Bam! Pow! 1960s TV Batman costumes up for auction



By Mike Coppola
LOS ANGELES

Holy priceless collection! Batman and Robin's costumes from the iconic 1960s television series starring the late Adam West are set to go on sale in Los Angeles for an estimated $150,000 to $200,000.
Burt Ward played Robin alongside West's caped crusader in 120 episodes of the camp cult hit "Batman" from 1966-68, battling flamboyant villains from The Joker to Catwoman.
According to Hollywood memorabilia auction house Profiles in History, the sale will be the only known pair of complete costumes from the superhero duo.
Other items from the show going under the hammer on Dec 17 include the bust of Shakespeare containing a secret switch to open the Batcave, and the Batmobile's famous phone.
The pieces belong to the collection of John Azarian, described by the auction house as the "most important collection of classic TV and superhero artifacts in existence."
The sale also includes tunics worn by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as Captain Kirk and Spock on the original Star Trek, estimated at $40,000 to 60,000 each.
The Fonz's signature leather jacket from "Happy Days" is predicted to yield at least $25,000.
In September, the same auctioneer sold Darth Vader's helmet from "The Empire Strikes Back" for $1,125,000.



Jimmy Soul


Jimmy Soul had a number one hit in 1963 with "If You Wanna Be Happy."
Soul was born James Louis McCleese in North Carolina and became a travelling preacher at the age of seven and a gospel star in his teens. (The name soul was  given to him by his church following.)

Frank Guida, recording scout and talent agent for Gary U.S. Bonds, gave Soul two chart hit singles, both of which were refused by Bonds, "Twistin' Matilda" in 1962 and 1963’s"If You Wanna Be Happy"  which was based on the calypso "Ugly Woman," by Roaring Lion.
"If You Wanna Be Happy" sold over one million records. But that was end of Soul’s success. He left the music business and joined the US Army. He eventually drifted into drugs and in 1986 was sentenced to 4 and a half to 9 years in prison as a second felony offender, convicted of criminal sale of a controlled substance in the third degree and criminal possession of a controlled substance in the third degree. Soul died of a drug-related heart attack on June 25, 1988, aged 45.



Remember the song “Teen angel” from 1960?


 It was sung by Mark Dinning and written by his sister Eugenia, and her husband Red Surrey. Dinning didn’t have much success in his sing career until "Teen Angel" became a hit. The lyrics, which told of the death of a teenage girl, were deemed to morbid by British radio stations who refused to air it. Still, it sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. Dinning was an alcoholic and as a result his career sank because he failed to show for concerts or showed up drunk, costing promoters money.  Dinning continued performing until his death from a heart attack in Jefferson City, Missouri, aged 52.


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Michael J. Pollard, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ actor, dead at 80


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Award nominee Michael J. Pollard, known for his roles in “Bonnie and Clyde” and “House of 1000 Corpses,” has died. He was 80.
“House of 1000 Corpses” director Rob Zombie broke the news on Facebook early Friday morning.
 “We have lost another member of our ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ family. I woke up to the news that Michael J. Pollard had died. I have always loved his work and his truly unique on screen presence,” Zombie said in his post. “He was one of the first actors I knew I had to work with as soon as I got my first film off the ground. He will be missed.”
Born 1939 in Passaic, N.J., Pollard attended Montclair Academy and Actors Studio in New York City in his early career. He started out in television in the late ’50s, appearing on shows like “Lost in Space” and “Star Trek,” but landed his breakout role as C.W. Moss, the accomplice-turned-snitch to Bonnie and Clyde in the 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Pollard received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor and BAFTA nomination for most promising newcomer. He went on to star in films like “Dirty Little Billy,” “Melvin and Howard,” “Roxanne” and “Tango & Cash.”
More recently, Pollard starred in Zombie’s 2003 cult film “House of 1000 Corpses.” His last role was “The Woods” in 2012.
 “Michael J. Pollard was one of a kind. Made every film he was in better. You sat up and took notice,” Larry Karaszewski, “Dolemite Is My Name” producer, tweeted. “I met him once on the street in Beverly Hills and tried to pay him a compliment. He growled at me. I mean — literally growled at me. It was a perfect moment.”

Solved: The murder of Karen Klaas.



