In video, "The mystery of Marilyn Monroe", the poignant investigation which makes the last witnesses speak

This summer will mark 60 years since the death of Marilyn Monroe.

On the night of August 4 to 5, 1962, the most famous movie star in the world died of an overdose of barbiturates.

In the solitude of a barely furnished room in his small hacienda in Brentwood, acquired a few months earlier.

"Probable suicide" then ruled the Los Angeles coroner.

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If the mystery surrounding the circumstances of this tragic death, at only 36 years old, contributed to the persistence of the myth, it does not explain everything.

Genius actress, model with a rare photogeny, gifted entrepreneur, victim, feminist, intellectual, manipulator... Since 1962, Marilyn Monroe has never stopped being reinvented as authors confront their extraordinary destiny, sometimes tackling their own obsessions or those of the time.

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In video, "The mystery of Marilyn Monroe", the trailer

The woman behind the star

Special correspondent in Hollywood in 1982 for a two-week report on the reopening of the investigation by the Los Angeles prosecutor into Marilyn's death, the British journalist Anthony Summers stayed there for more than three years.

Plunging into the twists and turns of the Mecca of cinema, finding traces of thousands of witnesses, unearthing numerous documents and making 650 sound recordings during an unprecedented investigation.

From this unique material, he published

in 1985 (released in France by Presses de la Renaissance, under the title

, reissued today in the United States in an enriched version), a 500-page biography leaving finally glimpse the complexity of the woman behind the star.

The slaughtered beauty

Childhood, beginnings, career, love life, ambitions, social and political conscience, rivalries, friendships, betrayals... Summers' bestseller dissected in a raw and addictive style every aspect of the icon's life.

The last chapter, a hundred pages devoted to the star's last days, presented in a convincing way, although in the conditional, the links between Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers, and earned the book a considerable international impact.

She didn't seek to see the people who had been close to her again.

Anthony Summers

Two bad tastes, however, ended up tarnishing the aura of Summers and the impact of his biography over time.

First, the use of numerous quotes from two "confidants" of the star, very focused on the conspiracy theory, Jeanne Carmen and Robert Slatzer, known since as licensed storytellers.

And above all, sacrilege, the publication of a photograph of dead Marilyn in one of the photo books of the book.

Bearing the references of a police file, the photo taken after the autopsy (frightening although in black and white) gives readers the face of the beauty massacred by the coroner of an unrecognizable woman with soiled hair and flabby, marked by post-mortem facial discoloration…

Hundreds of records

Two pitfalls avoided in

, the documentary that Netflix has been offering since April 27, based on Anthony Summers' initial investigation.

Despite the subtitle,

these are not new exchanges with the star, as the first minutes (or the trailer) suggest.

The words of Marilyn peppering the documentary come from two well-known interviews, conducted in 1960 and 1962 respectively by journalists Georges Belmont for

and Richard Merryman for

No, the treasures in the film are drawn from the 650 recordings made by Summers during his initial investigation in 1982.

At the time, only twenty years have passed since Marilyn's death and most of her colleagues and friends are still active.

In Hollywood more than anywhere else, the motto

" is worth religion.

And we guess from certain silences and from the palpable emotion that grips some of these witnesses called upon by the reporter that the memories of Marilyn evoked, although still fresh, had never been shared at the time.

We must therefore forget the close-ups on the vintage cassettes inserted into a tape recorder, the same eternal extracts from films or newsreel images and the sequences framing Summers with a serious face, facing the Irish moor, in an office invaded by cardboard boxes. archives.

Hollywood staging

These usage conventions passed, the documentary takes the gamble of staging the original voices of Marilyn's loved ones in bluffing twilight vignettes, where unknown actors interpret them in playback.

Despite the artificiality of the process – in defiance of any sense of casting, the actors chosen physically have little to do with those they are supposed to embody – the total mastery of

(lip synchronization) and the care given to the atmosphere of the reconstructions confer a rare emotional power to these testimonies.

It is thus as much the stamps of the big names of Hollywood who are incarnated (Billy Wilder or John Huston) as those of the shadow army (governess, journalist, photographer, psychoanalyst ...) who constituted the entourage and the surrogate family of the actress.

Dangerous relationships

In images, in pictures

See the slideshow20 photos

See the slideshow20 photos

“It pains me too much to talk about it”

Marked by a childhood deprived of the warmth of a home, ambition pegged to the body and yet plagued by doubt, intelligent and passionate, Marilyn Monroe was probably a colleague, a friend, a complex woman to love on a daily basis.

As Anthony Summers blandly confides, Jane Russell, her partner in

 : “We were close during the film, and afterwards, we still considered each other as girlfriends, but Marilyn changed the group of friends.

She left one band for another, she took refuge there for a while.

She did not seek to see the people who had been close to her again.

However, it is enough to hear the voice of her hairstylist, Sydney Guilaroff, break when Summers urges him to evoke the star's never-realized desire for motherhood to grasp the sincere attachment that everyone seemed to have for her in private: "I'm sorry.

You seem very nice, Mr. Summers, but it pains me too much to talk about it.

Really."

“How do you write the story of a life?

asks Marilyn out loud at the start of this documentary.

Perhaps simply by leaving, beyond films, photographs, controversies, good words and secrets, an imprint so strong that, sixty years later, each of us feels his heart sink, as if for a close, when we talk about his disappearance.

Sébastien Cauchon is the author of "

, Éditions Stock (2016), 216 pages, €21.50.