There is, of course, a confusion here. Oswald’s motivations are not inexplicable at all, as we have seen, but they are unknowable. And if by “a priori” Knight means “before knowing any of the facts,” then he would have a limited point if it weren’t for all the other lone gunmen and deranged would-be assassins who crowd the historical stage. There is a good reason why the single shooter often succeeds where the corporate conspirator might fail, and that is because he is not only unafraid of being caught, he probably wants to be caught. Knight’s analysis therefore fails to register just how far ordinary people are prepared to go in preferring to believe the improbable as opposed to the likely, and therefore risks underestimating the strength of the desire in society for the “higher” explanation.
Sections of the left, of course, looking back on how the promise of the Vietnam protests became first the Nixon years and then the Reagan era, had an interest in creating an account which somehow mitigated any sense of their own failure, or the failure of their ideas. But it should be remembered that for less partisan people, intellectual or otherwise, the Kennedy assassination was a genuinely appalling moment. The literary critic Irving Howe, writing a fortnight or so after Dallas, wailed his despair. It had been hard, he wrote, “these last two weeks, to feel much pride in being an American.” Oswald was, according to Howe, “a man who embodies the disorder of the city, an utterly displaced creature, totally and (what is more important) proudly alienated, without roots in nation, region, class. He cannot stand it, but what it is he cannot stand he does not know.”25 Oswald was an unbearable manifestation of an unbearable society. The writer and critic Dwight MacDonald wrote that the sniper had created “a wound to our consciousness of ourselves as American . . . Now we see we are more in the class of Guatemala or the Congo.”26
A lone shooter, far from suggesting an isolated act of homicidal madness, actually suggested a sick and chaotic society in which sudden and irrational violence could overtake anyone. That the target should have been young and one of the most famous men on the planet can only have made the feeling of dislocation and paranoia worse. Conspiracy theory, with its promise that the world was ruled by some kind of order, even if it was hidden, offered not the connection with reality that Popkin wanted but a flight from it.
Exit Marilyn
A rather more starry flight from reality surrounds the suicide of Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. The question is, whose flight was it? Hers, or those who believe she was murdered?
Marilyn died sometime during the night of August 4, 1962, fifteen months before the murder of President John Kennedy, her onetime lover. The Los Angeles coroner recorded a verdict of “probable suicide” by drug overdose, and the moviegoing world mourned the passing of the industry’s most glamorous star.
That Monroe should die of barbiturate poisoning was not the greatest surprise for many who knew her. She was a chronic insomniac who needed pills to sleep and—eventually—to wake. In his famous essay on Monroe, “A Beautiful Child,” Truman Capote paints a picture of Monroe in 1955, happily consuming pills, and she would sometimes have to be made up for performance while in a barbiturate-induced stupor. Monroe was famously afflicted by stage fright on set, maintained relationships with great difficulty, suffered from depression (in February 1961, she was briefly committed to a psychiatric hospital in New York), and at the time of her death was alone though contemplating her forthcoming remarriage to Joe DiMaggio. Some biographers also see significance in the fact that her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, was away at the time of her death. Greenson himself had confided in Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalyst daughter, who practiced in London) that he was concerned that Monroe might kill herself.
The early debates, then, were not about whether Marilyn died by her own hand but whether her death was intentional and who should bear the greatest measure of blame. Had Hollywood killed her? Or her shrinks? Or her men? Or all of us?
It took nearly two years for a revisionist version of Monroe’s death to appear. The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, self-published in 1964 by Frank Capell, was more of a pamphlet than a book. Capell’s orientation may be illustrated by the fact that his previous work was titled The Threat from Within: The Truth About the Conspiracy to Destroy America, to be followed a few years later by Henry Kissinger: Soviet Agent. Capell, in conformity with his general worldview, was of the opinion that Monroe had been murdered by Communist agents possibly in the pay of Robert F. Kennedy.
