The Marilyn Tapes

Dramatis Personae

Sara Drury, editor at Insight

David Lenihan, agent for the president

Michael Drury, estranged husband of Sara

Jeff Williams, employee at Insight

Melanie Baines, unofficial agent for the FBI

Frank Bellamy, associate publisher and partner at Insight

Erica Dane, dancer and Frank Bellamy’s mistress

Del Mayhew, studio head, Millennium Pictures

Laura Drury, daughter of Sara and Michael

Salvitore Rossetti, the Mob’s number-two man on the West Coast

Tully, a private investigator

Vanessa, Tully’s wife

Mrs. Helen Gregory, Laura’s babysitter

Historical Figures

Joe Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy clan

John F. Kennedy, president of the United States

Robert Kennedy, attorney general of the United States

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI

Clyde Tolson, number-two man at the FBI

Louella Parsons, newspaper gossip columnist

Excuse the mess. Not the sort of room you expect to see a goddess living in, is it?

And yet, over the past four or five years, she’s taken to her bedroom as if it were the last bastion of safety in the world.

Look at her now.

Hard to believe that this very pale, fleshy, middle-aged woman had just a few years ago been the leading box-office draw in the world. And had been called by no less a connoisseur than Pablo Picasso, “The most erotic girl of her generation.”

If you listen closely, you can hear it all in the silence of this room: the shouts, the applause, the whistles, the excited laughter of the GIs when she toured with the USO during the Korean War... the screaming semi-hysterical fans when The Seven Year Itch opened in New York... and the nervous whispers of the locals when she would appear with Clark Gable on the Nevada set of The Misfits.

All the tumult; all the fuss; all the splendor... echoing here in the stillness of this room as the goddess lies unmoving on her mussed and sweaty bed, a small empty bottle that once contained twenty-five Nembutal tablets near her dangling, unmoving hand...

Out by her pool, if you wanted to go check right now, you would find two small, stuffed animals, symbolic of the sentimental little girl Marilyn always was... And in her diary, no more than six feet from the bed where she lies, you would find all sorts of references to men she felt had betrayed her. Though she was not unintelligent, and though she was anything but the “simple” star of the tabloid press, she did yearn after one unreachable goal: to be the darling of myth, and yet be a quite normal wife and mother as well.

But all this is moot now, in the silence of this room, for a life has ended, all the different Marilyns from down all the years converging here on this bed... sweet and cruel, innocent and cunning, joyous and melancholy, hopeful and despairing...

Listen now a final time; a song is faintly playing, “Dancing in the Dark,” a song she loved all her life, “my princess song,” as she always called it, imagining herself a cool and poised Grace Kelly (a woman she greatly envied) instead of the hardscrabble working-class girl who never felt quite pretty, who never felt quite loved.

But the story does not end here tonight in this messy Hollywood bedroom...

For just as there were jackals in Marilyn’s life, so too there will be jackals after Marilyn’s death.