Darwin Porter

Darwin Porter (born September 13, 1937, in Greensboro, North Carolina)^[1] was the son of Hazel Lee Phillips, a fashion designer, and Paul Suggs, an attorney. His stepfather, Numie Rowan Porter, adopted him and changed his last name.

He became America’s leading travel writer, producing numerous titles, mostly for the Frommer Guidebook series, over a 50-year career span. In the 21st Century, he became a pop culture journalist-historian, the leading celebrity biographer in America in terms of volume of works produced.

Early life

He grew up in Western North Carolina, moving to Miami Beach when he was ten years old. His mother was the wardrobe mistress and secretary for the renowned entertainer, Sophie Tucker. As a young boy in Ms. Tucker’s home, Porter first met many of the stars he would later write about—Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan, Victor Mature, Richard Widmark, Frank Sinatra, and Elizabeth Taylor, plus an array of other stars.

He attended the University of Miami, graduating in 1959. He was the editor of the award-winning student newspaper, The Miami Hurricane, and the President of the Florida Intercollegiate Press Association. As a student journalist, he obtained major interviews, most notably with Eleanor Roosevelt. She befriended him and was instrumental in recommending him for a scholarship. He did interviews with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, along with Tallulah Bankhead, Ted Williams, Bette Davis, Ethel Merman, Adlai Stevenson, and Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

Career

In 1958, he joined The Miami Herald as an entertainment writer, book reviewer, and columnist. Later, he was appointed Bureau Chief of The Miami Herald in Key West, where he was a frequent visitor to Havana, writing about the growing tensions between the United States and Cuba. Once, he was taken into the hills to meet a guerilla fighter, Fidel Castro. In Key West, he conducted extensive interviews with Harry S Truman, who had made Key West his winter White House during his presidency.

In Key West, he was befriended by playwright Tennessee Williams, who introduced him to a number of stars, such as Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman, as well as such literary figures as Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, and Gore Vidal. Porter would later write biographies of these personalities. In 2014, he would publish a biography, Pink Triangle, devoted to Williams, Capote, and Vidal.

In New York in 1961, Porter was named vice president of Haggart Associates at the age of 24. Working with the company president, Stanley Mills Haggart, a noted interior designer, author, and magazine editor, they produced some of TV’s most watched commercials, specializing in hiring movie stars to sell their products. Haggart had the Pepsi-Cola account, the soft drink promoted by Joan Crawford. They also produced 20-minute musical shorts starring such entertainers as Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong.

A world traveler, Porter, in 1969, wrote the first ever Frommer guidebook. (Before that, the series produced a $-a-Day series.) In terms of volume, he would write more travel guidebooks than all others, over a 50-year span. In the 1970s and 80s, and into the 90s, the Frommer guidebook series was the market leader. They books were published, over the years, by Arthur Frommer, Inc.; Simon & Schuster; and John Wiley & Sons.

Porter also wrote and updated subsequent editions of travel guides for Lufthansa, American Airlines, TWA, Iberia Airlines, Greyhound, British Airways, SAS Scandinavian Airlines, American Express, TAP Air Portugal, Air France, and Alitalia.

Porter is also a novelist. His first novel Butterflies in Heat was reviewed by James Kirkwood, Jr., the Pulitzer prize-winning author of A Chorus Line, with “Darwin Porter writes with an incredible understanding of the milieu—hot enough to singe the wings off any butterfly.” Butterflies in Heat was later adapted into the film, Tropic of Desire.

Other novels include Marika, based in part on information gleaned from Porter’s long association with German and Austrian stars such as Hedy Lamarr, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Keller, the leading chanteuse of Europe during the 1930s. He also wrote Venus, a novel suggested by the life of the acclaimed diarist, Anaïs Nin. Other novels include Blood Moon, Hollywood’s Silent Closet, Razzle-Dazzle, Midnight in Savannah, and Rhinestone Country.

