The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 61

2003:01:07:21:39:54 By Myrna Oliver Times Staff Writer Jean Kerr, the witty author, playwright and columnist who translated her Broadway-oriented suburban family life into the bestseller Eat the which was spun off into a successful movie and television series, has died. She was 79. Kerr, the widow and collaborator of drama critic, playwright and director Walter Kerr, died Sunday in a White Plains, N.Y., hospital, apparently of pneumonia. She had lived in nearby Larchmont in what she called her dream The home, with unusual amenities including a two- story fireplace, was represented in most of her writings. It had been converted from the stables and coach house of what was once described as large estate with turrets, medieval courtyard and a 32-bell carillon geared to play the duet from every biggest hit play, starring Barbara Bel Geddes and Barry Nelson as a still-in-love divorced couple, ran for four years on Broadway; a touring version visited Los Angeles.

That play, like earlier book, was made into a motion picture in 1963, starring Nelson and Debbie Reynolds. Kerr had a few lesser hits on stage and some flops. But her greatest national following probably came with the 1957 publication of Eat the her essays about life in Larchmont with her husband, five sons, one daughter and assorted pets. The motion picture starring Doris Day followed in 1960, and the television series with Patricia Crowley ran on NBC from 1965 to 1967. Although neither Day nor Crowley looked much like the 5-foot, 10 1 2 -inch dark-haired Kerr, the family, careers and experiences of the book, movie and TV series all matched the backgrounds.

As for Kerr, like the onscreen heroines, she wore a bathrobe around the house. And at the peak of her popularity, when was playing to sellout audiences on both stage and screen and Eat the was popular in three media, Kerr told The Times modestly: pretty good for agirl who tried writing to jus- tify not doing the As a self-declared unnatural playwright, Kerr told Theatre Arts magazine in 1955, have two trifling ambitions in the theater: to make a lot of people laugh and to make a lot of Entertain she did, in her plays, her dozens of magazine and newspaper humor pieces and her books, which also included Snake Has All the in 1960, in 1970 and I Got to Be in 1978. ATimes critic reviewed her first book, in 1957 as series of essays about her children, her house, her diets, her sleep written in a of determined For example, he said, she wrote that in answer to the query your pen she always responded, just call it Another Times critic three years later noted of that Kerr has a husband, an old car, a houseful of kids, and somehow has parlayed these undistinguished materials into a laugh of domestic situations come convulsive Jean Kerr found the title, like most of her material, in her own home. When she congratulated a son for being cast as Adam in abiblical play, he complained, but the snake has all the Kerr was a nervous playwright and compared any opening night to public hanging, and the If she survived the performance, she always went home to a sleepless night, regardless of whether reviews were bad, mixed or raves. Although initial reviews of were mixed, by the time the touring version got to the now-defunct Biltmore Theater in 1962, Times critic Cecil Smith wrote: play sparkles with the sort of wit that has made Jean Kerr famous.

And the funniest lines are in the mouths of the outspoken Mary a sort of When play which played on Broadway for five months, opened in Los Angeles at the Ahmanson in 1973, then- Times drama critic Dan Sullivan wrote that the play suggests but never consummates infidelity and you some good laughs and not too much moralizing. It is avery sensible comedy, in the way that adjective is used to describe will learn to settle for what he has because, after all final theatrical effort, which made a respectable showing on Broadway, was directed by Mike Nichols and starring Sam Waterston and Gilda Radner. Bridget Jean Collins was born in Scranton, to Irish immigrant parents on July 10, 1923. She attended Catholic schools, graduating from Marywood College and later earning a degree at Catholic University. Looking to marry a man smarter than she was, she wed Catholic University drama professor Walter Kerr, whom she met while she was an undergraduate stage manager.

They married Aug. 16, 1943, and had a writing-centric, storybook marriage until his death in 1996 at the age of 83. She wrote her scripts, articles and manuscripts in longhand often in the family car parked far from their chaotic household and he typed them. Deciding years later that he had a more analytical than creative mind, he became a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama critic for the New York Herald- Tribune and the New York Times, willing to advise his wife on what might improve her plays. She said she appreciated his input, but that it could also rankle.

save me from failure, but he can save me from she once told the Los Angeles Times. But in another interview, she quipped, the grass appreciate the lawn The Kerrs collaborated on the first Broadway effort for both, the 1946 of adapted from Franz novel about a Frenchwoman canonized after she said she saw visions of the Virgin Mary in a grotto near Lourdes. The play failed. Jean first solo comedy, Kissed in 1948 also met with little success. But the two Kerrs scored a hit in 1949 with their comedy revue and which he directed.

