Page 43 – LIFE

Beltway Brilliance: Terry Ashe’s Portraits From the Hill

October 28, 2021October 28, 2021 by Bill Syken

The portfolio of Terry Ashe is a walk down memory lane for political junkies. There’s Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall from the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. There’s Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. There’s Hillary Clinton from the days when husband Bill put her in charge of health care reform. There’s newsman Matt Drudge, goofy hat and all, from when Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewisky scandal exploded.

Ashe, now 74, was an unlikely figure to chronicle the world of Washington D.C. He grew up in Holyoke, Mass., the son of a hotel clerk and a school teacher. His mother, the schoolteacher, died from bone cancer when he was 14 years old. She knew she had been sick for years, and was eager to cram in lessons with her son. She insisted, for one, that he learn to draw. “That’s how I got interested in art,” Ashe says. At the age of 13 he was given his first car, a 1950 Ford coupe in robin’s egg blue, with the idea that he would learn how cars worked, in addition to taking short rides up and down the driveway.

After high school Ashe went to trade school to study electronics. He only began with photography after a friend who was serving in Vietnam sent him a camera. A turning point came when Ashe was working at the local country club and a fellow bartender saw one of Ashe’s pictures and recommended that he apply to the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., where his son had gone to study photography.

At Brooks, Ashe found his groove, and began getting work as a photographer and an assistant. On the way up he served as an assistant for Dirck Halstead on shoots for Time magazine of future president Ronald Reagan and former president Gerald Ford. On the Reagan shoot, at his California ranch, Ashe accidentally dropped a light on the head of the former California governor, which Reagan took with good humor and for which Ashe couldn’t apologize enough. Then it was on to Ford, which really blew Ashe’s mind. “I left there thinking, I had just met an American president,” Ashe says. “Wow.”

Ashe would go on to shoot for LIFE, Time and others, following the work to Washington D.C. early in the Reagan administration. His unique background served him well as a photographer. His mother’s emphasis on drawing had given him an artistic sensibility. And his time studying electronics helped him gain a proficiency with the technical aspects. He cared greatly about his equipment, and he understood it. “The lenses I had were beautiful,” he says. He came to master exposures and lighting, and when his saw some Beltway colleagues struggling with those aspects, he says, “I knew I had an edge.”

It shows. His portrait of former U.S. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick could be a Renaissance painting. Or compare this story’s photo of actress Elizabeth Taylor testifying before Congress on behalf of AIDS research to this image from another photographer covering the event.

When listing his favorite photos, Ashe makes sure to mention his portrait of Senators Phil Gramm (R-Texas), Warren Rudman (R-New Hampshire) and Ernest Hollings (D-South Carolina) who came together to pass the 1985 balanced budget law that bears their name. “That’s when Congress was actually cooperating,” says Ashe, who still lives in a D.C. suburb.

It was a different time, one captured so expertly by a man suited to the moment.

Ronald Reagan in the House chambers for his 1986 State of the Union address.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Biden, then a U.S. Senator, spoke with fellow members of the Judiciary Committee, including Paul Laxalt (white hair, standing) and Chairman Strom Thurmond (seated, right) during hearings on Supreme Court Chief Justice nominee William H. Rehnquist. 1986.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her chambers in 1984, nine years before she joined the U.S. Supreme Court.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

House speaker Tip O’Neill, 1986.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Oliver North refused to testify before a House committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, 1986.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Terry’s Ashe photo of Oliver North made the cover of Time’s July 20, 1987 issue.

