PETERKURTH.COM

"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong." -- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Anyway, I turn on the TV in my hotel room in Whittier, California ... and there was BARBARA KURTH’S brother Peter on GOOD MORNING AMERICA this ordinary American man, who had been suddenly plucked from obscurity by the hand of fate, and he knew exactly what to do on television!  How to sit (not too slumpy, not too stiff), what to do with his hands (kept them quiet, don't gesticulate or fiddle with your ear or other body part), how to arrange his expressions (relaxed, alert, open, affable), how to speak in sound bites (don't digress! don't get mad! don't talk too long!).  It was as though he'd been on TV every day for years." – Katha Pollitt to Andrew Sullivan in Slate, "Breakfast Table," April 30, 1998

I have been, Katha, I have been – the trouble is they’re all reruns.  I sleep at night knowing that somewhere in the world, at any hour, I’ll be on television talking about ANASTASIA and the ROMANOVS, or about what the cable networks persist in calling the Royal Family of Monaco.  Monaco isn’t a kingdom; it can have no "royal" family.  But there I am anyway, on "Biography” and “True Hollywood Stories," interviewed as some sort of expert on the lives of Princess Grace and her children.  Judging by the frequency with which people tell me they’ve seen these things, they seem to air every twenty minutes or so.  They’re always on.  And I owe it all to Tina Brown, who sent me to Monaco years ago to get dirt on the Grimaldis, but didn’t like the story I wrote – not enough dirt -- and didn’t publish it. 

"It has the air of someone pushing his nose up against the glass," said she.  Vanity Fair does not push its nose up against the glass.”  So I sold the story to Cosmopolitan, which does, or did, when Helen Gurley Brown still ran that magazine.  Helen Gurley Brown is my favorite editor of all time.  "Royalty!" she said on the day we met.  "That’s classy!  But don’t give me any Greeks or Russians or Romanians.  My girls want the Windsors and they want Monaco, and that’s it!" 

MONACO:  IN THE HOUSE OF GRIMALDI (Cosmopolitan, 1993)

Wait!  It didn’t end there!

THE PLEASURE PRINCIPALITY (Observer Magazine, 2005)

Prince Albert of Monaco talks to Peter Kurth about his mother, his mistress and his secret son

And, of course:

FERGIE:  DUCHESS OF YUCK

 

(I’d already written about KING MICHAEL OF ROMANIA but it was too late for tears.)

 

        

PETER KURTH was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1953.  He is a graduate of the University of Vermont, where he earned departmental honors in English and Theatre.  His first book, ANASTASIA: THE RIDDLE OF ANNA ANDERSON (Little, Brown 1983), was an international bestseller and made into an NBC television miniseries.  Kurth’s biography of anti-fascist journalist Dorothy Thompson, AMERICAN CASSANDRA, also published by Little, Brown, won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award as the best book about American journalism of 1990.  (Hmm … that seems like a long time ago!)

In 1995-1996 Kurth was the author of TSAR: THE LOST WORLD OF NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA and co-author (with Eleanor Lanahan) of ZELDA: THE PRIVATE WORLD OF ZELDA FITZGERALD (Abrams).   His most recent book, ISADORA: A SENSATIONAL LIFE, was published in 2001.  (That seems like a long time ago, too.)

Kurth's work has appeared in a variety of national publications, including Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler, Forbes FYI, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Observer, Cosmopolitan, New York Newsday and Harper's Bazaar.  He has written extensively for SALON.COM and is "Crank Call" columnist for Vermont’s SEVEN DAYS, for which he recently won an award for outstanding commentary from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (third place, but who’s counting?).

Peter Kurth lives in Vermont (older but no wiser)

Comments to peterkurth@peterkurth.com

BOOKS BY PETER KURTH

ANASTASIA: THE RIDDLE OF ANNA ANDERSON

The most dramatic unsolved mystery of the century. 

In July 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children were shot by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.

In February 1920, a woman many believe was the Grand Duchess Anastasia was rescued from a canal in Berlin.

In July 1992, the body of Anastasia, the youngest of the Tsar’s daughters, was found to be missing from her family's grave.

This is the story of what happened in between.

