The Polish Americans
WQED, 9:30 p.m. Tuesday
Canonsburg's Bobby Vinton appears in The Polish Americans, along with actress Stefanie Powers; former U.S. National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski; Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Maryland; author Suzanne Strempek Shea; and others.
This program is filled with human-interest stories, some lengthy, of how Polish-Americans maintained their heritage in a brave new country.
Archival footage focuses on the immigrants and how they built churches and communities that resembled European villages within American cities like San Antonio, Cleveland, Baltimore and New York. The program briefly sifts through Poland's political problems, then concentrates on the development of Polish pride in its food, music, dance and, surprisingly, as members of Notre Dame's "Fighting Irish" football teams.
Just be prepared to go on humming Vinton's part-Polish "Melody of Love" for the next few days.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Stefanie on the Go
"I am en route to India for a conference on the Asiatic lion. I was asked to
replicate tour education center there and am giving a speech at the
conference. I go on to Hong Kong and Beijing for another set of meetings,
this time for the mutual funds, and then I go to Kenya so I am a bit busy
just now. Look on the site...www.sixdegrees.org and dial me up."
(Info from Nancy Dugan, Stefanie Powers On-line Fan Group).
replicate tour education center there and am giving a speech at the
conference. I go on to Hong Kong and Beijing for another set of meetings,
this time for the mutual funds, and then I go to Kenya so I am a bit busy
just now. Look on the site...www.sixdegrees.org and dial me up."
(Info from Nancy Dugan, Stefanie Powers On-line Fan Group).
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Stefanie, the Correspondent
Stefanie is the USA correspondent/interviewer for the UK's Sir David Frost television program. She'll be doing 20 interviews for the program and, there is a possibility that the show will be airing in USA as well. Several interviews are already in the can, including Micky Dolenz and Jacqueline Bisset.
She's also done several documentaries and is now trying to hook up with PBS for funding.
(Info from Nancy Dugan, Stefanie Powers On-line Fan Group).
She's also done several documentaries and is now trying to hook up with PBS for funding.
(Info from Nancy Dugan, Stefanie Powers On-line Fan Group).
Monday, February 05, 2007
Wildlife is no 'wild guess' for these experts
Saving endangered species from extinction, that's what a group of wildlife experts from USA, African and European countries will talk about at a two-day international symposium which begins on February 27 at Karnavati Club in Ahmedabad.
The symposium on 'Conservation of Endangered Species' has been jointly organised by the State Forest Department and Mumbai-based Vanishing Herds Foundation.
"Our main objective is to deliberate on conserving endangered species across the globe. More importantly, we wanted to get inputs on preserving Gujarat's wildlife from renowned experts in the field," said Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Pradeep Khanna on Monday.
Among the prominent wildlife experts expected to participate in the symposium are Don Hunt, chairman of Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy; Iris Hunt, who established Mount Kenya Animal Orphanage; Dr Betsy L Dresser, who is considered to be the world's foremost specialist in 'big cat' reproduction and genetics; Stefanie Powers, a Fellow of the Los Angeles Zoo and also a member on the advisory board of the Atlanta and Columbus Zoos;
Dr Stephanie Dloniak, a Zoology professor at Michigan State University and also the Director of The Mara Carnivore Conservation project, and, Scotland-based
Dr Roger Windsor, an expert in veterinary wildlife science.Giving profiles of the experts, Khanna said: "Don Hunt was part of a Kenyan Government project to stop wildlife, especially the rare White Zebra and Bongo antelope, from decimating.
The project, which lasted 35 years, is one of Africa's greatest success stories as not only did the decimation stop, the numbers of wildlife also increased significantly."
"Don Hunt's wife, Iris, is credited with the setting up of the Mount Kenya Animal Orphanage, a privately-funded animal shelter and refuge for wild animals with special needs.
The orphanage has become a model for a number of wildlife projects across the world. She has also been assisting her husband with wildlife translocations," he said adding that during the symposium, she will talk about the importance of an animal shelter in cohesive conservation programmes.
"Dr Dresser has worked with the University of Cincinnati's Medical Centre and is the senior vice president of the Audubon Centre for Research on Endangered Species. Her goal is to save endangered species from extinction through use of high-tech reproduction such as embryo transfers and in-vitro fertilisation.
Ms Winnie Kiiru, another eminent wildlife conservationist to participate in the symposium, will speak on "man-animal conflicts" and "large mammal translocation".
The symposium on 'Conservation of Endangered Species' has been jointly organised by the State Forest Department and Mumbai-based Vanishing Herds Foundation.
"Our main objective is to deliberate on conserving endangered species across the globe. More importantly, we wanted to get inputs on preserving Gujarat's wildlife from renowned experts in the field," said Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Pradeep Khanna on Monday.
Among the prominent wildlife experts expected to participate in the symposium are Don Hunt, chairman of Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy; Iris Hunt, who established Mount Kenya Animal Orphanage; Dr Betsy L Dresser, who is considered to be the world's foremost specialist in 'big cat' reproduction and genetics; Stefanie Powers, a Fellow of the Los Angeles Zoo and also a member on the advisory board of the Atlanta and Columbus Zoos;
Dr Stephanie Dloniak, a Zoology professor at Michigan State University and also the Director of The Mara Carnivore Conservation project, and, Scotland-based
Dr Roger Windsor, an expert in veterinary wildlife science.Giving profiles of the experts, Khanna said: "Don Hunt was part of a Kenyan Government project to stop wildlife, especially the rare White Zebra and Bongo antelope, from decimating.
The project, which lasted 35 years, is one of Africa's greatest success stories as not only did the decimation stop, the numbers of wildlife also increased significantly."
"Don Hunt's wife, Iris, is credited with the setting up of the Mount Kenya Animal Orphanage, a privately-funded animal shelter and refuge for wild animals with special needs.
The orphanage has become a model for a number of wildlife projects across the world. She has also been assisting her husband with wildlife translocations," he said adding that during the symposium, she will talk about the importance of an animal shelter in cohesive conservation programmes.
"Dr Dresser has worked with the University of Cincinnati's Medical Centre and is the senior vice president of the Audubon Centre for Research on Endangered Species. Her goal is to save endangered species from extinction through use of high-tech reproduction such as embryo transfers and in-vitro fertilisation.
Ms Winnie Kiiru, another eminent wildlife conservationist to participate in the symposium, will speak on "man-animal conflicts" and "large mammal translocation".
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Interview with Linda Evans
Not counting your battles on Dynasty, what's the meanest catfight you've ever been in?
I only did one other major catfight, in an episode of McCloud, before Dynasty. Stefanie Powers and I just went on for five minutes - beating the heck out of each other - and it was one of the best fights I've ever done with anybody. So when the Dynasty producers wanted Krystle and Alexis to have a fight, I told them what worked really well - what gave us the most punch for the least amount of injury. That was the pillows coming apart with feathers going all over the apartment.
I had learned to do my own stunts with Barbara Stanwyck on The Big Valley, because she's one of the few actresses who loved to do her own stunts, and it so pleased her when I did mine.
Of course, I love the fighting and Joan hates it. She hates being touched.
I only did one other major catfight, in an episode of McCloud, before Dynasty. Stefanie Powers and I just went on for five minutes - beating the heck out of each other - and it was one of the best fights I've ever done with anybody. So when the Dynasty producers wanted Krystle and Alexis to have a fight, I told them what worked really well - what gave us the most punch for the least amount of injury. That was the pillows coming apart with feathers going all over the apartment.
I had learned to do my own stunts with Barbara Stanwyck on The Big Valley, because she's one of the few actresses who loved to do her own stunts, and it so pleased her when I did mine.
Of course, I love the fighting and Joan hates it. She hates being touched.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Special Screenings - February 1
American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Bl, Hollywood, (323) 466-3456. Egyptiantheatre.com. Overlooked and Underrated � Experiment in Terror, 7:30; followed by Mister Cory. Discussion in between films with actress Stefanie Powers.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Sidney Sheldon, 89; master of flashy, trashy bestsellers
Sidney Sheldon, a writer whose keen grasp of popular tastes fueled a string of feverishly romantic and suspenseful books that made him a perennial bestseller with millions of copies in print around the world, died Tuesday. He was 89. Sheldon died of pneumonia at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, according to his friend and publicist Warren Cowan.
A multifaceted writer, Sheldon won a screenwriting Oscar and a Tony award and had created popular television sitcoms before starting his first novel at the age of 52. But it was through the novels that he gained his overriding fame.
