May 3: Responding to reports that she is not an orphan and that her mother is alive, Marilyn issues a statement through Erskine Johnson in the Los Angeles Daily News: My mother spent many years at the...
May 30: Shooting is on hiatus for Memorial Day. Marilyn stays home working on a watercolor of a red rose she wants to present to President Kennedy for his forty-fifth birthday.
May 25: Norma Jeane writes to Emmeline Snively about meeting Roy Rogers and riding his horse, Trigger. Fans on the Roy Rogers movie set think she is a movie star and ask for her autograph. When she te...
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...
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...
Friendship was, I think, a deep enchantment for Michael. He built up his favourite as a nonpareil. He touted you. But if you broke the spell, he would erupt with fury and then subside in a silence tha...
How did Brennan achieve this mythic status, this power over not just audiences but also his fellow actors? Today, the question remains unanswered, and this figure key to understanding the power of Hol...
I am not the first biographer to write a memoir about his work. But after reading the reminiscences of my colleagues, I am still looking for the kind of insider look this book offers.
I followed Michael upstairs to the living room, where Emma had prepared drinks. I know we have some other matters [Michael’s lovers] to talk to you about at some stage, he said, almost chuckling.
I mentioned a television documentary Julie and I had watched at Gilly’s house and that Jill remarked on how his Park Street flat was filled with women’s cosmetics and perfume bottles in the bathroom....
I noticed that he wasn’t looking at me while we talked. After we finished the take, I asked him where he’d been looking. Your ear, he replied. Why? I asked in surprise. Because that way more of my fac...
I slept on a sofa bed in Michael’s library. Each night before retiring, I would go through a shelf or pile of books (his only filing system) filled with letters and reviews and notes. Every night brou...
I think Walter Brennan was the greatest example of a personality that I’ve ever used. . . . When I was in trouble, I called on Brennan. He always came through. —HOWARD HAWKS IN CONVERSATION WITH JOSEP...
I went to this party for Francis Wheen’s book [on Marx]. I went and sat on a chair—at these places I can’t stand up and so I sat there and a woman came up to me—I gather from the Telegraph. It was jus...
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...
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...
In a memo dated April 22, 1942, concerning a script conference about Maryland, Darryl Zanuck rejected the idea of making a radical change in Brennan’s screen persona. Brennan simply could not be prese...
She sees you in her diaries as this fiery backbencher, and then you get in the cabinet and you’re behaving (to her) differently; that is, you seemed to be more of a compromiser. She found this almost...
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...
No other supporting player won three Academy Awards, and you would be hard-pressed to name another character actor whose performances frequently overwhelmed those of ostensible leads like Joel McCrea...
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