Contradictions Reveal A Fact
The world of literature written about Marilyn Monroe, and virtually every aspect of her complex life, is populated with more contradictions than Carter’s got little liver pills; and such is the case with the mythology surrounding Marilyn’s Little Red Diary. In Section 4, within the sub-section regarding Jeanne Carmen, I mentioned that a major contradiction relative to Marilyn’s Red Book of Secrets would appear in this section. The contradiction is between Robert Slatzer’s 1992 publication, Carmen’s 2006 memoir and David Heymann’s 2014 publication Joe & Marilyn: Legends in Love. Please suffer through a summary of those contradictions here.
Robert Slatzer’s 1974 publication asserted that he was the only person Marilyn allowed to see her Little Red Diary. She told him that was the case. “Have you shown this diary to anyone else?” I asked. She shook her head. “Nobody” (Slatzer 17); but eighteen years later, in the print version of The Marilyn Files, Slatzer contradicted himself. Not only had Marilyn shown the diary to a few other persons, one of whom was Jeanne Carmen, she had also shown it to Robert Kennedy. When Bobby finally learned of it, Slatzer asserted in his 1992 publication, he blew up. Marilyn showed it to him herself. Politically naïve, she had no idea how violent his reaction would be. … She quickly learned. Jeanne Laverne, an innocent bystander soon to be caught up in the conflict, she alleged, was present when Marilyn revealed her diary to the attorney general and he exploded. According to the innocent bystander, Robert Kennedy threw it on the coffee table, and said, “Get rid of this; get rid of this immediately” (Slatzer 43). The attorney general then advised the innocent bystander to avoid reading that diary.
David Heymann claimed that he interviewed Jeanne Laverne, who he accepted as Marilyn’s best girlfriend, and he reported her alleged testimony in his work about Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio. In 1962, following a late July party at the Lawford’s beach house, according to Jeanne Carmen as reported by Heymann, the attorney general and the actress spent the night together. The following morning, according to Heymann’s testifier, she joined them for a hot breakfast of oatmeal and cheese omelets prepared by Eunice Murray (Heymann Legends 330); but the morning collapsed into a heated argument after Robert Kennedy and Marilyn ate their hot cheese omelets: the attorney general spotted Marilyn’s Little Red Diary, which contained notes on conversations she’d had with JFK and him. “It wasn’t the so-called little red diary that supposedly disappeared after Marilyn’s death,” said Carmen. “In fact, there was no little red diary” (Heymann Legends 331). Carmen testified that even after dozens of visits to Marilyn’s small hacienda, she never observed any kind of book that even looked like a little red diary. Jeanne Laverne then asserted, according to Heymann, that she had a conversation with Ralph Roberts in 1963 about the existence of a diary; and Roberts, who was like a brother to Marilyn, assured Carmen that he had observed Marilyn with journals and notebooks but never with a little red diary. But wait. In Jeanne Laverne’s memoir, she repeated a similar anecdote involving Marilyn and Robert Kennedy, one that completely contradicted what she allegedly related to both Slatzer and Heymann.
In her 2006 memoir, Jeanne asserted that she visited Marilyn one day; and while Marilyn was engaged with showering, the door bell rang, prompting Marilyn to shout from the shower for Carmen to answer the door. Upon opening the door, Carmen reported, she was confronted with the attorney general; so she invited him inside. Once Marilyn finished her shower, she appeared, playfully greeted her distinguished visitor and then produced a bottle of champagne, from which she popped the cork and then poured the bubbly into three glasses.
