SHE was a screen icon adored by millions, but Marilyn Monroe’s endless search for love haunted her until the moment of her tragic death in 1962.
Even on the day she died, according to a new Netflix documentary, she had a furious row with lover Bobby Kennedy and accused him and his brother, President Kennedy, of passing her round “like a piece of meat”.
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Her affair with married US Attorney General Bobby was the final doomed romance in a long history of famous, powerful and often cruel men.
Sexually abused at eight and driven by twisted fantasies about her own father, who she had never known, the Some Like It Hot star wed her first husband at just 16 then stumbled from one relationship to another, often choosing much older men.
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Her marriages to baseball player Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller were desperately unhappy, and her affairs with stars like Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis were short-lived.
The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, on Netflix from today, examines the mysterious circumstances around her death from an overdose of barbiturates, at the age of 36, in her LA home.
It suggests the Kennedys instigated a cover up, sending FBI agents in to remove evidence from the house and destroying tapes of her calls and pictures of their meetings.
It’s a tragic end to the life of a beautiful, talented woman who felt used and abused by men all her life.
Abused at eight
Born Norma Jean King, the future star spent much of her childhood in the care of homes or relatives as mother Gladys, abandoned by Marilyn’s father after getting pregnant, suffered from mental health issues.
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At eight she was abused in a boarding home by an elderly man she called ‘Mr Kimmel’, and she was later assaulted by a cousin and a close family friend.
The man who was thought to be her dad, Stanley Gifford, rejected her when she tracked him down as a teenager, fuelling her often disturbing relationships with older men.
“We had a game we’d play at parties where we would say what we wanted most in the world,” says long-time friend Henry Rosenfeld.
“She said she wanted to put on a black wig, pick up her father in a bar and make love to him. Afterward she would ask, ‘How do you feel now that you have a daughter that you’ve made love to?’ ”
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Lamb to the slaughter
At 16, she married 20-year-old neighbour James Dougherty, but the relationship floundered when he joined the Merchant Navy and she took up modelling.
They divorced in 1942 after four years and Marilyn moved to Hollywood to pursue her career, changing her name on the way.
As a beautiful aspiring actress, Marilyn was a lamb to the slaughter in a town where the casting couch – and a lot worse – ruled.
She later told of men holding her down while she was attacked at LA parties and Orson Welles remembered one party where “Marilyn was surrounded by men and one reached out and tore off her top, revealing her breasts”.
She landed her breakthrough contract, in 1948, as the result of an “agreement” with 20th Century Fox boss Joe Schenck, then 69, that she would “service” him whenever he phoned.
At Columbia pictures, president Harry Cohn demanded she have sex with him in his office and when she refused, her contract was not renewed.
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‘Well-endowed’ comic
Marilyn met comedian Milton Berle – who Truman Capote revealed was famously well-endowed – on the set of Ladies of the Chorus in 1948.
Although he was officially dating film star Adele Jergens at the time, Berle claimed to have had a brief affair with the young actress.
“Marilyn was on the climb in Hollywood, but there was nothing cheap about her,” he wrote in his autobiography.
“She wasn’t one of the starlets around town that you put one meal into and threw into the sack.
“Maybe she didn’t know exactly who she was, but she knew she was worth something. She had respect for herself. Marilyn was a lady.”
Jealous and abusive husband
By the early 50s, Marilyn had found superstardom in hit films including How to Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
She found her first great love in sporting icon Joe DiMaggio, who she married in 1954.
“He understood some things about me,” she is heard saying in the documentary. “I understood some things about him, and we based our marriage on it.”
But DiMaggio was jealous and possessive, wanting a stay at home wife, and the pair had violent rows over her screen career, and Marilyn began relying on sedatives.
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The nine month itch
The final nail in the coffin for their nine-month marriage was filming of The Seven Year Itch and the infamous subway-grate scene, where her white dress flew up, exposing her famous legs and her underwear.
Billy Wilder tells the programme DiMaggio was on set and “didn’t like it very much”.
Gladys Witten, Marilyn’s hairdresser on the film, says he later attacked her in their hotel suite. “He beat her up over it,” she says.
