Immortal Mayhem
The Sweet Smell of Excess
“Here, smell this!” Mark Bellinghaus urges in his moderate German
accent, handing me a pair of black-and-white checkered pants once worn
by Marilyn Monroe. I hold the fabric to my face as though it were the
Shroud of Turin.
“Breathe in,” he commands. “Smell that — what do you smell?”
I inhale gingerly, wondering just what it is I’m supposed to be looking for, my face buried in the slacks of a dead movie star.
“Do you smell that? Do you smell that?” Bellinghaus asks excitedly. “It’s from years of storage.”
Now I huff the material and find he’s right — there is a
smell. Not the scent of woman or used-book-store mustiness, but the
melancholy tang of glamour forever frozen in time. The snuff that dreams
are made of.
Bellinghaus also owns the top half of a revealing gown Monroe was
supposed to wear for her “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but which was discarded in favor of a
more modest dress. He clearly prizes this bejeweled top garment and
quietly notes how another collector owns the southern half.
Bellinghaus’ home is a living museum that seamlessly incorporates
artifacts once belonging to Marilyn Monroe into its utilitarian décor.
There are so many of Monroe’s lighting fixtures, wall hangings, Mexican
tchotchkes, paintings and pieces of furniture here that parts of the
modest house near Cheviot Hills are exact reproductions of rooms from
the Brentwood house in which Monroe last resided. And Bellinghaus has
the photos of those rooms to prove it.
Much of Bellinghaus’ impressive collection can be seen on his Web
site, markbellinghaus.com, whose reverence for Marilyn Monroe is
reinforced by images of flickering votive flames, Merlin the magician
and a medieval knight. For the sake of my visit, Bellinghaus has locked
out his two dogs, a poodle named Marilyn and a Weimaraner named Monroe.
The afternoon sky is hazy and, looking around the darkened living room,
it’s difficult to discern where Marilyn’s stuff ends and Bellinghaus’
life begins.
“I had a very difficult time as a child,” Bellinghaus recalls. “My
parents put me in a boarding school when I was 6 years old and I felt
rejected. When I was 9 I saw a cutout of Marilyn from How to Marry a Millionaire, where she’s in front of those three mirrors and looks so magnificent.”
When it comes to Hollywood memorabilia, there are collectors and then
there are Marilyn collectors. After Monroe died of a barbiturate
overdose on August 5, 1962, her personal belongings were bequeathed to
her estate’s principal executors — Method-acting guru Lee Strasberg, who
died in 1982, and his wife, Paula, who had passed away in 1966.
Although Monroe’s will had stated that her effects were to be
distributed among friends, her belongings were instead kept in storage
for decades. Within months of the 1999 death of Susan, Lee and Paula’s
daughter, Lee’s third wife and widow, Anna Strasberg, auctioned off
Monroe’s possessions for about $13 million through Christie’s. The
long-standing presumption is that Anna was waiting for the legal field
to clear before making this move. For many Marilyn fans this was a
primal act of hubris and greed, a desecration ripped from Greek
mythology that supercharged Monroe’s possessions with controversy.
Against his family’s wishes, Bellinghaus, a lithe, boyish
43-year-old, came to Los Angeles in 1995 from Germany, where he had been
a successful film and TV actor. He chose L.A. because this is where
Monroe lived, and to take acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute —
just as Marilyn had done in New York. Los Angeles connected Bellinghaus
with Monroe on a spiritual level, but it also revealed to him a
disillusioning side of the Marilyn Monroe industry.
“I met Anna Strasberg,” Bellinghaus says. “She introduced herself to
me with a big lie. I was wearing an iron-on Marilyn-picture T-shirt. I
asked how Marilyn was and she said, ‘Beautiful!’ But she never met her!”
Bellinghaus has put his acting career on hold and devotes all his
time and money to two pursuits: collecting Marilyn and defending her
against exploiters. Every time a factually dubious Marilyn Monroe book
appears on Amazon.com, lengthy and vitriolic e-mail attacks are sure to
arrive from Bellinghaus (and to be removed by Amazon.com), whose
sarcastic postings run the gamut of online Monroe forums, and even
Wikipedia pages. His ultimate goal, he says, is to “liberate Marilyn” by
breaking the licensing grip held on most Marilyn Monroe images by CMG
Worldwide, the licensing company that owns copyrights on a large
inventory of dead movie stars and historical figures, including James
Dean, Babe Ruth and Rosa Parks.
Later in the day, Bellinghaus is joined by Ernest W. Cunningham, whose book, The Ultimate Marilyn,
is a guide to separating Monroe facts from fantasy. The 68-year-old
Cunningham, who walks with a cane, and the peripatetic German actor are
united by their determination to confront and uproot what they consider
Marilyn fraud and denigration wherever it appears.
