The New York Times. April 04, 2020

B12 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESSATURDAY, APRIL 4, 2020

Patricia Bosworth, who gave up
acting for the writing life, turning
her knowledge of the theater into
a series of biographies and mining
her own extraordinary life for a
pair of powerful memoirs, died on
Thursday in Manhattan. She was
86.
Her stepdaughter, Fia Hatsav,
said the cause was complications
of pneumonia brought on by the
coronavirus.
Ms. Bosworth had some suc-
cess as an actress. She was admit-
ted to the Actors Studio in its glory
days, learning method acting
alongside Marlon Brando and
Marilyn Monroe. She won some
important roles onstage and ap-
peared alongside Audrey Hep-
burn on film.
But she always wanted to write,
and she found material in the
many friendships she had culti-
vated with luminaries in Holly-

wood, the theater world and else-
where — Brando, Montgomery
Clift and the photographer Diane
Arbus among them.
She became a successful jour-
nalist as well, as an editor and
writer for several publications.
She was a contributing editor at
Vanity Fair for many years.
Ms. Bosworth’s best subject,
and the one that underlay most of
her work, was her own eventful
life. She explored it in “Anything
Your Little Heart Desires: An
American Family Story” (1997),
which centers on her charismatic
father, a lawyer who defended two
of the Hollywood Ten in the post-
war anti-Communist hysteria and
saw his career destroyed by the
blacklist; and “The Men in My
Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in
1950s Manhattan” (2017), about
her coming-of-age and emergence
as a writer.
Suicide haunted her. Her father,
who had long abused barbiturates
and alcohol, killed himself, on his

second try, in 1959. And her be- loved younger brother shot himself in his dorm room at Reed Col- lege in Oregon in 1953, tormented by depression and conflicted over his homosexuality. The subjects of Ms. Bosworth’s biographies were either suicides (the photographer Diane Arbus), survivors of a relative’s suicide (Jane Fonda) or flamboyantly self-destructive (Clift, Brando). She explained that writing these books was “one of the ways I coped with and tried to understand why the two men I loved most in the world had decided to kill themselves.” But as challenging as it may have been, Ms. Bosworth’s life was hardly grim. Patricia Crum was born into privilege on April 24, 1933, in San Francisco, the daughter of Bartley Cavanaugh Crum and Anna Bosworth Crum, who was known as Cutsie. Her mother was a for- mer crime reporter who wrote several novels, among them “Strumpet Wind” (1938). Her father, who was known as Bart, encouraged Patricia’s acting aspirations, and it was he who ad- vised her to take her mother’s maiden name — depriving future critics of the chance, as she put it, to castigate a “crummy perform- ance by Patricia Crum.” During Ms. Bosworth’s child- hood, her father practiced law in San Francisco and served as an adviser to the liberal-leaning in- ternationalist Wendell Willkie, in his Republican presidential campaign in 1940 and for some years after. In her first memoir, Ms. Bosworth remembered her parents as glamorous figures, always leaving for parties or throwing them, their living room crowded with celebrities. But there were shadows behind the California sunlight. Her mother, feeling abandoned by her constantly traveling husband, had affairs; her father’s heartfelt liberalism would run athwart of the postwar Red Scare. More than one reviewer of “Any- thing Your Little Heart Desires” compared the Crums’ story to an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Mr. Crum’s decline followed his defense of members of the Holly- wood Ten, who had refused to co- operate with the House Un-Amer- ican Activities Committee in its attempt to root out suspected Com- munists in the movie industry. His corporate clients disappeared. He moved the family to New York, where he purchased the left-wing newspaper PM and tried to turn it around as The New York Star. The attempt failed, and he became de- spondent, worried about money and harassed by the F.B.I. Mr. Crum eventually joined a Wall Street law firm and attracted celebrity clients. He represented Rita Hayworth, for one, in her di- vorce from the playboy Prince Aly Kahn. Ms. Bosworth, then a star- struck teenager, met another client, Montgomery Clift, lounging in the family living room. She kept one of his cigarette butts for the

rest of her life. Enrolling at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Ms. Bosworth, in her first semester, impetuously married a fortune- hunting art student she had known for six weeks. He quickly became psychologically and phys- ically abusive, she later wrote. Ms. Bosworth’s parents paid her tuition, but she was left to sup- port her husband and his grandmother. While continuing her classes, she began to model, land- ing a national campaign for Prell shampoo. It was as a model that she met and formed a bond with Diane Arbus, who at the time was assisting her husband, the fashion photographer Allan Arbus.

