Collateral Damage: Mark Shaw's Pubic Atrocity

[David Andrews]

Though she attempted suicide on other occasions, what's to blame for Monroe's successful suicide attempt?  The better accounts of her last days claim her Fox contract was reinstated, and she was returning to the picture she had been booted from.

The Peter Lawford call may have been her reach-out to be rescued one more time.  But why this suicide attempt, when she needed to appear bankable? 

Edited September 3, 2021 by David Andrews

[James DiEugenio]

Spoto's explanation is it was an accident.

Her insomnia was so bad that she took too many pills.

Don actually did an inventory.  In just one month she went well over 700 pills. And some of those pills were not prescriptions.  She was getting them on the black market. And some of them were really powerful.

Plus, her psychologist did not know what the psychiatrist was prescribing some of the time. Spoto put forth the idea that Greenson had an unhealthy relationship with her.  He wanted to control her.  He also wanted her to be his ticket to being a celebrity doctor.

[Joe Bauer]

While the death of America's most famous "sex goddess" icon at a relatively young age under somewhat suspicious or at least unsure circumstances is a high drama, truly sad tragedy story,

The clear murder of Dorothy Kilgallen is a much more important story imo, especially in the context of the JFK assassination.

Kilgallen was murdered because of her investigation into the JFK assassination and anyone with common sense can see this.

Her drug, prescription pill situation was nothing compared to Marilyn Monroe's. Kilgallen never attempted suicide. Never overdosed before, never had to see psychiatrists because of childhood and even adult trauma.

Monroe's housekeeper witnessed Monroe's long term abuse of prescription drugs. Kilgallen's close personal aides never saw anything like this.

Clearly, collective society here and even world wide were much more connected on a deeper emotional level with the super beautiful MM. Millions of men worldwide fantasized over her, women were envious.

Amazing how the sexual attraction part of our pyches effects how we give import and interest to deaths of certain celebrities over others. Freudian thing I guess.

Kilgallen didn't inspire anything close to the emotional interest level of MM's death in this way.

But in the more important subject of JFK's murder, it should have.

Just sharing an observation of my own interest.

 

Edited September 4, 2021 by Joe Bauer

[David Andrews]

Taking a page from Jim Hargrove:

Do we believe Dorothy Kilgallen was murdered?

I vote Aye, with reservations.

[Ron Bulman]

On 9/3/2021 at 8:40 PM, James DiEugenio said:

Spoto's explanation is it was an accident.

Her insomnia was so bad that she took too many pills.

Don actually did an inventory.  In just one month she went well over 700 pills. And some of those pills were not prescriptions.  She was getting them on the black market. And some of them were really powerful.

Plus, her psychologist did not know what the psychiatrist was prescribing some of the time. Spoto put forth the idea that Greenson had an unhealthy relationship with her.  He wanted to control her.  He also wanted her to be his ticket to being a celebrity doctor.

So Greenson, unintentionally, encouraged her to OD?  Sorry if I'm confused here.

[James DiEugenio]

I didn't say that.

What I am saying is that she became a pill addict.  There is no question about that. When you are taking over 700 pills per month, something is wrong someplace. Just do the arithmetic. And as I said, some of these were not prescribed.  She got them on the black market, and some of them were quite powerful. If her psychologist did not know what she was getting from Greenson, and if Greenson did not know what she was buying on the black market then Spoto's theory makes some sense.

Spoto took the list to a doctor and he said that some of those drugs, when taken in conjunction, would be lethal. IIRC, one of the black market drugs was Tuinal, which can be lethal on its own.

Edited September 5, 2021 by James DiEugenio

[Joseph McBride]

I knew Marilyn's press agent Rupert Allan, a highly sympathetic and sophisticated

man who also spent years as the press agent for Princess Grace. I asked Rupert

what he thought caused Monroe's death. He said she had little bottles of Champagne

all around her bedroom and would frequently drink them, often without thinking. He thought she popped too many

pills on the night of her death while guzzling Champagne and lost track of the effect until she fell into a fatal

unconsciousness. He said she was extremely upset at the time because Peter

Lawford had invited her to a party at his Santa Monica beach house at which

some call girls would be present; Marilyn was deeply wounded that Lawford

and company thought of her in that category, Rupert said. He also reported to me that she had seriously considered suicide while in the hospital

in New York in 1959 for a gynecological operation. She told Rupert that

she went to the window of her eighth-floor suite to jump but when she

looked down and saw a woman in a green coat waiting at a bus stop,

realized she might kill the woman by jumping, so she desisted.

Edited September 5, 2021 by Joseph McBride

[James DiEugenio]

This is from Don, not me.

When Marilyn died, Rupert Allan was no longer her press agent. He had been reassigned by Arthur Jacobs to Grace Kelly, the new Princess of Monaco. Allan followed Kelly to Monaco after she married Prince Rainer in 1956. At the time of Marilyn’s death, of course, Pat Newcomb was Marilyn’s press agent.

