On December 13, 1951, Joan Bennett walked out of a Beverly Hills office with her agent, Jennings Lang, who was carrying her coat, into a light winter …
On the night of December 7th, 1990, a nurse entered a bedroom in Scarsdale, New York, and found an 80-year-old woman dead in her chair, a photograph of four young girls clutched against her chest. She was Joan Bennett, once one of the most photographed faces in Hollywood, the sister of a movie queen, the … Read more
In June 1984, 13-year-old Jodie Trexler walked toward her grandparents’ house in Salisbury, North Carolina, looking for her older sister. She stopped at the crepe myrtle tree, saw both cars gone,…
On a Friday afternoon in June of 1984, thirteen-year-old Jodie Trexler crossed the grass toward her grandparents’ house next door in Salisbury, North Carolina, looking for her older sister. She got as far as the crepe myrtle tree in the yard. From there she could see the driveway: both cars were gone. The front door … Read more
In 1897, as London crowds filled six miles of streets to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the 78-year-old monarch who had spent decades avoiding public view was determined to be seen….
The brooch was gone. Queen Victoria, now in her seventy-eighth year, had been climbing into her carriage when one of the footmen reported that he had seen Abdul Karim’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Ali, hovering about the scene. Somebody then told Mrs. Tuck, the Queen’s dresser, that Ali had taken the brooch and sold it to a … Read more
In 1656, Velázquez painted a five-year-old girl in a silver dress, and art historians have argued about the meaning of Las Meninas ever since. What they rarely mention is that the painting was a…
The girl in the silver dress is five years old, and she is looking straight at you. She has been looking straight at you for nearly four centuries, from the center of the most famous painting in Western art. Velázquez finished *Las Meninas* in 1656, the little infanta flanked by kneeling attendants, a dwarf nudging … Read more
In 1939, as Nazi propaganda crowned Magda Goebbels the first recipient of the Mother’s Cross for bearing six children, the woman sharing Hitler’s bed had none. Eva Braun never joined the Nazi…
The telegram reached the Berghof in the middle of the afternoon of July 20, 1944. From her room high in the mountain retreat, Eva Braun wrote to Adolf Hitler after hearing that the bomb had failed and that he was alive. The entire political content of her letter fit into a single sentence. She wrote … Read more
In 1904, a Seventh Cavalry veteran named Theodore W. Golden finally wrote down what he witnessed at the Little Bighorn, an account he had carried for …
The day was June 28, 1876, and the men of the Seventh Cavalry were burying their dead. Theodore W. Golden, a veteran who had ridden with the regiment since 1873, moved among the fallen on the battlefield of the Little Bighorn. With few exceptions, including General George Armstrong Custer himself, the bodies showed unmistakable signs … Read more
In August 1915, on a chalk hillside above the English coast, Pauline Whitney sat at a card table playing bridge with three wounded soldiers. She was t…
In August 1915, on a chalk hillside above the English coast, a woman in a dark dress sat at a card table playing bridge with three wounded soldiers. She was a Whitney, daughter of a former United States secretary of the Navy, niece of a founder of Standard Oil. She had paid for the first … Read more
In 1909, Dr. Bennett Clark Hyde attended his wealthy brother-in-law James Moss Hunton, who had fallen ill at the Swope mansion in Independence, Missou…
In the autumn of 1909, Colonel Thomas Swope, one of the wealthiest and most prominent men in Missouri, lay recovering from a fall in his home at 406 South Pleasant Street in Independence. At eighty-one years old, he had decided to change his will. Instead of dividing the residue of his estate among his seven … Read more
On February 14, 1925, Alice Roosevelt Longworth gave birth to her only child, Paulina, in Washington. The baby carried the name of her husband, Nicholas Longworth, soon to become Speaker of the…
On the fourteenth of February 1925, in a house in Washington, a woman of forty-one gave birth to her only child and named the girl Paulina Longworth. The child carried the name of the man who would raise her, but on the weight of the evidence that has survived, that man was almost certainly not … Read more
In 1894, surveyor Leland Voss arrived at the Monastery of San Onofre, a low stone house in a valley with no other reason to exist. At the gate, Brother Cassian gave him one rule: when the bar goes…
The knock came at what Leland Voss guessed was two in the morning, though he had no way to be sure. Three slow knocks, a pause, then three more, from the direction of the gate. He lay in the dark of his cell and told himself it was Cirilo Baca, the old guide who had … Read more