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...
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...
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.
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...
Those hostile to biography rank professional biographers just above serial murderers.
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...
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...
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...
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
Talk about Michael sex’s life segued into a discussion of Arthur Koestler’s rape of Jill, a story that Michael himself first revealed in a review of a book about Koestler. He caused an uproar in the p...
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...
Talk turned to current affairs. When the Bush-Gore election came up, Michael noted, We discovered that to the credit of Gore he said his favourite book was Le Rouge et Le Noir. Stendhal was one of Mic...
Michael had an aching need to show the world what Jill had not been able to display herself, much as Thomas Carlyle had done for his late wife Jane and H. G. Wells had done for his Jane after she died...
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...
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...
It’s time to rip the veneer off the works and days of biographers’ lives.
Recently Michael had encountered Salman Rushdie at a party given by Geoffrey Robertson, the lawyer who had secured Michael’s libel judgment against Rupert Murdoch’s Times. Jill and Michael had install...
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