A night on the town for my parents’ generation included a bottle of Lancers with dinner, or maybe a Mateus. These were Portuguese rosé wines, faintly fizzy, in funny-looking bottles that didn’t look much like wine bottles at all. Quality wise they were less olé than oy vey. But they, or maybe a straw-wrapped Italian chianti standing on one’s table, were monuments to worldliness, and all the rage when American middle-class culture was just tipsy-toeing away from oenophobia in the 1960s. By the 70s, Sammy Davis, Jr. was hawking “Man, oh Manischewitz” kosher wine on TV for a secular audience…

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The man about to shoot a hole in his hat is Orvon Grover Autry — Gene Autry, the first certifiably famous “singing cowboy.” His voice carried across the nation from Melody Ranch, his radio show — on the air from 1940 to 1956. And he sat tall in the saddle on the silver screen. Born in — whoopi-ty-oh-ky-yay — Tioga, Texas in 1907, Autry became the fourth biggest box office attraction in America just a few decades later, hard on the heels of Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy, in that order. …

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Part One

It was a volatile time to arrive in this neck of North Africa — anywhere near the Middle East. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was gunned down while watching a military parade six days before my arrival in Cairo, right there at the airport. I could see where the atrocity occurred. The authorities hadn’t yet cleaned up the carnage. The next day, I went off to cover Operation Bright Star.

“Hey, Zimbo!”

I looked left. I looked right. I swung around and looked behind me. I saw no one trying to catch my attention. …

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It was — and still is — a veddy, veddy English cah. Even a modern Morgan looks like it just burbled out from under wraps, garaged since 1936: hence the long hood with engine-flanking louvers, swooping external fenders, ragtop open cockpit for two, an actual grille, and bug-eye headlights. With its peculiar chassis made of ash wood, you might imagine the ride to be, well, a bit stiff upper lip.

George Martin drove a Morgan. His passenger one dreary January day, in 1967, traveling not far from Liverpool through Blackburn, Lancashire, was John Lennon. They were on their way to…

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My answer to a casual question triggered the beginning of the end of my career shooting pictures.

Jeff Cohen had one of the most enviable business cards in the world: Photo Editor, Playboy. I’m sure he never paid for drinks. Jeff assigned me to photograph Apple CEO John Sculley, in 1987, for the September “Interview” section of the magazine. (Clearly, that was the only reason readers were expected to buy it.) Two years since Steve Jobs left the company, Sculley’s star shone brightly in the C-suite firmament. This was my first time to meet him.

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Apocryphal stories abound about Tom Waits, though it’s my understanding he likes it that way. He seems to encourage biographical ambiguity; not to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes but because a wild and wooly backstory was part of his schtick. The schtick was art. Performance was, and is, his life: “I was born at a very young age in the backseat of a Yellow Cab in the Murphy Hospital parking lot in Whittier, California.” The first thing he did was, “. . . pay, like, a buck eighty-five on the meter [and go find a job].”

Waits’s career spans…

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When I entered the University of Southern California as a freshman music major, in 1969, my ambition was to become the first-chair clarinetist in a preeminent symphony orchestra. I’d won an audition and the prize of a scholarship. I found out the same week Armstrong & Aldrin landed on the Moon. I was over the moon. But the scholarship came with a quid pro quo: conscription into the USC Trojan Marching Band.

The Trojans were hands down the best-sounding college band in the United States — in the world, with its unparalleled musicianship stemming from the faculty’s ability to recruit…

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Let me tell you about the first time I saw Groucho Marx, who happens to be the subject of my very first portrait. But my story begins before I took up photography.

Protect your bagels; put lox on them. It sounds like something Groucho might say. But it was just a clever admonition from the locals to visit Nate ’n’ Al’s Delicatessen in Beverly Hills. I was there eating brunch with several buddies before heading over to the Fairfax Theater in West Hollywood for a Marx Brothers double feature. Their zany humor from the Depression era was enjoying a revival…