THIRTY

In the five decades since Marilyn Monroe’s death, there has been so much obfuscation, so much evasion, so many lies told about the circumstances that many people have come to believe that Robert Kennedy and Peter Lawford were directly involved with her death, that they may even have murdered her to keep her from revealing her involvement with the Kennedy brothers. The confidential source who listened to the Spindel tapes, for instance, believed that when Peter and Bobby left Marilyn’s house on Saturday afternoon she was dead.

There was, without question, a cover-up, and Peter Lawford was a part of it. But the weight of evidence points only to a cover-up of Marilyn’s relationships with the Kennedy brothers, not of her murder. It is virtually certain that Robert Kennedy did not see Marilyn again after his last visit to her house, and Marilyn was still alive throughout the evening hours of August 4. She spoke on the telephone to a number of people that night, including a studio hairdresser, Sidney Guilaroff, at nine-thirty; a recent lover, José Bolanos, between nine-thirty and ten; and Joe DiMaggio, Jr. at ten.

While it is possible that Kennedy returned after ten that evening, he did not do so in the company of Peter Lawford, who is firmly placed in his home between the hours of seven P.M. and one-thirty A.M. by several friends and a maid who were with him that evening.

Much more likely is that Marilyn was overwhelmed by a crushing depression after Bobby and Peter left her house that afternoon. At four-thirty she urgently telephoned her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who made a highly unusual weekend house call. The actress was extremely disturbed when Greenson came to see her. He found her, he later told the suicide prevention team that investigated her death, “depressed and drugged,” “furious,” and “in a rage.” Circumspectly, Greenson said only that Marilyn had been involved sexually with “important men in government” and was feeling “rejected by some of the people she had been close to.”

Greenson spent two and a half hours with Marilyn, after which he felt that he had calmed her down. But she remained depressed. The friends who spoke to her later in the evening say that she sounded sad and groggy, her words slurred, her responses slow.

Peter had planned a dinner party Saturday night with Marilyn and a few other friends, including the Naars, George “Bullets” Durgom, an agent friend of his, and Milt Ebbins. Despite the earlier scene with Bobby, Peter still hoped Marilyn would come, and at six o’clock he called Joe Naar, who lived near her, and asked him to pick her up on his way over. Around seven-thirty, just as the Naars were leaving the house, they got another call from Peter. Marilyn wasn’t feeling well, he told them, and wouldn’t be coming.

Peter didn’t tell the Naars, but he was deeply disturbed by the conversation he’d just had with Marilyn. She had sounded terrible. “I could hear the depression moving in on her,” he would say later. “Her voice sounded slurred, she seemed to be slipping away. She didn’t understand everything I said.” Peter told LA Police Department investigators in 1975 that he began to yell at her, to give her a “verbal slap in the face,” but that she had simply said, “Say good-bye to Pat, say good-bye to the President, and say good-bye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.” Then there was silence, as though Marilyn had not hung up but had just put the receiver down — or dropped it.

Concerned, Peter called back fifteen minutes later, but heard only a busy signal. Around eight, after several more attempts met by nothing but the busy tone, Peter called the operator to check on the line. He was told that no one was speaking on the telephone and it must be out of order.

Now Peter was deeply worried. He knew that Marilyn had very good reason to be depressed, even suicidal. Most people would have jumped in their cars and sped to Marilyn’s house. But Peter Lawford was not a decisive man. He rarely took action without conferring with someone, and this night, because of the sensitive nature of Marilyn’s relationships with his brothers-in-law, Peter was especially reluctant to involve himself before he sought some advice. Instead of rushing to Marilyn’s aid, he picked up the telephone.

The first person he called was Ebbins, who earlier had begged off the dinner party. “Milt, a very strange thing just happened,” Peter told him. He then related Marilyn’s series of good-byes and said he wanted to go over and see if Marilyn was okay.

