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May 4: Hedda Hopper publishes "The Blowtorch Blonde" in the Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine: "Marilyn Monroe who has zoomed to stardom after a three-year stretch as a cheesecake queen is easily the most delectable dish of the day. . . . She is fast supplanting Sam Goldwyn as a source of anecdotes and every producer at Twentieth is bidding for her as box office insurance."
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Carl Rollyson |
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unvarnished treatment of real people, especially literary figures, can still invite outrage from critics, while those same literary figures, skewering their family and friends in novel after novel, take refuge in high art.
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Carl Rollyson |
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As much as most kids growing up I liked digging for buried treasure, and when there was no buried treasure to be found, I buried some myself for later discovery. I think of my subjects the same way: they like hiding things, and they may even have a sneaking admiration for the one who finds them out. In his 1995 Paris Review interview, Ted Hughes confessed: "Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of som..
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Carl Rollyson |
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May 21: Marilyn reports to Fox for color and wardrobe tests for Niagara.
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 22: Life publishes "They Fired Marilyn: Her Dip Lives On," photographs of her nude swimming scene for Something's Got to Give."
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Carl Rollyson |
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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.
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Carl Rollyson |
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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, who played her son, recalled, "[S]he was very tender . . . and in the fantasy world of being on the set and shooting the movie it was very nice to have Marilyn be my mother." Alexandra Heilweil, who played Marilyn's daughter, recalled, "I rem..
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Carl Rollyson |
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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.
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Carl Rollyson |
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For me, the most important thing is the overwhelming desire to write about a particular figure. That usually means I already have--even if I can't articulate it yet--a vision of my subject. I have already decided I'm right for the biography. Everything else, then, will have to fall in line, no matter what obstacles I encounter. To prospective biographers I recommend that you know yourself first, that you know why you want to write about so-..
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 25: Mickey Rudin warns Marilyn about expenditures for wardrobe, hairdressing, makeup, drugs, and the coaching services of Paula Strasberg--all of which threaten to exhaust the $13,000 remaining in her bank accounts. Marilyn calls the Justice Department.
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Carl Rollyson |
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He is the spy in William Golding's novel The Paper Men, caught by his subject in the act of rifling through his subject's garbage.
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Carl Rollyson |
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The world seemed to turn on Michael's likes and dislikes--as I learned when I mentioned I was giving a talk about Dr. Johnson at Cambridge. Michael objected to him as though Johnson was just another Tory politician. Indeed, literature seemed another form of politics and one had to declare a position. "What's all this anti-Johnson stuff," Michael's brother John had asked him. "It won't stand up," John said. Michael explained his complaint to..
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Carl Rollyson |
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The education Walter valued occurred during deliveries he began making by horse drawn carriage by the time he was eleven. All his life, Walter Brennan enjoyed delivering the goods, meeting people and drawing them out, learning about their jobs and asking them what they thought about their work.
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 14: Marilyn does a sound test with Robert Wagner, who stars with her in Let's Make It Legal.
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 19: Sunday at 2:30 p.m., Reverend Benjamin Lingenfelder of the Christian Science church marries Norma Jeane and twenty-one-year-old James Dougherty at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Chester Howell. Chester is an attorney and friend of Grace, who chooses the Howell home at 432 South Bentley Avenue in West Los Angeles because it has a spiral staircase that Norma Jeane uses to make a dramatic entrance. Ana Lower makes Norma Jeane's wedding gown..
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 28: Marilyn, in pain, is hospitalized for gallbladder surgery.
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Carl Rollyson |
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Embarking on each new biography is like beginning the world anew, establishing--once again--a network of contacts and conspirators, and inciting the enmity of countless cronies and court whores who do their best to make the biographer seem unworthy of the approbation they have so acidulously sought from their literary sovereigns.
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Carl Rollyson |
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Becoming a Biographer: Marilyn Monroe Made Me Do It
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Carl Rollyson |
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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 from her."
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 18: A rejuvenated Marilyn resumes plans for designing and decorating her Mexican-style home, accepting the first shipment of furniture from Mexico. June 18-19: Realizing its mistake in firing Marilyn, the studio begins to work on a way to reinstate her. Joe DiMaggio returns from London and offers to help Marilyn sort out her troubles with Fox.
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Carl Rollyson |
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You've got to be a bit ruthless, I think, to write a biography.--Peter Cameron, The City of Your Final Destination (2002)
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 17: A letter from Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison (probably written by John F. Wharton) suggests that an article in Motion Picture by Hedda Hopper is libelous, according to Sam Silverman, a libel expert in Wharton's firm. "I shall only say that bringing a libel suit might result in giving Miss Hopper a greater opportunity to display her venom. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't bring the suit if you wish us to." Marilyn did not..
