The Doheny apartment building south of the Sunset Strip has changed since actor John Hodiak, a mentor to me, occupied a unit alongside Marilyn's. At a small afternoon party, John asked if I’d met her and I said no. He winked and brought me to the edge of his terrace. Bright sun, the air clear, he called down, “Hello, there, gorgeous!” The blonde laughing in the midst of the group looked up against the glare.

Her teeth sparkling and catching the sun, she said excitedly, “Hi, John! Come on down!” She called out a name — saying it was that person’s birthday.

“I’ve got my own party going,” Hodiak said. “Come up and join us.”

I couldn’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses and her hair glowing almost white like a halo. She said she was waiting for some people. Her legs were slim in the skin-tight toreador pants and the red high heeled shoes had open toes. I remember seeing the red polish on her toenails. She looked small, her ankles and arms very white — hadn’t seen much sun. John introduced me. “This is Jonathan,” he said. “A young actor friend of mine. Needs to be a star!”

I said hello to Marilyn. She said, “Hello!” to me, then, “Bring your friend John Hodiak down and join me.” She said her party was probably better than ours.

“Different,” Hodiak said. “Different’s the word, honey.”

“Oh, come on, John,” Marilyn said. “They’re all the same, aren’t they?” She laughed and John wagged his finger at her.

“Yours are naughtier,” he said. “The joy of the world beating a path to your door.”

“They are not naughtier,” she said. “They’re just more fun!”

New York a few years later: Marilyn’s black sunglasses were bigger and half-hid her face. A black scarf covered her hair and tucked around her neck. She wore slacks, sort of rumpled at the bottoms, Saks loafers, no socks, and a forest-green raincoat that looked too big. Hard to tell it was her. You couldn’t see her hair or eyes or a hint of makeup. The cab driver couldn’t tell it was Marilyn Monroe he was carrying in his taxi. On her left was a young actor from Actors Studio, Ray Myers, someone Marilyn was tagging to keep her company at the request of Lee Strasberg, because she had “trouble right now being by myself,” as Ray told me. He said to the driver, “The lady wants to walk barefoot on the grass in Washington Square."

The driver asked, “Which side of the square?”

Ray was a New Yorker, a pal of John Stix, one of the first directing members of Actors Studio. Stix was also a friend of mine from a Broadway play he’d directed. Marilyn and I had launched from the same port: the Charity Ward of Los Angeles County General Hospital, Marilyn having floated into the world nine years ahead of me.

Strasberg, heading New York’s Actors Studio, jumped fast at the chance to take Marilyn under his wing. She’d complained that Hollywood was “suffocating” her, and said, “Why is it so fucking impossible to want to do the right thing?” That was the question perpetually causing Marilyn pain like a maddening, unreachable abscess. She’d never get a grip on the answer.

A bottle of champagne and light, afternoon rain. The mist was hitting the taxi windshield as we reached the Village.

Ray and I flanked the incognito Marilyn as she strolled across the grass in Washington Square. The rain was like a fog around us. Ray carried her shoes while she kept her hands in the pockets of the baggy raincoat, and I toted the champagne. We popped it open, Marilyn sitting on a bench with her hands still hidden, saying how she wished we were listening to Vivaldi. She said Arthur Miller had looked her in the face and said, “What do you know about Vivaldi?”

Half the bottle down, she said, “Well, I know about Vivaldi,” and then started to cry. Eyes hidden behind the enormous glasses, the tears leaked down her cheeks, her mouth struggling like a child’s to swallow the sobs. Ray put his hand on her shoulder and said to take deep breaths. She shrugged his hand off, saying, “I know how to breathe, for God’s sake.” I smoked until it started raining harder. Marilyn didn’t budge, like she was unaware of the rain, and we sat with her, saying nothing. My jacket wasn’t water repellent and I was getting soaked through.

Ray said to her, “Café Rienze’s across the street. Maybe you’d like to get out of the rain?”

She didn’t want to leave the bench. She said something like someone else might take it and then we’d have to stand if we decided to come right back. Ray and I exchanged a look. There was a sense of desperation beneath everything she was doing, everything she said. She was like creeping into some falling apart of her nerves, but said, “Control is the most important thing, isn’t it?” She repeated another line of Strasberg’s as rain water ran down the lens of her glasses. “A person’s own life,” she was saying, “belongs to them ...if you don’t want to think that it belongs to God.” Her face turned toward me and she said, “Hodiak has a terrible time, doesn’t he? He’s a wonderful actor. Truly someone whose talent I cherish. You know what he is? He’s like Robert Ryan in the way the business constantly overlooks the great talents that are right under its noses…”

“I think John’s doing an Indian picture right now,” I said. “Last I heard.”

