Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet
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HX (New York)
“Includes everything fabu in the previous years' movies. An essential guide for both the casual viewer and the hard-core movie watching homo.”
Bay Windows (Boston)
“From feisty Blood Moon Productions, this big, lively guidebook of (mostly) recent gay and gayish films is not meant to be a dustcollecting reference book covering the history of GLBT films. Instead, it's an annual running commentary on what's new and what's going on in gay filmmaking.
Mandate
Volume One (published 2006)
ISBN 9780974811840 $19.95
Volume Two (published 2007)
ISBN 9780974811871 $21.95
HOLLYWOOD BABYLON—IT'S BACK
From the Golden Age of beautiful bombshells and handsome hunks to today's sleaziest, most corrupt, and most deliciously indecorous hotties. As they were unfolding, these stories were known only within Hollywood's most decadent cliques. But all of that changed with the release of this book. HOT, UNAUTHORIZED, UNAPOLOGETIC, AND NOW
This is the hottest and most decadent compilation of inter-generational scandal in the history of Hollywood.
“The Ultimate Guilty
Pleasure”
BOOKS TO WATCH OUT FOR
“You know, everyone thinks Hollywood is a cesspool of epic proportions today, but please! It's always been that way. And if you love smutty celebrity dirt as much as I do (and if you don't, what's wrong with you?) then have I got a book for you.”
The Hollywood Offender
“The American movie industry is always eager for the spotlight if the closeup is flattering and good for business. But Hollywood may get more than it bargained for with Hollywood Babylon's compendium of stories, rumors, and myths. Virtually every page features one kind of train wreck or another, usually accompanied by spectacularly lurid photographs. It provides a hairraising list of compromises and strategically granted sexual favors as proof that some stars will do anything for a part. Try as you might, you won't be able to stop turning the pages. In revealing so many facts previously under wraps, this book, in fact, raises the question of how much more remains hidden.”
Shelf Awareness/Bookselling News
Hollywood Babylon It's Back: An overview of exhibitionism, sexuality, and sin as filtered through 85 years of Hollywood indiscretion.
“This book will set the graves of Hollywood's cemeteries spinning” Daily Express
Hardcover, 408 outrageous pages, with about a thousand photos, $24.95
ISBN 978-0-9748118-8-8
THE SECRET LIFE OF
HUMPHREY BOGART
THE EARLY YEARS (1899-1931) BY DARWIN PORTER
Loaded with information once suppressed by the Hollywood studios, this is the most revealing book ever written about the undercover lives of movie stars during the 1930s. Learn what America's most visible male star was doing during his mysterious early years on Broadway and in Hollywood at the dawn of the Talkiesdetails that Bogie worked hard to suppress during his later years with Bacall.
The subject of more than 80 radio interviews by its author, and widely covered by both the tabloids and the mainstream press, it's based on neverbeforepublished memoirs, letters, diaries, and interviews from men and women who either loved Bogie or who wanted him to burn in hell. No wonder Bogie, in later life, usually avoided talking about his early years.
Serialized in three parts by Britain's Mail on Sunday, it demonstrates that Hollywood's Golden Age stars were human, highly sexed, and at least when they were with other Hollywood insiders, remarkably indiscreet.
“This biography has had us pondering as to how to handle its revelations within a town so protective of its own…This biography of Bogart's early years is exceptionally well written.” JOHN AUSTIN, HOLLYWOOD INSIDE
“In this new biography, we learn about how Bogart struggled for stardom in the anything goes era of the Roaring 20s.” THE GLOBE
“Porter's book uncovers scandals within the entertainment industry of the 1920s and 1930s, when publicists from the movie studios deliberately twisted and suppressed inconvenient details about the lives of their emerging stars.”
TURNER CLASSIC MOVIE NEWS
“This biography brilliantly portrays a slice of time: In this case, the scandalsoaked days of Prohibition, when a frequently hungover Bogie operated somwhat like a blank sheet of paper on which other actors, many of them infamous, were able to design their lives. The book is beautifully written.”
LAURENCE HAZELL, PhD. University of Durham (UK)
Softcover. 527 pages, with photos. ISBN 0-9668030-5-1 $16.95
The private Newman was remarkably different from the public face he revealed to the world. He became one of the most potent, desirable, and ambiguous sex symbols in America. A former sailor from Shaker Heights, Ohio, he parlayed his ambisexual charm into one of the most successful careers in Hollywood.
From celebrity chronicler Darwin Porter, this is a compelling postmortem description of the dirt, the glory, the bad, the beautiful, the giddy heights, and the agonizing lows of a great American star.
Compiled over a period of nearly 50 years from firsthand interviews with insiders who knew Paul Newman intimately, this is the world's most revelatory biography of Hollywood's preeminent male sex symbol, with dozens of potentially shocking revelations.
Hardcover, available in July, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-9786465-1-6 $26.95
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Darwin Porter's contacts with Merv Griffin began in college. As chief editor of the Student Press at the University of Miami, Darwin hired Merv as the featured entertainer for the graduating class's senior prom. From there, a friendship continued, as well as the systematic compilation of information over the decades which made its way into this book.
Merv Griffin is but one of the subjects in Darwin's list of biographies of showbiz personalities. Other celebrities he's profiled include awardwinning overviews of Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Howard Hughes, and Michael Jackson. Several of these have been serialized in Britain, in either the MAIL ON SUNDAY or THE SUNDAY TIMES, which defined Brando Unzipped as “Lurid, raunchy, perceptive, certainly worth reading…one of the best showbiz biographies of the year.”
In 2008, Darwin's Hollywood Babylon-It's Back! was cited as the decade's best overview of exhibitionism, sexuality, and sin as filtered through 85 years of Hollywood scandal.
One of America's foremost travel authorities, Darwin is the widely read author of more than 50 ongoing titlesmost of them associated with coverage of Europe and the Caribbeanwithin The Frommer Guides, the world's bestselling travel series.
Most of the time, Darwin lives in New York City, with frequent trips to Los Angeles, London, and various other Frommer-related points around the world.