JEANNE CARMEN, 77
Pinup girl, actress
Jeanne Carmen, a 1950s pinup girl, B-movie actress and trick-shot golfer who hobnobbed with Frank Sinatra and other stars, died of lymphoma Dec. 20 at her Orange County, Calif., home, her son said.
Born in Arkansas, Ms. Carmen picked cotton with her family before running away at age 13.
The small-town girl was still a teenager when she came to New York. Despite having no show business experience, she immediately became a dancer in the Broadway show Burlesque, with comic Burt Lahr.
She later went into modeling, gaining a measure of success with a series of cheesecake shots in men's magazines.
One gig turned into a new career as a trick golfer. On tour with golfer Jack Redmond, she would perform stunts such as hitting a ball out of a man's mouth.
Ms. Carmen claimed that she later hustled golfers with Las Vegas mobster Johnny Roselli.
While still in her 20s, she went to Hollywood, where she appeared in low-budget movies with names such as Guns Don't Argue and The Monster of Piedras Blancas.
Ms. Carmen also claimed to have had affairs with Sinatra and other celebrities.
AUSTIN C. "SLIM" GREEN, 91
Saddle maker
Austin C. "Slim" Green, a saddle maker who created hand-tooled works of art, died Saturday in Las Cruces, N.M., his family said. A cause of death wasn't given.
Mr. Green's saddles have been featured at the Smithsonian Institution, the Professional Ropers and Cowboys Association Museum, the Gene Autry National Western Heritage Museum and Oklahoma's Elk City Butler Museum.
They also have been collected by movie stars, politicians and rodeo stars.
After living in Santa Fe, N.M., for many years, Mr. Green moved to Las Cruces in 1996.
A few years later, he donated his entire shop and tool collection to the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, where it is on exhibit.
Born in Oklahoma in 1916, Mr. Green moved with his family in a covered wagon to Texas, where he learned to be a boy rodeo rider and roper. He apprenticed himself to the legendary saddle maker Pop Bettes and made his first saddle in 1936.
He continued to make saddles while serving in the Army during World War II.
After the war, he moved to Santa Fe, became one of the co-founders of Rodeo de Santa Fe and worked with the New Mexico Art Division Apprenticeship Program, teaching the next generation of saddle makers.
STEPHEN RADICH, 85
Art gallery owner
Stephen Radich, a New York art gallery owner who became embroiled in a famous legal case involving flag desecration in the late 1960s, died heart failure Dec. 18 in New York, said John Torson, a Manhattan art dealer and longtime friend.
From 1960 to 1969, Mr. Radich operated the Stephen Radich Gallery at 818 Madison Ave., where he exhibited works by contemporary artists like George Sugarman, Yayoi Kusama and Dmitri Hadzi. In December 1966, he presented works by Marc Morrel, a little-known artist who incorporated American flags into works protesting the Vietnam War. In one piece the flag was stuffed and hung like a corpse; in another, it was made into a phallus attached to a 7-foot cross topped by a bishop's miter.
After the exhibition came to the attention of the New York police, Mr. Radich was summoned and eventually convicted of casting contempt on the American flag. He was ordered to pay a $500 fine or serve 60 days in jail. (Mr. Morrel was not charged.)
The New York State Court of Appeals upheld the conviction. Called as an expert witness, the critic Hilton Kramer, who was then writing for The New York Times, testified that Mr. Morrel's sculptures were legitimate works of art, albeit feeble ones.
After losing in New York, Mr. Radich appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in 1971, voted on the case 4-4, with Justice William O. Douglas not voting. Then the Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a tie vote did not represent an actual adjudication, thereby allowing for another appeal. In 1974, a federal judge overturned the conviction.
The case became a cause celebre in the New York art world. In 1970, the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village organized the People's Flag Show to protest Mr. Radich's conviction. The show included works in many different media that featured flags. Abbie Hoffman appeared in a shirt made from a flag, and three artists were arrested for flag desecration: Faith Ringgold, Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks.
HAROLD J. LEAVITT, 85
Author, management expert
Harold J. Leavitt, an author and management expert who advocated a more democratic approach to organizational decision-making but who also concluded that people in large groups work best through a chain of command, died of pulmonary fibrosis Dec. 8 in Pasadena, Calif., his family said.
Mr. Leavitt, a longtime business professor at Stanford University, wrote about his theories in lively articles and books, including Managerial Psychology (1958), a textbook still used almost 50 years after it was first published.
Mr. Leavitt devoted much of his research to studying the dynamics of group decision-making but found that hierarchical structures were unavoidable and probably necessary, though certainly not benign.
"They breed infantilizing dependency, distrust, conflict, toadying, territoriality, distorted communication and most of the other human ailments that plague every large organization," he wrote in 2005.
However, he concluded that hierarchy remained "the best method ever invented for solving large, complicated problems."
In the late 1940s, while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Leavitt helped organize and conduct experiments that revealed how small groups can reach rapid consensus in making decisions. The experiments placed five or so participants in a room, divided them into carrels and forbade them to speak to one another. They were allowed to pass notes, but with restrictions. Participant A, for example, could pass a note to Participant B, and perhaps to C, but not to D or E.
Mr. Leavitt found that when the decision to be made was of a simple nature, a highly structured system of communication within the group proved effective in getting something done. When the matter was more complex, he found, a freer flow of communication led to a more satisfactory outcome. The findings were described in Managerial Psychology.
Warren G. Bennis, a professor of business administration at the University of Southern California, said Mr. Leavitt's research was "beautifully inventive" and showed that a more democratic approach to communications was more likely to result in correct decisions, faster decision-making and better group morale.
Mr. Leavitt also studied how loose, internal social networks affect corporations. He returned to such studies in the 1990s, when he examined the dynamics of small groups within large ones, this time to demonstrate how energetic, idealistic elites can, for a short time, influence an entire organization.
He called these elites "hot groups" and explained the phenomenon in a book, Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organization (1999), written with his wife, Jean Lipman-Blumen, a sociologist.
Mr. Leavitt said such groups were usually "embattled enclaves" in which members felt connected by an intense sense of purpose. He found that they brought superior speed and innovation to bear on an organization's problems but were also short-lived. Frequently they were dismissed by the corporate hierarchy.
The challenge for company leaders is to recognize and harness a hot group's energy before it dissipates, Mr. Leavitt and Ms. Lipman-Blumen wrote.