Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

Marilyn Monroe. She's got to be one of the most famous people of all time, hasn't she?But what happens when an investigative war reporter dedicates years of his life to finding out who real Marilyn was, interviewing hundreds of people who knew her, from her co-stars, to her psychiatrist’s family, to her hairdresser?Today Kate is Betwixt the Sheets with journalist Anthony Summers who began his research after the inquest into Marilyn's death was reopened in 1982.Hear what he discovered about her relationship with the Kennedy brothers, her mental health, and the circumstances surrounding her death.You can find out more about Anthony's book, Goddess, here.*WARNING there are naughty words and adult themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Edited and mixed by Thomas Ntinas.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. This is Kate Lister, jumping in with your fair do's warning. Fair do's, this podcast is going to contain adult themes of an adult nature. We're going to be veering into some adult-like themes. Today we are talking about Marilyn Monroe. Oh, love a bit of Marilyn.

But we will be talking about mental health issues. We'll be talking about violence and we'll be talking about sex as well. Maybe you just don't want to listen to that one this time, in which case, not a problem. I'll see you next time round. But there was clearly an intimacy and a closeness and something once again that put her in the orbit of the president and his brother

in a way that when they were in the White House was certainly compromising. Is this a blue Maryland, a new style? No, I'm the same person. But it's a different suit. Marilyn Monroe. She's got to be one of the most famous people of all time. But what happens when an investigative war reporter

dedicates years of his life interviewing hundreds, almost a thousand people who knew her, from her co-stars to her psychiatrist's family, to her hairdresser? Can you ever find out who the real Marilyn was? Well, today we're looking into the hidden lives of Marilyn Monroe. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the money. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness had nothing to do with it, Derry. You'd be hard-pressed to find somebody that hasn't heard of Marilyn Monroe. And to be honest, I don't think I'd want to know someone who hadn't heard of Marilyn Monroe.

I'm quite a fan. But 60 years after her death, she's still intriguing people. With the new Netflix movie, Blonde, with Anna De Amos coming to Netflix, the infatuation is just growing and growing. Today we're getting betwixt the sheets to try and find out more about Marilyn.

From her affairs with the Kennedys, to her mental health, to the circumstances surrounding her untimely death at the age of just 36. My guest today is journalist Anthony Summers, who was a war reporter before he started to investigate Marilyn Monroe after the inquest into her death was reopened in 1982. He interviewed a thousand people,

including Marilyn's gentleman-prefered blonde co-star, Jane Russell, Marilyn's hairdresser and the family of her psychiatrist who lived with Marilyn when her mental health was in a particularly vulnerable state. Anthony's dedicated years of his life separating facts from fiction in the myth of Marilyn Monroe, and I'm speaking to him about some of his fascist. exciting discoveries during this episode. I hope you enjoy. Hello and thank you for joining me Anthony Summers. I'm so thrilled to talk to you today. Good to be here. Now, I am a huge fan of your work and I'm a

huge fan of Marilyn and your work, goddess, the lives of Marilyn Monroe, is pretty much the authority on the subject, isn't it? It's absolutely epic. And one of the things that I'm really interested in is why did you call it lives of Marilyn, plural. Is that how you view Marilyn? As there were multiple lives? I think maybe that one should add that all of us have multiple lives. She certainly did. And some of them we know nothing about yet because she kept them secret or because they were by nature hidden. Yeah. That's probably why. I was thinking about this in the lead up to this interview and it's a question that I've always been wrangling and I know that it's one that's been put to you endlessly is what is it about Marilynne that continues to entrance people and

fascinate people and do you have an answer for that what is it it's not just that she was beautiful there's many beautiful people out there what do you think it was well Marilyn Monroe was absolutely not my pin-up when I was a young lad at school I think without being quite sure of my fidelity I think that Natalie Wood, if there was a Hollywood actress that I thought of as a pinup, that was probably Natalie Wood. I fell into doing the Marilyn Monroe story. I had been spending a lot of time. I worked for the BBC back then, mostly on foreign assignments. I've been in Vietnam a lot, too much.

