American Way

Bonnie Siegler grew up hearing her grandfather Jules Schulback's stories — escaping Nazi Germany, arriving in New York, and one night in 1954 filming Marilyn Monroe on a Lexington Avenue subway grate — and assumed they were exaggerated. American Way traces the investigation that proved otherwise, uncovering a real chain of connections linking her family's escape to the publisher of Superman comics, Hollywood director Billy Wilder, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, and even New York mob boss Frank Costello.

Helene Stapinski and Bonnie Siegler reconstruct a genuinely astonishing true story that reads like fiction, anchored in the rediscovered film reel that started the search.