On August 5, 1962, international film icon and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) was found dead in her home, evidently the victim of a sleeping pill overdose. The fact that the seductive Monroe was reported to have been found in the nude has long helped to fuel the more prurient fires of her fame, as well as the posthumous interest in her life and its abundant scandals. Thrice married and thrice divorced, the ex-wife of the most famous baseball player in addition to the most notable playwright of her time, Monroe has long been suspected of having been the mistress of President John F. Kennedy and possibly also his brother Senator Robert Kennedy. Monroe was also linked to two other icons of her time, “Rat Pack” leader Frank Sinatra and mob boss Sam Giancana; such high-profile associations have been the driving force for abiding belief in a conspiracy purported to have been behind the murder of Monroe and a subsequent cover-up. Whatever the facts may have been, it is certain that Marilyn Monroe, already a legend in her own lifetime, became a fixture in the pantheon of American secular mythology upon her death.
Born in Los Angeles as Norma Jean Mortenson on June 1, 1926, Monroe spent much of her early life in institutional settings due to her mother’s mental illness. She married her first husband, James Dougherty, in 1942, but that marriage unraveled by 1946 when Monroe was discovered by a photographer while Dougherty was serving in the Pacific in the Merchant Marine. Her film career soon followed, and Monroe starred in thirty movies between 1947 and the time of her death. Monroe was married to Yankee superstar Joe DiMaggio for less than a year in 1954, and then to Broadway legend Arthur Miller from 1956 until 1961. At the time of her death she was reported to have rekindled her love for DiMaggio, and the couple was scheduled to remarry just days after Monroe’s death. DiMaggio is supposed to have mourned Monroe for the rest of his life, and he had flowers sent to her grave regularly for decades. Earlier in the summer of 1962 Monroe had been fired from her most recent film set for failing to come to work on time; by August, however, she had been rehired and was set to begin filming again. The project was never finished after Monroe died. Marilyn Monroe was interred in Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, in the Corridor of Memories.
American actress Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) poses on the patio outside of her home in Hollywood, California, in May, 1953. Married to the greatest baseball player—and in turn to the greatest playwright—of her era, and also linked to the Kennedys, the Mob, and the “Rat Pack,” Monroe was a towering icon of her times, and her unseasonable death under mysterious circumstances therefore seems destined to have engendered elaborate conspiracy theories. (Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
According to Monroe’s August 6, 1962, New York Times obituary, which enshrined the official version of events at the time, Monroe was found on her bed with an empty bottle of sleeping pills nearby. Her doctor was purported to have prescribed for her three days’ worth of medication, so the bottle should have contained forty to fifty pills. Numerous other medications crowded the small bedside table. Monroe was reported to have been undergoing psychoanalytic therapy for about a year, and had in fact summoned her analyst to her home the night of her death. The Los Angeles County Coroner ruled the death a probable suicide. According to official reports, the last person to see Monroe alive was her live-in housekeeper, Eunice Murray.
According to Murray, Monroe went into her bedroom around 8:00 p.m.; around 3:25 a.m., Murray noticed a light under the door, but Monroe did not respond to Murray’s call, and the bedroom door was locked. When Murray went outside the house to look into Monroe’s bedroom through a window, the starlet appeared to her to be in an alarmingly awkward position, so the housekeeper phoned Monroe’s analyst, Ralph Greenson, who forced his way into the bedroom. Determining that Monroe was dead, Greenson called the star’s physician, Hyman Engelberg, who arrived shortly thereafter. The police were called at 4:20 a.m. Upon inquiry from reporters, a police spokesman stated that the delay from 3:25 to 4:20 was not out of the ordinary, given that the professionals involved were competent to determine that Monroe was dead. The police noted that Monroe’s room was sparsely furnished and not very large; at the time of her death, Monroe was living in a nice but modest home and neighborhood, at least by Hollywood standards. Her neighbors saw little of her, and the international film star died something of a recluse.
In addition to the natural, if macabre, interest of the press in scandal and intrigue surrounding an international sex symbol struck down in her prime, Monroe’s death almost immediately spawned conspiracy theories due to some purported gaps or inconsistencies in the official story. Notable among these are the rumors that the ambulance drivers found Monroe in a state of rigor mortis that would have suggested a much earlier time of death, which suggests that any conspirators would have had ample opportunity to remove evidence of foul play from the scene. Moreover, the most famous and enduring conspiracy theories concerning the death of Marilyn Monroe include links to the Kennedy brothers. JFK was president at the time, and his brother Bobby was attorney general; both brothers are widely believed to have been romantically involved with Monroe.
