Hugo Chavez passes away at age 58.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died today after a long battle with cancer, according to Vice President Nicolas Maduro. He was 58-years-old. His last tweet was on February 18th.

The socialist leader and foe of the United States died believing that America had given him the disease. At least, that's what one could infer from his remarks after being diagnosed:

"Would it be strange if (the United States) had developed a technology to induce cancer, and for no one to know it?" he asked.

The New York Times has a very in-depth obituary of the fan of Fidel Castro's life, which we encourage you to peruse. Or Chavez's Twitter feed, if you can read Spanish.

Mr. Sarris, who died the other day at the age of 83, graced our pages for two decades. From ’89 to 2009, film buffs turned to his weekly reviews for insight, argument, or simply for a good read, which he provided with remarkable consistency. The great era of New York film reviewers may have been over, but Mr. Sarris continued to explain and explore film with the same enthusiasm he showed when he became an icon of criticism in the 1960s.

He was impatient with cant, whether from directors or from fellow critics. He also was not above changing his mind—he admitted after screening The Dark Knight that he would have to “rethink my past reservations” about director Christopher Nolan’s work.

It was an honor to publish Andrew Sarris for 20 years. His prose and wisdom continue to inspire our writers regardless of their beat or their passion.

Henry Hill's FBI mugshot in 1980 (Wikipedia)

According to the New York Post, Mr. Hill-- who was part of the Luchese crime family before turning around and ratting them out in court in exchange for a life in the Witness Protection Program--passed away at the West Hills Hospital in LA after entering the hospital at the end of May when he suffered a heart attack.

His manager and girlfriend, Lisa Caserta, said that Mr. Hill faced bad circulation due to his smoking and suffered from a drinking problem.

“I don’t think he ever got over his demons," Ms. Caserta lamented about the iconic crime figure. As for Mr. Scorsese's portrayal of Mr. Hill's life?

"“He always said it was 99.9 percent accurate,” Ms. Caserta told the press. So pour one out for Henry Hill, the original Goodfella, and tonight go home and watch the film. It is a classic, after all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sr-vxVaY_M

Wendy Diamond and Lucky in happier times (Animal Fair)

Poor puppy: Our story on Wendy Diamond and her terminally ill Maltese Lucky took a sad turn this morning, when we were texted by animal rights activist and television personality.

"Lucky has passed," read the text. And yet the wedding bells are still ringing...

"The wedding will still go on to celebrate her life," Ms. Diamond wrote, adding that an obituary could be found on her webzine Animal Fair. "I am now fostering a dog and have been heaven sent. I need to adopt another lucky dog, but there will only be one named Lucky though

On Animal Fair, her obituary reads:

In her constant quest to give back (and get some treats in return), Lucky served as the Chair-Dog for the Katrina Pet Memorial, Grand Marshall of Barkus, as well as the American Cancer Society’s Bark for Life and hosted 1000′s of fundraisers in her lifetime. She was the only civilian dog admitted into the United Nations, and inspired the White House Pet Correspondents Benefit, St Pawtricks, Yappy Hour, Paws For Style, Howloween events, all to promote animal rescue and welfare. The Humane Society of New York has named a wing after Lucky! Check out AnimalFair.com to take a memorable look at Lucky’s many accomplishments and adventures!

RIP Lucky: Our thoughts are with Ms. Diamond, as all of us here at The Observer know how devastating it is to lose a pet.

One-Shot Liz, more widely known as Elizabeth Taylor.

Politically, economically, culturally, globally—except for the elimination of a few unlamented dictators and calling an end to the war in Iraq—2011 had little to offer, and delivered even less. Definitely time to say adios and begin again, with renewed optimism. But before we draw the curtain on the old man with the scythe and welcome the new kid in diapers with his brand-new year to grow, let’s lift a glass in a proper, permanent farewell toast to the folks who filed out through the exit doors in the year just ended. From no-nonsense First Lady Betty Ford, 93, to self-destructive goth singer Amy Winehouse, 27, death played no favorites in age or character. From Elizabeth Taylor, once the world’s most beautiful woman, to Cheetah, always the world’s most beloved chimp, 2011 ran the gamut in important departures.

