Search this site

On 4 June 2008, Travis Alexander was killed inside his home in Mesa, Arizona. He was stabbed nearly 30 times, had his throat cut so deeply he was almost decapitated, and was shot once in the head. His body wasn't discovered for five days, found by friends who'd grown worried when he failed to show up for a planned trip to Cancun. The woman who killed him had been in his shower taking photographs of him less than two hours before he died. The Jodi Arias case didn't just become a true crime story. It became a national obsession. A five-month trial. Eighteen days of testimony from the defendant alone. Court TV coverage that had people queuing through the night to get a seat in the gallery. Love, religion, jealousy, and a camera pulled from a washing machine. It had everything. Who Was Travis Alexander? Travis Victor Alexander was born on 28 July 1977 and grew up in a difficult household in Riverside, California. His parents were drug addicts, and after his mother died and his father went to prison, he and his siblings were raised by their maternal grandmother. He converted to the Mormon faith as a teenager, and by all accounts the church became central to his identity and ambition. By his late twenties, Alexander had built a reasonably successful life as a motivational speaker and legal insurance salesman working with PrePaid Legal Services. He was sociable, well-liked, and known for projecting an image of faith-driven self-improvement. Friends described him as charismatic and driven. He was also, by his own admission in private messages, caught between his religious values and a complicated private life. The couple in happier times Who Was Jodi Arias? Jodi Ann Arias was born on 9 July 1980 in Salinas, California. She dropped out of high school, got her GED, and spent her early twenties moving around the West Coast working waitress jobs and pursuing an interest in photography. People who knew her described her as intelligent and creative, but also intense in relationships. Her own parents, when later speaking to investigators, said they believed she had mental health problems and might be bipolar. In September 2006, Arias met Alexander at a PrePaid Legal conference in Las Vegas. The attraction was immediate and the relationship moved fast. Arias converted to the Mormon church shortly after meeting him and, within months, relocated from California to Mesa, Arizona to be closer to him. That move tells you a lot about where her head was at. They broke up in June 2007, after around nine months of dating. But the contact didn't stop. They continued to see each other sexually, and Alexander began to pull away while Arias found it impossible to let go. Friends of Alexander later recalled her showing up to his house unannounced, letting herself into the garage because she knew the door code, and on at least one occasion crawling through the dog door to get inside. Alexander told friends he thought she was stalking him. He apparently told one friend she was "not wife material" while still sleeping with her. By spring 2008, Alexander was trying to move on. He'd been seeing other women and had invited a woman named Mimi Hall to join him on the Cancun trip he'd originally planned to take with Arias. On 4 June 2008, Jodi Arias drove from California to Mesa. She has never fully explained why. The Crime Scene and What the Camera Showed Alexander's housemates found his body on 9 June 2008. He was in the shower, in an advanced state of decomposition given the summer heat. The scene was described by investigators as one of extreme, prolonged violence. Twenty-seven to twenty-nine stab wounds. A gunshot to the forehead. A throat wound so severe it nearly separated his head from his body. The medical examiner's report indicated the stab wounds to the back were consistent with a person being hunched over and trying to get away. Travis Alexander in one of the final photos recovered from his camera. There was no sign of forced entry. Whoever did this, Alexander let them in. Investigators found a digital camera in the washing machine. Someone had tried to destroy it, but forensic technicians recovered time-stamped photographs from the memory card. Those images showed Alexander alive in the shower, then images taken accidentally during the attack, then images of his body. The timestamps placed Arias at the scene on the afternoon of 4 June 2008, directly contradicting her initial statement to police that she hadn't seen him in months. A bloody palm print on the wall of the bathroom matched Arias. A strand of hair near the body contained both her DNA and Alexander's blood. Arias was arrested on 15 July 2008 at her grandparents' home in Yreka, California. Autopsy photos here. Three Different Versions of Events What made the Arias case particularly gripping was the way her account of events kept changing. When first interviewed by police, she denied being in Arizona at all. She claimed intruders wearing masks had broken in and killed Alexander while she watched, then let her go. Police didn't buy it. When confronted with the forensic evidence, her story changed. She admitted she had been there but claimed two masked intruders had committed the murder. That version also fell apart. By the time the case reached trial in January 2013, Arias had settled on a third account: self-defence. She claimed Alexander had been physically and sexually abusive throughout their relationship, and that on 4 June he had attacked her after she dropped his camera. She said she grabbed a gun from his closet in response and that the rest of the violence unfolded from there, though she claimed to have no memory of the stabbing itself. She described a kind of dissociative episode, saying her memory simply went blank. Travis Alexander's wounds. Prosecutor Juan Martinez was having none of it. His argument was straightforward: this was premeditated murder, planned and carried out by a jealous woman who couldn't accept that Alexander had moved on. The evidence of planning, he argued, included the fact that Arias had borrowed petrol cans before the trip to avoid stopping at Arizona service stations, rented a car in a city away from her home, and turned her mobile phone off while in the state. The Trial That Gripped America The trial began in January 2013 and ran for five months. It was televised live and became something of a cultural event, particularly on HLN, which devoted hours of daily coverage and post-trial analysis to it. People debated the case on social media as though they were personally invested in the outcome. Some believed Arias. Many didn't. Prosecutor Juan Martinez became a recognisable figure in his own right, known for his aggressive, combative style. The defence, led by Kirk Nurmi, focused on Arias's mental health and the alleged abuse. Expert witnesses testified that she had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and PTSD, and that these conditions explained both the relationship dynamics and the violence itself. Arias herself took the stand and didn't step down for eighteen days, which remains one of the longest defendant testimonies in American murder trial history. Jodi Arias’ 2008 mugshot She described her sex life with Alexander in explicit detail. She discussed the religious hypocrisy she claimed underpinned their relationship. She talked about his alleged anger and controlling behaviour. She was also, the prosecution argued, a liar who had demonstrated she would say whatever was necessary to survive. The jury convicted her of first-degree murder on 8 May 2013. During the penalty phase, they couldn't agree on the death sentence, which resulted in a mistrial. A second sentencing jury in 2015 also deadlocked. Arizona law at the time required a unanimous jury decision for a death sentence, and Arias escaped execution twice on procedural grounds. Arias hears the guilty verdict in court. She was later sentenced to life in prison. Life Without Parole On 13 April 2015, Judge Sherry Stephens sentenced Arias to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In her remarks, the judge cited the cruelty of the killing. Arias made a statement expressing sorrow but maintained she had acted in self-defence. She's currently held at Perryville Prison in Goodyear, Arizona. Her appeals have argued prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective counsel, and media bias. Arizona's appellate courts have so far upheld her conviction. She will not be released. Why This Case Still Gets Talked About The Arias case touched something that a lot of true crime coverage doesn't quite reach. It wasn't a stranger murder or a serial killer. It was two people who knew each other, were physically attracted to each other, and whose relationship turned into something corrosive and ultimately fatal. The court heard recordings of phone calls between them that were graphic, tender, and then horrible. The camera in the washing machine gave the crime a visual dimension that was almost impossible to look away from. Jodi Arias in her 2015 prison mugshot It also raised genuine legal questions. High-profile cases tried in the media have a long history in America, but the Arias trial, with its round-the-clock television coverage, pushed that dynamic into new territory. Legal commentators questioned whether any jury could realistically remain uninfluenced by the volume of public opinion surrounding the case. The prosecution's version of events, that an obsessive and jealous ex-girlfriend carried out a premeditated killing, was ultimately what the jury accepted. The defence's argument, that a vulnerable woman killed in self-defence and dissociated from the trauma, did not persuade them. Whether you find the verdict straightforward or complicated probably says something about which details you decided to believe. Travis Alexander was 30 years old. He'd planned to go on holiday the following week. He'd let someone he knew into his house, and he never left it. Sources 1. Arizona v. Jodi Ann Arias, Maricopa County Superior Court (2013) 2. ABC News, "Jodi Arias Trial: A Timeline of Events" (2013) - https://abcnews.go.com/US/jodi-arias-trial-timeline-events-arizona-murder-case/story?id=18123295 3. A&E True Crime, "The Murder of Travis Alexander" - https://www.aetv.com/articles/the-murder-of-travis-alexander-and-what-killer-jodi-ariass-life-is-like-behind-bars 4. Martinez, Juan. Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars. William Morrow, 2016. 5. Fox News, "Key facts and questions about the Jodi Arias murder case" - https://www.foxnews.com/us/key-facts-and-questions-about-the-jodi-arias-murder-case.amp 6. ABC News, "Friends say they warned Travis Alexander that Jodi Arias was dangerous" - https://abcnews.com/US/friends-warned-travis-alexander-jodi-arias-dangerous-months/story?id=68731237 7. The Arizona Republic / AZCentral, News Archives (2008-2020) - https://www.azcentral.com This article is part of our True Crime archive, exploring murder cases, criminal investigations and the trials that followed.

