D8 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESMONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2020B
ARBARAWAXMANFIDUCCIAtook
pride in her identity as a disabled
woman. Her stylish dress,
whether a kimono-sleeved jacket, a
leather miniskirt or leopard-print
shoes, was more than an expression of
personal taste. To Fiduccia, a reproduc-
tive rights activist who used a ventila-
tor and maneuvered her wheelchair
with a sort of regal command, her cloth-
ing was part of a political statement, a
demand to be seen in full.
“She loved her body,” said Alice
Wong, an activist and author who was a
member of the National Council on
Disability during the Obama adminis-
tration, and who looked to Fiduccia as a
role model. “She was an unapologetical-
ly sexual disabled woman — unapolo-
getic about her politics and the way she
lived her life.”
Fiduccia was among the first to cam-
paign openly for reproductive rights for
people with disabilities. In trenchant
essays and policy papers, she chal-
lenged a dominant culture that viewed
people with disabilities as asexual
beings, with no feelings of intimacy or
desire to have children.
These attitudes, she said, were trans-
lated into public policies that discour-
aged disabled couples from marrying
and having families, and that created
barriers that prevented them from
enjoying sexually fulfilling lives.
In her 15 years as a sexual health
educator and counselor in Los Angeles,
Fiduccia regularly saw clients who
experienced self-loathing and sexual
loneliness — a consequence, she said,
of internalized cultural notions.
She pushed to broaden the disability
rights movement beyond physical
access to transportation, public build-
ings, schools and places of employment.
Disabled people, she wrote in a 1991
essay, are “concerned with being loved
and finding sexual fulfillment.”
“Why hasn’t our movement politi-
cized our sexual oppression as we do
transportation and attendant serv-
ices?” she wrote in the essay, which
was published in The Disability Rag, a
magazine devoted to disability issues.
“I believe we don’t speak out because
we believe we are ultimately to blame
for not getting laid — that it is somehow
a personal inferiority.”
Her message was empowering.
“She believed that denying your
sexuality was denying your person-
hood,” Corbett Joan O’Toole, a disability
rights activist and owner of Reclama-
tion Press, a publisher of books by
authors with disabilities, said in a
phone interview. “She came from the
place of a woman in an electric wheel-
chair, speaking for people who were
taught to be ashamed of who they are.”
Fiduccia pushed for increased access
to reproductive services, including
mammograms and pelvic exams. She
and others successfully lobbied to ex-
pand the national Hate Crime Statistics
Act to include violence against people
with disabilities. She also served on the
California attorney general’s Civil
Rights Commission on Hate Crimes.
With her future husband, Daniel
Fiduccia, a legal affairs consultant she
met at a 1992 training session for dis-
ability advocates, she fought to raise
the income limit for federal health
benefits, which stood in the way of
marriage for disabled couples. Daniel
Fiduccia was a survivor of childhood
cancer, and his mobility was limited
from radiation treatments that had
weakened his bones.
Under federal health limits, Barbara
Fiduccia’s salary as a single woman
was low enough for Medicare and Med-
icaid to cover the cost of her personal
attendants and ventilator. But the cou-
ple’s combined income was over the
limit, forcing them to choose between
marriage and the health benefits that
helped keep Barbara Fiduccia alive.
Her dilemma, she told The San Jose
Mercury News in 1995, felt “like a dirty
joke.”
“I was told in so many ways as a girl
that I’d always be alone,” she told the
newspaper. Instead, she said, she found
“tremendous love and passion” with a
man who wanted to spend his life with
her.
“I got over the stigma,” she said, “and
now I can’t get married.”
Her ventilator strapped to the back of
her wheelchair, Barbara Fiduccia made
the rounds on Capitol Hill, advocating
alongside other disability activists,
while Daniel Fiduccia helped map out a
legal strategy. Although Congress did
not eliminate the so-called marriage
penalty, the rules were changed in the
mid-1990s to allow states to grant
waivers to individual couples.