Legendary Liz. She once said, “I can never remember a day when I was not famous.” And she lived up to it with responsibility, humor, artistry, a passion for life and an enviable reputation as a social activist dedicated to helping the sick, underprivileged and disenfranchised. From child stardom in National Velvet to two Oscars, 52 movies, eight marriages (twice to Richard Burton), endless near-fatal illnesses and billions in jewels, she finally succumbed, at 79, to congestive heart failure. In a rich and turbulent life, she didn’t waste a single minute and died with her boots on, ready for bear. If you can believe it, Cheetah outlived her. Although they never worked together, when Liz was making Lassie Come Home, the world’s most famous chimp was toiling away on the MGM jungle set next door. After the Tarzan movies ended, he lived with his “boss,” Johnny Weissmuller, until he retired to the Old Chimps Home, where he still made monkey business, posing for pictures and playing the piano. Ironically, he was often visited by Johnny Sheffield, who played Boy, then retired from show business to become a lobster importer and died before Cheetah, after falling off a ladder while pruning a palm tree. Who else would tell you these things?

This time last year, I no sooner turned in my annual goodbye column than on Jan. 2 my adored pal Anne Francis died of complications from pancreatic cancer, leaving me with so many personal memories of the fun times we shared and indelible impressions on screens big (Blackboard Jungle, Forbidden Planet) and small (she won an Emmy for Honey West, the first TV series about a female James Bond).

Cheetah the Chimp.

Anne was as gorgeous inside as she was in Technicolor. Then there was busty sex symbol and Howard Hughes discovery Jane Russell, more notable for her inflatable bra and voluptuous dimensions (38D-24-36) than her acting ability, although in Gentleman Prefer Blondes opposite Marilyn Monroe, she was praised for them all. No more close-ups for lovely, versatile British star Susannah York, 72, an actress of wide range and extraordinary depth who was more than just another pretty face in Tom Jones and her Oscar-nominated performance in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? But my favorite of her roles remains the young, naïve, feminine half of a lesbian team in the groundbreaking 1968 shocker The Killing of Sister George.

No more 8x10 publicity layouts for Jill Clayburgh, the excellent and underrated star of Broadway’s Pippin and the film An Unmarried Woman, or for Dana Wynter, 79, the elegant German-born film star best known as the woman who tried to stay awake long enough to survive the pea-pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). No more curtain calls for the great musical comedy star Betty Garrett, 91, who headlined in scores of MGM musicals, on Broadway, and as a regular on TV’s Laverne and Shirley and as Archie Bunker’s neighbor on All in the Family. As a founder of nonprofit theaters and musical workshops in L.A., she raised a lot of money to fight AIDS, and in her last appearance on Broadway, singing “Broadway Baby” in a starry revival of Follies that was far superior to the current one, she was still stopping the show. I already miss the friendly, handsome face of my diligent friend Cliff Robertson, who won a much-deserved Oscar as a mentally disabled janitor in Charly. He passed one day before his 88^th birthday. I’ll never forget the night we were both given honorary degrees at Brandeis University, after which he flew me back to New York in a hair-raising lightning storm in his own twin-engine plane. He kept saying, “If we crash, I wonder who will get the most publicity.” Funny guy.

Jackie Cooper, as a child, and Oscar nominee already.

