Joseph Kennedy II’s ex-wife writes a tell-all book. Michael Kennedy’s adventures in baby sitting are late-night comic fodder for Dave, Jay, Conan and Bill. John F. Kennedy Jr. chastises his cousins in his own magazine. In November, Seymour Hersh’s “The Dark Side of Camelot” will be published.
As if the Kennedys didn’t have enough image problems, WinStar Home Entertainment has just released “Say Goodbye to the President: Marilyn and the Kennedys,” a 1985 documentary that first investigated the role that Marilyn Monroe’s alleged illicit relations with Jack and Robert Kennedy played in her mysterious death, and the alleged coverup that followed.
This is an expanded version that further reveals the sordid events of Monroe’s lost, and last, weekend, that, according to producer Ted Landreth, “led inexorably to her death.”
“This was a part of the story we couldn’t include in the original film,” Landreth said in a phone interview. “It was so horrible and frightening to the people who knew about it, they wouldn’t go on camera. . . .”
This “missing chapter” better explains why she died, Landreth said. “She was in a state of some despondency over her relationships with Jack and Bobby Kennedy and with people whom she thought were her best friends. From one weekend to the other, there was a visible downward spiral. All of those people, and I would include the president and his brother, knew the state she was in, and . . . they had to decide whether to rescue her or just let her go.”
“Say Goodbye to the President . . .” is a textbook model of what is now called tabloid journalism, but Landreth rejects the term. “It’s a matter of doing the job that journalism is supposed to do. In 1962, nobody laid a glove on the story. There were journalists with some degree of credibility who could have told major parts of it, but were either talked out of it or had their stories killed. Even in the 1980s, nobody wanted to touch it until the BBC (broadcast the film).”
“Say Goodbye to the President: Marilyn and the Kennedys” (WinStar Home Entertainment; $19.98; 71 minutes) is available for purchase from Facets Multimedia, 800-331-6197.
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