Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Ewww. 27% of Americans think that billboards are “beautiful.”

  • According to Anthony Summers in his book Goddess, Monroe’s press agent, Arthur Jacobs, may have been notified of Monroe’s death as early as 11:00 p.m., when he and his wife were at a Hollywood Bowl concert. According to Jacob’s wife, Natalie, “We got the news long before it broke. We left the concert at once.”

  • In 1982, Peter Lawford admitted in a sworn statement that he learned of Monroe’s death at 1:30 a.m., when her lawyer, Milton Rudin, called from the house to tell him about it.

  • The ambulance crew summoned by the police noticed that Monroe’s body was in “advanced rigor mortis,” suggesting that she had been dead for 4 to 6 hours. That would mean she died about midnight.

  Where Did Monroe Die?

  Monroe supposedly died in her bedroom. But did she?

  • Monroe’s body was stretched out flat on the bed, with the legs straight—not typical for a person who had overdosed on barbiturates. According to Sgt. Clemmons, barbiturate overdoses often cause a body to go into convulsions, leaving it contorted. “You never see a body with the legs straight. And I’ve seen hundreds of suicides by drug overdose.” He speculated that she had been moved. (The Marilyn Conspiracy, by Milo Speriglio)

  • William Shaefer, president of the Shaefer Ambulance Service, insists that “in the very early morning hours”—well before 3:00 a.m.—one of his ambulances was called to Monroe’s house. She was comatose; the ambulance took her to Santa Monica Hospital, where she died. “She passed away at the hospital. She did not die at home.” And he was certain it was Monroe. “We’d hauled her before because of [earlier overdoses of] barbiturates. We’d hauled her when she was comatose.” (ibid.)

  How Did Monroe Die?

  • Though Deputy Medical Examiner Thomas Noguchi speculated that Monroe had swallowed roughly 50 Nembutal pills, a common barbiturate, he found “no visual evidence of pills in the stomach or the small intestine. No residue. No refractile crystals.” Yet, as Noguchi recounted in his book Coroner, toxicological reports of Monroe’s blood confirmed his suspicions of an overdose.

  Yecch! 3% of American households keep a supply of anchovy paste in the kitchen.

  • Why was there no pill residue in Monroe’s body? Noguchi said that some “murder theorists” have suggested that an injection of barbiturates would have killed her without leaving pill residue. Other theorists have suggested that a suppository with a fatal dose of barbiturates would also leave no residue in her stomach. Or, at some point after the overdose, Monroe’s stomach may have been pumped.

  MISSING EVIDENCE

  Why has so much evidence pertaining to Marilyn Monroe’s case disappeared or been destroyed?

  Phone Records

  • Did Monroe try to call anyone the night she died? When a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Tribune tried to get her phone records and find out, a phone company contact told him, “All hell is breaking loose down here! Apparently you’re not the only one interested in Marilyn’s calls. But the tape [of her calls] has disappeared. I’m told it was impounded by the Secret Service....Obviously somebody high up ordered it.” (Goddess)

  • In 1985, a former FBI agent claimed, “The FBI did remove certain Monroe records. I was on a visit to California when Monroe died, and became aware of the removal of the records from my Los Angeles colleagues. I knew there were some people there, Bureau personnel, who normally wouldn’t have been there—agents from out of town. They were there on the scene immediately, as soon as she died, before anyone realized what had happened. It had to be on the instruction of somebody high up, higher even than Hoover...either the Attorney General or the President.” (ibid.)

  Monroe’s Diary

  • Monroe supposedly kept a detailed diary. According to Robert Slatzer, a longtime friend of the actress, “For years, Marilyn kept scribbled notes of conversations to help her remember things.” What things? Slatzer said the diary included her intimate discussions with people like Robert Kennedy. Monroe supposedly told Slatzer, “Bobby liked to talk about political things. He got mad at me one day because he said I didn’t remember the things he told me.” (The Marilyn Conspiracy)

  Americans buy 129 million eggs per week on average—and 206 million the week before Easter.

