The Lives They Lived

Wally Amos

Wally Amos outside the original Famous Amos cookie shop on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood in 1977. David Strick/Redux

How Wally Amos made his cookies — and himself — “famous.” By Brett Martin

b. 1936

Wally Amos

He was “Famous” before he was famous — but names have power, and it didn’t take long for reality to catch up. In March 1975, Wally Amos sent out 2,500 invitations to the opening of the first Famous Amos shop, on a somewhat seedy corner of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. There was valet parking and Champagne.Amos printed glossy “headshots” of his new product, luridly bulging with chunks of pecan and chocolate. The conceit was that the former talent agent was promoting his newest client, the Cookie. But it was Amos who was about to become a star.

Raised in Tallahassee, Fla., with a teenage diversion to live with his Aunt Della in Harlem, Amos had already spent over a decade in show business, after dropping out of high school. In the mailroom at the William Morris Agency in New York City, he used his lunch hours to practice his typing skills, eventually becoming the company’s first Black agent. He was responsible for signing Simon and Garfunkel. Passed over for a promotion, he set out on his own in 1967, opening a talent-management company in Los Angeles. Along the way, Amos came up with a gimmick: bringing bags of homemade chocolate chip cookies to his meetings. He credited the inspiration to the ones Della used to bake for him. The resulting warm feelings paid off: Among the first investors in Famous Amos were Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy.

With his beard, Panama hat and flowing, embroidered shirts, Amos was the picture of 1970s fabulosity, even managing to make his ever-present kazoo seem sort of groovy. For a stretch, he was everywhere — in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; on the cover of Time, featured as one of the “Hot New Rich”; on “Taxi”as a hallucination of the character Latka.  Read More

Shawn Amos, one of Wally’s four children, called his father part of the “Great American Negro Hustler Generation,” alongside such figures as his onetime office neighbor Quincy Jones: “Young Black men, born into Jim Crow America now shaping American culture.” Wally Amos himself resolutely avoided discussing race, even if it’s difficult now to not read sly jokes into the T-shirts and bumper stickers he printed reading “Have a Very Brown Day,” or the event he hosted with Andy Warhol titled “Cookies & Milk with Amos & Andy.” Still, it was no small thing to have the face of an actual Black business owner join the Uncle Bens, Aunt Jemimas and Cream of Wheat men on supermarket shelves. Fifty years later, it’s still hard to think of any Black food personality who has surpassed him in the public consciousness.

At his shops, which quickly proliferated, Amos’s small and irregular cookies were scooped from gold trays onto a butcher’s scale and sold by weight, $3 per pound. In upscale groceries and department stores, they came in brown paper bags. Each was suggestive of a health-food store or gourmet shop, though the cookies didn’t really belong in either. His recipe had in fact come from the back of a bag of Nestlé Toll House chips, albeit with some tweaks. Amos added coconut and pecans, swapped margarine for butter and, crucially, upped the amount of chocolate. “He wanted there to be a chip and a nut in every bite,” said Shawn, who helped his father open the first store when he was 7 and often worked behind the register.

Amos and his cookies were indivisible, right until they became all too divisible. He was a far better showman than businessman. In 1982, Famous Amos took in $12 million in revenue. Only a few years later, the company was deep in the red. In 1985, it was bought for a song by the first in a long series of corporate owners, each of which diminished Amos’s equity and involvement. Eventually he was legally barred from using the very name that had set his destiny.

It became a sort of existential capitalist ghost story: the man who lost his own name. Amos told it often, spinning the details of his failures into an improbable second career as a motivational speaker, author and literacy advocate. “Deprivation of anything which you think is rightfully yours is no more than a detour to a higher plateau,” he wrote in “Man With No Name: Turn Lemons Into Lemonade,” one of 10 books of mixed memoir and inspiration he published. This new identity proved more successful than Amos’s sporadic attempts to get back in the baking game, including with one company cheekily named the Uncle Nonamé Cookie Company.

“It was the great pain of his life,” Shawn said of his father’s losing his company. “But ironically, it was also his next act.” That is, by the end, Amos may have been most famous for no longer being Famous. Great American hustler indeed.

Brett Martin is a writer in New Orleans and the author of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.”

Willie Mays

Mays during a game against the New York Mets at the Polo Grounds in New York, 1962. Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Shutterstock

The strange, sad period when the beloved Hall of Famer was exiled from baseball. By Devin Gordon

b. 1931

Willie Mays

In November 1979, less than four months after he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, Willie Mays was banned from Major League Baseball. He was 48, six years into retirement, but he was still one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet. He still appeared on talk shows and network sitcoms. He still got mobbed in restaurants. Kids who weren’t alive to watch him play still practiced his basket catch in the backyard and memorized his iconic numbers: the 660 career home runs; the .301 lifetime batting average; the 12 Gold Gloves in center field; the 24 All-Star game appearances (a feat possible only because M.L.B. hosted two All-Star games per year from 1959 to 1962, and Mays played in all of them).

But he was also deep in debt, which was nothing new for Mays, except now he was no longer being paid like a superstar. For much of the 1960s, Mays was baseball’s highest-paid player; in 1970, his salary was $135,000, or about $1.1 million today. And he always parted easily with his money. He gave it away to kids in his neighborhood after stickball games in the street. He lent it to friends he knew would never pay him back. He paid his housekeeper’s income taxes on top of her salary, even as he was in arrears to the I.R.S. himself. He also liked nice things: cars, clothes, furniture, houses. After his first marriage ended in (costly) divorce, he bought a multilevel home built into the side of a steep slope overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, then added a spiral staircase running from the living room to the garage level so he could get to his convertible without going outside.

In the fall of 1979, Mays was making $50,000 a year as a good-will ambassador for the New York Mets, the last team he played for, when the Bally’s Park Place Casino Hotel in Atlantic City offered him a 10-year contract for $100,000 per year to spend 10 days a month at the casino as a celebrity greeter. Sign autographs, take pictures, tell stories, play golf with the high rollers. Be Willie Mays. Mays didn’t gamble, or drink, and even in retirement being Willie Mays depleted him, but he was always good at it, and he needed the money.  Read More

Today Major League Baseball has a lucrative partnership deal with FanDuel, the sports-betting platform, but in 1979, the baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn insisted that the entire sport would be tarnished by any kind of paid arrangement between a gambling operation and a baseball legend. Kuhn forced Mays to choose between Bally’s and the Mets, and if he chose Bally’s, he would have to accept banishment from M.L.B. — no employment of any kind, no appearances on the field at Giants games, or the World Series, or the Hall of Fame. If he wanted to attend a game, he’d have to buy a ticket. Choosing Bally’s was a rare act of defiance for Mays, a peacemaker by temperament who hated causing a fuss. But he felt disrespected by Kuhn. “They had no cause to go and dump me like that,” he told a Washington Post reporter who visited him at Bally's in 1980, a year into the job. “Baseball needs people like me.”

