Confidential magazine, Dick Powell & June Allyson, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford

In March 1937, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America expressed alarm at the number of candid shots being used in magazines and newspapers. While studio photographers were required to have their work approved by the organization’s Advertising Advisory Council, the same rules did not apply to photographers shooting on assignment. Modern Screen was again the subject of controversy, with its August 1937 issue, when it featured Joan Blondell in various stages of undress. The magazine had hired its own photographer, Frank Muto, to take the photographs and had not submitted them for studio approval. Modern Screen editor from 1935 to 1939, Regina Cannon was advised that “We shall take steps to prevent the recurrence of such an incident. If it is to be the policy of your magazine to publish such pictures, it will be impossible to cooperate with either your writers or photographers.” According to Variety, Shirley Temple was the subject of the most space given to female stars in the fan magazines in 1935. She also beat out Clark Gable, who came first in the male division. 

Runners-up in the female field were Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, and Marlene Dietrich. Trailing Gable were Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Dick Powell, Franchot Tone, Nelson Eddy, William Powell, and John Boles. Of approximately 2500 established players, only 330 were found on the covers, in full-page photographs and feature stories in the fan magazines. In 1935, Variety surveyed twelve publications: Photoplay, Picture Play, Silver Screen, Screenland, Motion Picture, Classic, Screen Play, Screen Book, Hollywood, Movie Mirror, and Modern Screen. Of the 132 covers represented by these magazines, Claudette Colbert was seen on ten; Shirley Temple on nine; Ginger Rogers on eight; Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow on seven; Janet Gaynor, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, and Ruby Keeler on six; Miriam Hopkins, Mae West, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn on four; Kay Francis, Dolores Del Rio, Alice Faye, Ann Sothern, Marion Davies, Bette Davis, and Loretta Young on three; Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Stuart, Virginia Bruce, Merle Oberon, Jeanette MacDonald, Margaret Sullavan, Joan Bennett, Grace Moore, and Ann Harding on two; and Irene Dunne, Lillian Harvey, Anna Sten, Madge Evans, Mary Carlisle, and Elizabeth Allen on one. There were no male stars on any of these magazine covers. 

In 1948, it was reported that there were currently only eight “absolutely safe” cover girls: June Allyson, Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Betty Grable, June Haver, and Esther Williams. The only “safe” male stars were Dick Powell and Alan Ladd, whose presence on a fan magazine cover would not reduce its newsstand sales by as much as twenty percent. Within a matter of a few years, several of the “absolutely safe” cover girls would be tinged by scandal, most notably Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, and Lana Turner. If the fan magazines were limited by studio control as to what they might openly discuss, to what extent could they indulge in innuendo? There were obviously certain key words and phrases used by gossip columnists and fan magazine writers that went far beyond the dictionary definition. An “engagement” between two players generally implied that sexual intercourse had taken place, particularly if the actress in question was someone like Lana Turner, exuding sexuality. An actress having “her appendix removed” usually meant that she was having an abortion. 

Flair magazine reported that the fan magazines in 1950 represented a multimillion dollar business. In his 1950 report on audience research, Leo A. Handel noted that thirty percent of audience members at the New York opening of a major production had read of the film in a movie magazine. In 1952, John Danz, president of the Sterling Theatres in Oregon, Washington, and California, stated that “Movie magazines are the ‘Dun and Bradstreet’ rating on movie stars, and invaluable to the exhibitor.” Earl Hudson, president of the Detroit United Theatres, claimed “Fan magazines helped make Van Johnson a movie star. Marlon Brando and Shelley Winters quickly became new favorites through youthful theatre audiences." In October 1955 at a luncheon of studio publicity directors in Beverly Hills, Irving S. Manheimer, president of Macfadden Publications, publisher of Photoplay and others, claimed that fan magazine sales now totaled more than 8.5 million copies per issue, a substantial increase over five years earlier. There was also a recognition that the fan magazine readership, while still devoutly female, was decreasing in age. More teenagers were reading fan magazines than were their mothers. Seventeen magazine had begun periodicals such as Sheilah Graham’s Hollywood Romances, earlier titled Hollywood Romances. 

Issues of these fan magazines from 1953 and 1957 had one thing in common—Elizabeth Taylor. For the next two decades, Taylor was one actress guaranteed a fan magazine cover because her image and her love affairs assured the magazines of an avid readership. Liz Taylor was on the cover of Sheilah Graham’s Hollywood Yearbook in 1953 and again in 1955, and she appeared on the cover of the September 1957 issue of Hear Hollywood, a decidedly odd fan magazine that provided its readers with a phonograph recording of some of its printed interviews. In 1958, Dell published a fan magazine, a one-off titled 'Liz and Mike'. Modern Screen featured Elizabeth Taylor on the cover in July 1958, with husband Mike Todd and the promise of an article titled “The Most Tender and Tragic Love Story of Our Time.” She was featured again in October 1958 and in December 1958, with a composite of her, Eddie Fisher, and Debbie Reynolds. 

Ironically, the 1959 breakup of Reynolds’ marriage to Fisher and his leaving her for Elizabeth Taylor helped ensure Reynolds appearance on the covers of countless fan magazines. “They’re running out of stills of Debbie,” reported Ezra Goodman. “They are taking old black-and-white pictures and tinting them for color. Debbie sells books. It’s a horrible thing they call reader identification.” Marilyn Monroe should have dominated fan magazine covers in the 1950s, but there were only an estimated seventy-five, beginning with Silver Screen in February 1952. Monroe’s first Photoplay article was “Make It for Keeps,” which dates from July 1951. Fan magazine editors could be quite demanding in terms of what they expected from a Monroe story, even if the writer was Hedda Hopper, and Monroe was volatile. 

Confidential magazine was founded in 1952 by Robert Harrison (1904–1978), who had worked for the New York Graphic and for the Quigley Publishing Company (responsible for the Motion Picture Herald). Harrison knew what a publisher could get away with and what the film industry wanted kept under wraps. The initial print run of 150,000 would eventually rise to 4.6 million. Confidential was to out a number of Hollywood celebrities, with damning stories on Lizabeth Scott, Marlene Dietrich, Dan Dailey, Tab Hunter, Sal Mineo, etc. In July 1957, it explained to its readers “Why Liberace’s Theme Song Should Be Mad about the Boy.” If nothing else, Confidential was decidedly more sleazy that any of the fan magazines of the period on offer, with stories such as “Why Sinatra Is the Tarzan of the Boudoir” (May 1956), “Joan Crawford’s Back Street Romance with a Bartender” (January 1957), and “Louella Parsons: Hollywood Hatchet Woman” (April 1959). However, it was the lawsuits that eventually forced Harrison’s sale of Confidential in July 1958, and the new owner, Hy Steirman, tried to keep away from Hollywood gossip. In reality, the magazine was about to be overcome by a new publication, the National Inquirer. Both Confidential and its founder died in the same year, 1978. At least one famous gossip columnist had ties to Confidential. Mike Connolly provided it with material he could not use in his column in The Hollywood Reporter. —"Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers" (2010) by Anthony Slide

Dean Martin possessed both wiles and wisdom beyond his years. But the wisdom served by those wiles was an annihilating wisdom. It was the wisdom of the old ways, a wisdom through which the seductions of reason and love and truth would in their seasons emerge and then, wither and die. The sum of Dino’s instincts had to do with the old ways, those ways that were like a wall, ways that kept the world lontano, as the mafiosi would say: distant, wisely at bay. That was how he liked it: lontano, like the flickering images on the theater screen, in the dark. Those close to him could sense it: He was there, but he was not really there; the glint in his eye was disarming, so captivating and so chilling at once, like lantern-light gleaming on nighttime sea: the tiny soft twinkling so gaily inviting, then illuminating, a vast unseen cold blackness beneath and beyond. The secret in its depth seemed to be the most horrible secret of all: that there was no secret, no mystery other than that which resides, not as a puzzle to be solved or a revelation to be discovered, but as blank immanence, an emptiness itself. An ex-prizefighter and ex-cardsharp, Martin had been laboring in a steel mill when he began singing nights and weekends in small clubs. 

