Died. Grant Withers, 55, once popular cinemactor who in 1930 eloped with 17-year-old Loretta Young, eventually chalked up five wrecked marriages, hit the bottle ("They threw a net over me and hauled me to a sanitarium"), was reclaimed by his friend John Wayne, who got him parts in Wayne pictures (Wake of the Red Witch, Fort Apache); by his own hand (an overdose of barbiturates); in North Hollywood.

Died. Raymond Chandler, 70, mystery novelist (The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The Lady in the Lake), screen adapter (with Billy Wilder) of Double Indemnity, creator of glib, tough-talking Private Eye Philip Marlowe; in La Jolla, Calif. Chandler came late (44) to his fiction career, but his imagistic style put brassy, sassy dialogue in the corners of some sizable Hollywood mouths,* set a standard few could imitate: "She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket." The lady had a voice "that dragged itself out of her throat like a sick man getting out of bed." Dinner "tasted like a discarded mailbag." Since Detective Marlowe was acceptable to brows of every altitude, including snobbish Critic Edmund (Axel's Castle) Wilson, even parboiled eggheads could carry Chandler's thrillers under their arms without resorting to plain wrappers.

Died. Samuel Wilder King, 72, onetime (1953-57) Governor of Hawaii (the first of part-Hawaiian ancestry), who intended to try to become the first Governor of the new state; in Honolulu.

Died. Sir Sayed Abdel Rahman el Mahdi, 73, Sudanese religious and political leader, posthumous son of Mohammed ("Mad Mahdi") Ahmed, whose dervishes took Khartoum from Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1885; in Khartoum.

Died. Fred Sauter Jr., 86, taxidermist who stuffed the head of the bison on the buffalo nickel, and whose shop on Manhattan's Bleecker Street once delivered 125 neatly packed rats for a movie version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, also provided the stuffed white Peking ducks that were passed off as seagulls when Ethel Merman blazed away at them in Annie Get Your Gun; in Mineola, L.I. Sauter was a taxidermist of the old school, a conservative who preferred to let his subjects keep their own skulls.

Died. Catherine Tobin Wright, 87, first wife of Patriarchitect Frank Lloyd Wright, mother of his first six children, including California Architect John Lloyd Wright, author of My Father Who Is On Earth, and Mrs. Catherine Baxter, mother of Cinemactress Anne Baxter; in Santa Monica, Calif. "Young husband-to-be just twenty-one, the young wife-to-be not yet eighteen," wrote Frank Lloyd Wright in the split-level prose of his autobiography. "Wedding on a rainy day. More resembled a funeral. The sentimentality I was learning to dread came into full flower. The heavens weeping out of doors --all weeping indoors." The Wrights were separated in 1910, and divorced some years later. "The young husband found that he had his work cut out for him. The young wife found hers cut out for her. Architecture was my profession. Motherhood became hers. Fair enough, but it was division."

* E.g., Dick Powell (Murder, My Sweet), Humphrey Bogart (The Big Sleep), Robert Montgomery (Lady in the Lake).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.