Her brief marriage over, Ms. Bosworth graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1955 and auditioned for the acting teacher Lee Stras- berg at the Actors Studio; her ac- ceptance, she later said, was “one of the high points of my life.” The studio, the birthplace of method acting, was in its heyday. In addition to Monroe and Brando, fellow members included Paul Newman, Elaine Stritch, Ben Gaz- zara and Steve McQueen, who once took her for a ride on his motorcycle. The studio crackled with erotic energy, and in the mid-1950s the casting couch was an accepted furnishing. Ms. Bosworth was cast in “Blue Denim,” directed by

Arthur Penn, at the Westport Playhouse in Connecticut in 1955. Among other roles, she went on to play Laura in “The Glass Me- nagerie” at the Palm Beach Play- house in Florida in 1956 (“the high point of my acting career”) and a character based on Nora Ephron in “Howie,” a 1959 play by Nora’s mother, Phoebe Ephron. In the movies Ms. Bosworth was a young nun, the best friend of Audrey Hepburn’s title character, in “A Nun’s Story” (1959). Ms. Bosworth ended her adven- turous decade by marrying Mel Arrighi, a playwright and novelist, in 1966. They were together until his death in 1986. She began writing during those years, contribut-

ing articles about theater to The New York Times and New York magazine. In time she worked as an editor at McCall’s, Harper’s Ba- zaar, Mirabella and Vanity Fair magazines. Ms. Bosworth’s first book was “Montgomery Clift: A Biography,” published in 1978. Rosalyn Drexler, writing in The Times, praised Ms. Bosworth’s “total im- mersion in the subject as well as her artistry.” When “Diane Arbus: A Biogra- phy” appeared in 1984, the Times critic Christopher Lehmann- Haupt acclaimed it as “detailed and balanced” as well as “highly intelligent.” Those adjectives showed up in most reviews of Ms. Bosworth’s work. (That book was the basis of a 2006 film, “Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Ar- bus,” starring Nicole Kidman.) Ms. Bosworth moved on to “Marlon Brando,” a book in the Penguin Lives series, in 2001, and later “Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman” (2011), a best seller. Ms. Bosworth had first met Ms. Fonda when they were both students at the Actors Studio. Ms. Bosworth told Publishers Weekly that in “Jane Fonda” she had tried to write as much a cul- tural history as a biography, to give context to Ms. Fonda’s ever- evolving career. “In the 10 years I took to write her biography, I observed many Janes,” she wrote in an essay for The Times in 2011. “I saw the Jane with the agenda; the girlish, self- effacing Jane when she’s with men; the armchair shrink Jane who spouts advice about sex and love and exercise as if by rote whenever she’s on TV; the ruth- less, hard-as-nails Jane in busi- ness and self-promotion; the gen- erous Jane with friends in need; the loving grandmother-matri- arch Jane; the celebrity Jane who in May walked down the red car- pet at Cannes in a glittery white gown and left all the young star- lets in her dust.” Creating a biography, Ms. Bosworth wrote on her website, was “like solving a mystery, always looking for clues.” Elegantly, and without self-pity or sentimen- tality, she eventually turned her attention to the mystery of her own life. Her first memoir was also a cul- tural history, backed by prodi- gious research, following her father’s life from his high-powered law career in San Francisco to his radicalization by the general strike of 1934 and his involvement in left-wing causes. Ms. Bosworth’s second memoir, “The Men in My Life,” covered her 20s, from 1953 to 1963. It is both the story of a survivor who strug- gles with the suicides of her father and brother and an entertaining account of her sexual awakening and life among actors in New York. In addition to her stepdaughter, Ms. Bosworth is survived by her partner, Douglas Schwalbe; a stepson, Léo Palumbo; and five step-grandchildren. She taught literary nonfiction at Columbia University and Barnard College and for some years ran the Playwright-Directors Unit at the Actors Studio. Her final book, “Protest Song: Paul Robeson, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Equality,” is to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux next year.

Patricia Bosworth, 86,

Who Gave Up Acting

To Write Books, Dies

By ELSA DIXLER

Ms. Bosworth with her biography of Montgomery Clift, which was published in 1978.

GRAHAM BEZANT/TORONTO STAR, VIA GETTY IMAGES

SCOTT WINTROW/GETTY IMAGES

Patricia Bosworth in 2006.

Finding material in

her friendships with

Hollywood royalty.

Ms. Bosworth, left, appeared alongside Audrey Hepburn in the 1959 movie “A Nun’s Story.” Right, Ms. Bosworth’s second memoir, “The Men in My Life,” was published in 2017.

WARNER BROS. PATRICIA WALL/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Julia Carmel contributed report-
ing.

Kevin Thomas Duffy, a federal
judge who presided over decades
of high-profile trials in Manhattan,
including those of mob bosses,
radical revolutionaries and the
terrorists who bombed the World
Trade Center in 1993, died on
Wednesday in Greenwich, Conn.
He was 87.
A longtime colleague and
friend, P. Kevin Castel, said the
cause was Covid-19, the disease
caused by the coronavirus. Judge
Duffy died in Greenwich Hospital
and lived in that town.
Judge Duffy is probably most
widely remembered for presiding
at the trial of the Islamic militants
who were convicted in the 1993 at-

tack on the trade center. He also
oversaw another trial in the 1990s
involving an aborted plot to blow
up as many as a dozen American
airliners over the Pacific Ocean.
In the 1970s, he heard a pro-
longed, contentious case over
cleaning up New York City’s air;
and in the ’90s he presided in an
emotional clash over the exclu-
sion of an Irish gay and lesbian
group from the line of march in the
city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day pa-

