The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.
—John F. Kennedy, October 1963
Over a hundred and ten books have been published on the subject of Marilyn Monroe since her death. In 1964, Frank Capell’s seventy-page booklet, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, was the first to say that the film star was murdered, and that the Kennedys were involved. Capell, whom many considered to be a right-wing extremist, was a former FBI agent and publisher of an anticommunist pamphlet, Herald of Freedom. He claimed that Marilyn Monroe’s murder was part of a communist plot involving Jack and Robert Kennedy. Capell’s extremism obscured many of the accurate revelations contained in his slender book.
Though the publication received scant attention, it was reviewed by J. Edgar Hoover. A personal memo from the FBI director to Attorney General Robert Kennedy dated July 8, 1964, states:
Mr. Frank A. Capell is publishing a 70-page paperback book entitled “The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe,” which should be ready for publication about July 10, 1964.
According to Mr. Capell, his book will make reference to your alleged friendship with the late Marilyn Monroe. Mr. Capell stated he will indicate in his book that you and Miss Monroe were intimate and that you were in Miss Monroe’s residence at the time of her death.
Any additional information concerning the publication of the above book will be promptly brought to your attention.
Critics scoffed at Capell, but Robert Kennedy took him seriously. When Richard Nixon released a long list of people whose phones had been tapped during previous administrations, Capell appeared on a list of those put under surveillance by Robert Kennedy.
Another writer, Fred Lawrence Guiles, first became intrigued by the Monroe story when he traveled to Reno in September of 1960. He discovered that The Misfits’ crew was filming nearby and began frequenting the location, where he befriended the film’s producer, Frank Taylor, and Marilyn’s masseur, Ralph Roberts. Eventually he was introduced to Marilyn. Though he never saw her again after The Misfits wrapped production, he was forever captivated and became one of her biographers. Deeply disturbed by the news of her death, in 1963 Guiles wrote a screenplay, Goodbye, Norma Jean, envisioned as a motion-picture biography. Frank Taylor brought Guiles’s screenplay to the attention of Pat Newcomb, who at that time was assisting Bobby Kennedy in preparing the cinematic eulogy to John Kennedy, Years of Lightning—Day of Drums, for the U.S. Information Agency.
With the assistance of Newcomb, Goodbye, Norma Jean became enlarged into a Ladies’ Home Journal magazine series in 1967 called The Final Summer of Marilyn Monroe. Newcomb assumed that Robert Kennedy’s involvement with Marilyn would not be mentioned; however, Guiles discreetly referred to “An Easterner—a married man not in the [film] industry…an Easterner with few ties on the coast…a lawyer and public servant with an important political career…an attorney who often stayed at his host’s beach house.” “The Easterner’s” identity was readily discernible beneath the disguise, and he was about to run for president. Newcomb had only recently recruited Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, and her accumulated coterie of Hollywood friends to support “the Easterner’s” campaign. Newcomb was so angered by Guiles’s revelation that she hasn’t spoken to him since.
Guiles’s magazine series was subsequently published as a book in 1969 under the title Norma Jean: The Life of Marilyn Monroe. (The correct spelling, as indicated on the birth certificate, is Norma Jeane.) It became a runaway bestseller, and for the first time the general public learned about Marilyn’s relationship with a “public servant with an important political career.” Guiles accepted the coroner’s verdict of probable suicide, but Robert Slatzer did not, nor did he hesitate to reveal the name of “the Easterner.” Though Slatzer was a writer of romantic fiction, he found himself becoming an investigative journalist out of necessity—nobody else knew what he knew. Imbued with a love of classic literature, Slatzer had arrived in Hollywood in the 1940s with a young man’s high hopes of becoming an important screenwriter. He eked out a living as a journalist for Scripps-Howard, and in time he did well as a Hollywood writer and director.
Initially Slatzer’s investigation into Marilyn Monroe’s death was an attempt to bring about an official inquiry; however, he soon discovered that the doors in the long marble halls of officialdom were firmly closed to him. In time he joined forces with Frank Capell and Jack Clemmons in the accumulation of investigative information. What started as a small file ended up a vast storehouse of material that now overflows his Hollywood Hills home.
Slatzer began compiling his investigative information in book form in 1964, but it was a long, tortuous odyssey from conception to completion. Death threats, beatings, break-ins, and arson lay along Slatzer’s labyrinthine path to publication. At one time in 1972 the monitored death threats became so severe that Slatzer was compelled by the Los Angeles Police Department to have a bodyguard.
