Mort Lindsey, a conductor, arranger and composer best known as the music director for Judy Garland in the 1960s and for his more than two decades as music director for "The Merv Griffin Show," has died. He was 89.
Lindsey, who was in declining health since breaking his hip six months ago, died May 4 at his home in Malibu.
A pianist and a former staff conductor for CBS and ABC in New York in the 1950s, Lindsey was music director for Garland at her historic Carnegie Hall concert on April 23, 1961. "Judy at Carnegie Hall," a two-record album, spent 13 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard chart and won four Grammy Awards.
"All you have to do is talk to people who went to that concert, and they will tell you it was the greatest night in show business. It was like a revival meeting," Lindsey said in 1998.
Garland, he said, "really lived on the stage. I think that's where she was happiest. I was never able to do a concert with her that I didn't get goose bumps, and I did 150 of them with her."
C. David Heymann, a literary biographer turned best-selling celebrity biographer who came to wide attention in 1983 after his life of the heiress Barbara Hutton was withdrawn by its publisher because of factual errors, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 67.
Heymann died after collapsing in the lobby of his apartment building, his wife, Beatrice Schwartz, said. The cause was believed to be cardiopulmonary failure.
Trained as a literary scholar, Heymann began his career with "Ezra Pound, the Last Rower: A Political Profile," published in 1976; continued it with "American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell, Amy, and Robert Lowell" four years later; and then had an epiphany: "I learned from this," he said in 1999, "never write a book about a poet if you want to sell books."
