“Who killed Marilyn Monroe? That’s a question.”
—Sean O’Casey
The murky, mysterious details of Marilyn’s last day have fueled speculation for half a century. Entire books devoted to her murder, contradicting each other, have been printed, some doing no more than muddying the water. Today, nearly all the principals have died, and those who remain, tottering around and senile, aren’t talking.
However, in the decade after her murder, many witnesses delivered bombshell revelations, if only on their death beds. Some of the key witnesses, including both Peter Lawford and Eunice Murray, repeatedly changed their original stories, which were complete distortions to begin with.
Other witnesses, separately or together, based on different motives and agendas, colluded in a cover-up.
The accounts of what most eyewitnesses established as their “official versions” can, for the most part, be dismissed as lies. Yet, in several cases, a few people close to the scene actually told the truth, despite the dense fog of deceit surrounding what actually happened that fateful night.
***
When the morning sun blazed across the Santa Monica mountains, it suggested that it was going to be a hot, muggy day. At Marilyn’s Brentwood home, the eucalyptus trees were like a rustling curtain in the morning winds, which would soon die down to a deadly stillness. Red and purple bougainvillea greeted the sun.
After a sleepless night, Marilyn didn’t welcome the sun. Although her career seemed ready to be re-launched, her personal life was in a state of confusion.
Pat Newcomb was still asleep in the adjoining “telephone room,” which had a cot, and the house was silent. Eunice Murray hadn’t spent the night.
On her bedroom phone, Marilyn placed her first call of the day. It was to Jeanne Carmen, who had been out half the night and desperately wanted her own sleep.
Marilyn told her about being kept awake coping with the crank phone calls, and pondering a remarriage to DiMaggio or a new marriage to Jose Bolaños.
Carmen thanked Marilyn for the set of gold-colored golf clubs she’d sent her for her birthday. They both talked about their golf date on Monday, scheduled for around eleven in the morning. Before ringing off, Marilyn asked her to come over and spend the day with her.
Carmen declined. “Not today of all days,” she said. “I’ve got three beaux coming over—at different times, of course—who have promised to give me big surprises for my birthday.”
“I hope they’re not exaggerating how big the surprise is,” Marilyn said. “You know how men like to brag.”
“These guys are for real,” Carmen told her. “They’ve visited mama before.”
“You’re lucky,” Marilyn said. “I’m the loneliest girl in the world today. Bobby Kennedy is in San Francisco, and I’m going to call him all day until he agrees to fly down and see me. We’ve got to have it out once and for all.”
“Oh, dear one, why don’t you take up with someone less controversial, less high profile?” Carmen said. “I met this kid on the beach at Santa Monica—I got to him before Lawford did—and he’s god’s gift to women. Let me get in touch with him and send him over. He told me he ‘can’t wait’ to meet Marilyn Monroe.”
“Perhaps late Sunday afternoon,” Marilyn said, “He sounds worth the trouble. So many men aren’t, as you, of all people, know.”
Carmen said she had to get back to sleep and would call Marilyn later in the day to see if she got through to Bobby.
Eunice Murray wasn’t due to arrive for an hour, but Marilyn’s first call of the day came in. It was from her loyal friend and chief supporter among the Hollywood columnists, Sidney Skolsky. He made a date with her to have lunch on Sunday to discuss his script for The Jean Harlow Story. “I’m sure Fox will go for it,” he assured her. “Thank God you’re already a platinum blonde so we won’t have to dye your hair.”
For Sunday evening, she had accepted an invitation to have dinner with Frank Sinatra and Mike Romanoff.
Marilyn was still making calls when Eunice arrived that morning. Marilyn was arranging a fitting for another Jean Louis dress that she was to wear at the premiere of Mr. President in Washington.
She also spoke to Gene Kelly and arranged a meeting scheduled for Monday afternoon to talk about the upcoming film, What a Way to Go.
Even though trying to conduct business that day, she couldn’t seem to get Bobby off her mind. She placed the first of her calls to the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. As reporter Florabel Muir would discover, before the afternoon ended, Marilyn would place a total of six urgent calls, leaving messages for RFK, which were not returned.
Feeling he would never call her, she phoned Peter Lawford at his beach house. Suffering a hangover, he’d just risen for breakfast. “I know he’s in California, and I know he won’t see me unless pressure is put on him.” She didn’t identify who “he” was. “You tell him if he doesn’t fly down to see me and talk things over, he’ll hear from me at my press conference Monday morning. It’ll make headlines around the world, although not of the kind that may help Jack’s bid for re-election.”
“Marilyn, you wouldn’t!” Lawford said. “You of all people have had romances that went sour, or maybe shouldn’t have begun in the first place.”
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” she said. “This is my last call. If I don’t hear from him no later than six o’clock, watch me on TV. Tell Bobby to tune in. You might also call Jack at the White House. I know he has a busy schedule, but he’ll have time to watch me. I plan to look dazzling.” She put down the phone.
As Marilyn took her morning coffee, she chatted briefly with Norman Jeffries, Eunice’s son-in-law, who was laying Spanish tiles in her kitchen. Since she’d fired Eunice, she also planned to fire Norman because she feared he’d be a spy and would report everything back to his mother-in-law.
Norman later said, “I think Marilyn was desperately sick. I thought something was terribly wrong with her—maybe it was the dope or the liquor or both. She seemed scared out of her mind. I’d never seen her this way before.”
Eunice offered to cook Marilyn some breakfast, but she declined. She went outside to pull weeds from the flowers planted around her guest cottage. While doing so, photographer Larry Schiller appeared in the yard. Instead of calling, he’d come by without an appointment.
He’d been one of the photographers who had snapped the nude pictures of her in the swimming pool on the set of Something’s Got to Give. But he was here this morning on a different matter.
Marilyn had posed for the first edition of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy in 1954. Hours before her death, Hefner was negotiating for her to pose for a different cover—but this time, with no nude centerfolds inside.
He wanted her to appear on the front cover dressed only in a white fur stole which would conceal her breasts and vagina. However, on the back cover, her rear would be turned to the camera. The fur stole would be draped around her neck, the famous cheeks of her ass completely exposed. Philippe Halsman had once claimed, “Those cheeks seem to wink at the onlooker.”
Taken by surprise, Marilyn told Schiller that she was still weighing Hefner’s offer. “I’m trying to get away from this sex symbol stuff, and posing for the front and back covers of Playboy would put me back right where I was in 1954. I still haven’t decided. Come by Monday afternoon. Tell Hugh he will have my answer by then.”
At noon, Agnes Flanagan arrived to do Marilyn’s hair. Marilyn told her, “I want to look my best for Bobby tonight.”
During their hairdressing session, a messenger arrived with a package for her. Eunice brought it in, and Marilyn asked her to open it. It was a soft toy tiger. “Is there a message?” Marilyn asked.
“Nothing,” Eunice said. “No card, just nothing.”
Flanagan noticed that Marilyn suddenly went through a complete change of mood. She did not know what the significance of the toy tiger was, but Marilyn seemed to know what it meant. Before its arrival, she was preparing herself to see Bobby. But she seemed to have abruptly changed her mind. “Fuck him!” she said, without identifying that “him” meant the Attorney General. She ordered Eunice to bring the phone to her, and she immediately called her masseur, Ralph Roberts, and set up a tentative dinner date with him, asking him to call back at the end of the afternoon to confirm it.
Through all her turmoil, Roberts had remained her confidant, occupying the same position that Roddy McDowal had with Elizabeth Taylor. Eunice and Flanagan could hear what Marilyn said. From the sound of it, it was just idle gossip. Suddenly, he said something that made her furious. “That cunt! What a fucking liar. What a double crossing bitch!”
Eunice and Flanagan did not know who Marilyn meant, but they were to find out in half an hour.
A still sleepy Pat Newcomb came into the kitchen after having slept for twelve hours. Marilyn, still getting her hair done, seemed to resent that she’d rested so much after Marilyn herself had gone through one of her most troubled nights, interrupted by those bizarre phone calls from San Francisco.
When Newcomb walked into the kitchen, Flanagan sensed that she and Eunice detested each other. Newcomb at one time was quoted as saying, “I think Mrs. Murray should have been hung up by her thumbs.” She made that statement in 1974 in an interview with Robert Slatzer.
With a steely look, Marilyn confronted Newcomb in front of Eunice and Flanagan. “I hope you and Bobby had a wonderful time together on his most recent visit to Los Angeles in July,” she said to her publicist.
“Who told you about that?” Newcomb said defensively.
“It doesn’t matter,” Marilyn said. “I have people who tell me every time a cockroach walks across Hollywood Boulevard.”
“It was just a short visit,” Newcomb said. “I meant to tell you.”
