The pair wrote a trio of thrillers together, starting with Miracle on the 17th Green (1995). De Jonge got a coauthor credit on all three covers but “wanted to do something of my own.” His first mystery novel featuring Detective Darlene O’Hara, Shadows Still Remain, came out in 2009; his latest, Buried on Avenue B, appeared in hardback last year and will be out in paperback in July.

Driving the plot of Buried on Avenue B is the (regrettably nonfictional) plague of elder scams. “My father was a victim of one,” De Jonge reveals. “He was starting to suffer from dementia and wound up giving tens of thousands of dollars to a scammer. They lure you in with false promises of prizes you’ve ‘won.’ Then, once you respond, they keep coming back at you. There’s an element of intimidation in it, too.”

The author’s older characters range from a detective in his 50s to a scam victim’s love interest in her 90s. All of them are quirky individuals who defy stereotypes of age. “My grandfather was a tough guy,” De Jonge recalls. “There’s some of him in one of my characters, Bunny ‘Schoolboy’ Levin. And my parents had a condo in Longboat Key, so I’ve crafted these characters based on 20 years of annual trips. I’m definitely trying to counter those who have a condescending view of people who are aging.”

That enlightened outlook also translates into compelling story lines. We want to know all we can about the borderline-alcoholic O’Hara, Levin’s suave friend Sol Klinger, and Levin himself specifically because de Jonge hints their time on Earth may be limited. Upon learning that Klinger gets a colonoscopy and a new Lexus every three years, for example, O’Hara fires back, “I hope you’re good for half a dozen more … of each.”

Do you have a favorite older character? (Uh, fictional character, that is…)

Jeffrey Tambor and Jessica Walter as George and Lucille Bluth on Arrested Development.
Courtesy Netflix

TV’s recent past is littered with sitcoms that portray older people as caricatures — the senile, loopy grandma played by Cloris Leachman on Raising Hope, William Shatner’s angry old guy at the center of the blissfully short-lived $#*! My Dad Says, even doddering Abe Simpson, bless his soul. But on Arrested Development, while George and Lucille are kooky, they’re also full-bodied, layered characters, vital to the chaotic storylines that careen around and crash together.

“Older characters usually just come on, punch it up, and leave,” says Tambor, 68, who plays not just George Bluth, but also his twin brother Oscar, both of whom have had romantic entanglements with Lucille. “We’re there, with a full workload.”

“Good TV parts for older actors are few and far between,” agrees Walter, 72. “Older people on most TV series are: dad is a (jerk) and mom is a loud-mouthed fool. I don’t think TV reflects how older people are important and valued in society.”

They both say they were lucky to have landed together on Arrested Development — “we make a good team,” says Walter — but their continued show biz vitality owes more to hard work and versatility than good fortune.

Walter currently gives voice to Malory Archer on FX’s animated hit Archer and until recently had a starring role on TV Land’s now-defunct Retired at 35. And between Arrested Development, a role as a TV news exec on the Amazon.com pilot Onion News Empire, a part in The Hangover Part III, a busy teaching and speaking schedule (his annual acting seminar at SXSW is one of the festival’s most popular sessions), the indie bookstore he owns in L.A. and a vibrant Twitter presence (@jeffreytambor), Tambor is as busy as he’s ever been.

“One of the secrets of Jessica and I is that we’re nimble,” says the actor, who doesn’t get much rest at home with four children under 8. “The work keeps me young. I’ve had the luck to have people around me, and inspiration around me, to be able to invent and reinvent myself.”

AD has been off the air since 2006, but restarting its engine wasn’t hard.

“It was a little bit surreal,” Walter admits. “But once we were all together in that penthouse (set) that was recreated down to the nails on the wall, looking at the same faces and hearing the same old voices — it’s like bike riding. You never forget.”

“It’s the right timing, the right property and the right engine,” Tambor says of the revival on Netflix, which will make all 15 season four episodes available at once. “People are telling me they’re going to miss work to watch all of it. I couldn’t be happier.”

