Perry, a recipient of a Grammys Trustee Award in 2015, died at a Los Angeles hospital after suffering cardiac arrest, friend Daphna Kastner said.

“He maximized his time here,” said Kastner, who called him a “father friend” and said he was godfather to her son. “He was generous, fun, sweet and made the world a better place. The world is a little less sweeter without him here. But it’s a little bit sweeter in heaven.”

Perry was a onetime drummer, oboist and doo-wop singer who proved at home with a wide variety of musical styles, the rare producer to have No. 1 hits on the pop, R&B, dance and country charts. He was on hand for Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” and The Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited,” Tiny Tim’s novelty smash “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and the Willie Nelson-Julio Iglesias lounge standard “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” Perry was widely known as a “musician’s producer,” treating artists like peers rather than vehicles for his own tastes. Singers turned to him whether trying to update their sound (Barbra Streisand), set back the clock (Stewart), revive their career (Fats Domino) or fulfill early promise (Leo Sayer).

“Richard had a knack for matching the right song to the right artist,” Streisand wrote in her 2023 memoir, “My Name is Barbra.”

Perry’s life was a story, in part, of famous friends and the right places. He was backstage for 1950s performances by Little Richard and Chuck Berry, sat in the third row at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival during Otis Redding’s memorable set and attended a recording session for the Rolling Stones’ classic “Let It Bleed” album. A given week might find him dining one night with Paul and Linda McCartney, and Mick and Bianca Jagger the next. He dated Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda among others and was briefly married to the actor Rebecca Broussard.

In Stewart’s autobiography, “Rod,” he would remember Perry’s home in West Hollywood as “the scene of much late-night skulduggery through the 1970s and beyond, and a place you knew you could always fall into at the end of an evening for a full-blown knees-up with drink and music and dancing.”

In the ’70s, Perry helped facilitate a near-Beatles reunion.

He had produced a track on Starr’s first solo album, “Sentimental Journey,” and grown closer to him through Nilsson and other mutual friends. “Ringo,” released in 1973, would prove the drummer was a commercial force in his own right — with some well-placed names stopping by. The album, featuring contributions from Nilsson, Billy Preston, Steve Cropper, Martha Reeves and all five members of The Band, reached No. 2 on Billboard and sold more than 1 million copies. Hit singles included the chart toppers “Photograph,” co-written by Starr and George Harrison, and a remake of the 1950s favorite “You’re Sixteen.”

But for Perry and others, the most memorable track was a non-hit, custom made. John Lennon’s “I’m the Greatest” was a mock-anthem for the self-effacing drummer that brought three Beatles into the studio just three years after the band’s breakup. Starr was on drums and sang lead, Lennon was on keyboards and backing vocals and longtime Beatles friend Klaus Voormann played bass. They were still working on the song when Harrison’s assistant phoned, asking if the guitarist could join them. Harrison arrived soon after.

“As I looked around the room, I realized that I was at the very epicenter of the spiritual and musical quest I had dreamed of for so many years,” Perry wrote in his 2021 memoir, “Cloud Nine.” “By the end of each session, a small group of friends had gathered, standing silently along the back wall, just thrilled to be there.”

McCartney was not in town for “I’m the Greatest,” but he did help write and arrange the ballad “Six O’Clock,” featuring the ex-Beatle and Linda McCartney on backing vocals.

Perry had helped make pop history the year before as producer of “You’re So Vain,” which he would call the nearest he came to a perfect record. Simon’s scathing ballad about an unnamed lover, with Voormann’s bass runs kicking off the song and Jagger joining on the chorus, hit No. 1 in 1972 and began a long-term debate over Simon’s intended target. Perry’s answer would echo Simon’s own belated response.

“I’ll take this opportunity to give my insider’s scoop,” he wrote in his memoir. “The person that the song is based on is really a composite of several men that Carly dated in the ’60s and early ’70s, but primarily, it’s about my good friend, Warren Beatty.”