ANNA-ANASTASIA NOTES ON FRANZISKA SCHANZKOWSKA

Anna Anderson’s biographer takes a closer look at the 1994 DNA results …

TEXT ONLY

PHOTOS ONLY

THE MYSTERY OF THE ROMANOV BONES (Vanity Fair, January 1993)

ANASTASIA: THE RIDDLE OF ANNA ANDERSON

 

ISADORA: A SENSATIONAL LIFE

“Isadora Duncan is one of the greatest women I have ever known … Sometimes I think she IS the greatest woman I have ever known.” – Auguste Rodin

“It is quite certain that no other American woman has so impressed the world outside of America—made such a mighty stir, commanded such a following at home and abroad . . . left behind her such a legend of personality and such a trail of effects." –  New York Times, 1928

"Come away!  her dancing says.  Come out into the splendid perilous world!  Come up on the mountain-top where the great wind blows!  Learn to be young always!  Learn to be incessantly renewed!  Learn to live in the intemperate careless land of song and rhythm and rapture!  Say farewell to the world you know and join the passionate spirits of the world’s history!  Storm through into your dreams!  Give yourself up to the frenzy that is in the heart of life, and never look back, and never regret!" – Robert Edmond Jones (“The Gloves of Isadora”), 1947

"We may never know whether 'one must have seen Isadora Duncan to die happy,' as one of her contemporaries claimed, but one way to live happily, at least for a few days, is to read Peter Kurth's Isadora.  Exhaustively researched, intelligently rendered, it becomes, in its lovingly judicious and ultimately explosive unfurling, the definitive portrait of this in the words of one of the few men not her lover 'figure of mourning and flame.'" J. D. Landis, author of Longing

"The most famous woman of the first quarter of the 20th century may have been Mary Pickford, but the most influential, and the most notorious, was Isadora Duncan.  She was the progenitor and soul of a new art form, modern dance.  She was the prototype of the uninhibited young American whose freshness and originality charmed jaded old Europe.  And for decades she startled respectable society even as she helped transform it with her flouting of conventions, both onstage and off.  You would have to go back to George Sand or Byron to find a comparably galvanizing figure. … And now there is Peter Kurth, sardonic yet appreciative, neither adoring nor denigrating. … He has stylishly synthesized the literature to give us the fullest and most coherent account of the life to date. … Excellent." Robert Gottlieb, The New York Times Book Review

"Peter Kurth has written the best biography we have of an astonishing and often underrated woman.  He writes so well that only the weight of paper will occasionally remind you of his subject’s amplitude. … Working from an assembly of sources vast enough to make you dizzy, he succeeds in making you love, hate and honor America’s greatest dancer, sometimes all at once.  Earlier biographies have tended to focus on her, just as Isadora herself did.  Kurth does better by giving vivid portraits of the lovers, friends and pupils whose voices make up a diverse chorus. …  Shrewdly, he gives space not only to Isadora’s wonderfully feckless chum, Mary Desti, the creator of the scarf that throttled her, but to Preston Sturges, Desti’s film-making son.  Preston’s amused, slightly spiky voice is, you will find, the one closest to Kurth’s own in this marvelously rich and well-told book.   Isadora deserves to be taught as well as read; this is how biography should be written." Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times (London)

SALON.COM BOOKS  DANCING IN THE DARK

I was racing against death when I signed up to write Isadora Duncan's biography -- and winning wouldn't even be my strangest adventure along the way.

SALON.COM PEOPLE | PETER KURTH

The author of the new biography of Isadora Duncan discusses the legendary dancer whose short life was a whirlwind of art, stormy love affairs and tragedy.

ISADORA:  A SENSATIONAL LIFE

 

AMERICAN CASSANDRA:  THE LIFE OF DOROTHY THOMPSON

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance.  He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship.  He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.  And nobody will ever say `Heil' to him, nor will they call him `Führer' or `Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of `O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'" -- Dorothy Thompson, 1937

