A perkier bit at the beginning of a Three Stooges comedy, Restless Knights (February 20, 1935), has Brennan playing their father, decked out in a large night cap and a fake white beard, lying on his d...
A letter from Brian Brivati, Gaitskill’s biographer, led Michael to describe an incident at Porto Fino. On holiday there, Michael and Jill ran into Gaitskill, who was accompanied by one of Michael fri...
May 17–18: In her New York apartment, Marilyn practices singing Happy Birthday for the president.
But if you are a biographer, you know that some of those people the biographer so fulsomely thanks cannot possibly be that good. In our contemporary language, we’d have to say those acknowledgments ju...
A Private Life of Michael Foot is an effort to show how a biographer struggles to tell his own story, even as family and friends cherish differing narratives about that same subject.
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 slept on a sofa bed in Michael’s library. Each night before retiring, I would go through a shelf or pile of books (his only filing system) filled with letters and reviews and notes. Every night brou...
I noticed that he wasn’t looking at me while we talked. After we finished the take, I asked him where he’d been looking. Your ear, he replied. Why? I asked in surprise. Because that way more of my fac...
I mentioned a television documentary Julie and I had watched at Gilly’s house and that Jill remarked on how his Park Street flat was filled with women’s cosmetics and perfume bottles in the bathroom....
Of an entirely different order is Brennan’s magnificent performance as Pop Gruber, an aging grifter in Nobody Lives Forever (November 1, 1946), starring John Garfield as a con man, Nick Blake, who eve...
I am not the first biographer to write a memoir about his work. But after reading the reminiscences of my colleagues, I am still looking for the kind of insider look this book offers.
How did Brennan achieve this mythic status, this power over not just audiences but also his fellow actors? Today, the question remains unanswered, and this figure key to understanding the power of Hol...
But the Butler-Brennan collaboration splendidly informs The Prince and the Pirate, a Samuel Goldwyn million-dollar Technicolor production that spoofs the swashbuckling pictures of the 1930s that made...
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...
It’s time to rip the veneer off the works and days of biographers’ lives.
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...
Becoming a Biographer: Marilyn Monroe Made Me Do It
Whether it was Byron, Wells, Hazlitt, Swift, or himself, Michael saw mating with women through a romantic screen that ennobled him and his heroes, no matter what grief they caused others.
March 7: With May Reis, Marilyn in mourning clothes attends the funeral of Arthur Miller’s mother, Augusta, who died of a heart attack. Marilyn offers Arthur Miller her condolences and consoles his fa...
It was rare for Walter Brennan to express more than satisfaction at work well done. But Three Godfathers (March 6, 1936) was something special. With its combination of an unusual director, Richard Bol...
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