When Michael greeted me at the entrance to their home only three months after Jill’s death, his pallid complexion shocked me. I thought that I had arrived at death’s door. He appeared to have aged mor...
What miffed Brennan about working with Ford was the director’s lack of respect for fellow professionals. Unlike Howard Hawks, Ford was not much of a collaborator. He never gave Brennan the feeling tha...
We spoke of other innovations—the fax machine, for example. Michael listened politely and though I offered to buy him one, emphasising how easy they were to operate, he could not be convinced. The wir...
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...
Thomas Carlyle once complained about mealy-mouthed biographers. I’ve done my best not to be one of them.
Then Brennan finally was awarded a bravura role, winning his second Academy Award for his Technicolor performance as Peter Goodwin in Kentucky (December 30, 1938). Goodwin is an unreconstructed Confed...
The general unacceptability of this story is emphasized by its overall low tone and by the suggestion that your sympathetic lead, Morgan, is a murderer, who is permitted to go off unpunished. The char...
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...
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...
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...
On the set, Walter provoked Spencer Tracy’s ire. Katie (Katharine Hepburn) didn’t have good judgment or common sense, Brennan told Tracy. Walter was referring to her attacks on Senator Joseph McCarthy...
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...
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...
May 7: Marilyn performs well as a wife returning home several years after she has been presumed dead. She kneels down to speak with the children she has not seen for so long. Robert Christopher Morley...
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
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,...
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 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 12: At Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, Marilyn makes the ceremonial first kick at a soccer match between the United States and Israel. She is photographed standing in an open field and with her tongue o...