Hell on Wheels

By Tony Kornheiser New Times November 27, 1978 Because my car is a 1972 Pinto it may also be a final tribute to me. Film at 11. My Pinto—“Charro”—gets 22 miles per gallon highway, 17 miles per gallon city. It gets 0 miles per gallon sitting in my driveway, where I...

Hog-Wild in the Streets

By John Berendt From Telling It Like It Was 1969 In the summer of 1968, John Berendt, a young associate editor of Esquire, accompanied three members of that magazine’s unusual team of reporters to the Democratic National Convention, held that year in Chicago: Jean...

Honor Thy Father Knows Best

By Joe Flaherty The New York Times January 23, 1972 It’s a fact, sophistication aside, that the publishing industry is as trendy as the garment industry. And its real motive is the same—to sell. We have witnessed the Kennedy Season, the Black Season (basic or...

A Conversation with Mel Brooks

By Harry Stein The Stacks Reader July 1973 Harry Stein’s father, Joseph Stein, is most famous for writing Fiddler on the Roof; he also worked in the legendary writers room for Sid Caesar in the 1950s, which included Mel Brooks. In the summer of 1973, Harry found...

The Marlboro Man

By Frank Rich New Times September 16, 1973 With his latest movie, The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman is once again asking for trouble—and once again there’s every reason to believe he’s going to get it. In the American film industry, this director is the ultimate...

The Say Hey Kid

By John Schulian The Stacks Reader June 18, 2024 The news out of San Francisco says Willie Mays is dead at 93, as if death can contain a virtuoso of his grass-stained, sweat-soaked magnitude. Death is a past-tense proposition and everything Mays did on a baseball...

Remembering Mike Downey

By John Schulian The Stacks Reader June 17, 2024 I counted Mike Downey as a friend for 47 years, and the only time he let me down was Wednesday. He had as big a heart as the laws of physiology allowed, a 24-karat, 18-wheeling, let’s-go-to-the-circus thumper that was...

Hepburn Reconsidered

By Helen Lawrenson The Dial March 1981 I am not a devotee of that cult of nostalgia wherein practically anyone who was a Hollywood star in the ’30s receives instant apotheosis. To my mind the most egregious example is probably Katharine Hepburn, to whom everyone now...

Jann Wenner is (Gulp!) 40

By E. Graydon Carter GQ November 1985 A mile or so from the spot where Jackson Pollock came to a messy end on a lonely stretch of Long Island black-top, Jann Wenner is sliding his silver Dino 308 GT4 Ferrari through a long, graceful turn. Route 114, between Sag Harbor...

The Lust Boys

By Marcelle Clements New York Woman October 1991 The best thing about fall in an urban environment, aside from the sight of a few burnished leaves, must be those delicious attacks of nonspecific, free-floating, and undirected lust. It’s not an oft-mentioned...

False Messiah

By Lawrence Wright Rolling Stone July 14-28, 1988 To understand clearly that Jimmy Swaggart plotted his own destruction, you must stand here in the courtyard of the Travel Inn, that squalid rendezvous on Airline Highway in Metairie, Louisiana, just across the parish...

Come Out Swinging

By Vic Ziegel Playboy June 1995 For three years, Mike Tyson stayed in the same Indiana zip code, behind the same walls, while we followed the bouncing heavyweight crown from the man with the heart problem to the man who wanted to put a kitchen in his bedroom to the...