Jean Kerr wrote part of the sketches for the well-received Murray in 1953 and, with Eleanor Brooke, wrote a 1954 comedy about a comic- strip artist, of The successful play was directed by Walter Kerr and starred Jackie Cooper and Cloris Leachman. The Kerrs co-wrote a musical comedy, staged by Walter Kerr on Broadway in 1958. It was such aflop that the couple vowed never to mention it again. She did slightly better with her romantic comedy play, which ran for four months on Broadway in 1964. Her final plays were in 1973 and Kerr is survived by her daughter, Kitty; sons Christopher, Gregory and Gilbert and twins John and Colin; two brothers, Hugh and Frank Collins; and 11 grandchildren.

Obituaries Jean Kerr, 79; Turned Suburban Life Into Broadway Comedies JEAN KERR The family life in suburbia and her dream were the basis for her plays, books, humorous newspaper pieces and magazine articles. By Mark Magnier Times Staff Writer Yayori Matsui, a pioneering Japanese journalist and rights advocate who fought for greater Japanese disclosure of its sexual enslavement of Asian women during World War II, has died of liver cancer. She was 68. As Japan became more wealthy and enamored of consumerism after the 1960s, Matsui provided a rare counterpoint someone driven to speak out against injustice and exploitation of the underprivileged, especially women, in a society known for its willingness to hide embarrassing information and go with the flow. Her strong views sometimes earned her enemies in right wing.

never hesitated to fight against something she thought was said her sister, Yayuki Mukoyama, 66. a sense, her life was a Matsui worked tirelessly and was visiting feminists in Afghanistan in October when she was overcome by her illness. She was diagnosed as having terminal cancer upon returning to Tokyo but continued to work from her hospital bed until shortly before her death on Dec. 27. Given all the unfinished work, wanted to live at least 10 more she told supporters in one of her final e-mails.

Matsui was born on April 12, 1934, in Kyoto, the eldest of six children. Her father, a Christian minister who had served in China during the war, adored her and would explain to her in great detail what he had witnessed, including many abuses committed by the Japanese. She went to college in Minnesota and Paris. On her way back to Japan, she stopped elsewhere in Asia, and was exposed to abject poverty for the first time. believe this was the first real trigger that would drive her said longtime friend and fellow activist Rumiko Nishino.

Matsui started working in 1961 at the mainstream Asahi Shimbun newspaper, making her among the first career female reporters in Japan. She initially shunned issues, fearful that she would be typecast or exiled by male managers to the lifestyle section writing cooking articles, she said in an interview published a week before her death. For the first decade, she concentrated on covering social issues on the main news pages and was among the first to aggressively pursue stories on use of thalidomide a sedative that caused birth defects and Minamata disease, a neurological disorder caused by mercury poisoning. was among the best female reporters in postwar Japan and left a great said Tetsuji Shibata, aformer Asahi editorial board member. Atrip to the United States opened her eyes to the 1970s liberation movement.

She was also influenced by growing awareness of the rising number of Southeast Asian sex tours by Japanese men. Fellow reporters say her uncompromising attitude often rubbed colleagues and editors the wrong way. was considered to be on the troublesome said Jun Kamei, a fellow journalist who knew Matsui, although she was also remembered for her keen sense of humor. Another turning point came in 1981 when the newspaper posted her in Singapore. Her exposure to the sex trade and so-called comfort women those forced into prostitution by the Japanese military during WWII helped focus her energies increasingly on these issues.

She returned to Japan in 1985 and retired from Asahi in 1994 after a 30-year career, turning full time to social activism. She founded Asia-Japan Resource Center the following year, wrote books, taught at several universities and worked on various projects, including efforts to identify Japanese fathers of half-Filipino children using DNA analysis. She was sometimes referred to as a Right-wingers stormed into a hall where she was speaking in 2002, resulting in the arrest of six, and last April she retreated to a hotel for a week under fear of attack. But she persevered and was also known for her charm and interest in swimming, yoga, painting, music, clothes and her love of red roses, which she considered a symbol of the French Revolution. In 2000, she helped organized perhaps her highest-profile event, a mock tribunal that drew former comfort women from all over Asia to testify.

