Blog

Margaret Kerry, who through months of graceful and poignant pantomime inspired the portrayal of the Peter Pan fairy Tinker Bell that the world knows best, died on June 11 at her home in Wilmington, N.C. She was 97.

The cause was lung cancer, her family announced on social media.

Tinker Bell’s origins lie in Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904), a play by the British writer J.M. Barrie later expanded into a novel, Peter and Wendy (1911). Barrie invented “fairy dust” to explain how Tinker Bell could enable children to fly, but in his story, she was “quite a common fairy” who fixes pots and pans. Peter ultimately forgets about her, and in stage performances, she was only a spotlight.

With Ms. Kerry’s help, Disney’s original animated film adaptation, Peter Pan (1953), produced a version of Tinker Bell that became definitive.

In the movie, the fairy communicates only through movement and expression; she does not speak.

To reinvent and animate the character, Marc Davis — the illustrator behind Snow White, Cinderella, and Cruella de Vil — oversaw an industrial equivalent of the modeling demanded by perfectionist painters like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or Paul Cézanne. Along with a few prop specialists, a camera operator, a makeup artist, and one or more directors, he spent more than six months having an actor act out everything he wanted Tinker Bell to do.

“Marc Davis is a man’s man — how does he know how a 3½-inch sprite is going to move, get angry, or stamp her foot?” Ms. Kerry said to the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “And how does he know what kind of emotion would go behind that?”

Ms. Kerry brought a record player to her audition for Davis and director Gerry Geronimi. With musical backing, she did a pantomime of making breakfast: Peering into a refrigerator, juggling eggs, closing the fridge door with her foot — “as much variety of movement as I could do in the context of a little story,” she said in a 2003 interview with historian Jim Korkis.

She got the job. The first time she stepped onto Disney’s enormous, empty soundstage, she asked Davis who he wanted her to be — ditsy like Betty Boop? Above it all, like the Queen of the Fairies?

“He said, very quietly, ‘Margaret, we want her to be you,’” Ms. Kerry recalled in an interview with author and YouTube host Jonathan Rosen.

“At that moment,” she told Parade in 2016, “Tinker Bell and I became one.”

One day she was asked, What would it look like if Tinker Bell landed on a mirror and saw herself? Ms. Kerry thought perhaps she would never have seen her reflection, so she began a preening once-over — until she reached her hips, got upset and stormed off. That became a scene in Peter Pan.

She was asked to fall onto a mattress — which, she soon discovered, was rather thin, causing her to thud on impact. Her look of pained surprise also made it into the film.

She was asked to pout. She demonstrated a whole menu of pouts and asked, What kind do you want?

She imagined Tinker Bell as a 13-year-old girl. That helped Davis capture one of the character’s most distinctive traits: Barrie’s idea that fairies are so small that they “have room for one feeling only at a time.” Davis’ Tink is consumed by competitiveness with Wendy, or consumed by fear for Peter — always just one feeling, felt to the utmost.

Margaret Kerry was born Margaret McCarty on May 11, 1929, in Springfield, Ill. Her mother died in childbirth and her father was unable to take care of his five children, Parade reported. She was adopted at 3 by Frederick and Grace (Lynch) Robb, who lived in Los Angeles.

Robb was a salesperson for Durametallic Corp., an industrial manufacturer. The couple decided their adoptive daughter was “as cute as Shirley Temple,” Kerry later recalled, and by the time she was 4 she was in Central Casting. She found a lot of work in Hollywood, including appearing in eight of the Our Gang short films about the Little Rascals.

Her stage name was originally Peggy Lynch. In 1948, she played the daughter of Eddie Cantor’s character in the movie If You Knew Susie. She changed her name to Margaret Kerry at Cantor’s suggestion.

In later years, she did voice-over work and hosted a weekly Christian talk show on Los Angeles radio.

She married Dick Brown, a television producer and director, in 1951. They divorced in the 1980s. Her marriage to Jack Willcox, in 1987, ended with his death in 1999. She is survived by three children from her first marriage, Eric Norquist, Christina McCarty, and Ellen Seibel, as well as several grandchildren.

In 2019, a veteran of D-Day, Robert Boeke, visited Europe to mark its 75th anniversary. He passed a store in Amsterdam called Tinker Bell Toys and said to a travel buddy, “I have been in love with Tinker Bell all my life.”

