Fritz Hawkes, Guide to Film Lore, Dies
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Fritz Hawkes, whose tours of the Paramount Pictures film lot were sprinkled with the still-vivid memories of the stars he first encountered there more than 50 years ago, has died.
The lieutenant of security for the studio’s Hollywood property was 80 and died Sunday at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank.
Hawkes--who counted Cecil B. DeMille, Mae West, Gloria Swanson, W.C. Fields and John Wayne among his friends--conducted VIP tours for Paramount in his later years. Among his guests were Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the late Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin.
He had met Adolph Zukor in 1933 while working as a security officer on Miss West’s film “I’m No Angel” and the two remained close friends until Zukor’s death in 1976.
In 1983, the studio honored him at a banquet and he recently was featured on a segment of KCBS-TV’s “2 On the Town.”
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