Friday, October 23, 2015

A00087 - Marty Ingels, Actor and Comedian

Marty Ingels, Actor Funny Onscreen and Outrageous Off, Dies at 79

By 
Marty Ingels, left, and John Astin, in 1962. The pair starred in a sitcom on ABC. Leigh Wiener/ABC
Marty Ingels, an actor and comic whose off-screen antics were long deemed outrageous even by Hollywood’s lofty standards, died on Wednesday in Tarzana, Calif. He was 79.
His death, from complications of a stroke, was announced by his wife, the actress Shirley Jones. In a statement, she said, “He often drove me crazy, but there’s not a day I won’t miss him and love him to my core.”
The precise ways in which Mr. Ingels deranged Ms. Jones, who was known for her demure, Middle American screen persona, can be gleaned from his activities over many decades. Onscreen, the sandpaper-voiced Mr. Ingels was best known for his role in the short-lived sitcom “I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster,” broadcast on ABC in the 1962-63 season. Mr. Ingels (as Fenster) starred opposite John Astin (as Dickens), as one of a pair of jovial carpenters.
Off screen, Mr. Ingels — who began his professional life as a talking peanut and was later a booker of celebrities on television commercials, a frequent TV guest star and a voice-over artist whose credits include Pac-Man in the animated series of the 1980s — was by all accounts highly voluble, genially combustible, energetically litigious and unmistakably larger than life.
There was the time, for instance, that Ms. Jones arrived home to find Mr. Ingels dancing on the lawn with her Oscar — awarded in 1961 for her role opposite Burt Lancaster in “Elmer Gantry” — accompanied by a hired mariachi band.
There was the time Mr. Ingels moved into a bank to live.
There were the various times he appeared in court, for Mr. Ingels always seemed to be suing someone, and someone always seemed to be suing him, in actions entailing, most notably, a curious incident involving the actress June Allyson and adult diapers.
There was the time that he tried to walk the red carpet at the Emmys accompanied by a life-size cardboard cutout of Ms. Jones, who was then out of the country. (Denied admission, the two-dimensional Ms. Jones was consigned to a closet for the duration of the ceremony.)
There were also darker times, as when Mr. Ingels, then an up-and-coming comic, had a paralyzing anxiety attack while performing on “The Tonight Show,” more or less ending his standup career.
There were the struggles with panic, agoraphobia and self-doubt that might well have had him “living at the Betty Ford Clinic in the Jewish and Depressed Room,” as Mr. Ingels said waggishly in a 2012 interview with Kliph Nesteroff for the website Classic Television Showbiz.
Mr. Ingels in 1977, working as a Hollywood agent at his company Ingels Inc., with Shirley Jones, then his fiancée.George Brich/Associated Press
“I always say creativity comes out of pain,” Mr. Ingels said in the same interview. “Shirley doesn’t believe that because she has had no pain. No anxiety. I live with it. It’s my life. My dream is for my wife, Shirley, to have an anxiety attack and pass out!”
Martin Ingerman was born on March 9, 1936, in Brooklyn. After graduating from Forest Hills High School in Queens, he briefly attended Queens College — his parents wanted him to be a dentist — before leaving to pursue a string of jobs.
One had Mr. Ingels, dressed as an immense nut, handing out Planters peanuts in Times Square. But he fell victim to his own volubility, for while a talking peanut is one thing, a prolix peanut is quite another, and he and Planters soon parted ways.
Mr. Ingels later joined the Army, where his mobile face was spotted by a talent scout for the TV quiz show “Name That Tune.” Appearing on the show, he won several thousand dollars and became known for his humorous repartee. With his winnings, he studied at the Pasadena Playhouse, but he learned immediately that the legitimate stage was not for him.
“They put me in a Greek chorus as a spear carrier,” Mr. Ingels told The Buffalo Courier in 1962. “When I stepped forth and spoke my one serious line, the audience broke up.”
After small parts on “The Phil Silvers Show,” “The Aquanauts,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and other programs, Mr. Ingels landed “I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster.” Though the show drew critical praise, the network canceled it after 32 episodes.
His other television roles include guest spots on “The Addams Family,” on which Mr. Astin starred as Gomez; “The Phyllis Diller Show”; “Murder, She Wrote”; and “CSI.” On film, Mr. Ingels appeared in “Wild and Wonderful” (1964), starring Tony Curtis, and “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969), starring Ian McShane.
In the 1970s he founded Ingels Inc., a Hollywood agency that matched celebrities like Cary Grant and John Wayne with advertisers.
Mr. Ingels’s first marriage ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Jones, whom he married in 1977, his survivors include three stepsons, Shaun, Patrick and Ryan Cassidy, from her marriage to the actor Jack Cassidy; and 12 grandchildren.
Mr. Ingels was a longtime resident of Encino, Calif., though in the early 21st century, while between homes, he lived for a time in a defunct branch of the Federal City Bank in Los Angeles. He had originally rented storage space in the building for his abundant belongings but wound up spending so much time there that he installed a couch, a refrigerator, a microwave and, eventually, himself. Every so often, a would-be customer knocked on the door.
“I’m thinking of putting a sign out in front,” Mr. Ingels told USA Today at the time. “Deposits only.”
With Mickey Herskowitz, he and Ms. Jones wrote a memoir, “Shirley & Marty: An Unlikely Love Story,” published in 1990.
In 1993, Mr. Ingels agreed to perform 120 hours of community service. The agreement settled a suit by Ms. Allyson, a former client, whom Mr. Ingels had accused of failing to pay him his commission after he placed her in a commercial for the Depend brand of adult diapers.
Ms. Allyson, who denied owing the money, contended that in seeking it, Mr. Ingels had harassed her by telephoning 138 times in the space of eight hours.
From even this adversity, Mr. Ingels made comic hay. He fulfilled his community service by working in a Los Angeles-area nursing home, where he entertained the residents. Extending an olive branch, he invited Ms. Allyson to join him there.
“It would be the perfect truce,” Mr. Ingels told United Press International in 1993. “And what better thing for Depends?”
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Thursday, August 13, 2015

