Chapter Twenty-two
ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, Nunnally Johnson told Marilyn’s old friend Jean Negulesco that he was going to be invited to direct Something’s Got to Give “because Marilyn has asked for you.” Negulesco, who had directed her in How To Marry a Millionaire, said he would be delighted to replace Cukor, for he considered Marilyn “a hurricane of glamour [who] had such a right sense of knowing the character she was playing—the way to enter a scene, to hold singular attention as the scene developed [and] the way to end a scene.”1 With Negulesco’s acceptance, everything was in place for the picture to recommence at the end of October. Marilyn was signed at a salary of $250,000, two and a half times the amount of her original contract.
Evelyn Moriarty heard the news about Negulesco and telephoned Marilyn, who was, according to Evelyn, “in great spirits—she was so happy to be going back to work. We talked about the script and the new director—all sorts of things. She was really in tip-top condition, and we all looked forward to starting the picture.” Marilyn also told Evelyn that Arthur Jacobs was going to produce I Love Louisa for Fox later that year, so there was even more to anticipate. With these projects and The Jean Harlow Story being developed, Marilyn’s career had never seemed brighter.
As for her immediate plans, Marilyn was preoccupied with preparations for a small reception to follow her wedding, and was drawing up a list of friends to be invited at the last moment. She also confirmed that the wine, sandwiches and salads would be delivered the following week from Briggs, the local emporium she frequented on nearby San Vicente Boulevard. Joe was due in Los Angeles Sunday night or Monday morning; they would be married on Wednesday and then proceed for a honeymoon in New York, where they both had close friends. Then perhaps they would spend a week on Long Island or Cape Cod.
Marilyn’s telephone records for August 1 also list a call to Leon Krohn’s office at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Krohn, whom she trusted without reservation and to whom she often went for advice on other than medical matters, had by this time attended her for a decade. From the 1952 appendectomy through the anxieties and heartbreak of Some Like It Hot and her subsequent third miscarriage right up to her recent minor surgery, “Red” Krohn was the gentlest of men and her most perceptive physician. He had been a good friend to her and Joe during their divorce proceedings, too, and so it was natural for her to call him with brighter news. She asked Krohn to dine with her that evening, saying she had something important to tell him; he replied that he would ring back after his hospital rounds. Then she telephoned again, late in the afternoon, and said she would call him in a few days.
The reason for this postponement is not entirely clear, but before the day was over Marilyn had gone to Greenson for a two-hour session and Engelberg had come to Fifth Helena thereafter, in early evening. The sudden change of dinner plans may have been the result of an injection, or just simple exhaustion; it may also, however, have been related to the tensions of Marilyn’s relationship with Eunice, whom she could at last dismiss permanently—and now had the perfect opportunity to do so, on the eve of her renewed life with Joe.
Besides Eunice’s proprietary attitude, her attempt to control Marilyn’s life and her alliance with Greenson, there were three final moments that pushed Marilyn’s patience too far and sealed the housekeeper’s fate. First, as Cherie Redmond wrote from the studio to Marilyn at the end of July, Marilyn’s mail from Fox and from her private post-office box were now “being held by Mrs. Murray,” whose liberties were becoming more and more presumptuous. Informed of this, Marilyn was rightly angry, since she felt once again like a child in her own home under the supervision of her own employee.
Second, at Marilyn’s invitation, Ralph Roberts had come that Wednesday morning to give her a massage. Eunice “made her presence known,” as he recalled, “and she looked at me with such hatred and venom, as if she were saying, ‘I thought we’d gotten rid of you.’ It was chilling how intimidating this little woman could be, how manipulative of Marilyn and divisive with Marilyn’s friends. Mrs. Murray was Greenson’s minion, that’s all, his on-the-spot representative.” Eunice’s attitude to Ralph did not escape Marilyn, who was further annoyed.
The third incident fixed Marilyn’s determination. Eunice had planned to accompany her sister and brother-in-law on a European vacation beginning Monday, August 6. But she had chosen not to tell Marilyn of this in advance and had not even made travel reservations: apparently she was unsure about leaving Marilyn at all. Cherie Redmond remarked on this indecision when she wrote to Hedda, “It seems to me that Mrs. Murray’s devotion to MM is so intense—that may not be the right word, but you know what I mean—that she wouldn’t want to go away.”
Whatever the rationale, several things are clear: on Wednesday, August 1, Eunice at last told Marilyn she would like to take a vacation on the following Monday. Marilyn, who must have been delighted with the news but perhaps did not show it, wrote her a check for a month’s wages and told Eunice not to return in September. Thus Marilyn, who always avoided confrontations, could fire the housekeeper for good with the excuse that she herself would be traveling for an indeterminate time and that her own future plans were as uncertain as Eunice’s sudden announcement. Although she made no mention of it in her memoir, Eunice probably also learned from Marilyn that afternoon about the marriage plans, for Marilyn knew that Eunice disliked DiMaggio as much as she did Roberts. In addition, Marilyn put through several calls to her New York maid, Hattie Stevenson, apparently to ask if she might be available on a short-term basis in Los Angeles that autumn.
* * *
Eunice’s reaction could only have been shock, hurt and possibly even anger. Here she was, finally in the ideal situation she longed for, in the replica of the dream house she had chosen, working with the wise father figure Ralph Greenson, determining more and more the life of her “daughter” Marilyn, nursing her as her sister Carolyn nursed children. At last she seemed to have fulfilled her lifelong dream of living up to the standard set by her sister; at last she had been able to correct the situation of her unhappy marriage and, through Marilyn, regain her lost home and head a kind of family.