“She screamed and yelled for us but we couldn’t hear her through those thick walls.”
The following day she had to cover her bruises with make-up and she announced her divorce a month later.
‘She was a little stray cat’
Director Elia Kazan – 26 years Marilyn’s senior – had an affair with the young actress while he was married to playwright Molly Thacher and confessed in a private letter: “I’m not sorry about it.”
Calling Marilyn a “touching pathetic waif”, he said he met her after an unnamed boyfriend “or keeper, if you want to be mean” had died.
He added: “I’m not ashamed at all, not a damn bit, of having been attracted to her. She is nothing like what she appears to be now, or even appears to have turned into now. She was a little stray cat when I knew her.”
It was Kazan who introduced her to her future husband, playwright Arthur Miller, who he said was “very taken with her”.
Hollywood star – to homemaker
Marilyn said it was love at first sight when she met Miller in 1950, although they didn’t start a relationship until five years later.
They married in 1956, with the playwright giving her a ring inscribed: ‘Now is forever.’
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“We’re so congenial, This is the first time I’ve been really in love. Arthur is a serious man, but he has a wonderful sense of humour. We laugh and joke a lot. I’m mad about him,” she said at the time.
Marilyn tried to become a home-maker, cooking, cleaning and taking care of Miller’s children, who all loved spending time with her.
But her workload, and increasing dependence on drugs, meant the romance began to crumble.
A cruel twist came when Miller, apparently deliberately, left notes lying around for her to read, in which he referred to her as a “whore”.
She told her acting coach: “It was something about how disappointed he was in me. How he’d thought I was some kind of angel, but now he guessed he was wrong.
“He’d married a woman as flawed as his previous wife had been.”
They divorced in 1961.
Brief encounters
In his memoirs published in 2009, Tony Curtis revealed that he had a passionate fling with Marilyn in the early 1950s which, he claimed, was reignited on the set of their iconic movie Some Like It Hot.
Despite her friends in the documentary claiming she never cheated on her husband, Curtis claimed he had fathered a child while she was married to Arthur Miller, which she lost in one of her many tragic miscarriages.
The actress also had a brief fling with Frank Sinatra when she stayed at his house, following the split from Miller.
The romance cooled off by 1961, when Sinatra proposed to Juliet Prowse, but the two remained friends until her death.
Another famous man who claimed to have had sex with the blonde bombshell is comedian Jerry Lewis.
In 2011, he told GQ she used sex like he used humour, adding: “She needed that contact to be sure it was real.”
Asked about the affair he replied: “It was … long. I was crippled for a month.” Then he joked: “And I thought Marlene Dietrich was great!”
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‘Used’ by JFK and brother
In a now famous clip, Marilyn appeared on the stage in Madison Square gardens, in a sheer, tight-fitting gown, and rasps: “Happy Birthday Mr President.”
The date in May 1962, and the pair rumoured to be having an affair, but the documentary claims JFK soon got “bored” and rejected her.
She turned to his brother Robert, known as Bobby, and later told psychiatrist Dr Ralph Greenson she was having a passionate fling with a powerful man she called “the General” – now assumed to be a pet name for the Attorney General.
On tapes heard in the new documentary, housekeeper Eunice Murray claims that, on the afternoon of August 4, 1962, Bobby Kennedy visited Marilyn after secretly flying into LA by helicopter.
The couple had a furious row and, according to Murray, “his protectors had to step in to protect him”.
Later that night Marilyn, according to surveillance expert Reed Wilson, was “raising a stink, calling John in the White House about his brother.
“She felt she was being used, she felt ‘passed around’ and treated ‘like a piece of meat’.
“She screamed, ‘Get your brother away from me, I hate all of you.”
While the documentary concludes that the star’s death, hours later, was probably suicide, the involvement of the two most powerful men in the US – and the missing documents and tapes – have fuelled many conspiracy theories.
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At the beginning of the programme, Marilyn is heard saying: “The true things rarely get into circulation. It’s usually the false things.”
Whatever the truth, the tragic screen idol was let down by the lovers in her life, again and again.
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