July 12th, 1979, 2:45 p.m. Joe and Mary’s Italian American restaurant, 205 Nicaboka Avenue, Bushwick, Brooklyn. Carmine Galante sat in the outdoor garden patio, finishing lunch with his cousin, Joseeppe Torano, and associate Leonard Coppa. The 69-year-old boss of the Banano crime family lit his signature cigar, the one that had earned him the nickname, the cigar.

His two bodyguards, Chzare Bonventree and Baldo Amato, stood nearby. Three men in ski masks burst through the restaurant. They ran into the garden. Shotgun blasts and automatic pistol fire erupted. Galante was hit in the chest and left eye. He was blown backward out of his chair, crashing into a small tomato patch behind the patio.

Joseeppe Torano and Leonard Coppola died beside him. The gunman fled. When police arrived, they found Carmine Galante lying on his back, blood pooling beneath him, his cigar still clenched between his teeth. The photograph would appear on newspaper front pages around the world. The most feared mob boss in America, executed in broad daylight at his cousin’s restaurant, shot by men sent by the commission, the mafia’s ruling body, betrayed by his own bodyguards who stood by and watched him die.

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This is the true story of Carmine Galante, the psychopathic mobster who tried to become boss of bosses and paid for it with his life. A man so violent that prison psychiatrists diagnosed him with a mental age of 14 and an IQ of 90. An enforcer who carried out over 80 murders and never showed remorse.

And a drug lord whose greed and paranoia turned the entire commission against him, leading to one of the most famous mob hits in American history. But here’s what makes this story different. Galante wasn’t killed by rivals from another family. He was killed by his own organization. The commission, including retired Banano boss Joe Banano himself, approved the hit.

His own family’s capos coordinated it, and his personal bodyguards sold him out. Because Carmine Galante had broken the most fundamental rule of the mafia. He tried to take too much power, and in doing so, he signed his own death warrant. Camilo Carmine Galante was born February 21st, 1910 in a tenement building in East Harlem, Manhattan.

His parents, Vincenzo James Galante and Vincenza Russo, had immigrated from Castella Mari del Gulfo, Sicily to New York City in 1906. Vincenzo worked as a fisherman. They settled in East Harlem, one of New York’s toughest Italian immigrant neighborhoods. Carmine had two brothers, Samuel and Peter Galante, and two sisters, Josephine and Angelina.

By age 10, he was already causing serious trouble. He was sent to reform school for his criminal activities. He soon formed a juvenile street gang on New York’s Lower East Side. By age 15, Galante had dropped out of school after 7th grade. On December 12th, 1925, the 15-year-old Galante pleaded guilty to assault charges.

On December 22nd, 1926, he was sentenced to at least 2 and 1/2 years in state prison. He was barely 16 years old. In August 1930, Galante was arrested for the murder of police officer Walter Decastia during a payroll robbery. However, he was never indicted. Also in 1930, NYPD officer Joseph Minahan caught Galante and other gang members attempting to hijack a truck in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

In the ensuing gun battle, Galante wounded Minahan and a 6-year-old bystander. Both survived. On February 8th, 1931, after pleading guilty to attempted robbery, Galante was sentenced to 12 and 1/2 years in state prison. He was 20 years old. While imprisoned in 1931, doctors diagnosed Galante as having a psychopathic personality.

They determined he had a mental age of 14 and an IQ of 90. These psychological evaluations described him as dangerous, impulsive, and incapable of feeling remorse. On May 1st, 1939, Galante was released from prison on parole. By 1940, he was carrying out murders for Veto Genevves, the underboss of the Luchiano crime family.

Galante developed an underworld reputation for viciousness. The NYPD suspected him of involvement in over 80 murders throughout his career. In 1943, Galante allegedly murdered Carlo Tresa, the publisher of an anti-fascist newspaper in New York. Vito Geneovves living in exile in Italy had offered to kill Tresca as a favor to Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini.

Galante was arrested but never convicted. On February 10th, 1945, Galante married Helen Maruli. They had three children, James Galante, Camille Galante, and Angela Galante. They later separated but never divorced. Galante would later state that he never divorced her because he was a good Catholic. Despite this claim, he lived for 20 years with a mistress, Anne Aquavella, who bore two of his five children.

By 1953, Carmine Galante had risen to become the Banano family’s underboss, under boss Joseph Banano. It was during this time that he was dubbed the cigar or Lilo, Sicilian slang for cigar. He was rarely seen without one clenched between his teeth. Galante’s value to the banano operation was in drug trafficking, particularly heroine.

He spoke various Italian dialects and was fluent in Spanish and French. This linguistic ability made him invaluable for international drug operations. Joseph Banano sent him to Montreal, Canada to oversee the family’s heroine business, smuggling so-called French Connection heroine from France through Canada into the United States.

Galante ran the Montreal operation for years, generating massive profits. But in 1957, Canadian authorities had enough. They deported him back to the United States. On October 14th, 1957, Galante attended the infamous Appalachin meeting in upstate New York, where over 60 mob bosses from across the country gathered.

