Marilyn Monroe's Blog

Leah and I were in Hollywood yesterday and came across a newsstand that had about 15 magazines with Jennifer Aniston on the cover. The headlines blared:

Jennifer Breaks Her Silence
Jen Reveals Secret Heartache
Jennifer’s Revenge
Jen Tells All

These stories stem from a recent interview Aniston did with Vanity Fair in which she spoke publicly about her divorce from Brad Pitt for the first time. A feeding frenzy then erupted with every celebrity rag trying to spin a story from her few comments. I haven’t read the original article but I’m sure that Jen did NOT “tell all” to the Vanity Fair reporter or anyone else. Just another example of our lust for details of the personal lives of the celebrities we inexplicably place on pedestals. Or am I being naïve? Was every cover piece vetted by Aniston’s publicist despite the actress’s pleas for privacy?

Even though I’m not particularly interested in Jennifer Aniston’s personal life, I don’t dare try to adopt a superior tone. You only have to read a few of the entries on this blog to see how captivated I am by the cult of celebrity. And while I’ve yet to run out to purchase the new Vanity Fair, I was riveted to the page one article in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times about another actress who is still the Ground Zero of celebrity obsession.

Marilyn Monroe died 43 years ago this weekend. The anniversary of her death rarely passes without all sorts of kooks coming out of the woodwork. First there’s the woman, now almost 60, who claims to be the daughter Marilyn gave birth to in 1947. Story has it that she was placed by the mob into an Italian family in Queens but the “pretty lady” used to visit the little girl regularly throughout the 1950s. I remember years ago when this woman was interviewed by Tom Snyder on the old NBC “Tomorrow” show and I was amazed she had climbed that high on the network food chain. She was in her 30s then and made the mistake of trying to look like Marilyn which only made her look a bit like a drag queen. You’d think that if it were true this poor woman would have found a distant relative of Marilyn's and had a DNA test done. But who knows? Loretta Young was able to keep the love child she had with Clark Gable a secret until her death.

Then there are the Marilyn impersonators who are swarming Hollywood Boulevard this weekend like peroxide locusts, posing with tourists for a small fee, their heavy makeup puddling on their faces in the intense heat. Most wear facsimiles of the famous “Seven Year Itch” dress, the one that blew upwards when Marilyn stood over the subway grate (a scene that so infuriated Joe DiMaggio that he stormed off the set and begged Marilyn to leave the film). Leah and I have our favorite Marilyn—she hangs out next to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and looks so much like the actress that we’ve been known to follow her for a full city block. I always try to talk to her just so I can hear her “Thank you ever so” in perfect Marilyn pitch (even though that voice itself was a fake that Marilyn put on as part of her image control). Kendall and I were at a screening of one of Monroe’s films recently and met Marilyn’s actual stand-in from the 50s. She looked very much like Marilyn back in the day so it was fascinating to get a glimpse of how Marilyn might look if she were still alive today (she’d be 79 years old if you can believe it).

Despite all the hoopla surrounding these anniversaries, I’ve rarely seen such a provocative front page article about Marilyn in a publication like the Los Angeles Times. Apparently a former Los Angeles County prosecutor named John Miner, now 86, believes that Marilyn Monroe did not commit suicide but was a victim of foul play. Miner was one of the principal investigators of Monroe’s death in 1962. He interviewed Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who had in his possession a series of stream-of-consciousness audiotapes Marilyn had recorded shortly before her death as part of her therapy. Greenson played the tapes for Miner only on the condition that he would never reveal their contents. The tapes were allegedly destroyed and no transcripts were thought to exist…until now.

