From 1951 through 1956, I Love Lucy was the most-watched show in television. Its launch was as rocky as the marriage of the real-life show-biz pros who crafted it.After their divorce in 1960, Lucille Ball appraised Desi Arnaz, her former husband: "He's like Jekyll and Hyde. He drinks and gambles, he's awash in broads and booze, and that gay actor, Cesar Romero, is his devoted slave. Love?" she asked. "I was always falling in love with the ...

From famed celebrity biographer Darwin Porter, this is the most honest and journalistically important biography of Michael Jackson ever published, with a roster of literary reviews that outnumber and outclass any other MJ bio on the market. After its original release in 2007, it was widely reviewed as the most thorough and comprehensive biography of the superstar published anytime during the previous 15 years. Following the superstar's death in June of 2009, Porter edited and amplified his...

Darwin Porter's saga of power and corruption has a revelation on every page-cross dressing, gay parties, sexual indiscretions, hustlers for sale, alliances with the Mafia, criminal activity by the FBI, and an obsessive and voyeuristic interest in the sex lives of Hollywood celebrities. It's all here, with chilling details about the abuse of power on the dark side of the American saga. But mostly, it's the decades-long love story of American law enforcement officers who were so powerful tha...

Midnight in Savannah is the deliberately more explicit, and more entertaining alternative to the John Berendt / Clint Eastwood Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. For more than a year after its appearance in 2000, it was one of the best-selling GLBT books in the Deep South. Midnight in Savannah skillfully incorporates Carson McCullers, Pamela Harriman, Libby Holman, the City of Savannah, and references to Georgia's most famous (recent) murder into one delectable whole. This book is no...

The enfants terribles of America at mid-20th Century challenged the sexual censors of their day while indulging in "bitchfests" for love, glory, and boyfriends. For the first time along comes a book that exposes their literary slugfests and offers an intimate look at their relationships with the glitterati-everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Jacqueline Kennedy and Marlon Brando. In this one-of-a-kind overview of literary show-biz during the peak of America's imperial power, celebrity biographe...

The Original Version of the Cult Classic from the 70s Back In Print At Last! Scorching, bizarre, and flamboyant, a strikingly beautiful blond hustler, Numie Chase, comes to the searing heat of Tortuga, southernmost point in the Continental US--the end of the line. There, he arouses passions in six decadent but vulnerable people, whose lives mesh together under the blood-red sun. There are those who've suggested that Darwin Porter's Butterflies is a potboiling revision of Sweet Bird of Yout...

The enigmas surrounding one of Hollywood's best-known cults have at last been decoded, thanks to the publication of this unvarnished overview of "the lost farmboy from Indiana," James Dean, the "other" (after Marilyn Monroe) most famous movie star of the 1950s.Written to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the violent death of a star who lived fast, died young, and became a legend, it's the recipient of the coveted BEST BIOGRAPHY award from the 2016 Los Angeles Book Festival. The m...

This is the first post-mortem, unauthorized insight into Merv Griffin, a failed singer and unsuccessful actor who unexpectedly rewrote the rules of America's broadcasting industry. He became the richest man in TV, befriended everyone in media who mattered, bought a casino, and maintained a secret life as America's most famously closeted homosexual. From a controversial writer whose previous work has virtually re-defined the art of the celebrity biography, HERE'S MERV.

This biography shatters myths with a controversial closeup of Bogart at the debut of his career, pre-Casablanca, pre-Bacall, and pre-African Queen, revealing for the first time what was under the trench coat of history's most famous male movie star. Focusing on those mysterious early years when Bogart, like dozens of other American actors, was making the transition from Broadway to the early Talkies in Hollywood, it's loaded with anecdotes and insights about those wild, Pre-Code days in an...

Every time I sing a song, I'm actually making love on stage. Call me 'The Boudoir Singer,' or so claimed Frank Sinatra. The crooner's career spanned more than half a century, earning him millions of fans. His boudoir conquests involved some of the most stunning women of the 20th century. But exactly who was this mercurial, enigmatic man? Darwin Porter, America's leading chronicler of Golden Age Hollywood, turns over more than a few boulders in Sinatra's secret garden, especially for those ...

In the mid-1950s, Lucille Ball rose to the top of the Gallup Poll as the most famous woman on Earth. Today, she's one of the best examples of a celebrity who succeeded at crafting an influential "Second Act" after I Love Lucy and her devastating divorce from her show-biz partner, Desi Arnaz.The is the second volume of a two-part biography crafted by two of the most prolific show-biz biographers in America. Fans and readers have good reasons to anticipate i...

Media gurus Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince are the owners and innkeepers of a wise and venerable Grande Dame, Magnolia House. Built in the 1830s and enlarged during America's Civil War, it's a NYC landmark in which at least fifty titles within the world-famous Frommer Travel Guides, and all of the show biz biographies of America's feistiest pop-culture publisher, Blood Moon Productions, were conceived, researched, and written.