Category: Obituaries

NEW YORK — Ann Godoff, a leading book publisher for more than 30 years with an eye for timely and timeless works from Alexander Hamilton and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to current bestsellers by Gisèle Pelicot and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, has died. She was 76.

Ms. Godoff died of cancer Tuesday in Albany, N.Y., according to a statement from Penguin Press, which she had founded in 2003.

“Ann’s impact on American book culture over the past four decades is incalculable,” Penguin Press publisher Scott Moyers said in a statement. “An editor of immense range in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Ann shepherded into print innumerable New York Times bestsellers, multiple winners of every major award, and works that have appeared on all manner of best books lists — of the year, the decade, and the century.”

A onetime NYU film student who studied under then-faculty member Martin Scorsese, sold cars and assisted on Dr. Joyce Brothers’ television show, Ms. Godoff was a late bloomer who didn’t begin her publishing career until her early 30s and soon revealed uncommon gifts for spotting and cultivating talent. As a rising editor at Random House in the 1990s, she published such debut phenomena as John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Caleb Carr’s The Alienist.

She also worked with Salman Rushdie, E.L. Doctorow, and Arundhati Roy and had lasting relationships with Michael Pollan and Ron Chernow, whose books with Ms. Godoff have included a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George Washington and the Hamilton biography that was the basis for the prizewinning stage musical.

“Ann supervised me with a rather light touch and never got lost in the details,” Chernow wrote in an email to the Associated Press.

“She was no less gifted in fashioning a design for the book — everything from the cover art to the paper stock — with a look fully consistent with my portrait of the character,” he added. “Everything was of a piece and that was carried straight through to the marketing and publicity. I always felt myself in the most capable hands.”

Ms. Godoff was eventually promoted to president and editor-in-chief of Random House, and her stature was so high that when she was forced out in 2003 amid corporate restructuring, her departure set off debates — evergreen in the industry — over the feared decline of literary publishing.

But Penguin soon signed her up to lead the new Penguin Press imprint. Chernow, Pollan, and other authors moved there with her, and she continued to publish bestsellers and critical favorites, including such Pulitzer Prize winners as Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars and John Lewis Gaddis’ George F. Kennan.

When Random House and Penguin merged into Penguin Random House in 2013, Ms. Godoff was under the same roof as her old company. Right up to the time of her death, she was shaping the public conversation. Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life recounts her horrifying marriage and how she came to be a leading voice against sexual violence, while Newsom’s Young Man in a Hurry is widely seen as a building block for a 2028 presidential run.

Ms. Godoff was born in 1949 in New York City, grew up in New York and California, and graduated from Bennington College. She started out at Simon & Schuster in the early 1980s as an assistant to Alice Mayhew, the renowned editor of Bob Woodward and Doris Kearns Goodwin among others. After serving as editor-in-chief at Atlantic Monthly Press, Ms. Godoff joined Random House in 1991.

Her marriage to Malcolm Drummond ended in divorce in 2012 after a long separation. The same year, Godoff married her partner, the writer-photographer Annik LaFarge. Besides LaFarge, her survivors include her brother, Peter Godoff.

Ms. Godoff was never the outsized personality of such Random House predecessors as Bennett Cerf and Harold Evans. She was regarded by many as serious, hard-working and committed, known for saying “The book will abide.” But she was competitive, and she didn’t mind making news. She paid a reported $8 million for Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier’s next novel, a sum many found excessive at the time, and a comparable amount for a memoir by former Federal Reverse Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Bestselling author Roger Lowenstein, whose seven books have all been published by Ms. Godoff, wrote in an email to the AP that she was an exacting but precise editor. He remembered a “blistering memo” from her while shaping the manuscript for Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War, a prizewinning history published in 2022. His final draft was 90 pages shorter and he couldn’t think of a “single word” that he regretted being cut.

“She generally reserved her praise, at least in my case, until the end of the process, often in letters that arrived unexpected in the mail,” he wrote. “Nothing was ever sweeter, because one worked so hard to get there, and because you knew that she meant it.”