Lady Diana outside a J.C.Penney store in Washington, DC, 1985.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S. Ambassador to United Nations, testified before the U.S. Senate about doings in Afghanistan, 1985.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Bush, then Vice President, swore in new Senator and future Vice President Al Gore, with Gore’s family, including wife Tipper, standing by, 1985.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Senators Phil Gramm, Warren Rudman and Ernest Hollings, 1986.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Anita Hill, who accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, spoke with an unidentified man during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, 1991.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, 1991.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham Clinton, then First Lady, during an outdoor town meeting regarding health care reform, 1993.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

White House senior adviser George Stephanopoulos testified before the House Banking Committee, which was conducting an investigation into the Whitewater affair, 1994.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Newt Gingrich, soon to be made Speaker of the House, on Capitol Hill, 1994.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Early internet newsman Matt Drudge spoke to the media during the Monica Lewinsky investigation, 1998.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Elizabeth Taylor advocated for AIDS research before the Senate Appropriations Labor and Health Subcommittee, 1986.

Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Terry Ashe (right) assisted during a shoot at the California ranch of Ronald Reagan in the 1970s with photographer Dirk Halstead (left).

Courtesy Terry Ashe

House speaker Photographer Terry Ashe looked on as Tip O’Neill signed a print of one of Ashe’s photos.

Courtesy Terry Ashe

The Sopranos: The Show That Changed Television

October 25, 2021October 25, 2021 by Bill Syken

The following is adapted from the introduction to LIFE’s new special issue The Sopranos: The Show That Changed Everything, available at newsstands and online:

Fourteen years after The Sopranos ended its six-season run with a famously abrupt blackout—and eight years after its indelible star, James Gandolfini, died of an infinitely more tragic heart attack—HBO’s transformational mob family masterpiece lives on. In part, of course, we can thank internet streaming services that guarantee video immortality—but it’s also because creator David Chase injected the series into our cultural bloodstream. As countless critics have noted, the richly textured, complex work—centered as it was on a nuanced antihero—redefined high-quality television. Pushing creative and moral boundaries along with audience expectations, it influenced a raft of prestige TV that followed in its wake—including Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, and Game of Thrones (some of which involved writers and directors who worked on The Sopranos). And the series is now ingrained in the lexicon. It has largely supplanted The Godfather as the go-to mafia reference; Donald Trump’s brazenly transactional tenure in the White House earned him plenty of unfavorable comparisons to Tony Soprano. A book by Deborrah Himsel, Leadership Sopranos Style: How to Become a More Effective Boss, holds up the fictional New Jersey mob boss as a model manager, if you overlook a few cold-blooded murders.

Now The Sopranos gained a whole new kind of currency with the release in October 2021 of a prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, starring James’s son, Michael Gandolfini, as a young Tony coming of age in the titular city during the racially charged summer of 1967. Written by Chase and Lawrence Konner and directed by Alan Taylor, the film explores the social and familial forces that helped shape a sensitive, impressionable youth into the angst-ridden mobster who riveted audiences from 1999 to 2007.

And what was it, exactly, that made The Sopranos can’t-miss TV during those years? For one thing, it was unlike anything that came before. “Pre-Sopranos TV was widely dismissed as a medium for programs that didn’t ask the viewer to think about anything except what was coming on next, and preferred lovable characters who didn’t change and had no inner life,” write critics Matt Zoller Seitz of New York magazine and Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone—both of whom covered the show for the Newark Star-Ledger—in their 2019 book, The Sopranos Sessions. The networks imposed rigid standards and rules when it came to language, story lines, sex, violence, race, and other content—controversial subject matter was anathema, and nobody wanted to rock the boat, or, heaven forbid, alienate the sponsors.

The Sopranos said goodbye to all that. Granted, it wasn’t the first series to push the envelope. There was All in the Family, with its humanized bigot, Archie Bunker; the morally complex Hill Street Blues; and other unconventional fare, such as Twin Peaks and the prison series Oz. But as Seitz and Sepinwall point out, The Sopranos was the first show to break all the rules “and still become a massive, enduring hit”—one widely used as a template. Many of the series’ most innovative features have become routine conventions of the small screen—antiheroic or even downright villainous central characters, serialized narrative arcs instead of discrete episodes, and the recognition that in real life there are moral gray areas and unresolved plots.