  • After Monroe’s death, Coroner’s Aide Lionel Grandison claimed that the diary “came into my office with the rest of Miss Monroe’s personal effects” during the investigation. But by the next day the diary had vanished—and, according to Grandison, someone had removed it from the list of items that had been brought in for investigation. (ibid.)

  The Original Police Files

  • In 1974, Captain Kenneth McCauley of the Los Angeles Police Department contacted the Homicide Department to ask about the files. They wrote back that the department had no crime reports in its files pertaining to Monroe’s death. Even the death report had vanished.

  • The files on Monroe may have disappeared as early as 1966. That year, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty requested a copy of the files from the police department. The police declined, saying that the file “isn’t here.”

  • What happened to the files? Lieutenant Marion Phillips of the Los Angeles Police Department claimed that he was told in 1962 that a high-ranking police official “had taken the file to show someone in Washington. That was the last we heard of it.”

  MONROE AND THE KENNEDYS

  • As part of his research for Goddess, the most authoritative book on Marilyn Monroe, Anthony Summers interviewed more than 600 people linked to her. He quotes friends, acquaintances, reporters, and politicians who confirm what many Americans already suspected—that Monroe had affairs with both John and Robert Kennedy.

  • Apparently, John Kennedy met her through his brother-in-law, Peter Lawford. According to Lawford’s third wife, Deborah Gould, “Peter told me that Jack...had always wanted to meet Marilyn Monroe. It was one of his fantasies.” Quoting Lawford, Gould says “Monroe’s affair with John Kennedy began before he became president and continued for several years.” (Goddess)

  • According to Gould, JFK decided to end his affair with Monroe early in 1962. He sent his brother Robert to California to give her the news. “Marilyn took it quite badly,” says Gould, “and Bobby went away with a feeling of wanting to get to know her better. At the beginning it was just to help and console, but then it led into an affair between Marilyn and Bobby.” (ibid.)

  Top six juices in the U.S.: orange, apple, “blends,” grape, grapefruit, prune.

  • It didn’t last long. By the summer of 1962, RFK began having second thoughts and decided to break off the affair. Monroe, already severely depressed, began acting erratically after being dumped by Bobby. She began calling him at home; when he changed his unlisted phone number to avoid her, she began calling him at the Justice Department, the White House, and even at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport. When Bobby still refused to take her calls, Monroe threatened to go public with both affairs.

  WAS IT A CONSPIRACY?

  THEORY #1: Monroe was distraught about her affairs and committed suicide. To protect the Kennedys from scandal, someone tried to cover up the suicide and cleaned up Monroe’s house.

  • Monroe may have become frantic when Robert Kennedy cut her off, perhaps—as some theorists guess—because she was pregnant.

  • Fred Otash, a Hollywood private detective, claimed that a “police source” told him that weeks before her death Monroe had gone to Mexico to have an abortion. According to Otash, “An American doctor went down to Tijuana to do it, which made Monroe safe medically, and made the doctor safe from U.S. law,” since at that time abortion was illegal in the United States. But author Summers disagrees, noting: “There was no medical evidence to support the theory that Monroe had been pregnant.” (Goddess)

  • In any event, if Monroe was threatening to embarrass the Kennedys by going public about their affairs, it was cause for alarm. According to several reports, Robert Kennedy—who wa
s vacationing with his family near San Francisco—flew to Los Angeles on August 4 to meet with Monroe and try to calm her down. It didn’t work.

  • Terribly depressed, Monroe took a massive dose of sleeping pills, but not before calling Peter Lawford and saying, in a slurred voice, “Say goodbye to Pat [Lawford’s wife], say goodbye to Jack [JFK], and say goodbye to yourself, because you’re such a nice guy.”

  • The call may have frightened Lawford so badly that he—and perhaps RFK—drove to Monroe’s home. There he may have found her comatose and called an ambulance. (This would explain the Shaefer Ambulance claim of having taken Monroe to the hospital that night.) If Monroe had been taken to a hospital emergency room because of an overdose, her stomach would almost certainly have been pumped—which would account for the coroner’s finding no “pill residue” in her stomach. When even the hospital’s best attempts could not save Monroe, perhaps her body was returned to her bedroom in an effort to avoid controversy.

