In November 2013, the new American ambassador rode toward the Emperor of Japan in a horse-drawn carriage through the streets of Tokyo. Thousands lined the route. Cameras followed her all the way to the palace. Her husband, the man who had been at her side for twenty-seven years, was not with her. He had not … Read more

At dawn on the 12th of February, 1929, a woman died in a cliff-top villa in Monaco. Her only companions were a paid nurse and two poodles barking in the next room. Her daughter refused to come. Her husband lived in a separate city. Yet when the news reached London, the newspapers gave her the … Read more

Inside Idle Hour, the vast Vanderbilt estate on Long Island, the marble and stone said nothing about the family crumbling behind it. The fortune that had built the place could raise nearly anything—palaces, yachts, an empire of rails—but it could not hold a marriage together, could not protect a daughter from a fate she did … Read more

Six days after Dallas, in a rainstorm at Hyannis Port, the thirty-four-year-old widow kept a magazine’s presses waiting. She talked for four hours, then edited the writer’s draft by telephone, and refused to allow a single word to be cut. Camelot. America thought it had just lost the perfect young marriage. The FBI files, the … Read more

On the night of August 13th, 1951, two women in two cities were waiting on the same dying man. In a house on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, Marian Davies was given a sedative and fell asleep. He died at ten minutes to ten the next morning, and his sons had his body taken … Read more

In May of 1964, at seventy-seven, Marjorie Merriweather Post was divorced for the fourth time. The end had arrived on her desk in photographs of her husband with younger men beside the pool at Mar-a-Lago, her own house in Palm Beach, and then a demand for money. She took back the name her father had … Read more

In a federal courtroom in Bowling Green, Kentucky, a man in his sixties stood to face the charge that had haunted this community for three decades. Robert Scott Froberg pleaded guilty to kidnapping resulting in death—the abduction and murder of seven-year-old Morgan Violi, a little girl snatched from a parking lot on a hot summer … Read more

On the sixteenth of September 1924, in the great gray stone house at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, Arabella Huntington died. She was seventy-one by the count of the New York Times, one more number added to a lifetime of numbers that never agreed with one another. The house around her had … Read more

The horses were gone by sunrise. Not stolen, not spooked, just gone, released one by one sometime after midnight, their gates left swinging in the wind as if no one cared whether anyone noticed. The storehouse doors hung open too, the shelves bare, the dust not yet settled. In the fire pit behind the smokehouse, … Read more