PEACE AND QUIET WERE NOT commodities in great supply at the Cal-Neva, a resort and gambling casino that attracted the Rat Pack, the Mafia and an assortment of high rollers and heavy drinkers. Before departing Los Angeles, Marilyn received a hypodermic injection courtesy of Dr. Hyman Engelberg and a fresh supply of barbiturates and sedatives as prescribed by Dr. Greenson. Besides the new supply, Marilyn had stocked her suitcase with an arsenal of pharmaceuticals taken from her medicine cabinet. She’d been taking pills for so long, she told a fellow resort guest, that only high doses had any effect.
Marilyn had spent a day at Cal-Neva with the Lawfords earlier in the month and had swallowed enough pills to knock herself out. She’d left her telephone line open to the resort switchboard, and when the operator heard her labored breathing, she located the Lawfords, who rushed to the room to find Marilyn unconscious on the floor next to the bed. Peter and Pat alternated cups of coffee with walks around the room until Monroe regained her senses. Frank Sinatra flew her back to Los Angeles that night in his private plane.
Joe DiMaggio had heard about the earlier Cal-Neva incident and blamed Sinatra and Skinny D’Amato, who’d left the 500 Club in Atlantic City to manage Cal-Neva, for plying Marilyn with alcohol. When Inez Melson, MM’s business manager, apprised Joe of Marilyn’s departure for the Lake Tahoe gambling resort, he made immediate arrangements to follow her there. To avoid a confrontation with Sinatra, he checked into the nearby Silver Crest Motor Hotel and surprised Marilyn when he walked into the Cal-Neva dining room, where she was seated with the Lawfords.
“We were eating dinner, and in marched Joe DiMaggio,” said Peter Lawford. “It was the first time in a long time I’d seen Marilyn crack a big smile. She leaped out of her chair and embraced DiMaggio for what must have been a good five minutes. To be honest, Pat and I were delighted to see him because it took the onus of responsibility for her well-being out of our hands. DiMaggio spent the night with her in one of the bungalows on the property. He had some business to attend to on Saturday afternoon and disappeared for several hours, which was when Marilyn again became very despondent and testy. She started drinking and taking pills. She also renewed her threat to ‘get even’ with the Kennedys. I took this to mean she still planned to give a press conference. She quieted down only when DiMaggio returned. We spent Sunday morning, July 29, by the swimming pool. Sam Giancana came by with a few assistant hoods, if I can call them that. He knew DiMaggio, and the two of them chatted for a while. After they departed, Marilyn said something that in retrospect seemed rather prophetic. She talked about growing old and wasn’t sure she wanted to go through it. ‘What’s worse than an aging sex symbol?’ she asked. ‘Everything—breasts, belly, bottom—begins to sag.’ ”
That Sunday night, Joe DiMaggio accompanied Marilyn and the Lawfords back to Los Angeles before continuing on to San Francisco, still secure in his conviction that he and Marilyn would be remarried on August 8. “Marilyn never uttered a word to me concerning her intention to rewed Joe DiMaggio,” remarked Peter Lawford. “I heard about it after she died. I have to believe this was DiMaggio’s fantasy, not Marilyn’s. Her fantasy resided in the hope that Bobby Kennedy would change his mind, and they would walk down the aisle together. And if that didn’t happen, she intended to bring him down. To preclude this eventuality, Pat and I were determined to stick as close to Marilyn as possible.”
On July 30 the Lawfords joined Marilyn and Pat Newcomb for dinner at La Scala. At another table, across the room, sat a New York publicist named Connie Stanville and Billy Travilla, Monroe’s former fashion designer. “Billy and I were good friends,” said Stanville. “We would have dinner together whenever I found myself on the coast. So we were dining at La Scala when I spotted this woman on the opposite side of the restaurant. She looked very thin and wore no makeup. ‘Isn’t that Marilyn Monroe?’ I asked. Billy gazed in the woman’s direction and said, ‘I think it is.’ When we finished our meal, we went over to her table. It was Marilyn, all right, but she didn’t look well. In fact, she looked stoned and glassy eyed. She stared at Billy but obviously didn’t recognize him. He asked her how she was doing, and she smiled but said nothing. After a minute or two, she asked, ‘Billy, is that you?’ We left the restaurant and headed for the street. Billy seemed hurt and upset. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognized him. They’d been very close at one point. In fact, they’d had a brief affair. He called me the next day and said he was going to write her a nasty letter. Marilyn died a few days later. Billy called me again. ‘Thank God I didn’t write that letter,’ he said. ‘Thank God!’ ”
• • •
In the late afternoon of August 1, Marilyn called Ralph Roberts and asked him to take her to Largo, a Los Angeles nightspot with a strip club on one side of the establishment and a gay bar on the other. “Largo was a bit sleazy,” said Roberts, “but it was unique in that it catered to both heterosexuals and gays. You had a lot of straight men watching the young female strippers on the club side, and a whole gay crowd—men and women—packed into an adjacent bar. The bar had a jukebox and a small dance floor. The men danced with men, the women with women. A soundproof wall separated the bar from the strip club.
“I picked up Marilyn at her house and learned that Jeanne Carmen would be joining us. Marilyn gave me a drink and poured herself one as well. We stepped outside into the garden, which was illuminated by a floodlight. She told me she’d been to a shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, where she’d acquired a few items of furniture and a wall hanging depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. From her local nursery she’d also purchased three more citrus trees and a half dozen rose bushes that were supposed to be delivered on August 4. I found this a bit odd in light of the fact that she kept telling me she intended to leave Los Angeles and move back to New York.”