  On Mother’s Day, Americans spend $329 million per year on candy, and $75 million on phone calls.

  The Cleanup

  • No suicide note was ever found, nor was Monroe’s personal phone book. Someone had probably “sanitized” her bedroom before the police came. The most likely person was Peter Lawford. His second wife claimed, “He went there and tidied up the place, and did what he could, before the police and the press arrived.” She also claimed Lawford had found a suicide note and destroyed it.

  • Lawford may also have hired detective Fred Otash to finish the cleanup. According to a security consultant who worked with Otash, Lawford hired him on the night of the death to “check her house, especially for papers or letters, that might give away her affairs with the Kennedys.”

  THEORY #2: The Mob killed Monroe to embarrass—or even frame—Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

  • The Mob almost certainly knew of Monroe’s affairs with the Kennedys: In fact, several reputable accounts claim that the star’s house had been bugged by the Mob. By recording intimate moments between Monroe and Robert Kennedy, the syndicate may have hoped to blackmail the attorney general and thus end his prosecution of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and other gangsters.

  • In their book Double Cross, Chuck and Sam Giancana—the brother and godson of Mob godfather Sam “Mooney” Giancana—allege that the Mafia eventually decided to kill Monroe and make with RFK, they figured, the public would decide that Monroe had killed herself over him. They figured a sex and suicide scandal would force him to resign. So the Mob waited for Kennedy to visit Monroe in response to her desperate phone calls.

  • Finally, Kennedy took the bait. According to the authors of Double Cross, when Sam Giancana learned that Bobby would be in California the weekend of August 4, he arranged the hit on Marilyn. The authors allege he chose Needles Gianola, an experienced killer, for the mission. Needles selected three men of his own to help him. Together they traveled to California “under Mooney’s orders, to murder Marilyn Monroe.”

  In 1800, there were 1 billion people on Earth. Now there are more than 5 billion.

  • According to Double Cross, the mob had already bugged Marilyn’s home, and the hit men were waiting at their secret listening post nearby when Kennedy arrived late Saturday night. They heard Bobby and another man enter the home and begin talking to Marilyn, who was extremely upset. Marilyn, the authors report, “became agitated—hysterical, in fact—and in response, they heard Kennedy instruct the man with him, evidently a doctor, to give her a shot to ‘calm her down.’ Shortly afterwards, RFK and the doctor left.”

  • Double Cross claims that the four killers waited until nightfall and then sneaked into Monroe’s home to make the hit. Marilyn resisted, but was easily subdued because of the sedatives:“ Calmly, and with all the efficiency of a team of surgeons, they taped her mouth shut and proceeded to insert a specially ‘doctored’ Nembutal suppository into her anus. According to the authors, the killers waited for the lethal combination of barbiturates and chloral hydrate to take effect. Once she was totally unconscious, the men carefully removed the tape, wiped her mouth clean, and placed her across the bed. Their job completed, they left as quietly as they had come.”

  • Unfortunately for the conspirators, however, Kennedy’s close friends and the FBI so thoroughly cleaned up Monroe’s house and commandeered her phone records that any proof of the romance was eliminated. The Giancanas say that J. Edgar Hoover protected the Kennedys because, after keeping their secrets, he knew that they’d never fire him. Double Cross also alleges that the CIA was also in on the hit, but its reasoning is not convincing.

  FOOTNOTE

  In 1982, after reinvestigating Marilyn Monroe’s death, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office released the following statement: “Marilyn Monroe’s murder would have required a massive, in-place conspiracy covering all of the principals at the death scene on August 4 and 5, 1962; the actual killer or killers; the Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner; the autopsy surgeon to whom the case was fortuitously assigned; and almost all of the police officers assigned to the case, as well as their superiors in the LAPD....Our inquiries and document examination uncovered no credible evidence supporting a murder theory.”

  Good for business: The Boston pub that inspired the “Cheers” TV show served 1,484 beers a day.

