There is a photograph taken backstage at a European concert hall sometime in the late 1970s. Nina Simone is seated alone at a dressing table, still in her performance gown. The audience on the other side of the wall is applauding. She is not listening to them. She is staring at her own reflection with…
Some men mistake silence for weakness. A martial arts demonstration has just ended at Long Beach, 1964. The crowd is applauding when a karate champion storms the stage, grabs the microphone, and tells the smaller man to go back to his rice field. 1,000 people laugh. The smaller man does not move. His name is…
On the evening of December 3rd, 1926, Agatha Christie ate dinner with her husband, Archabald, at their home in Sunningale, Berkshire. There was nothing recorded about the meal. No argument that neighbors overheard, no letter written beforehand to a friend. After dinner, she put their seven-year-old daughter, Rosalyn, to bed. Then, sometime after 11:00, she…
It is the summer of 1970 and Janice Joplain is sitting alone in a recording booth at Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles listening to a playback of a track she has just laid down. The engineers are outside the glass. The other musicians have stepped out. For a few minutes, there is no audience,…
Some men carry their proof in silence. A private gym in Los Angeles, Chinatown, 1967. The door swings open and a Japanese fighter walks in. Undefeated in 52 professional bouts. 30 of those fights ended with a single punch. He has crossed the Pacific for one reason, to expose a man he calls a fraud,…
In October 1985, Tina Turner sat for an interview in a London hotel room. She was 55 years old, newly famous again after decades of near eraser, and the journalist across from her kept returning to the same subject. Ike, the abuse, the escape. She answered each question with the same measured composure she brought…
The most dangerous man in any room is the one with nothing to prove. Three men block a hallway. Each one a trained killer. They corner a single man after a private demonstration at a military club in San Diego. One leans against the door. Another rolls up his sleeves. The leader steps forward and…
It is the spring of 1938 and a young American woman is being taught how to curtsy. Not casually, not once. For weeks in a borrowed London townhouse, Rosemary Kennedy practices the precise depth of bend, the placement of her hands, the timing of the dip relative to her forward movement. Her father has arranged…
It is the autumn of 1962 and Joan Kennedy is standing at the edge of a stage in Massachusetts. Her husband is at the microphone. The crowd is watching him. The voice, the jaw, the name. Joan stands slightly behind and to the right, the precise distance a campaign photographer would have calculated. She is…
February 11th, 2012, Beverly Hills, California. Downstairs, in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Clive Davis was holding his annual Grammy Eve party. The room was full. The guest list read like an inventory of American popular music. Cameras were present. Dinner was being served. Whitney Houston was expected to attend. She had been…
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