“For God’s sake, Peter, you’re the President’s brother-in-law,” Ebbins told him. “You can’t go over there. Your wife’s out of town. The press will have a field day. Let me get in touch with Mickey Rudin [Marilyn’s attorney]. It’s better to let someone in authority handle this.” Ebbins telephoned Rudin at about eight-fifteen and got his answering service. The service located Rudin at a cocktail party at the home of Mildred Allenberg, the widow of Burt Allenberg. The lawyer called Ebbins back at about eight-thirty. When Milt explained what had happened, Rudin told him to sit tight while he telephoned Eunice Murray at Marilyn’s home.

According to Mrs. Murray, the attorney inquired as to Marilyn’s welfare but did not tell her of Ebbins’s inquiry or suggest that there was any reason to suspect trouble. Murray, knowing Marilyn was in bed and having no reason to suspect all was not well, told Rudin that as far as she knew Marilyn was fine. (Murray later said that she was out of the house for part of the afternoon and although she knew Bobby Kennedy had been there, she was not aware of an argument between him and Marilyn.)

In 1962, Rudin was interviewed by police investigators. (He has refused all requests for interviews on this subject since.) At that time, according to the interviewer’s report, Rudin said that after speaking to Mrs. Murray he believed that “Miss Monroe was suffering from one of her despondent moments” and that he had “dismissed the possibility of anything further being wrong.”

Rudin then called Milt Ebbins back to tell him that there was no cause for worry. “Milt,” he said, “you know there isn’t anything in the world I wouldn’t do for Marilyn. Please don’t be concerned about her.” “Well, Lawford’s very worried,” Ebbins replied.

“You just tell him what I said.”

Ebbins called Peter, who told him that he wanted to hear directly from Rudin. When Rudin called Peter he said, “Believe me, she does this all the time. If there was any reason to be alarmed, we’d be way ahead of you because Mrs. Murray would have called us. But she does this every night.”

Still, Peter told Milt he wanted to go over to Marilyn’s. Finally Ebbins said to him, “So go. Get in your car and go. I can’t stop you.” But Peter didn’t go. Instead, he made more phone calls. One of the calls, according to Dr. Robert Litman, one of the members of the suicide prevention team, was to Washington. Another was to Bill Asher, who gave him the same advice Milt Ebbins had: “I don’t know, Peter. You’re the President’s brother-in-law. We don’t want to break into Marilyn’s window and find out something’s happened.”

While all this was going on, Peter did an excellent acting job in front of his guests. “I picked up on nothing,” Dolores Naar recalled. “Except that during the evening there was a call and Peter said, ‘Oh, it’s Marilyn again’ — like she does this all the time. His attitude didn’t change. It was a very light, up evening.” Erma Lee Riley, Peter’s maid, agreed: “There wasn’t a word of worry about Marilyn.”

But by the time the Naars left the Lawford house at around eleven, Peter was very drunk — and still concerned about Marilyn. Shortly after the Naars arrived home, Peter telephoned and asked Joe to go by Marilyn’s house and check on her. Joe, who had already undressed for bed, put his clothes back on and was headed out the door when Peter called again. “He said that he’d spoken to Marilyn’s doctor,” Dolores recalled, “and he had said that he had given her sedatives because she had been disturbed earlier and she was probably asleep, so don’t bother going. He said, ‘You’ll just wake her up.’” These were an odd pair of telephone calls in an evening replete with oddities. Why did Peter, who had been worried about Marilyn since seven-thirty, wait until the Naars had returned home to indicate any concern to them over Marilyn? And why did he first ask Joe to go over to Marilyn’s (after being told by Mickey Rudin that she was okay) and then, just a few minutes later, tell him not to go? Dolores felt that the two calls were “calculated to mislead us. Joe and I wondered, ‘Why did he call us the second time and tell us not to go?’ Maybe because by then he knew that Marilyn was dead.”

Or dying. For Marilyn Monroe’s press agent — traditionally the first person notified in a Hollywood emergency — did receive an urgent telephone call during a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. Arthur Jacobs and his fiancée, Natalie, were enjoying the Henry Mancini orchestra when they were disturbed about an hour before midnight. According to Natalie Jacobs, now Arthur’s widow, the call was most likely from Pat Newcomb, who worked for Jacobs, and the news was that Marilyn Monroe was dead. “Pat Newcomb was the first one at the house,” Natalie Jacobs insisted.

