Darwin Porter - Frank Sinatra, The Boudoir Singer: All the Gossip Unfit to Print

One of the worlds leading celebrity biographers, Darwin Porter, as an intense and precocious nine-year-old, began meeting movie stars, TV personalities, politicians, and singers through his vivacious and attractive mother, Hazel, a somewhat eccentric Southern girl who had lost her husband in World War II. Migrating from the depression-ravaged valleys of western North Carolina to Miami Beach during its most ebullient heyday, Hazel became a stylist, wardrobe mistress, and personal assistant to the vaudeville comedienne Sophie Tucker, the bawdy and irrepressible Last of the Red Hot Mamas.

Virtually every show-biz celebrity who visited Miami Beach paid a call on Miss Sophie, and Darwin as a pre-teen loosely and indulgently supervised by his mother, was regularly dazzled by the likes of Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, Veronica Lake, Linda Darnell, Martha Raye, and Ronald Reagan, who arrived to pay his respects to Miss Sophie with a young blonde starlet on the riseMarilyn Monroe.

Hazels work for Sophie Tucker did not preclude an active dating life: Her beaux included Richard Widmark, Victor Mature, Frank Sinatra (who tipped teenaged Darwin the then-astronomical sum of ten dollars for getting out of the way), and that alltime second lead, Wendell Corey, when he wasnt emoting with Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford.

As a late teenager, Darwin edited The Miami Hurricane at the University of Miami, where he interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt, Tab Hunter, Lucille Ball, and Adlai Stevenson. He also worked for Floridas then-Senator George Smathers, one of John F. Kennedys best friends, establishing an ongoing pattern of picking up Jack and Jackie lore while still a student.

After graduation, as a journalist, he was commissioned with the opening of a bureau of The Miami Herald in Key West (Florida), where he took frequent morning walks with retired U.S. president Harry S Truman during his vacations in what had functioned as his Winter White House. He also got to know, sometimes very well, various celebrities slumming their way through off-the-record holidays in the orbit of then-resident Tennessee Williams. Celebrities hanging out in the permissive arts environment of Key West during those days included Tallulah Bankhead, Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, the stepfather of Richard Burton, a gaggle of show-biz and publishing moguls, and the once-notorious stripper, Bettie Page.

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. Jointly, they produced TV commercials starring such high-powered stars as Joan Crawford (then feverishly promoting Pepsi-Cola), Ronald Reagan (General Electric), and Debbie Reynolds (selling Singer Sewing Machines), along with such other entertainers as Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Arlene Dahl, and countless other show-biz personalities hawking commercial products.

During his youth, Stanley had flourished as an insider in early Hollywood as a leg man and source of information for Hedda Hopper, the fabled gossip columnist. When Stanley wasnt dishing newsy revelations with Hedda, he had worked as a Powers model; a romantic lead opposite Silent-era film star Mae Murray; the intimate companion of superstar Randolph Scott before Scott became emotionally involved with Cary Grant; and a man-about-town who archived gossip from everybody who mattered back when the movie colony was small, accessible, and confident that details about their tribal rites would absolutely never be reported in the press. Over the years, Stanleys vast cornucopia of inside Hollywood information was passed on to Darwin, who amplified it with copious interviews and research of his own.

After Stanleys death in 1980, Darwin inherited a treasure trove of memoirs, notes, and interviews detailing Stanleys early adventures in Hollywood, including in-depth recitations of scandals that even Hedda Hopper during her heyday was afraid to publish. Most legal and journalistic standards back then interpreted those oral histories as unprintable. Times, of course, changed.

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 worlds leading travel accessories, THE FROMMER GUIDES, with particular emphasis on Europe, California, and the Caribbean. Between the creation and updating of hundreds of editions of detailed travel guides to England, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, California, and Switzerland, 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 about Frank Sinatra.

Darwin has also written several novels, including the best-selling cult classic Butterflies in Heat (which was later made into a film, Tropic of Desire, starring Eartha Kitt), Venus (inspired by the life of the fabled eroticist and diarist, Anas N in), and Midnight in Savannah, a satirical overview of the sexual eccentricities of the Deep South inspired by Savannahs most notorious celebrity murder. He also transformed into literary format the details which he and Stanley Haggart had compiled about the relatively underpublicized scandals of the Silent Screen, releasing them in 2001 as Hollywoods Silent Closet, an uncensored, underground history of Pre-Code Hollywood, loaded with facts and rumors from generations past. A few years later, he did the same for the country-western music industry when he issued Rhinestone Country.

Since then, Darwin has penned more than a dozen uncensored Hollywood biographies, many of them award-winners, on subjects who have included Marlon Brando, Merv Griffin, Katharine Hepburn, Howard Hughes, Humphrey Bogart, Michael Jackson, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen. Hes also co-authored, in league with Danforth Prince, four Hollywood Babylon anthologies, plus four separate volumes of film critiques, reviews, and commentary.

In 2011, Darwin, along with co-author Roy Moseley, won a total of four literary awards for Damn You, Scarlett OHaraThe Private Lives of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. They included either First Prizes or Honorable Mentions from the San Francisco, Paris, and N ew York Book Festivals, and the coveted Grand Prize from the Beach Book Festival, which defined that title as The Best Summer Reading of 2011, and as the most forthright and honest biography of the Romeo and Juliet of the 20th century ever published.

Darwin is presently at work on a book about celebrity, voyeurism, poltical repression and blackmail within high-level circles of the U.S. government, J. Edgar Hoover & Clyde Tolson: Investigating the Sexual Secrets of Amercas Most Famous Men and Women.

Darwin can be heard at regular interviews as a radio commentator discussing celebrity events, pop culture, and politics. Hes also a Hollywood columnist, pouring out bi-weekly and monthly newsletters which include Blood Moons Dirty Laundry, which anyone can receive without charge by registering an email address at www.BloodMoonProductions.com. Additionally, through South Floridas Boomer Times Magazine, he crafts a monthly column, Hollywood Remembered, about the complicated and competitive lives of players, past and present, in politics and the entertainment industry.