His books usually revolved around characters of great wealth, beauty, brilliance and bedroom prowess — none of which protected them from infidelity, betrayal and indiscretion. Sheldon's protagonists were usually women and his plots were so artfully constructed that his books are the very definition of a page-turner.
He was one of the world's most translated authors, selling more than 300 million books in 180 countries. They were printed in 51 languages, including Urdu, which is spoken in Pakistan and India, and Swahili.
With his second novel, "The Other Side of Midnight" (1974), Sheldon broke into the blockbuster ranks; the book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 53 weeks — a record at the time.
About half of his 18 novels — with such titles as "Rage of Angels" (1980) and "Memories of Midnight" (1990) — were turned into television movies or miniseries. Demand for his stories was so great that CBS executives reportedly paid Sheldon $1 million for the rights to make a miniseries of 1985's "If Tomorrow Comes" before they had even read it.
Some critics said his dialogue was banal and his plots were unbelievable, but many grudgingly acknowledged the author's unusual talent at producing what the Washington Post once called "good junk reading time after time."
After Sheldon's 1987 novel "Windmills of the Gods" debuted at No. 1 on bestseller lists, Charles Champlin, then The Times' arts editor, wrote that Sheldon had found "a statistically wider audience each time, evidently satisfying everyone except most literary critics, who regard popularity and quality as incompatible."
Fans admired plotlines that were amazingly complex yet easy to follow — and the colorful characters who could never be counted on to do the expected.
"Sidney's longevity secret is that he is a great storyteller, a master of the narrative tale," his literary agent, Mort Janklow, told The Times in 2004. "Readers care about his characters, many of whom are women under threat. He has an instinctive ability to read women's emotions."
For his part, Sheldon said: "I don't write for critics. I write for readers."
From the early 1940s until almost 1970, he had written mainly for viewers.
Wins Oscar in 1948
His wry and witty script for "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" (1947) won him a 1948 Academy Award for original screenplay. The farce, which starred Cary Grant and Shirley Temple, was "uncloyed with cuteness," the New York Times review said at the time.
Sheldon was also a screenwriter for the Judy Garland-Fred Astaire musical "Easter Parade" (1948) and the Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical "The Barkleys of Broadway" (1949). After he helped adapt the Irving Berlin hit "Annie Get Your Gun" to the big screen, the 1950 Betty Hutton-Howard Keel vehicle received generally favorable reviews.
He wrote half a dozen plays for Broadway. His biggest hit was the musical "Redhead," starring Gwen Verdon, which ran for a little more than a year from 1959 to 1960 and brought him a Tony for co-writing the book.
After working on about two dozen films, he turned toward television, writing scores of episodes for two hit sitcoms he created — "The Patty Duke Show" (ABC, 1963-66) and "I Dream of Jeannie" (NBC, 1965-70), according to Sheldon's memoir "The Other Side of Me" (2005).
Creating a show for Duke was a challenge because "she was so extraordinarily talented I did not want to waste her abilities," Sheldon wrote. He decided she should play twin sisters but changed it to look-alike cousins to explain why the characters had grown up without knowing each other.
"Jeannie," which starred Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman, opened to mixed reviews but had a loyal fan base, Sheldon wrote. One episode, "Bigger Than a Bread Box and Better Than a Genie," featured Sheldon's wife, Jorja, as a fortuneteller and his mother as a character in a seance scene.
He also created the glamorous "Hart to Hart" series, starring Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers, that aired on ABC from 1979 to 1984.
He was born Sidney Schechtel on Feb. 11, 1917, in Chicago, the son of Otto, a salesman, and Natalie, a homemaker. Unable to pay the rent, the family kept moving and Sheldon attended about a dozen schools.
Sheldon later remarked that his career as a writer was rather improbable considering his background.
Becoming a writer
"Both my parents were third-grade dropouts," he said. "My father never read a book in his life and I was the only one in my family to complete high school."
Sheldon won a scholarship to Northwestern University. Although he was forced to drop out halfway through his freshman year because of the financial pressures of the Depression, he recalled having an epiphany of sorts as he walked on campus one day.
"I saw all these well-dressed students, and I thought that years from now, no one will ever know they existed," he wrote years later. "I wanted to leave a mark, I wanted people to know I was here."
He made up the last name of Sheldon in the mid-1930s when he entered an amateur radio contest as an announcer.
At first, he worked in Chicago as a theater usher, shoe salesman and attendant in a nightclub checkroom. After the club's bandleader, Phil Levant, played a song Sheldon wrote, Sheldon left for New York City to try to make it as a songwriter. While there, he saw a lot of movies and turned his thoughts toward Hollywood.
Soon, he was in Los Angeles — he wanted to be a screenwriter but had promised his parents he would return to Chicago if he didn't have a job within three weeks.
Repeatedly, he was turned away from movie studio gates. As time was running out, he learned that producers hired readers to help analyze scripts. Since he had just read John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," Sheldon sent synopses of the classic to every studio and was soon working at Universal for $17 a week, he told The Times in 1992.
At his boarding house, Sheldon met a young writer named Ben Roberts and they began collaborating on "B" movies like "South of Panama," "Gambling Daughters" and "Borrowed Hero," all released in 1941.
"I can't even call them 'B' pictures," Sheldon once said. "They were 'Z' pictures. But we got paid and we got screen credits. We were professionals."
At the start of World War II, Sheldon enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces but within months he was discharged for medical reasons. He began collaborating with Roberts on a revival of the musical "The Merry Widow," which ran for nine months beginning in 1943.
Two other musicals they wrote, the comedy "Jackpot" and the fantasy "Dream With Music," had brief Broadway runs about the same time.
Back in Hollywood, Sheldon won an Oscar for "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" but couldn't wait to leave Shrine Auditorium.
"On what should have been the happiest night of my life, I was suicidal," Sheldon wrote in his autobiography of the paralyzing mood swings he experienced. A psychiatrist soon diagnosed him as manic-depressive, Sheldon wrote in his memoir.
In midlife, he turned to writing novels, a career change that came about almost accidentally, he often told interviewers:
"I had an idea for something complicated, that delved into people's minds and motives to a greater extent than I could put in any film or TV script. Trying to put it into novel form was the only answer."
"The Naked Face," published in 1970, did not sell well, but readers loved his second novel, "The Other Side of Midnight," the so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure set in World War II. It centers on a beautiful French woman named Noelle Page who is spurned by a dashing American pilot and spends the rest of her life obsessed with him.
Almost all of Sheldon's books hit the bestseller lists after that.
In his fourth novel, "Bloodline," a beautiful heiress becomes the target of the man who murdered her father. In his sixth, "Master of the Game," the Blackwell family rises to riches in the diamond mines of South Africa. In 1991's "The Doomsday Conspiracy," a naval intelligence officer must find witnesses to the crash of a weather balloon that could actually be a UFO.
His 18th novel, "Are You Afraid of the Dark?," which was published when he was 87, was a New York Times bestseller shortly after its release in 2004.
In his personal life, Sheldon was the opposite of the love 'em and leave 'em cads who populate so many of his works.
A family man
After a brief first marriage, he was married to his second wife, Jorja Curtright, for 33 years; she died in 1985 of a heart attack. In 1989, he married Alexandra Kostoff. Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter from his second marriage, Mary, who is a novelist; two grandchildren; and his brother Richard.
During most of his writing years, Sheldon and his family traveled the world together, researching and taking photos of the locations where he planned to set his next novel.
"If you read the description of a hotel, or of a restaurant meal, you can bet we actually stayed at that hotel or ate that exact meal…. That's what makes my books so realistic," he told an interviewer.
He wrote every day, first "ad-libbing" an initial and very long draft, which was transcribed by a secretary, and then rewriting and editing what he had written.
Over the years, he also wrote popular children's books. He owned a string of luxurious homes, finally settling in Beverly Hills and in a five-house compound in Palm Springs.
He told the Times in 2000 that he thought the profession of author suited him best.
"In a book, your imagination has no limits," Sheldon said. "There is no budget to worry about, you can have as many characters as you want, you can give them all yachts…. It's remarkable to write a novel, because the author is the star."
Services will be private.
The family suggests that memorial donations be made to Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, 4650 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles 90027. A celebration of Sheldon's life will be held later.