Marilyn . . . Marilyn’s busy life . . . Marilyn’s house . . . Marilyn’s insecurities . . . Marilyn’s dependency on Greenson—all these had become the emotional accoutrement of Eunice Murray’s identity, had provided her with a purpose. Without the house on Fifth Helena and its famous resident, without Greenson to serve and Marilyn to “nurse,” there would be no life for Eunice at all. Like Rupert Allan (who had returned to Los Angeles from Monaco for six weeks), Ralph Roberts and Pat Newcomb recalled that the final departure of Eunice Murray was in fact one of the important things Marilyn did in her own best interest. “I knew her attitude toward Greenson had changed,” Roberts recalled, “and concerning Mrs. Murray—well, Marilyn simply said how much the woman annoyed her, bored her to distraction.” The end of the employment, in light of the temporary separation in May, was not unexpected. “Marilyn just couldn’t stand her living there anymore,” said Pat. “The truth is that Marilyn at last felt in control of things, and so she fired Mrs. Murray. It was over.” Her last day of work would be Saturday, August 4; until then, there was a good deal of work to occupy them both. This was only the beginning of Marilyn’s healthy self-assertion, but the real challenge still lay ahead—confronting Greenson with her new autonomy.
Marilyn spent that afternoon at Fox, conferring about the resumption of Something’s Got to Give; this was so cordial and creative a meeting that an outsider might have thought there had been only a brief hiatus for some minor reason, with no troubled history at all.
On Thursday morning, August 2, Marilyn went to Greenson for a session and, as his subsequent invoices to her Estate testified, he drove to her house for a second meeting later that day. Clearly, there was a crisis. It is unimaginable that she would not have told him about the dismissal of Eunice and her forthcoming marriage, and to these news items he could not have reacted with any pleasure or approval. It also would have been logical for her to have discussed her temporary interruption of therapy in light of her travel plans, and with that, Greenson may have thought he, too, was about to be dismissed.
“Greenson’s connection to the studio she perceived as the ultimate betrayal,” said Ralph Roberts.
She deeply resented what she saw as his use of her. And she saw at last what was fundamentally true: that Hollywood was not her life, and that dependence on him was not her life. Her resentment of Greenson had reached the breaking point—so much was clear to all of us. He had tried to get rid of almost everyone in her life, and she didn’t have that many people to begin with. But when he tried it with Joe—I think that’s when she began to reconsider the whole thing. As for Engelberg and the pills and the shots, well it was obvious, wasn’t it? If you can’t control Marilyn one way, there were always drugs.
Emboldened by her action with Eunice, Marilyn was about to take the step that she believed would free her as much as her remarriage to Joe. “She realized she had to get rid of Greenson,” according to Roberts, “and she seemed ready to do so. After all, she had support from a lot of us for that!”
Marilyn had been, as Pat Newcomb knew firsthand, furious with her analyst over three things in three months: first, Greenson was in Switzerland when she returned from New York to find trouble brewing at Fox. “Marilyn was very angry about his not being there for her,” according to Pat—just as Marilyn had subsequently experienced physically his anger, which was a second cause of her resentment and whose perfidy she needed several days or weeks to realize. Third, she never forgot the way Greenson had tried to separate her from Joe.
“Several times, she threatened to fire Greenson—to leave him,” Pat recalled, “but I never took her threats seriously.” Now at last Marilyn was about to turn a warning into a promise fulfilled. Eunice was to be booted out and Marilyn was about to marry, effectively abandoning Greenson and his therapy for a husband and a honeymoon. She may not have been explicit about a firm termination of their relationship, as she had been with Eunice, but it was certain that she was moving on.
In his essay “Special Problems in Psychotherapy with the Rich and Famous,” Greenson neatly described the end of his relationship with this special client in a passage immediately following a lightly veiled disquisition on Marilyn, her background and her problems. The glittering generalizations show how emotional an issue this was for him, for all scholarly discretion is crushed beneath the weight of his unhappy memories:
Rich and famous people believe that prolonged psychotherapy is a rip-off. They want their therapist as a close friend, they even want their wife and their children to become part of the therapist’s family. . . . These patients are seductive.
Anyone in the audience who knew of his most famous client must have thought of Marilyn as he continued his projection of feelings onto her, and the implicit admission of his own history and dejection:
Rich and famous people need the therapist twenty-four hours a day and they are insatiable. They are also able to give you up completely in the sense they are doing to you what was done to them by their parents or their servants. You are their servant and can be dismissed without notice.
For Greenson, Marilyn had indeed become the rival Juliet, one to be controlled through the appearance of the most benevolent counsel. Talented, adored, applauded, beautiful, the actress in a way had taken the place of his sister Juliet in his complex feelings.
For her part, and to his satisfaction, Marilyn had come to a point where she had worked only with Greenson’s approval; she arranged her social life according to his lights; she accepted or rejected roles only with his approbation (Huston’s film about Freud, for example, was out of the question, no matter how much she longed to be in it). Muffling by proxy the applause for Juliet that he so resented, he had kept Marilyn in his home. Putting forth the notion of her schizophrenia and receiving the blessing of his colleague Milton Wexler for such unorthodox treatment (but apparently not for the prodigal administration of a drug regime), Greenson had brilliantly orchestrated everything under the pretext of reordering her life. “Come inside with me,” he seemed to say. “Renounce your fame, and therefore affirm my supremacy,” his actions said. With Marilyn Monroe, Ralph Greenson finally became not only a musician but orchestrator and conductor.