ROME — Daniela Petroff, who helped shape the Associated Press’ fashion and Vatican coverage for nearly four decades with style, authority and wit, has died in Rome. She was 80.

Ms. Petroff died Tuesday at home, where she was recovering from a fall, said her husband, Victor Simpson, the retired AP Rome bureau chief.

Ms. Petroff worked for the Chicago Tribune and Time magazine in Rome before moving onto the AP as a Vatican reporter and Milan fashion correspondent. She launched what became a mainstay of the AP’s culture report, covering the four weeks of menswear and womenswear each year.

In 1985, the Simpsons endured an unfathomable tragedy: Their 11-year-old daughter, Natasha, was killed during the Dec. 27, 1985, terrorist attack at Rome’s airport that also wounded their son, Michael. When their youngest daughter, Debbie, was born two years later, Pope John Paul II called to congratulate Ms. Petroff.

In announcing Ms. Petroff’s death, Simpson wrote that she had gone to sleep after lunch and decided not to wake up, “to finally embrace again her beloved Natasha.”

Led AP’s Milan fashion coverage

Fluent in Italian, German, French and English, Ms. Petroff spearheaded AP’s Milan fashion coverage just as Giorgio Armani was becoming an international figure, setting the pace for other reporters with informative, succinct, fact-based dispatches that stayed away from opinion and reviews.

“She had a gift for putting the facts into kind of a very artful context,” said Lisa Anderson, who covered Milan fashion for the Chicago Tribune for nearly a decade starting in the mid-1980s. “She looked at that industry, which often takes itself too seriously, with a lot of amusement as well as respect, which is probably the right combination of qualities to approach fashion reporting.”

Ms. Petroff’s last AP byline appeared in September, when her authoritative profile of Armani was published following the designer’s death.

“Starting with an unlined jacket, a simple pair of pants and an urban palette, Armani put Italian ready-to-wear style on the international fashion map in the late 1970s, creating an instantly recognizable relaxed silhouette that has propelled the fashion house for half a century,” Ms. Petroff wrote.

She covered the rise of Gianni Versace, Gucci in the Tom Ford era, Karl Lagerfeld at Fendi, and the Missoni fashion dynasty, and often put her fashion knowledge and smart wordsmithing to work on the Vatican beat.

In one 2014 story about Pope Francis’ new batch of cardinals, she mused: “But with the ‘slum pope’ now calling the sartorial shots, fashionistas and Vaticanistas are wondering how his new cardinals — who hail from some of the poorest places on Earth, including Haiti, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast — will dress themselves for their new role.”

In between those assignments, Ms. Petroff covered some of the biggest cultural events in Italy, including the 2003 reopening of Venice’s La Fenice opera house after a devastating fire. “True to its namesake the phoenix, La Fenice has risen up from the ashes,” she wrote at the reopening.

Early life in Paris, New York

Born in 1945 in Mecklenburg, Germany, Ms. Petroff grew up first in Paris and then New York, where she attended the all-girl Convent of the Sacred Heart Catholic school. An only child, her parents and she moved to Rome for Ms. Petroff’s final two years of high school, which she completed at Marymount International School.

After attending Manhattanville College in New York, Ms. Petroff returned to Rome and graduated from La Sapienza University with a degree in modern languages. In Rome, she soon met the new AP news editor, Victor Simpson. They were married in 1973.

A childhood friend from New York, Gail Willett Bejarano, recalled ice-skating in Central Park, afterschool ice cream at Schraftt’s, and pushing the rules with the nuns at Sacred Heart. While Ms. Petroff was a top student, she was also part of the posse of girls who would go to ogle the boys at nearby Loyola, “hike your uniform up and put lipstick on, all forbidden,” Bejarano recalled.

After retiring from AP in 2017, Ms. Petroff dedicated herself to her alma mater, Marymount, where she served as chair of the board.