Miner kept his promise to Greenson until the psychiatrist’s death. But when recent books about Monroe tried to implicate Greenson himself in the movie star’s demise, Miner got permission from Greenson’s widow to reveal his secret transcript of the tapes. These are the transcripts just published by the L.A. Times. Pretty amazing, but I haven’t seen such an abuse of privileged information since excerpts of Jackie Kennedy’s letters to her clergyman were released. In the wake of her husband’s assassination, Jackie said she was in so much pain that she contemplated ending her life. Marilyn, on the other hand, seemed anything but despondent on the tapes, and she was making lots of plans for her future including a commitment to study Shakespeare with Lee Strasberg:

I'll pay him to work only with me. He said I could do Shakespeare, I'll make him prove it…Then I'll produce and act in the Marilyn Monroe Shakespeare Film Festival which will put his major plays on film...I've read all of Shakespeare and practiced a lot of lines. I won't have to worry about the scripts. I'll have the greatest script writer who ever lived working for me and I don't have to pay him…I've some wonderful ideas for Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude. I feel certain I'll win an Oscar for one or more of my Shakespearean women.

I do feel a little sleazy reading Marilyn’s private comments to her shrink, not to mention reprinting them here. But they are mostly flattering to the film star, and do a lot to broaden our idea of what made her tick. Marilyn is obviously an intelligent, introspective person. In addition to Shakespeare, she talks about other authors she is reading including Joyce and Dolstoevsky. She is clearly someone who wants to be taken seriously despite her movie star image that she had a big hand in creating. At 36 years old, Marilyn surveyed the parts of her that the public seemed to be most interested in:

I stood naked in front of my full length mirrors for a long time yesterday. I was all made up with my hair done. What did I see? My breasts are beginning to sag a bit. My waist isn't bad. My ass is what it should be, the best there is. Legs, knees and ankles still shapely. And my feet are not too big. OK, Marilyn, you have it all there.

She mentions Clark Gable, with whom she had recently completed “The Misfits” with great fondness.

He was so nice to me and I didn't deserve it. I was having problems with Arthur and being sick and I held up the shooting a lot. Clark protected me from Huston who kept giving me a bad time… In the kissing scenes, I kissed him with real affection. I didn't want to go to bed with him, but I wanted him to know how much I liked and appreciated him. When I came back from a day off the set, he patted my ass and told me if I didn't behave myself, he would give me a good spanking. I looked him in the eye and said, “Don't tempt me!” He burst out laughing so hard he was tearing.

Because of his performance I've seen “Gone With the Wind” over and over again. He was perfect. It makes me so mad I could scream—those Academy fuckers didn't award him the Oscar. He should have won hands down.

Marilyn talked about her famous husbands in the tapes and confirmed that she and Joe DiMaggio still had feelings for each other:

Joe D. loves Marilyn Monroe and always will. I love him and always will. But Joe couldn't stay married to Marilyn Monroe, the famous movie star. Joe has an image in his stubborn Italian head of a traditional Italian wife. She would have to be faithful, do what he tells her, devote all of herself to him. Doctor, you know that's not me.

It's different with Arthur. Marrying him was my mistake, not his. He couldn't give me the attention, warmth and affection I need. It's not in his nature. Arthur never credited me with much intelligence. He couldn't share his intellectual life with me. As bed partners we were so-so. He was not that much interested. You know I think his little Jewish father had more genuine affection for me than Arthur did.

Am I getting too salacious here? But wait—you ain't heard nothin' yet! How have I lived on this planet for almost 46 years without ever hearing a word about the brief affair between Joan Crawford and Marilyn Monroe? Yikes!

We went to Joan's bedroom…Crawford had a gigantic orgasm and shrieked like a maniac…Next time I saw Crawford she wanted another round. I told her straight out I didn't much enjoy doing it with a woman. After I turned her down, she became spiteful. An English poet best describes it: hath no rage like love to hatred turned; and hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – most people wrongly credit that to Shakespeare. William Congreve is the author. That's me, Marilyn Monroe, the classical scholar.

Joan Crawford’s orgasm? Remember, folks, I’m getting this stuff from the L.A. Times, not the National Enquirer!

