New York Times on Kennedy Detail Secret Service Agent Winston Lawson

SSA Win Lawson, the advance man for the Texas trip, he rode ahead of Kennedy’s limo, helped lift the president onto a stretcher and then lived a half-century with regrets.

Mr. Lawson, left, was on duty during the burial of President Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery on Nov. 25, 1963, three days after the assassination. Credit...Cecil Stoughton/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Winston Lawson had been a Secret Service agent for four years when, on Nov. 22, 1963, he was in an unmarked police car in Dallas just ahead of President John F. Kennedy’s open limousine.

Within an hour or so, Kennedy would be dead, leaving Mr. Lawson to wonder for the next half-century whether he had done everything possible to keep the president safe.

“At times I wish I had never been born,” he said in an interview in 2013 with WTVR, a television station in Richmond, Va., on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

Mr. Lawson, who died on Nov. 7 in Norfolk, Va., at 91, had not only been guarding Kennedy in Dallas; he had been the advance agent for the presidential trip to Texas. Known for his attention to detail, he had planned security and travel routes for the trip, as he had for Kennedy in other cities in both the United States and Europe.

In Dallas, he worked with the local police to choose the route the motorcade would take from Love Field, where Kennedy had landed that morning from Fort Worth, through downtown Dallas and on to the Dallas Trade Mart, where Kennedy was to speak.

“It allowed us to go downtown, which was wanted back in Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Lawson said in 1964 in testimony to the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. “It afforded us wide streets most of the way, because of the buses that were in the motorcade.”

He calculated that the trip from the airport to the trade mart, about 10 miles, would take 45 minutes, given how slow the motorcade would proceed.

The Secret Service agent Winston Lawson, fifth from left, observing President John F. Kennedy greeting a crowd after arriving at Castle Air Force Base in Merced County, Calif., in 1962. Mr. Lawson was the advance agent for many of Kennedy’s trips, including his last, to Texas.Credit...Robert Knudsen/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Mr. Lawson — who rode in the front passenger seat of the lead car, a light-colored sedan being driven by Jesse Curry, the Dallas police chief — scanned the thickening crowds for potential trouble and kept turning around to check on Kennedy through the rear window, he told the commission.

After the motorcade turned onto Elm Street along Dealey Plaza and passed the Texas School Book Depository, Mr. Lawson heard the first shot from behind. In his testimony he was asked by the commission member John J. McCloy, a banker and diplomat, if he had seen anyone in the windows of the building. (Oswald had shot the president from a sixth-floor window.)

“No, sir,” Mr. Lawson said. “Just as we started around that corner, I asked Chief Curry if it was not true that we were probably five minutes from the Trade Mart.”

When two more shots were fired, Mr. Lawson turned around to see another Secret Service agent standing in the car behind Kennedy’s limo holding an automatic weapon. Had the agent just fired?

A motorcycle officer then pulled up to the lead car, telling Mr. Lawson and Chief Curry that the president had been shot. An order immediately crackled over Mr. Lawson’s two-way radio: Rush to the nearest hospital.

When the lead car and the limousine arrived at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Mr. Lawson dashed into the emergency entrance and saw medical personnel pushing two stretchers toward him — one for Kennedy and one for Gov. John B. Connally of Texas, who had been in the president’s limousine and also wounded.

When he reached the stretchers, Mr. Lawson testified, he “put one hand on each one as they pushed and I pulled.”

Mr. Connally was placed on the first stretcher. Mr. Lawson and three others, including the Kennedy aide Dave Powers, lifted the mortally wounded president from the back seat of the limousine onto the second stretcher.

“They really couldn’t do much,” Mr. Lawson recalled in the WTVR interview. “He was quite gray.”

He waited outside Trauma Room 1 as doctors worked unsuccessfully on Kennedy’s neck and head wounds. At 1 p.m. they declared the president dead.

Mr. Lawson later rode in a police car that escorted the Kennedy hearse — carrying the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, as well — to Love Field for Air Force One’s flight back to Washington. He stood guard outside the plane until it took off.


Returning from Love Field, Mr. Lawson went to the Dallas Police Headquarters. By then Oswald had been arrested and interrogated by detectives there, but Mr. Lawson arrived in time to observe as Forrest Sorrels, the Secret Service agent in charge of the Dallas district, interviewed the suspect.

