Richard Severo

His son, Mark Donen, confirmed the death.

Stanley Donen brought a certain charm and elegance to the silver screen in the late 1940s through the 1950s, at a time when Hollywood was soaked in glamour and the big studio movies were polished to a sheen.

“For a time, Donen epitomized Hollywood style,” Tad Friend wrote in The New Yorker in 2003. Donen, he wrote, “made the world of Champagne fountains and pillbox hats look enchanting, which is much harder than it sounds.”

Donen worked with some of the most illustrious figures of his era: from Astaire and Kelly to Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. He also worked with Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and the writing team of Comden and Green, not to mention Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor.

Donen’s filmography is studded with some of Hollywood’s most loved and admired musicals. “Royal Wedding” (1951), in which Astaire defied gravity, and “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), in which Kelly defied the weather, were just two of his crowd-pleasers.

Among many others were the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green collaboration “On the Town” (1949) — which, like “Singin’ in the Rain,” Donen co-directed with Kelly — as well as “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (1954), with Jane Powell; “Funny Face” (1957), with Hepburn and Astaire; and “Damn Yankees” (1958), with Tab Hunter and Gwen Verdon.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences acknowledged his mastery by honoring Donen in 1998 with a lifetime achievement award for “a body of work marked by grace, elegance, wit and visual innovation.” Many saw the award as Hollywood’s way of making amends because Donen had never been nominated for an Oscar, much less won one.

Donen also directed thrillers like “Charade,” wild comedies like “Bedazzled” and rueful romances like “Two for the Road.” But musicals were his specialty, and fellow director Jean-Luc Godard — though it could be said that his French New Wave films borrowed virtually nothing from Donen’s work — spoke for many when he called Donen “the master of the musical.”

He began his career in Kelly’s shadow. The two first worked together in 1940, in the original Broadway production of Rodgers and Hart’s “Pal Joey.”

Donen, who had graduated from a South Carolina high school that June at 16, was a member of the chorus; Kelly was the star. They were together again the next year on Broadway in “Best Foot Forward,” Kelly as choreographer and Donen as dancer. Film critic Andrew Sarris wrote in his book “The American Cinema” that Donen was “dismissed for a time as Gene Kelly’s invisible partner.”

But there was no dismissing the quality, or the impact, of his solo directorial debut, “Royal Wedding.” With a score by Lerner (who also wrote the screenplay) and Burton Lane, it starred Astaire as an American dancer who is in London to do a show with his sister (Powell) during the same period as the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip.

Astaire’s character falls in love with a dancer in his show, played by Sarah Churchill. One evening he comes home to his flat and, inspired by her photograph, begins to dance — first on the floor and then, in cheerful violation of the laws of physics, on the walls and ceiling.

The sequence, famous in Hollywood lore, took place in a chamber that revolved depending on where weight was applied. Astaire called it the iron lung. (Both Astaire and Lerner took credit for coming up with the idea.)

In his book “Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies” (1996), Stephen M. Silverman wrote that the room’s draperies were made of wood and the coat that Astaire took off was sewn to the chair where he left it, which in turn was screwed to the floor. The year after making “Royal Wedding,” for MGM, Donen teamed up again with Kelly for the same studio to make “Singin’ in the Rain,” widely regarded as one of the best movie musicals ever made.

Although they shared directing tasks throughout the movie — a story of the early days of talking pictures starring Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor and Jean Hagen, with a screenplay by Comden and Green and songs from the 1920s and 1930s — there was no question who was behind the camera when a thoroughly soaked Kelly bounded ecstatically down a back-lot street in a torrential downpour singing the title song, his dancing partner an umbrella that he ultimately thrust into the hands of a grateful passer-by. Critic Roger Ebert called it “probably the most joyous musical sequence ever filmed.”

Stanley Donen was born on April 13, 1924, in Columbia, South Carolina, the son of Mordecai Moses Donen, manager of a chain store that sold midrange dresses, and the former Helen Cohen. He did not much like living in the South, where he often encountered anti-Semitism. “It was sleepy, it was awful, I hated growing up there and I couldn’t wait to get out,” he is quoted as saying in Silverman’s book.

As a boy he experimented with cameras his parents gave him. “The camera was like a constant companion,” he once said. “It allowed me to withdraw into myself.”

Donen took refuge in the movies, collecting and studying silent films. Not long after seeing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in “Flying Down to Rio” (1933), their first screen pairing, he decided that he wanted to be a tap dancer.

His father spent summers at the home office of his company, in New York City, and a young Donen would accompany him. Although his parents were not at all sure they approved of his career path, they saw to it that while in New York he attended dance school. He also went to see many Broadway musicals.