After he teamed up with frenetic comedian Jerry Lewis in 1946, he assumed the role of a handsome, not-so-bright straight man. 'The Dago is lousy, but the little Jew is great,' were Sinatra first impressions of the duo. In 1962 Hedda Hopper would warn in her Los Angeles Times column: “The unions are taking a dim view of Dean Martin’s walkout from Something’s Got to Give,” citing a union official as saying, “Dean’s putting people out of work at a time when we are all faced with unemployment.” Mickey Cohen, a mobster who “got kind of friendly with him,” said that “Dean would’ve been in the rackets if he didn’t have a beautiful voice. He probably would’ve ended up a gambling boss somewhere. I’d say Dean had the perfect makeup to be a racket guy, although he is a little too lackadaisical, if you know what I mean.” Packaged romance was Dean’s racket. The traits he shared with the Fischettis – that lontananza, that dark self-serving ego – were never far beneath the surface of whatever spell he meant to cast. Whatever talent he had, that darkness beneath the spell, was immanent and intractable.

I chalk it up to the emergence of “mob culture,” the age of mass entertainment that Henry James foresaw as the coming “reign of mediocrity.” At 14, Dean Martin was helping his pals, the Rizzo brothers, run bootleg whiskey during Prohibition. Dean’s dealings with various gangsters gives the expression “mob culture” an intriguing double meaning. Martin’s relations with certain celebrated underworld characters were more cordial than cozy--he would occasionally perform freebies to help launch a mob-funded club or casino. He earned $200,000 a picture loafing in Hollywood, doing Matt Helm movies and dozens of bad films. The lousy pictures, the tasteless TV shows--they all made good money. In the late ‘60s, Dino was making $15 million a year. Dino also performed freebies to help out gangster pals like Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli. By the 1970s, having gone through three wives and dozens of girlfriends, Dino had become the ultimate hack celebrity, showing up at show-biz TV roasts, adrift in a fog of Percodan and Scotch. In all those tawdry ‘60s sex comedies Dean Martin would become the personification of tastelessness itself. In the end, the modern audiences often find themselves exasperated and unable to connect with Dean Martin and the worst aspects of the Rat Pack he personified. Eyeballing the world’s most impersonal celebrity, they find themselves chilled by his offensive indifference. ―Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992) by Nick Tosches

June Allyson's name is included in The Rat Pack's list of conquests (Rat Pack Confidental by Shawn Levy), presumably by Peter Lawford, who had a huge crush on Allyson. Joe Naar recalls one night that Peter had drunk heavily and boasted of his dalliance with June Allyson. Maybe Sinatra was jealous? Lawford asked, which a skeptical Sinatra denied. Dean Martin allegedly had received a letter from Allyson and he had wrote a telegram that read: "June, I'm still tingling", and wondering if Dick Powell bored her. Sinatra, having admired Powell's singing prowess as a crooner, said to Martin to shut up. One of Martin's reasons to try to bed Allyson might have been jealousy of Powell's talent. June first had met Dean Martin when he was appearing at Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom’s with Jerry Lewis. June became a regular ringsider at the club. And then she accompanied Dean when he moved from Hollywood to a nightery in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas natives weren’t as blase as they were cracked up to be. As one gossip columnist itemed it, “Dean Martin and June Allyson are having a ball in Las Vegas where they’re spinning faster than the roulette wheels.” 

Dick Powell did a lot of hollering when Confidential magazine echoed the rumors of an affair between Allyson and Martin, saying: "What can you do when a pack of lies appears about your wife? I was told legally that to sue [Confidential magazine] for libel is just blowing up a lot of wind. This is a job for the government." And the betting around Hollywood was two to one that Junie would be given her divorce papers. But it never happened. Powell may have been sore but he wasn’t sore enough to call the whole thing off. Just what he had to say to Junie when she returned from her Vegas adventure must have been quite a storm. Specially because Powell's lifestyle was the opposite of Martin's. A good friend met Dick Powell outside Hollywood’s Brown Derby and politely inquired: “How’s June?” “You mean Stupid?” Powell snapped, visibly angry. “I don’t know how Stupid is. Ask me another question.” Whilst, Martin resumed his list of conquests, including his improbable dalliance with Rita Hayworth. Supposedly, Peter Lawford was jealous of Martin, because he also had hit on Allyson a year before. 

According to actor Jackie Cooper, Lawford was obsessed with Allyson and was bold when both were reunited at Cooper's house. Cooper said he saw Lawford kissing a reluctant Allyson, while Allyson had Powell pick her up so it looked like she was just visiting Cooper and his wife. According to Lawford, Allyson had led him on only to finally rebuke him. Lawford said to Cooper: "Whenever the Powells had a party, I would assist with a girlfriend". Lawford said it was hard for him not try to kiss Allyson. Their failed romance soon appeared in gossip columns. Then the MGM bosses forbade Lawford to make a trip to New York because Allyson was going to be there at the same time. According to James Spada, this one-sided romance was over before it had a chance to thrive, ending with ill feelings on both sides. “There was word out that Peter might have been homosexual because he knew Van Johnson,” said UCLA football player Joe Naar. “Van Johnson may well have been gay, but Peter couldn’t have been more heterosexual. All we did was chase ladies in those days. He was dating Janet Leigh during The Red Danube and was after June Allyson like a madman.” 

In 1961, Gloria Pall met Dick Powell when he was living separated from June Allyson for a while, after his wife had asked for a divorce. Gloria said they dated occasionally and he helped pick out her sign for her real estate office on the Sunset Strip. In her memoir Cameo Girl of the 50's (1993) published by Showgirl Press, Gloria said Powell was always polite and attentive with her. Gloria wanted him to help finance her real estate Lavender R.E office on Sunset Strip. She said they had an intimate connection but apparently he wouldn't go to bed with her. Powell helped her stack up funds, since she needed 10,000$ to open her office. A sign outside her lavender-colored office read: "Call Pall." Her friendship with Powell ended when she found out he had returned to his wife June Allyson. Gloria Pall had previously dated Robert Mitchum, James Garner, and Elvis Presley. ―Sources: Inside Story magazine (1952), June Allyson: Her Life and Career (2023) by Peter Shelley, The Peter Lawford Story: Life with the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe and the Rat Pack (2015) by Patricia Lawford Stewart

Serpentine Plots in L.A. Noir, Dick Powell

Richard Ewing Powell was born on November 14, 1904, in Mountain View, Arkansas, a small town once described by the actor as “ten miles from modern conveniences.” The second of three boys of Sallie and Ewing Powell, an International Harvester salesman, Powell moved to nearby Little Rock at the age of 10. In 1923, Powell enrolled at Little Rock College, where he headed up the popular dance band Peter Pan, while working part-time for the telephone company. The future star also found time to get married to his college sweetheart, Mildred Maund, on May 28, 1925. A short time later, Powell played a variety of club acts; he sang with the Royal Peacock Orchestra in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Charlie Davis Orchestra in Indianapolis, and also played vaudeville theaters, adding saxophone and clarinet playing to his performing repertoire. In September 1926, he landed a job as emcee at the Circle Theatre in Indianapolis, and a few years later became master of ceremonies at the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh. During this period, Powell also hosted a weekly radio show in Pittsburgh, The Pow Wow Club. “In my field, it was wonderful experience,” Powell once said of his varied activities, “like playing stock is for an actor.” After several years at the Stanley, Powell was spotted by a talent scout from Warner Bros., and was invited to Hollywood. Powell’s wife, who had long objected to his choice of career, declined to accompany her husband. 

