ORINDA, Calif. (AP) — Photographer Wayne F. Miller, who created a ground-breaking series of portraits chronicling the lives of black Americans in Chicago after serving with an elite Navy unit that produced some of the most indelible combat images of World War II, died Wednesday at his home of six decades in Orinda, Calif. He was 94.

Miller, who was also known for his work as a curator on an international photojournalism exhibition called “The Family of Man” and for contributing the photos to Dr. Benjamin Spock‘s “A Baby’s First Year,” had become ill only in the last weeks of his life, his granddaughter Inga Miller said.

Born in Chicago, Miller trained for a career in banking but became a photographer when famed fashion photographer Edward Steichen picked him to be part of the military unit assigned to document the war. While assigned to the Pacific theatre, he took some of the first pictures of the atomic bomb-devastated Hiroshima.

His best-known wartime photograph shows a wounded pilot being pulled from a downed fighter plane. Miller had been scheduled to be aboard the plane before it was shot down, and the photographer who took his place was killed, according to Inga Miller.

After returning home to Chicago, Miller spent two years in the late 1940s on the city’s south side capturing the experiences of black residents, many of whom had moved north during the war in search of jobs and the promise of civil rights. The originals from his “The Way of the Northern Negro” series are now held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.

“He was tired of what a good job photography was doing of showing the way we were destroying each other and he decided to come back and have the medium connect people in a more meaningful fashion,” Paul Berlanga, director of Chicago’s Stephen Daitler Gallery, said. “He wanted to bring the white and black races together, and thought to make a photo documentary to introduce black Chicago to white Chicago and to white America.”

While he mostly turned his lens on ordinary Americans, his subjects for the series included emerging stars such as Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Eartha Kitt.

During the early 1950s, Miller reunited with Steichen in putting together “The Family of Man,” a Museum of Modern Art exhibit featuring hundreds of portraits by photographers from all over the world. A book of the same name based on the exhibit sold more than four million copies. An iconic photograph of Miller’s that was part of the exhibit showed his son David being delivered as a baby by his grandfather. It was included in a phonographic time capsule Carl Sagan put together that was launched with the Voyager spacecraft in the late 1970s.

Miller also produced an intimate book of his photography called “The World is Young.”

He spent the next several decades as a photojournalist for Life, Ebony, the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. For six years, he was president of Magnum Photos, a photographer’s cooperative. Magnum’s current president, Alex Majoli, praised Miller as a pioneer who “paved the ground for the rest of us who tried to depict the streets, the real life.”

“It might have seemed like golden years for photographers now, but he had to invent himself in many ways, a character trait I highly appreciate in people,” Majoli said.

Miller stopped working as a professional photographer in the mid-1970s, but he found a new passion crusading for the preservation of California’s redwood forests. He and his wife, Joan, restored a clear-cut patch of forest and helped lobby for the passage of laws that provided incentives for landowners to protect rather than log trees. According to his family, the forest was Miller’s main photographic subject after his retirement.

CHICAGO (AP) — The attorney for an 87-year-old woman who accuses Donald Trump of cheating her in a skyscraper condo deal told jurors in Chicago on Wednesday that he was personally repulsed by the “Apprentice” star whom he said lied on the witness stand.

The comments came during a sarcasm-filled closing argument at the civil trial in federal court that pits Jacqueline Goldberg against the billionaire real estate mogul-turned TV showman. Jurors withdrew to deliberate later Wednesday.

His voice rising, attorney Shelly Kulwin portrayed the case in his closing as a battle between a powerful businessman and a woman who learned her values growing up during the Depression.

Trump, of New York, wasn’t in court for the closings. But Kulwin projected a photograph of the beaming developer on a large courtroom screen.

“The thought of my grandma being in the same room with that guy. Yuck!” said Kulwin. The judge told jurors to disregard the comment.

Later, he said Trump was motivated to cheat his client by a love for money.

“It’s like his family, those dollars,” Kulwin said.

City pride also intervened when Kulwin appeared to make an unfavorable reference to executives in New York.

“Judge, he’s mocking New York,” Trump attorney Stephen Novack said, standing to object.

“I can’t mock New York?” Kulwin shot back. “I thought it was every Chicagoan’s right to do that.”

Addressing jurors later Wednesday, defense attorney Stephen Novack accused Kulwin of resorting to personal attacks on Trump out of desperation and a lack of evidence.

Goldberg alleges Trump persuaded her to buy two condos at around $1 million apiece in Chicago’s glitzy Trump International Hotel & Tower by promising she would share in building profits. But, Goldberg says, Trump reneged after she committed to the investment.

