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Marilyn: Say Goodbye to the President Reviews

1985
1 hr 11 mins
NR

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Produced for the BBC, this documentary sets out to establish the connection between Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and to explore the mystery surrounding her death in August 1962. The filmmakers interview a wide variety of people associated with the principals, including Kennedy friends and associates; an ex-wife of actor Peter Lawford (he introduced Monroe to J.F.K.); private detectives who were involved in wiretapping Lawford's Santa Monica home where the President and Monroe allegedly spent time together; associates of James P. Hoffa, the labor leader who publicly denounced Robert Kennedy and was privy to the surveillance tapes; a former lover of Monroe's; her housekeeper; and several of her neighbors. Also included is vintage footage of the principals, including Monroe's famous performance of "Happy Birthday to You" at the President's birthday party in May 1962. Although the film cannot definitively establish what happened on the night of her death, it does suggest that Robert Kennedy saw her that afternoon, that she placed a call to Lawford that evening (giving him the message in the title of this film), that she was unconscious but alive when first discovered in her bed, and that Lawford arranged for Kennedy to leave Los Angeles before news of her death was made public. It also concludes that Hoffa and some of his Mob connections were ready to make public the affair between Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe when the senator was assassinated in June 1968.

Reviewed By: Tom Wiener

The relationships between President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Marilyn Monroe are thoroughly discussed in this documentary that manages to be convincing, up to a point. That the Kennedy brothers both enjoyed the film star's company is obvious, and there's little doubt that in both cases there was sex involved. Knowing that Monroe's final days were spent in a haze of drugs, depression, and desperate phone calls, it's easy to posit that some in power might have seen her fragile emotional state as a threat to the status of the President and the Attorney General. Part of the problem is that the three principals here are long dead, and the fourth party with the most knowledge of what really went on, Peter Lawford, is also deceased. This leaves mostly second and third-hand testimony, and although many of the interviewees here come off as sober and sane individuals, one can't help but get the notion that many of them are looking for their 15 minutes of fame. Filmmaker Christopher Olgiati, for all of the questions he raises about when and how Monroe did die, offers no definitive or convincing scenario on how the film star might have been killed to silence her. For the most part, however, the film does not stoop to sensationalization (resorting only once to a reenactment, which is tastefully staged), which does make its skepticism about the official reports on Monroe's death plausible.