Candle in the wind

Did Marilyn Monroe die by suicide or murder?

By David Cocksedge

SHE WAS lusted after by men, adored by millions all over the world, yet she died alone. On the morning of 5 August 1962 , the dead body of screen sex goddess Marilyn Monroe was discovered by her housekeeper Eunice Murray. The movie star was lying naked on her bed in her bungalow at Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, Los Angeles . She had lived for 36 years and 64 days. Her lonely death was apparently caused by an overdose of barbiturates and labeled a suicide. She was known to take sleeping pills with champagne every night. The verdict of the inquest went unquestioned for some months. But when doubts were raised about the circumstances surrounding her death, the resulting scandal threatened to be bigger than anything the superstar had created in her short lifetime.

There were many questions, such as: did she die by her own hand or was she murdered? She apparently died clutching a telephone – who had she been trying to call in her last minutes of consciousness? Rumours of her affairs with both John and Robert Kennedy surfaced later. According to her friend, Robert Slatzer, Marilyn had two important meetings scheduled for Monday 6 August: one was with her lawyer and the other was a press conference. She had recently been fired from her last movie (ironically called ‘Something's Got To Give'), and was known to be in a depressed state. But there was no suicide note. What had she been planning to announce to the world?

A formal re-investigation in 1982 by the Los Angeles County District Attorney uncovered ‘no evidence of foul play' in Ms Monroe's death, but concluded that the original investigation twenty years earlier had not been conducted properly. Police officers had failed to secure the possible crime scene; people came and went about the house, contaminating or destroying vital evidence. The 1982 investigation also discovered that all lab reports, tissue samples and test results from the Monroe autopsy mysteriously disappeared from the LA County Coroners Office very soon after the official ruling had been made public in August 1962. The county coroner Dr Thomas Noguchi, who conducted the autopsy, claims that misplacement of samples has never happened in Los Angeles in any case before or since. He also conceded that though a few traces of the barbiturates Monroe purportedly took were found in her mouth, stomach and intestines; she had a ‘massive' amount in her bloodstream.

Marilyn was born on 1 June 1926 in the charity ward of Los Angeles County Hospital . Her registered name was Norma Jeane Mortenson, but her grandmother, Mrs Della Moore Grainger, later had her baptised as Norma Jeane Baker. For some time most biographers believed that her biological father was Charles Stanley Gifford, a salesman for the studio where Marilyn's mother, Gladys Pearl Baker Eley, worked as a film cutter. However her birth certificate lists Norwegian Martin Edward Mortenson as her real father, and in later years many have come to believe that the birth certificate is correct.

Gladys was unable to look after baby Norma Jeane and her grandmother would not take her on either, so she was placed with foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender of Hawthorne , California , southwest of Los Angeles , where she lived until the age of seven. In her autobiography, ‘My Story' Monroe states she thought that Albert and Ida were her biological parents until one day Ida rudely corrected her. Gladys visited Norma Jeane every Saturday, but (again according to Monroe 's book) she never smiled at, hugged or kissed her daughter. Gladys moved into a house for herself and Norma Jeane in 1933, but soon suffered a mental breakdown, and Marilyn recalled watching her mother “screaming and laughing” as she was forcibly removed to the State Mental Hospital in Norwalk , California , the same hospital where Monroe 's grandmother Della had died in 1927.

Norma Jeane Baker was now declared a ward of state and Gladys's best friend, Grace McKee (later Goddard) became her guardian. After Grace married in 1935, Norma Jeane was sent to the Los Angeles Orphanage and then to a long succession of foster homes where it is alleged she was subjected to abuse and neglect. She became a shy, nervous girl who panicked easily, but longed for real love and affection. By the age of fourteen she learned that she could obtain affection from men by granting sexual favours. She claimed that she fell pregnant at the age of fifteen, but was forced to give up her baby boy. She refused to name the father, and her claim has yet to be verified by any official documentation.

The Goddard family was moving to the East Coast and felt it would be best if young Norma Jeane married, otherwise she would be returned to the hated orphanage. She was introduced to a neighbour named James Dougherty and consequently married him on 19 June 1942 . But the life of a working-class housewife soon bored her, and escape came when Dougherty was called up to fight in World War II.

