Born Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette on January 28, 1873, she turned into one of the most celebrated French authors in the early twentieth century. She wrote seventy-three books—fiction, nonfiction, and a mixture of the two—about the sorrows and delights of love. In her life, as in her art, she gave a new dimension to two of France’s most enduring sexual archetypes, the schoolgirl seductress and the aging coquette.

Colette grew up in the country as the adored youngest child of a fiercely possessive mother and a retired army captain, and turned into a tomboy who went by her family surname and communed intimately with the flowers and animals in her own private enchanted garden.

At twenty, with braided hair falling below her knees, she married Henry Gauthier-Villars, a 35-year-old writer and friend of the family. Known as Willy, he added his young bride to his collection of mistresses, ghostwriters, and pornographic postcards in decadent turn-of-the-century Paris.

At Willy’s urge, Colette began to fill notebooks with erotic stories about the adventures of a young girl. The four Claudine novels, published from 1900 to 1903, enjoyed a great vogue, giving rise to a whole line of “Claudine” stories and to a cult of the precocious schoolgirl, innocent yet alluring, a sort of androgynous Lolita.

Rebelling against her literary bondage to Willy, who signed his name to his wife’s first six books, Colette began publishing sensual stories, using the name Colette Willy until 1906, and then simply Colette. In her stories, she even described a vegetable as a love object.

Willy turned out constantly unfaithful to Colette, who once followed him to an assignation and found him fornicating with Lotte Kinceler, a foul-mouthed, hunchbacked dwarf. Sometimes, Willy even brought his other coquettes to Colette’s apartment, where they would finger her things and speak smut. Willy tried to promote a liaison between his “sexually impartial” wife and one of his mistresses.

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As she felt more comfortable with her husband’s male young homosexual secretaries, Colette became disillusioned with Willy, whose bulbous eyes and drooping cheeks reminded her of Queen Victoria. She divorced Willy in 1906 and took refuge in her exhibitionistic career in mime and music-hall dancing. She also found comfort in the company of an aristocratic lesbian, “Missy”, the former Marquise de Belboeuf and a descendant of Napoleon, with whom she lived for six years after leaving Willy.

In her thirties, with sloe eyes and a mop of curly hair, Colette appeared in the mime theater seductively draped like an odalisque. One play required her to bare her breasts, which created “a luscious thrill of sensation” in the audience. Sensation turned to scandal when—miming a ballet in which a mummy awoke from eternal sleep, undid its bandages, and, near nude, danced its ancient loves—she ardently embraced her “prince”, who turned out Missy, the choreographer of the ballet.

Colette and Missy de Belboeuf, who looked and dressed like a man in daily life, enjoyed “a loving friendship”. Colette also appeared in tuxedo at the famous sapphic banquets of the day, wearing an ankle bracelet engraved “I belong to Missy”, and described her friend’s love as maternal and possessive. Colette went through numerous lesbian loves, one of the most colorful being Natalie Barney, an American expatriate in Paris known for her Friday salons and her affairs with other women. Colette once sent Barney a message: “Natalie, my husband kisses your hands, and I the rest.” She refused to distinguish between normal and abnormal sexuality.

Colette also contributed articles—published in 1970 in a book form as Tales of a Thousand and One Mornings—to Le Matin, a leading French newspaper. As soon as she entered the world of journalism, Colette began a whirlwind affair with the aggressive, virile Henry de Jouvenel. Fond of pet names, she called him “Sidi the Pasha”. The affair ended in marriage when Colette, nearly forty, became pregnant.

However, their amorous life became bumpy and wild.
      “Jealousy blooms like a dark carnation,” she wrote in reference to her second husband’s chronic infidelity.
      De Jouvenel complained, for his part, about his wife. “Colette is preoccupied with love, adultery, and half-incestuous relationship.”
      Colette took off on a Swiss winter vacation with her 19-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, after her separation from his father.

Their marriage ended in divorce, but while it lasted Colette achieved her greatest fame in 1920 with Cheri, the sexual tragedy of a young gigolo and an aging coquette, followed in 1923 by The Ripening Seed, a classic tale of adolescent sexual initiation.

At fifty-two, during the autumn of her womanhood, Colette met Maurice Goudeket, a 35-year-old journalist. Writing in bed, surrounded by cats and cushions, or basking in the warm sunshine of Saint-Tropez, she enjoyed with Goudeket a loving companionship that renewed her creative energy and enabled her to remain vigorously active well into old age. Maurice became her third husband in 1935.