In light of the recollections of other witnesses, however, it is more likely that Arthur Jacobs was summoned because Marilyn had fallen into unconsciousness and could not be roused. Such a situation, demanding official medical assistance, would have required under any circumstances that Marilyn’s press agent be alerted. Given the potentially explosive nature of Monroe’s relationships, the greatest care needed to be taken.

If Pat Newcomb alerted Arthur Jacobs to Marilyn’s condition, it is likely that she also alerted Peter. This would explain his abrupt about-face with the Naars. By now, Peter would have been very near panic. If Marilyn Monroe were to die, it would be impossible to keep reporters and photographers from descending on her house and discovering any number of items linking her to the Kennedys — her diary, her personal telephone book, perhaps even a suicide note. Peter could not have been anything but frantic at the prospect.

According to a number of sources, the extraordinary late-night events of August 4 finally pushed Peter Lawford into action. As Dolores Naar says, “Peter probably called Jack or Bobby and was told to take care of things — do whatever he had to do. And do it yourself — don’t involve anybody else under any circumstances.”

The first thing Peter did, from all appearances, was help Bobby Kennedy leave Los Angeles. According to LA police chief William Parker, Kennedy was seen at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Saturday night, so he did not return to San Francisco immediately after he left Marilyn’s house that afternoon. William Reed Woodfield, a photographer who had taken some of the last nude photographs of Marilyn during the filming of Something’s Got to Give, embarked on an investigation of Marilyn’s death with New York Herald Tribune writer Joe Hyams within a few days of the event. Woodfield heard that Bobby Kennedy had been rushed by helicopter from Peter’s house to Los Angeles International Airport late Saturday night.

On a pretext, Woodfield gained access to the flight logs of the helicopter company Peter used most frequently. There, for the night of August 4, he found a notation that a helicopter had been dispatched to the Lawford house for a trip to the LA airport sometime around midnight. The next morning at nine-thirty, Robert Kennedy attended Sunday mass near San Francisco.

Hyams and Woodfield knew they had the makings of a sensational story. Hyams called Robert Kennedy’s Washington office for comment and was told that the attorney general would be very appreciative if the story were not run. As Woodfield recalled it, “Joe said to them, ‘It will eventually come out. Why don’t you just say you were at Peter Lawford’s?’ We weren’t saying that Bobby was involved in Marilyn’s death. No one would have guessed from the story that Marilyn and Bobby were involved. Still they refused to comment and asked us not to do the story.”

Hyams did file the piece with the Herald Tribune, but the paper decided to kill it. The reporting contained, they felt, potentially libelous innuendo about the President and his brother.

WHILE ROBERT KENNEDY was leaving Los Angeles, there was a great deal of activity at Marilyn’s house on Fifth Helena Drive. By the time Arthur Jacobs arrived at the scene, an ambulance had been called. James Hall, a driver for the Schaefer ambulance service, remembered that he received the call on the way back from another within a few miles of Marilyn’s house. “It took us only a few minutes to get to her house.”

The official version is that when Marilyn was found, she was dead in her own bed, the telephone receiver in her hand. According to Hall, when he arrived with his partner, Murray Leib,15 Marilyn was in the guest bedroom, not her own room, and she was comatose but still alive. “We had to move her,” Hall recalled, “because you have to put the patient on a hard surface to do CPR or else the chest just sinks into the bed. We picked her up to lay her on the floor and we dropped her. I’ll never forget it because she was the only patient I ever dropped. The coroner talked about an unexplained bruise on her hip — that’s where we dropped her. Dead bodies don’t bruise, so she was definitely still alive.

“I applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and she was coming around. Pat Newcomb was hysterical. She was trying to climb over us to get to Marilyn while I was working on her. She was screaming, ‘She’s dead! She’s dead!’ over and over again and I wanted to knock the crazy bitch on her butt. She was hampering what we were doing, but I don’t think even a slap on her face would have calmed her down, she was that crazy.

