Marilyn Monroe in "The Enchanters" (2023)

Jimmy Hoffa assigns Freddy Otash to get dirt on Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, who are squeezing the Teamster head’s organized crime scene. Freddy starts his investigation. Then, Monroe is found dead. Bobby Kennedy, his brother John F. Kennedy’s attorney general at the time, wants to know what Freddy knows. So do LAPD Chief Bill Parker and his right hand and intelligence ace, a future chief by the name of Daryl Gates. Bobby the K doesn’t want evidence of his brother’s sexual promiscuity, especially among Hollywood starlets and hangers-on, to fall into the wrong hands. Parker wants to blackmail the attorney general into making him FBI chief. Then there’s the episode that kicks off the novel, in which Freddy and the Hat Squad, a real-life quartet of elite and dangerous LAPD detectives, are called in to solve the kidnapping of a B-movie actress named Gwen Perloff. They end up dropping one suspect off a freeway overpass. 

Freddy Otash: I blew off the floor and vacuumed the rugs. I filled half an evidence sheath with threads and unknown gack. I brush-dusted the touch-and-grab planes on the dresser and got useless partials, smudges, and smears. Monroe was a hoarder. My prior B and E’s taught me that. The dresser drawers deserved a toss. I might find all-new shit. It might be evidentially germane. The bedroom was hot, hot. I was dexedrined and jungle-juiced. This prowl-and-seek gig eroticized me. I penlight-flashed the bed and saw that white-blond hair on the white pillow. I opened the top drawer and viewed the contents. I inventoried nine pairs of nylon stockings and a red crocheted bikini. I photo-snapped said contents and counted off sixty seconds. I pulled the print and dropped it in my evidence kit. The room heat spiked. I broke a sweat. A strong wind rattled the windows. I reached under the bedsheets and touched Marilyn’s leg. It felt dead cold and hot-room warm all at once. Drawer #2 contained assorted slips and Chanel No. 5 sachets. Hot-room air merged with perfume residue. I counted six sachets and slips. The slips were all pale pastel. 

There’s a big sign out front. It denotes the “Loser of the Week.” Eddie Fisher begins his reign tonight. He’s the designated schmuck and all-star attraction. I’m bodyguarding Eddie. We’re perched in the greenroom. There’s a full bar and a deli-nosh spread. Note the goblets crammed with goofballs and bennies. Eddie said, “Nixon’s been Loser of the Week twice. Rock Hudson got the nod last month, but nobody knows why.” I lit a cigarette. “Sheriff’s Vice caught him blowing a quiff in the john at the Hamburger Hamlet. The nod’s to the cognoscenti. The Rock’s got a secret-life scenario going. He’s not a signature loser, like you and Nixon.” The Life pix were a worldwide sensation. 

The pictorial corkboard oozed Monroe. It featured the Polaroids from my 4/11 break-in. The dissolute bathroom and bedroom. The forty grand stashed in the lockbox. The jumbo-girl clothes. The coin stash. The lists of lovers and dope-dispensing physicians. The name-scrawled sheets of paper. Monroe’s nutty screed stuck inside Paul de River’s nutty book. The adjacent corkboard featured the week’s random notes. I unpinned them and typed them into bullet-point briefs. I started with Pat’s emphatic assertion: Jack and Marilyn coupled a half dozen times, from ’54 up to now. They were abbreviated assignations. Always conducted in neutral locations. Calvinist Bobby wouldn’t poke Marilyn with a long stick. Marilyn attended last week’s Lawford-house do. I feigned interest in the Jack/Marilyn rumors. Pat supplied the above tattle. I dissembled my way to Pat’s punch line: Marilyn and the K boys were now kaput. Pat said she encountered Marilyn at the Palisades Gelson’s. Marilyn spun a tale of recurrent break-ins at her new pad. The burglar moved around various objects and left her weirdo notes. 

The burglar besieged her with breather calls. Pat cited Marilyn’s “mystery intruder” on a prior tapped call. I’ve got Marilyn dialed. The “mystery intruder” was Monroe fantasia. I used Pat to get this information. The big reunion went down. I bullet-pointed the week’s legwork. That paper slip in Deedee Grenier’s wallet supplied a solid lead. She’d jotted pay-phone numbers for Barrington and Beverly Glen parks. I spot-surveilled the two locations, all week. Monroe failed to show. The phones never rang. Nobody called out on them. Fox kingpin Darryl Zanuck got tipped off. Some unknown woman called him. She finked Danforth and Stein and spilled one of their two girl-stash locations. Zanuck called his tight pal, Bill Parker. Chief Bill bootjacked the kidnap job. He dispatched Freddy and the Hats to a house off 6th and Dunsmuir. We grabbed Danforth and Stein. 

