February 10: Ladies of the Chorus is released. Tibor Krekes in the Motion Picture Herald gives Marilyn her first review: One of the brightest spots is Miss Monroe’s singing. She is pretty, and with he...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
February 13: On its cover Se Og Hor (Denmark) features a shot of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Marilyn (dressed in a fur stole and low-cut dress) smiling over a large manuscript.
Michael was never one to discuss relationships in depth. I would have to press him again and again—usually in response to what others said—to get him to open up. His pauses were blanks I had to fill i...
May 23: Cukor shoots Marilyn’s nude swimming scene from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., with a twenty-minute break for lunch. She takes off her flesh-colored bathing suit and swims in the nude. Photographers...
May 27: Marilyn poses nude for Tom Kelley’s calendar photographs while listening to Artie Shaw. She is given a fifty-dollar flat fee for signing a contract, using the name Mona Monroe. Altogether Kell...
May 29: Marilyn finishes shooting Bus Stop. She appears on a Look cover and inside in New Marilyn. Josh Logan takes Marilyn to dinner at the home of William Goetz, who is producing Logan’s next movie,...
Michael was a gallant campaigner—not just a politician, but a human being who tried to make every day an event. He would rise as high as possible to the occasion, drawing on whatever last reserves he...
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...
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...
It’s time to rip the veneer off the works and days of biographers’ lives.
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...
In Come Next Spring (March 9, 1956) and Goodbye, My Lady (May 12, 1956) Brennan was able to rise above the pedestrian roles that followed Bad Day at Black Rock by perfecting the persona of the small t...
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...
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...
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...
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