Helen Fry
Marilyn Monroe: Icon and Mystery

Dr Helen Fry - Marilyn Monroe Icon and Mystery

Visual slides are displayed throughout this presentation.

- We’re going to look at that icon of history, Marilyn Monroe, today. And when you think of Marilyn Monroe yourself, what are the images that are conjured up? Is it one instantly of glamour, that beautiful blonde? Of course, she wasn’t born blonde, it was part of the marketing of her as this idol. Or do you think of her as a tragic consequence of her relationships? Do you think of her death? Well, we’re going to explore some of these themes today. Next slide, please. And, of course, she has and remains, next slide, please, an incredibly beautiful woman. And some say that later, Princess Diana this modelled kind of glamour on her, and the paparazzi and the media couldn’t get enough of Marilyn Monroe. There was something enigmatic about her. And I guess this was fueled particularly by the strange circumstances surrounding her death. And I’m going to unpack a little bit of that today. Her image is allegedly protected, copyrighted. And, next slide, please, her whole estate, yeah, actually copyrights her, her name and her image. She’s not the only one that’s done that. And, of course, she’s made iconic in art, as well as in filmatography through Andy Warhol’s famous posters.

She just over 60, 70, 60 something years later, she is still one of those great women of history whose death remains a mystery. Next slide, please. So what about her beginnings? She has quite humble beginnings. She was born in 1926, coming up to the anniversary of her birthday at the end of this week. She was actually born Norma Jeane Baker. Her stage name was Marilyn Monroe, as part of the branding of her. Her father was actually unknown. She never knew her father. Her mother was the daughter of a film cutter. She had various psychological issues through her life. And Marilyn grew up in a very unstable household. And in many ways, it kind of began a life that would turn out to be one that was pretty tragic. She actually marries really young. She’s only 16 years old when she marries James Dougherty. He’s someone she’s known through much of her life and he was the son of a neighbour. Next slide, please. But for her, marriage she believes will give her stability. She was incredibly vulnerable. She wanted stability. She thought that life would be stable, that she would have a settled home.

She would’ve a husband that would love her, and in a way, create a family, and the love which she felt that she didn’t have as a child. Now during the Second World War, this becomes a period of instability for her because, I’m just going to kind of go over briefly her background and then move into what I think is a fascinating period and circumstances surrounding her death and her relationships. In the Second World War, her husband is actually posted away and he’s away for several years and that in the end does nothing for their relationship. And immediately after the war in 1946, they actually separate and divorce. But Marilyn, towards the end of the war, had been involved in her own war work. She’d worked in a special factory that made radio planes, in other words, kind of early models and experimentation, development of radio planes, remote controlled radio planes, I guess, which today morphed eventually into drones, quite extraordinarily, so she was part of that development working in the factory.

And it’s in the factory that she actually meets a photographer, David Conover, who’s actually working in the army as a photographer. And it’s through him that he sees something in her character. There’s something about her and he manages to arrange to sign her with Blue Book Agency. Next slide, please. And eventually, she’s lucky enough to have a six-month contract with 20th Century Fox. I mean, very, very early in her career to make this breakthrough was quite extraordinary. But 20th Century Fox realised that she couldn’t use her original name and neither could she still be that brunette, that if they actually dyed her hair and she became a blonde, she would kind of be that stereotype of the beautiful blonde. And they believe that she’ll propel herself successfully in the film industry, which of course did happen. And it was the branding of her, the rebranding by 20th Century Fox, which was really the success, but that also as part of that, she had to change her name. So she changed her name to Marilyn after the famous actress Marilyn Miller, and took her grandmother’s maiden name, Monroe. So there was born this icon of history, Marilyn Monroe.

But always in the back of her mind, she worried because her mother had had hugely psychological issues and had to be in and out of treatment. Her grandmother had been involved in being committed to various asylums. Of course, that wasn’t uncommon in the 1910s and 1920s. We don’t know exactly today how they would both be diagnosed, mother and grandmother, but Marilyn worried that this will be inherited and that kind of fed on her instability as well, which didn’t help in the background. But nevertheless, she was always, next slide, please, an optimist. And she believed that, I mean, she was so stunningly beautiful. She had so many people attracted to her, men in particular, of course. There was a lot of attention her way that she hadn’t had before. And she believed she would ultimately find happiness. So she was a great optimist in spite of the tragedy. And I’ve just picked a few iconic photographs of her there. The famous white dress, of course, that the wind blew, next slide, please, is what we remember. But there are a number of key people in her life if we think about her death.