In the 21st Century, for Blood Moon Productions, Porter has produced more Hollywood celebrity biographies than any other journalist, concentrating on legendary stars and personalities such as Marilyn Monroe, Howard Hughes, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Linda Lovelace.

He has written biographies of singers Michael Jackson, Merv Griffin, Frank Sinatra, and two biographies based on politicians—J. Edgar Hoover and The Kennedys.

Porter is also the author of four books on film criticism and has written a series of exposés as part of Blood Moon’s Hollywood Babylon series.

These biographies, based on compilation of firsthand, orally transmitted histories, have illuminated aspects of Hollywood history previously unknown to the general public. Some of Porter’s works have been serialized by major broadsheet newspapers in the U.K., including The Mail on Sunday. The Sunday Times (London) defined Porter’s biography of Marlon Brando (Brando Unzipped) as “Lurid, raunchy, perceptive, and certainly worth reading…One of the ten best show-biz biographies of the year.”

As a biographer, Porter has won numerous awards from, among others, the New England Book Festival, the Hollywood Book Festival, the Los Angeles Book Festival, the San Francisco Book Festival, and the Beach Book Festival.

His biographies and travel guides have been translated into many languages, including French, Italian, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese.

Most of his biographies were published by Blood Moon Productions (www.BloodMoonProductions.com), a New York City-based press directed by former New York Times reporter Danforth Prince, and distributed through the National Book Network (www.NBNbooks.com) Blood Moon originated as the Georgia Literary Association in 1997, adopting its current name in 2004.

Criticism

According to the Daily Mail, "Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, have written previous salacious biographies that have been challenged over their accuracy."^[2]

With regard to the claim made in Bill & Hillary: So This Is That Thing Called Love that Bill Clinton had attempted to seduce Jacqueline Kennedy, a representative for the Clintons said: "[Is it] possible to quote me laughing at the sheer absurdity of this story?"^[3]

Reviewing Porter's book Damn You, Scarlett O'Hara: The Private Lives of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, Roger Lewis, a biographer of Laurence Olivier, wrote that "for sheer muck-raking, crazy speculation and innuendo...it takes the absolute Custard Cream". Lewis stated that in writing his own work The Real Life Of Laurence Olivier he had interviewed Olivier's colleagues and contemporaries, and examined the archives, but nowhere had he come across evidence that supported some of Porter's claims. "What particularly made me chuckle was the dialogue, which is so crass it is like a bad forgery…Details appear to be wrong - dates, addresses, London topography, cockney slang…So, perhaps it is best to disregard the book as biography and re-classify it as an imaginative reinterpretation obsessed by sex…a dangerous new genre, which can be called bioporn. Let's hope nobody is taken in by single world of it."^[4]

Published works

FROMMER COUNTRY AND STATE GUIDES TO:
^[5] Anguilla, Aruba, Austria, The Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Bonaire and Curaçao, the British Virgin Islands, Bulgaria, the Cayman Islands, Denmark, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, England, Finland, France, Georgia (USA), Germany, Great Britain, Greenland, Grenada, Haiti, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Jamaica, Maine, Martinique & Guadeloupe, Massachusetts, Morocco, North Carolina, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Rumania, Scotland, Sint Maartin/St. Martin, South Carolina, Spain, St. Kitts and Nevis, Sweden, Turks and Caicos, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Wales

FROMMER CITY GUIDES TO:
^[6] Atlanta, Berlin, Boston, Charleston, Florence, Frankfurt, Geneva, Granada, Las Vegas, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Munich, New Orleans, Paris, Rome, Rome, Salzburg, San Francisco, Savannah, Seville, Venice, Vienna & the Danube, and Zurich

FROMMER REGIONAL TRAVEL GUIDES TO:
^[7] Andalusia, the Bavarian Alps, the Canary Islands, Caribbean Ports of Call, the Caribbean, the Channel Islands (U.K.), Europe, Europe by Rail, the Faroe Islands, the French Riviera, Great Britain, Key West & The Florida Keys, Miami, New England, Provence, Sardinia, Scandinavia, Sicily, and Spain's Costa del Sol

