Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (24 page)

Slatzer’s were not the only revelations of forgotten diaries or hidden recordings. Indeed, all the various agencies already mentioned, plus—according to some more way-out theorists—a paranoid Marilyn herself and Twentieth Century-Fox, were supposed to have bugged the Monroe house. Yet not one of the dozens of tapes that must have been made has ever surfaced for examination. There have been only “transcripts” or “eyewitness accounts” of the hard evidence, which has always conveniently disappeared from history.

One prime example of this kind of Monroevian evolution is afforded by the work of Matthew Smith, a Sheffield-based writer who has presumably made a good living out of Kennedyana in recent years, publishing
JFK: The Second Plot
in 1992 (Patrolman J. D. Tippit was in on it, apparently),
Vendetta: The Kennedys
(1993),
Say Goodbye to America: The Sensational and Untold Story Behind the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(2002), and
The Kennedys: The Conspiracy to Destroy a Dynasty
(2006). In this last book, Smith constructs an overarching theory that connects the deaths of Marilyn, JFK, RFK, and Mary Jo Kopechne, the girl who died in Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick in 1969. It was all—all of it—the work of elements within the CIA. They saw JFK as being too left-wing and bumped Marilyn off to discredit the Kennedys, both of whom were having affairs with the star at her bugged bungalow in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, that didn’t work, so they killed JFK the next year, and then, for some reason, waited another five years before getting rid of Bobby. The next year they arranged for Ted to drive his car, complete with a young woman, off a bridge, thus destroying his chances of the presidency.

Two difficulties with Smith’s thesis are that there is no evidence of Monroe having entertained JFK at the Los Angeles bungalow—their one attested liaison having taken place in 1960—and no real evidence that she ever had an affair at all with Robert. Until, that is, previously unknown recordings surfaced, to form the basis of Smith’s 2003 book
Victim: The Secret Tapes of Marilyn Monroe
.

In the preface to this work, Smith explained what had happened. A man named John Miner, who had been the head of the Los Angeles DA office’s medical legal section, had approached him with transcripts of two tapes made by Monroe herself shortly before she died. These tapes had been recorded for Ralph Greenson as part of a free-association exercise in which Monroe unburdened herself of various thoughts and memories, and were played by Greenson for Miner in the days after Monroe’s death on condition of the strictest confidentiality. Greenson’s aim, according to Smith, was to give Miner some idea of the star’s state of mind in the last days of her life. Despite the agreement with Greenson, Miner subsequently made “nearly verbatim” notes from memory, only breaking his silence when the by-now-deceased psychoanalyst was himself named as a possible Marilynicide.

As partially reproduced by Smith, the transcripts (not “tapes,” as he describes them) are both commercially comprehensive and properly incriminating. Marilyn begins by telling Greenson that this recording business is “really easy. I’m lying on the bed wearing only a brassiere. If I want to go to the refrig or the bathroom, I can push the stop button and begin again when I want to.”
²⁸
And she reminds Greenson (and thus Miner and thus Smith and thus the readers) that “you are the only person who will ever know the most private, the most secret thoughts of Marilyn Monroe.” And there it all is: her orgasms, her lesbian fling with Joan Crawford, the glitz, the sex, the high politics, and, of course, the Kennedys. And she finishes, “But Bobby, Doctor, what should I do about Bobby? As you see there’s no room in my life for him . . . I want someone else to tell him it’s over. I tried to get the president to do it, but I couldn’t reach him.” She was going to give Bobby the kiss-off, and then she was dead. It was, as Sarah Churchwell puts it in her serious biography of Marilyn,
The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe
, “thoughtful of Marilyn to dispose of so many of our questions about her life just before she died and to offer summary versions of all her most famous relationships to the psychiatrist she’d been seeing daily for two years.”
²⁹

So where were the original tapes? Greenson’s wife had never heard of them. No suggestion of them ever turned up in the Anna Freud archives. The first time they were ever mentioned was by Miner himself in a review of the Monroe case in 1982, and even then, despite Greenson’s death in 1979, Miner made no mention of any transcripts. In fact, there was only Miner’s word that the tapes had ever existed at all. Smith has told the
Los Angeles Times
that he believes Miner to be “a man of integrity.” He also said, “I’ve looked at the contents of the tapes, of course, and, frankly, I would think it entirely impossible for John Miner to have invented what he put forward—absolutely impossible.”
³⁰

Even a fairly casual look at what has been published reveals the absurdity of this claim. It would have been entirely possible for someone who had followed the theories about, and biographies of, Marilyn over the years to concoct such a story. Indeed, as Churchwell suggests, the transcripts seem credible only as a fabrication. Wearing only her brassiere, indeed!

And the motive for any such hoax is obvious too: Smith, of course, paid Miner an undisclosed fee for the use of the transcript. As rival Marilyn biographer and conspiracy theorist Anthony Summers revealed in 2005, Miner had been hawking his supposed transcript around the theorizing community for the best part of a decade. “What happened in 1995,” Summers told a television interviewer, “was that Miner got in touch to say he was going to let go what he claimed to have heard Monroe say on the purported tapes. He said he had seventy to eighty handwritten pages of what he called manuscript-type notes of what he supposedly heard back in 1962. He obviously wanted money . . . and he spoke of having been offered six-figure sums for his story.”
³¹
Skeptical about how anyone could reconstruct from memory eighty pages’ worth of Monroe speaking, Summers had asked to see the original shorthand notes. After a few months, all that Miner produced was a thirty-five-page condensation written on a yellow legal pad only a few weeks previously. “I said thanks, but no thanks,” said Summers, adding, “I don’t understand why any reputable paper like the
New York Times
, like the
LA Times
would decide to run the material.”
³²