If you've ever come across a strikingly sharp, glamorous photograph of a near-nude showgirl draped in pearls or feathers and thought it looked almost too beautiful to be real, there's a good chance you were looking at the work of Alfred Cheney Johnston. He wasn't the most famous photographer of his era, and he wasn't trying to be an artist in the fine art sense. What he was doing was something arguably more interesting: turning the women of the Ziegfeld Follies into icons before anyone had really figured out how to do that with a camera. Johnston was born in 1884 and spent much of his career working closely with Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., the Broadway impresario whose Follies revues ran from 1907 right through to 1931. The Follies were America's answer to the Moulin Rouge, a spectacular mix of comedy, music, and chorus girls that defined a certain idea of glamour and excess. Ziegfeld had a gift for finding beautiful women, but it was Johnston who gave them a lasting visual presence. His portraits of the Follies girls became the standard image of Jazz Age beauty, and many of them are still circulating today, over a century later. Johnston was born on 8th April, 1885, in Westchester County, New York, and spent much of his career working closely with Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., the Broadway impresario whose Follies revues ran from 1907 right through to 1931. If you want the full story of how Johnston came to work for Ziegfeld, and what happened to him in the decades that followed, our companion piece, Alfred Cheney Johnston and the Artistry Behind the Ziegfeld Follies' Golden Era, covers his biography, his technical process, and his rediscovery in detail. This piece is about something different: who Johnston was as an artist outside the Follies contract, and where his work sits in the wider story of early 20th-century nude photography. The Technical Approach Johnston worked with large format glass plate cameras, which gave his images an exceptional clarity and tonal richness that smaller formats simply couldn't match. His work is often filed under "soft-focus" glamour photography, and in terms of overall mood and the gentleness of his lighting, that's a fair description. But it's worth being precise about where the softness actually comes from. It isn't a blurred lens or an out-of-focus negative. His glass plates are, if anything, remarkably sharp. The dreamlike quality comes from his platinum printing process, his careful control of shadow and highlight, and his skill at positioning light to flatter rather than expose. For a sense of how a genuinely soft-focus, blurred-lens approach worked in contrast, our piece on Arthur Kales and the Pictorialist tradition is worth a read. Kales was chasing atmosphere through the lens itself. Johnston got there through print technique and lighting while keeping his negatives razor sharp, which is part of what separates his work from much of the commercial portrait photography of the same period. The lighting was always considered, always flattering, picking out the contours of a face or the curve of a shoulder without ever feeling harsh or clinical. His subjects look at the camera with a kind of serene confidence. They aren't passive objects; they're participants in the image. That's rarer than it sounds for this era, especially in work that was essentially promotional. The Ziegfeld Girls and What They Meant The Ziegfeld Follies girls occupied a strange cultural space. They were celebrated for their beauty, photographed constantly, written about in the press, but they weren't quite respectable in the way that stage actresses were. They existed somewhere between art and entertainment, between admiration and scandal. Johnston's portraits navigated this carefully. Many of his images are nudes, or close to it, but they never feel exploitative. There's always a sense of artistry, of deliberate composition. A woman with a veil, a woman reclining on a patterned carpet, a figure posed against a simple backdrop. The nudity feels incidental to the beauty rather than the point of it. Drucilla Strain Among his subjects were some remarkable women. Carolyn Nunder, a flapper and Follies girl whose portrait from the 1920s captures everything that word meant. Drucilla Strain, photographed in 1928 and 1929, appearing veiled and composed. Renée Adorée, the actress and dancer, caught in a playful image with a parrot. And then there's Adrienne Ames, whose portraits from around 1920 to 1925 show Johnston's range, working with a slightly more conventional approach that still manages to feel entirely his own. The Follies girls weren't the only subjects in Johnston's lens. He shot a wide range of performers, socialites, and actresses. Marion Davies, Alice Brady, and Marjorie Leet all sat for him. What's striking about his non-Follies work is how consistent his eye remained. Whether he was shooting a movie star or a chorus girl, the same patience, the same attention to light, and the same respect for his subject comes through. Enchanting Beauty and the Book That Collected It All In 1937, Johnston published Enchanting Beauty, a collection of his nude studies gathered from across two decades of work. The images in the book date from the 1920s through to the 1930s, and it's one of the most complete records of his mature style. Among its subjects was Tilly Losch, the Austrian dancer and actress, who appears in several of the plates in poses that show Johnston at his most formally ambitious. Losch was already famous by then, and the pairing of Johnston's camera with her expressive physicality produced some of his most memorable work. Enchanting Beauty wasn't a mass market publication. It was the kind of limited edition book that circulated among collectors and photography enthusiasts rather than sitting on a newsstand. That's partly why Johnston's reputation faded so quickly after his death in 1971. Without mass circulation, without a major retrospective or museum collection, his work slipped out of common knowledge even as the images themselves kept turning up on Tumblr blogs, vintage photography sites, and art auction catalogues. Where Johnston Sits in the Bigger Picture Johnston was working during a period when the photograph of the female nude was undergoing enormous changes. The kind of work being produced by photographers like E.J. Bellocq in the brothels of Storyville, or the vintage French nude photography of the 1920s that was being produced for postcards and prints, represented very different approaches to the same subject. Johnston's work sits somewhere in the middle. It was too artistic to be dismissed as merely commercial, and too commercially oriented to be taken seriously by the art photography establishment of the time. That ambiguity is actually what makes him interesting now. He wasn't constrained by either category. He could make a portrait of a nude woman that was genuinely beautiful without worrying too much about whether it met the standards of the Photo-Secession movement, and he could produce commercial work for Ziegfeld's promotional machine without letting it become purely transactional. It's worth putting his work alongside others who occupied similar territory. Kiki de Montparnasse, the model and artist's muse who defined bohemian Paris, was being photographed at almost exactly the same time as Johnston's Follies portraits, but in a completely different context and with completely different results. The contrast between Johnston's composed, studio-lit glamour and the looser, more contingent energy of the Paris scene says a lot about how ideas of beauty and the body differed on either side of the Atlantic. A Legacy That's Still Being Discovered Johnston died in 1971 having outlived his moment of fame by decades. He'd essentially retired from professional photography in the 1940s, and the work he'd done for Ziegfeld had been largely forgotten outside of specialist circles. The rediscovery of his photographs has been slow and mostly driven by collectors and enthusiasts rather than institutions, which gives it a slightly underground quality that suits the work rather well. The La Petite Mélancolie archive of Johnston's work is one of the better places online to see a substantial selection of his images gathered in one place, including multiple entries from Enchanting Beauty and portraits of his named subjects. If Johnston is new to you, it's a good starting point. If you already know his work, it'll give you the chance to see pieces you might have missed. Photography at this level is also closely connected to broader traditions of figure work. Our articles on Alfred Cheney Johnston and his exquisite images of Ziegfeld Follies showgirls go into more detail on the Follies context, and if you're interested in the world he was part of, pieces like our look at Studio Manassé and Vienna's glamorous photography revolution and le stéréo nu and boudoir photography in Belle Époque Paris help fill out the international picture of what was happening in this period. Johnston deserves to be talked about in the same breath as the other great photographers of the interwar period. He had a distinctive eye, a real technical command of his medium, and an unusual ability to make his subjects look both beautiful and fully present. That's a harder combination to achieve than it looks, and it's why his images have lasted. Sources: 1. Daily Art Fixx: Alfred Cheney Johnston, 1885–1971. https://dailyartfixx.com/2016/04/08/alfred-cheney-johnston-1885-1971/ 2. MONOVISIONS: Biography, Photographer of Nudes, Alfred Cheney Johnston. https://monovisions.com/alfred-cheney-johnston-biography-photographer-of-nudes-ziegfeld-girls/ 3. Northlight Gallery Research: Alfred Cheney Johnston. https://northlightgalleryresearch.com/alfred-cheney-johnston/ 4. Johnston, Alfred Cheney. Enchanting Beauty. Swann Publications, 1937. 5. Travalanche: The Images of Alfred Cheney Johnston. https://travsd.wordpress.com/2026/04/08/the-images-of-alfred-cheney-johnston/

On the morning of 6 October 1976, Thai police and right-wing paramilitaries opened fire on unarmed university students in Bangkok. They shot them with M-16s, grenades, and recoilless rifles. They hanged some from trees and beat the bodies with metal chairs. They dragged students who tried to surrender out of the gates and killed them anyway. By the time it was over, the official death toll stood at 46. Survivors and independent investigators have long believed the real number was closer to 100, with some estimates running far higher. It happened in broad daylight. Photographers were present. And for decades, almost nobody in Thailand talked about it. The return of Thanom Kittikachorn caused the sit-in at Thammasat University prior to the massacre. How It Started: A Dictator Returns To understand October 6, you have to go back to 1973. That year, mass student protests forced three military rulers out of Thailand, including Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, who'd run the country as a dictator since 1963. He fled into exile, and Thailand got its first taste of genuine democratic government. It lasted three years. In September 1976, Thanom slipped back into the country dressed as a Buddhist monk, claiming he'd returned for religious reasons. Students weren't buying it. Thousands took to the streets, furious that the man they'd risked their lives to remove had just waltzed back in wearing orange robes, and that the civilian government under Prime Minister Seni Pramoj was doing absolutely nothing about it. The right wing, meanwhile, had spent those three years building up. Military-backed paramilitary groups had been recruiting aggressively. The Village Scouts, a rural royalist militia, reportedly had three million members by 1976. The Red Gaurs were younger, more violent, and ideologically closer to fascism. A monk named Kittivudho had publicly declared that killing a communist wasn't a sin. The atmosphere was already combustible. The Spark: A Play, a Photo, and a Lie On 24 September 1976, two labor activists named Wichai Ketsriphongsa and Chumphon Thummai were beaten to death by police in Nakhon Pathom, a city just west of Bangkok. Their crime was putting up anti-Thanom posters. Their bodies were hung from a gate. The location became known as the "Red Gate." Students at Thammasat University staged a dramatisation of the hanging on 4 October to protest the killings. A photograph of the performance appeared in a right-wing newspaper called Dao Siam the following day. The paper's front page claimed that one of the student performers, made up to portray a hanging victim, bore a resemblance to Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn (today's King of Thailand). It was, at best, a stretch. The photograph had reportedly been doctored. But it didn't matter. Army-controlled radio stations broadcast the accusation across more than 260 frequencies, calling the students communist insurgents committing lese-majeste, the Thai crime of insulting the monarchy. The students tried to correct the record. Nobody was listening. The call went out over the airwaves: come to Thammasat. Right-wing forces began massing around the university. Around 15,000 extremists gathered near the campus. Even the military's Housewives Association mobilised. October 6: The Attack By the evening of 5 October, roughly 2,000 to 4,000 students were inside the Thammasat University campus on the banks of the Chao Phraya river. They were holding a sit-in, and they knew things were turning dangerous. Police had surrounded the perimeter. The attack began in the early hours of 6 October. Police opened fire on the campus using assault rifles, machine guns, pistols, grenades, recoilless rifles, and anti-tank guns. Right-wing paramilitaries stormed the gates. Students who tried to escape by jumping into the Chao Phraya river were shot at by the navy. The violence that followed was not just lethal. It was theatrical in its cruelty. Students were lynched from trees on the adjacent Sanam Luang, the open field next to the campus. The most enduring image from that morning, captured by Associated Press photographer Neal Ulevich, shows a hanged student's body being beaten with a folded metal chair by a man who appears to be smiling. Faces in the