Showman promoted drama and dogs
Howard Atlee, an eclectic publicist who represented award-winning shows during a now-bygone Broadway era and, as an avocation, also bred dachshunds that won best in show at dog competitions, died March 15 in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was 97.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by his friend and caregiver Harpreet Singh.
Transplanted from an Ohio city of 10,000, Atlee set his sights on Broadway after attending his first professionally staged production while serving in the Navy in Boston. After he was discharged, he was a theater major in college.
As a publicist, he would help launch the career of playwright Edward Albee by promoting his first full-length play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” at the Billy Rose Theater in 1962.
Atlee also helped found the
Negro Ensemble Company, which offered opportunities to fledgling Black actors and other theater professionals, including would-be publicists.
He started to show dogs in 1962. Four years later, Ch. Celloyd Virginia Woolf, a dachshund he had gotten as a birthday present, was a top winner. He later donated a bronze sculpture of her to the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog.
Howard Atlee Heinlen was born May 14, 1926, in
Bucyrus, in northern Ohio. His father, Howard E. Heinlen, was at various times a cabdriver, a firefighter and a real estate agent. His mother, Blanche (Neumann) Heinlen, managed the household.
Howard graduated from high school in 1944 and then attended Ohio State University. He was drafted and joined the Navy during World War II and, after serving, enrolled in Emerson College in Boston, where he earned a degree in theater in 1950.
In New York, where he became known professionally as Howard Atlee, he briefly worked as an actor and theater manager before becoming a publicist for a range of productions, from off-off-broadway to Broadway, including the 1969 revival of “The Front Page” (1969), “Bette Midler’s Clams on the Half Shell Revue” (1975), the Neil Simon-marvin Hamlisch-carole Bayer Sager musical “They’re Playing Our Song” (1979) and “Children of a Lesser God” (1980).
He retired as a press representative in the 1990s and returned to acting, appearing onstage in “Dancing at Lughnasa” and other plays and in bit parts on television series such as “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”
He met Barbara Anne Schumacher, an Amoco Oil Co. marketing executive, at a competition where she was showing her Salukis; they married in 1977. She died in 2013.