WEIRDLAND

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Movie Review: "Dinner in America"

English writer Osbert Sitwell, author of The Man Who Lost Himself and member of the Ghost Club, wrote: "For most of the well-to-do in the town, dinner was a shibboleth, its hour dividing mankind." Adding a thematically related quote by Ronald Reagan, "All great change in America begins at the dinner table."

Since premiering at Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2020, Dinner in America—written and directed by Adam Rehmeier (Jonas)—has received consistent critical acclaim. This treasured indie film is now available on Arrow UK. Theatrically, Dinner in America will be next released in Japan, in September 2021. One of the film's co-producers was Ben Stiller via Red Hour Productions.

Due to the fact that Rehmeier wanted to be faithful to his vision of the early '90s punk scene (which he personally experienced while coming of age in Lincoln, Nebraska), his project took almost a decade to crystallize thoroughly. And his attention to detail has greatly paid off, so it was well worth the wait. 

Hopefully, Dinner in America gets proper distribution and online streaming soon, because many potential spectators might benefit of its uplifting message and playful sense of humor—wrapped in vibrant cinematography by Jean-Philippe Bernier—to counteract these murky post-COVID crisis days. 

Kyle Gallner (Dear White People)—who recently won the Dublin Film Critics Special Jury Prize—plays punk renegade Simon/John Q, delivering a tour de force performance that won't leave most viewers indifferent, for better or worse. 

Opposite to Gallner is Emily Skeggs (The Miseducation of Cameron Post), a young actress who proves to be the film's truly lasting pulse. Her talent is a hidden gem, giving to her character Patty a pure off-beat light contrasting to Simon's grittiness. Skegg's portrayal emanates genuine love for certain type of misfit, in particular of nerdy-looking girls from suburbia.

In the first scene, we are treated to some gruesome medical experiments that Simon undergoes courtesy of Nutritional Tech (Naltech), a government sponsored company that only compensates him with a fraction of the money they had promised. When one of the doctors asks him: "10 being the strongest of the scale, how is the nausea?", an unfazed Simon responds: "I would say 11."

Simon leaves the medical center with an oversexed patient named Beth (Hannah Marks), who invites him to a Sunday dinner at her home. At the moment Simon succumbs to the advances of Betty (Beth's mom)—played by a seductive Lea Thompson (Back to the Future)—family chaos ensues in the aftermath. 

The "meet-cute" between Simon and Patty happens at the PetZone's back alley, when Patty is taking a break from the drudgery of her job. Suddenly she learns Simon is fleeing from some policemen, eager to catch him at the behest of Beth's family, who have offered a reward on his arrest and capture. 

Rehmeier skilfully subverts the 'toerag' stereotype that afflicts the antagonistic and sexist punk culture, by displaying each stage of flirting between the insolent and brooding Simon and the sweetly awkward Patty. Gallner offers subtle hints that Simon is strangely amused—yet shocked—by Patty when she dances to his band Psy Ops' hardcore tunes in her kiddy bedroom. 

After witnessing how their bond is strengthened—through several revenge pranks on a couple of despicable jocks, and shortly after that by forcing Patty's former employer to pay her last check—we start to suspect Simon will eventually let her know the real conflicted guy behind his punk mask. Slowly Patty manages to make Simon relatable and eventually redeemable—which in turn makes her the film's wacky heroine—especially during her rendition of the iconic song Watermelon.

A momentous dinner scene involves Simon's bourgeois family, who are terribly dismissive of Simon and Patty's creative music goals.  Whereas Patty's parents are quite lovable and naïve, Simon's seem to lack the most basic empathy skills.  In this specific scene, Rehmeier highlights how hypocritical and tendentious is Simon's sister Renae, who despises her rebellious brother and belittles Patty condescendingly. 

Rehmeier's criticism is sharp and accurate throughout, unveiling the ritualized conventionalisms of the typical middle-class family from the American MidWest. It looks as if their entire lives are a mere attempt to flaunt their social status and their fake façades, while actively hating those who are capable of finding their own way.

Simon resists the temptation of going mainstream by refusing to be the opening act of faux-punk band The Alliance. Simon is a quintessential rebel in the mold of Marlon Brando's cop-hating biker Johnny Strabler (The Wild One). Unfortunately, Patty doesn't have many similar female counterparts, since her atypical screen persona is such an original creation to date. 

Rehmeier explained: "At its heart, the film is an underdog love story about two very different characters, each marginalized misfits in their own right. They find each other through music." I think his film conveys a peculiar mixture of abrasiveness ("Fuck China Hut, Fuck America") and tenderness ("You need to take it down a notch") that deftly reflects the duality of these characters.

Rehmeier's Dinner in America brings to mind widely assorted influences of indie classics like Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse, Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite, Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, Michael Lehmann's Heathers, Allan Moyle's Pump Up the Volume, Darren Stein's Jawbreaker, Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America, Jefery Levy's S.F.W., Jason Reitman's Juno, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's American Splendor, Sam Mendes's American Beauty, and David Lynch's Blue Velvet, among others. 

"In a crisis a man learnt what was real to him and what was unreal; that he became himself, choosing what he really needed." —Alec Waugh (author of The Loom of Youth and Wheels within Wheels: A Story of the Girls)

Article published previously as Movie Review: "Dinner in America" on Blogcritics.

Friday, June 18, 2021

HEPI Sex Study, Generation X, Dinner in America

Sex and Relationships among students in the UK: Study conducted by Nick Hillman (HEPI's Director), April 2021: The Higher Education Policy Institute study shows increasing levels of sexlessness with 43% of undergraduate student reporting never having had sex. The sexually active statistics report 640,000 sexually active female students and 350,000 sexually active male students in the UK.

• Undergraduate students enter higher education with a range of prior experiences: 43% ‘had never had sex with anyone’, one-quarter (25%) had not ‘intimately kissed anyone’ and 18% were ‘in a long-distance relationship’.

• Sex is not a high priority for most new students – 58% say making friends was more important to them than finding sexual partners. Only 16% of students say ‘When first going to university, I was excited about having sex’.

• Just one-in-ten students (10%) expected to have sex during their welcome week and a similar proportion (9%) did so.

• Students’ experiences: 41% say they have had sex during their time as a student, 32% say they are ‘currently in a relationship’ and 11% say they are ‘voluntarily abstaining from sex’.