A00086 - Ben Wattenberg, Neoconservative Democrat and Author

Ben Wattenberg, Neoconservative Author and PBS Host, Is Dead at 81

By 
Ben Wattenberg during a roundtable discussion in 1982. He helped popularize the term psephology, the study of elections.George Tames/The New York Times
Ben Wattenberg, an author, a PBStelevision commentator and a professed neoconservative who vainly urged his fellow Democrats to court the nation’s centrist voters at a time when the party was moving to the left, died Sunday in Washington. He was 81.
The cause was complications of surgery, his son, Daniel, said.
After the Democrats imploded in the late 1960s and early ’70s in internecine warfare between liberal and moderate factions over the Vietnam War, Mr. Wattenberg sought to rescue the party, in his eyes, by promoting the candidacies of moderates like Senators Henry M. Jackson and Hubert H. Humphrey.
He emphasized cultural touchstones like crime, race and welfare that were worrying many Americans as much as traditional economic concerns in urging Democrats to appeal to the “middle-aged, middle-class, middle-minded, unyoung, unpoor, unblack,” who, he said, constituted the moderate majority.
It was a prescription embraced instead by a generation of law-and-order Republicans, including Richard M. Nixon in his appeals to a “silent majority.”
Mr. Wattenberg also defined himself as a “neo-manifest destinarian.” Free Press
In 1970, long before computer-generated models singled out soccer moms and Nascar dads as pivotal groups that national parties needed to target, Mr. Wattenberg and a co-author,Richard M. Scammon, a former Census Bureau director, wrote in “The Real Majority” that the quintessential voter who needed to be won over was a 47-year-old homemaker from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose husband was a machinist. The book was a best-seller.
A data-driven amateur demographer, Mr. Wattenberg helped popularize the term psephology, the study of elections. William Safire, the New York Times columnist, credited him with introducing the term “social issues” to the political lexicon.
As a Democrat, Mr. Wattenberg proudly accepted the label of neoconservative, which Irving Kristol defined as “just a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” When Nixon resigned in 1974, Mr. Wattenberg said that the president had “left a great political party in shambles — the Democratic Party.”
In the journal National Affairs this year, the political scholar Jonathan Bronitsky wrote that Mr. Wattenberg’s “most concrete triumph has been that every decade over a stretch of 60 years, he published at least one critically acclaimed title that challenged and reshaped conventional wisdom.”
“Above all,” he added, “he refused time and time again declinist forecasts about America.”
Joseph Ben Zion Wattenberg was born in the Bronx on Aug. 26, 1933, a son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Judah, was a real estate lawyer. His mother, the former Rachel Gutman, was a nutritionist.
He was raised in the Amalgamated Houses union cooperative and attended DeWitt Clinton High School. Even growing up as a Bronx boy, he was a contrarian: He dreamed of playing center field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Instead, he graduated from Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y., in 1955, served in the Air Force and worked as a journalist, specializing in nautical stories.
He was propelled into prominence as an author when, with Mr. Scammon, he wrote “This U.S.A.,” an exuberant portrait of American progress and an optimistic prognosis for the country that seemed to some at odds with the social and political turbulence they were experiencing or witnessing in the mid-1960s.
Mr. Wattenberg also had stints as a political operative. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration hired him as a researcher and speechwriter. He went on to help Mr. Humphrey return to the Senate after his defeat in the 1968 presidential election and worked on Mr. Jackson’s unsuccessful efforts to win the presidential nomination in 1972 and ’76.
Senator George S. McGovern, an antiwar liberal, was the party’s choice in 1972, and after his landslide defeat at the hands of Nixon, Mr. Wattenberg helped found the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. Its aim was to shift the party back to the center by focusing on pocketbook issues and centrist themes that resonated with what he considered the moderate majority and which Bill Clinton would eventually corral for the Democratic side in 1992.
After “The Real Majority,” Mr. Wattenberg wrote “The Real America: A Surprising Examination of the State of the Union.” The New York Times Book Review said the book overstated the progress of black Americans, but it concluded, “For all the author’s bumptiousness, this is a book that sheds real light on the American condition.”
In 1978, Mr. Wattenberg introduced the magazine Public Opinion, sponsored by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. In 2001 as a senior fellow at the institute, he published “The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900 to 2000,” which he wrote with Theodore Caplow and Louis Hicks.
Mr. Wattenberg also produced and hosted the PBS television series“Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg,” “In Search of the Real America,”and “Ben Wattenberg at Large.”
In addition to embracing the neoconservative label (his 2008 memoir was titled “Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism”), Mr. Wattenberg also defined himself as an American chauvinist and what he called a “neo-manifest destinarian,” believing in American exceptionalism. Citing the infusion of immigrants from around the globe that he had championed in his 1991 book, “The First Universal Nation,” he argued that the United States was poised for even greater success.
Worried about declining birthrates in the United States, he pronounced himself pro-natal, which he described as favoring tax breaks and other incentives for young adults who choose to have children. As a redistributionist capitalist, he said, wealth should flow from the childless to the child-rearing.
He proclaimed himself a foreign policy hawk. “Peace through strength,” he said. “That’s what I mean by a hawk.”
Besides his son, Daniel, he and the former Marna Hade, who died in 1997, had two other children who survive him, Ruth and Sarah. He is also survived by his second wife, Diane Abelman, and their daughter, Rachel, as well as a sister, the actress Rebecca Schull, and four grandchildren.
For all the political wisdom he may have imparted, Mr. Wattenberg learned early on that he was better at dispensing political advice than benefiting from it. Before 1970, when he lived in Stamford, Conn., he sought local public office twice. He lost both times.
_________________________________________________
Joseph Ben Zion Wattenberg[1] (August 26, 1933 – June 28, 2015), known as Ben J. Wattenberg, was an American author, commentator and demographer. Associated with leading Democratic politicians in the 1960s and '70s, he leaned increasingly conservative in his latter years.

