Tag: RFK

---

see Part 1

Cassettes 37 & 45: Robin Thorne, George Cukor’s Nurse

I must confess to a certain confusion regarding Robin Thorne’s testimony, both its content and its purpose. What does the testimony actually reveal? Additionally, the testimony is not exactly accurate.

If George Cukor, who directed Let’s Make Love along with Marilyn’s final, but incomplete, movie, actually thought very highly of Marilyn, he chose an odd manner of exhibition. According to biographer Gary Vitacco-Robles, Cukor engaged in an act of sabotage while filming Something’s Got to Give. The director told Fox executives, after watching prints of Marilyn’s scenes, he considered her acting inferior. She absentmindedly floated through her performance, Cukor asserted, on a drug or an alcohol induced cloud, possibly both. Cukor’s sabotage, combined with Marilyn’s frequent absence from the set due to illness, and her appearance at President Kennedy’s May 1962 birthday gala, prompted Fox to terminate her employment. Citing breach of contract, the studio sued both Marilyn and Marilyn Monroe Productions for financial redress in the amount of $750K.

What followed was a scorched earth attack by 20^th Century-Fox Film Corporation against the movie star that had earned the movie makers many piles of money. And based on evi­dence that was hidden by Fox in a vault for practically four decades—nine hours of exposed film and production documents—the studio’s campaign to ruin Marilyn’s career, using any and all means available, including false accusations and labeling her completely insane, was unnecessary and unsupported by all the evidence available at that time. But following two weeks of defending their decision to fire Marilyn, Fox withdrew their lawsuit and quietly reinstated her, partly due to intervention by former studio head Darryl Zanuck, but primarily because Dean Martin, the male lead and Marilyn’s friend, refused to proceed without her. Martin would not make the movie with any other actress. Marilyn finally agreed to return to the movie set starting in October, for which the studio agreed to more than double her salary. She wanted George Cukor replaced with Jean Negulesco, who had directed How to Marry a Millionaire. The studio agreed; but unfortunately, due to Marilyn’s untimely death, she never returned to the set of Something’s Got to Give.

Cassette 18B: Angie Novello

According to the accepted mythology involving Marilyn and her telephones, the Attorney General, once he succumbed to romance, provided the actress with an exclusive telephone number: a private line directly into his office at the DOJ. They talked constantly, walking around with sixties vintage telephone receivers hooked to their mouths and their ears. As usual, not one tiny fragment of evidence ever existed that confirmed such silliness, but that fact did not matter to the many authors that promoted the private telephone line mythology. The well-known fact that Marilyn and Robert Kennedy conversed via the national telephone wires became proof that the celebrities were lovers and gave the conspiracist writers another way for a heartless Robert Kennedy to reject and humiliate his movie star paramour—he extinguished her private line—giving an angry Marilyn another reason to retaliate and, also to dramatically get back at the AG, to threaten his exposure in the press. Angie Novello’s twenty seconds worth of testimony established for Summers that the actress and attorney general communicated by telephone, but it should be noted that Angie intercepted the telephone calls routed to the attorney general through the DOJ’s switchboard, RE7-8200. If Marilyn knew Robert Kennedy’s private number, why didn’t she use it? That is an obvious question never posed by Summers or any other conspiracist.

With the release of Marilyn’s 1962 telephone records for the months of April through July—the ones allegedly confiscated and then destroyed by the LAPD, the FBI, and the Secret Service—Marilyn placed a grand total of six telephone calls to Washington, DC, to the above noted Justice Department number. She called RE7-8200 initially on June the 25th, twice on July the 2^nd, once on July the 16^th and twice on July the 17^th. Three of her conversations lasted one minute, two lasted two minutes, and one of her July the 2^nd conversations lasted five minutes. According to Donald Spoto, Marilyn used the call of June the 25th to confirm that Robert Kennedy would be “at the Lawfords’ on Wednesday evening [June 27^th] and to invite him and the Lawfords to visit her home for a drink before dinner.” During that call, Marilyn spoke with Angie Novello. Not one person alive today knows the identity of the person to whom Marilyn spoke during the other calls to the Justice Department.

Many of Robert Kennedy’s friends and advisers over the years confirmed that the AG and Marilyn were telephone buddies. Edwin Guthman confirmed that Marilyn called the DOJ several times over the summer of 1962 and spoke with Robert Kennedy, who was interested in Marilyn’s life and her many problems. According to Guthman, the attorney general was not a man inclined to chit chat or idle talk with anybody; and so his tele­phone conversations with Marilyn were invariably short and concise. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. also confirmed that Marilyn called the attorney general, noting that Marilyn usually called Robert Kennedy when she was troubled and also noting that Angie Novello, who, I repeat, intercepted Marilyn’s telephone calls, talked to the actress more than the attorney general.

During a 1984 interview, Angie stated that the AG, when he was unoccupied, always accepted Marilyn’s telephone calls. If he was occupied, he returned her calls as soon as he could, if time allowed. Marilyn was, after all, Marilyn! Angie also remarked dur­ing the interview that Robert Kennedy was a sympathetic person, aware of Marilyn’s many problems. He was also an excellent listener. In Angie’s opinion, that is exactly what Marilyn needed the most: a sympathetic ear. The content of those conversations between Marilyn and the attorney general remain unknown; but they are often characterized, by those with a vested interest, as impassioned conversations between impassioned lovers, as if those offering such a characterization actually know or knew. As if they, too, were involved in the dialogue flying with the speed of light from coast to coast.

Finally, Angie also remarked that actress and singer Judy Garland was a close friend with whom RFK spoke frequently; but not one person has ever suggested that they were involved in a love affair. Why is that so? The answer is obvious.

Cassette Unnumbered: Natalie Trundy

The evening of August the 4^th in 1962 was slightly cooler than normal. So, Arthur Jacobs, Marilyn’s publicist, along with his fiancé, the actress Natalie Trundy, attended a Ferrante and Teicher concert in the Hollywood Bowl. According to Natalie, just before the concert was scheduled to end at 11:00 PM, an usher arrived and informed Jacobs that Marilyn was either dead or close to death. Therefore, according to Natalie’s account, Marilyn died sometime prior to or slightly after 11:00 PM on August 4^th.

According to Natalie, Jacobs left almost immediately, drove to Fifth Helena Drive where he conferred with some persons who were already at the hacienda. Jacobs left the hacienda only after a few minutes of conversation. A few days later, Arthur told Natalie that the situation at Fifth Helena Drive was horrendous. Natalie admitted to Donald Spoto that Jacobs never provided any details, commenting only that it was too dreadful to discuss; and Natalie never asked for details: her knowledge of what transpired that morning was, therefore, limited, an inarguable fact.

I would be remiss if I failed to note that Natalie Trundy’s testimony qualified as hearsay and it could not be corroborated by interviewing Arthur Jacobs. He died from a sudden heart attack in 1973.

Cassette Unnumbered and 126A: Ken Hunter and Walt Schaefer (respectively)

The tape recording of Ken Hunter was not the product of an interview conducted by Anthony Summers. The district attorney’s lead investigator, Al Tomich, conducted the Hunter interview; but Summers did not make that perfectly clear before he played the tape. The Hunter interview, and then Walt Schaefer’s interview generally began an unfolding of what has come to be designated “The Ambulance Theory.” During the years following Marilyn’s death, this theory has been continually retold—and has been reshaped with each retelling. It has appeared in many complex iterations, involving many persons: Peter Lawford, Pat Newcomb, Dr. Ralph Greenson, and, in one super imaginative scenario, the attorney general, who, along with Peter Law­ford, rode in the ambulance with the dying movie star, only to be returned, along with the movie star’s corpse, to Fifth Helena Drive.

However, Summers’ presentation of The Ambulance Theory implied that Ken Hunter, the former ambulance man, contacted the Los Angeles County District Attorney. Ken Hunter, along with Walt Schaefer, became parts of the theory’s evolution, but Hunter was not the first former ambulance man to contact the district attorney—and, in fact, Ken Hunter himself did not contact the DA’s office. Though Summers did not provide any context relative to calendar dates, the initial contact with the LADA’s office arrived in 1982. This was at the start of the LADA’s threshold re-investigation into Marilyn’s death. The former ambulance man asserted that his name was Rick Stone. Even­tually, Stone revealed that his actual name was James Hall, a desperate man on a pecuniary mission. Hall needed to rescue his family from financial troubles by selling a Marilyn Monroe story that involved him and an ambulance. The former ambulance man asserted that he would share his astonishing ambulance story with the district attorney’s investigators only if appro­priately compensated for any incurred expenses. More about Ken Hunter and James Hall will appear later.

Cassette HH: John Sherlock

Evidently, John Sherlock was a reporter. In Goddess, Anthony Summers identified his source as such, “Significant corroboration that an ambulance was called came following the publication of this book’s first edition from reporter named John Sherlock.” Sherlock also appeared in the book that allegedly closed Marilyn’s case, written by Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin. They identified Sherlock as an American writer and noted that:

a documentary featuring Anthony Summers surprisingly endorsed Walt Schaefer’s and Murray Leib’s original testimony via a key player the night [Marilyn] died. American writer John Sherlock relayed what his friend Dr. Greenson had told him.

The television tabloid program, Hard Copy, known for its use of dubious material, produced the referenced “documentary” in 1992.

Amazon lists four books written by a John Sherlock, published during a seven-year interval between 1981 and 1988. However, Amazon does not have any information about the writer. I have not been able to learn anything at all about John Sherlock, which means I have not been able to confirm, as alleged by Margolis and Buskin, that Sherlock was, in fact, Dr. Green­son’s friend. Despite the concussive quality of Sherlock’s testimony, it is gross hearsay. And Sherlock is not mentioned in any of the books about Marilyn in my possession other than the two mentioned above, not even Donald Wolfe, who often repeated hearsay testimony, mentioned Sherlock. Perhaps Sherlock’s hearsay was even out there for Wolfe.

I admit that I am a skeptical person; and regarding stories about Marilyn Monroe’s death, I am a complete, almost a querulous cynic. Primarily because I have uncovered more fabrications, prevarications, con­tradictions, and downright lies about that sad event than Carter’s got little liver pills. So, I am more than incredulous when I read or hear secondhand, uncorroborated statements, particularly one purporting that Dr. Ralph Green­son, while seated at table during a luncheon in 1964, or thereabouts, simply volun­teered, admitted that he was in an ambulance transporting Marilyn to a hospital when she died. And that the ambulance merely reversed course and returned Marilyn’s corpse to her bed at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, which is unquestionably a story that should have generated several hundred questions never asked by either Sherlock or Summers. I’ll pose but one: Did Dr. Greenson whisper his story to Sherlock so any person seated nearby would not hear it?

Cassette 18A: Bill Woodfield

Photojournalist Bill Woodfield was an acquaintance of Marilyn’s. She invited him to photograph the swimming pool scene on the set of Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn’s final but unfinished movie. Woodfield and another photojournalist, Joe Hyams, also an acquaintance of Marilyn’s, doubted that she had committed suicide, or Woodfield so alleged. As a result of their doubt, the photojournalists claimed that they investigated the circumstances surrounding the movie star’s death, an investigation that included a retired police officer. A rumor that a helicopter had been dispatched to and landed on Santa Monica beach early Sunday morning, August 5^th, prompted the investigation, certainly an abbreviated one: the investigation endured for slightly more than three days.

Woodfield claimed that he saw a helicopter log when, on August 8^th, the day of Marilyn’s funeral, he visited Hal Conners’ Helicopter Service: a ser­vice frequently employed by Peter Lawford and other celebrities. The random act of journalism, for which Summers expressed his respect during Woodfield’s interview, was the purported discovery of that log. There is only one prob­lem: Woodfield did not obtain a copy of the mysterious log. It has never been published. It has never been seen by anyone other than Bill Woodfield. There is no tangible evidence or verifiable proof of any kind that this helicopter log ever existed.

Additionally, in Goddess, Summers noted that the rented helicopter landed to collect a passenger and then to deliver that passenger to the main Los Angeles airport. According to Woodfield, the log confirmed Robert Kennedy’s presence in Los Angeles on August 4^th and his departure from Santa Monica Beach by helicopter during the early morning hours of August 5^th. Clearly confirmed? Precisely how? Not at any time did Summers or Woodfield, or anybody else for that matter, assert unequivocally that Robert Kennedy’s name was written on that helicopter log. It appears as if Woodfield or Summers made a quantum leap from “passenger” to Robert Kennedy. It appears that Woodfield, or someone conveying the story, simply assumed Robert Kennedy to be the passenger.

Additionally, the testimony attributed to Woodfield in the 1985 version of Goddess is apprecia­bly different than the testimony attributed to Woodfield in the 2012 version. Also, none of Woodfield’s taped testimony, as presented in the Netflix movie, appeared in the 1985 version of Goddess. Yet, according to Summers’ source notes, he interviewed Woodfield in 1983 and 1984. Furthermore, based on Summers’ 2012 source notes, the investigative jour­nalist did not re-interview his photojournalist source following the original interviews. And Wood­field died twenty-one years ago.

In the 1985 version of Goddess, Summers quoted Woodfield as follows:

The time in the log was sometime after midnight—I think between midnight and two in the morning. The booking is a blur in my memory now, but it was definitely in the name of either Lawford or Kennedy. (emphasis mine)

This is an odd use of the word definitely, at least in my opinion, considering that Woodfield’s recollection was definitely not definite. But then, according to Goddess 2012, Woodfield reported this: “The time in the log was sometime after midnight—I think between midnight and two in the morning. It showed clearly that a helicopter had picked up Robert Kennedy at the Santa Monica Beach.” Odd. Why the difference? No attempt to explain or account for the contradictory statements Summers attributed to Bill Woodfield. And I repeat: Woodfield died twenty-one years ago, before the revision. Furthermore, why did Summers exclude the testimony of Woodfield’s partner, Joe Hyams? The author’s source notes indicated that he interviewed Hyams in 1983, 1984, and 1985. Did Summers fail to tape record Woodfield’s partner? Likewise, Summers asserted in Goddess that he interviewed the retired policeman who assisted Woodfield and Hyams with their investigation. But Summers did not reveal anything about the policeman’s testimony, neither in Goddess nor the Netflix movie. We are left to speculate regarding why Summers excluded the policeman’s testimony.