After taking a sip of the champagne, Jeanne Laverne placed her glass on Marilyn’s coffee table. She then assert-ed: I suddenly noticed Marilyn’s red diary lying on the table […]. I had seen the diary lying around her house many times. I even picked it up once and flipped through it. On the diary’s pages she noticed many entries about the MOB, gangsters Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA along with the union leader James Hoffa; and in that small book, Marilyn had also entered descriptions of clandestine meeting places, detailed descriptions with maps of them sketched. She had also entered code names and sensitive alliances and stuff like that (Carmen).1
Carmen suddenly developed a feeling of apprehension due to the visibility of the red diary: she was concerned that Robert Kennedy would find the contents of the book less than amusing. She planned to move it, to prevent its discovery; but she never got the opportunity. According to Carmen, the attorney general spotted the little red book, lifted it off the coffee table and began to read, growing angrier as he did so. Then his eyes fixed upon one page and his forehead wrinkled. On that page, according to Carmen, Marilyn had written about the plan developed by Sam Giancana and Robert’s brother, the president, to assassinate Fidel Castro. The attorney general’s face reddened as his veins bulged. He then angrily slammed the book to the table and ordered Marilyn to get rid of this. Back in the world of Slatzer’s files and Heymann’s legends in love, Bobby either threw the book onto the coffee table or onto the floor before shouting his order to get rid of it. Take your pick on where the red book finally came to rest.2
I am not sure to whom I should attribute the preceding dumbfounding and glaring contradictions. Should I attribute them to Carmen or to Slatzer or to Heymann, who, in all fairness to Jeanne Laverne, could have invented the testimony attributed to her; but then, is an attribution even necessary? After you stop laughing at the silliness of it all, one obvious question will resound in your head: diary or no diary?
But another obvious and none the less resounding question is this: why didn’t Robert Kennedy, who was incredibly angry according to Carmen, immediately confiscate Marilyn’s diary when he had the chance? All the attorney general did, despite his controlled but nonetheless vein-bulging anger, was order Marilyn to get rid of her diary. Sure. And I believe that is exactly what would have happened, just like I believe the lunar surface is covered with green cheese. But then, the preceding implausible and contradictory anecdotes from Slatzer, Heymann and Carmen are not the only ones to be found in the testaments offered by our diary witnesses.
Norman Jefferies claimed that his mother-in-law briefly possessed the red diary after Marilyn’s death. The handyman told Donald Wolfe that he witnessed Eunice Murray surrender the diary, which she had in her purse, to an unidentified courier from the coroner’s office on August the 6th, the day Jefferies and Eunice returned to Fifth Helena to collect Eunice’s belongings. The courier then delivered Marilyn’s Little Red Diary, according to both Wolfe and Jefferies, to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office and ultimately into the hands of Samir Muqaddin. But wait. Muqaddin offered a different story! According to Muqaddin’s memoir, he inadvertently discovered the diary in Marilyn’s purse, one delivered to the coroner’s office by a courier he had dispatched to Fifth Helena in hopes of finding a way to identify Marilyn’s next-of-kin. The diary did not contain any information about Marilyn’s next-of-kin; but Muqaddin got a glimpse of her complicated world, he wrote in his memoir, from reading her diary at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office the day after she died, when a purse containing the little red book was put on my desk labeled “Marilyn Monroe Property” (Muqaddin 4).
But wait! Muqaddin offered yet another story in 1992. Reverting to his non-Muslim name, Lionel Grandison, Sr., the former coroner’s clerk appeared on The Marilyn Files, KTLA’s docudrama; and he appeared as a key witness to what transpired in August of 1962, particularly relative to Marilyn’s little red book. He dispatched two drivers from the coroner’s office, Muqaddin asserted, in an attempt to locate something that would identify Marilyn’s next-of-kin; and they came back with a book, the infamous little red book. During his 1992 testimony, Muqaddin did not mention a purse or any other property recovered from Fifth Helena by coroner’s employees that they then placed on his desk; and that obvious discrepancy between his 1992 testimony and his 2012 memoir was not his only contradiction.
On camera, Muqaddin testified as follows: I saw the book that Monday, obviously meaning August the 6th. We locked the property back up in the safe that Monday evening. That Tuesday, obviously meaning August the 7th, it was gone. Never to be seen again, at least in Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office to my knowledge.
Never to be seen again.
In his memoir, concerning the diary’s disappearance, Muqaddin wrote: This book disappeared from the safe at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office two days after it was brought in (Muqaddin 193). So, if the diary disappeared two days after the coroner’s employees delivered it to Muqaddin on August the 6th, then the diary must have disappeared on Thursday, August the 9th. At any rate, both accounts and both dates cannot be factual. Not surprisingly, for the many authors who interviewed him during the years following Marilyn’s death, Muqaddin recounted several stories regarding how he obtained Marilyn’s Little Red Diary; and, of course, all of his stories cannot be factual.
