Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  The meeting was a milestone in researchers’ efforts to discover what documents the FBI really holds on Marilyn Monroe. In 1980 the Bureau had referred to its Monroe references as ‘voluminous’, yet persistent applications had obtained only a handful of material. This did show that, since 1955, the FBI had kept a ‘105’ file on Marilyn, a designation that technically applies to ‘foreign counter-intelligence matters.’ In practice, under J. Edgar Hoover, it provided a pretext to investigate any person who did anything remotely political.

  Marilyn’s ‘105’ file related to her contacts with people the Bureau regarded as left-wing, dating from her relationship with playwright Arthur Miller and his associates. The FBI informed me, that the file contained thirty-one pages, of which only thirteen could be released — and those with portions heavily censored.

  The withholding was justified under three main categories: protection of privacy, of agency sources — and under the B-1 exemption. ‘B-1’, though used to cover many foreign affairs subjects, is meant to cover matters of national security.

  Even District Attorney’s investigators, looking into the Marilyn case in 1982, had been unable to see certain FBI material. The reason, they were told, was that it reflected monitoring of Marilyn’s activity in Mexico in February 1962, six months before her death.

  In Mexico, as reported in this book, Marilyn was escorted by a man the FBI had been watching doggedly for more than half a century, Frederick Vanderbilt Field. Field had left the United States a decade earlier, wearied by a long persecution for his communist sympathies, and by a spell in prison for refusing to give congressional investigators the names of his Communist friends.

  By 1962, Field was one of a group of some twenty-five expatriate Americans, including members of the Hollywood Ten, film-makers whose careers had been destroyed during the McCarthy era. These people were Field’s close friends, and he married a Mexican wife who had modelled for the artist — and Communist — Diego Rivera. In the eyes of the Legal Attaché’s office at the Mexico City Embassy, the local FBI base, Field was a target for permanent surveillance.

  With that in mind, my lawyer applied for release of FBI documents on Field, narrowing the request to the year in which he met Marilyn Monroe. To thwart FBI censorship in the name of Field’s privacy, Field himself supported the application. Meanwhile, with Peter Lawford’s death in 1984, his files too became vulnerable to the Freedom of Information Act. The Field and Lawford suits bore fruit, after complex legal manoeuvring, with the release of two hidden documents from Marilyn’s ‘105’ file.

  The two documents, dated March 6 and July 13, 1962, appear in both the Lawford and Field files (see following pages). Headed ‘MARILYN MONROE — SECURITY MATTER — C (Communist)’, the reports originate with the FBI in Mexico, and are addressed to the Director and other FBI offices. As the reader can see, the actual content of the reports is obliterated by the censor’s pen. Even so, for the stubborn researcher, they came as a breakthrough — above all the July document, dated just three weeks before Marilyn’s death.

  It was a fair guess that the March report, filed three days after Marilyn’s departure from Mexico, dealt with her friendship with leftists like the Fields. But why a report as late as July? And why, as FBI correspondence revealed, had several pages of the documents been withheld altogether?

  In response to these questions the FBI agreed to participate in a curious procedure permissible under the Act. In the meeting at FBI headquarters, my attorney faced Peterson, the FBI’s Unit Chief for Appeals. Armed with the blacked-out documents, he was permitted to question Peterson, who had before him the original, uncensored file.

  For more than an hour the FBI man — like a card player flashing part of his hand — gave cautious answers to my attorney’s questions. It seems a silly game, but the rewards were ample.

  Unit Chief Peterson explained that much of the censorship was designed to protect an intelligence source — a human being rather than an electronic device, who had supplied the information. That person, who was the source of all the information, was evidently close to Fred Field during Marilyn’s Mexico stay, and also had direct contact with Marilyn.

  A number of people had such access; Field introduced Marilyn to a number of his own left-wing friends. Eunice Murray, Marilyn’s companion — who had herself once been married to a U.S. labour activist — had a brother-in-law in Mexico City, Churchill Murray. He arranged a party at which Marilyn met diplomats and government officials. Meanwhile there was twenty-six-year-old José Bolaños, the Mexican film-maker who became Marilyn’s lover in Mexico.