Of course, the main thing people will be interested in is what Marilyn said about the Kennedy brothers. She waxed on about JFK’s promise as President:

This man is going to change our country. No child will go hungry. No person will sleep in the street and get his meals from garbage cans. People who can't afford it will get good medical care. Industrial products will be the best in the world. No, I'm not talking Utopia — that's an illusion, but he will transform America today like FDR did in the 30's…I tell you, Doctor, when he has finished his achievements he will take his place with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR as one of our greatest Presidents.

But Marilyn was confused about how to deal with her personal relationship with Bobby Kennedy.

I guess I don't have the courage to face up to it and hurt him. I want someone else to tell him its over. I tried to get the President to do it, but I couldn't reach him. Now I'm glad I couldn't. He is too important to ask…Maybe I should stop being a coward and tell him myself. But because I know how much he'll be hurt I don't have the strength.

Pretty incendiary stuff if it’s true. Marilyn’s other comments about Bobby are so frank that I can’t bring myself to reprint them here. Several people place Bobby at Marilyn’s house on the day that she died. They apparently had an argument and Kennedy stormed out, not that I think he had any direct connection to her death. John Miner is the only person alive who heard Marilyn’s tapes and only he knows if these are accurate transcripts. In releasing them, Miner is hoping to get public support for exhuming poor Marilyn’s corpse to run further tests that may prove her death was not a suicide after all. Yikes, it seems rather grisly to even contemplate exhuming a body 43 years after death. Shouldn’t we just leave the woman alone?

Looking at the lengthy article about Marilyn in the Los Angeles Times, I notice on the opposite page a piece on the famine and genocide taking place in Darfur. Oh hell, that is the story I should be reading and commenting on. I feel sickened as I think of how many people devoured the Monroe article and bypassed the other story completely. What is the percentage of people in this country who even know where Darfur is? Oh wait, isn’t that where Angelina Jolie just got her new baby?

Comments

[Elaine Soloway]

Not sordid, Danny, fascinating. Thanks for sharing Marilyn's "blog."

[david]

Well, you can't help it if it's fascinating! Shame on me: I could've been sitting in the washroom with the Wall Street Journal -- or working! -- but I couldn't stop reading this great post!

[Danny]

Elaine, I liked your idea of "Marilyn's blog" so much that I changed the title of this post! Maybe she would have written a blog if she had lived and was now a hip 79-year-old who won a few of those Oscars she hoped to get for her Shakespearean women. I can see how she might have matured into some really great roles that could have continued to this day—look at the other actresses who started out as sex kittens and later moved on to amazing performaces (Catherine Deneuve, Sophia Loren, even Jane Fonda come to mind). Not that I'm implying that Marilyn's performances were all lightweight—I thought she was a wonderful actress!

[Natalie]

Danny, most of the transcript of the tapes appears in the press over here (London) today, orgasms and all. I saw it in the Daily Express, a lousy paper that I never read but the others were all gone.
I agree that Marilyn was a great actress. And what gorgeous photos of her you've posted.
The "foul play" version of her death has been around for some time. Allegations that she was bumped off by the CIA or FBI (or both) because of her affairs with the Kennedys and the fear that she might become an embarassment. I think someone did a documentary on it - very convincing.

[adriana bliss]

Your pictures of Marilyn are gorgeous - I have to say, when I first read the article, the first few transcripts read just like a modern "blog." Made me think that's what many of us do: use cyberspace as our therapist. I know I do!

[Lauren]

Excellent Blog. I too was shocked to hear about Marilyn's short affair with Joan when I read it in the guardian. And you're right, I think it is too much to exhume her body. But then again, if it was me, and I was dead for over 43 years, I don't think I'd really care.

[Pauly D]

I'm amazed the LAT printed such a huge piece, but then again I guess she still is just about the most famous actress that's dead.

[Neil]

The glamour of a Hollywood actress back then, especially one who died so young, was so different than it is today, that I can't think of any actress today that would still be in the news 50 years after her death. Only Princess Di is sort of comparable in more recent history. I'm not sure we consider actors and actresses our "royalty" any more, despite our obsession with celebrity. Maybe there's just too many movies, TV channels, etc, so the pool of "famous celebrities" has been debased. Hell, you're now a celebrity if you've been on "Survivor."

