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I recently read the 1992 book, Marilyn: The Last Take, by Peter Harry Brown and Patte B. Barham. It’s a fascinating look at the final months of the star’s weary, exciting, and exhausting life.
I tend to veer away from yet also be fascinated by conspiracy theory. Hard not to be titillated sometimes, especially when it comes to the juiciest tales. And some of the juiciest tales, without question, arise from the American 1960s. You’ve got Marilyn Monroe, dead in 1962; John Kennedy, killed in 1963; Bobby Kennedy killed in 1968; Martin Luther King, also killed in 1968. And we’re just getting started.
A couple years ago I started a biography on Monroe and got about a third of the way through. I forget the name of the book now. It was well written and intriguing, but I (typical) got distracted by another book and never finished it. Then more recently I stumbled into this book covering the last months of her life. I figured I’d read a few pages and get bored. I’d bought the book with a Christmas bookstore gift certificate. But from page 1 I couldn’t stop reading.
In all honesty, in terms of strong writing, fantastic structure, solid arc and magnificent pacing, the story is one of the most compelling I’ve ever read. The authors—just from a glance at the book jacket—are solely “entertainment journalists,” not necessarily seasoned nonfiction book authors. (Though both have “several” books under their belt, it said.) I’m not saying that their writing is anything in the arena of “serious literary Art” or anything dubious like that. But as far as just simply creating a damn fine barnstormer of a story, they nailed it.
Here's the scene they paint. It’s spring, 1962. Twentieth Century Fox has one final movie in the contract with their famous client, Marilyn Monroe. Monroe—1926 to 1962 (36)—had not had an easy life. Abandoned by her father, and with a mentally unstable mother, she’d briefly lived in foster care before going out on her own in LA and getting married young. Being incredibly beautiful—understatement—she fell into the modeling world. One thing led to another and a producer in the film world found her photos and called her in. He wanted to see if she could act. She did her first film called Dangerous Years in 1947, at the tender age of 21.
By the time 1962 rolled around, she’d done nearly 30 films, including, most famously, Some Like it Hot, The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop and The Misfits. She’d been with multiple film corporations but in ’62 she was with Fox. At the time, as the book explains, Fox was in a complete, anarchic financial mess. Not just financial but organizational.
The main problem was this. Two films were simultaneously being produced by FOX at the time, Cleopatra in Rome with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and Something’s Got to Give in Hollywood with Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin. The problem was that FOX had promised an exorbitant amount of money to Taylor, and then she’d spent like a madwoman while on set. FOX in the end purportedly spent a whopping 42 million dollars on the film, which ended up being a flop. Worse, the sexual affair between Taylor and Burton (both married) caused a major scandal.
Monroe had always been searingly jealous of Taylor. Taylor always seemed to be on the cover of far more magazines; she got paid much more; she was internationally respected. On the contrary, Monroe seemed to be constantly disrespected and mocked, and more or less seen by the film industry as a sort of poor prostitute who happened to have looks and somehow, magically, made films and became famous. It felt like a class thing, mostly, the perception of Marilyn’s supposed lack of sophistication and social refinement.
Ergo: Something’s Got to Give got far less money from the studio. Add to this the sad, frustrating fact that the director for this film, George Cukor, loathed Monroe. He, like many others in the film world, perceived that Monroe was some sort of spoiled debutante who didn’t have any talent and didn’t deserve to be in any more films. She was constantly late. Sometimes she came to the set drugged-up from her sleeping pills, or else hungover. A few times she O.D.’d on pills. The studio, as with many other actors back then, gave her “hot shot” injections of methamphetamine. (Yes, really.) This woke her up in a jolt and sustained her energy for clips of time.
Monroe had dated many men—legend in the industry was that she’d slept with many men to get to where she’d gotten—including baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, among others. During this time she was single. She had a relatively “modest” house (for a star) at 5th Helena Drive in Brentwood. She suffered from terrible insomnia and took sleeping pills for it. She wrote vigorously in notebooks, detailing her daily life. She loved using the telephone. Depression sometimes descended. She drank too much, most often Dom Perignon and Champaigne. She enjoyed reading books. People said she possessed a sharp, quick mind. She was stunning and charming when she wanted to be or needed to be.
Monroe met John Kennedy at a dinner party in New York City in 1962. They had a brief affair—according to this and many other accounts—and then it was suddenly terminated because of the obvious potential public controversy, and because JFK was the president and was married. It seems that Monroe had some brief delusions that “Jack” would leave his wife and make Monroe First Lady, but that was non-reality.