And war situations in the Middle East, too much. and a friend in big newspaper in London asked me if I would go to Los Angeles to report on the new investigation into the death of Marilyn Monroe and I thought, well, there's a rewarding assignment from a major newspaper, but yeah, I'll go and do it. And I got to Los Angeles, found myself completely out of my depth

because I had not specialised in show business, knew nothing about it. Brand new to show biz as a subject. You'd never covered anything Hollywood glitzy before? No, not at all. And so there I was padding around a sort of war correspondent type

person in the lunacy of Hollywood. And the first thing I realized was this was not a story that I could just, I could, but I'd make a mess of it, that this was not a story I could properly report. The more I pecked at it for the newspaper, the more it eluded me. Both the facts of her death eluded me

because it was surrounded by so much gossip and garbage and non-facts. And the more the woman herself alluded me. So I got in touch with the man who'd commissioned the article and said, look, I don't think I'm going to do this. And he said, it's all right. You need to send me the effort to Los Angeles back. But if you're going to do a book instead, I want first rights to the serial. And so I started into it. I stayed in Los Angeles, I think now at that point for about 18 months. I did what I think now was about a thousand interviews, of which, and this I know, because I have the recordings, I did some 650 recorded interviews with individuals and built an archive in the way that I had built archives running investigative stories for the BBC.

Eventually had something that turned out to. be completely unique. And the result was the book which mercifully thank the gods of publishing really worked. It's a phenomenal piece. And interviewing a thousand people for this book, that is a staggering undertaking. But you can hear all these voices to the book all the time talking and talking. And it just gives you so many different perspectives on who this woman was. And I'm wondering if your past as a war journalist prepared you for this in any way. Did it help at all? Not so much my work covering conflicts, I think, although I tried to be very careful about the interviews covering conflict

because the people affected by conflict are really affected very personally. So I think I had by that time come to be an almost boringly careful person. And so in that sense, yes, but I had also worked, started an investigative unit within the panorama outfit at the BBC. And that, obviously, since it was an investigative unit, involved concentration and focus on stories and individuals taking one particular angle of a story and pursuing just that angle where others pursued their own angles. So I suppose you could say that everything I'd been doing up to then in a way prepared me for it. I had broken off to write a book earlier about the assassination of President Kennedy, and that had involved an enormous amount of information and focus. So perhaps I was the best and worst person to have embarked on this book,

but it worked in the end. It absolutely worked. So when you first started this, you can't have thought to yourself, I'm going to interview a thousand people, or maybe you did. But who are the people that you really wanted to talk to? Who are the people that when you got hold of them and you spoke to them? you're like, yes, these are the ones, this is going to change what people know about this woman. I suppose a knee-jerk thing to do was to start trying to find her family.

Not that it's rational to find that the family are close to a person because they certainly weren't in Marilyn's case. But by getting talked quite early on to her poor mother who was confined to a sort of mental asylum and, I mean, she was a religious fanatic. can find partly for that reason because of her fanaticism, her involvement with religion, talked to her, and that just gave me a taste of something to realize that this was the mother sort of with whom and then without whom Marilyn had grown to be an adult. And I look for her friends. And of course, in Hollywood, friend has a whole definition of its own. There are hundreds of thousands of people who thought of themselves as her friend,

that I was able to winnow through the crowds and get to people who seemed to me eventually to have been real friends. I'm thinking particularly of a poet. Marilyn liked to write poetry and to read other people's poetry and there was a poet called Norman Ruston who was from New York.

Marilyn spent a lot of her adult acting life in New York and she had made a friend of Norman Ruston and Norman Rustin had treated her not as though she was Marilyn Monroe, the famous star, but as though she was a human being who was interested in poetry and art. And it was soon enough, if you spend time with people, you begin to get a sense of how genuine and authentic their feelings are.

This was a man who'd known her in good times and bad times and indeed in the weeks and months shortly before she died. And so I got close to him, and I got close to a couple called the Greens, Milton and Amy Green, with whom she'd lived on the East Coast for a certain amount of time. And Amy had come to know Marilyn, she felt, as another woman, which was enormously helpful to me because I am a mere man, and I wanted to learn what I could about Marilyn as a woman. and this woman who was and is now from New York to the wilds of the Far East is still a symbol of something to do with human sex life. How was she as an actual woman? And from Amy Green, one learned about the sad personal side

of a woman who suffered from horrendous physical problems associated with childbearing or rather the inability to bear children and who confided, who had such terrible problems with her periods, for example, that she would ask someone driving the car to stop the car, and she would stagger out of the car and lie on the grass verge, doubled up and groaning, which was not everyone's image of the glamorous Marilyn Monroe. Learned a lot about her from her friend, Amy Green, who struck me as truthful.