Other stars who turned in their SAG cards forever included Jackie Cooper, 88, Our Gang alumnus who, at age 8, became the youngest actor nominated for an Oscar (The Champ, with Wallace Beery). He attended the Oscar ceremonies but fell asleep in Marie Dressler’s lap. He was washed up at 14, but became a race-car driver, a drummer with Claude Thornhill’s orchestra, a Broadway star in the 1950s, a major television executive in the 1960s, and an Emmy-winning producer-director in the 1970s. He came out of retirement to gain late-life popularity as Perry White, Clark Kent’s editor at the Daily Planet in the Superman blockbusters. There’s more: Peter Falk, a popular staple in John Cassavetes films and four-time Emmy winner for playing the rumpled TV detective Columbo, wearing the same battered trademark raincoat for 25 years until it shredded and had to be replaced; and Farley Granger, the 1950s heartthrob who waited until he was 80 to write Count Me Out, a candid, tell-all memoir about how, like Rock Hudson and Richard Chamberlain, he wasted his Hollywood years as a closeted gay star whose bisexual affairs included Ava Gardner, Arthur Laurents, Shelley Winters and Leonard Bernstein. (In a busy bed, Lenny only lasted two nights.)

Where will movies be without the flesh and bones of character actors like Pete Postlethwaite, British chameleon with a face of barbed wire, Oscar-nominated in 1994 for The Name of the Father and later applauded for everything from Alien 3 to Inception; Sada Thompson, the distinguished Tony-winning Broadway stalwart with the sandpaper voice; Marian Mercer, willowy, zany blonde who won a 1969 Tony for Promises, Promises; 93-year-old Clarice Taylor, who played Bill Cosby’s mother for seven seasons on The Bill Cosby Show; Phyllis Avery, petite blonde who played Ray Milland’s wife for two years in the TV sitcom Meet Mr. McNulty; Michael Tolan, the leading lady’s journalism teacher and boyfriend on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and one of the founders of New York’s American Place Theater; Margot Stevenson, 98, who starred opposite Orson Welles as the voice of Margo Lane, girlfriend of mystery man Lamont Cranston on the radio series The Shadow; all-American blonde Patricia Smith, who played Jimmy Stewart’s wife in The Spirit of St. Louis; James Arness, 88, a living-room fixture for 20 years as permanent as the family sofa in the role of Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, one of the longest-running horse operas in TV history. Later, he reprised the role in five feature-length Gunsmoke movies. (Everyone forgot he also played the monster in the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing.)

Stage star Margaret Tyzack.

More familiar faces now in bluer skies: Jill Haworth, the critically panned original Sally Bowles in the Broadway musical Cabaret, who was selected by director Harold Prince over 200 competitors despite the fact that she couldn’t sing or dance, then disappeared with her career in shreds; Mary Murphy, the pretty girl who played the wholesome small-town policeman’s daughter who fell for Marlon Brando as the leader of an invading motorcycle gang in the revolutionary film The Wild One (1953); and glamorous Elaine Stewart, a showgirl whose sexy presence added oomph to MGM classics like Brigadoon and The Bad and the Beautiful. In later years she became a household name as the hostess on two hit TV game shows, Gambit and High Rollers, nothing tops the way she stole an important scene from Lana Turner in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful with the cynical line, “There ain’t no great men, honey, there’s only men.”

I will also fondly remember celebrated British dowager Margaret Tyzack, whose co-starring role opposite Maggie Smith in the London-New York stage hit Lettice and Loveage won awards on both sides of the pond; Dulcie Gray, 95-year-old effigy of the stiff-upper-lip school of British oddballs who starred in more than 100 plays on the London stage; Diane Cilento, sultry stage and film beauty, and wife of Sean Connery; Googie Withers, who graced dozens of films in the 1930s and ’40s, including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes; Mary Fickett, a long-running favorite of women everywhere on the soap opera All My Children; Linda Christian, ravishing ’40s sexpot discovered by Errol Flynn in her native Mexico, then married to Tyrone Power, who moved on to Lana Turner after Linda played Lana’s maid in Green Dolphin Street. Those were the days in Tinsel Town. They did it in mirrors.