Gwen Perloff was stashed elsewhere. I held Danforth’s right arm. Max held his left arm. Red jammed his head down and force-fed him look-sees. Max went Where’s the girl? Red went Give it up or you fly. Harry, Eddie, and Pervdog Stein stood ten feet back from the drop. It was August-in-L.A. hot and humid. Max and Red sweated through their shirts and suit coats. Danforth wriggled and squirmed. He dug his feet in and thrashed. Dirt clods skittered off the cliff. The fucking drop loomed. I scoped Max and Red. They looked impatient. I clamped Danforth’s arm. He buckled against me. My hand went numb. My legs fluttered. Max and Red ran six-four and 240. Their legs fluttered. Red said, “You’re wearing us thin, Richie. We can’t keep this up all night. Tell us where the girl is, so we can walk away from here.” Danforth giggled and spit on Red’s shoes. He said, “I’m having fun.” I slid on my brass knucks and kidney-punched Richie. He stifled a screech and dug his feet in. I looked over the cliff. Cars zigged by—fast, with no letup. Max sighed. Red sighed. Max said, “Sink him, Freddy.” They dropped their hands. I shoved Danforth off the cliff. He treaded air for one split second, it came out garbled. I heard him hit a car roof. I heard brakes squeal. I heard wheels thump over him. Crisscrossed headlights lit him up. A mobile Caddy dragged him against a guardrail and sheared off his feet. We dumped Buzzy Stein with the DB guys at Highland Park station. Buzzy saw the drop show and finked a hostage pad in Encino. Gwen Perloff was stashed in a vacant bachelor crib off Woodman. The Fidel Castro dimwits hid her in a broom closet. Max called the lead Sheriff’s IO. He ran the command out of the West Hollywood substation. Six Sheriff ’s cars blew past us. The Ventura Freeway was all siren blare and hot lights. It vibed interagency grief. Bill Parker usurps a county job from Sheriff Pete Pitchess. 

Parker went rogue for Darryl F. Zanuck. Pitchess overplays the rescue of Gwen Perloff. The alley dead-ended at Saticoy Street. Déjà vu ditzed me. I knew I’d been here before. My brain wires fritzed. I couldn’t place the context. This summer was half booze-and-dope blur. It was San Fernando Valley hot. The torches leaked propane. The air reeked. The sky pressed down, explosive. The Hats plus Freddy O. We’re here to observe. We killed one guy and locked one guy up. LAPD came in early. The Sheriff ’s came in late. Let’s watch them save the girl. Crane shot. Motel Mike Bayless and Gwen Perloff walk out. Gwen’s unruffled and unmussed. It’s ninety-three degrees at 10:00 p.m. She’s been locked in a broom closet. There’s no sweat pools on her mint green shift. There’s no tape-gag residue. There’s no wrist-restraint chafe marks. She’s redoubtably composed.She’s an actress walking into a crowd. Some men whistle. Some hopped-up stews jump and wave. My biz phone rang. I grabbed it two rings in. A Brit-voiced man babbled at me. I made the voice. It was Peter Lawford. He was half-gassed and far-gone panicked. I heard “dinner party”/“no show”/“found the body.” I said, “Calm down and make sense.” Lawford wheezed. My phone line staticked up. I heard “late for dinner party”/“oh my God”/“Marilyn Monroe.” Gasps and garbles spelled it out. The line cleared. He went over/he saw the pill vials/there was no housekeeper extant.

"Freddy, she was cold. She was such a talent, the greatest female film star of her era..." Nembutal, Seconal, chloral hydrate. Instant dreamland. Lois twirled her ashtray. “The story’s inevitable. Jack and Marilyn. Bobby and Marilyn, when the wind drifts a certain way. People pick up glimmers or bits of stories, and they embellish like mad.” I feigned a yawn. Jack and Marilyn/Bobby and Marilyn. Nat and Lois talk. Pat confides in Bobby. It’s all extraneous yak-yak. “Let’s change the subject. You’ve got the stewardess-in-love flick, and you’re reading for this schlock guy at Fox, Maury Dexter. I heard he’s a pillhead in the Freddy O. mode. What else? Oh, yeah—he’s got a giant-rat job and a twist flick, and you’ll have to settle for scale.” Miss Lytess sipped champagne. “Marilyn overestimated her sway over people. She played her cards too quickly and desperately, in her efforts to impress and seduce them. If these people you posit were canny and properly reserved, and if she wanted to imitate their self-sufficiency and general hauteur, she would have set out to prove herself to them in most dangerous ways.” I squinted. The camera swung low. I saw legs and feet but no faces. I caught the hemline on the dress. I caught thin ankles and the black pumps Monroe wore as herself sixteen minutes back. She went somewhere. She changed clothes. Why did she do it? 

