April 22: I’m a bookworm and proud of it, Marilyn tells columnist Erskine Johnson.
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...
April 16: An alarmed Weinstein tells screenwriter Walter Bernstein that Marilyn wants major changes in the script. She rejects one section as sentimental schmaltz.
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...
[CR] This book is about how marriages stay together, even when there are these strains and tensions. [MF] That’s right.
With the Hellman biography, I encountered for the first time, the issue of authorization, a rather quaint notion that no modern historian would take seriously. Who gets to tell history?
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...
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...
The education Walter valued occurred during deliveries he began making by horse drawn carriage by the time he was eleven. All his life, Walter Brennan enjoyed delivering the goods, meeting people and...
Talk about Michael sex’s life segued into a discussion of Arthur Koestler’s rape of Jill, a story that Michael himself first revealed in a review of a book about Koestler. He caused an uproar in the p...
Sam Goldwyn had a long-standing business partnership with Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio making Tobacco Road. As a contract player, Walter had to do what he was told. The system usually suited him....
On one of his trips with Jill they visited Montaigne’s tower, twenty miles outside Bordeaux, said Michael, who liked to pinpoint the author’s biographical geography. We also went about to several of t...
Nothing much changed in Walter Brennan’s domestic life even after he won his Academy Award and received rave reviews for both Come and Get It and Banjo on My Knee. He remembered hurrying home with his...
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...