The story appertaining to Conners’ helicopter log is complex, convoluted, and lengthy. It involves two other chopper pilots who flew for Connors in 1962, James Zonlick and Ed Connelly. Zonlick was Conners’ chief pilot. During Summers’ interviews with both pilots, they repeated for Summers what they recalled Conners had told them in 1962. According to Zonlick, Conners stated that he had picked-up Robert Kennedy at Santa Monica Beach and delivered him to the Los Angeles International Airport. Ed Connelly testified only that Conners talked about landing on the beach without the aid of landing lights. Summers then reported that Zonlick could not remember the exact date of the Robert Kennedy flight Conners had mentioned. And likewise, Connelly could not pinpoint the date of the flight that Conners had mentioned to him. So, the exact dates of those flights have never been confirmed. And by the time Summers interviewed Zonlick and Connelly, Hal Conners was already dead. Zonlick believed, however, that the trip to collect and deliver Robert Kennedy occurred during the right time frame, probably during the latter half of 1962, meaning what, exactly? That Conners might have flown Robert Kennedy during the months of June, July, August, September, October, November, or December of the year? Not exactly compelling evidence or proof that the Conners’ flight with Robert Kennedy actually occurred on August 5^th, 1962.

At any rate, the pull quote from Woodfield’s taped testimony is this: “Find out where Bobby Kennedy was that weekend.” Well, in fact, Summers did find out where the attorney general was that weekend; but those niggling facts do not appear in the Netflix movie. Those facts will appear in this commentary later. But now, suffer a brief biography of Bill Woodfield.

Woodfield’s first true love was magic, along with hypnosis. In 1946, at the age of eighteen, the fledgling magician and hypnotist founded a newsletter that he described as a trade paper for magicians, Woodfield’s Magicana. He only published two issues. In September of 1947, The Conjuror’s Magazine featured a condensed version of Woodfield’s first two issues. Then, from January of 1948 until April of 1949, Genii Magazine featured a total of sixteen articles written by Woodfield. It became painfully clear that he could not support himself with magic or hypnosis. He turned to photography as the mid-fifties approached, a profession he left in the mid-sixties when he began to write for several television series, the most important of which was Mission: Impossible. Along with his writing partner, Allan Balter, Woodfield has been credited with changing the story lines of Mission: Impossible, while also incorporating scams and complex cons into the methods used by agents of the Impossible Missions Force to defeat their adversaries. The Big Con, written by David Maurer, became a guide for Woodfield and Balter as they prepared plot lines and scripts. A con devotee, Woodfield often referred to him­self as an apprentice cheat, meaning a con artist in training. It is entirely possible, I would suggest, that Bill Woodfield’s helicopter log story was a scam, his version of the big con. Keeping in mind, once again, that the helicopter log has never been published, posted or—for the record—seen.

Cassette 77: Harry Hall

Summers identified Harry Hall as a Law Enforcement Informant, as if that title suggested a category of professional endeavor that a fellow might declare on a job application. Former Employer: Law Enforcement. Position: Informant. While at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 24^th in 1984, Summers interviewed law enforcement’s informant. Summers wanted to learn if Hall had learned anything about Bobby Kennedy’s movements the weekend Marilyn died. Hall replied that he:

had heard, on good authority, that the Saturday that this happened—the day Marilyn died—Bobby had come into town. Bobby was in town and supposedly left. And when I say I heard it, I heard it from a federal agent, an FBI agent that nei­ther Hall nor Summers deigned to identify. (emphasis mine)

Summers questioned Hall regarding a possible FBI investigation into Marilyn’s death. Did the FBI investigate what actually happened? What the FBI performed, according to Hall, was not an investigation as much as it was a “hush-hush,” a cover-up orchestrated by Robert Kennedy: “He was the Attorney General of the United States,” Hall reported, “so he could have the FBI do anything.” Besides, the attorney general had to protect the president, and as a result, “they had done everything to hush this up.” One question: if Robert Kennedy could have FBI agents jump at his beck and call, do anything for him, why, then, did he and Pete Lawford need to rely on Fred Otash, as is often reported, to sweep clean, to sanitize Marilyn’s hacienda?

Summers did this throughout Goddess; repeating hearsay testimony from Los Angeles Police Department informants while also relying on persons of authority: former mayors, for instance, police chiefs, or others identified as agents of various authorities, to re­peat hearsay testimony, such as Mayor Sam Yorty. And like the testimony offered by Harry Hall, none of Summers’ other testifiers could offer a firsthand sighting of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles on August 4^th, 1962. There is an invariably ignored, but nonetheless overwhelming, reason why this is so, which I will discuss later. Also, not only was the testimony offered by Harry Hall hearsay, but it also represents illogic, one that appeared in the testimony of both Reed Wilson and Jim Doyle, whose testimony will appear in sections following hereafter.

Cassette 28: Reed Wilson

The taped testimony of Reed Wilson was presented by Summers, and his Netflix producers, primarily to confirm two aspects pertaining to Marilyn’s purportedly mysterious case:

1) Fred Otash procured dozens of salacious tape recordings on which Marilyn and the middle Kennedy brothers could be heard engaging in sexual activity; and

2) Robert Kennedy traveled to Los Angeles on August 4^th, 1962.

According to Summers’ exposition, he was advised on more than one occasion that he needed to have to talk with Reed Wilson, “renowned in government and business circles as one” terrific snoop. And yet, Reed Wilson’s name does not appear anywhere in the Marilyn canon, not in her legitimate biographies and not in the many publications that promoted a murder orthodoxy—at least, perhaps I should clarify and qualify, not that I have been able to discover. For an example, Matthew Smith, wrote two books about Marilyn, and her secret tapes, and did not mention Reed Wilson. Additionally, and notably, in the 2012 Kindle edition of Goddess, Reed Wilson does not even receive a mention by Summers. We are left to ponder: why? To maintain secrecy? Reed Wilson was still among the living in 2012, living in Solvang, California, at the age of eighty-three years. By that time, Marilyn had been dead for fifty years, John Kennedy for forty-nine and Robert Kennedy for forty-four. Reed Wilson lived until 2015.

Of course, the main problem with Wilson’s testimony is his assertion regarding Robert Kennedy’s location on that Saturday in 1962. While Wilson did not assert that the AG visited Marilyn, he asserted that Robert Kennedy telephoned Marilyn from Peter Lawford’s beach house. But then, the following question seems more than pertinent: why would Marilyn’s former lover travel to Los Angeles only to telephone her from Lawford’s beach house? He could have telephoned her from Washington or Hyannisport or Fairbanks, Alaska. At any rate, Robert Kennedy’s location on that Saturday is more than just a niggling issue for Anthony Summers and one he chose to ignore. That ignored issue will appear again later.

Cassette 93B: Eunice Murray

The taped testimony offered by Eunice Murray, at least the testimony included by Summers, appeared to confirm that Robert Kennedy visited Marilyn on August 4^th. But, on the show, Summers did not ask Eunice if Robert Kennedy visited on August 4^th: the term the author used was “that day,” along with “that afternoon.” We know that Robert Kennedy visited Marilyn, accompanied by Pat and Peter Lawford, on the 27^th of June in 1962. Eunice Murray recounted the attorney general’s brief visit on that Wednesday for biographer Donald Spoto. The Lawfords arrived at Fifth Helena that afternoon to collect Marilyn, and Robert Kennedy was with them: Marilyn wanted them to see her new home. After a brief tour of Marilyn’s humble hacienda, the group proceeded to the Lawford’s beachside mansion for a dinner party. That June visit, residential tour and dinner party was the fourth and final meeting of Bobby and Marilyn. The rumor of a fifth meeting at Fifth Helena Drive, based on an unsubstantiated story by photographer Lawrence Schiller, has never been confirmed.

Even though Mrs. Murray asserted that “the Kennedys were a very important part of Marilyn’s life,” an assessment that can be interpreted many ways, Mrs. Murray also admitted that she “wasn’t included in this information.” To what “information” was she referring? If she lacked information, how could she know just how important the middle Kennedy brothers were to Marilyn, despite being a witness to “what was happening.” And what exactly was happening? Evidently, Anthony Summers did not ask Mrs. Murray for any specifics and she did not volunteer any. Likewise, her comment pertaining to the activation of Robert Kennedy’s protectors was equally vague and lacked specificity. But it seems like vagueness was what Summers wanted. Additionally, the taped testimony offered by Summers did not represent the totality of Mrs. Murray’s statements about Marilyn and Robert Kennedy. Those specific declarations will appear later in this commentary.

Cassette 106: Jim Doyle

James Edward Doyle began his career with the FBI following WWII. He received special training at Quantico, Virginia, which prepared him to function as an Organized Crime Specialist. According to his obituary in the Capital Journal, Pierre, South Dakota, where Doyle was born and raised, he spent most of his FBI career in Indiana and Illinois, and then later, in Nevada and New Mexico. In 1979, while serving in the FBI’s Albuquerque Office, he retired from the FBI and founded his own investigative company, James Edward Doyle Investigation (JEDI). After operating JEDI for twenty-nine years, Doyle retired and relocated to Henderson, Nevada. He died in 2019 at the age of ninety-four. His obituary noted: “Jim’s FBI stories with the likes of Frank Sinatra, JFK, William Randolph Hearst, and Marilyn Monroe, to name a few, could be made into movies!” His friends considered Jim to be “the best storyteller ever.” Sadly, the forty seconds of Doyle’s taped testimony that Summers selectively included in his Marilyn movie did not include any of Doyle’s movie-worthy stories, the ones involving JFK and Marilyn. We are left to wonder about those stories: with what could the best storyteller ever have regaled us?

Summers posed the following question to Doyle: “As far as the actual records being removed, you were aware of that from your colleagues (emphasis mine)?” Doyle answered: “O yeah. Yes. This happened.” Doyle did not offer any exposition and Summers did not ask about the nature of the removed records. Also, based on Summers’ question and Doyle’s response, it is clear that the FBI agent learned about the alleged record removal from his colleagues. Summers, therefore, passively accepted hearsay testimony, possibly even second or third hand hearsay; but Doyle’s closing statements raise many pertinent questions: “I was there at the time when she died,” an assertion that can only be interpreted one way. Jim Doyle was inside Marilyn’s hacienda at the moment of the movie star’s death, certainly an incredibly explosive assertion that Summers evidently did not even pursue. Why? But then Doyle reported an equally explosive occurrence: “There were some people there that normally wouldn’t have been there.” Agents, bureau people. Doyle did not mention any names and Summers did not pose any probing questions. Was J. Edgar Hoover there? Clyde Tolson? Who was there? Doyle then informed Summers that these Bureau people, who normally would not have been there, due to their elevated position in Hoover’s fiefdom, one assumes, arrived immediately, “before anybody even realized what had happened,” one of the more remarkable assertions I’ve ever heard about the night of Marilyn’s death; and I’ve heard some real doozies. Summers’ lack of curiosity re­garding what Doyle actually asserted was and is remarkable, to say the least.

Summers included Doyle’s testimony as confirmation that agents, FBI people, materialized at Fifth Helena Drive in order to confiscate information that compromised the middle Kennedy brothers and proved that they were romantically and sexually involved with the World’s Sex Symbol. But a major illogic is lurking in the testimony of both James Doyle and Harry Hall.

A Well-Known Fact and the FBI Protection Illogic

Certainly, during the last nine months of her life, Marilyn associated with the middle Kennedy brothers and they with her. She initially met Robert Kennedy at a well-attended Lawford dinner party. As was well-known, Marilyn and the attorney general talked on the telephone several times during the summer of 1962. The actress initially met the president at a thousand dollar a plate fund raiser in Manhattan. Then, observed by Bing Crosby’s other guests and the Secret Service, for one night in late March of 1962, Marilyn and John Kennedy shared a bungalow on the crooner’s desert estate. Marilyn and the president met one last time in May at Madison Square Garden where Marilyn delivered her sultry rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” Several members of the Kennedy clan attended the president’s birthday gala, including Robert and Ethel Kennedy, accompanied by a large live audience of fifteen thousand. Other celebrities also performed that Saturday night; members of the press were there; and more than a few television stations reported on the Manhattan event in real time. In short, Marilyn’s association with John Kennedy and his younger brother was a well-known fact. No amount of documentation could have been removed from Marilyn’s home after she died to alter that fact. Since rumors of romantic entanglements had already begun to circulate even before Marilyn’s death.

As far as I know, the middle Kennedy brothers never commented publicly on Marilyn’s tragic end. Their silence has been used as evidence that each brother was guilty of having an affair with the world’s symbol of easy sex. But then, in 1962, the president’s job did not include acting as a bureaucratic ointment available to soothe the anxieties caused by every tragedy that occurred. Certainly, the president and the AG knew that anything they said about Marilyn’s death would have been promptly misconstrued, would only have served as a potent fertilizer fomenting more suspicion, speculation, and rumor. Besides, they and their advisors also must have known this old idiom: you cannot unring a bell.

The fact that Tony Summers included the statements of Harry Hall and James Doyle about the FBI allegedly covering up Robert Kennedy’s part in the death of Marilyn Monroe showed a lack of balance; plus an eagerness to accept the most illogical and ahistorical kind of testimony. For instance, that somehow there were FBI agents on the scene of her home in the early morning hours of August 5^th, which no credible author has ever noted. But the idea that J. Edgar Hoover would go to such lengths in order to protect the middle Kennedy brothers over something like a conspiracy to conceal a ruinous affair runs contra to just about all we know about Hoover. FBI Counter-intelligence chief William Sullivan, for one, said his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, tried to inflame rumors about an affair between Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. The problem was, neither the boss nor his minions could find any evidence of an affair.

Why did Hoover want to do this? Because Bobby Kennedy was the only attorney general who actually acted like he was Hoover’s boss. He could do so since his brother was the president and Hoover knew they did not want him there anyway. For instance, Hoover wanted to do next to nothing on civil rights, but Bobby Kennedy pushed that agenda. And even at that, Hoover would not reveal undercover information that could have prevented bloody violence during the Freedom Rides. (See Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 64) When Hoover tried to circulate a very negative memo about Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy ordered him to withdraw it.

When President Kennedy went up against steel executives in 1962, FBI agents served the subpoenas in the wee hours of the morning, not because Bobby wanted them to, but because that was when he called Hoover. Finally, to say the least, Hoover was reluctant to pursue the Mob, whereas Bobby was obsessed with that cause. (David Talbot, Brothers, p. 141) Hoover would have performed none of these actions on his own. He was a racist, was unperturbed about Mob influence, and was beholden to wealthy patrons. Hoover got back at the Kennedys by doing things like spreading rumors about the president and Ellen Rometsch, a reputed East German spy working out of Washington. When ace researcher Peter Vea discovered the raw FBI reports on Rometsch, there was nothing in them about an affair between her and the president. Bobby Kennedy once said that he thought Hoover was something of a psycho. (Talbot, p. 143) The enmity was mutual. FBI official William Sullivan said the two people Hoover hated most were RFK and King, in that order. As Hoover biographer Curt Gentry has noted, if such information about Monroe was available, Hoover would have used it against Bobby. And what is the denouement to this tale? As everyone knows, once John Kennedy was assassinated, Hoover pulled the private telephone line out of Bobby’s office. The testimony of Hall and Doyle is rather at odds with this record.

