Name: Fixer
ISBN: 9781538751428

Josh Young

Manfred Westphal

Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn

Fixer

This is a book about one of the foremost private detectives to work in Hollywood.  The anecdotes are interesting, but not really backed up by any concrete evidence.  Everything amounts to hearsay.  If some of the stories are true, then Fred Otash engaged in illegal behavior himself.  The big draws, according to the marketing of the book, are the word for word transcript of the  conversation between Rock Hudson and his wife in which he admits he is gay, and the audio tape on which Otash claims he "heard Marilyn Monroe die".  This tape was allegedly handed over to a high-ranking member of LAPD and never saw the light of day.  Of course, few if any of the people discussed in this book (including Otash himself) are alive to support or deny the stories.  One of my big questions is, if Otash kept a red file cabinet full of information as "an insurance policy" why would he only have 1 set of the material, and why would he keep it in his kitchen?  This book is fun, in the way a gossip column is fun, but I take the stories with a huge grain of salt.  Most of the information about Marilyn Monroe is not in the excellently researched "The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe", so I do not accept any of the stories here as completely factual.  The focus is more on Frank Otash and his life. 

Fixer Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn

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