For the uninitiated—those who aren’t “made” viewers, so to speak—Chase’s saga follows Tony Soprano, the bearish boss of North Jersey’s DiMeo crime family and patriarch of his own upper-middle-class household, and how he balances (or doesn’t) an often-violent “professional” life with the dynamics of his family. That would be Tony’s long-suffering, compartmentalizing wife, Carmela (Oz alum Edie Falco), and two adolescent kids—Ivy League–bound daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and perpetually confused son Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler). Also in the mix are Tony’s raging sister Janice (Aida Turturro) and troublesome elders—nightmarish mother Livia (Nancy Marchand) and Corrado “Junior” Soprano (Dominic Chianese), Tony’s shrewd and suspicious mafioso uncle. These characters interweave with Tony’s criminal crew, including his hotheaded “nephew” Christopher (Michael Imperioli) and guys with names like Paulie Walnuts, Big Pussy and Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri, as well as enemy mobsters, FBI agents, and Tony’s tag team of high-maintenance mistresses. Under constant stress from all of these and tormented by demons from his childhood, Tony has panic attacks and lands in psychotherapy, under the care of Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco).

That’s the general outline, but The Sopranos is so much more—it contains multitudes. Times of London critic Ben McIntyre told the BBC in 2007 that the series “covered all the great elements of drama like Shakespeare—Tony Soprano really is King Lear. The show’s themes are the great themes of literature.” The Sopranos, McIntyre noted, depicted “fathers fighting sons, kings controlling kingdoms, treachery, loyalty, love, guilt, revenge… everything, really,” adding that it was about “a bad man with good in him, trying to understand how he works.” McIntyre didn’t stop there. He also compared The Sopranos to the works of Charles Dickens, likening the show to a “huge, sprawling novel” with “small cameo parts that pull you along through it.”

Indeed, almost all the show’s characters are fleshed out. Tony as boss is by turns monstrous and murderous, reasonable and pragmatic; off the job, we see him engaged in feverish extramarital sex, then having a tender heart-to-heart with his wife or kids, or baring his childhood pain to his shrink. Almost everyone else also comes off as a multidimensional human, even those who make brief appearances—a psychopathic capo here, a crooked cop there. Though graphically violent on occasion, with many moments of high drama, The Sopranos has also been described—by Gandolfini, among others—as essentially a dark comedy. The scripts are generously leavened with humor high, low, broad, and subtle. The characters bicker and banter, sometimes over Seinfeldian minutiae; there’s irony and incongruity, mangled literary references, and mobster malapropisms. Even some of the more gruesome moments—Christopher crossing himself while disposing of a dismembered mobster’s head, for example—are so over-the-top you may be provoked to laugh.

The years since The Sopranos finale have brought heightened awareness when it comes to issues of race and gender. And the series has drawn understandable criticism. As The Many Saints of Newark explores, Tony and his pals spent their formative years in the racially incendiary crucible of Newark, and their exodus to the suburbs was part of the great “white flight” from the city. The mobsters’ racism is often on display as they fling casual slurs or try to pin their crimes on African Americans.

Meanwhile, Italian American groups have criticized The Sopranos for promoting ethnic stereotypes. “So you hear The Sopranos is a quality show, you turn it on to check it out, and it’s the same old thing again—Italian Americans stealing, hitting, shooting, cheating, killing,” Nicolas Addeo, chairman of a group called Speranza, which advocated for positive ethnic, religious, and racial representations on-screen, told the Star-Ledger in 1999. “This show is not meant to represent the Italian American experience,” Imperioli countered to the same paper. “It’s about a specific group of people, a specific time and place.”

Certainly, women have their travails in The Sopranos, operating in an old-world patriarchal subculture. Over the course of the series, female characters are used, abused, deceived, and savagely murdered. There are some fierce, assertive (and, at times, manipulative) women, though even the most impressive, Dr. Melfi, is brutally raped. But The Sopranos remains popular among women viewers. “The Sopranos was a work of art that understood the messy, unlikable truth of women in this insular world,” writes Vice critic Christina Newland. “That truth is rarely, if ever, empowering. But even at their most self-defeating or amoral, these women are allowed to be many paradoxical things. Their characterizations and the depth of writing allows them to be both maternal and fearsome, bafflingly remote yet empathetic.”