And for me, the death and the forensics around that and the detective work are absolutely fascinating as really an unsolved death. Whether we can say it’s an unsolved murder is a different question. And I want to raise a few questions today to kind of get you thinking around this, and hopefully we can take a fresh look at some of the information around her tragic death. So there are some key figures we want to look at today. Eunice Murray, who’s her housekeeper, Eunice Murray is really interesting. We’ll be saying a bit about her. JFK, President Kennedy himself. His brother Robert Kennedy. Peter Lawford, who was a very close friend of Marilyn, married to Pat Kennedy. Dr. Greenson was Marilyn’s psychoanalyst and doctor. And, of course, he would be the one that would actually find her dead. Next slide, please. So yeah, 4th of August 1962, that fateful day when Marilyn was found dead and the shock around the world that this beautiful iconic film star was actually dead. I’m not sure if people were surprised given her unstable life and background, but I think the reality, the fact that she was actually dead was still a shock for everything that had gone before. Next slide, please. She was found dead in her home. Here we go. Yeah, we have that beautiful home.

Next slide, please. In California, and it was a tragic end. Her body was actually found in the early hours of Sunday morning, Sunday the 5th of August. It was deemed that she died probably before midnight on the 4th of August, so just the day before. She was found in her bedroom face down, this is important for some of the stuff we’re going to look at shortly, face down, she was naked with a telephone in her right hand, a pile of empty medicine bottles at her bedside. That’s important. And this was immediately reported as suicide. Before anyone had analysed any of the evidence, it was reported as suicide. She had been taking drugs for a number of months beforehand and amphetamines, and we’ll come to that shortly. So why not? It seemed obvious that this was suicide. She had tragedies in her love life, tragedies in two of her marriages, but also in her love lives. Next slide, please. Yeah, there’s a scene of this dishevelled bedroom. This was what was released to the media later.

But actually when Dr. Greenson found her, she was actually, as I said, face down naked, but the room was really quite tidy. Next slide, please. And there are probably some psychoanalysts amongst our audience today who would probably say it’s quite unusual for the extremes of something to be so mega tidy if someone’s going to commit suicide. So there’s all kinds of things in the background to think about in terms of her psychological state and whether this was indeed suicide question mark. What about some of the events leading directly to her death? Well, just a few months earlier, less than six months earlier, Bobby tells her face-to-face that Marilyn’s affair with JFK is over. They’d had a pretty passionate affair, but JFK president had no qualms about not actually marrying her. There was no way he was going to marry her. He was not going to give up Jackie Kennedy. And Bobby, his brother, finally is the one, the messenger that tells Marilyn it’s all over, and she’s devastated, she’s absolutely devastated.

On the 10th of April, that same year, 1962, she’s scheduled to meet screenwriter Henry Weinstein about a new film “Something’s Got To Give,” but she was late. And this was the beginning of a pattern of unreliability and further instability with regard to her work. Previously, she’d been very committed and she’d turned up on time. But now from April, she started to be late for meetings, late for her filming schedule. And when Weinstein actually phoned her on various occasions, she was in and out of consciousness. And even during the day of her suicide, she was in and out of consciousness when he’d phoned her. Next slide, please. And it was discovered, we’ll come into this in a little bit more detail shortly, that she’d actually taken a deadly concoction, allegedly, she’d taken a deadly concoction of Nembutal, a barbiturate, so it has a sedative effect, Demerol, chloral hydrate, which is also partially sedative, and Librium. Why had she done that? Why had she done that at this particular point?

Next slide, please. Well, some theories suggest that it has to do not with the relationship that had ended with JFK, but that at this time, Bobby had also ended, as good as ended his relationship with Marilyn. They had on and off affairs. And it was even suggested, because the FBI files were not released until 2006, and in fact, I’m still pretty sure that most of the files have not been released with regards to Marilyn and JFK, but those files in 2006 released by the FBI actually suggested that Bobby was even prepared to divorce his own wife to actually marry Marilyn. That’s quite something. But already by the April, she’d started to turn up late for work. Marilyn was a very sick woman. And those lateness for filming, the lateness, her unreliability, actually put her contract with the film company, 20th Century Fox, in jeopardy. And in fact, I think for many reasons, the tipping point is that famous birthday party of the president, his 45th birthday party on the 19th of May in Madison Square Garden. I’ll have a photograph shortly of that incredible dress that she wears. I mean, utterly stunning, but that confidence with which she wore that stunningly expensive dress, but underneath she was pretty much a wreck.

