The DD Group: An Online Investigation Into the Death of Marilyn Monroe

I am told that the first two names I recognized as a child were President Eisenhower and Marilyn Monroe. Hopefully, for my parents' sake, this was after I understood who Mama and Daddy were. To be truthful, I'm not at all certain. By the time the newsman interrupted my cartoons on Sunday morning, August 5, 1962, to tell me that Marilyn Monroe had been found dead of an overdose at the age of 36, she had become such a natural part of my daily life that I could not quite grasp the concept of a world where she was not still out there going about her surely incredible life. To even begin to attempt to understand that someone as big as Marilyn Monroe could actually die threw my seven-year-old brain into serious philosophical doubt. I kept a close watch on my parents, my teachers, even my close friends. The way I saw it, if Marilyn Monroe could die, everyone was up for grabs.-author David Marshall, from the introduction to The DD Group: An Online Investigation Into the Death of Marilyn Monroe