  Fred Field advised Marilyn to stop seeing Bolaños, whom he saw as ‘a man of left-wing pretensions, deeply mistrusted by the real left.’ The relationship, however, continued until she died. Then, according to press reports, Bolaños rebuffed police efforts to question him. When I interviewed him, he admitted that he had travelled to Los Angeles after the Mexico meeting, and that he and Marilyn had secret meetings at an apartment there. Bolaños also said that — in their telephone call on the night she died — Marilyn told him ‘something that will one day shock the whole world.’ At the time of the interview — in 1983 — I did not take him too seriously. Having glimpsed FBI’s Security file on Marilyn, one wonders.

  The FBI said that to reveal its source for the Mexico documents could cause embarrassment — even today — to the Mexican government. In 1962, Mexican security officials worked closely with U.S. intelligence, and some censorship in the new Marilyn documents had been requested by an agency other than the FBI. That agency, almost certainly, is the CIA.

  Along with the freelance eavesdroppers, U.S. agents had been watching the Kennedy brothers as they dallied with Marilyn. Former FBI Supervisor William Kane said he recalled, ‘from internal doings at the time’, that reports came in of ‘the presence of Robert Kennedy’s car parked in her driveway.’ Another source named a senior FBI official, a former Assistant Director, as having directed surveillance.

  For J. Edgar Hoover, spying on the Kennedys was nothing new. He had listened delightedly, as far back as World War II, to the FBI tapes of John Kennedy, Ensign in Naval Intelligence, making love with Inga Arvad, suspected enemy agent. Already, in 1962, Hoover had ordered surveillance of Kennedy’s lover, Judith Campbell. It would be an odd omission not to be watching the Kennedys with Marilyn, so the existence of the Mexico file is not startling — the content is.

  Four documents were discussed at the FBI briefing on the file. They cover the period from Marilyn’s February visit to Mexico to the summer of 1963. Three reports summarize her association with Field and his friends, concern that she was meeting them, and — awful notion — the impression that Arthur Miller’s socialist ideas had rubbed off on Marilyn Monroe.

  The fascinating part of the material concerns the Kennedy brothers. The March 6 document reports that Marilyn ‘spent time with Robert Kennedy at Lawford’s home’, and that they discussed political issues. Field well remembered Marilyn confiding that — along with a number of liberal causes — she and Robert Kennedy discussed the Kennedys’ desire to fire J. Edgar Hoover. José Bolaños, for his part, says Marilyn told him of long, heated discussions with the Attorney General about American policy towards Cuba. Pressed for detail, Bolaños remained tightlipped.

  It is the FBI briefing on the July 13 report, though, that is most troubling. The document, and an accompanying Domestic Intelligence Division note, reports something the source had heard direct from Marilyn herself. She is quoted as saying she had ‘attended a luncheon at Peter Lawford’s residence’ with one of the Kennedy brothers. The conversation, says the report, had included discussion of ‘significant questions.’ One subject, to quote the FBI briefer verbatim, had been ‘the morality of atomic testing.’

  As reported in the FBI briefing, the luncheon had been ‘a few days’ before July 13, which has to mean either in the first two weeks of that month, or — at the earliest — in late June. The FBI report indicates that the Kennedy brother mee
ting Marilyn had been the President. Initial inquiry shows no day in the relevant time-frame when John Kennedy could have been in Los Angeles — he made an official visit to Mexico at the end of June. Research for this book suggests that the President did on occasion travel covertly. At least once — according to the widow of Marilyn’s press agent, Arthur Jacobs — he flew secretly to meet Marilyn in California. The record, though, makes it more likely that the luncheon was with Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

  FBI files show that Robert was in Los Angeles from the afternoon of June 26 till the morning of June 28. As reported earlier, he did see Marilyn during that visit. He would decide to fly west again two weeks later, to Nevada, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor. His specific purpose was to witness an atomic test.

  The atom bomb was the major international issue in 1962. Indeed, there has been no year when the nuclear issue was more immediately serious. The Test Ban Treaty would not be signed till the following year. In the spring, following anti-nuclear demonstrations, the United States had set off the first explosion in the megaton range, and begun a series of controversial firings of the Polaris missile. The first week of July, in the Nevada desert, saw the first known detonation of a hydrogen bomb on U.S. territory. More tests followed in the next fortnight, and it was one of these that Robert Kennedy observed.

