Carl Rollyson > Quotes

“Walter Brennan (1894–1974) is considered one of the finest character actors in motion picture history. His three supporting actor Oscars were awarded for his roles in Come and Get It (1936), Kentucky (1938), and The Westerner (1940). He was nominated a fourth time for Sergeant York (1941).”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“January 23: Niagara is released, making Marilyn a star. She plays Rose Loomis, a femme fatale. The picture features her 116-foot walk to the falls.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“The discussion later turned to Jamaica, which Michael had visited in January. Noel Coward had spent a good deal of time there, Michael noted. Michael met Coward once in a hotel: “He took me upstairs. He didn’t seduce me. I didn’t know about such things then,” he claimed. “An innocent abroad,” I commented. “Yes, I was.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Private Life of Michael Foot

“April 12: Venus at Large, a comedy by Henry Denker featuring characters based on Marilyn and Arthur Miller, opens on Broadway and receives negative reviews. Marilyn announces her intention to consult with Lee Strasberg before Something’s Got to Give starts shooting.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“April 24: Marilyn again reports in sick, refusing to come in to meet the Shah of Iran, since she does not know his position on Israel.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“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 wait like anyone else for his turn. I was amazed that he did not have someone come to the house and that the therapy was not more frequent. He could barely walk now. But he was loyal to the National Health Service, the creation of his hero Nye Bevan and avoided any appearance of seeking special treatment or assistance outside the NHS.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Private Life of Michael Foot

“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 singular? Would Dr. Johnson’s uniqueness suffer from various replications of his likeness in photographs?”
― Carl Rollyson, Confessions of a Serial Biographer