“But you forgot,” Marilyn said mockingly. Then she went on the attack, pouring out her resentments.
Jeffries later confirmed that the argument between Marilyn and Newcomb“ turned into a jealous catfight over Bobby Kennedy. Not once was President Kennedy’s name mentioned. He seemed to have faded from the picture, although the President was the one that everybody was gossiping about, not the Attorney General.”
Not wanting to engage in any further argument, Newcomb took a batch of film scripts sent to Marilyn and walked out to the pool area, where Marilyn had invited her the day before to take a sun cure to heal her bronchitis.
Marilyn had had a long history of jealousy with Newcomb, and the publicist was probably jealous of her as well. In fact, Marilyn’s nickname for Newcomb was “Sybil,” an abbreviation for “sibling rivalry.” Dean Martin’s wife, Jeanne, claimed that Newcomb was deeply in love with Bobby.
C. David Heymann, in his biography of Robert F. Kennedy, was the first to suggest that the Jack-Marilyn-Bobby triangle may indeed have been “a square.” He wrote, “Marilyn and Newcomb had a relationship so close and competitive that it appealed to Marilyn’s proclivity for lesbianism.”
Other biographers and journalists have echoed that belief. George Carpozi said, “There’s no question about it. Marilyn went both ways.” Her former lover, Ted Jordan, claimed that Marilyn had a lesbian affair with his wife, the stripper Lili St. Cyr. She also had affairs with Jeanne Carmen, Shelley Winters, Barbara Stanwyck, and Joan Crawford, and especially with her acting coach, Natasha Lytess.
“Newcomb had a habit of inching in on people who were hot and heavy for Marilyn,” Carpozi claimed. “Obviously, she was angry that Newcomb was seeing Bobby, who wouldn’t return her calls.”
”Lawford always maintained that Marilyn was bisexual. But, as Frank Sinatra said, “Peter is one to talk. That’s the equivalent of the pot calling the kettle black.”
In San Francisco, Bobby took a call from Lawford. It is not known what was said, but apparently, Lawford convinced the Attorney General how important it was to fly to Los Angeles almost immediately as a means of bringing Marilyn under control.
Back in Brentwood, Eunice asked Marilyn if she wanted her to prepare lunch. Apparently, her offer was refused, although Newcomb later claimed she had hamburgers with Marilyn. That doesn’t appear to be true. It seemed that the only food or drink Marilyn consumed that day was glass after glass of champagne.
After getting Bobby’s agreement to fly to Los Angeles, Lawford called Marilyn again. “Bobby’s on his way. I’ll drive him over as soon as he lands.”
While Newcomb remained at the pool, a call came in from lawyer Milton Rudin. He wanted permission to go ahead with negotiations for a new film to star Marilyn and Sinatra, along with Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. The Rat Packers would join Marilyn in a script written by Harry Brown, who had created Ocean’s 11 “for the boys” in 1960. “Go ahead,” Marilyn said. “I’ve had them all.”
Jeffries, who had been critical of Marilyn’s appearance that morning, changed his mind when he saw her in the early afternoon. “She looked gorgeous. Flanagan did wonders with her hair, and she wore a sexy dress and did her own makeup. She’d transformed herself into Marilyn Monroe, sex goddess of the Western World.”
For the arrival of Lawford and Bobby, she wanted the house emptied. She asked Eunice to do some shopping. “Call before coming back to the house,” she told her. Marilyn also asked Newcomb to go home, claiming that she had company coming, suggesting it was a date. About the last person she wanted in the house to greet Bobby was Newcomb. Jeffries agreed to work outside the house.
Just before leaving the house, Eunice answered the phone. A collect call came in from Joe DiMaggio, Jr. Eunice told the operator that “Miss Monroe is not here. We cannot accept the call.” She abruptly hung up. She did not approve of Marilyn’s relationship with DiMaggio’s son, who was now a young adult.
With Jeffries, Eunice, and Newcomb out of her house, Marilyn was left alone with her pet poodle, Maf. She didn’t know the exact time of Bobby’s arrival, so she placed another call to Carmen.
“The fucker is on his way,” Marilyn told her. “I guess he finally came to his senses.”
“I don’t mean to sound like your mother, but it’s about time you came to your senses too, especially regarding Bobby and Jack.”
Carmen claimed that one of her boyfriends had already visited her that morning. “Sometimes the fuck a gal gets at ten in the morning is better than ever. The guy’s well rested. He hasn’t started to booze yet, or hasn’t had to face the stress of the day.”
“I think that may be true,” Marilyn told her. “But there’s also something to be said for love in the afternoon. Before I kick Bobby out the door, I think I’ll insist on a farewell fuck. Something for him to remember me by. I’m sure I can still get a rise out of him.”
“Honey, you could even get a rise out of one of the many gay boys you hang out with,” Carmen assured her. “You’ve still got it, kid, and you’re going to hang on to it for a very long time.”
***
Bernard Spindel, who had bugged Marilyn’s residence, taped the arrival of Bobby and Lawford at her home. He and Fred Otash, along with others who listened to his tapes, estimated Bobby’s arrival time at around three in the afternoon.
After landing at the Los Angeles International Airport, Bobby had taken a helicopter to the helipad at 20th Century Fox, which had allowed him to use it since the studio was still in negotiations with him to film his book, The Enemy Within.
Lawford was waiting in his car to drive Bobby to Marilyn’s home in Brentwood. Although the dialogue among the three once they reached Marilyn’s house was not always clear, a rough scenario of what happened that fateful afternoon can be pieced together from snippets of sound, as remembered later by Otash and Spindel.
Apparently, in the beginning, their reunion went smoothly, although tense negotiations loomed. Some reports have Bobby storming into the house, demanding Marilyn’s red diary, but that did not come until later.
Before their arrival, she had called a local cantina in Brentwood, which had delivered a small buffet of Mexican food, including guacamole. Resting on a coffee table was a chilled magnum of champagne, with more of the bubbly chilling in her refrigerator.
Knowing that Bobby and Marilyn needed to talk, Lawford went out to the back yard for a nude swim in her pool.
She would later tell Carmen, and the Spindel tapes clearly indicated that as well, that she used all her seductive techniques to lure Bobby into her bedroom.
At one point, he can be faintly heard saying, “Marilyn, not now. Now’s not the time.” But he seemed to be giving in.
Carmen speculated that while he sat on her sofa, she unzipped him and began to perform fellatio on him. “That will get them all the time,” she’d once confided to Carmen. Judith Campbell had witnessed her perform the same stunt with the soon-to-be-President in 1960 in JFK’s hotel suite in Los Angeles.
The sound died out in the living room, but was picked up in her bedroom, which was also bugged.
She was one of the most seductive women in America, and, according to Spindel, Bobby gave in.
Both Otash and Spindel had seen film clips of Marilyn in the sack, and each of them knew the treat Bobby was receiving from her. But this time, according to Otash’s memory as expressed in dialogues and interviews he gave later, only the sounds of their sexuality on this hot afternoon were heard. From the sound of her moaning, the men knew that Bobby was getting to her, arousing her passion in spite of her rage at him over the previous few days.
She was emitting short, staccato, animal-like noises. They knew Bobby was almost there, as he uttered a long, low groan, reaching the pitch of orgasm.
Then it was over. But the next sounds surprised them. She seemed to be kneeling in front of him, licking and coddling his supposedly limp cock. Sounds of her kisses could be heard.
Finally, he could take it no more and seemed to be pulling away. Like perverts, Otash and Spindel had to imagine what was going on, having been privy only to the sound effects.
In the afterglow, Marilyn could be heard saying, “Oh, Bobby, Bobby, you’ve come back to me. I thought I’d lost you forever.”
It seemed that that farewell fuck she’d envisioned during her discussion with Carmen had shifted into a renewed hope for the continuation of their affair.
Bobby could be heard saying that he still loved her, but that a relationship “cannot be. Hoover’s on to us. Hoffa, God knows who? It can ruin Jack’s presidential chances. Destroy my marriage.”
She protested, reminding him he’d promised her that he’d divorce Ethel and marry her.
He admitted that he had done that, “But you’ve got to forgive my moment of insanity. I could never leave Ethel. I’ve got my brood to think of. I need to be a good father to them, and I love them. Please understand. We have to make sacrifices.”
On the Spindel tapes, the action shifted to the kitchen. Bobby’s voice was difficult to hear. He was speaking softly, but her voice was growing increasingly strident.
“I want you to leave your wife— today, not tomorrow, not some other year, not after some god damn presidential election. Today, damn it!”
His voice was picked up again. “Be reasonable.”
“What do you think I am? One of Jack’s hookers to be used and discarded like a piece of meat? I’m Marilyn Monroe. I’m even more famous that you are.”
