By John Ed Bradley Esquire December 1985 Out one night last summer in Williamsburg, Virginia—a night that started warm and breezy but quickly turned as hot and rank as old meat—D’Fellas quit talking about local trim for a minute and somebody started on God. Eric...
By Steve Oney Esquire September 1985 Under the cover of the lengthening shadows of a sleepy August afternoon in 1915, five Model T’s loaded with armed men quietly departed the northwest Atlanta suburb of Marietta. The men had told their wives they were going fishing....
By David Freeman Esquire April 1982 From December 1978 to May 1979, Alfred Hitchcock and I collaborated on a script. I was the last screenwriter to work with him before his death. The time we spent together was always decorous, frequently pleasant, occasionally tense....
By Ross Wetzsteon New York Magazine March 14, 1988 Flying. He’d wanted to fly since he was 16. Sitting at his desk in high school in Greenwood, Mississippi, he fantasized that it was a P-51 Mustang, F-86 Sabre jet. He didn’t want to be a pilot, he wanted to be a...
By Nik Cohn Inside Sports February 1981 In Atlantic City, Willie Mays played an elderly game, serving as designated greeter at Bally’s Park Place Hotel. After the fracas of his hiring, when Bowie Kuhn barred him from baseball, he settled into a gentle routine of...
By Pat Jordan GQ April 1988 He was just another bum bleeding to death in an alleyway at four o’clock in the morning. He lay motionless on the concrete, as if sleeping, his tangled shoulder-length hair ringed by a halo of blood. He lay there peacefully for a while, in...
By Robert Ward GQ March 1984 As I walk into James Garner’s suite at the Palisades Hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia, I suddenly feel as though I’m the Dude From the East accidentally strolling into the back room in Black Bart’s Saloon. There, sitting around a table...
By Robert Ward American Film March 1983 Character actor Frank Pesce has a problem. He is supposed to be standing in the rain with this menacing look on his face, pointing a rod at Gene Hackman. He is playing the gunsel who backs up surly Mickey Rourke, crazy Joe...
By John Schulian Chicago Sun-Times September 24, 1983 Up ahead, you could see a full moon sandwiched by thick, wet clouds. Beneath them glowed the lights of Chicago, turning the soggy heavens red-orange and proving that this ribbon of highway actually led somewhere....
By Mike Lupica Esquire April 1987 Here he is at Tiger Stadium in Detroit on a September baseball night hanging on to summer. He is getting ready to watch Jack Morris, the Tiger ace, go for win number nineteen against the Toronto Blue Jays. Elmore Leonard looks just...
By Philip Caputo Esquire December 1986 Twenty-four years ago, when I was a college junior with vague literary ambitions, a friend of mine and I were rummaging through a bookshop near the downtown campus of Chicago’s Loyola University. Weary of required...
By Richard Ben Cramer Esquire June 1987 I play golf, I recommend golf, I celebrate golf—for the exercise. For this I am roundly derided by friends. God knows what my enemies say. But they don’t understand. This exercise has nothing to do with getting winded, making...