“We feel very strongly about Marilyn,” Cunningham says. “It’s as
though they’re talking about your mother or sister. They’re calling your
mother a whore and a crazy woman, so you have to stand up to defend
her. This is a very important mission.”
left to right:
Ernest Cunningham, Jennifer Jean Miller, Mark Bellinghaus in front of Marilyn Monroe's crypt, at Westwood Memorial Cementary, Los Angeles, CA, USA
“I have put up my life savings, my acting money and my inheritance
from my father into my collection,” Bellinghaus adds. Then, gesturing to
the room, he continues: “But I live with this — this is my life. People
ask me, ‘Aren’t you trying to connect yourself with Marilyn Monroe?’ I
think that might be a totally stupid and wicked statement . . . I think
she
chose me.”
What makes a man give up so much? Who are the people Bellinghaus is
fighting and how did an insecure movie star become a gold mine long
after her death? The answers to these questions involve more than
obscure battles fought among collectors and memoirists. They speak to
how our celebrity-driven culture and an unquestioning media have created
a national audience that believes in anything it sees on television or
reads on the Internet.
Forty-five years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains Hollywood’s
single most recognizable icon. She is more than a household name, she
has become our Eva Peron. Typing her name into a Google search yields
more than 2 million Web pages — more than searches for Abraham Lincoln
or Mahatma Gandhi. To appreciate Monroe’s place in our national dream
life is to understand her journey from dead star to supernova.
Monroe had played center stage during so many moments of the American
narrative: A job at a defense plant recalled the country’s heroic war
effort; her marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller seemed to wed
the democratic enthusiasms of the stadium with the cerebral skepticism
of the academy; the appearance of an early photograph of a nude Monroe
in the launch issue of Playboy christened a new era of sexual
candor. Marilyn Monroe came to signify something to everyone and her end
meant more than the death of a movie star. (As Leo Braudy noted in his
study of fame, The Frenzy of Renown, Los Angeles County suicides jumped 40 percent in August 1962, following Monroe’s death.)
The posthumous fascination with Monroe began with the appearance of
Andy Warhol’s campy silk-screens of the movie goddess, followed by her
popularity in the poster-art hierarchy of the late 1960s. Then, when
Norman Mailer’s 1973 book, Marilyn: A Biography,linked her death
with the Kennedy family, her name became connected to the potent power
grid of conspiracy culture — and Monroe’s legend reached critical mass.
Today, an entire hypothetical history has been created in
self-published books, Web sites and blogs about exactly how Monroe died
or what would have happened had she not died. The mythology runs
something like this: Had Marilyn lived a few days more, she would have
remarried Joe DiMaggio, held a press conference to denounce the Kennedys
and revealed government secrets about UFO research at Roswell, New
Mexico. Or, if Monroe had lived out her natural life, John F. Kennedy
wouldn’t have been assassinated, the Vietnam War wouldn’t have taken
place, there would have been no George W. Bush. If only . . .
At this moment, there are people claiming to be Marilyn Monroe’s
children or former lovers, or to have encountered her as a schizophrenic
hitchhiker in Nova Scotia. There are also people selling Monroe
possessions on eBay whose fakeness is painfully obvious.
“This is going to stay with me forever,” Bellinghaus says of his work
exposing Marilyn frauds. “If I get hit by a bus or murdered by some
other people —” Here, he pauses. “I got death threats. I changed my
number. It was scary sometimes. I have some [window] bars here but you
never know — if someone hires a hit man they could easily get me.”
Bellinghaus shows me another garment, this one bearing a possible
coffee stain. It is Marilyn’s famous white terry-cloth robe, the one
that appears in so many photographs of her, which was found on the floor
near her bed the night she died. This time I’m ready for it — I have
breathed in the madness.
Bellinghaus, Mark and Cunningham, Ernest. Verlag: Privately Published, N.P., 2007. Preis: EUR 211,75. Währung umrechnen. Versand: EUR 32,89. Von USA ...
Separated at Death?
Sherrie Lea Laird remembers sitting in a Las Vegas Denny’s last
August, nursing the mother of all hangovers. The 43-year-old singer with
a Canadian rock band named Pandamonia had been partying the previous
night until 7 a.m. and now, as the sun scalded the sidewalk outside, was
trying to get down a late breakfast. Laird had known rougher days,
having struggled with alcohol and drug abuse, as well as bouts of
homelessness and confinements to mental hospitals following two suicide
attempts.
Laird’s life had been full of abrupt change and uncertainty, but as
she sat in the diner’s air-conditioned chill she knew one sure thing:
She was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. So much so that she was on
the last leg of a road trip from Toronto to L.A. so she could appear at
the annual graveside memorial for Monroe. She had even brought along a
Marilynesque dress whose strap tied behind her neck.
