B6 eZ re the washington post.tuesday, november 12 , 2019
obituaries
BY HARRISON SMITH
He was 10 inches tall, with
blond hair, bright blue eyes, over-
sized ears like Mickey Mouse and
the rosy cheeks of a child who had
played too long in the snow. His
name, To po Gigio, was Italian for
Louie Mouse, and during his doz-
ens of appearances on “The Ed
Sullivan Show” i n the 1960s and
early ’70s, he seemed, indeed, to
be a cartoon mouse sprung to life,
touched with Blue Fairy magic
like Pinocchio.
In recurring sketches with Sul-
livan, he scampered on two legs,
wiggled his ears, rolled his eyes,
poked fun at t he variety s how host
and pulled up the covers on his
tiny bed. When Sullivan once
greeted him with a kiss on the
cheek, he cartwheeled into a
handstand and kicked his legs
with delight — astounding mil-
lions of viewers who tried in vain
to spot any strings or wires con-
trolling his movements.
“The first thing everyone
wants to know is how does To po
Gigio work,” S ullivan told Popular
Science in 1967. “Even after all the
times I’ve worked with that darn
little mouse,” he added, “I some-
times forget he isn’t real.”
The bubbly, childlike mouse
was part puppet, part marionette,
created by Italian puppeteer Ma-
ria Perego, who was awarded a
patent for her design and operat-
ed To po with the help of one or
two other performers, plus a voice
actor. She was 95, and working on
a new To po Gigio series for Italian
television, when she died Nov. 7.
Her death was announced by
her lawyer Alessandro Rossi, who
did not give a precise cause but
told the Italian wire service ANSA
she had fallen ill at her home in
Milan.
Ms. Perego had experimented
with papier-mache and plaster
before using a soft, smooth foam
to create To po Gigio in 1959 with
support from her husband, Feder-
ico Caldura. Her character ap-
peared on Italian television pro-
grams before spreading to Swiss,
German, Dutch and Spanish pro-
gramming, eventually becoming
a hit in Japan and a staple of “The
Ed Sullivan Show” i n the United
States.
“I suppose in the 18-year histo-
ry of our show we’ve never had
any star who’s w on such affection-
ate acceptance as our little Italian
mouse, To po Gigio,” Sullivan said
in one 1967 episode, years after
his program helped introduce au-
diences to Elvis Presley and the
Beatles.
The host reportedly hired Ms.
Perego after seeing a tape of one
of her To po Gigio performances in
Europe, resulting in a string of 94
appearances from Dec. 9, 1962,
until the program’s final episode
on June 6, 1971, according to the
official Ed Sullivan and To po
Gigio websites. Almost every ap-
pearance ended with a request
from To po: “Eddie, kiss me good
night.”
While Sullivan was sometimes
criticized for having a stiff stage
presence and wooden delivery, h e
seemed to loosen up while talking
with To po Gigio, voiced by Italianactor Peppino Mazzullo. The pair
discussed modern art, To po’s love
for spaghetti and lasagna (as well
as gefilte fish and chow mein),
and the intricacies of show busi-
ness.
“How long, To po, do you think
you’ll last in television if you can’t
sing or dance or act?” Sullivan
asked in one episode. The puppet
replied, “Eddie, how long have
you been on the air?” — leading
Sullivan to retort, “Topo, nobody
likes a smart aleck mouse.”
In his book “Impresario: The
Life and Times of Ed Sullivan,”
biographer James Maguire cred-
ited Ms. Perego’s character with
helping to broaden Sullivan’s ap-
peal to younger viewers, enablingthe television host to display a
gentler, more endearing side of
himself.
“On its face the To po-Ed act
was a contradiction,” he wrote.
“Here was Ed, a man whom his
critics (and even friends) had
called every variation of stiff, w ho
had cursed and elbowed his way
to stardom, burning through an
ulcer, yet onstage with To po he
was a sentimental ball of sweet-
ness, being childlike for a live
audience of forty million viewers.... To po opened him up.”
Ms. Perego remained almost
entirely out of view even as her
character became famous around
the world, singing alongside Lou-
is Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and
Italian star Raffaella Carrà. For
most performances, she used two
fingers on her left h and to control
To po’s legs; with her other hand,
she operated a clothespin-like
system to open and close his
mouth. One or two other puppe-
teers would control his arms and
hands through a set of rods, de-
pending on the complexity of the
scene.