Rick Stone, Walt Schaefer, Ken Hunter and the Ambulance Yarn

On an unlucky Friday in 1982, August the 13th, just as the LADA started its threshold re-investigation into Marilyn’s death, Deputy District Attorney, Ronald H. Carroll, received a telephone call from a man who called himself Rick Stone. “Rick” identified himself and inquired if the LADA might be interested in purchasing some information about the death of Marilyn Monroe. The re-investigation’s summary report, published in December of 1982, clarified that Stone initially contacted the district attorney’s office on Wednesday, August 11^th; and thereafter, using the Rick Stone code name,

he telephonically contacted this office several times. Ultimately, he attempted to sell information to the District Attorney’s Office relating to his observations at the death scene on the morning of August 5, 1962, at Marilyn Monroe’s home.

Eventually, Rick Stone disclosed his actual name, James Hall, a former ambulance attendant who had driven for the Schaefer Am­bulance Service in 1962.

According to Hall’s narrative, he and his partner, Murray Liebowitz had been dispatched to Marilyn’s during the early morning on August  5^th, 20 years earlier, sometime between the hours of 4:00 and 6:00 AM. When he and Liebowitz arrived, Hall informed Ronald Carroll, Marilyn was still alive, but very near eternity. Hall/Stone then said that as the two attendants began their resus­citation efforts, she started to respond. A doctor then appeared and ordered Hall and his partner to stop. From his black bag, the doctor produced a long hypodermic and injected Marilyn directly into her heart with an unknown liquid, which immediately killed her. Such was the mind-boggling story James Hall relayed to the deputy district attorney. But as explosive as it was, Carroll declined to pay Hall for his testimony. So, Hall sold his story to The Globe, a super­market tabloid, for $40K. In fact, obtaining payment for his ambulance yarn was Hall’s primary goal, a fact confirmed by recorded telephone conversations between Hall, Ronald Carroll, and Alan Tomich, Carroll’s lead investigator. As an aside, $40K is approximately equal to $123K in today’s currency.

Walt Schaefer initially contradicted Hall’s story and denied that the attendant even worked for Schaefer Ambulance Service, but Walt eventually recanted his refusal and acknowledged Hall’s employment. He told the fib, he explained, because he feared the all-powerful Kennedy clan would retaliate and ruin his thriving ambulance business. The ambulance service owner also initially testified that the attendants dispatched that night in August were, in fact, Ken Hunter and Murray Liebowitz. Obviously hoping to unravel what was becoming a complicated tale, the LADA located Ken Hunter and obtained his testimony. According to the Summary Report:

Since Mr. Hall’s statements have surfaced, another person, a Mr. Ken Hunter, has been located who claims to have been an ambulance driver who responded to the Monroe residence in the early morning hours of August 5, 1962.

In the Netflix movie, Summers asserted that he had learned about Ken Hunter, “former ambulance man,” who had “contacted” the district attorney’s office, and “he said that he’d been aboard an ambulance that had gone to Marilyn Monroe’s house that night.” Hunter’s story appeared to corroborate Walt Schaefer’s story: one of Schaefer’s ambulances had transported a comatose Marilyn Monroe to Santa Monica Hospital during the early morning hours of August 5^th. But, as I stated earlier, Ken Hunter was not the first “former ambulance man” to contact the district attorney; and in fact, Ken Hunter did not actually contact the district attorney’s office, as denoted by Summers—not ever. As I stated above, James Hall contacted Ronald Carroll. The film presented only a small fraction of the Hunter/LADA interview /conversation. What follows is a transcription of the interview as presented in the Netflix movie:

LADA:  What happened?

Hunter: What do you mean?

LADA: Did you go into the house?

Hunter: Yeah.

LADA: Did you see Monroe’s body?

Hunter: Yeah. She was on the bed.

LADA: Do you recall if she was on her back or her stomach?

Hunter: Side.

LADA: She was on her side.

Hunter: Yeah.

What follows is a transcription of the actual Hunter/Tomich interview:

Tomich: What happened?

Hunter: What do you mean?

Tomich: I mean what occurred?

Hunter: Well, I don’t know. Nothing really occurred. She was dead and they wouldn’t let us take her. The morgue came and took her.

Tomich: Did you go into the house?

Hunter: Yeah. I believe so.

Tomich: Did you see Monroe’s body?

Hunter: Yeah.

Tomich: Where was it at the time?

Hunter: Umm. She was on the bed. Hanging off the bed…something…I don’t recall.

Tomich: Do you recall if she was on her back or her stomach?

Hunter: Side.

Tomich: She was on her side.

Hunter: Yeah. I believe she was on her side. Umm. Yeah, it seems to me she was on her side.

Tomich: Did either one of you touch her body?

Hunter: No, I didn’t.

Tomich: Do you know if your partner did?

Hunter: Seems to me he did.

Tomich: Do you know what he did?

Hunter: He checked her just to see if she was dead or what and I think she was…I think she was pretty cold at that time…Well, she was blue and then…the throat you know like she…like I said that she’d been laying there a while, you know what I mean?

Tomich: She was blue. Any particular portion of her body?

Hunter: Umm I think…I don’t…I don’t really remember if it was her neck or her side, you know. that she was laying on or what it…but it seemed to me like—well, let’s put it this way: I could stand across the room and tell that she was dead.

Tomich: OK. Umm. Let me relate a story to you that we’ve received information from a person that…an ambulance attendant was summoned to the residence…when the ambulance attendant and his partner arrived the only person there was a female standing outside screaming and that the attendant went in and found Marilyn Monroe on the bed, removed her from the bed and began CPR or closed chest message and that in the process of doing this that she started to come around and, you know, regain consciousness and a doctor came in and plunged a needle into the area of her heart and thereafter pronounced her dead. Does that sound familiar at all?

Hunter: Well, that’s bullshit.

Tomich: OK.

Obviously, the tape as presented was an edited version. Also, according to Hunter, the story related by James Hall and, by extension, also Walt Schaefer, was false. During his interview with Vernon Scott, published by the AP on October 5^th, 1985, Milt Ebbins as­sert­ed that the story of an ambulance arriving which transported Marilyn to the hospital was a complete fiction. Even though Ken Hunter could not remember the exact time that he and Liebowitz arrived at Fifth Helena, when they did, the cops had already arrived and Marilyn had already expired. The police would not let them take Marilyn’s body. It is important to note here that California statute prohibits an am­bulance from transporting a corpse. And Hunter clearly stated that “the morgue came and took her.” Hunter’s reference to the morgue’s arrival suggests, that while he and his partner were there, morticians Don and Guy Hockett arrived to collect Marilyn’s body. Therefore, Hunter and his partner arrived at Fifth Helena either slightly before or slightly after 5:45 AM. Eventually, however, Ken Hunter and his partner departed in an empty ambulance.

In the Netflix movie, Summers asserted: “And what’s more I found no less than seven members of Schaefer Ambulance who corroborated the notion that she had been carried that night.” (emphasis mine) Once again, the word notion suggests an imprecise recollection. And yet, Summers did not present the testimony of even one of the seven and did not reveal who those “seven members of Schaefer Ambulance” might have been. Meaning, of course, their al­leged corroborative statements about a “notion” could not be investigated.

Finally, the “ambulance yarn” was the product of James Hall’s imagination, not the imagination of Ken Hunter, but, since Summers did not delve into Hall’s fabrication, neither will I. One significant fact should be clear, though, The Ambulance Theory as presented by Summers and Netflix was neither complete nor exactly accurate. In fact, the use of Hunter’s testimony to confirm Walt Schaefer’s assertion—that Marilyn’s body was removed from her house and transported to a local hospital by an ambulance that night—put an elliptical twist on the fact that Ken Hunter’s testimony directly contradicted James Hall’s testimony. But, if I might be allowed to employ a form of paralipsis, I will not mention that Hunter’s testimony directly contradicted Walt Schaefer’s testimony as well.

The Kennedy Family at the Bates Ranch

On Friday afternoon in Chicago, August 3^rd, Robert Kennedy boarded an American Airlines flight connecting from Washington, DC. The attorney general joined his wife, Ethel, and his four eldest children, Kathleen, eleven years old, Joseph II, ten years old, Robert Jr., eight years old, and David, seven years old. The American flight proceeded to San Francisco where the Bates family awaited their weekend guests. John Bates, Sr. then drove the group southeast from San Francisco to Gilroy, a pleasant two hour and fifteen minute drive into the picturesque Santa Cruz Mountains. From Gilroy, they drove an additional twenty minutes west to the Bates Ranch located just north of Mount Madonna. The Ken­nedy family spent the entire weekend with the Bates family on their bucolic ranch. The preceding account is an irrefutable fact.

Also on the flight was the FBI’s liaison to the attorney general, Courtney A. Evans. An FBI file no. 77-51387-300, written by Evans, memorialized the Kennedy’s weekend excursion:

The Attorney General and his family spent the weekend at the Bates ranch located about sixty miles south of San Francisco. This was strictly a personal affair.

Evans noted as well, that he continued into San Francisco once the attorney general and his family were on their way to Gilroy. How the Bates family and the Kennedy family occupied themselves during the remainder of Friday has never been revealed. Also, there are no indications that other FBI agents were on the American flight from Chicago to San Francisco.

In the 1985 print version of Goddess, Summers mentioned the Kennedy family’s visit to the Gilroy ranch. But exactly how the families occupied themselves on Saturday, August 4^th, would not be revealed for eight years, appearing finally in Donald Spoto’s 1993 Monroe biography. Individuals at the Bates ranch on Saturday testified that the families rose early; and after a hearty breakfast, a group that included Robert Kennedy occupied them­selves by riding horses to Mt. Madonna. That equine jaunt, according to John Bates, Sr., consumed most of the morning. They returned to the ranch, where the afternoon included a BBQ, swimming, and a game of touch football. Due to the ranch’s rolling, hilly terrain, the participants had to locate a spot with a relatively level topography. That search required a group hike up to the top of the ranch, which consumed two hours round trip. After the football contest, the group enjoyed more swimming; and then, after the children had been cleaned and dressed for dinner, as they appeared outside, the attorney general tossed each of them into the swimming pool, which, of course, required a drying and re-dressing. Once the children had been fed and put to bed, the adults enjoyed a peaceful dinner. The conversation during dinner focused predominantly on a speech the attorney general would deliver to the American Bar Association in San Francisco on Monday, August 6^th. According to John and Nancy Bates, dinner ended at approximately 10:30 PM, after which the fatigued adults retired.

John Bates, Sr. and Nancy along with John Bates, Jr. and Roland Snyder, the ranch foreman, testified on more than one occasion that Robert Kennedy never left the ranch during that fun-filled Saturday. More importantly, though, a group of ten photographs taken that day clearly depicted each activity as described by the Bates family and clearly confirmed that Rob­ert Kennedy was at the ranch all day. He was an active participant in all the day’s activities; therefore, how could Eunice Murray—how could anybody for that matter—contend that Robert Kennedy was in Brentwood on August 4^th and visited Marilyn not once, but twice: In the afternoon and then later that night. It is mystifying indeed, since any absence by Robert Kennedy during that day would have been immediately noticed by any and all present, particularly Robert Kennedy’s children.

During the years following Marilyn’s tragic death, Eunice Murray sat for several interviews pertaining to Marilyn’s life, her relationships, and the events of August 4^th. Her interview with Anthony Summers was only one of several; and she often contradicted what she told Summers. She also published a memoir.

In 1973, to the Ladies Home Journal and The Chicago Tribune, Eunice reported that Robert Kennedy did not appear at Fifth Helena on August 4^th, a position that she also maintained in her 1975 memoir. During an interview with Maurice Zolotow, published by the Chicago Tribune on September 11^th, 1973, Mrs. Murray asserted that the stories about Marilyn and Robert Kennedy were “the most evil gossip of all before declaring: It is not true that Marilyn had a secret love affair with Mr. Kennedy…and I would tell you if it were so.” She recalled the Wednesday visit in June of 1962, when the attorney general, accompanied by the Lawfords, “came to see the house,” finally adding that Marilyn “certainly didn’t go sneaking around with Mr. Kennedy and have a love affair with him.” When asked directly by Zolotow if Bobby Kennedy was “in the house that Saturday night,” Eunice answered: “No.” After Zolotow posed the same question about Peter Lawford and Pat Newcomb, Eunice answered:

No. Absolutely not. There was nobody in the house that night except me and Marilyn. The doors were locked. The gate was shut. The windows locked. The French window in her room locked.

Ten years later, however, with the arrival of Anthony Summers, and after several denials, somehow Mrs. Murray changed her story: the attorney general, she said, had been there that Saturday afternoon. Then, in 1986, Marilyn’s former housekeeper made a similar declaration to a Marilyn researcher by the name of Roy Turner.

And yet, in the previously referenced 1985 article written by Vernon Scott, Lawford’s manager and friend, Milt Ebbins, shared the following:

I talked to Peter on the telephone several times that night. He never left his beach house in Santa Monica…Bobby definitely was not in Southern California that night and neither man went to Marilyn’s house…How could Bobby be in town that night? He was in Northern California with his wife and children.

And, yet again, on October 6^th, 1985, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel published a UPI article that generally discussed Eunice Murray’s testimony to Anthony Summers during the original 1985 documentary based on Goddess. According to the article, however, during an interview with the magazine Picture Week, then a new weekly publication by TIME, Mrs. Murray, eighty-two years old at the time,

refused to repeat her ac­count of Kennedy’s alleged presence in the house…According to the Sun-Sentinel article, Mrs. Murray admitted: Once in a while, everything becomes confused. I am confused.

Is it not entirely possible that a confused Eunice Murray erroneously translated Rob­ert Kennedy’s 1962 June visit into August?

However, the contingent at the Bates ranch that August weekend never expressed any type of confusion or changed their testimony. In fact, Roland Snyder stated emphatically:

They were here all weekend, that’s certain. By God, he wasn’t anywhere near LA—he was here with us; and John Bates, Jr. recalled: I was fourteen at the time and was about to go off to boarding school. I remember Bob [Kennedy] teasing me about it, saying, “Oh, John, you’ll hate it!” The senior Bates told Spoto: I remember Bobby sitting with the children as they ate and telling them stories. He truly loved his children.

