Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series)

by Darwin Porter

  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 step-father 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. On his nightly rounds, Stanley was most often accompanied by Hedda’s son, William Hopper, a close friend of Ronald Reagan’s.

  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 a corner.

  Darwin has also ghost written books for celebrities (who shall go nameless!) as well as a series of novels. His first, Butterflies in Heat, became a cult classic and was adapted into a film, Tropic of Desire, starring Eartha Kitt, among others. Other books included Razzle-Dazzle, about an errant female movie star of questionable morals; and an erotic thriller, Blood Moon, hailed as “pure novelistic Viagra, an American interpretation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde.”

  Darwin’s novel, Marika, published by Arbor House, evoked Marlene Dietrich for many readers.

  His controversial novel, Venus, was suggested by the life of the fabled eroticist and diarist, Anaïs Nin. His novel, Midnight in Savannah, was a brutal saga of corruption, greed, and sexual tension exploring the eccentricities of Georgia’s most notorious city.

  His novel, Rhinestone Country, catalyzed a guessing game. Which male star was the inspiration for its lovable rogue, Pete Riddle? Mississippi Pearl praised it as “like a scalding gulp of rotgut whiskey on a snowy night in a bowjacks honky-tonk.”

  Darwin 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.”

  Since then, Darwin has penned more than eighteen 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; the well known porn star, Linda Lovelace; all three of the fabulous Gabor sisters, plus Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

  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, Hollywood, San Francisco, and Paris.

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

  A resident of New York City, Darwin is currently at work on two biographies slated for release in 2015—Peter O’Toole, Hellraiser, Sexual Outlaw, and Irish Rebel; and Bill & Hillary—So This Is That Thing Called Love.

  DANFORTH PRINCE

  The publisher and co-author of Love Triangle, Danforth Prince is one of the “Young Turks” of the post-millennium publishing industry. He’s president and founder of Blood Moon Productions, a firm devoted to researching, salvaging, compiling, and marketing the oral histories of America’s entertainment industry.

  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.

  Prince, with
Porter, has co-authored such provocative biographies as Elizabeth Taylor: There is Nothing Like a Dame.

  With respect and a sense of irony about “When Divas Clash,” Prince and Porter also co-authored Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Members of their Entourages, as well as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Life Beyond Her Wildest Dreams.

  Prince is also the co-author, with Darwin Porter, of four books on film criticism, three of which won honors at regional bookfests across America, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. Special features within these guides included the cinematic legacy of Tennessee Wiliams; the implications associated with strolling down Sunset Blvd., that “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”; behind-the-scenes revelations about the making of Ben-Hur, starring Charlton Heston. From Flesh to Trash, he previewed many of Andy Warhol’s films and “unzipped” Marlon Brando. He also took a cinematic look at the legacy of Greta Garbo in the re-release of her movies of long ago, revisiting Mata Hari, Anna Christie, Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Camille, and Ninotchka, among many others.

  Prince, a graduate of Hamilton College and a native of Easton and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 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, “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 50 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 (#Bloodyand-Lunar) 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.