Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  The biggest noise was caused by the publication of Norman Mailer’s Marilyn, published in 1973. Mailer admitted that he depended heavily on Fred Lawrence Guiles’s Norma Jean [sic], written and serialized before Robert Kennedy died and published (without substantiating notes or sources) the following year. Guiles, taking his lead from Winchell, wrote of her affair with “a married man not in the [movie] industry . . . an Easterner with few ties on the coast.” The man was “a lawyer and public servant with an important political career . . . an attorney [who stayed] at his host’s beach house,” where he and Marilyn met for their rendezvous. No one had any doubt of the man’s identity, and as Guiles wrote later, “the [RFK] liaison with Marilyn, which my book doubtless exposed despite my precautions [!], has been written about over and over again.”

  Despite his telling observation that “Guiles’ version . . . may be no more than a compendium of the lies he was told,” Mailer then proceeded to compound the fiction by fantasizing that Robert Kennedy might have had a hand in Marilyn’s death or even that government intelligence agents might have killed her in an attempt to frame the attorney general. By simply being the first to name Robert Kennedy, Mailer had his bestseller.

  Excoriated by critics for his foggy ruminations, he was interviewed by Mike Wallace on the CBS news program 60 Minutes (on July 13, 1973), where Mailer had to concede, “I’d say it was ten to one that [Marilyn’s death] was an accidental suicide.” Why, then, did he trash Robert Kennedy? Mailer was nothing if not candid: “I needed money very badly.” He got it, but the public was hooked on a monumental deception.

  Meanwhile, Robert Slatzer pressed ahead, fruitlessly demanding an official Los Angeles County investigation into Marilyn’s death and enlisting the services of private detective Milo Speriglio. Their grandstanding was not much heeded until the appearance of an article—“Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?”—in the October 1975 issue of Oui, a monthly “adult” publication best described as a skin magazine. The writer, Anthony Scaduto (whose only sources were Slatzer and Speriglio), ran further with the Kennedy angle than anyone thus far; he also introduced two ingenious new elements into the tale.

  The first was the supposed existence of a red leather diary kept by Marilyn—a notebook, Slatzer said, in which she had carefully recorded government secrets told to her by the attorney general. In this book there were, it was claimed, the details of (among other items) a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, a secret Slatzer said Marilyn threatened to reveal to the world along with her Kennedy affairs when the attorney general ended their romance.

  The second “revelation” was the supposed existence of tape recordings, made by Marilyn herself, of her conversations with both John and Robert Kennedy—tapes, like the diary, that somehow no one actually possessed (or had even heard) but whose “existence” made good copy. As Speriglio, who could never be accused of understatement, blithely told Scaduto, “Marilyn knew more about what the president was doing, thinking, planning, than the public, the press, the Congress, the Senate, the Cabinet and even the Attorney General.”

  With this article, Scaduto took a permanent seat on the band wagon. In 1976, writing under the pseudonym Tony Sciacca, he expanded his article into a book, Who Killed Marilyn? The missing tape recordings, he now claimed, were said to have been made not by Marilyn herself but by a wiretap specialist named Bernard Spindel, whose clients included teamster chief James Hoffa. Otherwise, the same dreary, totally unsupported allegations continued.

  As with Capell, this lunacy was generally disregarded. But it also generated an internal investigation within the Los Angeles Police Department. Eventually, the department’s Organized Crime Investigation Division prepared a point-by-point refutation of Scaduto’s story, based on meticulous documentation and new interviews with Peter Lawford and Medical Examiner Thomas Noguchi. In an uncharacteristic literary smirk, the report turned a line from Scaduto against him: “The evidence is as thin as Depression-food-line soup.”

  But then an avalanche fell onto the shelves: slapdash memoirs—books by Marilyn’s early photographers David Conover and André de Dienes, who (taking cues from Slatzer) added details of sexual intimacy and of a close confidence that lasted until Marilyn’s death; and accounts by Ted Jordan, James Bacon and Hans Lembourn, who made claims of passionate affairs with her.