Since Summers did not include the firsthand, consistent testimony of the Bates family and Roland Snyder in his Netflix movie, should we therefore assume that the investigative journalist never interviewed them? It is clear, however, that he did. In Goddess, Summers announced: “Questioning of the Bateses aside, further checks on Kennedy’s time at the ranch are difficult. The weekend arrangements were private.” Summers’ rather curious out-of-hand dismis­sal of the testimony from persons who were actually with Robert Kennedy that August week­end, simply because he could not, he insinuated, otherwise confirm Robert Kennedy’s real-time locations, is difficult to comprehend, even considering the author’s self-evident agenda. And without any hesitation, in an effort to prove Robert Kennedy traveled to Los Angeles on August 4^th, Summers repeated more than a boatload of uncorroborated, hearsay testi­mony from more than a boatload of witnesses.

Additionally, in Goddess, the author dampened the testimony offered by the senior John Bates—scant testimony that Summers only offered in paraphrase.

Bates thought everyone went horseback riding together sometime on Saturday, Marilyn’s last day alive, Summers wrote and then offered some additional rephrasing: He [Bates] believed he would have known if Kennedy had left for long enough to reach Los Angeles and returned by the early hours of Sunday (emphasis mine)

Of course, John Bates, Sr. would have known if Robert Kennedy left the ranch for several hours, just like everyone there would have known; and having Robert Kennedy return to the Bates Ranch by early Sunday morning, August 5^th, was a significant requirement: the group attended an early morning Mass in Gilroy, an event on which the Gilroy Dispatch reported. On August 6^th, the local newspaper printed a brief article entitled “Robert Kennedys Visit Local Ranch.” After commenting on the attorney general’s Monday speech, the article noted:

Kennedy, his wife, and four oldest children have been the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Bates of Piedmont at their Gilroy ranch on Sanders Rd. They are expected to leave tonight when they fly on to the Seattle World’s Fair. Sunday morning, the Kennedys attended 9 o’clock mass at St. Mary’s Church in Gilroy.

In a letter that John Bates, Sr. wrote to Bruno Bernard in 1985 regarding the ten family photographs taken that Saturday, mentioned previously, and published by Susan Bernard in 2011, the senior Bates was very emphatic about what happened during that entire day. What about regarding the horseback jaunt that Summers insinuated the senior Bates was unsure had even happened? Well, a photograph of the group mounted on horses and his statement about the event clearly suggests that Summers was being—well, let us say, a bit obfuscatory? And it’s an obfuscation that is difficult to comprehend. For, the pictures on horseback are right there in Susan Bernard’s Marilyn: Intimate Exposures on page 186.

The more significant issue is this: why did Anthony Summers exclude the firsthand testimony of John Bates, Sr., Nancy Bates, John Bates, Jr., and Roland Snyder? The parents that August weekend were still alive when the 1980s began. Since they did not appear in the Netflix movie, we can only assume that Summers did not bother to interview them. Or what about the Kennedy children? In late 1982, Kathleen would have been 31 years old, Joseph II would have been 30, the junior Robert 28, and David 27. The importance of what the Kennedy children could have clarified, before the passing of many more years like a cudgel blunted their memories, cannot be overstated. However, giving Summers the benefit of a doubt, should we conclude that the investigative journalist requested an interview, but all four of Robert Kennedy’s children refused? But then, Summers has never even mentioned the Kennedy children.

To put an end to the discussion of where Robert Kennedy was on August 4^th, 1962, if not to a moral certainty, then certainly beyond a reasonable doubt, Robert Kennedy did not visit Marilyn on August 4^th, 1962. Not once, much less twice. The Bernard book proved that beyond question.

But for a moment, let’s accept, as has been suggested by various conspiracist authors, that Robert Kennedy left Gilroy sometime after 10:30 PM, after he and his wife, Ethel, retired for the night. If Natalie Trundy’s account of that Saturday evening is factual, then Marilyn was either dying or already dead at 11:00 PM, most certainly by 12:00 AM. Ignoring all the various problems associated with Robert Kennedy’s departure from Gilroy, his travel time to 12305 Fifth Helena Drive would have required at least 3.5 hours by helicopter—considerably longer by car. He could not have appeared in Marilyn’s home before 2:00 AM on August 5^th. That is, if he left immediately after dinner, which must be considered doubtful since his wife would have known about his departure. At any rate, Natalie Trundy’s testimony notwithstanding, forensic factors, like Marilyn’s liver temperature at autop­sy, indicated that Marilyn died before Robert Kennedy could have arrived at Fifth Helena. And if she was not dead, then she was certainly comatose, a nonresponsive body. Therefore, the assertions by many individuals regarding Robert Kennedy’s appearance at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive on the night of Marilyn’s death, regardless of the time asserted that the attorney general appeared, must be summarily dismissed. Robert Kennedy could not have telephoned Marilyn from Peter Law­ford’s beachside mansion; he could not have visited her and engaged her in some type of argument leading to a physical scuffle. The preceding facts are as clear as the water in an Irish mountain brook. Nothing could be more clear.

On March 21^st of this year, Megyn Kelly interviewed Robert Kennedy, Jr., a mere six decades after the events of 1962 and, to her credit, she broached the topic of Marilyn Monroe. Robert Jr. admitted: “There’s not much I can tell you about Marilyn Monroe.” But Megyn Kelly pressed the issue: “The rumors are that she had an affair with your dad, that she had an affair with your uncle, and even possibly that your dad was somehow there the night that she died out in California.”

Robert Jr. responded as follows:

Those are rumors that have been time and again proven completely untrue. There’s two days…my father’s schedule, every minute of his day is known. So people know where he was every moment of the day and it happens that the day that they say that my father, you know, that these people who are selling books and these things…the day that they say my father was with her he was with us at a camping trip up in Oregon and northern California and it would have been impossible for him to be there, though that was the day she died. O, and all the days that people, that these authors, who are just bogus authors, who have suggested, who are making money by, you know, saying these things, all the days that they claim my father could have been with Marilyn Monroe are days when we know exactly where he was, and he was on opposite sides of the country from Marilyn Monroe.

Unfortunately, Megyn Kelly then lapsed into the same fallacious argument employed by many persons who suffer from faulty reasoning and engage in hasty generalizations based on weak analogies: since allegedly John Kennedy was an inveterate philanderer, then his brother must have been as well. But then, many of Robert Kennedy’s friends and associates have asserted over the years that he was disinclined to engage in extramarital activities, a fact about his character that I have already noted and will expand in the section following hereafter.

The Devout Middle Kennedy Brother

In 1973, Norman Mailer published his biographical novel starring Marilyn Monroe. Concealed within Mailer’s lavender prose and his frequent flights of whirligig rhetoric, he of­fered the following proclamation:

If the thousand days of Jack Kennedy might yet be equally famous for its nights, the same cannot be said of Bobby. He was devout, well married, and pru­dent.

An interesting but baffling defense of Robert Kennedy, considering that Mailer would then proceed to accuse the attorney general of spending time between Marilyn’s smooth satin sheets, imbibing in a heady, clandestine romance that would end in her death. Mailer insinuated that Robert Kennedy either sanctioned Marilyn’s murder or was involved in it. Still, and despite Mailer’s failure to explore it, an adjective in the quoted defense cannot be ignored: devout.

Whatever one wishes to say about John Kennedy’s promiscuity today, his younger brother might be diagnosed a religion addict. Evidently, he and his wife, Ethel, displayed religious figurines throughout their McLean Virginia home: the Virgin Mary, for instance, and St. Francis, the saint from which Robert’s parents took his middle name. Also, Robert and Ethel not only prominently displayed the Catholic Bible at Hickory Hill, they actually read it, frequently aloud to their children, in whose bedrooms Ethel displayed crucifixes and holy water. The family prayed in the morning, before and after each meal and before bedtime, sometimes as a group and sometimes individually. Catholic custom and religious ritual was a significant part of family life within the home of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, even more significant than religious fealty and piety had been in the home of Rose and Joe Senior. But then, sixty years ago, religion, particularly Catholicism, was not the pariah it has become.

Robert Kennedy’s faith and his religious beliefs often found its way into his speeches; and according to Paul Kengor, Robert Kennedy “was the most devout among the Kennedy boys. Those closest to him considered him a prayerful Catholic…” Biographer Ronald Steel speculated that if Robert Kennedy had been “born into a poor family without a power-hungry patriarch driving the boys into politics, he might have been a priest.” Steel described Robert Kennedy’s religious ideology as a “fierce brand of Irish Catholicism” and that the attorney general was in his heart—and always was—”a Catholic conservative deeply suspicious of the moral license of the radical left.” Robert Kennedy did not “embrace the drug culture and sexual permissiveness of the ‘60s.” Even Jacqueline Kennedy once commented that “Bobby never misses Mass and prays all the time.”

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. offered the following:

[Robert Kennedy] lived through a time of unusual turbulence in American history; and he responded to that turbulence more directly and sensitively than any other political leader of that era. He was equipped with the certitudes of family and faith—certitudes that sustained him till his death. But they were the premises, not the conclusions, of his life.

Finally, regarding the attorney general’s deportment, Ken O’Donnell and David Powers noted the following hallmark: “Always he was the kindest man we ever knew.”

Certainly, I am not naïve enough to believe that being devoutly religious would preclude an occasional misstep, would preclude succumbing to a flirtation leading to a romantic temptation leading to a violation of a man’s marital vows. But certainly, also, devotion to one’s religion, devotion to one’s faith would engender a serious and effective internal argument against committing such transgressions, would diminish the inclination, perhaps even the desire, to engage in forbidden liaisons. According to several of Robert Kennedy’s friends, and Richard Goodwin, advisor to both John and Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, unlike the president, was temperamentally disinclined to engage in extramarital activities, even with the beautiful and sexy Marilyn Monroe. A fellow could advance the argument, then, that having an affair with a man disinclined to do so would have been virtually impossible, even for the one and only Miss Monroe. Robert Kennedy’s devotion to his religion, to his faith, is an inherent quality of his life-style, his personality, and character that cannot be ignored, even though the Marilyn Monroe conspiracists have, as they transmogrify the kindest man we ever knew into a philandering heartless man capable of suborning murderer.

Final Comments

The boast often proclaimed by Anthony Summers to extol his Marilyn pathography is this: his research for Goddess included one-thousand interviews, six-hundred and fifty of which Summers tape recorded. However, in his Netflix movie, Summers included a mere twenty-seven of the recorded interviews. Of the interviews Summers tape recorded, six-hundred and twenty-three, the vast majority, remain unheard. An inquiring mind would immediately ask several questions. What, for instance, is the testimony on the vast majority of the still unheard tapes? According to Marilyn biog­rapher Gary Vitacco-Robles:

In Netflix, Summers omits interviews which contradict the interviews he chose to include…He uses interviews to support Kennedy was at Peter Lawford’s house on August 4^th; however, he interviewed all of Lawford’s guests that night and all reported Kennedy was not there.

A case in point is the tape recording of Summers’ interview with Milt Ebbins. That tape exists. Several persons have heard it. Along with all of Summers’ tapes, the Ebbins tape is housed at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, California. Why was that interview excluded from the Netflix flicker show? Also, it is painfully clear that at least one tape presented by Summers had been edited, and that tape was not the product of a Summers conducted interview. It was the product of an interview conducted by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office. So, this imperative question follows: had any of the other tapes been edited especially for inclusion in the Netflix movie?

Moreover, it should be obvious, and also troubling, that Summers withheld, excluded testimony from witnesses who actually knew Marilyn and, unlike Arthur James, could prove they knew her. Pat Newcomb would be a case in point. Others would be Ralph Roberts, Norman Rosten, and Whitey Snyder, Marilyn’s personal make-up artist. According to Summers’ source notes, he interviewed all of the preceding persons. Did he fail to tape record those interviews?

But even more egregious than excluding the testimony of the preceding persons, and more than a few others, is the exclusion of the incredibly relevant, first-hand, eye-witness testimony of the Bates family and Roland Snyder, all of whom spent that early August weekend with the Kennedys. And dare I even mention the exclusion of the Bates family photographs, ten of them, that memorialized and created a historical record of what happened at the Bates Ranch on Saturday, August 4^th. Thus creating a documentary record that Summers did not even deign to mention, much less pursue. Those photographs have been available since 1962; and Susan Bernard published them in 2011. Anthony Summers, investigative journalist, has had at least eleven years to locate those photographs and then disclose their existence to the public. Actually, he’s had a full four decades. If the purpose of the movie was to present the facts, then why was essential and pertinent information withheld?

A fellow could accuse Summers of engaging in tactics that resemble a suppression of evidence fallacy regarding Robert Kennedy’s appearance at Fifth Helena Drive that tragic Saturday. Regarding that guileful legerdemain, he has been more than successful: every journalist and movie critic who reviewed the movie reported categorically that Robert Kennedy visited Marilyn on the day she died—when categorically he did not. But then, the media in general appears to have been completely confused by the Netflix movie: one journalist even asserted that the Los Angeles County District Attorney asked Summers to perform the threshold re-investigation into Marilyn’s death, a completely incorrect assertion.

During the past few weeks, I have read a considerable amount of opinion about what a documentary should be, should encompass, and for what it should strive. Needless to say, I encountered several differing opinions. One commentator even rejected the precept that a documentary had to necessarily present the truth; but another noted:

Within the context of wondering about the responsibility of filmmakers in delineating fact from fiction, the topic of documentary filmmaking itself ends up under fire. Documentaries, by definition, must be non-fiction. Commentary and opinions are allowed, but misrepresentation is not.

Despite what some persons might think, the preceding definition is a self-evident requirement of a documentary film; but then the commentator added: “…some documentary film­makers now aim for commercial success when they create a film and their films are in fact fictionalized to some extent through misrep­resentation and omission.” In that case, any film or movie featuring “misrepresentation and omis­sion” cannot be labeled a documentary; and the preceding assessment leads to this assessment: The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes is not a true documentary. It is a sensationalized melodrama featuring dramatized pantomime by unidentified actors, a cheesy and distracting tactic one reviewer noted; and viewers are treated to maudlin music and grimy film-noir-like cinematography. The sensationalized melodrama is the result of Summers’ repeated suggestions that perhaps Marilyn’s death was the result of activi­ties much more diabolical than suicide—Question marks. Dig, dig, dig. Over two years. Hollywood, Los Angeles, the bugging, the eavesdropping. Had she been murdered? John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa. Rumor. White House files, FBI files. Honesty. Minute after minute, Summers appeared to be building a prima facie case in preparation for the dramatic reveal: the dastardly and nefarious middle Kennedy brothers, but primarily Robert Kennedy, who visited Marilyn on the day she died, had her murdered to silence her: she simply knew too much.

