The movies will never be the same without beautiful, legendary Oscar winner Jennifer Jones. Through three tortured marriages to Robert Walker, David O. Selznick and billionaire Norton Simon, severe bouts of mental illness and the tragic deaths of two children, she epitomized movie stardom, smiling bravely and hiding her demons from the camera. What a book she could have written, but she was too much a lady to tell the truth. We also bid a shocking, unexpected farewell to vivacious Natasha Richardson, wife of Liam Neeson and member of a family of acting royalty, who died in a freak ski accident on the beginner’s slope at a vacation resort in Canada. She was only 45. Like her famous mother, Vanessa Redgrave, she was fearless on the stage (Cabaret) and the screen (Patty Hearst), tackling everything from Blanche DuBois to Chekhov. Two more who closed their scrapbooks too early: hunky Patrick Swayze and Charlie’s favorite angel, gorgeous Farrah Fawcett. Both lost long, publicized battles with cancer. I always think fondly of Farrah, who played my wife in her first film, Myra Breckenridge, thanking me many times through the years for a kindness and friendship I wasn’t even aware of, insisting I helped her feel welcome on a deranged movie set during a difficult time in both of our lives. I didn’t see her often after the film tanked, but every time I did, she rushed at me with outstretched arms and bear hugs. I don’t think she reserved the same affection for Raquel Welch.

Another class act, Karl Malden, robbed the screen of a lot of dignity and perfection when he died at 97. Who could ever forget his Mitch in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire? He was joined by two popular character actors, Pat Hingle (still burning a hole in my movie memories as Warren Beatty’s father in Splendor in the Grass) and versatile James Whitmore, who played everything from Harry Truman and Will Rogers to a dancing Cole Porter thug in Kiss Me, Kate. These guys were not leading men, but they turned every man they played into a leading human! It was au revoir to iconoclastic actress-author Betsy Blair, Oscar-nominated for Marty (1955), once married to Gene Kelly and blacklisted in the shameful McCarthy era, her once-promising career in ruins. I’ll miss the flashing smile of dashing Ricardo Montalban, who broke the Hollywood taboo against Mexican-born leading men by becoming an MGM heartthrob, making love to Jane Powell, Cyd Charisse, June Allyson and Lana Turner in Technicolor; marrying Loretta Young’s sister; and singing with Lena Horne in the Broadway musical Jamaica before he became a household name on the brainless TV series Fantasy Island. As Hollywood’s most popular racial commodity, he played ancient Babylonians; Brazilian hockey players; a Japanese kabuki actor in Sayonara; a Blackfoot Indian chief; and in a bomb called Fiesta, the twin brother of a matador played by Esther Williams. (Don’t ask.) For a time, he was the voice coming out of the steering wheel every time you turned the ignition key in a Chrysler convertible.

