The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (47 page)

Despite receiving extensive coverage in the press at the time, the story was not to reach notoriety until 1978 when Major Jesse Marcell, the intelligence officer of the ‘Roswell 509 Bomb Group’, went public about the UFO crash during an appearance on the American TV programme
Eyewitness News
. Coincidentally, Kilgallen was already familiar with the subject. In a report published in America on Sunday 22 May 1955, she had written about British scientists and airmen’s long-standing convictions about ‘flying saucers originating from another planet’. Following her article, Kilgallen was placed under CIA scrutiny and surveillance, which, quite conveniently, prevented her from pursuing further UFO-related stories.

Kilgallen knew that if Monroe’s allegations about the President of the United States were true, the announcement of such details to the American press could both frighten the public and cause immense embarrassment to Kennedy and his ambitious plans to have NASA put men on the moon by the end of the decade. As her conversation with Monroe unfolded, she soon became aware that the actress’s declarations were not just personal; they dealt with highly sensitive matters of national security. Moments after concluding the conversation, Kilgallen rang her close friend Howard Rothberg to tell him about the actress’s intentions. Unfortunately, unbeknown to Kilgallen, her phones too were being tapped and every startling utterance to Rothberg that day was being recorded by the CIA.

A day later, on Friday 3 August, in a one-page report entitled ‘Moon Dust Project’, details of Kilgallen’s conversation with Rothberg found their way into a hastily prepared CIA document, which revealed that some high government officials were in a state of ‘extreme anxiety’ over the fact that the Kennedy brothers had, once again, been foolishly imparting highly sensitive information to Marilyn, and that she was writing a lot of it down in her little ‘diary of secrets’.

‘Project Moon Dust’, as it was usually called, had been in existence since 1953. Its purpose was the recovery of UFO crashes and debris from fallen space vehicles. Over the years, much scorn has been poured on the Monroe/Kilgallen file. However, close examination of it reveals that the document has a reference, MJ-12; one that associates it with the whole question of government secrecy about unidentified flying objects. Dr Steven Greer, director of the CSETI (Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Disclosure Project group, remarked in his book
Extraterrestrial Contact: The Evidence And Implications
that Marilyn’s file had come to his attention in 1994 by way of a ‘contact with access to NSA officials’. With regard to the document’s legitimacy he added that ‘It has been authenticated by the best document researcher in the world.’ An FBI agent even told Greer that he ‘could be locked up indefinitely’ for publishing the file. (He does so anyway to this day.)

In fact, the file materialised two years prior to Greer’s notice of it. In the spring of 1992, it found its way into the hands of the independent researcher and private investigator Timothy S. Cooper, who claimed he received it from a former CIA worker; in all probability an archivist or somebody with access to little-known classified, historical documents. In August 1994, the file was featured on the Fox Television show
Encounters
. However, doubts about its true origins remained until the noted American writer and researcher Donald R. Burleson got onto the case.

‘The fact that the details of its original release have always been a little
less than clear is what spurred me on to want to authenticate it as a CIA document,’ he recalled, ‘which is why I essentially manoeuvred the CIA into validating it themselves . . . I put in a FOIA [Freedom Of Information Act] request for CIA records of wiretaps on Marilyn’s phones, and for her diary, which they are thought to possess, and when they denied having any of this stuff, I filed an appeal based on the famous memo; they
accepted
the appeal and sent it on upstairs to their Agency Release Panel. They don’t do that if, one, there’s nothing that could conceivably be released and, two, if the appeal is based on documentation that they don’t recognize as authentic, i.e. if the pertinent documents are thought, by them, to have been spuriously produced outside the Agency. Thus, by their own policies, in accepting the appeal, even though they ultimately didn’t release anything to me, they
authenticated
the document.’

Two important names attached to the file give further credence to its validity. The document was signed by James Jesus Angleton, the most shadowy and enigmatic figure in the Central Intelligence Agency’s history; and, behind the ‘Top Secret’ stamp at the top of the file, the name ‘Schulgen’ can be faintly seen. This was Brigadier General George Schulgen, Chief of the Air Intelligence Requirements Division of Army Air Corps Intelligence, and the man in charge of investigating UFOs. Due to a fear of being pilloried and ridiculed by the media, reports about the Monroe file have been continually suppressed. Interestingly, in 1991 the CIA published a document which clearly stated that the Agency had contacts or resources at every major media outlet to kill, spin or stop such stories.

