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In 1979, John Z. DeLorean was poised for greatness or disaster, having left behind the big automakers to create his own car from scratch, a gigantic gambit in the Industrial Age that required huge talent and hubris. Esquire writer William Flanagan profiled DeLorean that year, capturing the gambler in mid-deal, still bluffing, soon to be folding. The opening:

For a man who looks like Tyrone Power, is married to the stunning young model in the Virginia Slims and Clairol ads, and earns six figures a year, John Zachary DeLorean certainly doesn’t smile much. He can’t. Not just yet, anyway. The reason is simple: The most important project in his life has yet to be accomplished. DeLorean wants to make a monkey out of General Motors. He is on the verge of doing it, but he has a way to go.

There will be no rest for DeLorean until he finishes doing what no one else in the history of modern business has dared attempt–to design, build, and sell his very own automobile from scratch, an automobile the world’s largest car company wouldn’t, couldn’t, and probably shouldn’t build.•

In 1988, his dreams dashed and reputation destroyed, DeLorean was living in Manhattan, now a born-again Christian, still believing he would get another chance. He granted a rare interview to a local TV station from his old stomping grounds in Detroit. Funny to see him strolling through Central Park.

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Ayn Rand, author of Objectivist claptrap, had very specific taste in fellow writers, which she revealed to interlocutor Alvin Toffler in a 1964 Playboy interview:

Playboy: Are there any novelists whom you admire?

Ayn Rand: Yes. Victor Hugo.

Playboy: What about modern novelists?

Ayn Rand: No, there is no one that I could say I admire among the so-called serious writers. I prefer the popular literature of today, which is today’s remnant of Romanticism. My favorite is Mickey Spillane.

Playboy: Why do you like him?

Ayn Rand: Because he is primarily a moralist. In a primitive form, the form of a detective novel, he presents the conflict of good and evil, in terms of black and white. He does not present a nasty gray mixture of indistinguishable scoundrels on both sides. He presents an uncompromising conflict. As a writer, he is brilliantly expert at the aspect of literature which I consider most important: plot structure.

Playboy: What do you think of Faulkner?

Ayn Rand: Not very much. He is a good stylist, but practically unreadable in content–so I’ve read very little of him.

Playboy: What about Nabokov?

Ayn Rand: I have read only one book of his and a half–the half was Lolita, which I couldn’t finish. He is a brilliant stylist, he writes beautifully, but his subjects, his sense of life, his view of man, are so evil that no amount of artistic skill can justify them.•

Here she is at Madison Square Garden with Phil Donahue in 1979, explaining why she wouldn’t vote for any woman to be President of the United States.

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The Bobby Fischer of the recording studio, Phil Spector, ultimately more unhinged than unorthodox, couldn’t permanently muffle the dark voices within a Wall of Sound. Mad even back in 1965, he “amused” Merv Griffin, Richard Pryor, et al.