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Probable: To Celebrate Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jean Baker)'s 100th Birthday!

  • 46 minutes ago
  • 5 min read

For years now, I have researched and written a series of short stories entitled "Killing Kennedys," a direct quote from something Jackie Kennedy Onassis once said. I also have a series of short stories in that series about the many women victimized by the Kennedy men and the machine in and around them. This is one.


Today would have been the 100th birthday of Marilyn Monroe, and in her memory, here is my story, based on years and years of research and study, on how I believe Marilyn really died, through her point of view. I gave her a happy ending, for she deserves it. Please note this is a work of fiction. To learn more about individuals in the conspiracy theories (cough), please note the hashtags at the end of the story to learn more.


Happy birthday, Norma Jean! You are seen. You are heard. And most of all, you are REMEMBERED! This image below was generated by AI this morning, to highlight my story, which I wrote in 1999.




PROBABLE

COPYRIGHT BY Anne Hendricks, KILLING KENNEDIES, 1999


Justice is a bullshit notion. I know that now, floating here in the Void. The Void is a holding pen between what I was and what I am becoming. 


I’m dead. Yep, dead as a doornail. Yes, I am freaking dead. 


The reels of my life are playing back, flickering against the dark, and for the first time, I do not have to act. I have to watch. It is strange to be a voyeur. Everyone has been a voyeur of my life; now I get my turn. Should it be THE LIFE AND TIMES OF NORMA JEAN? Or here’s one: THE KNOCKING OFF OF MARILYN!


Mob talk can be easy when one hangs with Frank and Joe.


The reel starts. From the time I was born, my poor and crazy mother’s bastard, who the hell knows who my Pop is? Oh, yes, being dumped at the Home. I spent years scrubbing pots and pans and dishes, staring out a window at RKO, waiting to be a star. My magazines were my escape, and when I could, I went to the movies. The boys came in at night, and no matter how hard I fought, they won.


Everyone said I didn't "have a chance in hell!"


I was a broken child who grew up to be a blonde bomb, carrying secrets that were never mine to keep. I did pick my new last name, for my Mama’s people. Did you know the Monroes were all batshit crazy, too? I am not crazy, and I am not dumb. I was never, ever dumb. You do what you have to do to make it: I learned that in the school of hard knocks!


The reel shows the truth: the reading, the self-education, the production company, the failure at love, and the mastery of loss. Hard knocks, no justice. Choices, lots and lots of bad choices! I couldn’t even have my babies right. Oh my babies, my poor darling babies. Arthur used to throw the miscarriages up to me.

 

I wanted to know the real love of a man, a family, a home, and a great actress.  Check that: I didn’t get those first three things, but I did get the last one: I am a real actress, and that transcended the star dreams, right?


Then, the reel hits the jagged cut of my final night. The phone call to Joe Junior to encourage him to stay at military school. Calling Peter because I was going to have the press conference - I would not be silenced!  Bobby came over, and we argued. No one knew he came to LA to see me tonight. 


He was the bait. The lurking creepy GI men were in the cage. We fought. He left. Those Kennedy boys thought I was a stupid quickie, but I wasn't. I fell asleep after talking to my shrink. I hung up that phone!


Enter the suffocating hand, being gagged, the fight, the clawing against the sheets, just like Mama must have clawed against the darkness of her madness. They flipped me over like a pancake, and I felt that intrusive, cold violation, just like the rapes I endured, over and over, but they are putting poison in me. This time it was the end. 


They did not just kill me; they tried to erase me.


Now, the reel freezes on the morgue. I am hovering, a spectator to the end. I see the men. Lionel Grandison is so angry; he is a good man trying to save his soul by shouting the truth. Dr. Thomas Noguchi is the predator, hissing threats of disappearance. And there is Dr. Theodore Curphey, his hand a ruin of nerves, holding that pen like a jagged piece of glass.


He presses down. The onyx ink bleeds. I hate the second word, but the first word. Right there! Oh, that first word. That will be my justice. 


PROBABLE.


It is a stuttering, jagged admission. It is not the clean suicide they wanted; it is a fracture in their perfect lie. 


One crumb, I whisper to the Void. They think they have silenced me, but they have left a trail of ink that leads straight to the rot of all those men who used me: Roselli, J. Edgar—I could have loaned him my heels!—Giancana, Bobby, Jack. All of them. The cookie crumbs lead straight to their doors.


The Void pulls back the curtain, and I see the future. I see the same machine that ground me down turning on them. I see the bullets, a drum into an ocean, the betrayals. Dorothy Kilgallen could have known what to do with the letters I gave to Jeanne. Secrets have a way of outliving the people who buy them. Dorothy will leave her own crumbs. Jeanne will go into hiding and have her babies. I respect that; someone deserves to survive. Who is Mary Jo? Oh, that poor girl, that poor poor girl - So, Teddy was no better either?


The reel stops. The clinical cold of the slab and the suffocating weight of the lies shear away. 


The Void is gone.


The light expands. It does not burn because it holds. Justice was never found in a headline. It was found in the waiting, and I am leaving that now. 


The light swirls and twirls, taking me to a garden of flowers. I am Norma Jean again. Gone is Marilyn, the movie star. I’m the girl into a woman I deserved to be!  I feel the kiss of the sun on my face, twirling around and around in this meadow of lavender. I feel...


I feel love, for they are coming toward me, giggling, two tow-headed, blue-eyed, radiant little angels.  I do not look back at the city of secrets and lies. I do not look back at the word written in ink.


I am not a “chance in hell,” because I am in heaven. I hold out my arms as they bellow, “MAMA!” and I embrace my children.


I do not look at the city of secrets. I do not look back at the word written in ink. I am not "a chance in hell," because I have heaven. I am in heaven. I smile, I grab them in both my arms, and for the first time, ever, I am finally home.


 
 
 

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