Patricia Bosworth

American journalist (1933–2020)

Patricia Bosworth (née Crum, April 24, 1933 – April 2, 2020) was an American journalist, biographer, memoirist, and actress. She was a faculty member of Columbia University’s school of journalism as well as Barnard College, and was a winner of the Front Page Award for her journalistic achievement in writing about the Hollywood Blacklist.

Born Patricia Crum in Oakland, California, Bosworth was the daughter of prominent attorney Bartley Crum and novelist Anna Gertrude Bosworth. She grew up especially close to her younger brother, Bartley Crum Jr. Their father was active in politics as a confidant to Wendell Willkie during the 1940 U. S. presidential election, and he served on the 1945 Anglo American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine that advised President Harry Truman to support the creation of a Jewish state. The elder Crum gained renown for being one of the six lawyers who defended the Hollywood Ten during the Red Scare at the start of the Cold War in 1947. His career suffered during the fallout from the Blacklist, and the family moved from California to New York in late 1948. Arthur Penn cast her as the lead in her first professional play, a pre Broadway tryout of James Leo Herlihy’s Blue Denim, about the consequences of teenage pregnancy and abortion. Bosworth appeared in several Broadway shows during the 1950s and 1960s, including Inherit the Wind, Small War on Murray Hill (directed by Garson Kanin), and Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary (where she understudied from 1961 to 1965 before being cast as the lead for the end of the play's run). She played Elaine Stritch's sister in the drama The Sin of Pat Muldoon and a motormouthed teen based on the young Nora Ephron in Phoebe Ephron's comedy Howie. During this period, Bosworth toured in The Glass Menagerie, playing Laura to Helen Hayes's Amanda and Remains to be Seen with Tommy Sands. She worked regularly on popular television series, including Naked City, Kraft Theater (The Man That Didn't Fly 1958) The Secret Storm, Young Dr. Malone, and The Patty Duke Show. Bosworth can be seen in the film Four Boys and a Gun as James Franciscus's wife and as a disgruntled redhead in the audience of Bert Stern’s 1960 cult documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day, about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. As an actress, Bosworth is perhaps best known for playing Sister Simone, the young friend of Audrey Hepburn's character Sister Luke, in The Nun's Story (1959). Directed by Fred Zinnemann, the film was a box office success and nominated for multiple Academy Awards. In 1958, upon learning she was cast in The Nun's Story, she learned she was pregnant. She received an abortion at an underground abortionist in Manhattan. Shortly after, she boarded a plane to Rome to meet Fred Zinnemann, where she began to hemorrhage. In Rome, she was sent to a hospital convent where she was to learn about being a nun. The nun discovered she wasn't feeling well due to the abortion and rushed her to the hospital for care. The film was delayed for her recovery.

In the mid 1960s, Bosworth left acting to become a journalist. She gained notice as a writer with several Broadway focused features and interviews published in New York magazine and The New York Times. In November 1965, she was one of three people on the staff of Screen Stars magazine. Subsequently she worked at Magazine Management Company with Mario Puzo, who was then beginning drafts of his novel The Godfather. From 1969 to 1972, Bosworth was senior editor of McCall's; she served as managing editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1972 to 1974. Penthouse founder Bob Guccione hired Bosworth as executive editor of the erotic women's magazine Viva from 1974 to 1976. During the 1970s and 1980s, Bosworth reviewed numerous books for The New York Times, wrote freelance art pieces for the Times, Time Life, and other national magazines, and she contributed a monthly column on arts and entertainment to Working Woman magazine. Bosworth was an editor at Mirabella from 1993 to 1995. She was first hired as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair in 1984 under Tina Brown’s editorship of the magazine, and she served in this capacity until 1991. She continued to freelance for the magazine until 1997 when she rejoined as contributing editor under Graydon Carter’s leadership, a position she held to the end of her life. Her profile of Elia Kazan and his reflections on the Hollywood Blacklist, published in a spring 1999 issue of Vanity Fair, won Bosworth the Front Page Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York.