Even in a culture whose media is saturated with stories about
celebrity, the paranormal and the occult, it’s hard to imagine Sherrie
Lea Laird without the Internet. It was through a Web site that she met
Dr. Adrian Finkelstein, a Malibu psychiatrist specializing in “past-life
regressions.”
She e-mailed the doctor in 1998, telling him that for years she had
been oppressed by feelings that another person was fighting for
possession of her mind and body. Eventually Laird believed she was the
reincarnation of the actress, whose presence caused Laird to experience
crushing chest pains, which Finkelstein diagnosed as pain relived from
the moment of Monroe’s death.
Laird and Finkelstein spent the next year telephoning and e-mailing
each other. Then, in order to concentrate on her singing career, Laird
cut off contact with the psychiatrist until 2005. When she
re-established communication, Finkelstein, like Bram Stoker’s Dr. Van
Helsing, sensed his patient was mentally slipping away, and he flew to
Toronto twice to exorcise Laird’s demons. He placed Laird under hypnosis
in a darkened hotel room he had booked for the occasion.
There, Laird lay on a Holiday Inn bed and journeyed back in time. Her
sepulchral voice barely vented through unmoving lips as she answered
Finkelstein’s questions. Sherrie/Marilyn revealed she had been the lover
of both John and Robert Kennedy and had sex with then Senator John
Kennedy in the back seat of a car, although she admitted that Bobby was
more fun in bed. She also relived the asphyxiating final moments of her
death, the pain of which prompted Dr. Finkelstein to bring her out of
her somnambular state. As an unexpected bonus, he discovered, after also
placing Laird’s 20-year-old daughter, Kezia, under hypnosis, that Kezia
was the reincarnation of Norma Jean Baker’s mother, Gladys.
Adrian Finkelstein’s office sits in a small Malibu business complex
along the Pacific Coast Highway, tucked between a carpet dealer and a
foot masseuse. A native of Romania who emigrated to Israel in 1961,
Finkelstein exudes a mixture of Old World charm and New Age credulity.
As the zoom of coastal traffic swishes outside, Finkelstein explains his
belief in Laird’s story.
“There are about 35 known individuals claiming to be Marilyn Monroe,”
he says, “but most people claiming to be reincarnated celebrities are
crackpots — they are psychotic.” Nevertheless, he says that he
immediately believed Laird. For one thing, she didn’t want to be
Marilyn Monroe, and for another, she didn’t appear psychotic and she
possessed apparent photographic recall of details from Monroe’s life.
There were also what Finkelstein calls “biometrics” — genetic markers
passed down from one person to his or her reincarnation that are found
in bone structures and physical mannerisms. Equally persuasive, to the
doctor’s thinking, was the fact that Laird and Monroe shared the same
astrological north-south moon nodes and north-south house moon nodes. If
this wasn’t a smoking gun, what was?
Finally, all those coincidences — what Finkelstein calls
“synchronicities” — were impossible to dismiss. Sherrie was a singer,
while in the movie Bus Stop Monroe had played a singer — whose
name was Cherie. Laird had also once been married to a serviceman and so
had Monroe, and both women had had an Aunt Anne in their families. Not
only that, but Kezia — the reincarnation of Monroe’s mother — had been
born exactly nine months after the 1984 death of Gladys Baker. The
synchronicities just kept piling up.
Finkelstein, who enjoys physician’s privileges at Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center, has worked on about 4,000 cases of past-life regression,
in which patients, under hypnosis, travel back in time to meet
themselves in a previous existence. He says he has encountered himself
in 24 previous lives, most notably as a French physician during the
reign of Louis XIV. Armed with videotapes of his sessions with Laird,
and with transcripts of thousands of phone calls and e-mails,
Finkelstein published a book late last spring called Marilyn Monroe Returns: The Healing of a Soul.
About the same time, another woman claiming to be Monroe’s
reincarnation contacted Finkelstein and sent him a seminude photograph
of herself. However, this woman was deluded, he decided — the biometrics
just weren’t there. “She was kind of plump,” Finkelstein says.
To the unschooled eye, Laird and Monroe might not appear that similar
either, even when Laird wears her neck-strap dress. Still, Laird was
surprised when, after her hangover breakfast in Las Vegas, she spoke to a
friend in Ottawa while stopped at a gas station. “How do you feel about
the news?” the friend asked, and told Laird to pick up that day’s L.A. Times,
which featured a 2,050-word Calendar-section story about Laird,
headlined “Giving More Life to Marilyn?” Soon, after she drove the 275
miles through desert and mountains to L.A., people would be seeing lots
of Sherrie Lea Laird and that Marilyn dress.