But he was indeed, as he himself had feared anyone thinking, the incarnation of the musician Svengali to this new Trilby, the performer of the world. Just as Eunice had done, Greenson was, with Marilyn, reversing the resented past pattern: he was subjugating the other. Eunice Murray had become a crippled version of the increasingly healthy Marilyn: now Ralph Greenson was himself retreating into a psychoneurotic fear of abandonment and rejection, precisely the mental attitudes Marilyn was learning to put behind her.
Apparently, no firm decision was taken that Thursday about a termination to her therapy: this was to be something discussed by them over the next several days, or perhaps when Joe arrived and they announced their future plans; in any case, it would not have been an easy task for Marilyn to confront Greenson with this dramatic news.
Whatever the substance of their sessions, Marilyn asked Eunice to drive her on several errands in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Their last stop was The Mart, an antique collector’s paradise on Santa Monica Boulevard, where Marilyn went in search of a bedside table. “I have a Spanish house in Brentwood,” she told the store’s owner, Bill Alexander, “and I’m so happy, because I’m going to be married to someone I was married to once before.” They chatted about furnishings, and Marilyn selected a table to be delivered on Saturday. She would have lingered to browse and talk further, but (thus Alexander) “her housekeeper and companion seemed anxious and nervous and said, ‘Marilyn, we should be leaving. I will wait for you in the car.’ ” Around six o’clock, Marilyn invited Allan Snyder and Marjorie Plecher to the house for champagne and caviar. They recalled how happy and optimistic she was, radiating charm and wit and good health.
On Friday, August 3, 1962—as reported by the Associated Press wire service that evening and by the Los Angeles Times next morning—Robert and Ethel Kennedy and four of their children arrived by airplane in San Francisco, where they were met by their good friend John Bates and his family. The Kennedys were guests at the Bates ranch outside Gilroy—eighty miles south of San Francisco, three hundred fifty miles north of Los Angeles and high in the Santa Cruz Mountains—for that entire weekend, prior to the attorney general’s opening address at a convention of the American Bar Association on Monday, August 6.
This social note would have no relevance at all to the life and death of Marilyn Monroe were it not for the fact that from 1962 on, the most outrageous assertions were made—not only about a tryst between Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe that weekend, but also about Kennedy’s direct involvement in her death. The origin and accumulation of these claims—and the absurd alternate theories of a murder cover-up variously involving organized crime, the FBI and the CIA—are dispatched in the Afterword to this book. But a brief outline of the attorney general’s weekend, and of the several witnesses who attest to his considerable distance from Los Angeles, should be herewith provided.
The Kennedys and the Bateses were already friends, and in a way the Bates family was reciprocating a previous weekend they had enjoyed at Hickory Hill, Robert Kennedy’s Virginia compound. John Bates, then forty-four, had graduated from Stanford University in 1940 and had served for three years in the Navy. Through a college fraternity brother named Paul B. Fay, a close friend of John F. Kennedy, Bates met and also became a friend of Kennedy. After the war, Bates took his law degree from Berkeley in 1947 and joined the San Francisco firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, where he worked with such distinction that he eventually became a senior management partner.
By the time John Kennedy became president, John Bates was one of California’s most prestigious and respected attorneys, holding, among other positions, the chair of the judiciary committee of the Bar Association of San Francisco. It was no surprise, then, that the new administration invited him to head the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. This position Bates considered but rejected, preferring instead to remain with his law firm and to retain his California residence, where he and his wife were raising their three children.
“It was a difficult decision,” said Bates years later, “but I gratefully declined. When I learned that the attorney general was to address the bar convention, I wanted to show my appreciation for the offer to join the Kennedy administration, and so my wife and I invited Bob to join us for the weekend.” Kennedy’s presence at the remote Bates ranch in Gilroy that weekend is beyond dispute: in fact it was documented not only by the Bates family and household employees in detail, but also by the Gilroy Dispatch the following Monday. “The attorney general and his family were with us every minute from Friday afternoon to Monday,” said John Bates, “and there is simply no physical way that he could have gone to Southern California and returned.” Accounts to the contrary by the media and so-called eyewitnesses Bates always considered “outrageous, ridiculous and disgraceful.”
Bates is quite correct, for the airstrip nearest to his ranch is at San Jose, an hour’s journey by car. Because of the deep canyons, steep mountains and high power lines, helicopter flights have been always dangerous in and out of Mount Madonna, the site of the Bates ranch. The only practicable means of transportation from Gilroy to Los Angeles in 1962 was by car, a journey of no less than five hours each way.
Since 1962, the Kennedy schedule for that weekend has been well preserved in the Bates family guest books and documented in their photo albums. On Saturday morning, August 4, both families rose early and ate large breakfasts before Robert and Ethel Kennedy joined John and Nancy Bates for a horseback ride.
The foreman of the Bates ranch, Roland Snyder, was another witness to the weekend. “I saddled the horses for Mr. and Mrs. Bates and for Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, then they lined up and I took their picture and they took off for Mount Madonna. They were here all weekend, that’s certain. By God, he wasn’t anywhere near L.A.—he was here with us.”
The morning ride was followed by swimming and a barbecue lunch back at the compound. “I was fourteen at the time,” recalled John Bates, Jr., “and was about to go off to boarding school. I remember Bob [Kennedy] teasing me about it, saying, ‘Oh, John, you’ll hate it!’ ”
During Saturday afternoon, the attorney general—in a typical Kennedy-style challenge—suggested that everyone race a mile to an open field for a game of touch football. “The best flat meadow for field games,” according to John Bates,
was at the top of the ranch. So off we went, and all eleven of us played. We then went back to the compound for a swim and some games, and then the children showered and dressed for dinner. I remember Bobby sitting with the children as they ate and telling them stories. He truly loved his children.
