Given Ted Hartley’s full life — Navy pilot, actor, investment banker, writer, producer, movie studio head, and, with his late wife, Dina Merrill, philanthropist — the fact that he achieved success as an artist in his 90s, when he could have spent his days on the deck of his oceanfront house in East Hampton watching the waves roll in, is testimony to his lifelong passion for reinvention.
Mr. Hartley, who died at the age of 100 in New York City on Oct. 10, was born on Nov. 6, 1924, in Omaha, Neb., to Eugene Hartley, who was the president of Northwestern Bell Telephone Company, and the former Dorothy Ringwalt.
When he was 14, he won an essay contest sponsored by Warner Brothers. His composition, “Why I Would Like to Fly,” earned him flying lessons. He attended Shattuck Military Academy in Minnesota, and by the age of 16 had won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy. While at Annapolis, he was a U.S. Olympic finalist in wrestling.
After flight training, he served as a carrier-based fighter pilot, flying F-11 Tigers after their introduction in 1956. “I found flight training fulfilling in many ways,” he told The Star in 2019. “It was as close as one could come in the military to being in the zone. And then, in 1964, in spite of all my possible self-aggrandizing dreams of doing something great and getting medals, I fell getting out of a fighter plane and broke my back on the deck. What an ignominious way to go! It’s not the way I planned it.”
In addition to his time as a fighter pilot, while in the Navy he served two years as a White House aide under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. After his discharge he attended Harvard Business School and embarked on a career in investment banking, becoming executive vice president of First Western Financial Corporation.
A chance encounter in Los Angeles led him to acting, where he took on the role of the Rev. Jerry Bedford in the 1960s television series “Peyton Place.” He went on to featured roles in films with Cary Grant, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, and Dean Martin, and in the late 1970s was cast in the ABC series “Chopper One,” about helicopter-flying police officers.
“I was self-conscious as an actor, but fortunately I was given parts where self-consciousness was part of the role, and I got away with it,” he told The Star. “I wanted to be a member at the Actors Studio, and I just didn’t quite get there. Even though Lee Strasberg said wonderful things about me occasionally, I always had that feeling that he wanted me to be a little more authentic.”
Nonetheless, his film credits included “Barefoot in the Park,” “High Plains Drifter,” “Ice Station Zebra,” “Caddyshack II,” and, as recently as 2012, “A Late Quartet,” a drama that starred Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, and Christopher Walken.
Mr. Hartley’s predilection for storytelling led him to producing and directing. In 1987 he became involved with Pavilion Communications, a company that acquired smaller entertainment companies. Through that connection he learned of an opportunity to take over RKO Pictures, and, with Ms. Merrill, he purchased a major stake in that company, serving as C.E.O. and later chairman emeritus.
As a producer, his theater productions included “Top Hat,” which won the Olivier Award for best new musical, “Gypsy,” “Never Gonna Dance,” “13,” and “Curtains,” and his films included “Mighty Joe Young,” “The Gin Game,” “Shade,” and “Ritual.”
A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he also served on the boards of Orbis International, an international nonprofit devoted to providing access to eye care, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., the Steadman Philippon Research Institute, a nonprofit recognized for its research into osteoarthritis, healing, surgery, and injury prevention, and the Village Preservation Society in East Hampton.
In addition, he was the longest tenured member of the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C., and a member of the New York Yacht Club, River Club, Chevy Chase Club, and Bel-Air Country Club.
He and Dina Merrill were married in 1989 and stayed together until her death in 2017. Around 2009, when she first became ill, he started holding art classes for their friends at their house in East Hampton. The classes were an opportunity to see her friends without having to entertain.
“It was a wonderful thing for her,” Mr. Hartley said. “We would get together once and sometimes twice a week.” Their relationships with friends who joined the classes reached “a depth that we would never have reached just in casual conversation or over a martini.”
While the classes were engaging, at first Mr. Hartley did not care much for contemporary or even some modern art. But a year after his wife’s death, he discovered that the idea of finding his visual “voice” was a new way of looking at making art.
“It wasn’t creating something to see if it matched up to something else,” he told The Star. “It was, ‘What story do I want to tell?’ I think of myself as a storyteller. Suddenly, like a rose in bud, stuff began to happen, and I have never looked back.”
The stuff that happened included several exhibitions at Keyes Art in Sag Harbor. His 2019 show included more than 20 abstract works on paper, executed in ink, pastel, charcoal, colored pencil, watercolor, acrylic, and oil. In an essay for the exhibition catalog, George Negroponte, an artist and curator, placed Mr. Hartley in the tradition of such painters as William Merritt Chase, Fairfield Porter, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning.
“Ted Hartley has that uncanny ability to make art that is drenched in living atmosphere, color, and light,” Mr. Negroponte wrote. “His images palpitate like whipped-up airborne particles of energy that create an infinite and indeterminate mist. . . . Hartley believes the sea and sky can be captured in a bottle. . . .”
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This article has been modified from its original and print versions because Ted Hartley was a member of the Village Preservation Society, not the Ladies Village Improvement Society.