The year ended sadly for Edith Fellows, former Hollywood child star whose harrowing personal life (con men, drugs, alcoholism, a scheming mother and bankruptcy) was right out of a saga by Charles Dickens, and for Anna Massey, doe-eyed daughter of Hollywood actor Raymond, and star of Hitchcock’s Frenzy, who suffered from depression, anorexia and stage fright so severe it prevented her from being an international star, though she was admired, coached and revered by some of the most important people in film and theatre (including Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Celia Johnson, and her godfather, legendary film director John Ford). No more ovations for Roberts Blossom, famous for crabby old coots in movies like Home Alone; Tom Aldredge, Broadway veteran and husband for 50 years of costume designer Theoni Aldredge, who also died in 2011; John Howard Davies, the sensitive child star who played the title role in David Lean’s classic Oliver Twist, as well as the renowned British thriller The Rocking Horse Winner; John Wood, another Tony winner; French gamine Annie Girardot; Kenneth Mars, comic actor who played the nutty Nazi playwright in Mel Brooks’s The Producers; granite-faced Michael Gough and nice but stoic John Paxton (father of actor Bill Paxton), who both played the loyal butler in Batman movies; John Dye, only 47, who played the angel Andrew for nine seasons of Touched by an Angel; William Campbell, from the original Star Trek series; saffron-haired child star Susan Gordon; Oklahoma oil tycoon G.D. Spradlin, 90, who found acting late in life in such films as Apocalypse Now; gravel-voiced Bruce Gordon, memorable as mob boss Frank Nitti on the classic TV series The Untouchables, and Paul Picerni, who played FBI hero Elliot Ness’s right-hand man on the same show as well as the romantic lead in the classic 3-D horror film House of Wax. They died eight days apart. It was a reluctant send-off for Michael Sarrazin, the once-promising Canadian who shared star billing with Jane Fonda and Paul Newman before drugs took their toll on his looks and career. During the bloom of his romance with dazzling Jacqueline Bisset, they were my next-door neighbors on the beach one summer in Malibu, and they used to drop in to eat whatever I was cooking from pots on the stove. The book also closed on a chapter of TV sitcom history with the departure of David Nelson, 74, the last surviving member of the Nelson family on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. And who could forget pint-size Alice Playten, the saucer-eyed pixie with a voice as loud as Ethel Merman’s, who rose from Baby Louise in the original Gypsy to a series of hysterical TV commercials, including the one where her marshmallow meatballs, sweet-and-sour snails and heart-shape meat loaf drove her husband to Alka-Seltzer.

In a year notable for the sheer volume of its losses, we also bid adieu to camera-ready Marie-France Pisier, goddess of the French New Wave, discovered by François Truffaut and the star of such films as Luis Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty and André Téchiné’s The Bronte Sisters with Isabelle Huppert and Isabelle Adjani, before melting away in shallow, overblown Hollywood extravaganzas like The Other Side of Midnight. She was found floating in a swimming pool in the south of France. Foreign films lost Lena Nyman, a gifted Swedish actress whose acclaimed work as Liv Ullmann’s mentally damaged sister in Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata was unfortunately overshadowed by her frank sex scenes in the controversial 1969 bore I Am Curious Yellow, which turned it into an undeserving box office bonanza. And speaking of censorship ire, it was au revoir to Maria Schneider, the French actress whose explicit nude sex scenes with Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris introduced new ways to use butter. We signed off on Joanne Siegel, 93, the model for illustrator Joe Shuster’s first Lois Lane in the Superman comic books, who later married the strip’s cocreator, Jerry Siegel. No more Len Lesser (annoying Uncle Leo on Seinfeld and his spinoff, on Everybody Loves Raymond); Peggy Rea (the cousin on The Waltons); Phyllis Love, intense 1950s ingenue in Broadway plays (Bus Stop, The Rose Tattoo) and later, in movies (Gary Cooper’s Quaker daughter in Friendly Persuasion); Jane White, daughter of Walter White, civil rights leader and national secretary of the NAACP for 25 years, and in her own right, a theater icon who played the (hilariously) evil queen in Once Upon a Mattress. No more magazine covers will be graced by model-actress Doe Avedon, wife of illustrious fashion photographer Richard Avedon. Their love story, from 1944 to 1951, was the basis of the historic 1957 Fred Astaire-Audrey Hepburn musical, Funny Face. No more comforting portrayals by seasoned veteran Harry Morgan in what seems like 1,000 movies from High Noon to Madame Bovary, playing everything from Colonel Potter on M.A.S.H. to the harassed fathers of teenagers, to General Grant in How the West Was Won, negotiating the vicissitudes of war with John Wayne. Who can replace these unique originals? Who will direct them, after the passing of world-class directors like Peter Yates (Breaking Away), Michael Cacoyannis (Zorba the Greek), the eccentric Ken Russell (Women in Love), and especially the prolific Sidney Lumet, a meticulous craftsman with impeccable taste who proved movies don’t have to be vulgar, derivative and stupid to appeal to wide audiences and win critical praise. Eschewing mindless action epics, animated comic books and pretentious bores, he concentrated instead on turning out timeless classics like Network, 12 Angry Men, The Group, Stage Struck, Serpico and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, to name just a few of my personal favorites. Sidney made intelligent, elegant, solid, emotionally involving films that told stories without depending on computer-generated gimmicks and special effects. He was a genuine Derby winner in a stable of tired old Hollywood also-rans.

