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....
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...
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...
She sees you in her diaries as this fiery backbencher, and then you get in the cabinet and you’re behaving (to her) differently; that is, you seemed to be more of a compromiser. She found this almost...
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...
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...
Talk of Vanessa reminded Michael of the terrible 1963 accident. Vanessa and Jason (in the backseat) had escaped harm. We were saved by the Health Service, Michael believed. Taken to the Hereford hospi...
Talk turned to current affairs. When the Bush-Gore election came up, Michael noted, We discovered that to the credit of Gore he said his favourite book was Le Rouge et Le Noir. Stendhal was one of Mic...
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...
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...
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...
Appearing. After seeing the completed film, Brennan thanked Goldwyn for persuading him to do it. It’s stories like these, he told Hedda Hopper, that make you realize it isn’t all beer and skittles in...
The next day, Michael introduced a new subject: One of the reasons I’ve never been in favour of writing autobiography is because you can’t tell the truth. I agreed. All the great autobiographers have...
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 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...
Then Brennan finally was awarded a bravura role, winning his second Academy Award for his Technicolor performance as Peter Goodwin in Kentucky (December 30, 1938). Goodwin is an unreconstructed Confed...
Then he landed the part of Old Atrocity. For the first time, Brennan brought home a whole script, just as he had promised his family he would do one day. He cried, and as his daughter remembered on Th...
Then one day, Walter looked Ruth in the eye and abruptly announced that he was going to become an actor. He joined a generation of World War I veterans who, failing to make a killing in real estate, e...
Then we got round to Michael’s health. He’s reached a rather difficult stage, Julie said and began to talk about Michael’s digressions, his seeming inability to get to the point or stay on it. It was...
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...
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