By 1950, Brennan was settling into a schedule that saw him making three films a year, giving him more time on his ranch and with a new business he started in Joseph, a 487-seat movie theater that open...
Brennan’s contribution to The Wedding Night (March 8, 1935), starring Gary Cooper and Anna Sten—the Russian beauty Samuel Goldwyn was promoting as the next European import to rival Greta Garbo and Mar...
Brennan was as wily as many of the characters he played, which meant he finessed the constraints of the studio system, mocked studio bosses—even playing tricks on them—and took possession of his roles...
Brennan was also impressed with Lee Marvin during a scene in which Doc Velle offers his hearse to Macreedy as a getaway vehicle. Suddenly, Marvin appears and then nonchalantly walks over to the vehicl...
Biography deserves its Marlow, one who flinches not and is willing to see the horror as well as the hope in the biographer’s heart.
BY 1928, WALTER BRENNAN HAD APPEARED IN DOZENS OF UNCREDited roles as a customer in a store, a lunch counterman, a lumberjack, a yacht crewman, a cashier, a gangster, a pool hall shark, a ranch forema...
April 29: Fox holds the world premiere of River of No Return in Denver.
April 26: Marilyn attends the Newspaper Public Convention luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria. She is photographed with Hedda Hopper and J. Edgar Hoover.
April 18: Ethel Dougherty finds a job for Norma Jeane as a typist at Radioplane, a munitions factory that makes drones. But at a speed of only thirty-five words a minute, she does not do well and is a...
After dinner, Michael vouchsafed to me that he had had an encounter with Barbara Castle at a recent Tribune event: [MF] You told me about what she had done ... in your case. [Castle had asked for a fe...
Absalom, Absalom! That novel is an object lesson for biographers because it is about the obsession with knowing what really happened in the past, as well as about the utter futility of ever coming to...
On an outdoor set, he watched a donkey braying at all the wrong moments, angering the sound technicians, who could not get the animal to perform on cue. (Walter loved to tell this story, and of course...
We spent the morning discussing Michael’s role at Tribune, guiding the journal’s policy toward endorsing the creation of NATO and establishing an anti-Communist stance earlier than most other leftwing...
Ursula wanted to know about how Michael was coping with Jill’s death. Ursula knew that he had a regiment of women looking after him. I told him about Emma, the housekeeper-cook who had been married to...
Under contract to Sam Goldwyn for a decade beginning in 1935, he nevertheless saw himself as independent—in part because so many studios used him, and he was not part of the star machine If you’re not...
Tony? Michael spoke into phone in an unusually quiet manner. Michael Foot here. How are you? Can I wish you a happy new year?. I’m ringing about someone who’s writing a biography of Jill and I wondere...
Tony sometimes talks as if he is the only just man. ... He’s a very persuasive speaker. You think he believes every word of it and I think he does, actually. That’s why he comes across. There’s no fak...
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...
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...
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...