And although she enjoyed the party, was that instability mounting her own personal doubts in her mind? And actually, 20th Century Fox originally forbade her to attend that party because they knew she would be late for some of the filming. She would not be able to keep to her filming commitments elsewhere. Next slide, please. So they were concerned that they were not going to be able to deliver this film, and that’s money to them because she was bringing in big bucks in the film industry. But she went, she went anyway. She disobeyed and risked her job with 20th Century Fox. And why? I suppose perhaps she didn’t really think that 20th century Fox would do anything about it, but of course they do. But she wears this incredible dress by Jean Louis and I looked it up interestingly to see what had happened to it. And in 2007, the dress sold for $1.27 million. Extraordinary.

And of course, once Jackie Kennedy knew that Marilyn Monroe was going to perform, she was going to sing Happy Birthday at the president’s party, Jackie Kennedy refused to attend. So she doesn’t actually attend. So she threatened not to attend, but in the end, she does not attend her own husband’s glamorous 45th birthday. There’s, of course, a private party afterwards at which Marilyn’s invited, and it’s there that she is alleged to have spoken just very briefly to both JFK and Bobby Kennedy, but also it’s muted that after the party, she slept with JFK. And this is before Bobby had been to her to say that the affair is over, but it is alleged that she slept with JFK at the Carlyle Hotel, and then she visited Bobby’s room, so she’s alleged to have slept with both brothers on the same evening. Next slide, please. And we’ve got a photograph now of this wonderful dress. Oh, I thought we had. Next slide, please. We’ll pip to the next slide and then we’ll work backwards. Yeah, I had them the wrong way around, I do apologise. But that beautiful tight dress, sequined, just glamorous for the 1960s, extraordinarily glamorous with her blonde hair. Next slide, please. We’ve got another photograph of the dress.

Yeah, there we go. Okay, can we go back too, please? Thank you. So she actually returns to Los Angeles for her filming. 1st of June, it’s her birthday, her 36th birthday. She looked absolutely terrible on set. When she turned up, it’s said that there was deep concern about her. She then telephoned Dr. Greenson. He was a major support in her life as a psychoanalyst and doctor. And she was absolutely desperate at this point. Something was beginning to really kick in and she misses a whole day of filming. And then this begins a sequence where she’s periodically missing days of filming. And this comes to, in that week, this comes to a head and 20th Century Fox bite the bullet and they actually fired her from the set 8th of June 1962. I mean, sensational for them to have done that. She is the star of their film. Without her, the film is not going to be a success. But they were so frustrated. And then they issued a lawsuit against her for lost earnings, if you like, lost box office earnings, a lawsuit against her of half a million dollars. Well, she doesn’t necessarily have this money in her bank account.

It’s becoming a very difficult time for her. She’s actually spending her money, although she’s had large sums of money, she’s actually going through a lot of money. But Marilyn, at this point, is not unstable enough not to be quick thinking and her reaction is to mount a public campaign. So she’s giving interviews to some of the top, well, equivalent to like Vogue, the top magazines. She’s all over the public, in the public eye. And 20th Century Fox realised that this is a PR disaster for them. Next slide, please. But she’s so very, very clever in understanding. That’s it. Lovely. Next one, yes, great. So she’s understanding just how this can potentially turn things around for her, but those around her got a sense that she seemed a bit manic at points. And what was so frustrating for her is that the concern that she might have inherited, the mental instability of her mother and grandmother, but that those patches that she’d had to date, she felt she’d conquered them, but she hadn’t.

And from about mid-June onwards, she begins injecting herself with phenobarbital, Nembutal and Seconal, but also the FBI were rather worried about her liaisons. Number one, they’re worried, of course, about her ongoing relationship with JFK. They are worried about the fact that she’s allegedly sleeping with Bobby. Who else is she meeting? So they actually begin to follow her and they actually installed microphones, bugging devices in her house. Now, 20th Century Fox in the end had to see sense. They knew that their films couldn’t work without her. And so on the 1st of August, they’d patch up and they issue a new deal to her worth $1 million. And this will be for two films. So sometimes it had been thought that money issues could have led to the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, but we have to bear in mind alleged suicide. By the 1st of August, she’d got this $1 million deal. In the 1960s, I mean, in today’s money, that’s huge money. In those days, astronaut or multimillion pound deal.

She’s really set up almost for life. And so it cannot be financial troubles, which actually lead to her unexpected death. Next slide, please. By the 4th of August, things had got pretty dire for Marilyn. She was incredibly unstable, deeply unhappy. And that’s when she retreats to her room, to her bedroom. She doesn’t want to see anyone. She makes a number of phone calls. She tries to phone JFK, can’t get through. The only person in the house at that time was her housekeeper, Eunice Murray. I think she’s fascinating, and people who’ve written books on Marilyn Monroe haven’t actually, I don’t think, looked in enough detail to the housekeeper, Eunice Murray. I think she’s fascinating. I think she potentially knew a lot more than was given. Peter Lawford, her friend and husband of Pat Kennedy, actually called to see her briefly and she was prepared to let him in and then he left, but he was deeply concerned by the state of Marilyn. Now, Eunice Murray was supposedly, she said in her first statement, that she found Marilyn dead at 12 midnight, so Marilyn died just at some point before that, but Murray said she found Marilyn dead at midnight. It’s two hours later, 2:00 a.m., that Murray calls Dr. Greenson because she says Marilyn had locked her room and the light was still on.

