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...
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...
William Brennan did not live to see his son, now a remarkable transformative actor, win his first Academy Award, for Come and Get It, the first time the award for supporting actor was given. Edward Ar...
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...
There is value, too, in showing the rough edges of biography, the stops and starts, in an unapologetic fashion. I wonder if there has ever been a biography that has treated a British political and lit...
Obviously fond of Jill, Paul remembered a time they were all together in a car arguing, and Jill whispered in Paul’s ear, Michael thinks he can win an argument by how loud he shouts.
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...
No other supporting player won three Academy Awards, and you would be hard-pressed to name another character actor whose performances frequently overwhelmed those of ostensible leads like Joel McCrea...
Neither John Wayne nor Walter Brennan grew up in the cowboy West, and though Brennan became a rancher, he did not pretend to be his characters the way Wayne sometimes did. Walter’s son Andy remembered...
My legs are not quite properly operating and I’m having physiotherapy every Tuesday, Michael said after Emma had beaten him to the phone. I accompanied him on one of these sessions, where he had to wa...
The Thatcher/Major years, as far as Michael was concerned, had wrecked the world that the 1945 Labour landslide had inaugurated. Shortly after the incident with Major, Michael traveled to Manchester f...
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 often spoke of his father and their book discussions. Isaac Foot would visit London nearly every fortnight, Michael recalled, and they would see each other. Michael rarely spoke of anyone else...
Just then I felt I must confront the question of whether I was to do Michael’s biography as well as Jill’s. From our first meeting, Julie had been urging me to do so, to make sure I got my place in li...
Just then Michael was exercised about a letter he had received from Michael Scammell, Arthur Koestler’s authorised biographer, raising doubts that his subject had actually raped Jill. Certain of her f...
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...
Like other actors who worked for Goldwyn, Brennan was fond of repeating famous Goldwynisms, such as, in two words: im-possible, and include me out. Then there was the time Goldwyn called studio head D...
Michael’s career as a government minister made him a target of the tabloids. The Daily Mail ran a series of articles claiming that during a hospital stay Michael had received special treatment. But Mi...
Michael was the male partner in a dance, but he did not know how to lead. Or rather, he led by default, since Jill did not challenge his authority. He simply filled a vacuum. As a political man, he wo...
Michael was astonished to see Reagan reading his speech off of the teleprompter. I’d never seen it before. Everybody does it now. But it’s an outrageous thing. It absolutely destroys the idea that the...
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