One of the other jobs on this assignment, of course, all the time, when you're dealing with somebody as famous and infamous as Marilyn Monroe is the author's ability to know when somebody is telling the truth. That was an issue every day all the time. I mean, when I was reading the book and I was watching the Netflix series that's based on the book as well, I did find myself asking that question. This is somebody that people like to tell stories about. How do you decipher who is telling,

maybe not even people that are knowingly lying, but people, you know, we deceive ourselves, maybe our truth isn't quite what we think it is. How do you have a nose for that? How do you try and work out who is being genuine in a thousand interviews? Well, there's the old jigsaw factor. If you're talking about what facts are true and what facts may not be true or maybe lies, if you have an allegation about a fact or an event from one person and it's sitting there like a sore thumb, and then you have another person who tells something like it,

and then three or four more people so that the jigsaw goes together. I mean, it isn't complicated. It isn't really Dorothy Thayer's detective story stuff. When the jigsaw all fits, you can begin to be rather satisfied that you've perhaps found something approximate to the truth. You had access to the family and the notes of the psychiatrist that have been working with Marilyn. up until she died. Is that right?

I did. I was very fortunate. She'd been for several years before she died, seeing a psychiatrist called Dr. Greenson, G-R-E-E-N-S-O-N. And he was a very prominent psychiatrist on the West Coast, in other words, a man who'd seen many Hollywood stars and looked after them.

And he took on Marilyn, and she made enormous demands on him so that by the end, near the end, he was seeing her sometimes six or seven times a week. Wow, that's a lot. Yes, of course, and enormously expensive, and you could say a mistake on his part. But he felt a simple thing about her in the end, and I think not far into the treatment, he thought, wait a minute, here's a woman who is unmoored.

She has no meaningful family. She has her mother in the mental asylum. She has friends and friends in quotes in Hollywood. This is a woman who needs a sister, needs a family, needs a mother, and it was completely contrary to Freudian psychiatry practice to invite someone into your home, but that's what he did. And Marilyn would arrive and go walking with Greenson's daughter, who was, I may be wrong, but was about 18, late teens,

and to Marilyn's early 30s at that point. He had a young son, young Hollywood left winger, and he had his solid wife, Greenson's wife, Hildee, originally Swiss, was a good and proper lady who saw the family at meals at the right time and that they went for walks and did all those good, sensible things. In other words, gave Marilyn an anchor a sort of solid base to live. And Marilyn, all sorts of psychiatry says that's completely wrong, and you don't do that for your patients, and you get too far in, and there may have been an element to that.

but that's how he treated her. But nevertheless, perhaps as a preparation for where this interview, I fear, will go as we continue talking. Let me just read to you what Dr. Greenson wrote, because I very happily, and more about that in a minute, I eventually got to see some of his private professional papers. And he said that she, he thought of her after her death as a woman, quote, with extremely, extremely weak psychological structures, ego weakness, and certain psychotic manifestations, including those of schizophrenia. In his professional language, that's what we're dealing with, I think, here.

How did I get to these private papers? Because I was bloody lucky. Went to see the Brinson family once I got their trust on many occasions. And finally, Hildy Grinson, the doctor's widow, said to me. me, if you'll come with me into Greenson's study, and she pulled out a drawer, and there were all the letters that Greenson had written to Marilyn's East Coast, New York psychiatrist, keeping her, she was another very prominent psychiatrist called Dr. Marianne Chris, and he wrote to her saying, I've seen Marilyn this week and last week and so on, and this is what I have.

to report. And then when Marilyn got to New York, that Dr. Chris would have that letter and she would write back in turn to Greenson. So one had a record of the relationship and in a sense of record of Marilyn's life through the eyes of her psychiatrist, going back for quite a long way. And the lovely irony, if you're me, is that those papers are now all locked up and won't be viewable by researchers, I gather for another, I think it's another 20 years. And I saw them and was able to record chunks of them. That's just a historian's dream. That's just unbelievable.

I mean, he touched on there is that, I think that that's probably one of the things that's so appealing about Marilyn in a strange way is that fragility is she wasn't, I don't want to say she wasn't well, but she was... The word that she uses is waif, that she's a waif. Do you think that's why we find her appealing is because there is something very vulnerable about her? We all want to fix her.

I'm going to fix you, Marilyn. Oh, if only we could have helped, if only we could have done something, this lovely, fragile, brilliant woman and we could have saved her from herself. That part of her appeal. I doubt we should have taken on the hope of saving her from herself.

