Jean Howard, photographer, 89

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

Friday March 24 9:33 PM ET

Jean Howard -- friend, photographer to stars -- dies
By Chris Michaud

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Jean Howard, a one-time Ziegfeld girl who as the
wife of a powerful agent enjoyed access to Hollywood's top stars and
chronicled their lives in a pair of photography books, has died at age 89.

Howard, a renowned Hollywood hostess for decades, died Tuesday at the
Beverly Hills home where she entertained and photographed the film world's
top stars.

Humphrey Bogart, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Marilyn Monroe, Judy
Garland, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, even Bugsy Siegel and
John F. Kennedy -- Howard claimed all of them as friends, eventually
publishing her photographs in two coffee table books, ``Jean Howard's
Hollywood'' (1989) and ``Travels With Cole Porter'' (1991).

Born Ernestine Hill, which she later changed to Mahoney in honor of a
photographer who had helped her, in Longview, Texas, Howard made the rounds
of beauty contests and modeling until she came to Hollywood in the late
1920s.

After landing a contract with MGM, she was discovered by legendary Broadway
showman Florenz Ziegfeld, who cast her in the musical ``Smiles,'' changing
her name to Jean Howard.

In 1934, during her years at MGM in such films as ``Dancing Lady,''
``Broadway to Hollywood'' and ``The Prizefighter and the Lady,'' she met and
married Charles Feldman, one of Hollywood's first ``super-agents'' who went
on to produce such classics as ''A Streetcar Named Desire.''

During her years with Feldman, Howard turned their home into a gathering
place for the Hollywood elite.

Howard, who wrote in her 1989 book that ``Hollywood has changed and things
don't happen as they once did,'' documented down-home, antic-filled evenings
and leisurely afternoons spent with the likes of Richard Burton, Jennifer
Jones and Howard Hughes, who are captured in her black-and-white photographs
in their most unaffected moments.

She studied art photography in the 1940s and began shooting for Vogue and
Life magazines. Reviews of her work and books cited Howard's insider status
as practically unparalleled.

Howard and Feldman divorced in 1948, but continued to live together until
his death in 1968 in what the couple termed a ''can't live with you, can't
live without you post-marital relationship.''

She traveled extensively with Cole Porter after his wife, Linda, who had
mentored Howard in the ways of Hollywood wives, died in the mid-1950s,
eventually parlaying photographs of their jaunts into her second book.

In 1960, she hosted a party for Sen. John F. Kennedy during the Democratic
National Convention in Los Angeles at which he was nominated for president.
Howard told Town & Country magazine that Kennedy returned to her door after
the party saying he was starving and that nothing in Los Angeles was open.
She scrambled some eggs for him and they talked for hours.

Howard said Kennedy later asked her to photograph him, but was assassinated
before she could. ``When people ask me if I have any regrets,'' she told the
magazine, ``that's one.''

She met musician Tony Santoro on the Italian isle of Capri in 1964 and
married him in 1973. The couple lived in Italy for a decade, eventually
returning to Howard's Beverly Hills home.

Reuters/Variety

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