When Slatzer’s book The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe was finally published in 1974, Publishers Weekly termed it “bizarre and disturbing…touching and convincing.” Briefly on the bestseller list, it was the first major volume to document evidence that Marilyn Monroe was a homicide victim and that Robert Kennedy was implicated. Included in Slatzer’s book was the transcript of an interview he conducted with a man named Jack Quinn. Quinn had contacted Slatzer in 1972, after reading about his forthcoming book in a newspaper. Quinn claimed he worked for the Los Angeles Hall of Records and had recently reduced the Monroe police file to microfilm. He gave Slatzer permission to record their conversation, which is preserved in the Slatzer archives:
QUINN: You’re right about the coroner’s inadequate investigation…. Did you see the photographs of her…the coroner’s photographs taken in her bedroom?
SLATZER: No.
QUINN: She had bruises on her, but they were edited out of the final report…. I saw the reports from the intelligence units. We were supposed to destroy a lot of their original records and condense everything into a neat package for microfilming.
SLATZER: So what do you make of it?
QUINN: The bruises? I don’t know what they mean…. Bobby went to the house to see her—that’s what the police record says. Bobby went to see her on that last Saturday. That was after he got a call from her at Peter Lawford’s house. Now, the day before, when she was supposed to have been hysterical—I guess that was sometime in the late afternoon—she was saying how she was going to do this and that…
SLATZER: What else did you spot to make you suspicious?
QUINN:…One of the queer things about the Marilyn Monroe case was how the original folder from the autopsy report happened to get lost…and when they found it all that stuff about the two Kennedy brothers was taken out…. Everything from the investigative report over the ten previous days, going back from Marilyn’s last Saturday to the previous Wednesday, was not there anymore.
SLATZER: Any idea why?
QUINN: Because of the position of the Kennedy family. Actually, he didn’t lie. He just didn’t tell the truth.
SLATZER: Who?
QUINN: Bobby. When he gave his statement to the police—
SLATZER: He clouded it, in other words.
QUINN: Yeah. And did you know about the chloral hydrate? I’m talking about the discovery of Nembutal and chloral hydrate.
SLATZER: Noguchi was the one who did the autopsy on her.
QUINN: Yeah, that’s him. But when they did the autopsy on her, things like disclosing the shade of her fingernails never came out. I’m trying to tell you about the effect of chloral hydrate and Nembutal have on the fingernails, like turning them blue. Well, anyhow, all that was cut out. They did a hell of an editing job on that damned thing…. Do you know the whole record ran 723 pages, and they boiled it down to 54?
SLATZER: But everything’s on the microfilm in its original form—right?
QUINN: Well, you can petition the city for a hundred years, and they’re going to deny it exists. And what they’ll probably release is the fifty-four pages.
Quinn and Slatzer then met at a Hollywood restaurant. Slatzer brought along cinematographer Wilson Hong to witness the conversation. Quinn asserted that an official statement was made by Bobby Kennedy to the Los Angeles Police Department. “From what I saw in the deposition, it said that there was almost a divorce pending with Jackie and JFK.”
Slatzer asked, “Wasn’t there anything about Bobby’s having an affair with Marilyn?”
“No,” Quinn replied. “All Bobby said was that JFK was supposed to have been involved with Marilyn and that JFK had dispatched him to come out here and talk to Marilyn because JFK was getting a lot of phone calls from Marilyn and was afraid of the embarrassment it might cause him. Bobby also said that his brother was having wife problems because of Marilyn’s calls to the White House. All of this was in Bobby Kennedy’s deposition.” Quinn then went on to say, “Bobby also said in his deposition that he and Peter Lawford went to Marilyn’s house late in the afternoon of August 4. There was a violent argument and Marilyn was grabbed by Bobby and thrown to the floor…. Then she was given an injection of pentobarbital in her armpit, which settled her down.”
Slatzer then asked, “Does the record show that one of them injected Marilyn with the drugs?”
“No,” Quinn replied. “One of them called for a doctor to come over and give Marilyn the injection.”
“What doctor?” Slatzer inquired.
