“Like an anteater, Hollywood cannot see beyond its fucking nose.”

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Writer Norman Mailer wasn’t going to forget it. He waited until Marilyn was dead before launching his masturbatory, chest-beating scenario of Monroe’s legend, his fantasy based upon a previous crackpot’s short publication two years after Marilyn’s death. The crackpot was Frank Capell, a rabid, right-wing anti-communist friend of Walter Winchell who underwrote whatever barb against the Kennedys could be manufactured. Capell’s tale ushered in the notion that Robert Kennedy and his “Gestapo team” deliberately caused the death of Marilyn. “Capell told me his theory,” said the chairman of the Hollywood chapter of the John Birch Society, “but he lacked any concrete proof. He said Marilyn was a communist sympathizer under constant FBI surveillance, and Arthur Miller had been shadowed by the FBI, at Director Hoover’s orders. Miller and Monroe attended suspicious meetings.” Mailer snatched up Capell’s scenario and deliberately pressed the tale to stir a controversy. He needed money - he knew every fool in the world would jump at his tale: Marilyn Monroe murdered by FBI and CIA agents. Mailer’s publisher fired the volley of fake facts at the public and promoted Mailer’s book to bestseller status. A regretful but unconvincingly sorrowful Mailer later admitted he had avoided researching Monroe’s death, had never met her, but had manufactured the “controversy” in order to sell books - because he needed money.