The Backstory with Patty Steele

She was the sexiest, most beautiful actress in Hollywood during her short career. But Marilyn Monroe had a heartbreaking childhood with a mentally ill mother. Her upbringing destroyed her self-confidence. And that allowed Hollywood and dozens of men to use and abuse her.

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Scandal, fraud, embezzlement, wild parties, and illicit affairs—sounds very presidential, right? Not only was that the name of the game in the roaring 20s, a lot of it was essentially covered up by the press during Warren Harding’s short presidency. It was pure historical drama. With his sudden death, conspiracy theorists pointed at the ultimate insider.

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So we’re all sweltering from the heat…air so thick and hot you can feel it go down your throat as you breathe. But heat waves are nothing new. They killed thousands in 1898 and thousands more in the early 1900s. But the one that hit London 166 years ago, changed the city forever. It was “the great stink of 1858.”

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They say knowledge is power. But is it more important than ethics…or law? Over the centuries, researchers' quest to understand what’s under our skin, the human anatomy, has motivated scientists—as well as money-hungry grave robbers—to become body snatchers. But more than that, it sometimes inspired murder.

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Polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew spent almost 2 years trapped in sub-zero desolation after their ship, The Endurance, was ice-bound and finally sank, stranding them on an ice floe. This is their story of survival and endurance.

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When you meet a guy dripping with testosterone who loves hunting, war, alcohol, and women, you don’t expect that he’s going to be obsessed with kittens and cats…and have dozens of them all over his home and office. That’s the paradox of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author, Ernest Hemingway.

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You think politics bust up our families? It’s hard to believe that, like us, politics could fracture a Founding Father’s family. Ben Franklin was incredibly close to his son William, then NJ’s royal governor, until he declared his allegiance to the king.

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He was an Academy Award-winning mega movie star. He had scores of affairs with women and men, 11 children by a variety of women, and a family story dominated by illness, mental illness, addiction…and murder. 

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Belle Cora went from minister’s daughter, to prostitute, to San Francisco’s richest madam, to wife of a man hung for the murder of someone who insulted her—all that before her death at 34.  

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We all have to regularly be somewhere on time. But what did people do before cell phone alarms or even alarm clocks? Animals, body cues, and knocker-uppers were just a few of the methods.

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Politics is a nasty business. But it always has been. And it may have played a role in the death of a literary genius. You know the Edgar Allan Poe story called The Tell-Tale Heart, about the heart of a murder victim that never stops beating? Maybe Poe is still trying to tell us something 175 years after his mysterious death.

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We all love to laugh, no matter when, where, or how we’ve lived. Amazingly, there are a handful of topics that have given us the giggles for at least 5,000 years. And a lot of them involve 6th-grade humor.

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James Brown, the godfather of soul, had some anger issues. In fact, he went to prison after threatening agents at an insurance seminar with a gun because he thought they used his private bathroom. 

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Think politics today are the most angry and violent they’ve ever been? What about the days when senators and congressmen came to work armed with guns and knives? Or the murder of one congressman by another just because they had an ideological disagreement? That’s when politics were bloody.

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We think the world just keeps evolving. But what happens when a civilization like Rome collapses and all that technology disappears? 

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Imagine meeting your children…and they're way older than you! But you've been obsessed since your earliest memory with the idea that you were the mother of eight kids. But you died, leaving them orphaned. And your guilt was palpable, even as a three-year-old! You may not believe in reincarnation, but it’s hard to ignore Jenny Cockell’s story.

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