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SLATZER Robert

Robert F.Slatzer.

 
Date of birth : April 4th 1927, Marion, Ohio.

Date of death : March 28th 2005, Los Angeles.

 

Place of iiving :

Columbus, Ohio.

Hollywood Hills.

 

Practise: reporter.

 

Story

He was one of the conspiracy theory partisans about Marilyn's death, and unfounded assertions the most heard.

In 1974, he published "The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe" : he told how, young reporter in the press group Scripps-Howard, he had met Norma Jeane, model and budding starlet, in the hall of the Fox, in July 1946; they would have dated the very same evening and he claimed that their love story lasted 6 months, and that until her death, he remained close to her and shared her most private secrets.

According to him, they spent the week-end of October from 3rd to 6th 1952 in Tijuana, Mexico, and would have got married on October 4th 1952.  

Kid Chissell (former boxer and friend of Slatzer who corroborated his sayings) would have accompanied them; but this one later affirmed to a reporter that he had supported Slatzer only because he wanted to help a friend, and that he needed the 100$ Slatzer had given to him.

Then, they would have danced all night long at the Foreign Club.

The next morning, waking up at the Rosarita Beach Hotel, Marilyn would have realized that she had made a huge mistake when she heard DiMaggio's voice on the radio, who commentated on the base-ball national championship.

Back to Los Angeles, Darryl Zanuck, head of the Fox, would have convoked them, asking them to cancel this union. They would have returned to Tijunana the next day, and bribed the law man who had married them so that he burnt the wedding certificate.
Excluding the fact that Marilyn was in Los ANgeles this particular week-end, Slatzer had never been able to produce any document proving this union or its dissolution.
Since the publication of his book in 1974, not any witness has showed or made know to attest to the truth about this wedding.

Kay Eicher was married to Slatzer from 1954 to 1956, and she also confirms that Slatzer had only met Marilyn once, for the pictures in Niagara Falls.

They would have met in Summer 1952, during "Niagara" outdoor shootings. There are no proof that Marilyn and Slatzer had met again but there are no more letters, new picture sessions or evidences proving a relationship.

No member of Marilyn's circle has said knowing him, and his name didn't appear in none of Marilyn's personal address books.

 

Slatzer's detractors, and there are many of them, affirm that he was only a big-time fanciful man; he would have founded his whole life career on a passing meeting during the shooting of "Niagara" (1953). The only tangible evidence proposed by Slatzer in his book is a picture of Marilyn and him with the Niagara falls backdrop, on which appears the inscription" To Bob, Luck and Love, Marilyn".

Article dated September 18th 1952 from the Pottstown Mercury Pennsylvania : . 

Although Slatzer had became the most "noisy" partisan of the Kennedy theory, his allegations according to which the two brothers were involved in Marilyn's death had already appeared in the romanticized biography of Norman Mailer. Biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles had also alluded to it, and they had appeared for the first time in Frank A.Capell's pamphlet, published by the right-wing activist in 1964.

The story of an affair between Marilyn and Robert Kennedy, and the accusations he uttered according to which Kennedy was directly involved in her death, had a lot to do with his improvisations.

For years, in the press and on television, Slatzer made huge profit from this story.

He pursued his lie by selling some pictures he said he had taken in  1962 on the set of "Something's Got to Give". But the negatives and the contact sheets he sold, turned out not to have been taken by him (nobody remembered his visit on the very shut off set of Cukor's movie) but by James Mitchell, the Fox set photographer.

Since the publication of his first book in 1974, Slatzer had remained at the forefront of Marilyn's death investigation. He appealed to other people to help him in his crusade, including the private detective Milo Speriglio, who also wrote 2 books about the conspiracy surrounding Marilyn's death. In 1996 Slatzer and Speriglio held a press conference to outline another reason for which Marilyn had to be silenced : she was about to reveal what the governement knew about the Roswell extraterrestrials.

 

In 1982 John Van de Kamp, representative of the public prosecutor, influenced among others by Slatzer and 
Speriglio, required a preliminary investigation in order to decide if there were reasonable motives to begin an investigation about Marilyn's murder. The verdict was : "The facts aren't in favor of uncertain elements".

Slatzer also took part in the production of 2 TV movies on Marilyn, both based on his book, and made frequent appearances in documentaries about Marilyn.

Bibliography

"The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe", Robert F. Slatzer, New York, Pinnacle House, 1974.

"Enquête sur une mort suspecte : Marilyn Monroe", Robert F.Slatzer, Editions Julliard.

"The Marilyn Files", Robert F. Slatzer, New York, Shapolsky Books, 1992.

Those books have given TV programs.  The first one was the basis of "Marilyn and Me" (1991) in which Slatzer appeared briefly, then to the documentary "The Marilyn Files" (1992).

 

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