00:00:00
Speaker 1: So she is one of the most famous and enduring cultural icons who has celebrated for her films like Some Like It, Hot and The Seven Year Itch. And Today the first of June is Marilyn Monroe's one hundredth birthday. June the first, nineteen twenty six. My next guest, Anthony Summers, wrote the classic biography Goddess The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, which involved more than six hundred interviews that was later adapted into the documentary that you saw on Netflix called The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe The Unheard Tapes. He joins me from Ireland, Anthony Summers. Welcome, lovely to have you on Hello. Tell me about Marilyn Monroe from your point of view, Anthony, it's one hundred years now today, from obscurity to becoming a legend.
00:00:47
Speaker 2: She was, of course a legend in her own life. Better to say, a myth in her own life than a myth most of the time. Since I got into the story in a very odd way, colleague of mine on the London Sunday Times called me up, suggested the story was a doddle. Really, I just go to Los Angeles, he said, for ten days and do a story for the London Sunday Times about the reinvestigation of her death. I went there knowing nothing about Marilyn Monroe, thinking that I was there for the aforesaid Doddle for ten days. So I stayed for two years and decided not to do the article and instead to do a book. I found that the woman and the various stories about her were almost all just tittletettle. But I had one huge boom, which was that people who had been tight lipped after she died, and there were many of them, were now themselves feeling the ears, and they who were of the mind that if ever they were going to talk, now might be the time. And so I bought a car. I stayed there for two years with my then wife and child, and I came away with five or six hundred interviews, most of them on tape. It was one of those rare occasions when an author can say that, thanks to the fact that people's lips had been loosened, I managed to change history.
00:02:32
Speaker 1: It's really interesting, Anthony, because she's in such rarefied air and whilst this was a brilliant life that she laid, it was also very troubled wasn't it.
00:02:43
Speaker 2: She was very troubled. And one great boonyard was that I made friends social friends with the family of doctor Greenson, Doctor Ralph Greenson, who was regarded as the most senior and best experienced psychologist in California, indeed on the West Coast. His name is quoted nothing to do with Monroe, but his name is quoted on anything one tackles that covers during his lifetime. He concluded that and he died, But I made friends with his widow, who extremely carefully gave me access to some of his documents and the views on Maryland's mental state psychological state that he had shared with colleagues on the East Coast. Because Maryland, by nature of her life, she traveled a lot between the West Coast and the East Coast, so she had psychiatrists in both places and attended both of them an enormous amount. Greensome decided that what she was primarily missing, whatever the specific problems that she had psychologically, that what she was really missing with a family, things that maybe you and I take for granted, the domestic intimacy and the ability to reflect things other people and whether important things, huge things her worries or little things. And so he did what Freudian psychiatrists absolutely shy away from doing. With Marilyn, he did the opposite and invited her into his family, which gave me another opening. Marilyn had befriended a young woman who was Queenson's daughter.
00:04:53
Speaker 3: They had become very close, and Marilyn had given the young woman advice on yes and how to deal with those insidious people called men.
00:05:05
Speaker 2: In many aspects, and she talked quite often in code towards the end of her life when the drama, as indeed correctly rumored in newspapers today rumored perhaps is the wrong word, announced that when Marilyn was deeply involved with the Kennedy brothers, she talked in code about Bobby Kennedy to queens AND's daughter, whom she as though it was conceding the name she called the General when he was the Attorney General, in transparent code that one could understand. And so I learned quite a lot from that.
00:05:49
Speaker 4: Code in that way, and it also led on of course, to being able, I hope and trust to put together the last days of her life, and indeed the last night of her life more accurately.
00:06:06
Speaker 2: I like to think than anybody has done before.
00:06:10
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Do you think, Anthony, the fact that she was a lover of famous men does it take away in any way the legacy of her acting As we look back on a hundred years, do you think people will remember her more for her love life than her career.
