Could Pot Have Saved Marilyn?
The Calender
Girl Conspiracy
By FRED GARDNER
Marilyn Monroe once said, "I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle." This would have qualified her for an ADHD diagnosis in California nowadays. And if cannabis had been legal back in ’62, maybe the poor woman wouldn’t have been using all those prescription downers.
Why do men think of her as “sexy?” What do they mean by it? Why are big breasts so admired? That’s what I used to wonder at age 10 when I looked at the literally steamy "Marilyn Monroe calendar" on a wall of the barbershop situated between the locker room and the showers at the 92nd St. 'Y.’ The calendar itself was on a small pad stapled beneath the famous photo, which was on view from January to December, 1952. It showed a wavy-haired blonde, naked but with her legs crossed, leaning back against a red velvet drape, stretching to achieve the photographer's idea of a sexy pose. She did not look comfortable. That’s how Marilyn Monroe hit the scene and how she would always seem to me —straining slightly to achieve a pose that wasn’t quite natural.
Until a few weeks ago, when I saw footage from a home movie shot in the mid- or late 1950s, showing Marilyn, obviously at ease, smoking a joint with some girlfriends. The clip was forwarded by Ellen Komp, who produces a tabloidish-yet-scholarly website called Very Important Potheads. Check it out. (cuntinue reading The Calendar Girl Conspiracy after the joint)
Marilyn Monroe's New Roll
By Ellen Komp, Cannabis Culture - Friday, December 11 2009
CANNABIS CULTURE - Nearly 50 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe has made a film appearance: a previously undiscovered home movie purportedly showing her smoking pot at a party in New Jersey, circa 1958.
The silent film was purchased for $275,000 by documentary filmmaker and collector Keya Morgan, who was tipped off to its existence by the FBI.
In the film, Monroe is passed a cigarette in the manner that marijuana is shared (not the singular way that tobacco is smoked). She inhales deeply and giggles a lot, looking luminous and happy. The filmmaker, identified only as "Gretchen," says she procured the pot for the party.
Monroe lived in New York at the time the film was made with her husband Arthur Miller. In 1957, Miller was brought up on charges for not naming names to Senator Joseph McCarthy's House on Unamerican Activities committee. That year, Monroe suffered a miscarriage and sustained injuries from a fall at her home. In the fall of '58 she signed for her role in Some Like It Hot and left for Hollywood. It's not inconceivable that she would have gone to Jersey for a pot party to celebrate, or to find relief from the pressures of her life.
Confirmation that Monroe did indeed smoke pot has come through her late friend Jeanne Carmen's son and biographer. An actress, pin-up girl, trick-shot golfer and associate of Frank Sinatra, Carmen lived next door to Monroe and palled around with her in the years before she died. Carmen died in 2007. Her son Brandon James writes, "My mom was not a 'pot smoker' but she did smoke pot on occasion. Marilyn was the same way." (cuntinue reading Marilyn Monroe's New Roll after the joint)
(The Calendar Girl Conspiracy)
The home movie of Marilyn and her friends had been publicized in early December by a New York entrepreneur named Keya Morgan, who collects and sells Marilyn memorabilia and is making a documentary about her sudden death. Morgan’s thesis is that U.S. government agents did in the actress to prevent her revealing —or continuing— affairs with President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Keya Morgan told the media that he had learned about the existence of the home movie from an FBI agent he’d interviewed in connection with his documentary. The film had been shot in the mid- or late-1950s by a friend of Marilyn’s named Gretchen, who now lives in New Jersey. Morgan contacted Gretchen. She retrieved the reels of 8mm Kodachrome from her storage spot, and he paid her $275,000. Gretchen confirmed that she had rolled the joint Marilyn and friends were smoking, and that they had smoked marijuana on other occasions.
Some outlets reported that Morgan intended to immediately re-sell the film on eBay, but I saw no subsequent accounts of an auction being held. Wondering if the whole thing had been a scam, I contacted Morgan Dec. 21 for an update. He said that I was reaching him in Beverly Hills. (He owns an art gallery and other businesses in NYC.) I asked about the fate of the home movie. “The original was never going on eBay,” he explained. “Some reporters confused the original with the copyright [permission to publish the image]. The original I’m never selling. It’s sitting in my safe.”
