MIss Monroe By: Gaybria Rhoads

A young woman, known to the world as a voluptuous, clandestine, and flirty movie star died on the morning August 5, 1962.  It is “proven” that she died due to an overdose by way of prescription drugs authorized by her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson (Tristian). Yet her actual death, beyond what the media has informed us, still remains a mystery. Marilyn suffered from many woes, including depression and a troubled childhood and adulthood for that matter.  In fact, she lived her last days alone, only with the company of her medication (“Marilyn Monroe Is Found Dead.”). More than fifty years later several conspiracies about Ms. Monroe’s death have occurred including:

1.      Former president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert being responsible for her death because both brothers couldn’t risk their “love affairs” with Marilyn become public (Tristian).

2.      She was a victim of suicide (Tristian).

Let’s dive deep into the investigation of both conspiracies, analyze and conclude the most logical option that is responsible for the death of Marilyn Monroe.

            Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, Miss Monroe spent her life working to be greater on the outside than who she was on the inside. She suffered a great deal of hardship, difficulties and depression at a very tender age that she was not able to shake in her adult life. She was the product of a father that she never knew and mother whom struggled with some of the very same demons that Norma would later suffer from (“Marilyn Monroe Is Found Dead.”). The obstacles of having two unfit parents alone are enough to drive a person wild, yet she always preserved and put on a brave face. Marilyn’s problems were rooted much deeper than her parents had to do with so until she faced them she would forever suffer in silence.

Gladys Pearl Monroe Baker, a mother to three, was never able to live up to her maternal potential because she writhed with a mental illness that ultimately controlled the latter half of her life (Szucs). Unfortunately, Gladys’s children reaped the consequences of her mental state the most. In an effort to defer Norma and her two older siblings from suffering any longer, they were taken into foster care (Tristian). The young Norma had been abused both physically and mentally by her own troubled mother and the foster care system was no better (1). When Norma was nine years old, Gladys proved to be stable enough to care for her children, so her three offspring were reunited with their mother (By this time she had begun). Once the excitement had worn off Gladys’s troubles recurred once again and her children were placed back into foster care(1). After bouncing back and forth from orphanages to foster homes, Norma finally settled with Olive Burnings, her great aunt, who also provided a home of speculated sexual abuse by way of her son (1).

Living next door to Norma was her first husband, Jim Dougherty (Susman). The two wedded in “unholy” matrimony when she was sixteen and Dougherty twenty-one(1). Jimmie, as Norma liked to call him, was probably the only person outside of her household that knew personal struggles. He married her in order to prevent her from going back into the system after her aunt had decided that Norma couldn’t move with her to their new home (1). Dougherty went to serve our country oversees soon after their nuptials in the South Pacific and Norma held down the fort by taking a job in a factory (1). This very factory is where Norma was discovered by a photographer. He saw the value that was held in her curves and the worth of her effortless beauty and set her up with her first glamour pictorial.  Four years later in 1946, Jim returned expecting his missus, yet instead got a model on her way to stardom ( McLellan). Their polar opposite lifestyles got the best of them and the two decided to divorce in that same year. When asked about their short-lived marriage during an interview in the early 2000s Dougherty states, “I never knew Marilyn Monroe… I knew and loved Norma Jean ( McLellan)."

Norma’s newly single status also came with a new image, and she dyed her hair blonde and signed her first movie contract “Marilyn Monroe” (Susman).   Her new name was contrived from Gladys’s maiden name and a role model in show business, Marilyn Miller (Susman). For the next six years Marilyn starred in numerous films and she was fully dedicated to perfecting her craft. She even traveled to the Big Apple to study with some of the best acting coaches in show business (Tristian). In 1952, she tested her hand with love again. She married Joe DiMaggio, said to be one of the greatest major league baseball players of his time. Although their very public marriage only lasted for roughly nine months, DiMaggio and Monroe remained friends until her death (Susman). Their “friendship” is rumored to be the reason that Monroe split from her third husband a world renowned author, Arthur Miller (1).

Marilyn’s personal life during the peak of her career was perceived to be what is has always been, a MESS, but had never stopped her work ethic until 1962 (Tristian). Monroe was fired from her film Something’s Got to Give in 1962 after excessive absences due to “illness” (1). On the night of August 5, 1962 Marilyn finally dealt with her problems once and for all; a permeant decision of death was made for her lifetime of temporary unfulfillment. The sad reality of Marilyn’s unfortunate predicament was no matter how much public success she received she still looked at herself as a private failure. In her last days she suffered from depression that caused her to wallow in sorrow alone (1). She was inattentive in the media for quite some time before her tragic death by way of depression (1).  The “illness” that made her absence from the world permanent.

