Betty's Attic
Shop Betty’s Attic.com for nostalgic collectibles. Betty's Attic offers baby boomer toys, dolls, puzzles and games plus classic television, movie and radio memorabilia… Recycle
Friday, May 19, 2017
On this day in 1962, Marilyn Monroe sang her famous birthday tribute to John F. Kennedy Jr. It was the beginning of what would later be called Monroe's "summer of hell", which would end with her untimely and suspicious death on August 5.

I was a kid when it happened. I didn't fully understand the significance of the "birthday song moment". I couldn't fathom the weight of Marilyn's death just a few months later, or the tragic assassination of JFK himself the following year. As I got older, I finally came to understand only one thing about that time in history: in politics - as in Hollywood - things are seldom as they seem.

For example, it wasn't even the president's birthday. The event was a "super fundraiser" for the democratic party. JFK's early birthday celebration was just part of the staging. No one seems to know (or want to tell) whose idea it was to have the blonde bombshell delivery the breathy birthday tribute. Just as no one seems to know where Marilyn was when Peter Lawford tried unsuccessfully to bring her to the stage with not one, but three introductions. His final introduction, "Mr. President, the late Marilyn Monroe", drew laughs from the crowd, but in hindsight seemed an eerie harbinger of what was to come. (Or perhaps, as many now believe, a slip of the tongue on Lawford's part.)

There remain untold stories about John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, both separately and together. Still lingering in the public imagination is the unsettled sense of unsolved mystery - of something gone horribly wrong just offstage where we can't quite glimpse it.

My mom used to say "secrets always come to the light", but I'm not so sure. For five decades, authors and historians have tried to dust off the facts, presenting theories, explanations, and wild conjecture. It's nice to believe that someday we'll know the whole truth, but here's another thing I learned as I got older: some secrets do come to the light, some secrets are partially revealed, and some secrets never see the light of day.
Posted by: Betty | 8:00 AM | permalink
Newer›  ‹Older

© 2017 Johnson Smith Co.