crowd around him are grinning. The photograph won Ulevich the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1977. Those who surrendered weren't necessarily spared. Reports documented survivors being robbed, sexually assaulted, and beaten after giving themselves up. Some were killed anyway. The official figures, released by the military junta that seized power that same day, listed 46 dead, 167 injured, and 3,059 arrested. Puey Ungphakorn, the former rector of Thammasat who was in exile at the time, estimated the death toll at over 100. The Ruam Katanyu Foundation, the organisation that handled the bodies, put the figure at over 500. The truth has never been fully established, largely because no official investigation has ever taken place. The Coup and the Silence Within hours of the massacre, Admiral Sangad Chaloryu led a military coup and dissolved the civilian government. It was the eighth coup in Thailand since 1932. The new junta appointed Thanin Kraivichien, a hardline royalist judge, as prime minister. The incoming government's position on what had just happened was simple: forgive and forget. An amnesty law was passed that extended protection to those responsible for the violence. No one was charged. No one was prosecuted. One of the politicians who had publicly encouraged the crackdown, Samak Sundaravej, was rewarded with a position as Minister of Interior in the new government. He later became Prime Minister of Thailand in 2008. Discussion of the massacre was effectively suppressed. It wasn't taught in schools. It didn't appear in official histories. In a country with strict lese-majeste laws and a history of silencing political dissent, October 6 became what one scholar called "organised forgetting." The parallels with other instances of state violence against protesters are hard to ignore. Events like the 1955 murder of Emmett Till in the United States, or the lynchings of J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham Smith, also went unpunished for decades and were similarly erased from mainstream memory. The Students Who Went to the Jungle For many survivors, fleeing was the only option. More than 3,000 students left Bangkok after the massacre and headed into the jungle to join the Communist Party of Thailand, who were fighting a guerrilla insurgency against the military government. The memorial plaque at Thammasat University records this fact. Among those who went underground were people who would later become prominent Thai politicians, academics, and public intellectuals. Professor Thongchai Winichakul, now one of the most respected historians of Thai nationalism and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was a student leader on campus that day. He has said there wasn't a single day in the 40 years since that he didn't think about it. Others remained in hiding for years. Jaran Ditapichai, one of the arrested students, escaped from custody after a guard forgot to lock his cell and eventually fled to France, where he still lived in exile decades later, facing a charge of insulting the Thai royal family. The willingness of ordinary young people to risk everything in opposition to authoritarianism is a thread that runs through modern history. Sophie Scholl, executed by the Nazis at 21 for distributing anti-war leaflets, is one of the more well-known examples from the European context. The students of Thammasat belong in the same conversation. Why It's Still Relevant In 1977, the guerrilla insurgency that many survivors had joined began to collapse after China ended its support for the Communist Party of Thailand. A subsequent amnesty allowed many of the students to return from the jungle and reintegrate into Thai society. Some became the establishment they'd once fought against. Some remained dissenters. The massacre stayed buried in public consciousness for years. It wasn't until the 1990s that open commemoration became more possible. Annual memorial events now take place at Thammasat on 6 October, attended by monks, activists, and survivors. A monument on the campus marks the spot. The photograph Neal Ulevich took of the hanged student being beaten with a chair has become one of those images that circulates far beyond its original context. Fans of the Dead Kennedys punk band will have seen it; the image appeared on one of their album inserts. It's recognised globally. The event it documents remains largely unknown outside Thailand. Thailand's treatment of this history fits a pattern recognisable from other countries. The difficulty of confronting state violence is not unique to Thailand. Ginggaew Lorsoungnern, a Thai woman who survived her own scheduled execution, speaks to another dimension of Thailand's complicated relationship with state power and justice. Nobody has ever been held accountable for what happened on 6 October 1976. The perpetrators, both those in uniform and those who showed up as civilians with weapons, have never faced justice. A survivor named Wichian Visutanakon put it plainly at a memorial event in 2020: "The worst thing is those people who did those crimes are still proud and don't regret their actions." Forty-nine years on, that remains true. Sources 1. The 6 October 1976 Massacre, Wikipedia 2. "Unforgettable, Unrememberable: The Thammasat Massacre in Thailand", Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2018 3. "The Will to Remember: Survivors Recount 1976 Thammasat Massacre 40 Years Later", Khaosod English, October 2016 4. "Thailand Marks 40 Years Since the 1976 Thammasat Massacre", Time, October 2016 5. "Remember the Thammasat Massacre as an Act of Organised Hate", Southeast Asia Globe, December 2020 6. "Remembering the Nightmare of October 6, 1976", Nation Thailand, October 2023 7. "The Hidden Transcript of Amnesty: The 6 October 1976 Massacre and Coup in Thailand", Taylor & Francis, 2015 8. "AP Was There: 40 Years Ago, Young Thai Protesters Massacred", Fox News / AP, 2016 9. "Thais Remember 1976 Student Massacre as Protests Grow", Reuters, 2020 10. Neal Ulevich, Wikipedia

There's a moment in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita where Marcello Mastroianni follows Anita Ekberg into Rome's Trevi Fountain at night. She's wading through the water in a strapless black evening gown, arms spread wide, completely unhurried, calling his name into the dark. The Baroque masterpiece of a fountain is right there behind her, and you barely notice it. That's the kind of presence Anita Ekberg had. Born Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg on September 29, 1931, in Malmo, Sweden, she was one of eight children. Her father was the harbour master. She became a model as a teenager, won the title of Miss Malmo, then Miss Sweden in 1951. The beauty pageant circuit gave her a trip to America for the Miss Universe competition, and America, recognising what it was looking at, promptly kept her. From Miss Sweden to Howard Hughes She didn't win the Miss Universe title, but she didn't need to. A 1951 Life magazine story called her "the most photographed, most pursued and most popular girl" at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City. Hollywood notices that kind of coverage. Howard Hughes signed her, and Universal Pictures put her to work. Ekberg at 20 years old. Her first credited screen role was as a Venusian guard in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), which is either a humiliating start or a delightful one depending on your perspective. Ekberg always seemed to find it funny. She had a good sense of humour about the absurdity of the sex symbol business, which helped her survive it. The career-defining moment before La Dolce Vita came in 1954, when she was brought in as a last-minute replacement for Marilyn Monroe on a Bob Hope Christmas tour to entertain American GIs in Greenland, one of the first Hope specials filmed for television. Stepping into Marilyn Monroe's place and not getting destroyed by the comparison took nerve. Ekberg pulled it off. Playboy and the Pin-Up Years In 1955, Playboy featured a full pictorial on Ekberg, complete with the dutiful publication of her measurements: 39-22-37. The magazine and its relationship with the era's bombshells is something worth understanding properly: it wasn't just titillation. It was a cultural machine that processed European glamour, American pin-up tradition, and Hollywood publicity into something that genuinely shaped how mainstream America thought about female sexuality in the 1950s. The tradition Ekberg was working in had deep roots. The Ziegfeld Follies showgirl photography of Alfred Cheney Johnston from the 1920s had established the idea that photographing beautiful women as an art form was culturally legitimate. By the time Ekberg arrived in America in the early 1950s, that legitimacy had been fully absorbed into the mainstream. Posing for Playboy wasn't a career risk of the kind it would have been a generation earlier. It was, for someone with Ekberg's profile, practically expected. What made Ekberg distinctive in photographs, beyond the obvious, was her physical scale. She was 5'9" and built on genuinely statuesque proportions that photography of the era struggled to handle gracefully. The best photographs of her from this period have a monumental quality, something almost sculptural. She wasn't just pretty; she was overwhelming. La Dolce Vita and the Image That Stuck By 1960, Ekberg had been working steadily in Hollywood for most of a decade. Good roles had come: War and Peace (1956), Hollywood or Bust (1956) with Jerry Lewis, a string of European productions. But nothing had made her immortal. Then Federico Fellini cast her as Sylvia in La Dolce Vita, and everything changed. Fellini later said the idea for the film was inseparable from the idea of Ekberg herself. She played a visiting American celebrity, endlessly photographed and pursued, a walking embodiment of the new media culture of fame that the film was partly about. Which meant she was essentially playing herself, with Fellini's camera turning her into exactly the kind of overwhelming image the story was critiquing. It was a perfect loop. The Trevi Fountain sequence, shot in January 1960, took all night to film. The water was freezing, according to every account. Ekberg reportedly waded in without complaint while Mastroianni needed a wetsuit under his suit to endure it. The resulting images, both from the film itself and from the production stills taken that night, are among the most reproduced in cinema history. “She possessed incredible beauty," Fellini once said. "I had never seen anyone like her. The luminous colour of her skin, her clear ice-blue eyes, golden hair, exuberance, joie de vivre, made her into a grandiose creature, extra-terrestrial and at the same time moving and irresistible.” She always maintained, with some amusement, that Fellini owed his reputation to her rather than the other way around. Whether or not that's strictly accurate, it captures something true about the dynamic. La Dolce Vita needed Ekberg to work. She was the gravitational centre of the whole film. The "Handicap" of Being a Sex Symbol Later in life, Ekberg described her sex symbol status as a "handicap," which is a bracing word but a revealing one. The problem with being defined by a single image, however iconic, is that it becomes almost impossible to be seen as anything else. After La Dolce Vita, audiences wanted Ekberg to repeat the Trevi Fountain forever. Filmmakers cast her in increasingly superficial roles that played on the bombshell persona without giving her anything interesting to do with it. She worked steadily through the 1960s but the quality of roles dropped. There's a pattern here that you see across the careers of the great mid-century sex symbols: the machinery that creates the icon is also the machinery that traps it. Mansfield, Monroe, Ekberg, all found that the persona they'd helped construct became a kind of prison. In 1982, at the age of 50, she posed for a set of glamour photographs that were widely discussed in the Italian press. She was living in Italy by then, had been for years, and had become something of a permanent fixture in Roman cultural life. Five years later, Fellini brought her back for Intervista (1987), a semi-autobiographical film in which she and Mastroianni appear as themselves, watching footage of their younger selves from La Dolce Vita. It's one of cinema's genuinely moving moments. The Photographs, and Why They Matter For enthusiasts of classic glamour photography, Ekberg's archive is exceptional. Her American pin-up and Playboy work from the mid-1950s sits within a very specific tradition, one that connects back through Hollywood glamour photography all the way to the Studio Manasse in Vienna and the broader European tradition of photographing the female form as something worthy of artistic attention. Anita Ekberg dressed up as the devil for a costume ball, The Italian work, the production stills and publicity photographs from the Fellini years, has a different quality entirely: more cinematic, more consciously artistic, influenced by the Italian approach to image-making that was itself in conversation with everything from neorealism to the European art house tradition. Playboy's own historians placed Ekberg at number 14 on their list of the 100 sexiest stars of the century in 1999, with Monroe at number one. That ranking tells you something about how the magazine understood its own history: Ekberg was foundational. She was part of the first generation of international stars who helped establish what the magazine was for. Ekberg wasn't just a face in a magazine. She was part of a conversation about beauty, fame, and the female body that was happening across the 1950s and 1960s simultaneously in Hollywood, in European cinema, in Playboy's pages, and in the work of photographers who were quietly building a visual language that still shapes how we see glamour today. That's the tradition this community is here to celebrate. Anita Ekberg died in Rome in January 2015, aged 83. She never had children, something she later said she regretted. She'd lived in Italy for most of her adult life, the country that had given her her greatest role and her enduring fame. Appropriately, she'd decided it suited her better than anywhere else. She was right.