Police raided the meeting, exposing organized crimes national structure. The publicity triggered massive federal scrutiny. In 1958 and 1960, Galante was indicted for drug trafficking. In 1962, he was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. He was sent to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

While Galante sat in prison, the Banano family descended into chaos. Joseph Banano attempted to consolidate power across all five families, triggering what became known as the Banano War. Without Galante as his top enforcer, Banano’s plans collapsed. The commission forced Banano into retirement in 1968.

Philip Rusty Rustelli was installed as the new official boss. Galante was parrolled in 1974 after serving 12 years. The day he walked free from federal lockup in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, he sent a message. He ordered the tombstone of one-time New York mafia chief Frank Costello blown to pieces by dynamite.

It was a declaration. Carmine Galante was back and he was taking over. The commission had appointed Philip Rastelli as boss of the Bananos. Galante ignored Rustelli’s appointment and named himself the new Dawn. When Rustelli went to prison on extortion charges, Galante seized complete control of the family.

He surrounded himself with a crew of young imported Sicilian drug pushers called Zips for protection. These were tough, ruthless enforcers from Sicily who owed loyalty only to Galante. Galante rebuilt the family’s heroine empire. He used his Sicilian connections to import massive quantities of heroin through Montreal and distribute it across the United States.

The profits were staggering. But Galante wasn’t satisfied with controlling just the Banano family’s drug business. He wanted it all. During the late 1970s, Galante allegedly organized the murders of at least eight members of the Gambino family with whom he had an intense rivalry. He was trying to take over their narcotics operations.

He began musling in on other families drug territories, demanding tribute, eliminating anyone who refused to cooperate. Galante declared himself Capoiapis, boss of bosses. This was an arrogant claim that hadn’t been made since the days of Lucky Luchiano. The other families were alarmed and furious. Who did this guy think he was? The commission existed precisely to prevent any one boss from becoming too powerful.

Galante was violating every rule. On March 3rd, 1978, Galante’s parole was revoked by the United States Parole Commission for allegedly associating with other Banano mobsters. He was sent back to prison. However, on February 27th, 1979, a judge ruled that the government had illegally revoked Galante’s parole and ordered his immediate release.

Galante walked free again and immediately resumed his power grab. He continued expanding his drug empire. He continued eliminating rivals. He continued acting like he owned New York. The New York crime families were alarmed. Genevie’s crime family boss, Frank Terry, began contacting Kosanostra leaders to build a consensus for Galante’s murder.

Even Joseph Banano, the retired former boss who’d mentored Galante, gave his approval. When your own mentor agrees you need to die, you’ve crossed every possible line. In 1979, Philip Rustelli, the official boss still in prison, sought commission approval to kill Galante. The commission granted it. The contract was issued.

Rustelli had his two top capos, Alons Sunny Red in Delicato and Dominic Sunny Black Napolitano coordinate the details of the hit. First, they made a back channel deal with Galante’s inner circle, the Sicilian zips from Nicaboka Avenue. Cesari Bonventere and Baldo Amato, Galante’s personal bodyguards, were offered promotion and a bigger piece of the family’s drug rackets if they cooperated.

Bonvente and Amato didn’t hesitate. They sold out their boss. They agreed to set him up. About 100 p.m. on July 12th, 1979, Bonventree and Amato accompanied Galante to lunch at Joe and Mary’s Italian-American restaurant on Nicerbacha Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The restaurant was owned by Galante’s cousin, Josephe Torano, a soldier in the Banano family.

According to testimony from John Torano, Jeppe’s son, someone called the restaurant earlier that day. The caller identified himself as Jimmy Galante, Carmine’s nephew and driver. He asked if his uncle was there. John Torano later testified. Joseeppe Torano went to the garden patio to join Galante and Leonardo Copa, a frequent companion of Galante.

The men sat at a table in the outdoor garden behind the restaurant. It was a hot summer day, 87°. They ate a meal of fish, salad, and wine. Galante lit his cigar. Around 2:45 p.m., three masked gunmen stormed into the restaurant. John Torano heard one of the intruders say, “In the back, Sally.” The gunman entered the garden and opened fire.

Shotgun blasts and automatic pistol fire erupted. Galante was hit in the chest by a shotgun blast that threw him backward. Bullets pierced his left eye and riddled his chest. Jeppe Torano and Leonardo Copa were also killed. Bonvent and Amato, Galante’s bodyguards, did nothing. They stood by and watched their boss get executed.

They were left completely unharmed. The gunman fled. When police arrived, the scene was surreal. Carmine Galante lay on his back in the tomato patch, blood pooling beneath him. His cigar was still clenched between his teeth. Crime scene photos captured the moment. The New York Post ran a front page photo of the grizzly scene the next day.

Galante’s death, Grimace, cigar in mouth, became an indelible part of mafia law. Jeppi Torano and Leonardo Copa lay dead beside him. The bodies were covered by a floral oil cloth from the table. Chalk marks indicated where slugs, casings, and impact points were found. It was a professional hit. executed with precision.

