Marilyn and the Mob (2025) s01e02 Episode Script

1
"This programme contains discussion
of organised crime, drug misuse
and historic allegations which some
viewers may find upsetting"
ARCHIVE: There, glittering on the
screen, I can see my town
in its party dress, and see again,
shown so vividly across the horizon.
Marilyn Monroe.
Her beauty and talent
dazzled the world.
You mix everything about Marilyn
Monroe together like a cocktail.
Her physical beauty, her wit,
her talent for acting.
Yet, from her earliest days
in Hollywood
to the heights
of international stardom,
she moved in circles
dominated by powerful
and sometimes ruthless men.
She was pulled from pillar to post
by all of them.
She hated being in that position.
Men whose influence reached
from studio lots
to the corridors of power.
Including gangsters from
the world of organised crime.
ARCHIVE: On the surface, she seemed
to have such a zest for life.
As Marilyn's fame grew
Her international appeal took her
from command appearances
to the other side of the world.
these connections
became ever more dangerous.
These were people that Marilyn
will have, at some point or another,
come into contact with.
Some speculate slept with.
She entered into affairs
with influential figures
in Hollywood and Washington.
Some with reported links
to the underworld.
She was surrounded by wolves.
She needed a protector.
As she reached her mid-30s,
Marilyn's world was more perilous
than ever
ARCHIVE: The greatest
Box Office favourites
in motion picture history.
and on the horizon
danger loomed.
In July 1962, Marilyn Monroe
sat down with a reporter
from Life magazine
to reflect on her career.
One of the most glamorous actresses
in Hollywood,
Marilyn's life was marked
by remarkable highs
and a string of brilliant films
that showcased
her extraordinary talent
and effortless comic touch.
Yet her fortunes were now faltering.
Her personal life had unravelled
after failed marriages
to baseball star Joe DiMaggio
and playwright Arthur Miller.
Addicted to prescription drugs,
she had been fired and then
rehired on her latest film,
yet, she spoke openly about
the setbacks and struggles
she had faced.
What she didn't mention
were the powerful men
said to be circling her,
from crime boss Sam Giancana
to President John F Kennedy
and his brother Robert.
Nor did she speak of Frank Sinatra,
the Mob-linked entertainer
who had been both lover
and confidante,
who was about to take her away on
a glamorous weekend with his friend,
the English actor Peter Lawford.
Marilyn was in a very dark place
because of all these things
that were going on in her life.
So her friends Peter and Pat Lawford
took her to the Cal Neva Lodge.
Maybe a weekend away
would be good for her.
It was a very glamorous place.
There were lots of little cabins.
There was a sort of ballroom
where you could listen to shows,
and there was also,
most importantly,
a place where you could gamble.
When Sinatra brings Marilyn
to this Lake Tahoe ranch,
it is ostensibly with the desire
to shield her.
But he is kind of bringing her
into the hornet's nest.
Alongside its celebrity guests,
the Cal Neva Lodge is allegedly
also a haunt for shadowy men
from the world of organised crime.
Sinatra,
connected as he is to Vegas,
both as an entertainer and in terms
of the nightclub underworld,
is good friends with Sam Giancana,
and they co-own
Lake Tahoe Ranch together.
Giancana is one of the kind of
major figures, I think,
of 20th century organised crime.
He was one of the main people
who ran Hollywood.
As a gangster,
Sam Giancana would have a lot
of trouble owning a casino
so Frank fronted for him.
It is a place where people
can congregate
who are perhaps up to no good.
The mobsters are there,
Sam Giancana is there.
The stories surrounding
that weekend are horrific.
Her drinking too much,
taking too many drugs,
walking around the swimming pool
in a dishevelled state
and wearing nothing but a robe.
She apparently goes to sleep
at night
scared that she's going
to be attacked.
They had underground tunnels
so people could go
from one cabin to another
without anyone seeing them.
She unfortunately got
very inebriated
and had to be taken back
to her room.
There's the story of she breaks
down at the cocktail table
and she's in tears,
she's embarrassing them.
That's witnessed that,
that's photographed.
The man who was supposed to
develop the photographs
said he had a conversation
with Sinatra.
They looked at these photos
and Sinatra and the photographer
said, "We need to destroy these",
so the photographs don't exist.
Reports later emerged
that Marilyn's ex-husband,
Joe DiMaggio,
has learned of Marilyn's trip
and has followed her
to the Cal Neva Lodge.
