Allan Grant, 88; shot iconic photos for Life magazine
Allan Grant, a Life magazine photographer who got the last photo shoot with Marilyn Monroe weeks before her death and the first pictures of Marina Oswald just hours after the assassination of President Kennedy, has died. He was 88.
Grant died Feb. 1 of Parkinson's-related pneumonia at his home in Brentwood, according to his wife, Karin.
In their glory days, photographers for magazines like Life had extraordinary access to the glamorous worlds of fashion and Hollywood as well as history-making events.
Grant photographed atom bomb tests in the Nevada desert in the early 1950s, as well as Howard Hughes' memorable 1947 flight in the H-4 airplane that became known as the "Spruce Goose." He shot the Academy Awards, photographing Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly poised backstage for the best actress announcement at the 1955 ceremonies.
Colleagues recalled that Grant was also a fine spot-news photographer and captured former Vice President Richard Nixon, dressed in slacks and a tie, atop his rented house hosing down the roof during the catastrophic Bel-Air fire of 1961.
Grant photographed Monroe at her home for a Life magazine profile that appeared in the magazine's Aug. 3, 1962, issue. She died Aug. 5.
In a statement, Richard "Dick" Stolley, the Los Angeles bureau chief for Life magazine in 1963 who later served as the magazine's managing editor and was founding managing editor of People, recalled Grant as "very handsome and glamorous, two virtues that made him popular in Hollywood."
But, according to Stolley, Grant was "a newsman too."
The biggest assignment of the photographer's career came Nov. 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas
After news of the shooting broke, Grant and several other Los Angeles-based staffers flew to Dallas on a commercial flight packed with journalists. Arriving that afternoon, Grant and reporter Thomas Thompson set out to find the family of the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald's Russian wife Marina, who spoke little English, was living in the nearby town of Irving at the home of Ruth Hyde Paine. Grant and Thompson discovered her there along with her two children and Oswald's mother, Marguerite.
They stayed with the family all afternoon -- the police and FBI never arrived -- and eventually persuaded Marina, along with her two babies, Marguerite, Oswald's brother Robert and Paine, who spoke Russian and acted as an interpreter, to go with them to Dallas, where they put the family up in a hotel and promised to help them get rights to visit Oswald in jail. Grant continued to take pictures for their exclusive story.
