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...
Short of funds during a period in 1928, Brennan agreed to do a stunt: driving off a pier in San Diego into forty feet of water. I had to be doing 45 miles an hour, he later told an interviewer, and th...
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...
Michael, by his own admission, was a hero-worshipper, and even when he admitted his hero’s faults, he could not seem to then re-factor his hero worship.
May 17–18: In her New York apartment, Marilyn practices singing Happy Birthday for the president.
June 26: David Conover photographs Norma Jeane for Yank magazine.
January 28: Marilyn attends a March of Dimes fashion show at the Waldorf Astoria, held to benefit children with polio. She is photoraphed with several children, smiling and talking with them, as well...
I went to this party for Francis Wheen’s book [on Marx]. I went and sat on a chair—at these places I can’t stand up and so I sat there and a woman came up to me—I gather from the Telegraph. It was jus...
I think Walter Brennan was the greatest example of a personality that I’ve ever used. . . . When I was in trouble, I called on Brennan. He always came through. —HOWARD HAWKS IN CONVERSATION WITH JOSEP...
Friendship was, I think, a deep enchantment for Michael. He built up his favourite as a nonpareil. He touted you. But if you broke the spell, he would erupt with fury and then subside in a silence tha...
February 15: Marilyn accompanies Kazan and Miller to Santa Barbara for a preview of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Kazan. Marilyn moves out of Natasha Lytess’s apartment and into another apartm...
Becoming Roy Bean was an all-consuming project. Walter worked late into the night making the old fellow come alive. Weeks of preparation went into his performance. I have literally become that man and...
April 25: Billy Wilder sends a telegram to Marilyn expressing his delight that she will appear in Some Like It Hot. She is to receive her usual $100,000 fee, plus 10 percent of the profits. She is pho...
Period (1981-83), when Michael was Labour Party leader, had been devastating: Some things helped me—the Byron Society—Byron helped me to recover from that. He never gave in. Just after the election, I...
My reliance on fair use in the Hellman biography became a template for how I was to approach my unauthorized biographies of Martha Gellhorn, Susan Sontag, and Sylvia Plath.
Devotion that drove other actors out of the tent. Although Brennan’s political convictions were decidedly conservative, he remained outside the political arena, which perhaps accounts for why he playe...
[T]HE LEATHER, SUN-DRENCHED FACE THAT MOST COMMONLY HELPED tame the wild frontier was that of Walter Brennan, writes critic Manny Pacheco. Not Gary Cooper, not John Wayne, not Randolph Scott—or any ot...
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...
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...
May 31: Marilyn shoots scenes with Wally Cox, who is playing a shoe salesman. She makes thirty-eight takes of four camera set-ups (about two-and-a-half pages of the screenplay). June