Westwood Memorial Park is 2½ acres of lawn, firs and squirrels
located at the end of the Avco Theater’s parking-structure driveway.
Once an obscure pocket cemetery, the graveyard became many entertainers’
final destination of choice following Marilyn Monroe’s interment in an
aboveground crypt. Dean Martin is here, along with Billy Wilder, ?Burt
Lancaster, Jack Lemmon and Natalie Wood. About a dozen years ago, Playboy
founder Hugh Hefner purchased the wall crypt immediately next to
Monroe’s, which is covered with kiss imprints. When he is asked about
his choice, Hefner, who never met Monroe, sounds every bit the
pragmatist.
“That cemetery is very close to the mansion,” he says, “and a number
of my close friends are buried there — Mel Tormé, Buddy Rich and Dorothy
Stratten. It just seemed the place I ought to be.”
On most days, the cemetery is an island of calm just beyond the
trauma of Wilshire Boulevard traffic, but every August 5 since 1982 it
has drawn dozens of visitors to the Marilyn Monroe Memorial, an event
sponsored by the Marilyn Remembered fan club, which installed a
commemorative bench near Monroe’s crypt in the Corridor of Memories.
The club’s founder and president, Greg Schreiner, grew up in
Orangeville, Illinois, a town of 500 “near nothing.” His obsession with
Marilyn Monroe began as a child. “My parents took me to see Some Like It Hot at a drive-in,” he says. “I became fascinated with this creature on the screen, and I became a collector.”
Today, he owns 10 gowns (including the bottom half of Monroe’s sexy costume from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)
and furniture belonging to Monroe, along with her refrigerator. A small
room in his home has glass display cases containing pieces of
Monroebilia and many Monroe dolls, though he says much of his collection
is in storage or in traveling exhibits.
Although the fan club’s Westwood services often draw Marilyn
impersonators and people dressed in 1950s-style clothing, last August’s
gathering would stick out for Schreiner.
“We’ve dealt with people thinking they’re Marilyn’s children ever
since the club has been in existence,” says Schreiner. “We’ve had [such]
people show up and most of them are mentally ill. I guess they’re just
sick people latching on to Marilyn as an anchor in their lives.”
Schreiner says that as he addressed the assembled fans in the
cemetery’s A-framed chapel, Sherrie Lea Laird and her daughter, Kezia,
began inching toward the front. As he watched Sherrie and Kezia advance,
he recognized a new presence: Another woman, much older than Laird and
who also claimed to be Marilyn reincarnated, was advancing from behind
him. Suddenly Schreiner was caught in a pincer movement of reincarnated
Marilyns.
“I’ve got to speak!” announced the older reincarnate who, according
to Ernest Cunningham, had knocked over a couple of wreaths during her
advance.
“I’m sorry but this isn’t the time,” Schreiner recalls telling the woman, who then withdrew.
“She was in her 60s,” Schreiner says of the older woman. “You can’t
be alive the same time that Marilyn was alive and later be
reincarnated!”
Laird and Dr. Finkelstein’s ambitions extended beyond seizing
Schreiner’s moment. Now was the time to announce to the world that the
star of Niagara had been holed up in Laird’s body since 1963. Their quest did not go well.
“These Marilyn Monroe fans are so fixated on a dead idol, and most of
them don’t believe in reincarnation,” the doctor ruefully recalls in
the sanctuary of his Malibu office. “They were vicious.”
Laird knew many faces from Monroe’s past inside the cemetery chapel,
but these now-elderly friends of Marilyn’s did not in turn recognize
Laird, bringing her to tears. Many fans, Finkelstein says, were openly
contemptuous. Today, during a telephone call from Toronto, Laird’s voice
is completely guileless, her prairie-flat Canadian accent showing no
hint of her Scottish origins.
“I attended on my doctor’s insistence,” she says of last August’s
ordeal. “I wasn’t really prepared to go there but there was press from
Japan waiting for me to show up. Doctor forced me to go up to George
Barris.”
A moment of truth came when Laird, Kezia and Dr. Finkelstein cornered
Barris, the Hollywood photographer who reputedly took the last
photographs of the living Monroe, while the Japanese film crew recorded
the historic encounter.
Laird introduced herself to the bewildered octogenarian, believing he
would see in her eyes the Marilyn he beheld through his Nikon’s
viewfinder so many years ago. Barris listened and stared at Laird. Then
he spoke.
“There are many people who look like Marilyn,” Barris finally said to
the stranger. “I wish you luck — that’s all I can tell you.” As the
crestfallen Laird dabbed her eyes with a tissue, Barris turned to Dr.
Finkelstein: “Whatever she wants to be, let her be.”