Eventually Muqaddin’s 1992 off-camera testimony focused on what Marilyn’s diary contained: a very interesting series of stories, of assessments, of evaluations about things that were apparently going on in her life, Muqaddin asserted. The middle Kennedy brother’s names appeared, along with the term, Mafia, you know, he added, those kinds of catch phrases, terminology that should have been more thoroughly considered, Muqaddin opined, in order to determine exactly what she was saying. But, after taking a seat on the sound stage, before the live audience and alongside the program’s hosts, Bill Bixby and Jane Wallace, Muqaddin’s demeanor changed completely and his testimony veered into the twirled world of Salvador Dali’s mustache.
Bill Bixby wanted to know just how normal it was for items, like Marilyn’s Little Red Diary, to disappear from the coroner’s safe? Muqaddin explained: since the Coroner’s office consisted of three departments, each of which often shared information during on-going investigations, any of the departments might have had it. Still, Muqaddin stated his belief that the diary was probably taken during non-business hours which means somebody went there intentionally to take the diary, which meant whoever took the diary possessed a key to the coroner’s offices. Muqaddin asserted that three individuals possessed keys; but he did not reveal those individual’s identities. Even though the former coroner’s aide believed that the red book was taken out of there, he didn’t think much about it because of the sensitive nature of the diary’s entries. I was concerned because it was part of her property, he testified, and it might have led us to what my job was there, to find the next of kin and do those kinds of things.
Jane Wallace asked Muqaddin: Did you have any idea what a hot potato it was at the time, this diary? This startling response followed:
Well, I really didn’t have an idea. Some of the catch phrases that were in there were things that weren’t talked about in 1962. We sit here in 1992 and we say CIA Robert Kennedy John Kennedy. But in 1962 when I looked at it, it could have been the beginning of a Hollywood novel, you know, I didn’t know what it was, so I really didn’t pay that much attention to it.
Should we assume, based on the preceding startling statement, that invoking the names of the president and the attorney general, John and Robert Kennedy, were taboo or forbidden in 1962? Did uttering the letters “C-I-A” result in arrest and imprisonment? What, exactly, was Muqaddin attempting to communicate? But most certainly, the pull quote from, Muqaddin’s on-screen interview is this: […] I really didn’t pay that much attention to it. That assertion contradicted what he would write in his 2012 memoir, in which Muqaddin asserted that he was focused on Marilyn’s diary, read it closely and prepared notes on the diary’s contents over the course of two days before it disappeared from the coroner’s office safe.
How Samir Muqaddin occupied himself during the twenty years that elapsed after he appeared on KTLA’s docudrama, The Marilyn Files, is unknown to me. He may have appeared on other, similar programs. Since 1992 was the 30th anniversary of Marilyn’s death, many television programs produced similar docudramas or pseudo-documentaries. Hard Copy, for example, produced such a program; and certainly, similar programs would have appeared on future anniversaries of the movie star’s death. Muqaddin may have offered testimony for those programs as well; but with the arrival of 2012, a new Samir Muqaddin arrived along with his memoir; and his knowledge of the conspiracy to conceal the facts about Marilyn’s death, and his knowledge of what the red book actually contained―and what it actually meant―well, his knowledge increased exponentially, even though Muqaddin admitted, when he testified on The Marilyn Files, that he didn’t pay that much attention to the red book and he did not mention, during that program, any notes that he prepared on the diary’s contents. Keep in mind, also, he had neither seen nor read the diary in essentially one-half century; but still, on the pages of his 2012 memoir, he could quote verbatim from the red book’s contents; and he could offer his analysis of Marilyn’s complicated world and life. Indeed, by 2012, in Muqaddin’s world, the red book had mutated from an inconsequential little red book, which Muqaddin essentially ignored, into Marilyn’s Red Book of Secrets, her infamous Little Red Diary, the most coveted and dangerous diary of all time. Certainly remarkable, to say the least, and a diary never to be seen again.