When Morg attendants carried Galante’s body out of Joe and Mary’s, it passed beneath a sign reading, “We give special attention to outgoing orders.” Photographers captured that irony, too. The Catholic Arch Dascese of New York refused to give Galante a burial mass. Invoking a rarely used bit of ecclesiastical law, the church apologized but stated, “We are not able to grant a lurggical service in the church because of the scandal that would ensue.

It was a really big deal for practicing Catholics. Even those who made their living killing on the black market. However, the associates slain alongside Galante, Torano, and Coppa were granted proper Catholic burials. The investigation moved quickly. Only one person was ever charged for the crime. Anthony Bruno Indelicato, a member of Galante’s own Banano family and son of Capo Sunny Red in Delicato, was eventually convicted at the Mafia Commission trial in 1986.

He served 19 years in prison, but everyone in law enforcement knew the truth. You don’t hit a boss without approval. One federal source told reporters, “We feel quite strongly that the decision was made here in New York. The commission had authorized the hit. Multiple families had cooperated, and Galante’s own bodyguards had sold him out.

The murder had a domino effect. The Galante murder really opened and accelerated federal efforts to go after this heroine smuggling ring,” explained Jeff Schumacher, senior director of content at the Mob Museum. Ultimately, a couple of years later, it led to a mass of arrests of individuals involved in the heroine ring.

The hit also destabilized the Bonano family for years. Without Galantes iron grip, factions emerged. Power struggles erupted. The family descended into violence. Dominic Sunonny Black, Napoleano, one of the Capos who’d coordinated Galante’s murder, was himself killed in 1981 after the Donnie Brasco FBI infiltration was exposed.

Cesar Bonventere and Baldo Amato, the bodyguards who’ betrayed Galante, didn’t live long to enjoy their rewards. Bonvente was murdered in 1984, his body found stuffed in two oil drums. Amato was killed in 1982. Betraying your boss might save you temporarily, but in the mafia, betrayal is never truly forgiven.

So, what does Carmine Galante’s execution reveal about mafia power? It shows that greed has limits. Galante controlled the Banano family’s heroine empire. He was making millions, but he wanted more. He wanted to control all of New York’s drug trade. He wanted to be boss of bosses. That ambition made him intolerable to the commission.

The murder also demonstrates how the commission functions as a check on individual power. The mafia isn’t a dictatorship. It’s a confederation of families governed by rules. When one boss becomes too powerful, too greedy, too disruptive, the commission acts. Galante’s execution was strategic. It preserved the balance of power.

But perhaps the most revealing aspect is the bodyguard betrayal. Bonvent and Amato were supposed to protect Galante with their lives. Instead, they stood by and watched him die. The commission bought their loyalty by offering them more money and power. It proves that in the mafia, loyalty only goes as deep as the next best offer.

Galante’s famous arrogance contributed to his downfall. He was quoted saying, “No one will ever kill me. They wouldn’t dare.” That statement encapsulated his fatal flaw. He believed his reputation for violence made him untouchable. He thought his control of the heroine trade made him indispensable.

He assumed nobody would dare challenge him. He was catastrophically wrong. The commission dared and they succeeded. Today, Joe and Mary’s Italian-American restaurant is gone. The building at 205 Nicker Avenue has been shuttered for over 15 years. It’s an empty retail unit. The neighborhood has changed. Boutique pet shops and trendy bars have replaced old mob hangouts. Bushwick gentrified.

The mafia’s grip on the area weakened. But locals still remember. Bartenders at places like Three Diamond Door, just a few doors down from where Joe and Mary stood, hear the stories. That’s wild. One bartender told Fox 5 News when reminded of the history. The bloody demise of Carmine the Cigar Galante is part of the neighborhood’s dark folklore.

Carmine Galante’s legacy is one of violence, greed, and overreach. He was a psychopathic killer who murdered over 80 people. He built a heroine empire that destroyed countless lives. He tried to become boss of bosses and paid for it with his life. The photograph of him lying dead with his cigar still in his mouth became iconic.

It symbolizes the end of an era when mob bosses thought they were untouchable. Galante proved they weren’t. The commission was stronger than any individual. And when you take too much, when you become too arrogant, when you threaten the entire system, the system eliminates you.

If you found this story compelling, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment. Was the commission right to kill Galante? Or was this just another example of mafia hypocrisy where rules only apply when they’re convenient? Let us know below.

The Star Nobody Could Save: The Slow Destruction of Vivien Leigh :

There is a photograph of Vivian Lee taken in 1951 on the set of a street car named Desire. She is playing Blanch Dub Boy, a woman whose grip on reality is disintegrating, who has retreated into illusion because reality has become more than she can carry, who says [music] in the most famous line of the play, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

In the photograph she is between takes, the camera has caught her in the moment before the performance resumes. the moment when she is neither blanch nor entirely herself, suspended in the gap between the character and the woman. Her eyes are looking at something slightly to the left of the lens. She is 37 years old.

[music] She has already won one Academy Award and is about to win her second. She is married to the greatest actor in the English-speaking world. She is, by the consensus of every person qualified to judge such things, the most beautiful woman in Hollywood. And if you know what you are looking at, you can see it. Not in her face.