Donen moved to New York as soon as he could after spending a semester at the University of South Carolina studying psychology, a subject he had taken up to please his father. He paid $15 a week as a lodger in a couple’s apartment on West 55th Street and landed a job in “Pal Joey.”

In 1942, Donen, not yet 19, went to Hollywood, where he was hired as a $65-a-week dancer at MGM and appeared in the movie version of “Best Foot Forward” (1943), which he also helped choreograph.

In 1944, Columbia Pictures borrowed both Donen and Kelly from MGM for “Cover Girl.” Though neither man received screen credit for it, they both contributed to the film’s choreography, with Donen handling the famous “Alter Ego” scene, a double-exposure number in which Kelly appears to be dancing with himself.

Their association continued in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (1949), which starred Frank Sinatra and Esther Williams as well as Kelly. The director was Busby Berkeley, but Donen and Kelly staged the musical numbers and also provided the story line.

“On the Town,” the acclaimed story of three sailors (Kelly, Sinatra and Jules Munshin) on leave in New York, with music by Leonard Bernstein, was the first of three films the two men directed together. Their final collaboration was “It’s Always Fair Weather” (1955).

Donen was again on his own in 1954 when he directed “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” starring Powell and Howard Keel and choreographed energetically by Michael Kidd.

Cyd Charisse, who worked with Donen in “Singin’ in the Rain” and “It’s Always Fair Weather,” called him “one of the few directors I worked for who could tell you exactly what he wanted.” Gregory Peck, whom Donen directed in “Arabesque” (1966), a drama of international intrigue, praised his “terrific instinct for communicating.”

Donen shifted his focus from musicals after moving to England in 1958. He won critical praise for the romantic comedy “Indiscreet” (1958), starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant; the Hitchcockian comic thriller “Charade” (1963), with Grant and Audrey Hepburn; the manic “Bedazzled” (1967), starring and written by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore; and “Two for the Road” (1967), a romantic comedy written by Frederic Raphael, which starred Hepburn and Albert Finney.

He had few artistic or financial triumphs after returning to the United States in 1975 to direct the problem-plagued Burt Reynolds-Liza Minnelli vehicle “Lucky Lady,” which failed at the box office and damaged his career. He made a modest comeback in 1978 with the parody “Movie Movie,” written by Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller, but never directed another movie after the indifferently received 1984 comedy “Blame It on Rio.”

He remained intermittently active into the 21st century. In 1993 he returned to Broadway to direct a theatrical version of the classic dance film “The Red Shoes.” But the production closed after five performances.

All five of Donen’s marriages — to dancer and choreographer Jeanne Coyne, actress Marion Marshall, Adelle Beatty, actress Yvette Mimieux and Pamari Braden — ended in divorce. But he did not like living alone. For a time he had a cushion in his living room embroidered with the words “Eat, drink and remarry.”

Director and performer Elaine May was his companion of many years. He is survived by his sons, Mark and Joshua Donen, and a sister, Carla Davis. Another son, Peter, preceded him in death.

Donen made one of his last directorial efforts in 2002, directing May’s comedy “Adult Entertainment” off-Broadway. The play tells the story of a group of pornography stars on a public-access channel who find that they have higher cultural aspirations but who know they will never achieve them, that they “won’t stop time” and “be the reward to civilization.” To Donen, such is the lot of most people in show business, or in any business.

“Here it is,” he told The New Yorker. “As an artist, I aspire to be as remarkable as Leonardo da Vinci. To be fantastic, astonishing, one of a kind. I will never get there. He’s the one who stopped time. I just did ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ It’s pretty good, yes. It’s better than most, I know. But it still leaves you reaching up.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/obituaries/stanley-donen-dead.html" id="4a194f82-9526-304d-a8b3-9443d4103024">The New York Times</a>.

Stanley Donen, who directed Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling, Gene Kelly singing in the rain and a host of other sparkling moments from some of Hollywood’s greatest musicals, died Thursday in Manhattan. He was 94.

Stanley Donen, 'Master of the Musical' Who Directed 'Singin' in the Rain,' Dies at 94

His death was announced on the website of his organization, La Rouche/Pac. The statement did not specify a cause or say where he died.

Defining what LaRouche stood for was no easy task. He began his political career on the far left and ended it on the far right. He said he admired Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and loathed Hitler, composer Richard Wagner and other anti-Semites, though he himself made anti-Semitic statements.

He was fascinated with physics and mathematics, particularly geometry, but called concerns about climate change “a scientific fraud.”

