Remembering Marilyn

One day after Clint Eastwood's 95th birthday came what would have been No. 99 for Marilyn Monroe.

This is said about one who has been dead longer than she lived. She was not the most bankable, certainly not the most dependable, of Hollywood actresses. But from the first time she appeared on screen until she passed this life in 1962, age 36, she was a star.

Dial the time machine back to August 1962, when Monroe's body was found early on a Sunday morning in Los Angeles.

Dorothy Kilgallen, the most quotable Broadway columnist of Monroe's time, was working on a lead that Monroe, once married to a superstar in baseball (Joe DiMaggio) and another in literature (playwright Arthur Miller), had caught the eyes of someone in politics emitting even higher wattage.

It was common knowledge in the White House -- though perhaps not to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy -- that Monroe had the 35th U.S. president's work phone on speed dial. Kilgallen, a panelist on CBS' weekly Sunday-night game show "What's My Line," all but dropped John F. Kennedy's name in a column released the week of Monroe's death.

But what if it was not the president but his brother Robert, the U.S. attorney general? Biographer Donald Spoto, in his 2001 book about Monroe, puts RFK in the bedroom with the fallen star, whose death was ruled a probable suicide almost before the body was cold.

Another hot item then concerned wedding bells for DiMaggio and his second wife. That rare man to succeed at two national pastimes (baseball and sex), as one wag put it, DiMaggio immediately took charge of her burial, first eliminating perceived undesirables from the guest list: the Kennedys and singer Frank Sinatra among them.

Norman Mailer wrote a book about Monroe -- but who didn't? -- terming the actress as the American man's "sweet angel of sex."

All this for one unlikely to be included with Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor on any career top-10 list of Hollywood actresses.

If Hollywood producers then ever looked at something besides the bottom line or casting couch, they might have perceived something immediately recognized by A-list directors. That one Norma Jean Mortenson lit up the screen whenever photographed, often for great effect in some classic movies of the 1950s, her peak period.

Early in the decade, she stole scenes in "All About Eve," the Joseph L. Mankiewicz-written-and-directed inside look at Broadway. Davis and Anne Baxter received Best Actress Oscar nominations though there was nothing for Monroe, who holds her own in a party scene with 1950's Best Supporting Actor, George Sanders.

At decade's end, she appeared in perhaps Hollywood's greatest comedy, "Some Like It Hot," opposite Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in a film written and directed by Billy Wilder with a closing line for the record books.

Wilder, who in 1950 evinced an Oscar-worthy performance from silent star Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Boulevard," filmed the scene that effectively sundered DiMaggio's marriage to Monroe.

The indelible image from 1955's "The Seven-Year Itch" is that of Monroe's skirt top flying high in the air as she stands over a New York subway grating at night. DiMaggio, among the onlookers, might well have engaged in domestic violence on that occasion, historians note.

Miller wrote the screenplay for 1961's "The Misfits," the last major Hollywood effort for Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. John Huston directed what Monroe dismissed as a scorecard of Marilyn's private life. Gable, too old to play the lead as an aging cowboy in a new-age Western, died shortly after the film's release; Monroe got bad press for all but shooing Gable into the grave with her erratic shooting schedule.

In the end, Kilgallen wrote that the LA coroner's autopsy was pretty accurate, that her whole life amounted to a "suicide note." Another view was that she knew too much about certain people to live long and that the list of her possible slayers is lengthy, inside and outside government.

Elton John later wrote a song about Monroe, with "Candle in the Wind" modified after the 1997 death of Princess Diana, another luminary who died young and tragically. As Monroe nears her centenary, can any current entertainment stars expect such tribute when they pass this earth?

Bob Wisener

The Sentinel-Record 

What this article doesn't tell you is Dorothy Kilgallen died on November 7, 1965, with the cause was ruled an overdose of barbiturate and alcohol.  It didn't take long before the first ripples of innuendo about possible foul play begin to spread, and they would soon become wider concentric circles.  Much of the speculation centered around Kilgallen's journalistic investigation of and commentary on the JFK assassination.  The conspiracy theory goes that many people associated with Kennedy--or just those who had some information about the assassination--tended to turn up dead before long.  Dorothy died not long after writing about the Warren Commission report. Some conspiracy theorists felt that some parties who wanted the president dead would want Dorothy dead for the same reasons.