Television
Question master
Alexander Chancellor
Marilyn Monroe: Say Goodbye to the President (BBC1, Friday) was just a televi- sion version of the Sunday Times's recent revelations about the actress's affairs with the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby, and the mystery surrounding her death. These were taken from a new book called Goddess by Anthony Summers, who has assiduously interviewed everyone who will speak to him on the subject — most of them, it seems, retired private detectives. It is a sleazy subject anyway, but even sleazier on television than on the printed page. The revelations were not in them- selves spectacular. They confirmed, if any-
one still doubted it, that Marilyn Monroe had been involved with both the President of the United States and the Attorney- General. They also suggested that there had been some monkey business on the night of her death — the body removed still breathing to a hospital and then returned after death to her home, where it was officially discovered several hours later than it really had been. This messing around with the poor, dying film star was apparently intended to extricate Bobby Kennedy from a potential scandal. He had reportedly visited her not long before she took her overdose, and time was needed to put as much distance as possible between him and Los Angeles before her death was revealed. The television programme in- cluded a lot of interviews with the above- mentioned private detectives — a gloomy and untrustworthy-looking bunch. There was also an interview with an ex-wife of Peter Lawford, the Hollywood actor whose wives included one of the Kennedy sisters and who got his kicks by laying on sordid parties for Jack and Bobby in his Califor- nian villa. None of this was enjoyable to watch. The only enjoyable bits, even though often irrelevant in the context, were short clips from Marilyn Monroe films and extracts from old newsreels showing the Kennedy brothers at their most youthful and cocky and various cor- rupt villains like Jimmy Hoffer of the Teamsters' union.
On BBC2 Russell Harty has been doing a sort of glossy version of the radio'g Down Your Way series, most recently in New York and Liverpool. New York was unsur- prisingly more fun than Liverpool, where the people Harty interviewed included a retired docker and Cilla Black. But despite his rather irritating manner, which makes him seem like a working-class Norman St John-Stevas, Russell Harty is a cheerful interviewer and an agreeable enough guide. He is, however, thin gruel in com- parison with Alan Whicker, whose series Living with Uncle Sam (BBC1) — about British people in the United States — has been compulsive viewing. Last Sunday the main attraction was an extraordinary
woman who had led the most rackety life imaginable. She had started off as a boy, the son of Vita Sackville-West's chauffeur, emigrated to America, where he became the adopted son of Margaret Rutherford, then changed sex, married a black man in South Carolina's first ever mixed marriage, had a daughter — no, not an adopted daughter — and is now engaged to another black man who is a convict on Death Row. After all this, she looked like a slightly eccentric old spinster, but perfectly calm and a little nostalgic for her childhood in Hastings. Also on the programme was Pamela Mason, a former wife of James Mason, who lives luxuriously in Los Angeles from which vantage point she looks at Britain with unqualified loathing. Like many ex-patriates, she thinks Mar- garet Thatcher is wonderful. She seemed impressively tough, but thoroughly dislike- able. Whicker always looks unctuous but asks very direct and impudent questions, often about money or sex. However he does it, the technique is extremely suc- cessful.
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