“March 29: Marilyn writes to Lester Markel at the New York Times. She likes the Sunday piece on playwright Sean O’Casey. She provides her assessment of various contenders for the presidency, including Rockefeller, Humphrey, Nixon, Stevenson, William O. Douglas, and Kennedy. She considers Rockefeller “more liberal than many of the Democrats,” and declares that Stevenson “might have made it if he had been able to talk to people instead of professors.” Nixon has no soul. Douglas is ideal, but his divorce is an impediment. She is disappointed with the Times’s coverage of Castro and feels the United States should support and develop democracy. She includes some political slogans: “Nix on Nixon,” “Over the hump with Humphrey (?),” “Stymied with Symington,” “Back to Boston by Xmas—Kennedy.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“May 22: Grace pays twenty-five dollars to Nellie Atkinson for Norma Jeane’s care.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“January 14: Marilyn draws up a new will, removing Arthur Miller as her beneficiary and substituting Lee Strasberg, with bequests to Marianne Kris, a small trust for her mother, and gifts to Michael Chekhov’s widow and Patricia Rosten.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“April 3: Marilyn and Miller meet with Lew Wasserman of MCA and his assistant, Mort Viner, to discuss how to handle Twentieth Century Fox, since United Artists would be distributing Some Like It Hot. The group is also waiting to hear if Frank Sinatra will join the production (he was suggested for the part Tony Curtis would play). A memo states, “She [Marilyn] still doesn’t like Curtis but Wasserman doesn’t know anybody else.” British journalist Donald Zec sends a telegram to Marilyn saying he is on his way to New York and would like to call “FOR THAT CUPPA TEA.” Marilyn writes on the telegram, “By all means I am a woman of her word” and gives him her telephone number.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“Before becoming Sam Goldwyn’s prized possession—and during a decade and more of taking roles that put him out there to be seen and perhaps noticed—Brennan did play characters who disparaged women. But what happened when he was offered the plum role of Jeeter Lester in John Ford’s production of Tobacco Road (March 7, 1941) is revealing. Erskine Caldwell’s best-selling novel had been a huge hit when it was adapted for the Broadway stage, and now the prestigious director was casting the film version with several actors—including Ward Bond, Gene Tierney, and Dana Andrews—whose careers would benefit from Ford’s attention. In Tobacco Road, Jeeter is the shiftless family patriarch. Not only does he lack ambition, his jokes, to Walter Brennan, seemed offensive. Ada, Jeeter’s wife, is demeaned just for laughs when he says she “never spoke a word to me for our first ten years we was married. Heh! Them was the happiest ten years of my life.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“by 1934, Walter Brennan was in a state of near collapse. “What my grandma said,” Walter’s granddaughter Claudia Gonzales remembered, “[was that] he was eating his dinner, and he put down his fork. He looked at her, and he said, ‘I don’t know what to eat next.’” He had made it through World War I in reasonably good shape. Indeed, he had scoffed at the idea of shell shock. But then, as he told Goldwyn biographer Carol Easton, “Boy, I cracked up.” There were nights when he just wanted to sink into his bed. Then he would wake up at 2 am with a “nameless numbing fear.” As he also told Easton, “If it hadn’t been for my wife, I’d have jumped off the Pasadena Bridge. I fell away to nothin’. I weighed about 140 pounds. Gee, when I got a job in Barbary Coast, I was carryin’ my ground-up vegetables in a mason jar. They had to build muscles into my clothes.” Brennan’s son Walter Jr. (“Andy”) recalled that as a young boy he had not understood what his father was going through, but he knew that his father was in trouble.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“February 1: Photographer Sam Shaw escorts Marilyn to a party at the home of Paul Bigelow, an assistant to Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford, an original member of the Group Theatre, where Kazan, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and other important theater professionals made their mark in the 1930s. Crawford invites Marilyn to accompany her to the Actors Studio, formed some years after the dissolution of the Group Theatre.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“March 9: With Schenck’s help, Marilyn obtains a contract with Columbia Pictures for $125 a week. The studio puts her up at the Hotel Bel-Air. Ed Cronenwerth shoots her in various exercise positions, toning and stretching her body. She is also shown seated on steps, her right elbow on her raised right thigh and her right hand on her chin next to the sign “Los Angeles City Limits.” He also photographs makeup sessions. Marilyn applies lipstick, looking into a hand-held mirror, and is shot sitting while Helen Hunt styles her hair.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“February 11: Andre de Dienes sends Marilyn a telegram calling her “Turkey Foot,” his nickname for her: “STOP FEELING SORRY FOR YOURSELF. GET OUT OF THE HOSPITAL. LET’S GO DRIVING AND HIKING THROUGH THE REDWOODS, INCOGNITO, AND TAKE BEAUTIFUL PICTURES LIKE NOBODY COULD EVER TAKE. IT WILL CURE YOU OF ALL YOUR ILLS. CALL ME UP. LOVE.” Nan Taylor, the wife of Frank Taylor, producer of The Misfits, writes to Marilyn: “It seems to me again, as it did last summer, very sad that we who have been given so much by you cannot give you even what little we might in return. You have my admiration for your courage, my gratitude for the many delights of charm and beauty and humor your presence has meant, and my deep sorrow for your troubles. I believe in your strength, Marilyn, as I believe in the sun. If at any time I can help in any way, please let me, Love, Nan.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“April 13: Marilyn consults with Walter Bernstein, Cukor, and her producers about the script. She insists she needs to see Strasberg to “oil the machinery.” Physician Lee Siegel arrives to give her a vitamin injection. It is decided that shooting will not begin until April 23. Broadway composer Richard Adler calls to say he has written special lyrics for Marilyn’s rendition of “Happy Birthday.” She tells him that she will be wearing a “historical gown” for her appearance. Marilyn flies to New York.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“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 Kelley takes shots of twenty-four poses, although only two are published, titled “A New Wrinkle” and “Golden Dreams.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“In my view, her biographer needed to address two questions: (1) Why did she turn to acting as a way of finding an identity and fulfilling herself? and (2) To what extent—on the screen—did she actually achieve her goal?”
― Carl Rollyson, Confessions of a Serial Biographer

