8/4/22: DIED BLONDE W/ JAY MARGOLIS

Today is the 60th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe taking her last breath. She may have died in 1962 but at that same moment, a legend was born and while her life laid the groundwork for legendary status, it is her controversial death that catapulted her into iconic immortality. Many people believe that Monroe’s intimacy with the politically powerful Kennedy brothers may have led to a conspiracy against her life. Tonight on Ground Zero, Clyde Lewis talks with author, Jay Margolis about DIED BLONDE.

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8/4/22: DIED BLONDE W/ JAY MARGOLIS

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As I was contemplating the contempt that the United Nations has for conspiracy theorists, I realized that it was conspiracy theory that actually turned me on to history. I truly value my history background because it encompasses so many things in the areas of education.

We can be assured the authoritative voices will continue to flip the switch and play mind games, for shock and confusion are keys to effective propaganda.

The very nature of truth is under threat. The scientific method as a pursuit of truth is abandoned, as science is converted into a quasi-religion. A broad set of consensus truths, the public understanding of which is limited and flawed, but adherence to which is mandatory. Enforced under penalty of banishment.

Informing yourself and finding interest in the world around you can be very liberating.

I realized over time that pop culture studies, along with sociology and history encompassed everything that we as a country are about.

From history comes my penchant for philosophy, theology, literature, art, and all the disciplines really, including a careful study of popular culture.

I read it, I watch it, I experience it and then I like sharing what I learn.  It was always my hobby and now it is my vocation.

For years now, from both sides of the right-left paradigm, there has been a steady effort to “fight back” against the “sanctified” picture of the good old days. We are now being told that old values are not progressive enough and the culture seems to be changing in ways that people think is disgusting and immoral.

Old icons are now under attack by the Cancel Culture, From John Wayne to Kate Smith and all of the sacred cows attributed to cultural icons are now being eaten for lunch.

One such icon is Marylin Monroe.

A trailer for the movie “Blonde” has dropped for Netflix, a movie about Marylin Monroe that has been rated NC-17 — the first NC-17 rated film for the streaming service.

The forthcoming biopic, based on Joyce Carol Oates’s 2000 novel of the same name, is a drama that reimagines Monroe’s life as a Hollywood icon which recalls her volatile childhood, rise to fame, and romantic woes.

Netflix shared the first teaser trailer for “Blonde” on June 16, which showcases a haunting rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” leading us to believe that this film very well could be a horror film,

We are hearing rumors of aborted talking fetuses and vampiric sex scenes and of course, the mentally twisted world that allegedly led to her suicide on August 4th,1962 at her 12305 Fifth Helena Drive home in Los Angeles, California — exactly 60 years ago today.

It is, first and foremost, a film about the manifestation of trauma. “The whole idea of Blonde was to detail a childhood drama and then show the way in which that drama splits the adults into a public and private self– literally how traumatic mind control can create an alter or a split personality.

If the film is like the book, we never actually hear the real names of the men in Marilyn’s life, instead using pseudonyms; but it does cover her marriages, affairs, and toys with the theory that she was assassinated by a vindictive, powerful ex.

According to the prevailing conspiracy theory that powerful ex could either be John or Robert Kennedy.

As with any icon, the brand of Marilyn Monroe far transcends Marilyn Monroe the person, and even more so Norma Jeane Mortenson, as she was until 1946.

In her lifetime, Monroe was exalted as one of the most bankable stars of the day, essentially guaranteed to attract an audience to any event.

Monroe achieved such popularity due to a perfect storm of biography and cultural context, a potential that she managed to capitalize on with shrewd image management.

Indeed, it is the radical reinvention of her image that helps explain her appeal. In the shift from Norma Jeane to Marilyn, from girl-next-door brunette to blinding-peroxide blonde, and from stammerer to vocal seductress, she also moved from victim to agent.

Norma Jeane grew up in foster homes and orphanages, during which time she was sexually molested, and her mother was hospitalized with paranoid schizophrenia. As Marilyn Monroe, she took control of her brand, wielded her sex appeal to build her career, and founded her own production company – a rare thing for a woman at the time.

The height of Monroe’s popularity coincided with the intensification of the US civil rights movement, with the 1954 landmark Brown v Board of Education decision (which ruled that the segregation of black and white children in schools was unconstitutional), swiftly followed by Rosa Parks’ famous refusal to yield her bus seat in 1955.

The brutal lynching of Emmett Till the same year, and particularly his mother’s insistence on an open casket, further propelled civil rights issues into the public eye. In such a context, Monroe’s whiteness apparently stood as unequivocally American, comforting those who would resist the advance of racial equality.

