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Tara Hanks

~ Author of 'The Mmm Girl' and 'Wicked Baby'

Tara Hanks

Tag Archives: Bobby Kennedy

‘Dear Bobbybones’: Marilyn and Robert A. Miller

12 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by marina72 in Film, Marilyn Monroe

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After The Fall, Arthur Miller, Billy Fried, Bobby Kennedy, Bobby Miller, Connecticut, Focus, Jane Miller, Jean Miller, Ken Kesey, Marilyn Monroe, Mary Slattery, Rebecca Miller, Robert A. Miller, Robert Kennedy, Roxbury, The Crucible

Robert A. Miller, the film producer son of Arthur Miller, has died aged 74, as Billy Fried reports for the Laguna Beach Independent.

One of the privileges of hosting a radio talk show is getting to meet so many interesting personalities here in Laguna. But sometimes, serendipity reigns, and a fascinating person is plopped down right next door to you. Such was the case with Robert (Bob) Miller, who passed away on March 6, 2022, after a brief illness. It’s not easy being the son of anyone famous, let alone Arthur Miller, arguably America’s greatest playwright and third husband of Marilyn Monroe … You’d think these would be insurmountable odds for a normal life, but Bob was as humble, friendly and happy a guy as they come.

Robert Arthur Miller was born on May 31, 1947 in New York, to Arthur and his first wife, Mary Slattery, and their two-year-old daughter Jane. As Arthur Miller’s biographer, Martin Gottfried, wrote of this time, “Mary and Arthur had their bed in the living room while the master bedroom was used for ‘Junior,’ as Miller sometimes called him (at other times it was ‘Mister Robert’ after the current hit play) and the nurse … He certainly took to fatherhood, doting on little Jane while demonstrating a shamelessly conventional paternal pride in his infant son, regularly holding Robert in his arms and even feeding him.”

At the time, Arthur was enjoying his first Broadway success with All My Sons, which had opened in January. Two years later, his next play, Death of a Salesman, won the Pulitzer Prize. Mary, who had met Arthur in college, edited all of his early work and found Arthur his first publisher. Interviewed for the 2017 documentary, Arthur Miller – Writer, Robert recalled that his mother was “tough” and “spoke her mind.” He grew up in Brooklyn Heights, “back when the Dodgers were still there,” Billy Fried writes. “He would reminisce about walking the neighbourhood in summer and hearing the games broadcast out of every window, and always considered himself a Brooklyn boy at heart.” Continue reading →

Marilyn in Hollywood: The ‘Confidential’ Years

24 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by marina72 in Books, Fiction, Film, History, Marilyn Monroe, Periodicals

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Barney Ruditsky, Bobby Kennedy, Celebrity, Clark Gable, Confidential, Dan Dailey, Dick Powell, Dorothy Dandridge, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Gossip, Hollywood Research Incorporated, Howard Rushmore, Jeanne Carmen, Jerry Giesler, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Schenck, Johnnie Ray, Marilyn Monroe, Milton Greene, Nicholas Ray, Robert F. Kennedy, Robert Harrison, Robert Mitchum, Robert Slatzer, Rory Calhoun, Samantha Barbas, Scandal, Sonny Tufts, Tabloid, Wrong Door Raid

Samantha Barbas is a professor of law at the University of Buffalo, specialising in the history of America’s mass media. Her previous publications include Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity (2001), and The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons (2005.) In her latest book, Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story of Hollywood’s Notorious Scandal Magazine, she explores the lurid history and aftermath of a 1950s publishing phenomenon. Continue reading →

My 3 Favourite: Unfinished Novels

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by marina72 in Books, Fiction

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Beryl Bainbridge, Bobby Kennedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, For Books' Sake, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Irving Thalberg, Netochka Nezvanova, Robert F. Kennedy, Sheilah Graham, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, The Last Tycoon, The Love of the Last Tycoon, Unfinished Novels

girl-in-the-polka-dot-dress-beryl-bainbridge

‘Everyone has a novel inside them’, it is often said – but most of these novels will never be finished. Charlotte Brontё’s late fragment, Emma Brown, inspired the final novel by Clare Boylan in 2004, while the manuscript of Jane Austen’s The Watsons was recently sold at auction for nearly £1 million.