She switched identities in the middle of a roiling protest gig. She’s got the “dreamy eyes” Doc de River attributes to sex psychopaths. Schizo Marilyn. The ’48 pill vial I saw. The ’62 pill vial I saw. Marilyn crossed out “Norma Jean Baker” on the ’48 vial and wrote “Not my name anymore” beside it. Marilyn crossed out the “Marilyn Monroe” on the ’62 vial and wrote “Not my name anymore” beside it. Akin to the Weimar-era pix that Marilyn Monroe hoarded. The lights went up. Some Pali lettermen chanted, “Sex Creep! Sex Creep! Sex Creep!” Sid pointed Morty to the lectern. Morty ambled up. He said, “Here’s a preview of the next installment in my series. I’ve been in serious consultation with an eminent headshrinker here in the City of the Fallen Angels, and he told me the Creep is living through a ‘declension of fan crushes,’ which is to say that he crushed on the late Carole Landis, then went on to crush on someone like Jane Russell, then went on to the crush object of the era—the late Marilyn Monroe.” On to Marilyn. Her coded sessions file delivered. I got verbatim-transcribed Q and A here. The sessions had been tape-recorded and code-transcribed by de River himself. Marilyn consulted him from ’52 to mid-’54. De River coined the phrase “declension of fan crushes” at that time. It preceded her coupling with Timmy Berlin and her own attribution of the phrase. De River used Carole Landis as an example of a “neophyte crusher’s crush.” Marilyn said, “Oh, I knew Carole all right. There’s stories I could tell you.” De River excoriated Marilyn. 

He considered her to be shallow, vain, impetuous, peremptory, whimsical, usurious, and driven by infantile exhibitionism. The only way that she could successfully revise and shape an all-new persona would be for her to go anonymous and cultivate risk in the real world. And revel in the risk of exposure and punishment. Marilyn cited her “bit actress” friend Gwen. She had accomplished just that. Gwen was Marilyn’s age. They shared a room at Hollygrove. Gwen had taken on The Life. They played girl sleuth games at the Grove. Gwen said The Life meant going native. She set up burglary scores and scored seductress film roles. She comported with burglars, armed robbers, and flimflam men. She started stealing young. She underwent group therapy under his direction. De River was starting to bore Marilyn. 

De River fixated on the bold Gwen at the expense of the grasping “dim bulb” Marilyn. Marilyn talked up Gwen. She was her alter ego, doppelgänger, and amanuensis. Gwen carried the symbolic and metaphysical weight that Marilyn could not hoist to her own frail shoulders. Why mince words? De River packed a torch for Gwen and wrote off Marilyn as “stale goods.” She emitted a stale stench of desperate fear and put her own artistic success above all moral considerations. She could not inhabit any role other than the role of herself, at the risk of grave dissociation. My nerves decohered. I popped two yellow jackets to tamp them down and quash this schizzy limbo. I dialed in, dialed out, stepped back and reframed. The dope hit me. It cocooned me, warm and safe. It resituated the shadows and magnified the candlelight.” -The Enchanters (2023) by James Ellroy

Jim DiEugenio: Mike Rothmiller's book has been destroyed piece by piece by the best guy in the field, Don McGovern. Marilyn Monroe took her own life, either willfully or by accident. And Bobby Kennedy was never in Brentwood that day or night and that is provable. Mark Shaw is another of these gaseous blowhards who preaches this rubbish. Don [McGovern] and I will have a decimating review on his public talk in Allen, Texas soon. And I am prepping a long, intricate overview of this whole morass titled, "Joyce Carol Oates, Brad Pitt and the Road to Blonde." Rothmiller claimed to have heard Lawford's confession in 1982 yet made no mention of such a confession for four decades and produced exactly zero evidence that any such confession was actually made. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but Rothmiller has produced no evidence at all. Don McGovern has read something like 120 books on that case. Plus he went through 1000 pages of documents from the  archives at CSUN from the Capell/Slatzer collection. Plus he helped Gary VItacco Robles write his 1200 page bio on MM, Icon, which is probably the best one out there. The truth is, as Vitacco Robles writes, that Lawford did not leave his house or his guests. And the guests corroborate that. And he was always plagued by guilt about it. DA Ronald Carrol wrote a 641 page report which refuted them specifically and in detail. 

The MM conspiracy nuts only mention a 27 page report. But that was  only the summary. Gary VItacco Robles petitioned the office for the full report. And he uses it in his book Icon. Which is how we know that unlike Rothmiller states, neither LAPD nor FBI, or Spindel taped her house. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Mailer's biography of Marilyn Monroe: "Since Mailer did not have the time to thoroughly research the facts surrounding her death, his speculation led to the biography's controversy. The book's final chapter theorizes that Monroe was murdered by rogue agents of the FBI and CIA who resented her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy. Mailer later admitted that he embellished the book with speculations about Monroe's sex life and death that he did not himself believe to ensure its commercial success." Source: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com