Obviously, the anecdotes offered by Norman Jefferies and Samir Muqaddin, each and every one of them, are mutually exclusive; so they all cannot be true. Those anecdotal incongruities create a significant contradiction; and when combined with Ted Jordan’s many dubious and inconsistent assertions over the years regarding Marilyn’s diary, both a pattern and an undeniable fact, an undeniable truth begin to emerge.
UPI published two articles in 1982 that involved Ted Jordan and Marilyn’s red diary. The appearance of those articles coincided with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s threshold re-investigation. The first UPI article appeared on the 29th of August and the second appeared on the 14th of October. The Ellensburg Daily Record reprinted the August story, whose headline read: “Probe For Marilyn’s Diary: Probers seek to find actor with diary.” According to the article, many persons were searching for Ted Jordan, termed an elusive actor, because he claimed to possess Marilyn Monroe’s diary. Not only prosecutors and investigators but also conspiracy theorists wanted to find Ted in order to learn if the diary he allegedly possessed might contain secrets about Marilyn’s death. Jordan alleged to the Columbus Citizen-Journal that he knew where the diary was located and could retrieve it; but his legal counsel had advised him not to do so and not to speak about the diary.3
“Actor Produces Diary He Says Belonged To Marilyn Monroe,” announced the headline of the October article, which reported that Jordan led a reporter to an Ohio hillside from which he unearthed a box containing a diary which Marilyn putatively had given to Jordan twenty-two years earlier in 1960. UPI noted that Jordan had assumed a prominent position in a new investigation into Marilyn’s death after claiming he possessed the elusive diary; but Jordan later recanted that story: a thief, he alleged, had swiped the actual diary from his car’s backseat. The elusive actor finally admitted that statement was also a falsity, took the reporter to the hillside and unearthed the diary; but the diary Jordan unearthed contained only love poems that Jordan claimed had been transcribed by Miss Monroe.4
During the years following Marilyn’s unfortunate death, Ted Jordan made many false and contradictory statements, both about Marilyn and her mysterious Red Book of Secrets. According to private detective Milo Speriglio, Jordan reported to him that he possessed a Marilyn diary; but since he had not opened it, he did not know if the book in his possession was the diary. Jordan agreed to meet with Speriglio and allow the private investigator to inspect the diary; but the former best friend, confidant and lover of “Norma Jean” never appeared.
Logic leads us to this question: why would Jordan make the statements attributed to him by UPI in 1982 and then contradict each of them in his 1989 memoir? But then, Jordan’s many conflicting tales, reversals and falsities are difficult to comprehend or understand. They make little or no sense whatsoever. For instance, Jordan asserted that he possessed the diary for nearly two decades but had never opened it, or so he told Speriglio, an assertion flatly contradicted in the former actor’s memoir. Did he find what he thought was the diary on the garage floor at the house of his friend, a Marilyn memorabilia collector? Or, as he also claimed, did he find it in a steamer trunk in the same friend’s garage? He once claimed that he kept the diary in a safe deposit box, the one he buried in Ohio at a location he could no longer recall; but then, in 1982, he suddenly and miraculously recalled where he had buried Marilyn’s diary and dug it out of the ground. And, too, when did Jordan actually receive the unearthed diary? He told UPI Marilyn left it with him in 1960; but then, he asserted in his memoir that she presented the diary to him on the 1st of August in 1962 while standing at the threshold of his apartment. That evening, allegedly, was the last time Jordan saw Marilyn alive.
In the Epilogue of his odd memoir, Jordan returned to the subject of the diary’s existence. That infamous little red diary which some conspiratorialists allege was stolen from Norma Jean’s bedroom the night of her death, does not exist, he stated unequivocally. The only diary that exists is the one she gave me shortly before her death (Jordan 252), the one about which he never made a consistent statement, the diary Marilyn gave to Jordan on August the 1st in 1962; or was that delivery made in 1960? Still and all, and even considering all of Jordan’s falsities and dubitable constructions, I agree with his final assertion about Marilyn’s Little Red Diary, certainly the only fact regarding Marilyn that Jordan ever wrote or uttered and most certainly inadvertently: Marilyn’s Red Book of Secrets never existed.
