Jenny and Rosie Dolly were identical twins from Budapest who got so famous in the 1920s that a British department store magnate spent millions trying to keep them happy, a heavyweight boxing champion refused to pick a favorite between them, and a Spanish king reportedly carried on a three year flirtation with one of them. They danced their way from a cramped New York walk-up to chateaus in France, treated the casino at Deauville like a second stage, and packed in enough wealth, scandal and heartbreak for a dozen lifetimes. Then it all came apart, in a car crash outside Bordeaux and a length of rope in a Hollywood apartment. Most of what actually happened never made it into the sanitized 1945 movie version of their lives. Two Girls Named Yansci and Roszika Jenny and Rosie were born Janka and Roszika Deutsch in Budapest on October 25, 1892, to a photographer father and a mother who had once danced herself. Money was tight enough that the family eventually gave up on Hungary altogether, and in 1905 the girls and their mother sailed for New York while their father stayed behind. They had a younger brother, Ede, who later Americanized his name to Edward and built his own career as a stage and screen choreographer, a fact that tends to get lost next to his sisters' fame. The twins' only formal training was a few years of ballet lessons their mother scraped together the money for, and their mother sewed their earliest costumes herself. They made their professional debut in Boston around age thirteen, and by 1909 they were dancing at Keith's Union Square in New York under a new stage name. The story goes that a friend watching them rehearse said they were as cute as little dolls, and Jenny and Rosie Deutsch became Jenny and Rosie Dolly for good. Ziegfeld's "Cute" Discovery Florenz Ziegfeld booked the sisters for the 1911 Follies at $350 a week, reportedly telling them flatly, you can't do much but you're cute. It wasn't much of a compliment, but it worked. Ziegfeld built an entire visual identity around their looks rather than their voices, dressing them in elaborate costumes that leaned hard into an exotic, Asiatic-inspired fantasy, jeweled headdresses, finger cymbals and all, built around their dark hair, wide-set eyes and matching faces. Their signature number, a tightly synchronized routine built on the idea of two bodies moving as one, became the act every other twin duo on the circuit tried and failed to copy. Their singing was mediocre by most accounts. It didn't matter. Nobody bought a ticket to hear the Dolly Sisters sing. Married, Separated, Reunited The sisters' personal lives ran on a strange, synchronized clock almost as tight as their dance routine. Rosie married the composer Jean Schwartz in 1913, best known for writing the hit song Chinatown, My Chinatown. Jenny followed in 1914, marrying the vaudeville dancer Harry Fox, who claimed credit for inventing the fox trot. Before the marriages, they'd actually shared stages with their future husbands professionally too, Jenny appearing in 1913's Honeymoon Express alongside Fox and Rosie taking the role of Chin Chin in 1914's Hello Broadway. Both sisters spent 1915 and 1916 trying solo careers alongside their husbands, and both found out fast that neither act worked without the other one standing next to her. They reunited for Ziegfeld's 1916 Midnight Frolic and rebuilt their audience from there, starring together in the 1918 Broadway show Oh, Look! alongside Fox, a modest hit that ran only 68 performances but produced the song I'm Always Chasing Rainbows, which far outlived the show itself. That same stretch of years also gave them their only joint screen credit, the 1918 silent film The Million Dollar Dollies, its title a fairly blunt acknowledgment of what they'd become and its production notable for 48 custom costumes designed by Lucile, the British couturier better known today as one of the most famous survivors of the Titanic. Jenny divorced Fox in 1920. Rosie and Schwartz separated the following year. Both marriages, like the solo careers, quietly gave way to the twin act that actually made money. Twin Acts Were Big Business The Dollys weren't the only set of twins vaudeville audiences were paying to see in this era, just by far the most famous and the best paid. A very different pair, Violet and Daisy Hilton, were building their own following around the same years, and their story shows how much luck and leverage actually separated the Dollys from real exploitation. Born conjoined in England in 1908, the Hilton twins were sold as infants and displayed for profit long before they were old enough to have any say in it, and it took a 1931 court case, with help from Harry Houdini, to finally free them from their guardian's control. The Dollys had their mother steering every costume choice and career decision from the wings, and they signed over plenty of autonomy to managers and lovers along the way, but they were never literally owned by anyone. That difference ended up mattering enormously for how each pair's story turned out. Conquering London, Then Paris The sisters crossed the Atlantic in 1920 and quickly became fixtures of London society, starring in the West End shows Jigsaw that year and League of Notions the next, and adopting the fashionable close-cropped bob years before it became a general craze. It was during the Jigsaw run, in March 1921, that they were first introduced to Edward, Prince of Wales, at a private party, a connection that reportedly turned into something more serious with Jenny by 1924. From London they moved on to Paris, which is where the story really turns into a Jazz Age fable. In 1922 they signed a six week engagement at the Royal Hotel in Deauville, the seaside resort where wealthy Europe went every August to lose money elegantly, and the booking turned into years of return engagements there and in Cannes. They'd been introduced to gambling years earlier by Diamond Jim Brady, the New York diamond merchant and world class spender who'd doted on them during their Broadway years, but Europe is where it became a genuine habit. After Saturday night shows at the Casino de Paris, they'd reportedly take a private, champagne stocked train out to Deauville to play chemin de fer and baccarat through the night, then ride back in time for Sunday's matinee. The newspaper Paris Soir reported on August 4, 1924, that the sisters had lost three hundred thousand francs at baccarat in a single stretch at Deauville, a loss they more or less shrugged off against the roughly one million francs they were pulling in performing at the Palace Theatre that same season. The Millionaire Who Went Broke Loving Jenny No man in the Dollys' orbit spent more, or lost more, than Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American-born founder of London's Selfridges department store and the man behind the phrase the customer is always right. Selfridge, nearly seventy by the mid-1920s, became fixated on Jenny after seeing the sisters perform, reportedly proposing marriage to her more than once and being turned down every time. Harry Selfridge What he did instead was bankroll her life almost entirely. He bought and furnished a Paris home for her, covered her gambling losses at the casino while letting her keep any winnings, and showered her with gifts that ranged from the merely extravagant to the genuinely strange, including four-carat blue diamonds set by Cartier into tortoise shell cases and, on at least one documented occasion, ice cream flown over from London. After one particularly brutal losing streak at the tables, he reportedly sent Jenny a fresh set of diamonds and pearls with a note reading, I hope these will make up for your losses, darling girls. Estimates of how much Selfridge actually spent on the sisters over the years range wildly, anywhere from roughly four million to as much as twenty million dollars depending on the source, but the direction of the story isn't in dispute. He eventually lost control of the store that bore his name and died in relative poverty and debt, a business empire quietly dismantled in large part by his devotion to a woman who never did marry him. Kings, Boxers and a Very Public Tug of War Selfridge was far from the only man competing for the Dollys' attention. The Prince of Wales reportedly visited Deauville with the sisters in 1924 and won 80,000 francs at the tables during the trip. King Alfonso XIII of Spain kept up what one contemporary French magazine described as a three year flirtation with one of the twins, a romance discreet enough that it nearly had to be managed around a royal embassy event to avoid what the same report delicately called a family incident. William Randolph Hearst was said to be devoted to them, the Belgian financier Jacques Wittouck was another regular fixture in their circle, and Diamond Jim Brady, who never asked for anything more than their company, showered them with diamonds and once bought them a Rolls-Royce outright. Not every suitor got anywhere. One duke reportedly offered Rosie an emerald and diamond necklace and got turned down flat, for a reason that had nothing to do with money: she didn't care for men with red hair. When the heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey was asked which sister he preferred, he reportedly ducked the question by saying, "I ain't no Solomon", a nod to the biblical king famous for settling impossible disputes.. The twins were famously playful about their identical faces too. According to one story making the rounds among people who knew them, if Rosie found herself stuck at dinner with a suitor she didn't like, she'd order and eat a full meal, then slip away and let Jenny take her seat and order dinner all over again, running the unwitting date's patience and wallet down until he gave up and left. Suing the Moulin Rouge, and Winning For two women constantly portrayed as frivolous, the Dollys could be sharp-elbowed when it counted. In 1926 they sued the Moulin Rouge music hall over what they said was a breach of contract, after management billed the French star Mistinguett above them on the marquee. Rather than finish out the run, the sisters walked out of rehearsals and signed on with the rival Casino de Paris instead, prompting the Moulin Rouge to countersue for matching damages. The Dollys won outright, collecting roughly half a million francs in damages and costs, and rather than pocket it, they donated the entire settlement to the Actors' Benevolent Fund, a charity supporting performers who'd fallen on hard times. It's a detail that rarely makes it into the shorthand version of their story, which tends to flatten them into pure Jazz Age excess and nothing else. One Car, Two Very Different Endings The act itself quietly wound down before the tragedy did. Their last documented performance together was a charity gala at the Cannes Casino Ambassadeurs on February 7, 1928, which raised about $5,200 for local causes, a low key finish for two women who'd spent the better part of two decades as the most photographed act in Europe. The good years ran out for good once the 1930s arrived. On March 2, 1933, Jenny was in a car that crashed near Bordeaux while she was traveling with the French aviator Max Constant. The injuries were severe, including a fractured skull, and by some accounts her stomach was forced up into her chest cavity, and she went through as many as fifteen reconstructive operations trying to repair her face and body. Selfridge covered much of the medical expense, but the romance between them didn't survive the accident, and Jenny sold off pieces of a jewelry collection once described as the largest in private hands in the world just to keep going. It didn't fix what the crash had taken from her. I may look the same but I am just a broken shell, she reportedly said afterward. In 1935 she married a lawyer, Bernard Vinissky, and the couple adopted two Hungarian orphan girls, Kalri and Manzi. The marriage didn't last, and by 1941 Jenny was living quietly and mostly alone. On June 1, 1941, at 48 years old, she hanged herself from a curtain rod in her Hollywood apartment. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, where Rosie would eventually join her decades later. Rosie's path after the twin act ended looked almost nothing like her sister's. She married the Canadian tobacco heir Mortimer Davis in 1927, a marriage that ended in divorce in February 1931 with a settlement reportedly worth around $2 million, then married the Chicago department store heir Irving Netcher in a civil ceremony on March 17, 1932, performed by New York mayor James J. Walker. She arrived for that wedding with twelve trunks in tow, reportedly packed with forty hats, fifty pairs of shoes and fifteen evening gowns, old habits dying hard even in a comparatively modest second act. She spent much of her later life doing charity work for Hungarian children and largely out of the public eye. In 1962, at 70 years old, she attempted suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills and survived, telling an interviewer around that time how sharply fame had evaporated: "I found out that America has changed. I'm in New York, old friends you call up when you arrive, they've forgotten you. They don't call back". She lived another eight years, dying on February 1, 1970, at 77, following a hip injury and a bout of flu, having outlasted her twin by nearly three decades and, by her own account, watched almost everyone who once fought over her forget she existed. They forget very easily, she said. Hollywood's Sanitized Version In 1945, Twentieth Century-Fox released The Dolly Sisters, a Technicolor musical starring Betty Grable as Jenny and June Haver as Rosie, directed by Irving Cummings and produced by George Jessel. It was a genuine hit and picked up an Academy Award nomination for the song I Can't Begin to Tell You. It was also, by the studio's own later admission, heavily fictionalized. Grable and Haver weren't identical twins, an odd choice for a film literally titled after a pair of famous identical twins, and the contract for the film's rights reportedly barred the studio outright from depicting either Jenny's 1941 suicide or the couple's adoption of two orphaned children, both facts judged too dark for a wartime audience looking for glamour and spectacle. The real Harry Fox and Jean Schwartz both filed lawsuits over how the film portrayed them. Rosie, who was still alive to see it released, reportedly received around $52,500 for the rights to her and her sister's story, and was left privately unimpressed by just how much of the real story, including the hard parts her sister actually lived through, had been quietly written out. A Legacy in Porcelain and Bronze Long after vaudeville itself faded, the Dollys kept turning up in unexpected places. Art Deco sculptors of the 1920s and 30s, including Demetre Chiparus, Josef Lorenzl's contemporaries at Goldscheider, and the Royal Dux porcelain works, modeled bronze and ceramic figures directly on the sisters' matching silhouettes, meaning their image is still sitting in glass cabinets and auction house catalogs today, long after almost everyone who actually saw them dance is gone. The reckless, glittering, self-destructive version of the 1920s the Dollys represented on the French Riviera had a darker mirror playing out at the same time across the border in Weimar Berlin, where Anita Berber was dancing herself toward an early grave through nightly performances fueled by cocaine and morphine. Both scenes burned out around the same time, for strikingly similar reasons. Fame built entirely on being looked at rarely comes with an exit plan, and for one Dolly sister, it ran out in a Hollywood apartment on a summer afternoon in 1941. For the other, it just quietly stopped answering the phone. Sources 1. The Dolly Sisters: An Introduction, Jazz Age Club 2. The Dolly Sisters: Paris, Jazz Age Club 3. The Dolly Sisters: Tragedy, Jazz Age Club 4. Double Trouble, Bonhams Magazine 5. The Dolly Sisters, Into the Limelight 6. Five Fun Facts About the Dolly Sisters, Classic Movie Hub 7. Life's a Party, With the Dolly Sisters in Deauville, Normandy Then and Now 8. The Dolly Sisters, Sheryl's Art Deco Emporium 9. Jenny Dolly and the Tragic Dolly Sisters, Classic Actresses 10. Stars of Vaudeville 67: The Dolly Sisters, Travalanche 11. The Dolly Sisters (1945), AFI Catalog of Feature Films 12. The Dolly Sisters: A Research Blog, dollysisters.wordpress.com