On January 30, 1976, 32-year-old Karen Klaas, (born Karen O’Grady,) the first wife of Righteous Brothers singer Bill Medley, returned to her home on 24th Place in Hermosa Beach, California. She had started the morning by dropping her youngest son, Damien 5, at the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach. Her other child, Darrien Lee Medley, 10 was with her father for the weekend. She planned to join two girlfriends for breakfast. She was on crutches because she broke her leg taking a spin around the driveway on her son's skateboard.
Karen had grown up in Santa Ana, about an hour away and graduated from Santa Ana Senior High School in 1961. She started dating Bill Medley in 1963. “I first noticed her at church” Medley said “and then, when Bobby Hatfield (The other half of the Righteous Brothers) and I unveiled our first single, Little Latin Lupe Lu, at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach, California in 1963, I saw her in the middle of a thousand beautiful young girls. When we got off stage, I got her phone number and we started dating.”
They married and their son Darrin was born in 1965 the same year that the Righteous Brothers had recorded and released You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, a worldwide number one hit.

“ When you have the biggest record in the country everybody wants you, everybody needs you, and they need you now.” Medley said “I went to the hospital to have a minor ailment checked, and the doctor diagnosed mental and physical exhaustion. I was such a wreck Karen had to tell them my name – I couldn’t get it out. She took such good care of me. I’d get home from the studio at 2 or 3 in the morning and she would get up and make me tacos – what a great wife.



“I was on tour with The Beatles” Medley added “when she miscarried.
After the tour with the Beatles ended, the Righteous Brothers landed a contract at the Sands Casino with only served to weaken the marriage even more. “Vegas in those days” Medley wrote “was so exciting and we were just 25; we ate it up. Almost every lounge had a topless revue with the most gorgeous women you can imagine. I had sex with a girl in Frank Sinatra’s suite while he was on stage. Am I proud of that? No, I’m just proud I’m still alive. I’m not sure Frank would have appreciated it. I had another girlfriend who worked in the hotel’s ladies room. Bobby Hatfield and our bandleader Mike Patterson would run all over town looking for chicks after our last show of the night and all I had to do was call the women’s restroom. I’m not too proud of it now, but that was the life of a young performer in Vegas in the Sixties.


Within a few years, Bill Medley’s partnership with Bobby Hatfield was strained and the Righteous Brothers' partnership was drawing to a close. Not surprisingly, divorce also came within five years. “On our final tour” Medley said “I started an affair with the singer Darlene Love. I decided to get a divorce because I thought I was in love and it wasn’t fair to Karen.”
There was an attempt at reconciliation that didn’t work out and by then Karen had moved along and was seeing another man regularly, whom she eventually married, but she and Medley remained amicable.
In 1970 Medley married Suzi Robertson and then Janice Gorham, but both marriages were annulled soon after they began. Between those marriages, he had relationships with singers Mary Wilson and Connie Francis.
On the day Karen was killed in 1976, two neighborhood women watched her pull into her driveway. They wanted to tell her about a stranger, a man, who had been lurking around the neighborhood, but Karen rushed into the house through the backdoor that she always left unlocked, Hermosa beach is a safe place today but in 1976 it was even safer and still just slightly remote from LA.
A while afterward, the two neighbors walked over to her house and rang the doorbell. They could see Karen’s crutches on the floor through the glass. They could also hear whimpering, so they opened the front door and walked into the house but pushed aside by a man who said, ‘Hi girls,’ then walked out of the front door.
The women ran up to the ransacked bedroom, she had tried to fight him off, where they found Karen on the floor, the man had tried to strangle her with her bra and then tried to rape her. She was alive but barely. The strangulation had cut off the oxygen to her brain for 15 minutes. Doctors later told Bill Medley that if she lived, she would be severely brain-damaged. Four days after the attack, she died.
“I was sad and incredibly angry at the same time,” Medley said, “I wanted to find the son-of-a-bitch who) killed (His children’s) mom.”
The description the women gave to the cops was generic at best; they said the man was white, in his late 20s, about 5'7" to 5'9" with brown hair and a beard. The police, working for hours and hours with neighbors who saw the man leave the house created a plaster bust of the suspect, but the likeness brought in no clues. But the crime scene investigators did get several clear sets of fingerprints taken from the house, but a statewide computer system that could match the prints had yet been developed.
The man who raped and murdered Karen was Kenneth Troyer. He was born in Los Angeles in 1946. In 1964, when he was 18, he married another teen named Jeanne Dalton. They were divorced in Linn, Oregon in 1973. A year after he murdered Karen, in 1977, he returned to Oregon and married a woman named Valerie Hickey. He appears to have wandered back to California sometime in early 1980.
Police image of Karen's attacker


