Bücher veröffentlicht von Blood Moon Productions, Ltd

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.

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 ├ëpoque, 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.