Danforth Prince – författare

The fun and easy way to explore Europe

From great museums and historic sights to fabulous food and trendsetting styles, Europe has it all. Get the lowdown on everything from passports to palaces, culture to nightlife, and cathedrals to cuisine. With mini-guides to fifteen of Europe''s most popular cities and surrounding areas in eleven different countries, this book is your ticket to an exciting European adventure.

Open the book and find:

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 and Teddy, with extra space reserved for founding father Joseph P. Kennedy when he operated as a libidinous Hollywood mogul. Paparazzi cameras zoom in on that uber-goddess of all things glam, Jackie, documenting her many love affairs, which were matched only by America's Prince Charming, her son, John-John, a horny young man with a gleam in his eyes. The Kennedys is illustrated with hundreds of candid photographs.

Runner-Up in the category of BIOGRAPHY from the 2011 HOLLYWOOD BOOK FESTIVAL

Blood Moon Productions, a feisty independent press known for its occasionally lurid exposés of celebrity secrets, proudly announces the release, in advance of the presidential elections, of a flamboyantly outspoken personal and political biography of DONALD TRUMP.

            To millions of ardent fans, Donald Trump will restore the American Dream. To his enemies, he is the country’s worst nightmare—a braggart, a fraud, a false prophet, and, to the most extreme of the Evangelists, “the Anti-Christ.”  Whether  or not he eventually occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he remains one of the most envied and reviled men on the planet. 

            In this unprecedented publishing event, celebrity spinmeisters Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince present the most revelatory profile of “The Donald” —uncensored, unexpurgated, and sometimes embarrassingly intimate —ever conceived and crafted.

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.

This is the first in Blood Moon's "Magnolia House Series," chatty, ironic, and irreverent memoirs in which the authors (as filtered through the historic monument that sheltered them) review the icons and divas they encountered during their course of their work in travel and show-biz publishing. It's an overview of the seismic ironies associated with celebrity, fame and circumstance.

This is an "only in America" story, a sophisticated, witty overview direct from the high-octane peak of "The American Century." Loaded with gossip, some of it extracted from Blood Moon's award-winning backlist of celebrity biographies, it's about the famous or notorious players, some of them tragic, whose "talents to amuse" helped make America Great.

Built in stages between 1830 and 1875, Magnolia House is a historic landmark on Staten Island, the least-visited Outer Borough of New York City. 

Set within a 10-minute walk from the (free) Staten Island ferry that accesses Manhattan, it’s the headquarters of the widely distributed independent press, BLOOD MOON PRODUCTIONS, a feisty wordsmith noted for  celebrity biographies that have been reviewed in THE DAILY MAIL, the New York DAILY NEWS, show-biz news reports, and literary journals across the country.

Some visitors liken Magnolia House to a grande dame with a centuries-old knack for nourishing high-functioning eccentrics. Many of them have lived or been entertained here since New York's State Senator Howard Bayne, a transplanted Southerner, moved in with his wife, the daughter of the Surgeon General of the Confederate States of America, in the aftermath of that bloodiest of wars on North American soil, the War Between the American States.

Since then, many dozens of celebrities—some of them notorious—have whispered their secrets and rehearsed their ambitions within its walls. They've included movie vamps from the silent screen, MIDNIGHT COWBOYS, dancers from the dance, BUTTERFLIES IN HEAT, a heavyweight boxing champ, writers from every hue, faded film goddesses, playwrights who crafted blockbusters for both Marilyn (Monroe) and Elizabeth (Taylor), ultra-avant-garde diarists, every known variety of prima donna and diva, including some from the world of opera, and a world-class Olympic athlete.

They've also included Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, who spent decades here renovating it and producing a stream of FROMMER TRAVEL GUIDES and award-winning celebrity biographies.

This book illuminates Magnolia House’s contribution to the American Century, when dozens of individual movers and shakers—some of them sane and emotionally stable, others not—visited Magnolia House.

This book reveals what they did and what they revealed.

For millions of fans, Judy Garland will forever remain a relentlessly cheerful adolescent (Dorothy) skipping along a yellow brick road toward the other side of the rainbow. Liza followed her down that hallucinogenic path, searching for the childhood, the security, and the love that eluded her. Ferociously loyal but fiercely competitive, they live, laugh, and weep again in the tear-soaked pages of this remarkable biography from the entertainment industry''s most prolific archivists, Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince. 