In January of 1982, Troyer, age 36, broke out of the minimum security California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, where he was serving a sentence for burglary. Police had been tipped that Troyer would be in the Santa Ana area to meet a Pamela Cuen, 24 at about 12:40 p.m. Sunday at 2208 N. Main St. in Santa Ana, and officers staked out the location. Several days before Troyer had pulled a gun on a police officer and later raped a Huntington Beach woman, then fled in her car.
Police watched Cuen get into the stolen car with Troyer and then swarmed in and demanded Troyer step out of the car, but he sped away. The cops followed and after a short but intense high-speed chase Troyer lost control of the wheel and hit a tree at 17th Street and Cabrillo Avenue in Santa Ana. Troyer and Pamela Cuen climbed out of the car with their hands up but then Troyer suddenly turned and reached back into the stolen car and Police from Santa Ana and Anaheim opened fire hitting Troyer nine times with at least one bullet going directly through his heart.


Karen’s murder would go unsolved for decades, in fact, it was the only unsolved murder in Hermosa Beach history. However, the police and a private detective hired by Medley stayed on the case, tracking down what leads they could. The Sheriff’s office suspected Troyer in Karen’s murder but couldn’t tie him into the murder directly. Investigators were able to get a DNA profile from the crime scene using more advanced technology in the 1990s but could not make a match. In 2009, detectives reopened the case.

Troyer

On January 27, 2017, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced that investigators used a controversial DNA testing method called “familiar DNA”, meaning they had DNA from one of Troyer’s family members and were able to prove that Kenneth Troyer had murdered Karen in 1976.
“We miss Karen” Bill Medley “and the most important thing is the boys didn’t get to grow up with their mother,” he said. “She would have been an incredible grandma [as well]. She was a wonderful, wonderful girl.”

The Righteous Brothers, That Lovin' Feelin'... and why I'll never stop hunting the man who murdered my wife




By BILL MEDLEY

Bill Medley toured with The Beatles and performed in Vegas during the Rat Pack era, but tragically in 1976, his ex-wife was murdered
'Our relationship was very complicated,' said Bill Medley of his relationship with Bobby Hatfield

Everything seemed normal on January 30, 1976 as my ex-wife Karen returned from dropping her younger son Damien off at school.
She entered her Hermosa Beach house [in California] through the back door she always left open.
Her two closest girlfriends had plans to go for breakfast with her that morning.
They saw her pull into her drive, and thought she’d be ready in a minute.
There had been a strange-looking man around the neighbourhood the past couple of days, and they wanted to tell her about that. Why they didn’t just call the police, I’ll never know.
When they rang a little while later and nobody answered, they went over.
Karen’s crutches were on the floor – she had broken her leg trying to ride our ten-year-old son Darrin’s skateboard.
Her friend shouted her name and got no response.
They could hear whimpering. As they went into the hall, a man stepped out.
‘Hi girls,’ he said, then walked out of the front door.

The pair ran to find Karen on the floor of her bedroom. The man had tried to rape her and strangled her with her own bra. She hadn’t had oxygen to her brain for 15 minutes. She was barely alive.
That morning, Darrin and I were on our way to the Californian resort of Lake Arrowhead, and had stopped off to see relatives.
When we arrived, they told us they had heard Karen had been beaten up, there was an attempted rape, but they didn’t know how bad it was.
We shot back to Hermosa and went straight to the hospital. I hate to remember the sight of this beautiful young girl with that horrified look on her face.
They told me to sit there, hold her hand and talk to her because they didn’t know what she could hear or understand. It was the hardest thing in the world for me to do. Karen and I were still so close.
I told her, ‘You’re gonna be fine. We’re going to get through this. The kids are going to be great. I love you.’
But doctors soon realised that if by any chance she lived, she was going to be brain-damaged.
Finally, they closed her eyes. And four days after the attack, they took her off life-support.
Darrin was inconsolable, with deep wailing sobs. ‘No! No, I need her!’
I’ll never forget the first Mother’s Day after Karen passed. All the children in school had to write a Mother’s Day card for their moms.
Darrin wrote me a Father’s Day card. I can still see Darrin and his five-year-old brother Damien standing in the bathroom at my beach house, brushing their teeth getting ready for bed. These two beautiful little boys – it just broke my heart.
I was sad and incredibly angry at the same time; I wanted to find the son-of-a-bitch who killed their mom.

