Can Marc Cherry do for faith what he did for the suburban housewife? The 'Desperate Housewives' creator is at work on a new series, 'Hallelujah,' based on a small town that is being torn apart by the forces of good and evil.
According to Variety, things change in Hallelujah, Tenn. when a stranger comes to town and brings in peace, justice and faith.
Cherry has been with 'Desperate Housewives' since its launch in 2004 and is contracted until 2013, but the stars are only signed until the end of this season. The creator also has a two-year deal with ABC.
In other TV news ...
• WABC weather anchor Heidi Jones was arrested for filing a false police report. The weather anchor, who regularly fills in on 'Good Morning America,' was charged with a Class A misdemeanor for filing a report that a man tried to rape her in Central Park. She faces up to a year in jail or a $1,000 fine. [NY Post]
• The first 'American Idol' promo poster has been released. Those new judges certainly seem happy. [EW]
• A&E has ordered pilots for two hour-long dramas. 'Big Mike,' from Happy Madison and Sony Pictures TV, follows a plus-sized detective with the San Diego Police Department. He's an ace detective with a crappy romantic life. The other project, 'Longmire,' is based on the 'Walt Longmire Mystery' novels by Craig Johnson, about a small-town sheriff.
Can Marc Cherry do for faith what he did for the suburban housewife? The 'Desperate Housewives' creator is at work on a new series, 'Hallelujah,' based on a small town that is being torn apart by the forces of good and evil.
According to Variety, things change in Hallelujah, Tenn. when a stranger comes to town and brings in peace, justice and faith.
Cherry has been with 'Desperate Housewives' since its launch in 2004 and is contracted until 2013, but the stars are only signed until the end of this season. The creator also has a two-year deal with ABC.
In other TV news ...
• WABC weather anchor Heidi Jones was arrested for filing a false police report. The weather anchor, who regularly fills in on 'Good Morning America,' was charged with a Class A misdemeanor for filing a report that a man tried to rape her in Central Park. She faces up to a year in jail or a $1,000 fine. [NY Post]
• The first 'American Idol' promo poster has been released. Those new judges certainly seem happy. [EW]
• A&E has ordered pilots for two hour-long dramas. 'Big Mike,' from Happy Madison and Sony Pictures TV, follows a plus-sized detective with the San Diego Police Department. He's an ace detective with a crappy romantic life. The other project, 'Longmire,' is based on the 'Walt Longmire Mystery' novels by Craig Johnson, about a small-town sheriff.
Let's get one thing straight: Ashton Kutcher does NOT co-star in Brittney Jones Confidential, the sex tape his alleged mistress is set to release on December 14.
But that doesn't mean the actor is happy with the existence of the video, especially because Vivid Entertainment is referencing Kutcher and Jones' allegation in its marketing of the amateur adult movie.
Don't worry, Ashton. Brittney's film can't make you look any worse than Killers did.
In a Vivid press releasing touting the sex tape, the company writes "Ashton's fans will undoubtedly enjoy seeing what the star himself may have experienced."
Hilarious? Yes. Illegal because it uses the star's name to sell the porn? Probably, argues Kutcher's legal team.
In a letter sent to Vivid, Ashton's lawyers claim those behind the release are infringing on the actor's "marketable celebrity identity value." We're pretty sure he killed that himself with Killers, though.
These attorneys are threatening to take action unless Vivid stops using their client's name in association with Brittney Jones.
Let's get one thing straight: Ashton Kutcher does NOT co-star in Brittney Jones Confidential, the sex tape his alleged mistress is set to release on December 14.
But that doesn't mean the actor is happy with the existence of the video, especially because Vivid Entertainment is referencing Kutcher and Jones' allegation in its marketing of the amateur adult movie.
Don't worry, Ashton. Brittney's film can't make you look any worse than Killers did.
In a Vivid press releasing touting the sex tape, the company writes "Ashton's fans will undoubtedly enjoy seeing what the star himself may have experienced."
Hilarious? Yes. Illegal because it uses the star's name to sell the porn? Probably, argues Kutcher's legal team.
In a letter sent to Vivid, Ashton's lawyers claim those behind the release are infringing on the actor's "marketable celebrity identity value." We're pretty sure he killed that himself with Killers, though.