Powell was promptly cast in his film debut, Blessed Event (1932), a musical starring Lee Tracy and Mary Brian. Years later, Brian praised Powell’s performance in his initial feature film outing. “He had all the stage presence and professional experience when he came out, although pictures were new to him,” Mary Brian said in 1996. “He took to it like a duck to water.” In the early 1930s Mary Brian was engaged to Powell until he romantically was linked with Joan Blondell. Powell married the vivacious blonde actress on September 19, 1936, aboard the luxury Santa Paula liner. A short time later, Powell adopted Blondell’s young son, Norman, and in June 1938, the couple had a daughter, Ellen. “My mother said she was taken with the kindness and gentleness that he exhibited toward her, and the fact that he really seemed to love me,” Norman Powell said in 1996. “I think that’s what attracted her to him more than any other thing.” 

Powell was cast in yet another musical, Bring on the Girls (1945), starring Veronica Lake and Sonny Tufts. Balking at the assignment, the actor was placed on suspension. “This went on for 10 or 12 weeks,” Powell later recalled. “One day, in an elevator, I ran into Frank Freeman, then head of Paramount’s production. I said, ‘Frank, this is silly. I’m not going to do that kind of picture anymore. So you might as well let me out of the contract.’ And he did. I then went over to RKO and told them my little tale of woe. It so happened they had just bought Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. They gave me the script, I read it, and I said I’d do it. My problem was convincing the director, Edward Dmytryk. My box-office appeal was sagging and he could only see me as the singing marine. But I must have begged hard enough because he decided to take a chance on me, and it worked.” 

Author Raymond Chandler would later claim that Powell’s rendition of Marlowe was his favorite, and co-star Claire Trevor laid the film’s success squarely on Powell’s shoulders. “He was a revelation,” Trevor said. “Up to this, he was known only as a boy singer, but now he was playing Raymond Chandler’s tough private eye, and playing it magnificently. People couldn’t get over it. The film revitalized his career.” Indeed, Murder, My Sweet had finally given Powell the role that he had sought for so many years. But his career wasn’t the only aspect of the actor’s life that was undergoing a transformation. 

Since leaving Warner’s, Powell’s marriage to Joan Blondell had been increasingly strained, fostered by long absences while Blondell accepted stage roles in New York, and damaged further by rumors of her romantic involvement with producer Mike Todd. Meanwhile, while starring in the 1944 MGM musical Meet the People, Powell rekindled his friendship with actress June Allyson, falling for the younger ingenue. “He was wonderful to all of us new kids—if we had a problem, he would tell us how to do a scene or help us learn how to read a script,” Allyson recalled in a 1996 TV homage to Powell. “And our friendship just kind of grew.” In July 1945, Powell and Blondell were divorced, and a month later the actor married Allyson.

After the wedding, Powell played in another noir, Cornered (1945). Upon the film’s release, critics once again hailed the “new” Powell; one of the best reviews was offered by Jim Henaghan of the Los Angeles Examiner, who wrote: “If there was any question about Dick Powell’s astonishing performance in last year’s Murder, My Sweet, this picture will dissolve it. For in Cornered he plays a character equally as hard and tough, and draws a role considerably more complex and difficult to portray—and plays it to a fare-thee-well.” In Cornered Dick Powell plays a man exhausted, angry, and with little hope for the future. Though marred by its serpentine plot, Cornered is an important film noir. It offers an extraordinarily bleak worldview, precocious even for noir. Certainly no Hollywood film to date had brought to the screen a milieu so desolate or a hero so pathologically dour. Coming so quickly on the heels of cataclysm, previous efforts couldn’t have imagined the world portrayed in Cornered, neither This Gun for Hire nor Journey into Fear come close — and no previous film featured a protagonist with so little hope. In terms of global change the Second World War is the defining moment of the twentieth century, and a singular one in the development of the noir style. Insofar as this is concerned, no entry is more emblematic of that change than Cornered.

Much of Cornered’s originality comes from Powell’s interpretation of Laurence Gerard. It has been said that Cornered might have suited Humphrey Bogart better, an actor for whom tiredness was natural. Yet while Bogart could do angry, his rage seemed to have a leering quality — and while Gerard is reckless he’s no head case. Violent acts, especially the up-close, dirty, wet ones, have become frighteningly impersonal in Cornered, as the survivors are now numb to the moral absolutes of pre-war society. It’s in this notion of lashing out, of poker-faced violence, that Cornered also anticipates film noir’s shell-shocked man apart, plagued by some unknown neurosis or gnawing guilt. Like most good noir, the brooding thematic elements of Cornered are supported by the mise en scene, which pushes the dark frame to extremes. Dmytryk, art director Carroll Clark, and cinematographer Harry Wild give us the expected interplay of shadow and light, as well as numerous offbeat camera angles. 

In fact the only conventional shots seem to involve one of the film’s two female characters, which is a subtle clue to her true nature. Wild often shoots from behind a pillar, around a corner, or from on high to obfuscate our sense of environment. Filming Powell in tight close-up, making him difficult to place and reinforcing the idea that he doesn’t belong further heightens this confusion. The effect is claustrophobic, disorienting, and perfectly in keeping with the film’s tone. Cornered gets progressively darker and darker as it approaches its climax, eventually to place Gerard in utter darkness, groping and bumbling through a deserted warehouse. Cornered was a bitter reminder for a people still celebrating victory that not all was well in the world, yet it did well with critics and audiences. The film’s box office owes itself directly to the casting of Dick Powell. Preview audiences were ecstatic to see him again in what they described as a “he-man” role, with hardly any comments recommending a return to musical comedy. Even New York Times grouch Bosley Crowther lauded the film: “Cornered is a drama of smoldering vengeance and political scheming which builds purposefully and with graduating tension to a violent climax, a committing of murder that is as thrilling and brutal as any you are likely to encounter. Cornered provides a vision of a world gone to hell.” 

Even in his non-film noir features, Powell continued to play tough-guy roles; he was a narcotics investigator in To The Ends Of The Earth (1948), co-starring Signe Hasso; an undercover military investigator in the western noir Station West (1948); and an army intelligence agent in Rogue’s Regiment (1948). During this period, Powell took his first step toward his future career behind the camera, forming a partnership with Samuel Bischoff and Edward Gross to create Regal Films. The company’s initial effort marked Powell’s fourth film noir, the underrated Pitfall (1948). “Dick Powell was a man of immense self-confidence, outward ease, friendliness, warmth, and humor,” Christopher Knopf wrote in a 1976 Variety article. “He gave approbation to everyone he employed. If he hired you, you could do the job, or he wouldn’t have hired you. His confidence in you injected confidence in yourself.” 

In Cry Danger (1951) Rocky Mulloy (Dick Powell) is released from the slammer after serving five years of a lifetime sentence. He was framed for a murder and hold-up, where $100,000 are still missing. Rocky becomes a free man after a marine he never met before, Delong (Erdman), provides him after all this time with a bogus alibi. However, Rocky’s best friend, Danny, also framed, is still in prison (with a lesser charge). Rocky tells the wolfish Delong that Nancy Morgan (Rhonda Fleming) is out of bounds. Delong soon learns that Nancy was once Rocky’s girl, but dumped him for his pal Danny. The one who arranged the robbery is a bar owner/racketeer named Castro (Conrad), who first tried to get Rocky to go along with the heist. When Rocky is asked: “What do you plan to do with all the dough?” Rocky responds “I plan to get an operation, so I can play the violin again.” 

Rocky beats it out of Castro that it was Danny and Nancy who framed him, and Nancy has hidden the $50,000 half share from the heist Danny split with Castro. At the film’s end, Rocky turns Nancy over to Cobb, telling him with regret that “she’s already packed.” In this feature, Dick Powell turned in one of his best performances and his role was singled out as “adroitly played”. In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote: "Cry Danger is a tidy package of fictional extravagance. Usually you don't find much occasion for laughter in a picture that is concerned with revenge and murder. But in "Cry Danger" scenarist William Bowers has found room for some sardonic lines that are tossed off most effectively. This is the story of a man who was framed into a jail term and gets out when a former marine comes up with a convenient alibi. The marine just wants a cut of the $100,000 swag Rocky Mulloy is supposed to have stashed away. Dick Powell plays Mulloy with an air of cocky toughness that inspires confidence in his ability to run down the sleazy characters who fingered him as the fall guy for a big robbery and murder rap. This report will not disclose anything more about the plot details of "Cry Danger." (Inside intelligence; Mr. Powell is in town—he appeared on the Paramount's stage yesterday—and he can be pretty rough on squealers.*) As the chief feminine interest, Rhonda Fleming turns on the charm effectively and Jean Porter is amusing as a blonde pickpocket."

