The children in Betsy
Byars’ novels met hard-
ship with self-reliance.
Of the more than
65 books she wrote, many featured
characters with decidedly non-fairy-
tale lives. In Summer of the Swans
(1970)— winner of the Newbery Medal,
one of the most prestigious awards
in children’s literature—an awkward,
orphaned 14-year-old searches for her
intellectually disabled brother after he gets lost
in the woods. The Pinballs (1976) focused on
three children placed in the same foster home;
The Night Swimmers, winner of a 1981 National
Book Award, is about a girl who cares for her
brothers after their mother dies and their father
abandons them to become a country singer.
“Byars has a gift for exposing the soul of the lost
child—the damaged, the alienated, the unloved,”
wrote one reviewer in The New York Times,
though Byars had a more matter-of-fact descrip-
tion of her work. “I take some kids,” she said,
“and throw them into a crisis and solve the crisis.”
Byars grew up in Charlotte, N.C., where her
“father was a textile executive and her mother
was a homemaker,” said The Washington Post.
While a book lover from early on, she had noaspirations to be an author. “Their
photographs looked funny,” she
wrote in a memoir, “as if they’d been
taken to a taxidermist and stuffed.”
Instead, Byars sought a math degree
in college but switched to English
after flunking calculus. She married
“three weeks after her college gradu-
ation,” said Publisher’s Weekly, and
soon had the first of four children.
It was a move to Illinois, where her
husband pursued a graduate degree in engineer-
ing, that led Byars to start writing, said The New
York Times. Bored and lonely, she began con-
tributing articles to magazines and then decided
to try her hand at children’s books, figuring
the ones her daughters read looked easy. “She
endured many rejections before her first book,
Clementine”—about a very demanding stuffed
dragon—“was published in 1962.” The Newbery-
winning Summer of the Swans brought her a new
level of attention; she had to install a larger mail-
box to accommodate a flood of inquiries from
young readers. Byars likened the creative process
to trying to “spin straw into gold.” If a children’s
author gets “very lucky,” she said, “the straw
actually will be turned into gold, for a fleeting
moment by the miraculous mind of a child.”When Mart Crowley’s
play The Boys in the
Band opened in New
York City in 1968,
many theatergoers were stunned by
its unapologetic depiction of gay life.
Although it was an open secret that
leading playwrights such as Edward
Albee and Tennessee Williams were
gay, theater until that point had
tended to tiptoe around a character’s
homosexuality—or demonize it. Crowley tore
open the closet with his first play, which featured
nine gay men at a birthday party who lose their
filters as the booze flows. With lines like “You
show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you
a gay corpse,” The Boys in the Band captured
LGBT pessimism and paranoia one year before
the Stonewall riots. It ran for 1,001 performances
off-Broadway. “All the plays I had ever seen on
the subject were stereotyped, sensational, embar-
rassed, or evasive,” said Crowley, who was gay. “I
tried to be thoughtful and honest.”
Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Miss., to an
alcoholic father and a drug addict mother, said
The New York Times. “I always resented that
Eugene O’Neill already had my best plots,” he
said in 2002. After attending an all-boys Catholic
high school, Crowley studied drama at Catholic
University in Washington, D.C. “He was home inMississippi for the filming of director
Elia Kazan’s movie Baby Doll,” said
The Washington Post, and “talked
his way into a job as a produc-
tion assistant.” In 1966, Crowley
was “broke, unemployed, and fre-
quently drunk” and living in New
York City when he read an essay
by critic Stanley Kauffmann that
lamented the “disguised homosexual
influence” in theater and called on
dramatists to address gay themes head-on. The
essay “amounted to a kind of dare” for Crowley,
who wrote The Boys in the Band in five weeks.
Casting took longer. Many actors declined roles,
fearing the production would be a career killer.
The groundbreaking play was condemned by
some critics for presenting characters who were
“self-loathing and stereotypical,” said RollingStone
.com. Crowley wrote a film adaptation in 1970
and several more plays, but for decades his role
in the gay rights movement was overshadowed
by playwrights such as Larry Kramer and Tony
Kushner. Fifty years after its debut, The Boys in
the Band finally arrived on Broadway, produced
by Hollywood powerhouse Ryan Murphy. When
the play won the 2019 Tony Award for Best
Revival, Crowley finally felt accepted by the gay
community. “You gave me something I’ve never
had before,” he told Murphy, “which is peace.”Obituaries
Mart
Crowley
1935–2020Vik
ing
Bo
oks
fo
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g^ R
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P
The author who wrote about lost children
The playwright who revealed gay life
Betsy
Byars
1928–2020 Herb Goldsmith was hunting
for a name for his new fash-
ion brand in the 1970s when
he noticed a sign at his Long
Island, N.Y., country club:
“Members
Only.” Those
two words
perfectly
captured
the “snob appeal” that
Goldsmith wanted, and he
soon found a garment worthy
of the label at a menswear
store in Munich—a jacket
with narrow shoulder epau-
lets and a Nehru-style collar.
Goldsmith made a sketch,
added a strap to close the
collar, and selected a shiny
chintz fabric available in a
rainbow of colors. Goldsmith
recruited Anthony Geary, a
handsome star of the soap
opera General Hospital, to
appear in ads. The jacket was
an instant fashion phenom-
enon, worn by prep-school
students, pop stars, and even
Presidents Ronald Reagan
and George H.W. Bush.
Goldsmith was born in the
Bronx to a homemaker
mother and a father who
“was a traveling salesman
dealing in men’s coats,” said
The Wall Street Journal. After
a stint in the Army, where he
talked his way into a job as
an Armed Forces radio DJ,
Goldsmith tried and failed
to become an actor. So he
went to work for his father
and later founded his own
apparel company.
By the mid-’80s, Goldsmith
“felt his celebrity campaigns
were going stale,” said The
New York Times. So he
shifted his entire ad budget
to public service announce-
ments, including anti-drug
campaigns, that mentioned
Members Only “in a quick tag
line at the end.” When sales
soared to $125 million a year
in the late ’80s, Goldsmith
sold the firm and turned
his attention to Broadway,
producing some 30 shows.
He saw a direct connection
between fashion and the
stage. Consumers, he wrote,
“have to feel good about the
product and ready to pay the
price of admission: The sale!”Herb
Goldsmith
1927–202035
The Members Only
founder who created
an ’80s fashion essential