This visitor to the Lodge
said he watched her for a while
and she was looking up and there was
Joe DiMaggio looking back at her.
She needed a protector,
and Joe DiMaggio offered that.
He tries to rescue her, and he's
banned from arriving at the hotel.
It's quite hard to work out
which stories are true
and which ones are not true.
Whatever really happened that
weekend, Marilyn reportedly
flew home from the Cal Neva Lodge
utterly distraught.
The pilot of the plane said
that when the Lawfords and Marilyn
got on the plane,
she was slurring her words,
she was very, very awkward.
He didn't know what happened
but it was very sad to see.
The sum total of it is that
she comes back and she lands
in Los Angeles looking absolutely
terrible. She's barefoot
distressed, dishevelled.
She's clearly had something
really terrible happen to her.
She comes back a completely
different and utterly broken person.
Emotionally shattered,
Marilyn retreated to a house
she had recently purchased
in Los Angeles -
a sanctuary she had been encouraged
to create by her psychiatrist.
Dr Ralph Greenson
is Marilyn Monroe's shrink.
She apparently has some sort of
co-dependent relationship with him.
Dr Greenson suggested
that she put down roots,
which is one of the reasons
why she bought
a modest house in Brentwood,
not far from him.
It was the first place
she ever owned.
She was fixing up the house
because that had a feeling
of permanence for her.
She sees Greenson almost every day.
He also works with this doctor
called Dr Hyman Engelberg.
They are prescribing her
huge amounts of drugs.
Greenson also has
this special injection,
which he injects Marilyn with, which
must have some sort of speed in it
because she stays up for hours
and is high as a kite on it.
I don't think that was a good
doctor-patient relationship.
I'll quote her.
"If I'm generally anything,
I'm generally miserable."
That's a direct quote
of Marilyn Monroe.
It's troublesome to think of her
as having her demons,
and she did have her demons.
ARCHIVE: One of the most famous
stars in Hollywood history
is dead at 36.
Marilyn Monroe was found dead
in bed under circumstances
that were in tragic contrast to her
glamorous career as a comic talent.
When Marilyn Monroe dies in 1962,
she's only 36 years old.
This is someone that everyone
who went to movies
thought would be making movies
for many more decades
so when her death is announced,
it isn't just a national story,
it's a global story.
By all accounts,
she was home that day.
She was taking several substances,
as was kind of the norm for her.
She loved to have long
phone conversations,
so she often was calling people,
and she made several phone calls
that day, talking to various
people in her life.
She had her hairdresser around,
one of her publicists was around,
her doctor, who she was very
close with, and was perhaps
quite an unethical person in terms
of what he prescribed her.
And she apparently was thinking
a lot about the Kennedys
and being kind of estranged
from them
and the fact that it was
troubling her.
She, according to her housekeeper,
goes to bed at about 8pm.
It's the last time she's seen alive.
The housekeeper sees
the light on at 3am,
goes to the door,
the door is locked.
She calls this personal doctor,
who comes in.
He can see through the window
that something's not right.
One of them breaks the window
and they find Marilyn lying naked
holding the receiver
of a telephone,
apparently having died from
an overdose of sleeping pills.
The coroner rules it as
a barbiturate overdose,
either suicide or accidental.
Immediately there are conspiracy
theories surrounding this death.
None of it totally stacks up.
An ambulance driver said that she
actually made it into an ambulance
and was alive, but then passed away
either right before
she got to the hospital
or at the hospital,
and due to various powers that be,
was then returned to her home
to look as though
she died peacefully there.
The ambulance driver also later said
that he was paid to say that,
so there are so many conflicting
stories coming out
that it's quite hard to know what
the exact version of events was.
In order to take an overdose
of barbiturates,
you would need water
to drink the pills down with.
There is no glass of water
beside her bed.
There is also a discrepancy between
the telephone call to the doctors
and the telephone call,
eventually, to the police.
There's a great, long period
between the two.
The doctors are supposed to be
called at one o'clock,
and, eventually, the police
are called at three o'clock.
And in that phone call,
the doctors declare
that Marilyn Monroe
has committed suicide,
which is not really
their call to make.
After the LAPD arrive,
Eunice Murray,
Marilyn's housekeeper,
calls her son-in-law
to come and fix the window.
So he fixes the window
at 5.25am in the morning,
which seems a very odd thing to do,
to have a handyman
come and fix a window pane
when this is actually a crime scene.