Her face is composed as it always was, with a control and a deliberateness that she had spent her entire adult life perfecting. You can see it in the eyes, in the quality of the gaze. In the particular way, she is looking at the things slightly to the left of the lens, as if she is watching something approaching from a direction no one else can see.

The something that was approaching had been approaching for years. It had a name, though the name it was given in 1951 [music] was not the name we give it now. They called it manic depression. It arrived in episodes that lasted weeks or months, periods of extraordinary energy and productivity and erotic intensity followed by collapses into darkness so complete that she could not get out of bed, could not remember where she was, could not always remember who she was.

The episodes were becoming more frequent. The treatment was becoming more extreme. The treatment was electrocomvulsive therapy. [music] Electric current passed through a living brain. Memory erased. Personality changed. The woman who consented to it knew what it would do to her. She consented anyway because the alternative was the darkness.

And she had decided with the particular courage and the particular desperation of a person who has seen what the darkness contains that she would endure anything to remain functional, to remain herself. She did not remain herself. That is the tragedy at the center of this story. Not that she lost everything, though she did.

Not that her marriage failed and her career became unreliable and her body finally gave out at 53. But that she spent the last 15 years of her life fighting with every tool available to 1950s medicine and her own extraordinary will to hold on to the person she knew herself to be and that the fighting was what destroyed her.

This is the story of Vivian Lei, of what the illness took and what the treatment took after it and of the woman who understood both losses with a clarity that made them unbearable and bore them anyway. The world she was born into Dargiling 1913, Vivian Mary Hartley was born on the 5th of November. 1913 in Dargiling India to Ernest Hartley a British officer in the Indian cavalry and Gertrude Mary Francis Robinson a woman of Irish French and possibly Pari descent whose beauty was by every account extraordinary and whose inner life was complicated in ways that would

find an echo in her daughter. The Dargiling of 1913 was the Dargiling of the British Raj, a hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas, where the British colonial population retreated from the heat of the plains, where the tea plantations stretched across the slopes and the air was clear and cold, and the social world was composed of the particular rituals of expatriate British life at the height of empire.

Ernest Hartley was a competent and conventional man who loved his daughter straightforwardly and without complication. He was not the parent who would shape her. Gertrude was. She was devoutly Catholic, theatrical in her enthusiasms, possessed of a sensibility that responded to beauty and art and performance with an intensity that her husband did not share and could not entirely follow.

She read her daughter poetry before the child could understand the words for the music of it. She took her to concerts and to theatrical performances in Kolkata. She enrolled her at the age of three in a dancing class run by a woman named Mrs. Banerjee and she watched her daughter move and knew with the certainty of someone who recognized a quality she had always wanted for herself that the child was made for this.

Viven was 6 years old when she was sent to England. The sending away was not unusual. It was the standard arrangement of British colonial life [music] in which children were educated at home while their parents remained in the colonies. [music] She was enrolled at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roampton, a Catholic boarding school in southwest London, where she would remain for the next 9 years. 9 years is most of her childhood.

9 years away from her parents in the specific loneliness of a boarding school for girls who had all been sent away from somewhere. She was by every account of her schoolmates and teachers an exceptional child. Not in the way that causes disruption but in the quieter and more lasting way of children who have decided to be exceptional as a strategy for managing the world.

She worked furiously. She performed in every school play. She wrote in her journal. She was popular in the way that beautiful and talented children are popular. Admired slightly apart. She was also from early in her school years subject to moods that those around her noticed without knowing how to name. Periods of extraordinary brightness and energy, all-nighters in the dormatory, elaborate theatrical schemes, a social energy that left her friends exhausted and exhilarated, and periods of withdrawal so complete that she seemed, the same

friends said decades later, to have gone somewhere no one else could reach. The withdrawals passed. She returned. Nobody worried very much because she was so clearly brilliant that the darkness seemed simply to be the price of the brightness. It is always easier in retrospect to see what nobody saw at the time.

She finished school in 1931, spent time in France and Germany studying languages and theater and in 1932 enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She was 18 years old. She knew exactly what she was going to do with her life. What she did not know was what her life was going to do with her. The ascent London and Hollywood 1932 1940 she married Herbert Lee Hman in 1932 at 19.

He was a barristister 14 years her senior a solid and decent man who loved her and could not entirely contain her. Their daughter Suzanne was born in October 1933. The marriage was from the beginning a practical arrangement. She needed a home, a base, a life from which she could pursue the theater. She was fond of Homeman.

She was not entirely present in the marriage because she was never entirely present anywhere that was not the stage. She began working in film in 1934. Small parts that led to larger ones with the inexraable momentum of someone who has a quality the camera needs. [music] In 1935, she took the stage name Vivien Lei, combining her married name with her given name in the recristening that performers used to separate the professional identity from the personal one.

The separation was useful. She would spend the rest of her life managing the distance between them. She met Lawrence Olivia in 1935 at a party in London. [music] He was married, so was she. He was 28, she was 22. He was already one of the most talked about actors on the British stage. Intense, technically ferocious, possessed of a physical charisma that made people in his vicinity feel that something significant was happening.