By this time, Jeanne Carmen had arrived, and the three of them set off for Largo. “En route,” continued Roberts, “Jeanne started talking about Robert Kennedy, which I didn’t think was a great idea. She said Bobby and Marilyn had frequently engaged in phone sex. ‘Can’t you just see the attorney general jerking his chain while Marilyn talked him through the sex act?’ To change the subject, I asked Marilyn about Joe DiMaggio. She said he and his brothers Vince and Dom had agreed to participate in an Old Timers’ charity baseball game in San Francisco on August 4 and that he’d be joining her again in Los Angeles a day later. To which Jeanne said, ‘Yeah, but he bugged your phone just like the rest of them.’ ‘If that’s true,’ responded Marilyn, ‘it’s because he wants to protect me. Listen, if it weren’t for Joe, I’d probably have killed myself years ago.’ ”
Those were Marilyn’s last coherent words that evening. When they reached Largo, Marilyn—in her usual disguise—headed straight for the bar, ordered three bottles of champagne, handed one each to Ralph and Jeanne, chugalugged the third herself, ordered another, grabbed Jeanne’s hand, and hit the dance floor.
“I spent the better part of the night,” said Roberts, “standing at the bar, declining offers to dance from a variety of men in leather and chains. When I drove Marilyn home at three in the morning, her eyes were vacant. She looked like a zombie. She was drunk and drugged. The sight of her in that woeful state, as she wobbled out of the car and into her house, saddened and haunted me. After that night, we spoke on the phone once or twice, but I never saw Marilyn again.”
• • •
That summer, Marlon Brando and Marilyn communicated by telephone every few days. In his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, Brando claims they often spoke for hours. They frequently discussed the prospect of doing a film together. Another favorite subject was Lee Strasberg—both actors agreed he’d used them to further his own reputation. Brando and Monroe conversed for the last time in August, when she called to invite him over for dinner together with his great pal Wally Cox. Cox, a cast member of Something’s Got to Give, had established a separate friendship with Marilyn. Brando told her he and Wally had a previous engagement but that he would call her the following week to set something up. “Fine,” she said. He noted that she didn’t sound depressed. For that matter, she sounded healthier emotionally than she’d sounded in months.
She also called Dr. Leon Krohn, her gynecologist, and asked him over for dinner. He accepted, but after hanging up, she called him back and said she wanted to have him to dinner the same night as Marlon Brando—she wanted the two to meet. She told Krohn she’d call him back the following week.
That evening, she ate dinner by herself at La Scala. When she returned home, she called Norman Rosten and Kurt Lamprecht, both in New York. She told each of them that she and Joe DiMaggio were probably going to marry again. “I wondered,” said Lamprecht, “if this was simply some passing romantic notion, or whether it would really come to pass. What was predictable about Marilyn Monroe is that she was totally unpredictable.”
Norman Rosten, with whom she spoke for more than thirty minutes, thought she sounded high on drugs. She prattled on and on, barely pausing for a breath, skipping from one subject to another, repeatedly returning to Joe DiMaggio and the topic of marriage. Monroe and Rosten had once made a deal that if either one ever felt like jumping off a bridge, he or she would first notify the other. Rosten sensed no such urgency in Marilyn’s voice, only perhaps a bit of forced joy.
Next Marilyn called Lotte Goslar. “She sounded extremely positive at first,” said Goslar. “She had all sorts of plans in the works. First of all, there was her new house. She’d never owned a house before, and she loved furnishing and decorating it. Then there was Something’s Got to Give, which would soon resume production with Marilyn once again in the lead role. And Jack Benny, on whose television show she’d once appeared, had asked her to join him in a monthlong Las Vegas revue that would net her nearly $1 million. She still wanted to visit Russia and was now thinking of going to China and Japan as well. She was reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. She’d just bought an Italian cookbook so she could learn to prepare deep-dish pizza for Joe DiMaggio. They were seriously considering the possibility of getting remarried, so much so that she’d gone ahead and ordered a wedding dress from Jean Louis, the same designer who’d fashioned the gown she wore at Madison Square Garden the night of President Kennedy’s birthday shindig. She wanted to know what I thought of the idea. I assured her I was all for it. I always had been. Of all the men she’d known, he remained the one who loved her the most and was most capable of providing her with an emotional anchor. And she, in turn, understood him. She maintained a good sense of humor about him. I remember she gave him a record album of the Great Caruso performing a selection of arias, which he never unwrapped. ‘Joe,’ she kidded him, ‘you’re the only Italian I’ve ever met who doesn’t love opera.’ ‘I love you,’ he responded, ‘and you’re more than enough for me.’
“My conversation with Marilyn ended on an ominous note. Before marrying Joe, she vowed to hold a press conference in which she would out the Kennedys, expose them for what they were—a pair of womanizers, users and abusers. I told her I’d support whatever she chose to do, though I personally felt it was a mistake. What possible benefit could she derive from publicly humiliating the Kennedys? I had no idea, of course, that this was to be our final conversation. In retrospect, I realized Marilyn had a long and complicated history of feigned suicide attempts. She was like the boy who cried ‘wolf’ one too many times. She had a death wish but didn’t want to die. And in the end, not even Joe DiMaggio could save her. Nobody could.”