He condemned modern music as a tool of invidious conspiracies — he saw rock as a particularly British one — and found universal organizing principles in the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.

Some called him a case study in paranoia and bigotry, his mild demeanor notwithstanding. One biographer, Dennis King, in “Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism” (1989), maintained that LaRouche and his followers were a danger to democratic institutions.

LaRouche denigrated a panoply of ethnic groups and organized religions. He railed against the “Eastern Establishment” and environmentalists, who he said were trying to wipe out the human race. Queen Elizabeth II of England was plotting to have him killed, he said. Jews had surreptitiously founded the Ku Klux Klan, he said. He described Native Americans as “lower beasts.”

Even so, LaRouche was able to develop alliances with farmers, the Nation of Islam, teamsters, abortion opponents and Klan adherents. Acolytes kept LaRouche’s political machine going by peddling his tracts and magazines in airports, and by persuading relatives and friends to donate large sums to help him fight his designated enemies.

He operated through a dizzying array of front groups, among them the National Democratic Policy Committee, through which he received millions of dollars in federal matching money in his recurring presidential campaigns. His forces also sponsored candidates at the state and local levels, including for school board seats.

His movement attracted national attention, especially in 1986, when two LaRouche followers, Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, unexpectedly won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, respectively, in Illinois.

Adlai E. Stevenson III, the Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois that year, was appalled. He denounced the LaRouche group as “neo-Nazis” and refused to run with Fairchild and Hart, organizing a third-party bid instead. He, as well as the LaRouche supporters, lost to James R. Thompson, the Republican incumbent.

Some voters said they had voted for Fairchild and Hart because they had been endorsed by LaRouche’s National Democratic Policy Committee, which they thought was affiliated with the mainstream Democratic Party.

LaRouche’s critics believe he used that committee to deceive people abroad as well. In 1982, he managed to arrange a meeting with President José López Portillo of Mexico, evidently because Mexican officials thought LaRouche represented the Democratic Party.

“I’m as American as apple pie,” LaRouche once said.

Whatever he was, he received thousands of votes in his campaigns for president. In 1980, he outpolled Gov. Jerry Brown of California by 1,000 votes in the Democratic presidential primary in Connecticut. In 1986, the candidates fielded by his National Democratic Policy Committee received 20-40 percent of the vote in local elections in California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. was born on Sept. 8, 1922, in Rochester, New Hampshire, to Lyndon Sr. and Jesse (Weir) LaRouche. He grew up in the Quaker tradition. His father was a traveling salesman for the United States Shoe Machinery Corp., and his mother once ran a Quaker meeting in Boston’s Back Bay.

His was not a happy childhood. Boys would pick on him, he said, but he refused to fight them, which only brought more disapprobation.

It got no better after the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts. He regarded himself there as an “outcast” and had few friends in high school. He was not an “ugly duckling,” he said, “but a nasty duckling.”

When World War II began, LaRouche declared himself a conscientious objector, citing his pacifist Quaker upbringing. But toward the end of the war he enlisted in the Army despite his mother’s objections.

After the war, he enrolled in Northeastern University in Boston but “resigned,” he said, because the university was not challenging his superior intellect. He said he had been able to become the century’s leading economist without formal college study.

He married Janice Neuberger in the early 1950s and had a son, Daniel, by her in 1956. The marriage failed, and he never talked publicly about his son and his former wife in his later years.

LaRouche’s political roots were Marxist. From 1948 to 1963, he was active in the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite group.

His own group surfaced during the student unrest at Columbia University in the late 1960s as a faction of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. It evolved into the National Caucus of Labor Committees, an organization largely made up of young upper-middle-class people who espoused LaRouche’s Marxist views.

He first ran for president in 1976 as the candidate of the left-wing, United States Labor Party, now-defunct.

By then, though, his politics had already begun moving to the right. And after spending much time in West Germany, he returned with right-wing, anti-Semitic views. Many of his followers made the shift with him.

George Johnson, the author of “Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics” (1983), wrote that LaRouche had developed a conspiracy theory that stretched back to the beginnings of civilization.

“In the world according to LaRouche,” Johnson wrote, “history is a war between the Platonists (the good guys) and the evil Aristotelians. Anyone who has taken Philosophy 101 can follow the drift: Platonists believe in standards, an absolute truth that can be divined by philosopher kings like Mr. LaRouche. To the Aristotelians everything is relative.”

In LaRouche’s view, Johnson continued, “true Platonists believe that industrialization, technology and classical music should be used to bring wealth and enlightenment to the citizens of the world.”