Who will make me us laugh as much as Madelyn Pugh, who with her partner Bob Carroll Jr. wrote the I Love Lucy shows but, amazingly, never won an Emmy? Who will pen words of distinction after the final “The End” from playwrights Pam Gems (Piaf), Lanford Wilson (Talley’s Folly), Michael Hastings (Tom and Viv), Sidney Michaels (Tchin-Tchin) and Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey), radio dramatist Norman Corwin, Southern novelist Reynolds Price, French resistance fighter Jorge Semprun, who wrote scripts for Costa-Gavras (Z) and Alain Resnais (Stavisky), screenwriter David Zelag Goodman (Straw Dogs) and the great Arthur Laurents, whose works for stage and screen include Gypsy, West Side Story, Rope, The Snake Pit, The Way We Were, Anastasia and The Turning Point, despite being both gay in the days of homophobic Hollywood and blacklisted during the height of the McCarthy witch hunts. Nobody will look as splendiferous without the costume designs of Theadora Van Runkle, whose berets, calf-length skirts and sweaters for Bonnie and Clyde started a fashion trend called “gangster chic,” and Ray Aghayan, who created spangled spectacles for Cher, Ann-Margret and Diana Ross made of ostrich feathers, rhinestones and 10,000 sequins. One gown for Carol Channing had 80 pounds of crystal beading and a scarf so heavy that when she flung it over her shoulder she damaged the scenery. And just in case there is still a future for show business, who will tomorrow’s bold-face headliners be lucky enough to hire, now that the legendary Sue Mengers has collected her last 10 percent? When she controlled the careers of Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Bob Fosse, Ryan O’Neal and Michael Caine, she was as famous as her clients. Wickedly dispensing caustic, quotable one-liners, she was as fearless as she was powerful. I was in her office one day when Steve McQueen threatened to sue her for some now-forgotten contractual sin. “I’m an Irish mick and I don’t forget,” he barked. Without batting a mink eyelash, Sue retorted: “I’m a Jewish princess and I don’t give a fuck!”