Colette enjoyed both fame and an active old age, raising the coquette to the rank of patriotic heroine with the publication of Gigi in 1945 when she turned seventy-two. She enjoyed another nine years of active life and died on August 3, 1954.

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Born on May 27, 1878, Isadora learned ballet but rejected its rigid disciplines and other formal dance techniques. Instead, inspired by both Greek and Italian art, she created her own stage routines, in which her graceful, free-flowing movements and imaginative pantomimes, accompanied by great classical music, helped modern dance gain formal recognition as a new creative art. Based loosely on the calisthenics system of Francois Delsarte, her movements emphasized coordination of voice with body gestures.

In April 1898, after she lost her entire wardrobe in the disastrous Hotel Windsor fire in New York, Isadora had to come up with an innovative costume at her next appearance. One critic described it as “a species of surgical bandage of gauze and stain”.

Undaunted, Isadora sailed for Europe, and donned a see-through diaphanous tunic of Liberty silk, adorned with colorful streamers of varying lengths. Soon, she became the barefoot dancing darling of the continent.

“Toe walking deforms the feet,” said Isadora, “corsets deform the body, and nothing is left to be deformed but the brain and there is not much of this in the women who dance modern dances.”

Touring first with the Loie Fuller troupe, she then teamed up with impresario Alexander Gross and booked for solo appearances in Budapest, Berlin, Vienna, and other major capitals.

A shocked but titillated audience arrived en masse to see the nearly stark-naked nymph glide, pose, and leap around on the carpeted stage, accompanied by such well-known compositions as Strauss’s Blue Danube and Chopin’s Funeral March.

Isadora kept her virginity until twenty-five, but quickly made up for lost time. Her fancy fell initially on Oscar Beregi, a handsome Hungarian actor then appearing on the Budapest stage as Shakespeare’s Romeo. Mutually smitten at first sight, they galloped off to the downy privacy of a peasant four-poster bed in the Danube countryside. That night, she limped around during her Urania Theater recital. But the delighted Isadora rapidly booked Beregi again for another passionate session because he promised her “an ultimate heavenly feel on earth”.

In December 1904 Isadora began a torrid liaison with theatrical designer Gordon Craig, the son of English actress Ellen Terry. For two wild weeks the lovers made love repeatedly on some old blankets spread over artificial rose petals strewn on the black, waxed floor of Craig’s high-rise studio in Berlin. The nonstop orgy paused only for an occasional meal, ordered on credit and delivered while Isadora waited on the narrow balcony. Unaware of her amorous activities, her manager had to search police blotters, fearing abduction, but at no avail. Eventually he gave up and canceled her shows, publishing a discreet newspaper notice that “Fraulein Duncan has regrettably been taken seriously ill with tonsillitis.” Nine months later, the “tonsillitis” turned into Deirdre, a free-love production sired by Craig.

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In 1906 Isadora became the mistress of Paris Singer, one of the twenty-three children of sewing-machine magnate Issac Singer. The playboy millionaire gave her seven years of lavish living, along with the seed for her second love child, Patrick. A firm believer in free love, Isadora subsequently astounded her U.S. fans by touring while pregnant with her second child, with no intention to marry the child’s father.

Isadora, nonetheless, remained the “Pet of Society” for over two decades. Her personal life, however, dissolved in tragedy in 1913. In a freak accident, her car—momentarily driverless—rolled backward down a slope, drowning her two children and their nurse in the muddy Seine. Professionally, as well as emotionally, Isadora never fully recovered. Her idyllic affair with Singer passed away with her lost children.

Isadora took refugee, first in Italy, then back to France, where a willing sculptor fathered a third baby. The boy lived only an hour. At the close of the First World War, Isadora took on a new lover, pianist-composer Walter Rummel, her “archangel”. He showed great talent, but Isadora, aging and jealous, ended her affair in Greece when she suspected that his “shining wings” also embraced a younger dryad in her dance troupe.

In 1922, when she turned forty-four, Isadora set aside her aversion to marriage to become the wife of the Russian Revolution’s poet laureate, Sergei Esenin, seventeen years her junior.

When Esenin joked about her personal beliefs on religion, Isadora snapped back, pointing at a nearby bed, “Vot Bog! (This is God!)”