“I’ve got to have the red diary,” he said, imploring her. “I asked you to destroy it. Did you?”
“Hell, no, and I’m not going to,” she said. “I also had Fred Otash, that detective, tape our phone conversations.”
“You are trying to blackmail the Attorney General of the United States?” he asked. “You’re out of your mind.”
“Maybe you are the one out of your mind—you and that brother of yours, for getting involved with me in the first place. Promises, promises.”
“Turn over the diary, Marilyn, and anything else you have to link Jack and me to you.”
Their voices seemed to grow louder. When Otash heard the tapes, he claimed that, “If I had not known it was Bobby Kennedy’s voice, I would not have been able to nail it. He was screeching, high pitched like an old lady.”
The tape was unclear at this point. She screamed obscenities and seemed to flail away at his chest with her fists. In her fury, she picked up a small kitchen knife and lunged at him. It was at this point that Lawford’s voice is heard.
“Marilyn, drop the knife. There was the sound of a scuffle, and apparently one of them, either Bobby or Lawford, wrestled the knife away.
“Fuck!” Lawford yelled. “Get a grip, god damn it, Marilyn.”
Then she broke into hysterical sobbing, and no more sound came from the kitchen.
The next voice heard was that of Marilyn, who had returned to her bedroom. “Don’t threaten me,” Bobby told her. “Enough people are trying to destroy me. Not you, too. I’m really begging, and that’s something I don’t do.”
Lawford chimed in. “Don’t condemn him for falling in love with you.”
“You’re still seeing that Greenson guy, aren’t you?” Bobby asked.
“Yes,” she shouted back at him. “He’s been fucking me, too. I'll also fix his wagon at my press conference.”
“Don’t do it!” Bobby warned her.
“Before I tell everything, Giancana will also go down,” she threatened.
Lawford could be heard talking on her bedroom phone with Dr. Greenson. “ If she does what she claims she’s going to do, kiss your psychiatric career goodbye. You could end up in prison. I’m standing here with the Attorney General of the United States and he knows the law.”
Bobby was heard speaking to Greenson. “You’ve got to come over right away. She’s in bad shape. She’s threatening to bring down everyone’s House of Cards, including yours. You’ve got to sedate her.”
“I'll be right over.”
“All of us are in the dung heap together,” Bobby was heard saying. He abruptly slammed down the phone.
She picked up on his last line. “Dung heap, is it? Are you saying I’m a pile of shit?”
“Nothing of the kind,” Bobby said.
“Get out! Get out!” she was heard shouting at him. “I never want to see you again. If you don’t get out right away, I’m calling the press and alerting the newspapers.”
“Bobby said nothing else. Apparently, at this point, he stormed out the door, his famous temper flaring.
“Cool it, Marilyn,” Lawford said. “Be a good sport about this. I’ve got to go, but I'll call you later. I want you to come over and be with me. Let’s be good friends again. My party will cheer you up.”
“Get out, too,” she yelled at him.
“I'll still call you later,” he promised. “Dr. Greenson will give you something. You’ll feel better soon.”
After both Bobby and Lawford left, she could be heard dialing the phone. Apparently, she called the White House, where an operator must have told her that JFK was in Hyannis Port.
She was heard asking, “Then please give me his number in Hyannis Port, for god’s sake.”
She was obviously denied access to the number, because she ended her plea by saying, “Tell the President that Khruschev called. I’m launching a nuclear attack on Washington. Too bad he’s out of town.”
***
Dr. Greenson arrived with a black bag shortly before five that afternoon and was seen by Marilyn’s neighbors, although they didn’t know who he was. Those same neighbors had recognized Lawford and Bobby when they’d driven up and had gone into the house.
When Greenson arrived, he found Marilyn in a state of hysteria. She’d just received a call from a woman with a deep voice. “She warned me that my life was in danger,” Marilyn told Greenson.
She also told him that she’d tried to reach the President to report on her disastrous reunion with Bobby. She told him that after his visit, she was going to call Lawford and threaten him if he didn’t give her the President’s private phone number in Hyannis Port. “I feel I have the right to call and tell him goodbye.”
When Eunice returned with supplies, the housekeeper noted that Marilyn was “panicky.”
Greenson was so alarmed by her condition that he called Dr. Engelberg, who refused to come over. Preparing to divorce his wife, he apparently was spending time with the new love interest in his life, and had more or less run out of patience with his most celebrated patient.
Ralph Roberts called to confirm his dinner date with Marilyn, as requested. He later said that Dr. Greenson answered the phone. “Miss Monroe is out this evening. Don’t call again.”
“I didn’t believe him.” Roberts later said. “He didn’t want me hanging out with Marilyn. I think she was in the house when I phoned, but he wouldn’t call her to the phone. He had long urged her to drop me.”
Since his social date with her was off, Roberts then called other friends and arranged to go out to dinner with them instead. Shortly before Marilyn died, his answering service reported that she’d made a final call trying to reach him.
Seeing that Marilyn was in such bad shape, Greenson asked Eunice if she’d stay over with Marilyn for the night, even though her services were being terminated in the morning. His mother-in-law also asked Jeffries to stay over and sleep in the “telephone room” so recently vacated by Newcomb. He, too, was being dismissed Sunday, even though he was far from finishing the renovations he had begun on the house.
Greenson told Marilyn that he’d made a dinner date with his wife and had to leave at once to pick her up and honor their reservations on time. She pleaded with him to stay, even though she was dismissing him this coming week. He refused, adding to her feeling of desertion and loneliness.
She placed an immediate call to Lawford, who picked up the receiver. He’d already started to drink his “sundowners.” He told her that Bobby had left.
Since his wife, Patricia, was with her brother, Jack, in Hyannis Port, and Lawford had their private number, Marilyn asked him to give it to her.
“They’d kill me if I gave it out,” Lawford protested.
“I got Bobby to come down, and I think I can get the President to speak to me one final time,” she said. “Here’s the deal. If you will get him to phone me, just as soon as possible, I'll call off the press conference. He’s safe. If questioned, I'll just say I once shook his hand at his birthday celebration in May.”
“If you really mean that, I think I can get him to call you,” Lawford said.
“They got what they wanted, and I don’t want anything else these two little Irish Catholic boys have to offer.”
“Hang in there and pick up the damn receiver when Jack calls, and I know he will. Let’s bring all this shit to an end. The way things are going between Pat and me, I'll soon be kicked out of the clan myself.”
“All right, Peter, but don’t fuck this up,” she warned him.”
I’ve got people arriving for Chinese take-out tonight,” he said. “I'll call you back in an hour or so and see if you’re up to being the guest of honor.”
She put down the phone to wait to see if the President of the United States was really going to phone her after all her failed attempts to get through to him.
***
Bobby had spent only a short time at Lawford’s beach house. Lawford arranged for a helicopter to take him from Santa Monica to the Los Angeles International Airport. Two neighbors spotted him leaving, but later, when questioned, a neighbor couldn’t remember the time. “We’d had dinner,” he said, “so it must have been around nine o’clock that night. When these helicopters took off from a helipad near our home, they always blew sand into our swimming pool.”
At the airport, Bobby boarded a commuter flight to San Francisco. He was accompanied by two unknown aides from the Justice Department.
In San Francisco, he headed by limousine to the Bates Ranch, arriving there in time for Sunday mass, where he was seen with Ethel and some of his children.
***
Earlier Saturday night, the phone rang in Marilyn’s home. She immediately picked up the receiver. Could it really be him? “Hello,” she said in a very hesitant voice that was filled with anticipation. Her voice and that of her caller were being overheard by others.
“Marilyn, it’s the Prez, as you call me. I’m back home, not at the White House.”
“I guess it’s sometimes good to get out of that fish bowl in Washington,” she said. “How are you?”
“Having more troubles than a man deserves and making a sworn enemy every second. I don’t do enough for women’s rights, for black rights, for bird-watchers, for teenaged pregnant mothers, and, in your case, for the Queen of Hollywood.”
“I guess Bobby has called you,” she said. “Things didn’t go so well between us.”
“I know, and I’m sorry, but we’re doing the best thing. We could do no better favor for you than remove ourselves from your life. We were wrong to be there in the first place. Will you ever forgive us?”
“Of course, I will, and we’ll both go on. I’m making a spectacular comeback and you’re going to be the all-time greatest President.” She paused. “Except for one.”
“And who’s my competition?”
“Abraham Lincoln…he’s my favorite.”
“I can’t really talk now,” he said. “People are waiting for me. But your forgiveness will make my world a lot better.”
“I’ve got to step aside and let you do what you’re going to do. By 1968, with you as Prez, no kid in America is going to go hungry. People who don’t have insurance will get good medical care. You’re going to transform America like FDR did in the 1930s.”