Recently, a man stopped him in the airport. Tambor assumed he would be asked to pose for a picture. Instead, he asked for one favor: That he simply say George Bluth’s famous line, “There’s always money in the banana stand.” Tambor happily obliged — and has since turned the quote into a tagline at speeches, like the commencement address he recently gave at Penn State Lehigh Valley.

“It is sort of an optimistic note. When George said it he meant it literally, but now I’ve sort of co-opted it — to say there’s always hope.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Carol Burnett, who became famous for playing a variety of characters in sketch comedy routines on her namesake television show, was named the winner of the nation’s top humor prize on Tuesday.

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts said Burnett will receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Oct. 20 in Washington. A gala performance featuring top names in comedy will be taped and broadcast nationally Oct. 30 on PBS.

Related: Happy 80th Birthday Carol Burnett

The 80-year-old Burnett said she can’t believe she is receiving the prize from the Kennedy Center.

“It’s almost impossible to be funnier than the people in Washington,” she said in a statement.

Burnett had her breakout on Broadway in “Once Upon a Mattress,” performing at night in 1959 while also appearing in the mornings on TV’s “The Garry Moore Show.” She is best known for her own long-running variety show, “The Carol Burnett Show.” It ran from 1967 to 1978, averaging 30 million viewers a week on CBS. Her guest stars included Lucille Ball, Jimmy Stewart, Ronald Reagan and Betty White.

Burnett was born in San Antonio in 1933. She soon moved to Hollywood with her mother and grandmother and was raised in a small studio apartment. She received an anonymous donation to attend college at UCLA, where she studied journalism and took an acting class.

Burnett moved to New York City, where she staged musical revues and performed in nightclubs. She was spotted by talent bookers and soon performed her rendition of “I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles” on television.

Kennedy Center Chairman David Rubenstein called Burnett a “unique and beloved entertainer.”

“From her television program and appearances, as well as her performances on Broadway and in film, Carol Burnett has entertained generations of fans with her vibrant wit and hilarious characters,” he said in announcing the prize.

The Mark Twain Prize honors people who have an impact on society in the tradition of Samuel Clemens, better known as Twain, as a social commentator and satirist. Previous honorees include Bill Cosby, Steve Martin, Tina Fey and Ellen DeGeneres, who won last year.

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Waber died May 16 at his Long Island home after a long illness, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced Monday. He was 91.

Waber’s “warmth, energy, artfulness, elegance, and abiding respect for children were epitomized in his books,” Houghton’s senior vice president and publisher of books for young readers, Betsy Groban, said in a statement. His 33 books have sold 1.75 million copies, the publishing company said.

Waber debuted as an author in 1962 with “The House on East 88th Street,” which introduced readers to the loveable Lyle, first spotted in a bathtub in an Upper East Side brownstone. Lyle’s story continued in “Lyle Finds His Mother,” ”Lyle and the Birthday Party” and other works. Waber also wrote many non-Lyle books, such as “Ira Sleeps Over,” in which a boy fears he’ll be teased for bringing a favorite stuffed teddy bear to a friend’s house.

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Waber was a native of Philadelphia and a graduate of what was then known as the Philadelphia College of Art.

He is survived by his brother, three children and four grandchildren. His final book, “Lyle Walks the Dog,” was a 2010 collaboration with his daughter, Paulis.

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In a moment that would later be enshrined in the mythology of rock music, Manzarek asked Morrison what he’d been up to since he’d dropped out of school. Morrison told him that he’d been writing songs. Manzarek was intrigued. “Let’s hear ‘em,” he said. Morrison responded by kneeling, closing his eyes and slowly reciting the first verse of what eventually would become The Doors’ song “Moonlight Drive.”

Manzarek was astonished. “Those are the greatest [expletive] song lyrics I’ve ever heard,” he told Morrison. “Let’s start a rock ‘n’ roll band and make a million dollars.”