Profitable page-turners:
The novels of Sidney Sheldon
• "The Naked Face"
• "The Other Side of Midnight"
• "A Stranger in the Mirror"
• "Bloodline"
• "Rage of Angels"
• "Master of the Game"
• "If Tomorrow Comes"
• "Windmills of the Gods"
• "The Sands of Time"
• "Memories of Midnight"
• "The Doomsday Conspiracy"
• "The Stars Shine Down"
• "Nothing Lasts Forever"
• "Morning, Noon & Night"
• "The Best Laid Plans"
• "Tell Me Your Dreams"
• "The Sky Is Falling"
• "Are You Afraid of the Dark?"
A multifaceted writer, Sheldon won a screenwriting Oscar and a Tony award and had created popular television sitcoms before starting his first novel at the age of 52. But it was through the novels that he gained his overriding fame.
His books usually revolved around characters of great wealth, beauty, brilliance and bedroom prowess — none of which protected them from infidelity, betrayal and indiscretion. Sheldon's protagonists were usually women and his plots were so artfully constructed that his books are the very definition of a page-turner.
He was one of the world's most translated authors, selling more than 300 million books in 180 countries. They were printed in 51 languages, including Urdu, which is spoken in Pakistan and India, and Swahili.
With his second novel, "The Other Side of Midnight" (1974), Sheldon broke into the blockbuster ranks; the book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 53 weeks — a record at the time.
About half of his 18 novels — with such titles as "Rage of Angels" (1980) and "Memories of Midnight" (1990) — were turned into television movies or miniseries. Demand for his stories was so great that CBS executives reportedly paid Sheldon $1 million for the rights to make a miniseries of 1985's "If Tomorrow Comes" before they had even read it.
Some critics said his dialogue was banal and his plots were unbelievable, but many grudgingly acknowledged the author's unusual talent at producing what the Washington Post once called "good junk reading time after time."
After Sheldon's 1987 novel "Windmills of the Gods" debuted at No. 1 on bestseller lists, Charles Champlin, then The Times' arts editor, wrote that Sheldon had found "a statistically wider audience each time, evidently satisfying everyone except most literary critics, who regard popularity and quality as incompatible."
Fans admired plotlines that were amazingly complex yet easy to follow — and the colorful characters who could never be counted on to do the expected.
"Sidney's longevity secret is that he is a great storyteller, a master of the narrative tale," his literary agent, Mort Janklow, told The Times in 2004. "Readers care about his characters, many of whom are women under threat. He has an instinctive ability to read women's emotions."
For his part, Sheldon said: "I don't write for critics. I write for readers."
From the early 1940s until almost 1970, he had written mainly for viewers.
Wins Oscar in 1948
His wry and witty script for "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" (1947) won him a 1948 Academy Award for original screenplay. The farce, which starred Cary Grant and Shirley Temple, was "uncloyed with cuteness," the New York Times review said at the time.
Sheldon was also a screenwriter for the Judy Garland-Fred Astaire musical "Easter Parade" (1948) and the Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical "The Barkleys of Broadway" (1949). After he helped adapt the Irving Berlin hit "Annie Get Your Gun" to the big screen, the 1950 Betty Hutton-Howard Keel vehicle received generally favorable reviews.
He wrote half a dozen plays for Broadway. His biggest hit was the musical "Redhead," starring Gwen Verdon, which ran for a little more than a year from 1959 to 1960 and brought him a Tony for co-writing the book.
After working on about two dozen films, he turned toward television, writing scores of episodes for two hit sitcoms he created — "The Patty Duke Show" (ABC, 1963-66) and "I Dream of Jeannie" (NBC, 1965-70), according to Sheldon's memoir "The Other Side of Me" (2005).
Creating a show for Duke was a challenge because "she was so extraordinarily talented I did not want to waste her abilities," Sheldon wrote. He decided she should play twin sisters but changed it to look-alike cousins to explain why the characters had grown up without knowing each other.
"Jeannie," which starred Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman, opened to mixed reviews but had a loyal fan base, Sheldon wrote. One episode, "Bigger Than a Bread Box and Better Than a Genie," featured Sheldon's wife, Jorja, as a fortuneteller and his mother as a character in a seance scene.
He also created the glamorous "Hart to Hart" series, starring Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers, that aired on ABC from 1979 to 1984.
He was born Sidney Schechtel on Feb. 11, 1917, in Chicago, the son of Otto, a salesman, and Natalie, a homemaker. Unable to pay the rent, the family kept moving and Sheldon attended about a dozen schools.
Sheldon later remarked that his career as a writer was rather improbable considering his background.
Becoming a writer
"Both my parents were third-grade dropouts," he said. "My father never read a book in his life and I was the only one in my family to complete high school."
Sheldon won a scholarship to Northwestern University. Although he was forced to drop out halfway through his freshman year because of the financial pressures of the Depression, he recalled having an epiphany of sorts as he walked on campus one day.
"I saw all these well-dressed students, and I thought that years from now, no one will ever know they existed," he wrote years later. "I wanted to leave a mark, I wanted people to know I was here."
He made up the last name of Sheldon in the mid-1930s when he entered an amateur radio contest as an announcer.
At first, he worked in Chicago as a theater usher, shoe salesman and attendant in a nightclub checkroom. After the club's bandleader, Phil Levant, played a song Sheldon wrote, Sheldon left for New York City to try to make it as a songwriter. While there, he saw a lot of movies and turned his thoughts toward Hollywood.
Soon, he was in Los Angeles — he wanted to be a screenwriter but had promised his parents he would return to Chicago if he didn't have a job within three weeks.
Repeatedly, he was turned away from movie studio gates. As time was running out, he learned that producers hired readers to help analyze scripts. Since he had just read John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," Sheldon sent synopses of the classic to every studio and was soon working at Universal for $17 a week, he told The Times in 1992.
At his boarding house, Sheldon met a young writer named Ben Roberts and they began collaborating on "B" movies like "South of Panama," "Gambling Daughters" and "Borrowed Hero," all released in 1941.
"I can't even call them 'B' pictures," Sheldon once said. "They were 'Z' pictures. But we got paid and we got screen credits. We were professionals."
At the start of World War II, Sheldon enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces but within months he was discharged for medical reasons. He began collaborating with Roberts on a revival of the musical "The Merry Widow," which ran for nine months beginning in 1943.
Two other musicals they wrote, the comedy "Jackpot" and the fantasy "Dream With Music," had brief Broadway runs about the same time.
Back in Hollywood, Sheldon won an Oscar for "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" but couldn't wait to leave Shrine Auditorium.
"On what should have been the happiest night of my life, I was suicidal," Sheldon wrote in his autobiography of the paralyzing mood swings he experienced. A psychiatrist soon diagnosed him as manic-depressive, Sheldon wrote in his memoir.
In midlife, he turned to writing novels, a career change that came about almost accidentally, he often told interviewers:
"I had an idea for something complicated, that delved into people's minds and motives to a greater extent than I could put in any film or TV script. Trying to put it into novel form was the only answer."
"The Naked Face," published in 1970, did not sell well, but readers loved his second novel, "The Other Side of Midnight," the so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure set in World War II. It centers on a beautiful French woman named Noelle Page who is spurned by a dashing American pilot and spends the rest of her life obsessed with him.
Almost all of Sheldon's books hit the bestseller lists after that.
In his fourth novel, "Bloodline," a beautiful heiress becomes the target of the man who murdered her father. In his sixth, "Master of the Game," the Blackwell family rises to riches in the diamond mines of South Africa. In 1991's "The Doomsday Conspiracy," a naval intelligence officer must find witnesses to the crash of a weather balloon that could actually be a UFO.
His 18th novel, "Are You Afraid of the Dark?," which was published when he was 87, was a New York Times bestseller shortly after its release in 2004.
In his personal life, Sheldon was the opposite of the love 'em and leave 'em cads who populate so many of his works.
A family man
After a brief first marriage, he was married to his second wife, Jorja Curtright, for 33 years; she died in 1985 of a heart attack. In 1989, he married Alexandra Kostoff. Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter from his second marriage, Mary, who is a novelist; two grandchildren; and his brother Richard.
During most of his writing years, Sheldon and his family traveled the world together, researching and taking photos of the locations where he planned to set his next novel.
"If you read the description of a hotel, or of a restaurant meal, you can bet we actually stayed at that hotel or ate that exact meal…. That's what makes my books so realistic," he told an interviewer.
He wrote every day, first "ad-libbing" an initial and very long draft, which was transcribed by a secretary, and then rewriting and editing what he had written.