In any event, a whole new crop of viewers has generated Sopranos buzz. According to WarnerMedia, HBO’s parent company, the show’s popularity skyrocketed in 2020 during the pandemic. Noted Sepinwall to GQ at the time: “A lot of people [are] using the quarantine as an opportunity to finally watch or rewatch different shows they’ve had on their list for a while. But this is definitely one of the high ones, just because of its importance in TV and pop cultural history.”

And while millennial and Gen Z audiences may be watching The Sopranos for the first time in 2021, Sepinwall says they’re reacting to the series much as he did as a critic more than two decades ago: “They’re actually saying, ‘This is still one of the greatest—if not the greatest—shows ever made.’”

Here are selected images from LIFE’s new special issue The Sopranos: The Show That Changed Everything. Available here

LIFE: The Sopranos

AF archive/Alamy

The early episode in which Tony (James Gandolfini) took daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) on a college tour established that The Sopranos was a show about much more than organized crime.

Anthony Neste/© HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection

The Season Three episode in which Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli, left) and Paulie “Walnuts” Gaultieri (Tony Sirico) were lost in the Pine Barrens is among the series’ most beloved.

Barry Wetcher/© HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection

Tony’s sessions with Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), such as this one from Season Three, could run the gamut of emotions.

© HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection

Tony and wife Carmela (Edie Falco) had a joint therapy session in Season Three.

HBO/Hulton/Getty Images

Tony and crew members Bobby Baccalieri (Steven Schirripa) and Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) met with nemesis Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) in Season 6.

© HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection

After the death of James Gandolfini in 2013, the actor was memorialized at Holsten’s Ice Cream Parlor in Bloomfield., N.J.

ESBP/Star Max/FilmMagic/Getty Images

Michael Gandolfini, son of James, played young Tony Soprano in the 2021 movie ‘The Many Saints of Newark.’

Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images/Getty Images

David Chase, creator and producer of the “The Sopranos,” posed on the set in New York City.

Diane Bondareff/AP/Shutterstock

Letting Loose at Work: LIFE Goes to an Office Party

October 21, 2021October 21, 2021 by Bill Syken

in the age of remote working, holiday office parties are not what they used to be. That new reality lends an extra note of nostalgia to a story from 1948 entitled, “LIFE Goes to an Office Party: Employees and Bosses Loosen Up All Over the Place.”

The fashions in the story are pure 1940s, but the social dynamics on display will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked in an office.

“One night or another the lights burn late in many American business houses,” the story began. “The occasion is that great leveler, the office Christmas party, an antidote to the social formality which ranks between a few discreet cocktails and a free-for-all fight. Then all business barriers collapse; executives unbend; the office clown finds a sympathetic audience.”

For this story LIFE photographer Cornell Capa visited the offices of Schiff Terhune, a New York firm of insurance brokers. (The company, well established at the time, carried on until the 1980s, which it was acquired by larger corporation. A nice history of the firm is included in The New York Times obituary of Frank Schiff, the son of William Schiff, who appears in one of Capa’s photos).

Capa’s photos ran over two packed pages in the Dec. 27, 1948 issue, which featured on its cover a more sober seasonal story on Giotto’s paintings of Christ.

The Schiff Terhune office party appears to have been quite the frolic. People danced and wore funny hats. Santa led a conga line. They even had kissing under the mistletoe—a tradition that has all but disappeared as companies have become more aware on the topic of sexual harassment. Indeed, some of these pictures, showing male executives dancing with female underlings, could be used for a human resources slide show on behaviors that are frowned upon.

In general, office parties have been a wellspring of cautionary tales about regrettable behavior—the Seinfeld episode featuring Elaine’s dancing is one sitcom example— which is why around holiday season etiquette guides and advice pieces for how to manage the office parties abound online.

