Rushfield Babylon

“

One great test of a TV drama’s success is whether after every season you feel you know a character better than you did the year before. Even as the story sometimes soared into baroque drama, Gandolfini found the little moments — the asides, the attentions to his family, the shrugs, the appetites, with not a false note in six seasons — that made him grow as a presence in our lives. Every year, we saw him in his struggles both mundane and terrifying, and we came to know him more intimately than we did many of our closest friends.

And never in his performance did Gandolfini for one moment give the audience a wink to say, oh no, he’s not really like that. And never for a moment did his performance apologize for Tony or let the audience stand above him and feel superior to this gangster.

”—. 

“I listened to Marilyn Monroe die,” he claims in the notes, without elaborating, adding that he had taped an angry confrontation among Bobby Kennedy, Lawford and Monroe just hours before her death: “She said she was passed around like a piece of meat. It was a violent argument about their relationship and the commitment and promises he made to her. She was really screaming and they were trying to quiet her down. She’s in the bedroom and Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbors from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking to get out of there.”—

- from the tapes of Fred Otash, famed Hollywood PI of the 40’s - 60’s as quoted in the Hollywood Reporter this week.

I was involved in a project regarding these tapes for a bit and the accounts there regarding Marilyn are extremely credible and match up very well with other accounts that have trickled out over the years.

Whatever you think about Camelot and all that  - the glamour! the vigor! the confidence - there remain 50 years later some big questions that have not been fully absorbed into the public understanding of them.  After being involved with the Otash files, when I see pictures of them, I find it very hard not to think about how JFK and RFK it seems very clear, passed back and forth this woman who was very very much falling apart, and if she hadn’t been a star, would have been locked away somewhere, kept her on the hook until she became too much of a pest and then took steps to shut her up.  The questions about her death that have never been addressed are many.  I’m no conspiracy theorist, because in general theories exhaust me. But take a peek; there’s a lot there, and keep it all in mind when you toast the glamour of Camelot.