These attorneys are threatening to take action unless Vivid stops using their client's name in association with Brittney Jones.
We now know the identity of "this girl."
In the latest issue of Star Magazine, the tabloid cover touts an affair between Ashton Kutcher and a random 21-year old who claims she slept with the actor in the house he shares with wife Demi Moore. She's been identified as Brittney Jones.
In the article, Jones confirms that she met Kutcher at a bowling alley, exchanged numbers with him and started to receive texts asking if she was busy.
"I did all the suggesting in the texts, it was like he was paranoid and didn't want to text anything that would get him in trouble," Brittney said. "I asked him if he wanted to meet, that's how we made the plans."
Those plans, allegedly, included a sexual romp on a couch in Kutcher and Moore's living room. But Jones at least had nothing but positive things to say about the experience:
"He's a great lover. Very considerate and sweet. And it was very special to me."
Makes perfect sense. The guy is supposed to have a very big penis.
This is the second time Star has accused Kutcher of cheating on Demi. He threatened legal action after the initial story and his lawyer spoke out after this issue hit newsstands.
We now know the identity of "this girl."
In the latest issue of Star Magazine, the tabloid cover touts an affair between Ashton Kutcher and a random 21-year old who claims she slept with the actor in the house he shares with wife Demi Moore. She's been identified as Brittney Jones.
In the article, Jones confirms that she met Kutcher at a bowling alley, exchanged numbers with him and started to receive texts asking if she was busy.
"I did all the suggesting in the texts, it was like he was paranoid and didn't want to text anything that would get him in trouble," Brittney said. "I asked him if he wanted to meet, that's how we made the plans."
Those plans, allegedly, included a sexual romp on a couch in Kutcher and Moore's living room. But Jones at least had nothing but positive things to say about the experience:
"He's a great lover. Very considerate and sweet. And it was very special to me."
Makes perfect sense. The guy is supposed to have a very big penis.
This is the second time Star has accused Kutcher of cheating on Demi. He threatened legal action after the initial story and his lawyer spoke out after this issue hit newsstands.
The news conference is over, but the drama may just be starting.
Almost everyone has left the Jefferson High gymnasium, however, Terrence Jones is huddled with his parents in the corner of the gymnasium and folks are keeping their distance. Seems like a major pow-wow.
I spoke to Jones and I can tell this recruiting stuff hasn't been fun for him. On what is supposed to be a joyous occasion, he sighed heavily and said he was happy that it was over.
Unlike Terrence Ross (above, left), who was decked out in Husky purple and said he made his choice a month ago, Jones didn't know where he was going until the moment he picked the UW hat.
I believe that.
It also looks as if he needs a little more time to make sure he made the right decision.
Nearly an hour after making his choice, Jones still hasn't signed his letter of intent to Washington. I posted on the Live Chat he didn't have a LOI to UW, but that information came from his aunt and it was incorrect.
There is a UW letter of intent here and it's unsigned at the moment.
And there's more.
Kentucky coach John Calipari called Jones after his announcement and Jones was on the phone for a very long time. About 15 minutes. Reading body language, Jones seemed pained.
He told me, "You hurt thousands of people just as much as you make people happy."
Jones' mother said if he hadn't chosen Washington, he was going to pick Kentucky.
Coach Lorenzo Romar is in Portland. NCAA rules prohibit him from attending the news conference, but a Jones family member told me he was two blocks away and was going to see Jones Saturday morning.
This much is certain, Washington added Terrence Ross today and we'll have to wait and see if Jones will join him next season.
Stay tuned. A strange recruiting season may get even more bizarre if UW loses Jones to Kentucky.
The news conference is over, but the drama may just be starting.
Almost everyone has left the Jefferson High gymnasium, however, Terrence Jones is huddled with his parents in the corner of the gymnasium and folks are keeping their distance. Seems like a major pow-wow.
I spoke to Jones and I can tell this recruiting stuff hasn't been fun for him. On what is supposed to be a joyous occasion, he sighed heavily and said he was happy that it was over.
Unlike Terrence Ross (above, left), who was decked out in Husky purple and said he made his choice a month ago, Jones didn't know where he was going until the moment he picked the UW hat.