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 of the most unlikely spies of the Second World War. Then, when it was all over, Britain barely thanked her for it. From Wigan to the Berlin Opera House Margery Myers Booth was born in Wigan, usually dated to 1905, though the town's own local history archives put it more precisely at January 25, 1906. Her father ran the family's brush manufacturing business, and the family later moved to Southport, where an eight year old Margery made her first stage appearance in an operetta in 1914. She started formal voice training at 14, studied under Aileen D'Orme in London, and won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, picking up the Mercer Scholarship two years running along with the Liza Lehman prize. It was at Guildhall that she met Egon Strohm, a German student studying English, a friendship that would later turn into something more complicated. In 1928, still in her early twenties, Margery auditioned successfully for the Berlin State Opera and made her debut in La Tosca. By 1930 she was landing lead roles, including in the new opera Der Fremde Erde, an unusually rare honor for a foreign singer on a German stage. She told a reporter from the Lancashire Evening Post in 1932 that she loved Germany so much she wouldn't want to leave it. She had no idea yet how true that would turn out to be, or what it would cost her. Roses From Hitler In 1933, Margery performed in Wagner's Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival, carrying the Holy Grail across the stage in one of opera's most reverent roles. Adolf Hitler was in the audience, and afterward he came to her dressing room. She later described him to a reporter as perfectly charming, someone who wanted to talk about art and music, and he sent her 200 red roses tied with a swastika sash. Wagner's Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, Germany A few months later she was invited to dinner with Hitler and Crown Prince Wilhelm, telling the Lancashire Daily Post she'd received a beautiful bouquet and met people who were all very charming. It reads almost absurdly cheerful in hindsight, a British singer from a Lancashire mill town being courted by the men who'd go on to start a world war, but it put her exactly where she'd eventually need to be. She wasn't the only performer of her era who'd learn to use fame and access like this as cover. Josephine Baker was doing something similar for French intelligence around the same period, hiding messages in sheet music and smuggling documents in her clothing while touring as one of the most famous entertainers in Europe. Margery and Egon on their wedding day in 1936 with Terry her pet dog A Secret Wedding, and a Husband Broadcasting for the Nazis Margery and Egon Strohm married in a small, secret ceremony at All Saints Church in Southport on August 26, 1936, with only a handful of family and friends present, before returning together to Berlin. Egon, who came from a prominent German brewing family and held a doctorate in law and economics, ended up working for Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, the Nazi state broadcaster, under the on-air alias Scrutator, eventually rising to section head over a team of thirty. He was briefly dismissed in 1942 over an irregularity involving a trip to Budapest before being reinstated as chief commentator. The marriage itself didn't hold up nearly as well as his career. Friends later said it was an unhappy one, with Egon spending through Margery's money, and the two separated during the war before eventually divorcing. She kept performing at the Berlin Opera and at Bayreuth right through it, giving her final performance, Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, on August 31, 1944, shortly before Goebbels ordered German opera houses closed for good. The Knicker Spy Margery's espionage work centered on her relationship with John Henry Owen Brown, a British soldier captured near Dunkirk in May 1940 and sent to a POW camp in Upper Silesia. Brown volunteered for a series of work details specifically to put himself in a position to gather intelligence, eventually landing at Genshagen, a so called holiday camp the Germans had set up outside Berlin partly to identify potential collaborators for the British Free Corps. BQMS John Brown, Royal Artillery at Stalag VIII-B , Lamsdorf When Margery came to sing for the prisoners there, twice a month for roughly two hours a time, Brown recognized her immediately as the famous singer from his own part of England. He later wrote that he was moved the first time he heard her sing, though he had no idea yet how much he'd end up needing to trust her. She sang patriotic songs like Land of Hope and Glory to homesick prisoners, technically against German restrictions, and arranged for selected men from the camp to attend her State Opera performances followed by dinner at her flat, using those evenings to gather and pass along information. Brown fed her documents, including the names of British soldiers who'd defected to the German side, which she hid in her underclothing to carry between meetings, earning her the wartime nickname the Knicker Spy. Away from the camp she hid a Jewish woman in her Berlin flat for nine months and helped other people evade capture. At one point, with Gestapo surveillance tightening after the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, she buried a set of Brown's documents in the grounds of Cecilienhof, the Potsdam palace belonging to her Bayreuth acquaintance Crown Prince Wilhelm. Margery Booth at Genshagen POW Camp The Tiger Tank Secret The boldest story to come out of this period involves the Tiger tank, Germany's newest and most feared armored vehicle. As the story has been told since, at one of Hitler's birthday celebrations General Alfred Jodl presented the tank's technical specifications to the assembled guests, and Margery, present in the room, memorized the details by turning them into a piece of music in her head. She later passed the information to Brown, who encoded it and sent it on to London. Whether or not that specific version holds up to the letter, the wider intelligence effort around German tank capabilities in this period was real, and Winston Churchill did personally push for a captured Tiger to be brought back for British engineers to study. That tank, now known as Tiger 131, was seized in Tunisia on April 21, 1943, by the 48th Royal Tank Regiment and still sits today in the Tank Museum at Bovington, one of the only working Tiger tanks left in the world. Three Days With the Gestapo Margery's luck ran out, briefly, in January 1945. She was arrested at her own flat and held for three days of interrogation at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. They couldn't prove she'd been collaborating with British intelligence and eventually released her, but she wasn't free of them. For the rest of the war she was required to report back to Gestapo headquarters twice a month for two hour interrogation sessions, each one carrying the threat of deportation to a concentration camp if they found anything. She'd been warned plainly that being caught meant certain death. She kept singing anyway. Margery Booth at Genshagen POW Camp Fleeing Berlin The end came in the chaos of the Allied bombing campaign. On March 18, 1945, roughly 1,300 American bombers hit Berlin in a single raid, and by the end of the month Margery had fled the city with her fifteen year old maid, Augusta, who'd stayed loyally by her side. The two women made their way nearly 145 miles south to Pössneck in Thuringia, where they managed to reach advancing American forces on April 13. Margery was moved to a displaced persons camp in Naila, Bavaria, and stayed there for seven months while the paperwork and questioning around her identity sorted itself out. The stress of it all turned her hair white and left her, by her own account, barely able to write a coherent sentence. She had no idea whether Brown had survived to confirm any of what she'd done, and without him there was no one left who could vouch for her. Testifying Against Lord Haw-Haw Once she was back in Britain, Margery was called to give evidence in a string of high profile treason trials against Englishmen who'd broadcast Nazi propaganda or otherwise collaborated in Berlin, men she'd personally crossed paths with during her years there. She testified against William Joyce, the notorious Lord Haw-Haw, along with John Amery and Walter Purdy. Joyce was hanged on January 3, 1946, at 39 years old. Amery had already been hanged the previous December. Purdy's death sentence was commuted to life in prison, and he was eventually released on parole in 1954. Margery had spent years risking her life to help defeat men exactly like these, and now she was standing in an Old Bailey courtroom helping finish the job in person. Mistaken for the Enemy What happened next is the part of Margery's story that makes the whole thing sting. Back in London, looking for work as a singer again, she found producers assumed the opposite of the truth, that a woman who'd spent the war performing in Berlin and dining with Nazi officials must have been a collaborator rather than a spy. Nobody offered her work. She eventually left for New York to try to rebuild her career there, and on arrival was referred to a doctor who diagnosed her with terminal cancer. Margery Booth at the height of her fame She died in New York in 1952, in relative obscurity, without the acknowledgment or honours her actual wartime record would have justified. Calls for a posthumous honour have surfaced periodically since, including around a planned biopic that at one point attached Stephen Fry and Udo Kier to the cast. IMDb and a handful of film databases list that project under the year 2014, and one aggregator even shows a UK release date, but there's no actual review, premiere writeup or box office record anywhere to back that up. A 2019 press release for the same production was still describing it as pre-production and looking to start filming within six months, so despite what the listings suggest, the film appears to still be unmade. The woman Hitler once sent 200 roses spent her final days largely unrecognized by the country she'd risked her life for. Sources 1. Margery Booth – The Operatic Spy, Wigan Building Preservation Trust 2. British Opera Singer Turned Spy for Hitler, History News Network 3. The British Opera Singer and the Tiger Tank, Military Adviser for Film and TV 4. Margery Booth, World Biographical Encyclopedia 5. Stephen Fry to Play Top Nazi in Biopic of Wartime Opera Singer Margery Booth, Screen Daily 6. Margery Booth, Military Wiki 7. Margery Booth: Opera Singer and Spy, PeoplePill

Christopher Reeve remembered the moment clearly enough to write it down decades later. The first person he met at Juilliard was, in his words, a short, stocky, long haired fellow from Marin County wearing tie dyed shirts with tracksuit bottoms who talked a mile a minute. That fellow was Robin Williams, and the two of them stayed close for the next 31 years, through fame, through a horse riding accident that changed one of their lives completely, and right up until Reeve's death in 2004. It's a genuinely good story on its own, so it doesn't need the parts that got exaggerated along the way. The Only Two Students in the Room Williams and Reeve met in 1973 as the only two students admitted into Juilliard's Advanced Program that year, a small, intensive track run by the director John Houseman. On paper they had almost nothing in common. Williams had come from Claremont Men's College and the College of Marin on the West Coast, while Reeve arrived fresh off a degree at Cornell, already comfortable in the Ivy League world Williams found alien. Williams put it simply years later: "we were totally opposite, him coming from a junior college, me from the hard core Ivy League." They ended up as roommates anyway, and the contrast turned out to be the whole point. Reeve was disciplined and serious about the craft. Williams was, by every account, incapable of sitting still or staying quiet, doing accents and bits between scenes until instructor Michael Kahn started taking him seriously after watching him perform in The Night of the Iguana. Feeding a Friend Who Had No Money Money was tight for Williams in those years, tight enough that he later credited Reeve directly with keeping him fed. "Him being such a great friend to me at Juilliard", Williams said in a Reddit AMA decades afterward, "literally feeding me because I don't think I had money for food". Reeve, for his part, remembered a friendship that went past jokes fairly early on. Robin was able to share his real feelings with me, he wrote in his 1998 memoir Still Me, and I always did the same with him. This has remained true for twenty five years. It's an easy detail to skip past, but it's the actual foundation of everything that came after, two very different, mostly broke drama students who genuinely looked out for each other before either of them had any reason to think the other one would ever be famous. Swooping In on Fridays Their friendship stayed just as intense once both men had actually made it. Glenn Close, who starred alongside Williams in the 1982 film The World According to Garp, described watching the two of them together during that shoot as something close to a spectacle. On Friday evenings, she said, Reeve would literally swoop in, piloting his own plane, scoop Robin up, and away they'd fly for the weekend, before Reeve swooped back in on Sunday afternoon to deliver Williams back, a little worse for wear. Reeve had been a licensed pilot since his twenties, and Close called the bond between the two men the stuff of legend, a life giving force sustaining them both, decades before either man needed the other to survive something far more serious. May 27, 1995 Reeve was thrown from his horse, a competition jumper named Eastern Express, during an equestrian event in Culpeper, Virginia on May 27, 1995. The fall fractured his top two vertebrae and severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down and permanently dependent on a ventilator to breathe. In the days after, by Reeve's own account, he reached a point of genuinely wondering whether his life was still worth living, a feeling his wife Dana pulled him back from with a single line: "you're still you, and I love you." Then, separately, a surgeon walked into his hospital room, scrubbed in and talking in a thick Russian accent, announcing he was there to perform a procedure. It