At what point should a biographer’s work be discounted due to mistakes and falsehoods, exaggerations and fabrications, even outright lies? Is one error, one fabrication, one lie acceptable? Two three or four? I have read it written and heard it expressed by those who comment about such topics, and even some Marilyn fans, that everything Robert Slatzer or Jeanne Carmen ever expressed about Marilyn Monroe should not be dismissed simply because he and she lied about this or that minor detail or simply because Slatzer lied about his Mexican marriage to Marilyn. That position and attitude has been proffered about Clem Heymann and various other authors, which I find remarkable indeed.

Why, in a biography, would an author create fictional characters and fictional testimony? Why? Would he do so just to ensure that his personal agenda would be fulfilled?—an agenda whose goal was the creation of a malformed, even a monstrously distorted image of the person or persons about whom the author was writing? Was Heymann’s ultimate goal merely calumny? Or did Heymann resort to character creation and fictional testimony because he could not develop or otherwise locate any real or verifiable testimony that would advance his story lines? In the opinion of this writer, however, Heymann’s simple and ultimately banal goal was to generate a puerile and prurient interest in his publications, an interest that would most certainly translate into units sold and profits realized—money in his pockets and along with his bank accounts, the bank accounts of his duplicitous publishers. Even though, as suggested by Gerry Visco, Heymann may have had an ability to arrange words in a pleasing and competent manner, that ability did not and could not mitigate his loathsome practice of fabrications, his loathsome practice of lying.

But the major head scratcher is this: why did large and otherwise respected publishing houses choose to publish books like those written by C. David Heymann? Clearly, as Ryan Chittum noted in the 2014 previously referenced article, Heymann’s ability to get published, despite his reputation, was founded four square on the author’s ability to write sellable and profitable books. The importance of the profit, the ample bottom line—the books were best sellers and sold millions of copies, earned millions of dollars—allows and even encourages publishers like Simon and Schuster to promote and even defend Heymann’s writings, promote and defend the author’s slipshod work despite the evidence of fraud and fabrication presented by more than a few credible journalists and researchers like Donna Morel. Not unlike a child who misbehaves due to a lack of discipline, Heymann learned that his fraudulent literary efforts, intentionally voyeuristic and salacious, would still be published and that his publishers would still defend the falsities that he had written. Large book sales permitted like-minded publishers to rationalize Heymann’s fabrications, distortions and corruption of the historical record; but while David Heymann’s individual corruption of history may begin with him, his corruption does not end with him: his fabrications and corruptions generate a widespread infection via other books and media outlets and other authors who rely on a published work’s credibility.1Op. Cit. Chittum.

What responsibility does CBS share regarding Clem Heymann’s fraudulent works? Should CBS shoulder the weight of all the guilt that Heymann never felt and certainly never carried. It is certainly clear that CBS, and other related publishers, are more than just partly responsible for Heymann’s historical corruptions.

And yet, to expect publishers to remove all of Heymann’s books from retail bookshelves and pulp them or to expect retailers to stop selling his historical corruptions must be viewed for what they are: unrealistic expectations. Still and all, and perhaps in time, legitimate and honest biographers, authors who strive for truthfulness will cease referencing Heymann, and writers like him. For instance, Evan Thomas cited Heymann several times in his biography Robert Kennedy: His Life which was published in 2000; and as a result of the articles by David Johnston and Ryan Chittum, Thomas intends to perform a literary exorcism and purge his references to Heymann’s works. But until the rejection of Heymann as a historical source becomes widespread and commonplace, his fabrications and lies, his slander and libel of persons he never knew and persons who deserve to be depicted honestly, his heinous distortions and corruptions will continue to spread like weeds throughout the historical record, a miscarriage aided and abetted by a publisher who refused to accept that one of their authors was, as Chittum appropriately labeled him, a serial fabulist.

Clearly, Clemens Claude Oscar Heymann suffered from a severe pathology that removed a normal person’s compunction and moral resistance to lying, a disease that allowed him to rationalize and fabricate, not only many anecdotes and story lines, but the persons that he alleged provided those fabricated anecdotes along with their fabricated testimony and the fabricated testimony of deceased persons. Should we conclude, therefore, that Clem Heymann must have held a deviant’s view of humanity and a deviant’s view of the truth. But then, Heymann admitted to a Washington Post reporter, David Streitfeld: I always wanted to write fiction.2“Heymann’s Latest Unauthorized Bio Target? A Woman Named Liz” by David Streitfeld. The Los Angeles Times. 15 August 1989.As Lisa Pease observed in a 2014 Real History Blog article regarding Clem’s literary proclivities: You [the reader] have the power to determine if his wish came true.3“Of C. David Heymann, Lies and Truths” by Lisa Pease. The History Blog. 3 July 2014.

But equally as relevant is this question: at what point should the work of biographers who have willfully referenced not only C. David Heymann but sources and writers like Robert Slatzer, Jeanne Carmen, Ted Jordan, Gianni Russo, Frank Capell, Samir Muqaddin and others, conceding to Slatzer the status of being Marilyn’s former husband, and to Carmen the status of being Marilyn’s best girlfriend—at what point should the work and assertions of those biographers also be discounted? Are they not accessories? Those biographers include Mark Shaw, Donald Wolfe, Antony Summers, Peter Brown, Patte Barham, Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin—the list is almost endless. There is only one simple answer. Once a biographer has been caught perpetrating a falsehood then nothing that author has ever written can be trusted to be factual or truthful; and if an author who follows thereafter willfully repeats the falsehood, represents the falsehood as fact, then those authors share the dishonesty and no longer deserve a reader’s faith and trust, a relevant contention that must be duly considered when also considering the theories and orthodoxies about Marilyn Monroe’s purported murder; and accordingly, considering all that precedes, nothing the celebrity biographer C. David Heymann has ever asserted, particularly about the life and death of Marilyn Monroe, should ever be taken at face value. Nothing