Leonard Goldberg, 95

Leonard M. Goldberg of Amagansett, an illustrator who painted one of the iconic Camel billboards in Times Square and produced a series of print and television ads for Marlboro during a 40-year career, died at home on Dec. 6. He was 95 and had become frail.

Mr. Goldberg was an illustrator for agencies in Boston, Montreal, and then New York City, where he worked for the Fredman Chite agency before working freelance in the early 1960s. He designed movie posters and the covers of the Fu Manchu books, Harlequin Books novels, and novels by Barbara Cartland. He also designed Rheingold beer posters and print ads for Rheingold and the packaging and ads for Brawny paper towels. 

Leonard Max Goldberg was born on Aug. 21, 1922, in Chelsea, Mass., one of two sons of the former Sarah Karetski and Charles Goldberg, Russian immigrants. One of his grandfathers had designed book covers in Russia. 

Mr. Goldberg grew up in Boston, where he graduated from the Boston Latin School and studied design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He served stateside in the Army during World War II.

He met his second wife, Maureen Harris, who survives, on a blind date, and they married in July 1962, coming to Amagansett on weekends at first from Manhattan. Eventually, they bought land in Devon Woods in Amagansett and built a house in 1970, later moving to Montauk Highway.

Mrs. Goldberg said he would go to the drawing board at 9 a.m. and not stop working until 5 p.m. He had a studio on the second floor of their house and would go to the city to photograph models. He once had only 16 hours to design a poster for Bruce Beresford’s 1980 movie “Breaker Morant,” about a British-Australian soldier who was executed in 1902 for murdering Boer soldiers. He and Ms. Goldberg began arranging their living room for a photo shoot at 5 p.m. and he delivered the artwork by 9 a.m. the next morning.

Outside of his work, Mr. Goldberg was a voracious reader, Mrs. Goldberg said, who “could converse on everything, went to every museum, had season tickets to the Philharmonic for more than 40 years, loved The New Yorker, and did the New York Times crossword in pen every day.” He had also played the piano as a young man. “He was the nicest, loveliest gentleman on the face of this earth,” she said.

Even though his parents had moved to this country from Russia and Mrs. Goldberg’s had moved from Russia to England, they were so similar it was as if they had grown up in the same place, she said. 

In addition to his wife, three children from a previous marriage survive. A brother, Morton Goldberg of Boston, died before him. 

Rabbi Barbara Sheryl presided on Dec. 10 at a graveside service at the Independent Jewish Cemetery in Sag Harbor. Memorial donations have been suggested for the Kosher Meals for the Homebound program at Dorot, 171 West 85th Street, New York 10024.