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
Thomas Carlyle once complained about mealy-mouthed biographers. I’ve done my best not to be one of them.
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...
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...
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...
For me, the most important thing is the overwhelming desire to write about a particular figure. That usually means I already have—even if I can’t articulate it yet—a vision of my subject. I have alrea...
February 24: Marilyn and Joe return to the mainland.
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...
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...
February 25: With Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Marilyn attends a reception for Princess Antonia De Braganza of Portugal at the home of Mexican actor Dennis Bourke. Some reports say she cancels at the l...
February 26: At the French Film Institute in New York City, Marilyn receives the Crystal Star as Best Foreign Actress for her performance in The Prince and the Showgirl. At the party afterward, she is...
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...
February 26: Picture Week features a smiling Marilyn in black-and-white, dressed casually in a loose blouse, resting the right side of her face on her hands and her upper body on her elbows. A Glimpse...
For all Cooper’s fame and success, he was as insecure as anyone in Hollywood, where you were judged not by your body of work but by what you had done lately. He was a contract player, part of a studio...
January 15–16: Marilyn and Joe spend the first two days of their honeymoon at the Clifton Motel in Paso Robles. DiMaggio pays $6.50 a night for a room with a television. Marilyn’s lawyer, Lloyd Wright...
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...
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...
February 29: Marilyn’s management contract with John Carroll and Lucille Ryman expires.
February 5: Following her psychiatrist’s advice, a depressed Marilyn checks into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic and is upset when she is treated as a mentally ill patient who might do harm to he...
February 5: Marilyn visits the Tokyo Army Hospital.
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