A26 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESTHURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020 K+When Kirk R. Smith began his
research career in the 1970s, he
was studying the health risks
posed by nuclear power. But after
a trip to rural parts of Asia, he de-
tected an even bigger threat, af-
fecting more people: toxic fumes
being spewed from the solid fuels
that heat the humble chulha, a
small indoor cooking stove made
of mud and clay and used by more
than 40 percent of the world’s pop-
ulation.
He then began to focus on what
he called household air pollution.
When asked why he was turning
away from nuclear power, he
would reply, “The risks are too
small.”
This led to his mantra and be-
came the advice he gave to his stu-
dents: “Follow the risk.”
In doing just that, Dr. Smith was
among the first scientists to iden-
tify the health hazards caused by
cookstoves in developing nations.
With scores of studies and meticu-
lous measurements, he defined
the field of household air pollution
and established such pollution as
one of the leading causes of dis-
ease and death in the developing
world.
He also raised an early voice of
warning about the impact of cli-
mate change on public health.
Dr. Smith died on June 15 at his
home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 73.
His wife, Joan Diamond, said
the cause was cardiac arrest fol-
lowing a stroke.
Dr. Smith was a pre-eminent
global health researcher at the
University of California, Berkeley,
where he taught in the School of
Public Health. He was best known
for recognizing and quantifying
how toxic emissions from burning
firewood, charcoal and cow dung
to heat stoves threatened the
health of people in underdevel-
oped rural areas.
As part of that work, he made
the startling discovery that on av-
erage, cookstoves release the
smoke equivalent of 400 ciga-
rettes per hour.
About three billion people cook
with and heat their homes with
these dirty fuels, according to the
World Health Organization, which
has said that the effects of house-
hold pollution kill four million peo-
ple a year. They die of strokes,
heart disease, lung cancer, pneu-
monia and other ailments.
Dr. Smith saw that the fumes
from cookstoves threatened not
only the people who work around
the stoves all day — mostly poor
women and children — but the en-
tire planet, with toxic emissions
contributing to outdoor air pollu-
tion and exacerbating the effects
of climate change.
“We’ve realized that pollution
may start in the kitchen, but it
doesn’t stay there,” he said in an
interview last year with Berkeley
News, the university’s news web-
site. “It goes outside, it goes next
door, it goes down the street, and it
becomes part of the general out-
door air pollution.”
He found that at least one-
fourth of the diseases in the world
are caused by environmental fac-
tors like air pollution, water pollu-
tion, lack of sanitation and chemi-
cals in the workplace — all factors
that could be controlled.
“Kirk led the world to greater
understanding of the envi-
ronment’s outsized role in health,
not the least of which was due to
the burning of dirty household fu-
els, on which Kirk was the world’stop scholar,” Justin Remais, chair
of the division of environmental
health sciences at the Berkeley
School of Public Health, said in an
email.
In addition to identifying prob-
lems, Dr. Smith sought solutions.
He initially thought the answer
to household air pollution was bet-
ter cookstoves. But he came to see
that replacing old stoves with new
ones would take decades, particu-
larly on the massive scale needed,
and that many lives would be lost
before such a transformation
could take place.
Moreover, he realized, the new
stoves, at least those that were af-
fordable, would not dramatically
improve health.
“He spent a lot of time thinking
about and learning from the expe-
riences of the people he was try-
ing to help,” his daughter, Nadia
Diamond-Smith, who works in
global maternal and reproductivehealth in India and Nepal, said in
an interview. He understood, she
said, that if the new stoves were
only marginally better, people
wouldn’t use them, and that only
something with more obvious
benefits would make a difference.
In a major pivot, unusual for
such a prominent scientist, Dr.
Smith reset his goal and cam-
paigned instead for cleaner fuels
like liquefied petroleum gas, or
LPG.
In India, where 700 million peo-
ple relied on the old stoves, he
spent years collaborating with
colleagues and building relation-
ships. He was finally able to help
persuade local governments to
make LPG more widely available.
In 2016, Dr. Smith said, India in-
stituted a national program to dis-
tribute clean-burning stoves and
propane to 80 million impover-
ished households, or about 500
million people. And over the lastfew decades, several other coun-
tries have moved to cleaner cook-
ing fuels.
Dr. Smith’s advances were
widely recognized. He was elected
to the National Academy of Sci-
ences in 1997 and won numerous
awards, including the 2012 Tyler
Prize for Environmental Achieve-
ment, often called the Nobel Prize
of environment.
As it happened, Dr. Smith was
also a recipient of an actual Nobel.
As part of a team of scientists, he
shared the Nobel Peace Prize in
2007 with former Vice President
Al Gore. The team — the Intergov-
ernmental Panel on Climate
Change, a United Nations body —
was cited by the Nobel committee
for creating “an ever-broader in-
formed consensus about the con-
nection between human activitiesand global warming.”