But the old thing was that Marilyn’s bedroom had quite thick carpet and you couldn’t actually see a crack of light around the door anyway, so how did Eunice Murray know she was in there with the light on and she’d supposedly locked her room? Dr. Greenson came over and he immediately looked through the bedroom window, saw her, Murray had told him she’s locked herself in the room, so he breaks a window and climbs in. Next slide, please. And this is where we start to get with various plead statements, later we’ll see. Discrepancies in the accounts. And of course, immediately, there are a number of people who are implicated in the death, and this is ongoing decades later. There are still a number of key people who are implicated in her death. Bobby Kennedy, question mark. Peter Lawford, question mark. FBI. Dr. Greenson, had he really turned up and found her? Had he had anything to do with her death in reality? Question mark. Eunice Murray, she’s the only one in the house during the whole of the time when Marilyn Monroe has actually shut herself in her room and that’s the last time she’s seen the live. Was it some kind of mafia? But there were, as there always are with unsolved deaths, a number of suspicious circumstances. Why did Eunice Murray wait two hours?

Some say it was near three hours before calling the authorities. If you found someone dead, wouldn’t you automatically actually ring for help? And how did she know whether she was just unconscious but still breathing? Eunice later said in the statement that there was no lock on Marilyn’s bedroom door. And actually very little drugs were found in her stomach. And what was there wasn’t analysed properly. There was, and then we’ll come back to this, a discoloration of her lower intestine, high levels of barbiturates in her liver. Next slide, please. But for someone who’d committed suicide, allegedly, there was no suicide note, but there was a contentious statement made by the police, and I’ll come to that shortly, but “The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe” written by Taraborrelli in 2009, it’s a really good book actually, wrote, “If Marilyn died today with current science, there would be no mystery.” Well, I love that statement ‘cause I’m not actually sure that that would be the case. I think the optimism that he had in 2009, we’ve had a number of mysterious deaths since, haven’t we?

Including bodies in bags and all kinds of things. Whether one could really ever get to the root of some of these unsolved deaths, who knows? But anyway, it’s possible, isn’t it, I guess, but if it’s a coverup, then it won’t be. She faced deep mental illness and was a drug addict. By the time she dies on the 4th of August 1962, she’s already been injecting herself. She’s a known drug addict and she’s got deep, deep mental health issues. So that’s the end of the story, isn’t it? Next slide, please. This is a photograph from the immediate investigation. Of course, swarms of investigators descend, keeping the paparazzi away wherever possible that stormed on her house. Next slide, please. And interestingly, not many people kind of look at the evidence given by Jack Clemmons. He’s the police officer who was actually unfortunate enough, you could say, to be on duty on the night when the phone call was made finally to the LA Police Department. He receives the call at 4:25 a.m.

That’s at least four hours since Marilyn’s death. And he’s told by Greenson, Dr. Greenson is the one that telephones the police department, and says that Marilyn has died from an overdose. So number one, we’re automatically planting in the mind that this is suicide. But the question why did it take four hours for anyone, for Dr. Greenson who allegedly arrived at 2:00 a.m., so it’s taken him two hours before he rings the police. Why was she covered with a sheet and her bedroom tidy? And if you think about it, if one is suicidal, if one commits suicide, they kind of usually sort of die crumble in a heap. They don’t die in a neat straight line naked. I mean, it just seems a bit odd. Now, those empty medicine bottles are crucial because there was no glass anywhere to be seen. Nothing in the bedroom, nothing that Marilyn had. Marilyn hadn’t come out of her room. Don’t forget, she hadn’t come out of her room.

So it’s not like she’d taken an empty glass of water back to the kitchen. There was no glass with which she could have allegedly taken all that medication. And I’m sorry, but I really don’t believe you can take the amount of medication she’s supposed to have taken without water. Next slide, please. You might be able to take a couple of aspirin. I think most of us would find that difficult, but the amount of drugs that she’d taken, there’s no way you can do that with no water. So that’s a bit of a mystery already. Things aren’t quite right. As I mentioned, no suicide note. The later photographs that are released to the media, it’s not that kind of neat tidy bedroom. It’s all dishevelled and someone has scattered letters across the floor. And Clemmons, remember the sergeant that turned up, he’s the one that took the call, he’s the one that is on the scene now, the first police officer on the scene, could hear a washing machine in the background, as well as a Hoover. And he says something to Eunice Murray, so he challenges her and says, “What’s going on? Why can I hear a Hoover and washing machine?” She says, “Well, I want to make sure the house is looking nice and tidy before it’s sealed off.”