I believe that.
It also looks as if he needs a little more time to make sure he made the right decision.
Nearly an hour after making his choice, Jones still hasn't signed his letter of intent to Washington. I posted on the Live Chat he didn't have a LOI to UW, but that information came from his aunt and it was incorrect.
There is a UW letter of intent here and it's unsigned at the moment.
And there's more.
Kentucky coach John Calipari called Jones after his announcement and Jones was on the phone for a very long time. About 15 minutes. Reading body language, Jones seemed pained.
He told me, "You hurt thousands of people just as much as you make people happy."
Jones' mother said if he hadn't chosen Washington, he was going to pick Kentucky.
Coach Lorenzo Romar is in Portland. NCAA rules prohibit him from attending the news conference, but a Jones family member told me he was two blocks away and was going to see Jones Saturday morning.
This much is certain, Washington added Terrence Ross today and we'll have to wait and see if Jones will join him next season.
Stay tuned. A strange recruiting season may get even more bizarre if UW loses Jones to Kentucky.
Jennifer Jones, who achieved Hollywood stardom in the postwar years in “The Song of Bernadette” and other films while gaining almost as much attention for a tumultuous personal life, died Thursday at her home in Malibu, Calif. She was 90.
Ms. Jones, who was chairwoman of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., died of natural causes, said Leslie Denk, a museum spokeswoman. Ms. Jones was the widow of the industrialist and art patron Norton Simon.
After winning an Academy Award for her performance in “The Song of Bernadette,” Ms. Jones went on to star in successful films like “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” and “Duel in the Sun.” She was nominated for Oscars five times.
She was also known for an off-screen life that included bouts of emotional instability; an early marriage to the Svengali-like David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind”; the suicide of their daughter; and a later marriage to another larger-than-life figure, Mr. Simon.
It was Selznick who gave Ms. Jones the role of Bernadette Soubirous, the young French peasant girl whose visions at Lourdes created a sensation in 1858. “The Song of Bernadette,” based on Franz Werfel’s best-selling novel, was a huge hit, and it brought the little-known Ms. Jones instant fame.
“After that first big role, there was a kind of stage fright,” Ms. Jones said in 1981. She told another interviewer: “When you’re young, you’re full of hope and dreams. Later you begin to wonder. I did ‘The Song of Bernadette’ without knowing what was going on half the time.”
When she made “Bernadette,” Ms. Jones was married to the rising young actor Robert Walker and the mother of two small boys. She and her husband had met as students at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in 1938 and married a year later. They had struggled together until Selznick put Ms. Jones under personal contract in 1941. A year later, Mr. Walker was signed by MGM and had a star-making debut as the young sailor in “Bataan.”
But the marriage didn’t last; they separated in the fall of 1943, and by then Ms. Jones was deeply involved with Selznick. Seventeen years her senior, he would be the mastermind of her career.
Selznick’s wife, Irene, the daughter of the movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, left him in 1945, in part over his affair with Ms. Jones. David Thomson, in his biography of Selznick, “Showman,” said Selznick had found something special in Ms. Jones. “She was so meek, so young, so lovely, so entirely ready to be David’s creation that she left all the responsibility with him,” Mr. Thomson wrote.
Ms. Jones and Selznick were married in 1949 on a yacht off the coast of Italy. Until his death in 1965, he made virtually all the decisions in his wife’s career. He supervised her dramatic training and produced many of her early movies, including “Since You Went Away” (1944), “Duel in the Sun” (1947), “Portrait of Jenny” (1948) and a lavish version, the second, of Ernest Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms” (1957). The film, which also starred Rock Hudson, was a critical and box-office failure and the last movie Selznick made.
When Selznick lent his wife out to other producers, he often chose badly — turning down the classic film noir ”Laura,” for example, or insisting that she star as the mentally ill Nicole Diver in the film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” when she was both too old for the role and in precarious mental health herself.
Ms. Jones never set her own course. Though her roles expanded — from the country girl Bernadette to the passionate half-caste young woman lusting after Gregory Peck in “Duel in the Sun” to the wealthy adultress of Vittorio De Sica’s “Indiscretions of an American Wife” (1954) — the screen image was always as molded by Selznick.
