Every list of the sexiest moments in movie history starts the same way. Ursula Andress walks out of the Caribbean Sea in a white bikini in Dr. No and cinema is never quite the same again. It's such a famous image that it's easy to assume it tells you everything about how she felt about her own body. It doesn't. The real story, the one about what she actually said and did about nudity for the next sixty years, is a lot stranger and a lot more interesting than one costume. A Ch

On the morning of 26 August 2015, WDBJ7 reporter Alison Parker was doing exactly what she did most mornings, standing outside a lakeside tourist spot in Virginia, interviewing a local chamber of commerce official for a routine early segment. Twenty four years old, engaged to be married, two years into the job she'd wanted since school. Viewers watching their local news that morning saw her shot dead on live television by a man who used to work alongside her. Quick Answers Who

In the mid 1970s, a young Dolly Parton did something that made almost no financial sense at the time. Elvis Presley, the biggest star in music, wanted to record one of her songs. All she had to do was hand over half the publishing rights, standard practice for anyone who wanted "the King" to sing their material. Dolly said no. She cried about it the same night, by her own account, certain she'd just turned down the biggest break of her career. Two decades later, that stubborn

Anne Lister kept a diary for 25 years, and by the time she died in 1840 it ran to roughly five million words across 26 volumes, dwarfing even Samuel Pepys' famous journal by a factor of four. Most of it reads like any other 19th-century gentrywoman's record: the weather, her coal business, calls paid and received. About a sixth of it isn't like that at all. Woven through the ordinary entries is a private code of her own invention, and inside that code is one of the most detai

Everyone knows her as the Unsinkable Molly Brown. She never called herself that, and neither did anyone who actually knew her. During her lifetime she went by Maggie, or Margaret, or Mrs J.J. Brown. The name Molly was invented by a writer a year after she died, and she never lived to hear it. It's a small detail, but it says a lot about how much of what people think they know about Margaret Brown is legend layered over a genuinely remarkable real life, one that included runni

Candy Darling died at 29, broke and largely uninsured, having spent most of her adult life unable to walk into certain bars without risking arrest for the dress she was wearing. She also spent those same years being photographed by Richard Avedon, cast by Tennessee Williams and mourned, when the end came, by Andy Warhol crying for the only time anyone ever saw. Two of Lou Reed's most enduring songs trace back to her specifically, and most people who know one have never heard

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