She knows it’s going to be an investigation scene and she just wants to make sure Marilyn’s house is all kind of nice and tidy. It’s like crazy. But Clemmons couldn’t do anything at that moment because he had no warrant to search the house because as far as he’d known from Dr. Greenson’s telephone call, she’d taken an overdose and he hadn’t actually applied for a warrant to search the house. Next slide, please. What about the investigating officers? Let’s look at this now. During the time that the statements were made, Murray, at different points, Murray and Greenson actually revised the timings on when they’d last seen Marilyn Monroe. If you remember, Eunice Murray said she passed by the door at midnight and the light was still on and Marilyn was obviously still awake in there. But Murray then now said that she passed the door at 3:30 in the morning. And then, of course, it’s about half an hour later or so when they phone the police, which makes the call make a bit more sense maybe. And she says then the lights are still on. So she’s now saying she actually went past Marilyn’s room at 3:30 a.m. and not at midnight. But why did she pass Marilyn’s door at 3:30 in the morning?

And as I mentioned earlier, the thick pile carpet meant that no light could come in under the door. And she’d said, “Well, I saw the light under the door.” The toxicologist report gave a particular amount of pills that were in the bottles, but these have been emptied. The bottles were empty, but the toxicologist in his report said there were X number of pills left in the bottles beside her bed. So we’ve now got the mystery of the bottles and we’ve also got no glass for water. Next slide, please. So it’s becoming increasingly looking like Marilyn Monroe probably did not commit suicide, but hey ho. What about the sweeping of the place? So the private detective Fred Otash, something’s going on in the background, was hired by Peter Lawford to sweep the place of anything that incriminated the president. So it’s now moving towards, was she actually drugged by somebody such that Peter Lawford could send a private detective into the house to sweep the place of anything which could be incriminating? Who was the last person to see her alive? And we’ll come to this shortly. Robert Kennedy, question mark.

Sergeant Bryon, who was one of the investigating officers, he was actually chief in charge of the investigation, actually issued quite swiftly a press statement because, of course, the media were hounding for a statement. And he said this is possible, not possibly, but he actually says possible accidental, but it was supposed to be a suicide. Why was he quite swift in now shifting from suicide? The coroner hadn’t even sat and looked at the evidence. There was no cause of death given, but just this statement’s come out now possible accidental, but it’s later that term accidental is dropped. And then there were rumours circulating that an ambulance had been called shortly after midnight and that Marilyn was still alive. She couldn’t possibly have died at 3:30 a.m. because rigour mortis had already set in and that sets in much earlier. So the idea that she died around 3:30, shortly around the time when Murray and Greenson allegedly in their latter statement found her, couldn’t possibly be the case because rigour mortis had already set in to the body.

So there’s a number of forensic, if you like, medical things which are kicking off here, which means that something’s not connecting with the accounts. Next slide, please. Ah, the autopsy. I love these autopsies in unsolved murders or mysteries, unsolved deaths, I shouldn’t say unsolved murders at this point, should I? There’s always loose ends in the autopsy, isn’t there? Now the autopsy for Marilyn Monroe was carried out by Dr. Thomas Noguchi. He was a junior member of the coroner’s team. Now, I’m sorry, but do you really think that in such high-profile case as this, that the junior doctor, a junior doctor in the coroner’s team would carry out the postmortem? Wouldn’t it have been possibly the coroner himself or a team of them? And the results of the autopsy said this, that there were no needle marks on her body, so she couldn’t have injected any of the drugs like she had before. She may possibly have taken the tablets, but, of course, there’s no water.

Then lab analysis of various organs, her blood, various specimens, this is the point at which alarm bells should have rung. And Dr. Thomas Noguchi actually does become quite concerned that the evidence may have been tampered with, but he’s a junior doctor. It’s quite tricky for him. In the stomach and kidneys, there’s no sign whatsoever of drugs or alcohol. So there’s no apparent cause of death physiologically for her. So if there’s no drugs in the stomach or a combination of drugs and alcohol, she has not swallowed those tablets and she’s not taken an overdose with a combination of drugs and alcohol. The toxicologist’s answer was this, she died of a massive dose of barbiturates found in her blood and liver. Chloral hydrate was detected. That’s often used in Mickey Finns, the cocktail Mickey Finns. Next slide, please. So the coroner’s conclusion was this, “The death of Marilyn Monroe was caused by a self-administered overdose of sedative drugs and that the mode of death is probable suicide.”

