An editor of mine used to say that if someone comes up to you and says “I’ve got a story that’ll bust this town wide open!” it’s time to go out and get a huge chunk of salt.
It’s time to rev up the car and go to the grocery store. The reason: there are new revelations centering on what are said to be until-now-not-revealed transcripts involving tapes purportedly made by the late Marilyn Monroe — revelations, some suggest, that cast doubt on official accounts of her death on August 5, 1962. Do these notes indicate the 36-year-old sex symbol was too upbeat to commit suicide as the official findings stated? Yet, all of this avoids an underlying truth: these notes simply do NOT pass the journalistic confirmation test.
The revelations come via an intriguing story in the LA Times:
An autopsy conducted by Dr. Thomas Noguchi, then deputy medical examiner, concluded that death was due to acute barbiturate poisoning, and a psychiatric team tied to the investigation termed it a “probable suicide.”
Today, 43 years later, fans from around the world will gather, as they have for decades, near Monroe’s crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park to celebrate her life and mourn her death. John W. Miner, 86, will mourn too.
But there is bitterness and frustration as well for the former Los Angeles County prosecutor, who was at her autopsy and was one of those looking into her death. He didn’t believe that the actress took her life in ’62 and he doesn’t believe it now, and Miner says he’s heard secret tapes that Monroe made in the days before she died that prove the actress was anything but suicidal.
Whether Monroe died by her own hand has been debated and dissected by books, documentaries, conspiracy theorists, and Hollywood and Washington insiders alike for years.
Enough credence was given to the various reports that in 1982, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office reexamined the case. Miner, by then in private practice, was among those interviewed.
The resulting report notes that Miner mentioned the tapes. However, he did not say he had a transcript. Although the report concedes that “factual discrepancies” and “unanswered questions” remained in the case, it did not find enough evidence to warrant launching a criminal investigation.
As head of the D.A.’s medical-legal section when Monroe died, Miner had met with the actress’ psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson. During the interview, Miner says, Greenson played the Monroe tapes, but only on condition that the investigator never reveal their contents.
Miner said he took “extensive” and “nearly verbatim” notes, and only broke the promise years after Greenson’s death, when some Monroe biographers suggested that the psychiatrist be considered a suspect in her death. Miner recently gave a copy of the transcript to The Times.
So what we have now — breaking in the wires, getting lots of play on cable and television news and most ASSUREDLY leading to some kind of new book deal being signed by someone somewhere for a new book of slightly updated recycled conspiracy theories about Monroe’s death — is a one-source story. Nothing about it can be confirmed. The full transcript as published by the LA Times is here. Here’s the BBC’s 1962 report about Monroe’s death.
The most easy to read account of the transcripts actually comes via the New York Daily News, which boils the key sections down quite well. Among the revelations:
- It has long been reported that she had an affair with JFK. However, in the purported transcript notes she doesn’t mention a fling but does say she felt he would change the country.
- Various accounts have claimed that she loved JFK’s brother Bobby Kennedy the most, was clamoring to talk to him at the end. The quote used in the notes:”As you see, there is no room in my life for him. I guess I don’t have the courage to face up to it and hurt him. I want someone else to tell him it’s over. I tried to get the President to do it, but I couldn’t reach him.”
- She claimed to have had an affair with Joan Crawford.
There are other details: her nice comments about Frank Sinatra, about her ex-husband baseball great Joe DiMaggio (she loved him till the end), her ex-husband Arthur Miller (not so hot in the sex department). Overall the tone is of a forward-looking actress (even suggesting she wants to do more serious acting). Not the kind of stuff, it’s said, that someone who’d want to kill themselves would say (but, then, suicide is an impulsive action for many..)
The Independent notes that there’s also some info we really haven’t been clamoring to find out all these years:
Other items not to be forgotten: that while Monroe liked an occasional enema, Mae West depended on them. “She is given an enema every day and she has at least one orgasm a day … Mae says her enemas and orgasms will keep her young until she is 100.”
What’s the point of this?
- There have been many conspiracy theories about Monroe’s death over the years. The key one is that somehow the Kennedys, the mafia or the CIA (or even all of them) were somehow involved to shut her up before she publicly spilled the beans about her affairs with the Kennedys or even more Kennedy-era secrets.
- Many investigations over the years haven’t been definitive enough for many people and, as in the case of the Kennedy assassination, a kind of cottage industry has sprung up in books and other materials suggesting she didn’t kill herself…but was helped.
- It’s yet another dark stain on the whole Kennedy Camelot era image, no matter how it turns out. So much has emerged over the years about JFK’s unstable private life, the Kennedy’s purported pre and post election ties to the Mafia, etc. that the original image of JFK as a kind of politically pristine, Lincolnesque figure has taken a huge hit in the years following his tragic death.
But for readers — and journalists — the Monroe transcript stories must be read with a red WARNING flag.
Even if the transcripts are, in fact, accurate, there is absolutely no way to confirm them now.
Many of the raging political and journalistic controversies over the past several years have hinged on the whole idea of CONFIRMATION of assertions. That means more than just one person saying something is a FACT.
Milner shouldn’t be accused of making this up — but without confirmation, no matter what these will remain mere assertions…allegations. It can’t be proven that these were Monroe’s words. You have to assume they were — or wish they were.
We’ll never know. And that’ll also likely be the fate of lingering questions and suspicions surrounding her death.
MORE RELATED READING 4 U:
Coverups.Com on Marilyn Monroe’s death
Killed by psychiatric drugs?
Allegations she was murdered
The controversy over whether she was murdered
Video on the controversy
Wikipedia on Marilyn Monroe
FBI official DENIES RFK had affair with Marilyn Monroe
Celebrity Morgue on Marilyn Monroe (WARNING: has slab photo) and controversy over her death and RFK.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.