  Uncle John’s

  SEVENTH

  BATHROOM

  READER

  First published October 1994

  UNCLE JOHN’S NOTES:

  It strikes me, rereading this, that by 1994 we’d finally developed a sense of the mix of material that works in a Bathroom Reader.

  We’ve got articles on fingerprinting and the Dodo bird mixed in with histories of the Jeep and the pencil. We’ve got Barney...and Joseph McCarthy. We’ve got Lloyds of London...and bad hair days. We’ve got the Flying Nun...and Elvis.

  One of the reasons this worked so well was a BRI alumus named John Dollison—a natural storyteller who loves history. He took many of our ideas and made them even more interesting than we’d imagined. And of course, Gordon was always in the background, reminding us to concentrate on the story and not the extraneous details.

  Some of our favorites in this volume: (There are a lot)

  • Mama Mia!

  • Pirate Lore

  • What Is SPAM?

  • Accidentally X-Rated

  • Monumental Mistakes

  • Knitting with Dog Hair

  • Sweetened with Fruit Juice?

  • Mummy’s the Word

  • The Strange Fate of the Dodo Bird

  RUMORS

  Why do people believe wild, unsubstantiated stories? According to some psychobgists, “rumors make things simpler than they really are.” And while people won’t believe just anything, it’s surprising what outrageous stories we do seem willing to swallow.

  RUMOR: A leper was working at the Chesterfield cigarette factory in Richmond, Virginia.

  HOW IT SPREAD: Unknown

  WHAT HAPPENED: One of the all-time classic rumors to afflict an American product, the “Chesterfield Leper” rumor spread across the U.S. in the fall of 1934, costing Chesterfield thousands of dollars in sales as panicky puffers, fearful of catching leprosy themselves, switched brands overnight. The company fought the rumor hard—it invited Richmond officials to visit the plant and offered $1,000 for information on who had started the rumor. They never found out who was behind the rumor, but believed it was a competitor.

  RUMOR: The Ku Klux Klan, to encourage “a kinder, gentler attitude” toward its members and upgrade its image as a “historic American institution,” is forming a multiracial “KKK Symphony” to travel around the country and spread music, good cheer, and white supremacy. The band will be an equal-opportunity employer: All races are invited to apply for positions, including blacks, Jews, and Catholics—although everyone will be expected to wear white robes during performances.

  HOW IT SPREAD: Through a widely circulated fake press release, which boas
ted that the KKK Symphony would “tour the country, bring culture to various underprivileged areas, and work to modify mainstream attitudes” towards the Klan...all without the Klan changing its racist views. The release, which surfaced in 1990, stated that orchestra members would be paid $1,500 a week and $60 per diem, and would be covered by Blue Cross health insurance.

  WHAT HAPPENED: Both the Klan and a number of Klan-watch organizations denied the story. Klansmen and other garden-variety bigots took the story in stride: “I wouldn’t be surprised if [an individual] Klansman was behind this. We’re jokesters,” Richard Ford, the National Wizard of the Fraternal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, told Esquire magazine, adding that “Klansmen don’t appreciate classical [music]. And about that equal-opportunity thing. Well, there wouldn’t be much point to being in the Klan if there was equal opportunity, would there?”

  Wishful thinking? 80% of Americans say they believe in miracles.

  RUMOR: Nine months after a massive power failure hit New York City in November 1965, the birthrate rose dramatically.

  HOW IT SPREAD: It started as a joke about what people would do when the lights were out for a long time. Then an article in the New York Times on August 8, 1966, reporting an increase in births at the city’s Mt. Sinai Hospital seemed to prove it was true.

  WHAT HAPPENED: It turned out that the newspaper had only compared births that occurred on August 8, 1965, with the births of August 8, 1966. In other words, they were reporting a one-day variation in one hospital. Not exactly conclusive evidence. In 1970, J. Richard Udry, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, went back and studied birthrates from several New York hospitals between July 27 and August 14, 1966. His finding: The birthrate nine months after the blackout was actually slightly below the five-year average.