• Among those students who have had sex during their time in higher education, the majority (52%) have had just one sexual partner and a further one-quarter (26%) have had between two and three.

• A higher proportion of women (47%) than men (34%) say they have had sex during their time as a student. These men are less likely to claim they have only had one sexual partner. Source: www.hepi.ac.uk

They may call GenX "The Forgotten Generation," but they will never forget their music. They didn't need no damn blue ribbons. No one knew where they were after school until dark. There were no "parent pick-up lines..." They tried to solve their own conflicts. They made their own "technology." They hated being told what to do, but they never needed it anyway because bootstrapping was their thing. And they questioned the status quo. And most of all, they made some amazing music. Generation X is also considered the most romantically adventurous of all recent generations, having had 13.1 sexual partners so far in their lifetime. On average Baby Boomers have had 10.7 sexual partners so far in their lifetime. On average Millennials have had 11.6 sexual partners so far in their lifetime. On average Generation Z have had 5.6 sexual partners so far in their lifetime. Source: bodyandsoul.com.au

Snarling in a bomber jacket and powering down pavements like a man possessed, 90s punk Simon (Kyle Gallner, outrageously good) is seldom an ideal house or dinner guest. He’s a Rebel Without a Cause amplified to a ridiculous extreme. Ejected from a paid drug-research study, Simon hooks up with Beth (Hannah Marks), a fellow reject who invites him over for dinner, an occasion which implodes once Beth’s mom (Lea Thompson) gets frisky with the guest. Simon finds himself at the table of a second, entirely neurotic middle-class Michigan family. He arrives at this meal, reluctantly, at the behest of Patty (Emily Skeggs), a poignantly awkward 20 year old, who attracts ridicule both at home and at work. (Until, of course, she is fired.) By a mad coincidence, albeit one that sits snugly within this angular outsider romcom, Patty is an obsessive fan of Simon’s secret alter ego, John Q, the masked frontman of punk group Psy Ops. Source: Irishtimes.com

-Amber Wilkinson: It comes through in your film (Dinner in America), which feels quite singular. There's a very strong sense of personality that comes across. It's quite funny in that even though it's a very punk-spirited film, it's also a very romantic movie. I'm wondering if you are a romantic at heart.

-Adam Rehmeier: I found that out through the process that I'm actually a romantic guy at heart. This film broke me at several points, I edited it linearly and when I got to the arcade sequence, when Patty jumped on him and pulled him down, I just broke down. I just sobbed, it was the most beautiful thing. And so I had my own kind of awakening in the process of making the film. Source: www.eyeforfilm.co.uk

Kyle Gallner found the role of Simon to be a challenging one. “I thought Simon was a really interesting challenge, because you have this guy who at the beginning of the movie is almost actively trying to be disliked, he’s so aggressive and so abrasive. And by the end of it, you realize he’s a good guy, he’s just pushing back against all the bullshit in his life very actively. And when he finds Patty, they just kind of balance each other out.” Rehmeier wanted to cast Gallner after seeing a photo of him from Sundance 2015 that Rehmeier says just captured Simon in a single photo. “It was the same reaction that when I’d seen A Rebel Without a Cause, like how James Dean is able to balance pushing things and like a bad boy kind of thing, but like sensitive and vulnerable too. This image of Kyle had it in spades.” 

Kyle Gallner says he and Emily Skeggs are “kindred spirits” and credits Rehmeier for allowing the two to spend time together for two weeks before the film started shooting. One of the film’s high points is a sweet song, titled The Watermelon Song, which is arranged and played by Simon and sung by Patty in the film’s most emotional scene. Rehmeier recorded the song with Skeggs, playing the instruments himself and Skeggs singing and describes being “shocked” by Gallner’s emotional performance in the scene while shooting. Simon spends most of the film very reserved, aggressive and almost unlikable and his raw, emotional response to Patty singing is a tender moment in a film that otherwise projects such high, punk-rock energy. “I knew this is the first time you see Simon crack. That reaction was intentional, where you see that love growing, not just for her, but for the music. He sees something special in her and it’s special for him, he loves everything that’s happening. As gnarly as Simon is, there’s an authenticity in that, he loves his music and it felt like a very important moment for him and for them in their relationship.” Source: filmhounds.co.uk 

Director Adam Rehmeier said: “Dinner in America is my love letter to the early 90s punk scene in Lincoln, Nebraska that served as the backdrop for my formative years. I grew up playing in bands and spent the better part of two decades 4-tracking in a series of basements, apartments, and lockouts. The DIY ethic instilled through those experiences has informed my creative process and approach to filmmaking. At its heart, the film is an underdog love story about two very different characters, each marginalized misfits in their own right: Patty, a socially awkward, sheltered 20-year-old escaping her banal existence through punk music; Simon, a snarling anarchist and seemingly toxic punk seeking refuge from the law. When these two cross paths, their radically different personalities make them an unlikely duo. They are thrust together, at first by circumstance and necessity, but in short order they begin to inspire one another. An organic intimacy unfolds, eventually revealing a connection of which neither is initially aware they share. They find each other through music.” Source: www.thehollywoodnews.com

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Dinner in America: punk-rock dramedy

Adam Rehmeier: "Dinner in America is salty and abrasive on the outside, but inside it’s sweet. It subversively frames something ugly, but underneath it all, these two characters exemplify the good in people, as twisted as that can be at times, especially with Simon."

A troubled punk singer and his biggest fan get into a series of scrapes in indie dramedy "Dinner in America". Adam Rehmeier’s rebel yell of a movie is as if Valley Girl was accidentally shunted into a teleportation machine alongside Sid & Nancy and the whole soupy stew beamed into the 90s. It’s about an angry punk singer with a pyromania fetish and a lonely and nerdy young woman with ADHD who is his biggest fan. Kyle Gallner plays John Q Public (real name: Simon), the lead singer of a band called Psy Ops who performs anonymously in a balaclava; off-stage, he has a vocal-fry badass voice, like Ray Liotta in GoodFellas. Simon is experiencing furious musical differences with the rest of the band and is making money through selling weed and taking part in big pharma medical experiments. Emily Skeggs is excellent as quirky, dreamy Patty, who takes indistinct Polaroids of herself masturbating to his music and sends them to him via the mailbox address on the band’s flyers. Dinner in America is a hyper aggressive comedy that deep down has a huge heart that will break down the walls built up by the characters. Twenty years ago, Sam Mendes’s American Beauty and Todd Solondz’s Happiness were at opposite ends of the spectrum of difficult weirdness for this kind of material, Solondz setting a gold standard for strangeness, dysfunction and discomfort. Rehmeier is at the American Beauty end of things. His film has its own truculent charm. Source: theguardian.com

