Dorothy Kilgallen Said Many Things About Marilyn Monroe -- Consult Microfilm

[David Yarnell]

Has anyone consulted the New York Journal American on microfilm to read everything Dorothy Kilgallen wrote about Marilyn Monroe's death ?

If you're relying on Lee Israel's book as your only source, then you're missing a lot. Lee cites just two Kilgallen columns: those published on August 3, 1962 and August 8, 1962. Lee leaves out a few words from August 3 and several paragraphs from August 8.

Lee Israel skips Kilgallen's entire column from August 16. Here's an excerpt from that day:

"Why did Mrs. Murray call the doctor in the middle of the night just because Marilyn didn't answer a knock on her bedroom door ? If she were just trying to get to sleep and took the overdose of barbiturates accidentally, then she could have slept through an explosion. Mrs. Murray and Dr. Greenson knew that. Isn't there some other reason Mrs. Murray decided to call the doctor ?

"Also, if Mrs. Murray was really a housekeeper, why was Marilyn's room such a mess ? It was a small house and should have been easy to keep tidy."

In this column, Kilgallen says her readers have been sending her letters asking here these and other questions.

In another column from mid August 1962, Kilgallen asks why the Los Angeles police have failed to ask police in Lake Tahoe, Nevada about a suicide attempt Marilyn allegedly made there one week before she died. More than twenty years later, Anthony Summers said in "Goddess" that Marilyn did, indeed visit the Cal Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe a week before she died. He echoed Kilgallen's assertion that Marilyn overdosed on pills there and her stomach was pumped.

To learn more about Kilgallen's take on Monroe, please visit a microfilm collection in the New York City area or the University of Texas at Austin or the Library of Congress. I have heard that a few newspapers in the U. K. and Australia reprinted Dorothy Kilgallen's column, but they could have deleted the stuff that originated in New York. Only the New York Journal American published the entire Voice of Broadway.

I can't keep doing this again and again.