The police have never solved the crime, and the case remains open to this day. But every few years it pops up again, like a kick in the gut.
In the early days of the Righteous Brothers, it was only Karen who got me through.
I first noticed her at church, and then, when Bobby Hatfield and I unveiled our first single, Little Latin Lupe Lu, at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach, California in 1963, I saw her in the middle of a thousand beautiful young girls. When we got off  stage, I got her phone number and we started dating.
The Righteous Brothers started out in Orange County, California. It was about the whitest place in the country, but the black marines from the nearby base heard there were two guys singing rhythm and blues, so they came down to hear us.
At the end of our songs they’d yell out, ‘That’s righteous, brother!’ and that’s how we got our name.
When our first single took off, all of a sudden it was packed wherever we performed; I mean, you couldn’t get in. Even Elvis and his guys came to see us at a little bowling alley. We were like kids in a candy store.
The Beatles asked us to be on their first American tour, because we were white guys who sounded black, which they loved. We got to know them pretty well.
They were as knocked out with what was happening as everybody else. John and Paul especially were goofy, Ringo was funny but a little more serious, and George was very serious, a real musical guy.
We did 50 dates, many in outdoor stadiums.
It was scary – they’d put up a fence in front of the stage and all these kids were being crushed against it.
I thought they turned the lights on as soon as The Beatles went on stage, but it was camera bulbs, lighting the place up.

Karen and I married when she became pregnant and our little world started to explode. I was on tour with The Beatles when she miscarried.
By the time Darrin arrived, the Righteous Brothers had recorded and released You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, a number one.
When you have the biggest record in the country everybody wants you, everybody needs you, and they need you now.
I went to the hospital to have a minor ailment checked, and the doctor diagnosed mental and physical exhaustion.
I was such a wreck Karen had to tell them my name – I couldn’t get it out. She took such good care of me. I’d get home from the studio at 2 or 3 in the morning and she would get up and make me tacos – what a great wife.
Just as Lovin’ Feelin’ was cresting, we were offered a shot playing the lounge at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas. We were the first rock act ever to play there, but we had to get the OK from Frank Sinatra, who was in the main room.
I’m sure Sinatra didn’t have a clue who the Righteous Brothers were – rock ’n’ roll was a million miles away from swing music and the Rat Pack – but his daughter Nancy was a friend, and I can only think she swung it for us.
Frank would bring huge parties of his friends to the lounge after his show. We always knew when he was coming because, despite the long lines waiting to get in, there was a long row of empty chairs from the stage to the back of the room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s at every other chair.
They were the heaviest hitters in Hollywood – Burt Lancaster, the Rat Pack, you name it.
One night I had to sing Georgia On My Mind with my musical hero Ray Charles, that song’s greatest interpreter, sitting four feet away.

My voice suffered in the Vegas heat, and Sinatra would give me advice on looking after it. Why he took a liking to us, I don’t know – maybe we reminded him of when he was coming up.
He invited us to the hotel’s steam room every day at five o’clock, where he’d hold court and ask for a status report.
‘How’s the reed doin’ kid – any better?’
One time he started to talk while he was putting on his hairpiece. It was the greatest rug in the world; it was short and looked so real, not like the helmets some guys wore. I told him how cool it looked and he said, ‘Thanks kid.’
Bobby and I became very aware of the Italian mob guys and we knew the Jewish mob too, because they took care of the casinos.
They were great to us; they loved us. We never feared them, although I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of them. After a while they started calling us ‘the Golden Boys’ because we did such good business.
Vegas in those days was so exciting and we were just 25; we ate it up. Almost every lounge had a topless revue with the most gorgeous women you can imagine.
I had sex with a girl in Frank Sinatra’s suite while he was on stage. Am I proud of that? No, I’m just proud I’m still alive. I’m not sure Frank would have appreciated it.
I had another girlfriend who worked in the hotel’s ladies room.
Bobby Hatfield and our bandleader Mike Patterson would run all over town looking for chicks after our last show of the night and all I had to do was call the women’s restroom. I’m not too proud of it now, but that was the life of a young performer in Vegas in the Sixties.
The mob guys, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, and Frank Sinatra –  it was their world and we were just living in it.
Throughout our career, people thought Bobby and I disliked each other. That’s not true, but our relationship was very complicated.