It is definitely difficult, if not impossible, to conclude that Marilyn’s Red Book of Secrets actually existed based on Michael Rothmiller’s testimony. By 1998, the year Wolfe putatively interviewed Rothmiller, he was no longer a member of the OCID or a detective. He had departed from the LAPD amid controversy fifteen years earlier; and two decades had elapsed since he allegedly saw the copy of Marilyn’s diary. Why did he wait so long to reveal that this copy existed, to tell the world what he allegedly observed? Where was he in 1982 during the LAPD’s threshold re-investigation? Neither Robert Slatzer nor Jeanne Carmen nor Samir Muqaddin nor the 1982 LADA Summary Report regarding that investigation mentioned Michael Rothmiller. But then, the mythology surrounding Marilyn’s diary, as it relates to her death, is so ingrained in her story and so well known by most of humanity, it is certainly remarkable that more persons have not appeared with stories similar to Rothmiller’s.
The assertion that the little red diary existed in a storage room filled with secret files fits more than neatly into the conspiracist’s mindset and foregone conclusions, their conspiracy puzzle: for them, the diary has become the missing piece which will bring into focus the complete picture of Marilyn’s odd, mysterious and, for the conspiracists, unexplained death. Still, Rothmiller’s testimony remains uncorroborated and unverifiable. Wolfe apparently expected his readers to accept Rothmiller’s testament on faith, a quantum leap that I, for one, cannot make. Additionally, if someone made one copy of Marilyn’s diary, should we assume that someone, or multiple someones, also made other copies? Such an assumption only seems logical; and yet, the copy alleged by Rothmiller to have existed in the OCID file room has never surfaced and neither has the original.
In December of 1992, Michael Rothmiller published a book entitled, L.A. Secret Police: Inside the LAPD Elite Spy Network. Earlier that same year, on August the 17th, the former OCID detective also appeared on KTLA’s docudrama, The Marilyn Files. Rothmiller materialized for an on-camera, one-on-one interview with Jane Wallace, his only on-camera appearance and public testimony regarding Marilyn’s death, as far as I know, that is, and have been able to determine. Even though Rothmiller allegedly read portions of both Marilyn’s Red Book of Secrets and the sworn deposition putatively provided by Robert Kennedy to Captain Edward M. Davis of the Los Angeles police, wherein the attorney general revealed and admitted everything, his visits to Fifth Helena and his affair with Marilyn, Ms. Wallace did not broach those inordinately significant subjects. The host wanted to know if, in fact, the LAPD had a secret unit that actually spied on private citizens, kept files on those citizen’s activities and also participated in covering up actual crimes. Rothmiller answered affirmatively. Regarding Marilyn’s Little Red Diary, in both his publication and his 1992 testimony, Rothmiller neither wrote nor uttered a word.
Similarly, concluding that Marilyn’s diary actually existed based on Norman Jefferies testimony also proves difficult. Jefferies’ reliability as a witness has been questioned by several Marilyn biographers and experts. Also, he made several contradictory statements about the events of August the 4th and his purported presence at Fifth Helena. Jefferies was old and extremely ill by the time Wolfe interviewed him, an interview during which Eunice’s former son-in-law made some outlandish accusations about his former mother-in-law and just about every member of Marilyn’s inner circle of friends. Even so, if we discount his age, his physical condition and potentially his reduced mental capacity at the time he was interviewed by Wolfe, his testimony, although a firsthand statement, actually proved nothing, especially since Eunice Murray never made any sort of statement that could corroborate what her son-in-law alleged. In fact, Eunice never mentioned a red diary during her interviews or the memoir she wrote following Marilyn’s death; and Muqaddin contradicted Jefferies’ assertion regarding how the Coroner’s Office obtained Marilyn’s red diary. More about Jefferies later.