“They wanted to be married, and this
was their one shot,” Marsha Saxton,
director of research and training at the
World Institute on Disability in Oak-
land, Calif., and a friend of Barbara
Fiduccia, said in a phone interview.
“But they also wanted to change pol-
icy.”
The couple married in July 1996 in a
small Roman Catholic service near
their home in Cupertino, Calif., said
Rick Santina, a family friend who at-
tended. They were fond of children,
though they had none of their own.
Santina said his children came to know
Barbara Fiduccia as “Aunt Beep” be-cause she let them blast the horn on her
wheelchair as she gave them rides on
her lap.
Barbara Faye Waxman was born in
Los Angeles on April 1, 1955, the young-
er of two children of Sol Waxman,
owner of a commercial photography
lab, and Toby (Lowsky) Waxman. She
and her brother, Michael, had spinal
muscular atrophy, an inherited disorder
that causes progressive muscle weak-
ness. Her parents were told she would
not live past 30.
Because she could walk as a child,
albeit with difficulty, her parents wres-
tled with whether to enroll her in spe-
cial education classes, where she was
more likely to make friends, or in regu-
lar public school classes, where she
would receive a better education. They
chose the latter, an environment Fiduc-cia described years later as “psycholog-
ically damaging.”
During recess in grade school, a
teacher routinely admonished her to
run, though young Barbara was incapa-
ble of doing so. In high school, she
tripped almost daily on an uneven
carpet as her math teacher walked past
her, staring.
“In those 12 years, though they never
spoke of it, I believe it was my disability
they saw, while forgetting it was a child
who possessed it,” she said.
After receiving her bachelor’s degree
in psychology from California State
University, Northridge, in 1978, Fiduc-
cia went to work at Planned Parent-
hood in Los Angeles as a health educa-
tor and disability project coordinator.
Clients told her that gynecologists, like
her former teachers, often focused ontheir disabilities instead of on their
reproductive health needs.
“I know of many times when a wom-
an has been sent back to her orthope-
dist for a Pap smear,” she said in her
1985 testimony before a congressional
committee exploring changes to Title
IX, which bars gender discrimination at
institutions receiving federal funding.
But Fiduccia eventually left Planned
Parenthood, pained by what she called
a “strong eugenics mentality that estab-
lished disdain, discomfort and igno-
rance toward disabled babies.”
She cringed whenever her co-work-
ers discussed prenatal testing and the
need to abort a disabled fetus. “There
was a feeling that there were bad ba-
bies,” she told The New York Times in
1991.
Fiduccia then worked at the Los
Angeles Regional Family Planning
Council, an umbrella organization for
more than 100 clinics, where she contin-
ued her focus on reproductive health
for women with disabilities. After that,
she served as senior associate at the
Center for Women Policy Studies, a
feminist policy research organization.
Her husband, an advocate for child-
hood cancer survivors, died after a
recurrence of cancer in 2001. Fiduccia
herself died 18 days later, on April 24,
when her ventilator equipment failed.
She was 46.
A year after their marriage, the
Fiduccias renewed their vows in a
Jewish service in Los Angeles. Sur-
rounded by hundreds of guests, the
couple made their way, hand in hand,
across a terrace toward a huppah, he in
his scooter and she in her wheelchair,
which she rode, her friend Marsha
Saxton said, “like a queen on a steed.”
Under the wedding canopy, in keeping
with Jewish tradition, she circled the
groom seven times.
Fiduccia’s dress, Saxton said, was
“full of life,” a statement of triumph in
bronze and teal.
After the dinner, the Fiduccias took to
the dance floor, which was covered in
bubble wrap that joyously popped as
their wheels rolled over it. Soon guests
in wheelchairs joined them on the floor;
others looked on, waiving light sticks.