We were like brothers – and brothers don’t always see eye to eye.
A few months after our run in Las Vegas, The Sands called to say they wanted to put us in the main room, which represented the pinnacle of the show business world at that time.
I drove to Bobby’s house with a dozen roses for his wife, my heart going 100 miles an hour, to tell him the news. His response was, ‘I don’t want to do it’.
That’s when it became crystal clear to me that Bobby and I were just in two different comfort zones.
It’s not a right or wrong thing. It’s like a young married couple who grow older and one gains 100 pounds or one starts drinking or gambling. The other one thinks: ‘I didn’t sign up for that.’
When people lined up across the casino to get into our lounge show at the Sands, Bobby loved it.
But the pressure of having to pack the main room and have our name in huge letters on the Vegas Strip as headliners, that didn’t work for Bobby. He wasn’t wired that way.
Not long after that, things started falling apart. Bobby’s people were telling him he was the cute one and the smart one and he shouldn’t listen to me. I’d had enough.
He and I were very different characters. He loved the parties and the Hollywood events like the Grammys, but I focused my energy on the music. We were just cut from different cloth.
My marriage fell apart at the same time.
On our final tour, I started an affair with the singer Darlene Love. I decided to get a divorce because I thought I was in love and it wasn’t fair to Karen.
Later, when Karen was with the man who became her second husband, I wanted to get back together but she didn’t.

Mind you, I dated some of the greatest women in the world. Mary Wilson and the Supremes would come to my solo Vegas shows and sit at the front.
After a while Mary and I became more than friends and had an on-off-thing. I had another of those with singer Connie Stevens. She was a spectacular woman who loved to help people, but I was one of those schmucks, scared to death of commitment.
When Karen was killed, she even offered to raise Darrin. I think he’s still annoyed I didn’t let her. I’m sure it still annoys her that I never would commit.
Once she proposed to me, not necessarily to marry me, but maybe so we could get married and then she could leave me to get it out of her system.
Another girl who really got my attention in the Seventies was Goldie Hawn. I had known her from the Sixties and we started hanging out. I think she wanted me to ask her out, but I was afraid. I was in awe of her; she was one of the cutest, funniest girls I’d ever met.
I married twice more in the Seventies, and neither lasted very long. Not long before Karen was murdered, my solo career was going fine, but my voice was failing, so I reformed the Righteous Brothers, thinking I would make a couple of million and retire.
I was shocked when we found Bobby. He was broke and living alone in a small apartment, which he was going to be evicted from in a week.
He had a chair, a black-and-white TV, and a bed… that’s it. He looked like a bum. I knocked on the door and said, ‘Let’s go and be Righteous Brothers again.’
And we did, for a while. We had a big new hit with Rock & Roll Heaven, and then went out on a tour of 20,000-seat venues. The promoter must have lost a fortune, because every night only about 2,000 people showed up. But we kept working steadily until 1976, when Karen was murdered.

After her death, my world was a blur. When I told Bobby I needed time off to raise Darrin, he was angry. But this was the time for me to keep a promise I’d made to Karen long ago and not always kept – that I would be there when it was important for the family.
In spite of our divorce, Karen was my best friend. Over 35 years later, I’m still looking for the man who killed her. I’ve got a private eye on the case.
And even now, it’s like a bad movie; it stops my heart just to talk about it.
'Elvis said, "Bill, it's going to be all right." But it wasn't...'
'Everything you've heard about Graceland during Elvis's glory days is true and then some,' said Bill       
The friendship I had with Elvis began to take shape in 1968, when I was recording in Memphis.
I’d record during the day and Elvis would send one of his guys over to bring me to Graceland at night. There was always something fun going on, but Elvis always had his guys, his bodyguards or ‘The Memphis Mafia’ as they were known, to cater to his every need and laugh loudly at his every joke.
About this time, toward the end of his movie career, Elvis was like the Howard Hughes of rock ’n’ roll.
Outside of those of us who got inside the walls of Graceland few people ever saw him in public.
But when I was performing solo at the Sands in Las Vegas in 1968, there was a sighting to remember.
I had a little comedic Elvis bit in my show, where I talked about our friendship, mimicked his awkward speech patterns, and said I never understood what he was saying… all in good-natured fun. One night, the house maître d’ handed me a note that simply read,