“What was the attitude of Oswald during this period?” Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, a member of the Warren Commission and the future Republican president, asked Mr. Lawson.

“Oswald just answered the questions as asked to him,” Mr. Lawson testified. “He didn’t volunteer any information. He sat there stoically, not much of an expression on his face.”

Winston George Lawson (who was known as Win) was born on Oct. 15, 1928, in Dunkirk, N.Y., on Lake Erie, and raised in nearby Portland, N.Y. His father, Merle, was an accountant, and his mother, Cecile (Post) Lawson, was a schoolteacher who worked as a guard in a machine gun factory during World War II.

After graduating from the University of Buffalo (now part of the State University of New York) with a bachelor’s degree in history and government, Mr. Lawson worked as a carpet salesman and sales representative at the Carnation Milk Company before serving in Army counterintelligence.

After his discharge he returned to Carnation and had several other jobs before the Secret Service accepted him as an agent in 1959 in its field office in Syracuse, N.Y. He was assigned to the White House detail in 1961 and remained with the agency for the next 20 years.

He later worked for the Defense Department, doing background checks, and provided security for the evangelists Billy Graham and his son Franklin.

Mr. Lawson’s death, which was not widely reported at the time, was caused by coronary artery disease, his son, Jeff, said. Mr. Lawson is also survived by his wife, Barbara (Barrett) Lawson; a daughter, Andrea Lawson; four grandchildren; three step-grandchildren and his brother, Merlin.

Mr. Lawson said that his lingering anguish over Kennedy’s death had been assuaged by support from fellow agents.

“They would say to me — and it’s hard for me to say without breaking down or tears coming to my eyes,” he told The Dallas Morning News in 2003 — “‘Win, if it had to happen to anyone, we’re glad it happened to you.’

“Because I was known for doing the best, most thorough advance in the entire agency.”

Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer. He previously wrote about sports media and sports business. He is also the author of several books, including “The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic.” @RichSandomir

Reposted from The New York Times

In Memoriam Harlan Ellison

 

Harlan Ellison in Boston in 1977. He looked at storytelling as a “holy chore,” which he pursued zealously for more than 60 years. 

CreditBarbara Alper/Getty Images

I only got to meet Harlan two or three times, and since it was in my position of VP for Los Angeles PEN it was somehow always antagonistic (by his selection, of course). He tried to shout me down when I was announcing something or other. I told him, Why don’t you stand up and defend yourself like the writer that you are instead of just interrupting obnoxiously. He jumped to his feet, stated his case, then sat down. And grinned. It gave me a good feeling.

I loved reading his words, but none more than what he sent me one day when I asked him what he did with “cranks & weirdos” he must deal with even more than I did as an editor. He sent me a mimeographed statement he sent to them, that went substantially like this:

SOME PRETERNATURALLY IMBECILIC ASSHOLE, USING YOUR NAME, SENT ME  THE ENCLOSED PIECE OF SHIT USING THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE AND I AM RETURNING IT TO YOU HEREWITH IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU WILL NEED IT AS EVIDENCE WHEN YOU FILE A FEDERAL CASE AGAINST THE MORONIC FUCKER. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!

Being a professor at the time, I didn’t have the balls to actually use it, but I never failed to think about it when I opened a crank missive. If only I could adopt it to email today!

R.I.P., Ellison. You rocked!


Read New York Times Obituary

R.I.P. Ronald Linder

Dr. Ronald L. Linder

Born Ronald Leonard Linder on February 26, 1940, in Tacoma, Washington. Deceased on June 19, 2017, in Los Angeles, California of natural causes. Kate Linder, his wife of 41 years, has starred on "The Young and the Restless" for over 35 years, sadly announces his passing on June 19, 2017. He was 77 years old and died peacefully.

Linder was raised by his father George Linder, a home builder and cabinet maker, and his mother Dorothy. Linder was teaching at San Francisco State University, when he met Kate just after she graduated from the university with a Theatre Arts degree. Between stage productions, his future wife was working at the University’s activities office where they met, fell in love and the two were married on Valentine's Day in 1976. Linder was a proud husband who cheered on his wife when she received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and remained supportive of her career and her biggest champion during their long marriage. Many who knew the couple were unaware of his impressive background and history as an educator, author, innovator and expert on many matters of public health and drug abuse treatment and training techniques.