Through JFK she met his brother Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s younger attorney-general brother. According to this book, they developed a secret (or not-so-secret) love affair and were seeing each other on and off for a couple of months. This time, according to sources from then, people felt they were in love. Bobby, of course, was also attorney general under his brother, was married, and was fighting against the mafia in court.
During all of this Monroe was slowly working on Something’s Got to Give. But it was sluggishly moving. Several times she got seriously sick, coming down with Sinusitis. She’d gotten this after a trip to New York to see JFK. She also took time off to fly yet again, later, to NYC and, in front of JFK and a large crowd (Jackie chose not to attend because of Monroe), at Madison Square Garden, she sang a hyper-sensual, incredibly-sexualized rendition of Happy Birthday to president Kennedy. She was wearing a $12,000-dress which showed off her completely nude body minus some thin fabric blocking her private areas…barely. It caused a national sensation. Many within Kennedy’s circle were enraged. It seemed out of line, immoral, disrespectful. JFK, of course, was a notorious womanizer. Always had been.
And so, with all of this going on, the film clipped along very slowly. Making things ever worse and slower, director Cukor tortured Monroe by making her redo basic scenes sometimes as many as 30, 40 times in a row, with no discernible differences in the takes (people discovered later), totally exhausting her. Cukor and others mocked Monroe when she was sick—she even went several times to a hospital in Hollywood—claiming that she was faking the whole thing and didn’t want to work.
For decades, the FOX film archives of what had been filmed (it was never completed) of Something’s Got to Give had been hidden away, unfindable. Then an employee of FOX in the early 1990s located the film and made it public to people in a pro-Marilyn group. For thirty years people had been told that on this film Monroe had been a disaster, that she’d been stumbling and drugged-up and high. People were shocked when they watched the remaining footage of outtakes and filmed scenes. She looked professional, and her acting was superb; some of her strongest.
Why had the studio lied?
We may never know, exactly. But the argument from authors Brown and Barham basically goes as follows. The studio chose to take a huge financial gamble on Cleopatra and not on Something’s Got to Give. They generally liked Elizabeth Taylor, despite the headaches she caused, and did not like Monroe. At the same time they were spending obscene amounts of money on Cleopatra, more or less hemorrhaging dough. Investors in the company were angry. They worried they wouldn’t be able to recoup their expenses. Not to mention the sexual affair between Taylor and Burton threatened the film and even the studio on a whole other level.
Meanwhile, Monroe became sexually involved with JFK (she said he was horrible and “brutal” in bed, very mechanical and disconnected), had her heart broken and was cut off, only to begin a more “serious” secret love affair with Bobby Kennedy. (Allegedly.) At the time Bobby and John’s younger brother Ted Kennedy was running for the senate. Ted had no political experience; all he really had was the Kennedy name. With their father Joseph P. Kennedy (who’d worked as ambassador to Britain under FDR), and two powerful brothers, the Kennedy name meant a lot. A whole lot.
Bobby was usually the protector of the family; he was the one who always cleaned up Jack’s sexual affair issues when they got too messy. Bobby was the golden boy: Clean, straight, moral. He was married and had many kids. A family man. Responsible. Respected. Sometimes a Pitbull when it came to realpolitik tactics.
Yet, according to this account, he fell and fell hard for Marilyn Monroe. They originally met at that same dinner party in 1962 but later it was Bobby who had to cut her out of JFK’s life. He always did the dirty jobs. Yet he got caught in her web, too. He visited her at her Brentwood house. They walked on the beach. She liked him a lot more than JFK for many reasons, one of which was that he seemed to think she actually had a brain; he spoke to her of political and intellectual concerns. He even shared internal State secrets, about for example the Bay of Pigs, a planned assassination of Castro, and other things.
It's a long story. FOX decided, using her “fake” sicknesses as an excuse, among other reasons, to fire the platinum-blond star. Then they took her back not long after, increasing her pay when she sued the company. When she was again suddenly and unexpectedly and with not one warning or word dropped from Bobby’s life, the final hammer had come down on her psychological and emotional inner life.
At first she was sad, but the sadness soon morphed to anger and then to rage. First it was Jack Kennedy, and now his younger brother Bobby. They’d essentially treated her like trash, using her up until they got what they wanted and then ditching her without a word, like some high school slut after the game. A complete sexual object; beauty incarnate. She’d been a symbol of beauty, and the crude powerful brothers had pissed on that symbol simply because they could.
This she could not abide.