"Peter Kurth's opening description of perhaps the most influential woman journalist of the century is too good to pass up. 'The Reverend Peter Thompson's elder daughter, according to family legend, ran away from home for the first time at the age of three, taking with her some docile, dimly remembered childhood playmate and her father's buggy umbrella and heading straight down the line of the Erie Railroad into the open world.' But there you have Dorothy Thompson in a nutshell: precocious, independent, commanding, fearless, legendary. … Kurth weaves the public and the private Thompson together with considerable deftness. The task is made somewhat easier by the fact that much of his subject's private life was lived in public. Her romance with Sinclair Lewis (who proposed to her on their first meeting despite the inconvenience of being already married) was the stuff of which a John Reed need not have been ashamed. Indeed, the movie "Woman of the Year," with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, was an explicit satire on her exploits and notoriety. The fact that she is so little remembered today is itself a satire on celebrity, because in the interwar years she was one of the best known women in America. … This book does posthumous honor to a great American hell-raiser.” " -- Los Angeles Times

"Those who remember Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) know she was once married to Sinclair Lewis, and was a journalist of high influence and repute in her own time.  As Peter Kurth's sensationally good biography reveals, Thompson was much more: an opinion-maker, international celebrity and very real power behind several thrones - pushing and nagging the great, the near-great and the inept to ensure the survival of those humanitarian ideals for which she tirelessly campaigned and more than once risked her life.  Kurth's vividly detailed and dramatic portrayal of her life fully compensates for the memoirs she planned but never lived to write.  He shows her at her best and worst and, without insisting, leaves us persuaded that here was a one-of-a-kind incarnation of energy, honesty and commitment; a woman we must not forget." -- USA Today

MUSEUM OF TELEVISION AND RADIO:  DOROTHY THOMPSON

Dorothy Thompson was one of  the most influential journalists in American history. In the mid-1930s, having already forged a precedent-shattering career in print as a reporter, foreign bureau chief, and nationally syndicated columnist, Thompson went on the radio with her passionate and politically charged commentary. From 1936 to 1945, as the world first balanced on the edge of war then plunged full-bore into armed conflict, Thompson’s eloquent and well-informed views were regularly broadcast to millions… The volume of mail sent to Thompson’s office after one of her radio addresses was so immense it required delivery in special sacks. In 1939 she made the cover of Time magazine at an NBC mike. The article said that, after Eleanor Roosevelt, Thompson was “undoubtedly the most influential” woman in the United States.  At a time when America had scant comprehension of the extent of Fascism’s evils, Thompson warned her audience, with frightening prescience, what would happen if Hitler and other Fascist leaders remained in power. In 2005, forty-four years after her death, Thompson resurfaced in the news as part of a debate over the paucity of female journalists with genuine national opinion-making power.

REMEMBERING DOROTHY THOMPSON

"As far as I can see, I really was put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy.  My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all.  This is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says that Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people -- an old Jewish idea.” 

A DOROTHY THOMPSON SAMPLER

 “Security for all, aggression for none – that is the fundamental thesis of the United Nations.  But to make this thesis real one sovereign right – the right to wage aggressive war – must be banned by all nations, and an international power must exist to see that the ban is observed. …It does not require a `world government’ beyond one single world law:  a law against aggression and preparation for aggression.”

 

TSAR: THE LOST WORLD OF NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA

Photographs by Peter Christopher

With an introduction by Edvard Radzinsky

This spectacular illustrated history tells the story of the last Romanovs-one of the great tragic love stories of all time-with unparalleled vividness and intimacy.  The text, which follows Nicholas and Alexandra from their childhoods to the Siberian cellar where their lives ended, is complemented by rare images from the imperial family's private collections (locked away for decades in Soviet archives, and published here for the first time), as well as by contemporary full-color photographs of the places and palaces the Romanovs knew.

 

“We were twelve days in that awful Ekaterinburg.  You have no idea what a living nightmare is until you see that town.”  -- Isadora Duncan, 1924

“I was there at breakfast. Yes.  With the king [George V] … and the queen [Queen Mary].  Just the three of us.  Suddenly an equerry comes in.  I mean this was breakfast, for heaven’s sake!  Not done, you know, ever.  The king was furious, but the man went straight up to him with this note, which the king read and gave my mother, and she read it and gave it back and said, `No.’  The king gave it to the equerry and said, `No.’  Later that day I asked my mother what that was all about and she said the government was willing to send a ship to rescue the tsar and his family but she did not think it would be good for us to have them in England and so the Bolsheviks shot the lot of them” – Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor (in conversation with Gore Vidal)