[Mary]

First of all, I doubt the veracity of the transcripts; as someone who has done transcript from tapes, I know how long it takes to get it even close to accurate. How much time did the doctor give the author with the material?
And secondly, I don't find anything inconsistent in the transcripts, assuming they are reasonably accurate, with suicide--or, more to the point, emotional illness. She doesn't sound like she's making serious plans; she's making grandiose, castles in the air; as someone wrote in a letter to the Times, it's the "manic" phase that precedes the "depressive" phase. I always thought she didn't mean to kill herself, but lost track of the number of pills she took to blunt her pain. Pain that came in part from the number of people who used her to their own devices, which, to be honest, I think includes this guy.

[Danny]

I can't see why this guy would lie about the transcripts (we'll never know) but I completely agree with you, Mary, about his conclusion that Marilyn's statements to her shrink support the notion that she didn't commit suicide. I bet if you examined the journal entries of many suicide victims in the weeks preceding their deaths you'd find all sorts of hopeful ramblings about their future as they desperately try to climb out of their inner torment. But we'll never know that either. I don't rule out foul play at all, but I think there's a strong likelihood that she accidentally lost track of the pills she was taking and stupidly mixing with alcohol.

[Mary]

I think he could lie because there is no way to contradict him (only other source is dead, and the tapes themselves, assuming they existed, are destroyed) and would lie because he can and will make money off of it. I hate that I've gotten so cynical, but it's hard not to be. It's probably because I've never recovered from the discovery that Kenneth Anger made up most of Hollywood Babylon, one of the great formative books of my early years!
Love your blog, by the way, and your tender views on life.

[fabio napoleoni]

wow!...thanks for all the info... i have loved this woman since i was 10 years old... i get an ache in my heart very time i see a photo of her... the greatest american crime ever committed in my opinion... whe know who and why... it doesnt need to be writen...
thanks...fabio

[keri w]

Hey, I have to say Bravo!
Well done. I really appreciate what you have done. I adore Marilyn Monroe, and I will read anything I see written about her. I have to say this is by far one of the best.

Thanks,

Keri

[S. Greenson]

I stumbled onto this site after looking at some of the more recent stuff about this issue. I guess I'm not sure why everyone still thinks this is so fascinating. Ralph Greenson was my great uncle. Passionate and original and witty... What is the "greatest american crime" here? Why is he still-why are WE still constantly being berated? He's dead, she's dead. People still won't leave this alone!

[Cheri]

If you always want to know what happened to Marilyn Monroe? I did and I found out, the prodcuers of Marilyn Monroe An Act of Murder shows you the timeline of what happened to Marilyn during her last 48 hours. You can see this at http://www.marilynmonroeanactofmurder.com

[yvon]

Hello
mon hommage fait à Marilyn

http://lammquejaime.canalblog.com/

Yvon

[Jennifer J]

This is in response to Ralph Greenson's niece.

Marilyn Monroe died while under your uncle's care. He is referenced on this website, Citizens Commission on Human Rights for Psychiatric Human Rights Abuse: http://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/5324 for alleged abuse to Marilyn Monroe while she was under his care. As wonderful as you say he was, he and his cohorts who were there that night were not honest with the police as they should have been. People won't leave this alone because we care about Marilyn and want to know what happened to her. Your uncle had a chance to be "passionate, original and witty" hopefully to a ripe old age...but poor Marilyn Monroe did not and she left this world in a cloud of premature mystery...and people who truly loved her and care about her want the truth...thanks to the lack of honesty and integrity in part to your great uncle, Eunice Murray and Dr. Engelberg on 8/5/62 we will never completely know the answers. Sorry, that's why we won't leave it alone. Maybe if those who were there were more upfront, the rest of us wouldn't be sitting wondering and you wouldn't be bent out of shape with us for questioning. And if you weren't so dog-gone curious about it, why are YOU looking up stuff on Marilyn Monroe? Hmmm....