Over the years, he also wrote popular children's books. He owned a string of luxurious homes, finally settling in Beverly Hills and in a five-house compound in Palm Springs.
He told the Times in 2000 that he thought the profession of author suited him best.
"In a book, your imagination has no limits," Sheldon said. "There is no budget to worry about, you can have as many characters as you want, you can give them all yachts…. It's remarkable to write a novel, because the author is the star."
Services will be private.
The family suggests that memorial donations be made to Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, 4650 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles 90027. A celebration of Sheldon's life will be held later.
Profitable page-turners:
The novels of Sidney Sheldon
• "The Naked Face"
• "The Other Side of Midnight"
• "A Stranger in the Mirror"
• "Bloodline"
• "Rage of Angels"
• "Master of the Game"
• "If Tomorrow Comes"
• "Windmills of the Gods"
• "The Sands of Time"
• "Memories of Midnight"
• "The Doomsday Conspiracy"
• "The Stars Shine Down"
• "Nothing Lasts Forever"
• "Morning, Noon & Night"
• "The Best Laid Plans"
• "Tell Me Your Dreams"
• "The Sky Is Falling"
• "Are You Afraid of the Dark?"
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Through the Keyhole
Micky Dolenz was interviewed by Stefanie Powers for David Frost's U.K. game show, "Through the Keyhole."
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Lively — and revealing — 'Legends'
BEVERLY HILLS — Joan Collins showed off more than her talents at Tuesday night's opening performance of her traveling stage play, Legends, when the zipper on the back of her dress slid down, exposing the 73-year-old's lingerie-covered backside to a theater packed with '80s TV legends.
Among those who were treated to the moon: Hart to Hart's Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers; Knots Landing's Michele Lee; Falcon Crest's Lorenzo Lamas; and Dynasty's Pamela Sue Martin, Al Corley, Gordon Thomson and Pamela Bellwood.
On stage, Collins' co-star and Dynasty rival, Linda Evans, 64, struggled in vain to zip Collins up. "I tried, but it just didn't want to stay," Evans sighed at the after-party.
So Collins momentarily broke the fourth wall, vocally acknowledging her "wardrobe malfunction" and inspiring Evans to ad-lib "nice (butt)." Collins, who also was battling the flu, spent the rest of the show delicately sidestepping her way across the stage, occasionally clasping her hands over her posterior.
"That poor thing; what a trouper," Powers said. "I once had a set fall down on me."
At the after-party, Collins shared a booth with sister Jackie, who just finished her latest racy novel, Drop Dead Beautiful, about the continuing antics of heroine Lucky Santangelo
"How embarrassing," Joan said of the mishap. "But I had to make it fun, because if you're not having fun, neither is your audience."
Joan's husband, Percy Gibson, is a producer on the show, which casts Evans and Collins as aging actress rivals. After its two-week engagement in Los Angeles, the show will continue to Phoenix, Denver, Chicago and Boston before concluding in New Haven, Conn., on May 13.
It also was a night to remember those who could not attend. The most missed face was Dynasty patriarch John Forsythe, who had colon cancer surgery in September and was released from the hospital three weeks ago.
Forsythe's wife, Nicole, said her husband, who turns 89 Jan. 29, is cancer-free but is now fighting a leg hematoma. "He thinks he can get up and walk, because he's not getting any pain to his brain," Nicole said.
She planned to make the two-hour drive back to their Santa Ynez Valley ranch the same night so she would not worry her husband, who "saw me getting all dolled up."
Among those who were treated to the moon: Hart to Hart's Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers; Knots Landing's Michele Lee; Falcon Crest's Lorenzo Lamas; and Dynasty's Pamela Sue Martin, Al Corley, Gordon Thomson and Pamela Bellwood.
On stage, Collins' co-star and Dynasty rival, Linda Evans, 64, struggled in vain to zip Collins up. "I tried, but it just didn't want to stay," Evans sighed at the after-party.
So Collins momentarily broke the fourth wall, vocally acknowledging her "wardrobe malfunction" and inspiring Evans to ad-lib "nice (butt)." Collins, who also was battling the flu, spent the rest of the show delicately sidestepping her way across the stage, occasionally clasping her hands over her posterior.
"That poor thing; what a trouper," Powers said. "I once had a set fall down on me."
At the after-party, Collins shared a booth with sister Jackie, who just finished her latest racy novel, Drop Dead Beautiful, about the continuing antics of heroine Lucky Santangelo
"How embarrassing," Joan said of the mishap. "But I had to make it fun, because if you're not having fun, neither is your audience."
Joan's husband, Percy Gibson, is a producer on the show, which casts Evans and Collins as aging actress rivals. After its two-week engagement in Los Angeles, the show will continue to Phoenix, Denver, Chicago and Boston before concluding in New Haven, Conn., on May 13.
It also was a night to remember those who could not attend. The most missed face was Dynasty patriarch John Forsythe, who had colon cancer surgery in September and was released from the hospital three weeks ago.
Forsythe's wife, Nicole, said her husband, who turns 89 Jan. 29, is cancer-free but is now fighting a leg hematoma. "He thinks he can get up and walk, because he's not getting any pain to his brain," Nicole said.
She planned to make the two-hour drive back to their Santa Ynez Valley ranch the same night so she would not worry her husband, who "saw me getting all dolled up."
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
The Streets of San Francisco coming to DVD in April
The first season of the show (actually, it's one of those "Season 1, Volume 1" deals) will be released by Paramount on April 3. It will be 10 episodes plus the pilot movie. No word on extras or commentaries yet.
It's amazing to see all of the famous faces that graced this show, including Martin Sheen, Deidre Hall, Robert Wagner, John Ritter, Stefanie Powers, Harold Gould, Brenda Vaccaro, Stuart Whitman, Jamie Farr, Shelley Morrison (Rosario on Will & Grace), Leslie Nielsen, Dick Sargent, Dean Stockwell, Bill Bixby, Nick Nolte, Jessica Walter, and some guy named Arnold Schwarzenegger. There was a reunion movie in 1992, but Douglas didn't want to be in it (his character "disappeared" and Malden looked for him).
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Marina del Rey: 44th Holiday Boat Parade selects Stefanie Powers as grand marshal
Organizers of the Marina del Rey Holiday Boat Parade have announced that actress Stefanie Powers will serve as grand marshal for the 44th annual parade, scheduled for Saturday, December 9th.
Powers will be riding aboard the grand marshal boat YachtSea, which, along with the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Halibut, will lead the two-hour parade.
This year's parade theme is Water Winter Wonderland. A fireworks show will kick off the official start at 5:55 p.m. The parade is scheduled from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
"Stefanie Powers has brought entertainment and excitement to the world for many years and we're thrilled she will take the helm as grand marshal to lead our parade," said parade president Cindy Williams. "We are delighted to welcome Stefanie to our boat parade family and hope she enjoys the experience as much as we will."
Powers' acting credits include 28 feature films, three television series, miniseries and on-stage musical productions. She portrayed Jennifer Hart on the television series Hart to Hart.
She has released four home videos and is involved with several American zoos, where she works with species survival programs and is a frequent keynote speaker, according to Williams.
"She has combined a natural curiosity and passion for knowledge, world travel and diverse cultures in both an award-winning acting career and an equally active life of heartfelt philanthropic work," Williams said.
Powers is also president of the William Holden Wildlife Foundation, a public charity dedicated to the preservation of wild animals, which she helped found in honor of the late actor.
The William Holden Wildlife Education Center serves 10,000 students a year and is located near the Mount Kenya Safari Club and the Mount Kenya Game Ranch started by Holden in the late 1950s.
Information, parade headquarters, (310) 670-7130, or www .mdrboatparade.org
Powers will be riding aboard the grand marshal boat YachtSea, which, along with the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Halibut, will lead the two-hour parade.
This year's parade theme is Water Winter Wonderland. A fireworks show will kick off the official start at 5:55 p.m. The parade is scheduled from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
"Stefanie Powers has brought entertainment and excitement to the world for many years and we're thrilled she will take the helm as grand marshal to lead our parade," said parade president Cindy Williams. "We are delighted to welcome Stefanie to our boat parade family and hope she enjoys the experience as much as we will."
Powers' acting credits include 28 feature films, three television series, miniseries and on-stage musical productions. She portrayed Jennifer Hart on the television series Hart to Hart.
