Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (99 page)

They stood silently while the coffin was placed in a marble wall-crypt to which a bronze plaque was attached:

M
ARILYN
M
ONROE
1926–1962

After the mourners had departed, reporters, newsreel photographers and the public were at last permitted to approach. In the cemetery garden, cameras clicked and movie film whirred all afternoon and through the quiet evening.

Afterword:
The Great Deception

A
FTER THE PUBLICATION
of his book
The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe
in 1974 (see
chapter 11
, footnote beginning on page 227), Robert Slatzer continued to trumpet his unfounded relationship with Marilyn Monroe, presenting, without proof, information about himself and about her affair with Robert Kennedy and turning it into a cottage industry. Quoted in magazine articles, cited in books and featured on sensational television shows, Slatzer became the ultimate torchbearer and self-proclaimed authority. Marching as a heroic pursuer of justice, he played point man in a long-running, grotesque literary charade that matches any other for brazen audacity.

Others contributed to the legend. They include Lionel Grandison, a former coroner’s aide who said that the police falsified Marilyn’s autopsy; Jack Clemmons, the sergeant who first arrived at Marilyn’s home the morning of August 5, 1962; Milo Speriglio, a private detective who published his own fantastic allegations based on Slatzer’s questionable testimony; and Jeanne Carmen, who has described herself as one of the star’s closest friends but who, like Slatzer himself, was completely unknown to anyone who knew or worked with Marilyn. Slatzer and company regularly trot onto television talk shows, where they cheerfully corroborate one another’s outlandish assertions.

In part, the success of Slatzer’s enterprise witnesses the permanent
fascination the world has for Marilyn Monroe, the first public icon to suffer an untimely death during the 1960s. The subsequent allegation that her murder was politically motivated elevated her to the pantheon of that era’s tortuous history, and the supposed involvement of the Kennedys tapped into the realm of conspiracy and fable pre-eminently attached to that family.

But how did such colorful tales originate?

The first plank of it was put into place by New York gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen even before Marilyn died. On Friday, August 3, 1962, she published the news that Marilyn was “vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio.”
¹
She was then rivaled by columnist Walter Winchell, who pointed to “one of the President’s appointees . . . who ran like a Husband [
sic
]—back to his wife.” Winchell was following a lead from the right-wing fanatic Frank A. Capell, a man who—like Winchell himself—deeply hated the Kennedy clan, believing them soft on communism. Since 1938, as confidential investigator and then chief of the Subversive Activities Department for the Sheriff of Westchester County, New York, Capell had seen Communists lurking everywhere. But he was no ideal American: moving to the Compliance Division of the War Production Board, he was indicted and pleaded guilty in 1945 to three counts of conspiring with a colleague to solicit bribes from government contractors. Forced into civilian life, he began publishing a Communist-baiting newsletter,
The Herald of Freedom
.

One of Capell’s buddies was Jack Clemmons, the first policeman on the scene after Marilyn’s death. Clemmons was also connected to The Police and Fire Research Organization (more familiarly, “Fi-Po”), a team dedicated to exposing “subversive activities which threaten our American way of life.” In this capacity, Clemmons met with Capell just six weeks after Marilyn’s death to investigate supposed Communist affiliations in Hollywood. Clemmons then introduced Capell to Maurice Ries, president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the
Preservation of American Ideals, an anti-Communist forum that made headlines in the 1950s when it charged the Screen Writers Guild with fostering a Communist invasion of the movie world. At a meeting attended by all three men, Ries held forth on the hundreds of files he had compiled on celebrities, turning at last to the case of Marilyn Monroe.

“I’ll tell you a story,” Ries said. “Marilyn had been having an affair with Bobby Kennedy, and Bobby promised to marry her, and then he changed his mind and wanted to get rid of her. And she was threatening to go public with the story, and the Kennedys had her murdered to shut her up.”

“It sounds very interesting,” Clemmons said, adding later, “Capell said we should look into this. He said, ‘Jack, will you help me?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, Frank, I’ll help you.’ ”

His assistance took the form of a call to the Coroner’s office, where Clemmons learned that no residue of pills had been found in Marilyn’s stomach during autopsy. “For a long time that was really the only hard physical evidence we had,” Clemmons recalled. But it was enough to convince him and Capell that Ries was right in his theory, and at once Capell (thus Clemmons) “kept feeding information to Walter Winchell, and over a period of time Walter Winchell printed the whole theory in his column.”

Capell’s own version of the story was published in 1964 as
The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe
by his own Herald of Freedom imprint. In this seventy-page pamphlet, he offered an odd combination of autopsy, police and court reports with a haphazard and somewhat hysterical review of alleged Communist affiliations of almost every principal in Marilyn’s life, from Arthur Miller to Ralph Greenson to Hyman Engelberg. Capell used the snippets published by Winchell (which was virtually a case of Capell citing himself) and grandly announced his verdict. After a lengthy conjecture about Marilyn’s romance with Robert Kennedy, Capell claimed that, “because of the closeness of their friendship, she was led to believe his intentions were serious.” He then states that, since Kennedy was a Communist sympathizer, he “wanted her out of the way” because of his “mad ambition,” and so he covered up her murder by “deploying his personal Gestapo.” Such a paranoid imagination is perhaps unknown since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

At this point, into the picture stepped J. Edgar Hoover, who
learned of the imminent publication of Capell’s book through Winchell, Hoover’s close friend and regular conduit for celebrity news. The FBI director at once gleefully wrote to Robert Kennedy: “[Capell’s] book will make reference to your alleged friendship with the late Miss Monroe. Mr. Capell stated that he will indicate in his book that you and Miss Monroe were intimate, and that you were in Miss Monroe’s home at the time of her death.” Appropriately, Kennedy made no reply.

In 1964 and 1965, Capell and Clemmons collaborated still further, joining a radical right-wing ideologue named John Fergus in yet another defamatory political attack—this one aimed at Senator Thomas H. Kuchel of California, a Republican who incurred the wrath of racist groups by supporting the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Capell, Clemmons and Fergus were indicted in February 1965 by a California grand jury for conspiracy to libel by obtaining and distributing a false affidavit asserting that Senator Kuchel had once been arrested on a morals charge—specifically, that he had a homosexual encounter in the back of a car. The affidavit was based on an actual 1950 case, but one involving entirely different people and in no way connected to Kuchel. After the indictment, Capell and Clemmons issued the unintentionally hilarious statement that the press had demonstrated “disregard for our accepted standards of fair play.” After a two-month trial, it was determined that the conspirators engaged in “arm-twisting” to obtain a false affidavit, and “with smirking satisfaction began to apply it to their own purposes.” The judge accepted guilty pleas from Capell and Fergus; charges against Clemmons were dropped on condition he resign from the Los Angeles Police Department.

With the framers of the “Kennedy-killed-Monroe” fiction thus disgraced by 1965, the matter should have died. But the vein of malicious gossip it tapped was too appealing, the Kennedy-Monroe story too inflammatory to forget. Nothing more came into print before Robert Kennedy’s death in 1968, although the rumor mill continued to grind pernicious morsels. Stories were matched and swapped, embellished and improvised. But after Kennedy’s assassination, the whispers became shouts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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