When Lizabett Scott was loaned for Pitfall (1948), she was guaranteed a minimum of $75,000. Although Pitfall now ranks as classic noir (French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier considers it one of the genre's masterpieces), producer Hal B. Wallis could not have known that in 1948; he simply believed that Lizabeth appearing opposite Dick Powell, who showed his macho side in Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), was right for a movie about a woman who ensnares a respectable married man in a web of deception and murder, from which he emerges repentant but not exactly on the best of terms with his wife. With Jane Wyatt as the sexless wife, one could understand why she would stand by her man and at the same time why her husband would be drawn to a considerably more sensuous woman. Pitfall (1948), directed by Andre de Toth, is an even more caustic examination of the American dream than Double Indemnity, chiefly because its subject is the post-war nuclear family, amidst factories such as Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. 

Eisenhower engineered tax breaks and housing subsidies to create the ideal consuming unit: the residential nuclear family with a working father, purchasing mother, and dependent children, a unit which would buy the new consumer goods the war industries would retool to produce en masse: cars, houses, and household appliances. In Los Angeles, new suburbs were born, including the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys and the South Bay-Long Beach area. Pitfall exposes—as only a noir film can—the soft center of the American social ideal. About Powell's official debut as director, Split Second (1953). the critic for The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Powell, who certainly must get much of the credit for the consistently excellent performances, does a masterful job of pacing, starting off in a staccato style and relentlessly building up the tension to a breathtaking climax.” 

Meanwhile, Powell was making headlines not for his films or television work, but because of his deteriorating marriage. *The first bump happened around 1949, after the rumors floating about a dalliance of June Allyson with Dean Martin. The Paramount stage could allude to the set where Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were filming My friend Irma (1949), which was produced by Hal B. Wallis and released on August 16, 1949, by Paramount. A jilted Powell and a conceited Martin may well have exchanged some heated words. After reconciling with Powell following a brief separation in 1957, triggered by a frustrated romance with Alan Ladd, June Allyson filed for divorce in 1961, citing his workaholic nature and his frequent absences from home. Allyson was granted an interlocutory divorce in January 1961, which would become final in a year. But Powell had other plans; on the day following the court hearing, Allyson said, “he was sitting at the little breakfast nook, having breakfast and reading the paper.” “And I said, ‘What are you doing here? We just got a divorce,’” Allyson recalled. “He said, ‘No, you didn’t—you just got a paper that said you can have a divorce in a year.’ And he said, ‘You know, I’m never going to let you go. And you’ve spent all that money for no reason at all.’ And he went right on eating his breakfast. And we never did get the divorce. For which I’m very grateful.” —Sources: "Bad Boys: The Actors  of Film Noir" (2003) by Karen Burroughs Hannsberry and "L.A. Noir: The City as Character" (2005) by Alain Silver and James Ursini

Busby Berkeley, Dick Powell, The Gibson Girl

DAMES (1934) directed by Ray Enright, choreographed by Busby Berkeley; cinematography by Joan Blondell's husband George Barnes. Songs: “Dames,” “The Girl at the Ironing Board,” “I Only Have Eyes for You”, “Try to See It My Way.” “DAMES differed so little from the previous Berkeley musicals that only an expert can separate it from the others. Composer Harry Warren claims that he and Al Dubin tried to come up with a song in every picture that summed up the whole plot. Berkeley launches into another of his complicated, kaleidoscopic fanciful routines.” (Tony Thomas, The Hollywood Musical, 1975). The plot revolves around reformer Ezra Ounce (Hugh Herbert) who promises his cousin Horace P. Hemingway (Guy Kibbee) a fortune on condition that Hemingway heads the Ounce Society for the Elevation of American Morals and that he keeps out their young relative, 

Jimmy Higgens (Dick Powell), out of the theatre. Taking a train home, Horace finds himself stranded in a sleeping compartment with chorus girl Mabel Anderson (Joan Blondell) and he gives her money on condition that she keeps the matter quiet. When she reaches New York City, Mabel tries to get into Jimmy’s new Broadway show but he informs her he does not have the money to produce it. She acquires the funds by blackmailing Horace about the train incident. Meanwhile, Jimmy’s girlfriend, Barbara (Ruby Keeler), Horace’s daughter, becomes jealous of his involvement with Mabel and breaks off their engagement. When the fracas orchestrated by Ezra’s hirelings commences, the police arrive and everyone is carted off to jail. Behind bars, Ezra decides he prefers the company of chorus girls to reforming, while Horace must explain the situation to his strait-laced wife Mathilda (ZaSu Pitts), as Jimmy and Barbara become re-engaged. 

This was the fourth of seven Warner Bros. musicals to team Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell and the fourth of them to be directed by Busby Berkeley. “Dames” featured a bevy of blonde chorus girls weaving to and fro in intricate patterns bolstered by trick photography while Powell crooned the lyrics about the joys of gorgeous womanhood. According to Tony Thomas in The Busby Berkeley Book (1973): “By far the most memorable item in Dames is ‘I Only Have Eyes for You.’ One of the best songs ever written for a film, it is sung beautifully by Dick Powell and expertly staged by Berkeley. Dick and Ruby meet in front of a movie theatre, then take a long subway ride during which they fall asleep. As Powell dreams—hordes of girls appear, all wearing Benda masks of Ruby so that an army of Keelers assaults the audience's eye. Each girl, with a board on her back, bends over, and fitting the boards together, a gigantic jigsaw picture of Ruby’s face appears.” 

As in other Berkeley movies, his most spectacular number in Dames is held back for a delirious finale. As Richard Brody in The New Yorker described it, “The title number, a balletic day in the life of a showgirl, gives rise to one of Berkeley’s greatest visual inventions, a white background festooned with dancing girls’ black-clad legs—which rhythmically open and close to yield up a flying wedge of pubic rapture, ending with a black hole—at the end of which is a dancer dressed in baby clothes.  It suggests nothing less than “The Origin of the World.”

Producer Darryl F. Zanuck reteamed director Lloyd Bacon and dance director Busby Berkeley from 42ND STREET (1933), for this expansive musical affair: FOOTLIGHT PARADE (1933), which also contains some of Berkeley’s best remembered symmetrical production numbers, all presented in the final portion of the picture: “Honeymoon Hotel” with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler as newlyweds; the two in a woodsy love song “By a Waterfall”; and the finale, “Shanghai Lil,” involving James Cagney and Ruby Keeler in a saucy story within a story, which had both of them singing, tap dancing in military precision steps. Young crooner Scotty Blair (Dick Powell) is soon attracted to secretary Bea Thorn (Ruby Keeler), who proves to be an excellent tap dancer. Scotty romances Bea during rehearsals while brassy actress Nan Prescott (Joan Blondell), who is interested in Chester, is frustrated to see him being vamped by wealthy Vivian Rich (Claire Dodd). 

While FOOTLIGHT PARADE was one of Warner Bros.’ most costly Busby Berkeley musicals, it met with mixed critical reception. The New York Herald Tribune enthused, “FOOTLIGHT PARADE is elaborate, well acted and fantastically extravagant in its chorus numbers." The Los Angeles Times reported, “This Warner Brothers feature is just about the biggest song, dance and story picture to date and I would hesitate to name any in its class for spectacular numbers. It’s easy to figure this as a sensational hit.” Originally, when FOOTLIGHT PARADE went into production, Dick Powell was suffering from a throat problem and Stanley Smith was brought in to replace him, but Powell recovered in time to join the cast, thus allowing for the third screen teaming of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. The latter was not initially intended to sing in the “Shanghai Lil” number; it had been planned for Renee Whitney (seen in the film as Cynthia Kent), but at the last minute it was decided to have Keeler perform in the interlude. 