He was being literal: Boeke and Kerry dated when he was a college student in Los Angeles. A friend of his promptly found her email address and sent her a note. He assumed she had forgotten him.

But the email, like a bit of fairy dust, caused something to improbably take flight. Ms. Kerry had saved a piece of jewelry that Boeke gave her all those years ago.

On Valentine’s Day 2020, they married. They got together just in time to keep each other company through the coronavirus pandemic, and Boeke lived until just 2½ weeks before Kerry’s death. She told Rosen, “It was love at second sight.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Mark Singer, a staff writer at the New Yorker from the age of 23 who extended the magazine’s franchise of rich reporting and witty prose about offbeat, complicated, and quintessentially American characters, died Friday in New York City. He was 75.

The cause of death, in a hospital, was cancer of the salivary gland, his son Tim said.

Mr. Singer wrote urbane “Talk of the Town” pieces for the front of the magazine, reflected on serious national matters like the Affordable Care Act, and did a hitch traveling the country as the correspondent for the “U.S. Journal” column.

But he was best known as a profiler. His subjects included magician Ricky Jay, whom he called “perhaps the most gifted sleight of hand artist alive”; a set of four door attendant brothers in New York; and a braggadocious real estate developer, Donald Trump, years before he ran for office.

“He came out of the tradition of A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell and Calvin Trillin, which is to say he combined meticulous reporting and a very distinctive comic voice, which is extremely rare,” David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, said in an interview.

An Oklahoma native, Mr. Singer moved back to the state for an immersive series of articles in 1985 that became a book, Funny Money. It is about a small suburban bank that wildly pumped up its balance sheet during an energy boom, led by a buffoonish cast of executives, including one who wore Mickey Mouse ears to work.

A 2005 collection of Mr. Singer’s profiles, Character Studies, was subtitled Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed, a description that matched the author himself.

The book included pieces about a group of Texans searching for the missing skull of Pancho Villa and a family of fanatic California farmers, the Chinos, who grew vegetables for chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse (who happened to be married to Mr. Singer’s brother Stephen).

“Singer’s voice is pitched perfectly to the register of The New Yorker: cool and intelligent, with a wry and artful skepticism uncorrupted by cynicism,” Jeff Macgregor wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “Neither aloof nor Olympian, he maintains instead an efficient distance from his subjects. He is a terrific reporter, with a receptive ear for dialogue and a painter’s eye for the salient detail.”

The collection included Mr. Singer’s 1993 profile of Jay, with accounts of his performing mind-boggling card tricks and memory feats, which Mr. Singer witnessed over a two-year acquaintance.

“He has small hands — just large enough so that a playing card fits within the plane of his palm,” Mr. Singer observed. “There is a slightly raised pad of flesh on the underside of the first joint of each finger.”

He was much less stoked to be assigned by Tina Brown, then editor of the New Yorker, to profile Trump in 1997.

Observing him over several months on construction sites, in his Trump Tower office, and on a private plane, Mr. Singer concluded that Trump, in the period before he became a reality TV star, was a man “who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”

“That profile,” Remnick said, “got everything about Trump 20 years before he ran for president: the vanity, the casual cruelty, the outsized selfishness. It was all there.”

The profile was included in Character Studies, and after the Times review mentioned it, Trump wrote a letter to the editor attacking Mr. Singer as “not born with great writing ability.”

Mr. Singer sent a mock thank you to Trump for the publicity, which apparently bumped his book higher on the Amazon book charts. He also enclosed a check for $37.82, “a small token of my enormous gratitude,” he wrote.

Trump returned the letter with an all-caps note at the bottom, reading, in part, “MARK — YOU ARE A TOTAL LOSER.”

Trump also cashed the $37.82 check, Mr. Singer later said. Singer framed a photocopy of it for his apartment.

In 1999, Mr. Singer took on the challenge of solving the mystery of Joseph Mitchell, the magazine’s revered, Joycean profiler of New York eccentrics, who came to the office for 32 years without publishing a piece after 1964. Mr. Singer, who never quite solved the reasons for Mitchell’s epic writer’s block, quoted Philip Hamburger, a friend of Mitchell’s: “Why didn’t he write more? Well, he wrote enough.”

Mark Jay Singer was born Oct. 19, 1950, in Tulsa, Okla., the middle of five children of Alexander and Marjorie (Teller) Singer. His father ran an oil and gas business, Singer Brothers, which had been founded by his own father and an uncle, whose family members were Jewish immigrants from Russia.