CAMERA-READY FOR their final close-ups: air-brushed Edmund Purdom, wooden dude in ’50s sword-and-sandals epics such as The Egyptian and The Prodigal; rugged British star Richard Todd, a real-life war hero (a role he repeated many times in 28 films) who shot to U.S. movie stardom opposite Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart (1949) and Marlene Dietrich in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950). He was Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond, over Sean Connery. Who will make me laugh after actor–funnyman–celebrity chef Dom DeLuise and award-winning Bea Arthur, everybody’s favorite Golden Girl, with the deadpan, drop-dead acid one-liners and the voice of Gravel Gertie? No more cream pies in the face for Soupy Sales, a veteran comic who grew up as the only Jewish kid in a backwater town in North Carolina, where his father owned a dry goods store that sold sheets to the Ku Klux Klan. It was one last “take” for David Carradine, oddball star of the Kung Fu series and 200 movies, mysteriously found hanging naked in a hotel-room closet in Bangkok wearing women’s stockings; Brenda Joyce, the only actress who played “Jane” to two Tarzans (Johnny Weismuller and Lex Barker); Gale Storm, perky icon of early sitcoms like My Little Margie; Patrick McGoohan, Queens-born actor who specialized in playing suave British spies; Gene Barry, who ran the gamut from Bat Masterson to an aging drag queen in Broadway’s La Cage aux Folles; Joseph Wiseman, veteran stage and screen actor who played 007’s first villain in Dr. No; Edward Woodward, who co-starred with Tammy Grimes in the Broadway musical High Spirits and in the TV series The Equalizer; rotund Lou Jacobi, the ethnic character actor equally at home in comedies by Woody Allen or dramas like The Diary of Anne Frank; Paul Burke, star of TV’s Naked City; Sydney Chaplin, actor-son of Charlie Chaplin, who played the original Nicky Arnstein opposite Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl; Kathleen Byron, the evil, sexually psychotic nun who scared me out of my socks in Black Narcissus (1947); Ron Silver, Tony Award winner and liberal political activist; Harve Presnell, commanding baritone who starred in Broadway’s Unsinkable Molly Brown and repeated his role in the Debbie Reynolds film; Joel McCrea’s lanky cowboy son Jody; nerdy, nasal comedian Arnold Stang; Wayne Allwine (the voice of Mickey Mouse); and Phil Carey, best known for 28 years on the TV soap One Life To Live, but long before that, he was a Warner Brothers contract player who co-starred with Doris Day in Calamity Jane. As a child weaned on radio, I also lament the passing of Joan Stanton, who played Lois Lane on the Superman serials for 20 years. England lost its sense of humor when British drag sensation Danny LaRue, a forerunner of Dame Edna, dropped his final lace hankie. For decades, his face and name rose higher on London marquees than Laurence Olivier’s. It is said that his career earnestly began in the Navy when he delighted his fellow sailors by dressing like Hedy Lamarr in a shipboard production of White Cargo. I’ll bet.

I am personally grief-stricken to lose my “adopted sister” and one of my closest and most cherished friends, the phenomenally talented Collin Wilcox, darling of the Actors Studio in the early 1960s and a favorite actress of Lee Strasberg and Jose Quintero; she surrendered the stage prematurely when film director Robert Mulligan (who also died in 2009) whisked her off to Hollywood in 1962 to play the white trash country girl whose false accusations caused all the trouble in To Kill a Mockingbird. How I will miss those once-in-a-lifetime summer nights watching the moon slumber from the back porch of her log farmhouse in North Carolina. I also pine for my friend and neighbor, the glam actress Ruth Ford, a Southern belle who once wrote a play with William Faulkner and toured the world in it with her second husband, Zachary Scott. An intense and intriguing party girl, she turned her Dakota apartment into a salon for everyone from Tennessee Williams to Greta Garbo, but she also painted my library in Connecticut on her hands and knees—the only time in her life she ever wore a pair of blue jeans. Also taking a final curtain call: Olga San Juan, sparkling Brooklyn-born “Puerto Rican pepper pot” who sang and danced with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in Blue Skies (1946) before making a 1951 Broadway splash in the legendary Paint Your Wagon; and sterling soprano Susanna Foster, who was a sensation in several ’40s movie musicals, including the 1943 Phantom of the Opera with Claude Rains and Nelson Eddy. But when her career hit the skids it never recovered. At one point, she was living in the back seat of an automobile in Hollywood.

WHO WIL REPLACE replace the excitement of the old stars? Who will employ them without producers Roy Somlyo, Daniel Melnick and Roy Disney, Walt’s nephew and the crown head of the Disney empire? Who will write about the rich and famous now that ace Hollywood reporter Army Archerd has typed his last gossip column, and jaundiced, gimlet-eyed name dropper Dominick Dunne is no longer around to cover the trials of celebrity criminals in the pages of Vanity Fair? Who will direct the newcomers without the aforementioned Robert Mulligan; Tom O’Horgan, hippie Broadway director of the rock hits Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar; France’s Claude Berri; Paul Wendkos (Gidget); Ken Annakin (The Swiss Family Robinson); Howard Zieff, who graduated from hit commercials (“Mama mia, thatsa spicy meatball!”) to hit movies (Private Benjamin); and John Hughes, who raised the bar for dopey teenage flicks with Sixteen Candles? Who will make them look so lustrous without the genius of Oscar-winning cinematographer Jack Cardiff (The Red Shoes, The African Queen), whose demise is another nail in the coffin of how movies used to look?