The “impossible fact” in Marilyn’s death is supposed to be the body’s incapacity to ingest as much barbiturate as was found in Monroe’s bloodstream. Over the years this has given rise to two main thoughts: either that she was forcibly injected or—given the complete absence of any marks of injection—that she was treated to a barbiturate enema. Donald Spoto (Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, 1993) abjured vulgar murder theories and hypothesized that it was all a terrible mistake. He has Dr. Greenson instructing Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, to give her employer an enema of chloral hydrate, not realizing that it would react with the Nembutal that he had also prescribed. In this account, Greenson emerges as a kind of negligent Svengali, hugely influential over his patient and almost entirely stupid. Spoto, by positing an enema by consent, at least avoided the image created by Chuck and Sam Giancana, respectively brother and godson of the Mafia boss of the same name, in their 1993 book Double Cross. This had Mafia hit men, who had been spying on the star, going to Monroe’s bedroom, where she was lying on the bed facedown, and forcibly administering a Nembutal enema.
In Joyce Carol Oates’s best-selling fact-novel Blonde (2000), someone known only as the “Sharpshooter”—sent by an agency that wants Marilyn dead because her views are a bit progressive—gives her a lethal injection. Donald Wolfe’s The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe (1998) has several men—including RFK, Rat-Packster Peter Lawford, and Greenson—visit Monroe on the night of August 4 in what one critic called “the conspiracy sub-genre’s reductio ad absurdum: Bobby Kennedy and Sam Giancana and Marilyn’s psychotherapist tripping over each other in an effort to commit the great pointless homicide.”27
Though Marilyn theories have taken longer to emerge and have less purchase on the popular consciousness than their JFK counterparts, they have become every bit as diverse in their demonology. The mob did it to implicate the Kennedys; the mob did it at the behest of the Kennedys; Jimmy Hoffa did it; the Russians did it; the FBI or the CIA did it. Somehow the film star’s death succeeded in linking together those four great arenas for popular culture—politics, crime, sex, and show business—and, once the parade started, the floats kept on coming.
Secret Marriages, Hidden Tapes, Duped Reporters
Marilyn-themed conspiracy theories were always going to be lucrative. The seven hundred or so biographies of Monroe bear witness not just to authors’ fascination with the subject but also to the calculation on the part of publishers that such books will sell. But each book, each documentary, each major magazine article required something new—a twist, a revelation, a unique selling point. In such circumstances, the incentive to produce novel information and evidence is obvious. And so, too, is the desire to use it.
In 1974, a certain Robert Slatzer published The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe, in which he claimed to have been secretly married to the star—albeit briefly—in 1952 and to have been her lifelong confidant. In this capacity, he discovered her “affair” with Robert Kennedy and saw her little red diary, in which she mentioned “Murder Incorporated.” This, she explained to Slatzer, was in the context of Bobby telling her “that he was powerful enough to have people taken care of if they got in his way.” At least one other biographer has proved that on the day Slatzer was supposed to be marrying Marilyn in Mexico the star was actually shopping in Hollywood, yet Slatzer’s version of Monroe’s demise has been used as the basis for many more biographies and articles since.
Slatzer’s were not the only revelations of forgotten diaries or hidden recordings. Indeed, a
ll the various agencies already mentioned, plus—according to some more way-out theorists—a paranoid Marilyn herself and Twentieth Century-Fox, were supposed to have bugged the Monroe house. Yet not one of the dozens of tapes that must have been made has ever surfaced for examination. There have been only “transcripts” or “eyewitness accounts” of the hard evidence, which has always conveniently disappeared from history.
One prime example of this kind of Monroevian evolution is afforded by the work of Matthew Smith, a Sheffield-based writer who has presumably made a good living out of Kennedyana in recent years, publishing JFK: The Second Plot in 1992 (Patrolman J. D. Tippit was in on it, apparently), Vendetta: The Kennedys (1993), Say Goodbye to America: The Sensational and Untold Story Behind the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2002), and The Kennedys: The Conspiracy to Destroy a Dynasty (2006). In this last book, Smith constructs an overarching theory that connects the deaths of Marilyn, JFK, RFK, and Mary Jo Kopechne, the girl who died in Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick in 1969. It was all—all of it—the work of elements within the CIA. They saw JFK as being too left-wing and bumped Marilyn off to discredit the Kennedys, both of whom were having affairs with the star at her bugged bungalow in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, that didn’t work, so they killed JFK the next year, and then, for some reason, waited another five years before getting rid of Bobby. The next year they arranged for Ted to drive his car, complete with a young woman, off a bridge, thus destroying his chances of the presidency.
