Netflix Marilyn Monroe Documentary Is A Fascinating Deep Dive Into the Icon’s Death

Netflix’s new Marilyn Monroe documentary, ominously titled The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, begins with a sinister statement from one of Monroe’s biographers, Anthony Summers, claiming he found evidence that suggests “the circumstances of her death were covered up.” Later, you’ll realize this is somewhat misleading editing on the part of director Emma Cooper, when you hear the full clip of this Summers interview: He does not believe there is solid evidence to support any conspiracy that Monroe was murdered, by a government agency or otherwise.

Guided by Summer—whose 1985 biography, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, was a New York Times bestseller—The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe uses the real audio from over 650 taped recorded interviews conducted by Summer for that biography, including with Monroe’s friends, co-workers, and even the private investigators hired to spy on her. It does not come to any new conclusions beyond what was already covered in his book, but it’s undeniably fascinated to hear the archived taped interviews about the movie star—even if the accompanying “reenactments,” featuring actors lip-syncing to the audio, are silly.

Marilyn Monroe died of a drug overdose on August 4, 1962, in her Los Angeles home. Her death was ruled a probable suicide by officials. Nothing in Summer’s book, or this new documentary, disputes that, but it does spend a copious amount of time piecing together the timeline of her death. Summer found strong evidence to suggest Monroe died hours before the official “time of death report,” giving Robert Kennedy and his people time to remove evidence of the then-Attorney General’s connection to the pop icon. Hence, Summer’s cryptic statement which opens the movie.

Several people that Summer interviews—including Monroe’s close friends and a private investigator who says he was hired by Jimmy Hoffa to dig up dirt on the Kennedys—say with confidence that Robert Kennedy was having an affair with Marilyn Monroe. Several say that she was also having an affair with John Kennedy, aka the President of the United States. And, Summers suggests, when things got a little too real with the Cuban missile crisis and the red scare and the Malibu getaways, the Kennedy administration eventually reached a point where it decided it was simply too risky for the two most powerful men in America to be chatting with a woman whom the FBI deemed “leftist.”

There are a lot of threads to follow, but the most important one—that Cooper skillfully highlights by cutting in interviews with the legend herself—is Monroe’s ultimately tragic life trajectory from a child abandoned by her family to an icon tossed around about powerful, abusive men. That she felt used by the Kennedys, and many other men in her life, is made more than clear. So many saw her as a prize to win, rather than a talent to behold. In the end, the world suffered her loss as a result. The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe is a fascinating, if depressing, reminder of that.