Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Entertainment world mourns Kragen, Babitz
Both had hand in 20th century pop culture
One was a top entertainment producer, manager and philanthropist. The other reveled in her role as a Hollywood bard and muse who with warmth and candor chronicled the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s.
Both exited the stage this past week.
Ken Kragen, 85
Ken Kragen, a top entertainment producer, manager and philanthropist who turned to such clients as Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers in helping to organize the 1985 all-star charity single “We Are the World,” has died. He was 85.
Kragen died Tuesday of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles, according to a statement released by his family.
“Ken worked tirelessly on behalf of the artists he represented, but what I loved most about him, other than the essence of his spirit, was that he had a 360-degree understanding that the combination of art & commerce could be used to make the world a better place,” Quincy Jones, who produced “We Are the World,” tweeted this week.
Kragen was a Harvard Business School graduate whose other credits included producing “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and “The Gambler” television movies that starred Rogers. His most famous project began late in 1984 with a phone call from Harry Belafonte, who was anxious to raise money for starving people in Africa, notably in Ethiopia, where a famine had killed millions. The British recording “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” that featured George Michael, Bono and many others, had been a major success, and Belafonte wanted to organize a U.S. effort.
He first contacted Kragen, whom he didn’t even know.
“I needed a younger generation of artists, the ones at the top of the charts right now: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, and Cyndi Lauper. When I looked at the management of most of these artists, I kept seeing the same name: Ken Kragen,” Belafonte wrote in his memoir “My Song,” published in 2011.
Kragen was hesitant at first, Belafonte wrote, but called Richie, who said yes. Rogers said the same, as did Jones and dozens of others, including Jackson, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder. “We Are the World,” co-written by Jackson and Richie, went on to sell tens of millions of copies and win Grammys for record and song of the year. Kragen later received a United Nations Peace Medal.
Kragen’s survivors include his wife, actor Cathy Worthington; their daughter, cinematographer Emma Kragen; and her husband, director/ producer Zach Marion.
Eve Babitz, 78
Eve Babitz, who became a cult figure to generations of readers, has died. She was 78.
Babitz biographer Lili Anolik confirmed that she died of complications from Huntington’s disease on Friday afternoon, at a Los Angeles hospital.
Few writers captured a time and place so vividly as Babitz did. Her dispatches from the Troubadour night club and the Chateau Marmont, from the Sunset Strip and Venice Beach, became as much a testament of her era as a Jack Nicholson movie or an album by the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac.
Babitz knew everyone from Jim Morrison to Steve Martin, but her greatest subject was herself. She was often witty, sometimes amazed and sometimes could only shrug.
Babitz dished about her sex life, her connections and her affinity for the wicked.
“I hadn’t really liked Elizabeth Taylor until she took Debbie Reynolds’ husband away from her, and then I began to love Elizabeth Taylor,” she once wrote.
Like the movie stars who had fascinated her since childhood, she was a master of entrances. Her first major public appearance came in 1963, in her early 20s, in one of the art world’s most famous photographs: Babitz, in the nude, plays chess with the fully clothed Marcel Duchamp.
“Anything seemed possible — for art, that night,” she would remember. “Especially after all that red wine.”
Over the following decade, she designed the cover for the classic rock album “Buffalo Springfield Again” and for records by the Byrds and Linda Ronstadt, hung out with Nicholson and Michelle Phillips and dated everyone from Harrison Ford to Morrison (“I met Jim, and propositioned him in three minutes”) to music executive Ahmet Ertegun. She was an extra in “The Godfather, Part II,” introduced Salvador Dali to Frank Zappa and helped convince Martin to wear a white suit.
She was published in Rolling Stone and Vogue among
other magazines and her books included “Eve’s Hollywood,” “Slow Days, Fast Company” and “Sex and Rage.” Some were called fiction, others nonfiction, but virtually all drew directly from her life — with only the names changed.