DIED. Jessica Dragonette, seventyish, soprano queen of the air waves during 22 consecutive years as a radio star; of a heart attack; in New York City. A convent-educated orphan, Dragonette began on Broadway as the backstage voice of an angel in Max Reinhardt's 1924 hit, The Miracle. She ascended to stardom after moving to radio in 1926, beginning as NBC's Coca-Cola Girl in radio's first original musical serial, then introducing operetta to the medium on Philco Radio Time and later starring in Cities Service Concerts and CBS's Saturday Night Serenade.

DIED. Admiral Robert Lee Dennison, 78, President Harry Truman's naval aide and adviser from 1948 to '53, who as commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet during the early 1960s enforced the U.S. naval blockade of Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis; of a pulmonary embolism; in Bethesda, Md.

DIED. Erich Fromm, 79, German-born psychoanalyst and prolific social philosopher who applied the precepts of psychology to the study of this century's political, social and spiritual dilemmas; of a heart attack; in Muralto, Switzerland, his home for eleven years. Fromm began his practice in Berlin in 1925 as a dogmatically orthodox Freudian, but came to reject the passive, noncommittal role of the Freudian analyst and pioneered confrontational techniques now widely used by therapists. After emigrating from Nazi Germany to the U.S. in 1934, Fromm popularized his eclectic theories of human behavior as a lecturer at Columbia, Yale and other colleges. In Escape from Freedom (1941), he argued that fascism and compulsive social conformism were the outgrowths of alienating industrial development. In The Art of Loving (1956), he explored the nature and "redemptive power" of love; the book became a campus cult object in the '60s. Fromm's later works ranged over topics as diverse as Mexican village life, Marxism, the cold war and Zen Buddhism.

DIED. Tamara de Lempicka, eightyish, stylishly eccentric, Polish-born painter whose glossy art deco portraits of European socialites ("languid, aristocratic, very decadent," according to one authority) made her a millionaire in the 1920s and '30s, when her work was the rage of Paris; in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

DIED. Marcel Boussac, 90, second-generation French tailor who built a small textile business into a sprawling empire that at one point included 60 cotton mills, a racing stable, the firm of Christian Dior and the right-wing Paris daily L'Aurore, after a prolonged illness; in Mivoisin France. After the textile industry in Europe began to flounder in the late '60s France's "King of Cotton" was forced to relinquish a badly managed dominion bit by bit, eventually selling off Dior, his world-renowned stable and L 'Aurore.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.