Then at the seventy-eight-minute mark, Summers announced: “So, I’m not at all of the mind of the loony people who write books saying she was murdered.” I must confess, when I heard Sum­mers’ reference to “loony people who write books,” my chin promptly thudded against my hardwood floor. And then Summers announced:

There have been several conspiracy stories. There are people, on very thin evidence, I think largely made-up evidence, who suggest that people wanted to hide the precise circumstances of her death because Marilyn was murdered…I did not find out anything that convinced me that she had been deliberately killed.

Summers certainly rivals Norman Mailer’s use of paralipsis on a narrative scale, in which the novelist indulged himself with insinuation and innuendo, theories of conspiracy to the point of tedium before finally admitting that Marilyn more than likely took her own life. And Mailer’s Kennedy narrative, like Summers’ Kennedy narrative, ends up fundamentally incidental, most certainly speculative with a foundation of paper mache—but created by whom? Anthony Summers has contributed a large volume of literary smog to the mythological legend of Marilyn Monroe, particularly to the mythology of her purported affairs with the middle Kennedy brothers, the mysterious tapes, helicopter logs and ambulances; and the dreary, dismal Netflix movie was yet another eruption of that smog.

Even though one reviewer noted that the Netflix movie was just “too touch-and-go, too speculative about Marilyn Monroe’s life and mysterious death, to be of any genuine purpose,” I suggest the production had multiple purposes. Providing Anthony Summers’ with a stage to present his most recent version of the truth was a purpose; keeping the legend and the purported mystery of Marilyn Monroe extant, readily available, was also a purpose. But another purpose was allowing Summers to transform the narrative from one of murder into one of a hush-hush cover-up orchestrated by a reprehensible and morally bankrupt political royalty, the Kennedys. “The key to the events surrounding her end,” Summers wrote in Goddess, “lies in the word ‘scandal’”—and scandal is a gaping excavation from which the sparkly twinkly jewels of insinuation and speculation can be mined almost without end, the actual truth notwithstanding. But then, ironically, as Marilyn said at the beginning of the movie: “true things rarely get into circulation. It’s usually the false things.”

---

Sources

Barris, George. Marilyn: Her Life In Her Own Words. Citadel Press: Kensington Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition, 2012.

Chaplin, Jr., Charlie. My Father Charlie Chaplin. New York: Random House, 1960.

Churchwell, Sarah. The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Metropolitan Books. Kindle Edition, 2004.

Guilaroff, Sydney, as told to Cathy Griffin. Crowning Glory: Reflections of Hollywood’s Favorite Confidant. Sydney Guilaroff Enterprises, 1996.

Mailer, Norman. Marilyn: A Biography. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973. Kindle Edition 2011.

Marshall, David. The DD Group: An Online Investigation Into the Death of Marilyn Monroe. Lincoln: iUniverse. Kindle Edition, 2005.

Monroe, Marilyn, with Ben Hecht. My Story. New York: Taylor Trade. Kindle Edition, 2007.

Robinson, Jr., Edward G. My Father, My Son. New York: Frederick Fell, Inc. 1958.

Rosten, Norman, Marilyn: An Untold Story. New York: Signet, 1973.

Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. Robert Kennedy and His Times. New York: Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Fortieth Anniversary Kindle Edition, 2018.

Spindel, Bernard. The Ominous Ear. New York: Award Books. 1968.

Spoto, Donald. Marilyn Monroe: The Biography. New York: Harper Collins. Kindle Edition, 1993.

Strasberg, Susan. Marilyn and Me: Sisters, Rivals, Friends. New York: Warner Books, 1992.

Sullivan, William C. The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI. Toronto: George McLeod Limited, 1979.

Summers, Anthony. Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Macmillan, 1985.

—. Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Open Road Integrated Media. Kindle Edition, 2012.

Taraborrelli, J. Randy. The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition, 2009.

Vitacco-Robles, Gary. Icon: The Life, Times and Films of Marilyn Monroe, Volume 1, 1926 to 1956. Albany: BearManor Media. Kindle Edition, 2013.

—. Icon: The Life, Times and Films of Marilyn Monroe, Volume 2, 1956 to 1962 & Beyond. Albany: BearManor Media, 2014.

Wolfe, Donald H. The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe. London: Warner, 1998.

—. The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1998. Kindle Edition 2012.

Wright, Peter. Coroner’s Cold Case #81128 : Marilyn Monroe. Kindle Edition, 2012.

Zolotow, Maurice. Marilyn Monroe. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1960.

Link to the taped interview with Ken Hunter:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/monroe-investigation-interviews/

Donald Spoto quoted the Tribune story in his Marilyn biography. From his source notes: P491: They all came over: Eunice Murray, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, Sept. 11, 1973, sec 2, p. 1. “They all came to see the house. She certainly didn’t go sneaking around with Mr. Kennedy and have a love affair with him.”

RogerEbert.com article written by Nick Allen, 27 April 2022.

“The 6 most heartbreaking Marilyn Monroe moments from Netflix’s ‘The Unheard Tapes’ documentary” by Joy Saha, 27 April 2022.

“The Woman Mailer Forgot to Interview,” by Maurice Zolotow. Chicago Tribune. September 11, 1973.

“Rumors of Plot in Marilyn Monroe Death Abound, But Proof Lacking,” by Vernon Scott. UPI Archives, October 5, 1985.

“RFK Ended Affair with Marilyn Day She Died, Ex-Maid Says,” UPI. South Florida Sun-Sentinel, October 6, 1985.

“What’s the difference between a documentary and a docudrama? Does either one have to be true?” by Julia Layton. https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/documentary.htm

---

On several occasions, Marilyn Monroe commented on her friendship scarcity, a sad state of her existence that contributed to her deep, chronic feelings of loneliness. “Alone!” she wrote in a small black notebook, circa 1951, “I am alone—I am always alone, no matter what.” In the recently aired Netflix production starring Marilyn, twenty-eight minutes and thirty seconds into the proceedings, she declared, during a taped interview, that she did not enjoy many friendships. “It’s just that…I like people,” she ex­plained, “but for friends, I like few people.”

And yet, evidently, the movie star was friends with practically every human being walking the streets of Earth; and not just the nondescript garden variety sort of friend, but the variety of friend with whom she felt comfortable sharing the intimate secrets and details of her life, odd, to say the least. Marilyn was usually reticent about her personal life. She was not inclined to share intimate secrets with anyone. Marilyn was a very private woman. Pat Newcomb, arguably the dearest of Marilyn’s few female friends, commented on at least one occasion that Marilyn was acutely guarded; and it is a well-known fact that she scrupulously defended her privacy. As an example, the photographer Douglas Kirkland, accompanied by two of his assistants, met with Marilyn prior to his late November 1961 photographic session with her. “She seemed to be paranoid about her privacy,” Kirkland reported to biographer Donald Spoto. Marilyn compelled each man to vow that they “would never divulge where she lived.” So, if Marilyn did not maintain many friendships, as she herself confirmed, particularly intimate ones, how does the Netflix movie explain the multitude of purported intimate friends who offered testimony to author Anthony Summers? Well, the movie’s producers simply ignore the problem, the obvious discrepancy and contradiction, and remain mute, no explanation, a common malady with The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes. The movie and the tapes actually explain precious little.

Complex is the best adjective to describe Marilyn Monroe’s short life. But as short as her life was, it still consumed thirty-six years and sixty-five days, or three-hundred thousand long hours. The notion that a made for television film with a run-time of one and three-quarter hours might be able to clarify that life, reveal the facts and the truth about it, certainly suggests a certain conceit. Besides, calling a Netflix produced true crime, intended-to-be-a-shock movie, calling such a production a documentary should sound various warn­ing alarms. As one reviewer commented:

The gigantic streaming service did not invent scandalous or salacious entertainment, but they have the authorship of a content company that churns out such provocative reflections on reality, week by week. Its latest slop, served for an audience of armchair detectives, [is] a special kind of gross.

The problem is you have to be familiar with the subject matter. Ninety-nine percent of the public which watches this will not be.

When I first learned that Netflix would be airing a film that intended to reveal some previously unheard tapes obtained by Summers, I assumed the tapes would only be the interviews of this or that testifier obtained by the author during his research prior to writing Goddess. But I also recognized the remote possibility that Summers just might have uncovered and procured one of the missing and mysterious secret tapes: the ones purportedly made by private detectives Fred Otash, Bernard Spindel, and/or Barney Ruditsky, all three of questionable character and honesty. So, in another article that I wrote commenting on an article Summers wrote about his upcoming Netflix flix, I questioned what tapes Summers intended to expose to the public. Would Summers intone, “here are the recordings of real-time conversations between Monroe, JFK, and RFK?” Or would he exclaim, “here are the recordings of real-time love making sessions involving Monroe, JFK, and RFK?” Or would he announce, perhaps, “here is an actual recording of Monroe’s murder?” Unfortunately, I remarked, neither I nor the reader would know the answers to those pertinent questions until Netflix unveiled their new Marilyn flick. Well, the flick has been unveiled, and we now have the answers to those questions.

The structure of the Netflix movie is relatively simple and straightforward. Anthony Summers played his tapes as actors, dressed in nineteen-eighties style clothes, with appropriate coiffures, pretended to be the person being interviewed and lip synced their testimony. Intercut with the masquerading actors, the director included archival newsreel footage of Marilyn at various events and scenes from selected movies along with some direct quotations from the few interviews Marilyn gave. Of course, Summers offered some commentary about his investigation into Marilyn’s life and her death, but primarily her death and her sex life. Some of the interviewees knew Marilyn, or alleged they knew her anyway; but most of the persons that Summers interviewed, or at least the tapes of interviews that he included in the movie, occupied and operated on the periphery of Marilyn’s life. Several persons who were actually an integral part of her life, Pat Newcomb and Susan Strasberg for instance, persons that Summers interviewed just to mention two, did not receive any airtime, did not even receive a mention. Marilyn’s three husbands, Jimmie Dougherty, Joe DiMaggio, and Arthur Miller did not appear. Finally, of the persons whose testimony Summers presented, only two remain among the living: Arthur James and Joan Greenson Aebi.

The movie opens on a narrow, lonely stretch of highway as it curves and bends alongside a mountain stream as it cascades and carves a path through the damp and mist laden hills of Ireland. Odd, and even odder still, we are eventually treated to shots of Summers as he plods through the many boxes of stuff he accumulated during his research for his book Goddess. Should I prepare to watch a movie about Marilyn Monroe or Anthony Summers? At least one reviewer perceived the oddity and commented that:

The narrative within this documentary is more about Summers, to show off the tapes that helped him write his Monroe book…And in terms as crude as this doc is, it’s more or less about getting him on camera to talk about this before he is unable to do so himself…

“O, uh, I’d like to ask you,” Marilyn inquires of an unknown individual as the movie proper begins, “how do you go about writing a life story?” Summers did not provide any context for her question. Did she ask that question of the author and playwright Ben Hecht, who ghost wrote Marilyn’s unfinished memoir, My Story? The clever editing implies that Marilyn might have phoned and spoke with Summers. Not impossible, I suppose, since Summers was the age of nineteen when Marilyn died, but most certainly an event that did not happen.

Then Marilyn comments prophetically and explains: “Because…the true things rarely get into circulation. It’s usually the false things.” But Anthony Summers certainly could not be interested in false things, could he? So, like the prophet Daniel, the Irishman strode bravely into the lion’s den with the goal of learning the true things about Marilyn’s life and death, strode bravely into that chatterbox of a place called Hollywood to dig, dig, dig. He did not encounter any fierce lions, though, just a thick brick wall and his digging produced little because the chatterbox of Hollywood was not chattering. So, instead, he tells us: “I did what you always have to do if you reach a dead end: I went back to the beginning.” At this point, Summers begins to—selectively—release his heretofore unheard mélange of tapes.

Cassette 71A: Al Rosen

Evidently, Al Rosen was a big-shot Hollywood agent who founded the eponymous Al Rosen Agency. Rosen also advised Summers that he knew Marilyn “very well—that is, in the beginning, you know, when she was a kid.” Marilyn signed her initial Fox contract on the 26^th of August in 1946 at the tender age of twenty years. At that time, she was still legally a minor in California, but she had been a wife for four years, recently divorced. Besides, Al Rosen never represented Marilyn, a fact that did not, of course, preclude a possible acquaintanceship. Still, Summers did not tell his audience that Rosen was not Marilyn’s agent.

Rosen confirmed for Summers that Marilyn and the powerful movie mogul, Joseph Schneck, were lovers. After all, Rosen assured Summers, “Schneck was a human being;” and Schneck was not alone. He was just one of Marilyn’s many human being lovers. Of course, Summers did not report that both Marilyn and Joe Schneck denied that they were lovers. Each maintained steadfastly that their relationship was strictly platonic. Marilyn denounced the rumors circulating through Hollywood that she was Mr. Schenck’s paramour. She called the rumors scurrilous lies. According to Marilyn, the aging producer never solicited her for sex. According to Albert Broccoli, who later produced nine 007 movies, Schneck had kind feelings for Marilyn. She was, after all, a sweet and giving creature. Broccoli also asserted that Marilyn’s wonderful laughter invigorated Schneck: his face brightened when he saw her. All Joe Schneck wanted from Marilyn, according to Broccoli, was her friendship.  But according to Rosen, Marilyn’s name was one of many in the little black books of Hollywood moguls, the names of ambitious starlets who could be had. The reason Summers and Netflix positioned Rosen’s interview at the start of their flick is painfully clear: it’s all about the voyeurism: it’s all about the sex. Still, just how well Al Rosen actually knew Marilyn and when he actually knew her is certainly open to debate. Not one of the many Marilyn biographies that I consulted even mentioned Al Rosen. Hmm.

Cassette 50A: Gloria Romanoff

Married to restaurateur Michael Romanoff, Gloria informed Summers that she and her husband knew Marilyn in the beginning, her husband initially during the early forties, a problematic declaration captured by Summers’ cassette recorder. Here’s why. In the early 1940s, Marilyn Monroe did not exist. On June the 1st in 1940, Norma Jeane became a fourteen-year-old junior high school student living with Ana Lower on Nebraska Avenue on Sawtelle. The following year, she became a fifteen-year-old adolescent. At that time, Norma was four years away from Hollywood.