Credited with revitalizing the popularity of the movie musical, 42ND STREET is one of the best musicals in the history of the genre. With its adult, fast-paced plot, a quartet of sparkling songs by Al Dubin and Harry Warren, and an appealing cast, 42ND STREET remains a viewing delight no matter how many times it is watched (even in its computerized color version). Ace Broadway producer Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter), in failing health, is set to put on his greatest musical (Pretty Lady), a lavish affair starring veteran actress Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels). Marsh has to deal with the temperamental star, her “backer,” Abner Dillon (Guy Kibbee), and her new boyfriend, Pat Denning (George Brent). Marsh also has troubles trying to coach the show’s ingenue, Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler), who is falling in love with leading man Billy Lawler (Dick Powell), while a member of the chorus, Ann “Anytime Annie” Lowell (Ginger Rogers), keeps pushing for a bigger part in the proceedings. The part goes to Peggy, who after much coaching from Marsh, goes forth to perform, with the director commanding her, “You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star.” Peggy does just that and helps to make the show a hit. 

Peggy and Billy rejoice together. The film launched Dick Powell as one of filmdom’s most popular singers of the 1930s. It was also the beginning of Ruby Keeler’s movie hoofing career, which included nine musicals at the studio. Powell and Keeler were made for each other, they oozed pure chemistry together onscreen. 42ND STREET received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Sound. In Gold Diggers of 1933, composer Brad Roberts (Dick Powell) uses his family’s fortune to back a Broadway show for producer Barney Hopkins (Ned Sparks) and the production gives work to needy showgirls Carol King (Joan Blondell), Trixie Lorraine (Aline MacMahon), Polly Parker (Ruby Keeler) and Fay Fortune (Ginger Rogers). The girls are all focused on snaring millionaire husbands and when Brad’s conservative brother, J. Lawrence Bradford (Warren William), learns of his brother’s folly he rushes to New York City. Stuffy Lawrence encounters Carol and is convinced she is out to vamp Brad, who really is in love with Polly. 

While Berkeley’s dance extravaganzas of the early 1930s would seem to be impossible anywhere but on the movie screen, they in fact did have origins dating back to 19th century stage spectacles. They evolved from the revues that had been popular on Broadway in the 1910s and 1920s. Revues were not a series of completely unrelated acts, like in a vaudeville show, but a series of musical and comedy specialties structured around a loosely defining theme. There were no overhead views, but Berkeley used stairs and platforms to alter the space on stage, and in Earl Carroll Vanities of 1928 he used an optical device called the “Vanities Votaphonevitotone” to project enlargements of one chorus girl’s face at a time on a screen. At MGM, he had giant turntables in one of his Eddie Cantor movies, but they didn’t revolve. Berkeley was told if he wanted revolving turntables, he would have to go to another studio, and he decamped to Warners.

Toby Wing was one of Berkeley’s favorite chorus girls. Dick Powell sings “I’m Young and Healthy” to her. Berkeley showed a gaggle of executives what his plans were for “Young and Healthy”: “I staged this with three revolving platforms, and I explained to Zanuck that I couldn’t show him exactly what he would see on the screen because I planned to shoot it in cuts. I outlined the continuity for him and showed him my camera placements, then I had Dick Powell and the boys and girls go through the numbers in sections. Zanuck and the others seemed very pleased with the performance and the staging I had planned; he turned to the executives who were with him and said, ‘Give Berkeley whatever he wants in the way of sets, props, costumes. Anyhthing, he wants, he can have.’”James Sanders notes in Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, “One story has Darryl Zanuck coming onto the stage during the production of 42nd Street and finding the director in the rafters, looking at the stage floor. ‘What the hell are you doing up there?’ Zanuck shouted. ‘You can’t take the audience up there!’ ‘I know,’ Berkeley replied, ‘but I’d like to. It’s pretty up here.'” 

For Gold Diggers of 1933, he'd designed a crane that ran on dual tracks; it went both up and down as well as gliding back and forth. Sixty feet off the ground seemed not quite high enough, and he had holes cut in the studio roof to take his camera still higher. These numbers were rehearsed and rehearsed until they were perfect. Gold Diggers of 1933 embraces newly elected FDR’s New Deal, and in the pairing of innocents Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler looks forward to economic and spiritual rebirth. Busby Berkeley was an alcoholic, which became, after 1935, more of a handicap. He was hospitalized after a suicide attempt in July 1946. He was forgotten until his films began to be rediscovered as “camp” in the 1960s. —THE GREAT HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL PICTURES (2016) by James Robert Parish 

The Gibson Girls became the first 20th century standard of female beauty and style. Named after Charles Dana Gibson, a Life Magazine illustrator, the Gibson Girl was essentially an idealized brainy pin-up who would pave the way for the flapper in the Roaring 1920s. Gibson depicted the Gibson Girl as an equal and sometimes teasing companion to men. She was also sexually dominant, for example shown literally examining men under a magnifying glass, or, in a breezy manner, crushing them under her feet. Next to the beauty of a Gibson Girl, men often appeared as simpletons or bumblers; and even men with handsome physiques or great wealth alone could not provide total satisfaction to her. Gibson illustrated men so captivated that they would follow her anywhere, attempting to fulfill any of her desires. Source: www.harpersbazaar.com

Although Dick Powell's first directorial venture was uncredited at the time in the gritty noir Cry Danger (1951) by Robert Parrish, Rhonda Fleming, talking with Eddie Muller from the Film Noir Foundation, stated that Dick Powell had actually directed Cry Danger. Even in its streamlined construction, Cry Danger displays all the things that make noir the legendary film genre that it is, all the while raising the same philosophical questions that have come to be expected of the noir style, be it in literature or in film. In 2011, at the behest of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Festival of Preservation, with funding provided by the Film Noir Foundation, Cry Danger was given a sterling digital transfer by Olive Films, bringing to life 60-year-old celluloid that remained a taut, no-frills film noir of the old school, drenched in simple noir elegance. Cry Danger has one thing that many noirs don't—an acrid sense of humor. As Rocky Mulloy, Powell is the classic tough-guy, stone-faced noir man, one who rattles off dark threats as easily as he does witty quips. To a bartender after tipping him: “I got that money from a typhoid carrier”; to a woman that rebukes him after a failed flirtation: “Someday, Alice, you and I are gonna have a nice long talk. And you’ll really do some talking”. Source: popmatters.com

Cry Danger, a relatively little-known film noir is an absolute treat, combining a sharp, witty script, tremendously atmospheric L.A. location shooting, and a top-drawer cast. Co-star Richard Erdman said at the UCLA Film Festival that when he first went to meet Dick Powell, whose production company was involved in making the film, Powell asked him what he thought of the script and of his role. Erdman said "It's one of the best parts." Powell told Erdman he was right and then asked, "How can we help you?" Erdman said that's how Powell conducted himself during the making of the entire film, always supportive and generous. Dick Powell re-invented his screen persona as a world-weary, acid-tongued noir deadpan guy. He was more likely to deliver a devastating put-down than a gun-butt or upper-cut. In Cry Danger, Powell pushes this persona to its reasonable limits. At times, as the ex-convict Rocky Mulloy, he seems more like a displaced stand-up comedian than an underworld denizen, and he nails it in this movie. Rocky Mulloy is among the biggest sour-pusses in film noir. And Powell plays him flat as pavement, and twice as hard. Source: filmnoiroftheweek.com

Eddie Muller: Dan Duryea is my favorite noir weasel of all time. But the noir icon who is the most unlikely of noir icons and yet still one of my favorites is Dick Powell. By the time he’s making Cry Danger, he has perfected his technique, because his performance in Cry Danger is as good a laconic, wise-cracking, tough guy performance as anybody has given in film noir. Dick Powell has become a very important figure in relation to the work of the Film Noir Foundation. He wanted to be independent, he wanted to cut the studio out of the equation because he was tired of the studios overlooking him for parts that he wanted to play, like Double Indemnity. He finally said, “Well, the hell with them, if they’re not going to give me the parts, I’m going to produce the films myself and star in them.” And so he made Pitfall, Cornered, Cry Danger and Split Second which he directed and produced. Source https://parallax-view.org

Dick Powell's first official debut as director Split Second (1953) was a smash success. Craig Butler wrote: "Not as well known as it should be but a favorite of many who know it, Split Second is an incredibly tense film noir-cum-atomic bomb flick that marked an auspicious directorial debut for Dick Powell who is aided by the first rate black and white cinematography of Nick Musuraca." In 1954, Powell had in mind to film a story about the fabled Gibson Girl, starring Jane Russell. June Allyson joked saying: "If he cast me, it would be a very different kind of movie. I have a feeling Richard fancies Jane Russell for the part." [This project would be thwarted by Howard Hughes, who assigned Powell to direct the disastrous The Conqueror two years later.]