But her acting was admired. She received Oscar nominations as best actress for her performances as an amnesiac cured by Joseph Cotten’s love in “Love Letters” (1945), as the wanton Pearl Chavez in “Duel in the Sun” and as a Eurasian doctor in love with a Korean War correspondent (William Holden) in “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” (1955).
Ms. Jones was born Phyllis Lee Isley in Tulsa, Okla., on March 2, 1919, the only child of Philip and Flora Mae Isley. Her parents owned and starred in the Isley Stock Company, a tent-show theatrical troupe that toured the rural Midwest. As a child she spent her summers taking tickets, selling candy and acting in the company.
After a year at Northwestern University, she moved to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she was cast as Elizabeth Barrett opposite Robert Walker’s Robert Browning in “The Barretts of Wimpole Street.” The two soon married, and on their honeymoon in 1939 they went to Hollywood, where they found bit roles. Ms. Jones, as Phyllis Isley, appeared in a western, “New Frontier,” and a serial, “Dick Tracy’s G-Men.”
Retreating back to New York, the couple had a son, Robert Jr., in 1940, and another, Michael, less than a year later. Michael died in 2007. Robert survives her, as do eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Ms. Jones met David O. Selznick in New York when she went to his office there to read for the lead in “Claudia,” Rose Franken’s hit stage play, which Selznick was turning into a movie. The “Claudia” role went to Dorothy McGuire, who had starred in the play, but Selznick, who had by then triumphed with “Gone With the Wind,” was taken by the lithe, dark-haired Ms. Jones and saw a future for her in Hollywood. (He came up with the name Jennifer Jones during that first encounter.)
Ambitious but emotionally fragile, Ms. Jones placed herself in Selznick’s hands. He cast her in a William Saroyan play, “Hello Out There,” in a theater season he was presenting in Santa Barbara, Calif., and she received rave reviews. He was already planning to lend her to his brother-in-law, the producer Bill Goetz, at 20th Century Fox, for “Song of Bernadette.”
After “Bernadette,” Selznick cast her as Claudette Colbert’s daughter in “Since You Went Away,” his attempt to make a “Gone With the Wind” about the World War II home front. Ms. Jones was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar as the girl whose first love is a young soldier.
Although Ms. Jones and Mr. Walker were estranged, Selznick cast Mr. Walker as the fearful soldier who is strengthened by Ms. Jones’s love. The couple divorced in 1945. Mr. Walker, who later scored a success as the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” died at age 32 in 1951 after years of emotional problems and excessive drinking, which he attributed to his loss of Ms. Jones.
Among Ms. Jones’s other movies were the comedy “Cluny Brown” (1946), directed by Ernst Lubisch; “Carrie” (1952), a film version of Theodore Dreiser’s novel “Sister Carrie” co-starring Laurence Olivier; John Huston’s “Beat the Devil” (1954), a film noir parody that failed at the box-office but later found a cult following; “Madame Bovary” (1949); and “Ruby Gentry (1952), a King Vidor film with Charlton Heston about destructive passions reminiscent of “Duel in the Sun.”
After Selznick’s death in 1965, Ms. Jones’s film career petered out in “The Idol” (1966), about a young man sleeping with the mother of his girlfriend; the low- budget “Angel, Angel, Down We Go” (1969); and the ensemble disaster movie “The Towering Inferno” (1974). In 1968 she made a rare stage appearance, in a revival of Clifford Odets’s “Country Girl” at New York City Center.
The year before, Ms. Jones made headlines when she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and was discovered, near death, lying in the surf at Malibu. In 1976, on Mother’s Day, Ms. Jones’s 21- year-old daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, jumped to her death from a building in West Los Angeles.
Ms. Jones married another powerful man, the industrialist Norton Simon, in 1971, in a ceremony on a yacht in the English Channel after a courtship of three weeks. Mr. Simon, who had turned a bankrupt orange juice bottling plant into a conglomerate that included Hunt Foods and Canada Dry, had retired in 1969 at 62 to concentrate on collecting art.
He spent more than $100 million on his collection, one of the country’s greatest private art collections, housed at the Norton Simon Musuem.