She did see herself as a waive. She was a waif. She'd grown up a waif. She had in her childhood, she hadn't known her father. Her mother had pointed to a portrait on the wall when she was a little girl of a man with a mustache who looked a little bit like the film star, Clark Gable, and said, that man looks a bit like your father. Marilyn never had a father. She went off on expeditions to go and look for her father. And I think she probably did find him in later life, a man living in Southern California.

I went and dug him up. He was dead, but I went and looked up at the father's family after I started on working on the story and trying to put her life together. But she didn't know him. Her mother, she lost to, as we said, mental asylum. And so she did. Marilyn did literally become, in the true sense of the word, a waive living in several different orphanages at one point or another, even though she wasn't an actual orphan. And living with different people doing stand-in mothering for her, not actually being adopted, so never knowing quite how to place her need for love. Poor thing.

I mean, she was almost set from birth to be in a disaster zone, emotionally speaking. And that she was and that's how she lived and that's how she ended up. None of it should detract from the reality that Marilyn was very, very bright. She read enormously. People who have met so much about the disastrous Marilyn that sometimes the fact that she was very, very bright, extremely industrious, read hugely, kept a little record of her life in a series of little black books that she would always have on set, all sorts of people that talked about this, how she would write up her life, very keen on, not just on beauty, the beauty that people saw in the pin-up photographs,

but she, long before there was a fad in the world for going running to keep fit, Marilyn was running, I've got a picture of her doing it, through little alleyways and down quieter roads around because they existed back then in Los Angeles. And lifting weights. I've seen pictures of her lifting weights as well. She was a health freak long before there were any health freaks. She was an accomplished woman. There was just something causing missing in her emotional makeup that I think, when it's too simple to say doom a person to anything,

but seems to have doomed her to not only an inability to achieve happiness and self-assurance, but something, a missing cog in her personality that was more than that. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today.

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So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. Let's talk a little bit about the men in her life, because that was one of the big revelations from your book is the men in the life and the circumstances of her death. So she's very famous for having affairs with the Kennedys. Is that true or is that smoke and mirrors as well? Have you, she was having an affair with JFK and with his younger brother? Ah, what is an affair? True.

What is an affair when we're talking about JFK, John F. Kennedy? I think it becomes a bit clearer when we're talking about Robert F. Kennedy. his brother who was not known for his, as they say, that awful word womanising, in the same way as John F was known for that. Affairs? No, I don't think so. JFK was a WAMBAN thank you man fellow. He would never have survived the Me Too era, would he, ever?

Hardly. Hardly. There's a man who's quite sensible, retired doctor, who's been sending me in spare time documenting of JFK's love life, sex life, for years, and it runs into the hundreds and hundreds of women. Wow. And it's well-researched and a unique kind of document that's probably, because of the way it's done, not particularly exciting or sexy.

But it's a very fat dossier. What happened between JFK and Marilyn Monroe, I think, very little, very rarely, but it happened and it was nothing for him except she was Marilyn Monroe and of course it made him as all the womanizing he did when he was president it was another vulnerable act because she wasn't just another woman or another starlet making an allegation she was by that time Marilyn Monroe so he took a huge year and the risk became evident and what of Bobby Kennedy? Kennedy was very married. I think at... Like, they're very married.

Yes, he was. I think he and his wife, Ethel, had at that point, the point of Maryland's last month. I may be one-off, but they had about 10 children. I think it was eventually 11. That's very married. Wow. He is not known for his woman, I think. But I sat down to lunch in New York with Robert Kennedy's then-principle biographer, Arthur Schlesinger, who was a great... historian and a very interesting man. And he was very frank with me. He sat at lunch and he said, Mr. Summers, did anything happen between Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe? Let me just say that Bobby Kennedy was not a regular adulterer, but he was a man. He was a young man and he

traveled a lot and doors open sometimes for him. It was roughly what he said to me. And there it was. He was a man, and it was clear from the facts that I was able to put together that there was something between them that Marilyn Monroe had the phone number that she could reach Bobby Kennedy on as Attorney General at the Kennedy Justice Department. Okay. I talked to Robert Kennedy's secretary who sat at his side all day, and she told me, very frankly, that Marilyn would ring. she would ring often and the Attorney General would always speak to her. What did it mean?