[Listen to some of Manzarek's great riffs:]

So they did. The Doors, the most darkly apocalyptic and disturbing rock group of the ’60s, went on to sell 100 million records, and Morrison, an untutored singer with a mesmerizing stage presence and a penchant for reckless abandon, remains a pop culture icon more than four decades after his mysterious 1971 death in a Paris hotel bathtub.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But it was Doors keyboardist Manzarek, who died on May 20 at age 74 in Germany, who gave the Doors’ myriad Top 40 hits that distinctive, instantly recognizable sound that so set them apart from the guitar-centric rock played by other groups — from the oddly bouncy calliope-like intro of “Light My Fire” to the stark, menacing bursts of organ from “Waiting for the Sun.” (Alexis Petridis, a rock critic for the British newspaper the Guardian, offers this eloquent tribute to Manzarek’s keyboard wizardry.)

In this video, Manzarek — a classically trained pianist who loved jazz — talks about his famous cascading-raindrop piano riff on “Riders on the Storm.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are some intriguing facts about Manzarek.

1. He could have been another Francis Coppola. As a graduate student in UCLA’s film school, Manzarek was so talented that Colin Young, the director of the program, said that he could have gone straight to directing films. After the Doors disbanded, Manzarek reportedly spent years trying to make a film about the band — only to be bitterly disappointed by what he saw as the shallowness and inaccuracies in director Oliver Stone’s 1991 Morrison biopic The Doors, in which Manzarek was portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan.
2. He was the reason the Doors didn’t need a bass player. When the band auditioned at an L.A. nightclub, Manzarek noticed another group’s Fender Rhodes keyboard bass onstage, and it occurred to him that he could play it with his left hand while playing piano and organ riffs with his right. He liked not having a fifth Door, he once said, because “it kept the Doors as a four-side diamond, rather than an evil pentagram.”
3. He got into a legal battle over the Doors’ music. Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger got into a bitter legal dispute with Doors’ drummer John Densmore over Cadillac’s 2003 offer to pay $15 million to use “Break on Through” in a TV spot. Manzarek wanted to take the deal, but Densmore opposed it, noting that Morrison had been opposed to a 1968 offer from Buick, which wanted to change the words of “Light My Fire” to “Come on Buick, light my fire.”
4. He was a successful author. Manzarek wrote a best-selling memoir about his experiences, Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, in 1998, and a 2oo2 novel, The Poet in Exile, about a Morrison-like rock star who fakes his own death and then, decades later, resurfaces.
5. He was a father figure to 1980s punk rockers. Manzarek became enamored of the Los Angeles-based punk band X, and worked with them as producer and sometime keyboard player. Here’s a clip of him performing a cover of the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen” with X at the Whiskey A Go Go, a West Hollywood club that the Doors once packed with fans.

   Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a snippet of an interview with Manzarek, in which he recalls the band’s controversial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in which a network official unsuccessfully tried to get the band to delete the word “higher” from the lyrics to “Light My Fire.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo: Matt Carr/Getty Images
Audio montage courtesy of Paul Ingles via PRX, the Public Radio Exchange

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But White remains best known as the wife who sat next to a then-youthful William Shatner on an airliner in a classic 1963 episode of  The Twilight Zone, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” in which Shatner’s character sees a monster on the wing that apparently only he can perceive. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

White’s character, Julia Wilson, was the wife of Robert Wilson (Shatner), who had recently been discharged from a “sanitarium” after suffering a mental breakdown — on an airplane, as his bad luck would have it. As a New York Times obituary of White recounts, her signature moment came at the beginning of the episode, when she utters these fateful lines:

“Honey, you are cured. That Dr. Martin wouldn’t let you fly if you weren’t — would he?”

White’s character spent most of the rest of the episode dozing peacefully on her husband’s shoulder, thanks to a dose of sleeping pills. But the episode itself became so renowned that it was not only expanded into a movie, but also parodied on TV programs such as Saturday Night Live, 3rd Rock From the Sun and The Simpsons.

