B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAy, MARCH 3 , 2020
obituaries
BY ADAM BERNSTEINJames Lipton, who had a mul-
tifaceted career in entertainment
as a soap opera writer, Broadway
lyricist and producer-director of
star-studded TV spectacles, but
who became best known as the
discreetly probing host of the
Bravo TV s how “Inside the Actors
Studio,” d ied March 2 at h is home
in Manhattan. He was 93.
The cause was bladder cancer,
said his wife, Kedakai Lipton.
Mr. Lipton entered show busi-
ness in the 1950s as a young
writer and actor brimming with
ambition. For years he struggled
to find his place in the industry,
laboring over soap opera scripts
— he sometimes worked on three
shows at once — and weathering
two flops when he tried to break
into mainstream musical theater
as a lyricist and librettist in the
1960s.
He eventually became an im-
presario behind television spe-
cials featuring comedian Bob
Hope as well as made-for-TV
galas honoring the arts and
American history. He was head
writer from 1982 to 1987 of the TV
soap opera “Capitol,” set in and
around Washington, and contin-
ued to pour out television films,
one based on his novel “Mirrors,”
about ballet hopefuls in the com-
petitive world of New Yo rk dance.
It featured echoes of his own
professional life.
“I’m not that fond of every-
thing that’s been written or
filmed about dance,” Mr. Lipton
told the New York Times.
“They’re essentially variations on
‘42d Street.’ The star is hurt, the
understudy goes on and a new
star is born. More interesting to
me are all those dancers to whom
that never happens.”
Although he had spent the
great part of his career toiling in
genres that rarely attract critical
esteem, Mr. Lipton was invited in
the early 1990s to join the board
of the Actors Studio workshop, a
vaunted organization established
in 1947 by Elia Kazan, Robert
Lewis and Cheryl Crawford to
train actors, directors and writ-
ers. For decades its operations
had been dominated by artistic
director Lee Strasberg, who died
in 1982.
Mr. Lipton found the studio’s
finances in grave c ondition and
proposed a master’s-level drama
program — initially as a partner-
ship with the New School in
Manhattan and later with Pace
University — to generate i ncome.
The MFA program, launched
1993 with Mr. Lipton as dean,
proved a near-instant success.
The next year, he created “Inside
the Actors Studio” for Bravo to
increase the program’s name rec-
ognition.
The show featured an A-list
roster of Hollywood and Broad-
way royalty, including Paul New-
man, Barbra Streisand, Robin
Williams, Spike Lee and Steven
Spielberg. In exchange for their
appearance, Mr. Lipton provided
a relatively safe space for some-
times guarded celebrities to re-
veal themselves more personally
before a live audience.
Mr. Lipton used large blue
index cards, with notes and ques-
tions based on his voluminous
research about his interviewees,
to guide their conversations. He
was inquisitive but not tabloid-
minded, shunning uncomfort-
able questions.
Perhaps because of his own
experience, he never lingered on
projects that were critical or com-
mercial failures. Instead, he
called upon his deep knowledge
of stagecraft and the entertain-
ment industry to discuss his
guests’ philosophies toward their
lives and work.
“It is not journalism,” Mr. Lip-
ton told the Times. “It is meant as
an antidote to what is normally
done with these people. I want to
create an environment where
people are willing to talk about
the craft, not about themselves as
people but as artists.”
Bespectacled, bearded and
with a tendency to emphasize his
well-rounded vowels, Mr. Lipton
came across as cerebral, if some-
times sycophantic. He often end-ed his show with a questionnaire
popularized by French television
host Bernard Pivot. “If heaven
exists,” Mr. Lipton asked, “what
would you like to hear God say
when you arrive?”
“Inside the Actors Studio” won
a 2013 Emmy Award for out-
standing informational series or
special. He left the program in
2018, a year before it moved to
Ovation TV.
“The show is, in the end, about
the interior life of those who love
the art form, about the struggle
that leaves them lonely, intro-
spective, unsure,” Times journal-
ist Chris Hedges wrote in a 2001
profile of Mr. Lipton. His “ency-
clopedic knowledge and uncon-
ditional acceptance — he lets his
guests edit things they do not like
from the tape — combine to
create intimate and often moving
portraits of lives in progress.”
Mr. Lipton’s earnestness and
unctuous flattery was ripe for
lampooning. On “Saturday NightLive,” Will Ferrell played the Ac-
tors Studio host as verbose, self-
involved and prone to making
grandiose claims about forgetta-
ble careers and praising a guest’s
banalities as wisdom.
