At 4.25 a.m. the emergency services received the following call from 12305 Fifth Helena Drive: ‘Marilyn Monroe has died. She’s committed suicide. I’m Dr Engelberg, Marilyn Monroe’s physician. I’m at her residence. She’s committed suicide.’
When Sergeant Jack Clemmons arrived at the scene, he discovered Eunice Murray operating the washing machine, and Dr Greenson and Dr Engelberg in the bedroom with Marilyn’s body, along with a bed-stand covered in pill bottles. Some were empty, but it would appear not all of them were, however, as Marilyn’s former business manager Inez Melson bizarrely told interviewer Barry Norman that she flushed some pills down the toilet so that paparazzi wouldn’t find out about them. Since the bottles had already been photographed, however, this was a pointless exercise and also interfered with what was supposed to be a secured area.
From the start, the story of Marilyn’s discovery was patchy to say the least. Mrs Murray told police officers that she had awakened at around 3 a.m. and noticed a light and the telephone cord under Marilyn’s locked door. (Bizarrely, years later she was to change her mind and claim that the door was not locked after all.) Murray phoned Dr Greenson, who instructed her to pound on the door and look through the window. She did as she was asked and discovered Marilyn lying on the bed with the phone in her hand, and she ‘looked strange’. Greenson dressed and readied himself for the journey to Fifth Helena, and Mrs Murray telephoned Dr Engelberg, who did the same. When Greenson arrived at 3.40 a.m., he broke the window, entered the room and removed the phone from her hand, discovering that rigor mortis had already set in. Engelberg arrived at 3.50 a.m. and declared his patient dead.
By 4.30 a.m., employees at the Arthur P. Jacobs Agency had been told of her death and summoned to an emergency meeting at Marilyn’s home. Michael Selsman remembered: ‘It was panic of course. Events were already out of control, and now she was dead the press didn’t feel constrained to hide what they knew – except of course, for the Kennedy stuff – which came later. I fended off the media by saying we didn’t know what the cause of death was, because we didn’t.’
By the time Marilyn’s body had been picked up by the coroner, the news was flying around the world with tragic results: in Britain, twenty-eight-year-old actress Patricia Marlowe told friends that she understood why Marilyn had died and promptly took her own life with a concoction of sleeping pills; thirty-eight-year-old dancer Gerdi Marie Havious repeatedly asked her husband, ‘Why did she do it? Why did she do it?,’ then leapt to her death from their third-floor window. In Mexico three teenage girls gathered together their photos of Marilyn, then tried to take their own lives, thankfully being saved just in time.
Closer to home, Marilyn’s three husbands were told of the news: Jim Dougherty received a message from his colleague Jack Clemmons and turned to his wife: ‘Say a prayer for Norma Jeane,’ he said. ‘She’s dead.’ Arthur Miller refused to comment to reporters, but later revealed his feelings in a letter to friend Joe Rauh, confessing that he was stunned at the news; had always worried she’d step over the edge; but didn’t believe she meant to do it. His father, Isidore Miller, was heartbroken and told reporters, ‘She was like my own. She was a kind, good girl. I’m so sorry I was not out there to be with her. She must have been very lonely and afraid.’
Meanwhile, Joe DiMaggio flew into Los Angeles from San Francisco and, together with Berniece Baker Miracle and former business manager Inez Melson, proceeded to arrange Marilyn’s funeral for 8 August. They were all very concerned that they should avoid a Hollywood spectacle and released a statement which said that the funeral would be a private affair, ‘so that she can go to her final resting place in the quiet she has always sought’. It went on to explain that they could not invite one personality without offending many others, and urged everyone to ‘remember the gay, sweet Marilyn and say a prayer of farewell within the confines of your home or church’.
But not everyone was pleased with the reasons for exclusion and several show-business friends tried to trick guards at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery gates by replacing them with their own ‘security’. The plan backfired however, and Frank Sinatra was just one of the friends turned away from the cemetery. Peter Lawford told reporters, ‘I am shocked. Pat flew in Monday night from Hyannis Port, where she had been vacationing with the kids, to just attend Marilyn’s funeral. But we were not invited. I don’t know who’s responsible but the whole thing was badly handled.’ Even Arthur P. Jacobs got in on the act when he declared that if Marilyn had been in charge of the invitations, half the people on the guest list would not have been invited, and more of her friends would have been included.
But it wasn’t just celebrities that were faced with a ban. Foster family Enid, Sam and Diane Knebelkamp were excluded until Berniece Miracle insisted to DiMaggio that they be allowed to attend. Friend Catherine Larson telephoned Enid after Marilyn passed away. ‘Enid felt terrible about the death,’ remembered Carson’s friend James Glaeg. ‘But it made her feel better to be able to attend the funeral and provided immeasurable help in their process of mourning. Afterwards Enid said that Marilyn looked as beautiful in her coffin as she had in life. “Like a beautiful doll of a child,” she said.’
Almost immediately, the Abbott and Hast company were brought in to provide help with the arrangements, including hearses, flowers and other services. Both owners, Allan Abbott and Ron Hast, were used as pallbearers and Abbott assisted the embalmer to dress Marilyn in a green Pucci dress and blonde wig before carefully placing her in the velvet-lined coffin.
According to Hast, Joe DiMaggio was ‘noticeably heartbroken,’ during arrangements, while Abbott remembered that on the night before the funeral, DiMaggio spent four or five hours with Marilyn’s body, although what he said will forever remain private.
On the day itself, fans and the curious queued at the gates of Westwood Memorial Park to try and gain access. Inside, around thirty friends and associates said goodbye to Marilyn’s open casket, while Lee Strasberg read a heartfelt eulogy. Joe DiMaggio bent down to kiss the forehead of the woman he had never stopped loving, and whispered, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ before finally the coffin was sealed.
Marilyn’s body was entombed in the ‘Corridor of Memories’ section of Westwood Memorial Park, where Joe DiMaggio sat for several moments, after other mourners had left. Disturbingly, after he had said his final goodbye, hundreds of curious onlookers stormed in, knocking bouquets to the floor, crushing flowers, taking ribbons and stealing roses from the giant heart DiMaggio had bought himself. Two guards had to prevent the mob from attacking the tomb itself, and by the time they had left, they had taken most of the blooms with them.
Quite bizarrely, the spectators said they did it because of their love for the movie star, completely oblivious to the fact that it was not Marilyn Monroe buried in the crypt that day, but Norma Jeane Baker, the little girl who’s only desire in life was to be loved, respected and cared for, and who in the words of close friend Bill Pursel, ‘really blossomed into a legend, and along the way she met many men who could have – would have – given her the lasting fulfilment of womanhood. But, like the beautiful flower she was, she bloomed and died . . . and so the cycle of life goes on. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.’