Although Laird was unknown outside of Internet fan sites prior to her
appearance at the Monroe memorial, her reincarnation claim had
nonetheless reached the attentive ears of MSNBC’s Scarborough Country and CNN’s Showbiz Tonight,
both of which interviewed her and Dr. Finkelstein that week. The pair’s
interrogators rolled their eyes on cue and MSNBC brought in media
shrink Bethany Marshall to explain psychological delusion, but these
appearances, along with the L.A. Times piece, now entered a
collective unconscious already tenderized by conspiracy theories
regarding Monroe’s death. If the actress had been murdered by the Mafia
or the right wing or on order of the Kennedys, why should the
possibility of Marilyn’s reincarnation sound far-fetched?
Berth of the Hype
Today, Marilyn in death has become a bigger commodity than Marilyn in
life. CMG Worldwide, in partnership with Anna Strasberg, owns the
rights to license Monroe’s image and reportedly earns $8 million a year
on royalties from companies marketing calendars, posters and T-shirts.
“Anything that gets licensed for her sells pretty quickly,” says
Michael Marker, shipping supervisor of the Web-sales division of
Souvenirs of Hollywood, which operates two stores on Hollywood
Boulevard. “Her cardboard standups are very popular.”
The profiteers are not merely souvenir hawkers, however, but people
who sell personal items, allegedly owned by Monroe, on eBay or at
auction. In 2005, a proposed display of Marilyn Monroe possessions owned
by Chicago collector Robert W. Otto was rejected by the Hollywood
Entertainment Museum because of questionable authentication. A few
months after this rebuff, Otto’s exhibit found a berth in Long Beach
aboard the Queen Mary, which hosted a CMG-backed show called
“Marilyn Monroe: The Exhibit.” (Neither Otto nor CMG representatives
responded to interview requests for this article.)
In a more discerning time, such a high-profile display of 350
personal items that were not accompanied by photographic documentation
might have raised eyebrows, but little seems to have been done outside
of psychic medium James van Praagh honoring Entertainment Tonight’s
request that he “authenticate” the exhibit’s items. The bulk of
Monroe’s worldly estate had seemingly been disposed of in two major
auctions (the Christie’s 1,000-lot “Sale of the Century” in 1999 and the
288-lot auction by Julien’s in 2005), so where was this new inventory,
now appearing on eBay and at the Queen Mary, coming from?
The Queen Mary said it vetted the exhibition, which received
the added imprimatur of validation during a shipboard press conference
that included Otto, CMG Worldwide’s CEO Mark Roesler, Playboy’sHugh
Hefner, and June DiMaggio, who had sold to Otto about 30 items that
appeared at the exhibition. At first the show received lots of local
soft-news coverage and seemed headed to success. Soon the exhibit’s
organizers announced they would extend its stay before moving it to Las
Vegas for a planned world tour. What hadn’t been factored into the plan
was the appearance of the irrepressible Mark Bellinghaus.
Using a Beverly Hills Courier press credential, Bellinghaus,
who had purchased many Monroe possessions through the Christie’s and
Julien’s auctions, was alarmed to discover an exhibit scarce on genuine
memorabilia but inflated with lots of contemporary kitsch (Marilyn dolls
and bottle after bottle of Marilyn Merlot wine) and, worse, fake items.
The most prominent of the ringers was a transparent box of Clairol hair
curlers purportedly containing strands of Monroe’s hair. However, the
curlers, which originated from June DiMaggio’s collection, were soft
plastic, whereas rollers used during Monroe’s time were made of wire and
nylon bristle. A little research netted Bellinghaus a damning fact:
Clairol didn’t begin making these curlers until 1974, a dozen years
after Monroe’s death.
Bellinghaus, who owns Christie’s- and Julien’s-authenticated Monroe
curlers, says he and Ernest Cunningham were cold-shouldered when they
tried to bring this to the attention of the exhibit’s organizers. He
also claims that when they went to the Long Beach Police Department
their charges were met with shrugs.
Only when Bellinghaus and Cunningham got the ears of local TV-news
reporters were the rollers and some other items yanked from the show.
More importantly, the exhibit’s credibility in tatters, its organizers
cancelled the planned tour.
[
The exposé has not ended there, however — Cunningham and Emily Sadjady have filed a lawsuit against the Queen Mary,
Otto, CMG and others, alleging the defendants knowingly cobbled it
together in order to defraud a public that was charged nearly $23 per
admission.
“I’ll do anything to stick up for Marilyn,” says Sadjady, who feels a special connection to Monroe.
“When I was 12 years old,” the 63-year-old Sadjady recalls in a
brassy East Coast accent, “a voice came into my head and said, ‘You’re
going to be Marilyn Monroe when you’re 35 years old.’ ” The Boston
native was doubtful, since Monroe was very much alive at the time.