Now that we’ve familiar with the life of Marilyn, let’s become acquainted with her death. Although she died fifty plus years ago, her death still remains a mystery because of the lack of preservation of the crime scene and disappearance of key pieces of evidence, which is actually a driving factor behind one of the conspiracies surrounding Marilyn Monroe’s death. The other being, a simple suicide. 

            Here are the facts of Miss Monroe’s case. On the morning of August fourth, Marilyn Monroe got her prescription filled that was written by her personal psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, for 25 capsules of Nembutal pills, a serious drug that aids in sleeping (MARILYNMONROEHISTORY).  When she went to bed that night she locked her door, which was unusual behavior for her. That evening she had made and received a few phone calls, some of the most important being, her ex-husband, Joe DiMaggio and Dr. Greenson, both of which seemed like a normal conversation with Marilyn at the time (1). It was not until the call with Peter Lawford later on presented a Marilyn that he didn’t know (1).  Her words were slurred on her speech was moving at a snail’s rate. After not hearing from her boss all evening, Marilyn’s housekeeper, Eunice, knocked at her door and got no answer (1). Eunice reported that she figured Marilyn was sleeping (1). In the wee hours of the morning, Eunice Murray, tried at her boss’s door again and got no answer which alarmed her. In fear of something being extremely wrong, Murry called Dr. Greenson to help her get Marilyn out of the room (1). When Dr. Greenson arrived the two were forced to go out of the house to Monroe’s bedroom window and break the glass from the outside in order to gain access to the movie star’s room after seeing her naked body sprawled across her bed (“Marilyn's Last Day: Twenty-Four Hours Inthe Death of a Legend.”). Once in the bedroom Greenson then phoned to Dr. Hyman Engelberg, Monroe’s physician to come examine the scene (1). It is believed that the two waited two hours before calling an ambulance to the house (MARILYNMONROEHISTORY). When the police got there to question the witnesses, Murray was on the other side of the house taking care of her housekeeping duties in the laundry room (1).  

            Now days, the details of Marilyn’s death are all a blur due to the witnesses continuously changing their stories and an improper investigation into the deceased by the LAPD. Her autopsy found traces of at least twenty five Nembutal pills in her blood stream, yet her stomach was empty (1). They also concluded that there was no needle marks on her body anywhere which means that she did not ingest the Nembutal via syringe (1). So how could the Nembutal get there? Conspiracy theorists believe that Monroe was injected with the Nembutal by way of an enema (1). Personally, I would have to agree. An enema is the only logical explanation for Monroe’s overdose. Which leads us to another shady portion of her death, Marilyn Monroe’s autopsy concluded the cause of death to be a Nembutal overdose (“Marilyn's Last Day: Twenty-Four Hours Inthe Death of a Legend.”). The Nembutal was found in her system but it wasn’t in her stomach and there was no needle marks on her body, so how could the investigation stop there? Why did the LAPD just settle there, and why was the house, more importantly her bedroom declared a crime scene? Could it be that she did not actually die in that bedroom? When a person dies, the blood in the body stops circulating and the blood rushes to the part of the body that is in contact with something else. For instance, if the body died in anatomical position, the blood would settle on the posterior or rear side of the body, this is called lividity. On Monroe’s body the lividity marks were found on her right cheek yet she was found lying on her left cheek (MARILYNMONROEHISTORY). Theorists also believe that she was killed in a separate room on the opposite vacant side of her home and was moved later in the night (1).

