The unheard Marilyn Monroe tapes exposed: Insiders reveal a twisted sexual obsession, unspeakably vile habit… and truth about her lesbian encounters
I was listening to the voices of the dead whisper their memories of Marilyn Monroe – ghostly voices that had been silent for more than 40 years.
This unpublished material from a series of unheard tapes was just one of the sources for my new book about the star, timed to coincide with her centennial on June 1.
I listened to hundreds of hours of interviews, and read dozens of unpublished letters and private diaries to paint a fresh picture of the troubled star.
One of those quoted in the book is Harry Lipton, Monroe’s first agent.
‘She wanted to be wanted – that was the main thing,’ he said. ‘And I guess she felt that if she were a movie star she’d be loved.’
The poet and friend Norman Rosten echoed the sentiment, saying Monroe ‘needed that proof of being adored; it denied the inner dread of being unwanted, the trauma of the illegitimate and motherless child.’
Time and again, those who knew her best spoke of the actress’s desperate need to be loved.
At the heart of that insecurity, it seems, was her abandonment by the man who, through DNA testing in 2022, was finally proven to be her birth father: the devilishly handsome but abusive Charles Stanley Gifford.
Norma Jeane Baker (bottom right), future film star Marilyn Monroe, with her mother Gladys (top right) and friends, circa 1929
At the heart of Monroe’s insecurity, it seems, was her abandonment by the her birth father, the devilishly handsome but abusive Charles Stanley Gifford
Monroe never knew Gifford, and tracking down her biological father became something of an obsession.
Her first husband, Jim Dougherty, remembered how one day the actress – then known as Norma Jeane – got hold of Gifford’s number and called him. As soon as she told him who she was, he hung up on her.
She next tried to contact her father in the summer of 1950, when she drove out to Hemet, near Palm Springs, where Gifford had bought a dairy farm.
Accompanying her was gossip columnist and friend Sidney Skolsky, who recalled her reaction to yet another rejection.
Gifford dismissed her with the words: ‘Listen, Marilyn, I’m married, I have children. I don’t want you to start trouble for me now, like your mother did years ago.’
A few weeks later, she made the pilgrimage again, this time with drama coach Natasha Lytess.
They stopped at a gas station near the farm, and Lytess telephoned Gifford, but he refused to see his daughter.
‘He was incredibly rude and horrible,’ said Lytess. ‘He said he was married and had a family and didn’t want to know anything about this girl Marilyn Monroe.
‘And when I turned the receiver over to Marilyn he was filthy in his conversation with her.’
Monroe insisted on giving him her contact details in Los Angeles, but during the years that Lytess worked with her – from 1948 to 1955 – she said he never got in touch.
‘She talked about him often afterward and I tried to comfort her, make her feel it was good riddance,’ she said.
But then much later – one afternoon in the autumn of 1961 – Monroe found the tables had suddenly turned.
Her first husband, Jim Dougherty, remembered how one day Norma Jeane called Gifford and he hung up on her
On another occasion, Gifford dismissed his daughter with the words: ‘Listen, I’m married, I have children. I don’t want you to start trouble for me now, like your mother did years ago’
Monroe with her second husband, baseball hero Joe DiMaggio
Ralph Roberts – the actress’s masseur and close friend – was sitting with her at her apartment on North Doheny Drive when Gifford’s daughter called.
Monroe picked up the receiver and a moment later she said in a ‘cold, hard’ voice: ‘Tell him he can contact me through my lawyer, Mickey Rudin,’ before hanging up.
Monroe then turned to Roberts and related to him the nature of the call.
‘He [Gifford] was in the hospital and wanted to see her, or at least, talk with her,’ he recalled. Marilyn was still hurt by one of Gifford’s earlier rejections of her and the cruel words he had relayed via his secretary: ‘Tell her to contact me through my lawyer.’
The repeated rejection at the hands of her father at least partly explains Monroe’s attraction to powerful father figures.
Indeed, she called her first two husbands ‘Daddy’ or ‘Dad,’ and Joe DiMaggio even signed his letters to her ‘Pa.’
Henry Rosenfeld, the wealthy dress manufacturer who became close to Monroe, remembers a party when the guests started to play a game.
‘Everybody said what they’d want most in the world and she said… what she wanted was to put on a black wig, pick up her father in a bar, have him make love to her and then she’d say, “But how does it feel now to have your daughter make love to you?”‘
She may have told the story as a joke, but the anecdote contains rich pickings for anyone schooled in even the basics of Freudian theory.
Monroe’s need to be loved wasn’t restricted to the men in her life.
Since her death, it has also been claimed that she had multiple romantic relationships with women.
In his 1984 biography, Fred Lawrence Guiles claims a ‘slightly drunk’ Joan Crawford made a ‘sexual pass at Marilyn and the friendship abruptly ended. Marilyn, who saw nothing wrong with lesbianism, recoiled more from shock than offense.’