Years later, Sadjady entered show business as an interpretive dancer,
moved on to belly dancing and then became a stripper under the name
Rita Niles. When she got word that the club she was working at was about
to replace its strippers with female impersonators, survival instincts
led her to become a female female impersonator by developing a Marilyn
Monroe act. She was 35.
Cunningham and Sadjady are not the only ones suing CMG. Earlier last
year the descendants of four of Marilyn Monroe’s photographers,
including the son of Tom Kelley, who shot the famous red-velvet Marilyn
nude, are suing CMG Worldwide to establish that Monroe died a resident
of New York state, even though she passed away in California. If the two
suits succeed, they will not only break the monopoly that Anna
Strasberg and CMG have on Monroe’s image, but could also overturn the
right of corporations to own a dead celebrity’s legacy.
Here’s to You, June DiMaggio
At the exact same time of the Queen Mary exhibit, Playboy ran a cover package on Marilyn Monroe’s death, excerpting a small portion of Marilyn, Joe & Me: June DiMaggio Tells It Like It Was.
This new Marilyn memoir, released last fall, was co-written by June
DiMaggio, who claims to be New York Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio’s niece
and a close friend of Monroe. She and co-author Mary Jane Popp were
interviewed by Lisa DePaulo for the magazine, and both appeared with
Hefner at the Queen Mary press conference. When I ask June
DiMaggio about the questions raised regarding her contribution to the
exhibit, Popp speaks for her.
“We had nothing to do with the Queen Mary exhibit,” Popp says.
“Nor did we benefit from the showing in any way. The artifacts obtained
from June were given in good faith as to their origin. We had no idea
what went on with that — our dedication is to the book.”
Popp says that some possessions belonging to June’s late mother must have gotten mixed up with her Marilyn artifacts.
As with the exhibit, June DiMaggio’s Playboy excerpt of the
DiMaggio-Popp book and interview received unfavorable scrutiny. In the
interview, DePaulo says June sat next to her uncle on the car ride to
Monroe’s funeral. The photographic evidence, however, shows no sign of
June anywhere at the funeral — or anywhere with Marilyn Monroe when the
actress was alive. June DiMaggio now admits that she hadn’t ridden in a
car with “Uncle Joe” to Monroe’s funeral, but had confused that ride
with the one to her father’s services.
Hugh Hefner is bluntly honest when asked if Playboy made any attempts to verify June DiMaggio’s claims.
“No. No. No,” he says. “All of it’s obviously self-serving and you
just don’t know. Where reality ends and fiction begins, I don’t know.”
Dolores Hope Masi, a 64-year-old owner of a Las Vegas paralegal
business, claims that when she was a child in the 1950s, Monroe and Joe
DiMaggio, in order to escape the press, would stay overnight at Masi’s
family home in Sherman Oaks for several nights a week. Masi says she
attended the Queen Mary press conference and introduced herself to June DiMaggio, whom Masi says she doesn’t remember ever being around Monroe or Joe.
“I walked up to her,” Masi says, “and shook her hand and said, ‘Hi,
my name is Dolores Hope Masi, do you know who I am?’ She said ‘No,’ and I
said, ‘I don’t know who you are, either!’?” Masi herself has been the
subject of some derision, much of it, not surprisingly, coming from Mark
Bellinghaus. Masi, who was interviewed on a softball segment of ABC’s Good Morning America,
claims Monroe gave her or her mother 30 to 40 pieces of jewelry and six
items of clothing, including studio costumes. Since last year she has
been selling low- and high-end reproductions of this jewelry, and will
soon start marketing Monroe-gown knockoffs. Masi is also currently
negotiating a book deal about her life.
The doubts about June’s veracity focused suspicion on her book’s most
sensational claim — that not only was Marilyn Monroe murdered, but that
June’s mother, Lee, happened to be on the phone with Monroe at the time
the intruders broke into the actress’s home. If this weren’t enough,
June, who says she brought a homemade pizza over to Monroe hours before
her death, swears her mother told her that Monroe shouted the name of
one of her assailants into the phone just before they silenced her.
June’s mother, however, supposedly took this name to her grave, fearing
for her family’s safety. June says Lee did not even tell her this
information.
The somewhat oversized DiMaggio-Popp book fits neatly onto a small
coffee table. Written in the same folksy style that graces the back-menu
histories of old restaurants, it’s laid out like a scrapbook, with
family recipes and many photos of Joe and Marilyn at home with June’s
parents, as well as many of June as she struggled to define herself as
an actor during the 1940s and ’50s.
While June provides generously candid details about herself (she
possessed advanced ESP powers and a 42D bust that Monroe envied), the
book is filled with chronological improbabilities. She also claims to be
younger than Monroe when she is actually three years older. And she
omits the fact that Tom DiMaggio was her mother’s second husband, whom
she married when June was 19. There is also the matter of why she
doesn’t appear in any photographs with her confidante, Monroe. (June’s
only seen once, with what seems to be a napping Joe DiMaggio in a grainy
snapshot.)