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 it with gusto: The limited number of previous Lucille Ball biographies have each virtually ignored the last thirty years of her life, implying that her life ended in 1960 after her divorce from Desi Arnaz. One noted biographer summed up her three (emotional and fraught) final decades in five abbreviated pages. In vivid contrast, we maintain that Lucille, an artist and renowned businesswoman, deserves more. She gets it in the 500+ pages (with photos) of this book, the most in-depth portrait of this great American star ever published.

It examines her second husband, Gary Morton, a "Borscht-Belt" stand-up comedian with a gift for diplomacy and the tactful handling of divas. It describes how she reinforced her status as a reliable television "staple" with at least two ongoing (albeit derivative) series, The Lucy Show, Here''s Lucy, and as a last hurrah, the ill-fated Life With Lucy.  It examines the final years of a fast-collapsing Desi Arnaz, who, "post-Lucy," gambled away his millions and destroyed his health with late nights, liquor, and endless Havana cigars. It explores the drug addiction (and recuperation) of Lucille''s son, Desi Jr., and the show-biz struggles (and occasional resentments) of both of her children, including Lucie Arnaz. It also contrasts Lucille''s "vintage mystique" with the "Generation Gap" and the emerging careers of younger stars (Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore, Tom Selleck, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cher, and about forty others) who admired and perhaps resented her, too.

It''s also filled with details about Lucille''s behind-the scenes banter with MGM''s, Warner Brothers'', and Fox''s "dragons of yesteryear," once-celebrated stars dragged, by Lucille, back into the limelight through a formulaic roster of "TV Specials" that celebrated a fast-dying way of American life.

Extra-marital, post-Desi indiscretions? Let''s just say that our favorite redhead liked her men big and strong-"No pretty boys for me."

Her most frequent co-star in the final decade of her life was the nostalgic "for the way things used to be in Hollywood," Bob Hope.

In one format or another, the very durable Lucille Ball appeared on television every year of the last thirty years of her life, making her last appearance (alongside an even more durable show-biz warhorse, Bob Hope) at the Academy Awards in March 1989. She died about a month later of heart failure. Tributes poured in from around the world. Her legend, obviously, continues to thrive, stronger, perhaps, than ever. From the grave, Lucille might refer to the media brouhahas surrounding her demise as "My Comeback."

Actually, she has never gone away. Her telecasts have been broadcast somewhere, in some country, every day since the 1950s.   Her reign continues decades after her heyday. Everybody Loves Lucy. This book goes a long way in explaining why.

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 describing to socialites on both sides of the Atlantic-at least a dozen women who fast-evolved into the most widely publicized and romantically "unattainable" celebrities in the world.

During her heyday-the sexually permissive "Pre-Code" free-for-all of the Silent Screen and Hollywood''s early talkies-her lovers included the self-enchanted silent screen mogul, Nazimova; the "live fast and die young" tragedienne Jeanne Eagels; the blue-blooded aristocrat of the Jazz Age Broadway stage, Katharine Cornell; the most famous film goddess of the 30s and early 40s (Greta Garbo); and at least a dozen others. Within the deeply entrenched, phobically closeted lesbian circles of America''s mid-century, Mercedes become quirkily famous as "Hollywood''s Greatest Lover."    

     One of her paramours, the German-born bisexual Marlene Dietrich, put Mercedes'' promiscuous indiscretions into context: "During Germany''s Weimar Republic (1919-1933), in Paris, London, Berlin, and in the dives and cabarets of Hollywood and New York,  promiscuity was rampant and without any particular preference for any specific gender."

     In 1960, Mercedes published a "watered down" memoir (Here Lies the Heart) that instantly became notorious. In it, she "outed" many of her same-sex partners. A few years later-aging, crippled, blind in one eye, and desperately in need of money, she sold, for publication, some of the love letters addressed to her decades ago from, among others, Greta Garbo. And near the end of her life, within his home (historic Magnolia House on Staten Island), she was frank, unvarnished, and unapologetic during extensive interviews with film historian Darwin Porter, the co-author of this book.

     Suspecting that one day he might pass on some of the secrets she revealed, she cautioned him, "Don''t be vulgar, dear, and promise me that you won''t publish anything while my friends are still alive."

     Porter honored her request by waiting until 2020 to release this astonishing insight into the underground lesbian contexts of the stage, screen, and publishing scenes of the first half of "The American Century."   No other book has ever interconnected so many dots. No one, until now, has ever had the courage.  

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. Including Desi."