But Crawford’s biographer David Bret was skeptical, based on what he describes as the two women’s differing attitudes toward their personal hygiene.
He explained: ‘Joan’s extreme fastidiousness – showering several times daily – and Marilyn’s already legendary propensity toward dreadful manners and lack of cleanliness – never wearing underwear, even during her monthly cycle.’
Monroe was attracted to powerful father figures – and married playwright Arthur Miller in 1956
Monroe called her first two husbands ‘Daddy’ or ‘Dad’ (photographed with Arthur Miller)
It has been alleged that a ‘slightly drunk’ Joan Crawford made a ‘sexual pass at Marilyn’
I interviewed Angela Allen, the script supervisor in charge of continuity on The Misfits, one of the dwindling number of people still alive with memories of Monroe, and her recollections backed up those unsavory and unflattering rumors.
‘In my estimation, and looking at her behavior in another age, she would have been a prostitute. Yes – not even quite as high as a courtesan,’ she told me.
‘She was a whore at heart – that may sound brutal, but that’s the way I see her. She had this obsession about being nude – she never wore any underwear.
‘And I can tell you that in that sort of heat, I’m glad that I wasn’t the wardrobe woman having to deal with her clothes, which you couldn’t wash. She had this silk dress – well, you’d have it hose it down with chemicals.’
But still, those gay rumors refused to go away, and some believed, falsely, that Monroe was in an intimate relationship with her publicist Pat Newcomb – who Hollywood gossips claimed slept with both men and women.
The pair had grown very close in the years they worked together. However, towards the end of her life, Monroe had started to look at her friend in a different, more suspicious, light.
Already fiercely competitive with each other, Monroe had become increasingly jealous of Newcomb.
She told her therapist Dr Ralph Greenson how furious she became one day when her friend returned from the hairdresser’s with a platinum streak in her hair – the same shade as Monroe’s own hair.
Monroe, in Greenson’s words, ‘accused her [Newcomb] of trying to rob her of her most valuable possession.’
This incident, and perhaps others, sparked what can only be described as a kind of homosexual panic on Monroe’s part.
At the heart of the matter was her warped idea that homosexuality signaled some sort of twisted desire for possession. She had a fear that homosexuals of both sexes wanted to be her.
Dr Greenson tried to untangle her fears, but Monroe reacted so badly to what she saw as Greenson’s rejection of her that she threatened suicide.
So was some of this going through her mind the night she died? Did Monroe feel that her publicist and close friend was over-identifying with her? Did she think Newcomb was attracted to her? Or was it all a delusion?
Certainly, Greenson had stated that Monroe was ‘jealous’ of Newcomb, and exhibited ‘unconscious conflicts about homosexuality.’
‘In my estimation, and looking at her behavior in another age, she would have been a prostitute,’ said the script supervisor in charge of continuity on The Misfits
Monroe on the set of the Misfits: ‘She had this silk dress – well, you’d have it hose it down with chemicals’
Monroe with Pat Newcomb – did the actress die because of a ‘sleep competition’ with her friend?
There are a raft of conspiracy theories used to try to explain her death, ranging from involvement with the Kennedy brothers to murder by the mob. However, it’s likely that the truth of her death is a far simpler – but sadder – affair.
This is Newcomb in her own words, from an unpublished interview in 1974, revealing the reason for a heated argument the friends had the day Monroe died.
‘She was angry that I had been able to sleep all night and she hadn’t,’ she said.
‘I was asleep with my door closed [on the Friday night] – she apparently had been up wandering around. She just couldn’t stand not being able to sleep.’
Newcomb, in another unpublished interview, confessed she had taken one of Monroe’s sleeping pills, but ‘not one of the Nembutals.’
Dr Greenson expanded on the devastating consequences of this seemingly innocent act in an in-depth conversation in 1973.
‘I think the fight [between Monroe and Pat Newcomb] may have been because Pat Newcomb had taken the pills away.’
Excised from Greenson’s printed interview is this sentence: ‘It is possible that in her confused state, which seemed to be centered on sleep, she [Monroe] decided to get into some sleep competition with her friend [Pat Newcomb] and [had] taken a bottle of sleeping pills.’
Whatever the truth, because her life was cut short, we will always want to imagine the possibilities for the time Monroe had left, dream up the movies she might have made, muse over the loves she might have experienced.
She inspires, she arouses, she transfixes, she mesmerizes, she brings us together, she divides us: aspects of her biography fuel heated debates. Above all, she continues to make us feel.
Toward the end of his life, director John Huston – who worked with Monroe on The Misfits – was asked about her continuing appeal. Why did interest in her endure? What did this mean, both for him and for the public?
He paused and then replied: ‘Well, simply that she’s still alive.’
