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January 13: Marilyn shows up at the studio for still shots, but then departs not wanting to be present for a discussion of her next production with screenwriter Nunnally Johnson.
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Carl Rollyson |
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Barbary Coast was rather a mess when Howard Hawks took over direction of a film initially assigned by Sam Goldwyn to William Wyler. Hawks was famous--and sometimes notorious--for rewriting scripts on the set, inviting his actors to contribute lines. At the same time, he was loath to cede his authority, or to allow actors to take over a production. Meta Carpenter, Hawks's secretary and sometime script supervisor, vividly recalled how curt--e..
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 20: Andre de Dienes's color photograph of Marilyn on Mount Hood is on the cover of Vecko Revyn (Sweden). She is wearing a snow cap and a red sweater, and snow covers her pants and left leg, which is bent in a kneeling posture as she smiles straight at the camera.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 20: Marilyn fails to return to the studio on the day Fox has stipulated.
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Carl Rollyson |
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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 from one of the sixteen directors on her list.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 20: Monroe divorces Miller in Juarez, Mexico, on the day JFK takes the oath of office.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 20: Marilyn meets with Fox producer Henry T. Weinstein. Marilyn meets with the visiting Carl Sandburg, who demonstrates--holding books over their heads--a series of exercises intended to alleviate insomnia. Photographer Arnold Newman takes pictures of the meeting, during which Monroe tells the poet her troubles. "You are not what is wrong with America," he tells her. They sip champagne and talk about Abraham Lincoln. "He is so pleas..
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Carl Rollyson |
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By way of preparing me for a visit to Paul Foot, Michael told me a story about the time Paul, then 14 and a public school boy, visited Jill and Michael at the Abbey Road home. He was shocked that Jill and Michael had no interest whatsoever in going to Princess Elizabeth's coronation. Paul was to accompany Isaac Foot to the great event. Michael said, "We're going back to bed." Later they mocked Paul about his reaction. Michael wanted me to a..
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Carl Rollyson |
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The picture was Brennan's, but it was no good to him if Cooper, his co-star, did not hold his own. It was characteristic of Walter Brennan to want Cooper not only to be happy making the picture, but also to feel that the two of them had something in common--in this case, their servitude to Sam Goldwyn. Employing his powerful gift for mimicry, Brennan called Cooper and, in Goldwyn's voice, said, "You're so lousy I want Brennan to have top bi..
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 18: In the Lowell Sun, a DiMaggio friend is quoted saying Joe will remarry Marilyn, but her publicist John Springer insists the couple are just friends.
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Carl Rollyson |
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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 shocking. I don't find it surprising at all: "If you're going to be in the cabinet for God's sakes ... " I began. Michael finished my sentence: "You have to compromise." Michael added: "I sometimes said to Jill if I'd had the experience of bein..
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Carl Rollyson |
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Becoming Roy Bean was an all-consuming project. Walter worked late into the night "making the old fellow come alive." Weeks of preparation went into his performance. "I have literally become that man and will never for a single instant compromise with his character," Walter insisted. "He must always be himself and never his brother or his uncle. I find myself eventually thinking like him." Brennan had to see it in his own eyes as he watched..
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Carl Rollyson |
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CR] I was reading another of your books in your library last night--Herbert Morrison's autobiography. He's got one paragraph on you. It's the nastiest piece of business, calling you a TV personality. He doesn't know if you have any influence on anyone and he refers to your election defeat in Plymouth. He loads it on. Do you remember that? [MF] Ernest Bevin is supposed to have said of Morrison when someone else said, "He's his own worst enem..
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 13: Marilyn tells her agents she will not do The Blue Angel, noting that Fox had begun to work on the picture after the deadline in her contract specifying start of production for a new film.
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Carl Rollyson |
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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 performance in Sergeant York (September 27, 1941) foreshadows the country's emergence from isolationism into a reluctant, then confirmed internationalism. Although Brennan received an Academy Award nomination for his work in Sergeant York, his low-k..
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 25: Life publishes "Merger of Two Worlds." Newsweek publishes "Mr. And Mrs. Joe DiMaggio." Time publishes "Storybook Romance." Marilyn's lawyer tells the press that she has read the Pink Tights script and rejects it."
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Carl Rollyson |
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c7cff6b
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January 25: Marilyn sends a telegram to Darryl Zanuck saying she has received the script for Pink Tights: "AM EXCEEDINGLY SORRY BUT I DO NOT LIKE IT. SINCERELY MARILYN MONROE." Marilyn has dinner in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Dominic, DiMaggio's brother, has a home. She asks Joe for advice on handling Fox."
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 25: Marilyn is filmed singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." It is a production number in which she is surrounded by a group of adoring men, who ferry her across the stage in a routine reminiscent of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes--except that it is less raucous and more casual. Marilyn, wearing a large loose-fitting sweater and tights, is lofted onto the shoulders of her retinue. The result is mere imitation of her earlier performances. Th..
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 16: Fox announces shooting of Something's Got to Give will not begin until March 15.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 16: Dangerous Years is previewed.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 16: Arthur Miller arrives in Hollywood to work on a screenplay with his friend, director Elia Kazan. Marilyn meets playwright Arthur Miller on the set of her film, As Young as You Feel.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 16: Fox lifts Marilyn's suspension.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 16: Time publishes "Winner," an account of how Marilyn got the best of Fox in contract negotiations."
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Carl Rollyson |
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After dinner, Michael vouchsafed to me that he had had an encounter with Barbara Castle at a recent Tribune event: [MF] You told me about what she had done ... in your case. [Castle had asked for a fee as the price of an interview and I had refused.] [CR] I was really surprised. [MF] She spoke to me about that the other day. I don't want to cause any trouble. I don't want her to think that I've got any grievance against her because it won't..
