February 5: Marilyn visits the Tokyo Army Hospital.
February 29: Marilyn’s management contract with John Carroll and Lucille Ryman expires.
February 28: Marilyn is nominated for a Golden Globe award for her work on Bus Stop but does not attend the ceremony, at which Deborah Kerr wins for her performance in The King and I.
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 23: Marilyn and Joe fly to Hawaii on the first leg of their trip home to Hollywood.
February 22: Marilyn is photographed giving an interview to Elsa Maxwell, gossip columnist and professional hostess, at the Ambassador Hotel. Cecil Beaton photographs Marilyn in front of a Japanese wa...
February 19: Fox approaches Elia Kazan about doing a film with Marilyn.
February 18: Marilyn stays home without notifying the studio. When she doesn’t answer his knock at her residence, Montand slips a note under her door: Don’t leave me to work for hours on end on a scen...
February 11: Actress Edith Evanson visits Marilyn’s Brentwood home to work on the Swedish accent Marilyn is to use for her disguise as a maid in Something’s Got to Give, an identity Marilyn’s characte...
Brennan, who appeared in more than two hundred films and countless television productions over a fifty-year career, is Hollywood.
Brennan made everything he did look easy, but occasionally he revealed how much labor went into his roles. In Red River, for example, he walks with a slight stoop after the film flashes forward fiftee...
April 17: Schwab’s Pharmacy, Hollywood and Beverly Hills, bills Mrs. Marilyn Miller $11.42 for two prescriptions.
After completing work in December 1950 on Along the Great Divide, Walter Brennan made the first of several appearances on Family Theater, a radio series conceived by Father Patrick Peyton, who convinc...
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...
My reliance on fair use in the Hellman biography became a template for how I was to approach my unauthorized biographies of Martha Gellhorn, Susan Sontag, and Sylvia Plath.
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...
As Brennan’s roles became more important, he acquired the services of a stand-in. Years later, he recalled learning from his first stand-in, Dick Dickinson, about lighting and blocking. An alert stand...
[CR] I was reading another of your books in your library last night—Herbert Morrison’s autobiography. He’s got one paragraph on you. It’s the nastiest piece of business, calling you a TV personality....
You’ve got to be a bit ruthless, I think, to write a biography.—Peter Cameron, The City of Your Final Destination (2002)
Writing Michael’s biography had not occurred to me when I first contacted him. I was not prepared for this conversation and dropped it. Julie warned me that I did not have quite as free a hand with Mi...