2023 In Memoriam Part 2: Concluding Bruce Fessier’s look back on local luminaries we lost in the past year

The list of notable persons from the Coachella Valley and Morongo Basin who died in 2023 includes athletes, philanthropists, businesspersons and celebrities, including Suzanne Somers and Cindy Williams.

Here is part two of a series of 20 remembrances that previously included the A to L list.

Diana Marcum, Aug. 9, Fresno. 60. Diana was the only Desert Sun colleague I’ve had who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. And of all the amazing writers I’ve worked with at The Desert Sun, she was among the last I would have expected to win a Pulitzer. That’s not to diminish her talent. But I’ve always imagined Pulitzer Prize winners to be like dogs with a bone, determined to overcome any obstacle to get that big, important story.

Diana was capricious, almost flighty, with more of a zest for life than bylines. I had no idea she dreamed in the fourth grade of becoming a Los Angeles Times reporter until I read that in another poetic obituary in The Times. Many Desert Sun reporters have gone on to work at The Times, but Diana got there after quitting the Fresno Bee to explore the Azores off of Portugal. She returned as a freelance writer, and that’s where she shined, following her own muse instead of an assignment editor’s. A Times editor hired Diana and trusted her to tell the untold, human stories of Central California disenfranchised workers and that’s what earned her the 2015 Pulitzer. Diana related to those folks as well as she related to the un-famous of the Coachella Valley.

Go to the Cahuilla exhibition in the La Quinta Museum and you’ll see a story flashing across a TV monitor showing a 1993 story Diana did on Katharine Saubel, a Cahuilla leader who helped save the Cahuilla language. Katherine rarely gave interviews. But Diana got her to say, “When you lose the language, you lose everything – stories, songs. It’s gone.” I last saw Diana in April when her connection to a film editor led her to the American Documentary Film Festival while I was doing a Q&A with a music composer colleague of her companion. That random meeting became a joyous reunion because of Diana’s appreciation of the unexpected. That made the news her friend Larry Bohannan gave me three months later even more disturbing. She needed brain surgery to remove a glioblastoma. She lapsed into a coma afterwards and never recovered. Likewise, the light on this planet has never regained a certain luminance.

Read part 1 of the series here.

Sal Mistretta, Jan. 26. 78. I think I first saw this singer-actor perform at a “Twisted Broadway” benefit for the Coachella Valley Repertory. Or maybe it was their production of “Good People.” Or maybe it was the 2018 “One Night Only” at the McCallum Theatre.” Or the Coyote Stageworks production of “The Man Who Came To Dinner.” Or the MTU production of “Follies.” You get the picture. Sal was on stages all over the valley after “semi-retiring” to the desert. What I remember most is, whatever he was in, he made it better. He had a long resume of appearances on Broadway, film, TV and cabaret shows. What was he most famous for? I don’t know. Maybe Pirelli in “Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” He did the first national tour of that and appeared in the TV production. But he also was on Broadway in “Evita,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Cabaret.” And Sal didn’t just sing and act.  He supported theater. I got to know him seeing him in the lobby of so many shows. Like my wife, he also taught theater to MTU students. When he died, there were so many online tributes, his friend, Lucie Arnaz remarked, “I can’t get over the outpouring of love for this man I didn’t get nearly enough time to enjoy.” My sentiments exactly.

Kaiser Morcus, July 7, Rancho Mirage. 90. The Coachella Valley restaurant industry would be very different without this “founder and spirit of Kaiser Restaurant Group.” I never met the man. I only knew his son, Lee, who carries on his father’s spirit of fine dining and charitable community support. But I’ll never forget my first visit to their Kaiser Grille in Palm Springs. The restaurant features good steaks and patio dining on South Palm Canyon Drive, where people watching is an entertaining part of the daily menu. My wife and I were enjoying a patio table with our two teenage sons during a Pride parade when a car drove by with a topless woman who was waving. Talk about a tantalizing dessert! Kaiser came to the United States from Lebanon in 1956 without knowing any English. He opened the Hog’s Breath Inn in Carmel and turned it into a legendary institution known for its patronage by Clint Eastwood. Around the time Eastwood bought a place in La Quinta, the Morcus family opened another Hog’s Breath Inn in that city. By then, they had restaurants in Palm Springs, Palm Desert and Indio. Kaiser also had supermarkets, ski lodges, and various real estate ventures. As someone wrote in his Desert Sun obituary, “Kaiser exemplified the entrepreneurial spirit, promise, opportunity, and success that is and defines America.”

