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Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet

Page 75

by Darwin Porter


  Von Stroheim, Eric 235

  Vonnegut, Kurt 181, 447

  Wade, Stuart 43, 44

  Wagner, Robert 193, 209

  Wahlberg, Mark 482

  Waldorf-Astoria Hotel 47, 91

  Walker, Clint 209

  Walker, Nancy 132

  Walker, Robert 97, 99, 136, 140, 141, 143, 496, 521

  Wallace, George 421

  Wallace, Mike 418

  Wallach, Eli 178, 290, 310

  Wanderings of Oisin, The 153

  War on Poverty, the 419

  Ward, Ronnie 473

  Warhol, Andy 422, 431, 432

  Warner Brothers 34, 123, 124, 126, 127, 141, 177, 188, 446

  Warner, Jack 21, 121, 125, 126, 133, 144, 146, 159, 164, 173, 176, 187, 195, 217, 235, 246, 247, 249, 269, 270, 271, 326, 501, 522

  Warren, Earl 90

  Warren, Patricia Nell 440

  Warwick, Dionne 437

  Washington Post, The 419

  Waters, Ethel 166

  Wayne, John 203, 210, 212, 216, 217, 220, 259, 337, 412, 415, 420, 421, 438, 500, 521

  Wayne, Judge Diane 493

  Weber, Bruce 439

  Weekend at the Waldorf 47

  Weintraub, Jerry 490

  Weissmuller, Johnny 20, 29, 43

  Weldon, Joan 185

  Weldy, Pilar Palette 217

  Welk, Lawrence 101

  Welles, Orson 255, 440, 447, 457, 459, 460, 461, 462, 482

  Werner, Mort 354, 376

  West Point Story, The 212

  West Side Tennis Club 19

  West, Mae 114, 115, 157, 261, 262, 264, 265, 267, 334, 523

  Westcott, Gordon 199

  Westcott, Helen 199, 201

  Westinghouse Broadcasting Company (Group W) 377, 378, 408, 411

  Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery 514

  Whales of August, The 29

  “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” 403

  “What Do I Care?” 274

  What Does Joan Say? My Seven Years as a White

  House Astrologer to Nancy and Ronald Reagan 465

  What's My Line? 331

  “What's New Pussycat?” 324

  What's the Question? 368, 375

  Wheel of Fortune 2, 13, 377, 443, 444, 445, 446, 457, 467, 471, 486, 489, 494, 513

  Wheeler, Jerry 441

  “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” 402

  “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain” 299

  “Where'sa-Your House?” 317

  Whispering Winds, The 9

  White Cliffs of Dover, The 59

  White House, The 497, 499

  White, Betty 365

  White, Vanna 444, 445, 482, 489, 507, 513

  Whiting, Margaret 296

  Whitney, Jock 94

  Who Do You Trust? 332

  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 211, 306

  Whole Truth and Nothing But, The 253

  Wickes, Mary 159

  Wild River 358

  Wilder, Billy 311

  Wilding, Michael 119, 247, 248, 250, 251, 252, 253, 313, 324, 329, 427

  “Wilhelmina” 45, 86

  Will Rogers Memorial Award, The 481

  William Morris Agency, The 404

  Williams, Andy 365

  Williams, Dr. John E. 453

  Williams, Emyln 427

  Williams, Esther 481

  Williams, Guinn “Big Boy” 461

  Williams, Tennessee 23, 49, 50, 308

  Willson, Henry 31, 57, 58, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 225, 227, 240, 246, 271, 432, 433, 439, 519, 520