Next slide, please. But Thomas Noguchi, when this is made public, is actually quite alarmed because he knows that some of the other organs hadn’t been tested and he actually races, he goes to the coroner and says, “Well look, we need to carry out more tests.” There, are of course, as there always are, samples missing in unsolved deaths, destroyed potentially, which of course is against the law. That’s an offence. And no one crucially could check, no one did check if she just had an abortion because that’s another possibility that was flying around that she was actually pregnant by very high profile politician. I don’t need to spell that out, but those were the allegations. She might have actually been pregnant and she just had an abortion. Next slide, please. So none of that was checked out. The Deputy District Attorney John Miner, he becomes quite, and he points this out, he becomes puzzled really. There’s an odd discoloration in the colon, a purple discoloration. And so he is actually authorised, he’s high enough and senior enough to authorise a second opinion from two eminent pathologists. And the results come back that there’s inflammation in Marilyn’s large intestine from barbiturates. And that was not examined at all in the autopsy. And the only way that could possibly be found and that discoloration in the colon was if the barbiturates had been administered by, I never say this word, enema.

And, of course, that is essentially up the backside. So this actually now begins to contradict the report that she swallowed over 40 tablets, apart from which there was nothing found in her stomach. And John Miner then interviews Dr. Greenson again and Greenson now revises his theory and starts to say, “Well, now, no, no, I’m doubting. No, I don’t think it’s suicide.” So there’s all this going on. Next slide, please. What about the reactions of the American Secret Service? Did, on that night, and I don’t know that we can come, well, we can’t necessarily come to any conclusive conclusions in this, but I want to raise this as possible questions. The FBI had clearly moved to protect someone in the sense that Marilyn’s house was bugged, protect JFK from potential bribery maybe even, Marilyn’s house was bugged by both the FBI and the CIA, both who said for reasons of security. So I’m not sure what either of those at that point knew, but they both installed microphones at different places in her house because they both had concerns over security. Jimmy Hoffa wanted actual dirt on the Kennedy’s and the CIA, that was actually one theory put out, and therefore he’d actually put the microphones in partly to monitor Marilyn Monroe for security, but actually he thought he was going to get dirt on the Kennedy’s. Next slide, please.

Now in the early 1950s, I just want to rewind slightly, I’m just keeping an eye on the time. Just a second. Yeah. Okay. 1951, Marilyn first met JFK, so this is 11 years before her death, at a party thrown by one of her agents, Charles Feldman. 1952, the following year, she had the famous marriage to Joe DiMaggio, which didn’t turn out as a happy marriage for her. Next slide, please. She’s starting to have affairs again, and Marilyn began to meet JFK in secret locations. Sometimes at the home of Peter Lawford. She was frequently smuggled, it was alleged, in and out of various hotels by secret service men. In 1961, smuggled into the Carlyle Hotel in New York. And, of course, for JFK’s birthday, just 45th birthday, that’s when she allegedly last slept with him. And the press, the media didn’t know about the affair, but at this point, they chose to keep quiet. And because, next slide, please, Marilyn was exhibiting signs of instability, JFK was firmly told, “You’ve got to end this affair.” It’s early 1962 when Bobby, as I said at the very beginning, is actually sent, he’s the envoy, sent to tell Marilyn that it’s all over.

There are, at this point, rumours that Marilyn’s pregnant. Did she have an abortion? It was illegal then in certain states in America. What about the Marilyn tapes? I don’t have time to go into those, but you can Google stuff about the Marilyn tapes. She actually asked for the tapes to be released to her of her sessions with her psychoanalyst. And these could potentially, she’s supposed to have poured her heart out at various points and these tapes are supposed to have covered a number of years. This could be really incriminating evidence. So was Bobby send in early 1962 to actually not only end the affair with JFK, but try and retrieve the tapes which he believed Marilyn had. And potentially, it is often said that Marilyn was bribing them over these tapes. So has he also on that fateful night of the 4th of August returned, did he know about her death already? Had someone phoned him in that two-hour gap and he tries to recover the tapes, but Marilyn has made various threats, that she will go to the press with what she knows. Next slide, please. So fast forwarding on the evening that Marilyn dies, it is now known that Bobby makes an unscheduled visit to see his friend Peter Lawford, who’s married to his sister Pat, Bobby makes that unscheduled visit to Peter Lawford.