            The first and probably the most public conspiracy about the death of Marilyn Monroe is that she was murdered indirectly by the Kennedy brothers (Tristan). She was inappropriately close with both President John F. Kennedy and his brother Senator Robert Kennedy and it is believed that she knew confidential government and family secrets that were detrimental if they ever became public (1). Although the boys never showed up to Monroe’s house to do the job themselves, how hard is it to pay a hitman when you are the president of the United States? RFK was also a friend of Marilyn’s doctor, Dr. Ralph Greenson (1). In later years, after denying it multiple times, Eunice Murry admitted to Robert Kennedy visiting her boss early in the day before her death (“Marilyn's Last Day: Twenty-Four Hours Inthe Death of a Legend.”). With Greenson being a doctor, I think the Kennedy family hired him to kill Marilyn. He also became acquainted with Eunice easily because he saw her on a daily basis, so she was in on the job as well as possibly landing a helping hand in the murder. Greenson probably injected her with an enema after she took enough sleeping pills to fall asleep on her own in another room. With Marilyn taking a smaller amount of pills they digested faster explaining why there was nothing found her stomach and the rest of the job was finished with the enema. The reason that Greenson and Eunice called her physician first instead of the ambulance was to make sure that the job was finished so they could move her to her bedroom and stage the story that they told the LAPD before the police and media got involved. With the president having a hand in her death, he probably called off all the investigations regarding her death and also manipulated the coroner’s office to call her death a simple overdose. It was the best kept secret, until it wasn’t.

            The second conspiracy is just a plain suicide. Despite the holes and discrepancies in their stories, Marilyn actually did lock herself in her room. She actually did swallow twenty-four Nembutal pills. She actually did take her own life. The fact of the matter is, she was troubled all of her life, and she didn’t the true beauty she actually held within herself and she started the let her personal demons overpower her professional work. She had lost total control of her life, so she probably saw fit that it was best to end it.

            There are so many different conspiracies surrounding the death of Marilyn Monroe’s death and for this reason the survey question had to be able to satisfy all of those conspiracies. The question proposed for this conspiracy is, how do you think Marilyn Monroe died, suicide or foul play? The results of this survey was sixty-forty. Sixty percent of the participants did believe that there was some sort of foul play involved in her death but not total murder while the other forty percent accept that her death was a suicide.

After analyzing the two most popular conspiracies behind the death of one of America’s most iconic sex symbols, I conclude that the Kennedy brothers with the help of Dr. Greenson, Dr. Engelberg and Eunice Murray killed Marilyn Monroe. Although Marilyn Monroe lived a horrible childhood which spilled over into a depressing and lonely adulthood I just do not think she would take her own life. She survived not having a father, and being blessed with a unstable mother. She overcame being bounced from foster care to orphanages. She was, in so many words, an overnight star, gaining many friends and fans. She was going through probably one of the roughest, rough patches in her life, but I still do not think it was severe enough to take her own life. Moreover, there are so many unexplained gaps in the suicide story like the lividity being shown on the opposite side of her face and why it took Murray and Greenson so long to contact the police. Marilyn Monroe, a curvy movie star who set trends well beyond her time, may have “killed herself” in the sight of the world, but she definitely had help.

Works Cited

 

By this time she had begun modelling bathing suits and, after bleaching her hair blonde, was posing for pin-ups and glamour photos. “BIOGRAPHY: Marilyn Monroe Lifetime.” BIOGRAPHY: Marilyn Monroe Lifetime, http://www.lifetimetv.co.uk/biography/biography-marilyn-monroe.

 

“Marilyn's Last Day: Twenty-Four Hours Inthe Death of a Legend.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 28 Oct. 2006, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/marilyns-last-day-twenty-four-hours-inthe-death-of-a-legend-422034.html.

 

MARILYNMONROEHISTORY. “YouTube.” YouTube, YouTube, Dec. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfH7SzDiSiY.

 

“Marilyn Monroe Is Found Dead.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marilyn-monroe-is-found-dead.

McLellan, Dennis. “James Dougherty, 84; Was Married to Marilyn Monroe Before She Became a Star.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 18 Aug. 2005, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/aug/18/local/me-dougherty18.

 

Susman, Gary. “Marilyn Monroe Facts: 25 Things You Don't Know About the Hollywood Icon.” 15 May 2015, https://www.moviefone.com/2015/05/29/marilyn-monroe-facts/.

 

Szucs, Juliana. “All About Marilyn: A Look at Her Family Tree.” Bio.com, A&E Networks                              Television, 31 May 2016, http://www.biography.com/news/marilyn-monroe-family-genealogy#!

 

Tristan, /. “5 Conspiracy Theories About the Death of Marilyn Monroe.” Bizarre and Grotesque, 1 Feb. 2016, https://bizarreandgrotesque.com/2015/08/04/5-conspiracy-theories-about-the-death-of-marilyn-monroe/.