Bally’s put Mays’s picture on its poker chips — along with his jersey number, 24, but no mention of the Giants or any other trademarked imagery — and his casino handlers packed his schedule, making sure to get their money’s worth out of him. Invariably patrons would bring up “the Catch” — Mays’s game-saving over-the-shoulder grab at the Polo Grounds during Game 1 of the 1954 World Series — and he always said the same thing: that he had made several better catches before TV cameras were commonplace, that he knew he had it all the way (notice how he taps his thigh with his glove as he’s sprinting back for the ball) and that the best part of the Catch wasn’t the catch itself but how fast he spun around and fired the ball back to the infield, preventing the tiebreaking run from advancing past third base.

Mays played so hard on the field and heaped so much pressure on himself to perform like a god that his body sometimes had to remind him he was just a man. At least twice in the middle of his career, he collapsed during games from exhaustion and spent the next few days recovering in a hospital bed. It happened again while he was working for Bally’s, onstage in front of 400 kids at a junior high school near Atlantic City. The school principal later told reporters that Mays “just collapsed like a Slinky toy.” This time he was unconscious for 15 minutes before being revived. Everyone thought he was dead. He was rushed to a hospital but then discharged just two hours later, and by the weekend, he was back to posing for photos and regaling gamblers.

Mays got some company in exile in 1983, when the Yankee legend Mickey Mantle accepted a similar job at Claridge Hotel and Casino, prompting Kuhn to ban him too. Twice Mays petitioned Kuhn to reconsider his banishment, but the commissioner didn’t budge. When Kuhn stepped down in 1984, though, his successor, Peter Ueberroth, moved quickly to end what had become an embarrassment for M.L.B., lifting the ban during spring training in 1985. Mays and Mantle, the new commissioner declared, were “exceptions to the current guidelines.” They were, he said, “more a part of baseball than perhaps anyone else.” The time had come to resume treating them like it.

Devin Gordon is a writer based in Massachusetts. He is the author of ‘‘So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets, the Best Worst Team in Sports.’’

Shelley Duvall

Shelley Duvall’s distinct style signaled a new kind of female star. Bert Stern/Condé Nast

She upended conventions about actresses — and then left Hollywood. By Anthony Giardina

b. 1949

Shelley Duvall

Legend has it that Shelley Duvall was hosting a party in Houston in 1970 when a couple of her guests, crew members on Robert Altman’s new film, thought it would be good to introduce her to Altman. She was only 20 and had never acted before, but that hardly mattered; the wonder of early Altman is that everyone — even the familiar faces — seemed to be doing it for the first time. Not a lot of people saw the film she was eventually cast in, “Brewster McCloud,”but those of us who did felt as if we were experiencing the shock of the new. Keith Carradine would articulate the feeling four years later when, gazing at Duvall in Altman’s 1974 film, “Thieves Like Us,” he says, “I never seen nobody like you before.”

It was hard to miss the promise in her sweetly alert gaze. She seemed to be ushering us into the new decade, offering a preview of the emotional openness and sexual freedom that potentially lay ahead. After a decade in which we had to spend a little too much time with Julie Andrews and Doris Day, we were now being confronted by the sexual assertiveness of Glenda Jackson in “Women in Love”and Barbara Hershey in “Last Summer”orthe slow-burning anger of Carrie Snodgress in “Diary of a Mad Housewife.” Duvall’s distinction lay in couching her assertiveness in something softer, less threatening, that still let you know she could see right through any potential romantic partner and fully expected him not to measure up to much.

After discovering in “Brewster McCloud” that the boy (Bud Cort) she has effortlessly seduced is a virgin, she says, “That means that I’m responsible for you from now on.” Lest that seem a little too soft, she was ready to remind you that she was nobody’s pushover. In the same movie,she concludes the story of an attempted rape by blithely intoning: “I hit him with a lug wrench.” Pauline Kael got it right when she wrote that Duvall “seems able to be herself on the screen in a way that nobody has ever been before.”  Read More

Women found something liberating in Duvall. She offered them permission to violate the conventions of how a woman was supposed to look and act: the spider-web eyelashes she sported at the outset, the endlessly long legs landing in checkerboard knee socks and platform sandals in “Nashville.” Her pouty, off-center beauty was perfect for 1970s Hollywood in its attempt to make stars out of actors whose looks were more real.

For a while, it must have seemed as if the sky was the limit. Duvall’s development into a serious actress led to a nuanced performance in Altman’s 1977 film, “3 Women.”Playing an insecure, delusional health care worker, she finally got to show some hard metal, layering it so skillfully with vulnerability that she won best actress at Cannes that year. You might have expected parts like Norma Rae to come her way.

Instead, she got Stanley Kubrick and “The Shining.”Her performance in that film is often described as “iconic”; it’s the one most people know her by. But it amounted to a kind of dead end. According to Duvall, Kubrick cast her because “he said I was great at crying.” That’s mostly what she does in “The Shining”:cry and scream, while Jack Nicholson comes after her with an ax. But who wanted to see Shelley Duvall doing that? If you had been rooting for her since “Brewster McCloud,”you could be forgiven for wanting to shout at the screen, “Shelley, where’s that lug wrench?” In its own way, “The Shining”seemed to betray the early-’70s promise that by the end of the decade women were going to have something better to do than run from thuggish, violent men.

Duvall’s experience during the grueling 56-week “Shining”shoot seems to have done her in. She had nice things to say about Kubrick, but they alternated with darker thoughts: “I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me.” In the ’80s, she played smaller parts before turning to producing the admirable “Faerie Tale Theatre”for television. Then, in the ’90s, she left Hollywood and, in the company of her musician partner, Dan Gilroy, became again what she started out as: a Texas girl. She moved to Blanco, a Hill Country town with a diner moonlighting as a bowling alley and a used-book store heavy on the works of Fred Gipson (author of “Old Yeller”). “I wouldn’t say I became a recluse,” she said. “I just took time out.” The time stretched to 30 years, punctuated by rumors of mental illness brought about by a sensationalized appearance on the “Dr. Phil” show. She seems, in her later years, to have most enjoyed driving around in her Toyota 4Runner, rarely getting out of the car.