Mr. Lipton acknowledged and
embraced the caricature, telling
CNN that he admired Ferrell.
“We’re good friends — a nd I think
he’s got me cold, the rat,” he said.
Louis James Lipton was born
in Detroit on Sept. 19, 1926. His
mother was a teacher and librari-
an. His father, who had emigrat-
ed from Poland as a child w ith the
surname Lipschitz, abandoned
the family for an itinerant life as a
fiction writer and educator; later,
leading “jazz canto” workshops
on the West Coast, he attracted
an enthusiastic following among
Beat authors such as Allen Gins-
berg, Kenneth Rexroth and Law-
rence Ferlinghetti.
Raised by his mother and ma-
ternal grandparents, the younger
Lipton worked odd jobs to helpsupport his family while also
developing an interest in theater
and radio performance. For a
period, he played a child nephew
of the Lone Ranger on a local
Detroit radio station.
After brief Air Force service, he
found himself in Paris. At a finan-
cial low point, he worked as a
procurer of prostitutes. He re-
turned to the United States deter-
mined, he later said, “to be a
lawyer because that was as far
away from my father’s lunacy
that I could imagine.”
He e nrolled i n acting classes to
prepare himself for a career as a
courtroom advocate but became
immersed in a cultural milieu
that included Strasberg and Har-
old Clurman. “A bout five years
later, I said to myself, ‘Stop kid-
ding. You don’t want to be a
lawyer. This is what you want to
do,’ ” he recalled in a 2013 Parade
interview.
To subsidize more classes in
voice, modern dance and chore-ography, he took acting jobs in
low-budget films and had a re-
curring role as a doctor on the
soap opera “The Guiding Light.”
He began contributing scripts
and was soon named head writer
of the show in addition to writing
for two other soaps, “The Edge of
Night” and “A nother World.”
Mr. Lipton made his Broadway
debut as an actor in Lillian Hell-
man’s 1951 drama “The Autumn
Garden” and teamed with com-
poser Sol Berkowitz on a Prohibi-
tion-era musical called “Nowhere
to Go but Up,” directed by Sidney
Lumet and starring To m Bosley.
The show, for which Mr. Lipton
wrote the book and lyrics, closed
after a week amid dreadful re-
views.
The title, however, proved pro-
phetic. Mr. Lipton’s next musical,
“Sherry!,” with a score by com-
poser Laurence Rosenthal and
based on George S. Kaufman and
Moss Hart’s hit comedy “The
Man Who Came to Dinner,”
squeaked out a run that lasted
two months. (A 2004 all-star
recording of the score — featur-
ing To mmy Tune, Bernadette Pe-
ters, Nathan Lane, Carol Burnett
and Mike Myers, among others —
was greeted with more enthusi-
asm.)
His first two marriages, to
actresses Shirley Blanc and Nina
Foch, ended in divorce. In 1970,
he married Kedakai Turner, a
former model who became a real
estate executive. She is his only
immediate survivor.
An autodidact, Mr. Lipton
taught himself French and Latin,
learned to fly planes and was a
champion equestrian in show-
jumping tournaments. He also
wrote a book on language, “An
Exaltation of Larks,” which ex-
amined obscure collective nouns
(a murmuration of starlings, a
rag of colts, a skulk of foxes) and
has been in print since it was first
published in 1968. Over the years,
he proposed his own nouns of
multitude, including an unction
of undertakers, a shrivel of critics
and a queue of actors.
[email protected]JAMES LIPTON, 93
‘Inside the Actors Studio’ host interviewed Broadway, Hollywood r oyalty
KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
James Lipton received a lifetime achievement honor at the daytime Emmy Awards in 2007. He wrote
soap operas, TV films and helped produce made-for-TV galas honoring the arts and American history.BY JIA LYNN YANGJack Welch, the hard-charging
former head of General Electric
who transformed his company
and corporate America with his
ruthless attention to the bottom
line, died March 1 at 84.
The cause was renal failure,
said family spokeswoman Abby
Whalen. She did not say where he
died.
The hallmarks of Mr. Welch’s
tenure during the 1980s and
1990s have become part of the
playbook for chief executives ev-
erywhere: unflinching layoffs,
ambitious expansion around the
world, lucrative stock options for
high-performing executives and a
relentless drive to reward share-
holders with stellar earnings
quarter after quarter.
His methods were divisive.
Nicknamed “Neutron Jack” for
his massive firings of GE employ-
ees, he was hailed in 1999 as
“manager of the century” by For-
tune magazine.