And remember that Peter Lawford makes a quick call on Marilyn on that fateful night. And that claim with those tapes, it is claimed that on it, Bobby made love to her, and then they rowed violently, and Marilyn said she threw him out. Now, if that house is bugged, presumably there are recordings of what happened on that fateful night. If there are people like Peter Lawford who’s turned up quickly, even if Bobby himself is in and out quickly, 4:30 that night, the housekeeper rings Dr. Greenson and actually alerts him. She’s concerned about the state of Marilyn’s psychological mind at this point. She’s really concerned, something’s changed, but she’s more concerned than previously. At 5:00, Dr. Greenson arrives and he thinks, Well, she’s okay.“ She was perfectly okay to him. He’s reassured that she’s okay. This is the night that she dies. And apparently, it is said that Marilyn handed over the tapes to him. Next slide, please. I’m not sure if that’s been independently verified. There is another unscheduled visit by Bobby trying to search the house. Marilyn shouting at him to get out. Lawford is there telling him to calm down, and then there’s a sound of sort of bump.

And one extract of this tape says, "What do we do with the body now?” Now some theorists have said that these tapes are faked, but by now, one of her friends has spoken to her at 10:00 p.m. Next, slide please. Her friend Jeanne Carmen. So she’s phoning people, she’s quite frantic. And then what happens next? It is said that Marilyn had one last late night caller and he persuaded her to take him to the guest suite. And that was the only room, the guest bedroom was the only room in her house and he knew it that was not bugged. And was it then that he slipped her a Mickey Finn? He had a cocktail together, he didn’t drink it, and chloral hydrate in it, that sedated her, sedated her enough for somebody else to join her, join them to administer the fatal dose of an enema. So the fatal dose concoction that was inserted up her rear while she was heavily sedated. They couldn’t possibly have done it otherwise. This is probably the theory which is holding out now as the likely scenario that it was not suicide, that she has actually been murdered. Next slide, please.

And this is how the latest theories suggest it was done. That she was slipped a cocktail with something in it to make her sleepy enough to be able to put the lethal dose internally in another way. This would concur with the fact that chloral hydrate was found in her blood. The enema contained Nembutal, well that was easy to attain. She already had it in the house. It’s been prescribed to her, she was already taking it, and then it can look like suicide. And was it the killer who swept the house? Who was that killer? And I think for me, that remains one of the unsolved mysteries in this whole thing. Murray puts the washing machine on. Was she washing Marilyn’s bedding? Don’t forget the very first scene, the pictures that are released to the press later of this dishevelled bedroom is actually Marilyn Monroe’s own bedroom, but the prominent theory now is that she didn’t die in her own bedroom, she died in the guest bedroom, which was at the far end of the house.

And it was the only room, as I said, which did not have hidden microphones. So nothing could be taped, nothing could be overheard. This unsolved murder mystery, what role does Murray have in this? Is she part of this or not? Or is she just so concerned as the housekeeper that she’s happy to start clearing up the evidence? And this alleged suicide now becomes potentially in our eyes today a murder case. And if it does so, does the finger point at the Kennedy’s? Next slide, please. So who killed Marilyn Monroe? Well, I don’t want to disappoint you by saying I don’t know, but ultimately, I guess some theories are, well, I don’t like to go and have conspiracy theories, but some make more sense, if you like, than others. Certainly, JFK had enemies in the CIA, but the whole Bay of Pigs, the Castro, the alleged attempt to invade Cuba, it all went disastrously wrong. JFK’s failure to go to war to deal with the drug barons. And then, of course, we would have a short time after that, the Cuban Missile Crisis. But what we can say, so was it the CIA? Why would they have a need to get rid of Marilyn Monroe? Did she know too much?

Whatever happened, and this is what I want to say, whatever happened that evening, her body was moved from the original scene of the death and the evidence of her death was covered up. I think this is something which is not often kind of highlighted I think in enough detail that actually she doesn’t die in the room in that famous photograph that’s all dishevelled of her actual bedroom. It is highly likely that she died in another room in the house. But did she? Was she killed by the CIA? Was it the FBI? Did she know too much about JFK? Next slide. Was she bribing him? There is also something else which comes in here, which I can only really briefly mention, and that’s the Operation Paperclip. The Joint Intelligence Agency was actually involved in recruiting former Nazi scientists. And there was a programme in America, the Operation Paperclip was to smuggle out Nazis out of former Nazi Germany. If the paperclip was on the right-hand side of the file of a particular Nazi war criminal, the person dealing with it, the man, usually the man at the desk dealing with it, would actually just slip their file into the filing cabinet and that would just be lost.