‘He’s here.’ I read the note out loud to the crowd and said, ‘Who’s here?’ Just then at the back of the room a guy stands up and starts singing All Shook Up. It was Elvis. The house lights came on and the crowd went bananas. It took me about 20 minutes just to get them back.
What happened to Elvis in the following years is one of my saddest memories. I knew he’d been using pills for a long time – in fact he offered me some once.
We were in his room one time and he opened a suitcase with this huge stash of all different kinds of pills.
I declined but he assured me, ‘Bill, I really know what I’m doing.’
I suppose all addicts feel that they have a handle on their struggle. The very last time I saw Elvis was when I took my son Darrin backstage to meet him.
He was sitting in the hotel stairwell talking with one of his singers. He was wrecked, hardly coherent.
I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I quickly introduced him to Darrin and we said our goodbyes.
As I walked away he turned to me and said, ‘Bill, it’s going to be all right, man.’
It wasn’t. But Elvis Presley was a good guy, and he was my friend.

Ernie Kovacs dies


Television star Ernie Kovacs was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles during the early morning hours of January 13, 1962.
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Kovacs, who had worked for much of the evening, met Adams at a baby shower given by Billy Wilder for Milton Berle and his wife, who had recently adopted a newborn baby boy. The couple left the party in separate cars.

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 After a lull in a southern California rainstorm, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries.
A photographer managed to arrive moments later, and images of Kovacs dead appeared in newspapers across the United States. An unlit cigar lay on the pavement, inches from his outstretched arm. Jack Lemmon, who also attended the Berle party, identified Kovacs's body at the morgue because Adams was too distraught to do so.
His pallbearers were Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, Mervyn LeRoy, and Joe Mikolas.

Terry O'Neill, whose images captured 1960s London, dies at 81

          
LONDON – British photographer Terry O’Neill, whose images captured London’s swinging ’60s and who created iconic portraits of Elton John, Brigitte Bardot and Winston Churchill, has died at age 81.
O’Neill died Saturday at his home in London following a long battle with cancer, according to Iconic Images, the agency that represented O’Neill.
“Terry was a class act, quick witted and filled with charm,” the agency said in a statement posted to its website. “Anyone who was lucky enough to know or work with him can attest to his generosity and modesty. As one of the most iconic photographers of the last 60 years, his legendary pictures will forever remain imprinted in our memories as well as in our hearts and minds.”
Born in London in 1938, O’Neill was working as a photographer for an airline at Heathrow Airport when he snapped a picture of a well-dressed man sleeping on a bench. The man turned out to be the British home secretary, and O’Neill was hired by a London newspaper.
In the early 1960s he photographed the Beatles during the recording of their first hit single, and he captured the image of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill clutching a cigar as he was carried to an ambulance after a 1962 hospital stay.
O’Neill later said that when photographing the Beatles he placed John Lennon in the foreground because he thought that “it was obvious John was the one with the personality.”
Soon O’Neill was photographing the hottest stars of the mid- and late-’60s: Bardot, Raquel Welch, Michael Caine, Steve McQueen, Diana Ross and Audrey Hepburn.
He photographed many other big names over the course of a career that spanned decades, including model Kate Moss, Queen Elizabeth II, singers David Bowie and Amy Winehouse and former first lady Laura Bush.
O’Neill’s photos of Elton John remain among his most recognizable. One shows the singer, exuberant and sparkling in a sequined baseball uniform, with an audience of thousands in the background.
“He was brilliant, funny and I absolutely loved his company,” John tweeted Sunday.
Another iconic O’Neill photo, this one from 1977, depicted actress Faye Dunaway lounging poolside the morning after winning a best actress Oscar for her performance in “Network,” the statuette sitting on a table and newspapers strewn on the ground.
O’Neill was married to Dunaway for three years in the 1980s. According to British newspaper The Guardian, the couple had a son. O’Neill later married Laraine Ashton, a modeling industry executive.
In an interview with the Guardian last year, O’Neill discussed how he viewed his past photos.
“The perfectionist in me always left me thinking I could have taken a better shot. But now when I look at photos of all the icons I’ve shot — like Mandela, Sir Winston Churchill and Sinatra — the memories come flooding back and I think: ‘Yeah, I did all right.'”