When reached by phone at her Sacramento home, June sounds every bit
convincing as the senior citizen who recalls Monroe as a nearsighted
woman-child who visited Tom and Lee DiMaggio’s home without makeup and
her hair in pigtails. She sounds equally sincere when explaining why she
isn’t pictured with Monroe in any of her book’s photographs that were
taken at an aunt’s home.
“I took some of those pictures,” June says, implying that’s the
reason for her absence in the pictures showing Monroe and Joe. “And the
few pictures that were taken of me with Marilyn, a cousin destroyed.”
“We have done our due diligence with the book as far as
authenticating,” Popp says. “It’s not a biography, these are the
memories of June DiMaggio.” Popp says she and June are currently in
negotiations for a film version of their book.
Popp says that the motive behind revealing that Monroe was mysteriously murdered was to help restore the star’s public image.
“All this time they were saying she committed suicide or overdosed,”
Popp says. “It was important for us to say, ‘No, let this woman rest —
her life was taken from her.’ I’d be spinning in my grave if all these
theories and terrible things were coming up.”
“I wish they would let Marilyn rest in peace,” adds June DiMaggio. “The poor little thing.”
Bosom Buddies
The DiMaggio-Popp book is only the latest in a long line of memoirs
that, to put it mildly, strain credulity. The late Richard Slatzer got
the ball rolling in 1982 with a book in which he claims to have been
briefly married to Monroe. John Baker, a Canadian, took it a step
further in his self-published My Day With Marilyn, in which heclaims to have picked up a homeless, schizophrenic hitchhiker in 1984 who was Marilyn Monroe.
Last year, self-described Monroe confidante Jeanne Carmen’s self-published biography, Jeanne Carmen: My Wild, Wild Life As a New York Pin Up Queen, Trick Shot Golfer and Hollywood Actress also appeared. Written by her son, Brandon James, many of the book’s 550 pages recount Marilyn-and-Jeanne I Love Lucy hijinks
in which the two women appear as softcore versions of Lucy and Ethel —
fun-loving gals who’d spank a naked Jack Benny in a steam room or ogle
Rock Hudson scoring a very special hole in one with a younger partner on
a golf-course green. Most of the men in Carmen’s book are incredibly
endowed and on the make. She seems to have had a Zelig-like presence in
Monroe’s life and was even watching from Monroe’s bedroom closet, she
asserts, while the actress and her incredibly endowed husband, Joe
DiMaggio, had sex.
Brandon James claims his book, written in the first-person voice of
Jeanne Carmen, is “an artistic interpretation” of his mother’s life.
That statement seems to wink at readers who may wonder about the
biography’s improbable geographic details, its lack of hard dates, the
fact that Carmen and Monroe pop Valium and Quaaludes before the drugs
were even sold, and about why Monroe and others are quoted as using
current slang.
When contacted, however, Carmen flatly says, “It’s all true.” And,
like June DiMaggio’s mother, she knows who really killed Monroe.
“I guarantee you she did not commit suicide,” Carmen purrs in a Mae
West–like voice. “I pretty much know who did it and it would astound
you.”
Carmen has enjoyed a late-life, nostalgia-fed celebrity of her own,
some of it the result of her alleged friendship with Monroe, some it
from her own career as a pinup model and trick-shot golfer in the 1950s
and early ’60s. She has appeared at the Marilyn Remembered memorials and
as an expert on a 2006 episode of CBS’s 48 Hours Mystery program
that kited a list of rumors about Monroe’s death. Carmen’s appearance,
in which she claimed that Monroe called her on the night of her death
begging Carmen to bring her sleeping pills, was blasted by gossip
columnist Liz Smith, who, like many others, accuses Carmen of never
having been Monroe’s friend. Carmen acknowledges also getting heat from
Mark Bellinghaus, Ernest Cunningham and others.
“All these little, gay guys who have these clubs despise me and they
weren’t even born [then]. I was her friend, why are [they] jumping on
me?”
Yet Carmen shows no solidarity toward her fellow memoirist June DiMaggio.
“She’s the biggest liar that ever walked the face of the earth,”
Carmen says. “I doubt she ever met Marilyn. She came out of the woodwork
saying the craziest fucking things I’ve heard in my life.”
Carmen says she will no longer attend the Westwood cemetery memorials, following a confrontation with a stranger there.
“He jumped out from his car dressed in black and said, ‘You knew my
father, John F. Kennedy. I’m John Kennedy’s son.’ I shook his hand but I
had the feeling he was going to lay a bullet in my head.”