  Willson, Meredith 92

  Wilson, Demond 429

  Wilson, Earl 406, 449

  Winburn, Mark 292

  Winchell, Walter 106, 297, 319

  Windsor, Elizabeth, The Queen Mother 328, 329

  Windsor, Marie 185

  Windsor, Royal House of 389

  Winfrey, Oprah 417

  Wings 356

  Winters, Jonathan 334, 355

  Winters, Shelley 111, 296, 447

  With a Song in My Heart 131

  Withers, Grant 94

  Wizard of Oz, The 401, 423

  Wodehouse, P.G. 335

  Wonder, Stevie 511

  Wonderful World of Toys, The 343, 344, 345, 347

  Wood, Natalie 380, 431, 514

  Woods, Tiger 383

  Woolery, Chuck 377, 443, 444

  Woolley, Monty 22, 113

  Woolworth, F.W. 37

  Word for Word 368

  Words and Music 328

  Worldwide L.P. 473

  Worley, Jo Anne 386

  Wyler, William 430

  Wyman, Jane 48, 124, 143, 147, 196, 210, 272, 474, 497, 498, 500

  Yani, Andrew 507

  “Yankee Doodle Boy” 26

  Yasgur, Max 413

  Yeats, William Butler 153

  “Yellow Bird” 78, 411, 420

  “You Belong to Me” 285

  “You Go to My Head” 274

  “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” 438

  You Were Never Lovelier 201

  “You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To.” 28

  “You're the Prettiest Thing” 237

  “You're a Queer One, Julie Jordon” 257

  Young Lions, The 181

  Young, Billie (Penelope Ashe) 413

  Young, Loretta 92, 94

  Your Hit Parade 38, 103

  Youth International (Yippy) Party, the 415

  Zanuck, Darryl F. 94, 363

  Zerbe, Jerome 346

  Ziegfeld, Flo 93

  Zinnemann, Fred 160, 166, 178, 180, 256, 522

  Zoglin, Richard 386

  Zotto, Loretta (a.k.a. “Stormy Weather”) 213, 214

  Zukor, Adolph 263

  BLOOD MOON PRODUCTIONS

  Entertainment about how America interprets its celebrities.

  Blood Moon Productions originated in 1997 as The Georgia Literary Association, a vehicle for the promotion of obscure writers from America's Deep South. Today, Blood Moon is based in New York City, and staffed with writers who otherwise devote their energies to THE FROMMER GUIDES, a trusted name in travel publishing.

  Four of Blood Moon's recent biographies have been extensively serialized (excerpted) by the largest-readership publications of the U.K., The Mail on Sunday and The Sunday Times. Other serializations of Blood Moon's titles have appeared in Australia's Women's Weekly and The Australian.

  Our corporate mission involves researching and salvaging the oral histories of America's entertainment industry--those “off the record” events which at the time might have been defined as either indecent or libelous, but which are now pertinent to America's understanding of its origins and cultural roots. For more about us, click on www.BloodMoonProductions.com, or refer to the pages which immediately follow.

  Thanks for your interest, best wishes, and happy reading.

  Danforth Prince, President, Blood Moon Productions

  KATHARINE THE GREAT

  A LIFETIME OF SECRETS REVEALED

  BY DARWIN PORTER

  You already know about what Kate Remembered

  (there are a LOT of “deferential and obsequious whitewashes” already in print)

  HERE‘S AN UNVARNISHED ACCOUNT

  OF WHAT KATHARINE HEPBURN WANTED TO FORGET

  Darwin Porter's biography of Katharine Hepburn cannot be lightly dismissed or ignored. Connoisseurs of her life would do well to seek it out as a forbidden supplement”

  The Sunday Times (London)

  “Behind the scenes of her movies, Katharine Hepburn played the temptress to as many women as she did men, ranted and raved with her costars and directors, and broke into her neighbors' homes for fun. And somehow, she managed to keep all of it out of the press.

  As they say, Katharine the Great is hard to put down.”

  The Dallas Voice

  “The door to Hepburn's closet has finally been opened. This is the most honest and least apologetic biography of Hollywood's m
ost ferociously private actress ever written.”

  Boomer Times /Senior Life

  In Porter's biography of Katharine Hepburn, details about the inner workings of a movie studio (RKO in the early 30s), are relished.

  The Bottom Line (Palm Springs)

  “You can say or write anything about me you like.

  Just don't, for any reason, ever tell the truth.”

