Marilyn: A Biography (36 page)

One would also acknowledge the pleasure of
working editorially with Robert Markel, Nancy Brooks, and Larry
Schiller.

Still another work, brought to my attention
by Gary Null, must certainly be described. It is
The Strange
Death of Marilyn Monroe
, by Frank A. Capell, and was published
in 1964 by the Herald of Freedom, a right-wing press. Its thesis is
that Marilyn was murdered.
The Strange Death
suggests that
Marilyn was killed by a Communist conspiracy of agents expressly
because she had threatened Bobby Kennedy with exposure. The
corollary is that the Attorney General was secretly, even publicly,
sympathetic (in 1962!) to left-wing groups. According to Capell,
Dr. Greenson and Mrs. Murray were fellow travelers, and Dr.
Engelberg had been a member of the Party. It is, of course, a
considerable metamorphosis to go from being a man or a woman with
left-wing attachments to an agent capable of a job of murder for
the more advanced echelons of the Soviet secret police — which is
exactly the surrealistic apocalypse to which Capell’s thesis leads
— but his short book is nonetheless valuable on two counts. He
traces most of the discrepancies of the discovery of Marilyn’s body
to a point where further investigation can continue, and also gives
a full if unconscious portrait of how sinister a figure Bobby
Kennedy must have appeared to ultra-conservative groups. On
reflection, that may serve to bolster the argument that there was
much motive for the right wing of the FBI or the CIA to implicate
Bobby Kennedy in a scandal. And if one is looking for a tool in
such a right-wing conspiracy, who indeed could be more vulnerable,
and therefore more subject to severe pressure, than a Communist or
former Communist who has been under an investigative eye for years.
The execution of the Rosenbergs still weighed in full horror over
any American Communist who had cause to wonder whether some errands
he had done for the Party in the past were altogether free of
implication. But, then, if we are not careful, a new round of
speculation can begin — and this is merely an acknowledgment.
Perhaps one must finally acknowledge that all of this work has
brought us to the point where we can recognize that a corner of
biography is no more simple to put into perspective than a warp in
the matrix of lost space-time. If every human is a mystery, then
perhaps we can obtain our only gleam of the truth in the relations
we find between mysteries. Let us then take our estimate of her
worth by the grief on Joe DiMaggio’s face the day of that dread
funeral in Westwood west of Hollywood.

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