Remembering Marilyn Monroe 58 Years Later: E! News Rewind
For the past 60 years, it’s been impossible to separate Marilyn Monroe‘s longevity as a superstar from her death.
And yet it’s the cultural punch she packed when she was alive—radiating beauty and charisma from the screen while her tumultuous personal life perpetually overshadowed her serious acting ability—that made people obsessed with her untimely demise.
In turn, ever since a 36-year-old Monroe was found dead—or was she?—at her Brentwood home on Aug. 5, 1962, for many there’s been a mystery to be solved along with a flesh-and-blood person to be mourned.
There isn’t much about the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, that hasn’t been thoroughly parsed, from her childhood bouncing between foster homes and never knowing her father to her longing to have a child of her own to her rumored affairs with men in very high places and the subsequent conspiracy theories that her love life got her killed.
The 2022 film Blonde, adapted from the meaty Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name, featured an Oscar-nominated performance by Ana de Armas and a devastating twist of the facts of Monroe’s rise and fall, turning her life into a series of low points.
But as the icon herself is heard saying in the 2022 Netflix documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, “How do you go about writing a life story? Because the true things rarely get into circulation. It’s usually the false things. It’s hard to know where to start if you don’t start with the truth.”
This film starts with audio recordings from the research that journalist and author Anthony Summers began in 1982, when the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office started a threshold inquiry into Monroe’s death by barbiturate overdose, a precursor to deciding whether to open a full-blown investigation.
According to his tally, Summers interviewed a thousand people, including 650 on tape, two dozen of whom are heard from here.
Courtesy of Netflix
While most of the subject matter is well-trod ground (aside from other countless deep dives into her life and death, this project is built upon Summers’ 1985 book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe), the dichotomy between how the world saw the actress and what her experience of superstardom actually was never fails to leave a haunting impression.
And if you don’t know the purported real timeline of events that Summers lays claim to, the truth having been hiding on the receiving end of some well-placed phone calls, watching him recount his detective work in that capacity can be quite eye-opening.
Here are all the times Marilyn’s story made us shout “You deserved so much better!” at the TV:
The Los Angeles D.A.’s 1982 inquiry, which started in the face of renewed speculation that Monroe was murdered because of her political ties, re-confirmed the original findings from 1962.
“Based on the evidence available to us, it appears that her death could have been suicide or come as a result of an accidental drug overdose,” then-District Attorney John Van de Kamp said at a press conference. “Permit me to express a faint hope that Marilyn Monroe be permitted to rest in peace.”
The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes is streaming on Netflix.
(Originally published April 27, 2022, at 7 a.m. PT)