Barbara Payton was pulling in $10,000 a week, dating Gary Cooper and Howard Hughes, and being talked about as the next big blonde star to come out of Warner Bros. Ten years later she was turning $5 tricks in parked cars on Sunset Boulevard. Nobody in Hollywood fell faster or harder, and almost none of it happened quietly. There was a fistfight that put a movie star in a coma, a romance that got her frozen out of the industry entirely, and years later, a gas station attendant

For most of his life, Scotty Bowers was nobody in particular: a gas station attendant, then a bartender, a man who mowed lawns and did odd jobs around Los Angeles for decades. In 2012, at 88 years old, he published a memoir claiming that behind that ordinary front, he'd spent nearly 40 years secretly arranging sex, gay, straight and everything between, for some of the biggest names in Hollywood's golden age. The claims were explosive, largely unverifiable, and impossible to i

On 12 February 1979, an unknown 20-year-old dancer walked into a New York photography studio to earn a few dollars posing for an evening class. She gave her name as Madonna Ciccone. Six years later, the resulting photographs would spark a bidding war between two of America's biggest magazines, sell millions of extra copies on newsstands, and become one of the more unusual footnotes in the career of the woman who'd go on to be one of the best selling music artists of all time.

In the early 1950s, a model named Marguerite Hamrick posed for a series of photographs headed for one of America's nudist magazines, and before anyone even loaded the camera, she had to shave. It wasn't a style choice. Federal rules at the time simply wouldn't let a nudist magazine print pubic hair, and showing it risked getting the entire issue pulled from the mail, the printer investigated and the publisher hauled into federal court. It sounds like a small, almost silly det

On the night of December 3rd, 1926, the best-selling crime novelist in the world went missing from her own house. No note, no witnesses, no body. Just an abandoned car hanging off the edge of a chalk pit and a country that spent the next eleven days losing its mind trying to figure out what happened to her. The strange part isn't just that Agatha Christie disappeared. It's that nearly a century later, nobody, including her own family, has ever landed on an answer everyone agr

On 25 March 1931, a white teenager walking across the top of a freight car in northern Alabama stepped on the hand of a Black teenager named Haywood Patterson, who was hanging on to the side of the same train. A fight broke out. By the time it ended, a posse of armed men had stopped the train at a small station called Paint Rock, pulled nine young Black men off it, tied them together with plow line, and driven them to a jail in a town called Scottsboro. Two young white women

Huddie Ledbetter spent a combined fifteen or so years behind bars for a killing and a stabbing, and somewhere in between those two prison terms he became one of the most influential musicians America has ever produced. He wrote or preserved songs that would later define skiffle, shape the Beatles, and get covered by everyone from Nirvana to Led Zeppelin, and he did it while being marketed for years by the white folklorist who discovered him as, in his own words, a convict fir

In 1922, a newspaper columnist wrote that only two people in America could bring every reporter in New York down to the docks just to watch them leave the country. One was the sitting President. The other was a twenty-year-old Ziegfeld Follies dancer named Imogene Bubbles Wilson. Twenty-six years later, she was found dead in a three-room bungalow apartment, ninety pounds, with a child's poem and a handwritten note lying beside her that read simply, if this were only true. She

Lee Harvey Oswald never stood trial for killing President Kennedy. Jack Ruby shot him dead in a Dallas police basement two days after the assassination, and the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone was delivered without ever being tested in front of a jury. In July 1986, a British TV production company decided to fix that, twenty-three years late, in a courtroom built on a London soundstage. On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald flew a real Dallas jury, a real federal

In November 1934, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler sat down in front of a congressional committee and calmly explained that a group of wealthy businessmen had spent the previous year trying to recruit him to lead a private army of half a million veterans, march on Washington, and turn President Franklin Roosevelt into a puppet figurehead. Congress investigated. Its final report concluded there was no question the plot had been discussed and planned, and might

Shortly before midnight on 15 August 1953, an Iranian colonel named Nematollah Nassiri climbed into a car in Tehran carrying a piece of paper that was supposed to end a war fought entirely with money, radio broadcasts and rented crowds. The paper was a royal decree, signed by the Shah, dismissing Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Nassiri never got to deliver it. Mossadegh's people were waiting for him, and by morning he was under arrest rather than the man doing the arrestin

