Darwin Porter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Darwin Porter (born September 13, 1937, in Greensboro, North Carolina)[1] is an American 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, and celebrity biographer.
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 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. The 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 iconic stars and personalities such as Marilyn Monroe, Howard Hughes, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Katharine Hepburn, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Peter O'Toole, Rock Hudson, Debbie Reynolds and her daughter Carrie Fisher, Linda Lovelace, Burt Reynolds, and Kirk Douglas.
He has written biographies of TV personality Merv Griffin, singers Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra, lawman J. Edgar Hoover and politicians — Bill & Hillary Clinton, Ronald & Nancy Reagan, Donald Trump, 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 the 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 newspapers in the UK, including The Mail on Sunday. The Sunday Times defined Porter's biography of Marlon Brando (Brando Unzipped) as “Lurid, raunchy, perceptive, and certainly worth reading ... One of the ten best showbiz 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 New York Book Festival, The Northern and Southern California Book Festivals, The Florida 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 Production, a New York City-based press directed by former New York Times reporter Danforth Prince, and distributed through the National Book Network and later, through Ingram and Amazon. Blood Moon originated as the Georgia Literary Association in 1997, adopting its current name in 2004.