BTW Danny, great blog!

[Mark Bellinghaus]

Dear Jen,
wow, I am impressed, you have been blogging for so long, and about Marilyn Monroe, wonderful images, too.
Thank you for your recent purchase from my eBay store. Yeah, those hair pins are the last from that particular lot. I sold out on the powder, the hair clips, the larger pins and they have been sold to Marilyn admirer from all over the world. Most of the items are in appreciative hands.

Did you follow the "CHARACTER ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT," that has taken place over the last month?! Some crazy and super obsessed MM fan has threatened me physically, cause I exposed his friend Bebe Goddard and puclished her telling letters to mmdealer Guido Ortenzio as a total crooked criminal.
Weird but reality--these fansites, which were mostly started by Mark Roesler's CMG Worldwide in order to sell the plates, dolls and other MM products, they have started an anti Mark Bellinghaus campaign. But we expected such a move. The Roesler guy is literally done. He will never be believable after putting his name behind a trash collection of thrift store junk, claimed to be worth $8.75 million, when it wasn't worth more than $25K - $30K! That is mega fraud par excellence.

Anyhow, gotta run and it would be nice, if you would write down your thoughts on this, I like your pieces, and maybe you wanna publish something on and about it.

Friends Through Marilyn~Marilyn's Friends!

[chloe]

I like Marilyn Monroe very much!She is very attractive and lovely!
www.jromances.com

[marilyn monroe foundation]

marilyn monroe had a daughter. her name, nancy miracle

she was never on the show mentioned above and get your facts straight before putting your idiocy in print.

the only truth about the screen star is on marilyn monroe foundation web page

[marilyn monroe foundation]

read the play here i am mother by the only woman or man for that matter who really knows the story and has been censored by the estate people who have fed ignorant lies to the general public who chose to believe them.

[ricky ray]

the strasbergs have lied so much about marilyn monroe that even those who know better are starting to believe them

[Michael Morrison]

Wow! You've gotta see this. This is the coolest pop art of Marilyn Monroe I've ever seen. It's called Marilyn Monroe Tangerine. I think it's even better than Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe. The colors are better-- tangerine, deep purple and sky blue.

And here's the best part. I've also got a secret. I learned that there's a secret web page where you can get
this canvas print and save over $100! Here it is: http://www.marilynmonroepopart.com/secretpage.html.

Also I heard this is only one in a series of thirty-two. Hey I got mine and I'm so gald I did. I'm gonna collect all them. You gotta get yours now before this secret page goes away.

[Darlene]

I just read the coolest book. In it, Marilyn comes back to life--in a manner of speaking. It's a futurist thriller called Better Than Chocolate (by Bruce Golden). In it, a "celebudroid" is created to look and act like MM, and then programmed with all her films, all known facts about her. It IS Marilyn, but she begins to grow as a person in this new identity, so she becomes more than just the MM known to history. This celebudroid ends up partnering with a San Francisco police inspector to save mankind from a vast conspiracy. It's fun, it's funny, and it's engaging. You should check it out.

[Tigran Baroyan]