After being stricken by the paralyzing neurological disorder Guillain-Barre syndrome, Mr. Simon resigned as president of the museum and was succeeded by Ms. Jones, who also took the title of chairwoman. She oversaw a gallery renovation by the architect Frank Gehry. Mr. Simon died in 1993 at age 86.
Throughout her life Ms. Jones appeared shy and aloof in public, and she rarely gave interviews. She explained why in one of the few she did give, to a reporter in 1957.
“Most interviewers probe and pry into your personal life, and I just don’t like it,” she said. “I respect everyone’s right to privacy, and I feel mine should be respected, too.”
Jennifer Jones, who achieved Hollywood stardom in the postwar years in “The Song of Bernadette” and other films while gaining almost as much attention for a tumultuous personal life, died Thursday at her home in Malibu, Calif. She was 90.
Ms. Jones, who was chairwoman of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., died of natural causes, said Leslie Denk, a museum spokeswoman. Ms. Jones was the widow of the industrialist and art patron Norton Simon.
After winning an Academy Award for her performance in “The Song of Bernadette,” Ms. Jones went on to star in successful films like “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” and “Duel in the Sun.” She was nominated for Oscars five times.
She was also known for an off-screen life that included bouts of emotional instability; an early marriage to the Svengali-like David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind”; the suicide of their daughter; and a later marriage to another larger-than-life figure, Mr. Simon.
It was Selznick who gave Ms. Jones the role of Bernadette Soubirous, the young French peasant girl whose visions at Lourdes created a sensation in 1858. “The Song of Bernadette,” based on Franz Werfel’s best-selling novel, was a huge hit, and it brought the little-known Ms. Jones instant fame.
“After that first big role, there was a kind of stage fright,” Ms. Jones said in 1981. She told another interviewer: “When you’re young, you’re full of hope and dreams. Later you begin to wonder. I did ‘The Song of Bernadette’ without knowing what was going on half the time.”
When she made “Bernadette,” Ms. Jones was married to the rising young actor Robert Walker and the mother of two small boys. She and her husband had met as students at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in 1938 and married a year later. They had struggled together until Selznick put Ms. Jones under personal contract in 1941. A year later, Mr. Walker was signed by MGM and had a star-making debut as the young sailor in “Bataan.”
But the marriage didn’t last; they separated in the fall of 1943, and by then Ms. Jones was deeply involved with Selznick. Seventeen years her senior, he would be the mastermind of her career.
Selznick’s wife, Irene, the daughter of the movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, left him in 1945, in part over his affair with Ms. Jones. David Thomson, in his biography of Selznick, “Showman,” said Selznick had found something special in Ms. Jones. “She was so meek, so young, so lovely, so entirely ready to be David’s creation that she left all the responsibility with him,” Mr. Thomson wrote.
Ms. Jones and Selznick were married in 1949 on a yacht off the coast of Italy. Until his death in 1965, he made virtually all the decisions in his wife’s career. He supervised her dramatic training and produced many of her early movies, including “Since You Went Away” (1944), “Duel in the Sun” (1947), “Portrait of Jenny” (1948) and a lavish version, the second, of Ernest Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms” (1957). The film, which also starred Rock Hudson, was a critical and box-office failure and the last movie Selznick made.
When Selznick lent his wife out to other producers, he often chose badly — turning down the classic film noir ”Laura,” for example, or insisting that she star as the mentally ill Nicole Diver in the film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” when she was both too old for the role and in precarious mental health herself.
Ms. Jones never set her own course. Though her roles expanded — from the country girl Bernadette to the passionate half-caste young woman lusting after Gregory Peck in “Duel in the Sun” to the wealthy adultress of Vittorio De Sica’s “Indiscretions of an American Wife” (1954) — the screen image was always as molded by Selznick.
But her acting was admired. She received Oscar nominations as best actress for her performances as an amnesiac cured by Joseph Cotten’s love in “Love Letters” (1945), as the wanton Pearl Chavez in “Duel in the Sun” and as a Eurasian doctor in love with a Korean War correspondent (William Holden) in “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” (1955).
Ms. Jones was born Phyllis Lee Isley in Tulsa, Okla., on March 2, 1919, the only child of Philip and Flora Mae Isley. Her parents owned and starred in the Isley Stock Company, a tent-show theatrical troupe that toured the rural Midwest. As a child she spent her summers taking tickets, selling candy and acting in the company.
