Read Online Staten Island Historic Magnolia House Celebrity the Ironies of Fame A Memoir about Travel Guides Tabloid Exposes and the Landmark Where They Were Produced Blood Moon "magnolia House" Darwin Porter Danforth Prince 9781936003655 Books

Product details Series Blood Moon's "magnolia House" (Book 1) Paperback 230 pages Publisher Blood Moon Productions, Ltd. (December 21, 2018) Language English ISBN-10 1936003651

Staten Island Historic Magnolia House Celebrity the Ironies of Fame A Memoir about Travel Guides Tabloid Exposes and the Landmark Where They Were Produced Blood Moon "magnolia House" Darwin Porter Danforth Prince 9781936003655 Books Reviews

• Staten Island, New York City’s “Forgotten Outer Borough” has monuments and attractions I never knew about. It took the transformation of one of them into an AIRBnB for word to get out about how COOL some destinations within the borough really are.
  
  In this case, it’s Magnolia House, the 19th century headquarters of the island’s most aggressive civic booster, Senator Howard Bayne, a native Virginian who knew and entertained EVERYBODY during the borough’s impressive Gilded Age Empire-builders, novelists, filmmakers, and entertainers.
  
  The building’s history hasn’t always been ceremonial and demure Since the late 1960s, it’s been the home of the entertainment industry's Blood Moon Productions.. (Their celebrity biographies figure high on any Classic Film buff’s list of required reading.)
  
  WHO KNEW that so many of the reference books I took for granted, including ALL those Frommer Guides I used as “Travel Bibles” in the 70s and 80s, were written and edited here? And that so many celebrities I followed got “deciphered” through the company’s backlist of pop classics? As such, in the eyes of some, Magnolia House is a sprawling, overstuffed, sometimes notorious, celebrity-centric corner of the Old South incongruously positioned near the arrivals hall of the Staten Island Ferry in this Outer Borough of NYC.
  
  Should I Confess? I “discovered” this book during my overnight AIRBnB stopover at Magnolia House, the Superhosted and rather plush venue that was recommended, word-of-mouth, as a hot and affordable place to stay in lieu of a conventional NYC hotel. (and yes, I loved my stopover) But then…
  
  WHAM! Both my stay and the up-close-and-personal celebrity insights within this book hit me hard. Each of the resident ghosts—shades of occupants or visitors passed—has his or her own tale, stretching back to the early development of Staten Island as a film capital. The house is associated with John Barrymore, William Fox, Jolie Gabor and her famous daughter, Zsa Zsa, golden age film star Joan Blondell, playwright Tennessee Williams, and many more. For years of their later lives, when the fanfare ended, they hung out talking to co-owner Darwin Porter relaying stories about their glory years and, more poignantly, their falls from grace. (As a resident of the upper floors, Porter is on hand today to talk about them.)
  
  Porter informed me during my stay, “This is the closest thing I’ll ever write to a memoir. Descriptions of my celebrity encounters as commentaries on ‘The American Experience’ have been more or less tastefully filtered through the voice of Magnolia House. And by the way, other commentaries and exposés in this format will be forthcoming soon.“
  
  How does he feel about this invasion of privacy—in this case, visitors entering his sanctum sanctorum as tourists? Fine. His associate, Danforth Prince, alleges that he was probably born to be a show-biz patriarch, collaborating with the house itself (and its resident ghosts) in the presentation of this mixture of local history and pop culture in a way never seen before in print.
  
  By the way, if you happen to actually check into Magnolia House as an overnighter with AirBnb, you’ll probably receive a copy of this book for free. Regardless of how you acquire it, consider it an insight into the quirky corners of a media workhorse that for decades poured input and information into the travel and literary marketplace. From what I heard at Magnolia House, in addition to all those travel guides, something like forty-five full-length biographies were produced here. Each of them documents the dream-soaked belief that yes, Virginia Long ago and far away there was, indeed, a Hollywood—a place more convoluted and painful than the Bright Lights of MGM ever told us at the time.
  
  As you’ve probably already gathered from this review, I LOVED this book, and also the Grande “Magnolia-Scented” Dame where it was written.
• Many people are tracing their family tree to find out which branches they were born upon. But venerated old homes, which have withstood storms and the passage of time, as generations—good and the bad—came and went, also hold their secrets.
  Magnolia House, dating from the 1830s, is such a house, standing on the northern shore of Staten Island, overlooking Lower Manhattan. It has witnessed its slice of American history, sheltering everyone from a former First Lady ("The Marie Antoinette of the White House") to John Barrymore, “The Great Profile.”
  The poignancy of “This Old House” is encapsulated within the tantalizing pages of this guide. Few other books of its kind deliver so many quirky insights into the accelerated evolution of America's tastes, priorities, and values.
  Magnolia House is the headquarters of Blood Moon Productions, a publishing enterprise widely reviewed in the U.S. and U.K for unvarnished biographies of Hollywood’s Golden Age gods and goddesses like Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and more recent heroines and antiheroes like Jacqueline Onassis and Donald Trump.
  Magnolia House was also the temporary home of Julia Gardiner Tyler, the “Rose of Long Island.” As the antebellum wife of President John Tyler, she served as First Lady from 1844-45. Widely disliked for her flamboyance and endorsements of slavery, she was loudly denounced for her pretensions and Napoleonic splendor.
  After the Civil War, back in New York in reduced circumstances, living with her mother on Staten Island, she took brief refuge at Magnolia House after Yankee soldiers threatened to kill her and her children because of her Southern sympathies.
  In the 1890s, Magnolia House was acquired by the widow of the Surgeon General of the Confederacy, whose up-close-and-personal views of wartime horror can only be imagined. She willed it to her daughter, the wife of New York State Senator Howard Bayne, president of Staten Island’s Institute of Arts and Sciences.
  It was Bayne who ushered it into its most flamboyant era. Before Hollywood was a viable alternative, he pumped Staten Island as film capital of the world, encouraging directors and producers to shoot their silent films and "talkies" here. From his base at Magnolia House, he sheltered and fêted the literati and the glitterati of his era, including novelists Henry James and Theodore Dreiser, and such directors as Edwin S. Porter, who helmed The Great Train Robbery in 1903.
  William Fox of 20th Century Fox spent time at Magnolia House, as did Pearl White of The Perils of Pauline, even Broncho Billy, the first screen cowboy. Bayne even fell in love with a young Mable Normand, who lived a few houses away. Later, as the first of the flappers, she went to Hollywood, where she created scandals and died in misery.
  As it happens, the authors of this book, Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince happen to also operate as the innkeepers of Magnolia House (Yes, it’s a well-recommended and “Superhosted” AirBnb, with impressive reviews and a rollicking clientele of short-term overnighters.) Porter and Prince were also, for many decades, the chief writers of The Frommer Guides, “the Bible” to millions of travelers during "The Golden Age of American Travel." Significantly, the second half of Celebrity & the Ironies of Fame is devoted to the celebrity oddities they uncovered during their research for that travel series in Europe, the Caribbean, and North Africa. They refer to Part Two as a mini-anthology of “Travel Writing as a Celebrity Adventure.”
  What are some examples of how, as Travel Guidebook researchers, they multi-tasked between restaurant reviews? Readers learn what they discovered, on location abroad, about Jacqueline Kennedy’s affair with the handsome #1 matador of Spain, and her feud with Grace Kelly. (Evidently, Her Serene Highness dated JFK before Jackie did.). The book also reveals how their research in Seville for (you guessed it, Frommer’s Guide to Spain) revealed more than Carmen lookalikes and sangría—how Peter O’Toole, for example, sustained an affair with the Duchess of Alba during the filming of Lawrence of Arabia.
  Why do these appear within a guidebook to a historic home on Staten Island? Because Magnolia House--the site where the guides were produced--is the glue that binds the narratives together, this “Who’s Who of the Great and the Glam of The American Century.” What really happened in Puerto Vallarta (Mexico), during the filming of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana? What was the fate of Princess Diana’s tattle-tale lover, James Hewitt, in Marbella? How, and in what circumstances, did an aging Ingrid Bergman confess to Darwin Porter what was really going on between herself and Bogie during the filming of Casablanca? Also “confessed,” in a style reminiscent of a raunchier version of La Dolce Vita, are details swirling around Bob Guccione’s notorious Caligula during its filming in Rome. (Yes, Darwin was there.) And ALL those inside stories from Morocco during Tangier’s postwar “beat generation” venue as “the wickedest city in the world,” where Marlene Dietrich, Jean Genet, and a passel of U.S. and European expatriates made hay.
  It's charming, it's odd, and it's quirky. It's also a poignant, one-of-kind testimonial to Celebrity and the Ironies of Fame since the early days of Magnolia House, when the bloodshed of the recent war between the States was fresh, hotly remembered, and pungent.
  It’s also an homage, as stated by the authors themselves, to a Grande Dame, restrained, bemused, nurturing, indulgent, and wise Historic Magnolia House on Staten Island.