00:06:28
Speaker 2: Well, at the moment, yes, because it's the love life that make all the alleged love life that makes the headlines. But I think perhaps as history takes away, people will look a little more at the evidence of her films in which she was on many occasions of brineant actress. One sees why the name Marilyn Monroe results because, of course it resounded long before the final tangles, final emotional tangles of life.
00:07:01
Speaker 1: So you did so much research into this book, Anthony, and the amount of people that you interviewed were celebrating the one hundred years since her birth. Can we talk about her death and what you discovered and what your takeaway was from that?
00:07:14
Speaker 2: Yes. Of course what started me on the project was the fact that her death was being reinvestigated by the Los Angeles District Attorney. It reinvestigated fraudulent way of saying that it was being drounded by sensationalists, and it still is drounded by sensationalists, but I was able to put together real witnesses, people who rarely knew about the night of her death. It's filled with rumor and counter rumor about what Bobby Kennedy is supposed to have done, even going to the suspicion that Bobby kna possibly had something to do with with killing her to keep her quiet. That doesn't fit at all with what I managed to put together. Interviewing the psychiatrists who interviewed in turn her psychiatrists, the testimony of her housekeeper, and interviews with the policeman and the ambulance men who, unbeknownst to most people, were involved in her final arms in the last days of her life. She clearly was very upset about her treatment by the Kennedys, and one can understand it. Having discovered the story of the man she possibly most trusted, and this will make many people smile. But the man that many women today may most trust, her hairdresser Gilaroff, was a man who'd been her on set hairdresser in many movies, and she turned to him because he was He was not just a headdresser, he was a companion for years. He didn't speak then just before he died, he did talk to me, and he told me that at the time of her death, consumed about the way she was being treated by John Kennedy, the president, and Bobby Kennedy, the attorney General. He said that she had told him on the night she died that she had just seen Bobby Kennedy. Separate from that, I was able to interview Schaeffer, the head of the ambulance company, and to nine of the people who worked for his ambudence company, and I am quite sure that although you won't find it in the newspapers that an ambulance did attend her house that night, it seems that best account of her dying is one that in fact makes Bobby Kennedy look more compassionate than the ruthless, potential killer that he's sometimes described her. It seems to me that in all probability, Marilyn Monroe had not died. Bobby Kennedy was, for one reason or another, called to the house to talk to Marilyn. That she became comatose, that an ambulance took her to a hospital, but nearing the hospital, and this I have to extrapolate from the evidence. An ambulance man said to her, sir, she's gone. What is the Attorney General of the United States left in the middle of the night in an ambulance with the dead Marilyn Monroe? What is he going to do? I believe that he turned the ambulance around and took her to her home where she was found dead. Imbeddi a psychiatrist brother later in the night, and he got a sound damn fast And there's evidence for that as well. But that is a story for me, not a scenario, not of cruelty, but of compassion, and then of a public man running that hell.
00:11:32
Speaker 1: Anthony Summers is my guest. His book is called Goddess, The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. You can see the Netflix documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe The Unheard Tapes. Final question is who or what in your mind is your Marilyn? How do you remember her, how do you celebrate her? How do you think of her? On this day that would have been her hundredth birthday?
00:11:56
Speaker 2: The poor creature suffered more because of her own success. But a beautiful woman with all sorts, of all manner of tragedy surrounding her, including her own. One major part of her tragedy that we haven't touched on was that she dearly wanted to have children and she suffered from endometriosis. Too many women suffer from it still today. She suffered from endometriosis, which essentially meant that she was unlikely ever to give birth, and that is a dominant theme in her life as a woman.
00:12:38
Speaker 1: I do hope that she would understand the fascination and the fandom and the admiration that she still has Anthony one hundred years on.
00:12:48
Speaker 2: I'm not sure that she would. She was a real psychological model and its emotional muddle, but she was a striking woman of her depth in a cinema world in which hardly anybody can be sent to remain safely in their depth.