 "A page-turner packaged as a coffee-table book." -- Entertainment Weekly

"It has been common wisdom that most books as physically dazzling, as gorgeously illustrated, as Peter Kurth's "Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra" are accompanied by vapid non-texts.  Mr. Kurth's narrative is a striking exception to the rule.  The author's acquaintanceship with Romanov history was evident in his previous book "Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson." His new narrative … is amply documented and compellingly written, and offers as fine a portrait  of Nicholas and Alexandra's complex characters as any book since Robert K. Massie's biography of nearly three decades ago ... Peter Christopher's color photographs of the traditional Romanov sites are as beautiful as any pictures I've seen of Russia.  But the modest snapshots, patiently exhumed from archives, taken by members of the imperial family and their entourage, are even more affecting." -- Francine du Plessix Gray, New York Times Book Review

“Without doubt, the best and most comprehensive work to date.  This book is a work of art and obviously a labor of love from a dedicated and accurate researcher and author. It gives the most comprehensive and all encompassing coverage of one of the most fascinating yet tragic families that ever lived.  I have cried over this book and it has transported me time and time again to a place in history that I can only imagine. It is a beautiful testament to the Romanov family and I recommend it thoroughly for not only those not familiar with the story but collectors as well.  It is certainly the pride of my Romanov collection.” -- Amazon.com

"Romanov buffs will gorge themselves on these images, along with romantic puffs of introduction and text by the Russian writer Edvard Radzinsky, whose biography, The Last Tsar, was an international bestseller, and by Peter Kurth, author of Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson.  DNA or no DNA, Kurth won't admit that the Anastasia 'riddle' has been solved." -- New York Newsday

THE MYSTERY OF THE ROMANOV BONES (Vanity Fair, January 1993)

Don’t touch that dial! 

ROMANOV BONES NOT AUTHENTIC?

Japanese scientists have their doubts …

And so does Stanford University:

DNA UPDATE

One of the most riveting detective stories of the last century supposedly ended in 1998, when the Russian government declared that bones excavated from a Siberian mass grave seven years earlier indeed belonged to the Romanovs, Russia's last royal family, who were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. A new study, however, is reopening the book.

KNIGHT CHALLENGES GILL 2004

Dr Knight argues that the Home Office results were too good to be true and doubts the researchers could have obtained such long stretches of DNA from old bones, particularly those that had spent more than 70 years in a shallow, wet earthen grave.

 

TSAR: THE LOST WORLD OF NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA

 

ALSO BY PETER KURTH

PETER KURTH WEB LINKS

Articles, book reviews, columns and rants

AT HER MAJESTY’S PLEASURE

After a nightmare flight from New York to London, I was thrown into a Victorian hellhole of a prison alongside drug smugglers and rapists. This is my story.  [NB:  This is the edited version of the diary I kept during my incarceration in London.  For the longer and “unexpurgated” version, click here: BALLAD OF WORMWORD SCRUBS]

PASS THE WORD

Pondering the perils of publishing

KOESTLER’S LEGACY

The Author of `Darkness at Noon,’ a double-suicide with his wife, left his whole estate to paranormal research.

BOOK REVIEW:  DUCHESS DEAREST by Christopher Wilson

A dodgy new book claims that Wallis Simpson was genetically a man and romanced a much younger gay playboy -- "Dancing With the Devil" shouldn't be critiqued so much as held at a distance with tongs.

AMERICAN RHAPSODY by Joe Ezsterhas

Let's face it, America:  A straight man “telling all” isn't telling much.

MORE, NOW, AGAIN by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Sorry, Elizabeth -- wake up dead next time and you might have a book on your hands.

GEORGETTE MOSBACHER:  THE FEMININE FORCE

Georgette Mosbacher has earned every one of those power lunches, every one of those houses and gowns, those cars, those jewels, those shiny incisors and that big red hair. 

LISTENING TO PROZAC by Dr. Peter Kramer

The harder we're urged these days to follow our bliss and run with the wolves the more determined are the experts, in their oily little hearts, that we stay on the straight and narrow. 