She has released four home videos and is involved with several American zoos, where she works with species survival programs and is a frequent keynote speaker, according to Williams.
"She has combined a natural curiosity and passion for knowledge, world travel and diverse cultures in both an award-winning acting career and an equally active life of heartfelt philanthropic work," Williams said.
Powers is also president of the William Holden Wildlife Foundation, a public charity dedicated to the preservation of wild animals, which she helped found in honor of the late actor.
The William Holden Wildlife Education Center serves 10,000 students a year and is located near the Mount Kenya Safari Club and the Mount Kenya Game Ranch started by Holden in the late 1950s.
Information, parade headquarters, (310) 670-7130, or www .mdrboatparade.org
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Monday, October 30, 2006
Galactic Gala at Griffith Observatory
L.A.: Luminaries mark attraction's reopening this Friday.
Stars gazed upon stars Sunday at a Galactic Gala at Griffith Observatory to honor this week's re-opening of Los Angeles' No. 1 landmark.
Hollywood stars, city officials and supporters of the $93 million makeover sailed across a heavenly blue carpet to hail the observatory's Friday public launch.
"We've been waiting five years and are really excited to be here tonight," said Leonard Nimoy, who played "Spock" on the epic "Star Trek" series and who has donated $1 million toward a 200-seat theater built in his name.
VIPs - from Buzz Aldrin, the second human to set foot on the Moon, to actress Angela Bassett - were awed by the observatory that shone atop Mt. Hollywood.
Built in 1935 as a gift to Los Angeles by Griffith J. Griffith, the art deco observatory has become one of the city's most cherished icons.
Now, after four years of meticulous restoration, what has been dubbed "the hood ornament of Los Angeles" will re-open its doors to the public on Friday.
"To all the people of Los Angeles: One of the greatest buildings in the world is coming online," said Councilman Tom LaBonge, an observatory booster. "This is the greatest spot in the whole universe."
Outside, the historic observatory gleamed in ivory, its bronze solar and planetary telescopes guarding its green rotunda and copper planetarium dome.
A terrace now surrounds the movie icon and home to 2 million visitors a year, for the best views of Los Angeles. An outdoor transit marks the seasonal path of the sun.
Inside, the 40,000-square-foot observatory is now twice its former size with a new planetarium, theater, cafe, classroom, bookstore and more than 60 exhibits.
But with less than 200 parking spaces and a crush of expected visitors, the observatory will allow no drive-in access in the first months after re-opening.
Instead, visitors must make advance timed reservations to shuttle up the hill for a fee. Hikers and cyclists can visit free with a 48-hour advance reservation.
At Sunday's gala, guests walked toward the bust of James Dean, with views of the Hollywood sign and a glorious sunset over the Pacific Ocean. The party, which was hosted by Friends of the Observatory and organized by the Los Angeles Sports Entertainment Commission, included such local celebrities as James Spader, Courtney B. Vance, Lucy Lawless, Art Linkletter and Stefanie Powers.
"I adore this place," said Powers, who visited the observatory as a child. "It has all the grace and elegance of the age in which it was constructed - it was the Golden Age of Hollywood."
But it was Aldrin who commanded the galactic celebration.
"We've been coming to the Griffith Observatory for 35 years" the astronaut said, gazing at the moon above the planetary dome. "This is the place to come for L.A. night life."
Stars gazed upon stars Sunday at a Galactic Gala at Griffith Observatory to honor this week's re-opening of Los Angeles' No. 1 landmark.
Hollywood stars, city officials and supporters of the $93 million makeover sailed across a heavenly blue carpet to hail the observatory's Friday public launch.
"We've been waiting five years and are really excited to be here tonight," said Leonard Nimoy, who played "Spock" on the epic "Star Trek" series and who has donated $1 million toward a 200-seat theater built in his name.
VIPs - from Buzz Aldrin, the second human to set foot on the Moon, to actress Angela Bassett - were awed by the observatory that shone atop Mt. Hollywood.
Built in 1935 as a gift to Los Angeles by Griffith J. Griffith, the art deco observatory has become one of the city's most cherished icons.
Now, after four years of meticulous restoration, what has been dubbed "the hood ornament of Los Angeles" will re-open its doors to the public on Friday.
"To all the people of Los Angeles: One of the greatest buildings in the world is coming online," said Councilman Tom LaBonge, an observatory booster. "This is the greatest spot in the whole universe."
Outside, the historic observatory gleamed in ivory, its bronze solar and planetary telescopes guarding its green rotunda and copper planetarium dome.
A terrace now surrounds the movie icon and home to 2 million visitors a year, for the best views of Los Angeles. An outdoor transit marks the seasonal path of the sun.
Inside, the 40,000-square-foot observatory is now twice its former size with a new planetarium, theater, cafe, classroom, bookstore and more than 60 exhibits.
But with less than 200 parking spaces and a crush of expected visitors, the observatory will allow no drive-in access in the first months after re-opening.
Instead, visitors must make advance timed reservations to shuttle up the hill for a fee. Hikers and cyclists can visit free with a 48-hour advance reservation.
At Sunday's gala, guests walked toward the bust of James Dean, with views of the Hollywood sign and a glorious sunset over the Pacific Ocean. The party, which was hosted by Friends of the Observatory and organized by the Los Angeles Sports Entertainment Commission, included such local celebrities as James Spader, Courtney B. Vance, Lucy Lawless, Art Linkletter and Stefanie Powers.
"I adore this place," said Powers, who visited the observatory as a child. "It has all the grace and elegance of the age in which it was constructed - it was the Golden Age of Hollywood."
But it was Aldrin who commanded the galactic celebration.
"We've been coming to the Griffith Observatory for 35 years" the astronaut said, gazing at the moon above the planetary dome. "This is the place to come for L.A. night life."
Friday, October 13, 2006
Thalians' 51st Anniversary Ball
"Desperate Housewives" creator Marc Cherry, comedian Jay Mohr, "Housewives" co-star Andrea Bowen and "American Idol" contestant Ace Young were among the youngsters at the Thalians' 51st Anniversary Ball last Saturday night.
"If you're wondering why it's so cold in here, it's to keep most of you alive!" Mohr joked to the mostly elderly members of the entertainment industry's leading nonprofit organization dedicated to the treatment of mental health.
Doris Roberts presented Cherry with the Mr. Wonderful Award at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel before a crowd that included Debbie Reynolds, Connie Stevens, Stefanie Powers, Barbara Eden, Mitzi Gaynor, Mamie Van Doren, Valerie Harper, Dick Van Patten, Hugh O'Brian, Jack LaLanne, Jayne Meadows, Jack Klugman, Ruta Lee and Jane Russell.
Cherry got the award for his efforts to focus on the need for mental health on both the screen and in life.
"What do I know about shaky mental health?" Cherry asked during the evening that raised more than $400,000 for the Thalians Mental Health Center at Cedars-Sinai. "Well, I work with four actresses over 40! You do the math!"
The Ms. Wonderful Award went to actress/entrepreneur Stevens and her actress daughters Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher. The family trio — as well as Bowen, Young and Reynolds — all sang during the evening, while Cherry playfully dissed his "Housewives."
"It's a man-eater," Cherry chortled when he bid $3,000 to name a tiger cub.
"So I'm calling it Eva Longoria!"
"If you're wondering why it's so cold in here, it's to keep most of you alive!" Mohr joked to the mostly elderly members of the entertainment industry's leading nonprofit organization dedicated to the treatment of mental health.
Doris Roberts presented Cherry with the Mr. Wonderful Award at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel before a crowd that included Debbie Reynolds, Connie Stevens, Stefanie Powers, Barbara Eden, Mitzi Gaynor, Mamie Van Doren, Valerie Harper, Dick Van Patten, Hugh O'Brian, Jack LaLanne, Jayne Meadows, Jack Klugman, Ruta Lee and Jane Russell.
Cherry got the award for his efforts to focus on the need for mental health on both the screen and in life.
"What do I know about shaky mental health?" Cherry asked during the evening that raised more than $400,000 for the Thalians Mental Health Center at Cedars-Sinai. "Well, I work with four actresses over 40! You do the math!"
The Ms. Wonderful Award went to actress/entrepreneur Stevens and her actress daughters Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher. The family trio — as well as Bowen, Young and Reynolds — all sang during the evening, while Cherry playfully dissed his "Housewives."
"It's a man-eater," Cherry chortled when he bid $3,000 to name a tiger cub.