She started talking about Tallulah Bankhead, then made a face and said she was sick. “I think I’m going to throw up,” she said. “I don’t want to vomit on the grass because people are liable to step in it …” Ray said he’d get some paper towels from Rienze. No, she didn’t need it, she said. She wasn’t going to puke after all. She said, “All the time I feel like I have to throw up…” I couldn’t see her eyes to tell if she was still crying but she kept blowing her nose.

She’d made The Seven Year Itch, married baseball wonder Joe DiMaggio and divorced him eight months later. “You know, I am very close to Joe,” she was saying. “We can be so very far apart it is like two ships in two different harbors.” He’d wanted a Catholic wife and “gobs of squabs,” as Marlon Brando had put it in On The Waterfront. Ray told me Marilyn knew even then — before hitching up with “egghead” Arthur Miller that same year, that she’d never have a kid — Catholic, Jew, or otherwise. A congenital condition plagued her — tissues of the uterus lining leaving the uterus and attaching to other internal locations, resulting in pain, internal bleeding and infertility. Her dream of having a family was only a dream though she’d try again and again and leave behind a string of miscarriages.

She'd never had an abortion, contrary to supermarket hacks; never been a call-girl, whore or casting couch cutie as suggested by so many of the "respected biographers".

“Being a most serious actress,” she told Susan Strasberg, actor and daughter to Lee, “is not something God has removed from my destiny as He chooses to destroy my chances of being a mother. It’s therefore my perogative to make the dream of creative fulfillment come true for me. That is what I believe God is saying to me and is the answer to my prayers.”

She’d refused to make another picture playing the “dumbbell doorknob blonde,” as she put it, and the result was suspension from the studio. “They can suspend me until they are blue in the face,” she said. “A person must do what they believe they are summoned by destiny to do…”

There it was, all wrapped up in pink tissue paper, with ribbons around it, like Fred MacMurray says in Double Indemnity.

In 1960, Barbara Stanwyck told me, “I can’t say whether Marilyn’s strength lies in dramatic roles because she just kills me with the comic bits she pulls, and you can’t learn that kind of talent. You can’t get it taught at UCLA or the Actor’s Studio in New York. It’s in your goddamn blood like Harold Lloyd’s or Chaplin’s, like it is with those that no matter what anyone else is doing, they leap right off the screen and grab you, laughing your asses off … Take Marilyn in How To Marry A Millionaire. The picture’s a pile of shit in a lot of ways, but Marilyn’s just about the ultimate end as far as walking right out the door with the prize. The kid’s a comic wonder if she can just grab it and hold it. I never had a problem working with Marilyn. I loved working with her in Clash By Night. [Fritz] Lang was going bananas because she was insecure plus he hated working with women — especially blondes. But Marilyn had a freshness you can’t even describe and her talents seem to come right from the marrow of her bones…”

Rory Calhoun had made three pictures with Marilyn. He starred in How To Marry A Millionaire, then followed with River of No Return, opposite Marilyn. I knew Rory for several years, worked on his Ojai ranch which he’d bought from old movie wrangler Doc Burkhardt, a friend of John Wayne and Bob Steele. Both of us actors, Rory and I talked about Marilyn. “At first,” he said, “I got happy as a peach to work with Jean Negulesco — one of the best directors. An honor, and I was thinking, wow, Marilyn Monroe! Just don’t tell my wife! Tough enough I was lover boy to Betty Grable, and marry her in the picture. My working with Marilyn was limited due to the story, though we got to know one another in a special way — we’d exchanged a few words on the Fox sets for Ticket to Tomahawk. She’d had a small role but stood right out… She was indeed special and she had to have special handling. Kid gloves treatment, and Negulesco did it, treated her with a respect that made her feel okay. Made her feel like she was somebody really important. She was usually worried—scared, and she’d tend to get difficult and pretty damned hard to stick to what you wanted — I think because of being scared. We did scenes and she’d freeze right up — couldn’t separate herself from the camera being right there.