Her body appears to be moved.
They say that she is in what's
known as a soldier's position
with her feet together.
They've rolled the body over,
so the crime scene has already
been messed around with,
and then the level of incompetency
appears to continue.
The coroner was a young man who
had only just started in the job.
He wasn't the most experienced
coroner they had.
They threw away her vital organs
without having them properly tested.
The very next day, the phone records
go missing from the exchange,
which is either incompetency
or it's a cover-up.
You can see where
the conspiracy theories begin.
Marilyn Monroe,
Hollywood's greatest star,
is dead at the age of 36.
Soon after, in 1963, President
John F Kennedy is assassinated.
ARCHIVE: Around the world,
disbelief was the first reaction.
A moment in history that still
provokes conspiracy theories
thanks to his family's dealings
with organised crime.
So, unfortunately, JFK was not much
longer lived than Marilyn herself.
The following year, he would be shot
dead and assassinated in Dallas,
so there's tragedy
upon tragedy here.
ARCHIVE: And John-John
celebrates his third birthday
with a soldier's farewell
to his father.
I think a lot of the fascination
about their relationship
is fuelled by the fact that
they both died so young
and so close together.
His brother, Bobby Kennedy,
of course,
would also be assassinated,
in 1968 in Los Angeles.
The Mob, if they didn't
pull the trigger,
they had some very strong influence
on who did pull the trigger
to murder both Bobby Kennedy
and JFK.
During their lifetimes, the affair
between Marilyn and John F Kennedy
was hidden from the public,
although rumours swirled
amongst Hollywood insiders.
There was always talk about her
involvement with the Kennedys
during her lifetime.
At Hollywood cocktail parties,
it was the talk of everyone.
It was on everyone's lips.
There were blind items in the
newspaper, not naming names.
One of them said, "Marilyn Monroe
is involved with someone
"with a very big name, even bigger
than Joe DiMaggio in his heyday,
"so don't write her off
as over yet."
That was, like, right at the time
that she died.
The week that she died,
that was a blind item in a column,
so it was being talked about.
The assassinations of
the Kennedy brothers
ignite a wave
of conspiracy theories,
many of them involving Marilyn,
including author Norman Mailer's
claim that she was murdered
by the CIA and FBI for getting
too close to Robert Kennedy.
It's a claim Mailer himself
has since discredited.
Over time, countless other theories
have emerged
about how and why she really died.
Although a 1982 inquest confirmed
suicide as the cause of death,
journalists continue to probe
into the events
surrounding her final hours.
In the 1980s, an Irish author and
journalist called Anthony Summers
writes a book called Goddess,
and it is a collection
of a series of exhaustive interviews
that he's done in research
that he's done with people in
and around the constellation
of Marilyn's life and work and
romance in the lead-up to her death,
trying to figure out what
exactly happened that day.
Tony Summers, it's easy, isn't it,
after 23 years, when people
are not around to answer back,
to slur their names by innuendo?
I haven't slurred anybody's name
by innuendo.
I set out to do a biography
of Marilyn Monroe's life.
It was, in a sense, perhaps
the best example to date
of the power of rumour in our time.
It raises all kinds of questions.
Did Marilyn commit suicide?
Was she confused
and she inadvertently took
too many sleeping pills?
Or did her doctors change the story
of what happened about her death?
Was an ambulance called
after she was deceased?
If that was the case,
it was against California law,
that an ambulance cannot transport
a deceased person.
Was she taken to the hospital
still alive, although comatose,
and died at the hospital
and then returned to her home
to make it appear
that she had died at home?
The big question that's being
asked about Marilyn's death is
was she murdered?
Anthony Summers' book
explores theories and myths
surrounding Marilyn's
life and death,
including those that implicate John
F Kennedy and his brother Robert.
There was never, until now,
evidence that she had actually
had affairs with either
John Kennedy or Robert Kennedy.
Now there are.
It was Summer's belief, ultimately,
that there was a Kennedy
clean-up job on the house
to remove any association
that she had with them,
so there were certain things about
her death that seemed mysterious,
things that disappeared
but not because
there was actual foul play.
Given that it had enough in it
to corroborate certain doubts
around her story, it did
sort of send people spinning.
As a result of the book, the Chief
of Police has been forced to release
the partial remnants of
the police files from 1962,
showing Marilyn's calls
to Kennedy's Justice Department.