On Friday, August 3, Peter Lawford again went to dinner with Marilyn and Pat Newcomb. Pat Lawford had departed for Hyannis Port the day before. Over dinner the actress continued her obsessive rant about Bobby Kennedy, complaining that he hadn’t even had the common decency to apologize for his actions. Although he tried, Peter Lawford wasn’t able to assuage his dinner companion’s feelings. By the end of the meal, she was practically screaming.
At home later, unable to sleep, Marilyn resolved to speak to Bobby, even if it meant instigating the conversation herself. She phoned Peter, and he told her the attorney general was scheduled to be in San Francisco that weekend before giving an address there on Monday to a meeting of the American Bar Association. Noting the coincidence of Kennedy’s being in the same town as Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn asked where RFK would be staying. Lawford didn’t know, but he thought his wife might, and he gave Marilyn Pat’s number at the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts. The movie star called. Pat Lawford told her to try to reach Bobby at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel.
Marilyn left several messages for RFK at the St. Francis, which is where a lawyers’ group had booked rooms for the attorney general, his wife, and four of their children. But the Kennedy family was staying at the ranch of John Bates, a wealthy attorney (and president of the California Bar Association) who lived in Gilroy, some eighty miles south of San Francisco. Marilyn at last heard back from Bobby; after a brief and somewhat caustic conversation, he agreed to see her the following day.
Marilyn had demanded a full-scale, face-to-face explanation from her lover as to why she’d been abandoned. Bobby would now give it to her. Early Saturday morning, August 4, he flew to Los Angeles. From the airport he took a helicopter to the Twentieth Century–Fox lot, where Peter Lawford picked him up and drove him back to his house.
At eleven thirty, Lawford called Marilyn to say that he and Bobby would be at her place no later than two in the afternoon. It had already been a busy morning for Monroe. At eight in the morning, Pat Newcomb, having spent the night in the guest bedroom at the Brentwood house, drove Marilyn to Dr. Greenson’s home for a ninety-minute therapy session. The actress complained that Newcomb had “slept like a baby,” while she’d suffered her usual bout of insomnia. Overwrought because of her lack of sleep and Robert Kennedy’s impending visit, Marilyn convinced her psychiatrist to renew several of her barbiturate prescriptions, including one for chloral hydrate as well as another for Nembutal. She made no mention of the fact that on July 25, Fox’s Dr. Lee Siegel had given her two prescriptions for Nembutal, neither of which she’d filled as yet. Alarmed by Marilyn’s current state of mind, Greenson also called Dr. Engelberg and suggested he see the patient. Engelberg, who’d visited with (and injected) her the day before, was waiting for her when she returned home. Under the impression that Marilyn had run out of barbiturates, Engelberg administered a combination vitamin-barbiturate injection and wrote her a prescription for twenty-five additional Nembutal. When later asked by authorities why he’d given her a prescription for Nembutal without notifying Greenson, Dr. Engelberg replied that he’d been having problems with his estranged wife and hadn’t had time to report back to Monroe’s psychiatrist. Over the years, Engelberg’s version of events continually changed. The only explanation he failed to provide for his overt willingness to overmedicate the movie star was that he had, like so many other men, fallen victim to her charms.
Pat Newcomb, her throat suddenly sore, departed Marilyn’s home shortly after Dr. Engelberg’s arrival. When Engelberg left, Lawrence Schiller, a photographer who’d worked with Marilyn on Something’s Got to Give, drove by and gave the actress photo stills from the unfinished film, a number of which appeared in Norman Mailer’s 1973 biography of Monroe. Eunice Murray, scheduled to sleep over on Saturday night (Dr. Greenson insisted that Monroe was never to be left alone), greeted Schiller and then drove to the pharmacy to fill the various prescriptions Marilyn had collected from her three physicians. When she returned, she fielded a call from Isidore Miller, who wanted to speak to his former daughter-in-law. He’d spoken to her two days earlier, and Marilyn had assured him, “Dad, I feel fine.” In response to his August 4 call, Mrs. Murray told Isidore that Marilyn would have to call him back. She never did. Mrs. Murray was quick to notice that in her absence Marilyn had downed half a bottle of champagne and several Nembutal tablets from an old prescription. A major dilemma in the management of Marilyn’s self-medication regimen was that she often forgot how many pills she’d previously taken and would simply take them again—and again.
• • •
Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford arrived at Marilyn’s house at two in the afternoon. “In anticipation of our arrival,” recalled Lawford, “Marilyn had set out a buffet consisting of guacamole, stuffed mushrooms, Greek olives, and Swedish meatballs, plus a chilled magnum of bubbly. I poured myself a glass and wandered out to the swimming pool so Marilyn and Bobby could talk. Within minutes, I heard shouting. I returned to the kitchen, where they were having it out. Bobby maintained he was going to leave and return with me to my house. Marilyn insisted he spend the rest of the day alone with her.”
They argued back and forth for a good ten minutes, Marilyn—semipolluted and high on drugs—becoming more and more hysterical. At the height of her anger, she allowed how first thing Monday morning she was going to call a press conference and reveal the details of the treatment she’d suffered at the hands of the Kennedy brothers. At this point, Bobby Kennedy became livid. He told her in no uncertain terms that she would have to leave both Jack and him alone—no more telephone calls, no letters, no threats, nothing. They didn’t want to hear from her again.