Two difficulties with Smith’s thesis are that there is no evidence of Monroe having entertained JFK at the Los Angeles bungalow—their one attested liaison having taken place in 1960—and no real evidence that she ever had an affair at all with Robert. Until, that is, previously unknown recordings surfaced, to form the basis of Smith’s 2003 book Victim: The Secret Tapes of Marilyn Monroe.
In the preface to this work, Smith explained what had happened. A man named John Miner, who had been the head of the Los Angeles DA office’s medical legal section, had approached him with transcripts of two tapes made by Monroe herself shortly before she died. These tapes had been recorded for Ralph Greenson as part of a free-association exercise in which Monroe unburdened herself of various thoughts and memories, and were played by Greenson for Miner in the days after Monroe’s death on condition of the strictest confidentiality. Greenson’s aim, according to Smith, was to give Miner some idea of the star’s state of mind in the last days of her life. Despite the agreement with Greenson, Miner subsequently made “nearly verbatim” notes from memory, only breaking his silence when the by-now-deceased psychoanalyst was himself named as a possible Marilynicide.
As partially reproduced by Smith, the transcripts (not “tapes,” as he describes them) are both commercially comprehensive and properly incriminating. Marilyn begins by telling Greenson that this recording business is “really easy. I’m lying on the bed wearing only a brassiere. If I want to go to the refrig or the bathroom, I can push the stop button and begin again when I want to.”28 And she reminds Greenson (and thus Miner and thus Smith and thus the readers) that “you are the only person who will ever know the most private, the most secret thoughts of Marilyn Monroe.” And there it all is: her orgasms, her lesbian fling with Joan Crawford, the glitz, the sex, the high politics, and, of course, the Kennedys. And she finishes, “But Bobby, Doctor, what should I do about Bobby? As you see there’s no room in my life for him . . . I want someone else to tell him it’s over. I tried to get the president to do it, but I couldn’t reach him.” She was going to give Bobby the kiss-off, and then she was dead. It was, as Sarah Churchwell puts it in her serious biography of Marilyn, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, “thoughtful of Marilyn to dispose of so many of our questions about her life just before she died and to offer summary versions of all her most famous relationships to the psychiatrist she’d been seeing daily for two years.”29
So where were the original tapes? Greenson’s wife had never heard of them. No suggestion of them ever turned up in the Anna Freud archives. The first time they were ever mentioned was by Miner himself in a review of the Monroe case in 1982, and even then, despite Greenson’s death in 1979, Miner made no mention of any transcripts. In fact, there was only Miner’s word that the tapes had ever existed at all. Smith has told the Los Angeles Times that he believes Miner to be “a man of integrity.” He also said, “I’ve looked at the contents of the tapes, of course, and, frankly, I would think it entirely impossible for John Miner to have invented what he put forward—absolutely impossible.”30
Even a fairly casual look at what has been published reveals the absurdity of this claim. It would have been entirely possible for someone who had followed the theories about, and biographies of, Marilyn over the years to concoct such a story. Indeed, as Churchwell suggests, the transcripts seem credible only as a fabrication. Wearing only her brassiere, indeed!
