The New York Times - 19.09.2019

A24 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

Marina Schiano, who left home
as a teenager in Italy to become a
leading model before making an
even greater impact as a fashion
industry executive, stylist and
confidant of designers and artists,
died on Sept. 8 in Porto Seguro,
Bahia, Brazil. She was 77.
John Calcagno, a longtime
friend, said the cause was compli-
cations of surgery following a re-
cent diagnosis of kidney cancer.
Ms. Schiano had lived in Brazil
since 2001.
Once established as a model in
New York in the late 1960s, Ms.
Schiano enmeshed herself in a cir-
cle of well-known designers, artist
and writers, exhibiting, by all ac-
counts, an eye-catching stylish-
ness and unflappable self-confi-
dence that was hard to ignore.
Over a long career she worked
for two of the most influential de-
signers of the modern era, Yves
Saint Laurent and Calvin Klein.
She dressed celebrities for imagi-
native photo shoots for Vanity
Fair magazine, working with pho-
tographers like Annie Leibovitz
and Herb Ritts. Diana Vreeland,
the influential editor of Vogue,
was an early fan and supporter,
and the jewelry designer Elsa Pe-
retti — when she, too, was a model
— was a friend and frequent com-
panion on evenings out in Man-
hattan, where Ms. Schiano be-
came part of Andy Warhol’s cele-
brated clique.
“She was admired by everyone
who was important at that time in
New York: Halston, Andy Warhol,
Saint Laurent, Diana Vreeland,
the society ladies who loved her,”
the fashion journalist André Leon
Talley, a friend since the
mid-1970s, said in a phone inter-
view.
As a model in the late 1960s and
early ’70s, Ms. Schiano didn’t look
like her competition — her fea-
tures were more assertive than
conventionally pretty — but she
nevertheless appeared in the
pages of Vogue, in its American,
British and French editions, as
well as in other fashion magazines
of the time.
Ms. Vreeland was particularly
taken by her. “I suspect that Diana
Vreeland liked her because some-
how she reminded her of herself,”
the designer Diane von Fursten-
berg, who met Ms. Schiano in
about 1970, said in a phone inter-
view.
“Diana Vreeland liked to dis-
cover people who looked differ-
ent,” she added.
It was as a model that Ms. Schi-
ano met the designer for whom
she would become muse and,
eventually, employee: Mr. Saint
Laurent. Ms. Schiano both re-
flected and inspired his aesthetic
of the period, with designs that

were refined but often comfort-

ably wearable.

“She really embodied the vision

of what Yves Saint Laurent was

about and what he had in mind

about women,” said the makeup

artist Francois Nars, a close friend

of Ms. Schiano’s since the 1980s.

In 1972, Mr. Saint Laurent and

his partner, Pierre Bergé, hired

Ms. Schiano to run their new

men’s wear boutique on Madison

Avenue. She eventually became

president of the company’s North

American operations.

Ms. Schiano had virtually no

business experience when the two

men took her on, but her self-as-

suredness and understanding of

the brand won them over, said

Madison Cox, president of Fonda-

tion Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Lau-

rent and the widower of Mr. Bergé.

“She was smart, she was no-

nonsense, she was a hard worker

and she was the perfect ambassa-

dress, as opposed to a corporate

gentleman in a gray suit,” he said.

She had an emphatic presence:

about six feet tall in heels, always

impeccably dressed, seemingly

always wearing red lipstick, her

hair a lustrous ebony. “She was

walking down the street as if she

was walking down the catwalk,”

Mr. Cox said.

And then there was her voice:

deep, husky and heavily flavored

with her native Italian.

“She told me that Helmut New-

ton had said to her, ‘I wish I could

photograph your voice,’ ” Mr. Nars

said.

By the early 1980s, Ms. Schiano

had moved to Calvin Klein to over-

see publicity. Her own look was

grander than Mr. Klein’s trade-

mark minimalism; what she could

offer, however, were contacts and

a sense of unquestionable chic.

“She was photographed by

John Fairchild at Women’s Wear,

always for Saint Laurent, with

Saint Laurent, in Saint Laurent,”

said Mr. Calcagno, a colleague in

that era, referring to the editor of

Women’s Wear Daily. “I think

Calvin wanted some of that glam-

our.”

After a few years working for

Mr. Klein, Ms. Schiano joined Van-

ity Fair as the magazine’s execu-

tive style editor.

“I wasn’t looking for someone to

just get clothes,” Tina Brown, who

was editor of the magazine at the

time, said in a phone interview. “I

was looking for someone who

could be our sort of style setter for

the magazine, in a way that was

combining fashion, a social point

of view and an ability to handle the

big personalities and get them to

do covers that were out of the

box.”

For one shoot Ms. Schiano

dressed Madonna in specially-

made children’s clothes; for an-

other, for the cover of a 1993 issue,

she had Cindy Crawford in a black

maillot giving the singer-song-

writer K.D. Lang, in dapper men's

wear, a hot cream shave in a bar-

ber’s chair.

