February 12: Nunnally Johnson completes a new draft of Something’s Got to Give. Marilyn later writes on the script, We’ve got a dog here. She pencils in several suggestions and rejects some lines as n...
February 10: With Joe DiMaggio’s help, Marilyn is released from Payne Whitney. Ralph Roberts picks Marilyn up. She sits in the backseat with Dr. Kris, and Marilyn berates Kris for betraying her trust....
Did these two actors, both quite conservative, see the parallels between Norton and studio moguls like Sam Goldwyn? Did Norton’s private police force suggest to these men who began as extras the incip...
By the time he was six, Walter was luring tramps and other unsavory characters home with the promise of a meal. He loved to hear their tall tales. A year later, imitating an Irish neighbor, he began c...
Brennan often cited Goodbye, My Lady as one of his favorite films. Certainly it was a labor of love in the close collaboration with the director, William Wellman, better known for his action films and...
Back to Jill’s diary and her comments on Michael’s sartorial difficulties: Jennie Lee used to say, ‘Don’t let the Tories dress Michael.’ He got a big kick out of that. She also mentions meeting Denis...
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...
Asked Michael if he thought she could have become the Labour Party leader: I don’t think so, really, Michael answered decisively. What stopped her? I asked. The business of understanding other people’...
[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...
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.
We were invited to some of these royal functions, Michael said. Jill wanted to see what they were like. They had gone to Prince Charles’s wedding to Diana. There was a lot of nonsense about it. We had...
Watching the nuances in Brennan’s performances—especially in roles that would seem to allow for little variation—is to appreciate once again his incomparable place in Hollywood history as the consumma...
Walter also kept himself going by keeping an account book recording his earnings, starting from the first day he showed up on a movie set. He liked to turn the pages and see the entries for $7.50 unti...
Walter Brennan was always in demand and gave the lie to the Hollywood cliché that you are only as good as your last picture. He never delivered anything less than a competent performance, but he never...
Walter Brennan spent virtually his entire life making motion pictures, perfecting a persona, and embodying a range of characters that he began to observe and imitate during his earliest days on the do...
This is not a conventional biography. I rely not on documents, but almost exclusively on recorded interviews and memories of Michael Foot constituting a raw record of conversations not smoothed over b...
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...
Sensation Hunters (January 3, 1934), features Brennan as a stuttering waiter in a nightclub, whose scenes usually end before he can finish a sentence. Dressed in a short cutaway jacket with a lock of...
On the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, Walter Brennan embodied fundamental decency and democratic virtues that made him indispensable to Cooper’s signature Everyman roles. Brennan’s perfo...