Monday, Sep. 17, 1979
DIED. Jean Seberg, 40, American movie actress; in Paris. Police found her body and an empty bottle of barbiturates in her car after she had been missing for nine days. As a 17-year-old Iowa State freshman, Seberg won the title role in Saint Joan after a much-ballyhooed Otto Preminger search, but was so amateurish that her name became a synonym for miscasting. Moving to Paris in 1958 with the first of four husbands, she starred in New Wave films (Breathless), in her last years had been undergoing psychiatric treatment.
DIED. Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, 75, former energy czar of Venezuela and chief architect of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries; of cancer; in Washington, D.C. Perez Alfonzo helped form the Accion Democratica party in 1941, became Minister of Mines on its rise to power four years later. He sought to organize a union of oil-producing nations, a goal realized in 1960; and to nationalize Venezuelan oil, which was done in 1976. In recent years he admitted that as "the father of OPEC, I sometimes feel like renouncing my offspring."
DIED. Rose N. Franzblau, 77, Viennese-born psychologist whose column, "Human Relations," appeared in a dozen newspapers for 25 years, dispensing sugar-coated Freud and sensible solutions to family problems; of cancer; in New York City.
DIED. Homer Capehart, 82, three-term Republican Senator from Indiana (1945-63); from complications following a hip fracture; in Indianapolis. The son of a tenant farmer, Capehart made a fortune selling jukebox equipment and got into politics after organizing a 1938 "cornfield convention" of 20,000 Republicans. As Senator, he supported farm subsidies and helped establish the Small Business Administration. An enthusiastic McCarthyite, Capehart staked his 1962 senatorial campaign on a tough anti-Cuba stand ("invade or blockade") and lost narrowly to young Birch Bayh when President Kennedy's embargo of Cuba took away his thunder.
DIED. Ivor Armstrong Richards, 86, British scholar, language reformer and immensely influential literary critic; in Cambridge, England. "The guru of Cambridge" in the 1920s laid down the principles of what became known as the New Criticism, an attempt to apply scientific method to analysis of literary values. Teaching briefly in China and, from 1939, for more than two decades at Harvard, he turned his attention to primary education and became the world's leading proselyte of Basic English, a boiled-down, 850-word version of the language that he considered easily learnable by foreigners.
DIED. Guy Bolton, 96, grand old man of the Broadway musical who, with his fellow Englishman P.G. Wodehouse, wrote the books for shows with tunes by George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern; in London. Bolton collaborated on works that were vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence (Oh, Kay!), Ethel Merman (Anything Goes) and Fred Astaire (Lady, Be Good!), as well as the recently revived Very Good Eddie.
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