As an honors student, Ronald L. Linder graduated with a BA and MS degrees in health education from the University of Washington, an EdD in health education from the University of Oregon, and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in research at Stanford University. He started his teaching career at Alaska Methodist University at 23.

He was a fellow of the American School Health Association at 26. After chairing the Teaching Credential and Graduate Programs in health education at San Francisco State University for four years, he joined Dr. Joy Cauffman on the SEARCH: A Link to Services project at USC School of Medicine in 1974. He later coordinated the National Science Foundation's Biomedical Interdisciplinary Curriculum Project for four years, prior to his administrative and faculty positions in public health, medicine, and education at UCLA in 1978. His background in psychoactive drug abuse research led to coauthoring the first book on PCP abuse: PCP: The Devil's Dust -- Recognition, Management, and Prevention of the Phencyclidine Abuse, which was published in 1981. He has written articles in professional journals, monographs, and was awarded a million-dollar grant to train twelve thousand human service providers on PCP abuse throughout the State of California. He served as expert witness on many homicide and DUI cases related to PCP abuse during the past several decades.
After several years teaching administrative postgraduate medical education, consulting, and acting as the principal investigator on several UCLA training grants, he became director of education at the Hospital Satellite Network and subsequently was president of American Medical Productions, winner of several Telly Awards for medical television. Dr. Linder became the Regional Liaison Officer, Veterans Health Administrator Western Region for the Ambulatory Care and Education Initiative for five years. He created the Ambulatory Care Consultation and Education Support Services (ACCESS) program used to evaluate and transition selected inpatient to outpatient care.

In 1999, he coauthored Home Health Telecommunications. A few years later, he established two substance abuse treatment programs for the underserved in Los Angeles. In 2013, Linder and his former SEARCH partner Cauffman coauthored another book, A Forty-Year Retrospective of President Nixon's Committee on Health Education A Whistleblower's Diary. Dr. Linder received numerous awards and recognition for this work, including a "Medical Aspects of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Ware" symposium in 1981, which contributed to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1985.

Linder is survived his wife Kate, his mother Dorothy, his children from his first marriage Jay, Jon and Karyn, his nine grandchildren, his sister Janis Pupo and her husband Frank, his brother David and his wife Marilyn, his brother Gene, his sister Jorjann Buzzell, his mother-in-law, Molly Wolveck, his brother-in-law Randy Wolveck and his wife Gina.

Donations can be made to the Ronald Linder Memorial Fund at the ALS Association Golden West Chapter.

An Old Friend Passes: Charles Champlin dies at 88; former L.A. Times arts editor, critic

Former Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin speaks with director Alfred Hitchcock in 1977. Champlin was The Times' principal film critic from 1967 through 1980. (Los Angeles Times)

Charles Champlin, the former Los Angeles Times arts editor, film critic and columnist whose insightful, elegantly written reviews and columns informed and entertained readers for decades, died Sunday at his Los Angeles home. He was 88.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, said his son, Charles Champlin Jr.

The Harvard-educated Champlin had worked 17 years at Life and Time magazines before joining The Times as entertainment editor and three-times-a-week columnist in 1965.

During his 26 years at The Times, Champlin served as the paper's principal film critic from 1967 through 1980.

He then shifted to book reviewing and, with his "Critic at Large" column, offered a more general overview of the arts. He retired in 1991 but continued to contribute to The Times' daily and Sunday Calendar sections and wrote two books despite becoming legally blind from age-related macular degeneration in 1999.

Charles Champlin, shown in 1979, worked for the Los Angeles Times for 26 years. He retired in 1991 but continued to contribute to The Times' daily and Sunday Calendar sections and wrote two books despite becoming legally blind from age-related macular degeneration in 1999. (Los Angeles Times)

In honor of his film coverage and criticism, Champlin received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007.

"Charles Champlin was one of the great gentlemen of American film criticism and a pioneer in showing that mass-market newspaper reviewing could be smart and well-written as well as accessible," Times film critic Kenneth Turan said Monday.

His tenure as arts editor in the late 1970s was touched by controversy over the paper's coverage of one of the era's biggest Hollywood scandals: the ouster of David Begelman as president of the motion picture and television division of Columbia Pictures after he had forged $40,000 worth of checks, including one for $10,000 made out to actor Cliff Robertson.

The Times did not investigate the Begelman affair until well after rival papers had thoroughly reported on it, opening the paper to criticism in an era when the paper's entertainment staff was not expected to pursue investigative stories.