Still, it looks as if the employees of Schiff Terhune found their party a welcome respite. Wrote LIFE, “By the time a conga line and a frolicsome vice president were in action, even the most shrinking violet felt expansively aware of the brotherhood of man.”

Santa, in the form of company vice president Arthur D. Marks, led a conga line through the file cabinets.

Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Menroe. the “office cut up,” brandished a pair of pink cotton pants he had been given by the office Santa Claus.

Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Max Sherman’s soda bottle became tangled in the “pink drawers” that Santa gave him at the office Christmas party.

Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Stenographers posed with assistant department head Al Lyons at an insurance office Christmas party, 1948.

Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Insurance company vice president John Griffin danced with a giggling stenographer at their office Christmas party, 1948.

Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joe Menroe and biller Jessie Merman met under the mistletoe at the office Christmas party, 1948.

Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Company president William Schiff danced with secretary Theda Berkeley at their office Christmas party, 1948.

Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Stenographer Dorothy Newman took a moment to rest her tired feet at the office Christmas party, 1948.

Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Dixon returned to his desk to get some work done during his office Christmas party, 1948.

Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Vampires: Their Undying Appeal

October 26, 2021October 19, 2021 by Bill Syken

The following is excerpted from the introduction to LIFE’s new special issue V ampires: Their Undying Appeal, available at newsstands and online:

The most consequential night in the history of fright occurred in June of 1816 at Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva, where the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley were vacationing with Shelley’s 19-year-old fiancée, Mary Godwin, her half-sister Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s physician and traveling companion, John Polidori. Confined to their villa by two weeks of torrential rain, they began telling ghost stories to amuse themselves. Three years earlier, Byron had written “The Giaour,” a poem that warns of a corpse who, “as Vampyre sent,” is torn from its grave to “suck the blood of all thy race.” On this particular evening in Switzerland, he suggested that each traveler should produce a supernatural tale as entertainment for the others.

At midnight, Dr. Polidori recorded in his diary, as Mary nursed her four-month-old baby, the group “really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face and gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.”

By the end of that “wet ungenial summer,” Mary Shelley had conceived the germ of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and Polidori, then 20, completed The Vampyre, a short novel whose profound creative impact still endures in literature, theater, television, and film.

Polidori’s vampire, the rakish Lord Ruthven—said to be based on Byron himself—is an amoral debaucher of young women with a “dead grey eye” who stalks London, drinking the blood of his victims. The Vampyre was delivered to the Countess of Breuss and pretty much forgotten until the spring of 1819, when, amid Polidori’s acrimonious falling out with Byron, it was published in the New Monthly Magazine. To capitalize on Byron’s notoriety, the publisher released The Vampyre under Byron’s name. Polidori was outraged at this violation of his copyright. For his part, Byron disavowed authorship: “I have a personal dislike to Vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their secrets.”

Translated quickly into French, The Vampyre appeared in Paris as a popular stage play and gave birth to so many imitations that a decade later a critic complained, “There is not a theatre in Paris without a vampire!”

Two centuries after The Vampyre hit the stands, we’re up to our necks in feral figures who prey on the living—or shrink from them. Of all supernatural monsters, none is as boldly erotic as the vampire, who more often than not takes control of victims. “Dominance and submission come together,” said Anne Rice, best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. The vampire must feed nightly, and he or she tends to attack his or her hosts when they’re most helpless—usually, when they’re asleep.

Stories about vampires have been circulating for thousands of years. Though just about every culture has showcased some form of vampire, anthropologists generally consider them a Slavic invention. They haunted the lore of Albania, where they were known as vurvulak; Bosnia (lampir); Croatia (vukodlak); and Montenegro (tenatz). Vampire comes from the old Slavic word obyrbi. “If anything unites the pre-Serbian undead, it would be the spreading of a mysterious plague,” said Al Ridenour, host of the podcast Bone and Sickle, a celebration of the intersection of horror, folklore, and history. “The sickness was not passed on necessarily by direct contact or bites but could be more of an evil miasma that accompanied the undead rising from the grave.” Plague survivors looking for a scapegoat would blame the first victim.