Berkeley has a tradition of giv-
ing parking spaces to its Nobel
laureates. Dr. Smith joked that be-
cause he was one of hundreds of
scientists on the winning team, he
should get a parking space for one
day a year.
Dr. Smith was born Robert Kirk
Nisbet on Jan. 19, 1947, in Berke-
ley. His father, Robert Nisbet, was
a lawyer, and his mother, Ruth
(Griffin) Nisbet, a homemaker. Hewas 4 when his parents divorced.
His mother married James Smith,
an engineer, in the mid-1950s, and
Robert Kirk Nisbet soon changed
his name to Kirk Robert Smith.
He grew up in and around
Berkeley and Oakland until the
family moved to Marin County in
the late ’50s. His new next-door
neighbor, Joan Diamond, became
his wife in 1977.
She and their daughter survive
him, as do two grandchildren and
three half brothers, Scott Nisbet
and Mark and Thaddeus Smith.
Kirk Smith earned three de-
grees from Berkeley: a bachelor
of arts in physics and astronomy
in 1968, a master of public health
in environmental health sciences
in 1972 and a doctorate in biomedi-
cal and environmental health in
1977.
That year he moved to Hawaii,
where he founded and led the en-
ergy program at the East-West
Center, an institution for research
and education on problems in the
Asia-Pacific region.
Back in Berkeley in the late
’90s, he joined the faculty of the
Berkeley School of Public Health.
He was the founder and director of
the university’s global health and
environment program and the as-
sociate director for international
programs at the university’s Cen-
ter for Occupational and Envi-
ronmental Health.
He was a man of many inter-
ests, including beekeeping. But
the environment remained his
overriding focus.
Along with his scientific
courses, he taught a beloved un-
dergraduate seminar on envi-
ronmental disasters in postapoca-
lyptic fiction. And his idea of a va-
cation was to take his family to
Chernobyl.Kirk R. Smith, a Towering Figure in Environmental Science, Is Dead at 73
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYEKirk R. Smith in 2017. He was among the first scientists to identify
the health hazards caused by cookstoves in developing nations.AJAY PILLARISETTI‘We’ve realized that
pollution may start in
the kitchen, but it
doesn’t stay there.’
cite cactus lamps (Barbra
Streisand bought one for a baby
shower), who directed music vid-
eos in the early days of MTV, and
who photographed Annie Lennox
for a Eurythmics album cover.
As a devoted hedonist with a
can-do spirit, he helped create and
promote two of Los Angeles’s
more celebrated night clubs.
The first, the louche Fake Club
of the early 1980s, was situated in
a Trailways bus depot on a stretch
of Cahuenga Boulevard where
sidewalk stabbings were not un-
known. “Come as you aren’t,” was
the unwritten code of the Fake
Club, which opened in 1982, four
years after Mr. Fortune first drove
across country to a city where, as
he explained to Vanity Fair in Jan-
uary: “There was space, freedom,
more sunshine than I knew was
possible. It was like a big, weird
blank canvas and I could paint
myself into the picture.”
The second club, the moody Les
Deux Café, was created in collabo-
ration with the designer Michèle
Lamy and installed at Mr. For-
tune’s direction inside an Arts and
Crafts bungalow cum crack house,
resurrected and transported by
truck across a parking lot to a new
locale.
And it was at Les Deux Cafe,
with its self-aware design quota-
tions from Old Hollywood
nightspots like Chasen’s, Scandia
and the Brown Derby, that Mr.
Fortune laid the groundwork for
what is probably his signal
achievement: the design of the
Tower Bar, the clubby, walnut-
paneled dining establishment that
opened in 2007 and quickly be-
came the Hollywood power nexus
it remains.
Like so many other newcomers
to the land of self-invention, Mr.
Fortune adjusted and burnished
his biography as he went along.While the terms that tended to
attach themselves to Paul Fortune
— style guru, epitome of taste,
acme of chic, arbiter elegantia-
rum — had about them a whiff of
P.T. Barnum, his tax returns said
“interior designer,” a job descrip-
tion that failed to capture his
larger calling as a self-appointed
ringmaster in the social circus of
Los Angeles.
Mr. Fortune died on June 15 in
Ojai, Calif., at 69. His death, of car-
diac arrest, was first announced
on the website of Architectural Di-
gest, where he was regularly
listed among the top 100 profes-
sionals in his field, and confirmed
by his husband, the ceramist
Chris Brock.
Both professionally and person-
ally, Mr. Fortune attracted to him a
wide array of types, including the
boldface clients (Sofia Coppola,
Marc Jacobs, David Fincher, Bri-
an Grazer, Aileen Getty) on whom
he staked his reputation; billion-
aires and busboys; socialites and
drug dealers; artists and writers;
celebrities and the attractive no-
bodies that still flock to Los Ange-
les seeking fame.
Back when he was taking his
first steps toward stardom, a cer-
tain unknown British actor named
Daniel Craig bunked in the guest
room of Mr. Fortune’s storied Lau-
rel Canyon house.
