Scandalous Women

I've been an incredibly bad blogger lately and for that I must apologize.  Since 2011, when Scandalous Women was published, I've been working on and submitting proposals to my agent for a follow-up book, which unfortunately has yet to happen. I'm also working on some fiction projects which is also taking up the time that I spent doing research. So that's where my mindset has been over the past two years.  My goal for 2015 is to try and blog more often, at least two or three times a month. It will probably be a mix of reviews as well as new content. At least that's the plan. One of my Christmas presents to myself this year, besides the DVD of Season Five of Downton Abbey, was Lucinda Hawksley's biography of Queen Victoria's daughter Princess Louise (1848-1939). The book was in all the English newspapers last year when I was in England because of Hawksley's belief that Princess Louise might have had a child   with her brother's tutor while she was unw...

The Tiger Queens: The Women of Genghis Khan Author:  Stephanie Thornton Publisher:  NAL Trade (November 4, 2014) How Acquired:  From the Publisher through HFVBT From the back cover:  In the late twelfth century, across the sweeping Mongolian grasslands, brilliant, charismatic Temujin ascends to power, declaring himself the Great, or Genghis, Khan. But it is the women who stand beside him who ensure his triumph....  After her mother foretells an ominous future for her, gifted Borte becomes an outsider within her clan. When she seeks comfort in the arms of aristocratic traveler Jamuka, she discovers he is the blood brother of Temujin, the man who agreed to marry her and then abandoned her long before they could wed.  Temujin will return and make Borte his queen, yet it will take many women to safeguard his fragile new kingdom. Their daughter, the fierce Alaqai, will ride and shoot an arrow as well as any man. Fatima, an elegant Persian captive, will transfor...

Title:  Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood Author: William J. Mann Hardcover:  480 pages Publisher:  Harper (October 14, 2014) Language:  English How Acquired:  Edelweiss What it's About:   The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this juicy, untold Hollywood story: an addictive true tale of ambition, scandal, intrigue, murder, and the creation of the modern film industry.  By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America’s new favorite pastime, and one of the nation’s largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood’s glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies—including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now. My thoughts:   I've been obsessed with the mu...

“I turned a corner and met my fate,” Edith Bolling Galt Wilson “I need you, as a boy needs his sweetheart, and a strong man his helpmate and heart’s comrade,” Woodrow Wilson to Edith Bolling Galt during their courtship. What did Mrs. Galt do when President Wilson proposed to her? She fell out of bed. – Popular joke in 1915 This is the tale of one of the most romantic love stories in White House history.  No, I’m not talking about Olivia Pope and Fitzgerald Grant from Scandal .  I’m talking about the love story between Edith Bolling Galt and Woodrow Wilson. Their story is not only one of the most romantic in American history, but also one of the most scandalous and intriguing.  It encompasses death, grief, forbidden romance, , passion, politics, war, and a cover-up perpetrated by the First Lady of the United States.  At a time when women couldn’t vote on a national level, rarely held jobs other than domestic or schoolteacher, for a brief time a woman ran the White Hou...

“Yeah, I think I’ll be remembered as the voice of the 60’s…Andy Warhol, the Beatles, and me!” – Jacqueline Susann. I was first introduced to Jacqueline Susann by my father of all people. Oh, he didn’t mean to.  One summer he took my niece and me to the movies in Rosendale, the little town near our house upstate.  Back then, movies took a long time before they played the cinema in Rosendale.  The only movie playing was the movie version of the Susann novel Once is not Enough .  Apparently my father didn’t check the rating on this movie, so he had no idea that it was rated R. Not exactly the type of movie that you want to take a 10 or an 11 year old to but my niece and I were riveted at the story of January Wayne (played by Deborah Raffin) and her obsession/Electra complex with her father Mike Wayne (played Kurt Douglas).  I’m not sure how much of it we understood, although I do remember Brenda Vaccaro talking about all the plastic surgery her character had had, ...

Today is the release date for author Leslie Carroll's 6th book of non-fiction entitled Inglorious Royal Marriages. Scandalous Women is happy to welcome Leslie once again to the blog. About the book: Why does it seem that the marriages of so many monarchs are often made in hell? And yet we can’t stop reading about them! To satisfy your schadenfreude, INGLORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES offers a panoply of the most spectacular mismatches in five hundred years of royal history….some of which are mentioned below. When her monkish husband, England’s Lancastrian Henry VI, became completely catatonic, the unpopular French-born Margaret of Anjou led his army against the troops of their enemy, the Duke of York. Margaret Tudor, her niece Mary I, and Catherine of Braganza were desperately in love with chronically unfaithful husbands—but at least they weren’t murdered by them, as were two of the Medici princesses. King Charles II’s beautiful, high-spirited sister “Minette” wed Louis XIV’s younger broth...