In the spotlight

SHORTLY after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin allowed a small number of academics to poke around in the previously secret Communist Party and KGB archives.

The resulting flood of revelations — the American Communist Party was funded by Moscow; Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage — precipitated a mock headline from Weekly World News, the satirical supermarket tabloid: “Marilyn Monroe Was a Russian Spy!” Accompanying this latest “revelation” from the Kremlin vaults was a “never before seen” photograph of the dumpy Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev leering at Monroe and the additional claim that the two were lovers.

The story was meant to be a joke, of course. But once upon a time, FBI Director J Edgar Hoover had indeed considered that Monroe might be an agent of the communist conspiracy. Indeed, the trickle of material from American intelligence archives again demonstrates Hoover’s twin passions: anti-communism and the private lives of “politically unreliable” celebrities. Marilyn Monroe, a megastar whose unsophisticated politics were left-leaning, was a natural target for Washington’s Red-hunting G-men.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI released portions of its Monroe file in 2006, but with a significant number of redactions. When the Associated Press petitioned the agency to re-release the files with fewer blackouts, the FBI claimed to have lost the Monroe material — only to “rediscover” it and provide copies with fewer expurgations to the news agency.

The more complete files reveal that according to the bureau’s “sources”, members of Monroe’s inner circle were increasingly worried about the actress’s drift toward radicalism, citing her friendship with American expatriate Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a scion of the Vanderbilt fortune who was ostracised by his famous family for his communist sympathies.

Hoover’s interest in Monroe was piqued by her relationship with — and subsequent marriage to — nebbish playwright Arthur Miller, the author of the classic anti-McCarthy play The Crucible. Miller, who had loitered around various Soviet front organisations in the 1940s, earned himself a subpoena from the House Committee on Un-American Activities and, after failing to provide satisfactory answers to the committee, also earned a contempt-of-Congress charge for refusing to reveal the names of fellow writers with whom he attended political meetings. The FBI appears to have shared the concern of Los Angeles newspaper columnist Vincent X Flaherty, who fretted that “teenage boys and girls worship Marilyn”, and if “Marilyn marries a man who was connected with communism, they can’t help but start thinking that communism can’t be so bad after all!”

But the most revealing aspect of the Monroe files is the terrific shoddiness of Hoover’s investigators, who frequently catalogued third-hand information from dubious sources. One report notes that a New York Daily News reporter received an anonymous phone call fearing that Monroe had “drifted into the communist orbit”. Another relates that the actress had toured Brooklyn with “a Life photographer who is a [communist] party member”.

The files are stuffed with secondary source material: lurid items by gossip columnist (and Hoover confidant) Walter Winchell, clippings from speculative newspaper and magazine stories, and rumours culled from Monroe biographies, including an entertaining extended critique of a book by Norman Mailer, described as “an eccentric but well-known author” by an FBI field agent.

The FBI’s surveillance of Monroe was an outrageous offence against civil liberties motivated by extreme paranoia — but the agency wasn’t far off in assessing her political sympathies. According to Monroe biographer Lois Banner, by 1960 she had indeed transformed into a “dedicated leftist”, having even written to an editor at The New York Times to express disappointment in the paper’s coverage of Fidel Castro’s revolution, which she considered too critical of the revolutionaries. The recently released FBI files make no mention of this communication.

Hoover’s G-men ultimately concluded that Monroe wasn’t a party member, but merely a fellow traveller. “Subject’s views are very positively and concisely leftist; however, if she is being actively used by the Communist Party, it’s not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles.” And sadly the files provide no evidence to support the Weekly World News’s claim that she slept with Khrushchev.

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