“Both Cooper and Brennan got their start as extras. Like Brennan, Cooper had learned his craft by roaming around movie lots, absorbing the atmosphere and watching how things were done—especially the subtle interplay between actors, and between the best actors and the camera lens, which always picked up details that not even the most perceptive directors could spot before they were projected onto a screen. And like Brennan, when Cooper got his first two minutes of screen time, he was prepared. Watch him in Wings, playing an aviator about to go to his death, enter a tent and converse with the film’s two stars, Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen, who are immediately fascinated by his bluff allure. He is a hero without bravado. He is for those two minutes the picture’s star, the very embodiment of what Hemingway called grace under pressure. Cooper’s ability to convey composure just before a dogfight, to act with such quiet courtesy and aplomb, stuns Rogers and Arlen—and just that quickly Cooper takes the picture away from them.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“June 5: Eunice Murray calls the studio to report Marilyn is ill, and Dr. Lee Siegel is dispatched to her home. He discovers that she is suffering from sinusitis and has a temperature of 102 degrees. Marilyn’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, receives a letter stating Fox’s intention to sue for breach of contract. June”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“No one has ever offered a better diagnosis of Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe than she does in her concluding paragraph: “Its not to much fun to know yourself to well or think you do—everyone needs a little conciet to carry them through & past the falls.” Most of us carry with us some kind of illusion about who we are and what we can accomplish. Certainly this is true in my case. I can think of many writing projects that I would not have completed if I had known, from the start, how much trouble they would entail. So imagine the life of a young woman who did anticipate trouble, who could not help but observe herself, and who chose a profession in which she was on display all the time. Her self-consciousness could be paralyzing and was relieved only by moments of acting when she could embody another being. What a relief it would be to act unconsciously and ultimately, to be unconscious, no longer obliged to carry the burden of self, a burden already shouldered by Norma Jeane when she was still three years away from her first appearance in a motion picture. To carry that same burden as Marilyn Monroe was all the more deadly.”
― Carl Rollyson, Confessions of a Serial Biographer

“I went to Europe in 1917 with sixty-five lbs. on my back,” he told Hedda Hopper in a May 17, 1960, radio interview. To another interviewer, he quipped, “I learned to run the 100-yard dash in eight seconds flat, carrying a full pack.” He served for nineteen months as a private in the 101st Field Artillery Regiment in France. He never said much about what combat was like, except to confess that he was “severely frightened 500 times.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“June 4: Norma Jeane sends Berniece a note saying that she is staying with Ana Lower. She hopes her mother can be released from the hospital soon, and that Berniece will join them in California. Norma Jeane writes to Grace McKee Goddard, explaining she has not worked at Radioplane since January: “The first I know [the photographers] had me out there, taking pictures of me. . . . They all asked where in the H---l I had been hiding.” Conover told her that the pictures “came out perfect.” Conover mentions his contacts in modeling, and Norma Jeane reports, “I told him I would rather not work when Jimmie was here, so he said he would wait, so I’m expecting to hear from him most any time again. He is awfully nice and is married and is strictly business, which is the way I like it. Jimmie seems to like the idea of me modeling, so I’m glad about that.” June”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“On this visit there was much talk of my Gellhorn biography, which had just appeared and had received excellent reviews, with a few very negative ones, including a personal attack on me by one of Gellhorn’s friends, the journalist John Pilger. Michael wanted to know why. “Well, he said I wrote a salacious book,” I told Michael. Of course, it was nothing of the kind. Michael’s response was “Dirty sod. I tell you, I’ve got very strong feelings about him. The way he’s behaved over the breakup of Yugoslavia. It’s absolutely outrageous. Pilger bilge, I call it.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Private Life of Michael Foot

“January 26: Journalist George Carpozi Jr. interviews Marilyn at the Gladstone Hotel. He is accompanied by photographer George Miller, who accompanies Marilyn, dressed in a dark fur coat, on a walk through Central Park. She drives with DiMaggio to Cooperstown, New York, to see his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. They also visit his brother Dominic and Dominic’s wife Emily, who are living near Boston.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“February 4: Marilyn attends her first session at the Actors Studio. Elia Kazan introduces her to Lee Strasberg, who agrees to give her private lessons. On Strasberg’s advice, she also sees a psychiatrist, Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, who has been analyzing Milton Greene for several years. They work on her childhood traumas, fear of abandonment, and inability to commit to long-term relationships.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“February 23: Isidore Miller writes to Marilyn, “I can’t tell you how much your trip to Florida meant to me. I don’t ever remember having such a good time! The guests of the Sea Isle Hotel can’t get over how beautiful you looked the night there.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“February 2: Marilyn and Joe arrive in Japan. Two hundred policeman form an escort for her triumphal progress to the Imperial Hotel (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), where she is photographed on a balcony, her right arm raised in a salute to her fans.”
― Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events

“love to tell your story. Someone remarked to me after reading your poem in The Atlantic, ‘How intense.’ Sometime write me a little poem that isn’t intense. A lamp turned too high might shatter its chimney. Please just glow sometimes.” {CR1}”
― Carl Rollyson, Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 2: 1955-1963