00:13:10
Speaker 1: It's a fascinating book, it's a fascinating documentary. Thank you so much for your time, Thank you for putting in the work too. Who's told you, Anthony Summers. The book is called Goddess The Sacred Lives of Marilyn Monroe from Ireland. My guess
Speaker 1: So she is one of the most famous and enduring cultural icons who has celebrated for her films like Some Like It, Hot and The Seven Year Itch. And Today the first of June is Marilyn Monroe's one hundredth birthday. June the first, nineteen twenty six. My next guest, Anthony Summers, wrote the classic biography Goddess The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, which involved more than six hundred interviews that was later adapted into the documentary that you saw on Netflix called The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe The Unheard Tapes. He joins me from Ireland, Anthony Summers. Welcome, lovely to have you on Hello. Tell me about Marilyn Monroe from your point of view, Anthony, it's one hundred years now today, from obscurity to becoming a legend.
00:00:47
Speaker 2: She was, of course a legend in her own life. Better to say, a myth in her own life than a myth most of the time. Since I got into the story in a very odd way, colleague of mine on the London Sunday Times called me up, suggested the story was a doddle. Really, I just go to Los Angeles, he said, for ten days and do a story for the London Sunday Times about the reinvestigation of her death. I went there knowing nothing about Marilyn Monroe, thinking that I was there for the aforesaid Doddle for ten days. So I stayed for two years and decided not to do the article and instead to do a book. I found that the woman and the various stories about her were almost all just tittletettle. But I had one huge boom, which was that people who had been tight lipped after she died, and there were many of them, were now themselves feeling the ears, and they who were of the mind that if ever they were going to talk, now might be the time. And so I bought a car. I stayed there for two years with my then wife and child, and I came away with five or six hundred interviews, most of them on tape. It was one of those rare occasions when an author can say that, thanks to the fact that people's lips had been loosened, I managed to change history.
00:02:32
Speaker 1: It's really interesting, Anthony, because she's in such rarefied air and whilst this was a brilliant life that she laid, it was also very troubled wasn't it.
00:02:43
Speaker 2: She was very troubled. And one great boonyard was that I made friends social friends with the family of doctor Greenson, Doctor Ralph Greenson, who was regarded as the most senior and best experienced psychologist in California, indeed on the West Coast. His name is quoted nothing to do with Monroe, but his name is quoted on anything one tackles that covers during his lifetime. He concluded that and he died, But I made friends with his widow, who extremely carefully gave me access to some of his documents and the views on Maryland's mental state psychological state that he had shared with colleagues on the East Coast. Because Maryland, by nature of her life, she traveled a lot between the West Coast and the East Coast, so she had psychiatrists in both places and attended both of them an enormous amount. Greensome decided that what she was primarily missing, whatever the specific problems that she had psychologically, that what she was really missing with a family, things that maybe you and I take for granted, the domestic intimacy and the ability to reflect things other people and whether important things, huge things her worries or little things. And so he did what Freudian psychiatrists absolutely shy away from doing. With Marilyn, he did the opposite and invited her into his family, which gave me another opening. Marilyn had befriended a young woman who was Queenson's daughter.
00:04:53
Speaker 3: They had become very close, and Marilyn had given the young woman advice on yes and how to deal with those insidious people called men.
00:05:05
Speaker 2: In many aspects, and she talked quite often in code towards the end of her life when the drama, as indeed correctly rumored in newspapers today rumored perhaps is the wrong word, announced that when Marilyn was deeply involved with the Kennedy brothers, she talked in code about Bobby Kennedy to queens AND's daughter, whom she as though it was conceding the name she called the General when he was the Attorney General, in transparent code that one could understand. And so I learned quite a lot from that.
00:05:49
Speaker 4: Code in that way, and it also led on of course, to being able, I hope and trust to put together the last days of her life, and indeed the last night of her life more accurately.
00:06:06
Speaker 2: I like to think than anybody has done before.
00:06:10
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Do you think, Anthony, the fact that she was a lover of famous men does it take away in any way the legacy of her acting As we look back on a hundred years, do you think people will remember her more for her love life than her career.
00:06:28
Speaker 2: Well, at the moment, yes, because it's the love life that make all the alleged love life that makes the headlines. But I think perhaps as history takes away, people will look a little more at the evidence of her films in which she was on many occasions of brineant actress. One sees why the name Marilyn Monroe results because, of course it resounded long before the final tangles, final emotional tangles of life.
