Partner Dougie Crane
Queer Places:
1949 Taft Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90068
David Hanna (September 11, 1917 – June 21, 1993) was an American author, entertainment journalist, and publicist.[1][2][3] Among the Hollywood gay couples whose names Mike Connolly placed within spitting distance of each other were producer Harriet Parsons and dancer Evelyn Farney, Jacque Mapes and producer Ross Hunter, Tom Hatcher and screenwriter Arthur Laurents, and Frank McCarthy and Rupert Allan. In one item, director Mitch Leisen and singer Billy Daniel were actually adjacent to each other, but as a three-way "date" with Hedda Hopper. Billy Haines and Jimmy Shields got into the same sentence at least four times; since Shields had never been a film industry name, the mere mention of him was meant to convey gay information to insiders, especially when Connolly scooped Shields's secret facelift. The same held true when Connolly applauded writer David Hanna's genial cocktail party "at Ivy Wilson's place"; Wilson had been president of the Hollywood Women's Press Club, but her son Dougie Crane was Hanna's longtime partner, a connection Connolly intended his readers to understand. On the other hand, if a gay couple was not affiliated with Hollywood, Connolly could relax his rules, as he did with the famous writer Lucius Beebe and his partner Charles Clegg, publishers of the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise. When Beebe and Clegg came to town in their ornate private rail-road car, the Gold Coast, Connolly wrote about their joint ownership of it and the cocktail party they hosted in it, which he attended, with no compunction.
David Hanna was noted for his biographies of celebrities such as Ava Gardner (for whom he acted as publicist during the 1950s),[4] Elvis, John Wayne, and Robert Redford.
Born in Philadelphia but raised in New York, he lived and worked in Hollywood from 1935–1952, after which he returned to New York.[2][5] In the 1940s he created the CBS radio series Tapestries of Life. He served as an assistant managing editor at The Hollywood Reporter and a columnist and drama critic for the Los Angeles Daily News. He was a publicist on such films as Moulin Rouge, War and Peace, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. He also contributed to Film Bulletin, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, and London Express.[1]
Hanna also wrote novels and true crime non-fiction. He occasionally used the pseudonyms Gloria Laine and Antony James.[6]
He died of cancer on June 21, 1993 at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, aged 75.[1]
My published books:
