In "Call Me Madam," the 1953 movie version of Irving Berlin's hit musical, it was no secret that Ethel Merman was channeling a real person – a wealthy widow by the name of Perle Mesta ...

But some of Drury’s Dolly is a toned-down Perle Mesta, the capital’s most famous mid-twentieth-century party-giver. Readers are told that in Dolly’s “great white house amid the dark green ...

The Barn Owl, with its heart-shaped face and ghostly white feathers, silently hunts across fields and farmlands. They are one of the most widely distributed birds of prey in the world. The Barn Owl is ...