She walked into the room and he turned his head and the accounts of that moment given by multiple people who were present described the same thing that the air between them changed. They began an affair. The affair became over four years of considerable complication, divorces obtained, careers managed, public and press attention navigated with the careful strategy of two people who understood publicity, a relationship of genuine and overwhelming depth.

They were those who knew them well said, matched in their ambition, matched in their intelligence, matched in their inability to be anything less than everything they were capable of being. The match was also in the ways that perfect matches are often combustible dangerous. She got the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind through a combination of luck, timing, and the fact that she was exactly what the role required in ways that nobody else could replicate. David O.

Selnik had searched for two years, screen tested hundreds of actresses, and found no one who could be simultaneously beautiful and willful and desperate, and calculating and romantic and selfdeceiving at the level the script required. Vivian Lee walked onto the Culver City back lot on the night they were burning the Atlanta set, met Selnik’s eyes, and got the role without a formal audition.

She filmed Gone with the Wind through the winter and spring of 1939. It was grueling months of shooting, a director who was replaced mid-production, a script that changed daily, [music] and the physical demands of a role that required her to be on camera for a majority of the film’s 4-hour running time. She hated Lowe’s Angels.

She hated the studio systems management of her life, the publicity requirements, the ways in which the industrial machinery of Hollywood turned human beings into product. She also delivered a performance that is 80 years later still discussed as one of the greatest in cinema history. The Academy Award was given to her on the 29th of February 1940 presented by Spencer Tracy. She was 26 years old.

She and Olivia married on the 31st of August 1940 in Santa Barbara, California as soon as their respective divorces were finalized. They were in the public imagination and in many private ones the most glamorous couple in the English-speaking world. They were also in the years that followed the couple inside whom something was already going wrong that neither of them yet fully understood.

Notly Abby and the life they built Oxfordshire 1944 1953 they bought not a 1944. It was a former Augustinian monastery [music] in thame Oxfordshire established in the 12th century dissolved under Henry VIII converted over the subsequent centuries into a country house of the kind that requires substantial [music] wealth and complete dedication to maintain.

It sat on 70 acres of Oxfordshire farmland. Its medieval stone buildings looking out across gardens that Viven would redesign and plant and tend with the same perfectionism she brought to every other aspect of the life she was building. Not was the expression of everything they wanted their life to be. It was by every account of the people who were invited there on weekends, and everyone was invited, [music] the great and the would-be great, and the genuinely interesting of English cultural life in the postwar years. One of the most

beautiful private houses in England. The gardens were extraordinary. The dinners were long and funny and lit by the specific electricity that two [music] brilliant people generate when they are at their best together. The weekends at Notley became in the memory of everyone who attended them, a kind of golden period, a time when everything was possible and the two of them were at the center of it.

They were also the highest paid acting couple in the world. Their combined earnings from film, from theater, from the productions they mounted together under their production company, were equivalent, adjusted for inflation, to over $5 million in today’s money. They produced and starred in Shakespeare. They toured. They were celebrated in England and America and wherever the English-speaking theater mattered.

Lawrence Olivia was kned in 1947. She became [music] as his wife, Lady Olivia. But inside the golden life, the illness was already at work. The episodes had been occurring since her 20s. But in the decade after the war, they became more severe and [music] more frequent. The pattern was consistent. A period of extraordinary vitality during which she would work at an impossible pace, sleep very little, fill the house with guests [music] and plans and energy, and then the descent, the collapse.

The weeks during which she could not function, could not perform, could not sometimes leave the bedroom. Olivia managed the public face of these episodes with the craft of a man who understood what the press was capable of and the institutional loyalty of a husband who had committed to protecting her.

The illness was described when it had to be described at all as exhaustion, as a nervous breakdown, as the consequence of working too hard. The vocabulary of the era did not include the clinical language we would use now. And even if it had, the use of it in connection with his wife would have been professionally catastrophic. What the illness was, though they would not receive this framing for years, was bipolar disorder.

[music] The extremes of her manic episodes, the sleeplessness, the hypersexuality, the grandiosity, the recklessness and the severity of her depressive crashes were consistent with what clinicians now recognize as a serious psychiatric condition that responds in the 21st century to mood stabilizers that did not exist in the 1940s.

They did not have mood stabilizers. They had instead the [music] treatments that 1950s psychiatry offered for severe mental illness. And in 1953, following one of the most extreme episodes of her illness to date, an episode that had forced her hospitalization and the suspension of a film she was making, her doctors proposed a treatment that they believed would help. She consented.

She knew what it was. She had seen what it could do. She consented anyway. The treatment, London, 1953, electrocomvulsive therapy, ECT, was developed in Italy in 1938 by the neurologists [music] Yugo Cerletti and Lucio Biny. The principle is this. An electric current is passed through the brain inducing a controlled seizure.

The seizure, for reasons that are still not entirely understood, can interrupt severe depressive and manic [music] episodes with a speed and effectiveness that no medication of the era could replicate. In cases of severe bipolar disorder, in cases of treatment resistant depression, in cases where a person has become unable to function and the alternatives are limited, ECT is genuinely effective.

