The world saw a president and a first lady. What it never saw was the actual life they were living. Not the life behind the image. That phrase has been applied to public figures so many times it has lost its meaning. The actual life, the specific daily, irreducibly human texture of…
She was the most watched shopper in the world and nobody ever saw her do it. That sounds impossible. It was not. Jacqueline Kennedy spent four decades acquiring some of the most significant pieces of furniture, art, jewelry, and clothing in private American hands and she did almost all of it…
Two weeks before she died, Carolyn Bessette told someone she was scared. Not of death in the abstract, not of the Kennedy name, or the photographers outside their TriBeCa apartment, or the weight of a marriage that had become something other than what she had signed for….
They called it the War of the Waleses. On one side, Diana Spencer, the fairy tale princess, the people’s princess, the most photographed woman in the world. On the other, Camila Parker BS, the other woman, the villain of a billion tabloid covers, the shadow that hung over a royal marriage from…
On August 31st, 1997, Diana died in a tunnel in Paris. The whole world stopped. The Queen Mother didn’t. While a million people piled flowers outside Kensington Palace, and the country demanded the flag fly at half mast, the Queen Mother was at Balmoral. And according to those who have documented that…
At a private gathering in the summer of 2000, William saw something around Camilla’s neck that stopped him cold. It took him a few seconds to place it. He had last seen it on his mother. He went straight to her. “That was my mother’s,” he said. Camilla looked at him. What…
14 minutes. That is how long it took 11 men, no air support, no armored vehicles, no satellite uplink, to capture six members of an Al-Qaeda cell that a much larger American force, backed by analysts, aerial surveillance, and six months of accumulated reporting had been hunting without a clean result. No…
The transmission lasted 11 seconds. It came through on a captured frequency, a Motorola handset pulled from a destroyed vehicle 3 hours earlier, a channel no active coalition unit was monitoring that night. The handset had not been kept for luck. It had been left on passive monitor after one of the…
On June 21, 1977 in Rapid City, South Dakota, Elvis Presley walked to a piano on stage and sat down with visible difficulty. His hands were shaking, his breathing was labored. CBS cameras captured everything as he began to play and sing Unchained Melody, a song about longing, about time running out,…
June 6th, 1968. NBC Studio 4, Burbank, California. Elvis Presley and his creative team are in the middle of rehearsals for his television comeback special when someone in the building says the words that stop the room. Bobby Kennedy has been shot. They rush into the next office. The television is on….
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