The various tangled webs suggested by such theories are complex and confusing, but in sum, most suggest that Monroe had been the mistress of one or both Kennedys, who were growing concerned that the starlet was becoming more erratic and less stable, and that she might at any time bare her soul to the media, which would have had a field day with such a scandal. Even more dangerous, according to this line of thought, was Monroe’s intimate knowledge of the secrets of her bedfellows, and especially of purported connections between the Kennedys and the Mafia. By some accounts, Monroe’s famously sensual and intimate singing of “Happy Birthday” to JFK sparked concerns that her discretion was failing and that she—like her mother—might be seriously mentally ill. Some theorists posit that Bobby Kennedy used CIA operatives to remove this putative threat permanently, and often note that Monroe was in the company of actor Peter Lawford, a Kennedy brother-in-law, shortly before her death. Another very different line of thought suggests that Monroe was killed by the mob to punish the Kennedys for RFK’s attack upon the Mafia in his role as attorney general; according to this theory, Monroe’s death was meant both to pain and to implicate Bobby Kennedy, who in this version of events used his intelligence contacts to remove incriminating evidence from Monroe’s deathbed.
If any were needed, the fiftieth anniversary of Monroe’s death provided an opportune occasion for a reexamination of the circumstances surrounding the starlet’s demise. In his 2011 book Marilyn Monroe: A Case for Murder, for example, Jay Margolis asserts—among numerous other claims—that Monroe’s stomach was empty at the time of her death, despite the coroner’s official determination that she had swallowed dozens of pills. According to this and similar theories, Monroe was involuntarily given an overdose of barbiturates intravenously by her murderers. Margolis also claims that his years of research indicate that the Kennedys were indeed involved in Monroe’s death and the subsequent cover-up, and that Bobby Kennedy even managed to strong-arm Ralph Greenson into joining the plot.
Furthermore, audio tapes made by Monroe’s hairdresser George Masters also made the news in 2011. Although Masters died in 1998, the tapes he recorded within weeks of his death surfaced more than a decade later, and provided ample fodder for conspiracy theorists in the year preceding the fiftieth anniversary. In these recordings, Masters claimed that he had traveled with the star on August 3 to Cal Neva, at that time Frank Sinatra’s resort on the Nevada border. Monroe is known to have gone to the resort some days earlier, but Masters claimed that Sinatra and Giancana made one final effort to convince Monroe to stay quiet about her affairs with the Kennedys. Monroe returned to Los Angeles later that day on Sinatra’s private plane, according to Masters, and just over twenty-four hours later was found dead.
Rat Pack
The signature collection of cool hipsters from the 1950s and 1960s, the “Rat Pack,” headed by Frank Sinatra, included the Chairman of the Board’s boon companions and fellow crooners Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., and occasionally Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop; JFK himself was said to be an honorary member, and the Rat Pack’s mob connections were legend. Combining quick wit and massive alcohol consumption with Las Vegas showmanship, the Rat Pack appeared in a number of films, as well as in numerous television specials. Still celebrated for their iconic vocal stylings to this day, the Rat Pack legend was evoked—some would suggest fatuously—in the 1980s with an emerging “Brat Pack” of young film stars. Perhaps the artifact of the original Rat Pack best known to contemporary Americans, however, is Ocean’s Eleven, a 1960 “heist” feature that was reinterpreted into a twenty-first-century film franchise featuring a new generation of Hollywood stars.
C. Fee
On that much, all accounts—official and otherwise—are agreed, and it was in the early hours of August 5, 1962, that Marilyn Monroe became enshrined forever as a major figure of American myth, legend, and folklore. In the intervening decades, the cult of Monroe has continued to grow; in fact, Monroe has become a gay and camp icon, and Marilyn Monroe impersonators are legion. In mainstream culture, moreover, Monroe remains a fixture in the popular imagination, not only through her still-popular movies and the conspiracy theories concerning her death, but also through the Elton John song “Candle in the Wind,” which explicitly references Monroe and her brief but incandescent life. The fact that Elton John rewrote this song to mourn the death of Princess Diana emphasizes Marilyn Monroe’s abiding mythic stature.
C. Fee
See also Conspiracy Theories; Kennedy, John F., Assassination of; Lennon, John, Shooting of; Lincoln, Abraham, Assassination of; McCartney, Paul, Alleged Death of
Further Reading
Branson, Serene. 2012. “New Allegations Emerge about Marilyn Monroe’s Final Hours.” CBS Los Angeles Website. May 11. http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/05/11/new-allegations-emerge-into-marilyn-monroes-final-hours/. Accessed September 15, 2015.
Harrod, Horatia. 2012. “50 Things You Didn’t Know about Marilyn.” The Telegraph website. July 31. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9427022/50-things-you-didnt-know-about-Marilyn.html. Accessed September 15, 2015.
Knight, Peter. 2003. Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Margolis, Jay. 2011. Marilyn Monroe: A Case for Murder. Bloomington, IN: IUniverse.
“Marilyn Monroe Dead, Pills Near.” 1962. New York Times website. August 6. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/monroe-obit1.html. Accessed September 15, 2015.