Instant cult classic Dinner In America delivers darkly hilarious punk rock romcom thrills: As fate has it, Patty is Simon’s number one fan, though she doesn’t know it. He doesn’t know it either, not at first. The film's first 15 minutes may be a bumpy ride for some audiences as it focuses entirely on Simon and his zero-tolerance attitude to life: definitely an 'acquired taste' in character terms. However, this less-than-palatable introduction is critical to the film's success – and those who stick with Dinner In America will be rewarded by nuanced pitch-perfect performances from Gallner and Skeggs, whose tangible off-the-wall chemistry make this instant cult classic work. Patty's self-confidence grows as she witnesses Simon's brash bulldozing of school bullies, sexual harassers, amusingly passive aggressive parents/siblings and other everyday obstacles, helping her to realise that it's possible to stand up for yourself (and, indeed, re-invent yourself) while going against the grain. Source: irishnews.com

When we first meet Simon, he comes off as an irredeemable douchebag, and his quips and misadventures feel distinctly mean-spirited. Patty, meanwhile, can initially be read as a loose assemblage of Napoleon Dynamite-isms, or worse, an ableist stereotype (while it’s never stated outright, it’s generally implied that Patty has an unspecified learning disability or spectrum diagnosis). Indeed, the first act is strong medicine, and I can imagine more timid viewers bailing rather than opting to hang with these characters. As Patty, Skeggs is a ray of sunshine, a genuinely good person with just enough wry savvy that her ultimate romance doesn’t feel like a total mismatch. Gallner, meanwhile, carries himself with such snotty charisma that you find yourself liking him in spite of yourself. 

What’s more, despite their opposing acting styles, the two actors have fantastic chemistry, deftly bouncing off each other through scene after scene of witty repartee. Dinner in America is so raucous and hyperactive that, by the time its characters finally fall for each other, you don’t realize how hard you’re rooting for them. On the surface, this is not a subtle movie, but the transition from punk rock anarchy to swooning romanticism is real enough and felt enough that it sneaks up on you. By the end of the film, Patty has allowed Simon to drop some of his fuck-you defenses, and Simon has encouraged Patty to grow into her confidence and creative talents. Gallner is stunning in the role, crafting the image of a rebellious enfant terrible with a heart of gold. At the same time, Skeggs’s assertive eccentricity lends itself incredulously well to a film where everybody is trying to out weird each other. It’s a bit of a stretch to say this is some kind of subversive manic pixie dream girl narrative, yet there’s a strong sense of parity and mutual delirium between the two leads that makes their malady infectious.

Love and punk rock may seem like strange bedfellows, but they’re far from mutually exclusive. By the end of the film, these are the same smartasses you’ve come to love; they’ve just opened up their hearts a little bit more. It’s something of a cliche to refer to a film as a “romantic comedy for people who hate romantic comedies,” but in this case the description holds water. We’ll probably never hear Hugh Grant say “Take off that cat-shit-covered apron and I might be able to get hard,” and we’ll probably never see Julia Roberts furiously masturbate while blasting a dubbed cassette of hardcore b-sides, but as the movie unfolds, the emotions it evokes are the same. I had an honest-to-god lump in my throat as Patty crooned “Fuck ‘em all but us” over Simon’s sludgy guitar, and if that means I’ve gone soft in my old age, I don’t care. Dinner in America has a big, gushy heart beating under its crust-punk exterior, and it’s one of the most pleasant surprises of the year. Source: bostonhassle.com

Those who identified with the girl geeks of Ghost World and Welcome to the Dollhouse may also find something to love in Emily Skeggs’s Patty, a wide-eyed suburban nerd whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of Simon (Kyle Gallner), a punk rock runaway. A throwback to the brightly coloured offbeat teen movies of the 90s and a rude riposte to that era’s more mainstream offerings (She’s All That’s sexist makeover scene is subverted), this sweet (odd) romcom is buoyed up by the chemistry between its leads. Once Simon meets Patty his world begins to change as he finally meets his match. As Simon starts to mellow, the tone also morphs and becomes something beautifully quirky and uniquely original. 

It’s almost a punk Bonnie and Clyde. Dinner in America is an assault to the senses that really captures the attitude of punk-rock whilst at the same time crafting a quirky tale of love and self-empowerment. A joyously dark-hearted journey through suburban America that taps into the magic of films like Heathers, injects them with the spirit of punk rock and creates an instant hit that has the potential to shape a generation. Rehmeier doesn’t make explicit exactly what it is about America that Simon wishes to defy, but by the time he breaks bread with the William Sonoma family, viewers will get the idea. Suffice to say that young men like Simon grow up soaking in choiceless dissatisfaction, and they come of age renouncing their choicelessness. Partly it’s a class thing. Dinner in America doesn’t really cast America’s heartland in the most positive light. The film maintains traces of affection for the Mid-West regions mostly through the empathy felt for Simon and Patty, two loners in need of companionship who slowly become better people by being with each other. 

Grant that “better” involves, among other things, a truly gnarly revenge prank on the two asshole jocks who make a hobby of sexually harassing Patty, and causing a scene at the local pet store where she used to work in an effort at securing her final paycheck from her stingy boss. “Better” is a relative term, and given the suffocating atmosphere of their hometown, where individuality is choked out of people and replaced by droning normalcy, the strong desire to revolt feels like a moral imperative. Rehmeier litters Dinner in America with hideous examples of what “normalcy” looks like, from the asshole jocks to the racist football dad. By the time the movie ends, Simon and Patty look like heroes in spite of their abrasive rudeness and reckless actions. Source: www.pastemagazine.com

Monday, June 14, 2021

The Prankster and the Conspiracy: Kerry Thornley, JFK, LHO, Adam Curtis

Adam Curtis (February, 2021): "Individualism is born out of mass democracy. It’s a natural consequence of it. But at some point, individualism began to eat away at mass democracy, it began to strangle the very thing that had produced it, because it gets rid of collective power. What we’re waiting for is a politician who comes along with a really powerful story. The idea you could imagine something different has gone off the agenda. There are no politicians who think in that broader concept." Source: time.com

 
Aaron Good: For some reason, Adam Curtis decided to weigh in on the JFK assassination in his documentary Can't Get You Out of My Head. Though there have been a lot of good books written about the JFK assassination, from the looks of it, Curtis apparently did not read any of them. If he had done so, there would have been many angles that he could have taken to discuss the case, even if he could not cover the assassination in a comprehensive manner. He could have read David Talbot’s Brothers and then discussed how RFK came to believe that his brother had been killed as the result of a right-wing plot involving elements of the CIA, the Cuban exile community, and organized crime. The audience might have also appreciated learning about how RFK was assassinated before he could attain the presidency and reinvestigate Dallas—something he explicitly said he would do. Curtis often seems suspicious of power—especially technocratic power—but he seems even more suspicious of those who are suspicious of power.

