Lee Radziwill found Aristotle Onassis first. In 1963 she brought her sister aboard his yacht, and when the cruise ended, Jackie painted him a thank-you card: two sisters standing on a Greek shore, waving goodbye. Au revoir, Ari, merci. But Lee was not saying goodbye. That October, a Washington column reported she was ready to … Read more

On the evening of October 18, 1968, Maria Callas walked into Maxim’s in Paris wearing a bright printed gown and diamonds, and she smiled for the photographers. Two nights before the wedding, she had prepared her line the way a soprano prepares a phrase, so that grief might sound like wit. There was a premiere … Read more

The dive team’s sonar had just painted a picture on the screen that made Jacob Grubbs call it in without hesitation. It was a small car, upside down, sitting in the water right off Pleasant View Road. He had gone over it six times, and every pass gave the same reading. He was confident enough … Read more

Kay Kendall lay propped against the pillows in her private room at the London Clinic, her auburn hair spread across the pillowcase, her cheekbones casting their familiar shadows in the spring light of 1959. She was thirty-two years old, still breathtakingly beautiful, and she was laughing. That laugh. Everyone who ever shared a room with … Read more

The call came in the spring of 2017, and the detective recognized the name immediately. Timothy Bass had been on their radar for four years, ever since two local mothers had walked into the police station with a suspicion that had been festering since high school. But now the manager of the Franz Bakery distribution … Read more

Rough, but fast. That was the forecast most often repeated by Major General William Rupertus in the summer of 1944 as his First Marine Division prepared at a rest camp on Pavuvu, a coconut plantation in the Russell Islands. The camp had no mess halls at first, and the tents leaked. For years, the palms … Read more

In the summer of 1963, a Scottish judge spent four hours reading aloud a verdict that called a duchess a highly sexed woman who indulged in sexual activities to gratify a basic appetite. The courtroom was packed with reporters, and the evidence against her included photographs stolen from her own private drawer. Thirty-three years earlier, … Read more

Before she became a Vanderbilt and ruled the Gilded Age, she was simply Alva Smith. Born in Mobile, Alabama, on January 17, 1853, she entered a world thick with jasmine and judgment, a Southern family on the edge of ruin. Her mother Phoebe had been cast out of society, and the family fortune was dissolving. … Read more

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev launched his anti-alcohol campaign and ordered the destruction of vineyards across the entire Soviet Union. Vineyards that had survived for more than a century were torn up and bulldozed into the earth. Vodka production fell to a third of its previous level. Over the next three years, the Soviet budget lost … Read more