AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Grant]

So she knew something was up which was why she drove past at three am? But the murderers had dismissed her so she wouldn't have a key.

We need more research into exactly how she was sacked. I'm asking Chat GPT

[Mick Harper]

You're jumping the gun. We don't know whether she was the housekeeper. Remember, Monroe had just suffered some sort of mental collapse and her 'doctor' had advised her to live in an ordinary house in an ordinary LA suburb--but just round the corner from the doctor!--'to get in touch with the real Marilyn'.

Now that is potty in itself. Not as a therapeutic measure but as a practical one. Can you imagine the second most famous woman in the world (after the Queen) living somewhere that allowed anyone to ring the bell and say, "Is Marilyn in?" Except after the housekeeper had gone home, it would be, "Oh, Marilyn. Glad you're in..."

That's where ChatGP should start.

[Mick Harper]

So now we proceed to (a) make sense of the known facts while (b) de-fanging the conspiracy theory aspects. If we accept that Marilyn Monroe was simultaneously a valuable property and an embarrassment to various parties we might put together this scenario:

1. She is set up in a nice house in a nice suburb, handy for work, friends, doctor etc
2. The house is provided with discreet security externally and modest assistance internally
3. One night everything goes pear-shaped and Marilyn does a Jimi Hendrix
4. Everybody is scrambling to protect their backs
5. In co-operation with a mildly corrupt LAPD.

I think that just about does it. The only loose end is the identity of the people who 'set it up'. Candidates include: the studio, her actors agency, the doctor, the Mob, the Kennedys, the government, her Ratpack friends and herself.

That would be a matter of public record if anybody had been prepared to dig hard enough at the time. Maybe even now.

[Wile E. Coyote]

It looks to Wiley, (after a quick look) that it was an accidental death, but caused by severe medical malpractice, in which the houskeeper/personal assistant was also complicit.

Similar to Matthew Perry.

[Mick Harper]

This was huge at the time. Were the authorities so incompetent as not to uncover such skullduggery with the whole world watching? Even if they couldn't prove it, it would have been the (un)official explanation.

It doesn't explain why the housekeeper was around at 3 am nor why her nephew repaired the window at 5 am. A mere doctor would not have had the co-operation of even an LAPD-on-the-casual-take.

The Glazier's Story, it occurs to me, ties in with the missing key and the drive-by lit window. I should like to know the last definite sighting of -- or phone call with -- Monroe since the death might have occurred much earlier. Now we are in Chappaquiddick territory!

[Mick Harper]

I've had a coupla days letting this swirl around my mind. There's only one thing that pulls everything together, the studio.

As I understand it, the 'studio system' signs you up for relative peanuts, you have to do (say) three pictures a year, for seven years. You can't work for anyone else and you have to abide by reasonably onerous 'life' rules.

If you're a bust, you get cut; if you become 'bankable' you have to work for rookie money for half your working life. You have to make the films they say or you can be loaned out to other studios to make their films, whether you want to or not. It's just like the NFL.

Now Marilyn's mom is known to be clinically insane. Maybe she is too, maybe she just can't handle being a star, maybe she is just chafing against her contract. Whatever it is, she's going off the studio rails big time and she's the studio's biggest property. So what do they do?

They provide her with a house, a house doctor, a housekeeper, discrete security which includes tapes of what's going on in the house. All of which is testified to, sort of, but if it becomes national news the studio will be for the high jump. Marilyn's the world's sweetheart, never mind dead Kennedys'. Someone's got to pay.

Splish, splash, splosh, it ain't gonna be the studio. And if anyone even bigger than the studio (and/or the Mob) says otherwise, they've got the tapes. So it is a conspiracy theory after all. And unless I get a brown envelope pronto I'm going to write it all up on this website I operate, gazpacho?

[Mick Harper]

I was watching a Youtube about the last British manufacturer of train wagons--I won't give the URL in case this is too specialist for youse guys--when I thought I recognised the name of the company, W H Davis.

Sure enough, when I googled the name, it turned out there was a Welsh poet called W H Davies we had to study in primary school because he was a fave of one of our teachers. Or maybe that's too specialist for youse guys. If so, I apologise for wasting your time.

[Mick Harper]

But this goes some way to explaining the charms of Youtube. You would think, given the number of channels fighting for our attention, everybody's interests would be catered for. But we all know this just isn't so. They are all competing at the next level up. Even the level above that. We might call it 'the general interest, segmented'.

I can just about imagine a programme on W H Davies, the poet. More likely ten minutes about him in a BBC-4 doc about Welsh poetry, but even that would be a stretch. I cannot imagine a cable company coming up with anything so worthy.

Even though train buffs outnumber poetry enthusiasts by a fairly wide margin, there's not the remotest chance of twenty minutes being devoted to W H Davis the last wagon-maker in Britain. It might get a two-minute why-oh-why at the end of a news bulletin if it closes down.

So how has Youtube changed all this? /more