So they could smuggle former Nazi scientists out. And some were already, some of these Nazi scientists had already been studying all kinds of torture and brainwashing. And the US government, it’s said, actually undertook a secret program to look at mind control, could, with the use of drugs, you actually be involved in controlling someone’s mind. Next slide, please. And I want to just very briefly say about Project MK Ultra that’s linked to this. This has now been declassified, and I’ve not heard of it until I read about it in one of the Marilyn Monroe books. It was a code name given by the US government all of a human research programme. Could you, with the use of various drugs, actually control someone? And MK was the term for a technical agency, the department sponsored it within the Intelligence Services. Ultra kind of got its name after like the secret stuff of World War II. And it was all about mind control. And we’ve seen this fictionalised in a number of Hollywood movies. It began in 1950 and eventually was sanctioned officially in 1953. And it was said that the whole programme was over by 1973. But Marilyn Monroe’s right in the middle of this. Next slide, please.

And its remit then very quickly is to develop this MK Ultra Project, to develop mind-controlling drugs for use against the Soviet block and to control US citizens. Now the extent to which it was actually used isn’t clear, because the vast majority of the files have been destroyed. There are some that were released, I haven’t studied them myself, but could it be that the use of drugs could be used to manipulate foreign leaders to produce a perfect truth drug? That if you were to give it to someone in interrogation, they would start to tell the truth. This is all mixed up with the Cold War. And what I think we can say is there’s something uncomfortable about Marilyn Monroe’s death. That means she’s mixed up somewhere in this whole, I think, potentially Cold War era. And one theory has suggested that she was to administer one of these drugs. She was to get close to a Russian official in the Cold War, to sleep with a Russian official.

She was said actually to have slept with Khrushchev one occasion, unsubstantiated, I don’t know if that’s true, but if she could get close enough to enemies of the state to administer this kind of drug, this control drug, then perhaps the US could control certain countries. It seems very much like fiction to us. And I’m not sure how far they succeeded in their experimentation, I’m not a scientist, and it’s often said that this could be carried out without the subject’s knowledge or consent. And it has been suggested that Marilyn Monroe’s use of barbiturates, she may have been an experiment. I mean, who knows? Next slide, please. So I’ll carry on. We don’t need this one, but it’s basically looking at using this whole project to manipulate people’s mental state, use of drugs, hypnosis. So there’s all this experimentation going on in the Cold War, and there are some historians who believe that somehow, Marilyn Monroe is mixed up amongst this. Next slide, please.

So to conclude that part, MK Ultra then was concerned with the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behaviour. I think that sums it up very, very well. Next slide, please. I normally go into far more detail, we don’t have time today to go into far more details, but just to say that in 1977, Freedom of Information Act was requested by a journalist and this uncovered 20,000 documents relating to this Project MK Ultra. And it seems a bit off of a tangent, but it is relevant, I think, to Marilyn’s case as some historians do. And on the right-hand side there, you can see an example of one of the pages from a declassified report. Some of it’s blacked out and that’s nothing uncommon. We historians are used to, occasionally if we are lucky enough, to get declassified files from a former intelligence service, then it’s not uncommon to have things blacked out like this. There were senate hearings later.

And in 2001, some of the surviving information regarding you MK Ultra was finally declassified. Next slide, please. It’d be interesting to see what’s been written on it. So I leave you with that question really. Was Marilyn Monroe a victim of some kind of mind control programming as some historians think potentially? Can we fast forward to my penultimate slide because we’re running out of time, but Marilyn Monroe’s actually in the heart of what was a tragic life that gets mixed up. Now, I don’t think her death on the 4th of August 1962 was part of the MK Ultra Project gone wrong. I mean, that doesn’t make sense, but the use of those drugs, I certainly do think it was not suicide, but I want to finish with these thoughts that I’ve written up. Marilyn Monroe projected the image of a glamorous sex symbol. I mean, she does, she did. But the reality of her day-to-day life was pretty much the opposite. She was controlled.

One could say she was even abused, certainly exploited, and even traumatised by various handlers while living in almost prison-like conditions. She didn’t really have control over her own life and destiny and that played on her existing insecurities and her instability mentally. Her difficult situation slowly led to a total mental breakdown. And when she apparently lost her usefulness to those controlling her, whoever you think out there, however you think, whoever you think it might be, she lost her life in very strange circumstances. And so I don’t know when, if ever we can get to the truth of what really happened to Marilyn Monroe. But what I certainly think we can say, and I’ll repeat that final sentence, that her difficult situation led to a total mental breakdown. And when she’d apparently lost her usefulness to those controlling her, she lost her life in very strange circumstances. My final slide, please. And she is commemorated. There is a plaque for her at the Westwood Memorial Park. Very simple, given her glamorous life, a very, very simple memorial to her. So may she rest in peace. And I do hope actually that someday, there will be new evidence and we may finally know what really did happen to Marilyn Monroe on that night of the 4th of August 1962. Thank you.