Today, in a world awash with computer technology, it is very easy to scoff at stories about how in 1962 the CIA was in a high state of panic over Marilyn’s plans to disclose to the public details about JFK’s ‘flying saucer from another planet’. But the world was a vastly different place back then; not so many years earlier, after all, the young Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre company had created a state of high panic across a naïve, late-1930s America when on Sunday 30 October 1938 they performed their radio adaptation of the H.G. Wells science-fiction story,
The War Of The Worlds
. So effective was the broadcast that thousands of people believed they were genuinely under attack from aliens with metal hands in silver-coloured spaceships. From that point on, and for many years thereafter, the US Government was keen to avert any further alien-related alarms. And such was the case with Marilyn’s disclosures to Kilgallen.

On the same day, and less than 24 hours after Monroe’s phone revelations, Kilgallen courageously and unceremoniously became the very first journalist to write publicly, albeit cryptically, about a Kennedy brother’s relationship with Monroe. Once a private matter, only known by
those in the know, it had now become public. In her
New York Journal-American
article, Kilgallen did not, however, make clear to which Kennedy she was referring. (This confusion would forever taint and dominate the actress’s story in the eyes of the public, but Kilgallen would later come clean and tell friends she was in fact referring to Bobby.) But she felt she had left just enough clues for readers to make up their own minds. No doubt remembering Marilyn’s breathless performance at his 45th birthday gala in May, many readers attempting to decipher Dorothy’s cryptic piece incorrectly thought she was referring to the President.

In an exercise of damage limitation, JFK once more enlisted the services of former New York reporter William Haddard to put a stop to any further talk. As he had when the Kennedy/Monroe stories first began to circulate a few months ago, he paid a visit to every major newspaper editor and told them firmly, ‘If you hear these rumours, they are just
not
true!’

Kennedy’s honeymoon period with the American public was well and truly over by now. The overthrow in Congress, on Wednesday 18 July, of his proposed Medicare bill, which was set to aid the medical care of millions of hard-up senior citizens, came as a climax to a series of crushing developments for him. On Thursday 26 July, it was announced that America’s stockpile of gold had worryingly dipped a further $90 million. At the close of business on that day, it totalled just $16,208 million, the lowest since Monday 31 July 1939. His concerns magnified when it was announced that the available supply would not be enough to finance the great movements of trade, prompting many of his detractors to point out that, under his leadership, the United States had just taken its most backward step since the conclusion of the Second World War. It was a dire time indeed for the world’s most powerful man.

So, when he was handed a copy of the CIA ‘Moon Dust Project’ file and informed about Marilyn’s intentions to hold a tell-all press conference about him and his brother, he was naturally mortified. However, the fact that most disturbed him was her intention to reveal US plans to assassinate the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, a man who still had the actress’s famous 1952 nude calendar hanging on one of the walls in his home.

Approved by the President in November 1961, ‘Operation Mongoose’ was a covert plan aimed at stimulating a rebellion in Cuba which the United States could support. Placed in charge of the operation was his brother, Bobby. As Alexander Haig, Kennedy’s aide to the administration’s task force on Cuba revealed, by late 1963 the Attorney General had orchestrated at least
eight
separate attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader.

Unbeknown to Marilyn, at exactly same time she was sounding off to a reporter, ‘Project Mongoose’, as it was also known, had reached a critical stage. On Wednesday 1 August, as confidential CIA documents reveal, the
operation had just reached Phase III, whereby the government were ready to ‘have a final look at the situation and at the means in place before giving the signal to initiate actions leading to full-scale revolt’. Scheduled to take place in October, this was just two months away. Besides the fact that Marilyn’s announcement would blow apart their clandestine plans, he knew that it would also entirely ruin the hopes and political aspirations of both brothers. The fall-out from her conference, if she had progressed with it, would have been devastating. Would Marilyn’s scandalous revelations have forced JFK and not Richard Nixon to become the first President of the United States to resign from office in shame?