Did it mean that there was also an affair with Marilyn Monroe? Well, Marilyn talked as if there was. Maybe there was an intimacy. Maybe there was a brief sexual contact. I don't know. I don't pretend to know. After all the work I've done,

but there was clearly an intimacy and a closeness and something once again that put her in the orbit of the president and his brother in a way that when they were in the White House was certainly compromising. She wasn't just another woman, was she? She was the most famous woman, the most famous sex symbol in the world.

And if she had spilled the tea, if she had said publicly what was happening, that would have had an impact, wouldn't it? Would certainly have had impact. How much she would have been believed will never find out, because the great expose never happened. The fact that it never happened may, as I write in the book, hopefully on good grounds, have a great deal to do with the final drama and what did or did not happen in her home in the last days and the last hours of her life. Because there's so many conspiracy theories surrounding Marilyn's death that she was

killed by the government, that she was killed by the mafia, that it was suicide, that it was a murder. And I've always thought that, well, I'll let you answer that, but I've never been convinced by the idea that somebody actually deliberately bumped her off. Because like you said, if she had come out and said something about the affairs with the Kennedys, who would have believed her, that would it have been that damage? What has your research shown about her death? And what is your take on what happened that day? Well, let's stick to the hard facts. There is no evidence for all rumorizing and talk about conspiracy and plans to murder her, there is no evidence that she died of anything other than a possible suicide, an overdose of drugs taken deliberately or, as she had

done in the past, simple accidental overdose. The medical reports and I talked to all the people who were at the autopsy, and all the people who attended on her home after she died, no one ever found an injection spot or evidence of blunt trauma or anything at all indicating that she was killed. The only sign that makes one think of something else, not necessarily suspicious, but something else having happened that's not clearly explained, is the very unrued. romantic fact that the doctor doing the autopsy found bruising in her rear entrance to her body, which may have indicated that she'd had an enema. Now, Marilyn Monroe, like many, many other

film stars before or since, often had enemers. People had them enemers in those days to lose weight because they had to be a certain weight for a certain costume or a certain film. Marilyn also had done that in the past. It is a way also that you could and can introduce barbiturates into the body through an enema just as you can by swallowing drugs. So that remains sort of a question mark. But for my money, putting all the facts and the timings and the complex information that we have about how she died, the time which she died, the last events, the last phone calls of her life do not indicate to me that she was murdered by anyone other than herself, if it was a deliberate suicide or possibly just an awful, awful mistake.

How have you seen Robert Kennedy being involved in this? Because your research uncovered the possibility that there was a cover-up, more like it's staged. The scene that the press were told about was very carefully staged, managed. and that things had happened that hadn't made the press. That she had been taken to the hospital, for example. Well, let's take the she had been taken to a hospital. There's the formal story of the way in which she was found dead and then eventually removed and an autopsy was performed.

Does not include anything about going to a hospital. But I got in touch on some kind of tip I had during the work on the story, I got in touch with one of the biggest ambulance companies that operate. They still operated when I was working on the book. Operating in Los Angeles and talked to the boss. And he just said very bluntly within minutes of the conversation. Yes, we carried her that night. And she didn't die at home.

She died at a nearby hospital. That came out of left fields me at the time and started an enormous separate investigation. and I had the various versions of others. I had nine corroborations, notice I say corroborations, not contumations. I had nine other people from the same ambulance company, Schaefer Ambulance Company, saying that they had carried her that night. In the middle of that model, you have certain members of the ambulance company

who tried to make money out of selling their story to newspaper about an ambulance trip that night. You had one of them who muddled the ambulance trip, if there was one, up with a mysterious doctor coming in and jabbing a hypodermic needle into Marilyn's heart and thus killing her that way. A whole circus of allegations emerged from the ambulance story. The most important factoid in the story of Marilyn's death

is that it is clear to me, and I think to people who read my book, Goddess, that the timeline, the official timeline of what occurred that night was not honest, was not truthful. She was supposed to have been found dead in the late early hours of the morning, about 4 o'clock in the morning, but it is in fact rather clear that she was known to be dead

at the latest about 10 o'clock, 10 or 11 o'clock the previous evening. and that those missing hours between 10 or 11 o'clock and 4 o'clockish in the morning were used to cover up some facts about what had happened that night. And I think on balance, from talking to all those people that I talked to, I think on balance that it was at the center of what needed to be covered up was the fact that Robert Kennedy, for whatever reason had been in Los Angeles that evening, and had to be when she was found to be either very, very sick or dying or dead, that he had to be kept out of town, keep the scandal of the Kennedy connection away from the death of Marilyn Monroe. It's a rational conclusion to me. Not everybody would agree with me. What is the one fact that leads me to be so sure that the timing was staged?