The Feminist and the Fans
“Here I am, one of the founders of second-wave feminism and I’m hanging out with the woman who was Voluptua, who was a Playboy centerfold!”
Professor Lois Banner is taking a break from reading student papers
in her cluttered USC office to describe her involvement with the Marilyn
Remembered fan club. She teaches “Gender and Sexualities in American
History” and “American Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the United
States Past” — two courses that entwine history with gender and the
study of pop culture, and which discuss Marilyn Monroe. Banner says her
students have shown tremendous interest in Monroe, and next fall she
will launch a seminar devoted entirely to the movie star.
“It started out as a quest to find out about Marilyn,” she says.
“It’s become a very major part of my life and I could not even tell you
why. I think I find it a very welcome relief from the academic world.”
Banner’s published works include Intertwined Lives: Passion and Intellect in the Lives of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead and In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality.
The world of Marilyn studies was unlike anything she’d been used to —
it’s not as though the books by June DiMaggio, Jeanne Carmen or Adrian
Finkelstein are peer-reviewed. Instead, she found an untamed frontier of
pop culture to which she is trying to instill some amount of order.
“I’m very, very involved in the Marilyn community,” she says about
Marilyn Remembered. “I learn a lot from going to the club. I like the
club. I attend every meeting; my husband goes to the club. I have
friends in the club.”
Banner is friends with president Greg Schreiner — with whom she is
cataloging papers from boxes of Monroe documents — as well as with Mark
Bellinghaus and Ernest Cunningham. She is aware of the collector
rivalries and the frauds and questionable memoirists. She refuses to
become a collector herself, emphasizing this refusal as though it
requires an act of supreme will. Instead, Banner’s ultimate goal is to
establish a Marilyn Monroe archive, at either USC or the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library. This would
not be a museum of gowns, bracelets and hair curlers, but a scholarly
repository of documents that would fix Monroe’s place in American
culture.
“It’s dealing with national consciousness,” Banner says of her Monroe
work. “She’s emerging as the greatest female icon of the 20th century
and my interest is in giving some cohesion to the Marilyn community,”
she adds. “Just as my colleagues study Abraham Lincoln, I study both the
mythology and the reality of Marilyn Monroe. I don’t know of any other
scholar working on Marilyn Monroe.”
In December, the annual Marilyn Remembered Christmas party was held
at Greg Schreiner’s home, a tidy pink-stucco house in Mid City. As
Schreiner’s two dachshunds, Lorna and Liza, ran excitedly among the
40-odd guests, club members chatted and helped themselves to buckets of
Kentucky Fried Chicken, raw veggies and homemade eggnog. Lois Banner was
there, as was Voluptua (a.k.a. Gloria Pall), whose self-published book,
The Marilyn Monroe Party, is a very brief account of her
attending a party thrown for Monroe in 1952. At the Marilyn Remembered
event, there were lots of Marilyn neckties on display — one man owns
three dozen.
Mark Bellinghaus was not in attendance, nor had he any plans to be.
He is at bitter odds with some members, particularly those who have not
formally joined Ernest Cunningham’s lawsuit against the Queen Mary exhibit.
No club business was conducted this night, whose main event was a white-elephant gift exchange.
“Hey, maybe they’ll be Marilyn’s missing mink cuffs!” someone yells
out as a small package containing votive candles is unwrapped.
Early on in its existence, the club could count on speakers who had
worked with Marilyn Monroe on her films or who had known her personally.
Time, Schreiner says, has taken its toll on this group, and today such
appearances are increasingly rare. Death and fading memories are not
erasing Marilyn Monroe’s legacy, however, but transforming it into a
snowballing myth of sex and violence. Will it make any difference if we
ever know if Monroe took her own life or was murdered with a drug enema?
Or if she slept with the Kennedys or played big sister to June
DiMaggio?
As insignificant as the dubious Monroe memoirs and collectibles may
seem to the average person, the ease with which they subtly alter public
perceptions of the truth is disturbing. The great paradox of our time
is that the more information we have and the greater its accessibility,
the less certain we are about historical events that once seemed
indisputable. The Internet gives Marilyn fans instant knowledge, but it
also spreads the most outlandish claims, and has created an
international bazaar of counterfeit memorabilia.
“It may be impossible to stop the fabrication,” admits Professor
Banner, even as she tries to build her Marilyn archive of objective
truths.
Mark Bellinghaus and Ernest Cunningham will keep fighting those who
they believe exploit or demean Marilyn Monroe. Cunningham’s suit, which
has been partly financed by Bellinghaus, goes to court this May.
“You say it’s all right for someone to show a hair roller, but where
does the fraud end?” asks Bellinghaus. “Where does it become
unacceptable? I want to make sure that people in 100, 200, 300 years
don’t think Marilyn slept with Elvis — she didn’t.”