Phil Murphy, Dec. 4, Palm Desert 78. Anybody who knows anything about fine dining knows how important lighting is to a restaurant. The same can be said about theater. I discovered on my theater rounds that most of the best local theater was lit by one guy – this former senior vice president of Paramount Pictures Television! Phil designed the lights for Dezart Performs, Coyote Stageworks, Desert Rose Playhouse, MTU, the Date Festival Pageant and his friend Lucie Arnaz’s “Latin Roots” show at the McCallum. Phil started in broadcast journalism in the Midwest before coming to L.A. As a senior vice president at Paramount, he was in charge of the preservation of not just Paramount’s historic movies — from the 1912 “Queen Elizabeth” to the 1969 “True Grit” — but also many buildings on the Paramount lot. Structures were renamed after legends such as Preston Sturges and Hal Wallis and refurbished according to their original architecture. Talking to Phil in a tiny theater like the old Desert Rose, you’d never guess he was a man of such great responsibility.

Albie Pearson, Feb. 21, La Quinta. 88. My first vivid memory of Palm Springs was attending a Los Angeles Angels spring training game against the Chicago Cubs when I was 7 years old. It was the Angels’ first year of existence and our Whittier neighbors were from Chicago, so they came to root for Ernie Banks. The Angels were a ragtag bunch, and I recall that being exemplified by having the smallest man in baseball, Albie Pearson, hitting before the most muscular sleeveless man in baseball, Ted Kluszewski. At 5-feet 5-inches, Albie was an inspiration to everyone who bought into that Randy Newman song about short people. Albie proved short people had every right to play professional sports. He was Rookie of the Year for the Washington Senators in 1958 and an all-star centerfielder for the Angels in 1963, when he hit .304 with six home runs! He retired early due to injury and became a minister, founding the Father’s Heart Ranch for boys on 11 acres in Desert Hot Springs.

Lisa Marie Presley, Jan. 12, near Calabasas, Calif. 54. This daughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley was never a Coachella Valley resident, but she was supposedly conceived in Palm Springs – on her parents’ wedding night in their rented Las Palmas neighborhood home, now called the Elvis Honeymoon House. She was born exactly nine months after her folks were married on May 1, 1967. She spent her first Easter at Elvis and Priscilla’s next rented home on Kaweah Road in Las Palmas. Then she almost certainly vacationed at the Palm Springs house her parents bought the following year on Chino Canyon, which is now being refurbished with hopes of opening to the public in October. Lisa Marie was not just the heir to the Graceland throne (and the one-time wife of Michael Jackson), she was a talented singer. Listen to her 2005 LP, “Now What,” including her personal take on Don Henley’s classic “Dirty Laundry.” Such a shame she died so young from a cardiac arrest.

Grace Robbins, July 24, Los Angeles. 91. Grace was one of Palm Springs’ great socialites. She wasn’t a “society maven” like Jackie Lee Houston, who would herd friends into charitable events, or a paragon of party etiquette like Leonore Annenberg. But she was a lady you’d want to have lunch with because she had stories. She began her adult life as an advertising account executive in New York and a casting director for the prestigious Gray Advertising, where she met the salacious novelist, Harold Robbins. They quickly married in 1965, when Robbins had three books on the British best-seller paperback list. They came to define the jet set (when they weren’t cruising the Mediterranean on Robbins’ yacht) and Robbins’ publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, called him (and by extension her) “as much a part of the sexual and social revolution as the pill, Playboy and pot.” They divorced in 1992 and Grace wrote a book telling her sexy side of the story. Robbins demanded an open marriage, she said. He had “countless affairs” and hosted parties at their Palm Springs home. Her Desert Sun obituary respectfully described her as “a glamorous hostess, who lovingly entertained friends with her exuberance, joy and zest for life until her 91st birthday when she was diagnosed with cancer.”