00:07:01
Speaker 1: So you did so much research into this book, Anthony, and the amount of people that you interviewed were celebrating the one hundred years since her birth. Can we talk about her death and what you discovered and what your takeaway was from that?
00:07:14
Speaker 2: Yes. Of course what started me on the project was the fact that her death was being reinvestigated by the Los Angeles District Attorney. It reinvestigated fraudulent way of saying that it was being drounded by sensationalists, and it still is drounded by sensationalists, but I was able to put together real witnesses, people who rarely knew about the night of her death. It's filled with rumor and counter rumor about what Bobby Kennedy is supposed to have done, even going to the suspicion that Bobby kna possibly had something to do with with killing her to keep her quiet. That doesn't fit at all with what I managed to put together. Interviewing the psychiatrists who interviewed in turn her psychiatrists, the testimony of her housekeeper, and interviews with the policeman and the ambulance men who, unbeknownst to most people, were involved in her final arms in the last days of her life. She clearly was very upset about her treatment by the Kennedys, and one can understand it. Having discovered the story of the man she possibly most trusted, and this will make many people smile. But the man that many women today may most trust, her hairdresser Gilaroff, was a man who'd been her on set hairdresser in many movies, and she turned to him because he was He was not just a headdresser, he was a companion for years. He didn't speak then just before he died, he did talk to me, and he told me that at the time of her death, consumed about the way she was being treated by John Kennedy, the president, and Bobby Kennedy, the attorney General. He said that she had told him on the night she died that she had just seen Bobby Kennedy. Separate from that, I was able to interview Schaeffer, the head of the ambulance company, and to nine of the people who worked for his ambudence company, and I am quite sure that although you won't find it in the newspapers that an ambulance did attend her house that night, it seems that best account of her dying is one that in fact makes Bobby Kennedy look more compassionate than the ruthless, potential killer that he's sometimes described her. It seems to me that in all probability, Marilyn Monroe had not died. Bobby Kennedy was, for one reason or another, called to the house to talk to Marilyn. That she became comatose, that an ambulance took her to a hospital, but nearing the hospital, and this I have to extrapolate from the evidence. An ambulance man said to her, sir, she's gone. What is the Attorney General of the United States left in the middle of the night in an ambulance with the dead Marilyn Monroe? What is he going to do? I believe that he turned the ambulance around and took her to her home where she was found dead. Imbeddi a psychiatrist brother later in the night, and he got a sound damn fast And there's evidence for that as well. But that is a story for me, not a scenario, not of cruelty, but of compassion, and then of a public man running that hell.
00:11:32
Speaker 1: Anthony Summers is my guest. His book is called Goddess, The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. You can see the Netflix documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe The Unheard Tapes. Final question is who or what in your mind is your Marilyn? How do you remember her, how do you celebrate her? How do you think of her? On this day that would have been her hundredth birthday?
00:11:56
Speaker 2: The poor creature suffered more because of her own success. But a beautiful woman with all sorts, of all manner of tragedy surrounding her, including her own. One major part of her tragedy that we haven't touched on was that she dearly wanted to have children and she suffered from endometriosis. Too many women suffer from it still today. She suffered from endometriosis, which essentially meant that she was unlikely ever to give birth, and that is a dominant theme in her life as a woman.
00:12:38
Speaker 1: I do hope that she would understand the fascination and the fandom and the admiration that she still has Anthony one hundred years on.
00:12:48
Speaker 2: I'm not sure that she would. She was a real psychological model and its emotional muddle, but she was a striking woman of her depth in a cinema world in which hardly anybody can be sent to remain safely in their depth.
00:13:10
Speaker 1: It's a fascinating book, it's a fascinating documentary. Thank you so much for your time, Thank you for putting in the work too. Who's told you, Anthony Summers. The book is called Goddess The Sacred Lives of Marilyn Monroe from Ireland. My guess