Music hit a few sour notes in 2011. No more tasty recordings of classic songs from the Great American Songbook now that the incomparable Margaret Whiting has folded her sheet music, unplugged her mike and joined her songwriter father, Richard Whiting, and her surrogate father, mentor and best friend Johnny Mercer, in that soundproof recording studio in the sky. When he founded Capitol Records in 1942, she was the first artist he signed to a record contract. She was 18 years old. Her career spanned seven decades. Among the younger generation of sophisticated song stylists who inherited the polish and style of Ms. Whiting’s artistry, it was eight bars and out for Mary Cleere Haran, crushed under the wheels of a car in a small beach town in Florida while riding her bike without a helmet. Among the most accomplished and critically acclaimed interpreters of Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Porter, Gershwin and Berlin, Mary was a darling of the cabaret world, in a class by herself, and the loss is devastating. No more swinging chords from jazz pianist George Shearing. Although sightless, he turned 88 keys into the sound of an entire orchestra, revolutionizing jazz for almost 91 years. Whenever anyone asked if he’d been blind all his life, he always said: “Not yet.”

In jazz, both Bob Flanigan and Ross Barbour, the last living co-founding members of the Four Freshmen, a vocal group who grew from warbling undergraduates in malt shops to millionaire recording stars groomed by mentor Stan Kenton, sang their final four-part harmonies. Pete Rugolo, the hip Kenton big band arranger-conductor who wrote some of the Four Freshmen’s best albums, joined them in the jam session in the sky, along with fellow jazz arranger-composer Russ Garcia, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, Dave Brubeck’s drummer Joe Morello, trumpeter Snooky Young and sax wizard Frank Foster, who shaped the sound of the Count Basie orchestra. On the other side of Tin Pan Alley, Bruce Springsteen’s jovial sideman Clarence Clemens played his last soulful riff, country singer Ferlin Husky left the Grand Ole Opry one last time, and there will be no more hit tunes by Jerry Leiber, who with his writing partner Mike Stoller, penned durable pop songs like Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” and Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.” We won’t get any more brilliant songs by hip lyricist Fran Landesman, whose poetry in rhythm are passions for singers as diverse as Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand and the late June Christy—all of whom recorded “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” I’m really dating myself now, but I’m downright nostalgic about Georgia Carroll, the stunning supermodel from Texas who sang with Kay Kyser, later marrying the bandleader and starring in many of his zany films in the 1940s. After her retirement she retired to North Carolina, where she became active in the restoration of Chapel Hill, and Kyser became president of the Christian Science Church. That girl could sing.

Film scores won’t be the same without five-time Oscar winner John Barry, and colorful movie songs have lost their zip with the sad passing of Hugh Martin, the last of the great songwriters from the golden age of musicals. Meet Me in St. Louis alone contained “The Trolley Song,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “The Boy Next Door,” all standards for 70 years. No more concerts by Kay Armen, lusty singer of Armenian descent whose rich contralto brightened many TV shows and record albums and whose rousing “Hallelujah!” was a highlight in the all-star MGM musical Hit the Deck. It was one final stanza by singers Phoebe Snow and Barbara Lea, whose dedication to esoteric songs by Alec Wilder and other classy composers made her a favorite of New York’s midnight cabaret crowd. No more arias by tenor Giorgio Tozzi, whose voice traveled successfully from the Metropolitan Opera to movies (he dubbed for Rosanno Brazzi in South Pacific) and theater (starring in a Broadway revival of The Most Happy Fella). On the opposite side of the scale, Amy Winehouse, a punk-rock singer who looked like a biker moll on Halloween, got more unfair publicity for her drug addiction and crazy antics than for her odd but transfixing voice. As a result, few people ever discovered her real talents, and her jazz-inflected songs went largely underappreciated by serious music lovers. But the year’s most bizarre music-related scandal involved Oscar-winning songwriter Joseph Brooks, who won for the tune “You Light Up My Life” and ended up facing 25 years in prison after being charged in 2009 with drugging and raping 13 women after luring them to Manhattan with the promise of phony auditions. The case was awaiting trial when Mr. Brooks committed suicide at age 73, leaving his son, Nicholas, to face his own charges of allegedly murdering his girlfriend last December.