"So I'm calling it Eva Longoria!"
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Newport-Bermuda Race
The 100th anniversary Newport-Bermuda Race proves to be more a test of cooking skills than seamanship
The closest we got to a healthy breeze in the 2006 centennial Newport-Bermuda Race were the gales of laughter that swept up from the saloon after lunch on the third day out. As my watch tried to coax an extra tenth of a knot out of Ceramco New Zealand, an aluminum Farr 68, the B watch sat on the sails below and roared at The Wedding Crashers on DVD.
We'd started out well. The bright sunshine had warmed the land enough to generate a 12-knot sea breeze out of the southwest, allowing us to point sufficiently high to lay the buoys at the entrance to Narragansett Bay. We decided to go for a very conservative start, figuring it didn't make much sense to be over the starting line early on a 635-mile race with 264 entries. As we close-reached out to sea at nine or 10 knots in smooth water, we waited for the wind to die as forecast. We were pretty happy to be the fourth closest boat to Bermuda when it finally shut down a day and a half later.
The race went downhill from there. We were parked in a cold eddy south of the Gulf Stream and still had three to four knots of current pushing us toward our destination. The problem with cold eddies is that they're roughly circular in shape. Soon, the current that'd been helping us started pushing us east and then northeast, away from our goal, as we struggled to keep the boat moving.
The boats that stayed just a little farther west seemed to make out best in the race. They ran out of wind at about the same time as we did, but they got out of the eddy and didn't have to battle the current to start making way toward Bermuda again.
Talking to other crews after the finish, I found that most enjoyed a very pleasant sail. It was calm, sunny, and warm, and everyone ate like kings. Except the crews on the flat-out raceboats who had freeze-dried food ("It really isn't too bad. They've improved it a lot." Right). Aboard Ceramco, owner Diane Masters first went to sea as the cook on the famous maxi racer Kialoa III, so she knows how to produce truly fabulous meals for a hungry crew. And produce she did, starting with lamb chops with rice and fresh veggies, followed by homemade strawberry shortcake. (I watched her make it, and no, I looked nothing like a vulture watching dinner get run over on a lonely road. I merely hovered around the galley to see if I could help.) She fed us a cooked breakfast daily (I think she used 35 to 40 eggs each day—and is there a better smell than that of frying bacon wafting out the hatch on a cool morning at sea?), and our "rough-weather" meal of shepherd's pie made with mashed cauliflower instead of potatoes was wolfed down on a warm, calm evening.
After spending a few years sailing on the maxi circuit, Diane decided she'd rather own boats than be paid to work on them. She started her own business installing flooring in houses and now employs several dozen people. A few years ago, she embarked on a search for just the right boat. It had to be big enough to accommodate a lot of friends, tough, fast, comfortable, and fun to sail. She found all that in Ceramco New Zealand, built as the late Sir Peter Blake's entry in the 1981 Whitbread Around the World Race.
Our skipper for the Newport-Bermuda Race was Robert "Whitey" Russell, a tremendously experienced ex-yacht captain who helped Diane find the boat and then refit Ceramco over the winter, all with a view to sailing the 2006 race. Afterward, Diane planned to spend the summer daysailing with friends and perhaps doing a cruise to Maine if her work schedule permitted. This fall, she plans to sail Ceramco down to Saint-Barthélemy in the French West Indies and commute back and forth over the winter before sailing next spring across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. There, she plans to cruise the Balearic Islands and spend time in Valencia, Spain, watching the America's Cup races.
Diane wasn't the only entrant in the Newport-Bermuda Race with exciting plans. This year's race was merely the first leg for Colin Golder, who sailed Morgan of Marietta, his Wauquiez Centurion 42, in the race for the sixth time. Instead of sailing home to New Jersey, Golder, now retired, intended his next stop after Bermuda to be Horta, on the island of Faial in the Azores. He took advantage of the fact that race organizers sent nine shipping containers to Bermuda to have his Monitor windvane, dinghy, and other cruising gear meet him on the island after the race. He planned to cruise the Azores for a few weeks, then spend the balance of the summer cruising in Portugal before leaving the boat in southern Spain for the winter. The best things about the race for Morgan's crew were the nice weather, finding the eddies in the Stream, and having literally dozens of dolphins play around the boat for more than an hour—letting the sailors know they were in the right place at the right time. The crew evened out varying degrees of culinary expertise by cooking ahead and freezing several meals before leaving the dock. Every evening they popped one in the oven, and the whole crew sat down and relaxed for an hour over dinner.
Because of the light airs, this year's race was the second slowest on record. New York businessman Tom Carroll's previous race was on a Sweden 38 in 1998, the slowest race. He entered this year with Siren Song, his new J/133, and a crew of friends from western Long Island Sound. But this wasn't just any random group of guys: Watch captains Butch Ulmer and Howie McMichael have sailed the race 19 and 15 times, respectively; navigator H. L. DeVore had sailed four Bermuda races. Tom's son was aboard, sailing his first.
Though he intended to spend most of his time on the boat racing this summer, Carroll seemed a bit too proud of the job his girlfriend, actress Stefanie Powers, had done decorating the interior to convince me that he was a cutthroat racer, his racing record with the new boat notwithstanding.
When I asked him the standard interviewer question about his motivation for sailing the Newport-Bermuda Race this year, Tom's answer was especially poignant: "One of my best friends developed brain cancer last year. He was only 53 years old. We spent a lot of time discussing priorities in the three months before he died. We talked a lot about doing things, about not putting things off. The funeral was in September. I ordered the boat in October, and I ran the New York Marathon in November."
Dan Biemesderfer, a professor at Yale Medical School, sailed Shearwater, his beautiful Mason 43, in the race. Docked at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club in a prime spot after the finish, her sweeping sheer, long cabin house, bronze ports, and gleaming varnish provided quite a contrast to the dedicated racing boats surrounding her. She's a lovely and elegant cruising boat, certainly no racer. When I asked why he'd enter such a boat, Dan explained that he loves Bermuda and has done the Marion-Bermuda race since 2001, competing in the celestial-navigation division last year. He enjoys sailing offshore and doing the work to prepare the boat beforehand. The rigorous requirements and inspections leading up to the race help him ensure that the boat's ready for any conditions when his family is aboard.
Dan's crew of, as he described them, "hard-core racers," kept the boat moving in the light airs that frustrated so many of the sailors in the race. Having a crew of committed sailors aboard didn't prevent them from having a bottle or two of wine with their gourmet dinner every night. But the crew, no doubt, was a factor in the boat's final placing: Shearwater crossed the finish line off St. David's Head at 2131 on Wednesday to take third place in Class 14 and seventh overall on corrected time in the Cruiser Division.
Finishing just eight minutes behind them was another boat named Shearwater—a Morris 40 sailed by Conrad Hall, CEO of Trader Publishing, the company that owns Soundings magazine. This Shearwater placed third in class and fourth overall in the Cruiser Division. Conrad sailed the boat in the last Newport-Bermuda Race with a six-man crew, but since a rule change in the Cruiser Division allowed the use of autopilots this year, he felt he could sail with one less person and have a little more elbow room.
He's no stranger to offshore sailing. Every year he sails Shearwater back and forth offshore from her winter home at the Morris yard in Bass Harbor, Maine, to her summer home in Norfolk, Virginia, a distance each way approximately the same as that of the Newport-Bermuda Race. He has a great deal of confidence in his boat. "The Morris is a wonderful ocean boat for its size," says Conrad. "The crew may fail the boat, but the boat's never going to fail the crew." He loves the adventure of sailing an offshore race: "It's such a change from normal life, and sailing with good friends makes it all the more fun."
Learning about the weather and offshore sailing were the prime motivations behind Iris and Alex Frowein's decision to enter the race with Alaeris, their Outbound 46. They used to spend summers cruising their C&C 34 around the New England coast. Every winter, they'd charter bareboats in the Caribbean, and inspired by an article in the August 2005 Cruising World, "Secrets Revealed," they chartered in Culebra and Vieques last winter.
In 2004, Iris and Alex started thinking about packing up and venturing farther afield in a boat of their own. They decided the C&C was too small to suit them as a liveaboard for an extended cruise, so they started looking at bigger boats. That summer, an Outbound 44 sailed into their marina, and they liked what they saw. They contacted Skip Pond at Outbound Yachts and ended up taking delivery of a new Outbound 46 last fall. Skip suggested that sailing in the Newport-Bermuda Race would be a good way to get themselves and the boat up to snuff right away. "The boat was 90-percent ready when I got it," Alex says. "Having the race coming up was a great motivating factor to complete getting the boat prepared. Buying storm canvas and making sure that the refrigerators' lids lock in place get put off longer than they should—this way, we got it all done at once, rather than piecemeal."