  A favorite and oftrepeated declaration of Katharine Hepburn

  Softcover 558 pages, with photos. ISBN 0-9748118-0-7 $16.95

  The drama of Steve McQueen's personal life far exceeded any role he ever played on screen. Born to a prostitute, he was brutally molested by some of his mother's “johns,” and endured gang rape in reform school. His drift into prostitution began when he was hired as a towel boy in the most notorious bordello in the Dominican Republic, where he starred in a string of cheap porno films. Returning to New York before migrating to Hollywood, he hustled men on Times Square and, as a “gentleman escort” in a borrowed tux, rich older women.

  And then, sudden stardom as he became the world's top box office attraction. The abused became the abuser. “I live for myself, and I answer to nobody,” he proclaimed. “The last thing I want to do is fall in love with a broad.”

  Thus began a string of seductions that included hundreds of overnight pickupsboth male and female. Topping his Alist conquests were James Dean, Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, and Barbra Streisand. Finally, this pioneering biography explores the death of Steve McQueen. Were those salacious rumors really true?

  Steve McQueen King of Cool Tales of a Lurid Life

  by Darwin Porter

  ISBN 978-1-936003-05-1 Available December 2009 Hardcover $26.95

  HOWARD HUGHES HELL'S ANGEL

  AMERICA'S NOTORIOUS BISEXUAL BILLIONAIRE

  THE SECRET LIFE OF THE U.S. EMPEROR

  by Darwin Porter

  A rigorously researched, highly entertaining hardcover

  about the good but very naughty old days in Hollywood

  As serialized by London's Mail on Sunday,

  this book is about the Hollywood intrigue,

  and the Hollywood debauchery of

  The richest man of his era

  Howard Hughes

  and the A-list legends who participated.

  Researched over a period of 40 years, it's

  a stormingly good read about

  Who and What money can buy.

  “Thanks to Darwin Porter's biography of Howard Hughes, we'll never be able to look at the old pinups in quite the same way” THE LONDON TIMES

  “According to a new biography by Darwin Porter, Hughes's attitude toward sex, like the Emperor Caligula, was selfish at best and at its worst, sadistic. Only three people successfully resisted Hughes's persistent advances: Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Simmons, and Joan Crawford. Of the three, it was Crawford who most succinctly revealed her reasons for refusing Hughes's advances: “I adore homosexuals, but not in my bed after midnight.”

  THE SUNDAY EXPRESS (LONDON)

  “Darwin Porter grew up in the midst of Hollywood Royalty. His access to film industy insiders and other Hughes confidantes supplied him with the resources he needed to create a portrait that both corroborates what other Hughes biographies have divulged and go them one better.” FOREWORD MAGAZINE

  Read about Hughes' complicated emotional and sexual entanglements with Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Tallulah Bankhead, David Bacon, Jack Buetel, Bette Davis, and just about every other player, major and minor, in Hollywood.

  From the Georgia Literary Association,

  in cooperation with the Florida Literary Association

  and Blood Moon Productions

  THE RENAISSANCE OF A CULT CLASSIC

  Butterflies in Heat, by Darwin Porter. A novel about malevolence, vendetta, morbid fascination, and redemption. ISBN 1-877978-95-7. paperback $12.95. For information about how this novel indirectly applied to Merv Griffin, refer to pages 441, 442, and 520 of the book you're holding.

  You first heard about it in the 70s, when it was the most notorious and gossipped-about book in Key West. Now it's back.

  “Darwin Porter writes with an incredible understanding of the milieuhot enough to singe the wings off any butterfly” James Kirkwood, coauthor, A Chorus Line

  “I'd walk the waterfront for Numie Chase [Butterflies' doomed hero] anytime”

  Tennessee Williams

  “How does Darwin Porter's garden grow? Only in the moonlight, and only at midnight, when maneating vegetation in any color but green bursts forth to devour the latest offerings”

  James Leo Herlihy, author of Midnight Cowboy

  MIDNIGHT IN SAVANNAH

  BY DARWIN PORTER ISBN 09668030-1-9 Paperback $14.95

  A saga of corruption, greed, sexual tension, and murder that gets down and dirty in the Deep Old South, this is the more explicit and more entertaining alternative to John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil..

  If you've ever felt either traumatized or eroticized south of the Mason-Dixon Line, you should probably read this book.