For whatever reason, Curtis focuses on the figure of Kerry Thornley. So, what does Thornley do for Curtis? He largely serves to allow Curtis to be dismissive of “conspiracy theories,” even as he is superficially ambivalent about actual conspiracies elsewhere in the film. The Kerry Thornley arc in CGYOMYH begins with Curtis telling us how Thornley and his friend Greg Hill went to a bowling alley where they disagreed about whether the universe was orderly or chaotic. They eventually came to the conclusion that the world was chaotic, but that individuals could use their minds to create some semblance of order. But then something strange happened. Thornley joined the Marines, where he met a young defiant man named Lee Harvey Oswald. He decided he would write a novel about Oswald. While Thornley was writing this novel, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union. As a right-wing Ayn Rand devotee, Thornley detested Kennedy. He did not mourn when JFK died. But the fact that the figure he cast in his novel was the president’s alleged assassin was, according to Thornley, “very weird.”

Curtis states that around this time, Thornley got his Oswald novel published under the title, The Idle Warriors. This is an error; the novel did not get published until 1991—in the wake of Oliver Stone’s JFK. As Curtis would have it, Thornley ran into trouble because of the novel and the fact that—like Oswald before the assassination—Thornley was living in New Orleans in 1967. Thornley, Curtis tells us, believed that people in power used conspiracy theories to control people by making them believe that the world was run by hidden forces. This served to make individuals feel “weak and powerless.” Curtis does not bother to point out that Thornley is essentially positing a conspiracy theory to explain conspiracy theories. Curtis blithely asserts: 'Despite all the patterns, Jim Garrison could produce no evidence of a hidden conspiracy.' Curtis does not mention that Garrison had convinced the jury at the Clay Shaw trial that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. That was accomplished through one exhibit and two key witnesses. The witnesses were Dr. John Nichols for the prosecution and the second was Kennedy's pathologist Dr. Pierre Finck. The exhibit was the Zapruder film, which Nichols’ used to convincingly demonstrate a shot came from the front. This showed, at the least, that Lee Oswald was not the only assassin firing at Kennedy, which would mean JFK was killed by a conspiracy. So it’s convenient for Curtis to leave it out.

Garrison also discovered that Oswald had been in New Orleans as an ostensibly pro-Castro activist, but had been working out of the office of Guy Banister—a hard-right, ex-FBI man who ran the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, was a member of the fascist “Minutemen” organization, and had been involved in anti-Castro CIA operations like the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose. Given that Oswald’s New Orleans activities only served to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the obvious inference would be that Oswald was a pawn in some kind of counterintelligence operation. The Zapruder film was so definitive that when it was finally shown on network television in the 1970’s, public support for the Warren Commission fell to all-time lows. Years later it was revealed that Clay Shaw lied on the stand numerous times. He was also getting considerable support from the CIA during the trial. There is no excuse for Curtis’ failure to mention that the last official word on the JFK case—the HSCA investigation—concluded that the assassination was the result of a “probable conspiracy.” He then also fails to disclose to the audience that the chief counsel of the HSCA eventually signed on to a petition which stated that the culprits were elements of the US national security state.

Upon returning to Thornley and Discordianism, CGYOMH details how the group decided to use Playboy magazine to launch “Operation Mindfuck.” They kicked off the operation by submitting a fake letter positing that all the political assassinations in the US were the work of “the [Bavarian] Illuminati.” Any explanation of Operation Mindfuck is by definition a conspiracy theory. To acknowledge this truism would entail something that Curtis does not want to admit or explain: that any conspiracy theory—like any no-conspiracy theory—should be judged on its respective merits. One of many dispiriting aspects of CGYOMH is that Thornley and Operation Mindfuck are actually interesting subjects whose reexamination could offer fresh insights. The work of the illustrious and iconoclastic Florida State professor Lance DeHaven-Smith is instructive in this regard. By the end of the year 2000, DeHaven-Smith had already enjoyed an accomplished career as a scholar of public administration and defined SCADs (state crimes against democracy) as “concerted actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty.”

In 2013, Lance deHaven-Smith published Conspiracy Theory in America. There he detailed the ways in which powerful actors and institutions have aided and abetted SCADs by stigmatizing those who posit conspiratorial explanations of politically significant events: "Most Americans will be shocked to learn that the conspiracy-theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda program initiated in 1967, infusing the conspiracy theory label with powerfully negative associations. This program was directed at criticisms of the Warren Commission’s report. The propaganda campaign called on media corporations and journalists to criticize “conspiracy theorists” and raise questions about their motives and judgements." Does not the Discordians’ Operation Mindfuck plot dovetail perfectly with the Agency’s goal of stigmatizing conspiracy theorizing around suspicious political events? As we will see, this becomes all the more apparent when one looks at the overwhelming amount of evidence that Kerry Thornley was an intelligence asset involved in creating the legend that made Oswald a suitable designated culprit in the JFK assassination.

Nixon could not get the CIA to cooperate with him in a number of key areas, including the president’s attempts to obtain all the CIA files which might explain the JFK assassination and the Bay of Pigs operation. Nixon eventually fired Dick Helms, the director of the CIA, and ordered his successor, the outsider James Schlesinger, to compile all information about CIA crimes. He took these actions, in part, because he believed that the CIA was somehow involved in the Watergate scandal. There were good reasons for his suspicions. Two key Watergate figures—James McCord and E. Howard Hunt—were “former” CIA officers, were politically to Nixon’s right, and were so operationally incompetent that many suspect that they intentionally bungled their crimes as part of an operation to damage or gain control over the president. It is important to note that these leaks about Nixon, and about Nixon’s adversaries like the CIA, were part of what can be described as an Establishment civil war. To say that Nixon was merely paranoid about his liberal enemies is to greatly distort this history. Furthermore, such an explanation cannot explain how the ouster of Nixon led to the US lurching far to the right politically. Both major parties became more conservative. 

