Hideki Irabu, long plagued by hanging pitches in the major leagues, made himself a hanging pitcher, committing suicide at the age of 42. A star of the Japanese Pacific League, Irabu demanded the chance to come to the United States, and his team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, eventually complied and sold the negotiating rights to the San Diego Padres. Irabu refused to sign with the Padres, eventually forcing a trade to the New York Yankees, where he made his debut to a capacity crowd with 35 million more watching in Japan. He won that game, which would be the highlight of his season, and probably his career. Built for comfort, not for pitching, Irabu, pronounced I-rob-you, was a profound disappointment, with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner calling a “fat, pussy toad.” Finishing his career with a record of 34 -35, Irabu was less the Japanese Nolan Ryan, as he had been dubbed, and more the Japanese Ryan Drese.
Chip Mayer, the Fredo of the Duke clan, has died at the age of 57. In 1982, Tom Wopat and John Schneider pulled a Drysdale-Koufax and joined forces to negotiate new contracts before returning to The Dukes of Hazzard. With good reason, CBS assumed Dukes’ ratings were based more on the sex appeal of the General Lee, Catherine Bach and Denver Pyle than the two stars, and hatched a strike-busting plan. Knowing how much rednecks love cousins, the Tiffany Network replaced Bo and Luke with cousins Vance (played by Mayer) and Coy (played by Byron Cherry) faster than you can say Curly Joe DeRita, and the wacky antics, car jumping and Roscoe-taunting continued. But hicks and pre-teen boys are a fickle bunch and never warmed to the nouveau Dukes, who left Hazzard County as suddenly as they had appeared when Wopat and Schneider, having been shown the money, resumed their hood-sliding ways after 19 episodes.
G.D. Spradlin, who learned how to be an evil, powerful, manipulative bastard as an Oklahoma oil man and put that skill set to use as a prolific heavy character actor, has died at the age of 90. Best remembered as Nevada Senator Pat Geary, who goes Jack Woltz one better and gets a whole hooker in his bed rather than just a head, Spradlin didn’t begin acting until he was in his 40s and still managed to compile more than 70 films on his resume. When not attending donkey shows with Fredo, Spradlin did his best Tom Landry impression in North Dallas Forty and sent Martin Sheen up river to kill Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. But his knack for the heavies was his stock in trade, including sadistic Sheriff Cyrus Buelton in Tank, deranged racist commandant of the of the Carolina Military Academy in The Lords of Discipline, Coach Moreland Smith, who made Bob Knight look cuddly in One on One, the guy pulling Johnny Depp’s strings on an assassination attempt in Nick of Time, and Lyndon Johnson in the 1985 TV mini-series Robert Kennedy & His Times.
Or She Said No, No, No Amy Winehouse, the British drunk crackhead who occasionally sang has visited Club 27, joining Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Louis Chouvin. No cause of death has been reported, but I wouldn’t bet the house on natural causes. Adopting the John Derek philosophy “Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse” – well, two out of three, anyway – she rode her husky sound and a hip-hop retro soul sound to record her second album, Back to Black, which scored her 5 Grammys in 2008, including the career ending Best New Artist. She also won Song of the Year for Rehab, which in retrospect now looks more like an unanswered cry for help. Before and especially since, her personal life has made more headlines than her singing, as she sought treatment for anorexia, emphysema, injuries from falls, tuberculosis, and rickets, and of course, lots and lots of addictions with several stints in the dreaded rehab. At her most recent appearance, she was even more incoherent than usual, slurring her way through a couple songs she couldn’t remember the lyrics too – a poor showing, even by Belgrade standards, and she was booed off the stage. The rest of her tour was canceled, and her next public appearance came when she was wheeled out of her London apartment on a gurney.
Or Whipped The Del Rubio Triplets can start their reunion tour with the death of Milly, the last of the Grim Reaper’s hat trick, at the age of 89. The trio, the Boyds by birth, were a camp sensation of the 1980s with dyed bright blonde bouffant s, gaudy blue eye shadow and showing a lot more leg than any 60-year-olds should wear while offering bizarre interpretations of contemporary classics, such as an acoustic guitar cover version of Devo’s Whip It, which they reprised in an episode of Sliders and in a McDonald’s commercial. Other appearances included Peggy’s aunts on Married... with Children, Full House, The Golden Girls, Night Court, New Monkees and Pee-wee's Playhouse. The group ended with Eadie’s death in 1996, and got even quieter with Elena’s in 2001.
