Richard Lamparski, who "turned his obsession with forgotten stars into the Whatever Became Of ...? series, 11 volumes of pop-culture nostalgia, movie trivia and, let's be honest, schadenfreude," died November 8, the New York Times reported. He was 93.
Published from 1967 to 1989, each edition of the series included about 100 "profiles of once-upon-a-time celebrities, mainly from film but also from sports, politics and other arts, accompanied by then-and-now photographs that revealed the sometimes cruel toll of time," the Times wrote, adding that as 1960s America "hurtled into the future at warp speed and in Technicolor," the black-and-white books "offered a backward glance."
"I'm a voyeur, an onlooker," Lamparski told the blog BoyCulture in a 2012 interview. He had an encyclopedic memory for Hollywood trivia, and in the pre-Internet era, he was a resourceful investigator of obscure people, relying on word of mouth, street sightings, and paging through the phone book. "I got to meet people I would not have dreamed I could ever meet," he said in a 2010 interview with the blog the Showbiz Wizard.
Although Lamparski conceived of Whatever Became Of ...?" during the 1950s, his idea was not initially welcomed, with one publisher asking why anyone would care what had become of these people. His first outlet was WBAI-FM in New York, which began broadcasting Whatever Happened To ...? as a radio series in 1965. Subsequently, Crown Publishers offered him a contract, but there was not a lot of enthusiasm until he was interviewed on the Today show by Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs. "It just took off from there," he later recalled.
The 11th and final edition of Whatever Became Of ...? was published in 1989 but, Lamparski said, "Interest evaporated overnight."
"By then, readers had either moved on or were sating their appetites for then-and-now celebrity news in the pages of magazines like People and Us Weekly," the Times noted, adding that Lamparski ultimately withdrew from most professional and social engagements.