‘I’m inclined to think that if it
had
fully come out that JFK (via Bobby) had leaked classified information to Marilyn, especially in a tense international situation, he might very well have been not only impeached but possibly indicted for treason,’ Donald Burleson admitted. ‘And, of course, since his brother was Attorney General, he would have had to prosecute the case, step aside and appoint a special prosecutor, etc. etc. It all would have gotten very nasty.’ The Kennedys could not risk this political disaster. Considering Bobby was in charge of the CIA programme to eliminate Castro, and was also the individual responsible for imparting to the actress a great deal more top secret information, it was no surprise when he was ordered by his brother to go and see Monroe personally and demand her silence.

On Thursday 2 August, following her calls from Styne and Kilgallen, Marilyn travelled over to Dr Greenson’s office for another session. Afterwards, she returned home to phone Marlon Brando and invite him over for dinner. He was unable to attend, but promised to call the following week to set another date. ‘Fine,’ she replied.

‘She didn’t seem depressed,’ the actor remarked in 1994. ‘It’s been speculated that she had a secret rendezvous with Bobby Kennedy that week . . . I don’t think that. If she
was
sleeping with him at the time, she wouldn’t have invited me over for dinner.’ In another interview, this time from 1968, he recalled further details of that call. ‘I’m pretty good at reading people’s minds, and with Marilyn I didn’t sense any depression or clue of impending self-destruction at all. If someone is terminally depressed, no matter how clever they are, or how expertly they try to conceal it, they will always give themselves away. I’ve always had an unquenchable curiosity about people and I believe I would have sensed something was wrong if thoughts of suicide were anywhere near the surface of her mind that day.’

Marilyn’s make-up man Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder and hairdresser Agnes M. Flanagan were visitors to her home that afternoon. ‘She was as happy
as we’ve ever seen her,’ Snyder observed. With an assortment of nibbles, cocktails and glasses of Dom Perignon champagne, the trio celebrated the actress’s potential new deal with the studio. Shortly after saying goodbye to her friends, Marilyn faced up to the inevitability that, in order to obtain that new agreement, she had to sever her professional ties to Paula Strasberg. In a phone call that afternoon, the actress politely told her drama coach she would no longer be requiring her and Lee’s services. Their discussion became heated. Before concluding the conversation, however, and keen to remain friends, Paula asked Marilyn to drop in on her and Lee during her visit east the following week. The actress said she would.

Distressed by what had transpired, Marilyn called Dr Greenson late that afternoon and asked him to come over, which he immediately did. To help clear her mind, he suggested she should go for a drive. She agreed. Shortly afterwards, since Murray’s car was in the garage being repaired, she climbed into a hurriedly summoned limousine and was driven to Holiday House, the Malibu getaway home belonging to her friend, former Tinseltown director Dudley Murphy, and his fourth wife, Virginia. The exclusive venue, which overlooked the ocean, was favoured by the show business elite. However, her time there was brief. According to Hollywood reporter Sheilah Graham, just before she departed, Marilyn consented to sign the Murphys’ special celebrity guest book. Under the column ‘Residence’, she portentously scribbled ‘
nowhere
’.

Despite the actress’s valiant attempts to keep her visit a secret, as she attempted to leave the building and walk back to her car, she was faced by a small, local television news crew. Gossip that the seemingly reclusive actress was out in public had spread and reporters were desperate to cover it. They were glad they did, because once again she took the opportunity to foolishly declare her ill-conceived intentions of holding a tell-all press conference.

Surprisingly, hardly any of the channels chose to run the report and, as a result, very few people now remember it. However, one who does is Judy Simms, who recalled watching the footage at her home in Greenbrook, New Jersey when it was screened as a part of that evening’s news bulletin. ‘I was just a teenager when I saw it,’ she said. ‘Marilyn was on the sidewalk, flanked by the media . . . She stated that she had a little book, and said she was going to reveal what was in it. Naturally, my ears perked up when I heard this because I was curious about what could be in that book. I remember thinking, “This could be trouble.” She seemed very direct and determined. I can still see her with the mikes pushed at her. I don’t recall anything else they asked her and it was brief. I have never met anyone that remembers that interview.’ This is entirely predictable, since the piece was
never repeated, and, at the time of writing, is still missing from the television archives.