Hollywood Progressive takes a look at Carl Sandburg’s love of silent movies, and his friendship with Marilyn, with whom he shared a love of Lincoln, Chaplin and poetry:
‘He found her to be down-to-earth and genuine. He said that “she came up the hard way,” and since his path to fame had also been difficult, he probably admired her “rags-to-riches” saga. He thought she “was a good talker.”
Although “’there were realms of science, politics and economics in which she wasn’t at home, . . . she spoke well on the national scene, the Hollywood scene, and on people who are good to know and people who ain’t.”
He added that they “agreed, on a number of things—that Charlie Chaplin is beyond imitation, for instance”—and she “never talked about her husbands.” He also found in her “a vitality, a readiness for humor,” which was a characteristic Sandburg always appreciated in others, including Abraham Lincoln. In his Look magazine tribute, he expressed great regret over her death, “I wish I could have been with her that day. . . . I believe I could have persuaded her not to take her life.”’
Also included is a fragment from Sandburg’s last major poem, Timesweep, completed in 1963, a year after Marilyn’s death. Sandburg died, aged 89, just four years later.
“Makers and givers may be moon shaken,
may be star lost,
Knowing themselves as sea-deep seekers,
both seeking and sought,
Knowing love is a ring and the ring endless,
Seeing love as a wheel and the wheel endless.”