Movies and plays rarely amount to more than gibberish these days, but the loss of even more I.Q. points is guaranteed with the passing of esteemed playwrights and screenwriters like England’s working-class hero Keith Waterhouse (Billy Liar); tough, two-fisted Oscar and Pulitzer Prize winner Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront); barrister John Mortimer (he created the Rumpole of the Bailey TV series); versatile Millard Kaufman (everything from Bad Day at Black Rock and Raintree County to the Mr. Magoo cartoons); Ireland’s Hugh Leonard, who won four 1978 Tonys for Da; Fellini’s favorite screenplay writer Tullio Pinelli (8 ½, La Dolce Vita); and prolific, 92-year-old Texan Horton Foote, who chronicled the moral and spiritual history of everyday small-town lives in 60 plays and dozens of movies and television dramas, winning two Oscars and a Pulitzer Prize. His flawless ear for the lazy lyricism of Southern dialogue elevated To Kill a Mockingbird, Tender Mercies and The Trip to Bountiful to heights of critical applause. When it comes to comedy, Larry Gelbart remains unsurpassed. Starting out with Mel Brooks and Neil Simon as a writer for Sid Caesar, he graduated to TV (“M.A.S.H.”), Broadway (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and movies (Tootsie). Once erroneously reported dead in an Internet hoax in 2008, Larry shot back with “I was dead, but I’m better now.”

The world of letters diminished when John Updike locked up his typewriter keyboard forever, followed by Frank McCourt (who turned his hardscrabble childhood in the Dublin slums into publishing gold with Angela’s Ashes), Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), J.G. Ballard (Empire of the Sun), renowned novelist James Purdy (Malcolm), feminist author Marilyn French, publishing czar Alfred Knopf and meticulous prose stylist Hortense Calisher. Let’s fill the Champagne glass again for a special nod to the miraculous Irish writer Christopher Nolan, born mute and paraplegic, who spent 32 of his 43 years typing novels and a prizewinning autobiography, one letter at a time, with a stick attached to his forehead.

The music world thrilled to the final eight bars from jazz high priestesses Chris Connor and Blossom Dearie, two innovative staples of sophisticated New York night life who were beacons lighting the darkness of mediocrity. From her early days as a Stan Kenton vocalist, to a lucrative, chart-busting career as a recording star, Chris had a lush voice and hip phrasing that rendered powerless the risk of cliché; Blossom’s purity, immaculate way with lyrics and feather-light sweetness of tone masked her hard-driving jazz musician’s unwavering sense of time on piano. There was nothing melancholy or sentimental about them. Other musicians who left the bandstand early: Al Martino, a ’50s crooner who regained late-life fame playing Don Corleone’s godson in the Godfather films; ace arrangers Billy VerPlanck, Torrie Zito and England’s Wally Stott, whose wife, Christine, stuck with him after he became a transsexual and changed his name to Angela Morley; mellow guitarist-singer Kenny Rankin; Louie Bellson, the jazz drumming bandleader who recorded several albums with his wife, Pearl Bailey; country singers Molly Bee and cowboy Monte Hale; elegant jazz pianist Eddie Higgins; Hank Locklin, the oldest member of the Grand Ole Opry; Anne Brown, 96, the original Bess in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, who deserted the U.S. denouncing racial prejudice and lived most of her life teaching singing in Norway (one of her pupils was Liv Ullmann); the Metropolitan Opera manager Schuyler Chapin; Cincinnati Pops Orchestra conductor Erich Kunzel; Spanish concert pianist Alicia de Larrocha; New York cabaret favorite Judy Kreston; and pianist-composer Lukas Foss. Add a big fat “Bravo!” for Alan Livingston, tasteful president of Capitol Records, who made stars out of Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee and Bozo the Clown, and privately, survived a marriage to bombshell Betty Hutton. No more take-home tunes by songwriter Jack Lawrence (“Tenderly”) or throbbing movie scores from Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago). We applauded the last three-string clusters from guitarist Les Paul and swooned to the final dreamy notes by jazz saxophonist Bud Shank. No more arias from Wagnerian soprano Hildegard Behrens or rousing political protest songs from Peter, Paul and Mary’s blond Raggedy Ann, Mary Travers. It was “So long, Junior” to Jimmy Boyd, the boy who made a brief jukebox noise in 1952 with the obnoxious “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” The Catholic Church condemned it, accusing the 12-year-old of mixing sex with Christmas. That turned it into platinum overnight. And speaking of sex, no more goose bumps for naked porno sensations Jack Wrangler and Marilyn Chambers, the scrubbed all-American beauty who played with a baby in the Ivory Snow ads and a dildo in Behind the Green Door. They worked, if you’ll pardon the pun, long and hard.