Bosworth was the author of bestselling biographies on Montgomery Clift (1978), Diane Arbus (1984), Marlon Brando (2000) and Jane Fonda (2011). Her book, Montgomery Clift: A Biography explores how the actor's introverted approach to his craft influenced James Dean and many others. Bosworth, whose father had been Clift's lawyer in the late 1940s, had total access to Clift's family while doing research for the project. She also spoke to many of Clift's close friends and colleagues. Conversations between Bosworth and Brooks Clift appeared in Montgomery Clift's nephew documentary Making Montgomery Clift. Bosworth's biography of Arbus, a photographer known for her poetic approach to eccentric and abnormal subjects, was a nuanced appraisal of the artist that also investigated the lurid details of her life, culminating in Arbus's 1971 suicide. The book was critically acclaimed. Andrew Holleran of New York magazine said it was "a biography that seems to have more than enough material for several art legends Patricia Bosworth has created a spellbinding portrait." Washington Post Book World reviewed it as "fascinating" and "a compelling biography as valuable in its insights into the cultural history of the 50s and 60s as its understanding of the special place Arbus occupies in it." However, the book proved to be extremely controversial, and it did not receive formal approval from the Arbus estate. Bosworth's work is still widely considered to be the definitive biography of Arbus; it was the inspiration for Steven Shainberg’s 2006 film Fur, which starred Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus and Ty Burrell and Robert Downey Jr. as her husband and lover respectively. According to Publishers Weekly, Bosworth's biography on Marlon Brando "offers a vivid reminder of the personal and professional highlights of Brando's life [It is] an informative biography of Brando that, because of the limited format of the Penguin Lives series, hints at but cannot do justice to the great unruliness of Brando's career and life. She provides a fine, detailed sketch of his New York days when he took acting classes with Harry Belafonte, Elaine Stritch, Gene Saks, Shelley Winters, Rod Steiger and Kim Stanley, and presents a great portrait of the craziness on the set of Last Tango in Paris (co star Maria Schneider announced that they got along 'because we're both bisexual')", but in only 228 pages, the author "can't approach the complexity of her earlier work." Bosworth spent 10 years completing a biography of Jane Fonda, with whom she had attended sessions at the Actors Studio in the 1950s and 1960s. Fonda granted Bosworth total access; they met frequently throughout the research process for the book. Bosworth's biography Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman was on the New York Times bestseller list in 2011 and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Six Books of the Year. In addition to her biographies, Bosworth was the author of two memoirs. The first, Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1997. It tells the story of Bosworth's father Bartley Crum and how his decision to defend the Hollywood Ten at the height of McCarthyism destroyed his career, ultimately leading to his suicide. In the late 1980s, Bosworth was reintroduced to photographer Tom Palumbo, whom she had met decades earlier when Palumbo had been on staff at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. Palumbo was then moving from photography into directing theatre. He and Bosworth worked on a number of plays together for the Actors Studio and Lincoln Center, including a production of The Seagull starring Laura Linney as Nina and Tammy Grimes as Arkadina. They married in 2000. Palumbo died due to complications from Lewy Body Dementia on October 13, 2008. After Palumbo's death, Bosworth joined the board of the Lewy Body Dementia Resource Center. Bosworth died from pneumonia and complications of COVID 19 at Mount Sinai West hospital in New York City on April 2, 2020.

Montgomery Clift: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace and Bantam, 1978. (Reissued by Limelight Press, 1980)
Diane Arbus. New York: Alfred Knopf and Avon, 1984. (Reissued by W. W. Norton, 1995 and 2005)
Making Contact (play) in Best One Act Plays of 1991 1992. New York: Applause Books, 1992
Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. (Reissued by Touchstone, 1998)
Marlon Brando. New York: Viking/Penguin, 2001. (Part of the Lives series)
Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011
John Wayne: The Legend and the Man: An Exclusive Look Inside Duke's Archive. John Wayne Enterprises, with contributions by Bosworth, Ron Howard, Ronald Reagan, and Martin Scorsese. New York: PowerHouse Books, 2012
The Men in My Life: Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan. New York: HarperCollins, 2017
Dreamer with a Thousand Thrills: The Rediscovered Photographs of Tom Palumbo. New York: powerHouse Books, 2018