Post by Graveyardbride on Sept 18, 2019 12:45:37 GMT -5
The Killing of Marilyn Monroe Podcast
In a new episode of The Killing of Marilyn Monroe, podcast host Charles Casillo claims Frank Sinatra’s romance with Marilyn came to a screeching halt when he learned of her dark past. The blue-eyed crooner, it is alleged, planned to marry the famous blonde in the early 1960s prior to learning of her suicidal ideation. “Like many men, Frank Sinatra fell under her spell,” Casillo shares in the episode, as reported by Us Weekly. “He treated her like he had never treated any other woman. He was very protective of her.”
However, after talking with his attorney, Sinatra changed his mind. “He actually went to his lawyer and said, ‘I think I am going to marry Marilyn,’ and his lawyer talked him out of it,” insists Casillo, who claims the attorney convinced him that marrying America’s most famous sex symbol would destroy his career. “The lawyer said, ‘Don’t marry her,’” Casillo continues. “‘She’s going to commit suicide, and if she kills herself during the time that she is Frank Sinatra’s wife, you will go down in history as the man responsible for Marilyn Monroe’s death.’”
According to the podcast, Marilyn’s previous marriage to playwright Arthur Miller was doomed from the start. The two were married from 1956 until 1961. “Arthur Miller ran with a very intellectual crowd,” celebrity biographer Mark Bego shares in the podcast. “And then Marilyn was looked at by people in power as just being that movie star, that blonde bombshell, that sex goddess.”
According to Us Weekly, The Killing of Marilyn Monroe aims to investigate the icon’s final days by analyzing her career, marriages and affairs. The 12-part audio documentary is presented by the creators of the Natalie Wood podcast, Fatal Voyage: The Mysterious Death of Natalie. An episode drops every Monday.
James Kaplan’s 2015 book, Sinatra: The Chairman, includes a detailed account of the singer’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe. “There was no doubt that Frank was in love with Marilyn,” said talent manager Milt Ebbins in an interview with the author. He met her in 1954 while he was still married to Ava Gardner and they began seeing each other in 1961, a relationship that lasted several months.
“Yeah, Frank wanted to marry the broad,” Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra’s close confidante, told Kaplan. “He asked her and she said no.”
According to Kaplan, a year later, in 1962, Marilyn accompanied Sinatra to his Cal-Neva resort in Lake Tahoe and the following week, she died from a barbiturate overdose at the age of 36. Sinatra attempted to attend her funeral, but was turned away by Joe DiMaggio, who was briefly married to the Hollywood legend in the 1950s.
In August 2018, Casillo, who wrote Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon, said Marilyn’s final years were tumultuous. She was battling crippling depression, anxiety and low self-esteem and was under the round-the-clock care of a psychiatrist. It was reported that around this time, the actress was also struggling with substance abuse, as well as physical ailments, including endometriosis, which resulted in a miscarriage during her marriage to Miller.
Then in 1962, when she was in the middle of filming Something’s Got to Give, she was fired from the romantic comedy because she was consistently late or absent for days at a time. She was found dead from an apparent overdose just two months later.
Casillo tracked down some of the last living individuals who befriended the tragic star. “She had been living a very chaotic and frantic existence in her last months,” he explained. “She was on a downward spiral ... She was 36-years-old, and for her, that was devastating ....” In that era, for a sex symbol, a love goddess like Marilyn, 36 was the beginning of the end. “For someone like Marilyn [whose] whole identity and whole persona came from being sensual ... the idea of losing that was very frightening to her ... Also on the last day, she was furious about a lot of things ... She was very angry, she was very frightened.”
According to Casillo, part of the star’s emotional turmoil stemmed from her life-long quest to develop a relationship with her father after enduring an erratic childhood in a series of foster homes, where she was sexually-abused, only to be brutally rejected. “She was born illegitimately and her mother was in and out of mental institutions,” he explained. “... Her mother would show her a photo of a man with a fedora, a handsome guy, saying, ‘This is your father.’ At that time, Marilyn was shuffled from one foster home to another. She was in orphanages. She felt like she didn’t belong anywhere and her father came to represent security and someone who would love her and take her away from the kind of miserable existence that she had.
“... When she became an adult, she did try to contact him, and he wouldn’t talk to her. He wouldn’t see her. He said, ‘Talk to my lawyer.’ So he wouldn’t recognize her as being his daughter. I think that Marilyn spent her whole life trying to find a man to be a substitute for her father, someone who would be a savior, someone who would protect her, someone who would comfort the little girl that was always inside of her.”
Sources: Stephanie Nolasco, Fox News, September 18, 2019, and Apple Podcasts.