Local restaurateurs took care of her, taking food to her vehicle. And fans kept coming to the Hill Country, hoping for “Shelley sightings.” My own took place a dozen years ago, in a restaurant in Johnson City, not far from Blanco. I was finishing my cherry pie when a woman I didn’t recognize came in, little bells dangling from her boots, demanding that she be served “no organ meat.” The eccentricity and assertiveness should have tipped me off. When I asked my waitress who she was, she whispered, “I don’t know, but I hear she used to be a really big movie star.”

Anthony Giardina is the author, most recently, of the plays "The City of Conversation” and “Dan Cody’s Yacht.”

Phil Donahue and Ruth Westheimer

The talk-show host Phil Donahue and his frequent guest the sex expert Dr. Ruth Westheimer in 1997. Andrea Renault/Alamy

Together, they told us everything we wanted to know about sex. By Wesley Morris

b. 1935/1928

Phil Donahue and Ruth Westheimer

Before the answers to life’s questions fit in our pocket, you used to have to turn a dial. If you were lucky, Phil Donahue would be on, ready to guide you toward enlightenment. In a stroke of deluxe good fortune, Dr. Ruth Westheimer might have stopped by to be the enlightenment. He was the search engine. She was a trusted result.

Donahue hailed from Cleveland. The windshield glasses, increasingly snowy thatch of hair, marble eyes, occasional pair of suspenders and obvious geniality said “card catalog,” “manager of the ’79 Reds,” “Stage Manager in a Chevy Motors production of ‘Our Town.’” Dr. Ruth was Donahue’s antonym, a step stool to his straight ladder. She kept her hair in a butterscotch helmet, fancied a uniform of jacket-blouse-skirt and came to our aid, via Germany, with a voice of crinkled tissue paper. Not even eight years separated them, yet so boyish was he and so seasoned was she that he read as her grandson. (She maybe reached his armpit.) Together and apart, they were public servants, American utilities.

Donahue was a journalist. His forum was the talk show, but some new strain in which the main attraction bypassed celebrities. People — every kind of them — lined up to witness other people being human, to experience Donahue’s radical conduit of edification, identification, curiosity, shock, wonder, outrage, surprise and dispute, all visible in the show’s televisual jackpot: cutaways to us, reacting, taking it all in, nodding, gasping. When a celebrity made it to the “Donahue” stage — Bill Clinton, say, La Toya Jackson, the Judds — they were expected to be human, too, to be accountable for their own humanity. From 1967 to 1996, for more than 6,000 episodes, he permitted us to be accountable to ourselves.  Read More

Donahue amid his audience, whom he let ask most of the questions. Bettmann/Getty Images

What Donahue knew was that we — women especially — were eager, desperate, to be understood, to learn and learn and learn. We call his job “host” when, really, the way he did it, running that microphone throughout the audience, racing up, down, around, sticking it here then here then over here, was closer to “switchboard operator.” It was “hot dog vendor at Madison Square Garden.” The man got his steps in. He let us do more of the questioning than he did — he would just edit, interpret, clarify. Egalitarianism ruled. Articulation, too. And anybody who needed the mic usually got it.

The show was about both what was on our mind and what had never once crossed it. Atheism. Naziism. Colorism. Childbirth. Prison. Rapists. AIDS. Chippendales, Chernobyl, Cher. Name a fetish, Phil Donahue tried to get to its bottom, sometimes by trying it himself. (Let us never forget the episode when he made his entrance in a long skirt, blouse and pussy bow for one of the show’s many cross-dressing studies.) Now’s the time to add that “Donahue” was a morning talk show. In Philadelphia, he arrived every weekday at 9 a.m., which meant that, in the summers, I could learn about compulsive shopping or shifting gender roles from the same kitchen TV set as my grandmother.

Sex and sexuality were the show’s prime subjects. There was so much that needed confessing, correction, corroboration, an ear lent. For that, Donahue needed an expert. Many times, the expert was Dr. Ruth, a godsend who didn’t land in this country until she was in her late 20s and didn’t land on television until she was in her 50s. Ruth Westheimer arrived to us from Germany, where she started as Karola Ruth Siegel and strapped in as her life corkscrewed, as it mocked fiction. Her family most likely perished in the Auschwitz death camps after she was whisked to the safety of a Swiss children’s home, where she was expected to clean. The twists include sniper training for one of the military outfits that would become the Israel Defense Forces, maiming by cannonball on her 20th birthday, doing research at a Planned Parenthood in Harlem, single motherhood and three husbands. She earned her doctorate from Columbia University, in education, and spent her postdoc researching human sexuality. And because her timing was perfect, she emerged at the dawn of the 1980s, an affable vector of an era’s craze for gnomic sages (Zelda Rubinstein, Linda Hunt, Yoda), masterpiece branding and the nasty.

Hers was the age of Mapplethorpe and Madonna, of Prince, Skinemax and 2 Live Crew. On her radio and television shows, in a raft of books and a Playgirl column and through her promiscuous approach to talk-show appearances, she aimed to purge sex of shame, to promote sexual literacy. Her feline accent and jolly innuendo pitched, among other stuff, the Honda Prelude, Pepsi, Sling TV and Herbal Essences. (“Hey!” she offers to a young elevator passenger. “This is where we get off.”) The instructions for Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex says it can be played by up to four couples; the board is vulval and includes stops at “Yeast Infection,” “Chauvinism” and “Goose Him.”

Westheimer in 1986. She was determined to talk about sex to mass audiences using the proper terminology, avoiding euphemisms and encouraging Americans to seek pleasure. Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

On “Donahue,” she is direct, explicit, dispelling, humorous, clear, common-sensical, serious, vivid. A professional therapist. It was Donahue who handled the comedy. On one visit in 1987, a caller needs advice about a husband who cheats because he wants to have sex more often than she does. Dr. Ruth tells Donahue that if the caller wants to keep the marriage, and her husband wants to do it all the time, “then what she should do is to masturbate him. And it’s all right for him to masturbate himself also a few times.” The audience is hear-a-pin-drop rapt or maybe just squirmy. So Donahue reaches into his parochial-school-student war chest and pulls out the joke about the teacher who tells third-grade boys, “Don’t play with yourself, or you’ll go blind.” And Donahue raises his hand like a kid at the back of the classroom and asks, “Can I do it till I need glasses?” Westheimer giggles, maybe noticing the large pair on Donahue’s face. This was that day’s cold open.

They were children of salesmen, these two; his father was in the furniture business, hers sold what people in the garment industry call notions. They inherited a salesman’s facility for people and packaging. When a “Donahue” audience member asks Westheimer whether her own husband believes she practices what she preaches, she says this is why she never brings him anywhere. “He would tell you and Phil: ‘Do not listen to her. It’s all talk,’” which cracks the audience up.