Yes, there is. I talked to then young woman when I was working on the book, just started recently, Natalie Jacobs. She was the future wife of Arthur Jacobs, who ran Marilyn Monroe's press relations. She says she was with her husband to be at the Hollywood Bowl that night, listening to, I think, Henry Mancini's wonderful orchestra. When, while the show was still going on, somebody came and tapped on her husband's shoulder and called him to the telephone and he came back and said to her, something terrible has happened.

Marilyn's dead. I've got to leave. And they left the concert. Now, I was able to look up the hours of the concert. And, of course, the Henry Mancini concert at the Hollywood Bowl ended at about 11 o'clock at night. So if they had received that news at 11ish or earlier, then Marilyn had been dead four or five hours before. the official time of her death.

And then you do have a mystery that you can work with. But I do not think it's a mystery that involves, as so many writers and scandal mongers have suggested, I do not think it suggests that Marilyn Monroe. I certainly don't think that she was murdered. So this was about buying time to get Bobby Kennedy away from the area? Yes, there's some evidence that I found credible, some testimony. We know he was in California that weekend.

We know where he was staying in California. And there is verbal evidence that he came to Los Angeles that day. And it is rational, I think, at that time that he would have gone to see her. And that then, whether she was dead or dying, that there was a need to get Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States, the president's brother, out of town, Dan Quick, and that that alone accounted for the delay in announcing her death.

Oh, Anthony, I could talk to you forever, and I've still got a million questions, but I'm conscious of how much of your time I'm taking up. But before I let you go, I do want to ask you, what's your thoughts on the upcoming film, Blonde, that is going to be released, another biopic of Marilyn Watts. Do you have thoughts? I can see from your rice mail that you do. I have thoughts.

They're not very generous thoughts. I don't like to wish anybody ill, but I think that Marilyn Monroe's story, the story of her life and the story of her death, the real story is full enough to last us and to last non-fiction authors far into the future. And I didn't look at the novel on which the new film is based,

the novel, Blonde, when it came out. I'm not much for fiction about modern subjects That's probably my failure. But I have read it very recently. And I deplore particularly its coverage of the relationship with the Kennedy brothers and the suggestion that Robert Kennedy was in some way involved in events leading to her death, which is clearly portrayed in as a murder. I have not been very generous in my comments about it, but I really think the world has

so much scandal-mongering about Marilyn Monroe. so much rather cruel speculation about what did happen at the end of her life that one simply doesn't need more making-upy drama that is not based on the facts. And the book, in that sense, seems to me deplorable. And the idea that the film, which may be entertainment for many, is going to be, as its director, Andrew Dominic, has said maybe one of the best films, that's ever been made, one of the ten best films, I think he said, that's ever been made,

seems to me very dubious indeed. Do you know what I really loved about your work is that despite the fact that there is so much sadness and tragedy evident in Marilyn's life, you don't have to look far to find it. But what I get from your book is that it's not a tragic tale. It has tragedy in it, but there's strength and passion and overcoming enormous obstacles. And as you said, she was so clever and an amazing businesswoman and appreciated and loved so much. And what I'm kind of, I haven't seen blonde, so I need to be very careful. But it seems that it's going to focus on the tragedy narrative again, that poor little Marilyn was cruelly abused and used.

And what I really liked about your work is that it not necessarily pushed back against that, but provided all these voices that showed that that wasn't all that. was there. Well, there's a great line in the Western movie, The Magnificent Seven. I think it's in the Magnificent Seven. One of my friends may put me right, but there's a great line we deal in lead friends, because there's a guy with a gun, a shooter. He says, I deal in lead friends. Well, I deal in facts, friends. It's what I try to do. And I think that to blow the story of Marilyn Monroe's life and death into a fiction and then embroider it and wrap it around with blood curling further fanciful mysteries is simply not what the world means.

Absolutely. And it's not what Marilyn needs either. But you have just been amazing to talk to today. And I would urge anyone to go and get your book because it is just incredible or watch the Netflix show. But thank you so much for joining me today to talk to me about this amazing woman and the research that you've done. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for listening and thank you so much to my guest Anthony Summers for sharing all of his knowledge. I just adored his book and honestly I could have spoken to him

for ages and ages and ages. But if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. We've got episodes on private members, clubs and the history of phobias and manias all come in your way. I'll see you next time. This episode includes Music by Epidemic Sound.