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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.
Author: Liz Brown
Paperback Published 25 May 2021 400 pages
“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
“Some years ago, Liz Brown opened a drawer at her grandmother’s house and found a photograph that led her into a head-spinning real-life film noir: a tale of wealth, greed, corruption, fraud, lies, lust, and every other variation of the seven deadly sins, embodied in a gloriously grotesque cast of characters. Amid the mayhem, the shadowy figure of Harrison Post emerges as a phantom hero — charmed at the start, doomed by the end, and, now, resurrected by Brown’s spectacular, empathetic feat of storytelling. A thoroughly astounding book.” —Alex Ross, author of Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
“With a vividness that borders on the uncanny and an insightfulness that's frankly dazzling, Twilight Man offers a striking tale of self-invention, dissolution, empire and grief. Echoes of Chandler, of Fitzgerald, and of Oscar Wilde abound, but in the end Liz Brown's utter assurance and her relentless intelligence makes this story entirely her own. An essential work of queer-, and of California, history.” —Matthew Specktor, author of Always Crashing in The Same Car