelson, and in 2008 on “30 Rock,” playing Bucky Bright, a wildly out-of-touch former television star.

Younger viewers may know Conway best as Dorf, a diminutive character with a Mr. Tudball accent who appears in a series of short slapstick films he wrote; or as the voice of Barnacle Boy — the sidekick of Mermaid Man, who was voiced by his old co-star Borgnine — on the long-running animated show “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

Conway’s marriage to Mary Anne Dalton ended in divorce. He married Charlene Fusco in 1984. She survives him, as do six children from his first marriage: a daughter, Kelly Conway; and five sons, Tim Jr., Patrick, Jamie, Corey and Seann. He is also survived by a stepdaughter, Jackie Beatty, and two granddaughters.

In a foreword to Conway’s autobiography, Burnett called him “a kind and funny genius.”

“His sketches with Harvey Korman deserve a spot in whatever cultural time capsule we’re setting aside for future generations,” she wrote. “Maybe there are other performers as funny, but in my opinion I can’t think of anybody funnier.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="0326ee01-142c-33f3-a7de-12094e671d5e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/obituaries/tim-conway-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

Tim Conway, beloved TV bumbler, is dead at 85

Tim Conway, whose gallery of innocent goofballs, stammering bystanders, transparent connivers, oblivious knuckleheads and hapless bumblers populated television comedy and variety shows for more than half a century, died Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 85.

<h1>Jonas Mekas, a filmmaker, curator, archivist, critic and all-around evangelist for independently made movies in general, and for those variously known as experimental, underground or avant-garde in particular, died Wednesday at his home in New York City. He was 96.</h1>

His son, Sebastian, confirmed the death.

It is rare to have consensus on the pre-eminence of any person in the arts. But few would argue that Mekas, who was often called the godfather or the guru of the New American Cinema — his name for the underground film movement of the 1950s and ′60s — was the leading champion of the kind of film that doesn’t show at the multiplex.

A Lithuanian immigrant who, with a younger brother, Adolfas, arrived in New York City in 1949 speaking little English, he became within a handful of years an effective spokesman for avant-garde film. (Adolfas, who died in 2011, became an influential filmmaker, writer and educator in his own right.)

In addition to making his own movies and writing prolifically about the movies of others, Mekas was the founder or a co-founder of institutions that support and promote independent filmmakers, including, in New York, the influential journal Film Culture, published quarterly from 1955 to 1996; Film-Makers Cooperative, a distribution network; and Anthology Film Archives, the leading library and museum for experimental film. (Critic Andrew Sarris published his influential essay on the auteur theory in Film Culture.)

Part intellectual, part enthusiast, part provocateur, Mekas could always be counted on to sound off on behalf of experimental films, work that could be visually rich and narrative poor, startling or even shocking in imagery, patience-testing in pace and coherence, and taboo-testing in subject matter.

Beginning in 1958, he wrote a column, Movie Journal, for The Village Voice, then in its infancy as an alternative newspaper. He continued to write it until 1975. Essentially The Voice’s first film critic, he reliably excoriated such popular Hollywood fare as “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Anatomy of a Murder” and extolled the work of underground filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie and Jack Smith.

In 1963, Mekas was arrested on obscenity charges for screening Smith’s “Flaming Creatures,” a voyeuristic and surrealistic film featuring hermaphrodites, cross-dressers and other gender-ambiguous characters.

“I can’t understand why people prefer the grossness and banality of a Hollywood or a European Art movie, as against the illuminations and ecstasies of an Avant-garde Film,” Mekas wrote in an essay in The New York Times in 1969. “The Hollywood film deals with gross, simplified realities, banalized feelings, ideas, thoughts. The Avant-garde Film deals with the subtler nuances of experience, emotions, ideas, perceptions — it illuminates them — it deals with things that make you finer.