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.
Tabla de materias
Abbreviated Table of Contents (There are 19 chapters in this book. Here’s a description of the first seven)
Prologue
Chapter One: Growth of St. George & stylish New Brighton, Fashionable Celebrities, a Construction Boom, Howard Bayne (“Mr Staten Island, ”) Civic Boosterism, Silent Films, & new kinds of celebrities invade Magnolia House..
Chapter Two: The Magnolia-and-Blood-Scented Saga of Julia Gardiner Tyler, First Lady of the United States.
Chapter Three As Europe struggles to regain its economic footing after the ravages of World War II, prices are cheap and enthusiasm is high among Americans eager to “discover” the cultural wealth of “the old world.” Arthur Frommer and his associates, one of whom is Darwin Porter, help to reconfigure its touristic landscapes and travel patterns. Magnolia House plays an essential role as “Europe on $$ a Day” evolves into a travel empire.
Chapter Four Royal Intrigue on the Portuguese Riviera. How Darwin, a former Bureau Chief for The Miami Herald, on assignment for the Frommer Guides, recognized it as a gossip-infested beehive of royal intrigue, the site to which crowned heads fled after they’d lost their thrones. His encounters with the pretenders to the thrones of France, Spain, and Italy.
Chapter Five It’s the 60s and London is Swinging, Carnaby Street is Hot, and Darwin is on site for Frommer’s England. Unexpectedly, in Earls Court, over tea, he develops a friendship with MARGARET RUTHERFORD. OF COURSE the English have always been eccentric. No other British actress celebrated it as self-satirically as Margaret Rutherford, the (deliberately) dowdy actress who played Miss Marple. Here’s what England’s then-most-beloved actress was really like.
Chapter Six The Idle Rich, the Literary Counter-Culture, and what’s left of the Beat Generation are flocking to MOROCCO! In Marrakech, on assignment for the Frommer Guides, Magnolia House develops an inferiority complex after its emissaries, Porter and Prince, spend a week at the very posh and Historically spectacular VILLA TAYLOR. Name any newsworthy celebrity from Europe’s Haute Monde in the 70s who wasn’t aware of what was happening in Marrakech? Check out what happened when Magnolia House got Magical with “Mme la Comtesse” Boul de Breteuil at the most secretive hotel in Africa.
Chapter Seven Meeting the 20th Century’s Most Famous Incarnation of a Viking. The assignment was NORWAY. Darwin was researching Scandinavia for the First Edition of a Frommer Guide. Drinks and dialogue soon ensued with THOR HEYDERDAHL, developer and pilot of the KON-TIKI, the balsa wood raft that disproved the theories of generations of ethnographers who had previously denied that Polynesia could ever have been populated by “drifters” from Peru. An argument ensued. Read about it here.
Sobre el autor
Hailed for their ability to skewer the pretentions and myths of the Entertainment Industry, Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince are the most prolific celebrity biographers in the world. Winners of many literary awards for their work as long-time players at THE FROMMER GUIDES, they’ve spent a lifetime documenting the foibles and eccentricities of Celebrity and Fame in America.
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