After the children were put to bed, the four adults sat down to dinner: Nancy Bates remembered their discussion of Kennedy’s upcoming speech, which was reviewed and edited by Ethel (and on which the attorney general worked intermittently during the weekend). “Dinner lasted until about ten-thirty,” said John Bates, “and we were in our bedrooms not long after that.”
Sunday morning, August 5, the Bates and Kennedy families were up early for the trip to Mass in Gilroy, their presence documented by the local press next day. After luncheon back at the Bates ranch, John drove the Kennedys to San Francisco, where they were to stay at the home of Paul Fay during the convention. That afternoon and evening the Kennedys spent in San Francisco with John and Nancy Bates and other friends of both the Bates and Kennedy families (among them Mr. and Mrs. Edward Callan and Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Tydings). It is significant that over a span of more than thirty years not one of the dozen people who were with Marilyn on August 3 and 4—at her home and at Lawford’s—ever mentioned the presence of Robert Kennedy. In fact, when the stories began to be taken for truth, everyone took pains to deny these allegations. Finally, the FBI records confirm without any doubt precisely this schedule kept by the attorney general and his family that weekend.2
Friday, August 3, was a warm and unusually humid summer day, full of activity for Marilyn. She awoke early and refreshed, perhaps because she had not taken sleeping pills the night before. Then she spent ninety minutes with Greenson at Franklin Street and stopped at Briggs to add some items to her party list for the following week. Back at her home, Hyman Engelberg was waiting, apparently at Greenson’s request. He injected her and gave her a prescription for twenty-five Nembutal capsules. These were added to a store of chloral hydrate, the instant “knockout pills”—actually a liquid enclosed in a gelatine capsule—that had been prescribed by Greenson to wean Monroe off barbiturates, as he later detailed. Lee Seigel had also written for her a prescription for an unknown quantity of Nembutal on July 25 and refilled it on August 3. The precise numbers of pills available to Marilyn Monroe during the last months of her life was lost in the confusion of the days after her death and the conflicting accounts of several medical and legal sources, but clearly she had no trouble obtaining drugs in quantity.
The ease and redundancy of drug availability was partly due to a failure of communication between Greenson and Engelberg, made more difficult by Engelberg’s protracted and painful divorce from his wife, and he was often difficult to locate in late July and early August. Engelberg said later that he was careful to limit Monroe’s supply of Nembutal to one a day, and Greenson claimed that a primary object of his therapy was to break his patient’s drug dependency—but if their statements accurately expressed their protocols, both doctors were failing spectacularly.
That Engelberg’s injections were something more than vitamins is evident from the thirty-two-minute call documented by her General Telephone records. Norman Rosten recalled that during their conversation she was “cheerful, excited . . . high, bubbly, breathless. She seemed high. . . . She raced from one subject to another [with] barely a pause.” But although her tone seemed manic, Marilyn had a lot of news and was clear about her plans: she said she was feeling better than ever, that she would soon be back at work, that her house was nearing completion, that she was getting several film offers. It was, Marilyn said, time for them all to put the past behind them and begin to live before they were too old; no doubt Eunice Murray and Ralph Greenson were in her mind even as she spoke.
Other telephone calls kept Marilyn busy throughout Friday afternoon, as her records document. She spoke with the handyman Ray Tolman at his home in Fullerton, to arrange for him to work at the house early the following week: there was heavy cleaning to do, as well as some important repairs necessary. She then telephoned Elizabeth Courtney and Jean Louis to ask if they could deliver her new dress for a final fitting the next day; but suddenly remembering that would be Saturday, she corrected herself, said she did not want to interrupt their weekend and added that she could wait until Monday.
In midafternoon, Jule Styne, who was looking forward to composing her songs for I Love Louisa, telephoned from New York with another idea. He proposed to Marilyn a film musical version of Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which had been a successful Fox film in 1945. To this idea she responded enthusiastically and added that since she was coming to New York the following week, they could meet in his office. Thus an appointment was fixed for the following Thursday, August 9, at half past two: “She was very excited about the idea,” recalled Jule Styne, “and she would have been wonderful in it. We spoke of [Frank] Sinatra for the other leading role.” Marilyn also agreed to give a long interview for a photoessay accompanying her appearance on the cover of Esquire, and there were various social engagements as well. “My husband and I were expecting her to arrive that week,” according to Paula Strasberg, who had begun to purchase theater tickets for her visit.
Arthur Jacobs called to say that their meeting with J. Lee Thompson was scheduled for Monday at five o’clock to discuss I Love Louisa. Marilyn was delighted at the rapid progress of this project, too. Her calendar was filling up fast, and as even Eunice had to admit later, there was nothing somber about her attitude: “There was too much to look forward to.” The phone calls were interrupted when Marilyn decided she should dash over to Frank’s Nursery, where she ordered several citrus trees, flowering plants and succulents; delivery was arranged for the following day. Very likely she planned her wedding to be set outdoors, and the garden and pool area needed plantings and color.
Yet Marilyn Monroe was functioning soberly and creatively even after a second meeting with Greenson that Friday afternoon. She called Pat Newcomb, whom she invited to dine out with her. Pat, however, was suffering a bout of bronchitis—to which Marilyn replied, “Why don’t you come out here and stay for the night? You’ll have all the privacy you want, you can sun in the back yard and have all the rest you want.” As Pat said later, “I accepted her invitation. She was in a very good mood, a very happy mood.”