But consider what she talked about — and consider how she said it. My favorite Dr. Ruth word was “pleasure.” From a German mouth, the word conveys what it lacks with an American tongue: sensual unfurling. She vowed to speak about sex to mass audiences using the proper terminology. Damn the euphemisms. People waited as long as a year and a half for tickets to “Donahue” so they could damn them, too. But of everything Westheimer pitched, of all the terms she precisely used, pleasure was her most cogent product, a gift she believed we could give to others, a gift she swore we owed ourselves.

I miss the talk show that Donahue reinvented. I miss the way Dr. Ruth talked about sex. It’s fitting somehow that this antidogmatic-yet-priestly Irish Catholic man would, on occasion, join forces with a carnal, lucky-to-be-alive Jew to urge the exploration of our bodies while demonstrating respect, civility, reciprocation. They believed in us, that we were all interesting, that we could be trustworthy panelists in the discourse of being alive. Trauma, triviality, tubal ligation: Let’s talk about it! Fear doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Or if it did, it was never a deterrent. Boldly they went. — And with her encouragement, boldly we came.

Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine.

James Earl Jones

James Earl Jones in 1969, during the filming of ‘‘The Great White Hope.’’ Lawrence Schiller

After refusing to talk for most of his childhood, he discovered power in performance. By Reginald Dwayne Betts

b. 1931

James Earl Jones

When James Earl Jones was a small child, he stopped talking. He was born in Arkabutla, Miss., and learned to love its gullies and rises and deep ravines and the loam enriched by the Mississippi River and the way it felt against his bare feet.His parents had left him to his maternal grandparents, and when he was 5 or 6 they moved to Dublin, Mich., reluctantly taking the boy with them. He was devastated. The move opened opportunities for the family, but was a profound rupture for the young Jones. “The move from Mississippi to Michigan was supposed to be a glorious event,” he remembered in his 1993 memoir, “Voices and Silences.” “For me it was a heartbreak.”

Jones would later characterize himself as mute. It’s not that he couldn’t speak, but when he did it was with a terrible stutter that he developed after moving to Michigan. Before strangers, he wouldn’t muster his words. “I talked to my family in basic terms,” he wrote. His grandmother allowed him to skip church, the only place that would force him to struggle through words during those years.

Though he refused to talk with other people, his time in Mississippi taught him to listen. “Out in the country, with few books or strangers, and no such thing as television,” he wrote, “we depended on the stories we knew.” His grandmother told bedtime stories about “women cursed to wear the heads of mules and men who had bellies full of writhing snakes.” His family spoke of his great-grandparents, Wyatt Connolly and Sharlett Jeeter, and the 300 acres of Mississippi land they cultivated.  Read More

When Jones was in high school, a poet and former college professor named Donald Crouch persuaded him to break his silence. After the teacher introduced him to the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Jones wrote an ode to grapefruit patterned after Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.” In what might have been a bid to make the boy speak, Crouch said the poem was so good that it must have been plagiarized — a notion Jones could only dispel by reading it aloud. It turns out that poetry, like song, can help stutterers overcome disfluency, and in performance Jones found himself able to speak. Jones went on to participate in school competitions and recitals, sometimes reading lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s verse. As he discovered his voice, he gravitated toward anything that required him to use it: public speaking, debate, oratory contests.

After graduating from high school, he began his studies at the University of Michigan as a pre-med student. But medicine was simply a profession any first-generation college student might choose in 1949, not the vehicle for Jones’s self-expression. After struggling with chemistry and physics, he decided to become an English major because it was the closest thing to studying drama. Though he spent four years in college, he left without a degree and served in the military before eventually returning to school to study drama in New York City at the American Theater Wing, supporting himself through odd jobs. (He returned to college and got his degree in 1955.)

To discover the lower frequencies of the Mississippi in his timbre, he spent hours learning to strip away his Southern accent. Years spent in silence gave Jones an ear not just for what people conveyed with words but also for all the accumulated meaning of voice, cadence and articulation. He believed that understanding those details was the key to knowing a character.

One of his earliest stage roles was as Othello in a summer production of Shakespeare’s play in Michigan — a performance that foreshadowed his successful run in the early 1960s as a fixture of The New York Shakespeare Festival (now Shakespeare in the Park). After the director Stanley Kubrick saw him in a production of “The Merchant of Venice,” Jones earned his first film role in Kubrick’s “Doctor Strangelove.”

As his stature grew, Jones would come to embody a strange paradox: He was synonymous with a voice that he wouldn’t allow himself to hear. The risk? If he listened to himself, he might get caught up in his emotions and succumb to that old stutter. Instead he learned to listen for and discover the voices of his characters. In Howard Sackler’s 1968 play “The Great White Hope,” Jones portrayed a lightly fictionalized version of Jack Johnson, the champion boxer whose defeat of several white competitors and public relationships with white women made him a target for racial harassment. Roles like that allowed Jones to tell the multitudinous stories of Black men.

His voice, arguably the most memorable in cinema, was as flexible as it was indelible, the tool he used to transform himself from a poet into an actor. Despite that, he remained a chameleon, embodying the authority of fatherhood in so many guises: the resplendent King Jaffe Joffer in “Coming to America”; the heartbroken, embittered and abusive Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s “Fences”; the stern and upright Mufasa in “The Lion King”; and the foreboding Darth Vader in the “Star Wars” franchise.

Jones never imagined himself as representing that kind of authority, despite the unmistakable baritone that sounded as if it came from the hollowest part of a drum. For him, that was always the point. His discovery of language allowed him to understand in a different way the vital need humans have for hearing and telling stories.

Reginald Dwayne Betts a contributing writer for the magazine and the founding chief executive of Freedom Reads.

Paul Auster

Unexpected deaths led Paul Auster to believe that “the world was capricious and unstable, that the future can be stolen from us at any moment.” Spencer Ostrander

His life, and work, were marked by death. By Matthew Shaer

b. 1947

Paul Auster

In late July 1961, 14-year-old Paul Auster was hiking with a group of boys from his sleepaway camp when a storm stole over the horizon. Lightning “danced around us like spears,” Auster later recalled, turning “everything a bright ghostly white” and striking a camper named Ralph. Trapped in a meadow, far from the safety of camp, Auster stood watch over Ralph’s blue and cooling body, using his finger to prevent the boy from swallowing his own tongue. “In spite of the mounting evidence,” Auster said, “it never occurred to me that he wasn’t going to come around.”

