Becoming Roy Bean was an all-consuming project. Walter worked late into the night making the old fellow come alive. Weeks of preparation went into his performance. I have literally become that man and...
In contemporary fiction, the criminal is usually the biographer.
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...
March 4: Elia Kazan sends a telegram to Fox promising to arrive on April 1 to work with screenwriter Calder Willingham on a film starring Marilyn. Fox officially notifies Marilyn that she is assigned...
For me, the most important thing is the overwhelming desire to write about a particular figure. That usually means I already have—even if I can’t articulate it yet—a vision of my subject. I have alrea...
March 6: Emmeline Snively, head of the Blue Book Modeling Agency, sends Norma Jeane to Joseph Jasgur for test shots. In The Birth of Marilyn, Jeannie Sakol reports Jasgur’s first impressions: What he...
Short of funds during a period in 1928, Brennan agreed to do a stunt: driving off a pier in San Diego into forty feet of water. I had to be doing 45 miles an hour, he later told an interviewer, and th...
Asked Michael if he thought she could have become the Labour Party leader: I don’t think so, really, Michael answered decisively. What stopped her? I asked. The business of understanding other people’...
March 5: Marilyn flies from San Francisco to Los Angeles for the Photoplay Awards dinner. Joe flies to New York on business.
I was beginning to feel uneasy about falling into the authorised biographer’s trap of becoming privy to secrets that could not be divulged. I could see that I was heading toward some kind of confronta...
The world seemed to turn on Michael’s likes and dislikes—as I learned when I mentioned I was giving a talk about Dr. Johnson at Cambridge. Michael objected to him as though Johnson was just another To...
We were invited to some of these royal functions, Michael said. Jill wanted to see what they were like. They had gone to Prince Charles’s wedding to Diana. There was a lot of nonsense about it. We had...
Like Drums Across the River, Bad Day at Black Rock (January 7, 1955), is a revisionist work—this time examining the seamy side, the racism and thuggery—of postwar America. Brennan, looking much slimme...
By the time he was six, Walter was luring tramps and other unsavory characters home with the promise of a meal. He loved to hear their tall tales. A year later, imitating an Irish neighbor, he began c...
March 7: With May Reis, Marilyn in mourning clothes attends the funeral of Arthur Miller’s mother, Augusta, who died of a heart attack. Marilyn offers Arthur Miller her condolences and consoles his fa...
Richard Avedon photographs Marilyn, her torso covered in feathers (her sexual plumage) and wearing high heels, her left leg bent and brought up to her body so that the leg projects outward horizontall...
Never meant to be more than a B picture entertainment produced on the Universal International backlot and at the Iverson Ranch (a five-hundred-acre family property often used for location shoots), it...
Becoming a Biographer: Marilyn Monroe Made Me Do It
[CR] What about Barbara Castle. You never had a sexual relationship with her? [MF] No. Never. I wanted to, maybe, but in 1938 we went across the channel together, waiting to start on our new jobs. I h...
That was how I met Mrs. Thatcher, Michael said. It must have been 1976, just before she was elected leader of the Conservative Party. Michael had just given a speech: I went up to look at it, and ther...
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