Author: Darren Rowse

The document is filed in the United States Patent Office under the number 2,292,387. It is eleven pages long, illustrated with schematic diagrams of oscillating circuits and perforated paper rolls, and titled, with deliberate plainness, “Secret Communication System.” The inventors listed on the cover are Hedy Kiesler Markey of Los Angeles, California, and George Antheil of Manhattan Beach, California. The application was filed on June 10, 1941. The patent was granted on August 11, 1942. The name Hedy Kiesler Markey meant little to most readers in 1942. The name Hedy Lamarr, on the other hand, was everywhere. MGM’s publicity department…

He was one of the most celebrated musicians in American history. His voice had sold more than 60 million records. He had survived addiction, bankruptcy, two shattered marriages, and years of self-imposed exile in Europe. He had come home. He had moved back in with his parents. And on the morning of April 1, 1984, his father walked into his bedroom and shot him twice. Marvin Gaye would have turned 45 years old the very next day. The story of what happened inside that house on Gramercy Place in Los Angeles is not, at its heart, a story about a…

The Sunday dinners at my parents’ house always started the same way. My mother would make something that took all afternoon, my father would open a bottle of wine he’d been saving for a reason that didn’t quite materialize, and whoever arrived first would get recruited into setting the table. That Sunday in March, I arrived first. I was arranging the good cloth napkins — the ones my mother bought at a craft fair fifteen years ago and brings out whenever she wants the table to feel like an occasion — when Ethan and Olivia came through the front door.…

When Jerry Lewis died on August 20, 2017, he was 91 years old and had lived one of the most thoroughly documented careers in American entertainment. He had made sixteen films with Dean Martin. He had directed and starred in solo comedies that critics in France treated as high art while American audiences debated whether to take him seriously. He had hosted the Muscular Dystrophy Association Labor Day Telethon for more than four decades, raising hundreds of millions of dollars and becoming, in the public imagination, the face of charitable generosity toward sick children. He had a French Legion of…

The caretaker of the small cemetery at Corsier-sur-Vevey arrived for work on the morning of March 2, 1978, and found what should not have been there: an open grave. The coffin that had rested in that plot since late December — a heavy oak box containing the remains of one of the most recognizable human beings of the twentieth century — was gone. Tire tracks led away from the disturbed earth. Someone had worked through the night with shovels, crossed the cemetery grounds without being seen, loaded a 135-kilogram coffin into a vehicle, and disappeared into the Swiss countryside before…

The envelope was cream-colored and business-weight, the kind that looks like it has something official inside. I found it on the kitchen counter three days after we buried my mother. Not a card. Not a handwritten note. An envelope with my name typed on the front and my brother Daniel’s home return address in the corner. I stood there in my mother’s kitchen, still in the clothes I’d been wearing since the reception the day before, holding a cup of coffee I hadn’t touched yet. The kitchen smelled like her. It always did — a combination of the lavender dish…

When The Wizard of Oz opened in American theaters in August 1939, audiences saw a girl in a blue-checked dress clicking her heels and longing for home. The performance was radiant, the voice was luminous, and the face was open and earnest in a way that made the fantasy feel like something real. What the audience could not see was the industrial machine that had produced those ninety-eight minutes of magic — the fourteen-hour rehearsal days, the strict dietary monitoring, the pills to wake up and the pills to sleep, and the elaborate physical management of a teenage girl whose…

In the autumn of 1941, a twenty-three-year-old woman was brought to George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., and strapped to an operating table. She was given a local anesthetic to numb her scalp. Two holes were drilled into her skull, one on each side. A surgical instrument was inserted into her brain, and the white matter of her frontal lobes was severed while she remained conscious, responding to questions from the doctors who were cutting. The woman’s name was Rose Marie Kennedy — known to her family as Rosemary. She was the third child and eldest daughter of Joseph…

On the morning of April 30, 1943, a Spanish fisherman spotted a body floating in the waters off Huelva, on Spain’s Atlantic coast. The man was wearing a British military uniform, a life preserver, and a trench coat. A briefcase was chained to his coat. Within hours, Spanish naval authorities had taken custody of the body and its documents. Within days, senior German intelligence agents in Spain had seen the contents of that briefcase. Within weeks, Adolf Hitler had issued direct orders shifting German military defenses away from Sicily, the actual target of the largest Allied amphibious operation in history…

There is a phone call that Jack Nicholson has described as one of the most dramatic moments of his life. It did not come from a studio, a director, or a producing partner. It came from a reporter at Time magazine. The year was 1974. Nicholson was thirty-seven years old, among the most talked-about actors on the planet, a man whose face had graced more magazine covers in the previous five years than almost anyone else in Hollywood. He was, by every external measure, a person who knew who he was and where he had come from. Then the reporter…