Norma Jeane was by this time addicted to the ‘silver screen' and would spend hours in theatres watching her celluloid heroes and heroines. She became determined to become a big star herself, no matter what it cost her. She also discovered that she could make money by meeting men in bars and going to their hotel rooms with them. She used the cash to buy cosmetics, clothes and acting lessons that she needed to succeed in the Hollywood dream factory known as the movie industry.

She was soon discovered by photographer David Conover. He immediately saw her potential as a model and she was signed up by ‘The Blue Book' modeling agency. Ms Baker became one of the company's most successful models, appearing on hundreds of magazine covers. In 1946 she came to the attention of talent scout Ben Lyon who arranged a screen test for her with 20 th Century Fox. She was offered a six-month contract that got her started on the ladder. She adopted her mother's maiden name of Monroe as her surname and was given her first name by actress Marilyn Miller. She divorced Jim Dougherty on 13 September 1946 : he was insanely jealous of her blossoming career and her many trysts with producers and movie moguls which she believed would help it along.

After many bit parts, she landed a significant role in ‘The Asphalt Jungle' (1950) that catapulted her to movie stardom, and by the time she appeared on the cover of the first issue of Playboy magazine in 1952 she was world famous. Marilyn was now the star of Hollywood cocktail parties, a luscious ripe peach of a girl with dyed platinum blonde hair and a wiggle walk that stopped men's hearts. Being bubbly and beautiful, she was slotted into the ‘dumb blonde' category and those were the movie parts she got. Marilyn rarely wore underwear. Once, when asked what she wore in bed, she famously gushed, “Chanel Number Five!” Producer Billy Wilder once said, “Marilyn has breasts like granite and a brain like Swiss cheese.”

This was unfair. Marilyn was far from dumb, and secretly yearned to be taken more seriously. But she was locked into a part she felt forced to play, both on and off screen. Her marriage to Baseball hero Jo DiMaggio in San Francisco on 14 January 1954 was a media dream, but DiMaggio hated her sex goddess image and did nothing to help her career, refusing to pose with her, or attend celebrity parties. They parted after nine months of blazing rows. “What good is being a sex symbol if it drives your man away?” asked Marilyn bitterly.

Her third marriage in June 1956 to playwright in Arthur Miller also ended in tears. Marilyn felt she had made a point: she was no dumb blonde, but the wife of a world famous intellectual. But she suffered two miscarriages and fell into deep depressions when Miller neglected her to work on his writing, shutting himself into his study to tap away on his typewriter for hours.

By 1958, Marilyn was the couple's breadwinner, even paying alimony to Miller's first wife. His script for ‘The Misfits' (in which she starred) was meant to be a Valentine gift, but by the time filming started in 1960 the ship of their marriage had grounded on the rocks. A Mexican divorce was granted on 24 January 1961 and just 24 days later Miller married German-born Inge Morath. ‘The Misfits' was a big success, but her movie career ended abruptly in May 1962 when she consistently failed to show up on the set for ‘Something's Got To Give'.

Meantime, DiMaggio had re-entered Marilyn's life, but she was also still having many affairs. When Joe was not around, she was into pills, champagne and a succession of lovers, including Frank Sinatra and Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana. Sinatra introduced her to President John F Kennedy, a man now known to be insatiably promiscuous. They flirted outrageously: Kennedy stroked and pinched her bottom as he whispered ribald jokes in her ear. At his 45 th birthday party in May 1962, she breathily sang ‘Happy Birthday, Mister President' to him seductively on national television wearing a skin-tight flesh coloured rhinestone dress that auctioned for 1.5 million dollars in 1999. After several trysts with JFK, Marilyn moved onto his younger brother Robert, the Attorney General. These were dangerous liaisons, and FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, (who hated the Kennedys' with a passion), soon had a bulging file on the clandestine affairs.

Giancana had a sneering contempt for all politicians and actors. He told his younger brother Charlie (Chuck), “Those people are whores. They will do literally anything just to further their careers. How can you have any respect for people like that?” In his 1993 book, ‘Double Cross', Chuck Giancana made a startling revelation: Marilyn was murdered by hit men enlisted by his elder brother.

