In contemporary fiction, the criminal is usually the biographer.
June 19: Sunday at 2:30 p.m., Reverend Benjamin Lingenfelder of the Christian Science church marries Norma Jeane and twenty-one-year-old James Dougherty at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Chester Howell. Che...
February 29: Marilyn, accompanied by her lawyer, Irving Stein, finally appears in court, and Judge Griffin fines her fifty-six dollars for three traffic violations: driving without a license, driving...
But if you are a biographer, you know that some of those people the biographer so fulsomely thanks cannot possibly be that good. In our contemporary language, we’d have to say those acknowledgments ju...
May 26: Filming of Niagara begins.
February 9: Gladys enters Rockhaven Sanitarium. Marilyn pays $250 a month to support her mother. Marilyn is honored as A Rising Star at the Photoplay Awards Dinner at the Crystal Room of the Beverly H...
February 20: Bob Alden writes from Korea on New York Times stationery to Stan (not otherwise identified): The girl was just wonderful out here. She put every ounce of herself into everything that she...
Cooper caught a break with a featured role as a doomed aviator in Wings (1927), but Walter remained on the periphery, observing the unwritten rule that extras did not consort with stars, yet taking pr...
We had a lengthy discussion of the difficulties I had had working on other biographies and the efforts made by Martha Gellhorn, Susan Sontag and others to prevent publication. Gellhorn’s representativ...
Recently Michael had encountered Salman Rushdie at a party given by Geoffrey Robertson, the lawyer who had secured Michael’s libel judgment against Rupert Murdoch’s Times. Jill and Michael had install...
May 15–16: Marilyn arrives punctually and works through the customary starts and stops of production without complaint. She watches the rushes and realizes that she is sensational—to employ the word t...
Like the best character actors, Brennan brought a badly needed realism to the screen, where it served as an antidote to the soft-focus lighting and toupee-topped stars that romanticized movies.
June 3: Life publishes Unlikely Pair Make Great Match.
May 24: Marilyn and Miller leave the Rauhs’ home and travel by train back to New York City.
May 21: Marilyn reports to Fox for color and wardrobe tests for Niagara.
January 16: Fox announces shooting of Something’s Got to Give will not begin until March 15.
February 5: Marilyn is photographed in a two-shot with Carson McCullers, kissing her at McCullers’s home in Nyack, New York, and later with McCullers and Isak Dinesen, with the threesome seated and lo...
Michael, by his own admission, was a hero-worshipper, and even when he admitted his hero’s faults, he could not seem to then re-factor his hero worship.
May 20: Marilyn visits the Louella Parsons radio show.
May 17–18: In her New York apartment, Marilyn practices singing Happy Birthday for the president.