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'I listened to Marilyn die': Private eye who bugged Monroe's house reveals details of her final hours in his diary
By Leon Watson PUBLISHED: 11:09 EST, 9 June 2013 | UPDATED: 02:04 EST, 12 June 2013 Files shedding new light on Marilyn Monroe's last night alive and her relationships with President John F Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby have emerged 51 years after her death. Documents belonging to the late Fred Otash, one of Hollywood's most notorious private detectives, were uncovered by his daughter Colleen after being found in a suburban storage unit. According to Otash, who died in 1992, Monroe had a sexual relationship with the brothers and complained about being 'passed around like a piece of meat'.
'Passed around': President John F Kennedy and his brother Bobby (left) with Marilyn Monroe Otash, who had installed bugging devices in her Los Angeles home, has long been derided by Kennedy admirers for his claims to have listened to a tape of Monroe and JFK in bed together. But the notes published by The Hollywood Reporter magazine last week contained a detailed account of his bugging activities and what he heard. Shortly before his death, he told an interviewer: 'They were having a sexual relationship ... but I don't want to get into the moans and groans.'
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And in his notes, Otash claimed: 'I listened to Marilyn Monroe die.' He recorded that on August 5 1962, she had a violent argument with the Kennedys and that she felt that she had been 'passed around like a piece of meat'. The notes read: '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.' Otash only found out she had died later on.
Notorious: Private detective Fred Otash (right) on the stand before a state legislative committee in Los Angeles about photographs he ordered several of his employees to take of actress Anita Ekberg
Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to the President at Madison Square Gardens, in New York, in May 1962, shortly before she died At that point Otash was the most famous private eye in Hollywood and the first choice for any celebrity with a potential problem. Otash, a former Los Angeles detective, had set up his own bureau in Hollywood where he specialised in 'fact-checking' for a celebrity gossip magazine called Confidential. Among the stars he bugged was Rock Hudson, whose wife apparently confronted him about his homosexuality decades before the public knew he was gay and told him to 'grow out of it'. Hudson, who died in 1985 aged 59 due to complications related to AIDS, had been considered one of the most desirable men of his day, starring alongside female screen icons such as Doris Day in classics such as 'Pillow Talk'. His other files include information on Judy Garland and how in 1963 he cleaned her Beverly Hill apartment out of all the pills and alcohol she had stashed during her bitter split from third husband Sid Luft. Otash died in 1992 having been used as the inspiration for the shady PI played by Jack Nicholson in the Oscar-winning 1974 film Chinatown. James Ellroy, the crime novelist and author of LA Confidential, who met Otash several times, turned his career into a novel, Shakedown, published online and is now writing the script for a television version. According to The Hollywood Reporter, it was the negative portrayal of Otash in Ellroy's book that persuaded Colleen to search through her father's old records and make some of them public. 'I was very aggrieved,' she said. '[I thought]: what can we do to stop [Ellroy] from taking my father's life and turning it into just a horrible fictional depiction?' The Otash notes published so far do not reveal what, if anything, the detective discovered when he searched Monroe's house and the tapes of the Hollywood star's alleged encounters with the Kennedys have never surfaced. A red filing cabinet that contained Otash's most sensitive material was removed from his apartment by his lawyer after he collapsed from an apparent heart attack. Its contents were never seen again.
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