Here's the tale: at a party at the Cal-Neva Lodge near Lake Tahoe a week before she died, Marilyn drank heavily and then sobbed her heart out to Giancana, Sinatra and actor Peter Lawford, (who had married into the Kennedy family). She said that Bobby Kennedy had refused her phone calls – she had even tried to reach him at his home, something that sent the young Attorney General, recently hailed as ‘Family Man of the Year', into a rage. Political insiders knew that the Kennedy brothers were spectacular hypocrites, and Bobby's ‘dream' marriage to Ethel was essential to his clean cut Ivy League image. Marilyn was crushed by the knowledge that she was, as she put it, “nothing more than a piece of meat” for the Kennedys.

Giancana received word that Robert Kennedy would be visiting Marilyn at her Brentwood home on 4 August. The Mob boss flew to Palm Springs and arranged the hit. He wanted to be nearby when it happened, hoping to see Kennedy's face when the nation's Attorney General was implicated in the scandalous ‘suicide' of a rejected movie star. Giancana especially hated Robert Kennedy as the latter had harangued him mercilessly during the McClellan Committee hearings into organised crime. (“I thought that only little girls giggled, Mr Giancana,” Kennedy had sneered during one famous exchange. Giancana had stifled a laugh at one of Kennedy's comments).

Giancana had his trusted assassin, ‘Needles' Gianola, co-ordinate the job. Gianola brought his henchmen ‘Mugsy' Tortorella and two other professional hit men. Eavesdropping near her home where surveillance equipment had been set up by electronics expert Bernie Spindel, the killers waited patiently for Kennedy to show up. They knew that the Attorney General was making a secret detour by helicopter from San Francisco to see Marilyn whilst he was on official business in the city.

Robert Kennedy finally appeared at Marilyn's house just after 4pm , accompanied by another man. Ms Monroe soon flew into a hysterical rage at Kennedy, and in response, the listening men heard Kennedy instruct the other man, evidently a doctor, to “give her a shot to calm her down”. Marilyn was sedated, and Kennedy and the doctor then drove away.

The killers waited for the cover of darkness before entering Marilyn's home using a passkey. She struggled at first, but already drugged by the injected sedative, their rubber-gloved hands easily forced her nude body to the bed. Calmly they taped her mouth and proceeded to insert a specially doctored Nembutal suppository into her anus.

The suppository had been a brilliant choice, Sam told his brother. A lethal dosage of sedatives administered orally, and by force, would have been too risky, causing suspicious bruising during a likely struggle, as well as vomiting – a side effect that typically resulted from ingesting a large quantity of barbiturates necessary to guarantee death. Using a suppository would eliminate any hope of reviving Ms Monroe, since the medication was quickly absorbed through the anal membrane directly into the bloodstream. There would be nothing in her stomach to be pumped out should she be discovered in this highly drugged state. Additionally, a suppository was as fast-acting as an injection but left no needle mark for a pathologist to discover. In short, it was a perfect weapon to kill anyone and make the death look like suicide.

Within moments of insertion, the suppository's massive combination of barbiturates and chloryl hydrate quickly entered her bloodstream, rendering her totally unconscious. The killers carefully removed the tape, wiped her mouth clean, and placed her across the bed. They then left as quietly as they had come. Pathologists later estimated that Marilyn died around 10.45pm on 4 August 1962 .

Giancana now waited for Kennedy's sordid affair to be exposed and the Attorney General disgraced. But the Mafia Don had not counted on the lengths to which Robert Kennedy would go to cover his own tracks. Giancana expected that hordes of police would be called in, the area sealed off, and neighbours questioned which would lead to the revelation that Mr R Kennedy had been at her house just hours before her death. Instead, the killers listened over their wiretaps in the hours following Monroe 's death as a series of calls alerted Bobby to the news and ultimately mobilised FBI agents to avert political disaster for the Attorney General by sanitising the scene. Marilyn's diary disappeared sometime on the afternoon of 5 August 1962 and Hoover 's vigilant agents confiscated Monroe 's highly damaging telephone records. The death was termed an official suicide and Bobby Kennedy was not mentioned as either her lover or unwitting murderer until years later.

There are several gaps of logic in Giancana's dramatic story. Why kill Monroe when simply exposing her affairs with both Kennedy brothers would be enough to end their political careers? And what motive would J Edgar Hoover have in assisting the Attorney General (a man he detested) in a cover-up? The missing autopsy evidence is still to be explained, however, and FBI agents did remove her telephone records.

