MARILYN AND JUDY'S LAST PRESS AGENT SAYS, “IT’S ALL TRUE”
Bonnie Greer's Marilyn & Ella, a musical play about pop culture icons Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald, which originally premiered at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 2008, is to make its West End debut in three Sunday performances at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, Nov. 15, 22 and 29. The play is directed by Colin McFarlane, and features Suzie Kennedy as Monroe. It is produced by 4th Wall Entertainment and Neil Eckersley and Paul Spicer for Speckulation Entertainment.
According to press materials, Marilyn Monroe quit Hollywood for New York at the height of her fame in 1955 in search of something more real. During this time she immersed herself in the underground jazz bars of New York and for the very first time got to hear Ella Fitzgerald perform live. Monroe was reportedly blown away and promptly called the owner of her favorite L.A. club, Mocambo, and told him that she would sit in the front row of his club every night for a week if he lifted the color ban and allowed Fitzgerald to sing in his nightclub. He agreed, the ban was lifted, and the rest is history. Fitzgerald was later quoted as saying, "I owe Marilyn a debt."
Greer's play explores how Fitzgerald, one of the greatest music artists of the 20th century came to worship Monroe, the most beautiful woman in the world, not for her external looks but for the individual inside that few in the wider world ever caught a glimpse of. Interspersed with hits of the era, including "I Got Rhythm," "My Funny Valentine," "Every Time We Say Goodbye," "Mack the Knife" and "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend."
Suzie Kennedy has performed all over the world, in films, music videos, documentaries and TV commercials. She has also recently appeared in an Italian film, "lo e Marilyn", about her heroine. The part of Ella Fitzgerald is still to be cast.
Bonnie Greer is a playwright, author and critic. She has been a regular contributor to TV's "Newsnight Review" and "Question Time". Her latest novel "Entropy" was published in March 2009.
Director Colin McFarlane has appeared as actor in numerous theatre, TV and film roles including Commissioner Loeb in "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight". He is also a prolific voiceover artist and is currently the voice of ITV's new Saturday night entertainment show "The Cube".
To book tickets, contact the box office on 0844 412 4658, or visit http://www.marilynandella.com/.
And yet, despite this deluge of information, the public still wants more.
A new book heralded as yet another "definitive biography" about the enigmatic actress has just hit bookshelves in America, promising readers "explosive" new details about Monroe's life, particularly her alleged affair with slain president John F Kennedy.
Written by celebrity biographer J Randy Taraborrelli, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe claims to uncover new details about Monroe's tortured relationship with her mentally ill mother and her troubled childhood and adolescence.
The book also alleges that celebrated singer Frank Sinatra -- who enjoyed an on-off romance with the Some Like It Hot actress in the early 1960s -- could have saved Monroe's life had he not thrown her out of his house less than two weeks before her death amid fears she might die in his company.
This week, Taraborrelli's book was ranked eleventh on the New York Time's prestigious bestseller list.
However, some of America's most prominent book critics expressed disappointment with the biography, pointing out that Taraborrelli had failed -- despite his claims -- to reveal any previously hidden gems about Monroe's life.
"One reads doggedly through more than 500 pages of text and appendices hoping for some flash of insight, something to justify all the hours Taraborrelli spent cobbling this together, but not once does such a moment arrive," wrote veteran Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley in one withering attack.
"Someone who knows nothing about Monroe's life and legend will find the essential facts here, but no pleasure is to be derived from Taraborrelli's recital of them."
But to millions of people across the world, it scarcely matters what salacious details each new book on Monroe brings. For those who celebrate the actress as the enduring epitome of feminine beauty, sexuality and vulnerability, her legacy has lost none of its appeal.
"Marilyn set the standard for beauty in the 1950s and early 1960s, and she still sets the standard today. We often hear about starlets and celebrities being compared to Marilyn. Her look and style are imitated in red-carpet fashions and photoshoots," Scott Fortner, a recognised expert on Marilyn Monroe and one of the world's leading collectors of Monroe memorabilia, told the Weekend Review.
"It's amazing to think that this superstar from 50 years ago still reigns as one of the most beautiful women in history."
Taraborrelli, who in the past has written biographies about Madonna, Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor, based his research on extensive interviews with many close associates of Monroe, including some of the secret service agents assigned to protect JFK in the 1960s. In addition, he accessed previously unseen files, including unpublished interviews and notes from 1950s reporters.