Marilyn had been ditched
by JFK and Bobby Kennedy
so she is threatening
to go to the newspapers.
There's a story
that's already leaked.
A journalist writes
a piece of gossip
in the San Francisco Chronicle
about how Bobby Kennedy
is being comforted
by a star of some description.
So the story is beginning to leak
and Marilyn is really upset
about being treated like,
in quotes, a piece of meat.
Both of them have had their fun
and they've decided that she
is too much of a liability,
so they've both ditched her.
So she's threatening to have a press
conference on the Monday morning
and she's unhappy enough to actually
possibly go ahead with this.
The stakes could not
have really been higher
for the brothers at this point.
Bobby Kennedy was voted
Father of the Year the year before.
He's Catholic, he's married,
he's got seven children,
I think, at this point.
This is not in his interest,
for Marilyn to tell the world
about their affair.
The story is that he left
the Democrat conference
in San Francisco,
arrives by helicopter
to Peter Lawford's house,
Peter Lawford drives
to Fifth Helena Drive
and there is supposedly this massive
row between Bobby and Marilyn.
Bobby Kennedy is looking
for this thing
which is called
the "little red book".
Supposedly, every time she's
had dinner with Bobby Kennedy,
Marilyn has written down
the conversations
that she'd had with him.
They are supposed to have
secrets in them.
The nuclear testing in the desert,
the Bay of Pigs,
all these hugely important
state secrets.
Not for any malicious reason.
It was just to prove to him that
she wasn't a dumb, fluffy blonde
that everyone always
thought she was.
Supposedly, on the tapes there
was the sound of coat hangers
as he's slapping through her
wardrobe trying to find this book,
shouting at her, going "Where is it?
Where is it? Where is it?",
and she's screaming back, "I have
no idea what you're talking about.
"Leave me alone."
That is where the idea that
Bobby Kennedy was involved
in the murder of Marilyn Monroe
comes from.
The alleged confrontation between
Marilyn and Robert F Kennedy
is said to be caught
on surveillance tape
by a private investigator
named Fred Otash,
who has bugged Marilyn's house,
possibly on behalf of the Mob.
One of the sources many people use
is a fella named Fred Otash,
who some authors argue
is one of the premier
guys in espionage,
tapping phones, bugging rooms
and reporting on celebrities
and reporting on politicians.
Fred Otash said that at various
points he had worked wiretapping
and trailing people for
the FBI, CIA, the Mafia.
The dilemma with the reliability
or unreliability of Otash
is that there are no transcripts
of the tapes he said he did.
There are no recordings.
He's almost ubiquitous
in these stories,
but how reliable is Otash?
He could be fabricating much
or all of what he said.
Fred Otash continued to change
his story throughout his life,
up until he died in 1992.
Despite various sources linking
Robert F Kennedy to Marilyn,
on the day of her death, the Kennedy
family has long denied such claims.
Bobby Kennedy's connection
with Marilyn.
There's one major question.
He denied being in Los Angeles
on the day of her death
till the day he died.
His family have denied that he
was there on the day of her death.
The Los Angelese Police Department
deny that he was there
on the day of her death.
Peter Lawford said he was
and he drove him there,
and he certainly was with Marilyn
on the day of her death.
And Daryl Gates, the Chief
of Police, when he wrote
his autobiography, in black and
white, it's there in the book,
"We all knew Bobby Kennedy
was there on the day of death.
"We just didn't like to
tell people."
So he was there. Why did he deny it?
Why did they deny it?
The banshees of good taste
will tell you
that it's only because he would
have been smeared and besmirched
if it had been made clear
that he was there.
So it was just It wasn't a
cover-up, it was protection.
But if you're covering
something up,
is that protection?
Where's the transparency?
No transparency leads to speculation
and speculation leads to conspiracy.
Conspiracy leads to 60 years
of conjecture.
Over the years, interest
in Marilyn Monroe has grown
and conspiracies around her death
continue to swirl,
many of them involving
organised crime.
Anthony Summers' book Goddess
revealed many of Marilyn's
previously unknown connections
to major Mob figures
across her life
including gangsters
Johnny Roselli,
Sam Giancana
and a curious episode with
the notorious Mickey Cohen.
Mickey Cohen is perhaps
the most vicious gangster
that stalks the streets of LA.
He had his fingers in a lot
of different pieces of the pie,
particularly sex work and brothels.
