Adolf Hitler once sent Margery Booth 200 red roses wrapped in a sash printed with a swastika. He'd just watched her sing at Bayreuth and told her she was perfectly charming. What he didn't know was that the same woman was smuggling British intelligence out of Nazi Germany hidden in her underwear, hiding a Jewish woman in her Berlin flat, and burying stolen documents in the grounds of a royal palace. She got away with it for years, moving through Hitler's inner circle as one o

In 1954, the New York Times gave Peter Gowland a title that followed him for the rest of his life: America's No. 1 Pin-Up Photographer. It wasn't just a flashy headline. Gowland spent more than six decades photographing some of the most famous women in the country, sold over a thousand magazine covers, and got so annoyed with the cameras available to buy that he just started building his own instead. By the time he died in 2010, he'd designed more than twenty different camera

Tura Satana is best remembered as Varla, the merciless leader of a girl gang who kills a man with her bare hands in Russ Meyer's 1965 cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It's one of the most iconic performances in exploitation film history. It's also, by a wide margin, the tamest thing about her actual life. Long before she ever stood in front of Meyer's camera, Satana had survived an internment camp, run with a street gang, danced burlesque under a false name to hide