And so the two women dined quietly that Friday evening at a local restaurant, and then returned to Fifth Helena. Eunice Murray had gone to her home for the night, and Marilyn and Pat retired early. Pat slept soundly in the small second bedroom diagonally opposite Marilyn’s, but Marilyn endured another night of only intermittent sleep.
A few minutes after eight on the morning of Saturday, August 4, Eunice Murray arrived at Fifth Helena for her last day of work, which was to include supervision of the garden plantings. Marilyn wandered into the kitchen at about nine, wrapped in her white terry-cloth robe, and poured herself a glass of grapefruit juice. An hour later, Lawrence Schiller drove up: he had been one of the trio photographing the swimming scene on the set of Something’s Got to Give, and he had come to discuss a magazine feature exploiting the pictures; as ever, Marilyn had retained the right to approve or reject photos for American magazines. That morning, according to Schiller, Marilyn was fresh and alert, “seemingly without a care,” and tending a flower bed in front of the house when he arrived. She gave him a tour of her remodeled guest cottage and then marked the photos with a grease pencil, indicating her selection and rejection.
The morning was hardly a dramatic one. Marilyn signed for several deliveries (the bedside table from The Mart, the trees from Frank’s Nursery) and spoke with friends on the telephone. Ralph Roberts called, and they arranged to have a barbecue at Fifth Helena the following evening, after she returned from her second visit to Mama Jean Bello with Sidney Skolsky. It seemed, that sunny summer morning, the crisis with Fox that past season had somehow propelled her to a stage of freedom and a strength of purpose that had been her goal since 1955, when she deserted Hollywood for New York. Never before had her professional prospects been so various or so potentially rewarding, both financially and artistically.
Just before noon, Pat Newcomb arose, only to find her client and friend surly and sarcastic. “Marilyn seemed angry that I had been able to sleep and she hadn’t—but something else was behind it all.” Nevertheless while Marilyn telephoned friends, Eunice prepared lunch for Pat, who remained throughout the afternoon. She lay quietly, sitting under a heat lamp for her bronchitis and taking the sunshine at poolside while Marilyn attended her own business.
Shortly after one o’clock, Ralph Greenson arrived. Except for an interval between three and four-thirty, he remained with Marilyn until after seven that evening: “He spent most of the day with her,” as Milton Rudin said, based on his later conversations with Greenson. While Marilyn and Greenson retreated to her bedroom for a therapy session, Eunice as usual answered the telephone; there was apparently only one caller—a collect call, from Joe DiMaggio, Jr., then on duty with the Marines in nearby Orange County. Then twenty, he had maintained close ties with Marilyn, as had the Miller children, and scarcely a month passed without their exchanging several phone calls. But because Marilyn was closeted with her doctor, Eunice told Joe that Marilyn was not home. This occurred, as he told the police, at about two o’clock.
At about three, according to Pat Newcomb, Greenson “came out and told me to leave, that he wanted to deal with Marilyn alone. She was upset, and he told Mrs. Murray to take her out for a walk on the beach, in the car. And that’s the last I saw of her.”
With that, Greenson returned home, while Eunice drove Marilyn to Peter Lawford’s home; the housekeeper then went shopping for groceries as Marilyn instructed (so Eunice documented in her memoir) and then returned for Marilyn within an hour.
William Asher, who had directed the presidential gala, was a director in Lawford’s production company and was also a regular at Lawford’s social events, recalled Marilyn’s visit to the beach that afternoon between three and four. “I was there along with a few other people who had dropped by, when Marilyn arrived and took a walk on the beach.” Asher knew Marilyn through his frequent visits to the Lawfords, and through negotiations for yet another prospective new film project then being discussed—a comedy about a train heist to star Marilyn, Lawford, Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. Screenwriter Harry Brown (who had written Ocean’s Eleven for the same quartet of men) had completed a treatment for the new project, and Milton Rudin was already negotiating contracts.
But there was a drastic change in the sober manner and clear speech Eunice and Pat had observed in Marilyn that morning. After Greenson’s visit and by the time she arrived at the beach she was drugged, according to Asher—“not staggering, but clearly under the influence, and she wasn’t too steady in the sand.” Whether at Greenson’s suggestion or by her own choice, Marilyn during or after their session had taken sufficient sedation that her speech was now slurred and her gait wobbly: as her autopsy later revealed, there was a high concentration of sodium pentobarbital (Nembutal) in her liver, for which several hours of accumulation would be required.
There were several reasons for Marilyn to be given or to resort on her own to her habit of taking tranquilizers that day, and they were the same causes of the scratchy humor Pat had seen that morning. Eunice’s final hours in her employment must have made the atmosphere at Fifth Helena awkward, as would the imminent interruption of her therapy necessitated by her marriage and trip to New York. Marilyn was also restless because of her insomnia the previous night; she was eager for Joe’s arrival; and however enthusiastic she was about her many projects, she was as usual nervous and insecure about her participation in any professional activities. Asher remembered that Marilyn watched part of a volleyball game on the beach and then departed at about four o’clock.
At half past four, Joe DiMaggio, Jr., put through a second collect call to Marilyn, and Eunice Murray again told him she was not at home—but this cannot have been true, for by this time Eunice and Marilyn had returned from the beach together. The fact is that, as Greenson mentioned in his August 20 letter to Marianne Kris, he returned to Marilyn at exactly that time to continue what was becoming virtually a day-long therapy session, during which Eunice again answered the telephone. Greenson also wrote to Kris words that reveal most pointedly the extent of his emotional upset and the likelihood that they had at least discussed terminating her therapy: “I was aware that she was somewhat annoyed with me. She often became annoyed when I did not absolutely and wholeheartedly agree [with her]. . . . She was angry with me. I told her we would talk more, that she should call me on Sunday morning. . . .”