Published five decades after the fact, Muqaddin’s memoir is merely a description of and quotations from a book he claimed he read over the course of either one day or two days in early August of 1962, a red diary he claimed he found in a purse he purported to be Marilyn’s; and yet, he also equivocated and disavowed any certitude regarding the diary’s actual author. He stated in his memoir that the diary he found in a purse he purported to be Marilyn’s was just allegedly written by Monroe (emphasis mine), as if someone had uttered those words in his presence. He also equivocated and admitted that he could not one hundred percent verify she wrote it (Muqaddin 11: emphasis mine); so without any tangible proof to verify the diary’s existence or to verify the diary’s contents or to verify the diary’s author, he offered instead, as verification, his association with Robert Slatzer, Jeanne Carmen and Jack Clemmons, the former police sergeant already known to Muqaddin.
Apparently Muqaddin met Slatzer soon after the publication of The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe. However, I could not confirm precisely when the two Marilyn Crusaders actually met. In his memoir, Muqaddin asserted: I finally met someone who had actually seen the book and held extensive knowledge of Marilyn’s case. […] This person was journalist Robert Slatzer, one of the foremost authorities on the subject of Marilyn Monroe (Muqaddin 10). I find the preceding sentence slightly curious. It seems more appropriate for Muqaddin to have asserted that he finally met someone who had also seen the book. At any rate, apparently Muqaddin met Jeanne Carmen through Robert Slatzer in early to mid 1982.
The district attorney’s 1982 Summary Report mentions both Muqaddin, then known as Lionel Grandison, Sr., and Robert Slatzer in connection to Marilyn’s Little Red Diary.
Mr. Grandison [Muqaddin] reported that he saw associated with Miss Monroe’s property a scrawled note and the red diary. He alleges that both items disappeared from the Coroner’s Office shortly after the autopsy was performed. […] Our investigation points to the conclusion that Mr. Grandison is in error […] (SR 6).
The LADA’s summary listed several reasons why Muqaddin was in error; but the report noted pertinently:
Mr. Grandison [Muqaddin] admits that prior to his public statements concerning the existence of the diary, he had previously read [Robert] Slatzer’s book, The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe, published in 1974. The story of the red diary first publically (sic) appeared in Slatzer’s book. Slatzer claimed to have seen it and to have discussed with Miss Monroe the contents of her diary, including references to Robert Kennedy, Fidel Castro, the C.I.A., etc.. Excluding Mr. Grandison’s belated statements concerning the diary, Slatzer is the only source alleging the existence of the document (SR 6).5
Muqaddin recounted in his memoir how the four self-appointed Marilyn crusaders appeared before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the district attorney’s investigators in 1982, during which each crusader presented an opinion regarding Marilyn’s murder along with their belief in a subsequent cover-up. According to Muqaddin, Marilyn’s best girlfriend informed the district attorney’s investigators that she had also seen the red book; and she asserted that Marilyn also shared with her many of the details contained in her red diary, an apparent contradictory statement since, according to Slatzer’s 1974 account regarding the diary’s existence, Marilyn told him she never revealed her diary to or discussed it with any other person other than him; but then, as previously noted, the individuals to whom Marilyn allegedly revealed her Little Red Diary underwent a transformation in Slatzer’s 1992 publication. In the end, neither Slatzer nor Carmen nor Clemmons function as a sort of proof by proxy or afford any sort of validation for what Muqaddin asserted in his memoir. In fact, just the opposite is true: they only reduce the memoir’s already dubious validity. No person who has investigated, otherwise knows anything about or has read extensively about the life of Marilyn Monroe accepts any assertion made by Slatzer and his conspiracist cohorts; and any book which relies on those three discredited individuals to provide validity for it cannot and should not be trusted or accepted.