Death had marked Auster, and not for the final time. He had already mourned the sudden loss of one grandmother (heart attack) and would soon mourn the slow demise of the other to A.L.S., a disease, Auster observed, that seemed to leave its victims with “no hope, no remedy, nothing in front of you but a prolonged march towards disintegration. …” Later there were the deaths of his mother and father; a horrific car crash in which the lives of his second wife, Siri Hustvedt, and their daughter, Sophie, were somehow spared (“We should be dead,” Auster later said); and finally the passing of his 10-month-old granddaughter Ruby, and his son, Daniel, who overdosed in 2022. By then, Auster had long since decided that “the world was capricious and unstable, that the future can be stolen from us at any moment, that the sky is full of lightning bolts that can crash down and kill the young as well as the old, and always, always, the lightning strikes when we are least expecting it.”

Sadness permeated Auster’s work like storm water: In his novels and memoirs — and in a range of collected and uncollected essays — rarely is anyone left dry. “Paul was extremely interested in the idea of the hero who is cast into a new world by grief,” Hustvedt says. “He used that device a lot: the stripped person. The person who has lost their most profound connections to the world. And I’d argue that it goes all the way back to ‘The New York Trilogy.’”  Read More

Published in installments in the mid-1980s by a small California press, and in its entirety in 1987 by the British house Faber and Faber, the “Trilogy”is the series that made Auster famous — the three works he is still best known for today. Rereading it, you encounter all the themes that he would return to over the course of his career: the role of chance and dumb luck in human existence; the dark secrets we keep from those around us; the persistent suspicion that somewhere else, somewhere out of view, a different version of ourselves is living a life that both resembles and diverges from ours; and over it all, the pall of tragedy. Introducing Quinn, the character at the center of the first book, “City of Glass,” Auster writes that “he had once been married, had once been a father, and that both his wife and son were now dead.” Grief drives Quinn to do the things he does, even if he’s not always aware of it; and grief nudges Quinn (and eventually a metafictional version of Auster himself) toward epiphany, resolution, truth.

In April 2022, at age 75, now laureled and honored many times over and still producing fiction at a sturdy clip, Auster published a story titled “Worms”in Harper’s Magazine. The protagonist is Sy Baumgartner, an academic still grieving for his wife, Anna. “He gave me the pages to read, and said, ‘Hey, if I get a novel out of this, would you be interested in publishing it?’” remembers Morgan Entrekin, the publisher and C.E.O. of Grove.

Neither the author nor publisher was aware it would be Auster’s last book. As he was preparing a draft of what would become “Baumgartner” for Grove, Auster began to suffer from peculiar but persistent fevers. Soon after, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. “I’m certain Paul didn’t know he was ill when he started the book,” Hustvedt says, “but he definitely knew he was ill when he was finishing it. And I’ve had this uncanny feeling ever since he died that what he was really doing was writing my grief.”

In the book’s most indelible scene, Baumgartner hears the phone ring in his wife’s study, which he has kept preserved exactly as it was when she was still alive. Anna is on the line. She is in the “Great Nowhere,” she reports, “a black space in which nothing is visible, a soundless vacuum of nullity, the oblivion of the void.” She is not in pain, she tells her husband. She is not hungry. She can’t feel anything at all. You sense she has been returned whence she came. Still, Auster writes, “she suspects that he is the one who is sustaining her through this incomprehensible afterlife, this paradoxical state of conscious nonexistence, which must and will come to an end at some point, she feels, but as long as he is alive and still able to think about her, her consciousness will continue to be awakened and reawakened by his thoughts.” If he doesn’t let her go, in other words, Anna won’t truly be gone. She will stay with him.

“Baumgartner” was released in November 2023. In April, Auster entered hospice care and died shortly after at his home in Brooklyn, in his library, his favorite room in the house. A circle was closed. As Auster wrote a decade earlier, in a memoir titled “Winter Journal,” in which he returned to the image of young Ralph lying lightning-struck in a field, “You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen.” And then they do.

Matthew Shaer is a contributing writer for the magazine and a founder of the podcast studio Campside Media.

Michaela DePrince

Michaela DePrince in 2014. Philippe Vogelenzang/Trunk Archive

As a professional ballerina, she inhabited the world of fairy tales. It’s tempting to read her real life as one. By Niela Orr

b. 1995

Michaela DePrince

In 1999, when Michaela DePrince was just 4 years old, she saw an image that would change her life: a ballerina in a “glittering pink skirt,” standing en pointe on the cover of a magazine. Born Mabinty Bangura, she was living in the Safe Haven orphanage in Sierra Leone, having been sold there by an uncle after the deaths of both of her parents during the country’s civil war.

At the orphanage, Mabinty stood out. She spoke five languages, having picked them up at the marketplace and with her father, and had an indefatigable curiosity; her neck, clavicle and arms were speckled with tiny light-colored patches, a result of vitiligo. The orphanage ranked the children — 24 girls and three boys — based on which were thought to be the most adoptable; because of her skin condition, Mabinty was ranked last. Her time in the orphanage was very hard: She suffered physical abuse by the “aunties” who were in charge and survived an attack by rebel soldiers who murdered her favorite teacher. To make life bearable, she told stories, sang, created dancing games and became best friends with the girl ranked No. 26. She used her imagination as a shield against the place’s cruelties, playing pretend in order to ward off the aunties. “I am a witch,” she told one of them. “I will place a spell on you if you harm me.”

Months into her time at the orphanage, Mabinty was walking in a windstorm when the cover of the magazine blew into her face. “Someday I will dance on my toes like this lady,” she thought. “I will be happy too!” Shortly after, she and her best friend were adopted by Elaine and Charles DePrince, who took them home to Cherry Hill, N.J. At the time, the couple were the parents of three boys and had recently lost two others because H.I.V.-infected blood was used in the treatment of their hemophilia. The girls were renamed Michaela and Mia.  Read More

In her new home, DePrince repeatedly watched a recording of George Balanchine’s “The Nutcracker.” Just before turning 5, she asked her mother to enroll her in classes at the Rock School for Dance Education. With the determination of someone much older, DePrince committed to ballet — and with it the grueling training, cutthroat competitiveness and painful injuries. She was thrilled to be dancing but was also confused and dismayed by the racism of the classical-dance community, including the mother of a white classmate who said that Black girls should stick to modern or jazz. She encountered the absurd necessity of dyeing “nude” accessories from peach to dark brown to match her skin tone. In the documentary “First Position,” which chronicles a handful of young dancers’ bids to win the prestigious 2010 Youth America Grand Prix ballet competition, DePrince described the prejudice: “There’s a lot of stereotypes saying that if you’re a Black dancer, you have terrible feet, you don’t have extension, you’re too muscular, you’re not graceful enough.” She wouldn’t be moved, though. “I want to be known as a delicate, Black dancer who does classical ballet,” she said.