According to my research, Michael Romanoff was born in Lithuania in 1890 as Hershel Geguzin, but he adopted the name, Harry F. Gerguson. After Gerguson immigrated to NYC, he assumed the flamboyant but fraudulent nom de guerre of Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff. During his residency in The Big Apple, according to the New York Times, who labeled Romanoff a peddler and charmer, he wrote a fortune in bad checks, occasionally found himself incarcerated and in Dutch with the INS; but after relocating to Hollywood, Prince Michael became the favorite companion of various movie stars, primarily because of the faux prince’s many vivid and colorful stories, most of which were untrue. Certainly, his famous friends knew that Michael Romanoff was a fraud. In 1941, the peddling charmer opened his eponymous restaurant, seven years before he wed Gloria Lister. We can logically assume, I think, that the faux prince told his new wife Gloria that he knew Marilyn in the early 1940s, and the new wife simply believed her new husband.

Gloria informed Summers that Marilyn was a generous girl, warm girl, really rather lovable, and one who availed herself of the club and restaurant scene in Hollywood; and Romanoff’s was the place where all the pretty girls hung out. However, according to Marilyn’s unfinished memoir, after she signed her contract with Fox, she spent all of her time and money attending acting classes and several undergraduate classes at UCLA. She hoped to improve her mind; she had precious little time for nightclubs and parties and no money available for restaurants, especially expensive ones like Romanoff’s. The most important endeavor in her life at that time was learning the craft of acting.

When this Summers’ account of Marilyn’s life arrived at the mid­dle Kennedy brothers, the author asked Gloria if she could recall “just how early she started hearing…about Marilyn and the Kennedys?” Gloria did not exactly answer Summers’ question. John Kennedy spent time in California, she said, “on and off all through the 50s ’cause he had lots of friends here, you know, spending lots of time, you know.” Gloria never said that she actually heard anything at all about John Kennedy and Marilyn. Gloria only confirmed that then US Representative Kennedy spent a considerable amount of time in California with his many friends. John Kennedy’s allegedly frequent visits to California during the fifties proved exactly nothing about him or his younger brother, especially relative to Marilyn, their puta­tive relationships with her, or their putative involvement in her death.

Gloria briefly mentioned the Lawfords’ 1962 dinner party, which Marilyn and Robert Kennedy attended on the 1^st of February, along with many other guests, including Robert Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, Pat Newcomb, Edwin Guthman, and John Seigenthaler. Tony Curtis and his wife, Janet Leigh, also attended, along with members of the media. As Gloria noted, during the dinner party, Robert Kennedy telephoned his father, who had recently suffered a serious stroke; and Marilyn spoke to the aging patriarch. During the course of that same evening, Gloria reported, Marilyn actually danced with the attorney general. John Seigenthaler, Robert Kennedy’s administrative assistant and his friend for most of his political life, noted in a newspaper article: “Yes, Robert Kennedy danced with Marilyn Monroe. So what? I danced with Janet Leigh. Ethel Kennedy danced with Tony Curtis and Bobby danced with Ethel. It was dinner, dancing, conversation—and that was it;” and according to Seigenthaler, Robert Kennedy’s social encounters with Marilyn were just that and nothing more. Besides, Marilyn’s friendly conversation with the ailing Joe Kennedy, Sr., who could barely speak, and her dance with Bobby, proved nothing, except this: any activity, regardless of its innocence, can be transformed into innuendo and used to suggest an ill intent; especially when one is looking for it.

Cassette 84: John Huston

In late 1949, John Huston directed Marilyn in The Asphalt Jungle; and the gritty noir officially launched her cinematic career. Eleven years later, he directed The Misfits, Marilyn’s last completed film. During his interview with Summers, the auteur did not provide any new information pertaining to Marilyn’s career, her life, or her death.

Marilyn and Johnny Hyde were involved in a sexual relationship, Huston confirmed, a well-known fact. Huston confirmed another well-known fact: Johnny was in love with Marilyn. Of course, Summers reduced the relationship to its most ignoble form by asserting that Johnny Hyde was Marilyn’s sugar daddy, a label with a pejorative connotation suggesting that a heartless, gold-digging woman has become in­volved in a sexual relationship with an older man only for the financial benefits. Certainly, Marilyn received some benefits during the year she was with Johnny Hyde; but the main benefit was Johnny’s ability to advance her career: something he wanted to accomplish, to make Marilyn a star.

Johnny left his family hoping Marilyn would marry him; and he enticed her with his considerable wealth. Suffering from heart disease, Johnny knew that his days on Earth would soon end; and he enticed Marilyn with the promise of a large inheritance. Even though Marilyn often stated that she loved Johnny, she also admitted honestly that she was not in love with him. She also felt sorry for Johnny. And she did not consider her sexual submission to be a transgression: “The sex meant so much to him,” she confessed, “but not much to me.” Guided by her moral compass, she could not marry a man with whom she was not in love. And she also realized that she could not give Johnny the love that he desperately wanted. Joseph Schneck advised Marilyn to marry Johnny for the financial security the wealthy agent could provide. But she ignored Schneck’s advice and refused Johnny’s entreaties and proposals. As the biographer Donald Spoto recognized, this is hardly the behavior of a heartless, gold-digging predator. It seems wrong and unfair to tag Marilyn with such a label. But that is the kind of show this is.

Summers asked Huston about Marilyn’s decline during The Misfits’ filming. “Very soon we were aware that she was a problem,” Huston asserted. “She’d be late on the set always. Sometimes the whole morning would go by. Sometimes she’d be alright.” Of course, Huston’s comments were but a small part of the actual picture that Summers left unexplored and incomplete. Marilyn endured some hellish conditions while she filmed The Misfits: the oppressive mid-summer heat of the Nevada desert, writer Arthur Miller’s constant script changes, and Huston’s deplorable shenanigans.

Their marriage essentially over, Miller used the character Rosalyn as an outlet for his bitterness, as a weapon to bludgeon Marilyn and her cinematic career. As these feelings increased, so did his frequent script alterations, often requiring Marilyn to spend many of her nights memorizing new lines of dialogue. Is it not possible that Marilyn’s tardiness could have been caused, on occasion at least, by Miller’s last-minute script re-writes?  Miller’s alterations became so frequent that Clark Gable eventually refused to accept any more of them. And often her director would occupy the director’s chair when he was drunk. Even if relatively sober, he was frequently hung over, resulting in either directorial napping, disinterest, or a display of what his daughter, Angelica, admitted was her father’s mean streak. He would often mistreat his cast. Huston often asked for dozens of retakes, despite the oppressive desert heat and even after Marilyn and other members of the cast were satisfied; but arguably the worst charge attached to Marilyn and The Misfits is the egregious prevarication that her pill addiction and pill abuse alone caused all the production’s problems and a complete shutdown: she had to be hospitalized for detoxification.

Even before Marilyn arrived in Reno, Huston was already using a credit line established with the Mapes Hotel Casino. In his memoir, Huston soft-pedaled his gambling addiction. He gambled practically every night, he admitted. Huston also admitted that he liked to gamble, to lose, and then recover his losses the following night. But evidently, Huston lost considerably more than he ever won, frequently gambling all night, frequently traveling to shooting locations straight from the casino. Huston amassed a gambling debt of $50K—about a half million today—far in excess of what the casino agreed to allow in terms of credit for not only Huston, but the entire company. In late August, the Mapes Hotel and Harrah’s called the debt. Not long thereafter, the vice-president of United Artists informed Huston that the production’s bank account was empty and ordered the production stopped immediately.

Recognizing an opportunity to solve his financial problems, Huston telephoned Marilyn’s doctors, alerted them to her pill problem, what Huston termed her precarious behavior and asked them to intervene. On Sunday, August the 28th, her doctors notified Marilyn that production on The Misfits had been discontinued for a week and suggested that she would benefit from a week’s rest, not at her hotel, however, but at a restful private hospital. She agreed and that evening, her doctors admitted Marilyn to the Westside Hospital in Los Angeles. Apparently, Arthur Miller and the movie crew in Nevada were unaware of the unfolding machinations until Frank Taylor, the movie’s producer, convened a meeting Monday morning for the entire production company. During the meeting, Taylor announced that Marilyn was in the hospital after suffering a breakdown. Even Arthur Miller, according to Evelyn Moriarty, Marilyn’s stand-in, was infuriated by the subterfuge. He knew, as they all did, what had transpired. “Of course, she had troubles,” Evelyn admitted: “We knew that, but Marilyn was being blamed for everything.” Huston had exaggerated Marilyn’s condition to cover for his excessive drinking, profligate gambling, and general wastefulness. Evelyn added that, “It was so easy for her to be made the scapegoat.” During the production respite, Huston was able to negotiate for more money.

Huston’s assertion that he chastised Arthur Miller for allowing Marilyn’s drug abuse appears to be primarily self-serving, if not a fabrication. As an inveterate philanderer, he often twisted the truth to cover his behavior. How could Arthur Miller prevent Marilyn’s drug abuse, considering that her doctors prescribed the pills for her. Besides, it is painfully clear that John Huston did not really care about saving Marilyn Monroe. What he cared about was saving himself. Had Anthony Summers revealed Huston’s contribution to The Misfits’ production problems, then he would have actually revealed some relatively new information. And it would have made Monroe a sympathetic character.

Cassette 96: Jane Russell

In 1953, Jane Russell co-starred alongside Marilyn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Jane told Summers that Marilyn was very bright and she wanted to learn. Marilyn also worked constantly, Jane reported. Even after long days on set filming, Marilyn would work tirelessly with her dramatic coach: Marilyn wanted to be as good as she could possibly be.

Jane noted that the co-stars considered themselves to be friends while they filmed Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But when filming ended, Marilyn departed to create a new group of temporal relationships. Even though Jane would not associate with Marilyn during the nine years preceding Marilyn’s tragic death, her brunette co-star has invariably received the identifier as Mari­lyn’s good friend, certainly an amplification of Jane Russell’s relationship with Marilyn if not an aggrandizement. I’m not sure why Summers included Jane’s testimony. The brunette did not reveal anything new. If anything, she confirmed that Marilyn did not maintain prolonged friendships. But she was a movie star.

Cassette 92A: Danny Greenson

Dr. Ralph Greenson was Marilyn’s West Coast psychiatrist and Danny was the good doctor’s only son. While Dr. Greenson treated and enjoyed associations with many of Hollywood’s biggest stars and moguls, by his own admission, Danny was not fond of Hollywood and the people associated with cinema. Danny considered them to be “phonies and narcissistic char­acters.” And he admitted to Summers that he hated them.

Born in August of 1937, Danny was twenty-three years old when, in early January of 1960, his father began his frequent sessions with Marilyn. When he heard his father was treating Monroe, Danny admitted to Summers, he “was not jumping up and down and cheering.” Due to Marilyn’s inordinate fame, Dr. Greenson had to see her at the Greenson home; and Danny considered that arrangement to be a “bunch of bullshit.” However, after he began to talk to Marilyn, and he began to know her, his opinion of her changed. A friendship developed.

Danny confirmed for Summers that Marilyn was frequently depressed, a woman with practically no self-esteem, a woman who constantly referred to herself as a lonely waif that nobody liked and about whom nobody cared. Marilyn felt her emptiness as a severe loneliness; and evidently her loneliness and her depressive thoughts were so deeply ingrained that they could not be dis­lodged from Marilyn’s mind, not even by Dr. Greenson or his family. Still, Marilyn was happy on occasion. A photograph of Marilyn with Arthur Miller’s father, Isadore, prompted her to confide in Danny: “this is my happiest period. I was pregnant then.”

Eventually, Danny recounted how Marilyn had been invited to a Lawford dinner party that would also be attended by Robert Kennedy and other luminaries. Danny recalled Marilyn commenting that she wanted “to have something to talk to him about,” meaning the AG. Danny must have been referring to Marilyn and Robert Kennedy’s second meeting, which occurred on February the 1^st in 1962. Danny helped Marilyn develop some questions that she jotted down on a piece of paper and put in her purse. At that dinner party, she posed those questions to the AG while seated beside him at the dinner table. Everyone present heard the questions and the conversation that ensued, including the actress Kim Novak. She discussed the event briefly during an interview with Larry King eighteen years ago. Kim recalled that “she had on, of course, a wonderful low gown. And so, she got caught in the plate several times,” a comment that elicited laughter from the television crew. Kim continued and informed King that Marilyn had a list of questions to ask the attorney general, “political things and all. It was really interesting and fascinating.” Certain members of the press also attended the dinner party and reported that the actress and the politician spent what they, the reporters, considered to be an inordinate amount of time conversing; and thus, a few imaginative authors have speculated that Marilyn and Bobby discussed more titillating topics that night. In his memoir, Norman Rosten, Marilyn’s New York poet friend, remarked: “Romantic overtones were undoubtedly read into the prolonged tête-á-tête by the movie colony, whose greatest indoor game is to create imaginary infidelities… carnality in the eye of the beholder, civil rights in the hushed voices of Bobby and Marilyn.” Also, Pat Newcomb, a friend of both Marilyn and Robert Kennedy, testified unequivocally that the conversation between the movie star and the attorney general focused on his civil rights ideology and agenda.

Danny acknowledged that his father’s method of treating Marilyn was unorthodox. But his father realized, Danny explained, because of who Marilyn was, because of her unrestrained fame, “she could never be hospitalized,” which led to her “hanging with the family.” In fact, Dr. Milton Wexler, another therapist who shared Dr. Greenson’s office, suggested that Dr. Greenson and his wife, Hildi, should allow Marilyn access to their home as a method of re-parenting her. Dr. Wexler believed that having a “place to return to would alleviate her separation anxiety,” a treatment modality considered controversial then and now.

The testimony Summers elicited from Danny Greenson repeated information that has been known for decades. Marilyn’s psychological difficulties have been discussed and written about frequently; her personality and her behavior have been analyzed by psychologist and psychiatrist alike. Leading to diagnoses that Marilyn possibly struggled with a bipolar disorder along with a borderline personality. Her mood swings and her feelings could be extreme. Her thoughts generally focused on her profound unhappiness.

Cassette 56: Joan and Hildi Greenson

Born in 1941, Joan Greenson, now Aebi, was twenty years old when her father began treating Marilyn Monroe. Joan was forty-two years old when Summers interviewed her for the first time in 1983. According to his source notes, he re-interviewed Joan in 1986, virtually four decades ago. Joan is now an octogenarian.