The celebration ended with fireworks,
an explosion of color against the night
sky.1955-2001
Barbara Waxman Fiduccia
A reproductive rights advocate, she challenged a dominant culture that viewed people with disabilities as asexual beings.
By DENISE GELLENEBART BARTHOLOMEW FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESOverlooked is a series of obituaries
about remarkable people whose
deaths, beginning in 1851, went
unreported in The Times.
nytimes.com/overlookedONLINE:OVERLOOKEDPamela Tiffin, the bouffant-
haired brunette model turned ac-
tress who leapt to movie stardom
at 19 in a Tennessee Williams
drama and a Billy Wilder comedy,
then ran away to make Italian
movies and retired from acting
before her 32nd birthday, died on
Wednesday at a hospital in Man-
hattan. She was 78.
The death was announced in a
family statement to The Holly-
wood Reporter.
Ms. Tiffin began her Hollywood
movie career in two very different
films. In “Summer and Smoke”
(1961), based on the Williams play
about a spinster (Geraldine Page)
and her love for a local doctor
(Laurence Harvey), she played
the innocent and much younger
woman who steals him away.
That same year she starred as
the perky daughter of a Coca-Cola
executive in Mr. Wilder’s political
comedy “One, Two, Three.” Her
character travels to Berlin and
marries a sexy young Communist
(Horst Buchholz) — very much
against the wishes of her corpo-
rate watchdog (James Cagney).
But not long after making a 1965
film with Marcello Mastroianni,
she largely abandoned Hollywood
to star in Italian films. And in 1974,
when she was barely in her 30s,
she retired from acting altogether.
That was not what movie-indus-
try experts had predicted.
Interviewed by The Daily News
of New York in December 1961,
Mr. Wilder called her “the great-
est film discovery since Audrey
Hepburn.” In the same article, Ms.
Tiffin told the journalist Joe
Hyams why she was beginning to
prefer acting to her old career.
“A model sells herself, but an ac-
tress sells the characters she
plays,” she said. “I was pretty
bored with myself and my face
and body.”
Pamela Tiffin Wonso was born
on Oct. 13, 1942, in Oklahoma City,
the daughter of Stanley Wonso, an
architect, and Grace Irene (Tiffin)
Wonso. She grew up in Oak Lawn,
Ill., a Chicago suburb, and began
modeling — mostly in print adver-
tisements and runway shows —
when she was 13.
Three years later, she and her
mother moved to New York City,
where Pamela attended Hunter
College between modeling assign-
ments. There are two versions of
her discovery by Hollywood, and
both appear to be true.
On a vacation trip to Los Ange-
les, she was spotted having lunch
with a friend in the Paramount
Studios commissary and was
soon meeting with the producer
Hal Wallis. Mr. Wallis was almost
finished casting his newest
project, “Summer and Smoke.”
But Mr. Wilder, with “One, Two,
Three” coming up on his calendar,
was already searching for her.
He’d seen a lingerie ad in The New
York Times Magazine; the pho-
tographer was Bert Stern, and the
model, wearing only a slip, turned
out to be Ms. Tiffin. In a 1962 photo
essay in Esquire magazine, Mr.
Stern recalled the shoot and
called her “the movies’ hottest
new female star.”
After her two star-making film
roles, Ms. Tiffin’s third film was
“State Fair” (1962), a remake of
the 1945 Rodgers and Hammer-
stein movie musical (her singing
voice was dubbed), as a farmer’s
enthusiastic teenage daughter
looking for romance between the
pie-baking contests and the live-
stock shows.
Ms. Tiffin made two dozen films
in the 1960s and the first half of the
’70s. She remained visible and
marketable — playing a novice
flight attendant in the romantic
comedy “Come Fly With Me”
(1963) and a rich man’s flirtatious
daughter in “Harper” (1966), a
mystery starring Paul Newman.
At the same time, she was be-
coming known for movies aimed
at teenage audiences, including
“For Those Who Think Young”
and “The Lively Set,” both re-
leased in 1964. James Darren was
her co-star in both.
