Collaborators in the Production of this Book

Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince

DARWIN PORTER

As an intense and precocious nine-year-old, Darwin Porter began meeting movie stars, TV personalities, politicians, and singers through his vivacious and attractive mother, Hazel, a somewhat eccentric Southern girl who had lost her husband in World War II. Migrating from the depression-ravaged valleys of western North Carolina to Miami Beach during its most ebullient heyday, Hazel became a stylist, wardrobe mistress, and personal assistant to the vaudeville comedienne Sophie Tucker, the bawdy and irrepressible “Last of the Red Hot Mamas.”

Virtually every show-biz celebrity who visited Miami Beach paid a call on “Miss Sophie,” and Darwin as a pre-teen loosely and indulgently supervised by his mother, was regularly dazzled by the likes of Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, Veronica Lake, Linda Darnell, Martha Raye, and Ronald Reagan, who arrived to pay his respects to Miss Sophie with a young blonde starlet on the rise—Marilyn Monroe.

Hazel’s work for Sophie Tucker did not preclude an active dating life: Her beaux included Richard Widmark, Victor Mature, Frank Sinatra (who “tipped” teenaged Darwin the then-astronomical sum of ten dollars for getting out of the way), and that alltime “second lead,” Wendell Corey, when he wasn’t emoting with Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford.

As a late teenager, Darwin edited The Miami Hurricane at the University of Miami, where he interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt, Tab Hunter, Lucille Ball, and Adlai Stevenson. He also worked for Florida’s then-Senator George Smathers, one of John F. Kennedy’s best friends, establishing an ongoing pattern of picking up “Jack and Jackie” lore while still a student.

After graduation, as a journalist, he was commissioned with the opening of a bureau of The Miami Herald in Key West (Florida), where he took frequent morning walks with retired U.S. president Harry S Truman during his vacations in what had functioned as his “Winter White House.” He also got to know, sometimes very well, various celebrities “slumming” their way through off-the-record holidays in the orbit of then-resident Tennessee Williams. Celebrities hanging out in the permissive arts environment of Key West during those days included Tallulah Bankhead, Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, the stepfather of Richard Burton, a gaggle of show-biz and publishing moguls, and the once-notorious stripper, Bettie Page.

For about a decade in New York, Darwin worked in television journalism and advertising with his long-time partner, the journalist, art director, and distinguished arts-industry socialite Stanley Mills Haggart. Jointly, they produced TV commercials starring such high-powered stars as Joan Crawford (then feverishly promoting Pepsi-Cola), Ronald Reagan (General Electric), and Debbie Reynolds (selling Singer Sewing Machines), along with such other entertainers as Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Arlene Dahl, and countless other show-biz personalities hawking commercial products.

During his youth, Stanley had flourished as an insider in early Hollywood as a “leg man” and source of information for Hedda Hopper, the fabled gossip columnist. When Stanley wasn’t dishing newsy revelations with Hedda, he had worked as a Powers model; a romantic lead opposite Silent-era film star Mae Murray; the intimate companion of superstar Randolph Scott before Scott became emotionally involved with Cary Grant; and a man-about-town who archived gossip from everybody who mattered back when the movie colony was small, accessible, and confident that details about their tribal rites would absolutely never be reported in the press. Over the years, Stanley’s vast cornucopia of inside Hollywood information was passed on to Darwin, who amplified it with copious interviews and research of his own.

After Stanley’s death in 1980, Darwin inherited a treasure trove of memoirs, notes, and interviews detailing Stanley’s early adventures in Hollywood, including in-depth recitations of scandals that even Hopper during her heyday was afraid to publish. Most legal and journalistic standards back then interpreted those oral histories as “unprintable.” Times, of course, changed.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Darwin joined forces with the then-fledgling Arthur Frommer organization, playing a key role in researching and writing more than 50 titles and defining the style and values that later emerged as the world’s leading travel accessories, The Frommer Guides, with particular emphasis on Europe, California, New England, and the Caribbean. Between the creation and updating of hundreds of editions of detailed travel guides to England, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, California, and Switzerland, he continued to interview and discuss the triumphs, feuds, and frustrations of celebrities, many by then reclusive, whom he either sought out or encountered randomly as part of his extensive travels. Ava Gardner and Lana Turner were particularly insightful.

One day when Darwin lived in Tangier, he walked into an opium den to discover Marlene Dietrich sitting alone in the corner.

Darwin has also written several novels, including the best-selling cult classic Butterflies in Heat (which was later made into a film, Tropic of Desire, starring Eartha Kitt), Venus (inspired by the life of the fabled eroticist and diarist, Anaïs Nin), and Midnight in Savannah, a satirical overview of the sexual eccentricities of the Deep South inspired by Savannah’s most notorious celebrity murder. He also transformed into literary format the details which he and Stanley Haggart had compiled about the relatively underpublicized scandals of the Silent Screen, releasing them in 2001 as Hollywood’s Silent Closet, “an uncensored, underground history of Pre-Code Hollywood, loaded with facts and rumors from generations past.” A few years later, he did the same for the country-western music industry when he issued Rhinestone Country.

