Death of Marilyn Monroe - Publicity in The 1970s

Publicity in The 1970s

In 1973, Norman Mailer received much publicity for having written the first bestselling book to suggest that Monroe's death was a murder staged to look like a drug overdose. (The 1968 book titled The Mysterious Death of Marilyn Monroe, authored by James A. Hudson and published by Volitant Books, had received very little publicity.) The Mailer book has no footnotes and does not cite any interviews with witnesses, police officials or coroner Thomas Noguchi, who performed the autopsy, although there are many references to the Kennedy brothers. In a notorious 60 Minutes interview in August of that year, Mailer said Mike Wallace that he could not have interviewed Monroe's housemate Eunice Murray because Murray was dead before he started work on the book. Wallace said on-camera that Murray was alive and listed in the West Los Angeles telephone directory.

In a 1974 book on Monroe's death that was not publicized on television at the time, author Robert Slatzer made controversial claims about not only a conspiracy, but also his alleged brief marriage to Monroe in Tijuana, Mexico in 1952. (During that year her romance with Joe DiMaggio was reported by gossip columnists, although they did not marry until 1954.) Unlike Norman Mailer, Slatzer interviewed an authority whose name, which was unknown to the public at the time, appears in official documents from 1962. Slatzer's source was Jack Clemmons, a sergeant with the LAPD who was the first officer to report to the death scene. According to Clemmons' statements in Slatzer's book, Eunice Murray behaved suspiciously, doing laundry at 4:30 am and answering his questions evasively. When Slatzer approached Murray with questions, she denied any wrongdoing by herself or by Monroe's psychiatrist Ralph Greenson, who had hired Murray to watch the actress for signs of drug abuse or suicidal tendencies.

Greenson himself refused to talk to Robert Slatzer, having reacted with outrage to Norman Mailer's highly publicized book by doing interviews with Lloyd Shearer for Parade and with Maurice Zolotow. The piece by Zolotow, author of a Monroe biography that had been published while she was alive, originated in the Chicago Tribune in four installments and was syndicated to other newspapers in 1973. Zolotow quoted Greenson as saying Monroe was not sexually involved with either Kennedy brother "or with any other man" at the end of her life. Most of Greenson's statements in 1973 had to do with the last time he saw Monroe alive, which was at her home in the late afternoon of August 4, 1962, and the instructions he gave to Eunice Murray (during his visit) about the circumstances under which she could allow Monroe to leave the house. Greenson depicted Monroe as a loner after her divorce from Arthur Miller in January of 1961.