All of the puppeteers wore
black velvet robes, using gloves
and hoods to conceal themselves
in front of a black background
that rendered them invisible to
viewers. And while Ms. Perego
wrote many of the To po stories,
her character’s “Ed Sullivan
Show” appearances were also de-
veloped with help from other
writers — notably comedian Joan
Rivers, who was less appreciative
of To po than many of the show’s
young viewers.
“I lay on the floor and wrote a
sketch about this comic Italian
puppet mouse, with a little Italian
accent, who had become a semi-
fad in America,” she recalled, ac-
cording to Sullivan’s website. “I
had him asking Ed Sullivan to
explain football. I put To po in a
little football jersey that said ¼ on
the back. To po Gigio paid my car
payments for six months. God
bless that little lousy mouse.”
Ms. Perego was born in Venice
on Dec. 8, 1923, and by the mid-
1950s was working as a puppeteer
with the Italian public broadcast-
er RAI. She invented characters
such as Picchio Cannocchiale, a
riff on Woody Woodpecker, and
traced her puppetry break-through to a Christmas tree she
spotted in a barbershop window,
made from a piece of green
sponge.
She began using the material
for puppets, while slowing down
and speeding up records to get
new ideas for characters and situ-
ations, including “insects, fish,
singing flowers, cactuses with
large sombreros and [guitar]-imi-
tating Mariachis,” according to
her To po website.
To po began to take off in 1961,
appearing in Italy that year on the
popular TV program “Carosello”
and in a film, “The World of To po
Gigio,” co-directed by her hus-
band. “Put it all down as a nice
treat for the kiddies,” wrote New
York Times reviewer Howard
Thompson. “A nd while we’re at it,
who says a mouse can’t act?”
Her character later starred in a
1967 Japanese movie, “Topo Gigio
and the Missile War,” by celebrat-
ed filmmaker Kon Ichikawa, and
appeared in comic strips and
magazines.
Ms. Perego continued working
on him until her death — informa-
tion on survivors was not imme-
diately available — and said she
saw To po as “a naive character,”
with shades of Don Quixote and
Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp.
“With his optimism he tries to
justify himself, to invent, to intro-
duce himself and to enter into
fantasy and the absurd,” she said
recently on the Italian television
program “Le Ragazze.” “He’s al-
ways on the edge between imagi-
nation and reality.”
[email protected]Maria Perego, 95
Italian puppeteer created mouse Topo Gigio, a fixture on ‘Ed Sullivan Show’
mondadori/getty images
Italian puppeteer Maria Perego with her greatest creation, the
mouse Topo Gigio, Italian for Louie Mouse, during a TV sketch.FROM NEWS SERVICES
AND STAFF REPORTS
Bernard J. Tyson, the chairman
and chief executive of Kaiser Per-
manente, one of the country’s
largest nonprofit health-care pro-
viders and insurers, died Nov. 10
at 60.
The Oakland, Calif.-based com-
pany said he died in his sleep but
did not provide additional infor-
mation. He had recently spoken
at the AfroTech conference in
Oakland, tweeting the day before
his death in support of health
care that “is high-tech and high-
touch.”
Mr. Ty son was the first African
American CEO of Kaiser when he
took that position in 2013, after
nearly three decades at the com-
pany. He had previously worked
as a hospital administrator and
chief operating officer, and was
included on Time magazine’s
2017 list of the world’s most influ-
ential people.
Under Mr. Ty son, Kaiser grew
from 9.1 million members and
174,000 employees to 12.3 million
members and 218,000 employees,
increasing annual revenue from
$53 billion to more than
$82.8 billion, according to the
company.
His death occurred the day
before a planned five-day strike
by 4,000 mental health profes-
sionals at 100 Kaiser clinics in
California, amid a contract dis-
pute over retirement and health
benefits. Union officials voted
Sunday to postpone the strike.
Peter V. Lee, the head of Cov-
ered California, an independent
state agency that focuses on
health insurance, said Mr. Ty sons
“vision and laser focus on increas-
ing access, quality and affordable
health care coverage for all has
helped transform Kaiser and had
a positive impact on the entire
health care system.”
Mr. Ty son also was on the
boards of the American Heart
Association and Salesforce. He
was a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences
and deputy chairman of the
Americas of the International
Federation of Health Plans.
Bernard James Ty son was born
in Vallejo, Calif., on Jan. 20, 1959.
