When Michael greeted me at the entrance to their home only three months after Jill’s death, his pallid complexion shocked me. I thought that I had arrived at death’s door. He appeared to have aged mor...
We spoke of other innovations—the fax machine, for example. Michael listened politely and though I offered to buy him one, emphasising how easy they were to operate, he could not be convinced. The wir...
We read Byron’s letters there [in Venice] together. Then we were going up in the world, having the bloody government pay for our holidays. . . Venice revived him [Byron]. It restored him, Michael insi...
Walter Brennan was now making as much as $5,000 a week, an incredible sum for a character actor, and he was in a position to fulfill a cherished dream. He bought a twelve-thousand-acre ranch near Jose...
To say that Ruth Brennan was at the center of her husband’s life is no understatement. He never disparaged her supporting role, never spoke like some men do of the wife, as if referring to a possessio...
Thomas Carlyle once complained about mealy-mouthed biographers. I’ve done my best not to be one of them.
The picture was Brennan’s, but it was no good to him if Cooper, his co-star, did not hold his own. It was characteristic of Walter Brennan to want Cooper not only to be happy making the picture, but a...
The general unacceptability of this story is emphasized by its overall low tone and by the suggestion that your sympathetic lead, Morgan, is a murderer, who is permitted to go off unpunished. The char...
So how could Walter Brennan possibly dominate Gary Cooper? It would be virtually unheard of in Hollywood to reverse the natural order of things and have a character actor outshine the star. Who would...
Second only to the royals in Michael’s gallery of good-for-nothings were, of course, the Tories. John Major occupied a special page in Michael’s book of bad ones. The trouble began when Suraj Paul, a...
Scholars estimate that Boswell spent something like four hundred days in Samuel Johnson’s company. Over a period of three years and ten trips to England, I lived for something like one hundred days wi...
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...
On the set, Walter provoked Spencer Tracy’s ire. Katie (Katharine Hepburn) didn’t have good judgment or common sense, Brennan told Tracy. Walter was referring to her attacks on Senator Joseph McCarthy...
Michael was never one to discuss relationships in depth. I would have to press him again and again—usually in response to what others said—to get him to open up. His pauses were blanks I had to fill i...
Michael had an aching need to show the world what Jill had not been able to display herself, much as Thomas Carlyle had done for his late wife Jane and H. G. Wells had done for his Jane after she died...
Michael and Jill were connoisseurs of personality, transcending politics. They loved Randolph Churchill, who ran two losing campaigns against Michael in Plymouth and they adored Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs...
March 1: Marilyn makes an appointment at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, complaining of appendicitis, but director Howard Hawks insists that she return to the set of Monkey Business, and her operation is...
June 2: Filming of Niagara begins in Buffalo, with Marilyn playing Rose Loomis, the femme fatale murdered by her co-star, Joseph Cotten. Marilyn stays at the General Brock Hotel in Niagara Falls. Jose...
June 22: Life publishes They Fired Marilyn: Her Dip Lives On, photographs of her nude swimming scene for Something’s Got to Give.
June 18: A rejuvenated Marilyn resumes plans for designing and decorating her Mexican-style home, accepting the first shipment of furniture from Mexico. June 18–19: Realizing its mistake in firing Mar...