Diary of a Damn Yankee Fan

By Richard Ben Cramer The Baltimore Sun October 17, 1977 I admit it. I’m a Yankee fan, always have been. It wasn’t my fault, really…you see, my grandfather… Well, enough apologies. The fact is I’m glad the Yankees are back and if you had any sense, you would be too....

The Duke of Deception

By Pat Jordan Southern Magazine October 1987 “We had to get David out of the Klan. He was seducing all the wives.” —Ku Klux Klan member, July 1986  It was a stroke of genius. The Presidential candidate had been denied a platform to announce his candidacy by two...

The Sports Fan

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...

The Next Superstar

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,...

Pistol Pete’s Last Shot

By David Halberstam Inside Sports April 1980 They are slow this day at the baggage counter at the Seattle airport, and the players—up too early for the flight after a game the night before, anxious to get on with it, to get to the hotel so they can practice and then...

The Record Men

By Rich Cohen From The Record Men 2005 Leonard Chess had just turned forty. He had two children and was living on the South Shore of Chicago. Each new station in his life would be marked by a new house, a new office. It’s one of the places where the Jewish character...

Michelle Pfeiffer: Out of the Past

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...

Rear Window

By Michael Sragow The Boston Phoenix October 11, 1983 Rear Window is more than one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest comedies of terrors. Set in a Greenwich Village apartment and its adjoining courtyards, this urban variation on the backyard-murder story is a...

Sunset Boulevard Revisited

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...

Inside Marilyn Chambers

By Pat Jordan GQ September 1987 The constable who arrested her stands in the witness box, his eyes lowered to his notebook, and in a monotonous voice describes her act for the Provincial Court of Windsor, Ontario. “She pushed her breasts together and pulled them out...

The Hippest Guy in the Room

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...

Hopper’s World

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...