Or The Lady Tarnishes (Tip o’ the cap for Kirsti) Googie Withers, dispenser of a bit of old school British class in dozens of films of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, has died at the age of 94. Old enough to have been a native of Karachi in what was called British India before the English did such a great job redrawing the map of Asia, Withers took to the stage in London in the 1930s, where she caught the eye of Alfred Hitchcock before he tacitly acknowledged his fetish for icy blondes. Withers had a supporting role in The Lady Vanishes as one of the passengers on a stranded train from which a woman may have disappeared or may have never existed, later adapted as Flightplan and parodied on Andy Barker, PI as The Lady Varnishes. Other films included the inventory comedy One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Dead of Night and Night and the City. She married the Australian actor John McCallum and joined him when he took over a theater there, bringing to life the words of Chekov, Wilde and Maughum to a bunch of drunks named Bruce. For her efforts, she was the first non-Australian to be named an officer of the Order of Australia, in 1980, later tacking on a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2002. Her final role was the 1996 Australian movie “Shine,” for which Geoffrey Rush won an Oscar as a lunatic pianist.
Here’s the Story, of a TV Mogul, Who Stopped Breathing One Lovely July Night
Or Just sit right back and you’ll hear the tale The tale of a fateful trip That started down the river Styx Clutched in death’s icy grip
Or Deadwood Schwartz
Or The Silver Platters Announce Reunion Tour to Pay for Headstone
Or A Very Brady Funeral (Additional accolades for Phil)
Or Here's the Story... of a Corpse Named Sherwood! (Can I get a whoop whoop for Terry?)
Or The Minnow Has Been Lost (Props to Phil)
Or The Minnow Meets a Watery Grave (Kudos to Phil)
Or Hey Professor, you can built a radio out of coconuts, but you can't raise the dead? (More merit for Phil) Sherwood Schwartz, TV theme song auteur, has died at the age of 94. The Emmy-award winning writer of The Red Skelton Show had a vision for a sitcom bringing together a varied group of white people to serve as a microcosm for society that would enable him to explore some of the deeper questions of modern times, like what is man’s place in the universe?, has America developed an unbreachable schism between the classes?, and Mary Ann or Ginger? But as Schwartz assured concerned CBS Chairman William S. Paley, it’s a funny microcosm. Still, network executives were concerned that the show would be too high concept for casual viewers, forcing Schwartz to develop the iconic theme song to explain the show. After 3 seasons the show was canceled suddenly, pre-empting Schwartz’s planned finale revealing that the Minnow had actually sunk in the storm, taking all the “castaways” with it and that the island was actually purgatory and the giant incredibly fake spider and the bird that terrified it represented the good and evil sides of the island. Several years later, Schwartz tried to relax American taboos on the concept of incest with his open-minded take on family The Brady Bunch. Removing the blood relation to sneak around censors, Schwartz intended to show how to strengthen family bonds with bondage. Again, his show was canceled before Marcia got the chance to break something other than her nose up in Greg’s groovy attic apartment. Luckily, Alice and Sam were on hand to sex things up, with Sam’s job as a butcher giving a subliminal nod to talking about his meat. It’s About Time, about two astronauts cavorting with cavemen, Dusty’s Trail, basically Gilligan’s Island in a wagon train, and Big John, Little John, a sitcom built around Robbie Rist, best known as show running Cousin Oliver, were less well received.
Or The Last Ford Has Rolled Off The Assembly Line... (Props to Terry) Betty Ford, our nation’s pill-popping truck driver of a First Lady, has died at the age of 93. If Jerry Ford was our accidental president, Betty Ford was our perfect storm First Lady. Having started swiping her day’s gin at the age of 12 and giving the best hand jobs in the 9th grade, Ford told an interviewer that she wouldn’t be surprised if her teenage daughter was smoking marijuana and having sex. Not surprising, given that she was the first First Lady to share a bed in the White House with the president. Because when the First Momma (her CB handle - seriously) gets the itch in the middle of the night, she doesn’t want to have to sneak across the hall. When she and Jerry visited China, she kicked off her shoes and started dancing. She said couples should live together before marriage, that women should be drafted into the military, and was an advocate for abortion rights and the ERA. To some, it was a breath of fresh air; to others, she was the crazy aunt who shared a little too much after hitting the cooking sherry. She also candidly discussed her battle with breast cancer and mastectomy, instead of leaving it as the topic of hushed whispers where it belongs, and sold out for a lucrative naming rights deal for a celebrity nightclub for repeat partiers.