[David Andrews]

Gus Russo, Live By the Sword (1998):

Bobby then called the Secret Service at the White House and demanded the Oval Office tapes. White House conversations had been taped since July 1962, but only a handful of people were aware of the taping: JFK’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln, the two Secret Service agents who installed the system, Bobby Kennedy, and a few others.⁷ Those tapes are, as of this writing, still withheld from historians. In fact, the tapes made after November 8, 1963 are missing.

Years later, Bobby would summon George Dalton, a young Naval aide, to the Executive Office Building to undertake the task of transcribing some of the tapes he was given. Dalton had attracted the attention of the Kennedy family in September 1963. He was then responsible for launching helicopters to and from Hyannis and Squaw Island, where Jackie was staying just before the premature birth and death of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. When he left the Navy, Dalton went to work for Senator Edward Kennedy and performed odd jobs for Bobby. During the 1970’s, he reportedly removed tapes, and other family records, from a family vault in a National Archives warehouse in Waltham, Massachusetts. Dalton has consistently refused comment on all these matters.⁸ Recently, however, more was learned of the disposition of the Oval Office tapes.

The issue surfaced again in 1973, when the Kennedy family was preparing material for the newly-constructed John F. Kennedy (Presidential) Library in Boston. At the time, Kennedy family attorney Burke Marshall informed Senator Ted Kennedy’s aide Rick Burke, “We’re erasing the tapes.” A stunned Burke learned that “countless sensitive” conversations had been deleted by Marshall, Dalton, and Kennedy family key advisor (and brother-in-law) Steve Smith. In a few days, Marshall called to reveal some of what had been heard on the tapes: “Marilyn [Monroe] was on the phone with the President. Boy the things they talked about. . . .” In the coming weeks, Rick Burke was assigned to ship all of JFK’s files, now locked in storage in Ted’s inner office, to Steve Smith, who would then send them to the library. Burke discovered a 3-inch thick folder of telephone transcriptions of the tapes. He quickly scanned the conversations, reading steamy dialogue between the President and Monroe, and others such as Judy Campbell.⁹

7 James Johnston, interview by author, 27 December 1993. A Counsel to the Church Committee, Johnston attempted, in vain, to locate these tapes at the Kennedy Library in Boston.

8 The Boston Globe, 31 March 1993.

9 Burke, Richard E. The Senator: My Twelve Years With Ted Kennedy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992., 44-45, 61, 128; also Burke, interview by author with Seymour Hersh, 29 January 1997.

[James DiEugenio]

If you listen to Russo, there is a 28 point fingerprint of Oswald on the alleged rifle, which he did not order.

He also has a witness to Oswald shooting Kennedy.

[James DiEugenio]

From Don, swan song:

"All those damned secret tapes of steamy conversations between MM and JFK.

I find it odd that JFK’s White House conversations were being taped without his knowledge, but his personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, and RFK knew: they just never informed the president. I also find it odd that the Kennedy family destroyed the tapes but hired someone to transcribe them. For what purpose? Making a transcription of a tape a fellow destroys to obliterate its contents is absolutely nonsensical; and why, in 59 years, have none of those allegedly innumerable tapes or associated transcriptions ever surfaced?

According to the excerpt, the tapings began in July of 1962. No indications of when in July, early mid or late: Marilyn was gone in very early August."

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

One might also ask, what about all those taped calls at Marilyn's house?

If you recall, somehow, some way her house was like the NSA office because so many people e.g. Bernie Speisel among others, were secretly taping her.

If Bernie was not lying then those tapes would be worth a ton of money.  But he never sold them.

To me, Gus Russo is at about the level of the National Tattler on the JFK case, or anything dealing with that case.  And he has been since he made that Faustian bargain with PBS in 1993, and Sy Hersh/Darth Vader in 1997. Remember what Hersh said about the JFK murder, Kennedy's brace made him a sitting duck for Oswald. The fatal shot came from behind right Sy?

Please, please. I can only take so much.

Edited September 6, 2021 by James DiEugenio

[Joseph McBride]

Although Rupert Allan was not Marilyn's press agent at the time of her death, he was

well-connected with some of those who at least thought they knew what happened

to her. I am not vouching for his information, since I have not dug into the

case myself, but quoting what he said as an insider who knew some things

others did not. He told me, for example, that Marilyn told him directly

about her earlier suicidal impulse in New York and why she did not go through with it.

That story was never printed until I reported what Rupert told me.

Edited September 6, 2021 by Joseph McBride

[David Andrews]

20 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

If you listen to Russo, there is a 28 point fingerprint of Oswald on the alleged rifle, which he did not order.

He also has a witness to Oswald shooting Kennedy.

I'm just being a gadfly with that.  I can't believe the 180 Russo did between the 1992 presentation with John Newman and his 1998 book, Live By the Sword, in which Oswald is a lone nut drawn with materials from Priscilla McMillan.  Better not to write a JFKA book than to drag down his better work in books on the Mob, Sidney Korshak, et alia.