Monday, Jul. 20, 1959
Married. Robin Douglas-Home, 27, London jazz piano player who turned adman to win the hand of Sweden's willowy Princess Margaretha but reverted to the piano after the Swedish royal family stalled and his father roared that the Swedes were belittling the British Empire; and Sandra Paul, 18, homegrown, high-paid model; in London.
Divorced. By Deborah Kerr, 37, Scottish-born cinemactress (From Here to Eternity): Anthony Bartley, 40, British TV producer, one of the fighter-pilot heroes of the Battle of Britain; after 14 years of marriage, two children; in Santa Monica, Calif.
Died. George Grosz, 65, artist who savagely satirized Germany's feverish society between the world wars, with a contorted line drew bloated military and businessmen and their writhing wire-thin victims, relied on his own vivid experience in World War I trenches to depict human beings oozing into animal-like forms under the pressures of war, derided the Nazis so devastatingly from the appearance of the first swastika that Hitler labeled him "Cultural Bolshevist No. 1 and featured him prominently in the 1937 Munich exhibition of degenerate art; of a heart attack; in Berlin. Grosz fled to the U.S. in 1932, where he became a citizen and turned to painting plump nudes in placid landscapes, but the memory of homely sights and sounds lured him back to his beloved Berlin three weeks ago.
Died. Albert Fisk, 68, pioneer aeronautical engineer who developed the Sperry Gyroscope Co.'s automatic pilot and other flight instruments, gyrocompasses, high-intensity searchlights and ship stabilizers during the course of research that spanned two world wars; of a heart attack; in Tucson, Ariz.
Died. Vittorio Podrecca, 76, creator of the Rome-based Piccoli puppet theater, a group of 800 sprightly marionettes (manipulated by 23 minutely trained humans) who parodied human behavior from bullfights to ballet, charmed European and U.S. audiences in their grand tours in the '30s; in Geneva.
Died. Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, 83, seadog commander of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet in the tense years before Pearl Harbor, who defied threats from the Japanese without shooting at them, although his own U.S.S. Augusta was twice bombed, demanded and got $2,200,000 indemnity when the Japanese sank (1937) the U.S. gunboat Panay on the Yangtze, later, as a retired (1939) officer, denounced the dropping of atom bombs on Japan as "a diabolic act against a defeated nation"; in Newport, R.I.
Died. Henry Prather Fletcher, 86, one of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders who parlayed his wartime glory into a career (1902-29) as a poker-and polo-playing diplomat, while Ambassador to Chile and later Mexico deftly deflated anti-Americanism with a caustic wit, served (1934-36) as a bumbling Old Guard chairman of the Republican National Committee when the party got its most disastrous defeats by the New Deal; in Newport, R.I.
Died. Ernest Newman, 90, British music critic who in 38 years with the London Sunday Times wrote 2,000 reviews famed for their wit, ruthless honesty and precision of language, insisted on the importance of music for culture as a whole and always considered individual musical works within a wider philosophical context, boosted the controversial works of such great romantics as Richard Strauss and Berlioz, produced eight volumes on his favorite, Richard Wagner, that stripped the master's music of much of its mystical and racial accretions, viewed the spare music of this century more coolly and satirized it by fabricating a composer named Krzsmaly, whose great work, The Silent Symphony, consisted of no sound, only rests; in Tadworth, England.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.