  Milo Speriglio also scampered onto the field with a book—another item no one could actually locate—offering a few new sensations, among them the incriminating gist of a secret interview with Robert Kennedy. Speriglio also brought forth the coroner’s aide, Lionel Grandison, who claimed he saw extensive bruising on Marilyn’s body that was not noted in the autopsy report. Grandison added that he saw the red diary about which Slatzer told Scaduto, but that it had somehow disappeared after the night she died. With the righteousness worthy of those declaring a holy war, Speriglio and Slatzer then demanded a new investigation into the circumstances of Marilyn’s death. Appeals were made to the County Board of Supervisors, and this time official Los Angeles was persuaded. In August 1982, District Attorney John Van de Kamp ordered a so-called threshold investigation to determine whether reasonable cause existed to open a full-scale murder inquiry. The results of this investigation, submitted later that year, were important not for what they revealed about Marilyn’s death, but for the light they shed on Slatzer, his cronies and their ravings. Grandison, for example, turned out to be less than a credible source, for he was dismissed from the Coroner’s office for gruesome crimes “involving the theft of property from dead bodies.”

  The District Attorney also paid close attention to the allegations of a wiretap, and he found that Bernard Spindel was indeed “a rather notorious illegal wiretapper” who had been retained by Hoffa “in an effort to secure embarrassing information on Robert Kennedy.” Spindel had stated in late December 1966 that he had conducted electronic surveillance of Marilyn’s home and obtained material “surrounding the causes of the death of Marilyn Monroe, which material strongly suggests that the officially reported circumstances of her demise are erroneous.”

  But the timing of this claim was more than suspect. Spindel’s home had been raided by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office earlier in December 1966 during an investigation of illegal wiretapping that resulted in the indictment of twenty-eight practitioners of that craft. Days later—his evidence “stolen”—Spindel uttered his provocative announcement (after four years of mysterious silence). There the matter of the tapes lay until Slatzer and Speriglio recognized the value of a new story prop.

  By 1982, Spindel was dead and district attorneys in Los Angeles and New York, who could have made quite a coup had they succeeded in finding support for the existence of the “Marilyn tapes,” concluded that the whole thing was a fraud. “Spindel’s asserted desire to have the tapes made public,” wrote Assistant District Attorney Ronald Carroll in his final report, “appears to have been a ploy. . . . The [Spindel] tapes were in fact heard by staff investigators and none of the tapes contained anything relating to Marilyn Monroe.” William Graf, later chief investigator for the United States Environmental Protection Agency, added that Spindel was “a known boaster.”

  It is frankly unimaginable, if the tapes (like the diary) had ever existed, that someone, somewhere—over the course of so many years—would not have been able to come up with something tangible. In addition, Spindel’s claim raises a logical question: if compromising tapes were made available to Hoffa, why did he never use them to derail the prosecution launched against him by Robert Kennedy—procedures that eventually whisked Hoffa off to prison? And why, despite enormous cash rewards offered since 1966, has no one ever produced either the telltale tapes or the diary? The answer is obvious: like the sexual affair between Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy and his involvement in her death, these materials simply never existed.

  Los Angeles District Attorney John Van de Kamp announced the results of his inquiry in December 1982 with the simple statement, “The facts, as we have found them, d
o not support a finding of foul play. . . . Permit me to express a faint hope that Marilyn Monroe be allowed to rest in peace.”

  It was not to be. Belief in a “Kennedy murder cover-up” persisted, and it was to report on the District Attorney’s 1982 conclusions (see notes to Chapter 22) that Anthony Summers came on the scene. A British investigative reporter whose 1980 book Conspiracy had spread new seed onto the fertile field of John Kennedy assassination theories, Summers found that, despite the repeated claims of Slatzer and his friends, no one had dealt once and for all with the rumors of a Kennedy connection to Marilyn’s death. With that, Summers set to work in 1983. Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe was published in 1985.