As a movie critic, Champlin estimated that he saw 250 movies a year and reviewed half of them. He came to the job at a time when the new movie rating system launched in 1968 gave filmmakers unprecedented creative freedom.

"I quickly came to realize that I had acquired an aisle seat at a period of historic ferment in American films," Champlin wrote in "Hollywood's Revolutionary Decade," a 1998 annotated collection of his reviews from the 1970s.

Champlin was known for being "a discerning critic," as fellow film critic Arthur Knight once noted. But he also was criticized by some for writing what The Times' late media critic David Shaw, in a 2001 examination of how the media cover Hollywood, called "overwhelmingly favorable reviews."

Champlin acknowledged his "reputation as a kind critic." But in a talk he gave at Chapman University in 1977, he good-naturedly offered ample evidence to the contrary by reading excerpts from some of his less-flattering movie reviews.

Of the 1975 comedy-drama "Lucky Lady," for example, he wrote that it was a "cynical, vulgar, contrived, mismated, violent, uneven and uninteresting disaster." As for the plot of the Liza Minnelli-Burt Reynolds-Gene Hackman movie, it was, he wrote, "unmenageable, trois as we will."

Addressing the "perils of being a reviewer in Hollywood," Champlin told his Chapman audience that "it's not that [filmmakers] are going to put pressure on you. It's just that you like them in many cases. It's painful to say a movie is a disaster.

"It pains you to do it, but you have to do it. All you have going for you as a critic is your credibility. If you lose it, you're useless as a critic."

As a film critic, Champlin had many fans among the elite of Hollywood, including actor Jack Lemmon.

"I've gotten some pretty bad reviews along with the good ones from Chuck, but he's always been honest and constructive," Lemmon, who died in 2001, said in Don Widener's 2000 book "Lemmon: A Biography."

Director Arthur Hiller, then-president of the Directors Guild of America, offered his praise in 1992, when Champlin received an honorary Life Member Award from the guild.

Champlin, Hiller said, was "the epitome of a film critic [who] has shown an incredible knowledge of films, a deep caring about films and filmmakers."

The veteran journalist was in charge of arts coverage when the Begelman case broke into the headlines at other papers.

For more than two months after Columbia's initial announcement that it had launched "an inquiry into certain unauthorized financial transactions between David Begelman and the company," The Times ran only three brief stories — two just a paragraph apiece — buried inside the paper.

It was not until the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post published articles on the Begelman case that The Times entered the fray by running an edited version of the Post article.

And it was not until an ensuing flurry of newspapers and magazines latched onto the Begelman case as evidence of widespread corruption in Hollywood that The Times assigned a team of four reporters to the story in an effort to catch up.

"We were absolutely in a state of panic," Champlin recalled in a 1979 Times article by Shaw that chronicled the paper's poor coverage of the Begelman case.

Three months after the story broke, The Times published its first major piece on the scandal. Written by Champlin after a telephone interview with Begelman, the piece was seen as "sympathetic" to the producer and referred to the forgeries as "crimeless crimes" and Begelman as "a culprit who doubles as a victim."

Champlin, who years later said that he "couldn't pretend it was a piece of reporting," was criticized for the article, which outside observers viewed as an apologia.

In his analysis of The Times' failure in the Begelman case, Shaw noted a lack of communication between The Times' entertainment department and the news department. It also showed that, while the entertainment section's critics and feature writers covered the artistic side of Hollywood, it was, as Sunday Calendar section editor Irv Letofsky said in 1979, "not equipped to do hard-news investigation."

The fact that Champlin's article on Begelman didn't follow any investigative stories, Shaw wrote, "contributed to an already widely held perception that the Times had deliberately ignored the Begelman affair because the paper was 'protective' of Hollywood."

Champlin was born March 23, 1926, in Hammondsport, N.Y., a hamlet on Keuka Lake in the Finger Lakes region, where members of his family had long owned a winery that was effectively closed during Prohibition.

In 1943, Champlin headed to Harvard, where he joined the Army's Enlisted Reserve Corps in early 1944. That May — two months after he turned 18 — the self-described "bookish, introspective and fairly unassertive" college student volunteered for induction into the Army.