  Late June 1962 was only sixteen weeks away from the moment the world came closest to nuclear war, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fidel Castro, expecting another U S. invasion, was making urgent appeals to the Soviet Union for help. In early July Nikita Khrushchev made his fateful decision to ship ballistic missiles to Cuba. Already, U.S. aircraft were photographing Soviet vessels en route to Havana, and the surveillance would shortly discover that long-range missiles were being delivered.

  This was the period in which, according to the information in Marilyn’s FBI Security file, one of the Kennedy brothers — more probably Robert — discussed atomic testing with the actress. There is no suggestion in the file so far released — nor by this author — that either Kennedy blurted out state secrets to Marilyn. The point is that any private conversation by the Attorney General or the President on this subject would at that time have been of the utmost interest to Soviet intelligence.

  It is clear, from the author’s interviews with Marilyn’s contacts in Mexico — Frederick Field and José Bolaños — that Robert Kennedy did discuss important issues, including Cuba, with Marilyn. Bolaños said he last saw Marilyn in early July, the very time she reportedly mentioned her conversation with a Kennedy brother about atom tests. That same month Frederick Field, a man prominently identified as a Communist and involved with communist sympathizers in Mexico, was on a visit to the United States — staying at Marilyn’s New York apartment. Field’s FBI file shows that, in June and July, he was under intense surveillance. One document shows that the FBI was on the look-out, specifically, for any contact between Field and Marilyn.

  In the circumstances, and at this crucial time, J. Edgar Hoover’s vigilance was justified. In the light of the latest FBI releases — and we do not yet have complete access to the file — Marilyn’s contact with the Kennedy brothers had made her a potential danger. However naively, Marilyn liked to see herself as a supporter of the Left. According to José Bolaños, she had ‘a blinding row’ with Robert Kennedy over Cuba, one that led him to tell her she was ‘turning communist.’

  Whatever Marilyn prattled about her talks with the Kennedys — whether to actual Communists or in the Mafia milieu of the Cal-Neva Lodge, a group of men with their own malign interest in Cuba — she was a potential risk. However innocuous the brothers’ comments, their enemies could use them to advantage. Their famous plaything was a volatile woman, running to her psychiatrist every day, the wrong woman to be on intimate terms with the President and the Attorney General.

  Marilyn Monroe, weeks before her death, was a security risk — and the fault was the Kennedys’.

  Former Los Angeles Police Chief Tom Reddin, who succeeded the Chief in office when Marilyn died, said the new FBI material ‘explains why the real file hasn’t surfaced yet. There was not only a major embarrassment for the Kennedys, but also apparently a national security implication.’

  Reddin said he was told ‘in house,’ back in 1962, that — following an inquiry by the police Intelligence Division — a major report had been written. ‘An Intelligence Division file,’ Reddin said, ‘should be kept in perpetuity.’ Where is it now?

  The Los Angeles authorities have said new investigation could only be justified if there were grounds to suspect murder. There is no Statute of Limitation on murder. Assistant District Attorney Ronald Carroll, who ran the ‘threshold enquiry’ in 1982, later concluded, ‘We would have looked further if we had known, back then, of the statement that some individuals knew Monroe was dead five or six hours before the police were called.’ Carroll agreed, too, that there was only superficial inquiry into allegations that Monroe’s last hours were secretly tape-recorded.

  The man who conducted Marilyn’s autopsy, Thomas Noguchi, has said there should be a new official investigation. He had long since voiced his suspicion that the scene of death was ‘disturbed’. In October, 1985, on ABC’s Eye-Witness News, Noguchi said there was evidence that should be looked into.

  ‘She had a bruise, on her back or near the hip, that has never been fully explained,’ Noguchi told his interviewer. ‘We did not look into the collaborative (sic) evidence … and before we had a chance to study the stomach contents, the contents of the intestines — the specimens were no longer available. It might give the impression to the public that we have something to hide.’