If Marilyn was planning to expose the two Kennedy brothers as adulterers, then they had the most to gain by silencing her. Robert Kennedy certainly had the legal and political muscle to see it done, but did he also possess enough ruthlessness to have his former bedmate snuffed out?

There has also been much speculation about the relationship between Mrs Murray, Monroe 's psychiatrist Dr Ralph Greenson (who hired Murray ) and Marilyn's personal publicist, Pat Newcomb, who joined the Kennedy administration soon after her death. Was this appointment a reward for ‘services rendered' in dealing with the problem of the neurotic, unstable movie star?

Ms Monroe's body is interred in a crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles where thousands of loyal fans pay homage every year. In death, she achieved cult status and was voted ‘The Sexiest Woman of The 20 th Century' in 1999. Her mysterious end only added spice to the legend. Marilyn's starring roles in such movie classics as ‘The Seven Year Itch' (1955), ‘Bus Stop' (1956) and ‘Some like It Hot' (1959) are now recognised as works of comic genius. Today her image adorns posters and tee-shirts worldwide and there are Marilyn Monroe look-alike contests held everywhere.

A moving tribute penned by Bernie Taupin (sung by Elton John) in 1973 described her as ‘a candle in the wind' and that ‘The candle burned out long before the legend ever did.' (For rhyming reasons Taupin had his tense wrong: the legend of Marilyn Monroe still endures to this day).

Norma Jeane Baker dared to reach for the stars; then became one – and paid a terrible price for immortality in the form of ever-lasting fame.

(Research: wikipedia/marilyn_monroe; ‘Double Cross' by Charles Giancana, Warner Books, 1993)

IF YOU need a check on my True Crime series of stories, published in the Hua Hin Observer, here is a complete list to date:
April 2002 -The Green Bicycle case, 1921. May 2002 - The Craig/Bentley Case, 1952. June 2002 - The A6 Murder Case, 1961. July 2002 - Murder of the Earl of Errol, 1941. August 2002 - The O J Simpson murder trial, 1995. September 2002 - The Aileen Wuornos case, 1989. October 2002 - The Ronald Opus case, 1993. November 2002 - Madame X, 1929. December 2002 - The Spree Killer, 1984. January 2003 - Shootout at Smiths' Club, 1966. February 2003 - The Christine Dryland case, 1991. March 2003 - Poisoned Pie in Essex, 1982. April 2003 - The Heydrich assassination, 1943. May 2003 - The Diana Davidson Murder case, 1969. June 2003 - The death of Alkibiades, 404 BC. July 2003 - The headsman of Colmar, 1780. August 2003 - The Ruth Ellis case, 1955. September 2003 - The Mel Jones Murder case, 1975. October 2003 - The Bluebeard of the bath, 1915. November 2003 - Murder in a combat zone, 1966. December 2003 - The Barn Restaurant murder case, 1972. January 2004 - The assassination of JFK, 1963. February 2004 - Judge Falcone and the Mafia, 1992. March 2004 - Gilles de Rais/Bluebeard, 1404-1440. April 2004 - The hand in the sand case, 1885. May 2004 - The body in the bag, 1979

Life in Steinbeck's Country

I'M A LUCKY FELLOW. The folks in California are lucky folks. Heck the world is pretty lucky. If John Steinbeck were born in London or Glasgow he would probably have been lost in the masses of the great British writers who graced many a page of fine literature. Luckily John Steinbeck was born and raised at the turn of the century in the fertile farmlands of the “Salad Bowl of America”, the Salinas Valley.

The Salinas Valley is located in Monterey County on the central coast of California. He attempted college life at Stanford University but never graduated. Thereafter he moved to the Sierra Nevada Mountains and took a summer job at Fallen Leaf Lake, which fed Lake Tahoe with the pristine snowmelt from the vast and remote Desolation Wilderness. When winter arrived and the Fallen Leaf Lake Lodge became inaccessible due to the high snow his job ended and he moved to Lake Tahoe and worked as a house sitter for a large estate. He used his time while he was snowed in to write his first novel, “Cup Of Gold”, a swashbuckling tale of pirates and adventure. This was the start of a literary career, that many people feel, myself included, overshadows all other U.S. born authors. The Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes for literature leave no question he definitely was one of the best.

