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.
Stanley (as an art director) and Darwin (as a writer and assistant), worked as freelance agents in television. Jointly, they helped produce TV commercials that included testimonials from Joan Crawford (then feverishly promoting Pepsi-Cola); Ronald Reagan (General Electric); and Debbie Reynolds (Singer sewing machines). Other personalities appearing and delivering televised sales pitches included Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, and Arlene Dahl, each of them hawking a commercial product.
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 guidebooks, 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, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, the Caribbean, and California, 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.
It was while living in New York that Darwin became fascinated by the career of a rising real estate mogul changing the skyline of Manhattan. He later, of course, became the “gambling czar” of Atlantic City and a star of reality TV.
Darwin began collecting an astonishing amount of data on Donald Trump, squirreling it away in boxes, hoping one day to write a biography of this charismatic, controversial figure.
Before doing that, he penned more than thirty uncensored, unvarnished, and unauthorized bioraphies on subjects that included Peter O’Toole, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Merv Griffin, Katharine Hepburn, Howard Hughes, Humphrey Bogart, Michael Jackson, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, the notorious porn star Linda Lovelace, Zsa Zsa Gabor and her sisters, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote.
Darwin is also the author of Love Triangle, devoted to the Hollywood careers of Ronald Reagan and his two actress wives, Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis.
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.
In time for the 2016 race for the White House, and in addition to the Donald Trump book (The Man Who Would be King), Darwin also wrote Bill & Hillary––So This Is That Thing Called Love.
Porter’s biographies, over the years, have won twenty first prize or “runner-up to first prize” awards at literary festivals in cities or states which include Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Francisco, Florida, and Paris.
Darwin can be heard at regular intervals as a radio and television commentator, “dishing” celebrities, pop culture, politics, and scandal.
A resident of New York City, Darwin is currently at work on history’s first comprehensive biography of Rock Hudson, Erotic Fire.
DANFORTH PRINCE
The co-author of this book, Danforth Prince is president and founder of Blood Moon Productions, a firm devoted to salvaging, compiling, and marketing the oral histories of America’s entertainment industry.
Prince launched his career in journalism in the 1970s at the Paris Bureau of The New York Times. In the early ‘80s, he joined Darwin Porter in developing first editions of many of the titles within The Frommer Guides. Together, they reviewed and articulated the travel scenes of more than 50 nations, most of them within Europe and The Caribbean. Authoritative and comprehensive, they became best-selling “travel bibles” for millions of readers.
Prince, in collaboration 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; Frank Sinatra, The Boudoir Singer, Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like a Dame; Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Members of their Entourages; and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Life Beyond Her Wildest Dreams. More recent efforts include Peter O’Toole—Hellraiser, Sexual Outlaw, Irish Rebel; Bill & Hillary—So This Is That Thing Called Love; and James Dean, Tomorrow Never Comes.
One of his recent projects, co-authored with Darwin Porter, is DonaldTrump, The Man Who Would Be King. Configured for release directly into the frenzy of the 2016 presidential elections, and winner of at least three literary awards, it’s a celebrity overview of the decades of pre-presidential scandals—personal, political, and dynastic—associated with The Donald during the rambunctious decades when no one ever thought he’d actually get elected.
Prince is also the co-author of four books on film criticism, three of which won honors at regional bookfests in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Prince, a graduate of Hamilton College and a native of Easton and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is the president and founder of the Georgia Literary Association (1996), and of the Porter and Prince Corporation (1983) which has produced dozens of titles for Simon & Schuster, 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.
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 at least 50 documentaries, book trailers, public speeches, and TV or radio interviews. Most of these are available on YouTube.com and Facebook (keywords: “Danforth Prince” or “Blood Moon Productions”); on Twitter (#BloodyandLunar); or by clicking on BloodMoonProductions.com.
He is currently at work writing and researching two upcoming biographies, one that focuses on Rock Hudson, the other on the mother-daughter saga of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.
Lana Turner Page 88