By: Lynn Peril

The Clash was on the front lines of the punk revolution of the late 1970s, but bassist PAUL SIMONON (born 1955) shared some similarities with an iconic rebel of the previous generation. Like the Beatles’ […]

By: Lynn Peril

Finnish-born MAILA NURMI (1921-2008) kicked around Hollywood as a hatcheck girl and pinup model before a turn as the Charles Addams cartoon character later named Morticia changed the course of her life, not to mention […]

By: Lynn Peril

On September 23, 1969, a group of women, conspicuous among them a tall, patrician blonde, handed out mimeographed leaflets to passersby and newlyweds alike at New York City’s marriage bureau. Rather than wedding-day platitudes, the […]

By: Lynn Peril

Classically chiseled male bodies in sumptuous black and white.

By: Lynn Peril

LOTTE LENYA (1898-1981) once described her voice as “an octave below laryngitis.” With her quavering vibrato and what’s been described as her “cavalier” approach to key, no one would mistake Lenya for a trained singer […]

By: Lynn Peril

The time: 1977. The place: the hinterlands of Wisconsin. My friend Jacqué (pronounced “Jackie,” of course) and I are huddled together in her smoked-mirror-tiled bedroom listening to Queens of Noise, an album by all-girl band […]

By: Lynn Peril

As a visiting nurse in New York’s tenements at the turn of the 20th century, MARGARET SANGER (1879-1966) once heard a woman recovering from a self-induced abortion beg her doctor for information on how to […]

By: Lynn Peril

The early death of BUDDY HOLLY (1936-59) transformed him into an icon of the Boomers’ Happy Days-esque vision of American life in the 1950s, all poodle skirts and sock hops at the malt shop, or […]

By: Lynn Peril

She had oodles of cash, acres of style, and eventually her very own 18th-century palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal, where she slept in a sterling silver bed designed by Alexander Calder. There was heartache — […]

By: Lynn Peril

Clad in a leather jumpsuit, tiny waist offset by enormous bosom, her performance in Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) transformed what could have been a run-of-the-mill B-movie into a parable of female power […]

By: Lynn Peril

The name MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (1904-71) conjures up an image: a woman with a camera balanced atop one of the chromed, art-deco eagles that guard the upper reaches of New York’s Chrysler Building. Though she didn’t […]

By: Lynn Peril

NANCY SINATRA (born 1940) was everywhere in the mid-1960s: dressed in tight leather as a motorcycle mama in The Wild Angels, blowing minds with Lee Hazlewood and Sammy Davis, Jr. on her Movin’ With Nancy […]