He added: “The Aristotelians are trying to stop them by using not only sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll but also environmentalism and quantum theory. With their bag of brainwashing techniques, they hope to trick civilization into destroying itself, bringing on a new dark ages in which the world’s riches will be firmly in the hands of the oligarchs.”

LaRouche’s views became the foundation of a political movement. By the mid-1970s, his organization had 37 offices in North America and 26 in Europe and Latin America. A core membership in the United States numbered about 1,000. One follower won 27 percent of the vote in a local election in Seattle. LaRouche was pulling in enough money nationally to qualify for federal matching funds for his presidential campaigns.

He had also become an entrepreneur, starting three companies, one of which printed newspapers for high schools; together they brought in revenues of $5 million or more a year.

In his efforts to build a worldwide organization, LaRouche was helped by his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, a native of Germany who had been a journalist there. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

LaRouche was at the apex of his power in the mid-1980s, when he moved his headquarters to a large rented estate in Northern Virginia, in Round Hill, outside Leesburg. When neighbors wondered aloud why he had turned the estate into an armed camp, rigged with electronic security and patrolled by men with semi-automatic rifles, LaRouche went on the attack. He said that the Leesburg Garden Club was “a nest of Soviet fellow travelers.”

In 1987, after an FBI investigation, LaRouche was convicted in Virginia on charges of scheming to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and of deliberately defaulting on more than $30 million in loans from thousands of his supporters. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and sent to a federal penitentiary in Minnesota.

The conviction hurt his movement but did not end it. He was released from prison in 1994, after serving a third of his sentence. He immediately announced that he would run for president in 1996. He ran again in 2000 and 2004.

After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, LaRouche warned that the new president was in “grave and imminent danger” of being assassinated by the “British Empire,” a familiar target of LaRouche’s.

By 2015 he had long turned against Obama, calling for his impeachment and accusing him in one instance of orchestrating Turkey’s downing of a Russian fighter jet involved in the war in Syria. “Obama organized an act of war, and has thus endangered the United States, as well as all of humanity,” LaRouche wrote.

But he could be bipartisan in his attacks. He accused the Bush family of collaborating with Nazi Germany during World War II, and said that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a product of a neoconservative conspiracy, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, to deceive the American people. That view was expressed in a series of pamphlets, titled “Children of Satan.”

But LaRouche was heartened by the election of President Donald Trump, though he perceived a British conspiratorial hand reaching into the United States to foment efforts to “politically paralyze” the president and bring about his impeachment.

That would be a mistake, he said. As his website declared, “Not since William McKinley has a president been so clear in his intent to return the nation to the economic tradition of Alexander Hamilton, to end the policies of British imperial free trade, and make a full commitment to industry, manufacturing, scientific advancement and world peace.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/obituaries/lyndon-larouche-dead.html" id="02afa105-e497-31cb-a3d5-58371cecd7c7">The New York Times</a>.

Lyndon LaRouche, the quixotic, apocalyptic leader of a cultlike political organization who ran for president eight times, once from a prison cell, died on Tuesday. He was 96.

Lyndon LaRouche, Cult Figure Who Ran for President 8 Times, Dies at 96

His death was announced on the website of his organization, La Rouche/Pac. It did not specify a cause or say where he died.

He condemned modern music as a tool of invidious conspiracies — rock as a particularly British one — and found universal organizing principles in the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.

Some called him a case study in paranoia and bigotry, his mild demeanor notwithstanding. One biographer, Dennis King, in “Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism” (1989), believed that LaRouche and his followers were a danger to democratic institutions.

Whatever he was, he received thousands of votes in his campaigns for president. In 1980, he outpolled Gov. Jerry Brown of California by 1,000 votes in a Democratic presidential primary in Connecticut. In 1986, the candidates fielded by his National Democratic Policy Committee received 20-40 percent of the vote in local elections in California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

He first ran for president in 1976 as the candidate of the left-wing, now-defunct United States Labor Party.

LaRouche was at the apex of his power when, in the mid-1980s, he moved his headquarters to a large rented estate in Northern Virginia, in Round Hill, outside Leesburg. When neighbors wondered aloud why he had turned the estate into an armed camp, rigged with electronic security and patrolled by men with semi-automatic rifles, LaRouche went on the attack. He said that the Leesburg Garden Club was “a nest of Soviet fellow travelers.”

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Richard Severo

Articles written by the author

Stanley Donen, 'Master of the Musical' Who Directed 'Singin' in the Rain,' Dies at 94

Lyndon LaRouche, Cult Figure Who Ran for President 8 Times, Dies at 96

Lyndon LaRouche, Cult Figure Who Ran for President 8 Times, Dies at 96