was Williams, in a blue hat and yellow gown, reprising a bit he'd once played in the film Nine Months, and for a moment Reeve had no idea it was even him. "I laughed for the first time since the accident", Reeve wrote, "and I knew then, if I could laugh, I could live". Christopher's son Will Reeve later told the same story from the family's side of it, saying no one was better at showing up with love and the right dose of humor than Robin Williams, and that Robin and his wife Marsha gave the family support they could never fully repay. What Williams Actually Did, and What He Didn't A persistent rumor after the accident claimed Williams had personally promised to cover all of Reeve's medical bills. Both men denied it publicly, and it isn't true. What Williams actually did was smaller in scale but real. He bought Reeve a specially adapted van and a generator to keep his ventilator and other equipment running during power outages, became an honorary board member of the Christopher Reeve Foundation, and gave Reeve his first public appearance since the accident by introducing him on stage at the 1996 Academy Awards to a standing ovation. None of that needed a myth to be moving. It's also a decent reminder that Hollywood's press has always had a habit of flattening complicated relationships between men into one tidy headline, whether that's inflating a real friendship into an exaggerated financial rescue, or, in a very different case decades earlier, spending years trying to figure out exactly what to call the quiet, decades-long bond between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, who lived together on and off for over a decade and never much cared what anyone made of it. When he was honoured by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2005, the Golden Globes's lifetime achievement award, Williams dedicated it to Reeve Nine More Years, Lived Differently Reeve didn't spend the nine years he had left simply attempting to recover. He founded what became the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation to push funding toward spinal cord injury and stem cell research, testified before Congress, and kept working in the industry he'd trained for at Juilliard, earning an Emmy for narrating the documentary Without Pity and a Golden Globe nomination for a 1998 television remake of Rear Window, shot almost entirely from a wheelchair. Williams stayed involved through all of it, showing up at fundraisers and staying on as an honorary board member rather than treating the friendship as something that belonged only to their twenties. Brothers Until the End Reeve died on October 10, 2004, from cardiac arrest brought on by a systemic infection, at 52. His wife Dana died less than two years later, in March 2006, from lung cancer, leaving the couple's young son Will without either parent. Williams and his wife Marsha stepped in for the boy in the years that followed, a commitment Will later said never wavered. They had a friendship that someone should make a movie about, Will said of his father and Williams, and Robin was dad's best friend, and you show up for your friends. By every account the two men had genuinely thought of each other as brothers since their twenties, not as a media shorthand invented after the fact. Eighty Seven Bicycles Williams died by suicide on August 11, 2014, at 63, after a long private struggle with depression that was compounded, doctors later determined, by an undiagnosed form of Lewy body dementia. Glenn Close, reflecting years later for the 2024 documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, put it bluntly: "I always felt that if Chris was still around, Robin would still be alive." It's not something that can be proven either way, but it's a measure of how much weight people who knew both men gave to that friendship, that losing Reeve in 2004 is still talked about as a piece of what Williams lost too. Williams was an avid cyclist, and after his death his children found themselves with a large personal collection of his bikes. They donated 87 of them to charities and foundations focused on disability, including organizations carrying the Reeve name, a quiet final gesture that tied the two families back together one more time. Reeve had once written that a friendship like theirs, tested by fame and then by tragedy, had remained true for twenty five years. By the time both men were gone, it had held for over four decades in total, longer than either of them probably expected it to when they were two broke kids sharing a room at Juilliard. Sources 1. Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve's Devoted Friendship Began as Juilliard Roommates, Biography 2. Robin Williams Helped Christopher Reeve After His Accident in the Sweetest Ways, Collider 3. Robin Williams Was First Friend at Hospital After Christopher Reeve Was Paralyzed, Says Will Reeve, AOL/People 4. The Truth About Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve's Time as Roommates, The List 5. Actor Robin Williams Paid Actor Christopher Reeve's Medical Bills: Fiction, Truth or Fiction 6. Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve: A Lifelong Friendship, Yahoo Entertainment 7. 30 Years Ago, Christopher Reeve Survived His Tragic Horseback Riding Accident, Remind Magazine 8. Glenn Close on Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve's Deaths, Closer Weekly

Tempest Storm spent almost 60 years on stage, but her offstage life reads like a highlight reel of mid-century America's most dangerous men. She danced her way from a Georgia cotton farm to the top of the Vegas Strip, and along the way she wound up in the arms of a president-to-be, the King of Rock and Roll, and one of Los Angeles' most feared gangsters. She outlived pretty much all of them, and she never stopped talking about it. A Hard Start in Dodge County, Georgia She was born Annie Blanche Banks on February 29, 1928, a leap day baby, on a sharecropping farm in Eastman, Georgia, right in the middle of the Depression. Her family was poor even by the standards of rural Georgia, and by her own account her childhood held real horror in it. In later interviews she described being assaulted as a teenager by a group of men, one of them a local policeman, an experience she said never fully left her. It's the kind of detail that makes her later reinvention feel less like glamour and more like an escape hatch. She tried to build that escape early and clumsily. At 14 she married a boy to get out from under her parents' roof, and the marriage was annulled within a day. At 15 she married again, this time to a shoe salesman, and stuck it out for about six months before she left. By 20 she'd already been married twice and was on a bus to Hollywood with nothing lined up, which puts her in the same category of young women whose entertainment careers started because home simply wasn't safe. Evelyn Nesbit, the Gilded Age scandal magnet who was passed between powerful men before she was out of her teens, is the closest comparison from an earlier era: talent discovered young, then handed straight into an industry built to use it. From Cocktail Waitress to the Highest-Paid Stripper in America Once she got to Los Angeles, Storm worked as a cocktail waitress and, according to her own telling, briefly lived near a young Marilyn Monroe, who was still an unknown actress at the time. Someone at the Follies Theater talked her into performing rather than serving drinks, and by 1950 she'd picked a stage name. Supposedly she was choosing between "Tempest Storm" and "Sunny Day," and went with the one that sounded like trouble. She made it her legal name in 1957. The trouble paid off. By 1956 she was billed as the highest-paid burlesque performer in the country, pulling in roughly $100,000 a year on a long-term contract, an enormous sum for the era. Lloyd's of London insured her chest for a reported $1 million, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were fond of calling it "the best props in Hollywood." She toured constantly across the US, the UK and Canada, appeared in men's magazines, and starred in the 1955 cult film Teaserama alongside Bettie Page. She first played Las Vegas in 1951 and became a fixture there from 1957 onward, headlining the Dunes Hotel through the late 1980s. The Gangster: Mickey Cohen Vegas and LA in the 1950s ran on money that didn't always come from casinos, and Storm's circle reflected that. She dated Mickey Cohen, the former boxer turned Los Angeles crime boss who'd built a rackets empire out of jewelry stores, ice cream trucks and loan sharking after arriving in the city with backing from Chicago's Outfit. Cohen wasn't shy about his taste for burlesque queens either. He was also linked to strippers Candy Barr and a performer known as Beverly Hills, and he employed Johnny Stompanato as a bodyguard, the same Stompanato who was later stabbed to death by actress Lana Turner's teenage daughter in 1958. Cohen paid for Stompanato's funeral. Storm and Cohen's relationship played out in the late 1950s and never turned into anything permanent, but she never disowned it either. Decades later, when Sean Penn was cast as Cohen in the 2013 film Gangster Squad, an 84-year-old Storm gave her verdict to reporters, saying Penn had "a good amount of street experience" for the part and that there'd been "a nice guy" underneath Cohen's tough exterior, whatever damage he was doing to the city at the same time. Elvis at the Dunes In October 1957, Elvis Presley caught one of Storm's shows at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 22, she was 29, and after the performance a photographer suggested they pose together for a publicity shot. That photo was the whole story, or close to it. Newspapers later claimed the two had been inseparable for five days straight, but Storm's own account was more modest: they spent one night together, dining, dancing and talking, and that was it. She remembered him fondly, calling him "a real Southern gentleman, very polite," with, in her words, the most beautiful eyes she'd ever seen. Elvis's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was reportedly furious about the publicity photo, worried that being linked to a burlesque dancer would hurt his client's clean image. Elvis apparently agreed enough to quietly let the whole thing drop. Storm wrote about the encounter in her 1987 memoir, The Lady Is a Vamp, and again in a 2016 documentary about her life. "I Told Him He'd Be President": JFK Storm's other headline-grabbing claim was a relationship with John F. Kennedy, which she said began in 1957 when he was still a senator from Massachusetts, years before the White House. "I met him in 1957 when he was a senator," she told an interviewer decades later. "It was a great relationship." She also liked to say she'd told him early on that he'd end up president one day, a prediction that, if she really made it, turned out to be right within three years. There's no independent paper trail confirming the relationship the way there is for some of her other connections, but she repeated the story consistently for the rest of her life, right up through her final interviews before she died. The Rest of the Little Black Book Elvis and JFK were the two names Storm got asked about most, but her circle went well beyond them. She was pursued by Sammy Davis Jr. in the 1950s, had an affair with singer Vic Damone, and was close with Nat King Cole in a friendship that, by her account, crossed into romance at points. Louis Armstrong was reportedly a suitor before her Vegas years took off, Mickey Rooney and his wife were regulars in her audience, and she was later linked to director Russ Meyer, who cast her in some of his films. It's a guest list that reads like the greenroom of American entertainment at its mid-century peak, and Storm walked through most of it on her own terms. The Marriage That Cost Her Everything Storm's most consequential relationship wasn't with a gangster or a star. It was her fourth marriage, to singer Herb Jeffries in 1959. Jeffries had sung with Duke Ellington's orchestra and was known as Hollywood's first singing Black cowboy, having starred in a run of all-Black western films in the 1930s. He and Storm were an interracial couple at a time when that alone was treated as scandal, and the backlash was immediate and expensive. MGM Studios, which had reportedly been circling her for film roles, walked away. Her manager cut ties. Friends and family disapproved. Storm always said the marriage cost her the mainstream film career she might otherwise have had. The couple had a daughter, Patricia Ann, in 1963. Storm tried bringing the baby on tour with her, but after receiving threatening phone calls aimed at the child, she stopped, choosing to leave Patricia at home while she kept working the circuit. That distance never really closed. She and Jeffries divorced in 1967, and Storm spent decades afterward trying and largely failing to rebuild a relationship with her daughter, something she later called the greatest sadness of her life. Jeffries, for his part, lived to 100 and reportedly reunited with Storm on camera for her 2016 documentary before he died in 2014. An Almost 60-Year Career Storm kept working long after most of her contemporaries had left the stage. She officially wound down regular touring in 1987 at 59, but kept doing one-off shows for years afterward, including a 1999 performance at San Francisco's O'Farrell Theatre that was significant enough for the city's mayor, Willie Brown, to declare a "Tempest Storm Day." In 1995 she posed for Leg Show magazine alongside a young Dita Von Teese, effectively handing the torch to the next generation of the art form. She gave what's often cited as her last performance in June 2010, at a Burlesque Hall of Fame reunion show, at 82 years old. Musician Jack White interviewed her for a Third Man Records project in 2011, and in 2016 a feature documentary simply titled Tempest Storm traced her career and the fractures in her family life. Final Years and Death Storm settled in Las Vegas for good and lived there until her death on April 20, 2021, at 93. She'd had hip surgery and was dealing with dementia in her final stretch. Her longtime business manager, Harvey Robbins, said she "passed peacefully at her home with loved ones by her side." There was initial talk of raising funds to bury her at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles, next to fellow burlesque performers Bettie Page and Dixie Evans, but that plan didn't stick. She was ultimately laid to rest on May 12, 2021, back in Eastman, Georgia, the same small town she'd married her way out of at 14. It's about as clean a full circle as a life like hers could manage. Sources 1. Who's Who in Burly-Q: Tempest Storm — Burlesque Hall of Fame 2. Tempest Storm Dies: Burlesque Icon And Star Of Russ Meyer Films Was 93 — Deadline 3. Such a Night: Elvis Presley and Tempest Storm — Elvis Presley Biography 4. Inside Tempest Storm's Love Life Including Affairs With JFK & Elvis — The US Sun 5. Tempest Storm, Iconic Burlesque Performer Who Dated Elvis and 'Had an Affair With JFK', Dies Aged 93 — The US Sun 6. July 29, 1976: Mickey Cohen Dies in Los Angeles — The Mob Museum 7. Burlesque Legend Tempest Storm Dies in Las Vegas at 93 — News 3 Las Vegas 8. The Complicated Life of Burlesque Queen Tempest Storm — She Does the City 9. Real-Life 'Gangster Squad' — Old Timey Stripper Girlfriend Loves Sean Penn — TMZ 10. Tempest Storm (1928-2021) — Find a Grave Memorial 11. Burlesque Icon Tempest Storm Dies at 93 in Las Vegas Home — KLAS 8 News Now 12. Remembering Tempest Storm, Burlesque Legend and Former Portlander — Portland Monthly 13. Remembering Tempest Storm — Desperate Living