She was infuriated when the Japanese press refused to publicize it and filed alawsuit charging falsified reports against national broadcaster NHK, which is pending. it was from fear of the three taboos of the Emperor, comfort women and she told the Shukan Kinyobi magazine in an article published a week before her death. an information society, no media coverage is the equivalent of nothing She spent her final days planning a Japanese museum, scheduled to open in 2006, on comfort women along with other war-related subjects. She is survived by her father, age 96, and mother, 95. Yayori Matsui, 68; Japanese Journalist Became Noted Rights Activist Associated Press YAYORI MATSUI After a 30-year career in media, she turned to full-time activism.

By Jon Thurber Times Staff Writer The funeral of Mamie Till son, Emmett Till, was open-casket. Despite the pleas of the morticians who handled the body of the badly beaten and mutilated teenager, his mother have it any other way. She wanted the world to see what Southern racists had done to her only son. Nearly 50 years after her savage killing, which became a galvanizing symbol for the civil rights movement, Mobley has died. She was 81.

Mobley, who had been battling kidney disease, died at a Chicago hospital Monday afternoon of an apparent heart attack. It was August 1955 that Mobley sent Emmett, 14, from his home in Chicago to vacation with her relatives in Mississippi. Born and raised in Chicago, Emmett was unaccustomed to the mores of the segregated South. Before he left, his mother and grandmother cautioned him against looking whites straight in the eye and told him not to talk to whites unless he was first spoken to. The incident that led to killing occurred in the Mississippi town of Money.

Emmett was with a group of children who went into a store run by a white woman to buy bubble gum and candy. Emmett allegedly whistled at the woman as he left the store. Whether Emmett in fact whistled at the woman or whistled, as his mother taught him, to overcome a stutter, has never been determined. But four days later, Emmett was taken from his bed in the middle of the night by two white men. His body was found three days later on a bank of the Tal- lahatchee River.

His head was bashed in, an ear was missing and one of his eyes was detached. There was also a bullet wound in his head. Mobley brought her body back to Chicago for burial. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times some years ago, she recalled going to the funeral home to see her son. have the nerve to start at his head and work down, so I started at the toes and worked she said, knowing full well the extent of the trauma to her son.

I got to the knee, I said, yes, my I finally got to his face. His nose, his eye. One eye was missing, but one eye was eye. It was a hazel She decided then and there that the coffin lid would remain open for the wake. wanted the world to see what I had she recalled.

wanted the world to see what had happened in Mississippi. I wanted the world to see what had happened in The funeral of Emmett Till was a pivotalevent in the still- formative civil rights movement. Thousands of people filed past his coffin in Chicago. Protest meetings were held in several cities, including Los Angeles. An estimated 20,000 people rallied in Harlem to demand that Congress pass an anti-lynching bill.

In his 1993 book David Halberstam called the Till case first great media event of the civil rights Born in Tallahatchie County, Mobley moved to Chicago in the early 1940s. She married Louis Till, a private in the Army, and they had ason, Emmett. They divorced in 1943 when Emmett was 2. Mobley was working at an Air Force procurement office the summer she sent her son to Mississippi. (She eventually married Gene Mobley, but that was after the death of her son.) After murder, Mobley attended the Mississippi trial of the two men one of them the husband of the woman running the store who were accused of killing her son.

She recalled walking into the courthouse as young white boys fired cap guns at her and their fathers slapped their knees and laughed. An all-white jury acquitted the defendants. The verdict was returned in an hour. A juror afterward told a reporter that it have taken that long if the jury stopped to drink sodas. Look magazine later published an article in which the two men confessed to the killing.

Three months after Emmett was killed, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. She later told reporters she was thinking of Emmett Till. After the burial of her son and the trial in Mississippi, Mobley traveled the country for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, telling crowds about the son she had lost and urging political determination to overcome segregation laws. She remained a Chicago resident, working as an elementary school teacher.

For the rest of her life, she continued to tell her story in the hope that it would inspire a renewed investigation into his killing. It never did. She also became a forceful advocate for rights, and was known to visit the parents of other children killed in hate crimes. Her book Death of is due to be published in the fall. She also is featured in a current documentary: Untold Story of Emmett Louis was so amazingly articulate and the Rev.

Jesse Jackson said Monday night outside home. was a teacher, and she thought methodically and scientifically. She had a sharp mind and a compassionate heart. And she really sensed the place of her son in American history and her responsibility to keep that legacy Associated Press Mamie Till Mobley sent her son Emmett, 14, to Mississippi to visit relatives in 1955. Two white men, acquitted by an all-white jury, later admitted the crime in Look magazine.

They were never punished. Mamie Mobley, 81; Killing Was a Civil Rights Symbol Associated Press MAMIE MOBLEY She wanted the world to see what racists had done to her son. B12 CALIFORNIA LOSANGELESTIMES.