The kiss that never ends. The woman from the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt of a U.S. Navy sailor kissing a stranger in New York City's Times Square on August 14, 1945 has died at age ninety-two in Richmond, Virginia. The photo was made on Victory over Japan Day—better known as VJ Day—when New Yorkers were celebrating the end of World War II. Greta Friedman, who for many decades went identified, said of the moment, “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed. The guy just came over and grabbed. [He] was very strong. I did not see him approaching, and before I know it I was in this tight grip.” While today such an act would be unambiguously categorized as sexual assault—which makes perfect sense, because what woman wants to be grabbed and kissed against their will?—Friedman's relatives have said that in “that circumstance, that situation, that time,” the still unidentified sailor did nothing wrong. The result was one of the most renowned photographs ever made.
The fact that she’s not even a real blonde is the least of her surprises. Austrian writer Vicki Baum, née Hedwig Baum, is probably best known for her 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel, which became the smash Greta Garbo/John Barrymore/Joan Crawford movie Grand Hotel. Mortgage on Life, which was originally called Verpfändetes Leben, came in 1946, and tells of a show business love triangle set in Manhattan against the backdrop of Times Square and Broadway. We’ve never seen this particular cover for the book, which is why we’re sharing it, but it’s uncredited, sadly.
She always knew her name would end up in lights. A billboard on New York City’s Time Square at W. 43 St. and Broadway announces the death of Marilyn Monroe today in 1962. The billboard speculates suicide, and the Los Angeles medical examiner, after finding fatal amounts of barbiturates in Monroe’s body, called that the probable cause, but alternative theories about her death persist today.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison. 1918—The Red Baron Is Shot Down
German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is "Kaputt." The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes. 1964—Satellite Spreads Radioactivity
An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.
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