[On the early
morning of August
5th, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her LA home, in a
moment that quickly became as mythic as
everything else about young Norma Jean Mortenson. So this week I’ll remember
the iconic and singular Marilyn through posts on her life, career, and legacy
as well as her tragic death.]
On why Monroe’s
death became so unnecessarily complicated, and what we might learn from that.
Full disclosure:
when I first began drafting this series, in place of “tragic death” at the end
of the bracketed intro I wrote “mysterious death.” But then I did some further research
into Monroe’s passing and realized that it was apparently not very mysterious
at all: according to her doctors she had been dealing with “severe fears and
frequent depressions” for some time and was on a number of prescribed
medications; she had overdosed several times over the prior months (perhaps
accidentally, perhaps not); and when her live-in housekeeper Eunice Murray
and psychiatrist Dr.
Ralph Greenson discovered her body on that early August morning, she was
surrounded by empty medicine bottles and had stunningly high levels of both
chloral hydrate and pentobarbital in her blood and liver. The Los
Angeles County Coroner’s Office and the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention
Team, working in conjunction with that psychiatrist as well as Monroe’s
personal physician, quickly and logically enough classified
Monroe’s death as a probable suicide.
Case closed,
right? For a time it seems to have been, although even in the early years certain
segments of Monroe’s fans (or at least of celebrity-obsessed society) seem to
have advanced alternative
conspiracy theories, usually suggesting that Monroe was murdered (such as by
Dr. Greenson; NB: both of those hyperlinks are to a pretty extreme such conspiracy
theory website). But it was really with the release of Norman Mailer’s
Marilyn: A Biography (1973) that
the theories became truly widespread and even to some degree mainstream. In the
book’s final chapter, the ever-controversial (and often unhinged) Mailer
alleges that FBI and CIA agents conspired to murder Marilyn to cover up her supposed
affair with Robert Kennedy. While that particular conspiracy theory remained
beyond the pale for even most suspicious minds, Mailer’s book helped propagate
overall questions about Monroe’s death, to the point that in 1982 the LA
District Attorney John Van de Kamp opened a “threshold investigation”
to determine whether a full criminal investigation was warranted (spoiler
alert, it wasn’t).
There are
various lessons we might take away from that unfolding story, among them that
Norman Mailer had far too much cultural power for a couple decades there (I
like Armies
of the Night, but c’mon now). But to my mind, the most significant
lessons are ones closely linked to these
quotes from the immediate aftermath of Monroe’s death: Jean Cocteau arguing
that it “should serve as a terrible lesson to all those whose chief occupation
consists of spying on and tormenting film stars”; and Laurence Olivier calling
Monroe “the complete victim of ballyhoo and sensation.” While it’s possible to
overstate our celebrity-obsessed current moment and the paparazzi culture it
has spawned, I think those are very real and very destructive phenomena, and
ones toward which Monroe
represented an early and influential example. And more precisely, it seems
to me that the untimely death of a celebrity is one of the juiciest topics for
such feeding frenzies—but only, of course, if that death can be seen as
controversial or mysterious. That’s why I changed that latter word in my series
intro, and why we should continue to push back on all those conspiracy theories,
past and present.
Next Marilyn
memories tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
Well-balanced piece that you wrote here, Dr. Railton.
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