What else did the media get wrong or miss? Morgan said he had arranged a three-way call with Gretchen in New Jersey and reporters from CNN, Reuters and Fox. He expressed surprise that no reporter had inquired about the two women with whom MM was sharing the joint. “All they cared about was the marijuana… Those are her two best friends. They were the only two friends allowed at the funeral… Joe Dimaggio did not allow Peter Lawford and Pat Kennedy into the funeral,” said Keya.
He identified the handsome woman sitting next to Marilyn on the couch as “Mary” and the other woman as “Ann.” He said that Marilyn had phoned Gretchen two days before she died, fearful that people were out to get her. Ann and Mary had slept over at Marilyn’s house for two nights. They had seen Bobby Kennedy on the premises and on one occasion had seen Bobby smoke marijuana with Marilyn, according to Keya.
Keya aims to release his documentary, “Murder on Fifth Helena Drive,” on August 4, 2012, the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death. He has been doing research for many years. He says his sources include “my very close friend Jim Dougherty” (who married Norma Jeane Baker when she was 16); Arthur Miller (“a client at my gallery who became a friend”); and numerous FBI, CIA, LAPD and Beverly Hills PD operatives. He says he has former LA mayor Sam Yorty and police chief Darryl Gates on tape asserting that Bobby was in LA and being tracked. (Spy vs. Spy!)
It was the former “chief of the FBI for Southern California” who told Keya Morgan about Gretchen’s home movie. Agents who had learned of the film’s existence in the 1960s “borrowed it” from Gretchen to show to J. Edgar Hoover, Keya recounted. “Hoover was obsessed with Marilyn,” he said. “So was James Jesus Angleton of the CIA.”
The government snoops first got interested in her, according to Keya, “because she had met many huge Communists through Arthur Miller.” [Miller, the author of “Death of a Salesman” and “The Crucible,” was a lifelong leftist who had been close to the CP in his younger days. He married Monroe in 1956. He wrote a movie called The Misfits that she starred in. They had split by January ’61.]
Marilyn’s FBI file contains thousands of pages, Keya said. “Go to FBI.gov. You’ll see hundreds of pages there about Marilyn’s affair with President Kennedy.” Keya also claims to have a source whose father observed JFK smoking marijuana “on numerous occasions” (not with MM).
The “huge Communists” that Marilyn encountered included Frederick Vanderbilt Field and Nikita Khrushchev. Field was heir to a ruling class fortune —most of it withheld when he became a socialist in the late 1920s. He was involved with numerous CP front groups and did some time in jail after refusing to name names for Congressional inquisitors. In 1953 Field himself moved to Mexico, where he later took up archeology. According to Keya Morgan, Marilyn made “secret trips” to visit him in Mexico in the early ‘60s. Keya says, “Marilyn got very close to him. And he had pictures of Lenin in his office!”
That Marilyn met Khrushchev during the Soviet leader’s visit to the U.S. in 1959 is no secret. Keya says that spymaster Angleton once noticed, in a photo of Marilyn and Khrushchev, that she was wearing a different outfit than the one she had on when she met Khrushchev in a public setting. The CIA honcho deduced that there had been another, private meeting, and assigned agents to find out when and where. (Our taxpayer dollars at work.)
Keya pointed out that Marilyn’s death occurred in the year of the Cuban missile crisis. “You are hearing stuff no one has ever heard before,” he confided. But the idea that Marilyn was offed and that the Kennedy brothers were involved, directly or indirectly, is not new. MM died of a drug overdose in August, 1962. In the spring of ’63 an instructor in the government department at Harvard paid for a four-word display ad in the Crimson —which was read in the JFK White House— asking, “Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?” The cryptic ad was meant to let the Kennedys know that people were on to them, the instructor said at the time. Asked about the Marilyn Monroe ad last week, he said he had no recollection of it. “I have Jewish Alzheimer’s,” he added. “All I remember are my grudges.”