I'm very surprised to find a few well-read European readers have found it difficult to enjoy his works. I think it may be because his earlier and more famous books such as “ The Grapes Of Wrath”, “Cannery Row”, “Tortilla Flat”, “Of Mice And Men” and “The Pearl” were in some people's minds very simplistic in their portrayals of the common man. Steinbeck championed the causes of the common man and the under-privileged in a society that was in turmoil prior to World War II. These simple everyday emotions, actions and stories that are intrinsic in any culture or society were the things that made Steinbeck's portrayals so enjoyable and famous. Any person reading his stories, in any language, could relate easily to many of the characters and even see their own human experience being reflected in the thoughts and actions of these people. It is true that many of the characters were simple everyday people, in so many ways, yet their actions and emotions and that simplicity, were the common thread that connected them to readers worldwide. His non-fiction also makes great reading, “The Log From The Sea of Cortez”, “A Russian Journal” and “Travels With Charlie” gave great insights into the man and his perspective on a diverse realm of subjects. For pure pleasure “The Acts Of King Arthur And his Noble Nights” is a delightfully lyrical rendition of tales we know so well.

His novels brought great notoriety, success and acclaim in literature and many were turned into successful motion pictures by Hollywood. Unfortunately post-war America had an agenda and Senator Joseph McCarthy, Ronald Reagan and many other cowards who hid behind their so-called patriotism disgraced The Constitution of The United States and created an infamous witch-hunt in search of the dreaded “Commies”. Hollywood, unions, Steinbeck, his friends and many other creative and compassionate people were victims of this ugly, and regrettable piece of American history. Fortunately Steinbeck proved more resilient than others and was able to persevere and didn't see his life destroyed as so many others did during this debacle.

In 1960 Steinbeck purchased a new V-6 GMC pickup truck with a self contained camper and partnered up with his giant poodle Charlie and headed out from the east coast to travel the width of the United States and documented his observations in one of his last novels “Travels With Charlie”. The America he found left him with many concerns of where his once proud nation was going as he recorded his insights and observed what he felt was the beginning of the disintegration of many of the things that had made America great. His “King Arthur” book was published after his death in the late 60's and it showed his amazing versatility asa writer extraordinaire.

It was only after his death that his home town, Salinas, started to recognize his greatness and started to call him a favourite son. The “Commie”, the sympathizer for the poor and unfortunate was forgiven, and much was forgotten as they now could profit from his world wide fame and they would try to ride his coattails into respectability and out of the shadow of being a backwards thinking, big farm, small minded city. I guess all he might do is laugh if he were still around because the last thing I remember reading about the city of Salinas was that they closed their library because they said they didn't have the money to keep it open anymore. You have to laugh, otherwise you would end up crying. What a disgrace! I think closing the library should make the place much more famous than the claim that John Steinbeck was born there. I wonder if the farmers there think that irony is a fertilizer similar to magnesium.

Many of his earlier works didn't have a “Hollywood Happy Ending” (this could be one of the reasons he is a hard read for some). They show us the real world in California before and after World War II. These were not the best of times for many, but if you have read “The Grapes Of Wrath” and remember the end of the book there is no other novel that could possibly have the impact and feeling that was delivered by what has to be the most powerful and compassionate ending of any novel ever written. The Nobel Prize he received is almost insufficient in regards to the power that he was able to deliver with those final lines.

If you have read most of his works there is one book that most people I have met have not had a chance to read and enjoy. It is called “Steinbeck: A Life In Letters”. It was published by his sister Elaine and is a compilation of many of the letters that he wrote to his friends. From being snowbound in Lake Tahoe, to the Nobel Prize in Sweden, this book of letters is an enjoyable journey into the mind of one of the most intuitive writers of the human spirit and emotion. It is also a good chronicle of a broad expanse of time in a very volatile and changing America.

In the mid 1960's I started to read his works and took many of my steps in the same places as the characters of his novels. He had a way of putting a picture into your mind with just a few words. Heck if he was born in Texas people would probably have known hundreds of ways of describing flat and desolate, and they all would have been interesting and intriguing. Luckily he wasn't a Texan and when he talks of sitting under an oak tree next to a wooden farm house in the middle of 400 acres of pinto beans, or next to the Pacific Ocean as the sardine ships bring in their catch you can feel the fertile earth and smell the kelp beds when the tide is out.