Diane Arbus spent her career pointing a camera at the people most of America pretended not to notice, carnival performers, nudists, people living in institutions, strangers on the street who just looked a little bit off. She got closer to her subjects than almost anyone had before her, and it cost her something. She died by suicide at 48, a year before she became the first photographer ever given a solo spot at the Venice Biennale. Her career lasted barely 15 years, but it's hard to find a documentary photographer working today who isn't still answering to her in some way. Growing Up Rich and Lonely on Fifth Avenue She was born Diane Nemerov on March 14, 1923, into money. Her family owned Russek's, a high-end fur and fashion department store on Fifth Avenue, and her mother reportedly called her "Dee-Ann" as a kid. The wealth didn't translate into warmth. Diane described her childhood as comfortable but distant, and that sense of being on the outside of her own life, watching rather than belonging, shows up again and again in how people describe her later work. She had a complicated pairing in her older brother, Howard Nemerov, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1978 and served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1988 to 1990. Howard wasn't always kind about his sister's work while she was alive, once describing her photographs as "spectacular, shocking, dramatic" in a way that read more like discomfort than praise. He came around later. At her memorial in 1971, he spoke about how close they'd been as children and how much he regretted losing touch with her in her final years. Married at 18, and a Decade Shooting Fashion Diane fell for Allan Arbus when she was just 14 and he was 19, working the counter at her family's store. Her parents weren't thrilled, but she married him anyway the day she turned 18, in 1941. Allan is the one who taught her photography, and the couple turned their apartment bathroom into a darkroom before they'd even built a real career out of it. For most of the 1940s and 50s, Diane and Allan worked as a team shooting fashion spreads for Vogue, Glamour and Russek's own ad campaigns, with Allan usually behind the camera and Diane directing the shoot. They were good enough at it that a picture from their partnership ended up in Edward Steichen's landmark 1955 exhibition The Family of Man at MoMA. But Diane found the work hollow. Fashion photography was about hiding flaws and selling a fantasy, and she wanted the opposite of that. Ditching Fashion to Photograph "What Is Evil" Around 1956, Diane walked away from the commercial partnership and started studying under photographer Lisette Model at the New School. Model's advice to her, by Diane's own account, was to go photograph "what is evil," which her daughter Doon later said really meant whatever felt forbidden, the subjects everyone else was too polite or too scared to point a camera at. She took that seriously. Arbus started wandering New York looking for circus performers, nudist colonies, people living on the margins in flophouses and morgues, calling her growing collection of subjects her "butterfly collection." Her real break came in July 1960, when Esquire published a spread of her early street photography that readers had genuinely never seen the like of before. She didn't photograph people to flatter them. She photographed them to spend time with them, sometimes returning to the same subject over days or weeks until they stopped performing for the camera. The Twins Photo That Became a Horror Movie In 1962 Arbus switched from a 35mm camera to a boxier 2¼ format, which forced a slower, more deliberate way of working and produced the sharp, square, unnervingly direct images she's now known for. Her most famous shot from this period came in 1967, when she photographed seven-year-old identical twins named Cathleen and Colleen at a small Christmas party in Roselle, New Jersey, standing side by side in matching corduroy dresses and white headbands. Arbus said what drew her in wasn't how alike they looked but what she called "differentness in identicalness," the small details that made two supposedly identical people not identical at all. Stanley Kubrick clearly saw something else in it. The image is the direct visual template for the twin ghosts in 1980's The Shining, right down to the matching dresses and the flat, straight-on composition, though Kubrick pushed it toward horror in a way Arbus never intended. It's a strange kind of afterlife for a photograph, showing up as the visual DNA of one of cinema's most famous scares. It's also a funny echo of Kubrick's own start behind a lens as a teenage photographer roaming the same city Arbus did, before he ever picked up a film camera, and both of them are proof that New York in that era was crawling with people who'd end up defining how the rest of the century saw itself. New Documents, and a Grenade in a Child's Hands By the mid 1960s, Arbus had real institutional backing. She won Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966, and in 1967 the Museum of Modern Art put 32 of her photographs into a show called New Documents alongside Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, curated by John Szarkowski. It's now considered one of the exhibitions that dragged street photography out of photojournalism and into the fine art world for good. Her subjects didn't always love the results. Norman Mailer, who she photographed sitting with his legs spread in a deliberately unflattering pose that ran in the New York Times, reportedly complained that "giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby." It stung as an insult and worked as a compliment at the same time, and it's one of the more quoted lines about her to this day. In May 1971, one of her photographs, a boy clutching a toy grenade in Central Park, became the first photograph ever to run on the cover of Artforum, a milestone for a medium that critics still weren't fully convinced counted as art. The Last Project She Never Finished Between 1969 and 1971, Arbus spent time at institutions for people with intellectual disabilities, returning again and again for picnics, dances and Halloween parties, building the kind of trust with residents that took months rather than minutes. The resulting pictures, known simply as Untitled, weren't published until 1995, put together by her daughter Doon nearly a quarter century after Arbus's death. Critic Susan Sontag later accused Arbus of turning vulnerable people into spectacle, arguing her wealth and privilege made the whole project voyeuristic. Others have pushed back on that reading, pointing out that Arbus shot her disabled subjects in exactly the same head-on, unposed style she used for everyone else, refusing to treat them as visually different from her wealthy Manhattan neighbors. It's the same instinct that runs through her whole body of work, treating the people society pushed to the edges with the same camera, the same distance and the same patience she'd give anyone else. Photographer Anders Petersen would build a career on a similar approach a few years later in Hamburg, spending years inside a single bar to earn the trust of the regulars rather than shooting them as outsiders passing through. Marriage, Depression and a Death at Westbeth Diane and Allan separated in 1959 and divorced a decade later, after Allan moved to California to chase an acting career that eventually landed him a long-running role on M*A*S*H. Diane, meanwhile, had been struggling with depression for years, something she described in her own words as "chemical," like her energy was simply leaking out of her. She was also involved for years with Marvin Israel, the art director at Harper's Bazaar, in a relationship that ran alongside and then past the end of her marriage. On July 26, 1971, Arbus took barbiturates and cut her wrists in the bathtub of her apartment, Unit A on the ninth floor of the Westbeth artists' housing complex in the West Village, a converted former Bell Labs building. It was Marvin Israel who found her body, two days after her death. She was 48. A Legacy Built After She Was Gone Most of what made Diane Arbus famous happened after she died. MoMA staged a major retrospective of her work in 1972 that drew enormous crowds and split critics right down the middle, some calling it deeply humane and others calling it exploitative, an argument that still hasn't fully settled. That same year she became the first photographer to have a solo presentation at the Venice Biennale, a first for the medium as a whole and not just for her. The monograph her estate published through Aperture was considered such a financial risk that the publisher nearly passed on it. It ended up selling close to 400,000 copies and had to go back to print within weeks. Her market has only grown since. In May 2024, her 1967 photograph of Cathleen and Colleen, the same image that inspired The Shining, sold at Christie's for $1.2 million, a new auction record for her work and a staggering jump from the $65,000 it fetched at auction back in 2000. A major traveling retrospective called Diane Arbus: Revelations toured internationally through the mid 2000s, introducing her to a generation that had grown up watching photographers who'd learned everything from her without necessarily knowing it. Both of her daughters stayed in the arts too: Doon Arbus became a writer and has spent decades managing her mother's estate and archive, while Amy Arbus built her own career as a photographer. Diane Arbus never got to see any of it. She barely got a decade and a half behind the camera, and it was enough to change what a photograph was allowed to be. Sources 1. A Fresh Look at Diane Arbus — Smithsonian Magazine 2. Diane Arbus, Howard Nemerov and Sibling Rivalry — The Literate Lens 3. Unit A, Ninth Floor — Geist 4. 5 Facts About Diane Arbus, Fifty Years Later — Aperture 5. New Documents — Museum of Modern Art 6. Revisiting Diane Arbus's Final and Most Controversial Series — Artsy 7. Diane Arbus's Auction Record Jumps 18% as Work Sells for $1.2m — Heni 8. Diane Arbus's Iconic Twins Photo: What Is the Story Behind It? — Public Delivery 9. Shooting From the Hip — ARTnews

Pit Brow Lasses from an unknown colliery in Wigan, Lancashire. 1887. In 1887, twenty three women traveled from the coalfields of Lancashire and Cumberland to London and petitioned the Home Secretary directly. They weren't asking for better pay or shorter hours. They were asking Parliament to stop trying to take their jobs away from them, jobs that involved hauling coal tubs and sorting rock in trousers, jobs that respectable Victorian society had decided were degrading them. The women disagreed, and for a few tense months in 1887, it genuinely wasn't clear who was going to win. Female Collier from Rose Bridge Pits, Wigan, 1869 A Disaster That Rewrote the Rules Women and children had worked underground in British coal mines for generations before anyone in Westminster paid much attention to it. That changed after the Huskar Pit disaster of July 4, 1838, when a violent thunderstorm at the Silkstone colliery in South Yorkshire knocked out the boiler fires powering the mine's lifting engine. About 40 children were still underground when it happened, so they tried to climb out through a steep drift instead, a fifteen meter passage cut through a fault in the coal seam. A door partway up gave way under the pressure of the storm water, and the flood swept the children off their feet and into a dead end tunnel where 26 of them drowned. The youngest was Sarah Newton, who was eight. The oldest, Hannah Taylor, was seventeen. Fourteen children survived only because they found a pocket of trapped air to breathe until they were pulled out. The inquest, held at the local pub, returned a verdict of accidental death, and the children were buried three days later. It was the ages of the dead as much as the number that made the disaster impossible to ignore. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the reformer later known as Lord Shaftesbury, used cases like Huskar to push through the 1842 Children's Employment Commission report, which sent investigators including Samuel Scriven down mine after mine to document what child and female labor underground actually looked like. Parliament responded with the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, banning all women and girls, along with boys under ten, from working below ground anywhere in Britain. Banned Underground, Not Banned From Work The 1842 Act didn't put women out of work. It just moved them to the surface. Across the coalfields of Lancashire, Cumberland, Wales, Cornwall, Devon, County Durham and the Midlands, women went to work above ground screening coal, sorting out stone and rubbish, and hauling loaded tubs to the weighing station. Depending on where you were, they were called pit brow lasses, tip girls or pit bank women, and nowhere employed more of them than the Wigan coalfield, which had the single largest concentration of female surface workers in the country. By 1886 there were 4,131 women working colliery surfaces in Britain according to official mining inspectorate figures, about 4.5 percent of the entire surface workforce, and some historians have put the true nationwide total for surface coal work as high as 11,000 once every regional trade is counted. In some pit villages the numbers were startling. The Pemberton district near Wigan counted 164 pit brow workers in 1886, and 138 of them were single women or widows supporting themselves. Pit brow girl, Shevington, 1867 The Job, and the Trousers That Scandalized Victorian Britain The work itself was heavy and unglamorous. Women stood at moving belts breaking up large lumps of coal with hammers, picked stone and slate out of the passing coal by hand, and pushed loaded tubs weighing hundreds of pounds along tramways, often on ten hour shifts. North of Haydock up through Wigan, many of the women wore trousers under their skirts, sometimes rolling the skirts up entirely while they worked, since long fabric caught in moving machinery could get someone killed. Victorian commentators were less concerned with the safety logic and more scandalized by the sight of women in trousers at all, treating it as evidence of what one campaigner called "unsexing," language that turns up again and again in the parliamentary debates over these women's jobs. The Manchester Guardian went further, sniffing that trousers were "the article of clothing which women ought only to wear in a figure of speech," and some pit owners actually restricted visitors from the areas where women worked, ostensibly to protect the visitors' own eyes and moral sensibilities rather than the women's safety. It's the same reflex that showed up whenever nineteenth and early twentieth century women stepped into physical roles men considered theirs, whether that was hauling coal tubs or, decades later, outshooting the men on a college rifle team. A 21st-century depiction of the Pit Brow Lasses by David Venables. Twice the Work for Half the Pay For all the outrage about their trousers, nobody in Parliament seemed especially bothered by what the pit brow lasses were actually paid. In 1886, women doing surface work earned between one shilling and one shilling sixpence a