The New York Times bestselling history of the glamour and debauchery of the ultra-wealthy Palm Beach community--from The Breakers to Trump's Mar-a-Lago.
For more than a hundred years, Palm Beach has been an exclusive and exotic universe of wealth and privilege in America. And until Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme devastated its eternally sunny world, the reality of this affluent enclave has rarely been exposed to outsiders.
Now, in Madness Under the Royal Palms, resident insider Laurence Leamer reveals the secrets and scandals of this South Florida island via a cast of characters that includes social climbers, trophy wives, sugar daddies, glamorous widows and their escorts, sociopathic multimillionaires, and elegant society queens. Dive into the unbelievable true story of love, lust, money, and murder in a uniquely American paradise.
Bestselling author of Capote's Women Laurence Leamer shares an engrossing account of the enigmatic director Alfred Hitchcock that finally puts the dazzling actresses he cast in his legendary movies at the center of the story.
Alfred Hitchcock was fixated--not just on the dark, twisty stories that became his hallmark, but also by the blond actresses who starred in many of his iconic movies. The director of North by Northwest, Rear Window, and other classic films didn't much care if they wore wigs, got their hair coloring out of a bottle, or were the rarest human specimen--a natural blonde--as long as they shone with a golden veneer on camera. The lengths he went to in order to showcase (and often manipulate) these women would become the stuff of movie legend. But the women themselves have rarely been at the center of the story, until now.
In Hitchcock's Blondes, bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer offers an intimate journey into the lives of eight legendary actresses whose stories helped chart the course of the troubled, talented director's career--from his early days in the British film industry, to his triumphant American debut, to his Hollywood heyday and beyond. Through the stories of June Howard-Tripp, Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, and Tippi Hedren--who starred in fourteen of Hitchcock's most notable films and who bore the brunt of his fondness and sometimes fixation--we can finally start to see the enigmatic man himself. After all, his blondes (as he thought of them) knew the truths of his art, his obsessions and desires, as well as anyone.
From the acclaimed author of Capote's Women comes an intimate, revealing, and thoroughly modern look at both the enduring art created by a man obsessed...and the private toll that fixation took on the women in his orbit.
The renowned biographer and New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women returns with this first volume in a multigenerational history that will forever change the way America views its most famous family ...
A nonfiction legal thriller that traces the fourteen-year struggle of two lawyers to bring the most powerful coal baron in American history, Don Blankenship, to justice
Don Blankenship, head of Massey Energy since the early 1990s, ran an industry that provides nearly half of America's electric power. But wealth and influence weren't enough for Blankenship and his company, as they set about destroying corporate and personal rivals, challenging the Constitution, purchasing the West Virginia judiciary, and willfully disregarding safety standards in the company's mines--in which scores died unnecessarily.The New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women chronicles the powerful and spellbinding true story of a brutal race-based killing in 1981 and subsequent trials that undid one of the most pernicious organizations in American history--the Ku Klux Klan.
On a Friday night in March 1981 Henry Hays and James Knowles scoured the streets of Mobile in their car, hunting for a black man. The young men were members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America. They were seeking to retaliate after a largely black jury could not reach a verdict in a trial involving a black man accused of the murder of a white man. The two Klansmen found nineteen-year-old Michael Donald walking home alone. Hays and Knowles abducted him, beat him, cut his throat, and left his body hanging from a tree branch in a racially mixed residential neighborhood.
Arrested, charged, and convicted, Hays was sentenced to death--the first time in more than half a century that the state of Alabama sentenced a white man to death for killing a black man. On behalf of Michael's grieving mother, Morris Dees, the legendary civil rights lawyer and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a civil suit against the members of the local Klan unit involved and the UKA, the largest Klan organization. Charging them with conspiracy, Dees put the Klan on trial, resulting in a verdict that would level a deadly blow to its organization.
Based on numerous interviews and extensive archival research, The Lynching brings to life two dramatic trials, during which the Alabama Klan's motives and philosophy were exposed for the evil they represent. In addition to telling a gripping and consequential story, Laurence Leamer chronicles the KKK and its activities in the second half the twentieth century, and illuminates its lingering effect on race relations in America today.
The Lynching includes sixteen pages of black-and-white photographs.
From renowned biographer and New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women and The Kennedy Men comes THE SONS OF CAMELOT, the second volume in a multi-generational history bound to be considered an American epic.
Almost a year before publication, THE SONS OF CAMELOT: The Fate of an American Dynasty was already being widely discussed and debated in the media. Based on exclusive interviews with many Kennedy family members, their closest friends and associates, and five years of research, THE SONS OF CAMELOT is neither tabloid fodder nor a sanitized authorized biography but a stunningly revealing, deeply truthful account with intimate new information on every page.
In this outstanding continuation of The Kennedy Men, his powerful American epic of the Kennedy family, Laurence Leamer chronicles the lives of the Kennedy sons and grandsons after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and their struggle to fulfill the family legacy. These lives make for a book of overwhelming drama full of exalted aspirations, notable achievements and the most spectacular mishaps, excesses and tragedies. For the most part, these Kennedy men fell far short of the great vision that Joseph P. Kennedy had for his sons and grandsons. Their lives have been a bewildering juxtaposition of the most notable achievements and the most spectacular failures. There have been needless deaths, crippling accidents, drug addiction, alcoholism and allegations of rape. Their pratfalls, mishaps, excesses and tragedies have been one of the most certain forms of American popular entertainment for the last four decades. Yet among them are those who have helped Americans to have better health care, to sail on clean waters, to raise the rights and lives of those with mental retardation, to assist the poorest of African nations, to enable those with disabilities to lead normal lives, and to give health care givers opportunities.
In Leamer's passionate narrative, each Kennedy man becomes not the passive victim of the happenstance of birth and upbringing, but a full participant in his own fate. The good that the Kennedy sons have done is amply chronicled, and so is the bad and the tragic. John F. Kennedy Jr.'s life is a thread running through the pages of THE SONS OF CAMELOT. Some may be drawn to the book largely to read the definitive portrait based largely on the full cooperation of his eight closest friends. Others may come intrigued to read the intimate story of Senator Edward Kennedy or the stirring tale of Timmy Kennedy Shriver's rise to the head of Special Olympics International. But whatever draws the readers, they will read on driven by the powerful dramatic narrative with its impeccably researched details.
Some of these pages are inspiring, some are shocking, but all the pages are truthful. THE SONS OF CAMELOT is a spellbinding history of individuals and a family, a journey of character through time told by a brilliant, masterful writer.