“He would’ve probably said a lot more,” remarked Lawford, “had I not prewarned him that she might be using a hidden tape recorder. As it is, she went batshit. She absolutely lost it, screaming obscenities and heaving the contents of her half-filled glass of champagne at Bobby, but drenching me instead. I’d moved in close to Bobby in case I had to separate them, and Marilyn’s drink splattered against my face rather than his. Marilyn apologized and handed me a napkin. Bobby was already halfway out the door. I caught up to him. After we drove off, RFK suggested we contact Marilyn’s psychiatrist—maybe he could help her. So I pulled into a service station and called Dr. Greenson from a public phone booth. I described the scene that had just taken place. Greenson thanked me and said he’d drive over to see Marilyn.”
Bobby Kennedy said little as Lawford drove in the direction of his Santa Monica beach house. “Needless to say, he wasn’t a happy camper,” observed Lawford. “I don’t think he thought Marilyn would go through with her press conference threat, but Bobby wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to lose control of a situation. ‘Well, nobody can say I didn’t try,’ he ventured. ‘She’s crazy—it’s tragic.’ Indeed, by the end, Marilyn had slid into a psychiatric pit. She’d always been afraid of winding up like her schizophrenic mother. And in a sense, that’s what was happening.
“As for Bobby, once we reached my house, he made a telephone call, and a government car picked him up a few minutes later. So far as I know, he flew back to San Francisco, because Monday morning he gave his little talk before the bar association. Once the press started nosing around, John Bates, at whose ranch he stayed, swore up and down that Bobby had never left his place and barely knew Marilyn Monroe. Nobody believed him.”
• • •
Eunice Murray opened the door for Ralph Greenson at four in the afternoon. He found Marilyn in far worse shape than she’d been that morning. He attributed her despondency in part to the interaction of the medications in her system in addition to the train wreck of the near violent confrontation with Robert Kennedy.
Ralph Roberts called Marilyn’s house at about four thirty in the afternoon. “Dr. Greenson answered,” said Roberts. “I asked to speak with Marilyn. ‘Who’s calling?’ he asked, as if he didn’t recognize my voice by now. I identified myself. ‘Ralph,’ he said, ‘this is Dr. Greenson. Marilyn is not here at the moment, and I don’t know when she’ll be back.’ It made no sense. What would Greenson be doing in her house if she wasn’t around?”
Greenson stayed with Marilyn until five and then departed to attend a dinner party with his wife. Before he left, he suggested to Eunice Murray that she take Marilyn for a drive along the Pacific Coast Highway. It would relax her. They drove around for an hour, and when they returned, the phone rang. It was Peter Lawford. Apparently suffering an attack of conscience, he wondered how Marilyn was doing. “Better,” she said. Did she want to come to his place for dinner? He’d send out for Mexican food and maybe ask a few friends to join them, perhaps play a little poker.
“Is Bobby Kennedy still with you?” she asked.
“He left,” Lawford replied. “I’m all alone.”
Marilyn thanked Peter for the dinner invitation but told him she felt tired. “I think I’ll eat a sandwich, take my pills, and try to sleep,” she said.
As soon as she’d hung up with Lawford, Marilyn’s phone rang again. It was Joe DiMaggio Jr. calling from his marine base in San Diego. “I told Marilyn I’d broken my engagement to Pamela,” he recalled. “She seemed delighted to hear it. She never liked the girl and suggested I was too young to get married. ‘But you were only sixteen when you first got married,’ I reminded her. ‘Yeah—and divorced before you could blink an eye,’ she answered. I thought she sounded a bit spacey, but nothing out of the ordinary—not for her, at any rate. She didn’t sound depressed. On the other hand, I later realized she would’ve done and said almost anything to protect me, to prevent me from seeing her at her worst.
“The one subject that didn’t come up in our conversation was the possibility that she and my father might remarry. I never mentioned it, and neither did she. I don’t know what she had in mind; whether she intended to go through with it or not. I don’t think she herself knew what she intended to do. That’s Marilyn for you: fey, capricious, unpredictable. And when you get down to it, those were the very qualities that my father loved about her. He was stiff, regimented, and set in his ways; she was elusive, unmanageable, a creature from another realm.
“Our conversation lasted about fifteen minutes. Had I known what she was about to do to herself, I would’ve kept her on the phone forever.”
At approximately seven o’clock, Peter Lawford called Milt Ebbins, his business manager.
“I’d flown with Marilyn, Pat Newcomb, and Peter from Los Angeles to New York in May when she sang ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President’ at Madison Square Garden,” said Ebbins. “Peter introduced her that evening with the words ‘Mr. President, I give you the late Marilyn Monroe.’ He meant she’d been delayed coming onstage, but in retrospect it takes on a much darker meaning. In any event, I knew all about her and the Kennedy boys and how they’d shamelessly exploited her. I wasn’t surprised to hear what had transpired when Robert Kennedy went over there to deliver the final kiss-off. Peter and I spoke for a few minutes and made plans to get together the following day. Then, about an hour later, he called me back. He said Marilyn had just phoned. She appeared to be in bad shape, slurring her words and whatnot. She sounded a million miles away. And that’s when she made that now classic little farewell speech of hers. ‘Say good-bye to Pat, say good-bye to the president, say good-bye to yourself because you’ve been a good guy.’ Then her line went dead.”
