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.