AVANT-GARDE choreographer Merce Cunningham danced his last tour jeté. No more classes by Mira Rostova, famed acting coach who claimed to teach Montgomery Clift everything he knew—even though his film directors often threw her off the set. Andrew Wyeth, America’s best-known artist, painted his last canvas, but cheap prints of Christina’s World still hang on rent-controlled walls everywhere. Irving Penn, world-famous photographer of people and fashion, folded his tripod, but his work will survive on museum walls—some designed by another 2009 departee, Thomas Hoving, who saved the Metropolitan Museum. Do not wander accidentally into the Russian Tea Room hoping to see Meryl Streep’s über-agent Sam Cohn in his trademark orange sweater. He shredded his Rolodex. It was one last walk down the runway for America’s first black supermodel, Naomi Sims. The annals of medicine saluted Dr. Willem Kolff, Dutch physician credited with saving millions of lives by inventing the first artificial kidney with the use of sausage casings and orange juice cans. We suffered through one final infomercial by pitchman Billy Mays. Sheila Lukins, affable author of all those Silver Palate cookbooks, baked her last muffin. The kettle stopped boiling but the secret recipe lives on for Steve Bernard, the colorful adventurer who invented Cape Cod potato chips in a Hyannis storefront in 1980 and six years later was selling 80,000 bags a day. Let’s all tip our hats to 97-year-old Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the Titanic, and the youngest of the ship’s original 705 surviving passengers in 1912 (she was 9 years old). She never saw the hit film, although Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio contributed to her nursing home costs. And don’t forget Johnny Carson’s vestigial sidekick Ed McMahon, who mewled “Heeeeere’s Johnny” for 30 years, giggling and making dumb remarks. If he had any other talents, they remained elusive to the naked eye. He just sat there and grinned. It was the easiest money ever made in TV.

In politics, the polls finally closed for Jack Kemp, footballer turned Republican congressman; for Senator Claiborne Pell, who wrote the legislation that founded the National Endowment for the Arts; and for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who led America into the Vietnam War and spent the rest of his life apologizing. In yet another grim year for an ill-fated American dynasty, the deaths of Senator Ted Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver marked the end of Camelot. The sports world hung up the gloves of light heavyweight boxer Jose Torres; Ingemar Johansson, who knocked out Floyd Patterson to become the world heavyweight boxing champ in 1959; and baseball center fielder Dom DiMaggio, 92-year-old brother of Killer Joe and, for a brief time, brother-in-law of Marilyn Monroe.

I will not forget Daily News drama critic Douglas Watt, 95, a respected, erudite, lucid and well-liked reviewer in the good old days when there still was such a thing. The nose of print and broadcast journalism was bloodied by the deaths of 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt; courageous Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter Nan Robertson, who lost her fingers to toxic shock syndrome at age 55 and literally had to reinvent her own career; Runyonesque crusader Sidney Zion; dance critic Allen Hughes; sourpuss cable TV news analyst Robert Novak; veteran newscaster Paul Harvey; speechwriter-columnist William Safire; and editor James Brady, who fired me as television critic for Women’s Wear Daily because he said I couldn’t write for WWD and The New York Times at the same time. I chose The New York Times. Did I do wrong?

Finally, tears flowed in every living room for Walter Cronkite, who launched the institution of nightly network news, bringing to the job humanity, journalistic integrity, indomitable spirit and a trail-blazing voice of authority and reason. He covered news, made news and wasn’t afraid to show his enthusiasm, sorrow or boyish sense of discovery. He was not merely an impassioned observer. He lived the news, and became the most trusted anchor in the history of broadcasting. His likes will never come again.