So many goodbyes, so little space, but don’t overlook ballet’s flamboyant French choreographer Roland Petit, 87, credited with revolutionizing dance on stage and film, especially in splashy numbers for his wife, legendary prima ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire, who survives him. After the tasteless idiocy of this year’s disgraced producer Brett Ratner, I miss the polish of the deceased Gil Cates, whose reliable taste guided 14 telecasts to glory in 18 years without a hitch. Those were the days when the Oscar shows were worth staying up for. Still playing the fame game, I will not miss A.C. Nielsen, 92, the market researcher who invented the highly dubious TV rating system that turned the tube into incomprehensible hash. But I do miss Dolores Hope, Bob’s widow, who died at 102 wearing the biggest string of emeralds I have ever seen. No more fabulous meals from New York celebrity restaurant owners Armando Orsini, the “Playboy Prince of Pasta,” whose fabled Orsini’s was a West 56^th Street watering hole for everybody who was anybody in the 1960s, and Hungarian cookbook author and food maven George Lang, whose romantic Café des Artistes was a destination for anyone in love near Lincoln Center. If nothing else, he coined one of the best titles ever published for his memoir, called Nobody Knows the Truffles I’ve Seen. I will also miss fitness guru Jack LaLanne, who lived to be 96. There there were Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo and show-biz caricaturist Sam Norkin, often unfairly called “the poor man’s Al Hirschfeld,” whose drawings filled the arts pages of the same newspaper for 26 years. It was the end of visionary inventors Elliot Handler (Ken and Barbie dolls), Murray Handwerker (his family invented Nathan’s hot dogs), Harry Wesley Coover (Super Glue), Arch West (the humble Doritos corn chips, with total sales of nearly $5 billion annually) and Hubert Schlafly, who helped generations of politicians remember their lines by inventing the dependable cheating device called the teleprompter.

Some of those town criers who died in 2011 were likeable congresswoman and vice presidential hopeful Geraldine Ferraro, former Democratic New York governor Hugh Carey and Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher. But my favorite was still Betty Ford—one of the most inspiring women who ever lived in the White House. She was courageous, outspoken, humane and a strong believer in sharing the truth with the people she served. After Gerald Ford became president by default, she stuck by him through thick and thin, and inevitably found her own share of the spotlight when she frankly discussed her own personal problems with the millions who adored her for her—struggles with alcohol, pain pills and breast cancer—without a trace of self-pity. She always said she came to Washington “through an accident in history.” She stayed 28 years.

No more family reunions for Judy Lewis (illegitimate daughter of Clark Gable and Loretta Young, who pretended her child was “adopted” for 31 years), Dorothy Rodham (mother and mentor of Hillary Clinton), Lucian Freud (grandson of psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and famous for painting nudes), composer Peter Lieberson (son of Columbia Records mogul Goddard Lieberson and ballet star Vera Zorina) and Svetlana Stalin (daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin), who spent her last years wandering homeless and in poverty.

Journalism, which has one foot in the grave already, lost Tom Wicker, the New York Times White House correspondent, Washington bureau chief for 25 years and the only Times reporter in John F. Kennedy’s motorcade that fateful day in 1963 in Dallas that altered the course of U.S. history. Plus liberal talk-radio host Lynn Samuels, a sane alternative to the lunatic fringe of conservative hate-mongers who crowd the airwaves. Plus heavy-drinking, chain-smoking, self-professed bisexual slob journalist and professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens, and crotchety 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney, who kvetched charmingly about everything from the junk in his closet to the annoyances of computer technology for 33 years. I don’t know where to put computer whiz and Apple founder Steve Jobs or Jack Kevorkian, who made himself a household name by advocating euthanasia and even did eight years of jail time for what many believed to be a noble cause. He admitted to at least 130 “assisted suicides” and even invented a machine that taught people suffering from terminal illnesses how to do it themselves. To some, he was “Dr. Death.” To others, he was a saint. I could go on, but I’m feeling terminal myself.

Last but not least, did I forget to mention Karl Stover, 93, and one of the last surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz? He was important too. So goodbye, 2011, you were a lousy year. And good riddance, if you ask me.

rreed@observer.com