Peter Lawford wanted Milt Ebbins to call Marilyn to make sure she was okay. He gave Ebbins her phone number. Ebbins called. The line was busy. Fifteen minutes later, he tried gain. Busy. He asked the telephone operator to check the line. The operator reported that Monroe’s phone appeared to be out of order. Ebbins got back in touch with Lawford and explained that he hadn’t been able to get through. Alarmed by the possibility that something had happened to Marilyn, Lawford told Ebbins he’d drive to her house and look in on her. Ebbins stopped him by suggesting that he—Ebbins—contact Mickey Rudin, Marilyn’s lawyer. When he reached Rudin, the attorney said to Ebbins, “Tell Peter to stay put. I’ll check it out and get back to you.”
“As I understand it,” claimed Ebbins, “Rudin had seen Ralph Greenson, his brother-in-law, earlier that day, and Greenson had been quite concerned about Marilyn. For his part, Rudin was convinced that Marilyn was a very sick girl: totally insane, for that matter. He felt Greenson had done everything he possibly could to help her and could do no more. In any case, Rudin had a second private telephone number for Marilyn’s house. He dialed it, and Eunice Murray picked up. She said Marilyn appeared to be fine. Murray could hear the radio on in her bedroom, and under the doorway she could see that the light hadn’t been turned off. She’d probably fallen asleep and, as was later discovered, dropped her Princess phone on the floor. It happened all the time. Rudin asked Murray to enter the bedroom to make certain Marilyn was asleep. Murray said she’d tried to get into the bedroom a few minutes earlier, but the door was locked from within.
“Does she usually lock her door?” asked Rudin.
“No,” responded Murray. “Not usually, but she does on occasion.”
Rudin later expressed regret that he hadn’t probed deeper, but under the circumstances, he thought MM had merely fallen asleep. He called back Milt Ebbins and then went out for dinner with his wife. Ebbins phoned Peter Lawford. “Maybe you ought to drive over there after all,” he suggested. Lawford said he would wait until the next day and then go to see her.
In the end, it was Eunice Murray who felt most uneasy about Marilyn. Waking up after a few hours of fitful sleep, she went back to Marilyn’s bedroom. Nothing had changed. The radio and light were still on, and the door remained locked. She knocked at the door and called Marilyn’s name. No answer. She went outside and peered through a bedroom window. Marilyn unfailingly drew her blinds upon retiring, but to Murray’s surprise, they were wide open. The actress lay naked and motionless atop her bed, an arm extended, her eyes shut, mouth agape. Her position and appearance startled Murray. She returned to the house and immediately called Ralph Greenson, who’d returned home hours earlier. Something seemed terribly amiss with Marilyn, she told him, but she didn’t know exactly what. Greenson phoned Hyman Engelberg. Apologizing for the lateness of the hour—it was one thirty in the morning—Greenson quickly explained the reason for his call. Twenty minutes later, the two physicians stood in front of the entrance to Marilyn Monroe’s house.
“Eunice Murray let us in,” said Dr. Engelberg. “Because Marilyn’s bedroom door was locked, we grabbed a poker from the living room fireplace, walked outside, broke her bedroom window, undid the latch, lifted the window, and climbed into the room. Marilyn was sprawled across the bed. We were obviously too late, but we worked on her for more than an hour trying somehow to bring her back to life. I estimated she’d been dead since nine or ten p.m. Afterward we just sat there, silent and sullen. We were stunned. I have no idea how much time elapsed. Then we talked a little, and that’s when it emerged she’d received sleeping medication from both of us. But even if we hadn’t both medicated her with Nembutal, there were enough pill bottles in her medicine cabinet and on her night table to have killed a herd of cattle. The police confiscated no fewer than fifteen bottles of tranquilizers, sedatives, and sleeping pills from her house following her death, among them Seconal and chloral hydrate, both of which she probably procured during her visit to Mexico earlier that year. Still, I can’t say I wasn’t worried about covering my ass. Had Marilyn died ten years later, when authorities began paying attention to overdoses and their causes, Dr. Greenson and I could well have ended up together in a jail cell, our medical licenses revoked, our careers ruined.”
At three in the morning, Ralph Greenson phoned Mickey Rudin and gave him the news. Marilyn Monroe was dead, the victim of an apparent suicide. Rudin climbed out of bed, dressed, and drove to Marilyn’s home, arriving at approximately the same time as Arthur Jacobs, head of the publicity firm that represented Marilyn. Rudin had called Jacobs earlier that evening, reaching him in the middle of a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Hearing that Marilyn might be in trouble, Jacobs had left the concert and gone home to await further word. Now, like the others, he was staring at Marilyn’s lifeless body. Pat Newcomb, who worked for Jacobs, had likewise been notified and arrived at Monroe’s home shortly after four in the morning.
“When I got there,” recalled Mickey Rudin, “Romey Greenson took me aside and whispered, ‘Engelberg gave her a prescription I didn’t know about.’ I didn’t want to get in the middle of it, so I kept my mouth shut. Mrs. Murray looked exhausted. She was doing the laundry. I couldn’t figure out why. I guessed it was Marilyn’s bedding and underclothes from the day before. I asked Dr. Engelberg whether anyone had called the police. Nobody had done that, so I asked him to place the call, which he did.”
Jack Clemmons, a sergeant with the West Los Angeles branch of the LAPD, was the first police officer to arrive on the scene, setting foot in Marilyn’s Brentwood home at 4:50 a.m. Like Hyman Engelberg, he discerned that the actress had been dead since the evening hours of August 4. He started asking questions—he wanted to know why they’d waited so long before contacting the police.