“A big job, but we’ll give it hell.”
“As for Bobby, he’s got a pretty big agenda, too, especially when he becomes President after you. And he’s got a wife and a hell of a lot of kids. And you forgive me, too? You will, won’t you?”
“There is nothing to forgive. You offered love and that is the greatest gift of all. Without it, why would life be worth living?”
“There’s just one more thing,” she said. “It haunts me, but I aborted your child. It would have been the most wonderful boy or girl in the world. Just think—President Kennedy for his father and Marilyn Monroe for its mama.”
There was a long pause at the other end. Total silence.
Then he said, “Some things aren’t meant to be,” he said.
“You’ll always remember me, won’t you? I need to know.”
“When I expire on some hot summer day at the Cape, say, in August of 1987, I'll feel your sweet kiss on my old man lips. It’ll be my send-off as I depart this world for another one.”
“That’s the sweetest thing anybody has ever said to me,” she told him, echoing a very similar line in Bus Stop.
“Goodbye, Marilyn.”
“Goodbye, Mr. President.”
After hanging up and brushing aside her tears, she phoned Carmen, not wanting to forget one single line of what she and the President said to each other.
Fred Otash later said, “I felt deeply embarrassed listening to something that was so personal. It made me feel like a rotter hearing such private stuff. There was a lot of real emotion there, a lot of pain. Hell, I’m getting sentimental, and that’s not who I am or what I do.”
***
As Carmen would recall years later, “Marilyn caught me between fucks on my birthday. She wanted me to come over so she could tell me about her call from the president, but I told her that she’d have to give me a blow-by-blow on the phone.”
“After Marilyn told me what the President said, I had more respect for him, a real gentleman in spite of his reputation behind boudoir doors. That’s one of the nicest send-offs I’ve ever heard. Better than my send-off from Lex Barker. One drunken night he told me that he’d rather fuck Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl, than me.”
I had a boyfriend due to arrive in seconds, and I wanted to get Marilyn off the phone, as I needed some repairs after an afternoon session I’d had. Talk about a workout. He wanted everything. I told her I had a date.”
“Oh, Jeanne,” Marilyn said. “Can’t you cancel and come over and bring a bag of pills?”
“The request for pills was not unusual, Carmen said. “Marilyn and I often shared pharmaceutical drugs at that time, because they were fairly easy to get at any local drugstore. Frankly, back then, we didn’t know how habit-forming or dangerous some of these drugs were.”
“Over the years, I denied giving her drugs, because I didn’t want to be one of the parties accused of contributing to her death, if even indirectly. Back then, I didn’t want to reveal all that personal stuff about her—the final call from the President, claiming she aborted his child. Those revelations would have been like exploding bombs back then.”
Before Carmen hung up, she reconfirmed her date for a game of golf on Monday.
“Marilyn couldn’t really play very well, and I was a trick shot, but I was trying to teach her. I never figured out why she wanted to play golf, but she did. I promised to ring her up later to see how she was.”
“It was an instinct, but she seemed a little too deliriously happy. She still hadn’t decided if she were going to marry Bolaños or DiMaggio. I would have been happy to settle with either one. Of course, Joltin’Joe was where the money was. As a gal gets older, she has to think about money. Marilyn had a certain bravado that night. While planning this double marriage, she also told me that she’d met Warren Beatty last night, and she was definitely going to go for him and take him away from Natalie Wood. All of us showgirls and models in Hollywood in 1962 had set Beatty as our goal, but somehow I thought she would beat us out. Imagine having to compete with Marilyn Monroe for any Hollywood stud.”
***
Another call came in to Marilyn, this one from Johnny Roselli. He told her to cancel her other plans, claiming he had something very important to talk over with her. He also warned her that the nature of his talk was so confidential that he didn’t want her nosey housekeeper eavesdropping. “Clean out the house,” he instructed her. “Maybe after our little talk, we’ll have some fun.”
Apparently, she asked him if he could make it some other night. On Spindel’s tapes, the gangster was heard saying, “No, god damn it, it has to be tonight…or else!”
Lawford called back at around 7pm to see if she’d changed her mind about coming over. He seemed more interested in learning about her attitude toward his brothers-in-law than he did in having her as a guest. Her sudden shifts in mood had obviously alarmed him.
She did inquire about his guest list. He told her that he’d invited Marlon Brando, Wally Cox, and the television producer, Joe Naar, along with his wife Dolores. The Naars lived just two blocks from Marilyn’s Brentwood home. “You don’t have to drive over if you’re not feeling up to it,” Lawford told her. “The Naars can pick you up and bring you back.”
She declined the offer.
“Is Warren Beatty coming back again?” she asked.
Sensing her interest, Lawford said, “I think Warren is getting tired of Natalie. Would you like me to call him and give him your phone number? Perhaps you and he would like to get together and talk about starring in a picture together. I think the Sexiest Man in Hollywood and the Sexiest Woman in Hollywood would be a casting dream come true.”
“Give him my number,” she said. “I'll become known as Joan Crawford, auditioning all the young male stars in town.”
Lawford also told her that producer George (“Bullets”) Durgom would be there. Lawford then revealed the real motivation for his call. “Did you speak to the President?”
“Yes, he called,” she said.
“And…”
“And it’s okay,” she said. “It’s over. It’s over with Bobby, too.”
“And Teddy? Don’t forget Teddy.”
“No one’s forgotten Teddy,” she said. “He’s sweet, the sweetest of the lot. I'll always entertain him when he comes to the West Coast in case he can break free from all those hookers.”
“I know you must be feeling a little depressed after what you went through this afternoon, so I'll phone you later to check up on you.”
“Okay, but don’t call after ten o’clock. I’ve got an important guest coming over, and I can’t be disturbed.”
“Do I know this important guest?” he asked.
“You know him, but you don’t want to get too close to him—that’s for god damn sure.”
All their dialogue came across clearly on tape, and would be described later by Otash. Later, Lawford would lie to the police, telling officers that she was “barely coherent” when he talked to her right before his house party.
Lawford’s call was immediately followed by another one, all of it recorded on Spindel’s tapes—and perhaps on other illegal bugging machines as well. Otash still had orders from her to have her own phone tapped.
***
On his third attempt to speak to Marilyn that day, Joe DiMaggio, Jr. finally reached Marilyn. She picked up the phone herself this time instead of Eunice, who had kept lying, telling him that Marilyn was not at home.
He’d placed a collect call from Camp Pendleton, California. Later, he was able to determine the exact time of the call because he was watching the seventh inning of a baseball game between the Baltimore Orieles and the Anaheim Angels.
There had been a sense of urgency associated with all of young DiMaggio’s calls that day. He told her that he’d taken her advice and had broken off his engagement to Pamela Ries.
She told him that she was delighted to hear that. For some reason, she’d felt that Ries was not the right girlfriend for him, and she also feared that he was far too young to get married. She repeated her objections on the phone.
“I’m old enough to get married,” he said. “Old enough to marry you if you want me.” Then he brought up the subject he dreaded. “Dad called me and told me that you guys plan to remarry, either August 8th or the 15th. He invited me to the wedding.”
“He’s telling the truth,” she said
“Oh, Marilyn, don’t do it. Don’t go back there and repeat the same old mistakes. Plan a different life, like one with me. You know how much I adore you. It’s my time to be with you now, not Dad’s. Don’t betray me.”
“Oh, Joey,” she said. “You’re making this very difficult for me.”
“Make me one promise,” he said. “Don’t commit yourself right now. I’m getting a leave. I’m flying up from San Diego next week, and just let me spend one night with you. Just one night. You owe me that much. I swear to you that by morning, you won’t want to marry anybody but me.”
“Joey, you certainly can be persuasive and you know how to make a confused gal all the more confused.”
“Will you promise?”
“I promise,” she said, reluctantly. “Let me know when you’re coming. I’m not going to promise to marry you, but I will set aside time for you.” She giggled. “Actually, I’m flattered.”
“You need someone who treats you right,” he said. “You deserve that in a husband. That’s something you’ve never had before.”
“You’ve always been wonderful to me. But you’re so young and also you’re his son.”
“I have no control over who my father is or how old I am. Don’t hold either of those things against me. If you don’t think I’m experienced enough, you can teach me. I’m a fast learner.”
“That has already been demonstrated, sweetie,” she said. “You know I’m crazy about you. You make me feel like a kid again.”
“I want to devote my entire life to making you happy,” he said. “In some ways, you haven’t grown up either. Maybe we’ll grow up together, finding our way. Where you are concerned, age makes not one god damn bit of difference, and you know that.”
“You really mean you’d devote your life to me?” she asked. “No man has ever promised that. I’ve loved you ever since you were a boy.”
