Authors Electric

Sacheen Littlefeather, 1973 My greatest Walter Mitty moment, in a lifetime of them, came when I held Francis Ford Coppola 's Oscar for Best Picture in my hand and pictured waving it over my head to a cheering audience - probably longer than I should have. "It's heavier than I imagined," I told Coppola.  He grinned indulgently at me as I put the famed statuette back in its place among others on a fireplace mantle. "Solid gold," he said. At the time, I worked for Coppola as senior editor on City of San Francisco , a weekly arts-and-politics tabloid. Coppola often hosted staff parties at the splendid Victorian mansion he owned atop Presidio Heights in the city overlooking the Bay and Alcatraz Island. This was well before he relocated to his Coppola Family Winger estate in Geyserville, Napa Valley north of the city. It was 1975, and the redoubtable Francis was at the apex of his wealth and fame having pulled off a Godfather films Trifecta of artistic and commer...

I have only known one, for-sure, Russian spy in my life. I keep wondering what he would have had to say on the spreading oil slick of revelations about contacts between Trump minions and Kremlin agents meddling with the 2016 election. He'd very likely have deja vu, given his experiences with the Soviet (now Russian Federation) oligarchy and the KGB (now FSB). It's all in our book, High Treason : Revelations of a Double Agent . I met Vladimir Sakharov in the spring of 1979. His Russian accent - rich as Stroganoff - didn't fit with the name he was using then, Bill Stiller, an alias given him by the CIA, I was to learn. He was supposed to be from West Germany according to his fake dossier. When I got around to asking him how he felt about that, he shrugged stoically. "I keep it to myself. You learn to live with paradox," he said. Barbara Lowenstein , my then New York agent, had given me a phone number and very little else except that it would connect me with a ...