Rasputin and groupies. Gorokhovo street flat, Saint Petersburg, 1914
By 1914, the apartment at 64 Gorokhovy Street had become one of the most talked-about addresses in Saint Petersburg. It was here that Grigori Rasputin — the rough-mannered Siberian peasant who had somehow won the fierce loyalty of the Romanov imperial family — held court each morning in a kind of informal salon. What made it scandalous to polite society was precisely who showed up: not just priests and politicians, but women. Dozens of them. Noblewomen, socialites, the wives and daughters of generals and ministers, all waiting patiently in the corridor for a few minutes alone with the man they called starets, or holy elder.
Historians have long debated what actually went on in that flat. The rumors were lurid — and Rasputin’s enemies made sure they spread widely — but the reality was almost certainly more complicated. For many of these women, the appeal was genuinely spiritual. Russia in 1914 was gripped by a fashionable mysticism, and Rasputin, with his unsettling grey eyes and reputation as a faith healer, offered something the Orthodox Church’s formal liturgy could not: the feeling of direct, personal contact with the divine. Others were drawn by social calculation — access to Rasputin meant access to the ear of the Empress Alexandra herself. And yes, for some, the attraction was darker and more physical; several women left accounts suggesting Rasputin believed that sin and repentance were equally necessary steps on the road to God, a convenient theology. What is certain is that by the eve of the First World War, the queue outside his door had become a kind of barometer of St. Petersburg’s anxieties — a city simultaneously modern and superstitious, powerful and deeply afraid.
Only remaining image from Original ending of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. 1981
When The Shining first opened in May 1980, it actually had a different ending than the one audiences know today. Between the iconic hedge maze sequence and the final zoom into the 1921 ballroom photograph, there was an additional hospital epilogue set a few weeks after the events at the Overlook, in which hotel manager Ullman visits Wendy and Danny as they recover and tells them that investigators found no evidence of anything supernatural. The scene’s most chilling moment comes when Ullman tosses Danny the same ball that had been rolled to him from an unseen force outside Room 237, implying that Ullman was somehow connected to the hotel’s evil. Kubrick then issued the unusual order for projectionists to physically cut the scene from prints by hand and mail the strips back to Warner Bros. — Warner Bros. had suggested the removal, feeling the scene was too confusing for audiences, and Kubrick complied. Diane Johnson noted that Kubrick originally included it because he had a soft spot for Wendy and Danny, while Shelley Duvall argued it was essential for explaining the significance of the yellow ball and Ullman’s role — but Roger Ebert ultimately sided with the cut, feeling the epilogue undermined the film’s deliberate mystery, which is hard to disagree with in hindsight.
Oskar Schindler being greeted by 300 holocaust survivors in Jerusalem, on May 1, 1962
Circus Dwarf, Palisades, New Jersey, 1958
Stephen Hawking and his wife Jane, 1965
Jacqueline Kennedy backstage watching her husband during the first televised debate against Richard Nixon – 1960
Grief stricken Infantry man in Korea is comforted another soldier after his buddy died.
His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, in the early 1970s.
The FBI Sent A Letter To Martin Luther King Jr, Telling Him To Kill Himself
Mike Tyson and his trainer, Cus D’Amato, before his first professional fight
Once a Beatle: When Ringo was ill with tonsillitis, he substituted on drums for 8 concerts & lived a superstar’s life for 10 days. But Ringo has returned… Now Jimmie Nicol sits alone in the Melbourne airport, waiting for the plane that will take him back to obscurity
Few stories in rock history carry as much melancholy as that of Jimmie Nicol. On June 3, 1964, when Ringo Starr was hospitalized with tonsillitis on the eve of the Beatles’ first world tour, producer George Martin urgently recommended Nicol — a skilled but largely unknown London session drummer — as a stand-in. Nicol recalled getting the call while having a lie-down after lunch. Within hours he was rehearsing at Abbey Road, and less than 27 hours after the call came, he was on stage in Copenhagen wearing Ringo’s suit — taken in with clothes pegs to fit — performing in front of 4,500 screaming fans. Not everyone was thrilled about it: George Harrison threatened to pull out entirely, telling Epstein and Martin, “If Ringo’s not part of the group, it’s not the Beatles” — though he was eventually talked around. For Nicol, the ten days that followed were a complete rupture from ordinary life. He toured Denmark, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Australia, mobbed at every turn, photographed everywhere, temporarily one of the four most famous people on earth.
Then it ended. When Ringo flew into Melbourne to rejoin the band, Nicol graciously stepped out of the limelight and sat alone at the airport, bound for London with a gold watch, a Beatles flight bag, and a week’s wages. Brian Epstein handed him a cheque for £500 and a watch inscribed “From the Beatles and Brian Epstein to Jimmy — with appreciation and gratitude.” The aftermath was brutal. By 1965, Nicol was bankrupt, his wife had divorced him, he was estranged from his son, and he was living in his mother’s basement. He later said that “standing in for Ringo was the worst thing that ever happened to me — until then I was quite happy earning £30 or £40 a week. After the headlines died, I began dying too.” George Martin summed it up with characteristic precision: “Jimmie Nicol was a very good drummer who came along and learnt Ringo’s parts very well. He did the job excellently, and faded into obscurity immediately afterwards.” He eventually left music entirely in the mid-1970s and has spent decades actively avoiding any connection to his brief, glittering moment at the center of the world.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, somewhere in Arkansas, USA, circa 1933
The only known photo of Albert Einstein with his E=MC^2 equation – 1934
A German dispatch dog carries messages to the front line during a German offensive in January 1918
Harassment during a civil rights sit-in at the Cherrydale Drug Fair in Arlington, VA June 10, 1960
SS officer initiation – 1938
Recording an episode of “Gang Busters”, true crime radio show, New York, 1930’s
The corpse of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler after his suicide by poison. May, 1945
Moscow residents listen to the announcement of Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, June 1941.
Related Posts:
