Hollywood's Silent Closet

by Darwin Porter

Hollywood's Silent Closet provides a banquet of information about the pansexual intrigues of Hollywood between 1919 and 1926, compiled from eyewitness interviews with men and women, all of them insiders, who flourished in its midst. Not for the timid, it names names and doesn't spare the guilty. If you believe, like Truman Capote, that the literary treatment of gossip will become the literature of the 21st century, then you will love Hollywood's Silent...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0966803027
• ISBN13: 9780966803020
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Blood Moon Productions
• Length: 746 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 7.0" x 9.9"

Customer Reviews

Like No Other Book I Have Ever Read

This book is from another planet. It is like no other book I have ever read in my life. First of all, don't be intimidated by its number of pages--almost 800--a very long read with double sided columns. It is massive. I could not put this book down and read it almost constantly over four days long into the early hours of the morning. It is a scandalous book about the early days of the silent screen era in Hollywood. If you are interested in that era, this is a must read, otherwise, this is not for you. and you will be sorry. It is the autobiography, so to speak, of a make believe character called Durango Jones, a gay man, who seems to be involved and present in every early Hollywood scandal. Of course the book is fiction, but most, if not all, of the incidents are true to life. Fascinating to read. Shocking to discover what went on back then, and probably still does. I highly recommend it. Great fun and entertainment. The book is so massive that my hands hurt from holding it up to read. You will be amazed to find out that some of the biggest and brightest stars were homosexual or had many, many homosexual experiences---Clark Gable, Ramon Novarro, Gary Cooper, so many, many more, and the star of them all, Rudolph Valentino. Get this book.

Early Hollywood in a Lavender Light

I'm an ardent fan of Hollywood's earliest days, and as a gay man, I always felt tugs on my heartstrings and groin-strings whenever Rudolph Valentino made eyes at me across the silent screen. But not until I read Darwin Porter's important work on behind-the-scenes early Hollywood did I realize how earthy, how horny, and how promiscuous the pre-Talkie film industry's sex gods and goddesses really were. Narrated by the "intensely ambitious first sexual social climber in the history of Hollywood" Porter based his book, artfully, on hundreds of interviews with aged (and in some cases, dying) bit players from the Silent Era. Many of these interviews were compiled back in the 1960s, when they were seasoned with steamy (and sometimes downright raunchy) recitations of early Hollywood gossip that were relayed generations later by men and women who survived the slander. And thanks to their stories, generations of whitewash and saccharine, most of it deliberately misleading, and most of it produced by the film industry's publicity machines, get washed away. Porter repackages these histories and anecdotes into a swelling good read with enough erotica to keep the sexual sophisticates intrigued, and enough meaty facts to impress the most demanding Hollywood historian. Don't take this book lightly, and by all means, don't underestimate its cultural importance. HOLLYWOOD'S SILENT CLOSET represents an impressive contribution to our understanding of the American experience. And be warned in advance--the material is NOT dry and dusty. It reads like a high-camp gender-inspecific romp through the boudoirs of every star who ever batted his or her eyelids at viewers across the screeen. And twinned with the humor is an overwhelming sense of the tragic endings that befell celebrities who were sometimes more famous (in their words) "than Jesus Christ himself." For Porter's gift to Hollywood scholarship, and for his unvarnished insistence on ripping away commonly accepted veils and shrouds, I sincerely thank him for this enlightenment and liberation. SILENT CLOSET is an amazing and startling book--One which had it been indexed for easier access to its hundreds of references to the sexy, the powerful, and the promiscuous, would probably be configured onto the shelves of university libraries across the country as an indispensable reference source. Frankly, there's nothing like this book anywhere else on the market. And above all else--it's one heck of a lot of fun to read.

Who would have ever guessed?

This is a very interesting book that will make for an unusual but intriguing reading experience. The book centers on Durango Jones, a young man from Kansas that has arrived in Hollywood in 1919 in hopes of becoming a star. He meets some of the biggest stars of the era and relates his very personal experiences and wild adventures to us. While this book is referred to as a novel and many of the incidents and dialogue sound fictional, you'll find that many of the events mentioned have been proven to be true. This book sheds new light on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, the murder of William Desmond Taylor (a director for Paramount studios), and a host of other scandals that plagued many of the big stars. But more than that it is an intimate look at the sexual proclivities and perversions of many of the stars of the time. You'll also learn about the personalities, insecurities and fears these stars had. For instance, did you know that Rudolph Valentino was a very temperamental and arrogant person? Did you also know that Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford hated each other despite the fact they were business partners at United Artists? Or that Clark Gable was a movie extra and a small time hustler before he became a big star? Some of the people mentioned here are Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, John Barrymore, Mary Pickford, Mabel Normand, Douglas Fairbanks, Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert, Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson & many, many more. You'll also read about some of the stars that were huge back then but unfortunately have long since been forgotten like Barbara LaMarr, Theda Bara, Mae Marsh, Norman Kerry, Pola Negri, Antonio Moreno, Constance and Norma Talmadge, and Alla Nazimova. Although many of them are involved in some of the events, the book doesn't dig too deep into their lives, as they were only peripheral figures in many of the incidents. This is a good book but it does have some flaws. First, there are numerous typos and the incidents (especially the sexual ones) are described in a very similar fashion making the story seem trite and boring at times. If you can get past these flaws you'll definitely enjoy this book. A word of caution: the sexual encounters are very explicit, so if you have a weak stomach I'd advise you to skip this book, as it can be very shocking and graphic. Also, if you don't watch silent films or aren't familiar with the Hollywood stars of the late teens and twenties you might have a hard time getting into this book, but hopefully after reading about the scandalous and sometimes funny adventures, you'll be inspired to find out more about these larger than life people who ruled Hollywood during the birth of its Golden Age. This book was allegedly compiled from interviews given by some of the stars mentioned, so there's an overwhelming feeling of realism. If you research some of these celebrities and scandals that haunted them, you'll find that many of them

Juicy reviews of Hollywood's Gay Past

Hollywood's Silent Closet blows the lid off the secrets of many of the strong and silent icons of Hollywood's Golden era, from the Shiek to a young Clark Gable, both of whom weren't averse to hustling when the rent was unpaid and when the john, and the circumstances seemed favorable. I've read and loved two of Porter's previous books, BLOOD MOON and MIDNIGHT IN SAVANNAH, but I was delighted when he turned his attention to Hollywood's earliest years, before censorship and before the homophobia that came with the Great Depression of 1929. This book deals largely with one of the most scandalous eras in Hollywood history, between 1919 and 1926. In it we learn the career motivations, the social preoccupations, and the sexual secrets of such greats as Gary Cooper, Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin, Hopalong Cassidy, and Ben Hur's Ramon Novarro. It's a blockbuster, one meaty read about a young man who set out on a train from Kansas with a single-minded missionary goal: To seduce the male legends of the silver screen. This book is charming, picaresque, witty, raunchy, and a grade-A primer into the media-fueled leitmotif that helped define a nation. Bravo to this gutsy and funny writer for documenting stuff we've never seen before--in any venue.

Gargantuan and epic--this is a valuable book!!

I've never read a novel like this about Hollywood. All those innuendos about Hollywood in the 1920s are now exposed in cold print--if anything about this torrid read can be called "cold." This is a GARGANTUAN epic that's fat and messy, but fierce and unrelentless in its portrayal of the closeted superstars of yesterday. But instead of being shocked, all I wanted to do was to rush on in and join the ...! Epic and grand, it might be denounced as a lurid celebrity potboiler, but it's actually a panoramic sweep of the Silent Screen industry that will change forever your conception of the early stars of Hollywood, including some of your old favorites. It moves like a kaleidoscope through the early days of film with a take-no-prisoners approach. Never has there been such an assemblage of ... (or should I say "pan-...") scandals.Some of these early movie stars ran from bed to bed without much thought about the gender of the person they were sleeping with. Many of them are in this novel--Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Marion Davies, John Gilbert, Wally Reid, Barbara LaMarr, and, of course, Rudolph Valentino. And finally, we get an idea of what THE SHEIK was really up to during his short, tragic, and charismatic life. Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks (both Senior and Junior) and many others join in the fun. We're even given insights into one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in the history of Hollywood, about who it was that killed the endlessly promiscuous director, William Desmond Taylor, and about what really happened aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht on the night Tom Ince died.There's even a cameo appearance by the Prince of Wales (later known as King Edward VIII, and even later, the infamous Duke of Windsor) that was one of the most genuinely intriguing pieces of scandal-mongering I've ever read. Hollywood's Silent Closet is a towering achievement. Within its pages, the Silent Screen is silent no more. Nor will the players who contributed to that seminal era of American film ever again be confined within a closet.