Sam Zolotow; New York Times Theater Reporter, Columnist

Sam Zolotow, 94, for decades the colorful, nationally known New York Times theater reporter and inquiring columnist. “Give him a corned beef sandwich, a cigar and a telephone and he’d ferret out a producer’s most closely held secret, even if it took him all day and all night,” said Arthur Gelb, president of the New York Times Co. Foundation and a former theater critic who worked with Zolotow. “Sam was a Runyonesque character who terrorized Broadway for some three decades with his ferocious pursuit of inside theater news,” Gelb said. “His column was the show business bible in an era when show business gossip was a New York passion.” Hired by the New York Times as an office boy in 1919, he quickly became a legman and a Broadway insider profiled in the New Yorker. Zolotow, however, didn’t earn a byline until the 1930s. Over the years, his colleagues included Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Brooks Atkinson, Clive Barnes and Walter Kerr. In Los Angeles on Thursday.