  “In Darwin Porter's Midnight, both Lavender Morgan (“At 72, the world's oldest courtesan”) and Tipper Zelda (“an obese, fading chanteuse taunted as “the black widow,”) purchase lust from sexually conflicted young men with dropdead faces, chiseled bodies, and genetically gifted crotches. These women once relied on their physicality to steal the hearts and fortunes of the world's richest and most powerful men. Now, as they slide closer every day to joining the corpses of their former husbands, these oncebeautiful women must depend, in a perverse twist of fate, on sexual outlaws for le petit mort. And to survive, the hustlers must idle their personal dreams while struggling to cajole what they need from a sexual liaison they detest. Mendacity reigns, Perversity in extremis. Physical beauty as living hell. CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF's Big Daddy must be spinning in his grave right now.” EUGENE RAYMOND

  The author, Darwin Porter, a native Southerner, is co-author of The Frommer Guides to the City of Savannah and the State of Georgia. During his research, he formed some startling conclusions about the real Savannah, The Deep South, and the city's most famous murder

  IN HOLLYWOOD AT THE DAWN OF THE TALKIES, MOST OF THE SINS WERE NEVER SHOWN ON SCREEN

  Hollywood's Silent Closet

  A SCANDALOUS INFO-NOVEL BY DARWIN PORTER ABOUT THE SCENES BEHIND THE SCENES DURING THE SILENT ERA OF HOLLYWOOD FILMMAKING.

  “A brilliant primer for the Who's Who of early Hollywood. Intricately researched by entertainment columnist Darwin Porter, this is the most realistic account ever written about sex, murder, blackmail, and degradation in early Hollywood.”

  A banquet of information about the pansexual intrigues of Hollywood between 1919 and 1926, compiled from eyewitness interviews with men and women, all of them insiders, who flourished in its midst. Not for the timid, it names names, and doesn't spare the guilty.

  If you believe, like Truman Capote, that the literary treatment of gossip will become the literature of the 21st century, then you will love this book.

  Trade paperback 746 pages and 60 vintage photos

  ISBN 0966-8030-2-7 $24.95

  “Yummy!…Practically every page discloses a fascinating tidbit --about Liberace successfully seducing Dean, for example. This is an irresistibly flamboyant romp of a read.” Books to Watch Out For

  “This shocking new book is sparking a major reassessment of Brando's legacy as one of Hollywood's most macho lotharios.” Daily Express (London)

  “As author Darwin Porter finds, it wasn't just the acting world Marlon Brando conquered. It was the actors, too.” Gay Times (London)

  BRANDO LIKE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN HIM BEFORE. Now in its fifth printing, with translations available in French, Dutch, and Portuguese Another amazing biography by Darwin Porter. 625 indexed pages with 300 photos.

  ISBN 978-0-0748118-2-6 $26.96

  A COMPREHENSIVE BIOGRAPHY OF THE ONCE-MOST-FAMOUS ENTERTAINER IN THE WORLD

  Ill
uminating the life of the Gloved One throughout his childhood, his heyday in the 80s, his fall from grace, and latter-day attempts to revive his career, this is not just another attempt to pillory Michael Jackson. It's an unbiased, fair, and comprehensive report on a maligned musical genius--with the kind of even-handed reporting that no one else has even attempted.

  There hasn't been a bona-fide biography of Michael Jackson since 1992.

  HERE IT IS AT LAST!!

  “Don't stop till you get enough. Darwin Porter's biography of Michael Jackson is dangerously addictive.”

  The London Observer

  “Authoritative, exhaustive, and essential, it's the queer girl's and queer boy's onestop resource for what to add to their featurefilm queues. The film synopses and the snippets of critic's reviews are reason enough to keep this annual compendium of cinematic information close to the DVD player. But the extrasincluding the special features and the Blood Moon Awardsare butter on the popcorn.”

  Richard LaBonte, Books to Watch Out For

  “Blood Moon's Guide to Gay and Lesbian Film is like having access to a feverishly compiled queer film fan's private scrapbook. Each edition is a snapshot of where we are in Hollywood now. It's also a lot of fun…”

  Gay Times (London)

  “Startling. It documents everything from the mainstream to the obscure, detailing dozens of queer films from the last few years.”

 

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