Since then, Darwin has penned more than a dozen uncensored Hollywood biographies, many of them award-winners, on subjects who have included Marlon Brando, Merv Griffin, Katharine Hepburn, Howard Hughes, Humphrey Bogart, Michael Jackson, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the well known porn star, Linda Lovelace.

As a departure from his usual repertoire, Darwin also wrote the controversial J. Edgar Hoover & Clyde Tolson: Investigating the Sexual Secrets of America’s Most Famous Men and Women, a book about celebrity, voyeurism, political and sexual repression, and blackmail within the highest circles of the U.S. government.

He has also co-authored, in league with Danforth Prince, four Hollywood Babylon anthologies, plus four separate volumes of film critiques, reviews, and commentary.

His biographies, over the years, have won more than 30 First Prize or runner-up awards at literary festivals in cities which include Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Paris.

Darwin can be heard at regular intervals as a radio commentator (and occasionally on television), “dissing” celebrities, pop culture, politics, and scandal.

A resident of New York City, Darwin is currently at work on his latest biography: Pink Triangle, The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of their Entourages.

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DANFORTH PRINCE

The publisher and production manager of this biography, Danforth Prince is one of the “Young Turks” of the post-millennium publishing industry. Today, he’s president of Blood Moon Productions, a firm devoted to the research, compilation and marketing of “tell-all” celebrity biographies, most of whose subjects are associated with the Golden Years of Hollywood.

Prince has celebrated Zsa Zsa since his adolescence in a suburb of Chicago. “In an uncharacteristic nod to pop culture, my parents named our spaniel ‘Zsa Zsa’ in honor of LA GABOR’s notoriety as the mistress of Porfirio Rubirosa. I didn’t understand what the customers along my delivery route for the [now defunct] Chicago Daily News found so amusing as I yelled for ‘Zsa Zsa’ as she trotted and panted, following me as I delivered papers on my bike.”

“Later, my mother’s most notorious dress (a low-cut rhinestone-studded cocktail wrap) was selected purely on its merits as ‘The Zsa Zsa look,’ during one of her rare (and well-deserved) moments of escapist whimsy.”

“Because of this,” Prince said, “my ‘Gabor quotient’ and my role as a sometimes unwitting publicist for Zsa Zsa has been part of my consciousness virtually since birth. I confess with pride that I adore her, always and forever.”

One of Prince’s famous predecessors, the late Lyle Stuart (self-described as “the last publisher in America with guts”) once defined Prince as “one of my natural successors.”In 1956, that then-novice maverick launched himself with $8,000 he’d won in a libel judgment against gossip columnist Walter Winchell. It was Stuart who published Linda Lovelace’s two authentic memoirs—Ordeal and Out of Bondage.

“I like to see someone following in my footsteps in the 21st Century,” Stuart told Prince. “You publish scandalous biographies. I did, too. My books on J. Edgar Hoover, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Barbara Hutton stirred up the natives. You do, too.”

Prince launched his career in journalism in the 1970s at the Paris Bureau of The New York Times. In the early ‘80s, he resigned to join Darwin Porter in researching, developing and publishing various titles within The Frommer Guides, jointly reviewing the travel scenes of more than 50 nations for Simon & Schuster. Authoritative and comprehensive, they were perceived as best-selling “travel bibles” for millions of readers, with recommendations and travel advice about the major nations of Western Europe, the Caribbean, Bermuda, The Bahamas, Georgia and the Carolinas, and California.

Prince, along with Porter, is also the co-author of several award-winning celebrity biographies, each configured as a title within Blood Moon’s Babylon series. These have included Hollywood Babylon—It’s Back!; Hollywood Babylon Strikes Again; The Kennedys: All the Gossip Unfit to Print; and Frank Sinatra, The Boudoir Singer. Their most recent joint authorship venture was Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like a Dame. Prince, with Porter, have also co-authored four separate books of film criticism.

Prince is the president and founder (in 1996) of the Georgia Literary Association, and of the Porter and Prince Corporation, founded in 1983, which has produced dozens of titles for both Prentice Hall and John Wiley & Sons.In 2011, he was named “Publisher of the Year” by a consortium of literary critics and marketers spearheaded by the J.M. Northern Media Group.

According to Prince, “Indeed, there are drudge aspects associated with any attempt to create a body of published work. But Blood Moon provides the luxurious illusion that a reader is a perpetual guest at some gossippy dinner party populated with brilliant but occasionally self-delusional figures from bygone eras of The American Experience. Blood Moon’s success at salvaging, documenting, and articulating the (till now) orally transmitted histories of the Entertainment Industry, in ways that have never been seen before, is one of the most distinctive aspects of our backlist.”

Publishing in collaboration with the National Book Network (www.NBNBooks.com), he has electronically documented some of the controversies associated with his stewardship of Blood Moon in more than 40 videotaped documentaries, book trailers, public speeches, and TV or radio interviews. Any of these can be watched, without charge, by performing a search for “Danforth Prince” on YouTube.com, checking him out on Facebook (either “Danforth Prince” or “Blood Moon Productions), on Twitter (#BloodyandLunar) or by clicking on BloodMoonProductions.com.

During the rare moments when he isn’t writing, editing, neurosing about, or promoting Blood Moon, he works out at a New York City gym, rescues stray animals, talks to strangers, and regularly attends Episcopal Mass every Sunday.