Monday, Aug. 31, 1959

Married. Steven Clark Rockefeller, 23, second son of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller; and Anne-Marie Rasmussen, 21, former maid in the Rockefeller's Manhattan household; in Sogne, Norway (see FOREIGN NEWS).

Marriage Revealed. Sir Thomas Beecham, So, lordly British conductor; and Shirley Hudson, 27, his secretary; he for the third time, she for the first; in Zurich, Switzerland, on Aug. 10.

Died. Roy Wright, 42. at 13 the youngest of the "Scottsboro boys," whose sensational 1931 trial* became a landmark in the struggle for Negro rights; by his own hand (pistol), after killing his wife in a quarrel; in Manhattan.

Died. Elizabeth Dodero Shannon, 45, onetime Ziegfeld showgirl (stage name: Betty Sundmark) who. while appearing in Monte Carlo Follies, met and married Argentine Shipping Magnate Alberto Dodero, became an international-set hostess and an intimate friend of Argentine Dictator Juan Peron and wife Eva; in Manhattan. To solidify her husband's personal-business relationship with Peron, Betty once stripped a diamond ring off her finger to give Eva when she admired it.

Died. Dr. Helen Flanders Dunbar, 57, psychiatrist who pioneered in the study of the relationship of emotions to physical disease, reduced psychosomatic medicine to laymen's terms (Mind and Body, a 1947 bestseller), urged parents baffled by conflicting psychiatric advice to find a middle way between too much old-fashioned discipline for their children and too much modern freedom; by drowning; in the pool of her home in South Kent, Conn.

Died. Tiffany Thayer, 57, novelist who celebrated unending adventure and available women, served up a sex fantasy (Thirteen Men) with enough spice to make it an overnight bestseller in 1930, followed with others in the same highly seasoned vein (Thirteen Women, Rabelais for Boys and Girls), faded fast and returned to advertising; of a heart attack; in Nantucket, Mass.

Died. Theresa Helburn, 72, tiny (5 ft.), hard-driving director (one of six) of the Theatre Guild since its founding in 1919. co-director after 1939, who gave up middling playwriting and dramatic criticism to rescue the Broadway stage from commercial mediocrity in the 1920s by tenaciously putting on demanding works by such authors as G. B. Shaw, Eugene O'Neill, Robert Sherwood and William Inge, was the first to pair Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne on the stage (The Guardsman, 1924); of a heart attack"; in Norwalk, Conn. The Theatre Guild never recaptured its glories of the '205 but achieved some later notable successes. It was Theresa Helburn who sent the script of Lynn Riggs's Green Grow the Lilacs to Composer Richard Rodgers and suggested it might make a' good musical. Result: Oklahoma!

Died. Sir Jacob Epstein, 78, sculptor of powerful ideas and haunting portraits; of a coronary thrombosis; in London (see ART).

Died. Claude Grahame-White, 79, popular barnstorming pilot of aviation's infancy, Britain's first qualified pilot, who demonstrated the multiple uses of the airplane: he was the first to carry mail by air (letters from London to King George V at Windsor), the first to try night flying (boys trained their bicycle lights on the runway to help him take off; friends formed a procession of automobile lights along his route), the first to mount a machine gun on a plane and later use it in dogfights in World War I; in Nice, France.

Died. Wanda Landowska, 80, genius of the harpsichord; in Lakeville, Conn, (see Music).

Died. Carle Cotter Conway, 81, dynamic, debonair chairman (1930-50) of Continental Can, who in his long (1912-58) career broadened the use of can containers, steadily increased the number of his plants, boosted sales from $70 million in 1933 to $398 million in 1950, as a liberal-minded businessman headed and whipped into action the nine-man committee appointed to reorganize the Stock Exchange, saw his own recommendations embodied in the Exchange of today; in Lake Placid, N.Y.

Died. Alfred Kubin, 82, Austrian graphic artist in the great tradition of Diirer and Holbein, whose preoccupation with death and decay took shape in grotesque, pitiful figures trapped in a maze of twisted lines, mostly illustrations for books of authors particularly fascinating to him: Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoevsky, Strindberg; in Zwickledt, Austria.

Died. Dr. Frederick Sumner McKay, 85, spry dentist who was the first to recommend fluoridating drinking water to prevent tooth decay after he found that fluorides occurring naturally in Colorado Springs' water supply protected the teeth; in Colorado Springs.

*The nine Negro youths were arrested for allegedly raping two itinerant white prostitutes in an Alabama freight car, were dragged through interminable trials that included all the cliches of racial conflict: openly bigoted judges, brutal cops, a sullen courthouse mob. The case aroused nationwide protests against the South's double standard of justice, encouraged the Communists to exploit the racial bitterness and provoke a bloody race incident in Alabama. After six years in prison, Roy Wright and three of his companions were finally freed after the state dropped charges. Under public pressure, four others were eventually paroled, and one escaped.

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