The liberalism of the Kennedys was excised from the political power structure. The Republicans became a Reaganite party and the Democrats adopted positions that had previously been associated with Rockefeller Republicanism, cultural politics notwithstanding. Years after launching Operation Mindfuck, Thornley says he saw E. Howard Hunt’s photo after his Watergate arrest. He now recognized Hunt from his New Orleans days, when he also knew Oswald. Thornley also recalled how he had known Guy Bannister and Clay Shaw, suspects in Jim Garrison’s investigation. Suddenly, says Thornley, “I could not explain all these weird coincidences.” While the Operation Mindfuck hoax/operation promulgated an Illuminati meta-conspiracy theory, these bogus theories were getting mixed up with real world intrigues like CIA mind control and other scandals. Says Curtis, “The line between the reality of political corruption and a dream world of conspiracy theories started to get blurred in America.” Kerry Thornley, Curtis suggests, became swept up in this paranoid thinking. Thornley came to believe that the CIA had somehow manipulated him into setting up Operation Mindfuck, but he didn’t know how. Says Curtis, “Thornley had retreated into a dream world of conspiracy.”

There are more key facts and events that Curtis omits from his tale. The Thornley and Hill move to New Orleans in February 1961 has never been adequately explained. Right at the time of their arrival, preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion were ramping up. Ultra-rightists and Garrison suspects like David Ferrie and Guy Bannister were involved in these operations, conducted at locales such as the Belle Chase naval air station and Banister’s 544 Camp Street office. Upon arriving in New Orleans, Thornley began associating with these hard-right, CIA connected circles. In the mid-1970’s, when the HSCA investigation was about to begin, Thornley admitted that, in fact, he had known all of these characters. Furthermore, when his book on Oswald, The Idle Warriors, finally got published in 1991, Thornley admitted in the book’s introduction that he showed the manuscript to Guy Banister back in 1961. It is hard to take seriously any non-conspiratorial explanation of these events. Thornley decided to write a novel based on a not-especially-interesting marine who defected to the Soviet Union. Then Thornley whimsically decided to show up in New Orleans, where he happens to meet Guy Banister—one of the figures involved in creating the FDC. So, he shows Banister the novel he has written about Oswald, the same guy that Bannister’s FDC associates are impersonating. And apparently Adam Curtis doesn’t bat an eyelash.

Jim Garrison had at least eight witnesses who had seen Thornley and Oswald together during that summer (New Orleans, 1963). Two of these witnesses stated that Thornley had told them that Oswald was, in fact, not a communist. Garrison had a witness who said that she, “her husband, and a number of people who live in that neighborhood saw Thornley at the Oswald residence a number of times—in fact they saw him there so much they did not know which was the husband, Oswald or Thornley.” In that 1963 summer in New Orleans, Oswald was famously arrested while passing out Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) leaflets. Carlos Bringuier and Ed Butler were both involved with Oswald in an infamous radio debate. This followed Oswald’s arrest after a confrontation with Bringuier, during his strange FPCC leafleting spectacle. This seems to have been the objective that Oswald believed he was furthering—some sort of psychological operation for propaganda purposes. In summary, Thornley, Bringuier, and Butler were all instrumental in creating the evolving Oswald legend. Thornley first did so by depicting Oswald in The Idle Warriors as a communist malcontent in the Marines. Then he furthered Oswald’s legendary persona through his and his associates’ activities in New Orleans. 

All of this is not to say that Garrison was beyond reproach. He should not have been so trusting with the volunteers he allowed to work on the case. He should have indicted Ferrie sooner, lest his main suspect succumb to a deadly brain aneurysm whilst sitting on the couch looking at two typed, unsigned suicide letters. Furthermore, given all the things that have come out about Kerry Thornley, Garrison arguably should have sought to prosecute him rather than Clay Shaw. One reason to argue that Garrison should have gone after Thornley for conspiracy comes from Thornley himself. Said Kerry Thornley, “Garrison, you should have gone after me for conspiracy to commit murder.” Admittedly, Thornley was positing a contrived hoax, but even this JFK disinformation is of a piece with his prior roles in Oswald’s framing and in the cover-up after the fact. For Curtis to omit so many crucial facts about the JFK assassination, about Kerry Thornley, and about Garrison’s case is useful to his cause. It allows him to ignore the history-making interventions of the deep state and the extent to which these interventions have helped bring about the political nadir that America is experiencing. Curtis’ obscurantism allows him to downplay American state criminality as merely “political corruption”: He omits, distorts, and cherry picks facts to present his interminable exploration of our current dystopia. Source: kennedysandking.com

Saturday, June 12, 2021

Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy's America in Black & White, America on Fire, Hierarchy in the Forest

Growing up in a large Irish Catholic family, Bobby was a loner with an instinctive sympathy for people who were having a hard time. He was the most devout of nine children and possessed a moralistic streak, but his questioning spirit helped guard against the rigidity that might have accompanied that attribute. Murray Kempton once commented that the one thing Franklin Roosevelt could have learned from Joseph Kennedy “was how to be a father.” Joe was often away from home—in Hollywood, London, and Palm Beach—and he sent his kids to boarding school, but he cultivated an affectionate and close relationship with them all the same. Bobby was “the gentlest and shyest” of the Kennedy boys and “the least articulate orally.” A childhood nurse remembered him as “the most thoughtful and considerate of all the children.”

Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in his office at two o’clock in the morning on May 22, 1961. He is on the phone with his deputy Byron White in Montgomery, Alabama, after a raging mob attacked the First Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. and other supporters of the Freedom Riders had gathered. RFK advised: “Half a million American soldiers with 700,000 Vietnamese allies, with total command of the air, total command of the sea, backed by huge resources and the most modern weapons are unable to secure even a single city from the attacks of an enemy whose total strength is 250,000.” The time had come to take a new look at the war in Vietnam, “not by cursing the past but using it to illuminate the future.” Furthermore, it was not in the national interest to wage a war so destructive and cruel that “our best and closest friends ask, more in sorrow than in anger, what has happened to America.” In their responses to Watts and successive summers of uprisings and civil disturbances, Johnson and Kennedy could not have been further apart. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War divided the country and sapped resources for anti-poverty programs at a time of urgent need. 

Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King emerged as leading critics of cutbacks to poverty programs and as increasingly vocal opponents of the war. King and Kennedy were also closely aligned in their concerns about urban conditions and the oppression of Black youth. Early in 1966, King moved into a Chicago tenement and joined community groups in organizing a campaign to end housing discrimination. For their part, Kennedy and his aides met with residents, community leaders, and activists in the impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant and, drawing on what they learned from the community, established a major redevelopment project. The goal was to bring government, foundation, and private funds to bear on shortages of decent housing, jobs, recreational facilities, and education—all under the direction of a community board. The Bedford Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation marked a shift toward community control of urban revitalization, and the project remained a major focus of Kennedy’s until the end of his life. “As implemented and augmented by opportunistic Congresses,” writes biographer John Farrell, “governors like Nelson Rockefeller, and Nixon’s successors, notably Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—the ‘war’ on drugs and the battle for ‘law and order’ would metastasize, yielding punitive measures like mandatory sentences, no-knock raids and other relaxations of defendants’ rights.” Starting in the late 1960s, America’s prison population skyrocketed, with a move to mass incarceration that disproportionately impacted Black Americans. 

As historian Elizabeth Hinton pointed out in her study of the transition from the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, “African Americans born after 1965 and lacking a high school diploma are more likely to eventually go to prison than not.” Ending inequality would require nothing less than overcoming “the scarred heritage of centuries of oppression” manifested throughout America life, most notably in white attitudes and beliefs. Kennedy warned that “it would be a national disaster to permit resentment and fear to drive increasing numbers of white and black Americans into opposing camps of distrust and enmity.” There was but one choice, he said: “to face our difficulties and strive to overcome them, or turn away, bringing repression, increasing human pain, and civil strife.” Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White (2021) by Patricia Sullivan

No social world ever went from an egalitarian community to an elite-dominated, state-structured society in one fell swoop. It’s a gradual movement towards inequality. The pathway to inequality leads through unequal, but still small-scale and stateless, communities, in which incipient elites lived with and among their neighbours, and without control of coercive state institutions. As such, they were vulnerable, and as Christopher Boehm notes in Hierarchy in the Forest (1999). Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth. Just one rich family, the six heirs of the brothers Sam and James Walton, founders of Walmart, are worth more than the bottom 40 per cent of the American population combined ($115 billion in 2012). 
Bottom line: egalitarian, cooperative human communities are possible. Widespread sharing and consensus decision-making aren’t contrary to ‘human nature’. Indeed, for most of human history we lived in such societies. But such societies are not inherently stable. These social practices depend on active defence. That active defence failed, given the social technologies available, as societies increased in scale and economic complexity. Source: aeon.co

Wednesday, June 09, 2021

"Sinatra and Me: In the Wee Small Hours"

“Everybody wanted to know Frank Sinatra; almost nobody really did. Tony Oppedisano really did…. Utterly clear-eyed yet truly loving, Sinatra and Me is a matchless portrait of a flawed, brilliant man―and of a great friendship. A gem of a book.” ―James Kaplan, bestselling author of Frank: The Voice and Sinatra: The Chairman

“What a great book!  Tony O. does here what many have tried to do without quite succeeding: he’s made Frank Sinatra accessible… Certainly, this is one of the very best of the Sinatra books and, I daresay, maybe the only one the man himself would actually read!” ―J. Randy Taraborrelli, New York Times bestselling author of Sinatra: Behind the Legend

For months in 1947, Lee Mortimer had been circulating rumors that Frank had ties to the Mob. When the two men accidentally encountered each other in the entrance of Ciro’s restaurant a month before Mortimer visited the FBI, Mortimer murmured “Dago” as he passed Frank. For Italians in the forties, dago was the equivalent of the “n-word” for African-Americans. Italians might call one another “dago” affectionately, as Frank and Dean Martin did. But coming from a non-Italian, the word was a reason for fisticuffs. Frank decked Mortimer with a left hook and paid the resulting fine with no regrets. In May 1947, New York Daily Mirror reporter Lee Mortimer sat down for a chat with FBI agent Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s right-hand man and reported life partner. Mortimer was about to publish another piece on Sinatra and wanted help from the FBI in collecting dirt on Frank. The newsman handed Tolson a picture of Frank with a man whom Mortimer thought looked like a gangster and said he’d also heard a rumor that Frank’s godfather, underboss Willie Moretti, had originally backed Sinatra’s career. Mortimer then mentioned hearing allegations of a “sex arrest” of Sinatra in 1938. This was just the kind of stuff Hoover was looking for. The FBI was only too happy to give Mortimer what he wanted. The deal was done to the satisfaction of all parties, and Mr. Hoover could be assured of Mr. Mortimer’s understanding the terms. So continued the long, sordid history of the cooperation between our federal government and muckraking journalism, carefully recorded in an FBI file titled “Francis Albert Sinatra.” 

The allegations made the careers of dozens of journalists and, in their endless spin-offs, created a legend that destroyed the reputation of an American citizen. From the day Lee Mortimer published his first article on Sinatra and the Mafia, until Frank died fifty years later, the top secret FBI file was supposed to be the smoking gun proving Frank’s role in the Mob. Lurid biographies made vague references to it whenever they wanted to smear Frank. When the file was finally released a few months after Frank’s death, showing no evidence of Mob ties had ever been found, it made no difference. Nobody wanted to read a dull thirteen-hundred-page file debunking stories the public was already in love with. The FBI “sources” often turned out to be the gossip columnists themselves, but the press didn’t exactly rush forward to clear Frank’s name when the file was published. Frank loved to joke that the initials FBI stood for “Forever Bothering Italians.” No kidding. Nancy Sr. had a cousin who became a soldier for a Mob guy named Willie Moretti, who was chosen by Marty Sinatra as Frank’s godfather at his baptism. Neither Nancy nor Frank got involved in Willie’s “business.” Years later, though, when the press found out that Frank was Willie’s godson, they pounced on it. 