And through those,
he often collected information
on the famous clients
of those places
and then could use it as blackmail.
He also started a newspaper
called Hollywood Nightlife.
His partner in that
was Frank Sinatra's manager.
This newspaper magazine
was really a device
for blackmailing famous movie stars,
letting the world know who was gay,
who was a lesbian,
who was having an affair.
People dreaded what stories
might appear about them.
Every Hollywood producer
read Hollywood Nightlife
to see who was being scandalised.
Cohen would be very street savvy.
Would do a deal,
would give over the negatives,
would give over the compromising
pictures in return for cash,
but also in return for favours
that you, you're my friend.
A bit Godfather-like.
You know, one day you'll do me
a favour type stuff.
I think he tried to blackmail
Marilyn Monroe,
but I don't think he succeeded
in doing it.
Any investigation
into Marilyn's life
reveals a cast of shadowy figures
orbiting her world.
Men with power, secrets
and agendas of their own.
Together, they fuel
the endless white noise
of conspiracy
that still surrounds her name.
Another of the fantastic
conspiracy theories
about Marilyn Monroe's death
is that she was the object of a hit
that was organised
by Sam Giancana
a man who utterly hated
the Kennedys.
The Mafia were instrumental
in helping to secure the vote
for Bobby's brother.
There was a sense that the Kennedys
had kind of betrayed them
by enlisting their help
and then turning around
and attacking them.
It is my firm belief
that new laws are needed
in the common battle
against the rackets.
According to Sam Giancana's
grandson,
who wrote a book
called Double Cross,
what he expected is that
the Kennedy administration
would be not too rigorous
in going after organised crime.
John Kennedy appoints his younger
brother to be Attorney General,
who had been going after
Sam Giancana for years
on a Senate committee.
Is it because you got the $500?
No, sir.
Giancana saw that as a double cross.
And another layer to that
is that Giancana,
we now know, worked with the CIA
in this extraordinary effort
with Johnny Roselli
to figure out a way
to assassinate Fidel Castro.
He was involved with the Kennedys
in an operation called
Operation Mongoose.
The Kennedys were using the Mob
to be hit men, in effect,
and they never succeeded.
Giancana, he had done
what had been asked of him,
and now they're paying me back
by having Robert Kennedy Jr
and his Justice Department
to come after me.
So the theory is that he sent four
hit men to Marilyn Monroe's house
and they murdered her.
There was a book written
by one of his relatives
saying that Sam had sent a hit squad
into Marilyn's home in Brentwood
to wipe her out.
The theories are always
clever because, you know,
they didn't go with machineguns,
they went in with a suppository,
a Nembutal suppository,
which then poisoned or killed her,
but of course vanished
and no needle marks.
The autopsy was done
by the deputy coroner,
a guy called Thomas Noguchi,
which seems a very odd thing,
to have had the deputy doing
somebody so high profile
to start off with.
He spends a long time trying
to find injections in her.
He does a very sort of close look
at her skin and finds nothing.
The hope for those
who promote that theory
is that it will implicate
the Kennedy family
in the death of this icon.
And those who most hoped for that
were people in organised crime.
If they could somehow soil
the Kennedy reputation,
it would be just punishment
for the Kennedy family.
Adding even more fuel to
the conspiracy theories
is the fact that several of
the powerful and dangerous men
connected to Marilyn ultimately
died in grisly circumstances.
Johnny Roselli,
true to Hollywood type,
was found in a oil drum
floating in the Biscayne Bay.
He was somebody who knew about
the assassination of John F Kennedy,
and before he could testify to
the Senate Assassinations Committee,
he was lured onto a boat
off the coast of Florida.
He suffered from emphysema,
so the guy who killed him just
held his nose and covered his mouth
until Johnny Roselli
was asphyxiated.
They wanted to put his body into
an oil drum and it wouldn't fit,
so they had to cut off his legs
and put his trunk and his legs
in separately into an oil drum.
Two fishermen found it
and notified the coastguard.
An autopsy was done
and they identified the body
as that of Johnny Roselli.
After Giancana was called to testify
in front of a Senate committee,
he was assassinated in the basement
kitchen of his home in Chicago.
Sam Giancana being shot
I think five times under the chin
and once directly in the mouth,
had to do with perhaps the CIA
trying to keep them quiet,
because they'd been summoned
to appear
before a special Senate committee.
