Maybe the obsession with glamorizing Hollywood celebrity is almost as strong as the obsession with peeking behind the curtain to see just how sinister life beneath the veneer really is. So arrives yet another documentary study on the life and death of Marilyn Monroe at the same time we’re watching Johnny Depp and Amber Heard go head to head in the courtroom (which they already did back in 2020 when Depp sued The Sun for libel and lost).
Prompting a thousand think pieces on how this trial has served to “take the sheen off celebrity glamor,” especially since it also comes on the heels of Will Smith’s Oscar slap, what everyone seems to be forgetting is that Hollywood has always been filled with—in fact, arguably only attracted—damaged goods. Those with abandonment issues, those with a taste for some kind of sexual deviance… the gamut is endless. And every Hollywood celebrity, sooner or later, has come to embody some aspect of the “Babylon” trope the city merely encourages. It just so happens that the studio system once used to be in place to insulate stars from any such scandal associated with their behavior being leaked into the mainstream.
In Marilyn Monroe’s heyday during the 50s, that was starting to come undone, with gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons less and less amenable to sweeping things under the rug. Especially if there was nothing in it for them to do so. Indeed, they stood more to gain by shaking down celebrity scandal than trying to help the studio cover it up. Marilyn, while inherently beloved, was someone who was also viewed as a threat—perhaps particularly by less attractive women. And that’s why many were eager to expose her for the “slut” she was—which, in part, is why her affair with Yves Montand during the filming of Let’s Make Love was lapped up by the press. And oui, it was très scandaleux because both parties were married at the time. Granted, Montand’s French wife, Simone Signoret, was likely more accustomed to the French view of monogamy than Arthur Miller, who had already written Marilyn off as a whore in his journal right after they got married and he left the “private” musings out for her to come across during filming of The Prince and the Showgirl.
Obviously, this revelation about how Miller really felt about her made her all the more insecure and skittish during her performance—plus, Laurence Olivier did little to exude the “warmth” she required of a co-star and director in order to get the job done. So fraught was this filming, in fact, that it spawned an entire biopic about it starring Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn).
And yet, this, along with her affair with Montand, is barely broached (the latter not mentioned at all) in The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes. A title that suggests that, even after all of our endless, grotesque probing into the life of Monroe, there’s still quite a bit we can never truly know—including what, exactly, happened in her room on the night of her death.
The documentary opens in a place as far-removed from Hollywood as possible—Ireland—for the first and primary interview subject in The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe is Anthony Summers, the author the 1985 Marilyn biography, Goddess, the Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Sharing for the first time some of those tapes he recorded of Monroe’s so-called friends and contacts, perhaps what we’re given, more than anything, is insight into how to write a very thorough biography as opposed to anything we didn’t know already about Monroe (especially those of us who are already well-versed in her life and the many conspiracy theories surrounding her death).
One of the many “shocking” revelations of the film is intended to be corroborated by Al Rosen, a quintessential Hollywood power agent of the day. It’s no secret by now that “Marilyn worked the system,” as Rosen puts it. Cozying up to Joseph Schenck (pronounced, apparently, like “Skank” instead of “Shank”), the erstwhile husband of Norma Talmadge and a co-founder of Twentieth Century Pictures with Darryl F. Zanuck. Around the same time, Marilyn worked her charm on another Daddy figure named Johnny Hyde, the VP of the William Morris Agency. She met Hyde in the 1940s as she made her mark on the club scene of Hollywood as an escort to “Important Men” in the industry. As Rosen puts it, “Every casting director, every studio used to have a black book… So every girl, I’m talking about kids that were breaking in, like Marilyn Monroe, you know, when they get started… all the casting directors, they would write in their black book who could be laid.” Summers responds as politely as he can so as not to exude too much disgust, “Hmm, yeah.” Rosen continues, as though he’s being endlessly informative, “You see, the business has changed since then. Today it’s the buck. It used to be sex… remember that.”
In short, Marilyn was what Arthur said: a whore. Indeed, Arthur met Marilyn at the beginning of the 50s when she was still doing her glorified call girl work to break more fully into the business. He flew out to Hollywood with Elia Kazan where he, according to myth, immediately clicked with Marilyn. Saw in her that “little girl lost” characteristic that seemed to get so many men hot and bothered about wanting to “save” her.