“Young Sinatra’s Career Financed by Mobster.” Tipped off by the press, the FBI later added a note in Frank’s surveillance file that the Mob (again in the person of Willie Moretti) was “forcing” Frank to leave Ava Gardner and go back to Nancy. Sam Giancana, who took over as the boss of Chicago in the years after Capone, was one of the owners of a club called the Black Orchid. Frank played there. All the big guys played there, including Don Rickles, Danny Thomas, and Bing Crosby. Since their last names didn’t end with a vowel, however, no one cared. Frank used to get frustrated and say to me, “The joints weren’t exactly owned by Cardinal Spellman! I didn’t know any bishops, cardinals, or monsignors who owned nightclubs. Otherwise, I would have ended up rubbing elbows with them!” Clubs were highly attractive to Mob guys. They provided an environment that fit the mobster’s day-to-day lifestyle, where they never knew if there was going to be a tomorrow. Frank made a parody out of it and used to say to me, “Live each day as though it’s your last, and one day you’ll be right.” He also used to joke, “Anyone who’s dumb enough to take a nap in the trunk of a Cadillac deserves to be shot in the head”!

Everything changed when Lee Mortimer wrote an article about Frank’s trip to Havana in 1946. Frank had been performing at the Fontainebleau nightclub in Miami, the premier place to work at the time, owned by the usual Mob connections. Wiseguy Joe Fischetti came down from Chicago regularly to check on the business. Joe was an easygoing guy, and he and Frank would hang out and share a drink after the show when Frank was performing there. One night, Frank was complaining to Joe that he needed a vacation, and he was thinking about going to Cuba for a break. He’d heard that the Havana nightlife was hot, and so were the women. Mortimer and another Hearst writer, Westbrook Pegler, wrote a whole series of articles about Frank’s activities as a so-called Mob courier. Because journalists copy from each other, the stories spread like wildfire. No protests or threats of legal action on Frank’s part fazed the press. Frank was angry and increasingly desperate to stop the stories from spreading further. What happened next is something only I know. I’d never heard the tale until Frank told it to me in vivid detail. It’s the story of the day Frank Sinatra met newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for the iconic film Citizen Kane (1941). 

The whole experience was like something out of a movie. The meeting with Hearst came about because of Nancy Sr. Nancy was good friends with gossip columnist Louella Parsons. Parsons, in turn, was old friends with silent-film star Marion Davies. Marion Davies was the live-in mistress of William Randolph Hearst, whose newspaper empire was the biggest in the world. Mortimer and Pegler were both Hearst writers. Louella contacted Marion Davies for Nancy Sr., and a one-on-one private sit-down between Frank and Hearst was arranged. The face-to-face was to take place at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, under the strictest secrecy. Frank, Nancy Sr., and Louella Parsons drove north to San Simeon together for the meeting. For anyone who has ever seen it, the first sight of Hearst Castle, an art deco masterpiece, is spectacular. This was Frank’s first sighting. He told me he was awestruck by the sheer beauty of the place, astonished by its size. When he, Nancy, and Louella parked and got out of the car, the front door they approached looked like the entrance to a fortress. They rang the bell and they were very surprised when Marion Davies herself opened the front door to welcome them. In the towering entrance hall, Miss Davies spoke briefly with Nancy Sr. and Louella, then guided Frank down the hall to the library. Frank was very nervous as he waited for Hearst that afternoon, mentally rehearsing what he was going to say. After a few minutes, the big door to the library opened, and Hearst was pushed into the room in a wheelchair. 

Physically, he looked frail, but his face revealed a mind and will that were still strong. His attendant parked him across the table from Frank and then left the room. Without preliminaries, Hearst said to Frank, “What do you have to say to me?” Frank pleaded his case with all the passion he possessed. He told Hearst that Mortimer and other Hearst journalists were creating an elaborate lie about him. He said that he wasn’t a Communist or anti-American or affiliated with the Mob. Hearst promised to help Frank. Frank sat there for a while pondering what had just happened, until Marion Davies came in to guide him back to Nancy. For a few months, Hearst’s ultimatum was respected. The result was a brief moratorium on Frank in the Hearst press. But not long afterward, Hearst left San Simeon to seek medical care for what would be his final illness. His sons took over the running of the papers, and editorial policies shifted. Frank’s reprieve was a short one. Frank used to say about the press, “All day long, they lie in the sun. And after the sun goes down, they lie some more.” Even if William R. Hearst had lived longer, you can’t unring a bell. The damage to Frank’s reputation was done. Once Mortimer opened that door, the word was out that the feds wanted dirt on Sinatra. Unnamed informants flocked to the FBI. Informants volunteered information on Frank in hopes of avoiding prosecution themselves. J. Edgar Hoover lapped it up. Journalists continued to meet with FBI agents. In 1957, journalist Bill Davidson asked the FBI for derogatory information on Frank that he could use in what became a three-part series he was writing for Look magazine. IRS asked Frank Sinatra: Have you ever had any business dealings with Mr. Giancana? Frank's reply: None. 

Neither the IRS nor the FBI believed him. The government’s suspicions became a problem whenever Frank wanted to invest in something. Being business savvy, Frank had always dreamed of owning his own club. Las Vegas, where he headlined starting in the fifties, seemed the obvious place. The Flamingo was a lucrative possibility, but Frank told me he didn’t want to be at the Flamingo because that had been out-and-out owned by mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. When Frank started appearing at the Sands, that seemed more like the kind of place he’d like to be involved with. So many writers talk about Frank’s fascination with the Mob, but in reality, it was the other way around. The Mob, like the rest of the world, was fascinated by Frank. He possessed incredible charisma. Everyone wanted to bask in it, including mobsters. The Mob guys especially admired Frank because they recognized that he’d pulled himself up by his bootstraps—with his charm, sometimes with his fists, but most of the time with his voice and innate talent. He did it on his own—his way—not with Mafia money.

Frank and Marilyn were close, and he idolized her. She was beautiful and funny and charismatic and radiated sexuality. She was also as fragile as a troubled child, always looking for a man to take care of her and make her feel safe. Frank knew her for years, and they’d had a romance of sorts. Contrary to widespread belief, however, Frank never slept with her. He told me he badly wanted to, that he was terribly attracted to her, but he always stopped short. Marilyn was more than willing, but Frank felt she was too troubled, too fragile, for him to sleep with. He just couldn’t get rid of the feeling that sex with her would be taking advantage of her. They were close, though, and Frank was her confidante right up to the end of her life. The weekend before her death, Marilyn came up to Cal-Neva Lodge to stay in one of the bungalows and figure out the next step in her life. Privately, she was there to spend time with Joe DiMaggio. Joe had never gotten over Marilyn, and in her usual fashion, she looked to a man, a father figure, to fix her life for her. She decided Joe was the refuge she needed. Marilyn spent most of the weekend holed up in private with Joe.

