Milestones

By Harriet Barovick, Martha Bedford, Feilding Cage, Jackson Dykman, Elisabeth Salemme, Carolyn Sayre, Kate Stinchfield

DIED

TIME Magazine called him the "vicar of visuals," the man who changed U.S. politics by expertly choreographing Ronald Reagan's public image. As one of Reagan's closest White House aides, Michael Deaver arranged masterful photo ops--Reagan on the Great Wall of China, Reagan on a cliff overlooking the English Channel on the 40th anniversary of D-day--that capitalized on the former actor's appeal. In 1987, two years after leaving the White House, Deaver was convicted of lying to agents investigating his lobbying activities. Ever loyal to Reagan, he insisted he would not accept a pardon, which he felt would tarnish the President's image. Deaver was 69 and had pancreatic cancer.

o During the Big Band era, drummers unobtrusively maintained a song's rhythm. As a founding father of the revolutionary genre of bebop, visionary bandleader Max Roach made percussion a star player. He backed Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker as a teenager, and on seminal recordings ranging from Parker's Ko-Ko to Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool sessions, he created rich, complex, melodic sounds and drove rhythms disturbed by loud bass-drum beats, sudden silences and offbeat riffing. After his hugely successful quintet dissolved in 1956, following the death of his friend and band co-founder, trumpeter Clifford Brown, he tumbled into a severe depression. When he surfaced Roach pushed himself into new endeavors: agitating for racial equality, writing music for playwright Sam Shepard, leading an acclaimed percussionists-only band and irking traditionalists by giving a concert with hip-hop's Fab Five Freddy. Of his restless reinventions, he said, "You can't write the same book twice." He was 83.

o Sure, she had a delicate temper and was prone to irrational rages in which she summarily dismissed diffident maids or waiters. True, she allegedly opined that "only little people pay taxes" and earned the nickname "the Queen of Mean." But as she saw it, New York City hotelier Leona Helmsley, who donned a tiara for a high-profile ad campaign in which she assured would-be guests that "the queen stands guard," was really just a perfectionist. By all accounts, Leona adored and was devoted to her real estate tycoon husband Harry, who was said to have always been spared her wrath. But in 1989, the testimony of the Queen's abused underlings helped get her convicted of tax evasion, and she spent 19 months in jail. She was 87.

o In 1973, sensing that Californians were being ripped off by their utility companies, Sylvia Siegel, an outspoken, acerbic mother of two, taught herself the arcane details of utility law, launched a network to represent consumers before the California Public Utilities Commission and became the most visible and powerful utility consumer advocate in the country. Her expertise and occasional name-calling helped quash a plan to impose a "customer charge" even if no electricity was used during a given month, helped expose $345 million in overcharges by Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric, and was instrumental in creating affordable "lifeline" rates for low-income customers. She was 89.

o Her parents were social activists; her own activism began in college, where she organized local farmers. So in 1964 when clinical psychologist Carolyn Goodman's son Andrew wanted to go to Mississippi to help black voters register, she said, "we couldn't talk out of both sides of our mouths. We had to let him go." After Andrew and two other civil rights workers were murdered by Klansmen, Carolyn raised her national profile, repeatedly giving interviews at home among photos of Andrew and using her prominence to support myriad civil rights causes. She was 91.