Her sole appearance on Broad-
way was in a revival of the Kauf-
man and Ferber comedy “Dinner
at Eight” (1966). She played Kitty
Packard, the flashy and most ob-
viously out-of-place dinner guest,
played by Jean Harlow in the 1933
film.The year before, she had been
cast as Mr. Mastroianni’s wife in
“Oggi, Domani, Dopodomani”
(1965), a comedy about a man try-
ing to sell his wife to a harem. Af-
ter great reluctance and consider-
able argument, she agreed to be-
come blond for the role.
She found that she liked the
new look, and she kept it as she
began making films in Italy. She
appeared in at least a dozen, in-
cluding “The Archangel” (1969), a
crime comedy with Vittorio
Gassman, and “The Fifth Cord”
(1971), a crime thriller with
Franco Nero. After a decade and a
half in retirement she made her fi-
nal screen appearance in “Quattro
Storie di Donne” (1989), an Italian
mini-series.The official story was that she
gave up acting to raise a family,
but Ms. Tiffin told Tullio Kezich,
the author of “Cinema Dolce,” that
she really made the decision be-
cause Italian films were becoming
so erotic. Every job interview, shesaid, seemed to degenerate into a
discussion of whether she would
appear nude or at least partly
nude onscreen. Luckily, she had
saved her money and knew she
could survive.
Her last American film hadbeen “Viva Max” (1969), a com-
edy about a 20th-century Mexi-
can general who wants to recap-
ture the Alamo. Parts of it were
filmed in Rome, for her conven-
ience.
In 1962, Ms. Tiffin married Clay
Felker, then an editor at Esquire
magazine. A year later he became
the founding editor of New York,
The Herald Tribune’s Sunday sup-
plement, which later became New
York magazine. He edited the
magazine until 1977, while the
marriage, not as long-lived, ended
in divorce in 1969, after a long sep-
aration.
“We still love each other,” Ms.
Tiffin told Earl Wilson, the syndi-
cated columnist. “We still have
dinner. But life, it seems, is not a
Doris Day movie.”
In her memoir, “Daring: My
Passages” (2014), the author Gail
Sheehy, who became Mr. Felker’s
next wife, reprinted a particularly
civilized post-separation note
from Ms. Tiffin.
“I hear that you have stopped
seeing Gail Sheehy,” she wrote.
“Don’t be foolish. She is a woman
of fine character and great talent.
Be good to her.”
In 1974, Ms. Tiffin married Ed-
mondo Danon, an Italian philoso-
pher and professor who is the son
of the film producer and screen-
writer Marcello Danon. He sur-
vives her, as do two daughters,
Echo Danon and Aurora Danon.
Ms. Tiffin insisted that she had
never been interested in an acting
career. It took an East Coast film-
maker multiple tries to persuade
her to play a miller’s daughter in a
1960 short about Colonial
Williamsburg — her real screen
debut. She did study acting, with
Stella Adler, but only after her film
career had begun.
There was one aversion she
never got over, though. Acting for
the small screen was not for her,
according to Tom Lisanti’s book
“Pamela Tiffin: Hollywood to
Rome, 1961-1974” (2015). After
filming an episode of “The Fu-
gitive” in 1963, she said: “I’m slow
in life. I take time to read. I love
long lunches” — which led her to
conclude, “I think I’m too slow for
television.”Pamela Tiffin, 78, Star
Who Left Hollywood
For Italy in ’60s, Dies
By ANITA GATESPHOTOFEST/FILM FORUMPamela Tiffin in 1965 in Ma-
drid and, right, in 1961 with
James Cagney in “One, Two,
Three.” She made two dozen
films in the 1960s and ’70s.GIANNI FERRARI/COVER/GETTY IMAGES.An actress who was
called ‘the greatest
film discovery since
Audrey Hepburn.’