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Diane McBain, whose career playing spoiled rich girls included turns as the yacht owner Daphne Dutton on the ABC crime show Surfside 6 and an author stalking Elvis Presley in Spinout, has died. She was 81.

McBain died Wednesday morning at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills after a battle with liver cancer, her friend and writing partner, Michael Gregg Michaud, told The Hollywood Reporter.

McBain also guest-starred on four episodes of ABC’s Batman, first as a hat shop assistant who’s in cahoots with David Wayne’s Mad Hatter in 1966 and then as stamp company proprietor Pinky Pinkston — she wore only pink and had a pink dog — on the memorable 1967 installment that featured The Green Hornet (Van Williams) and Kato (Bruce Lee).

In her first film, McBain appeared with Richard Burton in Vincent Sherman’s Ice Storm (1960), then starred alongside Troy Donahue and Claudette Colbert...

Polly Bergen dead at 84: ‘First woman president of the U.S.A.,’ former mistress of Tony Soprano’s father Emmy Award-winning actress Polly Bergen — whose roles ranged from the first U.S.A. woman president in Kisses for My President to the former mistress of both Tony Soprano’s father and John F. Kennedy in the television hit series The Sopranos — died from "natural causes" on September 20, 2014, at her home in Southbury, Connecticut. The 84-year-old Bergen, a heavy smoker for five decades, had been suffering from emphysema and other ailments since the 1990s. "Most people think I was born in a rich Long Island family," she told The Washington Post in 1988, but Polly Bergen was actually born Nellie Paulina Burgin on July 14, 1930, to an impoverished family in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her father was an illiterate construction worker while her mother got only as far as the third grade. The family...

Katha Pollitt, digesting the prospect of Ross Douthat beaming aboard the NY Times' op-ed page: I haven't read his collected cyberworks, but even for a blogo-pundit, Douthat seems unusually averse to engaging with women intellectually, even on perennial topics like abortion and birth control, where you'd think we'd bring something missing to the table--like an interest in our health, well-being, happiness, longevity, pleasure and ability to have some control over our lives. Instead, he engages Slate's Will Saletan on whether contraception would prevent enough abortions to make it worth expanding government funding. Douthat thinks not; but if abortion is murder, wouldn't preventing 12,000 of them (his misleadingly low figure) be quite an accomplishment? That's equivalent to nearly two-thirds of the 17,000 murders of born people in the United States every year. In his ongoing stem cell debate with Michael Kinsley, sometimes embryos are people, and sometimes they're counters in arguments that are really about sex,...