FROMMER PORTABLE TRAVEL GUIDES TO:
^[8] The Bahamas, Charleston (SC), Frankfurt, London, Paris, Puerto Rico, Rome, San Diego, Savannah (Georgia), and Venice

$-A-DAY GUIDES, PUBLISHED BY FROMMER, TO:
^[9] The Caribbean, England, Scandinavia, and Spain

FROMMER SPECIAL EDITION GUIDES:
^[10] Frommer's Caribbean Bargain Book, Frommer’s Dream Vacations, and Frommer’s Guide to Caribbean Cruises

GUIDES FOR DUMMIES, PUBLISHED BY FROMMER, TO:
^[11] The Bahamas, the Caribbean, Europe, and France

THE IRREVERENT TRAVEL SERIES, PUBLISHED BY FROMMER, TO:
^[12] Paris

THE DAY-BY-DAY TRAVEL SERIES, PUBLISHED BY FROMMER, TO:
^[13] Florence & Tuscany

NOVELS
^[14] Blood Moon (1999), Butterflies in Heat (1976), Hollywood’s Silent Closet (2001), Marika (1977), with its Dutch translation, De weg naar de Top (1977), Midnight in Savannah (2000), Razzle-Dazzle (1995), Rhinestone Country (2002), and Venus (1982)

BIOGRAPHIES
^[15][16] Brando Unzipped (2005); Damn You Scarlett O’Hara, The Private Lives of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier (co-authored with Roy Moseley, 2011); Elizabeth Taylor, There is Nothing Like a Dame (2012); Frank Sinatra, The Boudoir Singer (2011); Hollywood Babylon Strikes Again! (2010); Hollywood Babylon—It’s Back! (2008); Howard Hughes, Hell’s Angel (2005); Humphrey Bogart, the Making of a Legend (2010); Inside Linda Lovelace’s Deep Throat—Degradation, Porno Chic, and the Rise of Feminism (2013); J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson—Investigating the Sexual Secrets of America’s Most Famous Men and Women (2012); Jacko, His Rise and Fall—the Social and Sexual History of Michael Jackson (2007); Katharine the Great—Hepburn, Secrets of a Lifetime Revealed (2004); The Kennedys, All the Gossip Unfit to Print (2011); Marilyn at Rainbow’s End—Sex, Lies, Murder, and the Great Cover-up (2012); Merv Griffin, A Life in the Closet (2009); Paul Newman, The Man Behind the Baby Blues (2009); Pink Triangle—The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote; The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart (2013); Steve McQueen, King of Cool, Tales of a Lurid Life (2009); and Those Glamorous Gabors, Bombshells from Budapest (2012).

FILM CRITICISM
^[17][18] Best Gay and Lesbian Films—The Glitter Awards 2005; Blood Moon’s Guide to Gay & Lesbian Film (2006 and 2007 editions); Fifty Years of Queer Cinema—500 of the Best GLBTQ Films Ever Made (2010)

MOVIE SCRIPTS A Simple Chemical Transfer (Voted as Best Industrial Film of 1977); Tropic of Desire (1977), starring Eartha Kitt, Matt Collins, Barbara Baxley, and Pat Carroll

CONTRIBUTING INTERVIEWEE FOR DOCUMENTARIES
Marlon Brando (2006), for German TV; Queer Icon: The Cult of Bette Davis (2010)

COMMENTATOR FOR AUDIO TRACKS ON DVD RELEASES OF CLASSIC FILMS:
The Call of the Wild (1935), starring Clark Gable and Loretta Young; Deadline U.S.A. (1952), starring Humphrey Bogart and Ethel Barrymore; The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), starring Lana Turner and Richard Burton

References