And the motive for any such hoax is obvious too: Smith, of course, paid Miner an undisclosed fee for the use of the transcript. As rival Marilyn biographer and conspiracy theorist Anthony Summers revealed in 2005, Miner had been hawking his supposed transcript around the theorizing community for the best part of a decade. “What happened in 1995,” Summers told a television interviewer, “was that Miner got in touch to say he was going to let go what he claimed to have heard Monroe say on the purported tapes. He said he had seventy to eighty handwritten pages of what he called manuscript-type notes of what he supposedly heard back in 1962. He obviously wanted money . . . and he spoke of having been offered six-figure sums for his story.”31 Skeptical about how anyone could reconstruct from memory eighty pages’ worth of Monroe speaking, Summers had asked to see the original shorthand notes. After a few months, all that Miner produced was a thirty-five-page condensation written on a yellow legal pad only a few weeks previously. “I said thanks, but no thanks,” said Summers, adding, “I don’t understand why any reputable paper like the New York Times, like the LA Times would decide to run the material.”32
More Forgeries
If Smith was taken in, he wasn’t the only one. One of the legendary investigative reporters of the last fifty years is Seymour Hersh, who currently writes for The New Yorker. In his book debunking the golden myth of the Kennedys, The Dark Side of Camelot, Hersh states as fact what can only be supposition, that Miner “was given confidential access to a stream-of-consciousness tape-recording Monroe made at the recommendation of her psychoanalyst . . . Miner put together what he considered to be a near-verbatim transcript of the tapes.” These tapes, said Hersh, helped to prove that “Monroe’s instability posed a constant threat to [John F.] Kennedy.”33
In Hersh’s book, the reference to Miner nearly had to play second fiddle to spectacular new evidence linking Kennedy to Monroe. For Hersh had come across a separate cache of astonishing documents and agreements—this time proving, among other dark things, that JFK had agreed to pay the film star $1 million in hush money to keep her quiet both about their affair and also about JFK’s supposed relationship with Mafia boss Sam Giancana. The source of these hundreds of new documents was Lex Cusack, whose father had worked as a lawyer for Marilyn Monroe’s mother before her death. Cusack found them, he claimed, when his father died in 1991, and over the next few years he would go on to earn up to $7 million through sales of the documents to dealers and middlemen. It was one of these, John Reznikoff, president of the University Archives at Stamford, who introduced the documents to Seymour Hersh, then in the process of researching his Kennedy book. Hersh was excited, clearly believing them to be genuine: one journalist wrote of him brandishing the documents in a restaurant and shouting, “The Kennedys were . . . the worst people!”34
Whatever Hersh agreed to pay Cusack or anyone else for the documents, they certainly seemed worth it, since NBC television agreed to pay $1 million for the rights to a documentary based on the forthcoming book. However, as was later revealed by the New York Times, NBC started to express doubts to Hersh about the authenticity of the docum
ents and then pulled out of the project.35 ABC took up where NBC left off, and it was ABC’s investigation, involving forensic testing, that demonstrated that the Cusack documents were fakes. Hersh removed all reference to them from his book, and in 1999, Lex Cusack was sentenced to ten years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of $7 million to his victims.
Hersh had had a narrow escape. Of course, there are those who question why he did not himself have the documents forensically analyzed, given the obvious questions about their provenance and the amount of money riding on their authenticity. One possibility is that they suited him so well he couldn’t bear them to be fakes—so they weren’t.
Belief is all-important. In the foreword to Smith’s book of dubious tapes, Monroe’s fellow actor Donald O’Connor writes, “I knew her well enough to believe she could not have killed herself; it was not in her nature. She was murdered, but by whom?”36 It is impossible to ask the late Mr. O’Connor just what kind of “nature” he thought a suicidal person may have. Perhaps it was simply that he didn’t want to believe that she could have killed herself. Certainly, for many of her fans and contemporaries the thought of the self-slaughter of someone so wealthy, popular, talented, and, of course, beautiful was almost too much to bear. And if she was killed, the thought didn’t have to be borne. It was far easier to see her as a pawn of powerful political forces.
“The conspiracies surrounding Monroe’s death are always about the intersection of her story with politics,” wrote Sarah Churchwell. “There are not similarly powerful theories surrounding the untimely death of any other celebrity except Diana Princess of Wales.”37
And Exit the Princess of Hearts
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Page 17