“It’s called a bait and switch,” Kulwin told jurors. “Here’s the bait. Here’s the switch.”

But Trump’s attorney described Goldberg as a detail-oriented investor who knew the contract that she signed stipulated Trump could cancel the profit-sharing offer as he saw fit.

“She knows the drill,” he said. “Nobody put a gun to her head (to sign).”

He later added: “Mrs. Goldberg went into this deal with her eyes wide open.”

Since the contract gave Trump rights to change the profit-sharing offer, Novack said the onus was on Goldberg’s attorneys to prove Trump secretly plotted to defraud her before she even signed up to buy.

“What do they call it? A bait and switch,” he said. “Switch is not enough. … There is no evidence whatsoever of a secret plan.”

In two days of sometimes combative testimony last week, Trump denied cheating Goldberg. And he told reporters outside court that he was the victim, not her. He declared, “She’s trying to rip me off.”

On Wednesday, though, Kulwin said Trump took the stand “to lie, evade and spout infomercials.

He also mocked Trump for telling jurors he never took notes of business meetings and so couldn’t say for sure when certain decisions were made and by whom.

“People who don’t want to be found out don’t write things down. They’re not stupid,” he said. “And Donald Trump may be a lot of things, but he’s not stupid.”

Kulwin told jurors Goldberg was seeking a total of $6 million in damages.

“Send a message not just to Mr. Trump — but to tell others like him,” he said pounding his hand on a podium. “You can say to them, ‘These people who do these things have crossed the line.’”

But Trump’s attorney told jurors their obligation was to the evidence, not to their sense of sympathy or to any urge to send a message.

“This isn’t the chance for you to decide that Wall Street is bad … and (now) we’re going to show these fat cats,” Novack said. “Look at the facts.”

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Follow Michael Tarm at http://www.twitter.com/mtarm

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a favorite among liberals for her forceful advocacy for consumers and attacks against the financial industry, has a book deal.

Henry Holt and Company announced Wednesday that the Massachusetts Democrat has an agreement with the publisher. The book, currently untitled, is scheduled to be released in spring 2014.

Warren will write about her childhood and early professional life, but the book will mostly be a “rousing call” for the middle class. She will describe her work on creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and her opposition to “powerful interests” in Washington and on Wall Street.

Warren was well represented for her book. Negotiations were handled by Robert Barnett, the Washington attorney whose clients have ranged from President Barack Obama to former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner.

NEW YORK (AP) — The idea of Michael Douglas playing Liberace might seem nearly as outrageous as Liberace himself.

Liberace, forever hailed as “Mr. Showmanship,” was the excess-to-the-max pianist-personality whose onstage and offstage extravagance were legendary, and who wowed audiences in Las Vegas and worldwide to become the best-paid entertainer on the planet during his heyday from the 1950s to the 1970s.

He was the forerunner of flashy, gender-bender entertainers like Elton John, David Bowie, Madonna and Lady Gaga even as he kept a tight lid on his gay private life, which he feared could have ended his career had it come out. (His fans never seemed to get wise.)

By contrast, Michael Douglas is a 68-year-old movie star known for he-man performances and morally ambiguous roles. And he was no piano player.

But Douglas now dazzles as Liberace in the new HBO film, “Behind the Candelabra,” including lavish musical numbers where he tinkles the ivories and flourishes his jewel-and-ermine finery. The film (executive produced by show-biz veteran Jerry Weintraub, a Liberace friend) premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. EDT.

Douglas’ co-star is Matt Damon, who, in a casting choice almost as counterintuitive, plays Scott Thorson, a dreamy, strapping teen who in 1977 met Liberace in his Vegas dressing room and almost instantly became his personal assistant, live-in companion and top-secret lover.

“Candelabra” (whose title cites the trademark prop ornamenting his onstage piano) also features Dan Aykroyd, Scott Bakula, Paul Reiser, Debbie Reynolds and a hilarious turn by Rob Lowe as Liberace’s on-call plastic surgeon.

It was the film’s director, Steven Soderbergh, who brought together the two lead actors, helped shape their splendid performances and masterminded this portrait of a loving but bizarre and tempestuous affair.

This show-biz saga may be over-the-top, but there’s plenty of depth and it dives deep.

“We played the script and tried not to wink at the audience,” said Douglas. “It’s a great love story. I watch it and I forget about Matt and myself. Then, pretty soon, I practically forget it’s two guys: The conversations and arguments sound like any ol’ couple.”

Adds Damon in a separate interview: “The question for us was, How do we make this look like a marriage that we recognize? Most of our scenes we could relate to because we’re both in long-term marriages. It was a male-female story with two guys.”