“Little boys grow up and get bigger every day,” he said.
“You don’t need to explain that to me,” she said. “I bet you’re the best looking boy in the Marine Corps.”
“I'll even bring a little military discipline into your life,” he said. “You’ll love it!”
“You naughty boy,” she said. “I know what you want to do.”
“Joking aside, I'll be there soon,” he said. “I love you. You’re my girl, and don’t you forget it.”
“There will always be a place in my heart just for you,” she said. “Good night, sweetie,”
“Good night,” he said. “I love you.”
She can be heard blowing kisses into the receiver.
Other than being on tape, these revelations were also confirmed by Joe Jr.’s next girlfriend, Pamela Lawson (not to be confused with the discarded Pamela Reis).
Eunice also eavesdropped on the conversation. She told her son-in-law, Jeffries, and later would tell others, “The whole thing was disgusting. She was just playing with that kid’s mind and leading him on. I don’t think she cared who she hurt. She was always complaining about how men had hurt her. She could also be destructive to men as well. It was a two-way street with that one, and I should know.”
After her phone dialogues with Lawford and Joe Jr., Marilyn, according to Eunice, announced that she was retiring for the night. It was around 8pm. For years, Eunice stuck to that one story, although changing much of her other unofficial testimony, perhaps forgetting what she’d said before.
It appeared that Marilyn did retreat to her bedroom at 8pm to receive some more phone calls. But she also had a late date with Roselli, who wanted everybody out of the house.
What Eunice didn’t tell was that Marilyn gave her a hundred dollar bill to go out and celebrate with her son-in-law, Norman Jeffries. Marilyn said she had a “hot date” and wanted some privacy. She told Eunice that her date would not be a long one because she was tired, suggesting they would be able to return by eleven. “But call first,” she cautioned. Otherwise, she didn’t want to be disturbed.
Eunice took her own time showering and getting dressed up. She would later be seen a mile away, in a Brentwood restaurant, dining with some man. A neighbor spotted her but didn’t know the identity of her dining companion. It can be assumed that the man was Jeffries.
Eunice did admit that right before she left the house, she heard Marilyn in her bedroom “having a very bad reaction to what someone on the other end of the phone was telling her.” All Eunice could make out was that Marilyn was telling her caller, “That’s horrible. That’s horrible. He should be warned.”
“All I know is, somebody told her something awful,” Eunice said. “She was still on the phone, I think, when we left the house.”
That caller was later identified as Fred Vanderbilt Field, her communist friend, phoning from Mexico City with some alarming news.
Marilyn made the last outgoing phone call of her life, speaking to Carmen and complaining about how tired she was and how much she needed sleep. “How are you, Birthday Girl?” she asked.
“Speaking of tired,” Carmen said, “I’ve been worked over by the two hottest studs in Hollywood today, with one more scheduled for around midnight.”
“You can have my birthday present,” Marilyn said. “Johnny Roselli is coming over. He says he’s got to see me. It’s urgent.”
“Are you sure? Maybe he just wants a piece of you.”
“No,” she said. “There was something in his voice. I think there’s trouble.”
“Unlike you, I love Johnny,” Carmen said. “He’s been good to me, especially whenever it comes time to pay the rent. But if he asks about me tonight, tell him I got a job in Vegas.”
“Oh, Jeanne,” Marilyn said. “I’ve got really important news. Frank Sinatra might not want to marry me, and Jack and Bobby have presented me with my walking papers, but I’ve got three other hot men, each one wanting me to be their bride. There’s also Warren Beatty, the new boy in town. I’m convinced he has the hots for me. Lawford practically told me so. I have more or less promised to marry two of these men, and I’ve got the third one dangling in the wind.”
“What do you mean, three men?” Carmen asked. “You underestimate yourself, girl. I count at least eighty million men in all colors, shapes, and dick sizes, from Nova Scotia to Cairo, who’d give their left nut to marry you.”
“The laws for this country are so god damn stupid,” she said. “A gal should be allowed to marry as many men as she wants. And they call this the land of the free.”
“Sweetheart, you’re always saying that! You don’t have to marry them,” Carmen said. “Be like your role model, Miss Lana Turner. Marry once in a while and have many, many boyfriends on the side. It’s the only way for gals like us.”
“If you say so, baby,” Marilyn said. “Guess what—I'll think about it tomorrow.”
Carmen said that she joined in to repeat the next line with Marilyn. “Because tomorrow is another day.”
It was Marilyn’s favorite line from Gone With the Wind, as uttered in 1939 by Scarlett O’Hara.
“I certainly didn’t know it at the time,” Carmen later said, “but for Marilyn, that poor misunderstood dear, there would be no more tomorrows, only yesterdays.”
***
It was a busy night for Marilyn. No sooner had she put down the phone than a call came in from Jose Bolaños in Mexico City. The time was around 9:30pm. She welcomed that call but dreaded the arrival any minute from Roselli.
Some sources claim that Bolaños placed the call from a bar in Santa Monica. But years after Marilyn’s death, he claimed, “That’s ridiculous. I was still in Mexico. If I’d been in the Los Angeles area, I would have been with Marilyn in bed. I’d proposed marriage to her, and she’d accepted.”
“That night, we talked about our wedding,” Bolaños said. “She sounded tired but excited. We were going to be married in about two weeks. I was closing out my affairs in Mexico and packing up to head to L.A. I was going to move in with her at Brentwood. I’d feel at home, since all her major pieces of furniture were being shipped up from Mexico.”
“Once married, I would definitely have a kid or two with her. But she was making a comeback. We’d need money, and I would wear protection during our first years. She couldn’t afford to miss out on any more movie deals.”
“Not only that, I’d written a new movie script that she’d agreed to star in. Well, almost… It was about an aging screen goddess who goes to Mexico and meets this handsome young actor. She falls madly in love with him. Eventually, she marries him and takes him back to Hollywood.”
“At first, he lives in her shadow, and the big enchiladas in Hollywood treat him like the star’s boy. But then he appears in a movie himself, and then another. In time, as her beauty fades, he has become a bigger star than she is.”
“One night she catches him with a young blonde actress who has dethroned her as the Queen of Hollywood. She has a gun in this big Hollywood mansion she lives in. She shoots her young lover, who falls face down in her pool.”
He laughed. “Marilyn told me that I’d have to rewrite the ending, that it was too close to an old Gloria Swanson movie called Sunset Blvd. After reading my script, she said the aging actress could be played by Joan Crawford, and that she could appear as the young goddess. Actually, I had meant for Marilyn to play the older role.”
“Of course, she was killed that night, and my film was never made, although I did offer it to Lana Turner, who turned it down, but didn’t turn me down on a personal level, if you know what I mean.”
Bolaños has often been quoted as saying that Marilyn never hung up the phone, but perhaps laid the receiver down and stopped talking to him, with the suggestion that she drifted off to sleep.
Years later in Mexico, he claimed “that was an invention of some writer and other writers copied it. It never happened that way. After declaring her love for me, and me for her, with a promise that we’d be together in a few days, she blew kisses into the phone, wished me a good night, and then put the receiver back on its cradle. Everything else said is a lie.”
After Marilyn died, Bolaños gave only a “limited hangout” about what they had talked about during her final hour. But he did say something that tantalized the nation’s press. However, he never delivered the punch line until years later, in Mexico.
“Before I hung up that night, Marilyn told me a secret so deadly it would have shocked the world.”
It took a lot of years and another celebrated death before Bolaños finally told what he’d heard that night.
[Editor’s note: for more on this, see “Marilyn’s Deadly Secret” within the final pages of this book.]
***
Peter Lawford later claimed that he was the last person to speak to Marilyn, although how he knew that was never revealed. Marilyn’s bugged phone indicates no final call to Marilyn from him. Otash later claimed that he believed that Lawford made up that final call.
Marilyn had two separate phones, one connected to a white phone and one connected to a pink phone. If Lawford had made such a call as he claimed, he would not have been able to get through to her, as her killers had taken both phones off their respective hooks. All that Lawford would have heard would have been a busy signal.
In 1975, during a police enquiry into Marilyn’s mysterious death, Lawford told the police that her last words were, “Say goodbye to Jack and say goodbye to yourself because you’re a nice guy.” The police knew, of course, that the reference to “Jack” could only mean John F. Kennedy.
No such call ever came into Marilyn’s house, to judge from the evidence. Lawford was setting the stage for defining her death as a suicide.
When a skeptical Frank Sinatra heard the details of Lawford’s testimony, he said, “All that proves is that MGM should have hired Peter as a screenwriter instead of as an actor.”