“We felt we had to first get clearance from Twentieth Century–Fox’s publicity department,” responded Greenson.
“The cop shot Dr. Greenson an unbelieving glance,” said Hyman Engelberg. “I mean, this bloke was a regular Sherlock Holmes. He had it all figured out. Not that Greenson’s explanation was true or made any sense, but this fellow had already determined that Marilyn hadn’t died by her own hand. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, he never deviated from that opinion, telling anyone who’d listen that Marilyn Monroe had been killed, that her corpse had been taken from her bedroom, then returned several hours later. This theory, propounded by any number of conspiracy buffs, finally brought forth an ambulance driver who claimed he’d been summoned to the Monroe residence and had carted Marilyn’s body off into the night. Mind you, not a shred of evidence, not a scintilla, supported any of this. It was pure conjecture. The cop was eventually dismissed by the Los Angeles Police Department for continuing to hawk his mawkish tale. I have no clue what became of the ambulance driver. I do know that an entire mythology was created around Marilyn’s death, part of which had to do with the so-called little red diary, which supposedly contained all sorts of state secrets that had been conveyed to Marilyn by the Kennedys. We were told by the myth makers that Bobby Kennedy himself somehow got hold of the diary and disposed of it by dumping it in the Potomac.”
According to Dr. Engelberg, the five-hour autopsy performed on Monroe later that day—August 5—did little to establish the exact cause of death. Thomas Noguchi, otherwise known as “the coroner to the stars,” conducted the autopsy. Surprisingly, he found no trace of barbiturates in Marilyn’s stomach lining or digestive tract and reported no evidence of needle puncture wounds, despite the fact that Dr. Engelberg had given her three separate injections over the last four days of her life. Calling Monroe’s death “a probable suicide,” Noguchi was widely criticized for having conducted an incomplete and inconclusive autopsy of Monroe, including the issuance of a merely partial toxicological report. Most notable was his failure to test Marilyn’s small intestine to determine the presence of barbiturates and alcohol. Nor did it help that an entire set of Marilyn’s tissue slides disappeared at some point during the autopsy, making it even more difficult to determine a definitive cause of death.
“There’s no question that Marilyn killed herself,” said Peter Lawford. “But as with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, there were those that couldn’t accept the obvious. There had to be some other, more sinister, and convoluted explanation. Lee Harvey Oswald, a virtual nobody, couldn’t possibly have killed the president of the United States without help from some higher authority. In Marilyn’s case, the most popular alternative theme had it that Bobby Kennedy hired a couple of hit men to dispose of his former lover because of her threat to hold a press conference wherein she would reveal the salacious details of their affair as well as her tryst with the president. So what! There were dozens of women who could’ve made more or less the same claim. It was clear to anyone with half a brain that Marilyn Monroe, at age thirty-six, had inadvertently taken her own life.”
• • •
Joe DiMaggio didn’t disappoint. On the afternoon of August 4, the day he and his two brothers took part in an Old Timers’ charity baseball game in San Francisco, the forty-seven-year-old former star center fielder for the New York Yankees thrilled thirty thousand spectators by belting a soaring home run into the left-field bleachers. After the game, the Yanks, having sponsored the event, presented the Clipper with a Wittnauer wristwatch inscribed with his name. That evening, Joe, Lefty O’Doul and O’Doul’s stepson, Jimmy, plus a couple of Lefty’s pals, went out to dinner and then on to the 365 Club, best known for its comely chorus line of showgirls. Aware of DiMaggio’s plans to remarry Marilyn Monroe, Lefty O’Doul said to him, “Think of tonight as your bachelor party.”
Regretting that he hadn’t called Marilyn that night, Joe retired shortly after two in the morning. Five hours later, the phone rang in his Beach Street home. Dr. Hyman Engelberg was calling from Marilyn’s Brentwood residence. The connection was poor, but DiMaggio made out the words “a terrible accident” and “Marilyn’s dead, I’m sorry.”
Not yet in shock, DiMaggio called Inez Melson. Marilyn’s business manager had just heard the news from Mickey Rudin and was about to call Joe when he called her. After speaking with Melson, DiMaggio phoned Harry Hall and asked his old friend to pick him up at the airport in Los Angeles. He’d try to catch the nine o’clock United Airlines flight in the morning.
“To be honest,” said Mickey Rudin, “none of us knew what to do. I contacted Aaron Frosch in New York, but he didn’t know what to do either. Marilyn’s mother was locked away in a mental hospital, so we couldn’t turn to her. I called Inez Melson and got a phone number in Florida for Berniece Miracle, Marilyn’s half sister, but she wasn’t around. Ultimately we took the cowards’ way out: we turned to Joe DiMaggio.”
Harry Hall picked Joe up at the airport at ten o’clock and drove him to the Los Angeles County Morgue, where he and Inez Melson officially identified Marilyn’s body. He signed the forms to have the body released for autopsy purposes, after which it would be transported to the mortuary at Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery, where Marilyn often indicated she wanted to be interred after her death. Hall then drove Joe to the Miramar Hotel. Checking into suite 1035, DiMaggio locked the door behind him and called his son. Joe Jr. arrived at the Miramar in the early afternoon. He found his father seated on the bed, his shoulders “stooped with grief.” As he sat there, said Joey, “a sound came out of him, an inhuman sound, almost like the roar of a lion. He then bent over and started to weep in deep gulps and gasps. We were alone at the time. Harry Hall had gone out to buy some booze. He returned with a couple of bottles of scotch and vodka. My father stopped crying, but he refused to drink. In addition, he refused to speak to the press. They kept calling the hotel for a comment. He instructed the front desk manager to hold his calls, except for Inez Melson and Berniece Miracle. Burying Marilyn would prove to be the most difficult thing my father ever had to do.”
