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.
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...
Then one day, Walter looked Ruth in the eye and abruptly announced that he was going to become an actor. He joined a generation of World War I veterans who, failing to make a killing in real estate, e...
That was how I met Mrs. Thatcher, Michael said. It must have been 1976, just before she was elected leader of the Conservative Party. Michael had just given a speech: I went up to look at it, and ther...
Talk of Vanessa reminded Michael of the terrible 1963 accident. Vanessa and Jason (in the backseat) had escaped harm. We were saved by the Health Service, Michael believed. Taken to the Hereford hospi...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
My legs are not quite properly operating and I’m having physiotherapy every Tuesday, Michael said after Emma had beaten him to the phone. I accompanied him on one of these sessions, where he had to wa...
Michael’s career as a government minister made him a target of the tabloids. The Daily Mail ran a series of articles claiming that during a hospital stay Michael had received special treatment. But Mi...
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 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...
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...
Michael and Jill were connoisseurs of personality, transcending politics. They loved Randolph Churchill, who ran two losing campaigns against Michael in Plymouth and they adored Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs...
May 9: The London tabloid Empire News publishes Marilyn’s account via Ben Hecht of child abuse. What happened exactly is not clear, although apparently she was fondled, and then stammered when she tri...
May 8: Cukor shuts down production after Marilyn, with an obvious fever and chills, cannot control her shaking and rests on the set’s patio furniture. She again has a temperature of 101 degrees. Dr. S...
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