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Carl Rollyson |
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in one comic scene, Brennan and Cooper share the same bed, with Brennan's arm, at one point, draped over Cooper's. It is tempting to see Lillian Hellman's hand in such scenes, since she was assigned to do rewrites of Busch's script. She specialized in the sexual ambiguity of the menage a trois, as in These Three (1936), a Goldwyn production that featured two schoolteachers in love with the same man. In The Westerner, it is the off-screen La..
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Carl Rollyson |
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Whatever misgivings Cooper had about entering the ring with Brennan, he also realized that Walter was too good an actor and had too refined a sense of ensemble acting to do anything other than make Cooper look good. It was all good, as a matter of fact. Wyler was able to shoot the film on location in Tucson, Arizona, benefitting from Goldwyn's million-dollar budget, which allowed for the construction of a replica of the opera house that Lil..
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Carl Rollyson |
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asked Michael if he thought she could have become the Labour Party leader: "I don't think so, really," Michael answered decisively. "What stopped her?" I asked. "The business of understanding other people's positions and working together--I don't think she [Barbara] had much ... " Michael did not complete his sentence but switched instead to saying Callaghan had a much better sense of the whole party. I observed to Michael that Castle's dia..
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 17: Marilyn and Joe are photographed laughing over pages of Maurice Zolotow's biography of her and are later photographed at Le Pavilion.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 18: Filming of Let's Make Love resumes. Stern (Germany) shows Marilyn, all in black, during a number from Let's Make Love.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 19: Joe DiMaggio and photographer Sam Shaw help Marilyn move into the Gladstone Hotel on East 52nd Street near Park Avenue.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 19-22: Marilyn works with Milton Greene in his Lexington Avenue studio on an all white series, with poses in fur and terry cloth.
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Carl Rollyson |
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January 19: Marilyn and Arthur fly from Jamaica to New York.
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Carl Rollyson |
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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 corridor of San Francisco's Town Hall, where the marriage takes place. Only a few of Joe's friends and family are present. Marilyn brings no guests to the three-minute ceremony. Photographs show Marilyn wearing a dark brown woolen suit with an ermi..
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Carl Rollyson |
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At lunch, Michael began to reminisce about his first election in Wales, when he was selected to occupy Nye Bevan's seat. A brief kerfuffle had resulted when his name did not appear on the short list of Labour Party candidates for the seat. Evidently some locals preferred not to take on Michael in spite of his association with Nye. Jennie Lee, along with others, intervened and Michael not only made the list but also was selected and won his ..
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Carl Rollyson |
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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, ended up working as extras in the film industry. Indeed, they arrived by the busload and trainload, according to Anthony Slide in Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, "Bit" Players, and Stand-Ins. It was a hard life for most extras, who were..
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Carl Rollyson |
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715d07c
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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 This Is Your Life, the family cried with him. Brennan looked down as his daughter spoke on the program, trying to close his lips and control his emotions.
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Carl Rollyson |
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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 there she was. She said to me something like, 'They won't let me say what I want to say.' I said, 'They will, sometime.' She said, 'Maybe."
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Carl Rollyson |
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It was the time Tony Benn and Denis Healey were competing for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party. I was pretty leftwing, so was Jill Tweedie and there was this huge feeling that Tony Benn was the villain. Suddenly Michael got to his feet and made this extraordinary speech. Well, you think he's going to have a heart attack. It's so impassioned ... a pretty savage attack on Benn.
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Carl Rollyson |
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BY 1928, WALTER BRENNAN HAD APPEARED IN DOZENS OF UNCREDited roles as a customer in a store, a lunch counterman, a lumberjack, a yacht crewman, a cashier, a gangster, a pool hall shark, a ranch foreman, a train conductor, a clown, and a musician. If you watch any of these films, don't blink--you may miss him. At this point, we are talking about a career that can be telescoped into a few minutes or so of film.
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Carl Rollyson |
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CR] This book is about how marriages stay together, even when there are these strains and tensions. [MF] That's right.
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Carl Rollyson |
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Cooper caught a break with a featured role as a doomed aviator in Wings (1927), but Walter remained on the periphery, observing the unwritten rule that extras did not consort with stars, yet taking pride in work that reinforced the function of character actors. As character actress Beulah Bondi said, "We are the mortar between the bricks." For Walter Brennan, it was enough to know that a chosen few--Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Gary Cooper..
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Carl Rollyson |
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Short of funds during a period in 1928, Brennan agreed to do a stunt: driving off a pier in San Diego into forty feet of water. "I had to be doing 45 miles an hour," he later told an interviewer, "and there was another dummy in the car with me, but he had his hat nailed on. And when I hit the end of the pier, I tell you, the first thing I thought of was my insurance." It took him three years to fully recover from the back injury he sustaine..
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Carl Rollyson |
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March 2: Johnny Hyde has Marilyn sign with the William Morris agency. Johnny Hyde secures a walk-on part for Marilyn in Love Happy, a Marx Brothers movie. To her line, "Men keep following me," Groucho, rolling his eyes, says, "Really? I can't understand why."
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Carl Rollyson |
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For all Cooper's fame and success, he was as insecure as anyone in Hollywood, where you were judged not by your body of work but by what you had done lately. He was a contract player, part of a studio system that, in effect, owned him. Don't do the part, and I'll sue you, Sam Goldwyn told Cooper. William Wyler--who had his own conflicts as a contract director working for Goldwyn--was assigned to The Westerner. The director saw the humor and..
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Carl Rollyson |