Johnny Monarch’s us sixties cook




We drove down to Virginia’s Hunt County this past Sunday and came across this great place called Johnny Monarch’s….a bus-taurant. The food and the staff were fantastic but even if they hadn’t been I would have eaten there anyway…..I mean restaurant in an old London Double Decker?  How could I not eat there?


The Sixties' decor is wonderful.


The menu is mainline American. Our chef was a young man named Andrew who was kind enough to let me try a slice of Piedmont Pie, the house specialty. I had the steak and cheese, called “Steak me away”….very tasty and very large, you get your money’s worth in this place. I also had a side of potato salad made with southern overtones (Creole mustard, asparagus with red peppers) and they HAVE A FRIED BALONEY SANDWICH ON THE MENU. It's on the kid's menu but they’ll make it for you if you’re a big kid as well.



Johnny Monarch’s is located at 8372 W. Main Street Marshal, Va. 20117 Phone: 540-878-3555
(Marshal is named after John Marshall the fourth Chief Justice of the United States for whom Marshal University in West Virginia is named because West Virginia was once part of Virginia, which gave rise to the film name “We are Marsha” because West Virginia)  


Email: needtheinfo@feedbagfoods.com


Charles Manson’s son, Charles Manson Jr., couldn’t stand his name. He tried changing it — but still found no solace so he killed himself


Where the 1960s “psychedelic” look came from


 The hippie aesthetic owes a lot to Art Nouveau.

By Marie Cascione  
When you picture hippies, you probably think of bell bottoms, long hair, and LSD. You might also think of a very specific graphic design and illustration style, seen on concert posters and album covers: curly, cloudy, barely legible lettering; trippy color combinations; and decorative meandering borders.
This style was first conceived in San Francisco by a handful of designers in the late 1960s. Their job? Make posters for bands like The Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller Band, Jimi Hendrix — all of whom were just getting their start, competing for nightly stage time at venues like the Fillmore and the Avalon.
But these designers didn’t invent that now-iconic style. In fact, they were heavily influenced by an art movement that started in the late 1800s called Art Nouveau.



Logan Paul buys Timothy Leary’s former LSD ranch in the San Jacinto Mountains



By JACK FLEMMINGSTAFF WRITER

Even among California’s myriad of mega-mansions and one-of-a-kind hideaways, Fobes Ranch stands out.
Sprawling across 80 acres in the San Jacinto Mountains, the desert dwelling hosted LSD advocate Timothy Leary and his band of Orange County surfers known as the Hippie Mafia in the late 1960s. After hitting the market last year for $1.495 million, the property has found its next owner: YouTube star Logan Paul.
Paul, who’s currently preparing for a boxing match against British YouTuber KSI at Staples Center, paid a dollar over $1 million for the property, records show.
Billed as the only private property in Duchess Canyon, the compound located in Mountain Center holds enough structures to house a small community — and it once did. Around 30 members of the Hippie Mafia, a.k.a. the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, led by Leary, occupied the property in the 1960s, using it to take and manufacture LSD, as well as worship nature in the rugged landscape.
Leary and his wife, Rosemary, lived in the ranch house while the rest occupied outbuildings and teepees scattered across the grounds. One died of an overdose in 1969, and three years later, narcotics agents raided the compound and made seven arrests, ending the group’s drug-fueled stay, according to Palm Springs Life.
The ranch house remains the largest home on the property, and other structures include a guesthouse, bunkhouse and workshop. There’s also a barn, two-car garage and two solar panel systems for power. A pair of springs feed a 70,000-gallon water tank.
In the two-bedroom main home, an expansive living room with a freestanding fireplace adjoins a kitchen with custom tile. The master suite offers wood beams and a custom fireplace. A 500-square-foot studio is brightened by angled skylights and walls of glass.
Timothy McTavish of Pacific Sotheby’s International Realty held the listing.
Leary was a clinical psychologist at Harvard University when he oversaw the controversial Concord Prison Experiment and Marsh Chapel Experiment, which tested the effects of psilocybin, a psychedelic drug, on prisoners and theology students in the early ‘60s. He became a strong proponent of using mind-altering drugs to treat behavioral disorders.
Leary died in Beverly Hills in 1996 at 75.
Paul, 24, gained a following on the video-sharing app Vine before creating a YouTube channel shortly after in 2013. Two years ago, he dropped $6.55 million on a contemporary mansion in Encino, The Times previously reported.