“I don’t remember his name,” Quinn responded. “All I can tell you is that Kennedy’s deposition shows that Marilyn went into a tantrum and that she was screaming, ‘I’m tired of this whole thing, of being a plaything!’ Bobby said that Marilyn complained that she was called over to Lawford’s house at times when they had prostitutes and that she was tired of the whole mess.”
Quinn then told Slatzer that according to the deposition, Marilyn lunged at Bobby and clawed him. Quinn went on to say, “It’s also on the record that the doctor came to the house at five o’clock. There’s a statement from him that he gave her a shot. But he didn’t say what drug was in the shot. But RFK said in his statement that the doctor gave Marilyn the shot under her left arm. He even named the artery on the tape. He said the shot that went into her was pentobarbital.”
Quinn ended by saying that the records also showed that Monroe’s death involved a “communist-inspired plot.”
Slatzer said these words made him skeptical. Nevertheless, he agreed to meet with Quinn again that night at eight. Slatzer arrived with photographer Wilson Hong ten minutes early, but Jack Quinn never showed up. After several days in which Slatzer vainly waited for Quinn to call, he drove to the Hall of Records and discovered there was no employee by the name of “Jack Quinn,” nor did anyone answer to his description. Slatzer never heard from the mysterious Jack Quinn again.
“Frankly, I didn’t know what to think about Quinn,” Slatzer recalls. “He seemed genuine, but when he mentioned the ‘communist-inspired plot’—as I heard those words spoken, I didn’t know what to believe. Quinn came on the scene at the end of ten years of a very frustrating investigation, and I had been lied to so many times I just didn’t feel capable of believing anyone anymore. I’ve tried to forget about Jack Quinn.”
However, there’s good reason to take a second look at the mysterious Jack Quinn. In 1972 he knew many secrets that have since been verified.
In 1972 only the police and the FBI knew about Marilyn’s disturbing telephone calls and letters to the White House and the Justice Department. The phone records weren’t made public until investigative journalist Anthony Summers published them in Goddess in 1985. Quinn also knew about the bruises on Marilyn’s body ten years before Grandison stated that there were bruises excluded from the autopsy report. He also placed Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford at Marilyn’s home on Saturday afternoon, August 4, 1962, long before witnesses corroborated this. And finally, Quinn knew the effects of cyanosis that had turned Marilyn Monroe’s fingernails blue—a fact substantiated in 1993 by photographer Leigh Wiener, who took photos of the body in the morgue. It is therefore clearly possible that the mysterious “Jack Quinn” had access to the 723-page Marilyn Monroe file secreted in the Intelligence Division of the LAPD, the same extensive file that intelligence officer Mike Rothmiller was to view in 1978.
The curiosity of the public and the press was aroused by the many unanswered questions posed by the publication of The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe. Norman Mailer’s 1973 bestseller Marilyn also alleged a relationship between Marilyn and Jack and Bobby Kennedy. Mailer concluded that “every implication of the evidence was toward murder,” and along with Robert Slatzer, publicly called for an official inquiry.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich supported the growing demand for a grand jury investigation, and the police department was besieged by questions it couldn’t answer. Many of those with firsthand knowledge of the Monroe case were deceased: James Hamilton, former head of the Intelligence Division, died in 1964 of a brain tumor; in 1966 Chief William Parker died during a testimonial dinner in his honor; and homicide detective Thad Brown died in 1972.
Scrambling for facts to feed a voracious press, the LAPD asked Hamilton’s successor, Captain Daryl Gates, to formulate an in-house report to fend off the call for an official inquiry. Faced with composing an investigative report on Marilyn Monroe, Captain Gates joined the paper chase.
Gates claimed he wasn’t able to find anything in the official police files—not even Monroe’s death report. However, he followed up on the rumor that Thad Brown had kept his own copy of the Monroe file. Accompanied by Thad’s brother, Finis, Gates discovered the unauthorized file Thad Brown had secreted in his garage, where they had moldered for over thirteen years.
The voluminous material comprised over 700 pages of documents, interviews, depositions, photographs, and reports. Gates elected to use only 19 pages of the original files, saying that certain information was withheld as “not part of the public record.”
Among the discoveries in Thad Brown’s garage were copies of Marilyn Monroe’s phone records, which Hamilton had removed from the General Telephone Company on the night of her death—records Chief Parker had denied obtaining. It would be yet another seven years before the LAPD would finally admit having them in its possession.