day. Men doing the identical job on the same pit brow earned two shillings sixpence, more than double. By 1887, after years of the same complaints, the maximum a woman could expect had crept up to two shillings a day, still nowhere close to parity. Campaigners for the women pointed out the obvious irony at the time: reformers were demanding these jobs be taken away from women on the grounds of protecting their dignity, while the same women were being paid roughly half of what a man got for doing the identical shift. The Campaign to Ban Them Outright Trying to legislate pit brow women out of work wasn't a new idea by the 1880s, it had first come up in Parliament back in 1872, but it turned serious in 1883 when a Cheshire coal contractor named Ellis Lever began actively campaigning for a total ban on female surface labor. Liberal MPs tried to slip an exclusion clause into mining legislation in 1886. Conservatives tried again in 1887. The exclusion campaign didn't split neatly along class lines either. Some Lancashire trade unionists, including the Wigan miner William Pickard, backed the ban, worried that cheap female labor was undercutting men's wages, while others, like William Kay of the St Helens Miners Association, argued publicly in the women's defense. Even reform minded feminists like Josephine Butler warned that banning the work outright, rather than fixing the pay and conditions, would just push these women into worse options. What made the real difference in 1887 was that the women organized their own defense too. The Vicar of Pemberton, Harry Mitchell, and Margaret Park, the Mayoress of Wigan, helped lead a public campaign on the women's behalf, drawing crowds of 200 or more to meetings in pit villages like Bryn. On May 17, 1887, twenty three pit brow women, twenty from Lancashire and three from Cumberland, traveled to London and personally petitioned the Home Secretary to leave their jobs alone. On June 23, a parliamentary test vote went the women's way and blocked the exclusion clause. When the Coal Mines Regulation Act finally passed that September, women over twelve were still allowed to work the pit brow. The only concession the reformers won was a rule banning women from moving coal wagons themselves. Muscular Maids and the Man Who Documented Them Much of what's known today about the pit brow lasses' lives comes from Arthur Munby, a barrister and diarist who spent roughly thirty years photographing and interviewing working women in physically demanding jobs, pit brow lasses among them. Munby, somewhat patronizingly by modern standards, referred to them as muscular maids, but his research undercut the reformers' entire argument. He found that former pit women in their sixties were often in noticeably better health than women who'd spent their lives in domestic service, and he noted that mothers in mining villages actively encouraged their daughters to apply for pit brow jobs rather than steer them away from the work. Munby's photographs of the women, in their trousers, aprons and headscarves, also fed a strange secondary industry. Studio photographers sold pictures of pit brow lasses to commercial travelers as curiosities, sometimes blown up to life size and hand colored, and the women themselves were often paid a shilling to sit for them. Some of the cards were even double sided, showing the same woman in her work clothes on one side and dressed up in her Sunday best on the other, as if her respectability needed proving twice over. It fed a middle class audience fascinated and faintly titillated by working women who looked nothing like the domestic ideal, not unlike the way the press covered working class women who ended up in Edwardian police mugshots a generation later, treating poverty and hard labor as a curiosity to be looked at rather than a life to be understood. Jean Millard's Pit Brow The best surviving firsthand account of the work comes from Jean Millard, born in 1934 in the Wigan township of Ince, who worked the pit brow at Moss Pit from 1949 to 1955 alongside her sister Lillian. Their father William had put in more than fifty years at the same pit, was wounded at the Somme in 1916, and later lost a finger to a conveyor belt accident on the very brow his daughters would go on to work. Jean started at 7am and finished at 2:30pm, five days a week, using spades, picks and even sledgehammers to break up and screen the coal, dressed in turbans, aprons, thick stockings and clogs. She earned one pound, five shillings and eight pence a week after union dues, and handed every bit of it straight to her mother. She remembered the belts stopping only once in her six years there, for a two minute silence on February 6, 1952, the day King George VI died. When mechanical screens finally replaced the pit brow lasses at Moss Pit in 1955, Jean wasn't impressed by the upgrade. It wasn't as good as the girls, she said afterward, and there was more dirt than coal going into the wagons. Looking back on the work itself, her verdict was simple: I really enjoyed it. Two World Wars and a Slow Fade Far from dying out, the pit brow workforce actually grew in the decades after the 1887 fight. There were 4,206 women working colliery surfaces in 1890, 4,808 by 1900, and 6,168 by 1909, and when the First World War pulled men out of the pits and into uniform, coal companies leaned on women even harder to keep production moving. The Wigan Coal Company put women back on jobs picking waste off conveyor belts and hauling tubs that had briefly been men's work, and thousands more did the same across Lancashire and Cumberland. Women stayed on through the Second World War too, still confined to the surface by the same 1842 rule, but just as essential to keeping British coal flowing while men were away fighting. “Pit girl brow workers at work”, Wigan Junction Colliery, Abram, near Wigan, Lancashire, 1900 The Last Pit Brow Lass What finally ended the job wasn't Parliament, it was the shovel being replaced by the machine. Nationalization of the coal industry in 1946 brought a wave of mechanization, and gravity washing plants and automated screens started doing in minutes what had taken women entire shifts to do by hand. The numbers collapsed almost overnight by historical standards. From several thousand pit brow women nationally in the early 1940s, the workforce had shrunk to just 956 by 1953, two thirds of them still in Lancashire. The job disappeared region by region after that: the last pit brow lasses in Lancashire left the industry in 1966, Scotland's Fife coalfield followed in 1967, and Cumberland held out until 1972, exactly 130 years after the law that was supposed to have pushed women out of coal mining for good. What actually happened instead was that a workforce Victorian society tried repeatedly to legislate out of existence just kept showing up for the next shift, in trousers, for over a century, until the machines made the job obsolete rather than the lawmakers. Sources 1. The Lancashire Pit Brow Lasses, and the Campaign to Remove Women from Surface Labour 1842-87, Wigan Building Preservation Trust 2. Challenging Notions of Womanhood: The Pit Brow Lasses of the Northern Coalfields, Museum Crush 3. Borough Life Winter 2006: Memories of One Pit Brow Lass, Wigan Council 4. The Pit Brow Women of Wigan Coalfield, The History Press 5. Pit Girl Brow Workers at Work, The National Archives 6. Pit Brow Lasses, Wigan Building Preservation Trust 7. The Huskar Pit Disaster, Heritage Silkstone 8. Huskar Pit Disaster, The Penistone Archive 9. The Women Miners in Pants Who Shocked Victorian Britain, Atlas Obscura 10. Women in the Coal Industry, Nottinghamshire Mining Museum

When you think of child stars who defined the early days of Hollywood, one name often rises to the top Jackie Coogan. He was the tousled-haired boy with the mournful eyes who tugged at the heartstrings of millions in The Kid (1921). But his story goes far beyond silent film stardom. It includes international charity work, a tragic car accident, military heroism, a transformative court case that redefined the rights of child actors, and a late-career resurgence as the ghoulish but lovable Uncle Fester on The Addams Family. This is the long, winding journey of Jackie Coogan, a name that left an indelible mark on both cinema and law. Early Life and Vaudeville Beginnings Born John Leslie Coogan on 26 October 1914 in Los Angeles, California, Jackie was practically raised onstage. His parents, John Henry Coogan Jr. and Lillian Rita (née Dolliver), were no strangers to performance. His father was an actor, and by the time Jackie was toddling, he was already appearing in vaudeville sketches and even made a silent appearance (uncredited) in Skinner's Baby (1917). Child star Jackie Coogan with his parents, Lillian Dolliver and Jack Coogan Sr, some time between 1920 and 1922. The turning point came when Charlie Chaplin spotted the young boy performing the shimmy dance onstage at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. Captivated by Coogan’s expressive face and natural mimicry, Chaplin cast him in a small part in A Day’s Pleasure (1919). But it was The Kid (1921) that launched Jackie into superstardom. As the abandoned child adopted by Chaplin’s Tramp, Jackie delivered a performance so affecting that audiences the world over were moved to tears. Chaplin later said Coogan “was a mimic and he was funny,” which made him an ideal screen partner. A Boy at the Centre of a Global Fandom Hollywood had seen stars before, but few child actors had commanded the level of adoration Jackie did in the early 1920s. At just seven years old, he was among the first screen actors to be commercially merchandised. Coogan-themed peanut butter, dolls, records, and even stationery became wildly popular, arguably a precursor to the kind of merchandising empire seen with modern child celebrities. In 1922, he played the title role in Oliver Twist under the direction of Frank Lloyd, further solidifying his reputation as a capable and compelling young actor. Despite his celebrity, Coogan’s education remained a priority. He was privately tutored until he turned ten, after which he attended military academies and preparatory schools. By 1932, he enrolled at Santa Clara University but later transferred to the University of Southern California, aiming to pursue a degree in business or law—though neither path would materialise as planned. Tragedy on the Highway On 4 May 1935, Jackie’s life took a harrowing turn. While returning from a dove hunting trip just over the Mexican border, the vehicle in which he was travelling veered off a mountainous stretch of the San Diego-Imperial Valley Highway. The crash killed four of the five passengers, including Jackie’s father, his best friend Trent Durkin (himself a former co-star), ranch foreman Charles Jones, and actor Robert J. Horner. Jackie, who had been riding in the rumble seat, was thrown clear and survived, albeit with two broken ribs and multiple bruises. The event marked a dark transition from childhood to adulthood, stripping him of both a parent and a sense of youthful invincibility. A Humanitarian Child Star Amid the glamour and personal setbacks, Jackie Coogan’s compassion stood out. In 1924, he embarked on a philanthropic “Children’s Crusade” with Near East Relief, raising more than $1 million (about $14.8 million in today’s terms) to assist children affected by war and poverty across Europe and Asia Minor. His efforts earned him accolades from U.S. and Greek dignitaries and even an audience with Pope Pius XI. A devout Catholic, Coogan maintained ties with the Catholic Motion Picture Guild and the Good Shepherd Parish in Beverly Hills. The Legal Battle That Changed Hollywood: The Coogan Act By the time Jackie turned 21 in 1935, he had earned between $3–4 million from his film work, roughly £55–£74 million today. But when he sought to access his earnings, he discovered a harsh truth: nearly all of it was gone. His mother and stepfather, Arthur Bernstein (who had also been the family’s financial advisor), had spent the fortune on luxuries like furs, jewellery, and cars. When Jackie sued them in 1938, his mother dismissed his claims by stating that he had merely "played" in front of the camera and was a “bad boy.” The case generated national outrage. Eventually, Jackie received only $126,000 after legal fees, but the lawsuit sparked a major reform. In 1939, California enacted the Child Actor’s Bill—commonly called the Coogan Law—which required that 15% of a child actor’s earnings be set aside in a trust. It also introduced stricter regulations around schooling, working hours, and rest time for minors in the entertainment industry. Adult Career: A Return to Screen and Stage Despite the financial betrayal, Coogan never turned his back on acting. In the late 1930s, he appeared in films like College Swing alongside his then-wife, Betty Grable. He later ventured into radio, starring in programmes like Society Girl and Forever Ernest on CBS. During the Second World War, Coogan put his acting on hold and joined the U.S. Army. Leveraging his civilian flight experience, he became a glider pilot in the Army Air Forces. He saw action in India and Burma, including the dangerous mission of flying British troops—the Chindits—behind enemy lines in the Burma Campaign of 1944. Uncle Fester and a Flourishing TV Career Re-Birth In the post-war years, Coogan pivoted to character roles in film and television. He made numerous guest appearances in shows such as Peter Gunn, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Brady Bunch. However, it was his role as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family (1964–1966) that cemented his second wave of fame. The quirky, bug-eyed, lightbulb-in-mouth eccentric became a cult favourite, allowing Coogan to reach a new generation of fans. He reprised the role in the animated series (1973–1975) and the 1977 television special Halloween with the New Addams Family. Personal Life and Family Legacy Jackie Coogan was married four times. His first marriage to Betty Grable was brief, lasting just under two years. He later married Flower Parry, with whom he had his first child, John Anthony Coogan. Subsequent marriages to Ann McCormack and finally Dorothea “Dodie” Hanson followed. Jackie and Dodie remained together until his death, raising four children in total. His grandson, Keith Coogan, followed in his footsteps, launching an acting career in the 1970s and changing his surname in tribute to his grandfather in 1986. Death and Legacy Jackie Coogan died on 1 March 1984, aged 69, following complications from heart and kidney ailments. His funeral was held publicly, fulfilling his wishes, and featured a heartfelt eulogy by John Astin, his Addams Family co-star. He was laid to rest at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—located at 1654 Vine Street—serves as a lasting tribute to a career that spanned nearly seven decades. Jackie Coogan’s life was anything but ordinary. From the golden age of silent cinema to a landmark legal case, from war heroism to cultural reinvention on primetime television, Coogan's journey mirrored the transformation of Hollywood itself. Though his early riches were unjustly taken, the legacy he left behind—both legal and artistic—has benefitted generations of child actors and entertained millions of viewers. He wasn’t just the first child star. He was the one who ensured those who followed had rights, protection, and perhaps a chance to keep the rewards of their talent.