His father was a carpenter and
minister; his mother had diabe-
tes, leading Mr. Ty son to spend
time in hospitals growing up. He
eventually decided that he want-
ed to run one of his own.
Mr. Ty son received a bachelor’s
degree in health service manage-
ment in 1982 and an MBA in 1984,
with a focus in health service
administration, from Golden
Gate University in San Francisco.
He joined Kaiser three years
later and worked as an assistant
administrator for its San Francis-
co medical center and CEO of the
Kaiser Foundation Hospital in
Santa Rosa, Calif. “I still do hospi-
tal visits, and I can tell how well
it’s run in a couple minutes,” he
told Bloomberg in 2015. “How
clean are the floors? How does the
staff respond? What’s the vibe?”
While at Kaiser, he was a mem-
ber of the Bay Area Council, a
business-led public policy organi-
zation advocating for a strong
economy for area residents. He
became Kaiser Permanente’s
chairman in 2014, the year after
he was named CEO.
On Sunday, the company’s
board of directors named Execu-
tive Vice President Gregory Ad-
ams as interim chairman and
CEO.
Mr. Ty sons marriage to Carla
Robinson ended in divorce. Sur-
vivors include his wife, Denise
Bradley-Ty son, and three sons
from his earlier marriage, Alexan-
der, Charles and Bernard J. Tyson
Jr.
[email protected]Bernard J. Tyson, 60
Chief executive oversaw
U.S. health-care giant
Brad Barket/getty images For Fast companyB ernard J. Tyson increased Kaiser Permanente’s annual revenue
from $53 billion to more than $82.8 billion.
BY EMILY LANGER
Jennifer Davis w as born to Jew-
ish parents in Johannesburg,
where her German mother and
South African father had sought
refuge from the anti-Semitism
th at increasingly threatened Ger-
man society i n the early 1930s.
As she came of age in the after-
math of the Holocaust, Ms. Davis
reflected on Nazi ideas of Aryan
supremacy and the consequences
they brought in Europe. “I
learned,” she told the South Afri-
can weekly the Mail and Guard-
ian, “that when we said ‘never
again,’ we meant, really, never
again would we allow such things
to happen t o any other people, not
just to Jewish people.”
Ms. Davis, who died Oct. 15 at
85, went on to devote decades of
her life to dismantling the apart-
heid system of racial segregation
that cleaved South African society
and oppressed the black majority
for nearly half a century after its
establishment in 1948.
Her activism made her persona
non grata in her home country, in
the description of a history of her
work published by the South Afri-
can government, and drove her in
1966 into exile in the United
States, where she redoubled her
efforts as one of the most forceful
advocates for the divestment of
stock in companies that did busi-
ness in apartheid-era South Afri-
ca.
“Simple arithmetic, which
proved correct, suggested to us
that the companies would stay,
enjoying the b enefits of apartheid,
until they calculated that staying
was costing them more than leav-
ing,” she told an interviewer for
the book “No Easy Victories: Afri-
can Liberation and American Ac-
tivists Over a Half Century, 1950-
2000.” “ So we needed t o raise t heir
pain — and that meant increasing
the size of the investments that
might be pulled out of their con-
trol.”
The divestment movement,
along with other efforts in South
Africa and abroad, was credited
with helping bring about the end
of apartheid in the early 1990s.
Nelson Mandela, the anti-apart-
heid leader who had spent 27
years in prison, became South Af-
rica’s f irst black president in 1994.
But before those momentous
events, the push for divestment
was a controversial matter. Some
opponents of apartheid support-
ed a strategy represented by the
Sullivan principles, named for
Baptist minister, Leon H. Sullivan,
who introduced them in 1977.
They called for companies with
operations in South Africa to en-
sure such standards as equal pay
for equal work and integrated
work facilities.
Ms. Davis, who from 1981 to
2000 w as executive director of the
New York-based American Com-
mittee o n Africa, found t hose prin-
ciples, well-intentioned as they
may have been, woefully insuffi-
cient. (In time, confronted withthe intransigence of t he apartheid
regime, Sullivan, too, adopted a
more aggressive stance.)
“The struggle in South Africa is
not about desegregation of the
workplace or integration of bath-
rooms. It is about ending the rac-
ist rule of a small, w hite m inority,”
Ms. Davis wrote in a commentary
published in the New York Times
in 1987. “Inside South Africa to-
day, millions of disenfranchised
people pursue this struggle for
freedom and political power — in
the face of police bullets, mass
arrests, torture and constant ha-
rassment.”