America’s own Vampire Panic in New England ran from the late 1700s to the late 1800s. Similar cases were documented in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island, most linked to savage outbreaks of tuberculosis. In 1830, a “vampire heart” was reportedly torched on the town green of Woodstock, Vermont. In Manchester, New Hampshire, a 1793 heart-burning ceremony at a blacksmith’s forge drew hundreds of onlookers: “Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton,” an early town history says. “It was the month of February and good sleighing.”

“The belief that circulated did not involve blood-drinking corpses, but the notion that those who had appeared to die of TB would live on in the grave, somehow feeding off the lives of those in the community in the process, causing them to succumb to the disease,” said Ridenour. There were at least 40 recorded instances in which corpses were exhumed, their vital organs burned, and stakes driven through their hearts. The most famous and possibly last of these was Mercy Brown.

During the 1880s, the town of Exeter, Rhode Island, was struck by an epidemic of consumption, as TB was then called. In 1883, Mary Eliza Brown died of the disease. Her oldest daughter, 20-year-old Mary Olive, died the following year. The entire town turned out for Mary Olive’s funeral and sang “One Sweetly Solemn Thought,” a hymn that she had picked out for the occasion. Not long after, the same illness struck Mary Olive’s 18-year-old brother Edwin, a strapping store clerk in excellent health. He left for Colorado Springs to take “the cure.”

In January 1892, Edwin’s 19-year-old sister Mercy Brown died. Then Edwin, having returned from Colorado Springs to Exeter “in a dying condition,” according to one newspaper account, took a turn for the worse. As he lingered on, a rumor gained purchase in the tight-knit farming community that the Brown family was cursed, and that one of the women was in fact not dead but secretly a vampire who was feasting “on the living tissue and blood of Edwin,” as the Providence Journal later put it. They persuaded the children’s father, George Brown, to allow the exhumation of all three bodies. Wielding shovels and pitchforks, a party of men went to the family burial plot in Chestnut Hill Cemetery and dug up the bodies. It was wintertime, and the remains of the long-dead Mary Eliza and Mary Olive were little more than bones. But the body of Mercy—who had died only a few months before and was kept mostly in a crypt above the ground—hadn’t much deteriorated. “The body was in a fairly well-preserved state,” the Journal’s correspondent wrote. “The heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found.”

Though the presiding physician noted the presence of “tuberculosis germs,” the villagers interpreted the presence of fresh blood as a sign that Mercy was undead. To stop members of her family from meeting the same vampiric fate, they gathered firewood and kindled a bonfire on a nearby rock. Then they cut out Mercy’s heart and lungs and burned them on the pyre. The ashes of her heart were brought back to the Brown homestead and mixed into a potion, which was fed to the ailing Edwin.

Evidently, the vampire remedy did little good: He died two months later.

Here are selected images from LIFE’s new special issue Vampires: Their Undying Appeal. Available here

Jeffrey Smith/Rapp Art

This 19th-century engraving showed men shooting a vampire with a stake already through his heart.

Leemage/Corbis/Getty

This 700-year-old skeleton from Bulgaria had its teeth removed and had been pinned down when it was buried out of a fear of vampirism.

Nikolay Doychinova/AFP/Getty

This 1781 painting by Henry Fuseli, `The Nightmare,’ was popular with the public and reproduced often in its day.

Oxford Science Archive/Print Collector/Getty

Vlad the Impaler, who lived in the 15th century and is shown here in a 16th century portrait, provided the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis/Getty

Bela Lugosi starred in the title role in director Tod Browning’s 1931 film Dracula.

Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock

In the 1931 film `Dracula,’ the count (Bela Lugosi) met up with his nemesis, Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) .

