11 Quotes by Carl Rollyson

  • Author Carl Rollyson
  • Quote

    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.

  • Share

  • Author Carl Rollyson
  • Quote

    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.

  • Share

  • Author Carl Rollyson
  • Quote

    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.

  • Share

  • Author Carl Rollyson
  • Quote

    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.

  • Share

  • Author Carl Rollyson
  • Quote

    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.

  • Share

  • Author Carl Rollyson
  • Quote

    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.

  • Share

  • Author Carl Rollyson
  • Quote

    May 22: Grace pays twenty-five dollars to Nellie Atkinson for Norma Jeane’s care.

  • Share

  • Author Carl Rollyson
  • Quote

    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.

  • Share

  • Author Carl Rollyson
  • Quote

    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?

  • Share