It also erases memory. This is the fact that the medical literature of the 1950s acknowledged but did not always foreground in the way that the patients undergoing the treatment might have required. The memory loss associated with ECT, [music] particularly with the multiple sessions administered in sequence that constituted a typical treatment course, can be extensive, disorienting, [music] and permanent.

It affects not only the period around the treatment itself, but longer stretches of personal history. It can alter in ways that resist precise description, but that the people who have undergone it describe consistently the texture of the self, the way memory is organized, the relationship between past experience and present identity, the felt sense of being a continuous person across time.

Vivian Lei underwent ECT multiple times over the decade from 1953 to the early 1960s. The exact number of sessions is not part of the public record. [music] Her medical records were private and remained so. But the accounts of those around her describe the aftermath of each treatment course with a specificity that makes the pattern clear.

She would come back from the treatment different, not different in ways that were immediately visible to strangers or even to acquaintances. She was always composed in public. The composure was if anything more pronounced after the treatments because the treatments took the edge off the mania and with it some of the energy that had made her performance of normaly so effortful.

But those who knew her, Olivia, her close friends, the actors who worked with her regularly described the same thing across the decades in the accounts they gave after her death. She came back quieter. Certain memories were gone. not random fragments, but organized stretches of experience. Weeks, sometimes months, conversations she had no record of, productions she had worked on, of which she retained only partial impressions, decisions she had made that she could not reconstruct.

The self that had walked into the treatment room was not entirely the self that walked out. She knew this is the thing about Vivian Lee’s experience of her illness and its treatment that is most devastating and least disgusted. She was not unaware of what was happening to her. She was not protected from the knowledge by a mind too damaged to track its own damage.

She was in the periods between episodes as clearsighted and as analytically capable as she had ever been, which meant she had full access to the understanding of what was being lost and what was being taken. [music] She discussed it with her friends in the careful and oblique way that private people discuss devastating things. She acknowledged the losses.

She would refer to certain periods as missing. Not gone in the way that names and faces go when you cannot retrieve them, but gone in the way that rooms go when the walls have been removed. And you can see where they were, but not what they contained. She knew the shape of what had been erased, even when she could not reconstruct the content.

[music] And she continued to consent to the treatment. Because the alternative, the episodes in their full severity, [music] the weeks of darkness or the weeks of mania that burned everything it touched, was worse. She had decided at some point in the early 1950s that she would accept the cost of remaining functional, that the price of being able to work, to appear in public, to maintain the life she had built, and the marriage she depended on was worth what the treatment extracted.

It is possible that she was right. It is possible that the treatment extended the periods of her life in which she could function, in which she could perform, in which she could be present in something resembling the way she wanted to be present. It is also possible that each treatment accelerated the deterioration it was trying to prevent.

Each session of electric current, altering the neural architecture of a brain that was already under extraordinary stress. The medical literature on ECT’s long-term effects was limited in the 1950s. It remains in the 21st century, a subject of ongoing research and genuine scientific debate. What is not debated is that the treatment, as it was administered in the 1950s without the refined protocols and anesthetic management that would be developed in subsequent decades, was significantly more aggressive than the ECT practice

today. What is not debated is that Vivian Lee underwent it repeatedly over a period of approximately a decade during which the illness did not stop and the person inside it changed. The marriage unraveling 1953 1960. To understand the dissolution of the Lee Olivia marriage, you have to understand what the illness did [music] to the erotic and emotional life they had built together.

Olivia has written about this period in his autobiography confessions of an actor published in 1982 with a cander that startled even the people who had been around them. He [music] describes the manic episodes in clinical terms that suggest he had educated himself thoroughly about what he was living with and found in that education some distance from the immediate experience.

He describes the way the mania expressed itself sexually, the hypersexuality of a severe manic episode, the way it produced desires and behaviors that were entirely inconsistent with her character during stable periods, the way it created situations that left everyone involved confused and damaged. He describes trying to manage the illness while maintaining a career of his own.

his career as a director, as a stage actor who was redefining the English classical repertoire at the Old Vic, as a film actor of international stature who had obligations that could not always be deferred for the management of a wife’s psychiatric crisis. He describes the specific exhaustion of a person who has spent years as the primary manager of someone else’s mental illness who has loved that person and been damaged by the management [music] and arrived eventually at the conclusion that he could not continue. What he does

not describe, at least not with the same honesty, is his own culpability. Because Olivia was also having an affair from the early 1950s with the actress Dorothy Tutin, and later the affair that would eventually end the marriage with the actress Joan Plowite, who was 22 years his junior, whom he had met during the 1957 production of The Entertainer, and whom he would marry in 1961 within a year of his divorce from Viven.

The illness was real. The exhaustion of managing it was real. The [music] damage it did to the marriage was real and documented from both sides. But the simplicity of a narrative in which a man left a woman because her illness was too much to bear leaves out what was also happening.

That the man had been looking for the exit for several years before he found it and that he found it in the bed of a younger woman who was not ill. Viven knew about Joan Plite before the formal separation. The knowledge arrived in the way such knowledge always arrives, not all at once, but in accumulation, in the specific and painful way that a person discovers they have been replaced.