Well, maybe. But that doesn’t override the risk factor for Douglas and Damon as they tackled roles dramatically at odds with their images and past work.

“I looked at Matt and thought, ‘Man, this guy’s brave,’” said Douglas. “It’s one thing for me at my age to stretch a little bit and try different characters. But ‘Bourne’! A man in the prime of his career going this route?! I was in awe of Matt’s courage.”

“He’s being nice,” laughed Damon, 42, when told what Douglas had said. “He would’ve done it in a second! He’d never turn down a great role.”

Why did Damon say yes to man-to-man pillow talk and sequined thongs?

“I’ve never said no to Steven,” he replied, noting he had worked with Soderbergh before in “The Informant!” and the “Ocean” trilogy. “It doesn’t get any more fun than working with Steven.”

Douglas, too, had been in Soderbergh films — including the 2000 thriller “Traffic,” during whose production the director first proposed Douglas playing Liberace.

Why did he agree?

“First of all, Lee was a nice guy,” Douglas began, calling Liberace by the given name he never used professionally. “He was a lovely, lovely guy. I don’t play many nice guys.”

Douglas nails Liberace’s velvety, nasal voice and almost-ever-present pearly smile.

“One of the things I enjoyed about this part was, I got to smile,” he said. “I don’t smile a lot in my pictures. I’m always so … grim.”

Still, in “Candelabra,” there isn’t always lots to smile about.

Thorson, a child of foster care, falls sway to Liberace’s charm and support, but it comes with a price. He is subjected to plastic surgery to mold him into a young Liberace (one of the remarkable makeup transformations Damon undergoes). He also becomes hooked on drugs in his mission to stay slim for Liberace, and, after a few years, his addiction and Liberace’s philandering bring a cruel end to the relationship, after which Thorson unsuccessfully sues for palimony.

Douglas, too, sports a variety of looks. Liberace is seen before and after his own plastic-surgery refresher, and, in a final scene, gravely sick from an AIDS-related illness from which he died in 1987 at age 67.

This death scene is particularly haunting for anyone who followed Douglas’ recent near-death experience. “Candelabra” is his comeback performance after a brutal six-month regimen of radiation and chemotherapy for stage 4 throat cancer in 2010.

When he stepped in front of the cameras after his own brush with mortality, he seems to have embraced Liberace as a positive life force and a fitting way to get back in the game.

“Yeah, I did,” he nodded. “I was enraptured by the joy that Lee had. He was a bit of sunshine to me.”

But Liberace also had a dark side. This, Douglas also captures despite a refusal to acknowledge it.

“It sort of happened,” he said. “It was there in the story.”

And while he allowed that “Candelabra” viewers might see Liberace as tormented and self-destructive, among sunnier traits, “I didn’t see him that way. I didn’t see a dark side to him.

“My career has been more in the gray area, if not the dark area,” Douglas went on (needing to point no further than rapacious money man Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film “Wall Street,” a character for which he won a best-actor Oscar, then revived it in the 2010 sequel, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”).

Playing Liberace “was so much fun!” he said. “You put on this mask and it allows you to do anything you want. I don’t get to do that very often. My movies are usually about stripping off the makeup, getting down to the skeleton.”

In “Candelabra,” Douglas certainly got to wear a lot of makeup, and subsequent projects should allow him to embody other colorful characters — such as President Ronald Reagan in the film he was about to start, “Reykjavik.”

“I’ve always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be,” Douglas said. “But during this two-year-plus hiatus, a bunch of good material came my way.”

As he spoke, he had already wrapped a comedy called “Last Vegas.” Ahead is a Rob Reiner film with Diane Keaton, and a couple after that.

“I’m at an age where I can try different things, do much different stuff than I thought I could do,” he summed up, looking pleased at a career (and himself) unexpectedly reborn. “I’m starting over. What I went through with Liberace has given me the confidence for this.”

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Online:

http://www.hbo.com

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EDITOR’S NOTE — Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier

NEW YORK (AP) — “Jenny from the Block” wants the block to buy Verizon phones from her.

Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez says she’s opening a chain of cellphone stores and a website under the Viva Mobil brand. The aim is to sell Verizon phones and services to Latinos.

The first store will open in New York on June 15. Lopez says the stores will have bilingual staff and provide a “culturally relevant shopping experience.”

Viva Mobil will be an authorized Verizon reseller, with the same prices and plans as regular Verizon stores.

Marketing cellphone service specifically to Latinos has not been a winning formula so far in the U.S. One company targeting Spanish speakers, Movida Communications, raised $40 million in 2007 and filed for bankruptcy the following year.