“She was herself a sort of a peer

to the people we photographed,”

Ms. Brown said, “and that made a

big difference to their willingness

to cooperate.”

After leaving Vanity Fair in the

mid-1990s, Ms. Schiano intro-

duced her own line of bold jew-

elry; the standout items were

oversize rings in silver and gold

adorned with semiprecious

stones. Though sold at high-end

stores like Barneys New York, the

collection was only moderately

successful.

Moving to Brazil in late 2001,

Ms. Schiano mostly gave up her

designer wear for simple white

cotton caftans and lost touch with

all but a core group of New York

City friends. “I think she was done

— she was done with the whole

scene,” Mr. Nars said.

Marina Schiano was born in Na-

ples on Nov. 18, 1941. She rarely

spoke about her parents, Michele

and Anna (Facciolli) Schiano, and

left home as a teenager.

“It’s almost as if she’d been an

orphan,” a friend, Isabel Rattazzi,

said by phone.

She carved out a modeling ca-

reer for herself, first in Italy and

then elsewhere in Europe and

New York, photographed by top

names of that era like Hiro and

Bert Stern.

She is survived by her husband

of more than four decades, Mar-

cus Vinícius Coelho, a photogra-

pher; and a brother, Claudio Schi-

ano. Another brother, Mariano,

died more than a decade ago.

In 1973, Ms. Schiano married

Warhol’s business manager,

Frederick Hughes, in a City Hall

ceremony. The marriage was

short-lived.

Ms. Schiano’s Neapolitan roots

remained part of her identity in

her New York years. Friends and

colleagues were often invited to

her Art Deco-furnished apart-

ment at 521 Park Avenue for

home-cooked Italian meals. She’d

sometimes regale them with her

impersonations, of the designer

Valentino, for example, or the au-

thor Truman Capote.

“I was told she was very good at

imitating me,” Ms. Von Fursten-

berg said, “but she imitated ev-

erybody.”

On the job, when things didn’t

go as well as she had hoped on a

photo shoot, for example, Ms.

Schiano could let colleagues know

of her displeasure in a full-

throated way.

“She was a diva,” said the writer

Bob Colacello, a longtime friend

and former Warhol associate.

“But it was based on the fact that

she was talented and creative and

impatient with people who didn’t

get things as quickly as she did.”

Marina Schiano, a Distinctive Presence in the Fashion World, Is Dead at 77

RON GALELLA/RON GALELLA COLLECTION, VIA GETTY IMAGES PL GOULD, VIA GETTY IMAGES

Marina Schiano with the designer Yves St. Laurent, left, in 1978 at a party in New York, and with the fashion journalist André Leon Talley, right, circa 1980.

A model who carved

out a career as an

executive and stylist.

By RACHEL FELDER

The package of rough scribbles
that Cathy Guisewite sent to the
Universal Press Syndicate in 1976
did not look at all like the accom-
plished comic strips that Lee Sa-
lem usually edited.
“I could not draw at all,” Ms.
Guisewite recalled. “What I sent
Lee wasn’t organized into a strip;
it was just raw emotion on the
page. These were drawings meant
for my mother’s eyes only: the hu-
miliating, worst moments of one
young career woman’s life.”
But Mr. Salem recognized a
strong new voice in Ms. Guise-
wite’s embryonic work. Rather
than tell her to spend more time
developing her ideas, he quickly
sent her a contract to create
“Cathy” — an anxiety-ridden
(“Ack!"), body-conscious woman

whose vulnerability would strike
a nerve with readers pleased to
follow her, frame by frame.
“He sent me a note with the con-
tract saying he was confident I
could draw,” Ms. Guisewite said in
a phone interview.
The success of “Cathy,” which
ran until 2010, was one of many for
Mr. Salem at Universal, where he
nurtured an empire of quirky and
influential comic strips like Garry
Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” Gary
Larson’s “The Far Side,” Bill Wat-
terson’s “Calvin and Hobbes,”
Aaron McGruder’s “The Boon-
docks” and Lynn Johnston’s “For
Better or for Worse.”
Mr. Salem died on Sept. 2 at his
home in Leawood, Kan. He was 73.
His wife, Anita (Parker) Salem,

said the cause was a stroke.

Mr. Salem understood what

made comic strips tick, prized

lively writing and gave his car-

toonists substantial leeway.

“We believe in the creative

process, and we believe that the

cartoonists, once they have devel-

oped a relationship with their

readers, have a right to try certain

things,” he said in an interview for

the website Mr. Media in 2007.

Mr. Salem also positioned him-

self as what Mr. Trudeau called a

“human firewall” when readers or

newspaper executives were an-

gered by episodes of “Doones-

bury.”

In 1985, Mr. Salem chose not to

distribute six installments of

“Doonesbury” that satirized the

anti-abortion film “The Silent

Scream.” That story arc was “so

controversial that it might kill the

strip altogether,” Mr. Salem told

The New York Times.