“Just as Marilyn started coming around, this doctor arrived. I believe it was Dr. Greenson. He had a bag with him and he looked legitimate. He said, ‘I’m her doctor,’ and Pat Newcomb didn’t say he wasn’t, so I figured everything was okay because she never would have allowed anyone near Marilyn who didn’t belong there. I yielded to him and he leaned over her, pushed her breast to one side, and gave her an injection in the crease of her breast.

“This guy was inept. He was very rough. I winced and thought, ‘God that must hurt.’ Then I heard a pop. It was quite a snap. One minute later she was dead. For years I’ve felt that she had been given an Adrenalin shot in an attempt to save her and it had failed. But now I don’t believe it was an accident. I think the shot was intended to kill her.”

Hall’s story has been both partially corroborated and vehemently denied. Walter Schaefer, the owner of the ambulance service, confirmed that an ambulance was called to Marilyn’s that night. Pat Newcomb said that she did not go to Marilyn’s house until four in the morning, when she received a call from Mickey Rudin that Marilyn was dead. But Natalie Jacobs insists Pat Newcomb told her that she was the first person on the scene, and Natalie believed it was Pat Newcomb who called the Hollywood Bowl that evening.

Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who performed the autopsy on Marilyn, stated that he examined her body carefully for needle marks, using a magnifying glass, and found nothing. But according to a bill submitted by Marilyn’s physician Dr. Hyman Engelberg to the Monroe estate, he gave her an injection the day before she died. Shouldn’t Noguchi have noticed an injection mark that recent? Could he have missed another?

There is no way for Hall to know whether or not the injection he witnessed was intended to help or to kill Marilyn. Dr. Daniel Greenson, Ralph Greenson’s son, vociferously defended his father. “He felt sorry for Marilyn Monroe, much more than most doctors feel for their patients. He brought her over to our house a lot because she didn’t have a family. That’s what she really needed, he said. My sister and I did a lot of things with her, played games. She was a nice person.

“Marilyn was dead when my father arrived at her house. He felt so awful that a patient of his killed herself. It really hurt him terribly, on a personal level. If he saw someone kill her, he certainly would have said something because he would want to relieve himself [of that burden]. I hate all this speculation, and especially that guy who says he saw my father plunge a needle into Marilyn’s heart. That’s ridiculous, and I’ve got to say that it hurts me.”

The true cause of Marilyn Monroe’s death may never be ascertained, what with all the loose ends and contradictory statements. Little of what has been said about what occurred that night has gone unchallenged — including reports of Peter Lawford’s activities.

That Peter finally did go over to Marilyn’s house in an attempt to remove any evidence linking her to the Kennedys, and then went to see Fred Otash, has been attested to convincingly by Otash, by an associate of his who prefers to remain anonymous, and by two of Peter’s wives. Deborah Gould states emphatically, “Peter did say that he was the first one there that morning. He never admitted that he took a suicide note, but he didn’t deny it either. I still believe to this day that he did.”

Peter’s last wife, Patricia Seaton Lawford, told the Los Angeles Times in 1985 that Peter told her he had gone to see Fred Otash sometime after Marilyn’s body was discovered. “He approached Otash afterward,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what it was about, but I think it was to make sure that nothing would harm Peter’s family.”

That was, of course, an overriding concern. There can be no question that a massive cover-up began the moment Marilyn Monroe died, one that would have been necessary no matter what the cause of her death. It began with a several-hour delay in notifying the police and continued with carefully rehearsed versions of what happened from Mrs. Murray and Marilyn’s doctors, versions that contain glaring inconsistencies and (it was later learned) evasions. It extended the next morning to the confiscation of Marilyn’s telephone records by the FBI.

It is certainly plausible that Peter Lawford would do everything possible to protect the Kennedys and that he would have turned again to the person who had helped him with sensitive matters in the past — Fred Otash.

Milt Ebbins and several other of Peter’s closest friends, however, firmly believe that Lawford could not have done any such thing. “Peter never did anything by himself,” Ebbins said, an observation confirmed by many of his associates. “He would have called me to go over with him, or Joe Naar or Pete Sabiston — nine people he would have called. And even if he did go over there, why wouldn’t he have told me about it afterward? He told me everything. He knew implicitly that I could be trusted.”

