By Charles P. Pierce The National Sports Daily May 10, 1990 The press conference was over, and two men from New Castle, Pa., named Robert Retort and Ed Grybowski had been charged with interstate transportation of stolen property, which is a federal felony. In the...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair June 1992 New York is a city famous for its talkers, its riffers, rappers, and raconteurs. But let’s face it, a lot of them are seriously overrated—depend on canned routines and canned Attitude, self-congratulatory cynicism and stale camp...
By Charles Simic From Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell 1992 Preface I have a dream in which Joseph Cornell and I pass each other on the street. This is not beyond the realm of possibility. I walked the same New York neighborhoods that he did between 1958...
By Marilyn Johnson Life 1997 ONCE UPON A TIME Hundreds of years ago, she would have been beheaded. She was a fair maiden, a beautiful virgin born on a summer’s day, married on a summer’s day. Touchingly, she loved her prince. He loved her not. She did her duty to the...
By Pat Jordan Life April 1994 It’s eight a.m. The lobby to the Riverfront Hilton in Little Rock, Ark., is crowded with pretty young girls. Their faces are elaborately made up—lipstick, mascara, false lashes; their hair is in curlers. The girls are not playing or...
By Jared Haynes Writing on the Edge Fall 1992 Roger Angell has been a fiction editor for The New Yorker since 1956 and has contributed to the magazine for close to fifty years. He is best known for his pieces on baseball, written for the magazine’s “The Sporting...
By Peter Richmond The National Sports Daily August 30, 1990 The first time I called Bill Murray to see if he wanted to watch some Cubs games he insisted on reading me the Recipe of the Month from the Cubs newsletter, which was Ryne and Cindy Sandberg’s recipe...
By Charles P. Pierce The New York Times Magazine November 15, 1992 A summer storm cell breaks, purplish and powerful, over the North Park Baptist Church on the north side of Orlando. Hard rain drums speedy and loud off the rusted tin portico of the recreation center,...
By Elizabeth Kaye Movieline 1990 Jeremy Irons recently observed that people are more interested in actors than they should, perhaps, be. Nonetheless, we are compelled to learn about the gifted people who move us to tears, who make us laugh, who take up residency in...
By David Freeman The New Yorker June 21, 1993 For a while in the mid-eighties, United Artists paid Billy Wilder a big salary and set him up in an office at its Beverly Hills headquarters. He was supposed to advise the studio’s executives and to give his opinion on the...
By Mark Jacobson Esquire December 1991 The last time I saw Harold Conrad, he was lying in a hospital bed wearing dark sunglasses. Leave it to Harold to stake out a small territory of cool amid the fluorescent lighting, salt-free food, and stolid nurses bearing...
By Peter Richmond GQ It’s not that a ’70 BMW 2800 CS Coupe isn’t the most magnificent machine ever designed by man. It is. Or that I wouldn’t orchestrate a major drug deal to own one—or even drive one, just once, along an autumnal Vermont mountain road, en route...