So goodbye, 2009—and, if you ask me, good riddance.

rreed@observer.com

In addition to money for infrastructure investments and an increase in federal assistance for Medicaid and other social welfare programs, which Paterson called for in a letter to President-elect Barack Obama earlier this week, the governors called for $250 billion to support schools and colleges over a two-year period.

"We do want this to fit together as a package, and not find that the cuts we're having to make are not working at cross-purposes with a federal stimulus," Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle said.

According to Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts, the new appropriations would be spread from preschool to colleges and universities. "Our country risks halting or reversing the progress that we've made on education," Patrick said. Doyle recalled his grandparents going to school in the Great Depression, and how similar people led America through World War II and the boom of the 1950s.

After two years, education funding from individual states would return to 2006 levels.

Paterson proposed $700 million in cuts for school aid as well as calling for a tuition increase for public universities, which was enacted by the S.U.N.Y. Board of Trustees. On the call, Paterson acknowledged proposing "exactly what Governor Patrick just warned would be a problem."

Obama has been formulating a stimulus package for states, but details of the size and scope are still in flux. When asked whether the governors on the conference call—which also included New Jersey's Jon Corzine and Ted Strickland of Ohio—had received any indication their proposals may be implemented, Paterson said, "We have to remember that the administration originally reached out to the governors."

Kelly delivered his usual "stump speech" (though widely rumored to be weighing a mayoral bid, he hasn't declared) about lower crime statistics, increased diversity for incoming classes of cadets, and a willingness to improve police community relations.

Many of the more than 100, mostly black and Jewish, attendees said they wanted more police in the neighborhood, but few complained about negative experiences, despite some high-profile incidents involving the police that occurred in the area during the 1990's.

Afterwards, people I spoke to seemed happy with Ray Kelly’s work and were open to the idea of the commissioner running for mayor in 2009, though not everyone was convinced he would be the best candidate.

“I think for a mayor, you have to be more, kind of, in the face,” said Leonie Logan, who recently retired from a career in the financial sector and is president of her neighborhood block association in East Flatbush. She added, “And I don’t think he’s reached that point yet. He’s too genteel to be a mayor.”

Sharon, a human resources worker who’s lived in Crown Heights since the last 1980's, was more positive. “Yes. Well, I’m a Democrat, but you can cross party lines once in a while,” she said. Her husband, Simeon, a contractor, told me, “He’d probably make a good mayor.”

At the very least, he seems to be a popular speaker.

Kuo previously did press for Councilman Vincent Gentile, a Democrat in the conservative-leaning Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn (the same area that produced Democratic operatives George Fontas, Scott Gastel and Sam Cooper). He also worked for Councilman Oliver Koppell in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. (There are probably some notable operatives from there too, but I'll need some help on that one.)

Felder’s most recent hire before Kuo was an operative with experience in Queens, which happens to be home to three likely opponents: Council members Melinda Katz, David Weprin and John Liu. Kuo's hire, if we feel like parsing the significance, not only gives Felder access to someone with experience in yet another part of the city but may help him, around campaign season, to appeal to any Chinese-American media and voters that aren't locked down by possible candidate Liu. (Kuo told me in a laudibly precise email that he can speak enough Chinese to hold basic conversations but not enough to put out statements.)

Also, Kuo should help with the ultimate Frisbee vote.

Other Democratic officials eyeing a run for comptroller are Assemblyman James Brennan of Brooklyn, and possibly Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion (if he doesn't run for mayor), David Yassky, who is term-limited, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer (who could join a crowded field and run for an open citywide seat in 2009, or run against a first-term incumbent in 2013 when he's term-limited from his office).

Let me know if I'm missing anyone.

“My hope is that she will run, as I think she would make a fantastic Mayor, and I would do anything I could to help if she does,” said Whitman, now the president of his own company in Chelsea.

And getting Quinn into the mayor’s office is the least NYC can do, considering the glass ceilings Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are breaking.

“And New York, in many respects, being the largest, and oftentimes being thought of as a progressive city—we’re behind the times,” he said.