Ms. Davis spoke before Con-
gress and the United Nations, on
university campuses and to reli-
gious organizations, pension ad-
ministrators, union officials and
lawmakers. She coordinated a
blizzard of newsletters and re-
ports on the economics of apart-
heid.
According to figures cited by
U.S. News and World Report in
1985, American companies repre-
sented as much as 10 percent of
investment i n South African man-
ufacturing, including 70 percent
of computer manufacturing and
44 percent of the oil industry, and
U.S. banks had extended loans
totaling nearly $4 billion to South
African b orrowers.
“We did lots of new learning in
those days, not only about Africa,
but about the nature of invest-ment,” Ms. Davis told the inter-
viewer for “No Easy Victories.”
“We recognized that although
both universities and churches
controlled many millions of dol-
lars of investments, the billion-
dollar funds we could influence
were held by states and cities,
often in public employee pension
funds. We needed to strengthen
ties with union members and
leaders, with state and city public
officials and legislators and with
investment a dvisers.”
The divestment movement se-
cured a major victory in 1986,
when Congress overrode a veto by
President Ronald Reagan of legis-
lation that, among other mea-
sures, prohibited all new Ameri-
can investment in South African
businesses and halted the impor-
tation of iron, steel, coal, uranium
and other products from South
Africa.
Ms. Davis was persuasive to
American audiences in part be-
cause she brought to policy de-
bates the clear-eyed insight that
sometimes only an outsider can
provide.
She once went to a dinner p arty
in the United States at t he home of
some wealthy acquaintances
where another guest remarked to
her, “You must see great differenc-
es between South Africa and here.”
“Of course I did, but I also saw
great similarities,” Ms. Davis re-
called. “So I said, ‘Yes, but I also seea tremendous number of very
poor black people, and wealthy
people seem mostly white.’ Slight-
ly disconcerted, she pulled herself
up to her elegant height and said,
‘There are no poor people in
America.’ ”
The anecdote, Ms. Davis said,
proved a useful tool when Ameri-
cans asked her “why many whites
in South Africa seemed blind to
the destruction inflicted on black
society by apartheid.”
Jennifer Heymann was born in
Johannesburg on Dec. 15, 1933.
Her father was a pediatrician, and
her mother had been a pharmacist
in Germany.
Ms. Davis was in high school
when she first became engaged
with c urrent affairs. She recalled a
heated political discussion with a
teacher at the time of the 1948
election, which brought the Na-
tional Party and the a partheid s ys-
tem to power. Ms. Davis become so
emotional as she spoke, she said,
that she snapped in two the ruler
she was h olding in her h and.
“I think perhaps this was the
first time I felt so passionate about
politics,” she said. “I have never
lost the feeling that what we as
individuals do, and how we allow
power to be u sed, m atters.”
Ms. Davis received a bachelor’s
degree in 1954 from the University
of the Witwatersrand in Johan-
nesburg, where she began her ac-
tivist work in earnest, and where
she studied literature, economics
and economic history. She con-
ceded that the curricular mix was
a “strange combination,” but it
was also one that informed her
future work, g rounded as it was i n
the ability of economics to shape
society.
After her graduation, she
worked in the trade union move-
ment and taught in South Africa
before settling in the United
States. She joined the American
Committee on Africa in 1967 and
had lived since 2003, following
her retirement from the organiza-
tion, in Washington.
Her death was confirmed by
her partner of 46 years, Derek
Boyd, who said she died at the
home o f a friend in Montclair, N.J.,
from a cerebral hemorrhage she
suffered while traveling.
Ms. Davis’s marriage to Michael
Davis ended in divorce. In addi-
tion to Boyd, of Washington, sur-
vivors include two children from
her marriage, Sandra Davis-
Horowitz of Hong Kong and Mark
Davis of Detroit; a brother; and
five grandchildren.
An account of Ms. Davis’s life
published on the website of the
South African president, Cyril Ra-
maphosa, described her as having
been “continually pestered by the
security forces and later threat-
ened with house arrest” during
her early years challenging the
apartheid regime. It praised Ms.
Davis for “dedicated efforts” that
“served not only the South African
cause, but helped the plight of the
African c ontinent as a whole.”
[email protected]JenniFer daVis, 85Activist in anti-apartheid, divestment movement
rick reinhard
Driven into exile in the United States, Jennifer Davis, right, pushed
for divestment from companies that did business in South Africa.