While serving in a mortar squad in March 1945, he was wounded in the right hip by a German artillery shell and returned stateside after about three months in combat.
lRelated William F. Thomas dies at 89; former Times chief editor


After his discharge, Champlin returned to Harvard, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in English in 1948. On a recommendation from a writing instructor at Harvard, he was quickly hired by Life magazine as a "trainee" in its picture bureau in Manhattan.

A year later, after moving up to a job as a researcher, Champlin was assigned as a correspondent in Life's Chicago bureau. After three years in Chicago and two years as a correspondent in the Denver bureau, he returned to New York City as a writer for the magazine.

In 1959, having become the senior writer in domestic news, he was assigned to Life's Los Angeles bureau. Before joining The Times, Champlin was a London-based arts correspondent for three years.

Over the years, Champlin brought his arts and film expertise to television, including hosting "At One With" on KNBC-TV Channel 4, "On the Film Scene" on the Z Channel in Los Angeles and "Champlin on Film" on the Bravo cable channel. He also co-hosted "Citywatchers," a public affairs program on KCET-TV in Los Angeles, with the late Times columnist Art Seidenbaum.

Among Champlin's other books are "The Flicks: Or, Whatever Became of Andy Hardy" (1975), which was revised and republished in 1981 as "The Movies Grow Up, 1940-1980"; "George Lucas: The Creative Impulse" (1992); and "A Life in Writing: The Story of an American Journalist" (2006).

His slim (69-page) 2001 book "My Friend, You Are Legally Blind" dealt with his struggle with macular degeneration.

Besides son Charles Jr. of Santa Barbara, Champlin is survived by his wife of 66 years, Margaret (Peggy) Derby Champlin; daughters Katherine Laundrie of Vista, Calif., Judith Desmond of San Anselmo, Calif., Susan Champlin of New York City and Nancy Cecconi of Eagle Rock; son John of Valencia; half sister Nancy Kreis of Camillus, N.Y.; 13 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Reposted from the Los Angels Times

McLellan is a former Times staff writer.
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

AEI Client Nancy Freedman dies at 90; feminist had long and wide-ranging literary career

Among her most famous books are 'Mrs. Mike,' 'The Immortals' and 'Joshua Son of None.' She was known for extensive research and varied subject matter, and the bulk of her work is 'ardently feminist.'

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times

August 22, 2010

Nancy Freedman, a novelist whose wide-ranging books include the bestselling "Mrs. Mike," co-written with her husband, has died. She was 90.

Freedman died Aug. 10 of temporal arteritis, an autoimmune inflammatory disease of the arterial vascular system, at her home in Greenbrae, Calif., said her husband and frequent writing partner, Benedict Freedman.

In a literary career that began in the late 1940s and continued until her death, Freedman wrote or co-wrote 20 novels.

The first was "Mrs. Mike" (1947), the story of a 17-year-old Boston girl coping with living in Canada's northwest wilderness with her Mountie husband in the early 20th century.

A bestseller that appeared in 27 foreign editions and remains in print, "Mrs. Mike" was turned into a 1949 movie starring Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes.

Other novels written with her husband include "The Apprentice Bastard" (1966), the story of a disillusioned man who resolves to abandon his high ethical standards to succeed but keeps backsliding.

Among Freedman's solo efforts are "The Immortals," a 1977 novel that tells how oil came to dominate the modern world; and "Joshua Son of None," a 1973 novel in which a young doctor removes a tiny piece of tissue from the body of President Kennedy after his assassination and pursues a plan to clone the president.

Benedict Freedman said, however, that "the bulk of her production could be characterized as ardently feminist."

That includes "Sappho: The Tenth Muse," a 1998 novel about the ancient Greek poet, and "Mary, Mary Quite Contrary," a 1968 novel about the origins of the modern feminist movement in Britain in the late 18th century.

As a novelist, Freedman was known for her extensive research and wide variety of subject matter.

"She never wanted to do the same thing," said her husband, a retired professor of mathematics at Occidental College in Los Angeles. "Even in the case of 'Mrs. Mike,' the publisher approached us offering a fortune if we'd write a sequel. But at that time, we had used up all the usable material."

It wasn't until decades later — after they had made repeated visits to Alberta, the locale of the original novel, and had done a lot more research — that they collaborated on the sequels "The Search for Joyful" (2002) and "Kathy Little Bird" (2003).

The daughter of a surgeon father and a journalist mother, Freedman was born Nancy Mars on July 4, 1920, in Evanston, Ill. She had rheumatic fever at 3, the same age at which she began acting professionally in local children's stage productions.