In 1922 her outspoken views on atheism and the Bolshevik Revolution brought further woes. Coming to the U.S. from Moscow with her Russian husband, she infuriated Boston theatergoers by waving a red scarf at them from the stage. In Chicago the tour earned the animosity of evangelist Billy Sunday. Playing upon the “Red Menace” theme, he labeled her “that Bolshevik hussy who doesn’t wear enough clothes to pad a crutch”.

In Indianapolis, the mayor bluntly called Isadora a nude dancer whose appearance might well earn her a trip by paddy wagon. Broke and disillusioned, Isadora returned to Europe.

Her brief marriage turned out another disaster. Esenin, half-mad and alcoholic, left a trail of broken liquor bottles and furniture on both sides of the Atlantic. In the nude, drunken, he scampered down hotel corridors. He gave away her money and clothes to friends and relatives. All his weirdos turned out too much for even the liberated Isadora to handle. She coaxed him back to Moscow the next year and quietly went her own way.

Afterward, she eked out a twilight existence, shuttling between Paris and the Riviera, until a second freak automobile accident occurred on September 14, 1927.
      Getting into a Bugatti, she tossed her trademark scarf around her throat, cheerily calling out, “Farewell, my friends, I am going to glory!”
      The dangling scarf caught in the spokes of a rear wheel as the car started up. And her neck got instantly snapped.

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Born in Calexico near the Mexico border on the Fourth of July in 1916, Iva Ikuko Toguri grew up a modest, taciturn, yet aspiring girl as the eldest daughter. The family moved around to better their livelihood. In the late 1920s, they settled down in Los Angeles, setting up a small import business while operating a retail grocery and variety store and selling mainly imported goods from Japan—the kind of mom-and-pop enterprise by which so many immigrants, from Japan or elsewhere, used to launch their families into a better life.

The U.S. soldiers called her Tokyo Rose—a temptress of the vilest kind who used the airwaves to taunt America’s fighting men in the Pacific during the bloody, brutal battles of World War II. A federal jury convicted her of treason and sentenced her to ten years in prison in 1949.

Yet Tokyo Rose never actually existed. Spawned by U.S. servicemen listening to female disc jockeys on wartime radio in the Pacific, “Tokyo Rose” seeped into their minds. In Japan, nobody called anybody by that name. Later, the U.S. media picked up the name while the government officials used the name to hand out blame for years of death and destruction. The seductive siren “Tokyo Rose” has melted into a myth ever since.

The real story of the woman who became known as Tokyo Rose, however, grew even more intriguing than the tale of some pulp magazine of the day. Iva kept her undying faith in America during the time when her name and face made her an alien in the country she called home.

In June 1941, just as diplomatic talks between Japan and the U.S. began to sputter and stall in Washington, D.C., Iva’s mother, Fumi, received word that her only living sister fell sick in Tokyo. Unable to go to Japan herself because of illness, Mrs. Toguri sent Iva instead. Despite her heritage, she had never been to Japan. A nisei, or first-generation Japanese-American, Iva had little knowledge of the land of the rising sun her parents had left a long time ago. Not unlike most children of Asian immigrants at that time, Iva saw herself simply as an American.

Her ship, the Arabia Maru, set sail from San Pedro, California, to Kobe via Yokohama July 5, 1941. As Toguri stood on the deck that day in the sparkling white sharkskin suit that her sister had made for her, she waved good-bye to her family down on the dock.

As Japanese planes interrupted the early morning calm over Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Toguri caught a glimpse of her bleak future. Since her arrival, Iva’ letters home had expressed little happiness about her life with her aunt and uncle in Setagaya Ward, one of the metropolitan Tokyo districts. Unaccustomed to Japanese food, her diet suffered. Unable to communicate in her parents’ native tongue, her plight became even exacerbated by the fact that she looked Japanese. Therefore the people around her expected her to speak the language. She had few friends and even fewer work opportunities. Moreover, the Japanese began to feel the effects of their nation’s war-stretched economy. Iva wanted to get back to the States, and told her father, Jun Toguri, not long before the attack on Pearl Harbor. But soon, like approximately 10,000 other Japanese Americans in Japan, she got stuck in a foreign land.

Two days after the war broke out, Iva received an unannounced visit from the infamous kempeitai, or the Special Security Police. The Japanese Gestapo gave her some idea—she remained the enemy, and they watch her.