Joe sent Berniece Miracle a telegram, requesting permission to make the final funeral arrangements. He wanted a small, simple, very private service for Marilyn, with “none of the usual Hollywood crowd.” Berniece agreed and granted him power of attorney to carry out his plan. Later that day, Joe, Joe Jr., and Harry Hall drove out to Monroe’s Brentwood house. The police were still there. “It was terribly depressing, what with all of Marilyn’s books, phonograph records, clothes, and furs still in place, as if she’d merely gone to the corner to buy a newspaper,” recalled Joey. “Maf, her little dog, eventually wound up with Frank Sinatra’s secretary. After looking around, we headed for Marilyn’s bedroom and located some of her correspondence and personal papers. My father rifled through the bundle, pausing here and there to read this or that. I have no idea what he was looking for. I don’t think he knew, either.”
Joe’s face suddenly brightened. He’d come across a short letter Marilyn had recently written to him but never mailed: “Dear Joe, If I can only succeed in making you happy—I will have succeeded in the biggest and most difficult thing there is—that is to make one person completely happy. Your happiness means my happiness. Marilyn.” DiMaggio neatly folded the handwritten note and slipped it into a pocket.
Berniece Miracle arrived in Los Angeles the following afternoon, Monday, August 6, and took a cab to the Miramar, where she, Joe, and Inez Melson went over DiMaggio’s list of funeral guests. They then issued a statement to the press, which read in part: “Last rites for Marilyn Monroe must of great necessity be as private as possible so that she can go to her final resting place in the quiet she always sought.” On Tuesday morning, Berniece and Inez Melson met with Eunice Murray at Marilyn’s home to select an appropriate burial gown for the actress. From her wardrobe closet they chose a chic, long-sleeved, apple green Pucci gown that Marilyn had last worn in February, while visiting Mexico.
That same evening, Whitey Snyder and his wife, Marjorie, arrived at the Westwood Memorial Park mortuary, where Marilyn’s body was being kept. After Whitey’s wife dressed the actress in the green gown selected for the somber occasion, Whitey began applying makeup, gradually transforming Marilyn’s death mask into a glowing presence. Agnes Flanagan came in to work on Marilyn’s hair. Assessing the damage done to the deceased’s scalp during the autopsy, she opted for a hand-styled blond wig similar in appearance to the hairdo worn by Marilyn in her most recent films.
“Joe DiMaggio sat in the cool, dark room and quietly watched as the three of us attended to Marilyn,” said Whitey Snyder. “He simply stared at Marilyn’s face, his body bent slightly forward toward her, his hands clasped tightly in his lap. He didn’t move. We finished our work about eleven at night and left the mortuary. Joe remained behind. Because of her funeral on Wednesday, August 8, I decided to return to the mortuary in the early morning to retouch Marilyn’s face. Joe was still there, in the same spot, having obviously spent the night alone with Marilyn as she lay in her open, bronze casket lined with champagne-colored satin. Lost in a trance, he barely noticed me when I came in. As I was about to leave, he said softly, ‘Thanks, Whitey—I’m certain you know that you were always one of Marilyn’s favorites.’ ”
At ten in the morning, Harry Hall drove Joe back to the Miramar, so he could shower, shave, and dress for the funeral, scheduled to begin at one o’clock at Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery. DiMaggio had engaged the Reverend A. J. Soldan to conduct a nondenominational service, together with a reading of the Twenty-third Psalm. Joe had asked Carl Sandburg to deliver the eulogy, but the writer had fallen ill, and although he later penned a Look magazine tribute to the actress, it was Lee Strasberg who composed and presented the eulogy.
Joe and Joe Jr. rode to Westwood Memorial Cemetery in a mortuary limousine. Joey wore his marine dress uniform, while Joe had on a charcoal gray suit. Joe Jr. suddenly noticed that his father was crying again. Without a word, Joe reached out and clutched his son’s hand. He held it until they reached the cemetery. Thinking back on the event, Joey reflected that he and his dad had never been closer.
Besides Joe and Joe Jr., the guest list included Lee and Paula Strasberg, Inez Melson, Berniece Miracle, Eunice Murray, Mr. and Mrs. Whitey Snyder, Agnes Flanagan, Mickey Rudin, Aaron Frosch, Ralph Roberts, Anne and Mary Karger, Sydney Guilaroff, the Greensons (Ralph, Hildi, Joan, and Dan), George Solotaire, and Lotte Goslar.
In total, thirty-one mourners attended Marilyn Monroe’s funeral. Dr. Hyman Engelberg had been invited but opted not to go. “I meant no disrespect, and it had nothing to do with our affair,” he said. “I simply wanted to mourn Marilyn’s death in private and in my own way.”
