Watch: Marilyn Monroe’s 100th Birthday: See the Actresses Who’ve Played the Movie Icon
When Marilyn Monroe died on Aug. 4, 1962, countless conspiracy theories were born.
The Los Angeles County Coroner determined that the 36-year-old—who was born Norma Jeane Baker on June 1, 1926—died of acute barbiturate poisoning and ruled her overdose a probable suicide.
But that verdict has simply never sat well with people who suspected she suffered an even darker fate.
“I’ve learned a lot that I wouldn’t trade for anything,” Monroe told Life magazine in a July interview published two days before her death. “I wouldn’t want a child of mine to go through what I’ve been through.”
The Some Like It Hot star added, “I hope to ultimately be able, through my work, to illuminate for some people some things I’ve learned. Maybe it’s just a dream. But I’m also entitled to my dreams.”
At the same time, it wasn’t a secret Monroe had been struggling. Her battles with substance abuse and depression were well-documented, and she was fired in June from the romantic comedy Something’s Got to Give for, as 20th Century Fox put it, “spectacular absenteeism.”
And yet in the nearly 64 years since, every moment of her final hours, days, weeks and months have been dissected for clues of foul play.
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“I didn’t know much about the death scene, about the autopsy not being as complete as it should have been, that one of the detectives was convinced the scene was staged,” The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe author James Patterson told The Hollywood Reporter in November. Despite his 2025 book’s subtitle, “A True Crime Thriller,” fine print notes it’s “a work of fiction.”
And while Joyce Carole Oates never claimed her 2000 epic Blonde, which was adapted into a haunting 2022 film starring Ana de Armas, to be anything other than inspired-by fiction, her ending includes a nefarious plot. In the book, Monroe overdoses, but someone comes into her Brentwood home, administers a fatal injection of Nembutal and clears the house of materials that could tie her to…somebody.
“That could be something like a hallucination,” Oates told The Telegraph in 2022 of the death scene. “But I also wanted to leave the possibility—like an alternative universe. It’s quite possible—not probable, but possible—that she was assassinated.”
Monroe’s alleged affairs with President John F. Kennedy and then-U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy were the unnamed elephants in Oates’ room, but the extent of their involvement with the actress remains so much hearsay.
No member of the Kennedy family has ever spoken publicly about Monroe, though J. Randy Taraborrelli wrote in his 2023 book Jackie: Public, Private, Secret that first lady Jacqueline Kennedy fielded a call from the actress at their home in Hyannis Port, Mass., in April 1962.
She considered Monroe a “disaster waiting to happen,” Taraborrelli wrote, “someone too vulnerable, too weak to be played with by JFK.”
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Meanwhile, Monroe’s friend Arthur James attributed her death to her involvement with the Kennedys, but only in that she was suffering from a broken heart.
After she performed “Happy Birthday” for the president at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962, “She was terribly hurt when she was told directly never to call or contact again, Robert or John,” James told biographer Andrew Summers, as heard in the 2022 Netflix documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes. “That was an order. Jack didn’t contact her, Bob did. And that’s what killed her.”
Though alternative theories will never die, an official 1982 inquiry maintained that the real unsolvable mystery was whether or not Monroe intended to kill herself.
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On Aug. 4, 1962, the day in question, Monroe’s housekeeper Eunice Murray called the actress’ psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson at around 3:30 a.m. after noticing a light still on in Monroe’s locked bedroom. When Murray told Greenson she could see through a window that Monroe was lying on her bed, he said he’d be right over and to call Monroe’s doctor Dr. Hyman Engelberg.
Engelberg called police at 4:25 a.m. to report that he was calling from Monroe’s home and she was dead.
There was an empty Nembutal bottle on the floor and, according to police, no suicide note.
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“I could see the phone clutched fiercely in her right hand,” Greenson later wrote, per Summers’ 1985 book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. “I supposed she was trying to make a phone call before she was overwhelmed.”
And she couldn’t have had any idea how much more obsessed people would be with her in death than when she was alive.
Monroe compared fame to caviar, telling Life, “It’s good to have caviar, but if you had it every damn day, you know?”
On what would have been her 100th birthday, see more of Monroe’s life in photos:
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