Perry’s post-1970s work included such hit singles as The Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” and DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night,” along with albums by Simon, Ray Charles and Art Garfunkel. He had his greatest success with Stewart’s million-selling “The Great American Songbook” albums, a project made possible by the rock star’s writer’s block and troubled private life. In the early 2000s, Stewart’s marriage to Rachel Hunter had ended and Perry was among those consoling him. With Stewart struggling to come up with original songs, he and Perry agreed that an album of standards might work, including “The Very Thought of You,” “Angel Eyes” and “Where or When.”

“We were at a back table in our favorite restaurant as we exchanged ideas and wrote them down on a napkin,” Perry wrote in his memoir. Stewart softly sang the options. “As I sat there and listened to him sing, it was clear that we both sensed we were on to something,” Perry added.

Perry was a New York City native born into a musical family; his parents, Mark and Sylvia Perry, co-founded Peripole Music, a pioneering manufacturer of instruments for young people. With his family’s help and encouragement, he learned to play drums and oboe and helped form a doo-wop group, the Escorts, that released a handful of singles. A music and theater major at the University of Michigan, he initially dreamed of acting on Broadway. Instead, he made the “life-changing” decision in the mid-1960s to form a production company with a recent acquaintance, Gary Katz, who would go on to work with Steely Dan among others.

By the end of the decade, Perry was an industry star, working on Captain Beefheart’s acclaimed cult album, “Safe As Milk” and the debut recording of Tiny Tim and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Ella,” featuring the jazz great’s interpretations of songs by the Beatles, Smokey Robinson and Randy Newman. In the early 1970s, he would oversee Streisand’s million-selling “Stoney End” album, on which the singer turned from the show tunes that made her famous and covered a range of pop and rock music, from the title track, a Laura Nyro composition, to Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.”

“I liked Richard from the moment we met. He was tall and lanky, with a mop of dark, curly hair and a big smile, which his big heart,” Streisand wrote in her memoir. “At our first meeting, he arrived laden with songs, and we listened to them together. Whatever hesitation I may have felt about our collaboration soon vanished and I thought, ‘This could be fun, and musically liberating.’ ”

AP Music Writer Maria Sherman and AP Entertainment Writer Jonathan Landrum Jr. contributed.

Jones, who spent more than 50 years at Alfred A. Knopf before retiring in 2011, died early Wednesday at her summer home in Walden, Vt. Her stepdaughter, Bronwyn Dunne, said she died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

Few better embodied and lived out the ideal of a life in New York publishing than the slender, refined Jones, whom Tyler once praised, both a person and as an editor, as “very delicate and graceful, almost weightless.” Jones worked at one of the leading publishing houses with some of the world’s most beloved authors. She thrived even as Knopf evolved from a family-run business to part of the international conglomerate Bertelsmann AG.

Moviegoers would learn about her in “Julie & Julia,” the 2009 film starring Meryl Streep as Child and featuring Erin Dilly as Jones. In the early ’60s, she signed up the then-unknown Child and “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” a landmark release that caught on again decades later thanks to “Julie & Julia.” Tyler, however, thought the movie “stupid” because of a scene in which Jones backs out of a dinner at an author’s home because it’s raining.

“Judith Jones would go through a blizzard,” Tyler told the Associated Press in 2012. “She’s the most indomitable person.”

Jones was herself an author and gourmet. She collaborated on several cookbooks with her husband, Evan Jones, contributed to numerous food magazines and wrote the memoir “The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food,” published in 2007. In 2006, she received the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, a fitting prize for Jones, who published Beard and was a close friend.

The daughter of an attorney, Jones was born Judith Bailey in 1924 and grew up in Manhattan. She majored in English at Bennington College, worked as an editorial assistant at Doubleday while still in school, and in her early 20s was a reader for Doubleday in Paris. Among her early achievements was finding a masterpiece amid the rejects: “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

“One day my boss said, ‘Oh, will you get rid of these books and write some letters. He went off to have some lunch with some French publishers,” she explained in a 2001 interview with The Associated Press.

“I curled up with one or two books. I was just curious. I think it was the face on the cover. I looked at that face and I started reading that book and I didn’t stop all afternoon. I was in tears when my boss came back. I said, ‘This book is going to New York and has got to be published.’ And he said, ‘What? That book by that kid?!'”