“I would never allow the audience to see how I was feeling,” DePrince wrote in a memoir. Tim Verhallen/Trunk Archive

In her memoir “Taking Flight,” written with her mother, DePrince describes the formative dance technique of “spotting,” or “continuously keeping an eye on a distant point as you turn.” Despite the distractions of youth, there was always that distant point: professional success. A performance at the Grand Prix won her a scholarship to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theater in New York. She graduated in 2012 to the Dance Theater of Harlem, where she became the company’s youngest principal dancer. In 2013, at 18, she moved to the Netherlands and danced with the Dutch National Ballet for seven years. She reached new audiences after being featured in Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” film in 2016. In 2021, she joined the Boston Ballet as a second soloist and remained there for the next three years. Her dreams came to pass.

Once, when DePrince was about 5, her mother told the anxious Michaela that her vitiligo spots “looked like a sprinkling of pixie dust or glitter.” It’s the job of a ballet dancer to inhabit fairy tales and their archetypes: the witches, ingénues and wretches; the princesses who outwit villains and overcome grueling obstacles. But fairy tales have troubling origins; as in the real world, there are few safe havens. (DePrince died at age 29 from undisclosed causes.)

Throughout her career DePrince embraced the mythic quality of her biography, crafting a story of uplift and transcendence. In her book and many public appearances, DePrince had the poise of someone anointed with magic dust. She was persistently put together, unassailably optimistic. “I would never allow the audience to see how I was feeling,” she wrote of her stoicism. “Even at 13, I believed that the audience should think that the hardest combination of steps was effortless, and a ballerina’s personal trials shouldn’t show on her face.”

Niela Orr is a story editor for the magazine. She wrote about the actor Angus Cloud from ‘‘Euphoria’’ in last year’s The Lives They Lived issue.

Bob Newhart

Bob Newhart on “The Bob Newhart Show.” CBS, via Getty Images

For him, comedy became a form of therapy. By Susan Dominus

b. 1929

Bob Newhart

People who met Bob Newhart weren’t always sure why he looked so familiar. Women on elevators often told him that he reminded them of their ex-husbands; men sometimes asked him if they served together in the war. Newhart just had that kind of face, an average white Midwestern sort of face, a face that always looked a little disappointed in itself.

For a long time, Newhart felt that way. His childhood home was as impersonal as a boardinghouse, he once said in an interview. More often than not, his father spent his evenings at a neighborhood bar near their house in Chicago; even when he was around, he never said much at meals. (“Maybe now Dad will notice me,” Newhart wrote in his memoir, “I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This!” describing his thoughts as he walked up to collect one of the three Grammys he received in 1961.) Growing up, Newhart filled a void in himself, he once told a literary magazine, by peopling his imaginary world with characters who would entertain him. “I think that’s true of all comedians,” he said.

Of the family’s four children, Newhart was the weakest student. Law school didn’t work out; he tired of accounting. At 29, when his friends were already married, having children and settling into careers, Newhart was single and living unhappily at home, too broke to pay rent. Somehow he summoned the self-confidence to try something new. He was funny, people always told him. Maybe he could make a living off that.  Read More

Newhart used to kill time at work by calling a friend of his in character, pretending to be an average Joe trying to maintain calm in the face of some ludicrous predicament — a pilot, for example, who’d fallen out of his plane. Someone encouraged him to tape those routines, and an executive at Warner Brothers ended up with the recordings. The executive suggested that Newhart record a live performance for an album.

“The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” released in 1960, made him an overnight star. It was the best-selling album on the Billboard charts for 14 straight weeks. “You knew that album by heart,” says the legendary sitcom producer Chuck Lorre, whose father bought it for him when he was 10. Richard Pryor told Newhart that he stole “The Button-Down Mind” from the record store as a kid. Newhart joked that he was owed some royalties, and Pryor forked over a quarter.

While brash comics like Lenny Bruce and Don Rickles were blasting their way into the new decade, Newhart satirized the strait-laced culture of 1960 using its own conventions, which sometimes meant leaving a lot unsaid. Having held down a number of part-time jobs, Newhart often turned his humor on the workplace, exposing its obligatory and artificial politeness, the unnatural self-control it often demanded in the face of absurdity or incompetence.

He applied that sensibility to routines that invited the audience to eavesdrop on one-sided conversations, bringing a fresh kind of sketch comedy to stand-up. In one, a modern-day adman urges his client, Abe Lincoln, not to cut “four score and seven years ago” from his speech: “Abe,” he says, irritated, “we test-marketed that, and they loved it.” In another, an American submarine commander tells his crew that the press made too much of the boat’s accidental attack on Miami Beach, especially “since it was the off season down there.”

Even after the money started rolling in, Newhart, like so many of his personas, remained prudent and reasonable: He went on to marry and have four children, and he left the itinerant life of stand-up comedy for a more stable career in TV. In 1972, Newhart debuted “The Bob Newhart Show,” in which he played the first psychologist on a sitcom, a role perfectly suited to his gift for showing restraint in the face of folly. When a ventriloquist who has gone to Newhart for help says his dummy would like a few minutes to talk to the doctor alone, Newhart, clearly suppressing his response, pauses, still and straight-faced, for four loaded seconds before offering a hesitant nod — an exercise in understatement that characterizes so much of his comedy.

Newhart never professed to have much faith in psychology or its precepts. Even the most casual viewer of the show, he wrote in his memoir, knew that his patients were “no better off” after a visit to his character’s office. And yet at some point, Newhart saw a psychologist himself, according to his son Tim. Tim and his siblings sometimes wondered what their father talked about in therapy. They knew he loved them, but they could see how hard it was for him to express his feelings. At home, off script, he was remarkably silent and could seem distant.

Eventually, Newhart’s psychologist decided to retire, and he suggested that Newhart join some of his other famous patients for group sessions that they could run mostly by themselves. The plan fell apart quickly, once Newhart got wind of who the other celebrities were. “They’re all crazy!” he told his family.

In his 80s, Newhart accepted his final recurring role, appearing on Lorre’s “The Big Bang Theory” as a version of his perennial character: the last sane man in a world gone mad. Newhart made a career of highlighting other people’s foibles by playing the straight man, but he was also sending up his own extreme reserve, perhaps the lingering relic of a disconnected childhood.

At the end of his life, when his health was failing, he continued to rely on humor during dark moments, said his daughter Jennifer. “You’re either going to laugh or cry,” she said. “I think most of us would rather laugh.”

Susan Dominus is a staff writer for the magazine. She has written about treatment for menopause symptoms, the efficacy of therapy and declining male enrollment at colleges.