“She talked a little about when she was a kid and being scared of things — of people, and I’d sure as hell had no easy time as a kid either. We had something — a kind of chemistry, I think that hooked up and I tried to make her feel comfortable. But the fact was she didn’t really know what she was doing. She was distant at first because she had all these props—I don’t mean movie props, but personal ones. The special treatment angle… What the hell, she was very sensitive and hungry for someone to take charge in a decent way. As an actress, and being funny as hell, you couldn’t watch anyone else, not even Betty Grable. Marilyn had the magic most of us only dream about.”

But Marilyn’s magic, as undenied by director Otto Preminger, was something exclusively an explosion between her image and the camera, perhaps the most remarkable exposure of that combination of the player, the lens, lights and celluloid.

Calhoun said River of No Return was “a horse of a different hue.” A dramatic film, none of Marilyn’s comedic streaks were summoned. Otto Preminger demanded that his cast, according to Rory, “be on tap like a faucet. He controlled the making of a picture,” Rory says, “like a major in the army. He let it be known he had no time to spend with the talent, and only that they follow his direction — what he says. So what happens with someone like Robert Mitchum in the movie, he just does all his Robert Mitchum things and pretty much walks through the film. Preminger liked Mitchum but he didn’t like Marilyn. I have to say neither did Mitchum like her. He was resentful and disrespectful, and in one scene where he almost rapes her, she’s running away and he grabs her, knocks her down. He actually hurt Marilyn and I was surprised. She was lying on the ground in pain, but Mitchum didn’t even help her. Just walked away — him and Preminger who had no patience with her, treated Marilyn and the rest of us not in a welcome manner. He never let up on her, and I said once, ‘She’s trying the best she can. She needs help and encouragement, and needs to know what she’s doing is okay.’ He didn’t like that and didn’t treat her any differently. What she did wasn’t the best she could have done — neither was Mitchum or myself, for that matter. I think we all stunk and I think the picture stunk. Preminger gave us not an inch. ‘Know what you are doing!’ he kept saying, yelling like we were a bunch of dinks off a boat.”

A year later in Niagara, Marilyn’s magic flared across the screen. Joseph Cotton told actor Richard Allan, “She’s like a damned atomic bomb.” Marilyn played Joseph Cotton’s wife, taking a dark-haired lover on the side—played by Richard Allan. He wasn’t a stranger to me; I’d known Allan since the year before. Marilyn took to Richard quickly, as she’d later do with Montgomery Clift in The Misfits, both men gay and both declaring a kind of secret simpatico with Marilyn, both understanding of her — siding with her against the adverse powers she professed to be surrounding her the more she tried to be herself.

“She experienced being an actress more as a kind of personal pain, some kind of disemboweling of her,” Clift said. “It emptied her — left her a nerve as raw as when the dentist drills away at your bone.” Clift drank and downed pills to stay numb. “Staying numb,” he said, “you don’t feel the pain. Living without the numbness is like living without any skin on body and everything you encounter causes pain.”

Marilyn understood. She stayed close to Allan during the Niagara shoot. “She could bitch to me,” he said, “because she knew I cared about how she felt. I cared about what was troubling her. We had talks about psychoanalysis and about probing into the psyche. She said, ‘All I have to offer is what I am …’”

John Huston said of her, “There’s a truth she has — that’s all the girl has.” Huston said she could reach into herself and tap some individual, vulnerable truth that no one else could get at. She could pull it up and there it was—radiating off the screen like searchlight.

Gracious with fans, Marilyn would try to please those that showed awe. She’d pose for pictures and sign autographs until she ached. Her health was never that great. She bruised easily, continually fought colds and flues and developed a dread of bacteria. Allan said, “She’d wash her hands with Listerine and wore cotton gloves to avoid touching things.”

Seeking to have his picture taken with Marilyn was a chubby, round-faced, sweaty man wearing obnoxious cologne. “Having worked for some rube paper,” said Allan, “this guy was doing some Hollywood press, so he said, for the Hollywood Citizen news or like that, and was gewgaw over Marilyn since he’d seen Asphalt Jungle. This guy who said his name was Robert Slatzer hounded the Niagara set that day like a vulture. He got his picture taken with Marilyn, imposed himself on her — and on me, got me in a picture with him, and kept snooping for personal tidbits about Marilyn. I didn’t like him — a guy if he borrowed your car you’d never see it again. Marilyn said, ‘He keeps asking questions and I don’t want to be rude…’ I told her, ‘Be rude. Tell him canoe down the Falls.’ She laughed… Henry Hathaway, directing Niagara, heard her laugh and said, ‘That’s the laugh, Marilyn! Laugh like that when you laugh.’ That made her laugh again.