Jones joined Knopf in 1957 as a reader of French translations. The company, run by founders Alfred and Blanche Knopf, was eccentric, old-fashioned, where women were warned against attending meetings because strong language might be used. She soon became an editor; her early clients including John Hersey, Elizabeth Bowen and a promising young author named John Updike. His first book with Knopf was “Rabbit, Run.”

“Alfred got on the telephone with John and said, ‘You’d better come right away.’ He said to me, ‘I don’t think you should attend the meeting; the language may be a little raw.’ Of course, I had seen the language,” Jones said. “We did an expurgated edition and every subsequent printing put a little bit back and now it’s all there.”

Jones was among the first to realize that World War II soldiers returning from Europe might be ready for more sophisticated cuisine. Jones herself was admittedly spoiled by the food in Paris. In the 1950s, she found the bread in New York so tasteless she baked her own at home.

Jones’ most famous discovery was Child, a middle-aged American chef in the early ’60s who, like Jones, had returned to the states after living for years in Paris. She and co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle were seeking a publisher for a cookbook (later titled by Jones “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”) that had been rejected by Houghton Mifflin. As recounted in her memoir, Jones was soon convinced that “this was the book I been looking for” and thought Child’s recipe for “boeuf bourguignon” worthy of the best dishes in Paris.

“I myself learned to cook from ‘Mastering,'” she later wrote. “I wanted my food to have the French touch, to taste ‘soignee,’ not just indifferently cooked. But there was no book that really taught me how, that is, not until ‘Mastering’ came along.”

Jones became the country’s gateway to international and national cuisine. Jones edited Marcella Hazan’s “The Classic Italian Cookbook,” which did the same for Italian food as Child’s book did for French. Other chefs Jones worked with included pioneers in California cuisine (Alice Waters), Middle Eastern food (Claudia Roden) and cooking from the American South (Edna Lewis).

Jones’ husband died in 1996. They had two children and two stepchildren. In recent years, she kept a blog, judithjonescooks.com, and wrote the book “The Pleasures of Cooking for One.”

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

RELATED STORIES:

Notable deaths in 2017

Sam Shepard, Pulitzer-winning playwright and actor, dies at 73

Actor John Heard, known for ‘Home Alone’ movies, dies at 71

Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint announced Monday that “after careful consideration” they had pulled the book, which had been high on Amazon.com’s best-seller lists and was the subject of intense controversy.

The announcement came hours after the Breitbart editor was disinvited to this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference because of past comments about relationships between boys and men. He has said remarks he made that could be construed as favoring men and boys having sex were edited wrongly.

“Dangerous” was originally scheduled to come out in March. But Yiannopoulos had pushed back the release to June so he could write about the uprisings during his recent campus tour. At the time of his publisher’s announcement, it ranked No. 83 on Amazon’s overall list and No. 1 in the subcategory of Censorship & Politics.

More than 100 Simon & Schuster authors had objected to his book deal, which was announced last December, and Roxane Gay withdrew a planned book.

Some bookstores had said they would not sell his book, although the National Coalition Against Censorship and other free speech organizations had defended the publisher.

Threshold is a conservative imprint that has published books by Republican President Donald Trump and Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney among others.

Penguin Press is calling the book “Grant” and plans to release it Oct. 17, the publisher told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Chernow’s previous book, “Washington: A Life,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. His 2004 work on Alexander Hamilton was the basis for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning Broadway smash, for which Chernow served as historical consultant.

Chernow’s new book will likely be the most high-profile effort yet to change the reputation of the country’s 18th president. As Penguin noted in its press release, Grant has been “caricatured as a chronic loser and inept businessman,” a drunk whose Civil War heroism was overshadowed by his legacy as a “credulous and hapless president whose tenure came to symbolize the worst excesses of the Gilded Age.”

MOST READ ENTERTAINMENT NEWS THIS HOUR

Grant’s competence is even challenged on the White House web site, www.whitehouse.gov. His biographical essay, which has been on the site for years, contends that “When he was elected, the American people hoped for an end to turmoil. Grant provided neither vigor nor reform.”