Stories of Marilyn's connections
to the highest offices in politics
and to some of the most violent
figures in organised crime
only deepen the confusion,
which leaves us asking,
what truly happened
to Marilyn Monroe?
She died of a barbiturate overdose,
that is certainly true.
There was enough barbiturates
in her bloodstream
to have killed, I think,
about seven or eight people.
She had a very high tolerance
for barbiturates
because she'd been taking them
for a very long time.
And, yet, she had no pill casings
in her stomach during the autopsy.
She was also very keen on enemas
during this period.
Marilyn used to have enemas
all the time.
An enema to make herself thin enough
to get into a dress.
She often would have two enemas
a day,
in the morning and in the evening,
to keep her stomach entirely flat.
There is a theory
that Eunice Murray,
who was her housekeeper,
had given Marilyn
a barbiturate enema that evening
in order to help her go to sleep.
Weirdly, Eunice Murray was leaving
the next day, she'd been dismissed,
so this was her last night
working for Marilyn.
Eunice Murray is always pictured
in the background washing sheets,
which seems a very odd thing to be
doing if your boss has just died.
With so many rumours
and theories swirling,
rivalries have emerged between those
who believe her life was ended
by dangerous gangsters
and those who believe
the truth is far less sinister.
I always say that Marilyn Monroe
is like politics and religion.
There's people on both sides
and they believe so strongly
and they hate you
if you disagree with them.
That's how passionately
they feel about it.
So many people have changed
their story over the years
about what happened
and the order of events
that I think it is genuinely
lost to time
and a lot of the records
and apparent recordings
and FBI files
are also lost at the time
which in and of itself is a cause
for people to become suspicious
and treat that as a part
of the conspiracy.
That's the thing about conspiracy
theory, they are self-generating
and self-sustaining, that everything
can become a part of the conspiracy,
when, in fact, a lot of stuff
is people changing their stories
because they got older, their
memory was bad, it was traumatic
and they don't remember it
exactly the same way.
I mean, there are a lot of reasons
why you can have different versions
of the story
and not all of them are sinister.
I think that on that night
she was in a moment of despair,
she took a lot of pills
and when she felt herself starting
to go under, she changed her mind
and she started dialling friends
to get help.
And some of her friends got
a message from what they said
was a "fuzzy voiced woman".
Obviously it was Marilyn Monroe.
While she was trying to get help,
she went under
and drifted off to Paradise.
I do feel that if she had
been saved that night,
sadly, she probably would have
done it a month later,
or two months later, or five
months later, or two years later.
There's something almost
Edgar Allan Poe
about the death of Marilyn Monroe.
Edgar Allan Poe said,
"There's nothing more poetic
"than the death
of a beautiful woman",
and certainly that's part of it.
You know, I could be the one
who saved her.
Or, what direction would her career
have gone in had she lived?
She lay in the mortuary for a day
unclaimed.
She really didn't have
any immediate family.
Some of her friends felt like
they weren't close enough to do it.
ARCHIVE: Brief and simple rites
mark the funeral
of Marilyn Monroe,
as former husband Joe DiMaggio
leads a last tribute to
the glamorous actress.
Joe DiMaggio stepped up.
He really, truly loved her.
He set up the funeral
and paid for it,
paid for her crypt.
Only 25 persons were invited
to the services
and no screen stars
were in attendance.
He didn't want any of her Hollywood
friends there, like Frank Sinatra
because he felt that
that contributed to her downfall -
the Hollywood set.
He kept it very small with just
people that were close with her.
Even though he's a sometimes
controversial figure in her life,
one thing is for sure, he loved her
very deeply and she loved him,
and she always turned to him
in her moments of need.
The final fade-out to the story
of the poor girl
who became a movie star
is written, Finis.
It feels unfair.
I understand him wanting privacy
for her and her family
but I don't understand why your
ex-husband should get the right
to control your funeral rites,
control who was there.
She had Hollywood friends.
She's also a woman who,
in spite of everyone
constantly talking about
the powerful men in her life,
had many female friendships.
It does seem profoundly unfair
to her
and so indicative
of that male ownership of her,
her body, her life, her privacy,
for someone to just decide that.
Nothing to do with her wishes,
I would assume.
Much more to do with his own
and what he wanted.
Peter Lawford, a one time friend,
associate,
and, of course, brother-in-law
to the Kennedys,
was also buried fairly nearby
to Marilyn.