  Attracted by the fantastic tale that Robert Kennedy had a hand in Marilyn’s death (and before that, two feet in her bed), Summers hailed Slatzer as a legitimate source, an intimate of Marilyn who afforded important insights into her motivations and affairs. Jeanne Carmen was given equal stature, as was a New York fan named James Haspiel—a man who, like Slatzer, parlayed a few photographs of himself with Marilyn into a career (and, eventually, wrote an unsufferable book that had the temerity to offer a nightmarish fantasy of Robert Kennedy suffocating Marilyn to death with a pillow). Summers admitted that “Capell’s role as an investigator, given his right-wing zealotry, was hopelessly flawed,” but he failed to add that of course Capell’s work was the basis for the claims of Slatzer, Winchell and others Summers himself endorsed.

  In uncritically accepting stories from all quarters, Summers found himself in the impossible situation of juggling several conspiracy theories, most of them mutually exclusive. Thus Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker is reported leading the official cover-up in an effort to become J. Edgar Hoover’s replacement at the FBI. Contrariwise, Summers wrote that Hoover himself intervened and supervised the cover-up, on orders from Robert Kennedy. Summers credits as “the most cogent account” that of Joe and Dolores Naar, who said they spent the evening of August 4 at Lawford’s home and that Kennedy was absent. A few pages later, it was reported that Kennedy was indeed with Lawford that evening.

  Worse, in Goddess Summers ignored and/or frequently misrepresented those he claims to have interviewed. On the matter of Marilyn’s supposed despondency over the end of her affair with Robert Kennedy, for example, he quotes her publicist’s widow, Natalie Trundy Jacobs: “Arthur and I would stay at her house till five or six in the morning talking to her, trying to stop her drinking or taking pills.” But Natalie Jacobs has consistently denied ever making such a statement to Summers; on the contrary, her account has never varied. She met Marilyn once only, at Arthur’s home for dinner and a film screening. Similarly, Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan (to name only two more) were outraged at Summers’s manipulation and misuse of their comments to him.

  Despite these and a number of factual bloopers,2 television documentaries based on Goddess were prepared in England and America. But a segment on the ABC news program 20/20 was rightly canceled by network executive Roone Arledge, who dismissed the entire Slatzer-Summers epic as nonsensical gossip—a wise professional decision for which he was unjustly reprimanded by colleagues who knew nothing about the life and death of Marilyn and instead raised cries of journalistic censorship. Arledge, alas, was unfairly termed an interfering Kennedy loyalist.3

  Thus the political smear launched by Frank Capell and Jack Clemmons finally reached critical mass. Despite the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 and the eventual passing of the Red-baiters, the rumors endured. The attorney general was unjustly transformed in the public’s mind from a compassionate champion of civil rights to a darkly amoral character willing to kill for his reputation, and Goddess became the popularly accepted and unworthy source book.4

  In its latter stages, the unfolding story of the Capell-Clemmons-Slatzer treachery reached the level of black comedy. Slatzer and Speriglio both returned to the well, each publishing a second book rehashing their old charges for what they hoped would be a new and larger audience. Slatzer even managed to sell his ridiculous story to ABC-TV, which in 1991 produced a movie of the week called Marilyn and Me.

  Double Cross, ghostwritten by an anonymous author for the godson and brother of Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, postulated that a pair of men colorfully named Needles and Mugsy traveled to Los Angeles on orders from Giancana. Needles and Mugsy waited patiently while Robert Kennedy had a final lovers’ quarrel with Marilyn, and then slipped into her home to administer a fatal barbiturate suppository. The goal was to embroil Kennedy in a politically devastating scandal. Logic seems not to have been the authors’ strong suit, for had this been the mobsters’ goal, Marilyn would certainly have been more valuable to them alive.

  But the most astonishing compendium of error was Marilyn: The Last Take, by entertainment writer Peter Harry Brown and Beverly Hills society columnist Patte Barham, for this book quoted people and sources inaccurately, embellished incidents and, under the guise of offering the last word, presented only the time-worn Kennedy/Marilyn scenario.

