WILLIAM HICKS

HICKS--William Spencer. William "Bill" Hicks, 85, of Pittsboro, NC, passed away at home on December 16, his husband at his side. He had suffered from COPD and related heart disease. A longtime resident of New York City and Garrison, NY, Bill enrolled in Princeton in 1954 (class of 1958), receiving a full scholarship, and was active in the Triangle Club. After Princeton he was accepted at Stella Adler Studio in Manhattan and later joined Las Vegas and road productions of "Gypsy" ("I played the rear end of the cow," he loved to recount), "The Boy Friend", "Take Her, She's Mine". Realizing that he "would always play Laertes, never Hamlet," Bill moved to a front-of-house job at Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, where he headed the box office in Central Park. He then became the first development director of the Festival and of Papp's Public Theatre. During the theater company's heady days in the 1960s and 1970s, Bill developed the legendary fundraising parties that would help underwrite such hits as Hair, A Chorus Line and That Championship Season that drew young stars in the making, such as Glenn Close, Colleen Dewhurst, Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, Kevin Kline, Al Pacino, George C. Scott, Meryl Streep, and Sam Waterston. From the theater, Bill took his fundraising skills to local and statewide politics and to special projects such as one at Wall Street's Trinity Church. He conceived and spearheaded the first large gay fundraiser in New York for his friend Gerry Studds, the Massachusetts congressman, which opened eyes that the gay community could be a major source of funds for compatible candidates. He also raised money pro-bono for Lambda Legal Defense in its early days. In 1968 Bill met his lifelong partner and later husband, William "Bill" Sadler, a Wall Streeter, while on a trip to Puerto Rico. They were together 53 years and known by many simply as "The Bills." After buying a home in Garrison in 1995, the Bills helped start an endowment for supporting gymnastics at The US Military Academy at West Point that today totals millions. Hicks was also an active board member and president of the Putnam History Museum in Cold Spring. In 2016 the Bills moved to a cottage at Galloway Ridge, a retirement community outside Chapel Hill, NC. There Bill discovered a play-reading group with few attendees, but under his enthusiastic guidance it soon grew to a steady attendance of 30+ aspiring thespians. Bill Hicks will be remembered by his many friends for his droll wit and devilish humor, his mischievous smile and laughter at his own foibles, his ribald stories about himself, his love of books and travel that stimulated his innate creativity and curiosity, and his near encyclopedic memory of film and theater. He was known to regale listeners with his takes of encounters with notable women, including Queen Elizabeth, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor. Of Finnish descent on his mother's side, blond-haired Bill Hicks delighted friends with the singing of Finnish drinking songs. He relished being the Methodist boy who grew up in Hewlett, a heavily Jewish community of Long Island, and his election as president of a local synagogue's "Sons of Israel." In addition to his husband, Bill is survived by his brother, Richard (Miriam Solomon) of Tucson, nieces Karen Dennis and Janice Marsh, both of Phoenixville, PA, and Kristen Park of Simsbury, CT, and dear friend, David Rhodes of New York City and London, whom Bill regarded as almost a godson. Bill was predeceased by his parents, Spencer and Elsie Leidi Hicks. A memorial service will be held when Covid allows.