As part of their frequent visits, the local police and kempeitai demanded that Toguri renounce her American citizenship. They said it would make life easier on her, implying punishments if she did not comply with their forceful requests. She told them no way.

Between visits from the kempeitai, Iva found part-time work with the Domei News Agency, monitoring the airwaves for American movements in the Pacific for 110 yen per month, or about $5. In June 1943, she also began working as a typist for Radio Tokyo at NHK’s American Division of the Overseas Bureau. However, her duties soon required much more than she thought.

Radio Tokyo took care of English-language radio broadcasts in the Pacific, which included anti-American propaganda. Organized and presented by Allied prisoners of war under the supervision of Japanese military intelligence, the “Zero Hour” program became popular among the GIs, playing the newest music of the day and giving war reports. However, the POW staff subtly sabotaged the broadcasts, headed by Australian Army Major Charles Cousens, a former radio celebrity in Sydney.

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When Radio Tokyo asked Cousens to add a female voice, he chose Iva from among several foreign working women at NHK, though she had no experience in broadcasting. Unlike the other women, her voice sounded stunted, not smooth— far from sexy. In other words, her voice turned out exactly what Cousens looked for: someone he could teach and mold to read scripts that pleased the Japanese supervisors at Radio Tokyo, but did little damage to the morale of Allied men.

Like other female radio personalities who broadcast in the Pacific during the war, Iva operated under a stage name. On the air she called herself Orphan Ann. From late 1943 to nearly the end of the war in the Pacific, Iva read scripts that Cousens had written, though she wrote a little on her own after Cousens collapsed from a heart attack in the summer of 1944

When the war ended and the U.S. occupation army came to Tokyo, Iva wept with joy. Now, finally, she would be able to return home. Before she did, however, the U.S. media swarmed across Japan in search of the post-war scoop. One of the reporters contacted Iva believing that she broadcast as “Tokyo Rose”. Excited about going home, she offered herself up freely to the press, explaining exactly what she did because she thought she had done nothing wrong. In the process, she became a star among the servicemen who thought they had heard her voice all those years. Military investigators, following the stories about this Tokyo Rose, tore her away from husband Felipe d’Aquino, whom Toguri married in 1945 after their years spent trapped in Japan. The occupation authorities locked her away in the Sugamo prison without counsel. Along the way she became the one and only Tokyo Rose.

Hearing the few remaining “Zero Hour” tapes, the investigators found that Iva said little in her broadcasts that could be construed as treasonous. Moreover, they failed to come up with any evidence of the name Tokyo Rose in radio programs from all over the Pacific. Therefore, the occupation authorities once released her.

But the situation changed in the States. The staff of the Attorney General’s office needed a scapegoat to divert the hatred and anxiety of the unhappy, frustrated, disgruntled citizens.

Iva’s three-month trial became the biggest and most expensive legal battle to date, with a price tag of $500,000. Her trial went awry from the beginning. In 1948, three years after the war, there still existed a strong hatred toward the Japanese. A lot of people had lost sons and brothers in the Pacific.

Kenkichi Oki and George Mitsushio, both California-born Japanese-Americans, worked as Iva’s superiors on the wartime broadcasts. Both admitted later that they had lied at the trial when they claimed she made a treasonous broadcast after the U.S. Naval victory in the Leyte Gulf of the Philippines in October 1944.

Why did they lie?

The U.S. prosecution team had to brand Tokyo Rose as a traitor in the same sense that Joseph McCarthy labeled his victims as red traitors. Feeling a lot of pressure from the prosecution team, both men got terrified and lied.

Ultimately convicted of one count of treason (charged with eight) with nearly no concrete evidence against her, Iva received a sentenced of ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine. She served more than six years of that sentence in Alderson Federal Reformatory in West Virginia.

In May 1976, the U.S. embassy in Tokyo contacted the Chicago Tribune reporter, who had first reported on the misled trial, to confirm the information. Support, albeit silent, began to build for her pardon. Finally, after the Tribune article and an appearance on the TV program 60 Minutes as well as with the efforts of other supporters, President Gerald Ford pardoned Iva Toguri as his last official act in office on July 19, 1977. She still lives in Chicago (as of January 2000) and waited on her customers in her North Side shop.