As a kid of 16, with my first wheels, my friends and I started taking trips to Monterey and the Cannery Row of Doc Ricketts, “Sweet Thursday” and “Tortilla Flat”. I realized that these were the places that inspired his fertile imagination, and they inspired mine also. I felt I had some sort of connection with many of his characters and scenes as I explored the then deserted fish canneries and an infamous little flat topped marine laboratory that were built on pilings in the intertidal rocks of the Monterey Bay on the Row. We always felt Doc Ricketts, a renowned and still published, marine invertebrate biologist, was a hero. Steinbeck used Doc's persona to create some of his interesting characters in a few of his books. When we went to his lab on the Row we would polish a little circle in the dirty windows and look in and see the cluttered lab and the equipment just as it must have been the day that he met his unfortunate demise at an unsignalled railroad crossing one night driving from the Row in the late 1940's. The lab was an anomaly in many ways and it was evident in the way that the little 15 foot tall by 40 foot wide building sat dwarfed by the massively tall football field size canneries that surrounded it.

“Cannery Row” was the story of the bustling activities and characters that a lucrative fishing industry had created around the canneries that lined Cannery Row in the port of the Monterey Bay in the 1930's. By the early 1940's the greed of war caused the fishermen, canners and wholesalers to catch virtually all the sardines that had existed in and around the Monterey Bay. What was once a bustling beehive of activity, revolving around the canning industry for the many huge canneries, turned into a virtual ghost town almost overnight.

To kids of 17 and 18 years old, this ghost town in 1970, was alive with the images of storybook characters. Our minds would run as wild as our spirits as we recreated imagined scenarios and searched for lost treasures that the magical world of literature had given us. Doc's lab was sacred and we never set foot inside, but the abandoned canneries were ripe for the pillage and plunder of our fertile imaginations and our strong and agile young bodies. At low tide, my cousin Dave and I, would slip and slide through the broken storm drains to the kelp covered rocks and rip rap under the old canneries and find one of the lower pilings and boost and shove our way up through a broken wooden floor plank and into the vast nothingness of these abandoned relics. As we surveyed the dirty unending emptiness we found what remained after thirty years. Creditors, bandits and vagrants had accomplished what we had hoped to do, and that was to find some treasure, anything of value. Every hope or thought of this grand accomplishment was dashed and forgotten in seconds. Everything, and I do mean everything, of any value was gone, there wasn't a stick of furniture, a vehicle, a tool or even any of the machinery left to be salvaged from these now huge mausoleums. The only thing that remained was the garbage of an industry that had been devastated. Boxes upon broken boxes of old sardine tin cans, lids and labels were scattered across the football field size open floors. We did our share of adding to the clutter as we kicked open some of the still intact cardboard boxes hoping to find something of value other than the useless rusting cans and labels that we were surrounded in. We had been robbed! Our dreams were crushed like the rusty tin cans, the treasures of our imagination destroyed. We were insulted, even the labels didn't say sardines on them; “Pilchards” was the word that was used to describe the picture of the fish on those bright red labels. We slunk away feeling gutted.

Gone was the proof of another existence, a place in time when different men lived a different life. Still these men had thought the same thoughts about many of the same old things, life and living, enjoying and giving, pain and sorrow, loving and losing, failing and winning. It's always the same, and it's constantly changing. Only a few people are good enough to take us on a journey in our minds, through the creative magic of words, to enjoy worlds that we may never physically visit. They allow us to become part of these worlds as they take us with them into a story that may have been told a hundred times before, by a hundred different people, but with them, we can become part of it. My cousin and I left that day knowing this story had been told and probably retold and we would have nothing to add to it as all the gold that was at the end of our rainbow would only be in the words that Steinbeck had given us in his books, and definitely not in our pocket books.

Cannery Row is about eight to ten hours from San Francisco by boat and a person can make it there in about two hours by car. If you would create a radius from those two points and swing an arc of just 90 degrees from San Francisco you would probably encounter nearly 100 colleges and universities. Three quarters of a century after the “Grapes Of Wrath” that area could probably be called the “Educational Bowl Of America”. Hopefully from this well educated and ethnically diverse group of people will come another writer similar to Steinbeck with the ability to tell tales of real people, simple people, as we all are. Now is a time when America, and the entire world especially, needs an author who can go to the roots of the common modern man, in common everyday situations, and show compassion, hope, good will and truth, so we will have a reason to have faith in the common good of all, and the better world that it can create.