The Powells don't gad all over the place. It's not the way her predecessor Joan Blondell, in her brash manner, tells it to gullible ears, but June Allyson certainly has made Dick Powell one of the best husbands in town. I asked June if she had ever given an off-screen performance worthy of note. She took her time and replied: "There was one, Sheilah, I don't know if it was one of my best, but it was certainly the most difficult performance I've ever given. It's over two years now, and it was when Richard was so ill. The doctors had told me that Richard probably had suffered an allergic reaction to penicillin after having caught pneumonia. At 4 in the morning the hospital called me to come over. I felt as though my heart would burst, but every time Richard opened his eyes, I managed to smile and tell him everything would be allright. Richard had told me how much those moments meant to him, so I bottled up the tears during my stay at the hospital. When he recovered and went back home, I must have cried buckets that day. You can do anything if you love someone enough." —Sheilah Graham for Photoplay magazine (November 1952, and August 1955)

Joan Blondell talks about her three husbands in the last two chapters of her alleged biography Center Door Fancy, and she disparages the three, although there are different degrees of grievance against her partners. She critizices her first husband George Barnes (who started as a still photographer for Thomas H. Ince, the man who died on Hearst' yatch) for being remote and not wanting children. Later, after divorcing him, she finds out he suffered a terrible childhood that left him deeply scarred. Barnes actually married eight times and had four kids, one with Joan (Norman S. Powell) who would be adopted legally by her second husband, Dick Powell. The most baffling reproachments against the collected crooner are quite contradictory. For example it's clear she was looking for security with Powell, who was a practical and caring family man. In fact, she leads Jim (Powell) to break up with May Gould (Mary Brian) and acts quite the seductress when she recounts: "Jim was waiting for me. I had on a white piqué sheath that made my skin tan and my hair very light. "You look pretty dawgone pretty," Jim said admiringly. "It'll be fun to make that musical together," I said to him. Jim laughed: "But I don't get you in the finale. Cagney does." 

"Try not to suffer too much, Jim. After all, you've got me off-screen, you know?" "Really?" Jim asked seriously, slowing the car down. I fidgeted for my cigarettes, trying to hide my embarrassment and asked Jim for his lighter. We didn't speak for several blocks. Jim suddenly asked me: "Do you still love David?" She says no. Her intimate relationship with Powell starts at this moment, when both share a kiss, and she abandons George Barnes, favoring the secure arms of Dick Powell, who had sent her a 1000$ check for her son's childbirth. She expresses doubts to Sally (Glenda Farrell) about her true feelings towards Jim, saying "he's too nice to hurt." They marry, spending their honeymoon at the Santa Paula yatch, and they consummate their marriage. She seems to find Powell charming and even a bit daring when he gives a playful whack on her behind. Also, she writes: "He smiled and put his hands on my shoulders. He says (naughtily): 'I'm sure that we didn't do it the last few nights because your eyes would look glassy now'." Nora (Joan) feigns not knowing: "Glassy?" "From doing it too much!," Powell jokingly says. Nora rolls her eyes and tells to herself: "What did I get into?" Supposedly she was a sex enthusiast and later thinks of Powell as mechanical in bed, but it sure doesn't look like that from her initial account during their honeymoon. 

When Nora bumps into a table playing with her son and bruises her leg, Jim says worried: "People will say I did some weird sex thing to you, and I can't have that." So he sounds sensible and pretty knowledgeable of sexual matters. Powell wasn't just a hick from Arkansas, he was a very intelligent, amiable man and obviously he had sex-appeal. It's true that Powell was conservative politically and Blondell was a Democrat, and she tries to exploit this gap too, trying to characterize Powell as racist and anti-semite. She has Powell ranting: "Damned Jews run this business! Damned niggers get some fancy salaries now. The goddamned government is killing us with taxes! I've got to change agents, the son of a bitch does nothing for his ten percent." She tries so hard to make an impression of Dick Powell as Nixon is not even funny. In the last chapter, Joan (Nora) acknowledges that Dick Powell and Ronald Colman (a friend of Barnes) drew up a pension fund for Joan through Lloyds of London, which would allow her to retire at the age of 47. "It's with Lloys of London and when I'm 47, I'll get money enought to live on the rest of my life," she boasts to Mike Todd. And don't get me started on her obsession towards her eternal rival, the sweet and easygoing June Allyson. Ironically, Joan (Nora) barely talks of her terrible fights with her third husband Mike Todd, who was pathologically jealous and threatened with killing her if she ever cheated with him. What a prize she got! Source: medium.com

Icon: What Killed Marilyn Monroe

Two reliable sources who were also guests at the Cal-Neva Lodge, Betsy Hammes and the actor Alex D’Arcy, told biographer Donald Spoto that Sam Giancana was not present. D’Arcy, a friend of mobster Johnny Roselli, told Spoto: "There was absolutely never any affair between Marilyn and any of these mobsters. In fact, there was no connection between Marilyn and the mob at all! She was in Lake Tahoe that weekend [July 27-29], and I saw Marilyn eating dinner. Giancana and his crowd weren’t there, and I would have known if they were." On December 17, 1982, Assistant District Attorney Ronald Carroll requested information and reverse directories for 1962: •​General Telephone •​Pacific Telephone •​Haines Company, Reverse Directory Publications •​Los Angeles Police Department •​Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department •​Federal Bureau of Investigation •​Los Angeles City Public Library. Investigator Alan Tomich successfully obtained photocopies of Monroe’s telephone records. None of the agencies retained 1962 telephone reverse directories, but telephone companies and the library retained Los Angeles directories. The Los Angeles District Attorney LADA’s investigation confirmed through “confidential LAPD records” that LAPD seized Monroe’s phone records. The seizure included toll records from General Telephone Company covering the period from June 1, 1962, to August 18, 1962. During this period, eight toll calls were placed from Monroe’s residence to RE 7-8200, a telephone number in Washington, D.C. The last of these calls was made on July 30, six days before her death. Using law enforcement resources, LADA investigators determined the number RE 7-8200 in Washington, D.C., was the published number of the U. S. Department of Justice headquarters. The number belonged to the general listing for the main switchboard and not a private line. 

If Monroe had called the Attorney General RFK, she would have been transferred via operator assistance to another number. Newspaper articles placed Robert Kennedy in San Francisco and Gilroy the weekend of Monroe’s death. A review of the toll records indicated that no phone calls were made to San Francisco area during the entire period covered by the records. Message unit records were also secured by LAPD for both phones in Monroe’s residence covering June 1 to August 18. The numbers, 476-1890 and 472-4830 are the same numbers for which the long-distance toll records had been secured. Four calls with message unit billings were placed from the Monroe residence on August 5. Two calls were made from each phone. Two of the calls were for two minutes each and two were for one minute each. These calls could have been placed from one minute after midnight on August 5 to one minute before midnight at the end of the 24-hour day. 