Eleanor Coppola

Eleanor Coppola on the set of “Apocalypse Now” around 1976. James Keane, via Zoetrope

Her filmmaking ambitions were thwarted by domestic life. Her daughter’s would not be. By Irina Aleksander

b. 1936

Eleanor Coppola

Eleanor Coppola met Francis Ford Coppola when she was 26. He was directing his first feature, a 1963 horror film titled “Dementia 13,” and Eleanor was his assistant art director. Months later, she found out she was pregnant. They married the following weekend in Las Vegas. She imagined that they would continue to work together. Instead, she found herself supporting her husband’s career. “My dad was this traditional Italian who had an idea of a wife’s role,” Eleanor’s daughter, Sofia, told me.

Eleanor knew how people saw her because they often told her. “Too small for such a big husband,” a crew member on “Apocalypse Now” told Eleanor, who weighed 99 pounds. Diane Keaton told Eleanor that she was her model for Kay, the quiet WASP who married into the Corleone family in “The Godfather.” And yet it was Eleanor who so sharply recorded her husband in “Hearts of Darkness,” a 1991 documentary about the making of “Apocalypse Now.” Francis’s epic struggle to get his film made, driving himself to the edge of bankruptcy and his own ego, appears in stark contrast to Eleanor’s calm, steady narration. “He gathers up his Oscars and throws them out the window,” she wrote in “Notes,” a 1979 collection of diary entries that also served as the film’s voice-over. “The children pick up the pieces.”

In a second memoir, “Notes on a Life,” Eleanor described her “internal war” between being an artist and a wife and mother. While Francis made his films, Eleanor wrote, “I attend to little tasks.” She shopped for children’s shoes, mops, frying pans, kitchen towels, firmer pillows, fresh flowers, groceries, wastebaskets, trash bags, laundry detergent, doormats, shampoo, duplicate keys. She tended to faucets, fridges, sinks, gardens, heaters, landscapers and sick children in hotel rooms where the windows never opened. Often she found herself descending into a depression. She went to psychologists and asked what was wrong with her. Not one, she wrote, diagnosed her as a creative person.  Read More

In 1975, Eleanor paid Sofia and her brother, Roman, to watch Sofia’s birth video in Sofia’s bedroom, part of an art exhibit she staged inside the family’s 22-room Victorian home in San Francisco. Back then, when a man won an Oscar, his wife received a miniature version to wear as a necklace charm. In another room, Eleanor removed her husband’s Oscars from a lighted display case and replaced them with her tiny ones, turning an indignity into art. Francis didn’t get it. “He thought I was making fun of him,” she wrote.

Sofia’s 27th birthday: Eleanor watched Francis mentor Sofia as she prepared to shoot “The Virgin Suicides,” her directorial debut, and felt a “hot, aching jealousy.” Eleanor had graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with an art degree. Her own father, a political cartoonist for The Los Angeles Examiner, died when she was 10. She imagined how her life might have unfolded had he been around to mentor her. Sofia’s life was going to be so different. On a trip to Tokyo in 1991, Eleanor observed Sofia, then 19, inspect a portable dishwasher and buy a wide-angle camera instead.

Eleanor didn’t share her frustrations with Sofia until her daughter was older. It’s not as if she guilt-tripped her children. The opposite: She was so present, always trying to keep their lives as normal as possible. As Francis worked on location and the family followed, Eleanor moved Sofia’s bedroom furniture to Tulsa, Okla., hid Easter eggs in Manila, dragged an entire Santa Claus suit to Tokyo. “We would have been messed up if it weren’t for my mom,” Sofia told me.

Eleanor worried about whether she had made an impact on her children. But she did, Sofia said. She made a huge impact. There is Eleanor in Sofia’s films, all of them such carefully constructed worlds, with women gazing out from inside them. Sofia learned from her mother that a film director doesn’t have to yell; that she can be both quiet and strong. One of Sofia’s favorite stories was about how her mother once found herself copying Agnes Martin drawings — just making steady lines over and over and not knowing why. But then she arrived on the set of “Apocalypse Now” and picked up a 16-millimeter film camera, and it turned out she had trained herself to have a steady hand.

The family’s home in Napa had a giant valley oak tree in its front yard. The children swung from its branches, had birthday parties beneath it. In the 1980s, an enormous limb snapped off and grazed the room of Eleanor’s elder son, Gio. Eleanor was looking at that very tree a few years later when she got the call that Gio, 22, had been killed in a boating accident. Eleanor was 50. She had expected the next decade to be a time of freedom. “A time to pick up the threads of my creative life left behind at age 26,” she wrote, adding, “I never expected a knockout blow.”

Years later, the whole damn tree would fall on the house, roots and all. When Eleanor became ill in her 70s with a rare cancer, Sofia remembers her aunt saying that Eleanor was like an oak tree — a grounding force under which the family built their lives. Eleanor declined chemotherapy. She wanted to work instead, making two feature films in her 80s and writing about that choice in a third memoir, which Sofia hopes to have published.

Perhaps what Sofia wants to share most is how much Eleanor taught her about motherhood. That it’s about those simple things: taking your kid to the dentist, taking her to buy shoes. The older Sofia gets, the more she feels as if she understands her mother. Eleanor was there not just when Sofia accepted her first Oscar but also when she became a mother herself. And she remembers the advice Eleanor gave her.

“Get a great babysitter,” Eleanor said, “so you can do your work and not feel guilty.”

Irina Aleksander is a contributing writer for the magazine. She last wrote about Tom Sandoval, a reality star on Bravo’s ‘‘Vanderpump Rules.’’

Frankie Beverly

Frankie Beverly, whose 1981 “Before I Let Go” achieved an undeniable centrality in Black America. David Corio/Redferns

How the R&B hit “Before I Let Go” became an enduring anthem. By Nikole Hannah-Jones

b. 1946

Frankie Beverly

The night Frankie Beverly died, his grandson, Brandon Beverly, left the hospital where he had been at his grandfather’s side and drove to the singer’s California home. On a normal night, Brandon would have put his phone on “do not disturb” before going to sleep. But exhausted, he forgot.

At 7 a.m., the incessant vibrating of that phone woke him up. Just an hour after the announcement of Beverly’s death was posted to social media, thousands of fans across the world were pouring out their memories of being touched by Beverly’s music.

Even though in the coming days, some obituaries of the Philadelphia-born singer noted that he had never achieved mainstream success, Brandon knew that his grandfather never really sought it. Beverly made music for Black people, and Black people loved him for it.

