Allan Grant, photographer for Life magazine
LOS ANGELES - Allan Grant, a Life magazine photographer who did the last photo shoot of 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.
Mr. Grant died Feb. 1 of Parkinson's-related pneumonia at his Los Angeles home, according to his wife, Karin.
In their glory days, photographers for magazines such as Life had extraordinary access to the glamorous worlds of fashion and Hollywood, as well as history-making events. Mr. Grant shot atom bomb tests in the Nevada desert in the early 1950s, as well as Howard Hughes's memorable 1947 flight in the H-4 airplane that became known as the "Spruce Goose."
He photographed the Academy Awards, where he captured Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly poised for the best actress announcement in 1955.
Colleagues recalled that Mr. Grant was also a fine spot news photographer. He captured former Vice President Richard Nixon, dressed in slacks and a tie, on the roof of his rented house hosing down the roof during a catastrophic fire in 1961 on the west side of Los Angeles.
And he photographed Monroe at her home for a profile that appeared in Life's Aug. 3, 1962, issue. She died two days later.
Richard 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 Mr. Grant as "very handsome and glamorous, two virtues that made him popular in Hollywood," Stolley said in a statement.
But, according to Stolley, Mr. Grant was a newsman, too.
The biggest assignment of Mr. Grant's career came Nov. 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald.
After news of the shooting broke, Mr. Grant flew to Dallas on a commercial flight packed with journalists. Arriving that afternoon, Mr. Grant and reporter Thomas Thompson set out to find Oswald's family.
Oswald's Russian wife, Marina, who spoke little English, was living in nearby Irving, Texas. Mr. 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, Marguerite, and Oswald's brother Robert to come with them to Dallas, where they put them up in a hotel and promised to help them get rights to visit Oswald in jail.
According to Mr. Grant's wife, the photo and story of the Oswald family never saw print until years later, when the images were published in a German magazine.