It is impossible to pinpoint the exact time of Monroe’s death from the records obtained by the original investigation. The evidence available regarding the level of drugs in her system and the apparent slow absorption rate indicate she probably died or was comatose around midnight the night of August 4, 1962. The records were secured 15 days after Monroe’s death, and it was during this period that rumors surfaced alleging she died while on the telephone or after fading out during a telephone call. If Monroe’s overdose was intentional, there was a legitimate need to investigate the possibility of her having been triggered to take her life by the content of a recent telephone call. The author cross-referenced the phone numbers appearing in the collection of Monroe’s 1962 account statements with Monroe’s 1962 address and telephone book. The results are as follows: •​TR7-7877 – attorney Milton Rudin’s residence in Los Angeles. •​TR5-1357 – friends Norman and Hedda Rosten’s residence on Remsen Street in Brooklyn. •​TR7-2212 – acting coaches Lee and Paula Strasberg’s residence on Central Park West in Manhattan. •​EL5-0954 – close friend Ralph Roberts’ residence on East 51st Street in Manhattan. •​PL8-0800 – attorney Aaron Frosch on East 56th Street in Manhattan. •​WBURY 263-3500 – Arthur Miller’s residence in Roxbury, Connecticut. •​OR3-7792 –Joan Copeland’s residence on Peter Cooper Road in Manhattan. •​PL9-4014 – Monroe’s private residential line at 444 E. 57th Street in Manhattan. •​MU8-4170 – photographer Richard Avedon’s office in Manhattan. •​LO5-0400 – dress manufacturer Henry Rosenfeld’s office on 7th Avenue in Manhattan. •​PL5-4400 – Joe DiMaggio’s residence in Manhattan. •​K13-1512 – Henry Sabini, driver of Exec-u-Car on West 60th Street in Manhattan, and •​CH2-3655 – poet Ettore Rella’s residence on West 14th Street in Manhattan. 

WHAT WAS DR. HYMAN ENGELBERG’S CULPABILITY? Psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson described internist Dr. Hyman Engelberg as a narcissist, and Engelberg’s wife accused him of overmedicating her prior to their separation. Engelberg prescribed nearly 900 units of medication to Monroe in her last 60 days, giving her an arsenal of lethal substances. Monroe died of an overdose of Nembutal and chloral hydrate, contraindicated medications that should not be prescribed or taken together. Engelberg prescribed both medications and later lied to authorities about prescribing chloral hydrate. His name appears on prescriptions for chloral hydrate issued to Monroe in her last months and on the label of the vial of chloral hydrate photographed in her residence by Barry Feinstein on the day her body was discovered. Engelberg and Greenson recklessly coordinated her treatment. Communication between the medical professionals broke down in Monroe’s last weeks because Engelberg had become preoccupied with his marital separation. In 1982, Engelberg accused Dr. Lou Siegel of prescribing Nembutal and chloral hydrate to Monroe, but the original police investigation documented Engelberg had refilled a month’s supply of Monroe’s drugs two days before her death. 

Engelberg prescribed 25 units of Nembutal to Monroe on July 31, 1962, and refilled the prescription on August 3; a total of 50 pills—and a lethal amount if consumed in an overdose. He also prescribed chloral hydrate to Monroe on July 25 and refilled the prescription again on July 31. These refills, issued less than thirty days apart, may be the “smoking gun” in the case as Monroe died from overdoses of these two contraindicated drugs. Additionally, on July 10, 1962, Engelberg prescribed Monroe the following on one prescription: 50 units of Valmid, 25 units of Seconal, 25 units of Tuinal, and 100 units of Librium. Engelberg’s prescriptions for Nembutal and chloral hydrate in late July and then refilled early on August 3, argues Engelberg’s culpability. In early July 1962, Engelberg prescribed to Monroe Dexedrine, a stimulant drug. This stimulant may have triggered a manic episode or mixed episode of mania and depression, precipitating her overdose death. Although Dr. Engelberg and Dr. Greenson reported to the Suicide Prevention Team their treatment plan to decrease Monroe’s dependence on barbiturates and substitute less dangerous medications in her last two months, Engelberg’s refill of the prescription for a month’s supply of Nembutal only three days after the original prescription contradicts this wildly. 

Marilyn Monroe displayed several symptoms consistent with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), identified but quite misunderstood during the era, and requiring firm and consistent boundaries between the doctor and patient. Dr. Ralph Greenson experienced countertransference feelings in which he found importance and gratification treating and befriending a famous, charismatic female star. He also referred Monroe to his brother-in-law, Milton Rudin, who became her attorney. Greenson’s reactivity triggered Monroe’s feelings of abandonment and behaviors of lashing out at him. In May 1962, Greenson traveled to Europe while Monroe worked on the production of her final, unfinished film. Prior to the psychiatrist’s departure, he prescribed Monroe a combination of a sedative and stimulant which may have contributed to her final decline. The stimulant may have triggered a manic episode or mixed episode of mania and depression, precipitating her death. The mania could have fueled Monroe’s energy, increased impulsivity, and reduced judgement, thus increasing her risk of acting on suicidal ideas.

The Kennedy family had connections to Samuel Rosenman, chairman of the 20th Century Fox studio’s board, and she requested assistance from Attorney General Robert Kennedy in leveraging that connection for her reinstatement in the film production. Änd in the weeks prior to Monroe’s death, the board made significant changes in the studio’s leadership. Greenson stated Monroe appeared depressed and over-medicated when he last met with her on the last day of her life. He instructed Pat Newcomb, a competent woman with a direct communication style, to leave the residence and left housekeeper Eunice Murray, a passive personality, with no specific safety instructions related to monitoring Monroe. Greenson alluded that Monroe appeared angry toward him and often reacted with anger when he disagreed with her. Monroe later called the psychiatrist and asked if he had taken her Nembutal. Greenson did not question her current access to Nembutal. Monroe may have provided a hint that Engelberg had recently prescribed the drug that Greenson later stated he and Engelberg agreed to discontinue and replace. 

Marilyn Monroe clearly had a genetic predisposition for mental illness. Engelberg informed the author and others of her having displayed symptoms consistent with the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder with mixed episodes of depression and mania making her a high risk for impulsive suicide. Monroe’s maternal grandfather took his own life by hanging; suicide is usually always the manifestation of a psychiatric disorder. Monroe’s maternal grandmother was institutionalized and diagnosed with Manic Depressive Psychosis. Monroe’s mother was diagnosed with Schizophrenia and was institutionalized most of her adult life. Monroe’s complex trauma in childhood may also have led to symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder, increasing risk for suicidal behavior to end her severe emotional pain. The forensic evidence points to Monroe having overdosed on approximately 47 Nembutal, pointing to her ingesting 25 pills in the original prescription and its refill. 

Many biographers deny Monroe’s potential for intentional suicide; they may be unaware of Borderline Personality Disorder crises that results in suicide gesturing to communicate emotional pain or to end emotional pain.  Greenson later reported Monroe was “quite upset” and “somewhat disoriented.” It was clear to him that she had taken some sleeping pills during her last day. “Marilyn was talking in a confused way,” Greenson told author Maurice Zolotow, “and it was hard to know what exactly what was bothering her.” If she accidentally overdosed, her condition suggests depression, disorientation, or disorganization. Individuals may take their own lives in a mixed or manic episode of Bipolar Disorder, when the serotonin levels in the brain increase energy and decrease judgement. Was Pat Newcomb concerned about Monroe’s stability and intentionally prevented Monroe’s access to Nembutal by keeping it secured in the bedroom where Monroe had invited her to sleep? Could this be the reason Monroe asked Greenson in their last telephone conversation if he had removed the vial of Nembutal? Had Newcomb indirectly deferred to Greenson’s judgment about granting Monroe’s access to the Nembutal in the room where Newcomb had slept the previous night? The constellation of Borderline Personality Disorder and Substance Misuse Disorder clearly increased Monroe’s risk for intentional or accidental overdose. 