For a public with a seemingly insatiable appetite for salacious details about the starlet's life, the book offers alleged details about Monroe's relationship with JFK.
In previous biographies it was said that Monroe and the late president enjoyed an intimate and lengthy affair that spanned several months but according to Taraborrelli, "what Marilyn really shared with JFK was either one or two nights of probable passion".
In one of the book's more revealing passages, Taraborrelli writes how the president asked Monroe for her telephone number at a dinner party thrown by his sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford, and her Hollywood actor husband, Peter Lawford, in New York in February 1962.
According to Taraborrelli, JFK called Marilyn the very next day and invited her to meet him at the home of Bing Crosby in Palm Springs a month later.
At that meeting in Palm Springs, "there was no question in my mind that Marilyn and the President were together. They were having a good time. She'd had a lot to drink. It was obvious they were intimate and that they were staying there together for the night," said Philip Watson, a Los Angeles executive interviewed by Taraborrelli.
A secret service agent assigned to protect Kennedy that weekend confirmed the liaison to Taraborrelli but denied that the affair continued after Palm Springs.
"What we knew was that JFK and Marilyn had sex at Bing Crosby's, and that's it. We didn't think it was a big deal. He had sex with a lot of women. She was just one of many and it wasn't that noteworthy," the agent said.
"If there was more to it between them, they somehow managed to keep it from us -- and I don't think you can keep something like that from the secret service." But the affair was set to have terrible consequences. By this stage, Monroe was deeply unstable. Addicted to a cartload of potentially deadly narcotics, she had taken to injecting herself with barbiturates, a cocktail she laughingly referred to as her "vitamin shots".
Obsessed with her weight, she was relying on colonic irrigation for weight loss, often enduring multiple enemas in order to fit into a favourite dress
Drugged and unresponsive in the mornings, her make-up artist Allan Snyder would begin applying her make-up while she lay groggily in bed. "There was no other way," he said in the book. "It would take her so long to get up."
While the President filed his tryst with Monroe as "another notch -- albeit an impressive one -- on his bed stand" says Taraborrelli, the actress sunk further into a deep depression.
Seventeen days after the Palm Springs weekend, Monroe was found semi naked and "almost dead" in a drug-induced coma in her Brentwood home in Los Angeles.
A close associate of Monroe told Taraborrelli exactly what had gone wrong. "JFK. That's what was wrong. She'd just been jilted by the president of the United States. It was Kennedy. That's why. Kennedy."
Four months later, she was dead. Her housekeeper found Monroe lifeless and prone on her bed clutching her telephone in her right hand. Over 15 pill bottles stood on her night stand.
Over time, despite the ruling of death by drug overdose, countless conspiracy theories would abound about whether her death was suicide or murder.
Since that day, Monroe has been regularly listed as one of the top 10 earning celebrities who are no longer alive, earning more in death than during her life.
For Fortner, who has been collecting Monroe memorabilia all his life -- and who now owns, among others, the silk cape she wore to James Dean's East of Eden premiere in 1955 -- the actress's rags-to-riches struggle remains her enduring legacy.
Her touching vulnerability and tragic demise may explain, says Fortner, why so many people continue to be fascinated by Monroe and why they still line up to buy books about her life.
"She continues to hold such a fascination in the hearts and minds of the public worldwide because people are intrigued with the Marilyn Monroe legend," said Fortner.
"She had a difficult childhood, and worked hard to become an actress. She was the biggest star of her lifetime. Her life ended tragically and too soon, and the mystery surrounding her death is still discussed and often hotly debated.
"We all want to know the truth, but probably never will. It keeps us interested."