It was uncharacteristic behavior for Peter, but the situation he found himself in was extraordinary, unprecedented — and dangerous.

Dolores Naar’s belief that Peter was told to do what he must — and not involve anyone he didn’t have to — makes a great deal of sense under the circumstances.

Another of Ebbins’s objections to this scenario concerns time. “I spoke to Peter at his house at one-thirty that night. Bullets Durgom told me he was there until one-thirty. At three o’clock I called Peter and there was no answer. He always disconnected the phone when he went to bed. He was very drunk when I spoke to him at one-thirty, and he couldn’t have driven in that condition. I’m sure he passed out and that was that.”

Time frames are notoriously unreliable in reconstructions of events long past, and rarely more so than in the mystery of Marilyn Monroe’s death. Mrs. Murray gave times as widely disparate as midnight and three A.M. as the point at which she realized something was wrong; Dr. Greenson said he was alerted at three; Dr. Engelberg said it was eleven or twelve. Most of the people interviewed for this book are uncertain about times. The question, “Could it have been earlier?” was answered, “Yes. Or later.”

That Peter did not answer his phone when Ebbins called him at three A.M. is not proof that he was in bed, passed out. He could just as well have been at Marilyn’s house or at Fred Otash’s. According to Otash, Peter was “half crocked or half doped” when he arrived at his door; no matter how drunk Peter was when he heard that Marilyn was dead, the news could have sobered him up enough to drive.

Several years after the original publication of this book, this author discovered a White House phone log at the Kennedy Presidential Library near Boston. It indicated that a call from Peter Lawford had come in at 7;30 A.M. the morning of August 5th. That would have been 4:30 Los Angeles time. It’s close to inconceivable that the call could have been about anything other than Marilyn’s death.

Ebbins believed that Peter did nothing but grapple with indecision that night. If he did more, it was only to protect the presidency of Jack Kennedy. Fantastic speculation aside, the most plausible verdict about the death of Marilyn Monroe is that it was a suicide — either intentional or accidental — and that a full-scale cover-up was immediately put into place to keep her relationships with the Kennedys from becoming public.

Thus the investigation of Marilyn’s death was hampered at every turn. Witnesses told contradictory stories but were never questioned under oath. Evidence was confiscated, even destroyed. Police interviewers noted that some of the principals were “possibly evasive,” but none of them was pressed for more complete answers. The police wanted to question Peter, a key participant in Marilyn’s last days, but were told that he had left town on a trip and was unavailable. Investigators never followed up with him, although he had gone no farther than Hyannis Port.

There are many reasons why the Monroe cover-up was allowed to succeed. Chief among them was the immense power and popularity of the Kennedys. Many of the key figures in the investigation were Kennedy supporters, people who were willing to turn a deaf ear and blind eye to what they were learning, or even to obstruct justice. Local law enforcement officers could do worse than ingratiate themselves with the President of the United States; at least one Los Angeles police official hoped for an administration appointment. And J. Edgar Hoover was more than happy to assist in the confiscation of such evidence as Marilyn’s telephone records; with this kind of ammunition against the Kennedys he need never worry about their replacing him.

It took more than twenty years for the conspiracy of silence around the Monroe case to crack, and many people refuse to talk about it to this day. Some observers believe that those who maintained their silence were rewarded. Mrs. Murray, who began to change her story in 1985, took seven trips to Europe in the years immediately following Marilyn’s death, and she was not a wealthy woman.

Pat Newcomb was rumored to have gone directly to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port and from there on an extended vacation. Truman Capote, a close friend of Monroe’s, said, “The Kennedys didn’t kill her, the way some people think. She committed suicide. But they did pay one of her best friends to keep quiet about their relationship with her. The friend knew where all the skeletons were, and after Marilyn died, they sent her on a year-long cruise around the world. For a whole year no one knew where she was.”