  From page one, The Last Take was a disastrously misleading book. At the outset, the authors imagined a melodramatic episode in which long-forgotten reels of Something’s Got to Give were stealthily removed from the vaults of Twentieth Century–Fox and spirited to the Los Angeles home of Greg Schreiner, president of Marilyn Remembered. There (thus Brown-Barham) the film was unspooled for a select group of Monroe admirers and then surreptitiously returned to the studio. These details might work in an espionage novel, but they bear no resemblance to the truth, which was at once simpler and more honorable: a New York collector had obtained outtakes of the unfinished film and sent them to Sabin Grey, who screened them at his home during a regular monthly meeting of Marilyn Remembered. Peter Brown, who ultimately assisted the expert Fox News producer Henry Schipper in the creation of a documentary on Marilyn’s last film, certainly should have known better. But he and Barham were never deterred from a good story by mere facts.

  The long list of errors was astonishing—among them:

  • Marilyn never traveled on Air Force One, as the authors claimed.

  • The respected surgeon Michael Gurdin, M.D., was unconscionably misquoted. In 1992, Dr. Gurdin took an hour to refute Brown and Barham’s misrepresentation of their brief telephone conversation with him about his care of Marilyn. “I don’t know why they got wrong everything I told them,” the doctor said.

  • Eunice Murray was not “a veteran psychiatric nurse”; indeed, she never graduated from high school.

  • Something’s Got to Give was not the only film in production at Fox during the spring of 1962: among others was The Stripper (then titled Celebration), with Joanne Woodward.

  • From 1951 to 1955, Marilyn was represented by agent and producer Charles K. Feldman, not by the William Morris Agency.

  • Marilyn’s limousine and driver were engaged by her, not by Fox, and the car had no studio logo engraved on the door.

  • George Cukor was never an “openly gay” Hollywood director: in fact he had to be extremely private about his sexual orientation, like everyone else so inclined during the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood.

  • Marilyn’s poodle Maf was a gift from Patricia Newcomb, not Frank Sinatra. And Newcomb never “worked for the Kennedys on a variety of special projects.”

  A quick survey of Brown and Barham’s notes to their key chapter, on Marilyn’s “tangled, disastrous affairs with President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy” is alarming. Heading two pages of sources supposedly confirming these affairs are the names of Marilyn’s masseur Ralph Roberts, Deputy District Attorney Ronald Carroll, Anthony Summers, Rupert Allan, Natalie Jacobs, Patricia Newcomb, former Kennedy press aide Edwin Guthman and the ubiquitous Robert Slatzer. Of this group, Roberts, Allan, Newcomb and Guthman have always insisted that no romance ever existed between Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe (nor did they ever say otherwise to these two authors); and Carroll and Jacobs have consistently denied any such k
nowledge. This, of course, leaves only Slatzer, Summers and those in their tradition.

  Furthermore, Brown and Barham’s notes amusingly elevate tabloid television talk shows to the level of academic scholarship: “Geraldo, Sally Jessy Raphael, Donahue and Hard Copy have all produced segments on the [RFK] affair and provided further evidence of what is now a historically accepted fact—that Monroe had tempestuous affairs with both [Kennedy] brothers.” The same notes go so far as to include, of all things, a book review of Goddess as further “evidence.” The lure of such storytelling is obvious, and it was enunciated by Norman Mailer quite early in the history of this remarkably persistent legend. It has to do with money.

  But the price runs higher than cash paid for shameful books. The cost includes the erosion of ideals, a loss of faith in good men and women, a cavalier disregard for the reputations of decent people and a profound indifference to the truth.

  Against precisely this grim cyclorama of deceit and sensation, Marilyn Monroe: The Biography was begun.

  1. Kilgallen did not name her source for this curious tidbit: Howard Perry Rothberg, a New York interior designer with no connection at all to Marilyn or her circle.

  2. Summers maintains, for example, that Marilyn inherited Marlene Dietrich’s dressing room at Fox. This is nonsense, for Dietrich never worked at that Hollywood studio.

  3. Even the best can be persuaded. ABC News commentator Hugh Downs, for one, surprisingly and loftily claimed that Marilyn’s affairs with both Kennedy brothers were “not in dispute” and “known to everyone.” Cf. Downs, on the documentary “The Class of The 20th Century,” Merrill W. Mazuer, prod. for CEL Communications, Inc./A & E Network (U.S. cable television), 1991.

  4. Summers’s unfounded allegations about Monroe and the Kennedys continued right through his next book, on J. Edgar Hoover (published in 1993).