Monroe struggled with sleep disturbances for many years, and according to Joan Greenson, especially in her last months. Monroe routinely took steps to create an environment conducive to falling to sleep and minimizing disturbances to awaken her. The fact that one of the telephone extensions remained in her bedroom suggests Monroe had not prepared for sleep when she ingested the overdose. This clue supports the theory that she intentionally overdosed. Of course, we cannot ascertain Monroe’s intention to die or to end emotional pain by overdosing. Nor can we ascertain if Monroe had acted out by risking her life in a suicide gesture during a Borderline crisis as a cry for help while hoping to be rescued. There is no hard evidence of Monroe and JFK’s involvement in an intimate relationship. Monroe’s friends, Ralph Roberts and Sidney Skolsky, wrote about her disclosing to them a brief affair with the President. But how accurate are these sources? Skolsky had been Monroe’s friend since the early days of her career and reunited with her in Los Angeles during her last year. Probably, Skolsky may have been influenced to write about an affair by his publisher. As a close friend and confidant, Roberts had frequent contact with Monroe in New York and Los Angeles during the last two years of her life. 

There are rumors of Monroe and Kennedy being together at Bing Crosby’s residence in Palm Springs in March 1962. The most compelling source is Monroe’s friend and confidante Ralph Roberts who documented a phone call from Monroe in Palm Springs in March 1962 and claims he spoke to a man with an unmistakable Bostonian accent. However, the phone call alone is not evidence of an intimate relationship with JFK. Monroe met Robert Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy at a reception hosted by Peter Lawford and Patricia Kennedy Lawford in February 1962 prior to the couple’s departure for a goodwill tour of Asia and Europe and socialized with them again during the President’s birthday gala in New York in May. In June 1962, Monroe declined an invitation from Robert and Ethel Kennedy to attend a reception at their home in Virginia during her negotiations with the studio. Monroe also had brief contact with Robert Kennedy at two social receptions at the Lawford residence in late June and late July. In June, Robert Kennedy briefly visited Monroe’s residence in the presence of Eunice Murray. Monroe contacted Robert Kennedy through the main switchboard of the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, from June 25-30, 1962. These calls were precipitated by her termination from 20th Century-Fox Studios following her appearance in May at the President’s Birthday Salute in New York. Monroe’s calls to the Attorney General were related to Kennedy’s connection to Samuel Rosenman, chairman of the board of Fox in New York. The simple explanation for Monroe’s calls is possibly her efforts to request Kennedy’s leverage of Roseman to support changes which would result in her return to the studio. In the end, Darryl F. Zanuck eventually returned and criticized the studio leadership’s decisions which had included Monroe’s termination. 

There is no evidence of Monroe and Robert Kennedy engaging in an intimate relationship either. Ethel Kennedy’s invitation to Monroe supports this along with Monroe’s reported denial of an affair to close friends such as Norman Rosten and Ralph Roberts. Most likely, Monroe had a social acquaintanceship friendship with both Kennedy and his wife, initiated through mutual friends Patricia Newcomb, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, and Peter Lawford. Ralph Roberts’ published memoir, Mimosa: Memories of Marilyn and the Making of “The Misfits” contains the author’s notes related to Monroe’s last excursion to Lake Tahoe. The notes include a nonspecific reference to “her disagreement with Joe DiMaggio.” Apparently, Monroe quarreled with her former husband leading to increased stress during the weekend. “I didn’t want to go,” Roberts quotes Monroe as telling him. “Pat [Lawford] persuaded me. It turned out to be a complete disaster.” Why was Monroe at the Cal-Neva Lodge? The simplest explanation is that she accompanied the Lawfords to support Dean Martin, her co-star in Something’s Got to Give, who was headlining in the resort’s Celebrity Show Room. The Reno Gazette-Journal promoted Martin’s booking at the Cal-Neva in July 26, 1962.

 

WHO FAILED TO INTERVENE DURING MONROE’S FINAL CRISIS? Peter Lawford called Marilyn Monroe on the last night of her life and after speaking with her, believed she was in danger. He described her slurred speech and voice fading out during the call. When he called Monroe back, her phone was busy. He called an operator who informed him of no conversation on Monroe’s telephone line, indicating her telephone receiver was off its cradle. Intoxicated and unable to drive, Lawford enlisted his friends, Joseph and Dolores Naar and manager Milton Ebbins, to check on her. Dolores Naar Nemiro is the only surviving guest of Lawford’s reception that evening (she is a member of SHARE, the oldest charity in Beverly Hills, started by the wives of the famous Rat Pack). Milton Ebbins went on recording having advised Lawford not to become involved in Monroe’s crisis as Lawford was married to the sister of the President of the United States. Ebbins initiated a series of telephone calls to enlist others in intervening, including his leaving a message with Milton Rudin for a call-back. Robert E. Litman, a psychiatrist who co-founded the nation’s first comprehensive suicide prevention center in 1958 in Los Angeles, examined Monroe's “psychological autopsy,” thinking after a deliberate overdose, she made a call for attention and she wanted to be rescued.

It was a Saturday night, and those involved may have been drinking alcohol and under its influence. First, Ebbins contacted the answering service of Milton Rudin, Dr. Greenson’s brother-in-law and Monroe’s attorney. Ebbins remained at home where he was meeting with comic Mort Sahl. When Rudin returned Ebbins’ call from a dinner party, Lawford’s urgent concern about Monroe may have been minimized. Rudin called Monroe’s residence but did not communicate an urgent concern when he spoke to Eunice Murray, housekeeper/companion. Murray stated Monroe was fine. Rudin did not press the issue with Murray. Murray’s lack of action may also have been influenced by Monroe’s intentions of firing her along with Greenson. After receiving Murray’s feedback, Ebbins called the Naars and told them not to drive to Monroe’s nearby residence to her. In the end, no one checked on Monroe’s safety after Peter Lawford raised the alarm. In this scenario, Murray delayed intervening until it was too late to save Monroe’s life. Toxicological and chemical analysis revealed Nembutal and chloral hydrate were present in high concentration in Monroe’s liver and low concentration in her blood, indicating an oral ingestion and complete metabolism of the drugs. Monroe slipped into coma, and cardiac activity and respiration slowed before ceasing. Time of death is estimated between 12:30 am to 1:00 am on August 5, 1962. Monroe ingested approximately forty-seven units of Nembutal and seventeen units of chloral hydrate. Medical Examiner-Coroner Theodore Curphey informed the press in 1962 that Monroe’s toxicology report indicating 4.5 milligrams of barbiturate poisoning per 100 cc of blood constituted about twice the amount usually considered a lethal dosage. 

Does anyone really want to know what lead to Marilyn Monroe’s death? I think not. That would close the case. It is the retelling of her death story that interests the public, sells books, attracts viewers to documentaries and dramatizations. Monroe is killed in each narrative. Writers recycle information regardless of its accuracy and despite it having been disproven. Marilyn Monroe was a resilient survivor of childhood complex trauma who succumbed to intergenerational mental illness. On August 18, 1962, according to the Suicide Team report, Monroe’s case should be classified as a “probable suicide.” The Coroner’s Office held a press conference to announce the findings during which the Chief Medical Examiner stated his conclusion: Monroe’s death was caused by a “self-administered overdose of sedative drugs and that the mode of death [was] probable suicide.” On October 1, 1983, Simon & Schuster released the first edition of Dr. Thomas Noguchi’s autobiography, Coroner, co-authored by Joseph Dimona. The former coroner went on record to defend his official findings of the cause of Monroe’s death. “In my opinion, the official conclusion stated the situation correctly (if evasively): ‘probable suicide,’” he wrote, “I would call it ‘very probable.’” The cause of death by acute barbiturate poisoning determined to be a “probable suicide” seems an appropriate conclusion based upon the forensic data and psychological history of Marilyn Monroe. —Icon: What Killed Marilyn Monroe, Volume Two (2023) by Gary Vitacco-Robles