Mr. Singer attended Yale University, where he found a mentor in William Zinsser, a nonfiction writing teacher whose classic guide, On Writing Well, preaches cutting clutter from sentences and choosing the precise word. (He also first introduced Mr. Singer to Mitchell’s work.)

Mr. Singer received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1972. Two years later, he was hired by the New Yorker, at a time when the magazine offered an on-ramp to promising but inexperienced young writers, who sank or swam by writing unbylined pieces for “The Talk of the Town.”

Mr. Singer married Rhonda Klein, a lawyer, in 1972. The marriage ended in divorce, as did a second marriage, to Caroline Mailhot.

Besides his son Tim, from his first marriage, he is survived by his partner, Lisa Brody; his sons Jeb and Reid, also from his first marriage; a son, Paul Mailhot-Singer, from his second marriage; two grandchildren; and his siblings George, Stephen, and Sandra Anderson.

Singer is also the author of Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin (1996), an expanded version of a New Yorker profile of a drug smuggler, murder suspect, and media manipulator that was a finalist for a National Magazine Award; and the collection Somewhere in America: Under the Radar with Chicken Warriors, Left-Wing Patriots, Angry Nudists and Others (2004).

The New Yorker writer Ian Frazier, who shared an office with Singer when both were tyros, recalled that his colleague and friend once buttonholed William Shawn, the magazine’s famously reserved former editor, at a wedding reception. Singer told Shawn a long-winded anecdote about his own first wedding.

As the editor seemed to recoil, searching the ceiling, Singer itemized an elaborate menu he had requested from a Jewish caterer — bagels, herring, etc. — after which the caterer said, “So far, you’re giving them nothing.”

Laughter ensued.

“Mark and I,” Frazier said, “would talk about, What is writing? That’s writing,” he said of Singer’s lengthy tale delivered with confidence to a defensive audience. “When you can sense a real wind and just keep going with it.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Jean Houston, a spellbinding figure in the human potential movement of the 1960s who used guided imagery to inspire unmoored suburbanites, burned-out executives, and even Hillary Clinton, helping Clinton conduct imaginary conversations at the White House with Eleanor Roosevelt, died on May 16 at her home in Ashland, Ore. She was 89.

Her death was confirmed by her friend and business partner, Constance Buffalo.

The daughter of a gag writer for Bob Hope, George Burns, and Henny Youngman, Ms. Houston rejected any association with the word “guru,” viewing it as an intellectual demotion. She called herself an “evocateur of the possible” and a “midwife of souls.”

“In my definition, guru is spelled ‘Gee, You Are You,’” she said on the Oprah Winfrey television show Super Soul Sunday. “I seem to be a process. I seem to be a verb of becoming, and held by the lure of becoming that keeps us going on.”

As the founder of numerous organizations, including the Human Capacities Corp., Mystery School, Social Artistry School, and the Possible Society, Ms. Houston led workshops at empowerment retreats, in corporate boardrooms, at her geodesic-domed house in Oregon, and in far-flung countries with the United Nations.

“She had a remarkable capacity to be present to others,” Robertson Work, a U.N. policy adviser who accompanied her on trips around the world, said in an interview. “You felt like you were being seen. You could discover: ‘What is my greatness? What is my potential?’”

Ms. Houston synthesized mythology, the psychology of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, and the experiential ethos of Esalen, the California retreat that shaped the human potential movement.

During her multiday workshops, participants engaged in imaginary conversations with historical figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Pablo Picasso, acted out the stages of evolution while pretending to be a fish or a monkey, and translated their dreams into elaborate dances.

“The idea was that it’s possible to cultivate a higher power within yourself,” Marion Goldman, a professor emeritus of sociology and religious studies at the University of Oregon and the author of The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege (2012), said in an interview. “By making the self a better place, you make the world a better place.”

In addition to her workshops, Ms. Houston published more than two dozen books, including The Possible Human: A Course in Enhancing Your Physical, Mental and Creative Abilities (1982), which sold more than 400,000 copies.

“The imaginal realms of inner space proliferate and spill over into the external world in a phenomenal growth of new science, art, music, literature, politics, and above all in a new vision of mankind and world that is the glory of humanism,” she wrote in the book’s introduction.

There were dissenters.