Self-described cruisers, they turned over nominal skippering duties for the race to Jim Binch, a Long Island sailor who's done several Newport-Bermuda Races in the double-handed division with watch captain Ned Brooks. Skip Pond also sailed on the boat. Alex appreciated having their talent available to tap into during the race. "Skip was a treasure trove of knowledge and experience, and the fact that he's sailed the Outbounds so many miles was very helpful, too."
Alex's position as navigator helped him ramp up his weather-forecasting skills as he learned more about weather routing and GRIB files. Iris loved the race, too. The helmsman of the pair, she also felt she'd become a better sailor, and she loved learning what the boat was capable of in light airs when you can't motor. Sailing offshore for the first time, they became an even better team, Alex says. "We've always been pretty dialed into each other on the boat, communicating well and sharing sailing duties." He notes that though they improved their skills immensely and became much more confident in, and comfortable with, the boat, they have no plans to take up racing full-time.
A few days after the finish of the race, Iris flew home to work while Alex sailed the boat back to Newport with two crew. Though they're thinking about entering the Marion-Bermuda race next year, Iris and Alex say their plans to go cruising in a year or two are now confirmed.
Because it was the centennial, this year's Newport-Bermuda Race saw more traditional boats entered than usual. Sailing under two different handicap rules used to predict theoretical boat speed, the race was won by two boats more than 25 years old: Lively Lady II, a 1970s-vintage Carter 37 owned by William Hubbard III, took handicap honors in the IRC Class, and Sinn Fein, a 1960s-vintage Cal 40 owned by Peter Rebovich, won the ORR Class.
The closest we got to a healthy breeze in the 2006 centennial Newport-Bermuda Race were the gales of laughter that swept up from the saloon after lunch on the third day out. As my watch tried to coax an extra tenth of a knot out of Ceramco New Zealand, an aluminum Farr 68, the B watch sat on the sails below and roared at The Wedding Crashers on DVD.
We'd started out well. The bright sunshine had warmed the land enough to generate a 12-knot sea breeze out of the southwest, allowing us to point sufficiently high to lay the buoys at the entrance to Narragansett Bay. We decided to go for a very conservative start, figuring it didn't make much sense to be over the starting line early on a 635-mile race with 264 entries. As we close-reached out to sea at nine or 10 knots in smooth water, we waited for the wind to die as forecast. We were pretty happy to be the fourth closest boat to Bermuda when it finally shut down a day and a half later.
The race went downhill from there. We were parked in a cold eddy south of the Gulf Stream and still had three to four knots of current pushing us toward our destination. The problem with cold eddies is that they're roughly circular in shape. Soon, the current that'd been helping us started pushing us east and then northeast, away from our goal, as we struggled to keep the boat moving.
The boats that stayed just a little farther west seemed to make out best in the race. They ran out of wind at about the same time as we did, but they got out of the eddy and didn't have to battle the current to start making way toward Bermuda again.
Talking to other crews after the finish, I found that most enjoyed a very pleasant sail. It was calm, sunny, and warm, and everyone ate like kings. Except the crews on the flat-out raceboats who had freeze-dried food ("It really isn't too bad. They've improved it a lot." Right). Aboard Ceramco, owner Diane Masters first went to sea as the cook on the famous maxi racer Kialoa III, so she knows how to produce truly fabulous meals for a hungry crew. And produce she did, starting with lamb chops with rice and fresh veggies, followed by homemade strawberry shortcake. (I watched her make it, and no, I looked nothing like a vulture watching dinner get run over on a lonely road. I merely hovered around the galley to see if I could help.) She fed us a cooked breakfast daily (I think she used 35 to 40 eggs each day—and is there a better smell than that of frying bacon wafting out the hatch on a cool morning at sea?), and our "rough-weather" meal of shepherd's pie made with mashed cauliflower instead of potatoes was wolfed down on a warm, calm evening.
After spending a few years sailing on the maxi circuit, Diane decided she'd rather own boats than be paid to work on them. She started her own business installing flooring in houses and now employs several dozen people. A few years ago, she embarked on a search for just the right boat. It had to be big enough to accommodate a lot of friends, tough, fast, comfortable, and fun to sail. She found all that in Ceramco New Zealand, built as the late Sir Peter Blake's entry in the 1981 Whitbread Around the World Race.
Our skipper for the Newport-Bermuda Race was Robert "Whitey" Russell, a tremendously experienced ex-yacht captain who helped Diane find the boat and then refit Ceramco over the winter, all with a view to sailing the 2006 race. Afterward, Diane planned to spend the summer daysailing with friends and perhaps doing a cruise to Maine if her work schedule permitted. This fall, she plans to sail Ceramco down to Saint-Barthélemy in the French West Indies and commute back and forth over the winter before sailing next spring across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. There, she plans to cruise the Balearic Islands and spend time in Valencia, Spain, watching the America's Cup races.
Diane wasn't the only entrant in the Newport-Bermuda Race with exciting plans. This year's race was merely the first leg for Colin Golder, who sailed Morgan of Marietta, his Wauquiez Centurion 42, in the race for the sixth time. Instead of sailing home to New Jersey, Golder, now retired, intended his next stop after Bermuda to be Horta, on the island of Faial in the Azores. He took advantage of the fact that race organizers sent nine shipping containers to Bermuda to have his Monitor windvane, dinghy, and other cruising gear meet him on the island after the race. He planned to cruise the Azores for a few weeks, then spend the balance of the summer cruising in Portugal before leaving the boat in southern Spain for the winter. The best things about the race for Morgan's crew were the nice weather, finding the eddies in the Stream, and having literally dozens of dolphins play around the boat for more than an hour—letting the sailors know they were in the right place at the right time. The crew evened out varying degrees of culinary expertise by cooking ahead and freezing several meals before leaving the dock. Every evening they popped one in the oven, and the whole crew sat down and relaxed for an hour over dinner.
Because of the light airs, this year's race was the second slowest on record. New York businessman Tom Carroll's previous race was on a Sweden 38 in 1998, the slowest race. He entered this year with Siren Song, his new J/133, and a crew of friends from western Long Island Sound. But this wasn't just any random group of guys: Watch captains Butch Ulmer and Howie McMichael have sailed the race 19 and 15 times, respectively; navigator H. L. DeVore had sailed four Bermuda races. Tom's son was aboard, sailing his first.
Though he intended to spend most of his time on the boat racing this summer, Carroll seemed a bit too proud of the job his girlfriend, actress Stefanie Powers, had done decorating the interior to convince me that he was a cutthroat racer, his racing record with the new boat notwithstanding.
When I asked him the standard interviewer question about his motivation for sailing the Newport-Bermuda Race this year, Tom's answer was especially poignant: "One of my best friends developed brain cancer last year. He was only 53 years old. We spent a lot of time discussing priorities in the three months before he died. We talked a lot about doing things, about not putting things off. The funeral was in September. I ordered the boat in October, and I ran the New York Marathon in November."
Dan Biemesderfer, a professor at Yale Medical School, sailed Shearwater, his beautiful Mason 43, in the race. Docked at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club in a prime spot after the finish, her sweeping sheer, long cabin house, bronze ports, and gleaming varnish provided quite a contrast to the dedicated racing boats surrounding her. She's a lovely and elegant cruising boat, certainly no racer. When I asked why he'd enter such a boat, Dan explained that he loves Bermuda and has done the Marion-Bermuda race since 2001, competing in the celestial-navigation division last year. He enjoys sailing offshore and doing the work to prepare the boat beforehand. The rigorous requirements and inspections leading up to the race help him ensure that the boat's ready for any conditions when his family is aboard.
Dan's crew of, as he described them, "hard-core racers," kept the boat moving in the light airs that frustrated so many of the sailors in the race. Having a crew of committed sailors aboard didn't prevent them from having a bottle or two of wine with their gourmet dinner every night. But the crew, no doubt, was a factor in the boat's final placing: Shearwater crossed the finish line off St. David's Head at 2131 on Wednesday to take third place in Class 14 and seventh overall on corrected time in the Cruiser Division.
