In 1950, while a schoolboy, Darwin Porter was introduced to a blonde starlet, Marilyn Monroe, by his mother, Hazel Triplet. The setting was the Helen Mar Hotel on Miami Beach. In charge of the hotel, Mrs. Triplet had been instructed by a fabled B-movie star, Ronald Reagan, to “give Marilyn whatever she wants.” He was picking up the tab, although discreetly staying in a suite at the more fashionable Roney Plaza Hotel nearby.
A fashion designer on the side, Mrs. Triplet designed and crafted a stunning white bathing suit for Marilyn to wear at poolside. It was very similar to a suit she’d designed for Linda Darnel for the film, Slattery’s Hurricane, shot the previous year in Florida.
“When Marilyn walked out by the pool in that bathing suit, she created a sensation,” Porter recalled. “A star was born.”
Years later, when Porter was an aspiring journalist and in college, Marilyn granted him a one-on-one interview when she flew to Florida to visit her former husband, Joe DiMaggio. “It was the beginning of my lifelong association with Marilyn Monroe,” Porter said.
After 1962, Porter began collecting and reading every bit of material he could on Marilyn, her life and death. While working for a television producer in Hollywood, Porter got to meet and know many of her friends and enemies—“both those who loved her and those who were highly critical, perhaps jealous. I ended up with enough material for ten volumes.”
Today, Porter is one of the world’s leading celebrity biographers, having written books on such diverse figures as Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Merv Griffin, Michael Jackson, the Kennedys, Frank Sinatra, and J. Edgar Hoover.
He is also the co-author of the popular Hollywood Babylon series, and is also the co-author of Damn You, Scarlett O’Hara, which exposed the complicated and deeply anguished private lives of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.
Currently, Porter is working on Elizabeth Taylor: There is othing Like a Dame, scheduled for publication in October of 2012.
When he isn’t traveling, Porter lives in New York City.