More Forgeries

If Smith was taken in, he wasn’t the only one. One of the legendary investigative reporters of the last fifty years is Seymour Hersh, who currently writes for
The New Yorker
. In his book debunking the golden myth of the Kennedys,
The Dark Side of Camelot,
Hersh states as fact what can only be supposition, that Miner “was given confidential access to a stream-of-consciousness tape-recording Monroe made at the recommendation of her psychoanalyst . . . Miner put together what he considered to be a near-verbatim transcript of the tapes.” These tapes, said Hersh, helped to prove that “Monroe’s instability posed a constant threat to [John F.] Kennedy.”
³³

In Hersh’s book, the reference to Miner nearly had to play second fiddle to spectacular new evidence linking Kennedy to Monroe. For Hersh had come across a separate cache of astonishing documents and agreements—this time proving, among other dark things, that JFK had agreed to pay the film star $1 million in hush money to keep her quiet both about their affair and also about JFK’s supposed relationship with Mafia boss Sam Giancana. The source of these hundreds of new documents was Lex Cusack, whose father had worked as a lawyer for Marilyn Monroe’s mother before her death. Cusack found them, he claimed, when his father died in 1991, and over the next few years he would go on to earn up to $7 million through sales of the documents to dealers and middlemen. It was one of these, John Reznikoff, president of the University Archives at Stamford, who introduced the documents to Seymour Hersh, then in the process of researching his Kennedy book. Hersh was excited, clearly believing them to be genuine: one journalist wrote of him brandishing the documents in a restaurant and shouting, “The Kennedys were . . . the worst people!”
³⁴

Whatever Hersh agreed to pay Cusack or anyone else for the documents, they certainly seemed worth it, since NBC television agreed to pay $1 million for the rights to a documentary based on the forthcoming book. However, as was later revealed by the
New York Times
, NBC started to express doubts to Hersh about the authenticity of the documents and then pulled out of the project.
³⁵
ABC took up where NBC left off, and it was ABC’s investigation, involving forensic testing, that demonstrated that the Cusack documents were fakes. Hersh removed all reference to them from his book, and in 1999, Lex Cusack was sentenced to ten years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of $7 million to his victims.

Hersh had had a narrow escape. Of course, there are those who question why he did not himself have the documents forensically analyzed, given the obvious questions about their provenance and the amount of money riding on their authenticity. One possibility is that they suited him so well he couldn’t bear them to be fakes—so they weren’t.

Belief is all-important. In the foreword to Smith’s book of dubious tapes, Monroe’s fellow actor Donald O’Connor writes, “I knew her well enough to believe she could not have killed herself; it was not in her nature. She was murdered, but by whom?”
³⁶
It is impossible to ask the late Mr. O’Connor just what kind of “nature” he thought a suicidal person may have. Perhaps it was simply that he didn’t
want
to believe that she could have killed herself. Certainly, for many of her fans and contemporaries the thought of the self-slaughter of someone so wealthy, popular, talented, and, of course, beautiful was almost too much to bear. And if she was killed, the thought didn’t have to be borne. It was far easier to see her as a pawn of powerful political forces.

“The conspiracies surrounding Monroe’s death are
always
about the intersection of her story with politics,” wrote Sarah Churchwell. “There are not similarly powerful theories surrounding the untimely death of any other celebrity except Diana Princess of Wales.”
³⁷

And Exit the Princess of Hearts

Bernie Taupin wrote “Candle in the Wind,” the famous song about Marilyn Monroe, for Elton John. Almost a quarter of a century later, Taupin updated it for the dead Diana, Princess of Wales.

The week of August 31 to September 6, 1997, which ended with Elton John’s singing “Goodbye England’s Rose” in Westminster Abbey, was one of the strangest that I can remember. The news of the death of Diana in a Paris car smash was followed by a public grieving completely unexpected in a nation that had previously understood itself to be phlegmatic in a crisis; the Spirit of the Blitz was somehow replaced by Men Can Cry Too. TV presenters wept on air; men and women spoke of how Diana’s death had acted as a point of contact between the public world and their own private agonies and disasters; commentators told us all about the new feminization of society and how this moment marked a break with the past. Outside Buckingham Palace and in Kensington Gardens, hundreds of thousands of still-wrapped bouquets created plateaus of cellophane. Every day brought some surprise. One of these wonders was the hostility shown by the public, and articulated by a guilty media, toward the surviving royal family. “They” had driven her to her death with their repressed emotions, their coldness, their affairs, their lack of empathy. At best, it had been a case of neglect: Diana was a fabulous plant needing warmth and water, and had received instead a windy place on a north-facing step. At worst, “they” wanted to be rid of her.

Twenty-one months earlier, in November 1995, Diana had given an extraordinary interview to Martin Bashir of the BBC’s
Panorama
, an interview whose planning was kept secret by top executives from the corporation’s royalist chairman, Marmaduke Hussey. Among many other revelations, the encounter emphasized Diana’s own belief that she was now victim of a paranoia gripping her husband’s family and their entourage. In a question almost certainly agreed upon with Diana beforehand, Bashir asked the princess whether she would ever be queen:

DIANA:
I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts, in people’s hearts, but I don’t see myself being queen of this country. I don’t think many people will want me to be queen. Actually, when I say many people I mean the Establishment that I married into, because they have decided that I’m a non-starter . . . I just don’t think I have as many supporters in that environment as I did.

BASHIR:
You mean within the royal household?

DIANA:
Uh-huh. They see me as a threat of some kind, and I’m here to do good. I’m not a destructive person.

BASHIR:
Why do they see you as a threat?

DIANA:
I think every strong woman in history has had to walk down a similar path, and I think it’s the strength that causes the confusion and the fear. Why is she strong? Where does she get it from? Where is she taking it? Where is she going to use it? Why do the public still support her?