The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. - book reviews

MARILYN & BOBBY & JACK

I CANNOT understand why Anthony Summers's book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe - www.MarilynMonroe.name (Macmillan, 1985; NAL paperback, with important postscript added, 1986 --this is the edition I am quoting from) has not had a greater impact upon the informed political sensibility. And this in turn raises questions about the forming of our public perceptions --that is, about why some material is admitted into our sense of a famous man while some other information, no matter how persuasive, is excluded. Perhaps, in this case, the legends of John and Robert Kennedy, shaped by that wintry inauguration in January 1961, by the proclaimed "New Frontier," by notions of "Camelot," and by the assassinations, is so compelling as to resist modification. We prefer those images to disturbing realities. And as far as the Kennedy myth is concerned, Anthony Summers's book is disturbing indeed.
It presents the evidence that John Kennedy met Marilyn Monroe - www.MarilynMonroe.name as early as 1951 and had a long sexual relationship with her that lasted well into his Presidency; that Robert Kennedy, while Attorney General, commenced an affair that overlapped with his brother's; that both men left themselves open to blackmail by the numerous people who had bugged Monroe's residence (there was apparently at least one tape of Robert Kennedy in flagrante delicto); that while Marilyn Monroe - www.MarilynMonroe.name was intimate with the Kennedy brothers she was simultaneously intimate with members of a far-left group in Mexico City, with whom she discussed national-security matters, to the infinite alarm of J. Edgar Hoover; that Marilyn Monroe - www.MarilynMonroe.name believed Robert Kennedy to have promised to leave his wife and marry her, and dreamed of becoming First Lady; that she was threatening to reveal this to the public; that on the day of her death (August 5, 1962) she was visited clandestinely twice by Robert Kennedy, once in the company of Peter Lawford; that Kennedy knew by then that her house was bugged, and searched frantically for the devices; that there are serious reasons to believe that Monroe may not have committed suicide; and that FBI agents and probably members of the Los Angeles Police Department obstructed the official inquiry in order to cover up evidence of her liaisons with the Kennedys.
To say that Summers's thesis has not become entrenched in the national consciousness is not to say that his book has been ignored. It was a bestseller and received excellent reviews in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Newsday, the Los Angeles Weekly, and the New York Times. And yet I myself had paid no attention to this book; I suppose I wrote it off as just another biography of Marilyn Monroe - www.MarilynMonroe.name, unlikely to shed new light on the Kennedys. After all, the memoir by Judith Exner (whom Kennedy shared with mobster Sam Giancana), Garry Wills's The Kennedy Imprisonment, and The Kennedys, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, had done much to bring out JFK's promiscuity and his mob connections. But those books cannot compare with this bombshell.
John Kennedy met Marilyn Monroe - www.MarilynMonroe.name early in her career and began with her one of his many casual affairs, meeting her at hotels in New York and Los Angeles and at Peter Lawford's beach house in Santa Monica. He slept with her after his 1960 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, and on into his Presidency, despite her close connection with various gangsters, until he was warned by J. Edgar Hoover. Then the John Kennedy-Marilyn Monroe - www.MarilynMonroe.name relationship ended.
The Bobby-Marilyn Monroe - www.MarilynMonroe.name affair seems to have begun in February 1962 after they met at a dinner party at the Lawford home. Bobby was at first amused by her attempts at political conversation, then outraged at her pro-Castro, anti-nuclear criticisms of the Kennedy Administration. There were arguments (taped) at her home in which Bobby yelled that she was "going Communist." She called him on a special number at the Justice Department to arrange trysts, while at the same time frequenting the left-wing circle of the expatriate "silver-spoon Communist," Fred Vanderbilt Field, in Mexico City.
Let us go to Summers's painstaking investigation of this whole sordid mess. Summers spent over three years on the book, with the help of several assistants, including a lawyer specializing in Freedom of Information Act requests. His 62 pages of bibliography, notes, and index are reasonably scholarly for a book of this type. The evidence for the Kennedy connection is overpowering, confirmed by Peter Lawford's wives, Marilyn Monroe - www.MarilynMonroe.name 's maid, psychiatrists from the Suicide Prevention Team who counseled Monroe's psychoanalyst after her death, various detectives involved in wiretapping and bugging her home, and many others.
This book abounds with circumstantial detail. Take, for example, Summers's account of an evening in July 1960. The Lawfords were throwing a party; it was the week of JFK's nomination in San Francisco, and the atmostphere is right out of Norman Mailer's The Deer Park. Two officers from the Los Angeles District Attorney's office approached the beach house and were blocked by armed guards. "There had been enough time to observe a wild party going on around the Lawfords' pool, one that included a bevy of women, some familiar to the officer as call girls supplied by a known madam.... Also present was John Kennedy."

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