At about five, however, Marilyn did take a call from Peter Lawford, who was trying to assemble a few friends for the usual Saturday night casual Mexican supper; he hoped Marilyn would return to the beach to join them—George Durgom, a personal manager of (among others) Lawford and of Jackie Gleason; Lawford’s closest friend, the agent Joe Naar, and his wife, Dolores, and Milton Ebbins and his wife (Patricia Lawford was in Hyannis Port visiting her ailing father). This invitation she declined, but Peter persisted: “Oh, Marilyn, come on down. You can go back early.” Lawford then said he would call again, hoping she would reconsider.3
But there were two other telephone calls that Marilyn was not able to intercept. The first came from Isadore Miller, to whom Eunice said that Marilyn was dressing and would call him back; Isadore never received a return call. The second call was from Ralph Roberts, at about five-forty or five forty-five, just before he drove to Jurgensen’s in Beverly Hills to purchase the food for their barbecue next evening. “But it was Greenson who picked up the phone,” according to Roberts. “When I asked for Marilyn, he said abruptly, ‘Not here,’ and immediately hung up on me without asking if I wanted to leave a message. Nothing else, just a blunt ‘Not here,’ and he put down the receiver.”
His manner may not have sprung from simple rudeness, however clear was the resentment of Ralph the analyst toward Ralph the friend. At precisely this time, Greenson was expecting a call from Hyman Engelberg, whom he had been trying to reach, and whom he wanted to come and provide Marilyn with medication—most likely an injection to help her sleep, as the internist so often did. Earlier that same day, amid the awkwardness of separating from his wife, Engelberg had received a message through his answering service from Greenson, asking him (as Engelberg’s first wife clearly recalled) to come to Fifth Helena. The internist had refused. Now, just after six, Greenson traced him to his home on St. Ives Drive. To Greenson’s dismay, Engelberg again declined, leaving the psychiatrist to cope alone.
At seven o’clock or seven-fifteen, Greenson claimed, he departed, leaving Marilyn alone with Eunice Murray. And shortly thereafter begins the series of inconsistencies, misrepresentations and outright lies masking the truth of the tragic and unnecessary death of Marilyn Monroe.
First, there is a conflict between Ralph Greenson’s account of Eunice’s remaining with Marilyn, and Eunice’s tale. In The Last Months, Eunice’s co-author and sister-in-law Rose Shade wrote that “before he left, [Greenson] asked [Eunice] if she planned to stay over that night, and she said she did. That was all.” Two weeks after Marilyn’s death, however, Greenson expressly noted in a letter to Marianne Kris, “I asked the housekeeper to stay over night, which she did not ordinarily do on Saturday nights.”4 In 1973, Greenson said he made this request because he “didn’t want Marilyn to be alone,” which was curious in light of the fact that by then everyone knew this was to be Eunice’s last day of employment under Marilyn. Things become more ominous still in light of what Eunice told the district attorney in 1982: that “this was the first time Dr. Greenson had asked Murray to spend the night at Monroe’s residence,” and that she had no knowledge of Marilyn’s ordinary sleeping habits or attire.5
Greenson and Murray were less than forthcoming and much less than consistent in subsequent accounts over the years. But two telephone calls provide important clues to a final resolution of the mystery surrounding Marilyn’s last night.
The first call came from Joe DiMaggio, Jr., who persisted in his day-long effort to get through to Marilyn. He finally succeeded between seven and seven-fifteen, when she picked up the telephone and the two had a pleasant conversation during which he informed her that he had decided to break his engagement to a young woman Marilyn did not like.6 As Joe, Jr., told police, he found her alert, happy and in good spirits—especially when he shared this news. Their chat lasted about ten minutes. Even Eunice Murray confirmed that during this conversation Marilyn was “happy, gay, alert—anything but depressed.” Greenson repeated a similar impression: he said Marilyn called him after hearing from Joe, Jr., and that she sounded “quite pleasant and more cheerful.”
The second call came from Peter Lawford, still hoping to persuade Marilyn Monroe to attend his little supper party. Lawford spoke with Marilyn soon after Joe, Jr.—at seven-forty or seven forty-five—and heard a woman in a very different condition from that heard by Joe, Jr.
Lawford heard Marilyn muttering in thickened speech, her voice slurred and almost inaudible. Distressed and disoriented, she frightened Peter, himself no stranger to the effects of barbiturates, alcohol and other drugs, and familiar with Marilyn’s own habits in this regard. Attempting to rouse her to consciousness, he shouted her name several times over the telephone, asking what was wrong. Finally, with a great effort, she seemed to inhale, and then Marilyn Monroe said, “Say goodbye to Pat, say goodbye to the president, and say goodbye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.” At that point, Lawford said later, “I really started to get angry and frightened.” Oddly, Marilyn whispered, “I’ll see, I’ll see,” and then she was silent.
Thinking Marilyn had hung up the telephone, Lawford immediately tried to call Monroe back, but he heard only a busy signal that engaged the line for the next half-hour. When he asked an operator to interrupt the conversation, he was told that the phone was off the hook or out of order. Frantic, he telephoned Milton Ebbins, who had also been invited to and declined the now defunct supper party. “Peter was obviously deeply concerned,” Ebbins recalled—and he would remain concerned through the evening, despite repeated assurances from several people that Marilyn was well and there was no cause for alarm.
There was, of course, very much cause for just that.