Writing in Skeptical Inquirer magazine, Martin Gardner, a critic of pseudoscience, called Ms. Houston’s workshops “bewildering” and judged her “flowery New Age jargon” to be “so vague and murky that it is often difficult to understand.” (Adding insult to injury, the article’s headline labeled her a guru.)

Still, her pull was gravitational — even at the White House. In 1994, Ms. Houston was among a group of motivational speakers whom President Bill Clinton and the first lady invited to Camp David for a series of pick-me-up conversations after their universal healthcare initiative failed and Republicans took control of Congress.

She and Hillary Clinton hit it off.

“Jean wraps herself in brightly colored capes and caftans and dominates the room with her larger-than-life presence and crackling wit,” Hillary Clinton wrote in her memoir Living History (2003). “She is a walking encyclopedia, reciting poems, passages from great works of literature, historical facts and scientific data all in the same breath.”

Ms. Houston helped Hillary Clinton prepare for a visit to India, Nepal, and Bangladesh in 1995. That year, the first lady invited her to the White House to brainstorm ideas for It Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton’s book about the well-being of children.

Hillary Clinton was physically and mentally exhausted. Perhaps, Ms. Houston suggested, she should speak with her hero, Eleanor Roosevelt. The idea was for Clinton to talk as herself and then answer back as Roosevelt — the sort of role-playing exercise that Ms. Houston had conducted thousands of times.

At some point, she described the sessions with Clinton to the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who recounted the details in his 1996 book, The Choice. After an excerpt appeared in the Post, tabloids and Republican opponents of the Clintons accused the first lady of holding seances at the White House.

Hillary Clinton released a lengthy statement in her defense. “This was an interesting intellectual exercise to help spark my own thoughts,” she said. “It was a brainstorming session for my book — not a spiritual event.”

In an appearance on the Today show, Ms. Houston told Katie Couric that she was simply helping the first lady focus her mind by imagining “what she would say to Eleanor Roosevelt should she have the occasion to do so.”

Houston felt that she had been unfairly maligned.

“I’m not a psychic,” she said. “I’m not a guru.”

Jean Houston was born on May 10, 1937, in Brooklyn. Her mother, Mary (Todaro) Houston, was an actor, interior designer, and stock analyst. Her father, Jack Houston, was a comedy writer.

Growing up, she found inspiration in a dummy. When she was 8, she accompanied her father to deliver a script to the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. Upon arriving, they found Bergen talking to his plastic-and-wood buddy, Charlie McCarthy.

“Charlie, what is the meaning of life?” Bergen asked the dummy, as Ms. Houston recalled in her memoir, A Mythic Life (1996). “What is the nature of love? Is there any truth to be found?”

The dummy mumbled some answers.

“At that moment,” Ms. Houston wrote, “my skin turned to gooseflesh, an electric hand seemed to touch mine, and a fractal wave of my future activities crashed on the shore of my 8-year-old self. For I suddenly knew that we all contain ‘so much more’ than we think we do.”

Her epiphanies proliferated. On a school trip, she met Helen Keller and marveled at how happy she seemed despite being blind and deaf. She joined an international pen pal club and corresponded about the scriptures of Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists. She had long conversations with an old man in Central Park; later, she discovered that she had been talking to philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

“When you befriend your own brain,” she said, “a great deal becomes possible.”

At Barnard, she studied religion and theater, acting in off-Broadway plays at night. She attended a doctoral program in religion offered by Columbia University and the Union Theological Seminary, but did not receive a degree. (She later received one in psychology from Union Institute in Cincinnati.)

During graduate school, while conducting studies on LSD use, she met Robert E.L. Masters Jr., a writer. They married in 1965 and spent their honeymoon writing The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, which was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

Also in 1965, the couple founded the Foundation for Mind Research, the first of many organizations that Ms. Houston started to promote and study human potential.

“We are living at the beginnings of the golden age of brain, mind, and body research,” she told the Washington Post in 1978. “We may well be standing, with regard to these, where Einstein stood in the year 1904 with his discovery of the special theory of relativity.”

Masters died in 2008. Ms. Houston has no immediate survivors.

Among her fondest memories was her childhood meeting with Keller, who was then in her late 60s — a story she recounted often.

Keller put her hand on Jean’s face to read her lips.

“Why are you so happy?” Jean asked.

“My child,” Keller responded, “it is because I live my life each day as if it were my last. And life in all its moments is so full of glory.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.