As a teenager, she toured in director Max Reinhardt's productions of "Faust," "The Miracle" and "Six Characters in Search of an Author."

She was a leading lady in little theater in Hollywood when she met her future husband, a junior movie studio writer, in 1940.

When the Freedmans were married in 1941, Nancy had recently suffered a recurrence of rheumatic fever and had been given three months to live.

"Her father told me that it was insane of me to want to marry a girl who had at most three months to live, and I said that Nancy and I had talked it over and had decided that even if it was only three months, we would want to enjoy it," recalled Benedict Freedman.

Although she never completely recovered and always had to limit her activities, he said, "all these illnesses and so on have just never deterred Nancy from going ahead and doing what she wanted, writing her books, having children against doctors' orders and all that."

She was, he said, "a very strong but very gentle woman."

Freeman gave up acting after she was married, but never stopped writing.

"The day she died, she was dictating to me from her hospital bed changes in a novel she had in progress," said her husband. "She was about halfway through an anti-war novel, which is also a love story."

He said he has all of her notes and plans to try finishing it for her.

In addition to her husband, Freeman is survived by her son, Michael; her daughters, Johanna Shapiro and Deborah Jackson; her sisters, Mary Lynn Tolle and Susie Hamilton; eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

dennis.mclellan@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Dede Allen dies at 86; editor revolutionized imagery, sound and pace in U.S. films

Dede was fun and funny. A friend and neighbor both here in LA and Palenville, New York. Her big, big laugh and the personality that went with it will be missed. - CLW

OBITUARY

Her work on 1967's 'Bonnie and Clyde' ushered in a new aesthetic that's now the standard in American film. She earned Oscar nominations for 'Dog Day Afternoon,' 'Reds' and 'Wonder Boys.'

Dede Allen's techniques included a staccato tempo sometimes called shock cutting, and beginning the sound from the next scene while the previous scene was still playing.

By Claudia Luther

April 18, 2010

Dede Allen, the film editor whose seminal work on Robert Rossen's "The Hustler" in 1961 and especially on Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967 brought a startling new approach to imagery, sound and pace in American movies, died Saturday. She was 86.

Allen, who was nominated for Academy Awards for "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975), "Reds" (1981) and "Wonder Boys" (2000), died at her Los Angeles home days after having a stroke, said her son, Tom Fleischman.

Allen was the first film editor -- male or female -- to receive sole credit on a movie for her work. The honor came with "Bonnie and Clyde," a film in which Allen raised the level of her craft to an art form that was as seriously discussed as cinematography or even directing.

"She was just an extraordinary collaborator, and in the course of editing that film, I came to develop confidence in Dede," Penn told The Times on Saturday. "Indeed, she wasn't an editor, she was a constructionist."

The two were "not just collaborators," Penn said, "but deep family friends. We made six films together."

Greg S. Faller, professor of film studies at Towson University in Maryland, said "The Hustler" and "Bonnie and Clyde" "must be considered benchmark films in the history of editing."

"It's hard to see the changes she made because most of what she did has been so fully embraced by the industry," Faller said.

Allen departed from the standard Hollywood way of cutting -- making smooth transitions starting with wide shots establishing place and characters and going on to medium shots and finally close-ups -- by beginning with close-ups or jump cuts. Although these editing methods had been pioneered by the French new wave and some British directors, Allen is generally credited with being the first to use and shape them in American film.

In Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon," she employed a staccato tempo, sometimes called shock cutting.

"She creates this menacing quality by not cutting where you'd expect it -- she typically would cut sooner than you might expect," Faller said. "You weren't ready for it."

She would also begin the sound from the next scene while the previous scene was still playing, a technique now standard in film editing.

In all, Allen edited or co-edited 20 major motion pictures over 40 years, but she was most closely identified with Penn and a handful of A-list directors such as Rossen, Lumet and George Roy Hill and actor-directors Paul Newman, Warren Beatty and Robert Redford.

Besides "Bonnie and Clyde," which was produced by Beatty and starred Beatty and Faye Dunaway, Allen's films for Penn included "Alice's Restaurant," "Little Big Man," "Night Moves" and "The Missouri Breaks."

She edited Lumet's "Serpico," "Dog Day Afternoon" and "The Wiz"; Hill's "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Slap Shot"; Newman's "Rachel, Rachel" and "Harry & Son"; Beatty's "Reds" (with Craig McKay, who shared the Oscar nomination) and Redford's "The Milagro Beanfield War."