Joan’s mother lived to the advanced age of ninety-nine. She died in 2013. According to her obituary Hildi Greenson was a remarkable woman. She and her husband, Dr. Ralph Greenson, transformed their home into a “haven for exchanging ideas and a refuge for all from the world’s cold winds. An insightful, inquisitive, and generous woman, Hildi had a passion for justice and beauty which found expression in her paintings.” Evidently, Hildi was also an artist.

In May of this year, I contacted Joan via email. I hoped she would agree to open a dialogue with me, during which we could discuss Marilyn along with the Greenson family’s association with Anthony Summers. The Greenson family, I had been warned by Donna Morel, felt that they had been misled by Summers about the kind of book he was writing. I have read transcripts of taped interviews with Joan and Danny, her brother, during which both said as much.

Each complained, but especially Danny, that Summers did not exactly write Marilyn’s biography. Summers wrote a pathography, condensed the first thirty years of Marilyn’s life into a single chapter, and then he concentrated primarily on the final two years of her life and her association with the middle Kennedy brothers. Summers had led them to believe that he was only marginally interested in Marilyn’s involvement with John and Robert Kennedy.

While Donna spoke to Joan several years ago, Gary Vitacco-Robles informed me that he never received any response to his requests for an interview. According to Gary, Joan gave Donald Spoto full access to her father’s archives regarding Marilyn, and then the biographer accused Dr. Greenson of prescribing a fatal enema that killed his most famous client. Gary also expressed the belief that Joan, understandably, no longer trusted biographers.

After I emailed Joan, a couple of days passed before I received a succinct response: she appreciated my interest, she wrote, but she could not provide any answers to my inquiry. In a second email, I asked Joan if she was under the constraint of a non-disclosure agreement, and if so, who or what entity held the agreement. To date, I have not received a response. Evidently, I should have been more clear about myself: I am not a biographer.

The testimony that Summers elicited from Joan Greenson and her mother was exactly like the testimony that he elicited from other interviewees: neither Joan nor Hildi revealed anything new or secret. They did not reveal anything remotely earth shattering. Even Joan Greenson’s comment about Marilyn calling the new man in her life “the General” was nothing new, despite Summers’ exposition about that moniker. Thirty-seven years ago, in the 1985 version of Goddess, Summers noted: “She [Marilyn] told me,” said Joan Greenson, “that she was seeing somebody, but she didn’t want to burden me with the responsibility of knowing who it was, because he was well known. So, she said she was going to call him ‘the General’.” In later editions of Goddess, Summers repeated Joan’s testimony. In fact, mythologizing authors have often repeated that quotation and pointed to Marilyn’s use of the esoteric moniker as proof that she and the attorney general were involved in a romantic affair.

But Marilyn denied that she and the attorney general were romantically involved. Marilyn asked both Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts if they had heard the rumors regarding a romance between her and Robert Kennedy. When each man responded affirmatively, she responded emphatically that the rumors were false. Marilyn posed the same question to Susan Strasberg, according to the latter’s memoir: She asked me if I’d heard the rumors about Bobby and her. She said: “It isn’t true.” Marilyn confided in both Allan and Roberts, along with Susan Strasberg, to whom she described Robert Kennedy as so puny, that she did not find Bobby physically appealing. She liked him, just not physically. The attorney general was not Marilyn’s preferred physical type. Marilyn preferred older men, tall, thin men who wore glasses. Even Peter Law­ford testified to the LAPD that what had been written by various authors about Marilyn and the middle Kennedy brothers was pure fantasy. And Lawford reported to Randy Taraborrelli: “All of this business about Marilyn and JFK and Bobby is pure crap. I think maybe—and I’m saying maybe—she had one or two dates with JFK. Not a single date with Bobby, though…” At any rate, I have a notion that a sardonically playful Marilyn was toying with Joan Greenson, and her mother, because Marilyn knew the two women would, as Hildi even admitted on tape, find the prospect of such a romance titillating. Marilyn could also have simply been engaging in what amounted to girlish one-upmanship.

Cassette 52A: Peggy Feury

Margaret Feury, known as Peggy, was primarily a stage actor and a highly regarded acting teacher who also appeared in several films. She was a charter member of the Actors Studio; and when Lee Strasberg was unavailable, she managed the studio’s acting sessions. In 1978, she and her family moved to Los Angeles where she taught at the Actors and Directors Lab before helping Lee Strasberg establish his Theatre Institute on the West Coast. Eventually, she and her husband, William Traylor, founded the Loft Studio where she taught acting classes whose participants included James Cromwell, Lou Gossett, Jr., Sean Penn, and Johnny Depp.

According to Peggy’s taped testimony, she saw Marilyn frequently at several Strasberg parties and they would talk a lot. Peggy said that Monroe “had very strong goals for herself,” and she was very “bright about acting.” During their conversations at the Actors Studio, Marilyn would discuss how she intended to approach her performance. In Peggy’s estimation, Marilyn really cared. But Peggy also informed Summers that they conversed about Marilyn’s childhood memories of being molested. Marilyn “felt that she had avoided…that she knew people who were psychotic from such episodes and she felt that at least she’d survived that.” Summers seemed nonplussed: “She was talking about that as late as then?” An expression of a certain dismay seemed prompted by his incredulity. Besides, Summers was primarily interested in Marilyn’s decline, a topic about which he often asked his interviewees; and he asked if Peggy saw Marilyn “in the time of her deterioration?” Apparently, Peggy did not respond.

Peggy Feury appeared in Summers’ print versions of Goddess. But the author did not include the testimony offered by Peggy that was included in his Netflix movie. Summers apparently doubted the veracity of Norma Jeane’s childhood molestation story, an event that Marilyn reported in her incomplete memoir. Summers wrote: “She claimed early on that she had been sexually molested as a child, and it was a theme she harped on obsessively throughout her life. Was it a real event?” Summers tended to dismiss Norma Jeane’s molestation story as a yarn with merely “a core of the truth…not the only episode of fantasy [and] self-serving exaggeration.” As Sarah Churchwell noted in her 2004 publication, Summers considered Marilyn’s memoir nothing but “a pack of self-serving lies” reported by a “pathological liar” and a “fantasist.” Summers decided that he would still rely on Marilyn’s unfinished memoir for information pertaining to Norma Jeane’s childhood, even though he had already dismissed the memoir as primarily an “unreliable” work of fiction. So, did Peggy Feury change Summers’ opinion? Had he grown to finally believe that Norma had, in fact, endured a childhood molestation? Summers left that question unanswered.

Cassette 98: Henry Rosenfeld

Known as the Henry Ford of dress makers, Henry Rosenfeld manufactured low cost dresses whose designs were chic enough to satisfy the uber wealthy, posh women of Manhattan. He made it socially acceptable for them to buy clothes off the rack; and as a result, he became wealthy himself. Yet another man who claimed to be Marilyn’s friend and intimate confidant for her entire adult life, he confirmed for Summers that Marilyn was, in fact, pregnant while she filmed Some Like It Hot, certainly not a globe rattling revelation. And Rosenfeld’s comment that Marilyn’s Happy Birthday performance for President Kennedy “was one of the most exciting things in her life” made him a master of the obvious. Certainly, any sentient person asked to perform at a president’s birthday gala would be excited; and by all accounts, Marilyn was not only excited, she was also unnerved, worried about her performance. But perhaps more importantly, Marilyn would later remark that she was honored by the invitation to perform at President Kennedy’s birthday gala. Again, who wouldn’t be?

Rosenfeld, on the other hand, used Marilyn’s understandable feelings about appearing at John Kennedy’s birthday celebration as an example of a flaw, a crack in her character: “Just being the one to sing. She was picked. The one.” But then, Marilyn was not the only person picked to perform that evening; many other stars also performed. In all, nineteen celebrities performed for the President of the United States. Are we to assume that all the other performers were nonchalant or apathetic about their performance for President Kennedy?

But―Rosenfeld’s testimony regarding what Marilyn wanted most in the world was categorically outrageous. And to contend that she would openly reveal such a grotesque fantasy at a party, borders on buffoonery. Evidently, Summers did not pursue that buffoonery or even ask any probing questions. For instance: where did this party transpire? Who threw it? Who else attended? Did Summers even attempt to locate a person who could corroborate Henry Rosenfeld’s ludicrous assertion? Apparently not: the print version of Goddess did not include a corroborating statement from anyone. We are left to conclude that the investigative journalist merely accepted what Rosenfeld said simply because the dress manufacturer said that he was Marilyn’s friend and confidant. In the end, though, why would Summers repeat Marilyn’s alleged sex-with-her-father-fantasy without any real evidence that she had actually admitted to that fantasy, admitted to it publicly? Perhaps to confirm Marilyn’s fundamental immorality along with her evident mental illness? But then, why would Rosenfeld make such a sad and grotesque accusation?

According to Scott Fortner, a recognized Marilyn expert, she rejected Rosenfeld’s proposal of marriage: “As it turns out,” Fortner revealed, “[Rosenfeld] proposed to Marilyn and was clearly in love with her based on letters he sent. Could this incredibly ridiculous statement about Marilyn wanting to sleep with her father be in retaliation for her unreturned affection?” Seems plausible, at least to me. With Rosenfeld’s sad but silly testimony in place, and Summers’ overriding point made, he proceeded to the next life-long confidant and intimate friend of the world’s most famous woman.

Cassette 97B: Arthur James

Just like many other men have declared, and even a few women, Arthur James also stated that he was Marilyn’s intimate confidant and friend for most of her adult life. In James’ case, he testified to Summers that they met many years before her 1954 wedding to Joe DiMaggio. I usually start with the quantity of ten to represent many. Certainly, Arthur James did not know Marilyn Monroe in 1944: she was persona nonexistent at that time.

Referring to the print version of Goddess, evidently James met Marilyn through Charlie Chaplin Jr., who began an alleged affair with the starlet in 1948.  However, on the 9th of March in 1948, Marilyn signed her six-month contract with Columbia Pictures. Almost immediately she fell in love with and became intimately involved with the studio’s musical director, and Marilyn’s vocal coach, Fred Karger. Marilyn even lived briefly with Fred’s mother, Anne, and his sister, Mary. Her relationship with Karger lasted until the end of 1948 and led directly to her monogamous relationship with Johnny Hyde; which ended with Hyde’s death in mid-December of 1950.

In the print version of Goddess, Summers quoted Arthur James frequently, and most of his testimony focused on Marilyn’s putative sexual relationships with Edward G. Robinson, Jr. and Charlie Chaplin, Jr., along with her sexual relationships with the middle Kennedy brothers. But since the Netflix testimony presented by Summers did not mention either junior, neither Edward G nor Chaplin, I will not excavate into that mound of problems. Still, each man left behind a memoir. Edward G. Robinson Jr. published his memoir in 1958; and Charlie Chaplin Jr. published his in 1960. Robinson mentioned only that he landed a tiny part in Marilyn’s movie, Bus Stop; primarily because his father knew Joshua Logan, the movie’s director. Chaplin junior mentioned that he briefly dated Norma Jean Dougherty, who, he reported:

started going to the top [of the movie world] fast, and it was the duty of her studio publicity department to keep her name in the papers by dating her here and there with other eligible young men. So, she and I drifted apart and I haven’t seen her for years.

Neither of the juniors, in their memoirs, mentioned Arthur James. In her memoir, Marilyn mentioned her romances with Fred Karger, Johnny Hyde, and Joe DiMaggio. But she did not acknowledge either Chaplin Jr. nor Robinson, neither friendship nor romance. And she did not acknow­ledge Arthur James. His name did not appear in My Story.

I have several serious issues with James’ testimony. But for the sake of brevity, I’ll discuss only one at this time: the assertion that Marilyn spent a weekend with her alleged good friend and confidant in Laguna Beach. James says that, “We met in Laguna a month before she died. She came down for the weekend and she told us…what had really taken place with the Kennedys.” There are only two weekends during which this purported visit to Laguna Beach could have occurred within a month of her death:

1. the last Saturday in June and the first Sunday in July (June 30^th and July 1^st), or
2. the first weekend in July (July the 7^th and 8^th)

I can only surmise that Marilyn did not inform James of any other life altering events that she had recently endured, at least not on the tape Netflix and Summers shared, just her alleged shattering break-up with the middle Kennedy boys. However, significant events that transpired during the month of June, prior to Marilyn’s reported trip to Laguna, suggests that several of those events just might have been weighing on her mind.

On Friday, June the 1st, Marilyn and the film crew celebrated the star’s thirty-sixth birthday on the set of Something’s Got to Give. Her co-stars Dean Martin and Wally Cox attended along with photographer George Barris, Eunice Murray, and Evelyn Moriarty, Marilyn’s stand-in. On Thursday, June 7, Fox sued Marilyn Monroe Productions and Marilyn Monroe for breach of contract. The suit asked for $500K in damages, effectively ended Marilyn’s employment and jeopardized her career, which caused her, quite understandably, to vacillate between utter depression and undiluted anger. Later, she would express her disbelief that Fox had actually fired her, the studio for which she had made twenty movies and earned tens of millions of dollars.

On the same day Fox filed their lawsuit, Dr. Greenson took Marilyn for an examination by Dr. Michael Gurdin, the eminent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. Marilyn’s eyes were black and blue and swollen. According to Dr. Greenson, Marilyn sustained the injuries when she slipped and fell while taking a shower. Even though Marilyn’s nose was not broken, she retreated to her Fifth Helena Drive hacienda where she sequestered herself for sixteen days. She could not be seen in public with a bruised, discolored face. Then, on Monday, June the 11th, Fox officially suspended production on Something’s Got to Give and filed an amended lawsuit that raised the amount of requested redress to $750K.

Due to Marilyn’s bruised face, she declined several invitations to attend social events, including an invitation from Ethel and Robert Kennedy to attend a party honoring Pat and Peter Lawford at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy’s Virginia home. Marilyn dispatched her regrets in the now famous telegram to the Kennedys regarding her fight for minority rights and her right, as an earthbound star, to twinkle.

Fox planned to replace Marilyn and continue filming Something’s Got to Give with the actress Lee Remick. But the executives at the studio did not foresee Dean Martin’s reaction: he had co-star approval. He refused to accept Lee Remick and summarized his position succinctly: no Marilyn, no movie. Marilyn was completely gratified by Martin’s loyalty. In utter disarray by this time, on June 19th, Fox sued Dean Martin and Claude Productions, Martin’s production company, for $3M, prompting Martin to counter sue for $6.8M.