Silver Screen Collection/Moviepix/Getty

Dracula drew crowds to the Stanley Theater in Jersey City, N.J. in 1931.

Courtesy Everett

`Dracula’ star Bela Lugosi, who played in other horror movies through the 1930s, made a sculpture of his own head, 1932.

Hulton/Getty

Grandpa (Al Lewis) and Eddie Wolfgang Munster (Butch Patrick) played vampires for laughs in the 1960s sitcom The Munsters.

Mary Evans/AF Archive/Everett

The vampire drama True Blood ran for seven seasons on HBO, from 2008 to 2014.

Alamy Stock Photo

In the comic 2015 movie Hotel Transylvania 2, the role of Dracula was voiced by Adam Sandler.

© Sony Pictures Releasing, Courtesy Photofest

Peanuts: The World’s Greatest Comic Strip

October 13, 2021October 13, 2021 by Bill Syken

The following is excerpted from LIFE‘s new special issue Peanuts: The World’s Greatest Comic Strip, available at newsstands and here, online:

Over five decades of solitary and deeply personal work, Charles Schulz drew 17,897 Peanuts comic strips, producing a body of work that constitutes not only the richest achievement in comic strip history, but also the most resonant sports strip of all time. Thousands of Peanuts panels are filtered through Schulz’s love of sports, a collective subcategory that perhaps more than any other delivers the essence of his work.

The simple genius of Peanuts lies in Schulz’s ability to get to the heart of large matters (unrequited love, loneliness) and critical life questions (is there a Great Pumpkin?) through the lens of emotionally precocious children. The reason the sports stuff works so well is that sports, by and large, compels a part of us that has never grown up. In a strip drawn after the Giants’ narrow loss to the Yankees in the 1962 World Series, Charlie Brown and Linus sit silently and glumly on a curb for three frames. In the fourth Charlie Brown blurts out, “Why couldn’t McCovey have hit the ball three feet higher?” It’s a movable lament for baseball fans: Why couldn’t Buckner have fielded that ground ball in 1986? Why couldn’t Bartman have backed off in 2003?

The events and relationships in Peanuts are for the most part events and relationships distilled from Schulz’s life. (Not long after a phone bill reveals to Schulz’s wife, Joyce, that he is having an extramarital affair, Charlie Brown prevents Snoopy from canoodling with a girl beagle. “And no more long-distance phone calls!” Charlie Brown warns.) And that distillation holds true in the arena of sports. Active as an amateur hockey player and organizer, Schulz was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in 1993. In Peanuts we see Snoopy at times as a goalkeeper and other times as a hard-checking skater doing battle with Woodstock on the frozen-over birdbath. Both of these players, it emerges, can also drive a Zamboni. Schulz’s father buried soup cans in the lawn so that young Charles could practice putting. Snoopy, in turn, plays the Masters and outdrives Sam Snead and Ben Hogan; Charlie Brown is his caddy. Schulz famously uses football as metaphor through action—Lucy yanked the pigskin away from Charlie Brown once a year, every year, from 1952 to 1999— and also through words: “I thought I had life solved,” Charlie Brown says, “but there was a flag on the play.”

No sport proves more present or more resonant than baseball. As a child, Schulz played on and ran a sandlot team, which preoccupied him. In one series of strips, Charlie Brown awakens to see the sun rising as a giant baseball. Next it’s the moon, then an ice cream cone that’s a ball. Finally, Charlie Brown develops a rash in the pattern of a hardball’s stitching on the back of his smooth, spherical head, leading him to a pediatrician. “Doctor, am I cracking up?” he asks. “Is it the bottom of the ninth?” On another occasion he loses a spelling bee after spelling maze “M-A-Y-S.”

For Charlie Brown, baseball is the end-all; he’s out pitching in deep snow and pelting rain. On the mound he gets undressed (literally) by opponents’ line drives. In the field he prays under a pop-up, then misses it. His failures lead to self-reflections and laments— “every now and then I am plagued by self-doubt”—but they are overcome by his unbeatable optimism. “This is the moment of moments,” Charlie Brown says, standing on the field, his glove on his hand, his face covered in bliss, “the beginning of a new season.”