She decided to make a press announcement the following week, saying they were officially back together. Once the press conference was announced, however, the rumor started that she was going to publicly rat out the Kennedys and Sam Giancana. In reality, Marilyn had no intention of going public with what she knew. Frank said she’d never have spilled her guts to the press about the Kennedys. Frank told me it was Marilyn’s death that was the final nail in the coffin between him and Peter Lawford. When everything spiraled down with Marilyn, Lawford did nothing to help her. As Frank saw it, Peter could take care of himself, but Marilyn couldn’t. Frank thought Lawford should have protected her. Within days of her death, Frank’s friend and attorney Mickey Rudin, who was told of Marilyn’s death six hours before the police were, told Frank that Marilyn had been murdered. The same rumor was circulating among Sam Giancana’s men, some of whom claimed involvement. Frank found it unbearable that such a damaged, vulnerable, helpless human being had lost her life because some powerful men feared what she might say. The assassination of Jack Kennedy a year later compounded Frank’s sense of grief and loss. He never got over losing either to premature and unnatural deaths.

Thirty years after JFK’s death, on November 22, 1993, Frank and I stopped over in Palm Springs for a brief hiatus in a heavily booked two-month tour. We got in at one a.m., drove to the compound, and slept for a few hours. That night, as usual, Frank and I watched the eleven o’clock news on the Palm Springs CBS affiliate. The reporter was doing a piece on the 30th anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination. Frank started talking to me, reminiscing about Jack Kennedy. Gradually, the conversation drifted to Marilyn Monroe. In the hours before dawn, in the vast silence of the desert, Frank talked to me about his friends Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy. His words rose and fell in a soft rhythm I can only describe as a lament. Three decades later, his pain and anger at their passing still haunted him. 

Frank once told me he’d never met a man who could give another man advice about women. “I’m supposed to have a PhD on the subject, but I’ve flunked out more often than not. I’m very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don’t understand them.” He enjoyed women, but he also had a lot of respect for the fairer sex, something he learned from his mother. Frank loved the ritual of courtship and seduction. He liked to pamper a woman, buy her gifts, make her feel like a queen. Frank knew what he wanted sexually, and he seemed to know what they wanted, too. But he’d rarely jump into bed upon first meeting someone. He was never a Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am kind of guy. He was surprisingly protective of a woman’s reputation. He’d drive a woman home after a date and see her to the door. Women never had to do the walk of shame with Frank. Some of Frank’s love affairs started as friendships and went from there. Many of his romances ended as lifetime friendships, including with the women he married and eventually divorced. As I’ve said, Marilyn Monroe was a woman Frank considered off-limits for ethical reasons. 

Another widely publicized example is Natalie Wood. Books about Frank nearly always state that Frank had an affair with Natalie Wood when she was a fifteen-year-old starlet, and he was nearly forty. It sounds sleazy, and it would be if it were true, but it isn’t. Frank was involved with Natalie when she was older, in between her two marriages to Robert Wagner, but never when she was a young teen. I talked about the allegation recently with my friend Robert Wagner, who was appalled by the story. He told me in pretty colorful language that it was absolutely untrue. He and Natalie had been close friends with Frank and discussed him many times. R. J. felt certain that she’d had a romantic relationship with Frank later in her life, but never as a teen. Frank told me once, “When Ava was relaxed, she could have a mouth like a truck driver. She drank as well as I did or better.”

Frank and Ava’s relationship was like fire and ice, either burning hot or ice cold. When their relationship was hot, it worked for a while, but when it cooled off, it was freezing, and Frank would be miserable. Their arguments were legendary. Frank said they were too much alike in all the wrong ways. She was a ball of fire with a red-hot temper like his. At the end of the day, Frank was afraid of what might happen if he said no to his fourth wife Barbara Marx. When he did say no to something she desperately wanted, she’d pull out the most effective tool in her arsenal, withdrawing her company. She wouldn’t talk to him or even see him for days at a time. It was Frank’s worst nightmare. When he was a kid, he was terrified every time his parents left him alone all night, frightened they’d never come back. He’d grown up fearing Dolly’s disapproval. As an adult, he had trouble coping with any strong-willed woman he loved. The thought that Barbara might leave him was more than he could face. My own relationship with Barbara Sinatra was complex. It wasn’t always an easy one, but I had real affection for her. I used to call her every year to wish her a happy birthday. When she’d pick up the phone in Palm Springs, I wouldn’t even say hello. I’d just start to sing “Happy Birthday.” Twice she thought it was Steve Lawrence singing, and I was very flattered. Even after Frank was gone, Barbara and I remained friends. —"Sinatra and Me: In the Wee Small Hours" (2021) by Tony Oppedisano

Actually, Frank and Marilyn had been lovers, on and off, throughout 1961. This was commonly known within her circle of friends, and Marilyn herself mentioned it in a letter to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson. The relationship ended when Frank became engaged to Juliet Prowse, but they remained on good terms until Marilyn’s death. Other sources – including Jilly Rizzo – have suggested that Frank wanted to marry Marilyn, but after three divorces, she wasn’t ready for another commitment. While she remained close to Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn said publicly that they were not a couple (“there is nothing to reconcile.”) Some friends of DiMaggio hoped they would remarry, but none among Marilyn’s circle believed she would. Furthermore, the ever-possessive Joe had abruptly ended his long friendship with Frank when he began dating Marilyn. Therefore, Frank would have had no part in Marilyn’s ongoing relationship with Joe. Frank was a vocal supporter of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, but their friendship cooled after Kennedy took office. Whatever encounters Marilyn may have had with the Kennedy brothers, it’s highly unlikely that she would have confided in Sinatra. Milton Rudin, who was Marilyn’s lawyer as well as Frank’s, never claimed that Marilyn was murdered in his interviews on the subject, but he was well aware of her emotional problems and addiction to sleeping pills. It’s possible that Sinatra, like many others, was swayed by the conspiracy theories about Marilyn’s death and the Kennedys that appeared in the 1970s. But at the time of her death, this was not a widely-held view, except by a small handful of far-right cranks with a rabidly anti-Kennedy agenda. Unfortunately, lurid gossip about Marilyn Monroe’s demise has become something of a cottage industry in this era of ‘fake news’, and a very profitable one for those who propagate it. Source: https://themarilynreport.com