By June 23^rd, Marilyn’s facial injuries had healed: the bruises were gone. Beginning on the 23^rd, Marilyn posed for Bert Stern, whose intermittent sessions for Vogue magazine ended on July 12^th. Marilyn also posed for George Barris at Santa Monica Beach during Friday the 29^th, Saturday the 30^th, and Sunday July 1^st. According to Barris and his memoir, each session took the entirety of each day. Barris mentioned the Sunday session particularly, noting that he and Marilyn worked until the sunlight began to fade to silver. Finally, on the 4^th, 5^th, 7^th and 9^th of July, she gave Richard Meryman what would be her last interview for Life magazine.

Clearly, a considerable number of life changing events had prevailed upon Marilyn during the month of June in 1962. I, for one, find it difficult to believe that the middle Kennedy brothers would have been the only topic occupying her thoughts. “As a person, my work is important to me,” she once commented during an interview. “My work is the only ground I’ve ever had to stand on.” Considering that her profession was in serious peril at that time, surely she would have mentioned that fact to her dear friend, Arthur James; and too, clearly there are calendar date conflicts. She could not have been in Laguna Beach if she was with George Barris at Santa Monica Beach or with Richard Meryman at Fifth Helena Drive giving an interview.

Arthur James also testified that Marilyn “was hurt, terribly hurt when she was told directly never to call or contact” the Kennedy boys again. An order that arrived from both the president and the AG: “That’s it. No more. That’s—that’s the end of it.” Then James informed Summers: “And that’s what killed her.” Curious. If Robert Kennedy abruptly dispatched Marilyn and ordered her not to contact him ever again, why did he and his wife invite Marilyn to attend a party at their Virginia mansion? Under the circumstances described by Arthur James, for Robert Kennedy to have extended that invitation was certainly nonsensical, not to even mention connubially dangerous.

Donna Morel, arguably one of the best, if not the best researcher on the planet, used Facebook to locate one of James’ relatives, who then arranged for Donna to interview James. Fre­quently lifted aloft by flights of fantasy, according to his relative, Arthur could lapse into episodes of yarn weaving. Even so, Donna talked with James on May 1^st of this year. They discussed Goddess primarily and James disputed several assertions that Summers attributed to him; but I will let those sleeping hounds continue to sleep―at least for the time being.

Of importance to note is this: Donna asked Arthur James if he had “any letters, photos or any type of evidence to substantiate his relationship with Monroe.” James admitted, just like Jeanne Carmen, Robert Slatzer, and Ted Jordan, that he likewise had no evidence, no proof that he even knew the world’s most famous movie star, much less that he was one of her most trusted confidants. But of even more importance is this: James denied asserting that Marilyn visited him at Laguna Beach in 1962, a month before she died. He reported to Donna that Marilyn’s weekend visit occurred “at least a year earlier than that. Then he seemed to indicate this happened in the early 1950s and she would stay at an apartment building he owned.” So, James denied saying what he had clearly said on tape; at least the tape that Summers unveiled for his Netflix movie. Such a conundrum: what to believe: what James said or what James said and then denied he said. When evaluating the testimony of any person, their credibility is the key. The question is, all things considered, particularly the information I have presented herein, does Arthur James have any real credibility? And why did Summers not cross check any of this?  Why leave it to Donna Morel and myself?

Cassette 81A: Milton Greene

In September of 1949, Marilyn attended a party at the residence of Rupert Allan and Frank McCarthy. While there, she met a rising star in the world of photography, Milton Greene. She spent most of the evening talking with and listening to the young and handsome New Yorker as he spoke about using the camera like a painter uses a brush. Milton soon returned to the East Coast and Marilyn returned to the travails of movie making. Four years would pass before Marilyn reunited with the photographer in October of 1953. By that time, the world of film and cameras had anointed Milton the Wonder Boy of Color Photography and Marilyn had become Marilyn. The photographer and the movie star became dear friends and Marilyn frequently posed for Milton’s photo­graphic paint brush. Between them a strong nexus formed, rather like the odd connection shared by identical twins. And even Milton’s wife, Amy, recognized and accepted that her husband and Marilyn could communicate using a shorthand that only they understood.

For Summers, Milton confirmed that he and Marilyn loved each other, period, that they shared a close relationship. Summers, however, was primarily interested in Marilyn’s sexual shenanigans while she was married. He asked Milton if a married Marilyn Monroe “was pretty much of a good, faithful wife?” Milton responded that Marilyn was and what she wanted most of all was a baby. That’s odd: didn’t Henry Rosenfeld say what she wanted most in life was to trick her father into seducing her? If Monroe had “a choice between children and stardom, Milton commented, it would have been children. Without question.” Summers could only manage a “Hmmmm.” He must have expected to learn some-thing completely different.

Cassette 1: Sydney Guilaroff

So far, two men have asserted that each was Marilyn’s most intimate friend and confidant from the beginning of her Hollywood career until her death. Sydney Guilaroff becomes the third. Still, and despite the fact that Guilaroff obviously knew Marilyn, several Marilyn historians have expressed doubts regarding the veracity of Guilaroff’s anecdotes about his relationship with the blonde movie star. According to David Marshall, Guilaroff was the guest speaker at one of the annual August assemblies to commemorate Marilyn’s death held at the Pierce Brothers Cemetery. Evidently, during his speech, Guilaroff recounted a few memories of Marilyn and referred to his association with her as merely “brief.” During that appearance, a few of Marilyn’s fans asked Guilaroff if he planned to write a book about his relationship with Marilyn. According to Marshall, Guilaroff declared that he “loved Marilyn dearly but he had nothing at all exciting to write about.”

But wait. In 1996, Guilaroff published his memoir filled with braggadocio, and he suddenly remembered:

1. that he actually directed Marilyn’s MGM screen test which secured for the blonde starlet the part of Angela Phinlay in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle; and
2. a frantic telephone call from Marilyn on the night of August 4^th regarding a visit by Robert Kennedy and a physical altercation with the attorney general, which caused Marilyn to fear for her life.

Both John Huston, who directed, and Arthur Hornblow, who produced, told differing stories about Marilyn’s casting in their noir heist movie.  Lucile Ryman, MGM’s casting director at that time, told another story which included Louis Mayer. The stories told by Huston, Hornblow, and Ryman did not include Guilaroff in any capacity other than Marilyn’s hairdresser. And as far as the frantic telephone call from Marilyn is concerned, Guilaroff is just one of many persons who asserted that they spoke to Marilyn on the night she died. None of those assertions have been or can be verified. Guilaroff gave several interviews with various authors; and during those interviews, he gave conflicting accounts regarding his purported telephone encounter with Marilyn. In one interview, he actually claimed that he spoke to her twice that Saturday.

The testimony that Anthony Summers elicited from Guilaroff included some laudatory comments about Marilyn, her naiveté, her soft and gentle quality. Guilaroff specifically noted that Marilyn was often unhappy; but he declined to say anything else, noting for Summers that Marilyn had been “gone for twenty years.” He then added: “It makes me unhappy to talk about it. It really does. I can’t bring myself to talk about it.”

Cassette (Unnumbered): Billy Wilder

Many cinephiles consider Billy Wilder to be the greatest Hollywood screenwriter and director of all time.  He either wrote or co-wrote and directed many movies that appear on various Greatest of All Time lists. Wilder directed Marilyn twice. In 1954, he directed The Seven Year Itch; and then four years later, he directed Some Like It Hot. Wilder’s list of accolades and awards is virtually endless. But when he received the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986, he thanked ten individuals by name, movie stars that had directly contributed to his legacy. Wilder included Marilyn Monroe on that list. During a party for Marilyn following the completion of The Seven Year Itch, the actress attributed her memorable performance to Billy Wilder, who was then directing The Spirit of St. Louis. She wanted Billy to direct her again, she commented and then added humorously: “but he wouldn’t let me play Charles Lindbergh.”

The celebrated director often spoke about Marilyn. He spoke about her on-set problems, her lack of confidence, her inability to memorize simple lines of dialogue, and her tardiness. He once commented, however, that he had an aging aunt in Germany who was always on time and could probably memorize her lines; but “nobody would want to see her in a picture.” Invariably, Wilder followed his criticisms of Marilyn with statements extolling her on-screen magic and her unique abilities. Marilyn, he testified, “was slightly discombobulated at all times”; but despite her often aggravating idiosyncrasies and need for multiple takes, Marilyn always deliv­ered “something absolutely unique that cannot be … that cannot be duplicated. I had no prob­lems with Monroe.” Wilder informed Summers: “Monroe had problems with Monroe. She had problems with herself.” Wilder once admitted, during an emotional interview about Marilyn, that he missed her like Hell. But once again, Wilder’s testimony revealed absolutely nothing new. But he was a big-name movie director.

Cassette 80: Jeanne Martin

Born Dorothy Jean Biegger in Coral Gables, Florida, Dorothy began a modeling career sometime around 1946 and she adopted the moniker of Jeanne. A year after she won the title of Orange Bowl Queen, Jeanne attended a New Year’s Eve show featuring the comedy team of Martin and Lewis. Evidently, after seeing each other, both Jeanne and Dean were immediately smitten. Dean filed for a divorce from his first wife, and only one week after the court granted that divorce, Jeanne and Dean wed in the Beverly Hills home of a friend. According to Jeanne’s obituary, the general public viewed the Martins “as one of Hollywood’s happiest couples until on Dec. 10, 1969, the date that Jeanne issued a statement announcing that she and Dean were parting ways.” The divorce was finalized in 1972. Jeanne and Dean remained friendly because of their seven children, even after he married for a third time in 1973. The former Mrs. Dean Martin never remarried.

Jeanne Martin’s testimony to Anthony Summers focused on the middle Kennedy brothers’ sexual predation.  Primarily the predatory behavior of John Kennedy, which, according to Jeanne’s testimony, she experienced firsthand. When Summers asked her if she was present at the Lawford’s beach house when Marilyn cavorted with either of the middle Kennedy brothers, Jeanne never directly responded. But she blamed Joe, Sr. for his son’s behavior, described by her as tacky and corny bad boy antics: “they were chips off the old block,” she editorialized. Then Summers asked if Bobby was a “grabber?” Jeanne answered: “Yeah. Not in the terms that Jack was.” She did not elaborate and Summers, of course, did not pursue any additional details or an explanation.

A considerable amount of testimony pertaining to Robert Kennedy’s somewhat Puritanical attitude and behavior has been offered over the years. Testimony from acquaintances, friends, and even FBI agents dispatched by J. Edgar Hoover with the expressed mission of mining muck on one of Hoover’s archenemies. In his posthumously published memoir, William Sullivan, who was Deputy Director of the FBI under Hoover, asserted that the boss desperately wanted and attempted to catch Robert Kennedy in compromising situations. But the FBI director never did because Robert Kennedy “was almost a Puritan.” Agents of the FBI often observed him at parties during which the attorney general “would order one glass of scotch and still be sipping from the same glass two hours later,” Sullivan asserted. The stories involving a love affair between Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were just that, stories started by Frank Capell, “a right-wing zealot who had a history of spinning wild yarns.” According to many persons who knew Robert Kennedy, he was a devout Catholic. And regarding whether or not Marilyn was under the influence of a “Bobby thing” or a “Jack thing,” Jeanne recalled that her impression was both (emphasis mine). Miriam-Webster Dictionary defines impression as follows: “an often indistinct or imprecise notion or remembrance.”

Cassette 33: Fred Otash and John Danoff

Private investigator Fred Otash was a muckraker for the gossip magazine Confidential. He actively searched for compromising information about movie stars, their sex lives, and their spouse’s sex lives. He often targeted the friends of celebrities. Otash was the most disreputable private detective that ever haunted the dimly lit streets and dark alleys of Hollywood. He was a cold damp mist.

Mike Wallace interviewed Otash for Sixty Minutes in 1973. Following that interview, Wallace announced that Otash was the most amoral man that he, Wallace, had ever interviewed. Convicted of a criminal conspiracy to defraud for financial gain, offering a bribe, and also doping a horse, Otash had his license indefinitely suspended by state authorities. Otash was a recognized prevaricator at best and, at worst, an incorrigible liar. He appeared in Goddess and the Netflix movie to confirm that the umpteen secret tapes of Marilyn and the middle Kennedy brothers actually existed: Otash made and actually heard them.  But wait, there is even more. Otash actually listened as someone killed Marilyn Monroe, he listened to her die. Summers expected his audience just to accept the testimony of a known criminal and liar, a horrid man who, if you believe him, listened to Marilyn’s murder but did nothing to stop it. John Danoff, an Otash employee, functioned as a form of dubious corroboration for the Otash testimony.

There is only one problem. During the six decades since Fred Otash purportedly obtained the tape recordings involving Marilyn, John and Robert Kennedy, not one tape has ever surfaced. Not one has ever been heard by the public. In six decades. Imagine their monetary worth.

Furthermore, why should I—or anyone else—just accept the testimony of a man as degenerate and corrupt as Fred Otash. Many authors, including Summers, have invoked Otash’s name and invoked the specter of his unheard tapes as a form of proof, a form of confirmation that the lurid and salacious stories about Marilyn and the middle Kennedy brothers are factual, which is, frankly ludicrous. And those author’s expectations that I will accept testimony from a man like Otash insults my intelligence and my humanity, as it should us all. To even consider Otash’s testimony after the passing of sixty years, without any tangible evidence that the obscure and farcical tapes ever existed is ridiculous.

One final word about the purported secret tapes. During his interview, Otash noted: “And someone wired up Marilyn’s house on behalf of Hoffa.” (emphasis mine) The photographs that flashed on screen during that piece of Otash testimony were of Bernard Spindel, which Summers did not reveal. Spindel was Hoffa’s ally, his telephone tapper and bedroom bugger. Both Hoffa and Spindel were indicted for illegally tapping the telephones of the teamsters’ union headquarters in 1957. Two years later, Spindel became embroiled, due to his Hoffa association, with Robert Kennedy, then an attorney for the McClelland Investigating Committee on Labor Racketeering. This, of course, involved both Jimmy Hoffa and Bernard Spindel. In December of 1966, New York police and special agents from the telephone company, raided Spindel’s New York home and laboratory. The officers confiscated all of Spindel’s equipment, files, and tape recordings. The New York State District Attorney’s investigators reported to the Los Angeles DA in 1982, as noted in the LADA’s Summary Report, that “none of the tapes contained anything relating to Marilyn Monroe.” Like his pal Fred Otash, Spindel was “a known boaster” and frequently alluded to having knowledge of a number of secrets.

Yech.

see Part 2