February 10: After several days of steady work, Marilyn calls in sick just after Miller leaves for Ireland to consult with John Huston about The Misfits
Brennan often cited Goodbye, My Lady as one of his favorite films. Certainly it was a labor of love in the close collaboration with the director, William Wellman, better known for his action films and...
Biography deserves its Marlow, one who flinches not and is willing to see the horror as well as the hope in the biographer’s heart.
Back to Jill’s diary and her comments on Michael’s sartorial difficulties: Jennie Lee used to say, ‘Don’t let the Tories dress Michael.’ He got a big kick out of that. She also mentions meeting Denis...
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...
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....
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.
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 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...
Walter also kept himself going by keeping an account book recording his earnings, starting from the first day he showed up on a movie set. He liked to turn the pages and see the entries for $7.50 unti...
Walter also became a hotelier, western style. A brochure touted Walter Brennan’s Indian Lodge Motel. The Motel of Distinction. Enjoy Your Vacation In The Switzerland of America. Fishing—Hunting—Swimmi...
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...
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...
To Rio Bravo, Brennan brought his own brand of realism. He explained his reaction to the script to reporter Steven H. Scheuer: They tell me I’m playing a crippled old man who’s got a rifle built into...
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...
Then we got round to Michael’s health. He’s reached a rather difficult stage, Julie said and began to talk about Michael’s digressions, his seeming inability to get to the point or stay on it. It was...