A private funeral is scheduled Thursday. A memorial service is planned for Monday at Marymount.

In addition to Simpson, Ms. Petroff is survived by her son, Michael, and daughter, Debbie.

Willie Colón, the Grammy-nominated architect of urban salsa music and social activist, died Saturday. He was 75.

Over his decades-long career, the trombonist, composer, arranger, and singer produced more than 40 albums that sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. He collaborated with a wide range of artists, including the Fania All Stars, David Byrne, and Celia Cruz.

His celebrated collaboration with Rubén Blades, Siembra, became one of the bestselling salsa albums of all time, and the pair were known for addressing social issues through the genre.

Mr. Colón’s family and manager confirmed his death through social media posts.

“Willie didn’t just change salsa; he expanded it, politicized it, clothed it in urban chronicles, and took it to stages where it hadn’t been heard before,” manager Pietro Carlos wrote. “His trombone was the voice of the people, an echo of the Caribbean in New York, a bridge between two cultures.”

Mr. Colón, who was nominated for 10 Grammys and one Latin Grammy, made famous songs such as “El gran varón,” “Sin poderte hablar,” “Casanova,” “Amor verdad,” and “Oh, qué será.”

Blades said on the social platform X that he confirmed “what I was reluctant to believe” and offered his condolences to Mr. Colón’s family.

The path to the trombone — and fame

Born in New York’s Bronx borough, Mr. Colón was raised by his grandmother and aunt, who from a young age nurtured him with traditional Puerto Rican music and the typical rhythms of the Latin American repertoire, including Cuban son and tango.

At age 11 he ventured into the world of music, first with flute, then bugle, trumpet, and finally trombone, with which he stood out in the then-nascent genre of salsa.

His interest in trombone arose after hearing Barry Rogers playing it on “Dolores,” Mon Rivera’s song with Joe Cotto.

“It sounded like an elephant, a lion … an animal. Something so different that, as soon as I heard it, I said to myself: ‘I want to play that instrument,’” he recalled in an interview published in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo in 2011.

At 17 he joined the group of artists that formed the famous record label Fania Records, led and created by Jerry Masucci and Johnny Pacheco. Fania was largely responsible for the new sound that was produced in the Latin world of New York and would later be called “salsa.”

Mr. Colón’s main characteristic as a musician was the fusion of rhythms, as he harmonized jazz, rock, funk, soul, and R&B with the old Latin school of Cuban son, cha-cha-cha, mambo, and guaracha, adding the nostalgia of the traditional Puerto Rican sound that encompasses jíbara, bomba, and plena music.

In 2004 the Latin Recording Academy awarded Mr. Colón a special Grammy for his career and contributions to music.

Community leader and activist

As a community leader, Mr. Colón fought for civil rights, mostly in the United States. He was part of the Hispanic Arts Association, the Latino Commission on AIDS, the Arthur Schomburg Coalition for a Better New York, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, among others.

In 1991 he was honored with the Chubb fellowship from Yale University, a public service recognition also awarded to the likes of John F. Kennedy, Moshe Dayan, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Ronald Reagan, among others.

In the political arena, he served as special assistant to David Dinkins, New York’s first Black mayor, and was later appointed special assistant and adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Mr. Colón had little luck running for public office himself, however. He failed in a challenge to then-U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel in the 1994 Democratic primary, and in 2001 came in third in the Democratic primary for New York’s public advocate.

He backed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008, but he told the Observer that he voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

Mr. Colón had public clashes with artists and politicians. His friendship with Blades ruptured after Mr. Colón sued for breach of contract over the 2003 concert “Siembra … 25 years later,” held in Puerto Rico. He also sparked a controversy when he called the then-president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, “rotten” on a social network.

Mr. Colón acted in films such as Vigilante, The Last Fight, and It Could Happen to You, and on TV in Miami Vice and Demasiado Corazón. More recently he appeared in Bad Bunny’s music video for “NuevaYol.”

He is survived by his wife and four sons.