rade. In handling these and thou- sands of other criminal and civil matters over almost 40 years, Judge Duffy gained a reputation for being colorful and often con- troversial in the courtroom, dis- playing an independent, even de- fiant streak and delivering unvar- nished comments from the bench. He would sometimes compliment jurors on their apparel. He once referred to a prosecu- tor as “that obnoxious little twerp.” In another case, an appeals court threw out a verdict because it said that the judge’s comments before the jury — including calling a lawyer’s questions “silly” and “goofy” — might have preju- diced the jurors against the lawyer’s client, who lost the case. After one of the six men convicted in the 1993 trade center at- tack maintained at his sentencing that he had not been involved in the bombing — in an underground garage, killing six people — Judge Duffy called him an “out-and-out” liar and declared, “The others were low, you’re even lower.” When Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was convicted of directing the bombing, asserted that terrorism was the only viable response to American policies toward Pal- estinian and other Muslim people, Judge Duffy read passages from the Quran showing, he said, that “your God is not Allah.” “Death was truly your God, your master, your one and only re- ligion,” he said. The judge sentenced Mr. Yousef to life in prison plus 240 years. He sentenced the five other conspira- tors to 240 years each, though an appeals court later said that he

had erred in setting the terms for four of the five men, and he resen- tenced them to 108 to 117 years each. In another trial before Judge Duffy, Mr. Yousef and two other men were convicted of plotting to blow up jetliners over the Pacific. Because of his involvement in those terrorism cases, the judge had round-the-clock security for about a decade.

Judge Duffy also presided in 1983 at one of the several Brink’s robbery and murder trials stem- ming from the 1981 shootout be- tween the police and Black Liber- ation Army and other radicals in Rockland County, N.Y., in which a guard and two officers were killed. The trials led to several convic- tions. And in 1985 he oversaw the trial of Paul Castellano, the reputed head of the Gambino organized crime family, who was assassi- nated outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan after the trial had begun. Some lawyers considered Judge Duffy unduly tough in met- ing out sentences. For his part, he made it clear that he favored wide discretion in sentencing. In a 1987 decision, as federal

sentencing rules that limited the discretion of judges were about to take effect, he criticized people who, as he put it, wanted sentences to be imposed by “a mindless robot, automaton or comput- er.” Kevin Thomas Duffy, who pre- ferred using his full middle name, was born in the Bronx on Jan. 10, 1933, to Patrick and Mary (Mc- Garrell) Duffy. His father was a carpenter, his mother a home- maker. After earning bachelor’s and law degrees from Fordham Uni- versity, he was an assistant United States attorney in Manhat- tan and a lawyer in private prac- tice. In September 1972, he was the administrator of the New York re- gional office of the Securities and Exchange Commission when President Richard M. Nixon nominated him to the United States Court for the Southern Dis- trict of New York. Judge Duffy married Irene Krumeich in 1957. She was a judge with the New York State Family Court and also served in the Crim- inal Court and the New York Su- preme Court. She survives him, as do a daughter, Irene Moira Luel- ing; two sons, Kevin Jr. and Gav- in; two sisters, Marie Heslin and Patricia McKeon; and eight grandchildren. His son Patrick died in 2017. Judge Duffy also had a home in Southampton, N.Y. One of the most drawn-out cases overseen by Judge Duffy was the 1970s battle involving New York City’s air quality. Envi- ronmental groups contended that

the administrations of Gov. Hugh L. Carey and Mayor Abraham D. Beame had failed to enforce a pol- lution-reducing plan — including the imposition of tolls on East River bridges to discourage traffic — to which previous state and city administrations had agreed. May- or Beame called the plan ques- tionable and too costly. In two early rulings in the case, Judge Duffy declined to order the city to comply with the plan. But after an appeals court directed him to issue enforcement orders, the case became one of seemingly endless strife. At one point, Judge Duffy threatened to hold Gover- nor Carey in contempt if he failed to meet one of the judge’s dead- lines. The case ended without contempt proceedings and with the toll provision scrapped. In the case of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, Judge Duffy ruled in 1993 that the parade’s sponsor, a Roman Catholic fraternal order, had a constitutional right as a private organization to bar the gay and lesbian group from marching. The United States Supreme Court later issued a similar decision in a parallel case involving Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. In addressing jurors before one of the World Trade Center trials, Judge Duffy provided some in- sight into his courtroom manner, suggesting that his informality was intended to make jurors feel at ease. None of the trial participants would be allowed to use a word longer than “delicatessen,” he said, because legal matters should be expressed in language simple enough for everybody, including himself, to understand.

Kevin Thomas Duffy, 87, U.S. Judge Who Presided Over Mob and Terrorism Trials

By JOSEPH P. FRIED

Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy in 2016 in his chambers. Left, defendants in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Julia Carmel contributed report-
ing.

HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Criticizing people who

wanted sentences to

be imposed by ‘a

mindless robot.’

The New York Times. April 04, 2020

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