Who (or What) Killed Marilyn Monroe?

Forty-five years ago yesterday, on August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead in the bedroom of her Los Angeles home. Her housekeeper and her psychiatrist broke into the locked bedroom at about 3:30 a.m. and discovered her face-down on her bed, nude, with a hand on a telephone receiver. An empty container of Nembutal sleeping pills was on her nightstand. The authorities labeled the cause of death as “probable suicide,” but controversy and conspiracy theories quickly followed, and they’ve never gone away.

Almost half a century after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains the definitive sex symbol in popular culture everywhere. It was an image she worked hard to cultivate over her whirlwind career. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles in 1926, she grew up in a series of foster homes, poor and mistreated. At 16 she dropped out of high school to get married. Two years later, working on a World War II assembly line, she was discovered by an Army photographer, David Conover, who took a picture of her for Yank: The Army Weekly. The picture got the attention of a modeling agency and then of a film agent, who landed her a screen test at 20th Century–Fox. In short order she divorced her husband, signed a movie contract, changed her hair color from natural brown to blonde, and, at her agent’s urging, adopted the alliterative stage name Marilyn Monroe. (She would legally change her name in 1956.)

She started out in small parts in films like the Marx Brothers’ Love Happy (1949), the noir classic The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and the Academy Award–winning All About Eve (1950). With her sheer magnetism, she was quickly noticed by moviegoers and, more important, by people in the movie industry. “She can make any move, any gesture, almost insufferably suggestive,” said the director Henry Hathaway. Her subsequent larger roles cemented her fame and her place in popular culture, most notably her part in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), in which she sang “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” (Madonna would famously pay homage to that performance in the video for her 1985 song “Material Girl.”) Other major roles included 1955’s The Seven Year Itch, with the much-imitated scene where her skirt blows upward over a subway grating, and the classic 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot, for which she was awarded a Golden Globe.

Offscreen her life was often and publicly turbulent. She was married twice more, to the baseball star Joe DiMaggio in 1954 and the playwright Arthur Miller in 1956. Of Miller she said, “He is a wonderful writer, a brilliant man. But I think he is a better writer than a husband.” Both marriages ended in divorce. She also had many affairs; widespread speculation connected her with President John F. Kennedy, to whom she very breathily sang “Happy Birthday” at Madison Square Garden in 1962. (“I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way,” Kennedy joked at the time.) Several biographers have theorized that she also had an affair with the President’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

She battled depression and, especially toward the end of her life, drank heavily and abused prescription drugs, particularly sleeping pills. She had a history of suicide attempts, including several during her marriage to Miller. So when she was found dead next to an empty pill bottle, officials assumed she had succeeded in killing herself at last.

But the Los Angeles County coroner, Thomas Noguchi, found oddities while examining her body. There were large amounts of Nembutal and another sedative, chloral hydrate, in her liver and blood, but no traces in her stomach. This quickly led to speculation that she hadn’t taken pills at all; someone had injected her with a fatal dose. Maybe she hadn’t committed suicide.

Indeed, to this day, murder theories abound. One of them has her distraught over the end of her affairs with the Kennedys and threatening to go public, so she is silenced by government operatives. Another even has Robert Kennedy administering the lethal injection himself. Or Mafia hitmen killed her in a convoluted plan to embarrass the Attorney General, who was aggressively prosecuting organized-crime cases.

For the most part, the theories are simply absurd. Noguchi—who would later gain fame as the coroner for Robert Kennedy, Natalie Wood, John Belushi, and many other public figures—insisted she hadn’t been murdered, saying it wasn’t unusual for overdose victims to quickly assimilate drugs into their systems. He also said he hadn’t found a single needle mark anywhere on her body. The true explanation is likely the obvious one: Marilyn Monroe ended her own life.

“Perhaps this case keeps returning because she was one of the last superstars and in many ways an American dream,” Noguchi said in a 1986 interview. Perhaps so. Today it still seems that every blonde starlet is eventually compared to Marilyn Monroe. But Marilyn Monroe, only 36 when she died, wasn’t larger than life at all. Rather, life was more than she could bear.