George Solotaire had originally planned on flying from New York to Los Angeles on August 7 in order to serve as best man at Joe and Marilyn’s on-again, off-again wedding ceremony. “That was certainly one of the sadder aspects of Marilyn’s death,” claimed Robert Solotaire, George’s son. “Joe had spoken to my Dad about getting remarried on August 8. As it turned out, that was the day of Marilyn’s funeral. Joe loved Marilyn beyond anyone’s imagination. He was totally distraught. I recall my dad telling me that somebody showed Joe an August 7 copy of a Los Angeles Times interview with Peter Lawford in which the actor lambasted DiMaggio for not allowing Marilyn’s Hollywood pals to attend the funeral. Joe had an absolute shit-fit. He said, ‘Sinatra and the others, including those goddamn low-life bastards the Kennedys, killed Marilyn. That faggot Peter Lawford also had a hand in it. If he or any of those fucking Kennedys turn up at Marilyn’s funeral, I’ll bash in their faces. All of those sons of bitches killed Marilyn.’ The truth of the matter is that Joe never fully recognized the degree and extent to which Marilyn was addicted to booze and pharmaceuticals. In the long run, that’s what killed her—not the Kennedys.”
For their part, the Kennedys couldn’t distance themselves far enough from Monroe’s death. The only comment offered by any member of the family came from the First Lady. Asked by a reporter what she thought of MM, Jacqueline Kennedy responded, “There will never be another Marilyn Monroe, but there doesn’t need to be because she will go on eternally.”
Reverend Soldan conducted the first part of Marilyn Monroe’s funeral service inside the Westwood Memorial Park Chapel. “Marilyn’s casket lay open,” said Lotte Goslar, “and Marilyn looked at peace. As private a man as he happened to be, Joe DiMaggio made no effort to masquerade his emotions. He broke down, crying openly during the service, and truly my heart went out to him. His son also cried. It seems almost trite to say that with Marilyn’s death, Joe DiMaggio died as well. Her unintentional suicide took two lives.”
The service, as stark and poignant as DiMaggio had envisioned it, ended with Lee Strasberg’s eulogy, which began: “Marilyn Monroe was a legend. In her own lifetime she created a myth of what a poor girl from a deprived background could attain. For the entire world she became a symbol of the eternal feminine. But I have no words to describe the myth and the legend. I did not know this Marilyn Monroe . . .”
As the guests filed out of the chapel and into the bright California sunlight, Joe DiMaggio approached Marilyn’s casket. He knelt beside it and kissed Marilyn’s lips for the last time, then placed three long-stemmed red roses in her folded hands. Although no direct source is cited, Richard Ben Cramer writes in his DiMaggio biography that Joe’s final words to Marilyn were “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
The casket, now shut, was carried two hundred yards from the chapel to crypt number 24 amidst a tranquil setting of grass and trees, an oasis in the center of a jumble of steel-and-cement high-rise office buildings. Throngs of onlookers lined the stone walls that ran along the edge of the cemetery. There was some running and shouting, even some laughter and the sound of transistor radios. A contingent of young, burly policemen stood guard along the interior of the wall. A mountain of flowers from all over the world was piled high in front of the vaultlike crypt. No bouquet was larger or more impressive than Joe DiMaggio’s heart-shaped arrangement of roses. A half dozen cemetery workers attired in black lifted the casket and slid it into place. The crypt was closed and locked. From beginning to end, Marilyn Monroe’s funeral lasted less than thirty minutes.
The mourners, among them Joe and his son, left soon after, as did the cemetery workers and the police. Now the crowd that had gathered behind the surrounding walls descended and headed straight for Marilyn’s crypt. Surging forward like a swarm of locusts, they grabbed each and every flower, tearing them off the mountain until not a single blossom remained. Watching the carnage from afar, Joe DiMaggio surmised that maybe Marilyn would have enjoyed the spectacle, just as she’d adored the adulation of thousands of American servicemen when she performed for them in Korea during their honeymoon in early 1954. The problem, DiMaggio later told his son, was that what Marilyn needed was less adulation and more of what is real.
• • •
To avoid the press, if for no other reason, Joe DiMaggio decided to leave the country. On Friday evening, August 10, he joined Harry Hall and Harry’s crony Sugar Brown on a ten-day road trip to Mexico. On their way out of town, the trio stopped off at Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery, where Joe went over a few of the thousands of condolence cards and telegrams that had poured into the cemetery office during the past two days, along with hundreds of fresh bouquets of flowers. Joe arranged with the office manager to have Inez Melson come in and pick up the cards and telegrams. Given what had taken place after Marilyn’s funeral, he authorized the cemetery to donate the flowers to nursing homes and hospitals in the area.
While Harry and Sugar returned to the car to wait for him, Joe walked out to the crypt for a good-bye visit with his beloved. The cemetery had closed for the night, and Joe had Marilyn all to himself. He’d already made plans with a nearby florist to deliver fresh roses to the crypt twice a week for years to come. He’d also ordered a bench to be made and installed in front of the crypt so that visitors could sit and soak it all in.
In the gathering dark, with only a sliver of moon in the sky, Joe stayed only for a minute. Overcome by sadness, he vowed never to return. It was too upsetting for him.
Before rejoining his friends in the car, Joe stopped back in the cemetery office. He told the office manager he had one final request. He wanted to pay the cemetery to have a plaque of white marble permanently affixed to crypt number 24, and it should read simply, “MARILYN MONROE, 1926–1962.” The cemetery consented, and the plaque was attached to the crypt. With the passage of time, the white marble gradually turned gray.