Did Marilyn Monroe actually attend national security briefings involving spies, intelligence agents and members of the MOB? Was she actually escorted to those meetings by the sitting president of the United States and his attorney general, meetings where covert plans to assassinate Fidel Castro became a topic of unguarded conversation? Did she become involved with Communist groups or visit the Cuban and Soviet Embassies during her trip to Mexico City? Did she meet or otherwise cross paths with Lee Harvey Oswald? I believe the probability that all those events actually transpired is nil; and, once again, there is simply no evidence nor proof, even though Muqaddin asserted that all of his allegations had been proven by other journalists, biographers and conspiracists who had written about Marilyn and her infamous diary. His assertions are patently false; and regarding the Castro assassination plans, neither John Kennedy nor Robert Kennedy, neither before nor after John Kennedy’s presidential election, participated in the development of those murder plans. Both Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease have written extensively about that fallacy.6So, the assertions by Muqaddin, Slatzer, Carmen and Heymann regarding Marilyn’s participation in formulation meetings with the president and the attorney general are also patently false.
Muqaddin also asserted that the many declassified intelligence reports now available via Al Gore’s Amazing Internet prove conclusively that Marilyn performed intelligence missions. Likewise, that assertion is patently false. If the declassified FBI reports prove or indicate anything, they prove and indicate very clearly that Marilyn Monroe was never an intelligence agent, not at any time in her life. Not one shred of evidence of any description existed, or exists, which proved, or proves, that Marilyn Monroe ever worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Central Intelligence Agency.
Muqaddin’s assertions about Marilyn’s life in the intelligence world and her little red diary might be called sensationalistic; but doing so would be a classic example of understatement. He is the only person, living or dead, to ever level such a nonsensical, contradictory and preposterous passel of tarradiddles; and most, if not all, of the other assertions advanced by his memoir are equally as nonsensical, contradictory and preposterous.
Moreover, a pertinent question about timing must be asked: why did Muqaddin wait as long as he did to write and publish his memoir? According to him, he was convinced in 1962 that Marilyn had been murdered because she knew too much about the middle Kennedy brothers and all their nefarious mobster related activities. Of course, Muqaddin asserted that his life was threatened many times over the years following Marilyn’s death, just like Slatzer so asserted. The resultant fear for his family’s safety, along with fear for his safety, discouraged him from revealing what he knew; however, Muqaddin’s allegation regarding threats of violence could not be confirmed.
Still, by 1982, when Muqaddin appeared before the county board of supervisors along with his fellow crusaders and conspiracists, John Kennedy had been dead for nineteen years, Robert Kennedy for fourteen and Hoover had died ten years earlier. Sam Giancana was dead, as was Johnny Roselli. Why wait another three decades to publish a book that fundamentally repeated the theories of Frank Capell, Robert Slatzer, Norman Mailer and a host of other conspiracists? For true, he added some of his own preposterous embellishments; but all things considered, Muqaddin’s memoir is merely a point on a circle of odd orthodoxies surrounding Marilyn’s death. I, for one, and speaking only for this one, do not believe for even one minute that Marilyn Monroe was an agent working for the FBI or the CIA, recruited to find proof that Arthur Miller was a Communist. What proof might exist to support Muqaddin’s ridiculous assertions? None.
Like many of his fellow conspiracists, Muqaddin asserted that Robert Kennedy, accompanied by his brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, visited Marilyn on August the 4th in 1962. According to several of Muqaddin’s brethren, Robert and Peter appeared at Fifth Helena twice; and according to others, Bobby appeared twice accompanied by two LAPD thugs, members of the LAPD’s Gangster Squad. Each time, after alternately drugging Marilyn and after slapping her around, the men searched, virtually ransacked Marilyn’s small hacienda in a frenzied quest to find her inflammatory Little Red Diary. They never did.
Allegedly that night, after Marilyn was dead, agents from the FBI and the CIA, private detectives dispatched by the MOB, members of the Gangster Squad and Secret Service agents broke into the filing cabinets located in Marilyn’s guest cottage and otherwise searched her house for the diary. None of those motivated men, nefarious criminals, highly trained intelligence agents and officers of law enforcement, could find that damn diary; and all along, holy cow, the Red Book of Secrets was not hidden in a pair of Marilyn’s Capri Pants nor in her dirty clothes hamper nor in a drawer with her panties and brassieres; all along, holy cow, all the searchers needed to do was open Marilyn’s purse. I found that to be amazing news. But then, maybe Marilyn owned a room full of purses; but then the real amazing news is this: Marilyn’s diary, or more precisely, her diaries, have finally been found.