Before reality TV, before Instagram, before anyone had figured out how to turn a body into a brand, there was Jayne Mansfield. Born Vera Jayne Palmer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1933, she arrived in Hollywood with a plan so simple it was almost radical: be impossible to ignore. It worked. Mansfield was a legitimate contradiction. She had an IQ reportedly around 163, spoke multiple languages, played the violin, and studied philosophy at college. But she understood, with total clarity, that in 1950s America the fastest path to fame ran straight through the male gaze. So she leaned in, all the way, and never looked back. The Playboy Years When Bettie Page was building her cult following through fetish photography and Irving Klaw's mail-order pin-ups, Mansfield was playing an entirely different game: mainstream stardom via Playboy. She appeared in the magazine as early as 1954, and her 1955 appearance as Playmate of the Month sent subscriptions climbing. Warner Bros. noticed, and offered her a seven-year contract shortly after. Between 1955 and 1966 she appeared on the Playboy cover a remarkable number of times, becoming one of the most frequently featured celebrities in the magazine's history. Her 1963 centrefold was one of the best-selling issues the magazine ever produced. This wasn't coincidence. Mansfield was a student of attention, and she treated every photo shoot like a PR campaign. The really fascinating thing about her Playboy work is how calculated it was. In an era when nude modelling could easily end a career, Mansfield turned it into a launchpad. She'd already been doing nude modelling for art classes to make ends meet before she hit it big, which tells you something about how she viewed her body: as a tool, not a liability. The Pink Palace and the Persona Her Los Angeles home, nicknamed the Pink Palace, had a heart-shaped swimming pool and a heart-shaped bathtub. She kept pet lions on the property. The whole setup was essentially a living photo shoot, and the press ate it up. In just nine months between 1956 and 1957, Mansfield appeared in an estimated 2,500 newspaper photos. That's the kind of saturation that would look calculated even by modern standards. The press called her "the Cleavage Queen" and "the Queen of Sex and Bosom." Newspapers of the era would routinely publish her measurements alongside news stories about her. Evangelist Billy Graham once complained publicly that Americans knew more about Jayne Mansfield's statistics than the Second Commandment. Which, honestly, was exactly the kind of coverage she was going for. Her film career had genuine highlights too. The Girl Can't Help It (1956) gave her a proper starring role, and in Promises! Promises! (1963) she became the first mainstream American actress to appear nude in a starring role, at a time when that was a genuinely scandalous thing to do. She always pushed the line, and she always knew exactly where it was. The Body as Art What makes Mansfield so interesting from a photographic history perspective is that her shoots existed on a spectrum from pure cheesecake to something closer to genuine artistic portraiture. The photographers she worked with in the 1950s, including the glamour specialists associated with the Hollywood studio system, were working in a tradition that went back to photographers like John Everard and Peter Basch, who shaped mid-century Hollywood portrait photography into something that was both commercial and artistically serious. The best of Mansfield's photography sits in that same space: clearly aware of its own sensuality, but composed with enough craft and intention that it rises above simple titillation. The lighting, the poses, the carefully managed reveals. These are images that know what they're doing. It's also worth noting how Mansfield's work influenced the economics of magazines like Playboy. She was part of a cohort of women, alongside Marilyn Monroe and Anita Ekberg, who essentially established the blueprint for the celebrity-magazine relationship that defined the mid-20th century. Before them, stars carefully protected their images. After them, a certain kind of strategic exposure became a legitimate career move. The Tragedy, and the Legacy In the early hours of June 29, 1967, Mansfield was travelling from Biloxi, Mississippi, to New Orleans, where she had a television appearance scheduled for later that morning. She'd just finished a nightclub performance in Biloxi, and she was in the front seat of a 1966 Buick Electra along with her boyfriend and lawyer, Sam Brody, and her driver, Ronald B. Harrison. Three of her children, including three-year-old Mariska Hargitay, were asleep on the back seat. Her four pet Chihuahuas were in the car too. Around 2:25 in the morning, on a dark stretch of US Highway 90, the car ran into a thick white fog drifting across the road from a mosquito-spraying machine working nearby. The driver didn't see the slow-moving semi-truck until it was too late. The Buick ploughed directly into the back of the trailer. The impact sheared off the entire roof of the car. Mansfield, Brody, and Harrison were killed instantly. The three children in the back seat survived with relatively minor injuries. Jane Mansfield's body indicated by the arrow. The decapitation rumour that attached itself to the crash almost immediately, and has never entirely gone away, is false. Her undertaker Jim Roberts told the New York Times in 1997 that her head was attached "as much as mine is." The coroner's official cause of death was a crushed skull with avulsion of the cranium and brain: catastrophic, and almost certainly instantaneous, but not decapitation. The story persists partly because the crash scene photographs were genuinely shocking, and partly because Hollywood has always preferred its tragedies operatic. She was 34 years old. Her funeral drew nearly a thousand people to Fairview Cemetery in Pennsylvania, and fans visited her grave in such numbers that a truckload of topsoil had to be brought in to replace what they'd taken as keepsakes. The crash itself had a lasting practical legacy: the bar now legally required across the rear undercarriage of all large commercial trucks in the United States, designed to prevent cars from sliding underneath trailers on impact, is known in the industry as the Mansfield bar. She left behind five children, including actress Mariska Hargitay. Her daughter Jayne Marie Mansfield later became a Playmate herself, the first woman to follow her mother into the magazine's pages. She's often dismissed as a Monroe imitation, which does her a real disservice. Monroe was fragile in ways that Mansfield wasn't. Mansfield was calculating, funny, self-aware, and utterly in control of her own image right up until the end. The persona was a performance, and she was always the one directing it. For fans of classic nude and pin-up photography, Mansfield's catalogue is essential. The sheer volume of images she produced across a decade, combined with the consistent quality and the fascinating story behind them, makes her one of the great subjects of mid-century glamour photography. The Pubic Wars between Playboy and Penthouse that would reshape the industry in the 1970s were still years away when Mansfield was in her prime. She was working in a world where the rules were being written in real time, and she helped write them. Jayne Mansfield wasn't just a product of the 1950s. She was one of the people who built them.

In 1859, a 27-year-old London bookseller with no formal academic credentials published what would become one of the most influential linguistic documents of the 19th century. He didn't put his name on it. The first edition of A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words appeared credited only to "A London Antiquary." The author was John Camden Hotten, and the book that would later become The Slang Dictionary was about to go through five editions in 15 years. The 1865 edition, the third, is the one most people mean when they reference the book. It's the version bearing that gloriously blunt subtitle: "The Vulgar Words, Street Phrases, and Fast Expressions of High and Low Society." By that point Hotten had given up the anonymity. His name was on the cover. He'd also substantially expanded the contents, to nearly 10,000 words and phrases, which he described as "commonly deemed vulgar, but which are used by the highest and lowest, the best, the wisest, as well as the worst and most ignorant of society." It was a runaway success. And it was also, by the standards of respectable Victorian scholarship, completely disreputable. Who Was John Camden Hotten? Hotten was born in Clerkenwell, London, in 1832, to Cornish parents. His father was a carpenter and undertaker. At 14 he was apprenticed to a London bookseller, John Petheram, which is where his obsession with rare and obscure texts took root. By 1848 he was in the United States, where he spent five or six years absorbing American popular culture and the lively, irreverent tone of American street language. He came back to London around 1853 and set up his own publishing house at 151 Piccadilly. From there he built a genuinely unusual list: slang dictionaries, histories of signboards, the first British editions of Mark Twain and Artemus Ward, and, in his spare time, a steady stream of erotica published under various pseudonyms. One of his more colourful sidelines was a bawdy comic opera titled Lady Bumtickler's Revels. He wasn't especially discreet about it. When he died in 1873, aged just 40, his publishing business was bought by his former clerk, Andrew Chatto, who turned it into Chatto & Windus. The firm is still active. Hotten's name is mostly forgotten, but his dictionary isn't. A Book That Covered Everyone What made the Slang Dictionary unusual wasn't just that it documented criminal cant, though it did that thoroughly. It was the breadth of the social terrain it covered. The full subtitle of the 1859 first edition made this explicit: the book covered slang "used at the present day in the streets of London, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Houses of Parliament, the dens of St Giles, and the palaces of St James." In other words: everyone. Hotten's thesis was that slang wasn't the exclusive property of criminals and the poor. It was everywhere, used by every class, simply adapted to fit context. Alongside entries for thieves' cant and beggars' jargon, the dictionary includes public schoolboy slang, pirate slang, stagehand slang, equine stable slang, the slang of softened oaths, and phrases attributed to Dr Johnson. He even documented parliamentary slang. The book treats the Duke's choice of words and the pickpocket's choice of words as equally worthy of study. Hotten also thought carefully about the origins of slang, tracing it back through centuries of linguistic borrowing. He identified words of Romany origin, terms absorbed from Italian, French, and Dutch, and vocabulary inherited directly from much older criminal argots. He disagreed with contemporaries who thought the tradition of recording such language began with Richard Head's Life of an English Rogue around 1680. Hotten traced it back to Thomas Harman's Caveat for Common Cursitors in 1567, which he reproduced at length in the dictionary itself. Back Slang and the Costermongers One of the most fascinating sections of the dictionary is its glossary of back slang, the secret language used by London's costermongers, the street traders who sold fruit, vegetables, and other goods from barrows and market stalls. Back slang was exactly what it sounds like: words spoken in rough reverse, designed to be unintelligible to outsiders, particularly police and customers. Hotten's 1859 first edition is considered the first printed back slang dictionary, following Henry Mayhew's earlier documentation of it in London Labour and the London Poor in 1851. The system had its own internal logic. A shilling was a "gen" (shilling reversed, more or less). A pound was "dunop." Numbers ran: eno, oat, earth, roaf, evif, exis, nevis, theg, enin, net. Fifteen was "earth-evif." Eighteen was "net-theg." The word "yob," meaning a boy, survives in modern English carrying a very different connotation from the neutral Victorian original. And "tenip," meaning a pint, is still occasionally encountered. The system had its impurities. Hotten himself noted anomalies where words weren't straightforward reversals, and modern scholars have since pointed out that his accuracy wasn't always reliable. But the attempt to document it at all was significant. Rhyming Slang Gets Its First Serious Treatment The Slang Dictionary is also one of the earliest serious academic treatments of rhyming slang, the Cockney dialect in which a word is replaced by a rhyming phrase, usually with the rhyming word then dropped. "Table" becomes "Cain and Abel." "Mince pies" are eyes. "Dog and bone" is a phone, though in 1865 that particular entry was still a few decades from being relevant. Hotten included not just definitions but histories, tracing how these formulations developed and spread. He was genuinely curious about the mechanics of how language moves between social groups, how an expression coined in a Whitechapel market stall could end up in a West End drawing room, and what that journey said about Victorian society. It's also worth noting the cover illustration of the 1865 edition, showing a character labelled "The Wedge" and another called "The Wooden Spoon." These aren't decorative doodles. Both are slang terms defined inside the book, and putting them on the front cover was a small act of wit that most readers probably missed entirely. The Slang Dictionary had that quality throughout: a dry self-awareness that stopped it from being merely a catalogue. The Controversy, and the Lasting Legacy Hotten's scholarly reputation during his lifetime was complicated by his other publishing activities. The erotica didn't help. His use of a loophole in international copyright law to publish cheap British editions of American authors without paying royalties earned him lasting enmity from Mark Twain, who referred to him in correspondence in terms that aren't printable here. The irony of Twain's most colourful insults appearing in letters about the man who compiled The Slang Dictionary presumably wasn't lost on everyone. Oxford Academic has since noted that the dictionary's etymologies are frequently unreliable. Hotten was working without the tools of modern linguistics, and his enthusiasm sometimes outran his evidence. But as a snapshot of the living language of Victorian London, the book is irreplaceable. Scholars still use it. The dictionary directly influenced Eric Partridge, whose Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English became the standard 20th-century reference work in the field. Partridge acknowledged his debt. The book was also continued and republished after Hotten's death, with later editions incorporating his unpublished notes and corrections, running well into the 20th century. It's free to read online now, thanks to Project Gutenberg. Which Hotten would probably have appreciated, though he'd almost certainly have found a way to charge for it. If you're interested in how the Victorians communicated in other covert ways, the site's piece on the language of flowers covers a rather more fragrant form of coded messaging from the same era. Read the dictionary in full here - You can put a face to the people that may be using this language by taking a look at these fantastic photos of Victorian London SOURCES 1. Project Gutenberg, The Slang Dictionary: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42108 2. American Numismatic Society, Hotten's Numismatic Slang: https://numismatics.org/pocketchange/numismatic-slang/ 3. Wikipedia, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_Slang,_Cant,_and_Vulgar_Words 4. The Public Domain Review, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860): https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dictionary-of-modern-slang/ 5. Oxford Academic, Julie Coleman, A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries Vol. III: https://academic.oup.com/book/4666/chapter/146833231 6. Victorian Web, Earth Yenneps: Victorian Back Slang: https://victorianweb.org/history/slang2.html 7. Lehigh University, A Dictionary of Modern Slang exhibit entry: https://exhibits.lib.lehigh.edu/exhibits/show/dictionaries/slang-dialect/hotten

There's a photograph taken in 1924 that sold at Christie's in 2022 for 12.4 million dollars, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. It shows a woman from behind, nude to the waist, with the f-holes of a violin painted onto her back. The woman is Kiki de Montparnasse. Most of the headlines called her Man Ray's muse. That's accurate, but it's also about half the story. Kiki de Montparnasse, born Alice Ernestine Prin in 1901, was a model, painter, cabaret singer, actress, and memoirist. She was crowned Queen of Montparnasse by the artists she moved among, and by most accounts she was as much the centre of that world as any of the men who painted her. She died at 51, largely forgotten. It's worth knowing who she actually was. From Burgundy to the streets of Paris Alice Prin was born in Chatillon-sur-Seine in Burgundy in 1901 into a poor family. Her mother eventually sent her to Paris at age 12, where she attended school for a single year before leaving to take on a series of menial jobs to help support the family. It was a hard start. In 1917, to supplement her meagre earnings, she began modelling for a sculptor. Her mother disowned her for it, considering it an inappropriate source of income. Homeless and poverty-stricken, she drifted to Montparnasse, the bohemian district on the Left Bank that had become the unofficial home of Paris's artistic community. There she befriended the painter Chaim Soutine, who introduced her to a wider circle that included Maurice Utrillo, Jean Cocteau, Modigliani, and others. She was, by all accounts, immediately at home. Around 1918 she began a relationship with the artist Maurice Mendjisky, who is often credited with giving her the nickname Kiki. It stuck. From that point on, Alice Prin effectively ceased to exist. Kiki de Montparnasse was who she became. The model at the centre of an era Throughout the 1920s Kiki modelled for nearly all the leading avant-garde artists working in Paris. The list is remarkable: Alexander Calder, Francis Picabia, Chaim Soutine, Foujita, Kisling, Cocteau, and Modigliani, among many others. As Artnet News noted in their coverage of Mark Braude's biography, she was a model to a slew of major artists, but the biography argues she was in many ways the centre of the Parisian avant-garde rather than simply a peripheral figure within it. Foujita and Kiki (with a portrait of Kiki by Foujita hanging on the wall), detail of a photograph taken by Marc Vaux, circa 1920 Foujita, the Japanese-French painter, considered her his favourite model. His 1922 painting of her, Nu couche a la toile, was exhibited at the Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais and sold for 8,000 francs, a significant sum at the time. He reportedly shared some of the proceeds with Kiki. Kiki in all her splendor, on May 3, 1929 at the charity ball of the Friendly Aid of Artists. What made her different from other models of the period wasn't just her looks. It was her personality. She was funny, outrageous, completely herself. She sang bawdy songs at the cafes and bars of Montparnasse, held court at La Rotonde and Le Select, and had the kind of presence that people built their evenings around. At a legendary party in Montparnasse, she was formally crowned Queen of Montparnasse, a title that recognised her not just as a model but as an equal participant in the creative life of the neighbourhood. Man Ray and Le Violon d'Ingres In 1921 Kiki met the American photographer and painter Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, shortly after he arrived in Paris. They moved in together and began a relationship that lasted most of the decade. As Literary Hub's coverage of Braude's biography makes clear, when they created Le Violon d'Ingres in 1924, Kiki and Man Ray had been living together for three years, and at that point she was arguably the bigger star of the two. Man Ray had failed to sell a single work at his own Parisian debut. Le Violon d'Ingres is one of the most recognised photographs of the 20th century. It shows Kiki from behind, nude to the waist, wearing a turban, with two f-holes painted onto the print of the photograph to make her body resemble a violin. The title references a French idiom, 'violon d'Ingres', meaning a hobby or pastime, a nod to the neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who played the violin as a sideline to his painting career. As the Smithsonian reported when the print sold at Christie's in 2022, no other photograph has proven to have the lasting power and playful eroticism that defines the Surrealists of the 1920s. Le Violon d'Ingres The image first appeared in Andre Breton's Surrealist magazine Litterature in June 1924. It's beautiful and unsettling in equal measure. Man Ray made dozens of photographs of Kiki over the course of their relationship, often nude, always recognisably her. She was also the star of his experimental film L'Etoile de mer, shot mostly through a glass filter that blurs and distorts, though her presence comes through regardless. More than a muse: painter, performer, writer One of the frustrating things about how Kiki tends to be remembered is the word 'muse'. It reduces her to a passive role in someone else's creative process. The reality is more complicated. In 1927 Kiki held her own exhibition of paintings in Paris, and it sold out. Her work, mostly romanticised portraits and scenes from her Burgundy childhood, had a simple, bright, dreamy quality. Man Ray apparently dismissed her painting as a hobby. Given that her show sold out and his debut didn't, this says more about him than about her. Two years later, not yet 30, she published her memoirs. Ernest Hemingway wrote the introduction. The book was a bestseller. Even though it was banned in the United States. She was also a serious cabaret performer whose songs were, as Artnet described it, the pulse of Paris in those years. This was an ephemeral art, one that doesn't leave behind paintings or photographs, which is part of why her reputation has faded while Man Ray's has only grown. But those who were there consistently described her as a force in her own right. I had found my true calling. The painters had taken me in; my sadness was over. I still often went hungry, but laughter made me forget all that. (Memories , 1929, Kiki) The end and the forgetting Kiki and Man Ray separated in 1929. The decade that had made her ended, and the years that followed were harder. She struggled with drug addiction, and the bohemian world she'd thrived in scattered as Paris changed around her. She died in 1953 at the age of 51. The forgetting that followed is a familiar story for women of her era. The paintings and photographs she appeared in survive in major museums. Her own work, her performances, her personality, the thing that made all those artists want to paint her in the first place, is harder to recover. Cultural historian Mark Braude's biography, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, is the most serious recent attempt to put her back at the centre of her own story rather than the margins of someone else's. For r/RetroTease, Kiki represents something important: the idea that the person in front of the camera or canvas is never just a subject. The best nude photography and art has always been a collaboration, even when history doesn't record it that way. Sources 1. More Than a Muse: A New Biography Casts Kiki de Montparnasse as a Leader in the Heady Art Swirl of 1920s Paris — Artnet News 2. How Kiki de Montparnasse Made Her Life Into a Work of Art — Literary Hub (Mark Braude) 3. Man Ray's Iconic Portrait of Kiki de Montparnasse Is Now the Most Expensive Photo Ever Sold at Auction — Smithsonian Magazine 4. How a Stormy Romantic Relationship Inspired Man Ray's Most Famous Photograph — Artnet News 5. Kiki de Montparnasse — Biography — Britannica 6. Paris in the 1920s: The Tale of the Notorious Kiki de Montparnasse — Bonjour Paris

If you've ever seen a Modigliani painting, you don't forget it. The long necks. The almond-shaped eyes with no pupils. The figures that look like they're made of something between flesh and sculpture. There's nobody else who painted quite like him, and there's probably nobody else who lived quite like him either. Modigliani's birthplace in Livorno Amedeo Modigliani was one of the most distinctive artists of the early 20th century. He was also broke, sick, and almost entirely unrecognised until after his death. He died at 35. The day after he died, his pregnant partner threw herself from a window. His entire serious career lasted barely a decade. And yet the work he left behind is extraordinary. Here's who he was, what he made, and why those nudes in particular are still worth talking about. A sickly kid from Livorno who wanted to be an artist Modigliani was born in 1884 in Livorno, a port city in Tuscany, into a Sephardic Jewish family that had fallen on hard times. He was the youngest of four children and was sick for most of his childhood, battling pleurisy, typhoid fever, and eventually tuberculosis, the disease that would eventually kill him. His mother kept a journal, and in it she wrote about young Amedeo's delirium during a fever at age 14. In his ramblings, he apparently talked about wanting to see the great paintings of Italy. His mother took it seriously. When he recovered, she started taking him to museums and galleries, and by 16 he was studying art formally. He moved to Paris in 1906, which is where the story really begins. Paris in the early 1900s was the centre of the art world, and Modigliani threw himself into it. He was charming, handsome, spoke multiple languages, drank heavily, used drugs, and had a habit of reciting Dante at parties. By most accounts he was magnetic and completely impossible to be around for any length of time. The style that came from everywhere and looked like nowhere else Modigliani's influences were all over the place, and somehow they fused into something completely his own. He was deeply affected by African sculpture, which was everywhere in Paris at the time and had captured the attention of Picasso and others. He spent several years focused almost entirely on sculpture, carving elongated stone heads with those characteristic simplified features. Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and André Salmon, 1916 When bad health and the cost of materials pushed him back toward painting, the influence of the sculpture stayed. His figures have that same quality of carved stone. They're simplified, stylised, stripped back to something essential. He was also influenced by Cezanne, by the Italian Renaissance painters he'd studied as a teenager, and by his friend Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor whose work had a similar quality of distillation. The result was a style that felt ancient and modern at the same time. His portraits, and he painted a lot of them, have an intimacy that's unusual. The subjects look like they're being truly seen rather than simply depicted. Even when the eyes are blank, somehow the painting feels emotionally present. The nudes that caused an actual scandal In 1917, Modigliani had his one and only solo exhibition during his lifetime, held at a gallery in Paris run by a dealer named Leopold Zborowski. The show featured a number of his nude paintings, and it was shut down by the police on the opening day. The reason? The nudes showed pubic hair. This sounds almost comical now, but at the time it was considered obscene. Classical painting and sculpture had always depicted the nude with a kind of smooth, sanitised idealism. Modigliani's figures were real bodies. They had hair. They looked like actual people rather than mythological archetypes, and that specificity apparently crossed a line. His nudes are remarkable paintings. There are around 30 of them, mostly reclining female figures, and what makes them different from the long tradition of the reclining nude in Western art is that they aren't passive or distant. They look directly at the viewer. They're present, sometimes confrontational, often unsettling in a way that's hard to pin down exactly. They're not objects being observed. They feel more like participants. His treatment of the body owes something to the Italian masters he studied, but the elongation, the simplified planes, the colour choices, all of that is unmistakably his. The skin tones he used are extraordinary, warm ochres and burnt siennas and terracottas that make the figures look lit from within. The last years and the myth that followed By the time Modigliani was making his best work, his tuberculosis was getting worse. He was drinking heavily, living in poverty, and rarely eating properly. His partner Jeanne Hebuterne, a young art student nine years his junior, had their first child in 1918 and was pregnant with their second when he died in January 1920. He was taken to a charity hospital and died two days later of tubercular meningitis. He was 35. Jeanne, who was nine months pregnant, took her own life the next morning. It's one of the most tragic endings in art history, and it contributed to a mythology around Modigliani that has sometimes overshadowed the actual work. The 'cursed artist' narrative, the bohemian life, the early death, all of it has made Modigliani a romantic figure in a way that can feel a bit reductive. The paintings are better than the legend. They don't need the tragedy to justify them. Why his work still holds up Modigliani's paintings sell for extraordinary amounts now. His Nu couche (Sur le cote gauche) sold for over 150 million dollars in 2018. But the money isn't really the point. Nu couché (sur le côté gauche) / Reclining Nude (On the Left Side) What holds up is the quality of attention in the work. Whether he was painting a portrait of a friend, a stranger, or a nude model, there's a sense that he was genuinely looking. The simplifications he made weren't laziness or limitation, they were choices in service of getting at something true about the person in front of him. For a community like r/RetroTease, Modigliani sits at exactly the right intersection of fine art and the nude as subject. His figures are never prurient, but they're also never cold or academic. They're human, warm, and entirely worth your time. Sources 1. Modigliani: Beyond the Myth — The Jewish Museum, New York 2. Exhibition Guide: Modigliani — Tate Modern, London 3. Modigliani's Painted Nudes: A Technical Study — Tate Papers, Tate Research 4. Amedeo Modigliani — Artist Page — Tate 5. Modigliani and The Dreyfus Affair — The Jewish Museum Stories 6. Amedeo Modigliani — Artist Profile — Pace Gallery (retrospective history and institutional collections)

Most people know Joe Pesci and Frank Vincent as two of Martin Scorsese's go-to guys for on-screen violence. They beat each other up in Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino, usually with Pesci coming off worse for wear in one film and Vincent getting the short end of it in another. But long before any of that, the two men were something else entirely: bandmates in a lounge act grinding through the New Jersey nightclub circuit, six hours a night, night after night, for years. It's one of those backstories that sounds made up. Two future movie mobsters, playing jazz standards in tuxedos for half-drunk crowds in Times Square bars. But it's absolutely true, and the story of how it happened, and what came next, is a genuinely fascinating bit of entertainment history that most Scorsese fans have never heard. Frank Vincent Needed a Guitar Player Frank Vincent, whose real name was Frank Vincent Gattuso, was born in North Adams, Massachusetts in 1937 and grew up in the Greenville section of Jersey City, New Jersey. His father encouraged him to take music lessons, and by the time he left school at 16, Vincent had already developed real skills on both drums and trumpet. He spent the 1950s working his way into the New York metropolitan music scene, eventually becoming a session drummer backing some notable names, including Paul Anka, Del Shannon, Trini Lopez, and The Belmonts. By the late 1960s, Vincent had formed his own band, initially called Frank Vincent and the Aristocats (later the Aristocrats). They played jazz and lounge standards, dressed in coordinated tuxedos, and worked the honky-tonk clubs of Times Square and the surrounding area. The band was professional, tight, and capable. There was just one problem: the world had moved on. Big band and jazz lounge acts were increasingly out of step with what audiences wanted. Bookings were getting harder to come by. In 1969, Vincent put out an ad for a guitar player. A younger guy from Newark named Joe Pesci answered it. Joe Pesci Was Already a Showbiz Veteran Pesci, born in 1943, had been performing since he was a child. His mother was a part-time barber, and he learned the trade from her, but music and performance were always the real draw. By the age of ten, he'd already appeared on the television talent show Star Time Kids, the same show that helped launch Connie Francis. As a teenager, he fell in with the group of musicians who'd eventually form Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. According to most accounts, Pesci played a role in introducing the members to each other, including keyboardist Bob Gaudio, whose songwriting would define the band's sound. Before joining Vincent's outfit, Pesci had also played guitar with Joey Dee and the Starliters, the house band at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City. In 1968, he released a debut album called Little Joe Sure Can Sing!, credited under the name Joe Ritchie, on Brunswick Records. It was covers of contemporary pop hits, and it didn't exactly set the world on fire. When Vincent's ad appeared, Pesci was a capable, experienced musician who hadn't yet found his moment. He joined Frank Vincent and the Aristocrats, and the two men clicked almost immediately, though not necessarily in the way either of them had planned. From Band to Comedy Act The music was decent, but it was increasingly passe. As the lounge bookings dried up through the early 1970s, Pesci and Vincent found that the funniest parts of their shows were getting the best reactions. Vincent had a background in insult comedy and had already developed a sharp, confrontational stage personality. Pesci, naturally quick-witted, could hold his own and then some. Their onstage chemistry was hard to manufacture but impossible to miss. By around 1970, the two had shifted their act away from pure music and toward comedy. They billed themselves as Vincent and Pesci, and the act was described by those who saw it as something between Abbott and Costello and Don Rickles. Some nights it'd be Vincent roasting the audience while Pesci played straight man. Other nights they'd flip it entirely, with Pesci taking shots at Vincent. They did sketches, accents, and physical comedy, working the same New Jersey club circuit they'd been playing as musicians. Vincent later described the partnership as being like a marriage, saying the two of them were like "a husband and wife" who broke up many times over the course of those six years. But they always came back together, because the act worked. According to sources from the time, they toured nightclubs across the United States and in 1975 were even part of Roy Radin's new vaudeville revue, which was then enjoying a modest revival on the American entertainment circuit. They also recorded together during this period, releasing a handful of music and comedy singles as Vincent and Pesci. One of them was a funky instrumental called "Little People Blues." Another was a comedy Christmas single called "Can You Change the Way I Talk for Christmas?" in which Vincent played Santa Claus and Pesci voiced Porky Pig. The Act That Launched Two Careers The comedy duo wound down by 1975, but neither man was done with showbiz. The following year, both Pesci and Vincent were cast in a low-budget crime film called The Death Collector, also known as Family Enforcer. It was rough around the edges, but the performances stood out, and the film eventually caught the attention of two people who would change both their lives: actor Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese. The connection didn't pay off immediately. After The Death Collector, both men found themselves back at square one. Pesci famously went back to working in a restaurant, living in a small apartment above it in the Bronx, with no acting work on the horizon. Then, in 1979, he got a phone call from Scorsese about a boxing picture. That picture was Raging Bull. Vincent's path back was similarly accidental. He happened to bump into Pesci again in 1978, and that chance meeting led to an audition with Scorsese. He ended up playing Salvy Batts in Raging Bull, the mob enforcer who has a brutal altercation with Jake La Motta's brother early in the film. It was a supporting role, but it was exactly the right kind of role for the right kind of director. What happened next is the part everyone knows. Scorsese reunited them in Goodfellas in 1990 and in Casino in 1995. Their shared history gave their on-screen chemistry a weight that was almost impossible to fake. When Vincent's Billy Batts tells Pesci's Tommy DeVito to go get his shine box in Goodfellas, there's something electric in the exchange that goes beyond the script. These were two men who'd spent years performing together, reading each other's timing, knowing exactly how far to push before things snapped. You can find more on the real history behind that film's characters over on our true crime stories section. A Footnote That Deserves to Be a Headline There's something genuinely strange about the way this chapter of their lives has been largely forgotten. Joe Pesci is one of the most recognisable actors of the late 20th century. Frank Vincent became a fixture in prestige television through The Sopranos, where he played Phil Leotardo across more than 30 episodes before meeting one of the show's most memorable deaths. Their names are synonymous with a very particular strain of American cinema. And yet, for about six years before any of that, they were just two guys from New Jersey playing jazz and doing insult comedy in clubs, putting in six-hour sets with a few breaks to catch their breath, releasing Christmas novelty singles, and slowly figuring out what they were actually good at. Frank Vincent passed away on September 13, 2017, following complications from heart surgery. He was 80 years old. He'd been married to his wife Kathleen since 1970, and the couple had three children. Pesci, now in his 80s, has largely stepped back from public life but has continued to record music, releasing an album called Pesci... Still Singing in 2019. If you're interested in more stories about the surprising early lives of famous faces, take a look at our history articles at Utterly Interesting. The Aristocrats never charted. Vincent and Pesci never cracked the big time as a comedy act. But without all of it, there's no Goodfellas. There's no shine box scene. There might not even be the same Martin Scorsese filmography we now take for granted. Sometimes the long way round is the only way that works. Sources 1. Travalanche (Travis Stewart's blog): "When Joe Pesci and Frank Vincent Had a Vaudeville Comedy Team" (2022) – travsd.wordpress.com 2. Rotten Tomatoes: Frank Vincent biography – rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/frank_vincent 3. TV Insider: Frank Vincent actor biography – tvinsider.com/people/frank-vincent/ 4. Cheat Sheet: "Why Joe Pesci and Frank Vincent Worked So Well Together in Scorsese Movies" (2019) – cheatsheet.com 5. Grokipedia: Frank Vincent biography – grokipedia.com/page/Frank_Vincent 6. Encyclopedia.com: Joe Pesci biography – encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/film-and-television-biographies/joe-pesci 7. The Sunday Independent Ireland: Frank Vincent obituary (2017) – pressreader.com 8. TV Tropes: Frank Vincent creator page – tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/FrankVincent

