February 9: In the company of Laurence Olivier, Marilyn calls a press conference in the Terrace Room of the Plaza Hotel to announce their joint project, The Sleeping Prince (later titled The Prince an...
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.
February 10: Norma Jeane sells her white piano to Ana Lower.
May 28: Shooting begins on There’s No Business Like Show Business. Marilyn’s director, Walter Lang, does not seem to know how to handle her. Donald O’Connor, Marilyn’s love interest in the film, recal...
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...
[CR] What about Barbara Castle. You never had a sexual relationship with her? [MF] No. Never. I wanted to, maybe, but in 1938 we went across the channel together, waiting to start on our new jobs. I h...
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...
Obviously fond of Jill, Paul remembered a time they were all together in a car arguing, and Jill whispered in Paul’s ear, Michael thinks he can win an argument by how loud he shouts.
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...
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...
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...
Never meant to be more than a B picture entertainment produced on the Universal International backlot and at the Iverson Ranch (a five-hundred-acre family property often used for location shoots), it...
Michael had been an all-day walker for much of his life, but at eighty-seven, the rises robbed him of air and he had to stop frequently to tell his anecdotes. Yet he was still taking buses and clatter...
I was beginning to feel uneasy about falling into the authorised biographer’s trap of becoming privy to secrets that could not be divulged. I could see that I was heading toward some kind of confronta...
Walter Brennan was now making as much as $5,000 a week, an incredible sum for a character actor, and he was in a position to fulfill a cherished dream. He bought a twelve-thousand-acre ranch near Jose...
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...
Unvarnished treatment of real people, especially literary figures, can still invite outrage from critics, while those same literary figures, skewering their family and friends in novel after novel, ta...
Richard Avedon photographs Marilyn, her torso covered in feathers (her sexual plumage) and wearing high heels, her left leg bent and brought up to her body so that the leg projects outward horizontall...
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...
In one comic scene, Brennan and Cooper share the same bed, with Brennan’s arm, at one point, draped over Cooper’s. It is tempting to see Lillian Hellman’s hand in such scenes, since she was assigned t...
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