Twilight Man
Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire
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4.5 • 14 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"Twilight Man is biography, romance, and nonfiction mystery, carrying with it the bite of fiction." -- Los Angeles Review of Books
“In Twilight Man, Liz Brown uncovers a noir fairytale, a new glimpse into the opulent Gilded Age empire of the Clark family.” —Bill Dedman, co-author of The New York Times bestseller Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
The unbelievable true story of Harrison Post--the enigmatic lover of one of the richest men in 1920s Hollywood--and the battle for a family fortune.
In the booming 1920s, William Andrews Clark Jr. was one of the richest, most respected men in Los Angeles. The son of the mining tycoon known as "The Copper King of Montana," Clark launched the Los Angeles Philharmonic and helped create the Hollywood Bowl. He was also a man with secrets, including a lover named Harrison Post. A former salesclerk, Post enjoyed a lavish existence among Hollywood elites, but the men's money--and their homosexuality--made them targets, for the district attorney, their employees and, in Post's case, his own family. When Clark died suddenly, Harrison Post inherited a substantial fortune--and a wealth of trouble. From Prohibition-era Hollywood to Nazi prison camps to Mexico City nightclubs, Twilight Man tells the story of an illicit love and the battle over a family estate that would destroy one man's life.
Harrison Post was forgotten for decades, but after a chance encounter with his portrait, Liz Brown, Clark's great-grandniece, set out to learn his story. Twilight Man is more than just a biography. It is an exploration of how families shape their own legacies, and the lengths they will go in order to do so.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An unearthed family secret prompts an investigation into the closeted life of a 1920s Hollywood millionaire in this deeply researched yet sluggish debut biography from journalist Brown. After uncovering evidence that her grandmother's uncle, L.A. Philharmonic founder William Andrews Clark Jr., had a longtime male lover named Harrison Post, Brown set out to "recuperate a lost gay history as a way to assert my own queer lineage." She describes Clark's background as the son of a Montana senator and copper tycoon and Post's Jewish heritage and exotic good looks ("shades of Rudolph Valentino"). They met when Post waited on the older, wealthier man at a luxury boutique store in San Francisco. First taken in as "a ward," Post later became Clark's "secretary." ("You could enter a higher class, it seemed, by catering to it," Brown writes.) Post lived as a kept man surrounded by an "aura of wealth and intrigue," and inherited a small fortune after Clark's death, though he descended into alcoholism amid numerous personal and family troubles. Brown has clearly done her homework, but the romance largely happens off the page, resulting in more facts than feelings. This well-intentioned effort has flashes of inspiration but never takes off.
Customer Reviews
A queer history buff’s must read
A stunning tale about queer love and survival cobbled together from the few remaining tidbits of lives lived in the shadows during an era not so long ago when even journal entries were subject to self censorship. How many other biographies have been penned by other less sensitive authors unaware of the coded language of the past?