IN THE NAME OF THE SISTER:  THE STEPHEN FAGAN CASE

“You'll remember that Barbara Kurth is the mother whose daughters were kidnapped by her ex-husband, Stephen Fagan, who changed his name and lived in shadowy splendor in Palm Beach, Florida, raising "the girls" as they are always called, having told them their mother died in a car crash. … So, of course, since she is the mother, Barbara Kurth has been attacked in the media, solely on the basis of allegations by Stephen Fagan, who says she was an alcoholic who neglected the children, leaving him no choice.  … He doesn't explain why he kept up the deception for two decades, long after his ex-wife had clearly overcome her problems, if she ever had any, and had gotten a Ph.D. (she is now a professor of cell biology, married -- but no kids).  His whole family was in on it, too … It's hard to imagine the cruelty involved here.” --  Katha Pollitt

D. A. MITTELL COMMENTARY

“In order to strip Stephen Fagan bare of the image contrived by his hired flacks, we need to look at his case coldly and see it for what it is: His crime was heinous, unspeakably cruel; and morally, if not legally, he renewed it and repeated it on every one of the approximately 7,300 days he kept his girls and their mother in the dark.”

Notes on the Plague Years

REFLECTIONS ON PROTEASE THERAPY

National Public Radio, “Morning Edition,” October 1996

CALL ME LAZARUS

There’s nothing like rising from the grave to get people’s attention.

AN OPEN LETTER TO SANDY THURMAN

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to address an AIDS Czarina -- "Your Tokenhood?" "Your Nothingness?" "Your Ineffectuality?" (Salon.com, 1997)

PROPECIA

One of the stranger side effects of the super-toxic chemicals I take to stay alive is that my hair has started growing again. I mean new hair. On my head.

HOMO RULE

Remember, when they say “one man, one woman,” they mean one at a time.

CIVIL UNION

On the subject of Vermont’s civil union law, I can see all points of view, even the stupid, hateful, ugly, Christian ones.

LEMON-AIDS

I never expected to live this long, never mind in such good health.  I also never expected that citrus – a little Florida Sunshine, as that old fag-baiter Anita Bryant used to say – might be the answer for us all. 

Egypt, ca. 3000 BCE – “My lover is like a date-cake dipped in beer.”

AND JUST FOR LAUGHS …

 All the news that gives us fits

 www.sevendaysvt.com

WEATHER OR NOT

Talking about the weather is the very best thing to avoid talking about something else -- Dick Cheney, for example.

WAR … BY ANY MEANS

It was Clausewitz, we’re always told, who said that “War is a continuation of politics by other means,” but he was wrong:  War is a continuation of ownership by any means.

JONBENET WHO?

Let’s face it, from the point of view of media scandal, the kind the public gobbles up, this summer’s been Double Dullsville.

QUEENGELINA JOLIE

We need someone who’ll rule us by fiat, with an iron fist – or, in Angelina’s case, iron lips.

“THE FUTURE? WHAT’S THAT?”

A doctor called in to attend to the tribe’s immediate needs told the Times matter-of-factly, “The Nukak don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into.”

AN OPEN LETTER TO G. W. BUSH

George, you’ll have to forgive me for not addressing you as “Mr. President.”  I’d like to honor your office, at least, but in your case I’m not allowed. 

BIBLE TIME

The Lord doesn’t mind a little stealing, really, because He puts it way, way down on the list of things thou shalt not do.

FLIP-FLOP

Right now, Mel Gibson could say that the world is balanced on the back of a giant turtle and half the population would flip-flop itself into believing it.

THE BREAST THAT ATE PITTSBURGH

It’s hard to know if the sight of Janet Jackson’s dexter mammary posed an “imminent” threat to public morality, or if it was merely “urgent,” “immediate,” “serious,” “mortal” and “mounting.”

POP GOES THE CULTURE

You just keep your eyes on Harry Potter!

AMERICAN BATTLEAXE

Barbara Bush is said to regret that she has sometimes been “too outspoken” in public life – outspoken by whom?

UNDER GOD

I suppose everyone knows by now -- don't they? -- that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a card-carrying socialist.

E PLURIBUS BUNKUM

Take “civility” -- please!

BOTOX BLUES

No wonder you look worried!

CRANK CALL ARCHIVE

Selected complaining, 1997-2006

For a complete “Crank Call” archive, 2001-2007, click here

PETER KURTH WEB LINKS

Comments to peterkurth@peterkurth.com