She responded with the kind of public dignity that her upbringing and her professional training had made available to her, and with the kind of private devastation [music] that those who were close to her described in their subsequent accounts. The divorce was finalized on the 2nd of December, 1960. She was 47 years old.

She had been married to Olivia for 20 years. She had loved him by every account that has survived with an absolute consistency that her illness had sometimes expressed in ways that damaged both of them, but that had never at its core wavered. He was the person around whom her sense of herself had been organized for 20 years.

When he left, the organization went with him. Notly Abby was sold. The golden life that had been built there, the gardens that she had planted and tended, the weekends that had seemed to those who attended them like a permanent condition of the world, all of it sold and dispersed. She moved to a flat in Eaton Square in London.

She was, in every practical sense, starting again at 47, [music] with an illness that was not controlled, and a marriage that was over, and a career that the illness had made unreliable. The Last Act, London, 1960 1967. She did not stop working. This is the thing that must be said about the last seven years of Vivian Lee’s life before anything else. She did not stop.

She did not retire to the flat in Eaton Square and give up on the career that had defined her since she was 18 years old. She went back on stage. She appeared in Jewel of Angels in New York in 1960, a production that transferred from London to Broadway and that received reviews which acknowledged her as still in possession of extraordinary gifts, still capable on certain nights of the kind of performance that had made her famous.

She toured with the production. She did the work. She appeared in Tovich on Broadway in 1963, a musical in which she had a genuine success, a Tony Award nomination, good reviews, weeks of soldout performances. She was 50 years old and she was on Broadway in a musical which required vocal stamina and physical energy that her illness and the ect had depleted in ways that those who watched her prepare for the show found sometimes alarming. She did it anyway.

She filmed the Roman spring of Mrs. Stone in 1961, a Tennessee Williams adaptation directed by Joseé Quantero in which she plays a fading actress, a drift in Rome, [music] who becomes involved with a young jigalo. The film has its weaknesses, but her performance in it is something she had not been entirely expected to be capable of producing after the previous years.

composed, controlled, specific, genuinely moving in its portrayal of a woman who has outlived her public self and has not yet decided what to do with what remains. She had a relationship in the years after the divorce with the [music] actor Jack Marvel. He was devoted to her in a way that Olivia by the end had not been prepared to manage the illness to be present during the episodes to offer the steady and uncomplicated care that she needed and that a man with his own enormous career and his own enormous ambitions had

ultimately been unable to provide. Maraveville was not Olivia. She did not love him the way she had loved Olivia. But he was there. He was there in a way that Olivia in the final years had not been. [music] And there was a kindness in his presence that those who witnessed it found moving.

The tuberculosis had been diagnosed in 1945. It was the disease of the Victorian age, the disease of the consumptive heroine, the disease that the 20th century had substantially controlled but not eliminated. In her case, it had been managed for 20 years with the treatment available at the time, which in 1945 meant rest and limited activity, and by the early 1960s meant antibiotics that were more effective, but managed, not cured.

The disease remained in her lungs, a condition rather than a crisis for decades. [music] In 1967, it became a crisis. July 8, 1967, Eaton Square, London, she had been working. She had been in rehearsals for a production of Edward Alb’s A Delicate Balance [music] scheduled to open in the West End later that year. She had told those around her that she was feeling better than she had in some time.

The illness was in the spring of 1967 in one of its more stable periods. Not gone, never gone, but managed to a degree that permitted the ordinary routines of a working life. The tuberculosis was a different matter. Those who saw her in the final months of 1967 describe a woman who was thinner than she had been, who tired more quickly, who was managing a physical diminishment with the same will that had managed everything else.

On the night of the 7th of July 1967, Jack Maravevel left her flat in Eaton Square after dinner. She seemed well. She was in good spirits, he would later say engaged, talking about the rehearsals, making plans. He returned the following morning to find her on the bedroom floor. She had gotten up in the night apparently and collapsed.

The tuberculosis had flooded her lungs in the final hours. She had been dead for some time before he found her. She was 53 years old. The obituaries were immediate and comprehensive and almost uniformly focused on the beauty and the talent and the Academy Awards and the marriage to Olivia. These were the coordinates of the public.

Vivien Lei, the one who had played Scarlet and Blanch, who had attended [music] premiieres with Olivia in the years when they were the most glamorous couple in the world, [music] who had been photographed at Notly Abbey in the garden she had made. Olivia, who had remarried and was working in the [music] theater, received the news and said nothing public for some time when he did speak in interviews given years later.

And in the autobiography published in 1982, he spoke about her with a grief that seemed genuine and a guilt that was also genuine and with the particular honesty of a man who had done something wrong and knew it [music] and had spent 20 years understanding that knowledge. He said in one of the last interviews he gave before his own death in 1989 [music] that she had been the great love of his life.

He said this with apparent sincerity. He also said it having been married to Joan Plarite for 28 years which is a complexity that resists easy resolution and perhaps should resist it what the treatment took. There is a quality in the performances Vivian Lei gave before the ECT treatments began that is [music] different in a way that is difficult to articulate precisely from the quality of the performances she gave after.

