The cameraman gained the trust of the morgue workers with two bottles of whiskey and managed to get into chamber 33, where the body of the most famous symbol of the 20th century lay.
On August 5, 1962, Eunice Murray, Marilyn Monroe's assistant, called the authorities and said that she had found the actress inert in her Los Angeles mansion. At least, that counts as the official version. on her side, and with bumps and bruises, the corpse of the eternal symbol lay in the middle of a scene that had clearly been altered. Her life always exuded a halo of mystery, but her death did even more.
Wrapped in conspiracies, delusions, contradictions, secrets, and unusual testimonies -and sometimes implausible...-, the accurate account of what happened that day may never be known. That fateful night, as anticipation grew in the affluent neighborhood, the body of the actress was transferred to the morgue. They assigned her body number 81828 and kept her in chamber number 33.
Only hours later, when the news was already jumping dizzyingly from one newsroom to another, a shrewd photographer approached the funeral home. After winning over the employees with several shots of whiskey, Leigh Wiener slipped through the halls of the morgue, getting impromptu friends of hers to open the chamber for her. In a matter of minutes, she found herself in front of the corpse of the ethereal actress. And although she then took five rolls of photographs, only three came to light.
Not even the son of that fearless photographer knows today where his father hid the rest of the images. This is how he confessed in a documentary that Fox News Channel will broadcast this Sunday, entitled Scandalous: the death of Marilyn Monroe.
"It was not the first time that she used a couple of bottles of whiskey to gain access to a restricted area," the photographer's son, Devik Wiener, narrated for the documentary. "He offered a couple of men a drink, and the next thing he knew, he was inside [the morgue]."
One of the images that Wiener captured with her reflector that night, went around the world. In the painting, you could see the feet of the actress, still inside her burial chamber. He sent three of the scrolls to LIFE magazine but believed that the other two were not for public consumption.
"The last two rolls, containing images that went beyond the toe tag, he took to his own studio and, he said, processed them, examined them, and quickly placed them in a safe deposit box," Devik Wiener recounted. who claimed not to know where his father kept the photographs. "Really, he died with that mystery," he maintained.
According to his version, the photographer died in 1993 without sharing his great secret. Leigh Wiener was not the only cameraman who managed to enter the depths of that morgue. Another image in which Marilyn Monroe appears covered up to her neck by a white sheet, and shows her pale and emaciated face, impressed the world.
The body of the protagonist of How to Catch a Millionaire (1953) remained in the morgue for more than 24 hours without anyone claiming it, a fact that the three-part documentary series also recalls.
