In Passing
Los Angeles
Jay Bernstein, ‘star maker’
Jay Bernstein, the flamboyant Hollywood personal manager best known as the “star maker” who launched Farrah Fawcett and Suzanne Somers to fame in the 1970s, has died. He was 68.
Bernstein, a one-time Hollywood publicist, died April 30 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after suffering a stroke. Fawcett, Bernstein’s longtime friend and client, was at his bedside.
As a publicist in the 1960s and early ‘70s, Bernstein’s many clients included Sammy Davis Jr., Sally Field, William Holden and Burt Lancaster.
Moving into personal management in 1975, he took on Fawcett and helped turn her into a national phenomenon as one of the original stars of the television series “Charlie’s Angels” and the smiling subject of a famous swimsuit poster.
Somers said she had no personal management when the TV series “Three’s Company” began in 1977.
“I was watching what Jay Bernstein did with Farrah Fawcett,” Somers said. “I went to Jay and said, ‘I’ll make a deal with you.’ “
The deal, she said, was that she would give him all the money she was making during the initial run of “Three’s Company” as a six-week replacement series in exchange for him making her “visible enough” that if the series didn’t make it she could get another job. The first year after Bernstein took over, Somers said, she was featured on 55 national magazine covers – and became a household name.
Bombay, India
Pramod Mahajan, Indian politician
Pramod Mahajan, the top strategist of India’s main opposition Hindu nationalist party, died nearly two weeks after being shot by his younger brother in an apparent family dispute. He was 56.
Mahajan died Wednesday at a Bombay hospital, where he had been on life support since being shot April 22 in his Bombay apartment.
His death left the Bharatiya Janata Party without one of its most celebrated organizers. A fiery orator, Mahajan was a key figure in the transformation of a party once dismissed as fringe Hindu rabble-rousers.
Mahajan’s brother Pravin surrendered within an hour of the shooting last month and confessed to the police, saying he was fed up with being humiliated by his brother.
Amarillo, Texas
Kay Noble, pro wrestler
Kay Noble, whose fresh-faced femininity and no-holds-barred ferocity in the ring won her an enthusiastic following among professional wrestling fans, died of stomach cancer April 27 in Amarillo, Texas. She was 65.
Fans who flocked to grimy small-town arenas and big-city coliseums across North America knew they’d get their money’s worth when she was on the bill, whether tangling with Gladys “Kill ‘Em” Gillem, Lillian “Fabulous Moolah” Ellison or a host of other well-known female wrestlers during her prime in the 1960s and 1970s.
Noble wrestled throughout the 1970s and on a part-time basis into the 1980s while raising five children.
After she retired from the ring, she owned and operated Kay’s Upholstery in Amarillo and in recent years worked with children who had cancer at Amarillo’s Baptist St. Anthony’s hospital.