On paper, the results were un-
deniable. In his 21 years at the
helm of GE, Mr. Welch increased
annual revenue from $25 billion
to $130 billion; profits rose to
$15 billion from $1.5 billion; and
the company’s total value on the
stock market grew 30-fold to
more than $400 billion — which
at one point made it the most
valuable public company in the
United States.
His success turned him into a
model for middle managers ev-
erywhere, who pored over his
books on management to learn
his methods, or what he called
“the Welch Way.”
He was in many ways an un-
likely person to lead the but-
toned-down General Electric. He
was born to working-class Irish
American parents without high
school degrees. He had a stutter
and began his career at GE as a
plastics researcher with a PhD in
chemical engineering.
“The odds were against me,”
Mr. Welch wrote in his best-sell-
ing memoir, “Jack: Straight From
the Gut,” which was published in
2001 and sold more than 800,000
copies. “Many of my p eers regard-
ed me as the round peg in a
square hole, too different for GE. I
was brutally honest and outspo-
ken. I was impatient and, to
many, abrasive.”
Mr. Welch ran GE as if he were
a general who would settle for
nothing less than world domina-
tion. He spun off units with little
sentiment and charged into new
industries with bold acquisitions.
And he wasn’t afraid to take on
more debt to finance the compa-
ny’s expansion.
Mr. Welch’s decisions led —
and reflected — the wrenching
changes going on more broadly in
the U.S. economy as it shifted
away from old-line manufactur-
ing toward more services, espe-
cially in finance. He took a com-
pany that was making hair dryers
and disposable razor cartridges
and moved it headlong into com-
mercial banking, high-tech medi-
cal devices and television
through the takeover of the NBC
network.Scandals
His long record of success at
pleasing Wall Street was dotted
with a number of scandals. In
1992, the company’s aircraft en-
gine division pleaded guilty to
defrauding the Pentagon of
$42 million and giving the money
to an Israeli general to win jet
engine orders. In 1994, the com-
pany revealed that a rogue bond
trader at t he newly acquired secu-
rities firm Kidder Peabody had
faked $350 million in profit.
After it became clear that GE
had for years dumped pollutants
into the Hudson River, Mr.
Welch’s legal team argued tire-
lessly that the firm had no respon-
sibility to clean it up. In 2002,
after Mr. Welch left, the Environ-
mental Protection Agency and GE
reached a settlement in which the
company would remove the toxic
chemicals, but environmentalists
said the firm cleaned up only a
fraction of the mess.
A messy divorce from his sec-
ond wife, Jane Beasley, also cast a
shadow on Mr. Welch’s reputa-
tion. Divorce filings showed he
was enjoying elaborate retire-
ment perks from the company,
including the use of a Manhattan
apartment that cost $80,000 per
month to rent.
The company’s performance
soon after Mr. Welch left also
showed cracks in the legend. GE
nearly cratered during the 2008
financial crisis because its fi-
nance unit — which Mr. Welch
turned into a juggernaut that by
then accounted for about half the
company’s profits — h ad taken on
too much risk and required a
massive bailout.Some began to wonder wheth-
er Mr. Welch had been simply the
beneficiary of great timing. His
time at the top of GE coincided
almost perfectly with a historic
bull market in the United States
during the 1980s and 1990s. He
left just before the market took a
dive in 2001.
“What made his strategy possi-
ble, and fully shape it — was the
rising stock market — and the
new ideology that praised free
markets even as they failed,”
wrote journalist and economic
policy consultant Jeff Madrick of
Mr. Welch in his book “A ge of
Greed: The Triumph of Finance
and the Decline of America.”
Welch was, “in microcosm, the
new American economy,” Mad-
rick wrote.Working-class roots
John Francis Welch Jr. was
born Nov. 19, 1935, in Peabody,
Mass. The family soon moved to a
working-class neighborhood in
nearby Salem.
The senior Welch worked as a
railroad conductor on the Boston
and Maine commuter line. Mr.
Welch’s mother, the former Grace
Andrews, stayed home to raise
“Jack,” as he became known. Mr.Welch considered her his best
friend and confidante.
During summers, his father
encouraged him to caddie at a
local golf club to make money.
The job made an impression on
Mr. Welch, exposing him to suc-
cessful people and turning him
into a lifelong golf enthusiast.
He graduated in 1957 from the
University of Massachusetts at
Amherst with a chemical engi-
neering degree and in 1960 re-
ceived a doctorate in chemical
engineering from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He married a fellow student, Car-
olyn Osburn, in 1959.
After getting his PhD, Mr.