Jackie Coogan made Hollywood's first child star fortune and never got to spend a dime of it himself. Between 1923 and 1936 alone he earned just over three million dollars, with a few million more in property and contracts on top of that, and he'd been told the whole pile would be his once he turned 21. By the time he actually asked for it, his mother told him flatly that none of it had ever been his to begin with. What happened in between, the mansion, the furs, the diamond studded pocket watch, the courtroom fight that followed and the law that came out of it, is a much stranger and more detailed story than the usual one line summary about a kid who got robbed. The Kid Who Built an Empire Charlie Chaplin spotted four year old Jackie Coogan doing the shimmy, a popular dance craze of the era, on the stage of the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles in 1919. What caught Chaplin's eye wasn't really the dancing. It was how naturally the kid could mimic anything put in front of him. Chaplin gave him a small role in A Day's Pleasure that year, then built an entire feature around him in 1921, The Kid, casting Coogan as an abandoned boy that Chaplin's tramp character raises as his own. It made him arguably the first true child star in movie history, and he followed it a year later with the title role in Oliver Twist. His look from The Kid, the pageboy haircut, the oversized overalls, the flat cap, got copied everywhere. Department stores sold the same outfit for other people's kids, and even some of the child performers in Hal Roach's Our Gang shorts borrowed the same haircut trying to catch a bit of his popularity. Coogan wasn't just acting. He became one of the first people ever merchandised like a modern celebrity brand, with his name and face sold on peanut butter jars, stationery, whistles, dolls, records and figurines. By 1936 he'd personally earned $3,012,422 as a performer, and his parents had put roughly another $1.5 million of his money into Los Angeles real estate held in his name. Add it up and he was closing in on $4 million or so, somewhere around $55 million in today's money, and he was told it would be handed over once he turned 21. Day to day, he saw almost none of it. His allowance ran him six dollars and twenty five cents a week, worth about $115 today. Jackie with his parents The Crash That Changed Everything For most of Jackie's childhood, his father, Jack Coogan Sr., kept a fairly tight and careful handle on the money, which is part of why what happened next felt so sudden. That control ended in May 1935, five months before Jackie's twenty first birthday, when the car his father was driving rolled seven times outside San Diego and crashed into a creek. His father and three other people died, including his close friend and fellow child actor Trent Durkin. Jackie survived the crash cushioned by sacks of dead doves the group had shot on a hunting trip that day, and he later said the birds acted like feather pillows and probably saved his life. Not long after the funeral, his mother, Lillian, married the family's financial advisor, Arthur Bernstein. Within about a year, the fortune Jackie's father had spent a childhood protecting was almost entirely gone. Where the Money Went Lillian and Bernstein spent Jackie's earnings on furs, diamonds, expensive cars and property. They lived in what was reportedly the largest private house in Los Angeles at the time, built around one of the first residential swimming pools in Southern California. Bernstein reportedly bought himself a diamond studded pocket watch. None of the spending was slowed down by the fact that none of it was technically in Jackie's name, and none of it came with an accounting he was ever allowed to see. Meanwhile his own life was starting to come apart too. In November 1937, right as the money situation was quietly falling apart behind the scenes, Jackie married actress Betty Grable. It didn't last. The marriage collapsed within about two years, right around the same time his fight with his mother was about to go public. It's All Mine and Arthur's When Jackie finally confronted his mother about the money, she didn't pretend there was anything left to negotiate. In court, under oath, she said it outright: you haven't got a cent, there never has been a cent belonging to you, it's all mine and Arthur's, and so far as we are concerned you will never get a cent. Asked directly on the stand about her legal right to spend her son's earnings however she pleased, she answered just as plainly, saying I believe that is the law. She also called him a bad boy and claimed no promises had ever been made to give him anything. Bernstein backed her up with a legal argument dressed up as sympathy, telling reporters the law was on their side, since lawyers had told them every dollar a child earns before turning 21 legally belongs to the parents. It wasn't entirely made up. At the time, it mostly was the law, which is exactly what made the case worth fighting. The Lawsuit Jackie filed suit against his mother and Bernstein in April 1938. The court appointed a receiver, John E. Biby, to go through the family's finances and figure out what was actually left, and what he found was worse than anyone had said publicly. Of the roughly three million dollars Jackie had earned as a child, only about $250,000 remained. His late father's estate still owed Jackie Coogan Productions $84,948. Lillian's own personal assets, meanwhile, totaled just $39,443, with only $519 dollars sitting in the bank. The case dragged on for almost two years before it finally settled in February 1940. The roughly $252,000 that was left got split in half between Jackie and his mother, putting his official share at about $126,000. Jackie later said what he actually walked away with, after legal fees and cashing in a life insurance policy to cover his own debts, was closer to $35,000, somewhere in the range of $790,000 to $2.8 million today depending which figure you're measuring. Coogan wasn't the first young performer whose money and future ended up in someone else's hands. Evelyn Nesbit had already lived through a version of it a generation earlier, and Audrey Munson, America's first supermodel, saw her own career and finances collapse around the same era, both proof that Coogan's case wasn't some isolated fluke of bad parenting. The Coogan Law The case moved fast through Sacramento once it became public. In 1939, California passed the Child Actor's Bill, generally known as the Coogan Law, giving judges the power to order part of a child performer's earnings into a trust the parents couldn't touch. It had a loophole from the start, the protected trust only covered net income after managers and agents took their cut, and it stayed on the books largely unchanged for sixty one years. In 2000, California finally closed that gap, making it mandatory rather than optional, requiring 15 percent of gross earnings to go into trust, and stating explicitly for the first time that a child actor's earnings belong to the child, not the parent or guardian. Jackie in his army days A War Behind Enemy Lines Jackie had learned to fly before Pearl Harbor, and he enlisted in the Army on March 4, 1941, volunteering for the dangerous work of flying gliders specifically because of that civilian flying background. He trained at glider school in Lubbock, Texas and Twentynine Palms, California, and earned the rank of Flight Officer with the 1st Air Commando Group under Colonel Phil Cochran. He deployed to India in December 1943, and on the night of March 5, 1944, he flew as part of Operation Thursday, the aerial invasion of Burma, piloting a Waco CG-4A glider carrying British troops under General Orde Wingate roughly a hundred miles behind Japanese lines into a jungle clearing the operation had code named Broadway. Beyond flying, he was personally responsible for the unit's tow ropes, the nylon lines that connected each glider to its tow plane, since losing one mid flight could strand an entire glider crew behind enemy lines. He came home in May 1944 and was discharged in December 1945, the same man who'd once had his own money spent without him ever getting a say in it, now flying troops into some of the most dangerous airspace of the war on his own terms. Jackie as Uncle Fester What Happened to Jackie Coogan kept working through all of it, picking up smaller film and television roles once he was back from the war. His personal life took a while longer to settle than his career did. After Betty Grable, he married actress Flower Parry in August 1941, divorced her in June 1943, married Ann McCormack in December 1946, divorced her in 1951, and finally married Dorothea Odetta Hanson, known as Dodie, in April 1952. That one stuck, and the two of them stayed together for more than thirty years, right up until his death. At one particularly broke stretch along the way, Charlie Chaplin, the man who'd discovered him as a boy, sent him $1,000. Coogan finally found a second wave of real fame in 1964 playing Uncle Fester on The Addams Family, a role that introduced him to a whole new generation who had no idea he'd once been the most famous child in the world. He kept working steadily through the 1960s and 70s, turning up on Perry Mason, The Brady Bunch, I Dream of Jeannie, The Partridge Family, Hawaii Five-O and McMillan and Wife before retiring in the mid 1970s. He died of cardiac arrest on March 1, 1984, in Santa Monica, at 69, after a run of strokes and heart and kidney problems. Jackie Coogan never got his fortune back. What he got instead was a law with his own name attached to it, one that's still the reason every child actor's contract in California sets aside a piece of their earnings before their parents can touch a cent. Sources 1. Cinema: Kid, Time (1938 archive) 2. The Very Sad Story of Jackie Coogan, American Heritage 3. Jackie Coogan, Hollywood Walk of Fame 4. Flight Officer Jackie Coogan, National Museum of the United States Air Force 5. This Actor Is Responsible For Child Actors Getting Control of Their Money, Collider 6. Imagine Earning $70 Million As A Child Actor, Then Finding Out The Money Had Been Completely Squandered, Celebrity Net Worth 7. The Tragic Real-Life Story of Jackie Coogan, The Vintage News 8. Jackie Coogan and the Missing $4 Million Dollars, Down the Road Less Traveled 9. Whatever Happened To Jackie Coogan From The Addams Family, Do You Remember 10. The Tragic, Trailblazing Life of Jackie Coogan, Yahoo Lifestyle 11. More Than Pocket Money: A History of Child Actor Laws, Library of Congress 12. A Trip Down Memory Lane: Jackie Coogan, The Original Child Star, Great Entertainers Archives

On the night of August 8, 1969, five people were murdered at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, and the story that came out of it, Charles Manson, a race war he called Helter Skelter, a group of young followers acting on his orders, has been repeated so many times it feels like a closed case. Books got written, a prosecutor became famous, everyone involved either died in prison or spent decades fighting parole boards. But pull on two threads still hanging off that story and it stops looking finished. One is a string of unsolved Los Angeles murders the LAPD itself says might be connected. The other is that the man who built the entire prosecution around Helter Skelter reportedly didn't fully believe it himself. The Night at Cielo Drive Just after midnight on August 9, Tex Watson climbed a telephone pole outside the gate at 10050 Cielo Drive and cut the line before he, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian moved in on Manson's orders to kill everyone inside. Eighteen year old Steven Parent was already on his way out. He'd been visiting William Garretson, the property's caretaker, who lived in a separate guest house on the grounds, and was pulling out in his car when Watson stepped up to the window with a revolver and told him to halt. He shot Parent four times before the others had even reached the main house, leaving blood on the steering wheel and making Parent the first person killed that night. Watson slipped in through a window and let Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door. This is a very graphic collection of images from the crime scene. Wojciech Frykowski was asleep on the living room couch when Watson shot him with a .22, and when the gun jammed, Watson beat him with it until the grip snapped off in his hand. Frykowski fought back hard enough that he ended up on the front porch in pools of blood, shot twice and stabbed fifty one times by the time it was over. Down the hall, Abigail Folger had been reading in her bedroom. She broke free at one point and ran for the pool area, leaving a blood trail through the hallway and across the lawn before Krenwinkel caught her and stabbed her twenty eight times. Jay Sebring was with Tate in her bedroom when Atkins came in with a knife and marched them both into the living room. When Sebring objected to how Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, was being tied up, Watson shot him, and he was later found with seven wounds total between the gunshot and the knife. Watson looped a rope around Tate's neck and threw the other end over a ceiling beam, tying her to Sebring's body as she begged for her unborn child's life. She was stabbed sixteen times. Atkins wrote the word pig on the front door afterward, using Tate's blood. It wasn't the first time that summer the family had written a message in someone's blood. About a month earlier, Bobby Beausoleil had tortured and killed a Manson associate named Gary Hinman over a soured drug deal, with Manson reportedly slashing Hinman's face with a sword partway through the ordeal, and the group scrawled political piggy alongside a panther paw print on Hinman's wall in his own blood, an attempt to pin the murder on the Black Panthers. Pig on Tate's door wasn't improvised. It was a method they'd already tried once. The next night, Watson, Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in their own home across town, writing death to pigs and rise on the walls and a misspelled healter skelter on the refrigerator, all in Leno LaBianca's blood. The crime scene photos from that weekend are still some of the most reproduced images in American true crime, part of the same wider stash of vintage LAPD crime scene photography that documents Los Angeles's darker history decade by decade. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca The Motive Everyone Repeats The version most people know comes from Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who tried the case and then turned it into the bestselling book Helter Skelter. His argument was that Manson believed an apocalyptic race war was coming, that he wanted to speed it along by making the murders look like they'd been committed by Black militants, and that the Tate house was chosen partly out of resentment toward Terry Melcher, a record producer and Doris Day's son who used to live there and had turned down Manson's music. It's a tidy explanation, and it's also one Bugliosi apparently had doubts about himself. Journalist Tom O'Neill spent twenty years investigating the case after Bugliosi told him something off the record, during what was supposed to be a routine interview, that O'Neill has said sent him down a rabbit hole he never fully climbed out of. Separately, a research blog that's tracked the case for years cites Bugliosi telling documentarian Bill Curtis flatly that he didn't believe Manson bought into all aspects of Helter Skelter either. Even the Melcher connection is murkier than the trial made it sound. Police later concluded Manson actually knew Melcher had moved out of Cielo Drive seven months before the murders, which undercuts the idea that the house was targeted by mistake or by a straightforward grudge. It wouldn't be the last time an LA celebrity case left the public more unsettled than satisfied, Claudine Longet's manslaughter trial seven years later did something similar. Reet Jurvetson The Body That Waited 46 Years for a Name On November 16, 1969, just three months after the Tate murders, a birdwatcher found a young woman's body in the brush off Mulholland Drive, a few miles from the Cielo Drive house. She'd been stabbed roughly 150 times and had no identification on her, so the LAPD logged her as Jane Doe No. 59 and the case went cold. She stayed nameless for 46 years. In 2015, a friend of the victim's family spotted her photo on the missing persons database NamUs and recognized her. DNA testing confirmed she was Reet Jurvetson, a 19 year old from Montreal who'd moved to Los Angeles that same year. A postcard she'd sent home sixteen days before her death described nice weather and an apartment in Hollywood. Given the timing and the location, detectives went as far as questioning Manson himself about it at Corcoran State Prison. By the LAPD's own account, the conversation didn't produce anything fruitful, and the case remains open, unsolved and not officially attributed to the Manson family or anyone else. A Separate LAPD Case File, and a Set of Tapes Nobody's Heard The Jurvetson case isn't the only loose end. Years before she was ever identified, LAPD Commander Andy Smith announced in October 2012 that detectives were investigating twelve separate unsolved murders around Los Angeles with possible ties to the Manson family, cases that had happened near known Manson hangouts and looked similar to the Tate and LaBianca killings. Part of what detectives wanted was a set of tapes: hours of recorded conversations between Tex Watson and his defense attorney, Bill Boyd, made not long after Watson's 1969 arrest. Watson fought to keep them sealed, citing attorney-client privilege, but his own side had already undercut that argument decades earlier. Back in 1976, Watson let Boyd sell copies of the tapes to a chaplain who used them to co-write a book with him, for $49,000 that went toward his legal bills. In March 2013, a federal judge ruled that sale had waived the privilege, Watson missed his window to appeal, and the LAPD finally got its hands on the recordings. More than a decade later, the tapes still haven't been made public. Officials have cited an ongoing investigation exemption under California law, though no case tied to the tapes has ever surfaced, and it's unclear whether Jurvetson's case is even among the twelve. The Search That Never Quite Ended Sharon Tate's sister, Debra Tate, has spent decades arguing the official body count is too low. She's pointed to Barker Ranch, the remote Death Valley property where Manson and his followers hid out after the murders, as a possible burial site for other victims, and said publicly that we are just scraping the surface. In 2008, a forensic team that included researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory searched the ranch with a cadaver dog and ground penetrating radar, working off decades old rumors, including a reported jailhouse claim from Susan Atkins about three more people killed and left in the desert. The dig turned up animal bones, a shell casing and a rat's nest, nothing human. The county sheriff at the time, Bill Lutze, called the lack of remains a relief rather than a disappointment. Debra Tate hasn't dropped the subject since. A 2025 documentary revisited the Jurvetson case directly, and Tate has continued pushing for the Watson tapes to be released, still hoping there's something in them nobody's heard yet. More than fifty years later, the Manson case gets treated like one of the tidiest true crime stories there is, a motive, a trial, a book, a movie. But the prosecutor who wrote that book reportedly wasn't fully convinced by his own theory, a body found three months after Tate's murder has never been officially connected to anyone, and a dozen more cases sit open in an LAPD file somewhere, waiting on tapes nobody's been allowed to hear. Closed cases don't usually come with this many loose threads still hanging off them. Sources 1. Charles Manson biography, Biography.com 2. Five Down on Cielo Drive: The Road to the Tate Murders, Murder Inside 3. Tate Murders Photo Archive, CieloDrive.com 4. Manson Family Murders: The Terrifying Story in Pictures, CBS News 5. The Story of the Murder of Gary Hinman, According to Convicted Killer Bobby Beausoleil, Oxygen 6. LaBianca Murders Photo Archive, CieloDrive.com 7. How Music Producer Terry Melcher Was Tied to Charles Manson, Oxygen 8. Forget What You Think You Know About the Manson Murders, NPR 9. Some Brief Thoughts About Motive, Helter Skelter, Bugliosi and RFK, Tate-LaBianca Homicide Research Blog 10. 1969 Jane Doe No. 59 Murder Victim Identified After 46 Years, LAPD Online 11. Was She Charles Manson's First Victim? South China Morning Post 12. Police: No Evidence Linking Montreal Woman to Manson Killings, CBS News Los Angeles 13. 12 Unsolved Murders Have Possible Ties to Manson Family, LAPD Says, NBC Los Angeles 14. Did the Manson Family Have Other Victims? CBS News 15. New Search at Manson Ranch Called Off, NBC News 16. Sharon Tate's Sister Says There Are Unsolved Manson Murders, New Doc Investigates, Fox News

Warren Jeffs has been locked up since 2006, serving a life sentence for crimes against children, and by any normal measure that should be the end of his story. It isn't. A Netflix documentary that came out in April 2026, Trust Me: The False Prophet, traces a newer FLDS splinter leader's rise straight back to Jeffs, and Jeffs' own children have spent the years since his conviction giving wildly different accounts of who he actually is. Some call him a monster who abused them as toddlers. Others still call him a prophet. Born Into the Prophecy Jeffs was born prematurely on December 3, 1955, in Sacramento, the son of Rulon Jeffs, who led the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a splinter group that kept practicing polygamy long after the mainstream Mormon church banned it. Warren grew up near Salt Lake City being groomed for leadership, and by 1976 he was principal of Alta Academy, the FLDS's own private school, where he became known for extremely rigid discipline. When Rulon took over the church presidency in 1986, Warren served as his counselor and understudy. Rulon eventually married somewhere between 19 and 20 wives and fathered around 60 children, and when he died in 2002, Warren inherited his titles outright, President and Prophet, Seer and Revelator, and President of the Priesthood. It gave him almost total authority over the community. A Prophet With Eighty Wives Within a week of his father's death, Jeffs married nearly all of Rulon's widows himself. As the only person in the FLDS allowed to perform marriages, he could assign wives to husbands and just as easily reassign them as punishment, which meant he controlled who got a family and who didn't. It's the same kind of absolute grip that let cult leaders from Jonestown to Heaven's Gate walk dozens of otherwise ordinary adults toward decisions they never would have made on their own. Over the years Jeffs went on to marry roughly 80 women and girls in what the church called spiritual ceremonies. One of them, his 65th wife, Briell Decker, later described him publicly as creepy. He also controlled around 100 million dollars in land across Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, held through a church trust called the United Effort Plan, until courts stripped that control away in 2012 and put the assets in state custody. The Wife Who Got Away Not every woman around the Jeffs family stayed quiet. Rebecca Musser was married off to Rulon Jeffs at nineteen, when he was eighty five, becoming his 19th wife and growing up entirely under the family's control. After Rulon died in 2002 and Warren took over, Musser left a note on her bed and slipped past the community's security guards to get out. For roughly a decade afterward, she was the only member of her extended family who'd successfully escaped. She later testified as the star witness in the case against Jeffs, and her testimony helped convict eleven FLDS leaders in total, Warren included. She wrote about it all in a memoir called The Witness Wore Red. The Lost Boys To keep the marriage math working in a system built around one man taking dozens of wives, someone had to be pushed out, and it was almost always teenage boys. More than 400 of them were expelled from FLDS communities along the Utah Arizona border over the years, some for as little as being caught kissing a girl, others simply cut loose in their early teens with no explanation given. Jeffs' own nephew, Brent Jeffs, was one of them, and he later wrote a memoir called Lost Boy detailing abuse he said dated back to the late 1980s. He wasn't the only relative to come forward. Warren's own son Roy Jeffs left the FLDS in 2014 and said his first memory of his father was being sexually abused at four or five years old. Roy died by suicide in 2019. Running From the Law By 2006, Jeffs was facing multiple charges tied to arranging marriages between underage girls and grown men, and he disappeared rather than face them. The FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted list that May with a $100,000 reward on his head, and he stayed loose for 114 days, well under the average fugitive's run of roughly 300 days on that list. He was finally pulled over on Interstate 15 north of Las Vegas for a missing registration sticker on his red Cadillac Escalade. Inside the car with him were his wife Naomi and his brother Isaac. FBI agents searching the SUV found more than $50,000 in cash, a stack of cell phones, laptops and three wigs. Almost a decade later, in 2015, a former FLDS bodyguard turned whistleblower named Willie Jessop bought that same Escalade and everything still inside it at auction for $80,000 combined, including 15 cell phones, walkie talkies, a police scanner and a duffel bag stuffed with unopened envelopes that may have held even more cash. He said at the time he planned to display it at his bed and breakfast. One Conviction Overturned, Then Another Trial Utah prosecutors tried him first, convicting him in 2007 as an accomplice to rape for arranging the marriage of fourteen year old Elissa Wall to her nineteen year old cousin, and a judge sentenced him to two consecutive five years to life terms. It didn't stick. In July 2010, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously threw the conviction out, ruling that the trial judge had given the jury the wrong legal standard for consent. Utah eventually dropped the case rather than retry him, but by then Texas was ready with its own charges, this time accusing Jeffs directly as the perpetrator rather than an accomplice. What Investigators Found Inside the Temple In April 2008, Texas authorities raided the FLDS's Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado and pulled more than 700 pieces of evidence out of its temple alone, including a specially built ceremonial bed with padded sides designed, according to Jeffs' own commissioned specifications, to hold him in place. Jeffs kept meticulous written records of his own conduct, dictated to his scribe and wife Naomie Jeffs, and prosecutors later read some of those entries aloud in court, including one where he wrote that the Lord was showing him he needed to take another young girl because she would be easily taught, and married a twelve year old days later. Investigators also recovered a fourteen minute audio recording prosecutors said captured Jeffs with a twelve year old during a so called celestial marriage ceremony, and DNA testing on a child born to one of his other underage wives confirmed he was the father. It's the kind of case that echoes Marcus Wesson, another self declared prophet who fathered children with women he considered his wives and used religious authority to control an entire household. A Trial He Tried to Turn Into a Sermon Jeffs fired his lawyers partway through his 2011 Texas trial and represented himself, at one point delivering a 55 minute speech to the court framing the evidence against him as religious persecution. When the judge tried to move things along, he responded with what he called a divine proclamation, warning she'd be struck with a crippling disease that would take her life. He stayed almost completely silent through the most damaging testimony against him, then stared at the jury for half an hour during closing arguments before finally saying, I am at peace. They deliberated for 39 minutes and convicted him of aggravated sexual assault of a child. He was sentenced to life. Still the Prophet, Still Behind Bars Jeffs is now in his seventies, held at the Powledge Unit in Anderson County, Texas, and isn't eligible for parole until 2038. He reportedly receives more than a thousand pieces of mail a day from followers who still consider him their spiritual leader, and in 2022 a written edict attributed to his son Helaman called on the FLDS to pray for his release. His daughter Rachel has said publicly that he remains in full control of the church from prison. It's a pattern true crime readers have seen before in men like Jimmy Savile, who used a position of total public and institutional trust to keep abusing people for decades, in Savile's case largely undetected until after his death, in Jeffs' case despite an active life sentence. The Netflix documentary Trust Me: The False Prophet, released in April 2026, follows a rival FLDS offshoot led by a man named Samuel Bateman, and even that story keeps circling back to Jeffs as the template every splinter leader since him has tried to copy. Bateman styled himself as a prophet too, coerced followers into handing over their underage daughters as child brides, and in November 2022 had eight of those girls kidnapped out of state custody and driven across state lines. He pleaded guilty in April 2024 and was sentenced to 50 years in prison followed by lifetime supervised release, for abusing at least ten children, some as young as nine. Jeffs has been locked up for close to two decades, and by most accounts, he's never actually stopped being in charge. Sources 1. Where Is Warren Jeffs Now? Inside His Life in Prison, Biography.com 2. Warren Jeffs Is Still Behind Bars, But His Son's Account Reveals What Prison Didn't Stop, The Tab 3. Hundreds of Lost Boys Expelled by Polygamist Community, ABC News 4. Warren Jeffs Arrested in Las Vegas, KSL.com 5. Ex-Bodyguard of Polygamist Leader Buys Warren Jeffs' Escalade, Car Contents at Auction, St. George Utah News 6. Utah Supreme Court Awards Victory to Polygamist Leader Warren Jeffs, NPR 7. What Were Some of the More Than 700 Pieces of Evidence Found in Warren Jeffs' Yearning for Zion Temple? Oxygen 8. The Warren Jeffs Trial, Texas Monthly 9. The Witness Wore Red: A Polygamist's Wife Finds a New Life, NPR 10. Leader of Child Sexual Abuse Ring Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison, U.S. Department of Justice