Arnaz summed up his marriage to Lucille: "We were anything but Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. They had nothing to do with us. We dreamed of success, fame, and fortune. And guess what? It all led to hell."

Their early struggles were epic. As a girl, Lucy at times was literally chained to her backyard in Jamestown, New York. As a teenager, she broke away and earned a reputation as "The Jamestown Hussy," riding around with Johnny DaVita, a local hoodlum.

Later, she broke into show business, hustling "sugar daddies" and stage-door Johnnies who gave her money and gifts. When she was desperate, she worked as a nude model.

In the 1930s, she migrated to Hollywood and made films for RKO.

Desi, however, was born to wealth and privilege in Cuba. At the age of twelve, as an incentive to helping him lose his virginity, he was escorted to a local bordello by his father.

Having lost most of their assets in the Cuban Revolution, his family fled. In Miami, Desi got a job as a janitor cleaning out canary cages. Later, in Manhattan, he accepted whatever gigs he could get. He became the "kept boy" of the gay composer Lorenz Hart, sustaining an affair with superstar Ginger Rogers on the side. That included the task of escorting her into Canada for an abortion. He was eventually hired by bandleader Xavier Cugat to "beat hell out of those Afro-Cuban drums."

After drifting to Hollywood, he spotted Lucy on a sound stage "dressed like a two-dollar whore who had been badly beaten by her pimp."

[That was, indeed, the character she developed for her role in Dance Girl Dance (1940). During its filming, she "more or less politely" resisted the lesbian advances of her director, Dorothy Arzner. Desi succeeded where Arzner failed, marrying Lucy that same year.] Characterized by violent fights and long separations, their stormy marriage staggered along for two traumatic decades.

Desi''s obsession with sex became legendary. He seduced every prostitute in Polly Adler''s infamous NYC whorehouse. In Hollywood, Lana Turner and Betty Grable came and went from his life, along with countless showgirls and hometown gals attending his on-the-road band shows.

Meanwhile, Lucy waited for his return, occupying her nights with the son (Elliott Roosevelt) of the U.S. president; actor/mobster George ("Black Snake") Raft; and George Sanders, Zsa Zsa Gabor''s suicidal husband. Coming and going from her boudoir were-among many others-William Holden, Milton Berle, Henry Fonda, Orson Welles, and Robert Mitchum.

By the early 1950s, the careers of both Lucy and Desi had run out of gas. TV executives objected to his Cuban accent. But I Love Lucy was launched nevertheless and shot up in the ratings, morphing into the most successful sitcom in TV history.

"With gold arriving in wheelbarrows" (Desi''s words), Lucy and Desi bought RKO Studios and launched Desilu Productions. It became the largest motion picture and television studio in the world.

This first-of-a-kind biography of TV''s wackiest and most eccentric couple is generously stuffed with ironic facts and blunt assessments from their frenemies. It radically changes the premises of the American Dream that helped fuel its success. 

Throughout his forty-five year career, Henry Fonda-a stable, reassuring archetype of the American male-never gave a bad performance, immortalizing himself in such films as Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, and Mister Roberts. The torments of his introverted private life vied with his on-screen dilemmas. Personal dramas included five wives (two of whom committed suicide) and involvements in many of the seminal events (including active service in the Navy during World War II) of the 20th Century. His affairs starred such mega-divas as Lucille Ball, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis, and with his second wife, Frances Seymour, he founded a Hollywood dynasty with movie star children, Jane and Peter.  

This, Volume One (1905-1960) covers Henry''s origins in Depression-era Nebraska, his rise to fame, his complicated dynamics with other celebrities, and his middle-aged years navigating his passion for acting with the business realities of Hollywood.

Throughout his forty-five year career, Henry Fonda-a stable, reassuring archetype of the American male-never gave a bad performance. Personal tragedies included five wives (two of whom committed suicide), and affairs which starred such mega-divas as Lucille Ball, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis. 

This, Volume Two of Blood Moon''s "Fonda" project, turns klieg lights on three emotionally intertwined mega-celebrities, two of them Oscar winners: The lanky and boyish American hero, Henry; his beautiful daughter, "the eternal rebel" Jane; and his son, Peter, a preppy-looking thrill-seeker indelibly linked to the "bad boy on a bike" narrative of the 60s.  

This is about the Fabulous Fondas, one of Hollywood''s most talented but tormented families. It reflects the private agonies of a father, daughter, and son engulfed by the divisions of their respective generations and the ironies of the American Experience.