But writers ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates to the historian Jean Edward Smith have argued that Grant is an underrated and even heroic president. Their defense of him extends from the same issue that led early critics, many sympathetic to former confederates, to denounce him: His determination to enforce equal rights for blacks in the South after the Civil War. According to Penguin, Chernow will address Grant’s drinking and other flaws, but within a “grand synthesis of painstaking research and literary brilliance that makes sense of all sides of Grant’s life, explaining how this simple Midwesterner could at once be so ordinary and so extraordinary.”

Chernow’s other books include “Titan,” a biography of John D. Rockefeller; and “The House of Morgan,” winner of the National Book Award in 1990. The 67-year-old author received a National Humanities Medal in 2015, when he was praised for combining “skillful storytelling with a taste for great themes and detailed psychological portraits.”

RELATED STORIES:

‘Hamilton’ review update: Wayne Brady and the ghost of Obama

Lessons from ‘Hamilton’ on how to get political

Review: ‘Hamilton’ makes the most of its Chicago shot

Jeremy McCarter’s best-seller more than stands beside ‘Hamilton’

Counting down the best of Chicago theater in 2016

Why the NY cast of ‘Hamilton’ was right. And the Chicago disrupter wrong.

NEW YORK (AP) — “To Kill a Mockingbird” will not be Harper Lee’s only published book after all.

Publisher Harper announced Tuesday that “Go Set a Watchman,” a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the 1950s and put aside, will be released July 14. Rediscovered last fall, “Go Set a Watchman” is essentially a sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” although it was finished earlier. The 304-page book will be Lee’s second, and the first new work in more than 50 years.

The publisher plans a first printing of 2 million copies.

“In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called ‘Go Set a Watchman,'” the 88-year-old Lee said in a statement issued by Harper. “It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel (what became ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’) from the point of view of the young Scout.

“I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn’t realized it (the original book) had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.”

Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal was negotiated between Carter and the head of Harper’s parent company, Michael Morrison of HarperCollins Publishers. “Watchman” will be published in the United Kingdom by William Heinemann, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

According to publisher Harper, Carter came upon the manuscript at a “secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.'” The new book is set in Lee’s famed Maycomb, Alabama, during the mid-1950s, 20 years after “To Kill a Mockingbird” and roughly contemporaneous with the time that Lee was writing the story. The civil rights movement was taking hold by the time she was working on “Watchman.” The Supreme Court had ruled unanimously in 1953 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 led to the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott.

“Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus,” the publisher’s announcement reads. “She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.”

Lee herself is a Monroeville, Alabama native who lived in New York in the 1950s. She now lives in her hometown. According to the publisher, the book will be released as she first wrote it, with no revisions.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is among the most beloved novels in history, with worldwide sales topping 40 million copies. It was released on July 11, 1960, won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a 1962 movie of the same name, starring Gregory Peck in an Oscar-winning performance as the courageous attorney Atticus Finch. Although occasionally banned over the years because of its language and racial themes, the novel has become a standard for reading clubs and middle schools and high schools. The absence of a second book from Lee only seemed to enhance the appeal of “Mockingbird.”

Lee’s publisher said the author is unlike to do any publicity for the book. She has rarely spoken to the media since the 1960s, when she told one reporter that she wanted to “to leave some record of small-town, middle-class Southern life.” Until now, “To Kill a Mockingbird” had been the sole fulfillment of that goal.

“This is a remarkable literary event,” Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham said in a statement. “The existence of ‘Go Set a Watchman’ was unknown until recently, and its discovery is an extraordinary gift to the many readers and fans of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Reading in many ways like a sequel to Harper Lee’s classic novel, it is a compelling and ultimately moving narrative about a father and a daughter’s relationship, and the life of a small Alabama town living through the racial tensions of the 1950s.”

The new book also will be available in an electronic edition. Lee has openly started her preference for paper, but surprised fans last year by agreeing to allow “Mockingbird” to be released as an e-book.