Palm Springs Babylon

Palm Springs, California, is a city of philanthropists and philanderers, movie stars and media moguls, athletes, actors, and aesthetes. Mungo's Palm Springs Babylon is the conflagration of their secrets, packed with pictorial persiflage and damning documentation--Hollywood's history at its sleaziest and most corrupt.

Palm Springs, long a desert hideaway for celebrities, has a history as unique and varied as its residents. From the original Cahuilla inhabitants of the area, to the settlers who were drawn to the therapeutic waters of the original hot springs, you will get to know the people and stories that made Palm Springs famous.

Palm Springs has been a desert vacation oasis for nearly a century and remains the ultimate posh desert spa in pop culture. Film stars put Palm Springs on the map as a destination for weekend getaways. In the postwar era, it became a centerpiece for golfers and a second home for such Hollywood icons as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Over the years, postcards portraying Palm Springs have concentrated on its hotels, spas, golf courses, celebrities, and other aspects that have fed the national reputation of the city and its environs as a playground for the rich and famous.

This is a revised and enlarged version of A Troubled Oasis: A Critical History of Palm Springs. The key chapter on the tragedy of the Section Fourteen so-called "urban holocaust," when minorities were evicted from the center of the city in the 1960s, has been dramatically updated in light of a tranche of new, revelatory documents published online by city officials in the spring of 2023. However, all of the chapters have been enriched by greater detail, new subjects, and deeper research, making this new edition practically a new book. A critical perspective has been maintained, eschewing the boosterism of traditional municipal histories. This comprehensive study should appeal to anyone who wants to know more about the history of Palm Springs, from the prehistoric times of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians to the present day.

Hadleigh, authority on celebrity gossip, turns to Broadway to examine its juiciest scandals, secrets, flops and feuds. Discerning fact from rumor, quoting hundreds of players, and revealing the stories behind over a century of major headlines. Personaliti

Parlor Whales: A City Hall Brawling Borderlander's Memoir of Drug Prohibition's Collateral Mayhem, and How to Use America's Most Powerful Weapon to Conquer Substance Abuse By: Chris Cauhapé “A unique plan for ending the drug overdose crisis and eliminating the black market in drugs… A must read for anyone suffering an addiction in the family.” An intriguing, very personal up-close account of local politics and the devastating unintended consequences of drug prohibition from the viewpoint of a lifelong resident of the US frontier with México. The author is genetically, culturally, linguistically, historically and geographically connected to America’s southern neighbor. Cauhapé came of age just as returning Vietnam vets taking advantage of the GI Bill’s educational benefits brought back a very relaxed view of cannabis use from the battlefields of Southeast Asia and introduced that viewpoint to baby boomer classmates on college campuses throughout the US. Cauhapé dubs the resultant 1960s drug explosion “The Big Bong”. Cauhapé, a self-described Anarchistic Constitutionalist, relates his experiences from harvesting lettuce and laboring at menial jobs to competing with laundered drug money and convict labor in the business world. He exposes how Corporate Socialism on the local level has bilked the taxpayer and how politicians’ obsession with incarceration has undermined societal tranquility and the very infrastructure of the entire nation while providing a world-class education in criminal activity for American jailbirds on the dime of law-abiding college students. Through more than a half-century of research and personal observation, Cauhapé indicts drug prohibition as the number one cause of drug abuse. He chronicles drug policy’s collateral damage in his own environment by citing crime in his barrio and the substance-abuse-related murders of friends, neighbors, and employees. Parlor Whales offers a solution to chemical dependance and its monstrous baggage by utilizing the same devastating weapon that vanquished America’s opponents in The Second World War and the Space Race. That same weapon was the knockout punch in mankind’s victories over many other diseases that have haunted our species since day one.

More people watched his nationally syndicated television show between 1953 and 1955 than followed I Love Lucy. Even a decade after his death, the attendance records he set at Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl, and Radio City Music Hall still stand. Arguably the most popular entertainer of the twentieth century, this very public figure nonetheless kept more than a few secrets. Darden Asbury Pyron, author of the acclaimed and bestselling Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, leads us through the life of America's foremost showman with his fresh, provocative, and definitive portrait of Liberace, an American boy. Liberace's career follows the trajectory of the classic American dream. Born in the Midwest to Polish-Italian immigrant parents, he was a child prodigy who, by the age of twenty, had performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Abandoning the concert stage for the lucrative and glittery world of nightclubs, celebrities, and television, Liberace became America's most popular entertainer. While wildly successful and good natured outwardly, Liberace, Pyron reveals, was a complicated man whose political, social, and religious conservativism existed side-by-side with a lifetime of secretive homosexuality. Even so, his swishy persona belied an inner life of ferocious aggression and ambition. Pyron relates this private man to his public persona and places this remarkable life in the rapidly changing cultural landscape of twentieth-century America. Pyron presents Liberace's life as a metaphor, for both good and ill, of American culture, with its shopping malls and insatiable hunger for celebrity. In this fascinating biography, Pyron complicates and celebrates our image of the man for whom the streets were paved with gold lamé. "An entertaining and rewarding biography of the pianist and entertainer whose fans' adoration was equaled only by his critics' loathing. . . . [Pyron] persuasively argues that Liberace, thoroughly and rigorously trained, was a genuine musician as well as a brilliant showman. . . . [A]n immensely entertaining story that should be fascinating and pleasurable to anyone with an interest in American popular culture."—Kirkus Reviews "This is a wonderful book, what biography ought to be and so seldom is."—Kathryn Hughes, Daily Telegraph "[A]bsorbing and insightful. . . . Pyron's interests are far-ranging and illuminating-from the influence of a Roman Catholic sensibility on Liberace and gay culture to the aesthetics of television and the social importance of self-improvement books in the 1950s. Finally, he achieves what many readers might consider impossible: a persuasive case for Liberace's life and times as the embodiment of an important cultural moment."—Publishers Weekly "Liberace, coming on top of his amazing life of Margaret Mitchell, Southern Daughter, puts Darden Pyron in the very first rank of American biographers. His books are as exciting as the lives of his subjects."—Tom Wolfe "Fascinating, thoughtful, exhaustive, and well-written, this book will serve as the standard biography of a complex icon of American popular culture."—Library Journal