But it was the violent tale based on the true story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow -- lovers and robbers on the run during the Great Depression -- that secured her place as a pioneer in film.

Hardly a chase scene or violent sequence filmed since "Bonnie and Clyde" has not been a reference to Allen's distinct style, which she developed under Penn's direction.

"What we essentially were doing," Penn said Saturday, "was developing a rhythm for the film so that it has the complexity of music."

The famed final ambush scene in which Bonnie and Clyde are gunned down on a gravel road in rural Louisiana contains more than 50 cuts, though it lasts less than a minute. At Penn's urging, Allen and her assistant, Jerry Greenberg, employed slow motion at some points and faster speed at others, creating a tense, violent and balletic conclusion.

Although the film initially left some movie critics in near-apoplectic disapproval of its mix of comedy and graphic violence, Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker magazine, called it "excitingly American."

Kael had special praise for the movie's editing, especially the "rag-doll dance of death" at the end of the picture, which she called "brilliant."

"It is a horror that seems to go on for eternity, and yet it doesn't last a second beyond what it should," Kael wrote.

In his review in 1967, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert called it "a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance."

Kael's review and other critical praise prompted many to reevaluate the film, which in 1998 was listed at No. 27 on the American Film Institute's list of the "100 Greatest American Movies of All Time."

Dorothea Corothers Allen was born in Cincinnati on Dec. 3, 1923. She attended Scripps College in Claremont but left to take a job as a messenger at Columbia Pictures, hoping she could someday fulfill her dream of being a director.

Within a year, she was an assistant in sound effects, working on three-reelers. After long hours at her job, she would sit beside Carl Lerner, then an editor in television who later edited "Klute" and other films. With Lerner's guidance, she learned the craft of editing: the assemblage of various scenes to create a coherent film.

In the early days of Hollywood, the cutters, as they were called, were often women, perhaps because, as Allen once commented to author Ally Acker, "women have always been good at little details, like sewing."

But later those jobs mostly went to men, especially after World War II when military veterans returned to the film industry.

Unable to get a stronger foothold in the movies, Allen went with her husband to Europe and then New York City, where she took various jobs, including editing commercials, while raising her two children.

Working on commercials helped shape her style of editing, she often said.

In the late 1950s, Lerner recommended her for her first major editing task -- for director Robert Wise's "Odds Against Tomorrow," the taut film noir starring Harry Belafonte.

Allen credited Wise, who had been a film editor ("Citizen Kane"), for giving her the confidence to find her footing in the profession. She began experimenting with using sound to move the action forward, the precursor to her method of initiating sound from the next scene while the previous scene was still running.

"The overall effect increased the pace of the film -- something always happened, visually or aurally, in a staccato-like tempo," Faller wrote in "Women Filmmakers and Their Films."

"Odds" led to Rossen's "The Hustler," which gave Allen her first real opportunity to demonstrate what she had learned, including the use of cuts instead of dissolves between scenes.

"I think it surprised Rossen, but he left it," she told the Film Quarterly in 1992 of her way of editing. "He used to say, 'It works. It plays. Leave it. Don't improve it into a disaster.' "

Ebert wrote of Allen's work on "The Hustler" that she found the rhythm in the pool games -- "the players circling, the cue sticks, the balls, the watching faces -- that implies the trance-like rhythm of the players. Her editing 'tells' the games so completely that if we don't understand pool, we forget that we don't."

When "Bonnie and Clyde" came along several years later, Allen employed her well-honed techniques and instincts about performance and story to help Penn deliver a film unlike any made in America before.

In 1994, Allen received the highest honor from her peers, a career achievement award given by American Cinema Editors. In November 2007 she received the Motion Picture Editors Guild's Fellowship and Service Award.

For seven years during the 1990s, Allen was an executive at Warner Bros., overseeing pre- and post-production on many films. She returned to editing with "Wonder Boys" and was co-editor of Omar Naim's "The Final Cut" (2004) and editor of "Fireflies in the Garden" (2008).

In addition to her son, Tom, a sound recording mixer, she is survived by her husband of 63 years, Stephen E. Fleischman, a retired TV news executive, documentary producer and writer; daughter Ramey Ward; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Claudia Luther is a former Times staff writer

news.obits@latimes.com