Los Angeles County's Department of Children and Family Services oversees roughly six hundred children with the most severe medical needs in its entire system. When one of those children is expected to die soon and needs somewhere to spend their final weeks or months, staff there say there's only one name they think to call. For more than three decades, Mohamed Bzeek has been the only foster parent in the county willing to take children other homes won't. He's cared for more t

Most retellings of Elvis Presley's funeral stop at the hearse pulling out of Graceland's gates on 18 August 1977. That's usually where the story ends: eighty thousand mourners lining Elvis Presley Boulevard, a white suit, a Cadillac procession, a nation stopped in its tracks. What most of them leave out is that Elvis didn't stay buried where he was buried. Nine days after the funeral, three men tried to steal his body out of its tomb, and the break-in that followed changed wh

Werner Herzog has spent six decades making films about people who chase impossible goals in places that don't want them there: a man dragging a steamship over a mountain, conquistadors floating to their deaths on a raft in the Amazon, scientists holed up at the bottom of the world. Long before any of that, he was living the same story himself. Between finishing school and shooting his first real film, Herzog followed a girlfriend to a slum in Manchester, tried to walk into th

For 57 years, a woman audiences knew as Mabel Stark walked into steel cages packed with tigers, wrestled her favourite among them to the ground in front of paying crowds, and survived at least 18 separate maulings along the way. She's usually remembered as the first woman to make a career out of training tigers, in an era when most circuses wouldn't let a woman near the cats at all. Her real name wasn't even Mabel Stark. A Rough Start in Kentucky She was born Mary Ann Haynie

On August 24, 1847, a parcel went out from Keighley railway station in Yorkshire, bound for a publisher's office in London. Inside was a handwritten manuscript running to hundreds of pages, sent by a writer using a name that wasn't really hers, from a family address that wasn't disclosed, on the back of a novel that had already been rejected more times than anyone was keeping count of. Six weeks later it was a bestseller. The writer was Charlotte Brontë, the book was Jane Eyr

A Kansas farm girl from a strict Catholic family ran off to join a traveling carnival in 1916, taught herself to ride a motorcycle sideways around a vertical wooden wall at full throttle, and spent the next couple of decades billed as the world's foremost woman motorcycle stunt rider. That part of Lillian La France's story shows up on plenty of vintage photo blogs. What most of them leave out is what happened to her memory decades later, when an experimental filmmaker tracked

For 25 years, Herb Ritts built his entire career on physical perfection. He photographed the most idealized bodies in the world, supermodels glistening in black and white, Madonna at her most sculpted, an unknown actor named Richard Gere looking like a god at a gas station, and sold that vision of flawless health to magazines, movie studios and advertising agencies across the planet. The whole time, for well over a decade of it, he was quietly living with HIV, a fact he hid f

Before it had emperors, movie stars and one of Weimar Berlin's most scandalous dancers in front of its lens, the Atelier d'Ora was just one woman's stubborn bet on herself. Dora Kallmus opened it in Vienna in 1907, at a time when formal photography training simply wasn't available to women, and built it into the most fashionable portrait studio in the city with the help of a technician named Arthur Benda who eventually got his own name on the door. For twenty years the studio

Most people who've heard of Radclyffe Hall know exactly one fact about her: she wrote The Well of Loneliness, and the British government banned it for being obscene. That trial is real, and it mattered. But it was actually the second time in Hall's life that a court was asked to decide whether she was, in the words used both times, "a grossly immoral woman." The first case came eight years earlier, grew out of her secret hobby investigating psychics, and has been almost entir

Ross McWhirter spent his career counting things. He and his identical twin brother Norris built the Guinness Book of Records out of a talent for tracking down the fastest, the tallest, the heaviest and the most, and it made both of them minor celebrities, regulars on the BBC quiz show Record Breakers where kids wrote in with dares for them to settle. Then, in the autumn of 1975, Ross put a price on the heads of the IRA unit bombing London and was shot dead outside his own fro