Finishing just eight minutes behind them was another boat named Shearwater—a Morris 40 sailed by Conrad Hall, CEO of Trader Publishing, the company that owns Soundings magazine. This Shearwater placed third in class and fourth overall in the Cruiser Division. Conrad sailed the boat in the last Newport-Bermuda Race with a six-man crew, but since a rule change in the Cruiser Division allowed the use of autopilots this year, he felt he could sail with one less person and have a little more elbow room.
He's no stranger to offshore sailing. Every year he sails Shearwater back and forth offshore from her winter home at the Morris yard in Bass Harbor, Maine, to her summer home in Norfolk, Virginia, a distance each way approximately the same as that of the Newport-Bermuda Race. He has a great deal of confidence in his boat. "The Morris is a wonderful ocean boat for its size," says Conrad. "The crew may fail the boat, but the boat's never going to fail the crew." He loves the adventure of sailing an offshore race: "It's such a change from normal life, and sailing with good friends makes it all the more fun."
Learning about the weather and offshore sailing were the prime motivations behind Iris and Alex Frowein's decision to enter the race with Alaeris, their Outbound 46. They used to spend summers cruising their C&C 34 around the New England coast. Every winter, they'd charter bareboats in the Caribbean, and inspired by an article in the August 2005 Cruising World, "Secrets Revealed," they chartered in Culebra and Vieques last winter.
In 2004, Iris and Alex started thinking about packing up and venturing farther afield in a boat of their own. They decided the C&C was too small to suit them as a liveaboard for an extended cruise, so they started looking at bigger boats. That summer, an Outbound 44 sailed into their marina, and they liked what they saw. They contacted Skip Pond at Outbound Yachts and ended up taking delivery of a new Outbound 46 last fall. Skip suggested that sailing in the Newport-Bermuda Race would be a good way to get themselves and the boat up to snuff right away. "The boat was 90-percent ready when I got it," Alex says. "Having the race coming up was a great motivating factor to complete getting the boat prepared. Buying storm canvas and making sure that the refrigerators' lids lock in place get put off longer than they should—this way, we got it all done at once, rather than piecemeal."
Self-described cruisers, they turned over nominal skippering duties for the race to Jim Binch, a Long Island sailor who's done several Newport-Bermuda Races in the double-handed division with watch captain Ned Brooks. Skip Pond also sailed on the boat. Alex appreciated having their talent available to tap into during the race. "Skip was a treasure trove of knowledge and experience, and the fact that he's sailed the Outbounds so many miles was very helpful, too."
Alex's position as navigator helped him ramp up his weather-forecasting skills as he learned more about weather routing and GRIB files. Iris loved the race, too. The helmsman of the pair, she also felt she'd become a better sailor, and she loved learning what the boat was capable of in light airs when you can't motor. Sailing offshore for the first time, they became an even better team, Alex says. "We've always been pretty dialed into each other on the boat, communicating well and sharing sailing duties." He notes that though they improved their skills immensely and became much more confident in, and comfortable with, the boat, they have no plans to take up racing full-time.
A few days after the finish of the race, Iris flew home to work while Alex sailed the boat back to Newport with two crew. Though they're thinking about entering the Marion-Bermuda race next year, Iris and Alex say their plans to go cruising in a year or two are now confirmed.
Because it was the centennial, this year's Newport-Bermuda Race saw more traditional boats entered than usual. Sailing under two different handicap rules used to predict theoretical boat speed, the race was won by two boats more than 25 years old: Lively Lady II, a 1970s-vintage Carter 37 owned by William Hubbard III, took handicap honors in the IRC Class, and Sinn Fein, a 1960s-vintage Cal 40 owned by Peter Rebovich, won the ORR Class.
Monday, September 18, 2006
Hart to Hart on DVD
Hart to Hart - The Complete Second Season
DVD Release Date: September 19, 2006
If you don't have the first season on DVD yet:
DVD Release Date: September 19, 2006
If you don't have the first season on DVD yet:
Rabbit set to cause a buzz in British film
Emily Mortimer is one of the stars to make a cameo in the film
Take one Rampant Rabbit, the world's most popular sex toy. Add a first-time director and writer and sprinkle in cameos from London's great and good. Mix well.
That's the remarkable recipe for the new "mockumentary" Rabbit Fever, which is set to become the unlikeliest British film smash of the year when it is released on Friday.
Among the stars appearing in the film are Emily Mortimer, Sienna Guillory, Tom Conti, Germaine Greer, Lisa B, Stefanie Powers, William Boyd and Richard Branson.
In the picture, which was filmed across the capital, the stars deliver their verdict on the Rampant Rabbit either as themselves or as fictional characters.
Stephen Raphael, writer and producer of Rabbit Fever, got the idea for the film when he overheard some female gossip at the dinner table.
He said: "It all started in early 2004 when I went to a dinner party and there were a group of women there who had a bit to drink and started to talk about the Rampant Rabbit.
"I was amused and surprised by this. But then a friend told me he knew about this girl in his office who was always coming in late because of it and I thought, 'I have to write a film about women's addiction to the Rampant Rabbit'.
After recruiting first-time director Ian Denyer, Raphael then raised funds for the film by persuading 25 friends, ranging from writers to financiers, to stump up the cash. He added: "Just so that there was never any doubt in anyone's mind, we brought a Rabbit vibrator along to the investors' meeting and plonked it in the middle of the table. The Rabbit disappeared and I never got it back."
Perhaps Raphael's most inspired move was hiring the well-connected Dixie Chassay as casting director. Chassay is the former girfriend of James Blunt, the subject of his number one smash You're Beautiful, and the daughter of Groucho Club founder Tchaik Chassay.
Raphael says: "Dixie was amazing. Ninety-nine per cent of the stars in the film we got through her."
These included her actor boyfriend Tom Hollander, who plays a marketing executive cashing in on the sex toy's popularity, and Evening Standard writer Toby Young as a Labour MP who faces calls for the Rabbit to be banned.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Frederic Raphael - Stephen's father - also appears as a sleazy Hollywood producer.
Raphael Jnr said: "It's truly an independent film. Our production office was my parents' flat in Chelsea. Not receiving any money from the Government or the Lottery meant I had total control of the film. If you can do it this way, you don't want anyone else on board.
Take one Rampant Rabbit, the world's most popular sex toy. Add a first-time director and writer and sprinkle in cameos from London's great and good. Mix well.
That's the remarkable recipe for the new "mockumentary" Rabbit Fever, which is set to become the unlikeliest British film smash of the year when it is released on Friday.
Among the stars appearing in the film are Emily Mortimer, Sienna Guillory, Tom Conti, Germaine Greer, Lisa B, Stefanie Powers, William Boyd and Richard Branson.
In the picture, which was filmed across the capital, the stars deliver their verdict on the Rampant Rabbit either as themselves or as fictional characters.
Stephen Raphael, writer and producer of Rabbit Fever, got the idea for the film when he overheard some female gossip at the dinner table.
He said: "It all started in early 2004 when I went to a dinner party and there were a group of women there who had a bit to drink and started to talk about the Rampant Rabbit.
"I was amused and surprised by this. But then a friend told me he knew about this girl in his office who was always coming in late because of it and I thought, 'I have to write a film about women's addiction to the Rampant Rabbit'.
After recruiting first-time director Ian Denyer, Raphael then raised funds for the film by persuading 25 friends, ranging from writers to financiers, to stump up the cash. He added: "Just so that there was never any doubt in anyone's mind, we brought a Rabbit vibrator along to the investors' meeting and plonked it in the middle of the table. The Rabbit disappeared and I never got it back."
Perhaps Raphael's most inspired move was hiring the well-connected Dixie Chassay as casting director. Chassay is the former girfriend of James Blunt, the subject of his number one smash You're Beautiful, and the daughter of Groucho Club founder Tchaik Chassay.
Raphael says: "Dixie was amazing. Ninety-nine per cent of the stars in the film we got through her."
These included her actor boyfriend Tom Hollander, who plays a marketing executive cashing in on the sex toy's popularity, and Evening Standard writer Toby Young as a Labour MP who faces calls for the Rabbit to be banned.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Frederic Raphael - Stephen's father - also appears as a sleazy Hollywood producer.
Raphael Jnr said: "It's truly an independent film. Our production office was my parents' flat in Chelsea. Not receiving any money from the Government or the Lottery meant I had total control of the film. If you can do it this way, you don't want anyone else on board.
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