A Whole Lotta Dying Goin' On

Anyone responsible for creating THAT look deserves some post mortem recognition.

Van Smith, who was admiringly called both an artist and a terrorist for the costumes and makeup he designed for the films of John Waters, died on Tuesday at his home in Marianna, Fla. He was 61.

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An early exponent of the trash aesthetic, Mr. Smith was widely credited with having created the public face — once seen, not soon forgotten — of Divine, the seventh-of-a-ton transvestite star of Mr. Waters’s early movies. Mr. Smith designed the costumes for all of Mr. Waters’s films, and the makeup for the first six of them.

Also making exits this week:

Jay McShann, jazz pianist, bandleader and vocalist, was 90.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Kansas City was a hotbed of jazz activity, Mr. McShann was in the thick of the action. Along with his fellow pianist and bandleader Count Basie, the singer Joe Turner and many others, he helped establish what came to be known as the Kansas City sound: a brand of jazz rooted in the blues, driven by riffs and marked by a powerful but relaxed rhythmic pulse.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, UN ambassador in the Reagan administration, was 80.

She was the only woman, and the only Democrat, in President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council. No woman had ever been so close to the center of presidential power without actually residing in the White House.