  Later, speaking to reporters seeking clarification, Noguchi said of the bruise on Marilyn’s body, ‘There is no explanation for it, and it is a sign of violence.’ He said he could not be positive the actress was not murdered by injection. The former Coroner added, ‘I feel an inquiry or evaluation of the new information should be made, instead of the door being closed.’

  Mike Antonovich, of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, insisted that the ‘Numerous inconsistencies and new discoveries — including the issue of timing and the mysterious ambulance episode — should be investigated. If the autopsy surgeon believes there was possibly violence, he should be asked formally to explain what he means.’

  Conceivably, the case could be reopened even now — either by the Los Angeles District Attorney, using the Bureau of Investigation, or by a Special Prosecutor. That, however, seems highly unlikely.

  It is the reporter’s role to report, not to press officials to hold investigations. The end of this report must be to record the failure of the authorities — in 1962 or since — to hold a full and open inquiry into the death of a citizen. Truth has been a casualty of that failure.

  *William Golding’s book, published in 1954, was being turned into a film in 1962.

  *See p. 374

  *See p. 489.

  *In 1975, during a Senate inquiry into CIA involvement with other Government agencies, Morrissey admitted briefing a federal official on what was described as electronic assassination equipment.

  Bibliography

  On Marilyn Monroe

  Agan, Patrick. The Decline and Fall of the Love Goddesses. New York: Pinnacle, 1979.

  Anderson, Janice. Marilyn Monroe. New York: Hamlyn, 1983.

  Capell, Frank A. The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe. Herald of Freedom, 1966.

  Carpozi, George, Jr. The Agony of Marilyn Monroe. London: World Distributors, 1962.

  Conover, David. Finding Marilyn: A Romance. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1981.

  Conway, Michael, and Mark Ricci. The Films of Marilyn Monroe. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1973.

  Dougherty, James E. The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe. Chicago: Playboy, 1976.

  Franklin, Joe, and Laurie Palmer. The Marilyn Monroe Story. New York: Rudolph Field, 1953.

  Goode, James. The Story of the Misfits. New York: Bobbs-M
errill, 1963.

  Greenson, Joan. Unpublished manuscript by the daughter of Marilyn Monroe’s last psychiatrist.

  Guiles, Fred Lawrence. Norma Jean: The Life of Marilyn Monroe. London: W. H. Allen, 1969.

  —. Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe. London: Granada Publishing, 1985.

  Hoyt, Edwin P. Marilyn: The Tragic Venus. London: Robert Hale, 1967.

  Hudson, James A. The Mysterious Death of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Volitant, 1968.

  Hutchinson, Tom. The Screen Greats: Marilyn Monroe. New York: Exeter, 1982.

  Kobal, John, ed. Marilyn Monroe: A Life on Film. London: Hamlyn, 1974.

  Lembourn, Hans Jørgen. Forty Days with Marilyn Monroe. London: Arrow, Hutchinson, 1979.

  Lytess, Natasha, with Jane Wilkie. My Years with Marilyn. Unpublished manuscript (Zolotow Collection, University of Texas, Austin).

  Mailer, Norman. Marilyn. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974.

  —. Of Women and Their Elegance. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980.

  Martin, Pete. Will Acting Spoil Marilyn Monroe? New York: Doubleday, 1956.

  Mellen, Joan. Marilyn Monroe. London: Star Books, W. H. Allen, 1974.

  Monroe, Marilyn. My Story. London: W. H. Allen, 1974.

  Moore, Robin, and Gene Schoor. Marilyn & Joe DiMaggio. New York: Manor, 1977.

  Murray, Eunice, with Rose Shade. Marilyn: The Last Months. New York: Pyramid, 1975.

  Pepitone, Lena, and William Stadiem. Marilyn Monroe Confidential. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979.

  Robinson, David, and John Kobal. Marilyn Monroe: A Life on Film. New York: Hamlyn, 1974.

  Rosten, Norman. Marilyn: An Untold Story. London, Millington Ltd, 1974.

  Sciacca, Tony Who Killed Marilyn? New York: Manor, 1976.

  Shaw, Sam. Marilyn Monroe as the Girl: The Making of ‘The Seven Year Itch’ in Pictures. New York: Ballantine, 1955.

  Skolsky, Sidney. The Story of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Dell, 1954.