Select the subject and enter the room
Ernest Borgnine
Character actor, 40-year career
Oscar winner for Marty (1955)
The warmest man in Hollywood spent a decade playing villains
William Burroughs
Beat Generation novelist, Naked Lunch
Shot and killed his wife, Mexico City, 1951
Spent 46 years writing his way out of it
Kate Bush
British singer-songwriter, Wuthering Heights
Produced her own albums, toured once in 35 years
Still trying to get back to unselfconscious dancing
Dick Cavett
Late-night talk show host, 1968–1996
Last interviewer of Hendrix, Joplin, and Lennon
Carried clinical depression through every conversation
Tom Cruise
Hollywood action star, Mission: Impossible
15 schools in 14 years, a violent father, Scientology
Does his own stunts because he grew up in uncontrollable danger
Ian Curtis
Singer, Joy Division
Wrote She's Lost Control before his own epilepsy diagnosis
Died at 23, the night before Joy Division's American tour
Salvador Dali
Surrealist painter, The Persistence of Memory
Born to replace a dead brother who had his name
Performed his own myth until he couldn't stop
Peter Gabriel
Genesis frontman, then So and Sledgehammer
Four years at a brutal English boarding school
Discovered in therapy he contained rage he didn't know about
Werner Herzog
German filmmaker, Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man
Stole his first camera; dragged a real ship over a real mountain
Walked 600 miles in winter to keep a film critic alive
David Lynch
Filmmaker, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet
Meditated daily for 50 years; said he was the happiest person he knew
Made the most disturbing images in American cinema
Richard Nixon
37th President of the United States
Opened China, created the EPA, ended the draft
Destroyed himself over a third-rate burglary
Genesis P-Orridge
Founded industrial music with Throbbing Gristle
Surgically modified their body to resemble their late partner
Received the Burroughs mandate: short-circuit everything
Prince
Musician, Purple Rain, Sign o' the Times
Named after his father's stage name and unfulfilled ambitions
Died alone at Paisley Park; the vault has never been fully opened
Ken Russell
British filmmaker, The Devils, Tommy
Escaped his childhood in the cinema every day
So extreme the BBC never hired him again
Rod Serling
Creator of The Twilight Zone
Watched his best friend die in the Philippines, 1945
Built science fiction as the only honest route past the censors
John Steinbeck
Novelist, The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden
His entire moral universe came from one book given to him at age nine
Won the Nobel; a Times editorial asked the next day if he deserved it
Donald Trump
45th and 47th President
Shaped by his father Fred, Roy Cohn, and Norman Vincent Peale
Has been trying to rebuild his father's 1950s Queens at national scale
Katt Williams
Stand-up comedian, The Pimp Chronicles
Emancipated at 13, homeless in Miami for four years
Warned about Diddy on a podcast — Diddy arrested eight months later