I went to another funeral this week. It was someone I knew only very slightly and in fact Liz knew the deceased much more than me. His name was John and he was a pretty nice guy. The funeral service though seemed to me to be a little bit flat, a little lacking in soul. There was no priest or reverend at the service, just the celebrant. She read out a history of John’s life and family, someone came up to read a sad poem and his Grandson played a tune on his guitar.
The big problem though was the heat. Despite hearing for most of the year that a heatwave was coming this summer, most of the time we in the UK have suffered weeks of bad weather. The day of the funeral though turned out to be the hottest for a long time. Sweat poured down my face in the crematorium and when the service was over I had to make a quick exit as I had a doctor’s appointment to get to. It was wonderful to sit down in the air-conditioned surgery and cool down.
Afterwards we drove back to the wake but the venue that had been chosen was a hotel just by the seafront and the sun had brought out the crowds and parking was impossible, well, almost impossible. Luckily a small school next door was good enough to open its gates to the mourners otherwise I could never have parked at all.
At the wake I knew no one except the widow but everyone I did speak to said the same thing, wasn’t it a lovely service? Actually, I didn’t think it was although I would never have said that. Was it because there was no priest or vicar? Did the tributes fall flat because no one there had any faith in anything except the finality of death?
Funerals are odd things; in a way they are not for the dead but for the living, those left behind after a loved one has died and I have to say, not only did I enjoy my mother’s funeral, although enjoy is not perhaps the right word, but it helped me more than anything to say goodbye to her.
Something else that made me think about death this week was reading a blog on Medium.com from an American writer. He had read that in the state where he lives, and I can’t remember which one it was in the USA, he had read that the average life expectancy for a male was 77 years. He was 57 and so he reckoned that on average, he had about 20 years left. 20 years sounds a lot but when it comes down to it, it really isn’t that much at all and if the same thing is true for me, a male living in the north west of England, then I’ve only got about 11 years left.
This week as I write this, is the 61st anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe. I wrote about Marilyn a while ago talking about my collection of books about Marilyn and the clippings in my scrapbook. Over on Twitter and Instagram, pictures and clips of Marilyn are still pretty plentiful despite her dying back in 1962. One post I saw on Instagram paid tribute to her memory but at the same time the author decided to take a poke at those who believe Marilyn was murdered by the Kennedy family.
I have to say I don’t believe that, not for a minute, but at the same time I don’t believe Marilyn committed suicide either. I mentioned that on the Instagram post and the author told me there were no credible witnesses regarding her involvement with the Kennedys. Not so I replied, there was Marilyn’s housekeeper and handyman, there was Marilyn’s neighbour, there was Marilyn’s friend Jeanne Camen and of course there was Marilyn’s psychiatrist Ralph Greenson who when pressed about Marilyn’s death answered ‘ask Bobby Kennedy.’
Other people jumped into the argument too, some supported me and some didn’t. Jeanne Carmen was a liar said one, so was Bob Slatzer who has not only claimed Marilyn had been murdered but also that he was actually married to Marilyn for a short time. The studio forced the couple to annul the wedding or so he says. The problem there is that there are no records of the supposed wedding and the dates Slatzer gave were dates when Marilyn was known to be somewhere else.
Walt Schaefer, the head of the Schaefer ambulance company that sent an ambulance to 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Marilyn’s home, says Marilyn was alive when the ambulance arrived but she died on the way to hospital. How did her body then get back to her home where it was supposedly discovered by housekeeper Eunise Murray later that night?
Here’s another thing: in 1985 a former employee of the ambulance company came forward to say that he was part of the ambulance crew that night. James Hall says Marilyn was found in the guest cottage but CPR was applied and she began to revive, her colour going from blue to normal. A doctor then appeared; he gave Marilyn an injection into the heart which missed and cracked a rib but she then died.
Hall has passed numerous lie detector tests but like many of the stories of Marilyn’s last hours, his story has never been corroborated and no broken rib was reported by the coroner, Thomas Noguchi.
Did Bobby Kennedy visit Marilyn on her last day alive? Yes, as I said earlier there were eyewitnesses to his visit. Did he murder Marilyn? Of course not but whatever happened, Marilyn did not survive that night.