A month later, Mr. Trudeau

mocked Frank Sinatra’s alleged

ties to organized crime and had

him, in one strip, threatening a ca-

sino blackjack dealer if she shuf-

fled the cards before dealing.

Through his lawyer, Mickey

Rudin, Sinatra demanded a re-

traction.

“Lee called me up and said in

that calm, steady voice of his,

‘Rudin says you got a lot of the

facts wrong,’ ” Mr. Trudeau said in

a eulogy delivered at Mr. Salem’s

memorial service. “And I replied:

‘Of course I got a lot of the facts

wrong. I made them up.’ ”

So, Mr. Trudeau added, “Lee di-

rected the syndicate’s counsel to

send a one-sentence reply stating

the obvious: that the strip was

covered by the First Amendment.

Rudin stood down.”

Lee Salem was born on July 21,

1946, in Orlando, Fla., and grew up

in Boston and Portsmouth, N.H.

His parents were Rosemary

(Segars) Salem, a waitress, bar-

tender and factory worker, and

Louis Salem.

Mr. Salem received a bachelor’s

degree in English from Park Col-

lege in Parkville, Mo., and taught

high school English for a year. He

then earned his master’s in Eng-

lish at the University of Missouri,

Kansas City.

While attending graduate

school, he worked in the claims

department of a health insurance

company. One of his college teach-

ers, who was freelancing at the

Universal Press Syndicate (now

called Andrews McMeel Syndica-

tion), recommended him for a job

at the syndicate as an assistant

editor in 1974.

In 1981, he was promoted to vice

president and editorial director.

“He took over for my father, and

the editorial side never missed a

beat,” Hugh Andrews, the chair-

man of Andrews McMeel Univer-

sal, said by phone. (Mr. Andrews’s

father, Jim, founded the syndicate

with John McMeel in 1970.) “Lee

was at his core very smart, caring

and compassionate, and as loyal

to his creators as he could be.”

One of those creators was Mr.

Watterson, who in 1985 brought

Universal a comic strip about a lit-

tle boy named Calvin whose

stuffed toy tiger, Hobbes, comes to

life, but only in Calvin’s mind.

“It was so breathtakingly sim-

ple, fresh and professional that I

had to set it aside with the

thought, ‘This can’t be as good as I

think it is,’ ” Mr. Salem recalled in

an interview for the website Go-

Comics in 2015. He circulated

samples of “Calvin and Hobbes”

around the office and at home,

where his son, Matt, told him,

“This is the ‘Doonesbury’ for

kids.”

Mr. Watterson said that Mr. Sa-

lem could read through a month’s

worth of “Calvin and Hobbes”

strips and not even giggle. “He

could have been reading obituar-

ies for all the delight he radiated,”

Mr. Watterson told The Washing-

ton Post in 2012. Mr. Salem said he

had been taught by Jim Andrews

that it was a sign of weakness to

laugh at a cartoonist’s work in

front of the cartoonist.

Over the 10-year run of “Calvin

and Hobbes,” Mr. Watterson and

Mr. Salem feuded over licensing

rights. Despite the potential

riches from splashing the images

of comic strip characters on T-

shirts, mugs and other products,

Mr. Watterson wanted none of it,

saying that rampant commercial-

ization would cheapen his comic

strip. Universal eventually gave

him the licensing rights.

At its peak, “Calvin and

Hobbes” was syndicated to 2,400

newspapers. Mr. Watterson ended

the strip in 1995.

Four years later, Universal be-

gan running “The Boondocks,”

which satirized African-American

culture and American politics

through the eyes of its young lead

character, Huey.

“The match of Aaron McGrud-

er’s talents with the times was

perfect,” Mr. Salem told Hogan’s

Alley, a magazine about comics, in

1999. “Newspapers seemed ready
      to accept a strip that used satire,
      candor and a strongly held per-

spective to tackle this country’s

toughest subject: race.”

Mr. Salem, who became Univer-

sal’s president in 2006, also over-

saw the syndication of other edito-

rial products, including William F.

Buckley Jr.’s column and “Dear

Abby.” But it was his nurturing of

comic strips that earned him the

2013 Silver T-Square award from

the National Cartoonists Society

for his service to the profession.

He retired in 2014.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Sa-

lem is survived by his son; his

daughter, Laura Salem; five

grandchildren; and a half brother,

Ed Callahan.

Ms. Guisewite said that Mr. Sa-

lem had helped her master the

comics format and create distin-

guishable characters.

“He would talk to me about

what worked and didn’t work, but

once it started, he was this solid

rock wall behind me, and he was

that for all of us,” she said.

And he never tossed out the

original package she sent him.

Lee Salem, 73, a Champion

Of Quirky Cartoon Strips

LALO ALCARAZ/ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

CATHY GUISEWITE/ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

Lalo Alcaraz, the creator of “La Cucaracha,” paid tribute, top, to Mr. Salem, who was also behind the success of “Cathy,” above.

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Prizing lively writing

and giving cartoonists

substantial leeway.

ANDREWS MCMEEL UNIVERSAL

Lee Salem