In 1975, when he was director of operations, Daryl Gates decided to interview Peter Lawford and add his statement to the selected items to be included in his report. While Peter Lawford’s recitation of the events had always supported the official version, Lawford had never been officially interviewed by the police. Several days after Marilyn Monroe’s death, Sergeant Byron had tried to interview Peter Lawford but was told by his secretary that “Lawford had flown out of the city” and would not be available for several weeks. Six hundred and eighty weeks later, the police interview took place—on October 16, 1975.
Time and circumstances had collected their toll: Jack and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated; Peter and Pat Lawford had been divorced; Lawford’s career had plummeted, and he had become a hopeless drunk and drug addict. Having lost his wealth, he moved from the former Louis B. Mayer beach mansion to a small apartment in West Hollywood on the wrong side of the Strip. Everything had changed—except Lawford’s story about the night Marilyn Monroe died.
Gates’s “in-house” investigation continued until the public outcry for a grand jury investigation had subsided. The final report, issued on October 22, 1975, found “insufficient evidence to warrant an official investigation. Some of the evidence is as thin as Depression food-line soup.”
The 165-page report consisted of forty-five pages photocopied from Slatzer’s book; a copy of the Lawford interview; a Xerox copy of Monroe’s last will and testament; a list of debtors’ claims to her estate; a compendium of crank letters sent to the Police Department; a Xerox copy of the autopsy report; and a scrapbook of Monroe’s newspaper clippings.
This “exhaustive” report, which undoubtedly required going to the Xerox room on numerous occasions during the year it took to prepare, contained no interviews with the key witnesses—other than Peter Lawford. One of the key witnesses Gates failed to interview was Dr. Ralph Greenson. Photographs of Greenson taken in his later years reveal an extraordinary physical and emotional decline. When he returned to Los Angeles after a lengthy period of analysis with Dr. Max Schur, he shared offices with his friend and associate Dr. Hyman Engelberg at 465 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. Taking on fewer patients, he immersed himself in teaching and writing.
In his later years Greenson suffered from depression, coronary illness, and an episode of aphasia. “That was very hard for someone who had so many words for everything.” recalled his patient Janice Rule. “He became enraged when he found he couldn’t express himself.” Ralph Greenson died under the care of Dr. Engelberg on November 24, 1979, at the age of sixty-eight.
The death of Ralph Greenson silenced forever the voice of one of the most important of the key witnesses to the circumstances of Marilyn Monroe’s death. Whatever he revealed to John Miner was secreted within the hallows of professional confidentiality. However, disturbed by allegations in Donald Spoto’s 1993 book, Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, that Dr. Greenson was responsible for the actress’s death, John Miner obtained permission from Greenson’s widow to reveal some of the things he had heard on the tapes Greenson played for him in 1962.
Miner revealed that Greenson told him Marilyn Monroe had recorded the tapes at her home in the days before her death. They were an extension of her free-association sessions with Greenson. Because she had difficulty sleeping, Marilyn suggested she record the tapes at night. She would then give the recordings to Greenson at the following session.
On the tapes played by Greenson during the 1962 interview, Miner stated that Marilyn discussed her relationship with both Jack and Robert Kennedy. “She was very explicit about the sexual relationship,” Miner disclosed. Though she had once been in love with Jack Kennedy and couldn’t understand why she was suddenly rejected and treated so badly by both Kennedy brothers, she was determined to put the Kennedys behind her and go on with her life.
According to Miner, “The tapes reveal an intelligent woman with a good sense of humor. She had important future plans, and the last thing one could conclude from hearing these tapes was that she was contemplating killing herself.
“Dr. Greenson was of the opinion that she definitely had not committed suicide,” Miner continues, “and I don’t see how it could have been accidental, with the volume of barbituates that caused death. I don’t think she could have swallowed anything like a lethal dose…. If there had been an inquest, and I think there should have been, I think there would have been clearer evidence that it was not a suicide.”
On the basis of the tapes, Greenson’s disclosure, and the toxicology report, Miner believes that the case should be reopened. There is no statute of limitations on a homicide. In June 1997 Miner wrote a formal letter to the Los Angeles district attorney, Gil Garcetti, requesting a new formal investigation into Marilyn Monroe’s death. He has recommended that the body be exhumed for reexamination and is prepared to testify about the Marilyn Monroe tapes and what Greenson told him during the interview for Coroner Curphey on August 12, 1962.
Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti has yet to respond to Miner’s request.