To the south of Cannery Row is undeniably one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. If you go about a mile south of the aquarium to the point of the bay, you will hear the roar of the waves, seals and sea lions in the large rocks that abound in sea-life. At that point you are in Pacific Grove, an eccentric quaint seaside town that borders the Del Monte Forest that encompasses the famous areas of Pebble Beach and Carmel. Along the next almost 100 miles of coastline is a wilderness almost completely devoid of man. I am sure that there is no place on earth that is more beautiful, just as I am sure that there are many places that may be just as beautiful, but this southbound route is a picture postcard every few minutes.

A testament to the ruggedness of this terrain is the fact that the cork-screwed two lane road that clings to the sides of the hills and mountains almost never allows you to drive anywhere near the level of the beach. Being in the passenger seat as you go south allows you to view the ocean crashing against these abutments as an Arctic storm comes crashing down from the north. That same seat may offer a view of a sleek lion racing across the road and up the steep and heavily forested mountains while almost 500 feet straight down is that same ocean as calm as a lake with acres of kelp bobbing in sun drenched water sparkling like diamonds. There are few places someone can lodge along this stretch of Highway 1, or as we call it, the “Coast Highway”. When I talk about a “few” I'm not talking about using the fingers on both my hands to count. Esalon is the name of a world famous retreat centre that is situated on this very untravelled and unknown part of the world.

Today, 2005, Cannery Row is a “Conney Island” or a “Blackpool”, well maybe not quite, but with over-priced restaurants and wall to wall shops selling trinkets and curios and cotton candy at three times the price of a county fair you would have to say it is a full fledged tourist trap. It does have a redeeming world-class marine aquarium built with money donated from the fortunes of the inventors of the first American computer (Mr's Hewlett and Packard). Millions of people have and will continue to visit the Row looking for the magic of the Steinbeck tales of the past. If you get a chance to visit definitely stroll about a third of a mile east down the Row from the aquarium and see if that little flat roofed marine lab is still standing. If it still is, hopefully it will help you imagine a different time, a time in the past that Steinbeck immortalized. Maybe it will make you remember another time, almost four decades ago, when a couple of kids searched the bowels of the abandoned canneries searching for adventure and some sort of treasure only to come up empty handed amidst rusting and mouldy debris.

I think it was about 15 years ago when I decided to bite the bullet and go back to the modern, spiffed up Row and have a look at this new world class aquarium and see what remained of my cherished old dilapidated Row. Yes, things had changed, for the better, I couldn't say. There are expensive hotels nearby and fancy restaurants are now perched on pilings over the bay. It costs big bucks just to park your car if you can find a place. I stopped at what is now one of the many tourist traps, an old wooden store built on solid ground at the base of a hill that rises out of the Row. It is nearly a hundred years old and was once owned by an old Chinese man who did a healthy trade and it was now more prosperous than ever selling all the typical tourist trinkets you would expect to find.

There is gold in the written word, there is gold in having dreams. There is gold in the imagination of kid's minds as they explore the magic that some people's literature creates, but much much more than that, there is GOLD, yep, gold I said, green gold in that old Chinese market. 15 years ago they were selling, for five dollars each, those old red “Pilchard” (???) canning labels that we kicked across the floors of those broken down canneries.

Oh the hopefully soon to be forgotten memories. Boxes and boxes of tin cans and lids, 10's upon 10's of thousands of labels and lids and more, boxes and boxes, dirty and dusty, filthy and rusty, stinky and musty, 15 years, 35 years, a lifetime of diamonds and rust and gold and dust, could it be just..... FIVE DOLLARS!!!! It couldn't be!! FIVE DOLLARS 5 5 5 for each and every one, five-dollar bills all boxed and bundled as we were stupid and bungled then off we had stumbled.

Dave, it was good that you at least grabbed a fistful of labels, even though you can't find them anymore. I wonder who now owns my old ‘57 Cadillac El Dorado Biaritz convertible with the metallic blue leather interior, if only we filled that fancy trunk (if Steinbeck were born in Glasgow he'd call it a boot) up with those labels and parked it in the barn, if oh if if.

Well there is no “Hollywood Happy Ending” here either. Maybe, just maybe, if Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck are looking down at all that is happening around the Row, maybe they might say, it doesn't matter what people are looking at, just as long as they are looking.

By Tom Duzanica

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