Keya Morgan’s rap consists of two separate stories. Story one —Marilyn Monroe smoked pot— is small, finite, plausible and documented. Story two — Marilyn was murdered— is big, sprawling, implausible, and unsupported by any evidence. Will Keya’s “documentary” provide any? I doubt it in front. If one really had evidence to support such a big story, why wait two-and-a-half years to break it? The 50th-anniversary-of-her-death release date is redolent of schtick, not news. Show biz, not journalism.
“Conspiracy theory” is usually used as a put-down, but not all conspiracy theories are unfounded. Corporate strategists are meeting all the time, in secret (in beautiful venues), to plan predatory projects. A tragic example involved the owners of Standard Oil, General Motors, and Mellon Bank conspiring in the 1930s to secretly subsidize the Greyhound bus line to expand and offer cheaper rides until the light-rail lines were driven out of business. Some of the same villains conspired in the same period to make the production and distribution of marijuana illegal.
Jesse Ventura is about to host a cable TV show that will look into various conspiracy theories. Could be interesting.
Fred Gardner edits O'Shaughnessy's, the journal of cannabis in clinical practice, online at pcmd4u.org. He can be reached at fred@plebesite.com
(Marilyn Monroe's New Roll)
As told in James's book, JEANNE CARMEN: MY WILD WILD LIFE (2006), in 1961 or '62 Monroe and Carmen were invited to a "boat party" with B-movie actor/ladies' man Steve Cochran. He pulled out some weed, and Marilyn smoked it, but when he tried to turn the party into an orgy, she and Jeanne jumped ship.
Tony Curtis, Monroe's co-star in Some Like It Hot, was brilliant as a swarmy PR flack who tries to smear a jazz guitarist as a pot-smoking commie in Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Curtis was caught at Heathrow Airport with marijuana in 1971, when he flew to London for an anti-tobacco appearance. (Michael Caine and Roger Moore credited him with helping them quit tobacco in the early 1970s. Moore later admitted to smoking pot himself in an interview where he expressed surprise at seeing ashtrays at Curtis's home.)
Actor and Kennedy-in-law Peter Lawford, another associate of Monroe's, helped a friend get rid of a joint aboard Air Force One in 1961, according to the book Peter Lawford: The Man Who Kept the Secrets, by James Spada. Later, Lawford and his chum Sammy Davis Jr. "embraced the sixties mod style wholesale, complete with swinging parties, flower-child jargon, and experimentation with LSD and marijuana," Spade writes. "Peter considered marijuana a godsend, a way to get high without drinking and further damaging his liver."
Lawford may have put something into a joint he smoked with Johnny Carson in 1971, causing Carson to nearly jump off the terrace of Lawford's 13-floor penthouse. The event reportedly ended Carson's association with Lawford, and he never guested on The Tonight Show again. (A search of imdb.com shows Lawford guested three times on The Tonight Show in 1970, but not in 1971 or thereafter.) (Read about Carson on Cannabis Culture)
Whether or not Lawford and the Kennedys had anything to do with Marilyn Monroe's death may never be known, but John F. Kennedy: A Biography by Michael O'Brien (St. Martin's Press, NYC 2006) describes briefly an affair JFK had with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the former wife of CIA agent Cord Meyer and sister of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's wife Tony. It says Post executive Jim Truitt, Kennedy and Meyer smoked marijuana together.
O'Brien notes that during her affair with Kennedy, Meyer visited Timothy Leary, a fact confirmed in Robert Greenfield's Timothy Leary: A Biography (2006, Harcourt). Leary wrote in Flashbacks that Meyer told him she wanted to run an LSD session with a famous public figure. After Meyer was found murdered in October 1964, Leary theorized it was JFK and that she'd recorded the event in her diary, which was never found. Bradlee has said two different agents came looking for it immediately after her death. Marilyn also had a diary, and according to Carmen, RFK was furious about it and told her to get rid of it. It was also never found.
"They felt that Marilyn Monroe posed a security threat to the presidency because she was under the influence of marijuana and under the influence of alcohol, and could be a danger not only to herself but also to the presidency," Morgan told AFP. He will release a film about Monroe's death later this year.
Ellen Komp is an activist/writer who manages the website VeryImportantPotheads.com
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