In less than a half hour, something terrible happened to Marilyn Monroe, as the coroner later noted:
Monroe was laughing and chatting on the telephone with Joe DiMaggio’s son . . . and not thirty minutes after this happy conversation, Marilyn Monroe was dying. . . . This was one of the strangest facts of the case.
Peter Lawford understood her few words as indicating that she was dangerously drugged or even dying. Something was so wrong and different that he was convinced this was not what some people later claimed—a cry of “Wolf!” With panic in his voice, he then tried to obtain help for her from whomever among his friends he could enlist. And in this effort he persisted so fiercely that even an eventual call from no less than Milton Rudin was not enough to allay his fears.
First, there was Ebbins:
Peter said, “Let’s go over there [to Marilyn’s house]. I want to go over there right away—I think something terrible is happening to Marilyn.” But I said, “Peter, don’t do it! You’re the president’s brother-in-law! If you go over there, if she’s drunk or drugged or something, you’ll see headlines all over the place and you’ll get yourself involved. I’ll tell you—let me call Mickey Rudin, and if he says so, then you can go, because otherwise, if you go, you’re really opening a can of worms.”
Ebbins then called Rudin—a logical choice, since he was Marilyn’s attorney—reaching his office at eight twenty-five. He learned that Rudin was attending a party at the home of Mildred Allenberg, the widow of Sinatra’s agent, and Ebbins called Rudin there. “Rudin asked me to let him check it out—to see if there was any trouble,” Ebbins recalled. “So he telephoned Mrs. Murray.” With this account Rudin concurred: “I did not call [Greenson]. He had had enough, quite frankly. He had spent the day with her. But I did call the housekeeper.”
Rudin reached Eunice at about eight-thirty or a few moments later, in the room at the guest cottage. After asking her to check on Marilyn, he waited “for about four minutes, and then she came back to me and said, ‘She’s fine.’ But I had a feeling she never went out to take a look.” Rudin’s intuition served him well, as Eunice’s account of his call suggested: “If only [Rudin] had told [me] that he had received a worried call from someone,” she lamented in her book. “If only . . . ,” then what? She would have actually taken the trouble to ascertain Marilyn’s condition? But in her memoir, Eunice wrote nothing about Marilyn’s nonresponse: she did not say that she went to the door, that she knocked, called out to her—nothing.
Rudin then called Ebbins and reported his conversation with Eunice; Ebbins in turn reported to Lawford. Still, Lawford was neither satisfied nor convinced: becoming more and more drunk as the evening progressed (and Ebbins knew from subsequent calls), he persisted in his anguished concern for Marilyn, calling other friends to enlist help.7 Among these was Joe Naar, who lived on Moreno Avenue, a half-mile from Fifth Helena. Lawford called him at about eleven, asking him to drive over to determine Marilyn’s welfare “because she sounded as if she might have overdosed,” as Naar said later. As he was dressing to do just that, Naar received another call—this time from Ebbins, countermanding Lawford’s request and saying that everything was fine: Rudin had just contacted him to the effect that “Marilyn’s doctor has given her a sedative [thus Naar, quoting Ebbins] and she was resting. The doctor was Greenson.”
While Ebbins continued to keep people away from Fifth Helena, Lawford repeatedly sounded the alarm, calling Asher as late as one o’clock Sunday morning, imploring him to make the trip to Marilyn’s house. Only at one-thirty did Lawford desist in his efforts—because by then he had learned the truth in a telephone call from Ebbins, who had heard the news from Rudin. According to Lawford, Rudin had telephoned Ebbins at exactly that time from Fifth Helena, where Rudin and Greenson “had found Marilyn dead at midnight.” Lawford’s confidence as to the time was based on his simultaneous glance at a bedside clock.
In fact, according to Milton Rudin, Marilyn was dead before midnight. He recalled, in his first full discussion of this night for the record, that he returned home early from the Allenberg dinner party and before he prepared to retire, he received a call from his brother-in-law Ralph Greenson: “I got a call from Romey. He was over there. Marilyn was dead.” Rudin said he drove at once to the scene.
The brief timespan during which Marilyn’s death must have occurred becomes narrower still in light of another telephone call, this one received by Arthur Jacobs at the Hollywood Bowl, where he was attending a concert with the producer Mervyn LeRoy and his wife, and with the actress Natalie Trundy—later to be Mrs. Arthur Jacobs—on the eve of her birthday. “At about ten or ten-thirty,” according to Natalie Jacobs,
someone came to our box and said, “Come with us right now, please, Mr. Jacobs. Marilyn Monroe is dead.” That I will never forget. Arthur asked the LeRoys to take me home. I don’t know why, but I had the distinct impression it was Mickey Rudin who called Arthur at the Bowl, and that he [Rudin] had been called by Greenson from Marilyn’s house.
Well before midnight, then, several people close to Marilyn were aware of a terrible disaster and were moving to control it.
According to Natalie Jacobs, Arthur arrived at Fifth Helena, conferred with those already present and then departed. The burden of the worldwide public-relations tangle that was soon to begin would be handled by Marilyn’s friend, Pat Newcomb. Pat was not at home that evening and could not be reached until several hours later. She was finally informed of Marilyn’s death about five o’clock Sunday morning by Rudin. “I remember his exact words,” according to Pat. “He said, ‘There’s been an accident. Marilyn has taken an overdose of pills.’ I asked, ‘Is she okay?’ and he said, ‘No, she’s dead. You’d better get over here.’ That I remember.”
These firsthand reports fully contradict the entire official report of Marilyn Monroe’s death, which depends on Ralph Greenson’s and Eunice Murray’s versions of the events.
