Culture
Marie Winn, Who Wrote of a Famous Central Park Hawk, Dies at 88
Marie Winn, the author who chronicled the avian sensation Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk that took up residence on the overhang of an Upper East Side apartment building only to be evicted in 2004, sparking protests by birders who had been thrilled to watch him woo lovers with disemboweled rats, died on Dec. 25 in Manhattan. She was 88.
Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her son Michael Miller.
After publishing several books in the 1970s and ’80s about the changing nature of childhood, Ms. Winn began writing a column on mother nature for The Wall Street Journal in 1989, a career turn that eventually put her at the center of an only-in-New-York-City melodrama.
It began in Central Park, where Ms. Winn started bird watching in 1991, the year an unusual-looking red-tailed hawk arrived from places unknown.
Instead of the dark brown features that typically mark red-tail hawks, this one had light-colored plumage. Ms. Winn named the curious fellow Pale Male. She and other bird watchers of Central Park — “the Regulars,” as Ms. Winn called them — followed him everywhere.
“Shortly after his arrival in Central Park,” she wrote in her book “Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park” (1998), “Pale Male had discovered a hunting ground that was to become his favorite: an area near the park entrance at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street — the killing corner, as the Regulars dubbed it.”
Every day, a man fed a flock of pigeons there. Pale Male watched from a chimney.
“Peering down intently, Pale Male would search out one that was imperceptibly slower, clumsier, stupider,” Ms. Winn wrote. “Then he would plummet down in that breathtaking dive falconers call a stoop. Bingo.”
Pale Male liked the neighborhood so much that he decided to settle at 927 Fifth Avenue, a 12-story luxury apartment building near the corner of East 74th Street. The building, which has a view of Central Park, was also home to the actress Mary Tyler Moore. Pale Male did most of his mating on the 12th-floor cornice. He also occasionally vacationed at a building nearby, on Woody Allen’s penthouse terrace.
Ms. Winn and “the Regulars” were consumed by Pale Male’s romantic life, naming his succession of girlfriends First Love, Chocolate and Blue. The birders sat on a bench outside the park with binoculars waiting for action, shouting, “They’re doing it!” when they were doing it.
There was heartbreak, too. First Love “ate a poisoned pigeon and died on a ledge of the Metropolitan Museum,” Ms. Winn wrote in The Wall Street Journal. Chocolate, she added, died in “a collision on the New Jersey Turnpike.”
But perhaps the most lamentable event in Pale Male’s life occurred in December 2004, when the co-op board at 927 Fifth Avenue, fed up with rat carcasses and bird droppings falling to the building’s front sidewalk, voted to remove Pale Male’s nest, upending his courtship of his new consort, Lola.
Protests outside the building attracted national media attention.
“I’m restraining myself, Margot, from being obscene,” Ms. Winn said on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” addressing the interviewer, Margot Adler. “I’m so angry about this.”
So was Mary Tyler Moore.
“These birds just kept coming back to the edge of the building, and people kept coming back to see them,” she told The New York Times, adding, “This was something we like to talk about: a kinder, gentler world, and now it’s gone.”
New York City residents expressed their dismay via the 2004 version of Twitter — letters to the editor.
The hawks were “all about location, location, location: what a view they had of the park, and what a view we had of them,” Matthew Wills of Brooklyn wrote to The Times. “Like those who destroy a landmark in the middle of the night, those responsible for destroying the nest at 927 Fifth Avenue have shown their contempt for the city they call home.”
A week later, in response to pressure from the National Audubon Society, the co-op board reversed its decision. On the morning of Dec. 28, workers removed an apparatus on the landing that had prevented the hawks from alighting.
“In no time at all Pale Male and Lola landed on the nest site,” Ms. Winn wrote. “Later that afternoon Lola was seen bringing a new twig to the nest.”
Marie Wienerova was born on Oct. 21, 1936, in Prague. Her father, Josef Wiener, was a doctor. Her mother, Hanna Taussigova, was a lawyer and later a broadcaster. After emigrating to New York City in 1939, her parents changed their names to Joseph and Joan Winn.
Marie Winn attended Radcliffe College and graduated from the University of Columbia School of General Studies in 1959. She became a freelance journalist, contributing articles to The Times and other publications.
She married Allan Miller, a filmmaker, in 1961.
As they started a family, Ms. Winn began publishing books for young readers, including “The Fireside Book of Children’s Songs” (1966), for which her husband wrote the musical arrangements; “The Man Who Made Fine Tops: A Story About Why People Do Different Kinds of Work” (1970); and “The Sick Book: Questions and Answers About Hiccups and Mumps, Sneezes and Bumps, and Other Things That Go Wrong with Us” (1976).
In 1977, Ms. Winn wrote “The Plug-in Drug: Television, Children and the Family,” a social critique about TV’s role in the home. The book was widely praised. Writing in The Times Book Review, the television critic Stephanie Harrington called it a “multiple warhead launched against the great American pacifier.”
Ms. Winn followed with “Children Without Childhood: Growing Up Too Fast in the World of Sex and Drugs” (1983) and “Unplugging the Plug-in Drug” (1987), a sequel to her earlier book.
She also translated works by Czech writers, including Vaclav Havel, the playwright and last president of Czechoslovakia.
Along with her son Michael, Ms. Winn is survived by her husband; another son, Steven; and four grandchildren. Her sister, The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, died in 2021.
A red-tailed hawk believed to be Pale Male was found sick not far from 927 Fifth Avenue in 2023 and died a short time later.
Ms. Winn returned to nature writing in 2008 with “Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife,” writing delightfully, reviewers said, about moths, cicadas and screech owls. She also reflected on how Pale Male had became, in her opinion, “the first avian superstar.”
“Pale Male — the very name was a crucial ingredient in creating this hawk’s celebrity. It fell trippingly from the tongue,” she wrote. “People liked to say it — Pale Male.”
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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