Some other interesting facts about White:

• She began acting in plays while attending the University of North Carolina, where she studied English.

• She reportedly was romantically involved with actor James Dean in her youth, and her final role was in a 1976 made-for-TV movie about him.

• She appeared in the 1973 movie Magnum Force as a woman who flirts with Clint Eastwood’s character Harry Callahan.

• She eventually left acting and returned to her native Washington, D.C., to take care of her elderly mother. During that time, she produced and distributed a quarterly bulletin, The Rampart Papers.

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And y’all had better hold on tight for the season finale of ABC’s Nashville on Wednesday (5/22). One of the few surviving shows from last fall’s crop of newcomers, the Music City soap led by Connie Britton and Hayden Panettiere has more than delivered on the promise of  Callie Khouri (Thelma & Louise) as creator and T. Bone Burnett supervising the music. It’s yielded two first-rate soundtracks and featured a number of Nashville names including Pam Tillis and Vince Gill. This week’s show has Brad Paisley as himself, singing with Rayna (Britton) and her guitarist/lover/secret baby daddy Deacon (Charles Esten). Nashville had a jaw-dropping penultimate episode that, if you missed it, you may want to watch prior to this week’s show. If so, don’t read any further.

As things stand, we have Rayna and Deacon ready to come out publicly as a couple at the CMAs and be happy in spite of mean ole ex-husband Teddy the mayor (Eric Close) and his restraining order shenanigans. But, uh-oh, daughter Maddie (Lennone Stella) has found the box! It’s not too sharp of Rayna to leave this evidence lying around in a not-so-hard-to-find spot. Maybe deep down she wants Maddie to know the truth despite her promise to never, ever ever reveal it. What would Dr. Freud have to say? Meanwhile, Juliette (Panettiere), who had to endure viewing the accursed sex tape with a group of lawyers and her mother in the room, doesn’t have to worry about being blackmailed any longer, because mama Jolene-the-addict (Sylvia Jeffries) shot Dante (Jay Hernandez)  and then OD’d.  Where the heck is all this going to go now?

According to the show’s Judith Hoag (politically ambitious sister Tandy), the cast is sworn to secrecy and all the scripts are watermarked, which makes her glad: “I think keeping secrets is a lost art.” She says that although the cast was optimistic about Nashville being renewed, “we’ve all had our hearts broken so many times when things felt like sure bets, we didn’t want to assume anything. And we had these really long pauses with two or three episodes in a row that were reruns. We really tested our audience to see if they would hang on. You have no say in it,” she adds, speaking of the network’s scheduling. However, adds the actress, “Social media saved the day. A few years ago, this wouldn’t have been possible, but now you can talk to your fans — you can tweet about it, now you can go to Facebook about it and let people know what is going on, and that is a really cool thing.”

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First Andrews. Under a cloudless sky in Boulder, Colo., on May 10, she began by finding common ground with the graduates at America’s premiere party school, claiming to have welcomed the dawn with them the night before. Then she declared kinship with the University of Colorado mascot — asserting that her own gender-bending role in the 1982 musical Victor/Victoria gave her insights into the female bison celebrated as “Ralphie.”

The heart of Andrews’ talk, though, was a much-better-than-average summation of the usual graduation day concerns: overcoming fear of the new and unknown, discovering the value of lifelong learning and turning adversity into opportunity. She also talked endearingly about the advantages of a rich life that includes the arts, in all their complexity and variety.

But the strongest section of her speech was the description of growing up — nailing the moment when self-awareness, self-satisfaction, self-self-self melted away, and she began to realize that life was about other people.  “Don’t just engage in random acts of kindness,” she pleaded. “Engage in planned acts of kindness.”

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Getting past your ego is also the subject of a short film making the rounds on the web, based on a commencement speech given by writer David Foster Wallace (his Infinite Jest is considered by many one of the best novels of the mid-20th century) at Ohio’s Kenyon College in 2005. Wallace committed suicide in 2008.

