Netflix’s New Marilyn Monroe Documentary Revisits the Investigation Into Her Death

The trailer for Netflix’s The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes opens with a question from the late actress herself. “How do you go about writing a life story?” Marilyn Monroe says, as we see archival footage and photographs of the Seven Year Itch star. “The true things rarely get into circulation. It’s usually the false things.”

The upcoming documentary film, however, will attempt to separate what’s true from what’s false about Marilyn’s life — as well as her death nearly 60 years ago.

As we hear a cover of “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” a song Marilyn famously performed in Some Like It Hot, we learn that Los Angeles launched a new investigation into her death in 1982, two decades after her untimely demise. And now, in the new documentary, interviews from that investigation are purportedly becoming public for the first time.

“I can’t say anything,” someone says in one of the recordings. “And I knew it all.”

In the new documentary — which will start streaming on Netflix on April 27 — fans will gain new insight into the end of Marilyn’s life, culminating in her death of a barbiturate overdose on August 4, 1962.

“Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe’s tragic death spawned conspiracies and rumors for decades, often overshadowing her talent and shrewdness,” Netflix says in a press release for The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe. “By piecing together her final weeks, days, and hours through previously unheard recordings of those who knew her best, the film illuminates more of her glamorous, complicated life, and offers a new perspective on that fateful night.”

Anthony Summers — a Pulitzer Prize nominee who has written about former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, former President John F. Kennedy, and the 9/11 attacks — interviewed more than 600 people about Marilyn Monroe for his 2013 book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. And it’s that research that provided the basis for the new Netflix documentary.

According to the synopsis of Goddess, Summers was the first person to access the files of the actress’s last psychiatrist, and the author “establishes, after years of mere rumor, that President Kennedy and his brother Robert were both intimately involved with Monroe in life — and in covering up the circumstances of her death.”

Summers also returned to Goddess for an updated edition with new evidence. “My purpose is to offer new facts, credibility,” Summers said in a statement. “Reporting involvements with President Kennedy and his brother Robert need not descend to fabrication. Information is now substantiated, sources, identified. Previously suppressed FBI documents, now released, are published.”

In the trailer for The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe, we hear an offscreen voice, presumably that of Summers, saying, “Marilyn, and the truth, it’s like going into the lion’s den, and I indeed found out things which had not been found out before.”

Expect to learn those things when The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes starts streaming on Netflix on April 27!