Athens, December 1943. The garden soil crumbled beneath her hands, dark and cold in the winter night. Princess Alice of Battenburgg knelt in the palace grounds, mud staining the hem of her grey nuns habit. While three stories above her head, Nazi officers conducted another search of the palace. She placed the velvet pouch…
You probably know John F. Kennedy as America’s 35th president. But did you know he had to be reminded to eat dinner, donated his entire salary to charity while scraping by on a $75 monthly grocery budget, and credited a beef soup recipe with helping him win …
They were photographed together constantly, smiling, walking hand in hand, the picture of the perfect American couple. But behind the doors of the White House, John and Jackie Kennedy slept in separate rooms. His bed was dressed in angels and cherubs on blue and white fabric chosen by a man who told his decorator he…
She wore pearls that cost less than $200 to every state dinner and every White House photo opportunity for three years straight, and nobody in the room ever knew they were fake. She had a dermatologist who prescribed her champagne as one of her daily dietary requirements …
Christian IIth’s most trusted adviser, his doctor, slept with his wife and tried to usurp his crown. When Christian finally caught on, the doctor faced one of history’s most gruesome punishments. While monarchs like Henry VIII or King George III get a lot of historical attention for…
The conservation light falls cold and precise across the honeycomb diamonds of the Grareville tiara sealed behind museum glass at Windsor Castle’s exhibition galleries. It is the spring of 2018 and somewhere inside Buckingham Palace, another room holds a velvet tray bearing this same tiara alongside a second piece, Queen Mary’s Bandeau, arranged for a…
Forgotten in the jewel box, the jewels of Queen Elizabeth never seen enough. There’s something haunting about a jewel that sparkles just once before disappearing into darkness. Queen Elizabeth II possessed hundreds of treasures, some worn constantly until they became part of her identity. Others that emerged for a single evening before vanishing for decades….
Cedar Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles. March 23rd, 2011. Morning. Elizabeth Taylor had been there for 6 weeks. Admitted on February 11th with congestive heart failure, a condition she’d been fighting since her diagnosis in 2004. She was 79 years old. The disease had narrowed her world down to that hospital, to that floor,…
August 31st, 1997. Diana makes a phone call from the back seat of a Mercedes in Paris. The person she calls is Richard K, the Daily Mail’s royal correspondent, a man she has trusted for years, met in back alleys in Bazewater to keep the palace’s surveillance from registering the relationship. They have been…
The commission meeting was held in a private dining room at a restaurant in Staten Island on September 15th, 1984. Present were the bosses and underbosses of New York’s five families. Paul Castayano from the Gambino family, Anthony Fat Tony Solerno representing the Geneovves family, though everyone knew the real boss was Vincent the Chin…
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