The story goes that he was
heartbroken by her death
and his failure to successfully
intervene or to save her.
It does feel a little bit for me
like Marilyn has died
surrounded by the same wolves
that hounded her in her life.
Although her life was cut short,
Marilyn Monroe lives on
as a legendary figure.
A blend of glamour, talent
and tragedy.
She gave so much joy
and so much entertainment to people
that that's what we
should really focus on.
Her career, what she left behind,
the good things that she did.
She was a really marvellous person.
All these other theories, I mean,
I just don't think they're
I've never seen anything
that really convinced me.
For me, right now, it's enough
that she left behind
such a really wonderful legacy
in such a really short time.
But I do think that the final story
is a lot simpler
than people want to make out.
I know that Marilyn touches people
in different ways,
and if it's very important for them
to believe she died one way
and I believe that it happened
another way, I'm fine with that.
I think there's a certain point
where somebody like Marilyn,
and I think this is true of her
in life as well as a star figure,
they kind of lose some of their
humanity. They become symbols to us.
And now that a lot of time
has passed, they're not really
flesh and blood human beings with
families and grieving loved ones.
And so it becomes
almost like a pub debate
or a fun conversation to have.
"What do you think really happened?"
It becomes kind of this
parlour game for people.
I think conspiracy theories thrive
in the absence of certainty
and in the absence of wanting
to accept a certain sad reality.
I think it's really tough to
accept that accidents happen,
that people are led astray,
that they have bad friends,
bad guidance, that they struggle
for mental health issues.
It's long been sympathetic
to Marilyn.
A lot of these conspiracy theories,
a lot of them say she was
yes, she was a mess,
yes, maybe she was promiscuous,
but actually she's a victim
of circumstance.
And they are maybe well-meaning,
but none of them really tell
the truth about her ambition,
her complexity, her talent,
because they are so invested
in the tragedy
because it's dramatic
and because it's a neat
sort of, neater trajectory
for them to follow,
so people are interested in that.
I think Marilyn will continue
to beguile audiences
because in spite of
her personal troubles,
mostly what you get from her
on the screen
is actually just vivacity
and joy and liveliness,
and it's interesting that there's
so much focus on her troubles
and her death,
when in fact her films,
particularly her musical numbers
in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and How To Marry A Millionaire
and some of her comic routines
in Some Like It Hot,
she's just so alive on the screen,
she's so vivid.
And I think this idea that there is
a dichotomy between this happy woman
on the screen and this miserable
woman off of it, it's sort of
an old stereotype. I think it was
much more complex than that.
Ultimately, she gives
a lot of joy to viewers,
and I do believe I could sit
a five-year-old or a 15-year-old
or a 95-year-old
in front of her best films
and they will find some kind of joy
and some kind of happiness
or humour from them.
The other thing about it is that
from the tantalising things
that we do know and we do hear,
whether it's hearsay, rumour,
gossip or confirmed,
that the LAPD was deeply corrupt,
that the Mafia and Hoover and FBI
were doing some deeply, deeply
frightening things.
And all just under the surface
of a 1950s and '60s public
Americana and show business
that was so wholesome-looking
and was so designed
for wholesomeness and morality
and good, clean fun, and Sinatra
crooning and Marilyn dancing,
and, you know, those beautiful kind
of images of wholesome Americana.
And then, just underneath,
there were some really, truly
diabolical things going on.
And people are fascinated by that,
quite understandably.
People are fixated on Marilyn
as somebody who may have been
involved with or murdered by
organised crime associates
or by the Mob.
The fact of the matter is,
the Mafia was very powerful
in Hollywood,
particularly in the mid-century.
Most stars of a certain calibre
were associating with those people.
And they did have pull
and there were certain people
in Hollywood you didn't mess with.
Every Hollywood party liked
to have its token shady guy
or gangster because it was cool,
it was glamorous,
so there is this underworld
just beneath the surface
that's beguiling to people.
The reality is,
they did do bad things,
often things that we'll never
find out about
because the nature of them
is shrouded in secrecy.
Marilyn Monroe, a woman
whose life has been examined
more closely than almost any
in modern history.
Yet, across every timeline
and testimony,
one pattern persists.
From her earliest days in Hollywood
to the final hours of her life,
individuals connected
to organised crime
appear again and again in her story.
The rumours continue
and the conspiracies linger,
but the truth may be lost forever.