The nine-minute film, This Is Water, produced by a company called The Glossary, mixes music with excerpts from Wallace’s address, while live action scenes play out on screen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You don’t need to know much about the prodigiously talented Wallace, or his difficult masterpiece, to appreciate the video. It’s inspiring and mind-altering in a way that the talk itself might not have been, with the graphics and personalities of the actors adding a human element to the text.

Wallace’s words are also clearly the product of a great writer, as well as someone who never found a comfortable way to be in the world.

If you’ve said, even once today, “Who are all these people in my way?,” then you owe it to yourself to watch this video, whether or not you can remember your own college graduation, or, like Julie Andrews, never even finished high school.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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If you’re a fan of orchestral music, opera, jazz or musical theater, there’s The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Should you prefer a more intimate venue, there’s Blues Alley. But would you ever think of the U.S. Supreme Court? Highly doubtful, to say the least.

As it turns out, however, the court’s nine justices aren’t so completely consumed with weighty matters that they can’t take an occasional afternoon break to enjoy some live music. On May 16, for example, they played host to Broadway legend Barbara Cook, 85, who won a Tony Award back in 1957 for her portrayal of Marian the Librarian in the original production of The Music Man. Cook was accompanied by a band that included jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli as she performed old standards such as “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Let’s Fall in Love,” “I’ve Got Rhythm,” and “Makin’ Whoopie,” according to Legal Times.  

Cook’s choice for her final number, though, was a bit surprising: ”Imagine,” John Lennon’s quasi-anarchist anthem to the abolition of private property, religion and national governments. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the song’s sentiments were “strikingly at odds with court precedents granting privileges to religious institutions, enshrining property rights and limiting the reach of international law.” Nevertheless, Cook’s emotion-packed rendition apparently pleased the justices, who reportedly responded with an standing ovation.

The master of ceremonies was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who in 2002 took over running the recital series that was started in 1988 by the late Justice Harry Blackmun, a music lover who brought such performers as singer and pianist Bobby Short to the court. Other performers who’ve appeared before the court include piano legend Marian McPartland and opera superstar Renee Fleming.

If you missed Cook’s performance at the court, as we did, here she is at the Tony Awards back in 1987.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo: Cook in 2009 by David Shankbone (via Wikipedia)

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But it wasn’t always like that. In fact, when entertainment lawyer James Tolbert, who died on April 22 at age 86 in Santa Monica, started working to break the network color line in the early 1960s, there were few blacks in Hollywood — not just in acting, but on the other side of the camera, too.

Tolbert, who cofounded the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP, helped shatter that color line. A moderate who preferred negotiation to confrontation, he worked hard to persuade more-aggressive activists to hold off on picketing the studios. Instead, he personally prodded network and advertising executives — who often publicly espoused support for the civil rights movement — to live up to their professed convictions. In an August 1963 speech to 125 of the industry’s top movers and shakers, later recounted by industry historian Mary Ann Watson, Tolbert made the case to them that integration also was a smart business move:

“We Negroes watch Bonanza and buy Chevrolets. We watch Disney on RCA sets. Jack Benny entertains us and we buy General Foods products. Our babies eat Gerber baby foods and we photograph them with Polaroid cameras. … we buy all the advertised products, the same as you do.”

Tolbert simultaneously pressured craft unions, and pushed for the hiring of at least one African-American technical employee on every movie and television show. He and the NAACP decided to crack the color line with the sitcom Hazel, and threatened a boycott of sponsor Ford Motor Co., unless the production hired at least one black. “We have said that beginning with Hazel, every crew should be integrated,” he proclaimed in a 1963 New York Times article. Hazel‘s producers agreed to comply, and hired a black employee. Others soon followed.

Within a few years, Tolbert’s efforts paid off. By the 1963-1964 season, black actors played almost 140 parts in network TV series, according to a Jet magazine analysis. The following year, Bill Cosby because the first African-American to star in a TV drama, with his role as Alexander Scott in NBC’s I Spy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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