Whipped Cream Difficulties

Frank Jacobs, one of the old time “Mad” magazine guys.

Working with artists like Mort Drucker (who died last year), George Woodbridge and Gerry Gersten, Mr. Jacobs parodied movie musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof” (which he turned into a sendup of suburbia in “Antenna on the Roof”); critiqued the policies of President Ronald Reagan in a line-by-line satire of Poe’s “The Raven”; wrote obituaries of comic-strip characters like the hapless office worker Dilbert (who suffocated from a lack of ventilation in his cubicle) and the working-class layabout Andy Capp (whose death was caused by a drunken driver); and devised Christmas carols for dysfunctional families.

…

A fan of musical theater, Mr. Jacobs teamed with Mr. Drucker to turn “West Side Story” into “East Side Story,” a musical battle at the United Nations between gangs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet premier (and gang leader) Nikita Khrushchev sang:

When you’re a Red
You’re a Red all the way
From your first Party purge
To your last power play!
When you’re a Red,
You’ve got agents galore;
You give prizes for peace
While they stir up a war.

John Naisbitt, Megatrends guy.

Finally, Burt Pugach died on Christmas Eve last year, though his death was not widely reported until now.

I wrote a little about this case when his wife died, but that was a long time ago. In brief: Mr. Pugach was married, and carrying on an affair with Linda Riss. She found out he was married and broke it off. He wasn’t having any of that and continued to pursue her.

Finally, he hired thugs – he claims to “beat her up”. The thugs threw lye in her face and left her blind. Mr. Pugach was disbarred, his wife divorced him, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, released after 14 years…

…and after being released, he married Linda Riss, and they stayed married until her death in 2013.

Mr. Pugach left a legacy of recriminations and legal challenges over changes in his will that left a majority of his $18 million in assets to his caregiver. The latest version of the will disinherited several friends and reduced a planned bequest to the foundation for the visually impaired that he had established to honor his wife, Linda Riss Pugach, who died in 2013.
His assets have been frozen while the challenges are adjudicated, said Peter S. Thomas, a lawyer for the foundation, and Peter Gordon, who had drafted earlier versions of Mr. Pugach’s will. Those earlier versions had provided about $10 million for the foundation and roughly $5 million for Shamin Frawley, the 52-year-old caregiver with whom Mr. Pugach (pronounced POO-gash) had been living in Flushing since last year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2021 at 9:11 am and is filed under Books, Law, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.