Posthumous publication is nothing new – collections of essays and short stories by Virginia Woolf were unseen until after her suicide in 1941 – but nonetheless, this prolific sub-genre raises questions about the creative process, and its ownership.

The Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, began his first full-length novel, Netochka Nezvanova, in 1846.  Three years later, when the first section of Netochka Nezvanova was serialised, Dostoyevsky was imprisoned for his political beliefs.  He never resumed work on his fledgling novel.

Divided into three main episodes, the story recounts the early life of Netochka Nezvanova, whose name literally means ‘nameless nobody’. Born into poverty, Netochka spends her first decade in the care of her sickly mother, and her stepfather, Efimov, a failed musician whom Netochka idolises.

By her own admission, ‘it was a most unchildlike love’, and Efimov’s manipulation of his step-daughter – turning her against her hapless mother and persuading her to steal money, which he then spends on drink – is genuinely chilling.

After the deaths of her parents, Netochka is adopted by an aristocratic family. But she never really transcends her ‘outsider’ status. In many ways, Netochka’s lack of identity makes her a perfect storyteller, as she absorbs the emotions of those around her.

On the cusp of adolescence, Netochka embarks on a passionate friendship with the spoiled Princess Katya. Dostoyevsky’s nascent prose style has been dismissed as ‘over-heated’, but nonetheless it conveys a remarkable, half-conscious eroticism.

The final part of this novel-in-progress is less striking. Netochka’s role of go-between, in the unhappy marriage of Alexandra Mikhailovna and her domineering husband, is sketchy. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this episode is Netochka’s clandestine reading of forbidden books.

In the years before his death in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald was living in Los Angeles, and working on a novel about the movie industry while penning scripts and short stories. Fitzgerald considered Hollywood ‘the last frontier’ and was fascinated by the immigrant moguls who had pioneered American cinema.

The Last Tycoon was published in its incomplete state in 1941, edited by his friend, Edmund Wilson. In 1976 it was filmed with Robert De Niro in the lead role. But it wasn’t until 1994 that Fitzgerald’s original, unaltered manuscript saw the light of day.

The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western is perhaps the closest we will get to what could have been Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.  Even unfinished, The Last Tycoon ranks alongside The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night.

Monroe Stahr, the Hollywood producer and hero of the novel, was probably based on Irving Thalberg, the ‘boy wonder’ of MGM, whom Fitzgerald met briefly. Cecelia Brady, daughter of Monroe’s rival, narrates part of the story.

She affects a jaded tone – ‘Writers aren’t people exactly,’ she sneers. However, Cecelia is infatuated by Stahr. ‘I was head over heels in love with him then,’ she admits, ‘and you can take what I say for what it’s worth.’

Stahr’s doomed romance with Kathleen Moore was probably inspired by Fitzgerald’s ongoing relationship with the English journalist Sheilah Graham. And Stahr’s dead wife, the movie star Minna Davis, may remind the reader of Fitzgerald’s own former muse, Zelda Fitzgerald.

Beryl Bainbridge died in 2010. In her later years, hampered by poor health and failing eyesight, Bainbridge had attempted, and discarded, several book ideas. A surviving manuscript, published in May, was inspired by a diary the author had kept during a 1968 trip to America, according to The Telegraph.

The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress focuses on the travels of an unlikely couple, ‘Washington Harold’, and a young woman, Rose, whom he had met previously in London. They hope to track down a mutual friend, the enigmatic Dr Wheeler, who is involved with Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

Those familiar with the details of Kennedy’s assassination – outside a Los Angeles hotel, as he made a speech accepting the Democratic nomination – will know that Bainbridge’s title refers to a girl in a polka-dot dress, reported to have fled the scene.

Bainbridge’s style is, as always, uncanny – and Rose, with her steely wisdom hidden beneath apparent kookiness, recalls the author herself. The novel is a cross between a road movie and a political thriller, detailing the clash between jaded Europe and hopeful America, whose certainties will soon be shattered.

As with all unfinished novels, the reader may be feel cheated. But with sensitive editing, a writer’s presence can still be felt, even if the last pages remain unwritten.

Marilyn And Bobby Kennedy

28 Sunday Sep 2008

Posted by marina72 in History, Marilyn Monroe, Updates

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Bobby Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy

Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers

Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers

My new article for the ‘Twilight’ series, Marilyn And Bobby Kennedy, has now been published on Immortal Marilyn

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