Thus the final months of Monroe’s life—the summer of 1962—were made up, according to this book, of dozens of attempts to reach Bobby. He’d given her his private line; this was now disconnected. When she called his office his secretaries stonewalled her. She used her contacts to find out where he was and tried to call him, a couple of times reaching him. He refused to speak with or discuss things. Due to the political reality of the Kennedy brothers, and because of Ted’s big for office, the Kennedy family had decided that Marilyn Monroe was a major liability. She’d slept with both Kennedy brothers and she was a major American star who was internationally famous. Not only that but she knew State secrets.
As Monroe tried harder and harder to reach Bobby, and grew angrier and angrier, she began to make threats. Basically, she said she was going to have a press conference wherein she’d expose her relationship with both men. These were the two most powerful, most famous men in America in 1962. They had everything riding on this. JFK had defeated Nixon by the narrowest of margins in 1960 and had arguably cheated while getting the vote in Chicago.
They could not afford to let this go public.
Marilyn was close friends with Bobby’s brother-in-law and his wife. She spoke with them many times about this. They tried to dissuade her. Once, they got her out of town using an excuse when really it was because Bobby was in LA for a couple days doing speeches. Their goal was to ultimately protect the Kennedys. But the threats from Monroe kept coming. She was red-faced angry by now, fuming, apoplectic. She wanted to hear Bobby apologize for his behavior and tell her on the phone or to her face that he no longer wanted to see her. He’d left her in the cold, out of the blue, after wooing her for months and even promising her marriage. Monroe felt powerfully, ruthlessly spurned.
After having recently signed a new $1 million contract for a second film with FOX, and being rehired, promising to show up on time and give her best acting to the studio, she was found dead in the early morning of August 4th, 1962. She’d had a massive barbiturate overdose.
The truth is: We may never know the actual 100% truth of what happened the night of August 3 and the morning of August 4. This book claims notes, documents, papers and journals, among other things, were removed by people who were likely secret service, right after she died. It also claims that the amount of drugs in her system was more than she had on hand and more than she could taken herself in the amount of time the drugs would have knocked her out. Because there was no lining of drugs in her stomach (looked at in the autopsy), some feel the drugs were force-injected into her arm-pit or rectum.
Some eyewitnesses claimed to have seen Bobby Kennedy at Monroe’s house, having traveled by chopper and then car from the east coast, the night she died. Phone records were removed but later located and it was discovered that one of the last people she spoke to, the night she died, was Bobby Kennedy. Clearly, she was a massive liability to the Kennedy family. The authors make a strong case—using eyewitness accounts, partial phone records, interviews with actors, studio heads, neighbors, police and other people who knew her or were involved with the case—that Monroe was killed in order to prevent her from talking to the press about her affairs with the Kennedy brothers, and potentially revealing top-secret State information.
Yet, of course we don’t know anything for sure. There are a plethora of books published about Monroe, just as there are about JFK and Bobby, both of whom were assassinated a year and six years later respectively. It’s possible that Monroe—who’d been more stable lately overall but did have a history of barbiturate abuse and had O.D.’d several times in the past, simply committed suicide. It’s also possible that she “accidently” overdosed. Though, according to this book’s sources, when you dig down a little these two possibilities don’t seem likely.
The amount of drugs (experts put the number of pills needed to do the job at between 70 to 90 or more), the stomach not having a lining of barbiturates, the fact that she’d just been given a $1 million contract for a new film and had an 11 million series in the works as well, that she’d been doing well and performing strong acting on Something’s Got to Give (which the studio lied about for decades), and of course the secret affairs with the two most powerful men in America at the time, all seem to point pretty clearly to murder. JFK himself was taken down the next year, in November 1963.
Something’s Got to Give was never finished. Cleopatra became a flop. Taylor and Burton left their spouses and got married and had a decade long wild, alcoholic, abusive relationship which finally crashed and burned. The Kennedy brothers died and Ted went on to political prominence. Marilyn became more famous than ever after her premature death. The starlet had risen from poverty, from nothing, and had made a name for herself. She’d experienced power, privilege, pomp and circumstance. More than anything in her life—probably due to her father in childhood—she feared rejection. She was intelligent, witty, strong, but also sensitive. (Like most artists.) Something’s Got to Give was the first and only role she ever got that wasn’t some version of “blond slut.” She was seen, at least partially, as a real actor.
Monroe could handle the rejection by FOX, but she couldn’t handle the rejection of first John and then Bobby Kennedy. She decided to fight back. She never had a chance.
Something had to give. And it did—her life. They had her offed. No question. The Kennedys were handsome, famous, and as dirty as their father was.
Truly haunting.