Longtime local entertainment writer dies
Edwin Howard — Memphis’ premier arts and entertainment columnist for decades and the first reporter to interview “a promising young Sun artist” named Elvis Presley — has died.
Mr. Howard, 92, died early Monday at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He and his wife, Corinne “Tugar” Hanover Howard, relocated to the Washington, D.C., area in 1990, almost a decade after the closing of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, where Howard presided over “The Front Row” — a column about theater, movies, opera, symphony music, travel and other “amusements” — from the 1940s until 1981.
Although Mr. Howard titled his 2002 anecdotal autobiography “Seeing Stars: Memoirs of a Professional Celebrity Seeker,” he was a local celebrity himself. His mug shot appeared in the Press-Scimitar year after year, and he reviewed movies and offered theater commentary on local television. Erudite, somewhat patrician and with movie-star good looks for much of his career, he functioned as the PressScimitar’s one-stop culture desk, writing about gallery art and editing the Book Review section as well as covering the “lively” arts.
As a movie critic and reporter, Mr. Howard took full advantage of the many publicity tours once offered by movie studios to journalists with a yen for travel. He interviewed and occasionally befriended such luminaries as Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne, Patricia Neal, William Faulkner and Clark Gable. “Looking back, I almost feel guilty that I got paid ... for the great times I’ve had on the job,” Howard wrote in a 1992 column in the Memphis Business Journal that marked his 50th year in journalism.
Wrote Mr. Howard: “In what other line of work could I have been paid for visiting Sophia Loren in her apartment on the Rue de Rivoli ...? Or for being invited by Mae West to come up and see her sometime in her all-white suite in the Ravenswood Apartments in Hollywood?” He added that he watched John Wayne “get gloriously drunk” and toured the Sistine Chapel with Charlton Heston — in the midst of playing Michelangelo in “The Agony and the Ecstasy” — as his guide.
But Mr. Howard’s most his-