It’s hard to imagine a time when the voice of a Nazi sympathiser could reach six million British radios in wartime Britain, but for a time, William Joyce (better known to history as Lord Haw-Haw) was a fixture of British homes. With a nasal, jeering voice and upper-crust accent, Joyce became the most infamous English-speaking Nazi propagandist of the Second World War. His story is one of transatlantic origins, ideological obsession, opportunism, and eventual disgrace. In 1946, he was executed at Wandsworth Prison, technically for a lie told on a passport application. But his real crime in the eyes of many was treason. Let's explore the full trajectory of William Joyce: from Brooklyn-born boy to fascist ideologue, Nazi broadcaster, and finally, the last person in Britain to hang for treason. Born in Brooklyn, Raised in Galway: A Conflicted Childhood William Brooke Joyce was born on 24 April 1906 in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest son of Michael Joyce, an Irish Catholic, and Gertrude Emily Brooke, a Protestant from a well-off Anglo-Irish family. His father had acquired US citizenship in 1894, but by 1909, the Joyces had returned to Ireland, settling in Salthill, County Galway. Educated at the Jesuit-run Coláiste Iognáid between 1915 and 1921, young William grew up in a household that fervently supported the British Empire, his parents were unionists who despised Irish republicanism. In adolescence, Joyce rejected Catholicism for Anglicanism, supposedly after being told that his Protestant mother would be damned. Though he remained nominally Anglican, his later religious views were patchy at best. During the Irish War of Independence, Joyce aligned himself with the Black and Tans, acting as a scout. His hardline imperialism alienated even some loyalists. It is said that the IRA tried to assassinate him on his way home from school. With the help of Captain Patrick Keating of the Intelligence Corps, he was spirited out of Ireland and enlisted in the Worcestershire Regiment under a false age. He was discharged months later due to rheumatic fever and his true age being discovered. From Student to Fascist: The Making of an Ideologue Settling in England in the early 1920s, Joyce initially studied pre-medical sciences at Battersea Polytechnic but left, reportedly for laziness and radical views. He later studied English and history at Birkbeck College, earning a first-class BA and publishing academic work on philology. He was a gifted linguist and mathematician, though he later claimed that his work had been plagiarised by a Jewish scholar. One of the most striking features of William Joyce was the deep scar running from his right ear to the corner of his mouth, commonly described as a "Glasgow smile" or "Chelsea grin." This injury occurred on 22 October 1924, during a heated political rally. Joyce was stewarding a meeting in support of Conservative candidate Jack Lazarus in Lambeth during the general election. The event was disrupted by communists. In the ensuing violence, Joyce was slashed across the face with a razor. He would later claim the assailants were "Jewish communists," feeding into his later antisemitic rhetoric. However, historian Colin Holmes cited Joyce’s first wife as saying it was actually an Irish woman who inflicted the wound. Regardless of its origins, the scar was both literal and symbolic. It altered his appearance, lent him a sinister air, and was frequently mocked in political cartoons. It would also play a role in the final act of his life, at the moment of his hanging. By 1928, Joyce was active in the Chelsea Conservative Association but was eventually expelled over sexual misconduct and eccentric behaviour. He married Hazel Kathleen Barr in 1927, with whom he had two daughters, but the marriage dissolved in 1937 amid infidelities and violence. William Joyce in Berlin. Climbing the BUF Ranks: Joyce and Oswald Mosley In 1932, Joyce joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) and quickly rose through the ranks. His fierce oratory drew attention, with journalist Cecil Roberts describing him as: "Thin, pale, intense, he had not been speaking many minutes before we were electrified ... so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic." Joyce was appointed Director of Propaganda in 1934 and then Deputy Leader. He led the BUF’s shift from economic corporatism to racial antisemitism. A 1935 speech denouncing the Government of India Bill revealed his ideological fervour, calling its backers a: “... loathsome, foetid, purulent, tumid mass of hypocrisy, hiding behind Jewish Dictators.” BUF activity in West Sussex under Joyce became particularly intense, supported by figures like Norah and Dudley Elam. However, his extremism began to alienate Mosley. By 1937, Joyce was dismissed during BUF staff cuts, his departure triggering the formation of his own group, the National Socialist League. Despite ideological overlaps, Mosley later denounced Joyce as a traitor. Yet, Norah Elam would later state that Joyce should not have been hanged, as he was Irish, not British. Germany Calling: Joyce Becomes “Lord Haw-Haw” On 26 August 1939, shortly before war broke out, Joyce fled to Germany with his second wife, Margaret Cairns White, a fellow fascist and activist. There, through contacts like Dorothy Eckersley, he secured work as a broadcaster for Nazi radio. His first broadcast came on 6 September 1939. He was naturalised as a German citizen in 1940. The Daily Express critic Jonah Barrington coined the nickname “Lord Haw-Haw” for the affected, aristocratic voice he heard on Nazi broadcasts. The term was initially misapplied to another speaker, possibly Wolf Mittler, but by 1940 it had stuck firmly to Joyce. Joyce began to relish the role. He introduced himself on air as: “William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw.” The broadcasts opened with the now-notorious phrase, “Germany calling, Germany calling,” and often featured jeering commentary, exaggerated claims, and predictions of British defeat. At his peak, Joyce reached an estimated six million regular listeners. For many, he was both a grim source of information and a darkly compelling curiosity. The Voice of Treason While officially listening to Joyce’s broadcasts was discouraged in Britain, it remained legal. Civilians tuned in to hear Nazi perspectives, sometimes morbidly fascinated by his knowledge of British troop movements and POW names. Urban legends proliferated about Lord Haw-Haw’s seeming omniscience, rumours suggesting he had access to British informants or was orchestrating sabotage. Joyce wasn’t limited to radio. He wrote propaganda leaflets, tried to recruit British POWs to the Waffen-SS’s British Free Corps, and authored Twilight Over England, a treatise comparing decadent capitalist Britain to the alleged utopia of Nazi Germany. His broadcasts continued even as the Allies advanced, though they took on an increasingly desperate and drunken tone. On 30 April 1945, the day of Hitler’s death, Joyce signed off with: “Heil Hitler and farewell.” Capture, Trial, and Execution On 28 May 1945, Joyce was captured by British forces at Flensburg, near the Danish border. Intelligence officer Geoffrey Perry, a German-Jewish émigré, recognised his voice. Joyce was shot in the buttocks while reaching for identification and was brought back to London. Tried at the Old Bailey in September 1945, Joyce faced three counts of high treason. Though born in the US, he had acquired a British passport fraudulently, which the prosecution argued entitled him to British protection—and thus made him subject to British treason laws. As historian A. J. P. Taylor drily noted: “Technically, Joyce was hanged for making a false statement when applying for a passport, the usual penalty for which is a small fine.” Despite appeals, including one to the House of Lords (with Lord Porter dissenting), the conviction held. On 3 January 1946, William Joyce was hanged at Wandsworth Prison by famed executioner Albert Pierrepoint. His was the last execution for treason in British history. Joyce’s final words reportedly included: “In death as in life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war … I am proud to die for my ideals.” Joyce’s execution was unremarkable in one respect—Pierrepoint was a consummate professional. But due to the pressure exerted on his neck during the drop, the scar that had defined his appearance for over two decades split open. Blood reportedly poured down his cheek as his body was left to hang. Legacy and Reburial Joyce’s remains were interred in an unmarked grave at Wandsworth. But in 1976, after a campaign by his daughter Heather Iandolo, they were reburied in Galway. He received a Roman Catholic Tridentine Mass despite religious ambiguity in life. Heather, who died in 2022, publicly condemned his Nazi activities while remembering him as a warm father. To some, William Joyce remains a traitor and propaganda tool of a genocidal regime. To a small number of neo-Nazis, he is a martyr. But for most, he is a chilling reminder of how ideology, disenchantment, and delusion can lead a man from the lecture hall to the gallows.

The script described it simply as 'chess with sex.' Two or three days of filming. No dialogue. Almost entirely improvised. Director Norman Jewison would crouch behind the camera during tight close-ups, whispering instructions to his actors because the shots were so close he wasn't in frame. The result was one of the most charged scenes in 1960s cinema, and it made Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway into one of Hollywood's most electric screen pairings. Neither of them was supposed to be in the film. Nobody Wanted McQueen The Thomas Crown Affair began life as a screenplay by Alan Trustman, a Boston lawyer turned first-time scriptwriter. The character of Thomas Crown, a fabulously wealthy Boston businessman who orchestrates a bank robbery purely for the thrill of it, was conceived as polished, patrician, and immaculate in a suit. Steve McQueen, best known for playing tough, denim-clad working types in films like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, was so far from the producers' minds that he was barely considered. Norman Jewison directed Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in the 1967 crime caper ‘The Thomas Crown Affair,’ 1967. Richard Burton was the first choice. Sean Connery was second, and came close: producer Walter Mirisch had lunch with him at the Regency Hotel and spent most of a Saturday afternoon in conversation, but couldn't seal the deal. Jack Lemmon was floated. Jean-Paul Belmondo was briefly considered for a French angle on the character. Brigitte Bardot was at one point considered a near-certainty for the female lead. McQueen heard about the script through a friend, not through his agency. When he called director Norman Jewison directly, Jewison was blunt: 'If it's Thomas Crown, forget it. You're not right. I love you and respect you as an actor. But I'll never tell you lies. You can't have the part.' He then listed McQueen's specific shortcomings for the role, including a habit of looking at the ground or squinting into the sun rather than holding eye contact. Only after three hours on Jewison's back lawn did the director relent. 'The more he talked,' Jewison later said, 'the more I saw him as Thomas Crown.' McQueen knew it was a risk. 'I don't have any illusions on that score,' he told interviewers. 'If people laugh at me, my ass is gone.' But he'd been actively looking to change his screen image. 'I felt it was time to get past those tough upright types,' he said. 'When Norman showed me the Crown part I grabbed it.' Faye Dunaway Finding Faye Dunaway Faye Dunaway was 27 and had just finished filming Bonnie and Clyde when she was cast as Vicki Anderson, the sharp insurance investigator hired to catch Crown. It was her second major film role. Jewison later said he'd been watching her work and saw something in her that he wanted for the part: a quality of intelligence that read as sensuality on screen, and a self-possession that would make her a genuine match for McQueen rather than simply a love interest. The chemistry between the two leads was, by all accounts, genuine and immediate, though they'd never worked together before. Jewison said later that it was terrific from their first scenes together, and that a significant part of his job became simply not getting in the way of it. Filming in Boston The decision to shoot in Boston rather than in Los Angeles was, in Jewison's words, a significant advantage. 'We were far away from Hollywood and there was no one to bother us.' The production had the run of the city, filming at real locations including the Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton for the polo sequences and the former Salem glider airport in New Hampshire for the gliding scenes. McQueen, an experienced racing driver and pilot, was enthusiastic about the glider work but was only filmed in the cockpit on the ground. A local pilot actually flew the plane. The dune buggy sequence on the beach was another showcase for McQueen's physical confidence on screen and helped establish the playboy restlessness of Thomas Crown in a way that dialogue couldn't. It also served as something of a warm-up for Bullitt, which McQueen made the following year and which would take his affinity for machines to a considerably higher gear. The Split Screen Obsession Cinematographer Haskell Wexler was central to the film's visual identity, which leaned heavily on an experimental technique called multi-dynamic imaging, better known as split screen. Jewison had discovered it at Expo 67 in Montreal, in a short film called A Place to Stand by Christopher Chapman that condensed an hour of footage into 17 minutes using simultaneous images. He took Wexler and editor Hal Ashby to Montreal to see it, and proposed using the technique for the film's opening heist sequence, in which five strangers who've never met carry out a coordinated bank robbery. The split screen allowed Jewison to show all five men's parallel actions at the same time, conveying a huge amount of information in a short space. He noted that the eye can process multiple simultaneous images as long as there's no competing dialogue, and the wordless heist sequence put that theory to work. Critical reception of the technique was divided: some reviewers found it dazzlingly innovative, others found it exhausting. Roger Ebert called the film 'possibly the most under-plotted, underwritten, over-photographed film of the year,' though he acknowledged it was great to look at. Pauline Kael was more forgiving, calling it 'pretty good trash' with genuine entertainment value. The technique influenced a generation of filmmakers regardless. The Chess Scene The scene that everyone remembers takes place midway through the film, when Crown invites Vicki to his mansion and she notices his oversized, stylised chess set. 