In 1957, barely into his twenties, Lucien Clergue published his first photography book, and it came with a cover designed by Pablo Picasso, an introduction written by Jean Cocteau and poems selected from the surrealist Paul Éluard. Most photographers spend a lifetime chasing that kind of company. Clergue got it before he'd had a single major exhibition, and it wasn't luck. It was the payoff of a childhood spent surviving war, poverty and grief, and turning all of it into a camera lens. A Childhood Built From Ruins Clergue was born in Arles in 1934, in a town famous for its Roman amphitheater and, by the time he was a kid, equally well known for the rubble left behind by World War II air raids. His house was destroyed in a bombing raid near the end of the war, and not long after, his mother died, leaving him without a parent as a teenager. She'd already set his life in motion though. When he was thirteen, she gave him his first camera, a cheap black Bakelite box, after years of paying for violin lessons she'd hoped would turn him into a musician. He left school not long after to work in a factory and pay off debts she'd left behind. Photography wasn't a hobby he picked up in comfort. It was something he built out of loss. The Bullfight That Changed Everything In April 1953, at a bullfighting event in Arles, the nineteen year old ran into Pablo Picasso and worked up the nerve to show him his photographs. It could have ended there, but two years later Clergue turned up at Picasso's home in Cannes, La Californie, and the two men struck up a friendship that lasted two decades, right up until Picasso's death in 1973. Over that time Clergue photographed him constantly and casually, in his studio, cuddling his dog, smoking, sunbathing, watching bullfights. He eventually assembled twenty seven of these encounters into what amounted to a visual diary of Picasso's later life. Picasso, for his part, became godfather to Clergue's daughter Olivia. Cocteau, Éluard and a Debut Most Photographers Only Dream Of Picasso wasn't the only giant in Clergue's corner early on. In 1956 he met Jean Cocteau in Paris, and the connection paid off fast. The following year, Clergue's first book, Corps mémorable, hit shelves with a cover by Picasso, an introduction by Cocteau and poems by Paul Éluard. For a photographer with no formal training and barely any exhibition history, it was an almost absurd amount of firepower behind one slim volume. Cocteau later brought Clergue onto the set of his final film, Testament of Orpheus, in 1959, giving him total access to document the six week shoot. Clergue described the experience like stepping into another world, writing that man-horses, man-dogs, the Sphinx, the goddess Minerva, and mythological figures such as Oedipus, Orpheus and Tiresias were all living with them on set. The Nudes That Turned Bodies Into Landscape By the mid 1950s Clergue had also started the series that would define him, black and white nudes photographed on the beaches of the Camargue, the marshy delta region near Arles. He shot women half buried in sand or caught between waves, deliberately leaving faces out of frame so the bodies read more like landscape than portrait. It was a bold thing to be publishing before the sexual revolution of the 1960s had even started, and it worked. Arthur Kales had already shown decades earlier that a camera could be handled like a paintbrush, and Francis James Mortimer had proven that darkroom manipulation belonged in fine art conversations too, but Clergue pushed further, treating skin itself as terrain. E.J. Bellocq had approached nude photography with a similar sense of dignity back in early 1900s New Orleans, working in a genre that could easily tip into exploitation and choosing not to. Clergue's version of that same instinct, paired with the geology of his home region, became the work that MoMA in New York picked up in 1960, making him the first French photographer exhibited there. Making Photography a Fine Art Clergue spent the back half of his career trying to get photography treated with the same seriousness as painting or sculpture, and he had the résumé to back the argument. In 1970 he co-founded the Rencontres d'Arles with the novelist Michel Tournier and curator Jean-Maurice Rouquette, a festival that's still one of the biggest photography events in the world and that pulled in figures like Ansel Adams within its first few years. In 1979, he defended a doctoral thesis at the University of Provence built entirely out of photographs rather than written text, with a preface from the critic Roland Barthes. Three years later he helped found the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, giving the medium its own dedicated academic home. Postwar photographers had been figuring out how to make sense of a broken world in real time too. Todd Webb was doing something similar across the Atlantic, walking the ruined and rebuilding streets of New York with a camera not long after Clergue was doing the same, in his own way, in the south of France. The First Photographer in a 400 Year Old Academy The clearest proof that Clergue had won his argument came in 2006, when he became the first photographer ever elected to France's Académie des Beaux-Arts, prompting the institution to create an eighth section specifically for photography. He'd already been made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2003, and he went on to serve as the Académie's president in 2013, an extraordinary position for someone who'd started out as a factory worker with a Bakelite camera and no formal art education. Final Years and Legacy Clergue married art curator Yolande Clergue, who founded the Foundation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, and the couple raised two daughters, gallerist Anne and handbag designer Olivia, Picasso's godchild. By the time he died on November 15, 2014, in Nîmes at eighty, Clergue had produced somewhere around 800,000 photographs and published more than 75 books. The following year's Rencontres d'Arles was dedicated to his memory, and the Grand Palais in Paris mounted a retrospective of his earliest work called Lucien Clergue: The First Albums. It's a strange arc for a kid who grew up picking through bomb rubble in a town full of Roman ruins, but that's more or less the throughline of Clergue's whole career. He kept finding beauty and structure in things that looked broken, whether that was a bombed out building, a body on a beach or a medium nobody else took seriously yet, and he built an entire life's work out of insisting it was there all along. Sources 1. Lucien Clergue biography, lucien-clergue.com 2. The Lasting Works of Photography Pioneer and Proponent Lucien Clergue, Artsy 3. Lucien Clergue: Twenty-Seven Encounters with Picasso, Museu Picasso Barcelona 4. Lucien Clergue: The Arlesian, Blind Magazine 5. Remembering French Photographer Lucien Clergue, a Giant of the Field, Hyperallergic 6. Lucien Clergue, Jean Cocteau: Testament of Orpheus, Westwood Gallery 7. Lucien Clergue, the First Albums, Grand Palais (RMN) Lucien Clergue, International Center of Photography

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 models and built somewhere around 1,500 individual cameras by hand, no two of them exactly alike. Born Into a Hollywood Family Gowland was born on April 3, 1916, in a wooden shack near Sunset Boulevard, which is a pretty unglamorous start for a man who'd spend his life photographing glamour. His parents had emigrated from England around 1913 and worked as film extras for two dollars a day. His father, Gibson Gowland, went on to land the lead role of McTeague in Erich von Stroheim's Greed, the wildly ambitious 1924 silent film that's still studied today as one of the great triumphs and great disasters of the silent era. His mother, Sylvia Andrew, wrote the script for a 1916 Universal short called Small Magnetic Hand and put her own six week old son in it. Gowland's first film credit happened before he could hold his own head up. A Malibu Childhood He kept turning up on movie sets as a kid, working as a double and background extra, and later said that's where he first picked up an eye for lighting, watching how cinematographers lit the stars around him. When he was eleven, his mother decided Hollywood wasn't doing him any favors and sent him off to a British military academy in town instead. He remembered being dropped off clutching a toy truck with no idea what was going on. In 1930, he and his father moved into a one bedroom house on the Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu that cost five hundred dollars, with a ten dollar a month land lease, no gas, no electricity and an outhouse out back. Heavy rain would send eighteen inches of canyon debris straight through the place. His father went back to England in 1944 and died in London at seventy four, buried at Golders Green. Love at First Sight Gowland met his future wife Alice in December 1941. By his own account it was love at first sight, and they eloped three weeks later. It turned out to be one of the more successful impulsive decisions in Hollywood history. Alice was born in Pittsburgh in 1920 and moved to LA at eight years old, and she ended up running the business side of what became a genuine photography empire, handling sales, camera production and lecture bookings. They stayed married until his death, sixty eight years later. War Breaks Out Between 1942 and 1945, Gowland worked days as an engineering cinematographer for North American Aviation and spent evenings and weekends shooting portraits and pin-ups with Alice on the side. Then he shipped out with the Army Air Force to Germany, where he ran the photo lab at Furstenfeldbruck air base from 1945 to 1946. While he was gone, Alice kept selling their beach pin-up shots to magazines, so by the time he came home they already had a client list and a reputation to build on. Building America's Pin-Up Empire They used a GI loan to build their first studio in West LA in 1946, and things took off from there. Gowland found his models on film sets, through agencies and at beauty contests, then shot them in the studio or along the stretch of coast between LA and Malibu, feeding straight into the idea of California as one long sunny dream. He wasn't the first photographer to walk that particular line between art and titillation. Arthur Kales had already been treating the camera like a paintbrush in the Pictorialist scene of 1920s California, and across the Atlantic John Everard was quietly photographing nudes out of a small London studio under far stricter censorship laws. Decades earlier in New Orleans, E.J. Bellocq had photographed the women of Storyville with a similar kind of respect, and before any of them, Audrey Munson had already lived through what it meant to be America's first professional model and muse. Gowland's own version was cleaner and sunnier, tasteful black and white work that critics described as sitting someplace between titillation and art. He photographed Jayne Mansfield, Raquel Welch, Joan Collins, Muhammad Ali, Jonathan Winters and Alfred Hitchcock among plenty of others, and his photos ran in Playboy, Rolling Stone and Modern Photography, adding up to more than a thousand magazine covers. The Cameras No One Else Was Making None of that would have happened quite the same way without Gowland's other obsession, building his own gear. He owned sixteen Rolleiflex cameras at one point and loved how easy they were to use, but he wanted the big four by five inch negatives that large format cameras produced, and nothing on the market did both. So he took cameras apart to figure out how they worked and built his own twin lens reflex from scratch, the Gowlandflex, generally credited as the world's first large format twin lens reflex camera. It had a waist level finder, a Schneider Symmar f/5.6 180mm lens, and a mechanism that kept the viewing and taking lenses in sync as the bellows extended, which mattered when your subject was a moving person instead of a building. He sold more than 600 of the 4x5 model alone, and it ended up in the hands of Annie Leibovitz and Yousuf Karsh, and reportedly the FBI. He also built an eight by ten version nicknamed The Beast that stood almost a meter tall, plus view cameras, an aerial camera and a lightweight architectural model. His whole design philosophy came down to one line he liked to repeat: a camera is only a light-tight box. He answered his own phone at the workshop, and customers would sometimes get a call back from Gowland himself, not because anything was wrong with their order but because he genuinely wanted to know how they were using the camera. Rustic Canyon and the Final Years In 1954, Peter and Alice built a home and studio together in Rustic Canyon, designed by architect William F. Overpeck, and stayed there for the rest of their lives. Between them they wrote more than thirty five books on portrait and glamour photography and traveled internationally giving lectures on it. Alice split her time between the business and her own interests, beach cleanups, political volunteering, dancing, piano and swimming the coastal bluffs near their home. Gowland kept shooting and kept building cameras almost right up until the end. He died on March 17, 2010, in Los Angeles at ninety three, from complications after a fall. Alice outlived him by four years, passing away in 2014. In 2016, a selection of around 180 of his photographs was published as a book called Peter Gowland's Girls, pulled from an estate archive of thousands of prints and slides. It's a strange kind of legacy, half of it hanging in gallery shows and photography books, the other half sitting in camera bags belonging to photographers who never met him but still shoot with a Gowlandflex because nothing else quite does what his cameras do. For a guy who summed up his entire profession as a light-tight box, Peter Gowland built a genuinely huge career out of very simple tools. Sources 1. Peter Gowland's Girls, Kehrer Verlag 2. Camera Geekery: The 4x5 Gowlandflex Glamour Camera, Japan Camera Hunter 3. Peter Gowland's autobiography, petergowland.com 4. About Peter Gowland, petergowland.com 5. Alice Meets Peter, petergowland.com 6. Alice Gowland obituary, Palisadian Post 7. Peter Gowland dies at 93, Cork Analogue Photographers 8. The Gowland Camera, B2W Photo Classy, to the end. Peter Gowland, 1916-2010, Random Camera Blog