***
Unknown to Marilyn, her fate was about to be decided by five men who’d arrived in Brentwood the day before, after a bumpy flight from Chicago. Their orders from Sam Giancana were firm: Kill Marilyn Monroe before midnight Saturday.
In their lifetimes devoted to murder, it would be estimated that this cabal of killers would assassinate some three-hundred people, mostly men but an occasional woman, too.
None of their murders was as high profile as that of Marilyn Monroe. But her reputation didn’t seem to hold them in awe. Murder was their game, and they were professional. Even if they’d been instructed to assassinate the President of the United States, they would no doubt have proceeded with the same skilled efficiency. Of course, the higher the profile of their victim, the greater the price tag attached to the killing.
At the Los Angeles airport, Johnny Roselli, Giancana’s henchman on the West Coast, was waiting to greet the killers. He knew each of them, not only by reputation, but he was also aware of who they had murdered in the past.
Each man got into a limousine with darkened windows, while a chauffeur drove them to a rented house in Brentwood, only two blocks from Marilyn’s own hacienda.
Here, they would wait for their orders and listen to wiretaps coming from Marilyn’s home. These hit men were not privy to all the behind-the-scenes negotiations that had led Giancana to place Marilyn at the top of his hit list. Those secret maneuvers, or the identities of all the men involved in the decision to silence Marilyn forever, will probably always be lost to history.
The listening post into Marilyn’s home occupied an inconspicuous van bearing the name of the Anderson Cleaning Service, a company not registered in Los Angeles, and with no known address. The van looked battered on the outside, but its interior was equipped with top-rated audio equipment, including a Uher 4000 audio recorder. The van even contained a table and a small fridge stocked with Budweiser and cold cuts. Each of the men was assigned to take turns monitoring the audio input that was broadcast from the secret transmitters within Marilyn’s house.
When Bobby Kennedy had entered her house that afternoon, a lot of sounds were obscured because Marilyn had insisted on playing Sinatra records in the background.
***
In Chicago, Sam Giancana had assigned the “contract” to murder Marilyn to Felix Alderisio, whose nickname was “Milwaukee Phil.” Within the Chicago outfit, he was the underboss to Giancana, whom he called “Momo” or “Mooney.”
Alderisio’s career as a criminal had been launched during Prohibition. His first minor arrest had been for vagrancy, since he was seen every day waiting outside All Capone’s headquarters at Chicago’s Lexington Hotel, hoping to get a job as a messenger. Eventually, he broke into the mob, who employed him as a “bagman,” bringing cash payoffs to Chicago judges and police officers.
By the 1950s, he’d risen to the position of “the enforcer,” working with his partner, Charles (“Chuckie”) Nicoletti, who would also be hired to kill Marilyn.
As enforcers, the two men made gangland hits on merchants and others who did not pay the Mafia insurance money. They became known for their own version of a “Batmobile,” except that in their case, their black vehicle was a“hit mobile,” with special switches that controlled taillights and headlights as a means of obscuring the car’s license plate and helping avoid police detection.In a concealed compartment within the vehicle, they carried pistols, shotguns, rifles, and plenty of ammunition.
Alderisio and Nicoletti also directed a gang of “cat burglars” who broke into homes in Chicago’s upscale Gold Coast district, looting jewelry for the most part, and whatever cash was on hand. Alderisio and “Chuckie” eventually expanded their operations to Milwaukee, where they ran bordellos, striptease joints, nightclubs on Rush Street, and three small hotels.
From their collection of payments from various restaurants and nightclubs on the North side of Chicago, Alderisio and Nicoletti handed over millions to the Mafia after their cut was taken out.
As one of Giancana’s top aides, Alderisio was probed by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate looking into organized crime. Alderisio developed a personal hatred for Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, who had him hauled before the committee, where he refused to testify, pleading the Fifth Amendment twenty-three times.
Sometimes, Alderisio and Nicoletti arranged for the smuggling of heroin into the United States, traveling, at Alderisio’s insistence, to Italy, Turkey, and Greece as a means of expressing his passion for classical ruins. While Alderisio wandered among the ruins of yesterday, Nicoletti preferred to stay in his hotel room “fucking the local broads and giving them a treat,” as he immodestly put it.
Alderisio was also involved in the CIA-Mafia link to the failed Bay of Pigs covert operation in Cuba aimed at toppling Fidel Castro.
During May of 1962, weeks before being hired to murder Marilyn, Alderisio directed an infamous mob torture incident. Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia had ambushed and shot two Mafiosi. Alderisio and Nicoletti captured McCarthy and tortured him until he revealed Miraglia’s name. Alderisio and his henchmen extracted information from McCarthy by placing his head in a vise, slowly tightening it until one of his eyes popped out of its socket. After McCarthy revealed Miraglia’s name, Alderisio slit his throat. Nicoletti then trailed Miraglia, eventually catching up with him and cutting his throat too.
Over a period of several decades, Alderisio was arrested three dozen times for bombing, racketeering, gambling, hijacking, counterfeiting, bootlegging, extortion, bribery, and murder for hire. By the late 1960s, years after his assault on Marilyn, he was convicted and sent to prison, where he died of a heart attack on September 25, 1971.
When not involved with Alderisio, Nicoletti often worked with Francis Schweihs (“Frank the German”). Giancana also selected Schweihs as a hit man to murder Marilyn.
Tom Knight, Assistant U.S. Attorney, would later refer to Schweihs as “one of the most violent people ever to stand before a judge.”
As another of his cohorts, Frank Cullotta, would later testify, Schweihs wanted to rape and torture Marilyn before her execution, but Giancana demanded, under threat of death, that her killing be relatively painless.
When not murdering people, Schweihs sold “insurance” for the Mafia in Chicago, and was considered the best salesman among Giancana’s henchmen.
Schweihs, or so it is believed by law enforcement officials, would later be the hitman who killed Nicoletti, with whom he had joined forces during the night of Marilyn’s murder. Giancana had by this time turned against Nicoletti, accusing him of skimming money from the Mafia, and ordered Schweihs to murder him.
Long after Marilyn’s murder, Schweihs was convicted of extortion in 1989 and sentenced to a thirteen-year term in prison. Schweihs, along with his partner, Angelo J. LaPietra, nicknamed “The Hook,” were caught skimming millions from Las Vegas casinos in the 1980s.
After prison, Schweihs was known to have lived for a while in Dania Beach, Florida.
Sought on a charge of murder in April of 2005, he became a fugitive, but was eventually caught in Berea, Kentucky, just before Christmas of that same year. In prison, he was diagnosed with cancer, and moved to a federal medical center at Rochester, Minnesota, where he seemed to recover, at least slightly, after a series of operations. He was set to go to trial on October in 2008, but died that summer on July 23.
When questioned by the police about the death of Marilyn Monroe and its link to Sam Giancana, he said, “Marilyn Monroe? Never heard of her. I always jerked off to the pictures of Jayne Mansfield with her tits hanging out. As for Giancana, someone once pointed him out to me in a restaurant.”
Schweihs has the dubious distinction of being the longest surviving member of the gang who killed Marilyn, most of whom ended up murdered themselves. Giancana himself was murdered in 1975, assassinated in his Chicago kitchen, his brains splattered over the tile floor.Later that year, Roselli ended up in a barrel dumped into a Florida bay.
Felix Alderisio (“Milwaukee Phil”)
Charles (“Chuckie”) Nicoletti
Anthony (“The Ant”) Spilotro was the fourth mobster assigned to the Marilyn hit. TheChicago-born hood was only twenty-four years old when he joined in Marilyn’s murder.
FBI agent William F. Roemer, Jr., called him “that little pissant,” but the media didn’t want to use the word “piss” so they shortened his nickname to “Ant.”
Spilotro met Giancana because of Giancana’s frequent meals at Patsy’s Restaurant in Chicago, which was run by his parents, Pasquale and Antoinette Spilotro. In fact, Giancana often held mob meetings in the parking lot of Patsy’s.
After Marilyn’s death, Spilotro’s mob career took off, and by 1971, he was the Chicago mob’s link to its operations in Las Vegas.
Spilotro embezzled (“skimmed”) profits from the casinos and sent the money back to the Mafia in Chicago. Ten years after Marilyn’s murder, Spilotro orchestrated one of the most vicious murders in America’s mob history. He killed Leo Foreman, a real estate agent and loan shark by repeatedly stabbing him with an ice pick, cutting out chunks of his flesh. To further horrify his victim, as an act of psychotic sadism, he castrated Foreman, removing one of his testicles andchomping down on it with his teeth, as Foreman, screaming, looked on as blood dribbled from the corners of Spilotro’s mouth.
In spite of overwhelming evidence, Spilotro was later acquitted of Foreman’s vicious murder.