Welch joined GE in a new chemi-
cal development operation in
Pittsfield, Mass. His career began
to take off when he persuaded GE
to open a factory for a new plastic
product called Noryl. Sales grew
quickly, and at age 32, Mr. Welch
was promoted to general manag-
er of the company’s $26 million
plastics business.
“The move put me into the big
leagues with all the trimmings —
an annual invitation to the com-
pany’s top management meeting
every January in Florida and my
first stock options,” Mr. Welchwrote in his memoir.
By 1973, his long-range career
goal became clear: to someday
run GE. That year, he got a big
break when the company made
him responsible for a number of
different businesses, from chemi-
cals to medical systems and appli-
ance components, totaling $2 bil-
lion in sales and 46,000 employ-
ees.
GE’s then-chief executive, Reg-
inald H. Jones, began to notice
Mr. Welch’s success and called on
him to take another job running
the company’s products and ser-
vices — this time in company
headquarters in Fairfield, Conn.,
where he essentially would be
competing against a number of
candidates to become the next
head of GE.
Some at GE thought that Mr.
Welch was too young and brash to
be chief executive. But on April 1,
1981, Jones picked him.Formula for success
The new chief executive quick-
ly launched a formula for GE’s
success: The company would only
be in markets where it was No. 1
or No. 2. And he wanted to tear
apart the firm’s layers of bureau-
cracy.
In the early 1980s, with the
country suffering from recession
and fears that the Japanese would
overtake U.S. firms, Mr. Welch
kept making GE leaner, arguing
that it was more “humane” to cut
people sooner because they
would be able to find jobs faster
than they would if the company
waited for things to get worse.
“A ny organization that thinks
it can guarantee job security is
going down a dead end,” Mr.
Welch wrote in his memoir. “Only
satisfied customers can give peo-
ple job security. Not companies.
That reality put an end to the
implicit contracts that corpora-
tions once had with their employ-
ees.”
By the end of 1985, the compa-
ny’s head count was down to
299,000, compared with 411,000
at the end of 1980.
Mr. Welch was tough on those
who remained, developing a cut-
throat evaluation system in
which each of GE’s businesses
had to rank its employees in three
groups: the top 20 percent, the
vital middle 70 percent and the
bottom 10 percent. Members of
the last group usually had to be
fired.In 1987, Mr. Welch divorced
Carolyn, blaming the failure of
his marriage in part on his worka-
holic tendencies. He soon met his
second wife, Jane Beasley, a law-
yer. He persuaded her to quit her
job and travel with him full time.
She later nursed him through two
heart attacks.
But in 2002, he served her with
divorce papers (bringing along a
state marshal to do the task). He
had fallen in love with Suzy Wet-
laufer, who met Welch when she
was editor of the Harvard Busi-
ness Review and interviewed him
for an article. They later married.
The divorce from Beasley was
public and nasty, as each side
fought over Mr. Welch’s $ 800 mil-
lion fortune. Days before the case
went to trial, the Welches issued a
statement saying they had
reached a settlement. Its terms
were never publicly disclosed.
In 2 001, Mr. Welch handed over
control of the company to Jeffrey
R. Immelt, who, like Mr. Welch,
had spent years running GE’s
plastics division. After GE, Mr.
Welch co-wrote with his wife the
best-selling book, “Winning,”
which sold more than half a mil-
lion copies.
Complete information on sur-
vivors was not immediately avail-
able.
One month before the 2012
presidential election, Mr. Welch
suggested on Twitter that Presi-
dent Barack Obama had manipu-
lated monthly jobs figures to im-
prove his chances of reelection.
Former White House economist
Austan Goolsbee was among
those who fired back via Twitter:
“You’ve lost your mind.”
A reporter at Fortune wrote an
article critical of Mr. Welch’s c om-
ments, and Mr. Welch terminated
his contract with Fortune and
Reuters, where his columns, co-
written with his wife, had ap-
peared.
Brash, unapologetic methods
had been a consistent theme in
Mr. Welch’s career and personal
life.
“This is no perfect business
story,” h e once wrote of his time at
GE. “I believe that business is a lot
like a world-class restaurant.
When you peek behind the kitch-
en doors, the food never looks as
good as when it comes to your
table on fine china perfectly gar-
nished. Business is messy and
chaotic.”
[email protected]JACK WELCH, 84
Corporate America’s ‘manager of the century’ ran GE as a general would
BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS
Jack Welch’s methods were divisive — he was nicknamed “Neutron
Jack” for his massive firing of General Electric employees.