“She was interested in astrology,” Allan said. “A girl was doing charts — one of the cast, and made a comparison between Marilyn and myself, saying we were astrologically brother and sister...

“That Slatzer guy never saw Marilyn again as far as I know, and as far as anyone else in Hollywood ever seems to have known. Years later, after Marilyn passed away, this guy published the most ridiculous book I’ve ever read — claiming they’d been lovers even before she got into pictures — years before he ever showed up that one time on the Niagara set… He went as far as to claim he and Marilyn had been married and that he was her closest confidant right up until the time of her death. Like he’s living in another world, he never even knew Marilyn!”

Writer Norman Mailer led the sensation pack with his masturbatory chest-beating of Monroe’s legend, and ushered in Robert Slatzer’s dump truck of bold-faced lies.

Marilyn's graciousness with fans could reach a point of often overextending herself. She meant well, believing she was insuring their continued admiration and box office support. Slatzer had never known Marilyn before the picture-taking episode on the Niagara set. he would never know her after snatching away the snapshot. Apart from having a picture taken with the queen of his dreams, no other connection or crossing of paths had or would exist between Marilyn and Slatzer. Anyone quoting Slatzer as having been chummy with Marilyn or his opinions about her, has perpetrated the falsehood.

In the early 1970's, my literary agent was Donald Shepherd, operating the Shepherd Agency out of the Taft Building on Hollywood and Vine. Slatzer was also a client of the Shepherd Agency, and occupied a small office in the same building. The agency had been selling a number of action paperbacks by another writer, published by Pinnacle Books. The publisher was Dave Zintner and the senior editor Andrew Ettinger.

As soon as Norman Mailer published his 1973 fictional bio on Marilyn (a decade after her death), hinting at the connection between Marilyn and the Kennedys, not to be left out, Slatzer decided to “get in on the action,” to “cash in”, as he put, by “whipping out” a bio on Marilyn. He would brandish the Niagara set snapshot as “proof” of his “first-hand authority of getting the story from the horse’s mouth” — Marilyn Monroe’s mouth. Slatzer kicked off his campaign by claiming to have known Marilyn “on and off a long time, even before she started making movies.” Since Slatzer was far from a skilled or accomplished writer, another client, ex-newspaper reporter Will Fowler, was ushered in to ghost Slatzer’s "biography" on Marilyn and “take home a percentage of the profits.” At the time, the Shepherd Agency was handing the Gene Fowler estate, trying for reprints as well as a reissue of Will Fowler’s book, The Second Handshake.

Newsman that he was, Fowler hastily scanned the pile of assorted clippings and press that Slatzer had pasted together into a bulky wad of “yesterday’s news.”

Fowler said, “This you wrap fish in. You’ve got nothing but clippings and no proof at all that you knew Monroe or that she ever told you anything about her life.” Laughing, Fowler walked out, tossing back, “Too bad you hadn’t married the broad — you'd have a story to write.”

Days later, Slatzer “confessed” to the agency that he had actually been married to Marilyn. The fact had “just slipped” his mind. He said, “Me and Marilyn took a drive to San Diego…spent a night in a hotel and then got married…”

Always a glib, a spur of the moment name-dropper and Hollywood tall-tale-teller, Slatzer began pumping together his hot-air ruminations of a past with Marilyn, piecing together invented details of the alleged marriage and their “romance” before and after the wedding. He hired a Hungarian wannabe actress to “research” the incident which Fowler would later say was, “To find some hard-to-prove or disprove setting for this burlesque they were concocting.”

With renewed recollections, Slatzer announced, “It wasn’t San Diego where we got married. It was in Mexico because now I remember we drove across the border that weekend… That’s how it was.” But he couldn’t remember exactly when it was — the date of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe — or the place. “But it was sometime in the early 50’s,” he said.

“You have to be specific,” he was warned. “We're talking a hot deal with Pinnacle for all the mysterious crap and the Kennedy stuff a la mode Mailer. Okay?”