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Marilyn Monroe began her life as Norma Jean Mortenson on June 1, 1926, and became the reigning sex symbol of the post-war decade of the 1950s and the early period of the tumultuous 1960s. Full of sexual vigor externally, yet fragile and insecure in her personal life, Marilyn sought security in her sexuality and relations with “powerful” people—from Hollywood producers to the ill-fated president of the U.S.

Her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, worked hard as a Hollywood film cutter, but turned into an emotionally unstable woman. Her second husband, Edward Mortenson, a man of Norwegian extraction and uncertain employment, disappeared shortly before she gave birth to Marilyn.

Norma Jean grew up in her deprived, Depression-poor childhood. Her mother entered mental hospital for for paranoid schizophrenia, and Marilyn spent the next three years in an orphanage and foster homes. Grace Goddard, her mother’s best friend, took care of her from eleven till sixteen when she got married to Jim Dougherty.

Soon Marilyn found her husband boring. So when he went overseas in 1944, she felt relieved. While she worked in a war plant, a photographer found her charm and beauty. She loved to pose, and the camera revealed a beautiful young woman, voluptuous yet vulnerable. On the picture, she turned into a combination of allure and innocence.

Obsessed by the dream of stardom, she divorced her husband, and became a popular model. Later she took a silent screen test at the 20th Century-Fox, and demonstrated a remarkable impact on the testers. The studio signed her, lightened her hair, and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.

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Marilyn emanated a strong sexual aura, and would describe herself as selectively promiscuous, submitting only to men she liked. She tended to prefer older men—kindly, warm father figures.

Hollywood in the late 1940s turned into an “overcrowded brothel” in her words, and she needed all the help she could get to move up from third-string blonde to a higher up. Joe Schenck, a 70-year-old veteran producer, became her first patron, and wined and dined with the starlet, inviting her regularly to his home and office.

Schenck introduced Marilyn to Harry Cohn, the tyrant of Columbia Pictures, but he fired her after her first film because she had rejected his imperious sexual demands.

Many so-called one-time lovers offered an intimate glimpse of Marilyn’s sexuality. Anton LaVey, then an 18-year-old accompanist at a strip joint where 22-year-old Marilyn worked briefly after being fired from Columbia. LaVey, who had a two-week affair with Marilyn in motels, described her as sexually passive. One of her biographers wrote: “she was too self-absorbed to respond to men most of the time.” Norman Mailer concluded: “she was pleasant in bed, but receptive rather than innovative.”

Johnny Hyde, a short well-groomed top Hollywood agent, succeeded Schenck as Marilyn’patron. At fifty-three and suffering a serious heart ailment, he became infatuated with Marilyn and wanted to marry her, but she refused. He gave her a sense of security as well as a new wardrobe, and paid for plastic surgery on her nose and chin. Most importantly, Hyde used his influence to set up Marilyn for her best early films in 1950: Asphalt Jungle and All about Eve. Marilyn didn’t enjoy sex with Hyde but would fake ecstasy not to offend him. Joe DiMaggio became Marilyn’s first real-life hero- lover while Marilyn turned into a superstar with the release of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire in 1953. Out of the blue popped up her nude calendar, for which she had posed during her unemployment. Instead of tainting her fame, it rather enhanced her career. Unfortunately, however, DiMaggio hated the idea of her being a superstar after their 1954 marriage. Possessive and old-fashioned, he detested Hollywood and got infuriated by the display of his wife’s sexual charms.

He also disliked Marilyn’s drama coach and mentor, Natasha Lytess, who retaliated by suggesting that Marilyn got along better with women. In a desperate effort to save their marriage, DiMaggio conspired with his friend Frank Sinatra to catch Marilyn with “the other woman”—presumably to force her into dropping her divorce suite.

Trying to break away from her studio-imposed stereotype of the sexy blond, Marilyn left Hollywood for the East Coast, where she thought she could find a man interested in more than her body. Playwright Arthur Miller had first met her in 1950.
      “You know what?” said Marilyn to a friend, “He sat and held my toe and we just looked into each other’s eyes.”
      They married in 1956.