As you talk to Thomas Noguchi, it’s hard not to glance down at his hands. He has long, delicate fingers and as he talks he folds them together. When he closes his eyes, it looks as if he is in prayer. And what a strange, often terrible, story these hands have to tell. Perhaps none stranger than what happened on the morning of Sunday, August 4 1962 when Noguchi, then a junior medical examiner, reported for work at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. As soon as he arrived, he was told that the Chief Medical Examiner wanted him to perform an autopsy on a young woman. She had been found eight hours earlier in a small house in Brentwood – the victim, it appeared, of a drugs overdose. There was, Noguchi was warned, a good deal of press interest in the case. He was, he says, rather taken aback by the request. In prominent cases, the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Theodore Curphey, invariably conducted the autopsy himself. But for reasons that still puzzle him, this did not happen. When Noguchi looked at the police report, he saw that the dead woman was 5ft 4in tall and weighed just over 10 stone. Various bottles of pills, including an empty bottle of the sleeping pill Nembutal, had been found close to her body. Her name meant nothing to him. It was only after he had read the report that someone told him that she was better known as Marilyn Monroe. ‘Even then,’ says Noguchi, ‘I didn’t think for a moment he meant the movie star. I just assumed it was someone else who had the same name.’ But when he walked into the autopsy room and lifted up the sheet that had been placed over the naked body, any doubts were swept away. When he’s asked how Marilyn Monroe looked in death, Noguchi, who has a fondness for poetry, quotes the Latin poet, Petrarch: ‘It’s folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying. For death looked lovely in her lovely face.’ At the time, though, it’s safe to assume that Petrarch was not uppermost on his mind. ‘Of course, I felt pressure, but I remember thinking very clearly that I must make sure I was not distracted by who she was.’
First of all, Noguchi did what he always did. He took out his magnifying glass and examined every inch of the dead woman’s body. ‘When you are a coroner, you start from the assumption that every body you examine might be a murder victim.’ He was looking, principally, for needle marks in case she had been injected with drugs. Also, of course, for marks indicating physical violence. Noguchi found no needle marks, but just above Monroe’s left hip, he did find a dark reddish-blue bruise. Judging by its colour, the bruise was fresh rather than old. Under the External Examination section of his autopsy report, Noguchi noted: ‘The unembalmed body is that of a 36-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female… the scalp is covered with bleach blonde hair… a slight ecchymotic area is noted on the left hip and left side of lower back.’ He then began the internal examination. It was this that has given future generations of conspiracy theorists sufficient room in which to exercise their imaginations. In Monroe’s stomach, Noguchi found no visual evidence of any pills. Nor was there any sign of the yellow dye with which Nembutal capsules were coated – and which might have been expected to stain her stomach lining. All he found was what he describes as ‘a milky substance – there were no food particles or anything like that’. Along with samples of blood, the internal organs were sent off for toxicology tests. Several hours after he had completed the autopsy, Noguchi received the toxicology report. The tests on the blood showed 8.0 mg per cent of chloral hydrate – another sleeping pill – while the liver tests revealed 13.0 mg per cent of pentobarbital (or Nembutal). Both of these were well above the fatal dose. However, Noguchi admits he made a mistake at this point. The toxicology tests had only been performed on the blood and the liver – not on the other internal organs. He should, he feels now, have insisted that all the organs were examined. ‘I am sure that this could have cleared up a lot of the subsequent controversy, but I didn’t follow through as I should have.’ As a junior member of staff, he says, he didn’t want to risk displeasing anyone. At a press conference later that day, his boss, Dr Curphey, announced that Monroe had committed suicide. Noguchi did not disagree with his conclusion. None the less, he was sufficiently troubled by the oversight to go back to the toxicology lab a few weeks later and ask if they could test the other organs that he’d sent over. But when he did, he was told that the organs had already been disposed of as the case had been marked as closed. ‘I think that was a great shame,’ he says, speaking very deliberately. ‘Not suspicious. I’m not saying that; it was a perfectly normal procedure. But still a shame.’ Noguchi’s autopsy was widely derided when it was published. The journalist Anthony Scaduto called it ‘one of the weirdest autopsy reports ever confected’, while Norman Mailer in his 1973 book, Marilyn: A Novel Biography, openly questioned Noguchi's motives. ‘The word was out to keep this thing a suicide, not to make it a murder… If you’re the coroner and you feel the official mood is to find evidence of a suicide, you wouldn’t want to come in with murder.’ Almost 60 years on, Noguchi, now 82, sits in his salmon pink mock Tudor house in Los Angeles and all this talk of his having come under pressure makes him wave his hands dismissively. He believes now – as he believed then – that Monroe’s death was suicide. As for the purportedly suspicious aspects to her death, he carefully picks them off one by one.
Displayed in time for the 2009 Academy Awards, recent paintings of Marilyn Monroe by the artist Ludvic show a new side of the famous movie star with the artists expressive interpretations of her image.
A collector by the name of Michael Bennett-Levy is auctioning his collection of early technology memorabilia at Bonhams in England on September 30, 2009. Included in his collection is a console television from 1954. 
Sarit Chalamish Gallery is pleased to present “Drama. Queens.Drama.”, a solo art show featuring Michael Harris’ unique paintings and collages.