The other great theatre of identity wars was the cold war, where Monroe represented a celebration of everything that the American narrative insisted the Soviets wanted to destroy. The eager popular consumption of Marilyn was emblematic of the golden age of capitalism born of a post-war economic boom.

Ultimately, though, it may be the circumstances of her death at just 36 that assured Monroe of a place in the pantheon of 20th-century icons. The unexpected and untimely nature of her death is crucial, meaning her stardom works differently because we never got to see her age and her iconic look remains eternal and almost paranormal.

I always thought that reflecting on the death of Monroe is like finding a ghost whose image tells so many stories but a lot of what the image says is still shrouded in mystery — a ghost with so much to say and so many people who are willing to speak for it from psychics to top investigators.

Marilyn Monroe may have died in 1962, but at that same moment, a legend was born. And while her life laid the groundwork for legendary status, it is her death that catapulted her into iconic immortality.

It was a tragic death that spoke of inner demons more so than those in many intelligence groups who saw her as an obstacle and a liability to the Kennedy dynasty.

Adding to suspicion about the Kennedys, Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, claimed RFK visited Monroe on the night of her death.

The media said that she had a dark history of mental illness and substance abuse, and her body was surrounded by pills when she was found. Oddly enough there was no glass of water in the room where she allegedly took the pills.  Marylin was said to have a hard time swallowing pills without water.

On the day she died, the body of Marilyn Monroe went missing for ten hours.

Usually, the speculation around the circumstances of her death focuses on whether she accidentally overdosed, committed suicide, or was murdered. And if she was murdered, who would have wanted the thirty-six-year-old sex symbol dead? Was there a Kennedy conspiracy? Marilyn had been romantically linked to both President Kennedy and his brother Robert. And why was Kennedy’s cousin Peter Lawford one of the first to be called to the scene?

Eunice Murray, Marilyn’s housekeeper, found her a little after 1 AM dead of an apparent overdose of barbiturates, which included pentobarbital and chloral hydrate. The police weren’t called to the scene for over four hours.

Murray told the authorities she had to wait to get the okay from the Twentieth Century Fox Publicity Department and that it took a “bit of time.”

Officers knew as they drove up the private driveway to the her home that Marilyn lay inside, dead. Murray greeted police at the door with two of Marilyn’s physicians, Ralph Greenson and Hyman Engelberg. They escorted detectives back to Marilyn’s bedroom. The housekeeper seemed calm; she was even doing laundry, which was kind of weird considering it was five in the morning.

From the bedroom doorway, officers could see Marilyn’s nude body lying facedown in what investigators call the “soldier’s position.” Her arms were by her side, her legs stretched out, and her face was burrowed in her pillow. This arrangement was odd for someone who had overdosed, because ODs victims almost always have convulsions and vomit before they die, and their body is left usually on their back, their limbs twisted.

The coroner’s report stated that Monroe’s death was due to a massive overdose of 47 Nembutal capsules but there was no trace of drugs in her stomach, or evidence of her having taken the tablets orally

Later, Sgt. Jack Clemmons of the LAPD claimed that it looked as if her body had been posed on the bed, legs stretched out perfectly straight, unlike the contorted bodies of most victims who have overdosed on sleeping tablets.

I’m most fascinated by the hours that Marilyn’s body seems to have disappeared—starting when the corpse left her house off

Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills to the time it was checked into the LA County Morgue—over six hours later. Normally the drive would take half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes—but six hours? Of course there were theories that money was exchanged while deranged individuals defiled her corpse.

A TV report from 1982 laid out a possible reason for Monroe’s death at the hand of the government. The broadcast, which aired on NBC August 10, 1962—the transcript of which is published on the CIA website—claimed Monroe had a missing diary with information on a handful of international issues. The information, which detailed a plan to kill Fidel Castro, among others, was given to Monroe by President Kennedy, according to NBC.

The diary was also believed to have held the intimate details of Monroe’s intimacies with the Kennedy brothers, and the channel claimed Monroe was ready to speak publicly about her affairs with the government officials.

Who could forget this iconic and sexy birthday performance for the U.S. president himself? Monroe’s sultry serenade — which, took place just a few short months before her sudden death — was the catalyst for decades of rumors surrounding the alleged affair between Monroe and then-president JFK.

Rumors had already been flying, but this risqué-for-the-time performance sealed the envelope of confirmation on the Monroe/Kennedy love affair theory for many.

And while Marilyn’s affair with JFK may not be fully substantiated, there is reason to believe they had at least a brief rendezvous.

Political intrigue at its finest. Many people believe that Monroe’s intimacy with the politically powerful Kennedy brothers may have led to a conspiracy against her life.

