June 8: The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) serves Miller with a subpoena to testify on June 14 in Washington, D.C. The committee agrees to delay the hearing until June 21, so that Mi...
June 27: Sidney Fields is the first columnist to write about Marilyn, commenting in the New York Mirror: Marilyn is a very lovely and relatively unknown movie actress. But give her time; you will hear...
June 23: Reporters stake out Marilyn’s apartment, responding to rumors that she and Miller will marry that night.
June 20: Spyros Skouras, Fox’s president, meets with Marilyn and Miller to advise the playwright to cooperate with HUAC. Miller refuses, and Marilyn admires his integrity and courage.
January 21: Marilyn returns to New York and visits Lee Strasberg.
January 20: Lew Schreiber at Fox, having received notice that Marilyn is ready to work, reviews her list of approved directors, since she cannot be required to work until the studio has a commitment f...
January 19: Marilyn and Arthur fly from Jamaica to New York.
January 15–16: Marilyn and Joe spend the first two days of their honeymoon at the Clifton Motel in Paso Robles. DiMaggio pays $6.50 a night for a room with a television. Marilyn’s lawyer, Lloyd Wright...
January 14: At 1:46 p.m. Marilyn marries Joe DiMaggio. She gives Harry Brand, publicity director at Fox, only one hour’s notice, but one hundred reporters still manage to make it to the lobby and corr...
It’s time to rip the veneer off the works and days of biographers’ lives.
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...
It is their privilege as novelists to cut real lives loose from their moorings in biography, even as biographers fret about libel laws and suits over invasion of privacy.
I brought up Michael’s passionate support of Indira Gandhi. I read The Asian Age every morning, you know, Michael said by way of stressing his deep concern with Indian politics. Much to the outrage of...
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.
How many different photographs do we have of Norman Mailer? Suppose we had only five painted portraits of him, like the five Joshua Reynolds did of Dr. Johnson? Would Mailer’s greatness seem more sing...
February 9: Marilyn’s institutionalization is reported in the press. She is permitted a call to Joe DiMaggio.
February 9: Marilyn visits the Brady Airbase and is photographed with several women. She fits right in with her attire, which is like the conservative high-collar fashion displayed by the women who ar...
February 5: Laurence Olivier, his agent Cecil Tennant, and playwright Terence Rattigan arrive in New York to discuss with Marilyn a film of The Sleeping Prince, to be produced in London with Olivier a...
February 5: Following her psychiatrist’s advice, a depressed Marilyn checks into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic and is upset when she is treated as a mentally ill patient who might do harm to he...
February 28: Marilyn is nominated for a Golden Globe award for her work on Bus Stop but does not attend the ceremony, at which Deborah Kerr wins for her performance in The King and I.