“The Ant” often worked with his brother, Michael Spilotro. Together, they established “The Gold Rush, Ltd.” a Las Vegas operation for the fencing (distribution and sale) of some of the most valuable stolen goods in the country.
In 1979, evada’s Senator Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate beginning in 2007 and still holding that title at presstime for this edition, got Spilotro blacklisted from all evada casinos.
The Spilotro brothers, in yet another venue linked to “The Gold Rush, Ltd.” eventually spearheaded a burglary ring known as “The Hole in the Wall Gang,” because of their penchant for drilling through the exterior walls and ceilings of buildings they burglarized.
Frank Sinatra knew the Spilotro brothers and actually suggested that some of their criminal antics be used as plot devices in Ocean’s 11, a movie released in 1960 that featured some of his fellow Rat Packers.
Eventually, Spilotro was indicted for his role in at least twenty-two murders, including that of Bill McCarthy.
In Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film, Casino, Mc-Carthy’s murder was depicted, albeit in a less gruesome way, through the murder of an onscreen character named “Tony Dogs.”
Spilotro’s murder of San Diego real estate heiress Tamara Rand was another event depicted in Casino. Rumors on the street also implicated Spilotro, along with Johnny Roselli, in the murder of Giancana.
In 1986, both of the Spilotro brothers were killed in the basement of an abandoned hunting lodge in DuPage County, Illinois. They were beaten and strangled to death before being buried in a cornfield beside Highway 41 in northwestern Indiana. Their former comrade, Frank Schweihs (“Frank the German”) was arrested in 2005 and charged with their murders.
The fifth and most unlikely member of Marilyn’s murder squad was Frank Cullotta (sometimes spelled “Culotta”), a former Las Vegas detective who “switched sides.” He had been a childhood friend, growing up in Chicago, of the Spilotro brothers.
Francis Schweihs (“Frank the German”)
Anthony (“The Ant”) Spilotro
Cullotta was arrested in July of 1981 during a botched robbery and was tried and convicted. In prison, he learned that Spilotro, “The Ant,” had ordered his execution.
“The Ant” had once trusted Cullotta to handle Mafia money, but he learned that Cullotta had been “skimming” the illegal profits before turning them over to the Mob. Cullotta was stashing a lot of the money in his own offshore bank accounts.
In nearly all cases when the Mafia discovered that one of their members was doing that, a death sentence was issued.
“The Ant” chose Lawrence Neumann, nicknamed “Crazy Larry,” to execute Cullotta. Neumann and Cullotta had been comrades-in-arms when they worked together murdering and robbing for the Hole in the Wall Gang.
Unaware that Cullotta had been tipped off that he was going to be murdered, Neumann believed that his Mafia comrade still trusted him. He arranged to pay Cullotta’s bail and to have him released into his custody. But Cullotta wasn’t having any of that, fearing that if he accepted a release into Neumann’s custody, that he’d be murdered that very night.
As his only chance for survival, Cullotta approached the warden and volunteered to become a state witness against his former comrades, who included both “Crazy Larry” and “The Ant.” When “The Ant” learned of this, he renamed Cullotta “The Canary.”
Interviewed by state law enforcement officers, Cullotta revealed “The Ant’s role in the brutal murders of both Miraglia and McCarthy, and he also testified that “The Ant” had engaged in a number of other notorious murders, including the 1979 slaying of Las Vegas mob member Sherwin (“Jerry”) Lisner.
Based on Cullotta’s charges, Spilotro was indicted (but not convicted) on murder and racketeering charges. Criminal Court Judge Thomas J. Maloney ruled that the case could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. However, the judge himself, in 1992, was convicted for accepting bribes.
Frank Cullotta
Cullotta was rumored to have been the only mobster to testify about the men who murdered Marilyn Monroe on the night of August 4, 1962.
His testimony was sealed and delivered to the Department of Justice in Washington. None of his revelations were ever released, and his confidential report has never been made public under the Freedom of Information Act. It remains sealed to this day or else was destroyed by some official in government, perhaps a Kennedy loyalist, although that is pure speculation.
After his release from prison, Cullotta was assigned to the witness protection program and relocated somewhere in Heartland America with a new identity. He was never heard from since then, and presumably died years ago.
These were the mobsters that Giancana sent to kill Marilyn, turning the matter over to Roselli to choreograph.
***
On the evening of August 4, 1962, the arrival of Johnny Roselli on Marilyn’s doorstep was not an immediate cause for alarm. He was known to have visited her on several previous occasions, even when she lived in apartments. He often bragged to his henchmen, “I’ve got to pop in at Marilyn’s to pop her one.”
Alone in the house except for her poodle, Maf, Marilyn answered the door. Perhaps eager to learn about what important message he had for her, she invited him into her living room for a glass of champagne.
When he came in, he must have flicked open the lock on her front door, as later, there would be no sign of forced entry.
It can be assumed that no threatening dialogue occurred between them because Roselli already knew that anything he said to her would be recorded. What survived on the Bernard Spindel tapes has long ago been destroyed…perhaps. The only record we have of this is Spindel and Otash’s memory of the recording, as relayed to witnesses and interviewers after the event.
Maf began to bark, and Roselli got up and took the dog and removed him to another room, perhaps asking her permission to do so because the poodle seemed highly agitated. An hour or so later, the barking dog would be released from his captivity in the telephone room by Norman Jeffries.
Roselli and Marilyn idly chatted for no more than five minutes before two of the hit men, perhaps “The Ant” (Spilotro) and Schweihs (“the German”) came into the room.
Slipping behind Marilyn, one of these men removed a chloroform-soaked washcloth from his bag. Perhaps at this point, alerted by the smell, she quickly turned around, but it was too late. The cloth was forced over her nose and mouth. Her struggle was useless. Giancana had issued orders that her body was not to be bruised.
Knowing that the living room was bugged, Roselli ordered the other hit men, who by now had entered the living room, to remove her body to the guest cottage at the far end of the compound. Apparently, no one had ever bugged the cottage.
Before invading her home, Giancana’s henchmen had prepared a solution of liquid Nembutal, chloral hydrate, and water.
All struggle gone from her, Marilyn was stripped, and her nude body was placed on the bed. A bath towel was placed under her buttocks. The solution had been transported in a Thermos bottle.
A bulb syringe was filled from the contents of the Thermos bottle, and the tip of the syringe coated with petroleum jelly for easy insertion into her rectum.
The poisonous concoction was then released into her colon. She was then given a second dose of the deadly solution.
Another hit man had gone into her bedroom and emptied the contents of her medicine bottles into his bag and had left the empty bottles. Apparently, the mob wanted it to appear that she’d swallowed all the capsules.
The entire assault had taken less than thirty minutes, or so it seemed. Perhaps hearing a noise, the men rushed out so fast they even left the door to the guest cottage ajar and a lamp turned on.
At approximately 10:15pm, Eunice and Jeffries returned from dinner. Marilyn had insisted that they call first before returning to the house, but when they tried, they had found both lines busy.
Getting out of the car, Jeffries was the first to notice that a light was on in the cottage and its door was ajar. Had Marilyn put an overnight guest in there?
The mother-in-law and the son-in-law went to investigate. As Eunice opened the door, she shrieked in horror to find a nude Marilyn on the bed, lying in her own waste.
As a trained nurse, she immediately checked Marilyn’s pulse. She was still alive. “Call an ambulance,” she yelled at Jeffries.
“She rushed to the other phone and placed an emergency call to Dr. Greenson. “Marilyn’s dying Come at once. Get Engleberg.” She slammed down the phone and rushed to attend to Marilyn. She didn’t know whether the ambulance or Greenson would arrive there first.
At this point, the scenario becomes the subject of debate. Eunice obviously realized that the death of Marilyn Monroe would become an international headline, and she didn’t want to be left alone with Jeffries to manage the press, the photographers, and the police.
It was at this point that it is believed that she called Pat Newcomb in spite of her hostility to her. Someone trained in public relations had to manage the crisis, and Eunice didn’t want to be in the spotlight.
The sound of an arriving vehicle could be heard. Eunice pulled back the curtains of the guest cottage and looked out at the street. It was an ambulance. Two men were getting out and rushing toward the house with a stretcher.
She stood outside the cottage signaling the young men to come toward her and not to go in through the front door of the main house, which was being held open by Jeffries.
James Hall, the ambulance driver, later gave much disputed testimony, although any statement from anybody—all parties, in fact—is much disputed.
Some biographers have placed Bobby Kennedy at the murder scene, but this claim later seemed outrageous to Hall, who was actually there.
Hall claimed that his fellow ambulance driver was Murray Liebowitz, who later denied that he was Hall’s partner, and denied, for a while, that he was at the scene at all. Hall said, “We were returning from a run to UCLA Hospital, when we received a call to rush to 12305 Fifth Helena. We were told it was an emergency. We were real close, practically around the corner. We were at the house within two minutes.”
