Shana Alexander, RIP

[Dan Gould]

Shana Alexander, 79, Dies; Passionate Debater on TV

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: June 25, 2005

Shana Alexander, a journalist and television personality best known as the liberal sparring partner of the conservative commentator James J. Kilpatrick on the television newsmagazine "60 Minutes" in the 1970's, died on Thursday in Hermosa Beach, Calif. She was 79 and had lived in Manhattan and Wainscott, N.Y., for many years.

The cause was cancer, her family said. She had been in an assisted living facility.

A former columnist for Newsweek and Life magazines, Ms. Alexander joined "60 Minutes" in 1975 as the liberal voice of its debate segment, "Point/Counterpoint." Once a week for nearly five years, she and Mr. Kilpatrick, a columnist for The Washington Star, locked horns over some of the most divisive issues of the day, including drugs, women's liberation and the Vietnam War. "60 Minutes" dropped the segment in 1979.

Ms. Alexander also wrote several nonfiction books, including "Anyone's Daughter" (Viking, 1979), about Patty Hearst; "Very Much a Lady: The Untold Story of Jean Harris and Dr. Herman Tarnower" (Little, Brown, 1983); and "When She Was Bad" (Random House, 1990), about the Bess Myerson conspiracy trial.

In 1995, she published a memoir, "Happy Days: My Mother, My Father, My Sister and Me" (Doubleday), an account of her privileged but loveless childhood.

Shana Ager was born in Manhattan on Oct., 6, 1925. Her father, Milton Ager, was a successful Tin Pan Alley composer whose tunes included "Ain't She Sweet" and "Happy Days Are Here Again," which became a Democratic Party anthem. Ms. Alexander's mother, Cecelia, was a film critic for Variety and the New York newspaper PM.

Shana and her younger sister spent their early childhood in the family's opulent home on West 57th Street. In later years, the family lived in a string of elegant hotels. Her parents numbered Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers and the Marx Brothers among their friends.

Ms. Alexander earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Vassar in 1945. While in college, she worked as a copy girl for PM and after graduating became a reporter there; her first assignment was to interview the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Ms. Alexander was later an entertainment editor at Flair magazine.

In 1951, Ms. Alexander was the first woman to be named a staff writer of Life. She wrote a regular column, The Feminine Eye, for the magazine from 1964 to 1969. From 1969 to 1971, she was the editor of McCall's magazine, the first woman in nearly half a century to hold the job.

Ms. Alexander joined "60 Minutes" on Jan. 5, 1975, replacing the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman. Though she and Mr. Kilpatrick were friends off camera, their on-camera arguments were so famously heated, and so exquisitely literate, that they were regularly parodied by "Saturday Night Live" in its mock newscast, "Weekend Update."

Playing a character modeled on Ms. Alexander, Jane Curtin would begin the segment with a stream of impassioned statements. Dan Aykroyd, as Mr. Kilpatrick's alter ego, would invariably retort, "Jane, you ignorant slut." She would shoot back, "Dan, you pompous ass."

In the years after "60 Minutes," Ms. Alexander turned to writing accounts of true crime, which often opened windows onto larger issues like sex roles and social class and, in some cases, onto Ms. Alexander's own life. In most of her books, the central figures were women whose lives of privilege had caused them little but sorrow.

Many reviewers praised Ms. Alexander's strong characterizations, eye for detail and ability to capture entire social milieus. But some critics took her to task for identifying with her subjects too strongly. Her biography of Jean S. Harris, convicted in 1981 in the shooting death of her lover, the diet doctor Herman Tarnower, is an impassioned portrait of Ms. Harris as the victim of a domineering man. Ms. Alexander later publicly supported clemency for Ms. Harris. (Ms. Harris's sentence was commuted in December 1992.)

If Ms. Alexander felt a kinship with her subjects, she had good reason: she too was reared in icy splendor, by a remote, glamorous mother. Reviewing her memoir, "Happy Days," in The New York Times Book Review, Delia Ephron called it "heartbreaking," adding: "There is no physical cruelty in this tale, just the awesome power of withheld love."

Ms. Alexander's two marriages ended in divorce. Her only child, Kathy, died in 1987 at the age of 25 in a fall from Ms. Alexander's Park Avenue apartment building, an apparent suicide. Ms. Alexander's sister, Laurel Bentley of Manhattan Beach, Calif., is her only immediate survivor.

Among Ms. Alexander's other books are "Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder" (Doubleday, 1985); "The Pizza Connection: Lawyers, Money, Drugs, Mafia" (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988); "Marking Time: Letters From Jean Harris to Shana Alexander" (Scribner, 1991); and "The Astonishing Elephant" (Random House, 2000).

Though Ms. Alexander always considered herself a print journalist, it was her gleeful, if carefully scripted, battles with Mr. Kilpatrick that made her famous. "Imagine having to explain the facts of life to Jack Kilpatrick on national TV," Ms. Alexander said in a 1976 segment on maternity leave.

And from Mr. Kilpatrick, in a 1977 broadcast: "If ever I heard an oversimplified fairy tale of the last years in Vietnam, I just heard one from you."

Their act, Ms. Alexander knew, had a time-honored antecedent. "Unwittingly," she told Publishers Weekly in 1979, "we have reinvented an ancient classical art form known as the 'Punch and Judy Show.' "

And besides "Jane you ignorant slut" and "Dan you pompous ass" let us not forget the moment in Airplane when Jack Kilpatrick says, "Shana ... they bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash."

Edited June 25, 2005 by Dan Gould

[JSngry]

Alexander and Kilpatrick were/are both throwbacks to a time when the "public" liberal/conservative divide was usually along the lines of methodology, not fundamental human values. It was a time when it was easy for all but the most reactionary on either side to feel genuine warmth towards those with whom they had political disagreement. It's still possible, of course, but not nearly as easy.

It was a better time, I think. Here's one liberal who says, at least in this regard, "TURN BACK THE CLOCK!"

[JSngry]

she and Mr. Kilpatrick were friends off camera, their on-camera arguments were so famously heated, and so exquisitely literate

See, there you have it - friendly, literate, ongoing disagreement.

TURN BACK THE CLOCK!

[AllenLowe]

she was the object of the song Aint She Sweet - her father wrote it specifically for her -

[Ted O'Reilly]

That's a pretty good song to dedicate to 'an unloved child', Alan.

(And isn't "Shana" yiddish, or Hebrew, for "Beautiful"? Musta bin some kinda affection there...)

[Ted O'Reilly]

Of course, now that I think of it, Ager wrote the music, and Jack Yellin wrote the words... Was Yellin thinking of Shana, I wonder?

I often think it's okay to write songs for your children, but not not your spouse. Things change in adult life...I wonder how Alice (MacLeod) Coltrane felt when "Naima" was played. I also wonder to how many women Duke intimated "Sophisticated Lady" was written. Smaarrtt.....