If Black gatherings have an anthem, without question, it’s Beverly’s R&B song “Before I Let Go,” which he wrote for his band, Maze. It doesn’t matter the region of the country, or the age of the crowd — there isn’t a reunion or barbecue or house party or graduation where the revelers at some point don’t line up, as if on command, to do the electric slide as they join Beverly in crooning:

“You know I think the sun rises and shines on you/You know there’s nothin’, nothin’, nothin’ I would not do/Whoa, no/Before I let you go … /Ohhh … /I would never, never, never, never, never, never, never/Never let you go, before I go.”  Read More

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about this song that makes it so special. It wasn’t a megahit when it came out in 1981. But somehow in the years following its release, “Before I Let Go,” with its upbeat, almost giddy tempo and sing-out-loud-inspiring lyrics, became an enduring, cross-generational essential, the opening chords giving way to Beverly’s whoa whoa hoooaaa acting as a summons to the dance floor. As my colleague J Wortham said on the “Still Processing” podcast, when the song comes on, “We run toward it, literally and psychically.”

Today, the centrality of “Before I Let Go” in Black America is undeniable. “Is this song the biggest song in our culture?” DJ Envy, a host of “The Breakfast Club,” one of the top hip-hop morning shows in the country, asked the day after Beverly’s death. “It might be No. 1.”

Brandon, of course, knew the song — he first remembers hearing his grandfather sing it onstage when he was 4 — but he didn’t fully realize its cultural power until he started going to parties at Howard University in the early 2010s. At the end of a party, the D.J. would play “Before I Let Go,” immediately shifting the mood among people who were born at least a decade after the song first came out. “Literally, every time I went to Howard, and it never didn’t happen — like, it always happened — they would play ‘Before I Let Go,’” Brandon, who is 32, told me. “I’m like, y’all listen to my grandpa like that?”

It was a testament to how even as musical styles changed, Beverly’s music tapped into something that remained integral to the Black experience: the heartache of having endured so much loss, but also optimism that better days will always come. As the lyrics of another of his hits go, “Joy and pain are like sunshine and rain. … When the world is down on you, love’s somewhere around. … Over and over you can be sure, there will be sorrow but you will endure.”

Beverly “did not care about selling 10 million records,” Brandon says. “He didn’t care about, you know, Billboard this and Billboard that. He was like, ‘Look, if I can make the most beautiful music that I can, and take my blood, sweat and tears and put it in my music for people to love, that’s all I care about.’”

That dedication to expressing his ups and downs through music is what kept Beverly filling outdoor venues and concert halls across the country, where crowds tended to wear white, as Beverly had come to do over the years, while experiencing what always felt more like revival than entertainment.

Brandon told me that Beverly was a private person who didn’t talk much about his musical process. But during the pandemic, when Brandon was spending time with his grandfather, he asked him about his best-known song. Beverly’s response surprised him.

“He was like, ‘Man, I cried so much writing that song,’” Brandon says with a chuckle. “I’m like: ‘This is everyone’s party song. How are you crying when you write something like this?’”

Go back and play it again, Beverly told him. Brandon, like so many of us, had been experiencing the song but not actually listening to it. “And then I realized, Oh, he was telling the girl, ‘Before I let you go, I am sorry,’” Brandon says. In a 2020 Essence magazine interview, Beverly explained that he wrote the song about a woman he still loved, while he was in a relationship with someone else.

The song that evokes sheer happiness at parties across the land is actually a song about heartbreak and love lost. The fact that so many of us failed to realize it gets to why Black Americans so cherished Frankie Beverly: He did not just make you feel a certain way. He made you want to feel a certain way.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for the magazine. In 2020, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her essay about Black Americans and democracy. She is the creator of The 1619 Project.

Jerry West

Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers guarded by the Boston Celtics’ Bill Russell in Game 1 of the 1965 N.B.A. Finals. Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images

One of the world’s greatest basketball players, he thought of himself as a loser. By Sam Dolnick

B. 1938

Jerry West

It was the summer of 1969, and Jerry West couldn’t sleep.

He was one of the greatest basketball players on Earth, an athlete whose grace and drive had transported him from the dirt roads of rural West Virginia to the glitz of Los Angeles arenas.

But he was a loser. There was no polite way to say it, and he wouldn’t hear otherwise. He had just led his team, the Los Angeles Lakers, to the N.B.A. Finals for the sixth time. And for the sixth time, he and his team had lost.

And if that wasn’t cruel enough, he lost each championship to the same opponent: the smug, invincible, hated Boston Celtics. The 1969 series was tied 3-3 when they played the seventh game in Los Angeles. Despite West’s heroics, the Lakers lost, again, and there’s a photograph of him leaving the court in stunned defeat. He’s walking slowly, one foot in front of the other, shoulders squared. His hamstring bound in tape, his eyes sunken sockets — a prisoner on his way back to his cell. In his memoir, “West by West,” he captioned the photo: “Where do I go?”

West played so spectacularly well in that losing series, averaging nearly 38 points per game, that he was awarded the Finals M.V.P. — the first and only time the losing star has ever been so recognized. As a prize, the league gave him a brand-new Dodge Charger. He fantasized about blowing it up with dynamite.  Read More

For any competitive athlete, losing would have been misery. But for Jerry West, a man who measured his childhood in beatings and his career in defeats, it was intolerable. “Every night I went to bed I thought about it,” he wrote of that summer. “Every night. Every goddamn night.”

Growing up poor in West Virginia, West was envious of his classmates’ Christmas presents and resentful of his watery soup dinners. His father, a bully and a tyrant, beat him mercilessly. His mother was a haunted, spectral figure. “I never learned what love was and am still not entirely sure I know today,” he wrote. When West was 13, a revered older brother, David, was killed in the Korean War. Shooting hoops late into the night, West imagined that if he made one more basket, it might bring David back.

West led his high school team to the state championship and could have gone to college anywhere he wanted. He chose West Virginia University, securing his status as a hometown hero in a state that often felt left behind.

In the N.B.A., West became a star who could shoot, pass, play defense and take a punch. He turned the Lakers into a force — but a stoppable force. In 1970, his team reached the Finals for a seventh time, only to lose — again — this time to the New York Knicks. They had another shot in the Finals two years later. West played badly, missing easy shots that he had made all his life. He turned to passing, and finally — finally! — the Lakers prevailed. Jerry West was an N.B.A. champion.

He had a hard time enjoying it. “I played terrible basketball in the Finals,” he said years later. “I was playing so poorly that the team overcame me.”

Here’s how the world saw West: a Hall of Fame athlete with ferocious tenacity and grit who so reliably hit the big shots that he was nicknamed Mr. Clutch.

Here’s how West described himself: “A tormented, defiant figure who carries an angry, emotion...