In fact, there is some possible evidence that points to Robert Kennedy being with Monroe on the night before she was found dead. “Witnesses claim to have heard a disturbing tape, from the bugged Monroe home the night of her death, on which the voices of Peter Lawford, the actor who reportedly introduced Monroe and JFK, an angry Bobby Kennedy and a screaming Monroe are audible,” this was reported in reported People Magazine.

There is much talk of Monroe’s mysterious “little red book,” in which she is said to have recorded information about the men she’d slept with — and which allegedly disappeared after her death. “Monroe was also thought to be a liability, allegedly keeping records of conversations detailing highly confidential government information in a ‘little black  book,’

Marilyn was known to keep a little black book documenting all her affairs and conversations. And perhaps the existence of such documentation put her at risk: “At the time of her death, Hollywood rumors were circulating that she was about to announce a press conference the following Monday, It’s also said that on the night of Monroe’s death, it’s unknown how many people had access to her home. Papers were destroyed, and telephone records seized.

Were they searching for that little red book?

According to The Independent, there’s a theory that Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, may have been in on an event that would lead to the starlet’s death.

Her housekeeper Eunice Murray and her psychiatrist, Greenson, administer a barbiturate-laced enema to calm Monroe down, which reacts with other drugs in her body with fatal consequences,” wrote The Independent. “When the police arrived, they find Eunice doing the laundry. Some biographers insist it was murder, with Greenson variously seen as a spy for the Comintern, the FBI or at least on the Fox pay roll. Murray, they claim, was in league with Greenson and had been sacked by Monroe the day before for insolence.”

If this were the case, then it surely had gone terribly wrong.

Finally there is also the case of the last photo ever taken of Marylin and that was a 1962 photo with Peter Lawford at Cal Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe.

Some people think that she was murdered there and her body was moved to her Brentwood home

According to Marilyn’s hairdresser, George Masters, he was with Marilyn at the Cal Neva on August 4, 1962 — the day of her death —  which would mean she wasn’t in Los Angeles as other reports claim.

And according to Jay Margolis, author of Marilyn Monroe: A Case For Murder, Monroe endured the harrowing ordeal of being assaulted by two mobsters during her final days at Cal Neva.

She reportedly flew back… a lot of people think maybe she didn’t take a plane, maybe she was driven down to Brentwood, California and if she was conscious or not, nobody knows,

While the official stories about Monroe’s suicide are a part of history the idea that Marylin was murders seems to be and intriguing conspiracy theory 60 years later. Hank Messick, an award-winning journalist and former consultant to the New York Joint Legislative Committee on Crime, claimed that informants in the Mafia told him the mob killed Marilyn to entrap and frame Robert Kennedy.

According to Frank Sinatra the well known crooner and friend of Monroe she was murdered and he never got over it.

Sinatra and Monroe were close friends but not lovers. While Sinatra thought she was beautiful and funny, he felt she was too troubled, too fragile, for him to sleep with and then walk away,

She did however confide her most intimate secrets including her affairs with John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

When the affairs ended abruptly, Marilyn told Frank she didn’t understand why they’d shut her out completely once she stopped having sex with them.

Sinatra says that she and Peter Lawford stayed at the Cal Neva lodge in Tahoe before her death.  By the way he owned that lodge so he would know.

Sinatra says that she was there to spend time with her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio who was staying nearby and that she had decided to make a press announcement the following week that they were getting back together.

The news of a press conference sparked a rumor that Monroe was going to share details of her relationships with JFK and RFK.

According to British journalist, Anthony Summers, who now can be seen in a Netflix documentary about Monroe’s death says the evidence does not support a murder verdict but does support a conspiracy.

That is, Marilyn died either of an accidental or deliberate overdose of barbiturates, but her death was covered up for hours, and her body was driven around in an ambulance, which eventually returned the body to her home, so that federal agents could go through her house, removing all evidence of her affair with Kennedy.

Summers also produces evidence that the Mafia, probably by authority of Sam Giancana (a suspect in many John F. Kennedy assassination theories, oddly), had planted a bug in the cottage where Marilyn and Bobby met to have sex.

The cottage belonged to actor Peter Lawford, who appears to have acted as a virtual pimp for both Kennedy brothers, setting them up with many beautiful actresses. Ironically, Bobby learned of the bug because of another bug that the Justice Department had placed on Sam Giancana, so he broke off his affair with Marilyn before the mob had enough tape to blackmail him. This part of the story is particularly well documented, an should give pause to anyone who says that no conspiracies ever exist.

They do and the controllers are now lamenting the fact that conspiracy theorists are allegedly exposing them –while they deny that they are trying to create a world order.

The case of Marilyn Monroe should be lesson in how things are not as they seem, and official stories are always neat tidy, and most certainly wrong.

SHOW GUEST: JAY MARGOLIS

Written by Ron Patton