Overnight, Slatzer claimed to recall the marriage taking place “the first week in October of 1952.” He remembered it was a weekend — the first weekend in October. But no, Slatzer didn't have a copy of the marriage license. "That was lost years ago," he said, shaking his head sadly. "After all, the marriage only lasted a few days because the story would've have hit and nobody at Fox wanted that. See...so it got annulled." Then, he said, he had to drive back down to Mexico to "pay-off" the authorities to "keep it quiet because the studio wanted it hushed up." Slatzer then produced a punch-drunk ex-boxer he knew from some stunt work in a B-movie, ready to swear in as a "witness" to the wedding. The ex-pug was paid for his "services" though in truth had trouble recalling where'd been the past twenty or more years of his life.

Will Fowler backed away from the project, the proposed book being sold to publisher Dave Zintner at Pinnacle. Working “night and day”, the agency whipped together the “juicy” book Pinnacle had been eager to published on the tail of Mailer’s publicity. While inflating his Monroe balloon even further, building an imaginary “life with Marilyn,” Slatzer and Shepherd co-authored another book — this time trashing Bing Crosby who boulevard blow-hard Slatzer claimed to have known "intimately" (he'd had a picture taken with Crosby on a golf course). "Crosby and I were close friends," he swore, "and I know personally what a bastard he was." The book, THE HOLLOW MAN, was also published by Pinnacle, still eager for more. Another “good friend” of Slatzer’s came onto the firing line — this time John Wayne. During the drumming together of DUKE, supposedly an “inside” view of Wayne, it became painfully obvious to Shepherd, the hard-writing pack-mule of the duo, that Slatzer had no more “in” to Wayne than he’d had to Crosby or Marilyn or the dozen other celebrities Slatzer managed to wangle a snapshot with. Anxious for a story, the desperate duo drummed up Wayne’s makeup man, Dave Grayson. They pumped Grayson deep for details until the markup artist got wise to the game. He told Slatzer and Shepherd, “You guys have got nothing except me, and if you want my story on the Duke you’ll have to make me a co-author and split the dough." Otherwise, Grayson would tell Wayne the writing "team" were nothing but fakes. Shepherd, not only the guts of the pair but the brains as well, quickly agreed with Grayson who became the third author on DUKE, another hollow book.

In time, Slatzer sold the film/TV rights to his “insider” Monroe book and a ridiculous TV movie was produced, MARILYN AND ME, for which Slatzer boasted of “raking in fifty grand.” The film showed Marilyn and Slatzer in Darryl Zanuck’s office, with Zanuck, sympathetic to their romantic involvement, insisting on the married being annulled for the sake of Marilyn's career.

At the time the made-for-TV movie was aired, the conspiracy nuts were climbing out of the woodwork -- blowing up their own tales from the same hot-air hose sucked on by Mailer and Slatzer. "The Kennedys murdered Marilyn!" They all claimed "cover-ups" reaching the highest levels of government. UFO's were even involved. Would-be actress Jeanne Carmen began claiming a long-lasting friendship with Marilyn who in fact had never known Jeanne Carmen. Slatzer stayed busy thrusting himself into the limelight like a sweaty wrestler struggling between the ropes, and enlisted any support for his continued “investigation into the mysterious death of Marilyn…” who he claimed was murdered “in cold blood”. Any media source showing the least interest in Slatzer’s hazy theories and thick-lipped proclamations was fodder for the cause — demanding a new investigation into the “murder” of Marilyn, first to “exhume the body and reexamine the remains for evidence of foul play.” Slatzer was ready. He called press conferences. He had his personal cameraman and a "crew" standing by for the opening of the crypt and unsealing of Marilyn's coffin. Coroner Thomas Noguchi, who had performed the autopsy on Marilyn for the County of Los Angeles, found no evidence of foul play. He only shook his head and said, "Welcome to Hollywood..."

Fortunately for the memory of Marilyn and all who had known her in real life, Slatzer’s fiasco was legally daunted by the District Attorney and the Coroners Office before it gained sufficient enough momentum to be enacted upon.

However, undaunted are the so-called journalists and other top-dollar hacksaw reporters, biographers and writers shoving every conceivable conspiracy theory into the media like Japanese subway guards packing a car way past the gills. Each year the tall-tales arrive from every scribe-like crackpot on the planet, the culture fanatic, the sociologists and arm-chair psychologists, stewing and swilling the fictional fantasies. The “respected ones,” like Anthony Summers, Gloria Steinem, Donald Wolfe and a clan of others have been limping the lying Slatzer and other fabulists under their arms as totems of truth in selling (and “laughing to the bank") the fictional half-truths, exaggerations, nothing-but-bullshit ideas and sneaky innuendos for a gullible, scandal-hungry public. The tales of conspiracy and cover-ups, of “UFO’s and Marilyn” have wormed their way into the melee, the flames stay fanned by checkbook journalists like Donald Wolfe who in fact described himself to me as “a nutcase,” and who in his fabrications thrives on crucifying-in-death legendary women of celebrity like Marilyn — and like the tragic Hollywood murder victim, Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia.

