ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 1, 1996 TAG: 9610010086
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: NEW YORK
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: The New York Times
MEMO: NOTE: Shorter version ran in Metro edition.
Frances Lear, a mercurial figure in the media world who spent some $25 million she received in a divorce settlement to start a magazine named after herself, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 73.
She died of breast cancer, said Dr. Jonathan LaPook, her son-in-law.
Lear was married for 28 years to Norman Lear, the highly successful television producer of series such as ``All in the Family'' and ``Maude.'' Her divorce settlement from Lear, an amount variously estimated to be between $100 million and $112 million, was one of the largest ever recorded.
``I was very much a part of his thinking,'' she often said, justifying the amount of the settlement. ``Norman could not have done his shows without me.''
It is generally considered - and she herself claimed - that she was the inspiration for Maude, the feisty and opinionated title character played by Bea Arthur on one of the situation comedies .
Lear made a name for herself among feminists, working in political campaigns, including Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 1968; with the National Organization for Women on behalf of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment; as a partner in an executive search firm specializing in placing women; and as a writer, producing articles for national publications.
But she believed that she had faded into the background as her husband's career took off in the 1970s. After Norman Lear acquired his own movie studio and founded his own civil liberties group, People for the American Way, she wrote about her frustrations on the opinion page in The New York Times in 1981.
A woman in Hollywood is a nonperson, she wrote, ``unless she is under 21, powerful or a star.''
Lear, in her own words, ``always aspired to something out of the ordinary,'' and she moved to New York after her divorce in 1985.
She quickly set out to change the nonperson identity she had felt in Hollywood by creating Lear's, a magazine aimed at women like herself - ``the woman who wasn't born yesterday,'' as the magazine said on its cover.
Lear's began publication in 1988 and was a success. It started with a circulation base of 250,000 and grew to 350,000 in a year. But after two years, Lear abandoned her original concept and lowered the age of the theoretical Lear's woman to over 35. Abandoning the older-age niche put the magazine into competition with other women's magazines, and its advertising never recovered from the move.
Almost immediately after the magazine's debut, Lear developed a reputation for being unpredictable and hot-tempered. She held a series of intimate lunches in her apartment during which she sought, and then usually ignored, advice for her fledgling publication.
In an article in The New York Times, a staff member recalled that when Lear had been told that she could not change a quotation, she had shouted, ``It is my magazine, and I will do what I want.''
A former associate once said of her, ``She spent her life in Hollywood, where you go on your gut and you are prized for being slightly nuts.'' Lear did not deny the validity of the remark. She had lived with that behavior for many years, she said, and ``very possibly some of it rubbed off.''
Lear was born July 14, 1923, at the Vanderheusen Home for Wayward Girls in Hudson, N.Y., the child of an unwed mother and an unknown father. ``The odds were stacked high against me,'' she once said.
She was given the name Evelyn, but she was renamed Frances when she was adopted after 14 months in an orphanage by Aline and Herbert Loeb of Larchmont, N.Y.
LENGTH: Medium: 71 linesby CNB