Then he landed the part of Old Atrocity. For the first time, Brennan brought home a whole script, just as he had promised his family he would do one day. He cried, and as his daughter remembered on Th...
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...
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...
Talk of Blair stimulated Michael to say, Some of our people are in my opinion too critical of him. Some of them say, ‘Oh Gordon Brown is much better, you know.’ I doubt that there is all that much dis...
Sensation Hunters (January 3, 1934), features Brennan as a stuttering waiter in a nightclub, whose scenes usually end before he can finish a sentence. Dressed in a short cutaway jacket with a lock of...
One of Michael’s favourite pastimes was hauling books down from his shelves and reading to me, or pointing out comments he had made on the flyleaves. The astringent Brigid Brophy never failed to amuse...
On the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, Walter Brennan embodied fundamental decency and democratic virtues that made him indispensable to Cooper’s signature Everyman roles. Brennan’s perfo...
Of an entirely different order is Brennan’s magnificent performance as Pop Gruber, an aging grifter in Nobody Lives Forever (November 1, 1946), starring John Garfield as a con man, Nick Blake, who eve...
My biography of Jill, the trips to Dubrovnik, were all part of Michael’s effort to recoup his loss and turn it into a kind of celebration.
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 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 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...
May 13–14: Marilyn accompanies Miller to Washington, D.C., where he goes on trial for contempt of Congress. She stays with his attorney, Joseph Rauh, and Rauh’s wife. May 14: Miller’s trial begins.
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...
March 7: With May Reis, Marilyn in mourning clothes attends the funeral of Arthur Miller’s mother, Augusta, who died of a heart attack. Marilyn offers Arthur Miller her condolences and consoles his fa...
Like Drums Across the River, Bad Day at Black Rock (January 7, 1955), is a revisionist work—this time examining the seamy side, the racism and thuggery—of postwar America. Brennan, looking much slimme...