After Niagara, Marilyn phoned Richard Allan many times. He said, “She told me our spirits were in fact linked in a ‘sibling soul manner,’ she said, something we could never comprehend because we’re only ‘small human beings.’

“I saw the trouble coming — so alone she was, yet afraid not to be alone. She said it was a prison and she wanted to know how to get out of it, to be set free. One night I could barely make out what she was saying. She’d been drinking and said I made her laugh. She said, ‘Richard, I have to tell you no one in my life has ever loved me … the person inside this terrible prison.’ She said, ‘I’m being abused, you know, and tortured by these people who won’t love me …’ She said we should run away together — ‘far, far, far away,’ she said, and we can be happy. She said, ‘We can laugh about things…’”

Allan and Marilyn went to a beach north of Malibu late one afternoon. “The sun was going down,” he said, and she stared at the sun on the water, how it sparkled and flashes, and she talked about drowning — how the writer Virginia Wolfe filled her fishing boots with rocks and walked out into the ocean. She asked me if there was much pain to drowning…” Richard said he didn’t know. She told him, “Perhaps it is possible that one doesn’t have any pain that way because you suffocate, and as soon as you die your spirit can come above and be a part of the way the sunlight is on the water…”

Whatever pains she might’ve had, said actor Tony Curtis, were mild compared to “the aches in the ass” she caused everyone else making Some Like it Hot. “I’m saying hours—days. Billy [Wilder] did all he could to instill in her a sense of professional responsibility. It was to no avail. You couldn’t get through to her … She was smart — bright, wasn’t a formal education but a native intelligence, yet she couldn’t fit in with the people in her surroundings. That’s what gets me looking back now. It was play-acting — her brightness was twisted at the bases, and I loved her but she was a monster plain and simple. I’m not exaggerating, and God forgive me, but I can’t help facing the bitter truth of it. Her attitude was inappropriate with everyone. Wouldn’t come out of the dressing room. What the fuck’s she doing in there? We’re waiting — waiting like wooden props. Like we’ve got no lives, you know. Everything around her suffered because of her attitude. Making a show of what a monster she could be so we’re all as miserable as she is. I said to her, ‘If this is such a pain the ass, why don’t you quit the business and go into Russian or Nazi politics?’ She said back to me, ‘Oh, Tony, what on earth do you mean by that?’”

Co-star Jack Lemmon said, “I talked to her. I tried to get her to get control of things in the hope of getting through the picture. We had a trying schedule and it was practically impossible for her to stick to it. I had a life apart but it became increasingly apparent to me that Marilyn didn’t. Getting close enough to her to make a difference was an exercise in futility. She simply had no life off the set. She made that her prison.”

I saw Marilyn once again in New York, and the last time on the 20th Century Fox lot the year before she died.

Twenty-one years after Marilyn’s death, Jane Russell told me, “She felt good with me like I was her big sister. She wanted someone close to her she could lean on for emotional support. Without it, she would fall apart, get scared and frantic. She got a lot of cosmetic support to keep her image in shape, and punishment when she was bad. She wanted to do something remarkable — she said ‘important,’ like a dramatic role on Broadway. She came as close to that as she did to the kind of emotional support she sought … being loved and being able to love in return. She’d never had it…”

The momentum of Marilyn’s pain, festering from an inability to unite her success with her past overrode any forgiveness she was granted or promises of a bright life. Like slow poisoning, it appeared the point of no return had been reached.

It was that other part of Marilyn, not the manufactured, paper-doll Marilyn occupying front-row among the indelible icons of American culture, but an angry, quarrelsome, wanting and lacking young girl haunting her every step -- the kid she believed nobody cared about that the most glamorous person in the world might never reconcile with or even reach.

After nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts, Marilyn indirectly succeeded in killing her pain. Her death was not a suicide or a murder. Marilyn died from an overdose of the drugs she had been consuming at an alarming rate, compounded by too much champagne. She died alone, her door locked, a passing that no one could dictate, direct, upstage, punish or take away from her.

-- Copyright © 2006 by John Gilmore

 

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