Obit watch: August 11, 2021.

Alex Cord. He may have been best known as “Archangel” in “Airwolf”, but he had a significant body of work going back to the 1960s. No “Mannix”, but a lot of other cop shows, and multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, among other credits.

Patricia Hitchcock. Yes, Alfred’s daughter.

Born on July 7, 1928 in the UK to famed film director Alfred Hitchcock and his infamously loyal wife, Alma Reville, the legendary duo’s offspring would go on to appear in a string of her pop’s projects including “Stage Fright” (1950), “Strangers on a Train” (1951) and the aforementioned “Psycho” (1960). She also guest-starred in 10 episodes of the classic TV anthology series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” from 1955 to 1960.

She had a few other credits, but retired in the 1970s.

Tony Esposito, Hall of Fame goalie for the Chicago Blackhawks.

Walter Yetnikoff, legendary head of CBS Records.

In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Yetnikoff somewhat reluctantly let Ron Alexenburg, the head of CBS’s Epic label, sign the Jacksons. Epic had wrested the group from Motown Records (which retained the rights to the group’s original name, the Jackson 5), and though Mr. Yetnikoff wasn’t overly impressed with the Jacksons’ initial albums for Epic, he cultivated a relationship with the group’s key member, Michael, supporting the young singer’s interest in expanding into solo work.
In 1982, that encouragement resulted in “Thriller,” still one of the top-selling albums in history.

Other megahits released during Mr. Yetnikoff’s tenure included Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” in 1977, the ambitious Pink Floyd double album “The Wall” in 1979, Mr. Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1984, Mr. Jackson’s “Bad” in 1987 and a series of hit albums by Mr. Joel, including “The Stranger” (1977) and “Glass Houses” (1980).

Unfortunately, he was one of those people who didn’t just have issues: he had a lifetime subscription and a complete run of bound volumes.

…his ascension was accompanied by numerous affairs, which he detailed, along with his substance abuse, in his autobiography. Other record executives from the period wrote their stories, too, but Mr. Yetnikoff’s was in a class by itself. It was, Forbes said, “a portrait of such out-of-control megalomania that any music executive today, no matter how egotistical or ruthless, has to look better by comparison.”

In 1990, Mr. Yetnikoff, having offended too many people with his outrageous behavior, was dismissed by Sony, the company that at his urging had bought CBS Records only three years earlier. He had gone into rehab in 1989 and kicked the booze and drugs that had been his more or less daily diet throughout his reign, but getting clean didn’t make him any more tolerable.

Tommy Mottola, once a friend and later, as Mr. Yetnikoff’s successor at CBS Records, viewed as an enemy, put it this way in his own autobiography, “Hitmaker: The Man and His Music” (2013): “The treatment center had removed the alcohol and drugs from Walter’s life — but not the underlying problems that Walter had been using them to anesthetize.”

Brian Mulheren. He was the man in the NYPD in the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, and to quote the NYT, he was a “veteran detective who as an audacious, deft and indefatigable one-man emergency management liaison between City Hall and the New York Police and Fire Departments became known as ‘Mr. Disaster’ and the ‘Night Mayor’…”

Mr. Mulheren played an outsize role for a first-grade detective. He was armed with a gold shield, but his uniform, such as it was — it typically consisted of a rumpled beige trench coat and a crumpled Irish tweed hat — was devoid of the stars and bars that define status on the police force.
Yet by sheer force of personality and the connections he had cultivated, he was deferred to by city commissioners and by police supervisors who outranked him when he arrived, often first, at the scene of a crisis in his black Lincoln Town Car, which was crowned with a forest of antennas that linked him to every emergency radio frequency in the city.
In the 1970s and ’80s, he served as City Hall’s wake-up call when an officer was shot or a firefighter was felled. Before the city established a full-fledged emergency management department, he seamlessly and almost single-handedly coordinated interagency strategies.
“He was one of those rare people who kept the N.Y.P.D. and the Fire Department together,” John Miller, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, said in an interview. “He basically created the organized response to chaos that we replicated and have used ever since.”

Mr. Mulheren was credited by Officer Steven McDonald’s family with saving his life when he was shot in Central Park by a teenage bicycle thief in 1986 and rushed in a patrol car to Metropolitan Hospital, where doctors said he was unlikely to survive.
In 2016, Mr. McDonald told Columbia, the Knights of Columbus magazine, that he vividly remembered Mr. Mulheren’s dauntless intervention.
“You might think he’s not going to make it, but we’re going to Bellevue,” Mr. Mulheren announced on his own initiative, according to “New York’s Finest,” a forthcoming book by Michael Daly.
“He had no rank or high station but stepped forward and said, ‘No, he’s not going to die; he just needs a second chance,’” Mr. McDonald recalled. “I believe that was the Holy Spirit speaking through Brian to everyone there. Just like that like they loaded me up on a special ambulance and flew down to Bellevue Hospital, where they saved my life by the grace of God.”

In another emergency, when a firefighter was overcome and no ambulance was immediately available, Mr. Mulheren was said to have commandeered a city bus, told the passengers to debark and ordered the driver to take the injured man to the hospital.
Serving mostly under Mayors John V. Lindsay, Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins, Mr. Mulheren, a police buff since childhood, insinuated himself into the department’s decisions to buy smaller patrol cars to economize on gas; change their color from green, black and white in the early 1970s to “grabber blue” with white accents to make them more visible and less intimidating; modernize lights and sirens; air-condition the cars; and improve radio communications. He also encouraged the Fire Department to requisition a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber to treat burn victims.

He was 73 years old, and passed away due to COPD. His family attributes his condition to inhalation of debris at the WTC site after the 2001 attacks.

One Response to “Obit watch: August 11, 2021.”

  1. Jimmy McNulty says:

    If only I had the looks of Alex Cord and the guts of Detective Mulheren. At least I am not a man remembered for being such a jerk as Mr Yetnikof. I guess I am pretty average in all.
    Thanks for a great blog, to remember what is lost and what remains.