For the others in the Peanuts gang—think of Lucy in right field with her umbrella, Snoopy at shortstop with his supper dish—baseball is folly. This may be Schulz’s most valuable lesson to the impressionable child: In the end, sports don’t matter all that much. In one strip, after Linus tells Charlie Brown that he has been “the victim of a short and sad love affair,” we see Linus under a fly ball. “I got it!” he shouts. “At least I think I’ve got it! Who knows? Actually who cares? When you’ve lost at love, you’ve lost at everything… Nothing matters.” The ball drops.

Only a small portion of Schulz’s work gets into his sports side, but those strips convey a lot about the Peanuts gang, as well as about ourselves as fans. Some of the best baseball strips are gathered into book collections, including 1977’s There Goes the Shutout. The title derives from a strip in which the team falls behind 63-0 in the first inning. On the bench afterward, Linus says to Charlie Brown, “Well, there goes our shutout.” The game itself, by implication, is still within reach.

Here are a few sample images from LIFE’s new Peanuts: The World’s Greatest Comic Strip, available here.

© 2021 Peanuts Worldwide LLC

Charles M. Schulz with a few of his Peanuts characters, including (on top of books) Lucy van Pelt and Charlie Brown, and below, from left, Linus (with blanket), Snoopy and Schroeder (at piano), in 1962.

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The first frame of the first Peanuts comic strip, 1950.

© 2021 Peanuts Worldwide LLC

Snoopy, ever irreverent, took Linus’ blanket in this 1959 strip.

© 2021 Peanuts Worldwide LLC

In 1965 Snoopy first embarked on his writing career (above) and also began to take on the persona of a World War I flying ace.

© 2021 Peanuts Worldwide LLC

This discussion of clouds in 1960 proved to be one of Peanuts’ most popular strips.

© 2021 Peanuts Worldwide LLC

Peanuts’ strips about sports, such as this one from 1965, expertly touch on that part of ourselves that has never grown up.

© 2021 Peanuts Worldwide LLC

Charlie Brown and Linus spoke about the meaning of Christmas in the TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas.

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Snoopy starred in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City in 2013.

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Margaret Severn: A Woman Who Really Knew How to Wear A Mask

November 1, 2021October 11, 2021 by Bill Syken

If there’s one takeaway from Nina Leen’s photographs of dancer and choreorgrapher Margaret Severn, it is that a mask is the beginning of a costume, but not the end.

Severn was a master of the mask. She made her reputation performing masked dances at the Greenwich Village Follies, a downtown variation of the Ziegield Follies that ran from 1919 to 1927. Severn explained in the 1982 documentary Dance Masks: The World of Margaret Severn that those performances revived an ancient tradition that spanned centuries and cultures, but had fallen out of favor starting around the 18th century. “When I put them on they hadn’t been used for years in the theater, so this was called a complete novelty by some, those who didn’t know anything about the history of masks, and by others it was a renaissance of the art of the mask.”

In her performances, she said, she viewed the mask as a portal to a new identity. “The mask has this peculiar quality, as if it were inhabited by a disincarnated spirit of some sort, and when the dancer puts the mask on, he is possessed by this spirit and ceases to be himself, and so I just allowed that to happen with these masks that I wore,” she said.

She added that, “Each mask, in its particular feeling, usually finds some person, and perhaps many people, in the audience who respond to that particular emotion, who see themselves in that particular guise. I think that’s one reason they have such universal appeal.”

Severn and Leen met in 1940 to create this photoset, which focuses on Severn but also includes images of a group performance (it’s hard to identify Severn in those pictures because, well, everyone is masked). These pictures never ran in LIFE, and without any accompanying story or surviving photographer’s notes, it is hard to say precisely what inspired this collaboration at that particular moment. Regardless, the photos capture a master of a particular, and peculiar art.