To be accepted, the accounts of Greenson and Murray relied on the consensus that no one thought there was anything amiss until around three o’clock Sunday morning, August 5—fully ninety minutes after Lawford’s telephone call from Ebbins and almost five hours after the news was reported to Jacobs.
At three, Eunice said, she awoke, “for reasons I still don’t understand” (as she said with her typical blend of feigned innocence, coy vagueness and a soupçon of bogus mysticism). She then noticed a light under the door to Marilyn’s room, tried to open the door, found it locked and then, her concerns aroused, telephoned Greenson. He instructed her to take a fireplace poker, then to go outside the house and part the draperies through the open grille-covered front casement windows, to see if Marilyn was asleep and apparently well. Eunice did as she was told and saw Marilyn lying nude and motionless on the bed. This she reported back to Greenson on the telephone. He rushed over and, using the same fireplace iron, broke a second, unbarred window (on the side of the house), which he unlatched, thereby climbing into Marilyn’s bedroom. A moment later he unlocked the bedroom door from within to admit Eunice, saying quietly to her, “We’ve lost her.” At three-fifty, Greenson telephoned Engelberg, who pronounced Marilyn dead. At four-twenty-five, the two doctors then called the police, who arrived at the house ten minutes later.
The first flaw in the story was the idea that light shone under the door: new, deep-pile white carpeting had recently been installed in Marilyn’s bedroom, so thick that for two weeks it had prevented the door from being fully closed, which it could not be until a slightly pressed arc was worn into the carpet. No light could be seen beneath the door. Confronted with this later, Eunice quickly amended her account to say that she became alarmed when she noticed the telephone cord leading under the door.
But there were even more serious problems.
For one thing, there was never an operating lock on Monroe’s door, a fact Murray conceded years later in written correspondence. On February 9, 1987, archivist and genealogist Roy Turner wrote to Eunice (whom he had befriended), asking, “Was Marilyn’s door locked when you found her?” She replied in one handwritten word following his question: “No.” This would have been entirely true, for Marilyn never locked her bedroom door; leaving the door unlocked had been a lifelong habit, especially reinforced since the Payne Whitney experience. “She didn’t lock doors,” Pat said years later. “I never thought about that, but it’s true.” Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan concurred.8
Moreover, the idea that Eunice parted the draperies of Marilyn’s bedroom window with a fireplace poker and found the actress, sprawled dead across her bed, is impossible to accept. The window coverings were not draperies but the heavy blackout fabric from Doheny Drive, nailed across the casement and beyond both sides of the window by Ralph Roberts soon after Marilyn moved in. Disturbed by the slightest light when trying to sleep, Monroe had them installed in one piece: there was no part in the middle for Eunice to push aside even if the windows had been open.
The question of timing also proved troublesome for Eunice. When she was interviewed by Sergeant Jack Clemmons, the first police officer arriving on the scene at four-thirty-five on the morning of August 5, Eunice said she had called Greenson to the house at about midnight. But soon she must have realized the problems this would cause, for Greenson had not called the police until four and a half hours later. And so, by the time a detective interviewed her later that Sunday morning, she changed the time of her call to Greenson to three. The summons at about midnight would, however, have been consistent with the news reported to Lawford by Ebbins, that Rudin and Greenson were at the house before one-thirty, and that Marilyn was already dead.
Greenson told the police the same story as Murray, but his version never changed because he agreed to be interviewed but rarely, never wrote a memoir and was never challenged. The failure in both versions to mention the presence of Milton Rudin further damages the credibility of Greenson’s account.
The weakness of this official version effected many results, not least among them a series of fantastic conspiracy theories, the inventions of nefarious plots and counterplots, government-inspired murder and so on. The problem is obvious for any theory involving the FBI, the CIA, organized or disorganized crime, the Kennedys or Kennedy cronies: there is simply no concrete evidence to support any such claim.9
The psychiatrist and the housekeeper always neatly escaped scrutiny themselves—he because of his accomplishments, prestigious position and canny retreat behind the curtain of professional confidence, and she by virtue of a brilliantly calculated public image, reinforced via print and television interviews, as a dear little old lady.
But as their individual histories and their actions that final evening revealed, and as the medical record would soon confirm, it was these two alone who had something to hide.
1. In a desperate move to save the picture, Fox had decided to replace Cukor.
2. See FBI File # 77-51387-293, dated August 6, 1962 and registered August 21, 1962.
3. The Naars and the Ebbinses eventually withdrew, too, after Lawford told them Marilyn, Marlon Brando and Wally Cox—the original trio invited—had all begged off.
4. Italics are the author’s.
5. Italics are the author’s.
6. Joe DiMaggio, Jr., was able to fix the time of his conversation. In his subsequent police interview, he said that Marilyn picked up the phone while he was watching on television the seventh inning of a baseball game: the Baltimore Orioles against the Anaheim Angels, being played in Baltimore that Saturday evening. The game began just after seven-thirty Eastern Daylight Time, which would have put the seventh inning at about ten o’clock (or seven o’clock Pacific Daylight Time).
7. However, he heeded the advice to stay away. As both his maid Erma Lee Riley and his friend George Durgom insisted, Lawford never left his home that night.
8. Between March 15 and June 30, according to their invoice #7451, the A-1 Lock & Safe Company of 3114 Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica, installed only two locks in the house: a cabinet lock for Cherie Redmond’s files, and a replacement lock for the front door of the house. Additional locks were not installed until August 15 and 21, after Marilyn’s death (A-1 invoice #7452).
9. For a detailed treatment of the alternates proposed for the death of Marilyn Monroe, see the Afterword.