With his square-jawed good
looks, English accent and acerbic
wit, Mr. Fortune was himself a
character who seemed plucked
from Central Casting, the kind of
actor capable of slotting into any
role.
And he played many parts in his
varied design career, including
that of the man who planted the
first vintage Cadillac nose first in
the facade of the Hard Rock Café,
who designed a line of spiky Lu-
While he would eventually ac-
quire some of the affectations of a
swell, he was born Paul Stephen
Fortune Fearon on Sept. 5, 1950, in
a suburb of Liverpool, England, to
Frances (Fortune) Fearon, a tele-
phone operator, and Kevin
Fearon, a production manager at
a company that supplied Christ-
mas hampers to Harrods.
When he was still a boy, Mr. For-
tune’s family relocated to a large
and ramshackle house in
Cheshire, England, within earshot
of the lion’s roar at the Chester
Zoo. “Paul’s natural flair was a
driving force” in the restoration of
Cranwood, as the house wascalled, his brother, Mark Fearon,
said in an email. Mr. Fearon and
Mr. Brock are his survivors.
As a youth, Mr. Fortune often
dragged his three siblings to coun-
try house sales and auctions, Mr.
Fearon explained, not only help-
ing his parents furnish Cranwood,
but also showing an unwavering
conviction about the correctness
of his own taste. This was to be an
earmark of his design practice
and recurring theme in “Notes on
Décor, Etc.,” a 2018 book he wrote
that was equal parts portfolio,
memoir and how-to.
Mr. Fortune, who was of Irish
descent, attended Catholic school
and served as an altar boy, then
fled to London and had a brief
stint in art school before continu-
ing his journey to New York and,
eventually, the West. “I just
wanted to take drugs and have sex
and run around and have a good
time,” Mr. Fortune said on a de-
sign podcast last year. But he was
more serious than that.“Paul’s taste was so extraordi-
nary and singular,” said Marc Ja-
cobs, whose triplex in Paris, town-
house in New York and new home
— Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1955 Hoff-
man House in Rye, N.Y. — were all
designed by Paul Fortune. “I’m so
stubborn about what I want, but
there are a few people, very few,
who make me rethink something I
like. In that sense, Paul was a per-
fect sparring partner.”
The director Sofia Coppola,
whose New York townhouse was
designed by Mr. Fortune, added,
“I’m such a control freak, but with
Paul, I just said, ‘Do whatever you
think.’ ”
In reality Mr. Fortune seldom
considered doing otherwise, an
approach that may have cost him
as many clients as it gained.
“What I love about Paul is that
he just didn’t give a damn about
design as a career,” said David
Netto, a designer who chose Mr.
Fortune as his collaborator when
he restored a landmark RichardNeutra house in Los Angeles. “He
cared about it as a life-enhancing
thing.”
That was clearest at his home in
Laurel Canyon, an ongoing ex-
periment improvised within the
eccentric frame of a hillside haci-
enda built by the man who once
designed the sets for “Mutiny on
the Bounty.”
With its cozy Paul McCobb
chairs, earth-toned colors and
warmly enveloping domestic
aura, the Laurel Canyon house —
where he lived for 35 years before
selling it in 2013 to the musician
Nate Ruess and his wife, the de-
signer Charlotte Ronson — was a
visual antidote to the steroidal
bloat now blighting residential
Los Angeles.
And it served as a proving
ground for concepts he would de-
ploy most successfully at the
Tower Bar: brass-inlaid panels
that frame geometric Art Deco
windows with cinematic views
over the city; lampshades lined in
puce-colored silk that cast flatter-
ing light on even the most surgi-
cally adjusted of faces; Ultra-
suede banquettes that soften to
whispers ruthless conversations
about status recalibrated daily in
the trades.
“Paul understood the framing,”
Jeff Klein, the owner of the Sunset
Tower hotel and its Tower Bar,
said.
One of Mr. Fortune’s inspired
strokes in designing Tower Bar,
Mr. Klein noted, was to comb local
memorabilia shops for movie
stills, which he then annotated
and had framed.
“He would go to all these old
junk shops and buy black-and-
white photos of nobody actors,”
Mr. Klein said. “He didn’t want
stills of the stars. He said, ‘Actors
that never made it — that’s the
real Hollywood.’ ”Paul Fortune’s boldface clients included Holly and Eric Montgomery, for their home in the Berkshires, left, and Charlotte Ronson and Nate Ruess, for their home in Lower Manhattan, right.
WILLIAM ABRANOWICZ WILLIAM ABRANOWICZPaul Fortune, 69, Interior Designer to the Stars and Ringmaster of a Social Circus
By GUY TREBAY“Paul’s taste was so extraordinary and singular,” said Marc Jacobs, whose triplex in Paris, left, town-
house in New York and 1955 Hoffman House in Rye, N.Y., were all designed by Mr. Fortune, above.FRANCOIS HALARD DEWEY NICKSDeploying charm, his
chiseled good looks
and an English accent
as his tools.