The difference is not in the technical accomplishment. She was a technically precise actress throughout her career and the precision does not disappear in the later work. [music] The difference is in something underneath the technique. A quality of complete exposure of the innermost self made visible through the character that was present in the early and middle work and that became in the later work more controlled, more managed.

The early Scarlett O’Hara, filmed before the illness had been subjected to the treatments [music] that would alter it, has a rawness and an emotional immediacy that is not simply a matter of technique. It is a matter of what Lee was willing to put in front of the camera. The Blanch Dub Boys of 1951 has the same quality.

A woman playing a woman coming apart and the performance is convincing not only because she was a great actress, but because she understood from the inside what it felt like to be a mind at war with itself. The act did not take her talent. That is important to say. She remained to the end of her career an actress of genuine distinction.

But those who knew her before the treatments and knew her after describe consistently the specific thing that was altered, not the craft, but the access. The treatments had managed the illness by moderating the extremes, the manic highs reduced, the depressive crashes somewhat cushioned, and in moderating the extremes had also, at some cost that cannot be precisely calculated, [music] modified the quality of total exposure that had made the extreme performances possible.

She knew this too. She talked about it in the oblique way she discussed the most painful things. She talked about the early work as coming from somewhere that she could no longer entirely reach. She did not frame this as a complaint or as an accusation against the treatment that had done it.

She framed it as a fact, a loss that she had chosen and accepted and was living with. The losses accumulated across the decade of treatment, [music] the marriage, the years she could not precisely reconstruct, the quality of access [music] that had made her extraordinary, the self-image that had been built on a certainty about who she was, and that the repeated experiences of episode and treatment and recovery had destabilized in ways she managed externally but felt continuously.

She was, those who were with her in the final years, say, still herself, still funny, still sharp, still capable of the wit and the warmth and the precision of response that had always been hers. The illness had not taken everything. The treatment had not taken everything. She was still there, but she was not the person she would have been, and she knew it, and the knowing was its own kind of grief, carried privately, managed impeccably, never entirely put down.

The kindness of strangers Tennessee Williams wrote Blanch Dub Boys in 1947 and Vivian Lee played her in 1951. And the line that Blanch says, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers became in the decades after Lee’s death inextricably associated with her in a way that was perhaps inevitable and is certainly apt.

She was not Blanch. She was not a woman undone by illusion, not a woman who could not face the truth. She faced the truth about her illness with a clarity that was by every account remarkable. She faced the truth about what the treatment was doing to her. She faced the truth about the marriage, about Olivia, about what the departure of the greatest love of her life meant for the remainder of it.

[music] What she shared with Blanch was something else. The dependence, the specific and unchosen dependence of a person whose mind had betrayed her, on the people around her, on the doctors who administered the treatments on the friends who managed the episodes, on Jack Meal, who was there when Olivia was not, on the strangers in the audience who received what she gave them from the stage and gave back the applause that was in some fundamental way the thing that kept her going.

[music] She gave everything she had to the work for as long as the work was available to her. Two Academy Awards, decades of stage performances that those who witnessed them described as transformative, a body of film work that includes at its peak performances that remain among the finest in the history of the medium. She gave all of it, and she gave it while managing privately and without public acknowledgement, a condition that would have ended the careers of less determined people in its first decade.

She was 53 years old when she died on the floor of her flat in Eaton Square. 53 is not old. It is the age at which upset the illness and the treatment and the tuberculosis, and the departure of the man she had organized her life around. She might have been in the middle of a late flowering, a period of rich character work of the kind of performance that deepens rather than diminishes with age that Judy Dench would later demonstrate was available to British actresses of the first rank.

[music] She did not get that period. The illness took it and the treatment took parts of what remained. What was not taken, what no treatment and no illness could reach was the quality of what she left. The Scarlet O’Hara that runs in cinemas and on streaming platforms 80 years after it was filmed [music] and is still being seen by people who find it new every time.

The Blanch Doo boys that is still taught in film schools. Still discussed by actors trying to understand what total commitment to a role requires. Still moving in ways that defy the 60 years between the filming and the watching. [music] She put herself into those performances without reservation. She put in what the illness had given her.

the access to extremity, [music] the understanding of what it felt like when the mind stops cooperating with the life it is supposed to be running. She put in what the beauty had given her, the particular burden of being desired so comprehensively that the person behind the face could become invisible, even to herself.

She put in everything she was and everything she knew. And the performances are still alive because the person who made them was completely present in the making. She depended on the kindness of strangers. Millions of strangers across 80 years have been kind in return. They have watched. They have not looked away.

They have not let her become only the illness, only the marriage, only the treatments and the losses, and the bedroom floor in Eaton Square. They have kept watching the performances, which is where she wanted to be, which is where she put the best of herself. That is not a small kindness. For a woman who spent her life trying to hold herself together for the sake of being able to work, to have the work survive, complete, alive, [music] unddeinished by everything that tried to diminish her is perhaps the most significant mercy available. The star

nobody could save left something that didn’t need saving. That will have to be enough. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.

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