Biography[edit]

Early years[edit]

Wattenberg was born in The Bronx to Jewish parents, and went on to graduate from Hobart College in 1955, majoring in English. From 1955-57 he was in the U.S. Air Force, based in San Antonio.[citation needed] He was an aide and speechwriterto President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968, and served as an adviser to Hubert Humphrey's 1970 Senate race and Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's contest for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, and Democratic Party presidential primaries of 1976, and served on the 1972 and 1976 Democratic National Convention platform committees.[citation needed]

Career[edit]

Wattenberg came to national attention as co-author with Richard M. Scammon of The Real Majority, the 1970 analysis believed to have provided the basis for the campaign strategies of the Nixon administration in the 1970 congressional elections and 1972 presidential election.
He was the host of a number of PBS television specials, including Values Matter Most, The Grandchild Gap, America's Number One, What Next?, The Stockholder Society, A Third Choice (about the role of third parties in American politics),Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, The Democrats, and The First Measured Century. He hosted the weekly PBS television program, Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, from 1994 to 2010,[2] and previously hosted PBS series In Search of the Real America and Ben Wattenberg At Large.
Wattenberg was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He was appointed to various committees and commissions by Presidents Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, as well as by then-Speaker Tom Foley.

Personal[edit]

Wattenberg was the son of real-estate attorney Judah Wattenberg and Rachel Gutman Wattenberg, and the younger brother of actress Rebecca Schull.[3] He had four children, Ruth, Daniel and Sarah with his first wife, the former Marna Hade who died in 1997, and Rachel with his second wife, Diane Abelman.[1] Wattenberg died on June 28, 2015 from complications following surgery.[4]

Bibliography[edit]

  • This U.S.A., 1965
  • The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate, 1970
  • The Real America, 1974
  • Against All Enemies: A Novel, co-authored with Ervin S. Duggan 1977
  • The Good News is, the Bad News is Wrong, 1984
  • The Birth Dearth, 1987
  • The First Universal Nation, 1991
  • Values Matter Most, 1995
  • The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America 1900–2000, co-authored with Theodore Caplow and Louis Hicks, 2000
  • Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, 2004
  • Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism, 2008

Filmography[edit]

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