'Do you play?' he asks. 'Try me,' she says. What follows is less a game of chess than an extended, wordless negotiation of desire, with every move on the board reflected in glances, small gestures, and deliberate physical proximity. The script's instruction for the scene, as written by Trustman, was exactly two words: 'chess with sex.' There was no dialogue written for it and no choreography either. Jewison spent two to three days filming it, working almost entirely through improvisation. He'd whisper directions to the actors from behind the camera during close-ups, invisible because the shots were too tight to include him. He instructed Dunaway to let her right hand travel slowly up her left arm, across her shoulder and to her throat, and told McQueen to watch it. The camera watched McQueen watching her. The scene works, as Jewison acknowledged, because of three things working together: Wexler's playful, intimate cinematography, Michel Legrand's sensual score, and Hal Ashby's editing, which builds tension through rhythm rather than action. The chess moves in the scene were real, for anyone keeping track. By the 12th move, the board reflected a position from an 1898 Vienna tournament game between Zeissl and Walthoffen, a Ruy Lopez Schliemann variation. Whether that was deliberate or coincidental has never been confirmed. The Kiss and What Came After The chess scene builds to a long, slow kiss, shot in tight close-up. Dunaway cradles the curved side of a bishop between her fingers. McQueen smokes a cigar. The scene ends with the two of them in bed, which by 1968 standards was about as far as mainstream Hollywood went. Jewison described the film as the only one he'd made that he'd consider amoral, essentially because it asks the audience to root for a man who steals and lies and gets away with it. The film does nothing to complicate that: Thomas Crown wins, more or less, and the film thinks that's wonderful. The original glider sequence was cut to Strawberry Fields Forever, though the Beatles withdrew permission for the song before the film was released. Michel Legrand's score replaced it, and Legrand's The Windmills of Your Mind won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 1969 ceremony. The film was nominated for a second Oscar for Legrand's score. Reception and Legacy The Thomas Crown Affair opened on 19 June 1968, premiering in Boston, and went on to gross $14 million against a $4.3 million budget. Critical reception was mixed but the film found a substantial audience. It was stylish in a way that felt new: a heist movie that wasn't really about the heist, a romance without sentiment, a thriller with almost no violence. McQueen wearing a three-piece suit and flying a glider was a genuine revelation to audiences who'd only seen him in motorcycle leathers. The film has aged interestingly. The split screen sequences feel dated in a way that's almost nostalgic. McQueen and Dunaway, on the other hand, haven't dated at all. The chess scene in particular holds up as a masterclass in how to film attraction without spelling it out, built entirely from close-ups, music, and two actors who understood precisely what they were doing without needing it written down for them. A remake followed in 1999 with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, which is a perfectly enjoyable film and has the advantage of a real art heist plot. A second remake, with Michael B. Jordan, is in development. We shall see whether the second remake manages to replicate the specific quality that made the original work: the sense that both leads were genuinely surprised by what was happening between them, and that nobody was entirely in control of where it was going. Sources 1. BFI Sight and Sound: Norman Jewison on The Thomas Crown Affair 2. The Magnificent 60s: Behind the Scenes, The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) 3. Wikipedia: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 film) 4. Chess.com: The Thomas Crown Affair 5. Roger Ebert: Thomas Crown Affair review (1968) 6. Grokipedia: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 film) 7. Movie Locations: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) 8. LIFE: The Original Thomas Crown Affair: Talk About A Steamy Set 9. Peter Viney's Blog: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

On August 13, 2004, a man named Bharat Kalicharan Yadav was brought to Courtroom No. 7 at the Nagpur District Court in Maharashtra, India, for a bail hearing. He'd been arrested less than a week earlier. Nobody who knew him expected this arrest to stick any more than the previous 14 had. He was known to everyone in Kasturba Nagar simply as Akku Yadav, and for 13 years the slum community there had lived under his terror. He walked in that morning with the same swagger he always had. He didn't walk out. Within 15 minutes, Akku Yadav had been stabbed more than 70 times, had chili powder thrown in his face and forced into his mouth, and had his penis severed with a kitchen knife. His killers were mostly women. Many of them were his victims. When police regained control of the courtroom and asked who was responsible, every woman in the room raised her hand. The Making of a Monster Akku Yadav was born in 1971 in Kasturba Nagar, a dense slum in central Nagpur. His father was a milkman. He left school after class 7. By his own community's account, author Swati Mehta later wrote in her book Killing Justice: Vigilantism in Nagpur, he had graduated from being a milkman's son to a local menace before he was old enough to shave. His first confirmed rape was in 1991, when he and his gang kidnapped a woman near an abandoned building they used as a base. She reported it to Jaripatka police station. Officers there were already receiving bribes from Yadav's extortion racket. They initially ignored her complaint. When a formal report was eventually filed and Yadav was arrested, the case never made it to court. After posting bail, he broke into the woman's home and beat both her and her husband. She never reported him again. As it turned out, this was the only rape he was ever formally reported to police for. Over the following 13 years, Yadav raped more than 40 women and girls, some as young as 10. He murdered at least three people. He extorted money and goods from daily-wage labourers, domestic workers, and small business owners throughout the slum. He'd arrive at homes at 4am, claim to be police, force his way in, stab husbands, lock them in bathrooms, and drag women away. He cut off a woman's ears for her earrings and her fingers when her rings wouldn't come off. He directed his gang to gang-rape a 12-year-old girl as a warning to her family. How He Kept Getting Away With It Yadav stayed free through a combination of corruption, intimidation, and caste politics. He bribed police officers with cash and alcohol. He tipped them off when he found out complaints had been filed against him. In one documented case, a woman who reported him was subsequently gang-raped by police officers at the station. A post-lynching survey found that 73 percent of Kasturba Nagar residents said they'd stopped filing complaints because they knew nothing would happen, and feared retaliation. Kasturba Nagar, Shahadara, New Delhi The local Jaripatka police were later found by a court to have been effectively in business with Yadav. He also had political protection: local politicians were among those who benefited from his network and helped shield him from sustained prosecution. Most residents of Kasturba Nagar were Dalit, from the lowest rungs of India's caste system. Their complaints carried little weight with officers who saw the slum as someone else's problem. He was arrested 14 times in total. Each time, bail was granted. He'd return to Kasturba Nagar and pick up where he'd left off. Sometimes he'd specifically target whoever had reported him. After one arrest, he was released on the grounds of good behaviour. After another, he walked free because witnesses were too frightened to testify. The Murder of Asha Bhagat The most significant of Yadav's murders, in terms of what it set in motion, was that of Asha Bhagat in 1999. Bhagat ran a small alcohol business in the slum and was one of the very few people in Kasturba Nagar who wasn't afraid of him. When Yadav began extorting money from her customers and assaulting women in her orbit, she organised a group of men to attack him. They got him drunk and beat him. He survived. Yadav waited and then went to Bhagat's home. He slit her throat, cut off her ears and breasts, and stole her jewellery. He did all of this in front of her teenage daughter, Megha, who was so traumatised she couldn't testify against him in court. The case collapsed. Yadav walked free. Bhagat's sister, Resha Raut, later became one of the key figures in the events of August 2004. The scene inside the courtroom The Day the Women Walked to Court In early August 2004, a woman named Usha Narayane finally fought back openly against Yadav. After he and his gang threatened her, the community organised and burned down his house. Yadav went to police claiming he needed protection. Officers, perhaps calculating that he was becoming more trouble than he was worth, arrested him. His bail hearing was set for August 13. Word spread through Kasturba Nagar that he was going to be released again. Women didn't organise a formal protest. They simply started walking toward the courthouse, in ones and twos and then in groups, carrying the tools they had to hand: vegetable knives, stones, chili powder. Between 200 and 400 people gathered outside Courtroom No. 7. When Yadav was brought in, he was escorted by just two or three unarmed constables. He spotted a woman in the crowd he'd previously raped and called her a prostitute. She took off her sandal and hit him, shouting: 'We can't both live on this earth together. It's you or me.' The room erupted. Women surged forward, overpowering the constables. They threw chili powder in Yadav's face and at officers who tried to intervene. Within minutes he was on the floor. He begged for his life, reportedly crying: 'Forgive me! I won't do it again!' It made no difference. He was stabbed more than 70 times. His body was left in a pool of blood on the courtroom floor. Arrest Us All When police regained control, every woman in the room raised her hand. 'Arrest us all,' they said. The strategy was deliberate and effective: collective responsibility made it impossible to single out individuals. Five women, including Usha Narayane and Anjanabai Borkar, Asha Bhagat's mother, were eventually arrested on murder charges. Within days, 400 residents stormed the court demanding they be freed. More than 100 lawyers volunteered to defend the accused for free. Bail was granted amid public pressure. The women were unapologetic. They framed what they'd done explicitly as social justice and a form of the freedom struggle. Trade union leader V. Chandra publicly called the killing justified. The case became a flashpoint in India for debates about vigilantism, gender violence, caste, and the limits of a justice system that had utterly failed a community for over a decade. The Verdict, Ten Years Later The murder trial formally began in August 2012, eight years after the killing. Twenty-one people were charged, including 14 men and 7 women. Three died during the course of proceedings. The investigation was shambolic: key forensic evidence was never properly analysed, police officers who'd filed original reports contradicted themselves under cross-examination, and the court acknowledged that the local police had not just failed to protect victims but had in some cases actively assisted Yadav. In November 2014, the District and Sessions Court in Nagpur acquitted all 18 surviving accused on the grounds that there was no clinching evidence to prove individual guilt. The verdict was delivered in the same courtroom where Yadav had been killed a decade earlier. Nobody was ever punished. The Netflix docuseries Indian Predator: Murder in a Courtroom, released in 2022, brought the story to a global audience. Resha Raut, Asha Bhagat's sister, appears in it. So does Vilas Bhande, another accused who had been directly threatened by Yadav in the weeks before his death. The series frames the killing not as a descent into lawlessness but as what happens when a community is given no other option. It's hard to argue with that conclusion. Sources 1. The Print: Stabbed 70 times in court: why the women who killed Akku Yadav were hailed as heroes 2. Thar Tribune: Akku Yadav Was the Demon of Kasturba Nagar Until a Courtroom Mob Killed Him in 2004 3. Vice: How My Mother Took Revenge on My Sister's Murderer 4. India TV News: Nagpur courtroom death: When women gave a horrific end to serial rapist 5. Wonder Never Ends: Akku Yadav Court Killing: The Shocking Story of How 200 Women Delivered Justice 6. The Cinema Holic: Who Was Akku Yadav? Why Was He Murdered? 7. The News Dirt: How Nagpur's Women Took Justice Into Their Own Hands 8. NPR: Women Accused of Killing Man in India 9. Grokipedia: Akku Yadav 10. Mehta, Swati. Killing Justice: Vigilantism in Nagpur. 2005.