Suzanne Blackmer, 92, actress, tenant in battle vs. Trump
SALISBURY, N.C. -- Suzanne Blackmer, an actress who became better known later in her life for her ability to prevent Donald Trump from forcing her out of her Manhattan apartment, died Aug. 27 at the Lillian Booth Home for actors. She was 92.
In the mid-1980s, Ms. Blackmer had been paying a pittance for her third-floor apartment at 100 Central Park South -- just $203.59 a month because of rent control, her age, and her income, which was less than $10,000 a year from Social Security, a small Actors' Guild pension, and occasional acting.
Then, Trump bought Ms. Blackmer's apartment building. With other apartments on the same street with the same view renting for $5,000 a month, Trump wanted more for her apartment and others like it.
The real estate mogul's lawyers served Ms. Blackmer with an eviction notice. She and a group of plaintiffs served Trump with a lawsuit. In 1998, after a decade of legal wrangling, a New York court ruled that Trump could turn the apartments into condos and sell them -- Ms. Blackmer's was assessed at $750,000 then -- but if the renters wanted to stay, they could, with rent control.
At her funeral Saturday in Salisbury, the Rev. Douglas L. Holmes read from a letter that an acquaintance wrote to Ms. Blackmer while her case against Trump was in court.
''Keep letting them have it!!" Salisbury native Susan Gussman wrote. ''They are small men whose wallets are located where their hearts should be!"
Ms. Blackmer stayed in the apartment until she got sick last winter and moved to the Lillian Booth home.
Her son, Jonathan, an attorney in Washington, D.C., said before the funeral that the family will not keep the apartment because there were no succession rights to family members.
A native of New York City, Suzanne Kaaren was invited to appear in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies when she was only 15, but her parents refused to permit it, according to an online biography.
She appeared in the Three Stooges' movie ''Disorder in the Court" and was the heroine in the Bela Lugosi low-budget movie ''The Devil Bat." More recently, she appeared in an uncredited role in ''The Cotton Club."