At first the Millers embarrassed friends with their physical possessiveness. After one night of lovemaking, Marilyn would not let her maid change the sheets, saying, “I want to lie on these all day.” Then Marilyn suffered two miscarriages, despite corrective surgery, followed by increasing depression. Her later filming went through lots of troubles because Marilyn showed up late or failed to appear. The director had to complete the film under great strain and the producers had to cope with the mounting cost. Unable to sleep, she became a heavy barbiturate user, narcotizing herself into oblivion. More than once Miller rescued her from accidental overdosing. After collaborating on The Misfits in 1960, the Millers got divorced, incidentally, on the day John F. Kennedy became president.

Now approaching thirty-five, alone and desperately worried about aging, Marilyn sought for reassurance. She had engaged in a highly publicized affair with Yves Montand, her co-star in Let’s Make Love, who disappointed her terribly by ending the affair because he didn’t want to leave his wife, Simone Signoret. Marilyn had hoped for more than a fling.

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Then Sinatra introduced her to the Kennedys. “Can you imagine me as First Lady?” Marilyn mused to her friend Bob Slatzer in 1962. She enjoyed secret assignations with the President at his brother-in-law Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house, at the Beverly Hills Hotel in California, and on the presidential jet. She bought a house and moved back to Los Angeles. JFK began to be annoyed by her lateness and her constant telephone calls, and became fearful of publicity. Marilyn grew too hot to handle by the time JFK’s 45th-birthday fund-raising party took place at Madison Square Garden in May 1962. Marilyn stole the show singing Happy Birthday.

By June, softening the blow of rejection, the President handed her over to his brother Bobby. Bobby and Marilyn consummated their relationship in a car outside Lawford’s house. Marilyn began fantasizing marriage again. When her trust proved to be devastatingly misplaced, and RFK changed his phone number to escape her calls, she talked idly about calling a press conference to blow the whistle on him.

Suicide? Or murder?

Marilyn’s moods during her last summer of 1962 swung from gaiety to despair. Only pills helped her depression, and she had to take daily psychiatric sessions. The studio finally fired her because of absenteeism. Apparently, her life slipped into disorder. When her maid found Marilyn dead from an overdose early one Sunday morning in August, the news came out as a shock but not a total surprise for many who knew Marilyn.

let’t suppose somebody killed her. Then why did he want to kill her? Did anyone have a motive? There existed four main theories.

The first theorist says, Marilyn knew too much. She and her diary became too explosive. The Kennedys—or some shadowy agency on their behalf—did away with her.

The second theorist speculates that Marilyn, already linked to the Kennedys by gossip, was killed by the brothers’ enemies to insure an explosion of scandal that would destroy the presidency. Which enemies? Many of those around Marilyn had leftist connections, and this fact suggests a Communist murder plot, designed to protect Robert Kennedy—portrayed by the Right as a rabbit left-winger—from scandal.

The third theorist insists that there was much motive for the right wing of the FBI or the CIA to implicate Robert Kennedy in a scandal.

Yet the fourth theorist says, the Mafia—aware of the Kennedy affairs, and inspired by Marilyn’s recent close call with death at Lake Tahoe—manipulated a drugged Marilyn out for help, to lure Robert Kennedy into a trap. The plot failed when Kennedy hardened his heart and failed to rise to the bait. He refused to respond to Marilyn’s pleas, and she died.

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Those who scorn murder theories point to the fact that Marilyn had tried suicide before, and plainly on the way to destroying herself. Her life story certainly demonstrates that. Still, murder theorists would retort, what safer way to murder a test pilot than by sabotaging his aircraft? What easier way to murder Marilyn than by simulating suicide?

For anyone who wished to embarrass the Kennedys, and begin a whispering campaign that would destroy them by 1964, how perfect a move it is to kill Marilyn in such a way as to make it look like suicide.

Some say, it does not matter whether somebody murdered Marilyn or she died by her own hand. The key to the events surrounding her end lies in the word “scandal”, through which some people see the flaw in Kennedy’s character—his womanizing—as one that might end his political career. The enemies of the Kennedys watched, listened, and waited for an opportunity to expose their secrets. Murder or not, Marilyn’s death turned into such an opportunity.

Still other observer says, it turned out lucky for the Kennedys because the press failed to investigate Marilyn’s passing in 1962—unlike the Watergate incident—and that the job passed into right-wing scandalmongers with a limited audience. The circumstances of Marilyn’s death, which certainly involved the Kennedys, got deliberately covered up.

Nobody knows for sure what actually happened in the previous evening. However, one bare fact remains firm: the love goddess died on August 5, 1962, ironically, for lack of love.

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