Arlene Rosenthal, Oct. 17, Desert Hot Springs. 79. This philanthropist and custom clothing businesswoman couldn’t have been more of a Grace Robbins opposite. Like Grace, she was intelligent and cultured. She championed opera with the Palm Springs Opera Guild of the Desert and her own OperaArts organization, formed after splitting from the Guild. She was a product of the Berkeley free speech movement, and she never hesitated to speak her mind to power. She became president of the nonprofit homeless services provider, Well of the Desert, and, while others debated what to do about the homeless, she moved among them and fed and clothed them. She was an ardent LGBTQ+ activist and feminist who told me she managed people from a feminist perspective. “I like inclusivity as opposed to exclusivity,” she said. “Feminism is basically everybody is equal. There is no top or bottom. So, the person in the leadership position must make sure to protect everybody.” We sadly lost her amid unclear circumstances when we needed her most.

Suzanne Somers, Oct. 15, Palm Springs. One day shy of age 77. Suzanne was best known as the ditzy blonde on the 1970s and early ‘80s sit-com “Three’s Company” – a show so popular, my journalist friend Richard Guzman said he learned English in Nicaragua from watching it. But Suzanne reinvented herself more often than Jane Fonda or, to cite someone more politically aligned with her views, Ronald Reagan.

When her manager-husband Alan Hamel sought a raise for her on par with co-star John Ritter’s salary, ABC offered an extra $5,000 an episode — or $35,000 to Ritter’s $150,000 an episode. Their impasse ultimately led to Somers being fired. But she emerged from TV exile as a Las Vegas variety star and that led to her return to TV. “She’s the Sheriff” sucked, but “Step By Step” lasted seven seasons. By the time it ended, Suzanne had become an entrepreneur and a writer who didn’t need to rely on anyone else for income.

When a film developer suggested she endorse an upper-body exercise machine called V Toner, Suzanne put it between her legs and squeezed. She and Alan called it the Thighmaster and registered the name to guarantee their financial security for life. But Suzanne wasn’t just an entertainer and entrepreneur.

She had a spiritual side that opened her to new experiences. She wrote her first of 25 nonfiction books, “Keeping Secrets,” after sitting in a cave near Santa Fe and imagining its inhabitants from an ancient civilization. She wrote in her memoir, “Two’s Company: A Fifty-Year Romance With Lessons Learned in Love, Life & Business,” “When you follow the flow and don’t resist, life takes you on the most interesting journey.”

Suzanne’s voyage led to her becoming a spokesperson for alternative health and a community advocate who lent her celebrity to such events as the opening of the McCallum Theatre, the Steve Chase Awards for the Desert AIDS Project, the Evenings Under the Stars for AAP — Food Samaritans, the Frank Sinatra Celebrity Invitational Gala for the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center, Christmas Tree Lanes for ACT For MS and the Film Awards Gala for the Palm Springs International Film Festival. She dreamed of renovating and running the Plaza Theatre with Alan, her constant inseparable companion. He had a study done and determined a restoration would cost much more than the city estimated. But Suzanne was willing to invest millions of her and her friends’ money.

The city preferred to retain control and Suzanne died of a cancer she’d been battling for decades just two months before the city affirmed Alan’s assessment. It chose to pay another $20 million of taxpayer money, instead Suzanne and Alan’s funds, to restore the theater.

Cindy Williams, Jan. 25 in Los Angeles. 75. Cindy’s career paralleled Suzanne’s for a minute. They were both Californians born less than 10 months apart. Both were dyslexic. Both got their big break in the 1973 film, “American Graffiti,” with Cindy co-starring opposite Ron Howard and Suzanne having a memorable bit role as the girl in the white T-Bird who enthralls Richard Dreyfuss. Cindy became a big TV star in “Laverne & Shirley” in 1976 and Suzanne became a big TV star in “Three’s Company” in 1977. Suzanne refused to appear in episodes during a contract dispute in 1980 and Cindy walked off her show during a contract dispute in 1982. But that’s where the similarities end.

Suzanne reinvented herself and made more money than at the height of her TV popularity.  Cindy continued trodding the TV soundstages. She co-starred in the TV sitcom, “Getting By,” which lasted from 1993 to 1994, and “Parenting & Beyond,” which lasted 11 episodes in 1996. But mostly, she made TV guest appearances until the pandemic. Both she and Suzanne were devoted parents, but Cindy lived a low-profile life in Desert Hot Springs after divorcing Kate Hudson’s estranged father, Bill Hudson, in 2000. She began somewhat of a comeback in 2022, presenting the West Coast premiere of her one-woman show, “Me, Myself and Shirley,” that January at the Annenberg Theater in Palm Springs. She got a recurring role as the grandma in the sitcom, “Sami” that aired in 2023. But she died after a brief illness in L.A. before the series aired.

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