After a year at Northwestern University, she moved to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she was cast as Elizabeth Barrett opposite Robert Walker’s Robert Browning in “The Barretts of Wimpole Street.” The two soon married, and on their honeymoon in 1939 they went to Hollywood, where they found bit roles. Ms. Jones, as Phyllis Isley, appeared in a western, “New Frontier,” and a serial, “Dick Tracy’s G-Men.”
Retreating back to New York, the couple had a son, Robert Jr., in 1940, and another, Michael, less than a year later. Michael died in 2007. Robert survives her, as do eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Ms. Jones met David O. Selznick in New York when she went to his office there to read for the lead in “Claudia,” Rose Franken’s hit stage play, which Selznick was turning into a movie. The “Claudia” role went to Dorothy McGuire, who had starred in the play, but Selznick, who had by then triumphed with “Gone With the Wind,” was taken by the lithe, dark-haired Ms. Jones and saw a future for her in Hollywood. (He came up with the name Jennifer Jones during that first encounter.)
Ambitious but emotionally fragile, Ms. Jones placed herself in Selznick’s hands. He cast her in a William Saroyan play, “Hello Out There,” in a theater season he was presenting in Santa Barbara, Calif., and she received rave reviews. He was already planning to lend her to his brother-in-law, the producer Bill Goetz, at 20th Century Fox, for “Song of Bernadette.”
After “Bernadette,” Selznick cast her as Claudette Colbert’s daughter in “Since You Went Away,” his attempt to make a “Gone With the Wind” about the World War II home front. Ms. Jones was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar as the girl whose first love is a young soldier.
Although Ms. Jones and Mr. Walker were estranged, Selznick cast Mr. Walker as the fearful soldier who is strengthened by Ms. Jones’s love. The couple divorced in 1945. Mr. Walker, who later scored a success as the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” died at age 32 in 1951 after years of emotional problems and excessive drinking, which he attributed to his loss of Ms. Jones.
Among Ms. Jones’s other movies were the comedy “Cluny Brown” (1946), directed by Ernst Lubisch; “Carrie” (1952), a film version of Theodore Dreiser’s novel “Sister Carrie” co-starring Laurence Olivier; John Huston’s “Beat the Devil” (1954), a film noir parody that failed at the box-office but later found a cult following; “Madame Bovary” (1949); and “Ruby Gentry (1952), a King Vidor film with Charlton Heston about destructive passions reminiscent of “Duel in the Sun.”
After Selznick’s death in 1965, Ms. Jones’s film career petered out in “The Idol” (1966), about a young man sleeping with the mother of his girlfriend; the low- budget “Angel, Angel, Down We Go” (1969); and the ensemble disaster movie “The Towering Inferno” (1974). In 1968 she made a rare stage appearance, in a revival of Clifford Odets’s “Country Girl” at New York City Center.
The year before, Ms. Jones made headlines when she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and was discovered, near death, lying in the surf at Malibu. In 1976, on Mother’s Day, Ms. Jones’s 21- year-old daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, jumped to her death from a building in West Los Angeles.
Ms. Jones married another powerful man, the industrialist Norton Simon, in 1971, in a ceremony on a yacht in the English Channel after a courtship of three weeks. Mr. Simon, who had turned a bankrupt orange juice bottling plant into a conglomerate that included Hunt Foods and Canada Dry, had retired in 1969 at 62 to concentrate on collecting art.
He spent more than $100 million on his collection, one of the country’s greatest private art collections, housed at the Norton Simon Musuem.
After being stricken by the paralyzing neurological disorder Guillain-Barre syndrome, Mr. Simon resigned as president of the museum and was succeeded by Ms. Jones, who also took the title of chairwoman. She oversaw a gallery renovation by the architect Frank Gehry. Mr. Simon died in 1993 at age 86.
Throughout her life Ms. Jones appeared shy and aloof in public, and she rarely gave interviews. She explained why in one of the few she did give, to a reporter in 1957.
“Most interviewers probe and pry into your personal life, and I just don’t like it,” she said. “I respect everyone’s right to privacy, and I feel mine should be respected, too.”