I’m her housekeeper,” the unknown woman told Hall. “Come in here.”
“It was the single most memorable moment of my life, a vision that would be with me forever, when I came into that cottage on that hot August night back in 1962,” Hall recalled years later. “I looked down at the body on the bed.”
“My God!” he said. “This woman is a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe.”
He remembered the hostility reflected on Eunice’s face. “It is Marilyn Monroe, you idiot. Save her!”
“Marilyn Monroe?” he asked. “You gotta be kidding me!”
“Save her life, you goddamned fool!” she shouted at him.
Hall was nervous and inexperienced, and he was only twenty-two years old and new to the job. He felt Marilyn’s pulse and determined that it was “very weak, very rapid, her respiration almost nonexistent. A classic symptom of overdose. In Los Angeles, I’d already seen a lot of that.”
Hall and his partner decided to apply CPR. “The bed is too soft. We’ve got to put her on her back, a hard surface,” Hall told his assistant.
The floor in the guest cottage was too cramped, so both men picked up her body to move her to the foyer. “Unfortunately, I dropped her on her fanny. It was my fault. Later, I heard that the coroner found two unexplained bruises on her body. The one on her upper arm was probably caused by my fingertips. I’d gripped her really hard. The other bruise, I’m sure, definitely came from dropping her. All the time, my partner had held onto her feet. We then picked her up again and moved her into the foyer. She was still breathing, but I thought [she was] going fast.”
The fact that she bruised showed that she was still alive,” he said. “I’d recently learned that dead bodies don’t bruise.”
While Leibowitz went back to the ambulance for a resuscitator, Hall inserted an airway into her throat to aid her intake of oxygen.
The housekeeper helped hook up the resuscitator.
“I felt the CPR was starting to work,” Hall said. “We were getting a good exchange of air from her body. Some of the color was coming back to her face. When I first saw her, she looked like she was still wearing that graveyard white makeup she wore in Bus Stop. I thought it was safe now to move her. I called out ‘get the gurney.’”
It was then that a hysterical woman in raincoat and pajamas ran down the hallway, screaming ‘SHE’S DEAD, SHE’S DEAD!’”
“She came and butted in,” Hall said, “hovering over the body. I wanted to knock the crazy bitch on her ass because I feared she’d fuck everything up.”
“Who in the hell are you?” Hall asked.
“I’m her publicist,” the woman shouted at him.
He later said, “At that time of my life, I didn’t even know what a publicist was.”
“We’re not ready for you yet,” he told the woman. “She’s not dead. You can publicize it if she’s dead. But we’re going to save her.”
As Hall and his partner were getting ready to remove Marilyn, a man appeared in the hallway, carrying a black leather bag. “I’m her doctor,” he shouted at me. “Give her positive pressure.”
“Turkey, what in the fuck do you think we’re doing?” an angry Hall said. He was tired of all this interference. “She’s breathing, thanks to me.”
“When I took the job, I had been instructed to follow doctor’s orders at the scene of any emergency—or else get fired,” Hall said. “I took the resuscitator off, put an extension on the airway, pinched her nose, and then started to give her mouth to mouth. You can’t get any god damn more positive than that.”
“At that time, this doctor guy began to give her CPR,” Hall said. “I thought he should apply it to her chest. Instead, the fucker was applying it to her lower abdomen.”
“Look, doctor, you blow and I'll push,” Hall suggested. “He didn’t pay me any attention. He opened his bag and pulled out this hypodermic syringe with a heart needle attached.”
Hall claimed he heard the doctor say, almost to himself, “I have to make a show of this.”
Then, according to Hall, the doctor removed a pharmaceutical bottle from his bag and then inserted the needle into the bottle, filling the syringe. “I’m sure it was Adrenalin.”
“He told me he had to inject her between the sixth and seventh ribs. He counted down her rib cage, pushed a breast to the side, and stuck the needle into her chest. He sure got it wrong. He entered at a bad angle, and the needle hit something, no doubt her rib. Instead of taking the needle out, he pressed down hard, and I heard this ‘snap.’ The fucking needle probably had broken a rib. He shoved the needle right into her heart. I knew at this point that it was curtains for Marilyn.”
“The doctor stood up and confronted me,” Hall said. “He looked like I had killed Marilyn. ‘She’s dead,’ he told me. ‘You guys can leave now.’”
“As we were heading out, he came up to me, standing very close like he was trying to intimidate me. ‘Whatever you do, don’t report one word of what happened here tonight. Don’t call the newspapers. We’ve got it handled. If you don’t follow my instructions, things will go very, very bad for you.’He gave me the creeps.”
As Hall was gathering his paraphernalia, to the sounds of that publicist screaming hysterically in the hallway, two men appeared on the scene.
One was a police officer, and the other guy wore a suit,” Hall recalled. The guy in the suit looked familiar, but like he was coming off a forty-day drunk. I thought he might have been a detective summoned from some bar.”
“Later, when I saw his picture in the paper, I recognized Peter Lawford,” Hall said. “He was no damn detective. I’d heard he was a movie star, but I’d never seen one of his films. The papers said he was married to one of President Kennedy’s sisters.”
Twenty years from the night of Marilyn’s murder, Hall said, “I firmly believe that Dr. Ralph Greenson—by then I knew his name—murdered Marilyn Monroe, who was already at death’s door. But he finished her off. Had he not shown up, and with me in charge, we might have gotten her to the hospital.”
“All that shit that appeared in all those books about her being rushed to the hospital is just so much bull,” he said. “We never put her in that ambulance. It never happened.”
Hall would be the only person at the scene of the crime who volunteered to take a Polygraph test. All the other people on the scene never even had to testify under oath, and most of them denied even being at the scene until shortly before dawn that Sunday.
[In 1982, Hall was flown to Florida, where he was introduced to John Harrison, the co-inventor of the Polygraph (a device popularly referred to as a lie detector). “I administered six tests on Hall,” Harrison claimed. “I asked him, ‘On the evening of August 4, 1962, did you attempt to administer life-saving techniques to Marilyn Monroe?’ He was not lying. He passed each of the tests I gave him with flying colors. It seemed that everybody, even those remotely connected to Monroe, lied, told some more lies, and even changed their stories. I’d love to have given some of them my Polygraph test, especially Eunice Murray, Bobby Kennedy, Johnny Roselli, Peter Lawford, and Dr. Greenson…and that would be just for starters. My money’s on Hall.”]
***
On the night of Marilyn’s death, Arthur Jacobs operated one of the largest public relations companies in Los Angeles. One of his senior employees was Pat Newcomb, whom he had signed as Marilyn’s personal publicist. Other clients of Jacobs included Judy Garland, Richard Burton, Rock Hudson, James Stewart, and Gregory Peck.
Jacobs would become better known for two major events in his life—the death of Marilyn Monroe and the production of the wildly popular Planet of the Apes series.
On that August 4 Saturday night, he had invited his girlfriend, Natalie Trundy, to the Hollywood Bowl to hear a Henry Mancini concert. They were accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Mervin LeRoy. He was a famous producer of such hits as Quo Vadis? and Gypsy.
Jacobs had planned, after the concert, to take Natalie to Chasen’s to celebrate her birthday. As the concert was nearing its final half hour, at approximately 10:30pm, a messenger boy arrived from the manager of the Hollywood Bowl. The teenage boy told Jacobs that there was a “most urgent call for him” in the front office. Excusing himself, Jacobs rushed to the office and picked up the receiver to hear the startling news: “Marilyn Monroe is dead.”
The famous reporter, Florabel Muir, later investigated and concluded that the call was placed by Pat Newcomb from Marilyn’s home in Brentwood.
Natalie claimed that she did not see Jacobs for the next two days and two nights, but she was obviously aware of where he’d gone. “Pick up any newspaper, turn on the TV and radio, and you could figure it out.”
“Arthur was in damage control at Marilyn’s house,” Natalie said. “Studios since the 1920s had guys like Arthur covering up scandals they didn’t want the public to know.”
“The man who became my husband fudged everything, he later admitted to me.” She revealed this only after Jacobs had died at the age of fifty-one in 1973 of a heart attack. He chose to keep his Marilyn Monroe secrets.
Arthur Jacobs and Natalie Trundy
“Perhaps staging the scene after the death of Marilyn Monroe that summer of 1962 was Arthur’s greatest achievement,” Natalie said. “Much of the world today still believes that her death was a suicide, accidental, or deliberate. Arthur did not want the world to know that she was murdered. That would have led to an investigation that would have stretched from Los Angeles via Chicago to Washington.”