The Daddy issues Marilyn had are, of course, well-trodden territory that come up in the documentary. Complete with a more Electra complex-oriented angle wherein Marilyn apparently had a fantasy of picking up her father while wearing a black wig in a bar and having him make love to her and then saying afterward, “How does it feel to have a daughter you’ve made love to?” Like some form of ultimate vengeance and retaliation to make him feel even guiltier. Because if he hadn’t left her, then maybe he would know what she looked like in the first place—wig on or not.
Monroe also famously sang the highly inappropriate (especially now) and suggestive songs, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and “Every Baby Needs A Da-Da-Daddy.” Just in case there was anyone out there who wasn’t really sure that her Daddy fixation far outweighed anything Lana Del Rey would ever give us (in point of fact, it’s a wonder Del Rey has never covered either of the two aforementioned songs).
As the documentary progresses, it’s obvious that Marilyn established the modern blueprint for what fame would be like for the proverbial Female Icon. In truth, one can’t help but think of Britney Spears at the peak of her popularity in the 00s as the paparazzi sought to decimate her by knocking her off of a pedestal with their voracious appetite for unflattering photos and gossip.
At one moment, a recording of Marilyn’s voice is used so that we can hear her say, “Just being able to have some secrets for yourself. There is a need for aloneness, you know?” By the same token, there was perhaps no one more alone in the world than Monroe. Although she was beloved and highly sought-after, those she did allow to be close to her—typically, powerful men—never really understood her, and only ended up seeming to be disappointed by her in some way. As though the real woman couldn’t live up to their image of the sex symbol.
One man who seemed to actually enjoy the company of the “real” woman was, ostensibly, Robert Kennedy. And maybe his plowing of Marilyn started out as an assertion of equal importance to his presidential brother, but it seemed, over time, that Marilyn started to prefer him. Until he went and cocked that up too by suddenly getting scandalized by his own “loose lips” (no innuendo intended) blabbing all about the potential onset of nuclear war to her. Marilyn, peacenik that she was, insisted that nukes were a bad idea, and shouldn’t be employed (yes, she probably would have made a brilliant Cabinet member).
Bombshell indeed. In any event, what the documentary implicitly states is that, one way or the other, it seems the Kennedys killed her. Mainly because of the abrupt rejection on the part of both brothers seeking to distance themselves from her. A type of rejection that cut to the core of her worst insecurities about being casually cast aside from the very outset of her life. Feeling as though she had been treated, as usual, like a piece of meat to be ground up and spit back out for yet another male’s pleasure, Marilyn, it is speculated, likely took an overdose of pills as an emotional response to being tossed out of the fold by the Kennedys. This, compounded by being thirty-six in a business that scarcely let any woman over thirty still remain relevant, likely had her feeling especially fragile at the end of that summer. However, that didn’t mean she didn’t have plans for her future, even if her Achilles’ heel of turning to drugs for emotional support had other plans for her instead.
Here, too, it bears noting that Spears herself might have gone down the same path with her own drug addiction in the 00s were it not for the constantly-dangled threat of being withheld access from her children. Which subsequently happened anyway thanks to that totally needless and heinous conservatorship.
But it isn’t just Spears who could tell you, as a hyper-idolized, hyper-sexualized woman, what Marilyn knew: “Fame is fickle. It has its compensation, but it also has its drawbacks. And I know it.” Perhaps that knowing was part of what killed her as well. Her death still shrouded in mystery depending on one’s view of just how much of a threat she really posed to “national security.” For all women who are both attractive and intelligent pose a threat, but especially a world-famous one of this caliber who also harbors certain government secrets culled from pillow talk.
To this end, one thing Summers makes clear is that the Kennedys—namely, Bobby—were most likely involved in a massive cover-up in the hours that followed her death, assuring that nothing linking her to them could be found. So, ultimately, Marilyn was just another woman whose experience was meant to be silenced and suppressed. Something that also continues whenever yet another man chooses to tell her story without really saying much that’s new or groundbreaking at all.