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Carl Rollyson |
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Thomas Carlyle once complained about mealy-mouthed biographers. I've done my best not to be one of them.
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 23: Reporters stake out Marilyn's apartment, responding to rumors that she and Miller will marry that night.
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Carl Rollyson |
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May 15-16: Marilyn arrives punctually and works through the customary starts and stops of production without complaint. She watches the rushes and realizes that she is "sensational"--to employ the word the film's editor, David Bretherton, uses when she asks him about her performance and appearance. But she angers Cukor, who learns of her criticisms of his shooting style. Marilyn's lawyers are notified they will receive a letter from Fox sta..
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Carl Rollyson |
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Here is Johnson's comment on writers' lives in his exculpatory biography of his friend, the rogue poet Richard Savage: "The heroes of literary as well as civil history have been very often no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved."
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 21: Marilyn consults with her attorney, Aaron Frosch, and Lee Strasberg about Rain.
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 6: In a Los Angeles Daily News column, Ezra Goodman identifies Marilyn as a rising new talent. June
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Carl Rollyson |
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Those hostile to biography rank professional biographers just above serial murderers.
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Carl Rollyson |
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May 19: At 2:00 p.m., Marilyn arrives at Madison Square Garden for a brief rehearsal. She departs to have her hair styled by Kenneth Battelle at a cost of $150. Then she returns to her New York apartment for a $125 makeup session with Marie Irvine. Finally, her maid, Hazel Washington, helps hook Marilyn into her Jean Louis gown, and she arrives at Madison Square Garden approximately three hours before she is to perform. Introduced to an aud..
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Carl Rollyson |
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In contemporary fiction, the criminal is usually the biographer.
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Carl Rollyson |
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With the Hellman biography, I encountered for the first time, the issue of authorization, a rather quaint notion that no modern historian would take seriously. Who gets to tell history?
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Carl Rollyson |
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May 24: Marilyn and Miller leave the Rauhs' home and travel by train back to New York City.
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 2: Filming of Niagara begins in Buffalo, with Marilyn playing Rose Loomis, the femme fatale murdered by her co-star, Joseph Cotten. Marilyn stays at the General Brock Hotel in Niagara Falls. Joseph Cotten arranges a cocktail party for cast and crew in his hotel room. Marilyn arrives in a terry cloth robe and drinks orange juice. When a guest observes that "Sherry Netherlands Hotel, New York" is embroidered on the robe, Marilyn replies,..
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Carl Rollyson |
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June 26: David Conover photographs Norma Jeane for Yank magazine.
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Carl Rollyson |
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Writing biography is a shameless profession, an exercise in bad taste, a rude inquiry.
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Carl Rollyson |
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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, Sayonara."
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Carl Rollyson |
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I aim, as my introduction promises, to be resolutely indiscreet.
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Carl Rollyson |
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ON APRIL 27, 1970, WALTER BRENNAN WAS INDUCTED INTO THE HALL of Great Western Actors at the Cowboy Hall of Fame's annual awards ceremony in Oklahoma City. After listening to several speakers lavish praise on him, he stood up and said, "Other than that, I'm a dirty old man." He often liked to undercut a compliment with a self-directed jibe. But as his son Andy said, his father was thrilled with the honor. Later Brennan donated his papers to ..
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Carl Rollyson |
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April 19: Norma Jeane attends a picnic at Balboa Park with her fellow workers. Photographs show her with long curled hair, standing and sitting in the center of a lineup with four other women, posing for the camera.
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Carl Rollyson |
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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. Siegel confirms she must return home to rest.
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Carl Rollyson |
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Brennan had the best lines in the script. Dispensing justice from his saloon bar, he declares, "Don't spill none of that liquor, Son. It eats right into the bar."
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Carl Rollyson |
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April 18: Ethel Dougherty finds a job for Norma Jeane as a typist at Radioplane, a munitions factory that makes drones. But at a speed of only thirty-five words a minute, she does not do well and is assigned to inspecting parachutes. She is paid twenty dollars per week. She works ten hours a day and tells Grace McKee it is hard work because she is on her feet most of the time. But the alternative, a job with the army, was worse because of a..
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Carl Rollyson |
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May 17-18: In her New York apartment, Marilyn practices singing "Happy Birthday" for the president."
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Carl Rollyson |