You might be thinking that perhaps I’m getting a little obsessed with the death of a film star who died 61 years ago and actually, you might have a point. The more I read about Monroe and her death the more I want to know the truth but it seems to me that Monroe fans are split on the subject of her death. There are those who think Marilyn took an overdose and there are those who think something sinister involving the Kennedys happened. It’s a little bit like the JFK assassination; some think Oswald did it, some think that something happened involving the CIA, the Mafia, J Edgar Hoover, Cuban exiles or a combination of all those.
There’s a great scene in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall where Woody tries to explain just how all those differing theories and ideas can get on top of you and perhaps it’s time to put my Marilyn murder books away for a while and read something else and watch some different documentaries.
These last few days I’ve spent trying to sort out my huge collection of VHS video tapes. Any films that are likely to be shown again on TV or that I can now buy on DVD I tend to just throw away. Some that are proper commercial recordings I’ve taken to the charity shop but I’ve still got a shed load of tapes of F1 events, TV shows and documentaries. What I’ve tried to do with those is to copy them to DVD as I just happen to have a VHS/DVD recorder combo. One of the videos I found was the 1985 documentary Say Goodbye to the President which was of course about Marilyn Monroe, her involvement with the Kennedys and her last days. It’s a bit sad but films get reshown time and time again but TV documentaries rarely get a second showing.
A few weeks ago I was writing a post about stars who have appeared in Columbo and I knew I had a video of Jane Greer talking about her experiences with Howard Hughes. Could I find it after searching through my cupboards and boxes of VHS tapes? No, of course not. This week when I thought I would carry on with my mission to copy a few more interesting VHS documentaries to DVD, I opened a box and there was the video I’d been looking for. It was a tape marked ‘The RKO Story, the Howard Hughes Era.’ It was an episode from a 1980’s BBC documentary series about RKO Studios which were for a short period owned by Howard Hughes. Jane Greer was finally free of her contract to Hughes and had been signed to RKO and then Hughes bought the studio. I’m not sure if he bought it just to get control of Jane Greer but of course that is what happened.
Hughes told Jane how he knew she wasn’t happy; she told him she was. He wanted to buy her a house; she told him she already had a house and by the way, also a husband and child living there. Hughes was undeterred. He wouldn’t put her in any pictures unless she left her husband which she wasn’t ready to do so he kept paying her wages according to her contract and she just went home, cashed her pay cheque and got on with her life. Her film career of course stalled fatally.
A number of others told a similar story, Janet Leigh was one, another was Jane Russell. Jane had encountered a lot of racy publicity due to the film The Outlaw but as she pointed out, the sexy publicity pictures and film posters were really not representative of how she actually appeared in the film.
The film censors of the day wouldn’t allow the film to be released and Hughes used the ensuing battle with the censors to promote the film. He famously designed a bra for Jane to wear in the film which was intended to look as if Jane didn’t have a bra on at all. Jane Russell refused to wear it, padded her own bra with tissues and Hughes was apparently none the wiser. The film was finally released years after it was made, did very well and was even re-released when Hughes took over RKO.
As I said earlier, any film I have on VHS is not really worth saving as most are easy to find on DVD or on TV but I do have a few that I have rarely seen on the small screen in recent years. One of my absolute favourites is Random Harvest starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. I love that film. It’s a bit soppy and sentimental and always brings a tear to my eye at the end. It was written by one of my favourite authors too, James Hilton, who came from Leigh in Lancashire, now part of Greater Manchester. I haven’t seen it on TV since I recorded it on VHS back in the 1980’s. Is it worth copying to DVD? Of course it is, in fact I think it’s time to make a brew, get out the biscuits and the tissues and settle down for a watch.
The other day I was idly watching an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. It was the one where Ray and Debra his wife are watching their wedding video and suddenly the screen dissolves and on comes a football match. Debra is furious because Ray has taped over the wedding. Yep, those sort of things happened back then and on my video tape something similar occurred. The race video vanished into a hail of snow only to be replaced by a James Bond documentary. I was furious for a moment but then I got interested in the documentary. It focussed on Miriam D’Abo who starred in the 007 film The Living Daylights and she interviewed various ladies who had the dubious honour of being a ‘Bond Girl.’ There were plenty of clips from the Bond films, interviews and bits and pieces of behind the scenes stuff, in fact it was all pretty interesting for a Bond fan like me.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 