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Set amid descriptions of the unimaginable changes that affected America between Hughes's birth in 1905 and his death in 1976, this book gives an insider's perspective about what money can buy and what it can't. Darwin Porter's access to film industry insiders and other Hughes confidants supplied him with the resources he needed to create a portrait of Hughes that both corroborates what other Hughes biographies have divulged, and go them one better...
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Whereas Humphrey Bogart is always at the top of any list of the Entertainment Industry's most famous actors, very little is known about how he clawed his way to stardom from Broadway to Hollywood. This radical expansion of one of Darwin Porter's pioneering biographies begins with Bogart's origins as the child of wealthy (morphine-addicted) parents in New York City, then examines the scandals, love affairs, breakthrough successes, and failures that...
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Born in Central Europe during the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, three "vonderful vimmen"-Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda Gabor-transferred their glittery dreams and gold-digging ambitions to Hollywood. They supplemented America's most Imperial Age with "guts, glamour, and goulash," and reigned there as the Hungarian equivalents of Helen of Troy, Madame du Barry, and Madame de Pompadour.
More effectively than any army, these Bombshells from Budapest...
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On the campus of Yale University, in 1970, an "odd couple," Hillary Rodham and Bill ("Bubba") Clinton, came together at a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Museum. Before the end of that rainy afternoon, they had formed an unbreakable bond forged while they rested on the seat of a Henry Moore sculpture. They were from completely different worlds, he, a populist from a poverty-stricken background in Arkansas, she, a former "Goldwater Girl" and conservative...
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Blood Moon's newest book examines the hidden sexual secrets of long-time companions, FBI Directors J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, and their decades-long obsession with the darkest indiscretions of famous Americans.
This is history's first exposure of J. Edgar's obsession with voyeuristic sex and its links to the priorities of his law enforcement agency. It's the most detailed and most shocking insight into J. Edgar Hoover ever published, an unprecedented...
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The hottest compendium of inter-generational scandal in the history of Hollywood. An overview of exhibitionism, sexuality, and sin as filtered through 85 years of Hollywood indiscretion. As they were unfolding, the events described within this book were, known only within Hollywood's most decadent cliques. All of that has changed with the release of this book.
From bisexual Elvis to cover-ups of murder, from the scandals of Hollywood's Golden Age...
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One hot summer night in 1945, three young American writers, each an enfant terrible, came together in a stuffy Manhattan apartment for the first time. Each member of this pink triangle, was on the dawn of world fame, Tennessee Williams for A Streetcar Named Desire; Gore Vidal for his notorious homosexual novel, The City and the Pillar, and Truman Capote for Other Voices, Other Rooms, a book that had been marketed with a photograph depicting Capote,...
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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...
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Hugh Hefner, the Playboy of the Western World, was a visionary publisher, an empire-builder, an avatar of pleasure, and a pajama-clad pipe-smoker with a pre-coital grin.
Although lauded by millions of avid readers, he was denounced by feminists for exploiting women, and defined as "the father of sex addiction," "a huckster," "a lecherous low-brow feeder of our vices," "a misogynist," and, near the end of his life, "a symbol of priapic senility."
This...
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No other book in the history of publishing has assembled in one volume 80 years of pansexual scandals associated with the Kennedys, all in one guilty pleasure of a sizzling book. Meticulously researched, it showcases the indiscretions and extramarital romps of America's most famous political clan. In addition to lesser, known and often shocking scandals about Jack (Mr. President), other parts of this pioneering page-turner will be devoted to Bobby...
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This is a pioneering and posthumous biography of a charismatic icon of Tinseltown whose rule over the hearts of American moviegoers lasted for more than half a century. It's loaded with never-before-published revelations that look behind the innocent-looking baby blues that enthralled the movie-going public. He became one of the most potent, desirable, and ambiguous sex symbols in America, a former sailor from Shaker Heights, Ohio, who parlayed his...
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A self-defined "seductress of beautiful women" and the by-product of an immense fortune, lesbian activist Mercedes de Acosta (born in 1892) was descended from Spain's Dukes of Alba and a beneficiary of the best education and best social skills that her parents' Gilded Age fortune could buy. From her perch within the aristocracy of the Belle Époque, and continuing as an arts-industry "swinger" until her death in 1968, she became notorious for seducing-and...
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"God put me on this earth to raise hell!" Thus, spoke the charismatic Irish actor, Peter O'Toole, who shot to international stardom in 1962 for his Oscar-nominated performance in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. In that four-hour epic, he played the heroic but flamboyantly doomed T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"). After such a worldwide success, O'Toole announced, "I've arrived. Ignore me at your peril!"
He would go on to be nominated for seven...
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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 wrong man....
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Kirk Douglas was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, his father a collector and seller of rags. After service in the Navy during World War II, he moved to Hollywood, oozing masculinity and charm. Conquering Tinseltown and bedding its leading ladies, he became the personification of the American dream, moving from obscurity and (literally) rags to riches and major-league fame.
En route to his status as a myth and legend, his performances reflected...
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That ongoing, barely under control drama known as Marlon Brando-Hollywood's Ultimate Bad Boy, Megastar, and Sexual Outlaw-with a special focus on his early rise to fame and his social and sexual associations with the A-list legends of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Brando Unzipped is the definitive gossip guide to the late, great actor's life.
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As an insight into the American experience of celebrity death on the 50th anniversary of the murder of the Love Goddess, biographer Darwin Porter has compiled, after decades of research, an intriguing roundup of the conspiracies and dark secrets behind Hollywood's most notorious mystery: Who Killed Marilyn?
This relentless page-turner, a lip-smacking and juicy read, examines the mass hysteria that followed in the wake of Marilyn's assassination....
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God had a talent for creating exceptional women-Helen of Troy and Cleopatra come to mind. So does Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, who lives again in this "warts-and-all" portrait. It's being released on the 20th anniversary of the tragic death, in 1994, of the icon, who changed America's beliefs about what a woman of style, power, and influence could accomplish "behind the throne" of men, whose careers changed the course of history.
During her...
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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...
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In the interim since Rock Hudson's tragic death as one of the early (and perhaps the most shocking, based on his celebrity) victims of AIDS, his legend has evolved into a nationwide cult. Yet despite his post-mortem fame, his salaciously poignant story has never been, told. Until now.
Loaded with details never set into print before, this unvarnished, uncensored overview of Rock Hudson's scandal-soaked rise to fame and subsequent fall from grace,...
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