Peter, for his part, was never put on tape as saying anything other than that Marilyn’s death was a tragic accident that left him deeply remorseful that he hadn’t gone to her aid immediately. He insisted until his death that Bobby Kennedy was on the East Coast the night Marilyn died and that the talk of affairs between Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers was nothing but “nonsense.”

He repeatedly turned down large sums of money to tell the story. In 1976, he signed a contract with a New York publisher to write his autobiography for an advance of sixty thousand dollars, and was offered another hundred thousand dollars from the National Enquirer for serialization rights to the book. An editor worked with Peter in Palm Springs, but after two weeks the man gave up in despair and the publishers canceled the contract: Peter refused to talk about what they really wanted him to talk about — Marilyn and the Kennedys. “When Peter was desperate for money, practically destitute, he still wouldn’t do it,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He was too fond of Jackie and her kids, too fond of Jack’s memory, and too conscious of his reputation in his own kids’ eyes to ever do something like that.”

In 1984, Peter told the Los Angeles Times, “Even if those things were true, I wouldn’t talk about them. That’s just the way I am. Plus the fact, I have four children. I’m not going to embarrass them. I’m not going to embarrass the rest of the family.”

To avoid “embarrassment” at the time of Marilyn’s death, Peter proved himself a master of prevarication. There was a great deal of press speculation over the identity of the “mystery caller” to whom Marilyn was supposed to have been speaking when she died, telephone in hand. Peter “revealed” to columnist Earl Wilson that he had been. “She said she felt sleepy and was going to bed,” Peter said. “She picked up the phone herself on the second ring, which leads me to believe that she was fine. She did sound sleepy, but I’ve talked to her a hundred times and she sounded no different.”

In another interview a few days later, Peter claimed to know nothing of Marilyn’s tortured emotional condition toward the end of her life: “If she had fits of depression, they were behind closed doors. She was not the kind to come moaning around with her troubles. She was always gay — she ‘made’ our parties when she came.”

ON MONDAY, AUGUST 6, Pat Lawford flew back to Los Angeles from Hyannis Port to attend Marilyn’s funeral. To the Lawfords’ shock, they and all of Marilyn’s other Hollywood friends were barred from the services by Joe DiMaggio, who had taken over the funeral preparations. The official reason, a spokesman for DiMaggio said, was that “if we allow the Lawfords in, then we’d have to allow half of the big stars in Hollywood. Then the whole thing would turn into a circus.”

Peter was outraged at his exclusion. “The whole thing was badly handled,” he said. “Marilyn had lots of good friends here in town who will miss her terribly and would love to have attended her final rites.” Joe DiMaggios private response to Peter’s published comment got closer to the truth about the snub: “If it wasn’t for her so-called friends, Marilyn would still be alive today.” It was a comment that hit home for Peter, as did another from Dr. Ralph Greenson when he was asked who — or what — bore responsibility for Marilyn Monroe’s death: “There’s enough blame for everyone to share.”

Peter spent the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge that a large portion of that blame was his. He had brought Marilyn into the sexually charged, politically dangerous vortex of the Kennedys, a world with which she was emotionally unable to cope. He had watched ineffectually as she repeatedly courted death with drugs and alcohol. He had been instrumental in creating the situation that would finally send her over the edge. And after she called out for help, he vacillated for hours as her life slowly slipped away.

For years afterward, Peter would break into tears whenever the subject of Marilyn’s death was raised. “I blame myself for the fact that she is dead,” he told journalist Malcolm Boyes in 1982. In his 1984 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said, “To this day I’ve lived with this. I should have got in my car and gone straight to her house. I didn’t do it.” At that point in the interview, he broke down and cried.

The most vivid example of just how much Peter was haunted by Marilyn’s death occurred about a year after the event. In Judy Garland’s Los Angeles house, Scottie Singer, her young secretary-companion, was watching television; Judy was in her bedroom. Suddenly Singer heard frantic pounding at the front door. She jumped up to open it, and Peter rushed in. “Where’s Judy?” he shouted. “What’s happened to her?”

“Peter, what are you talking about?”

“I’ve gotta get to her!” He pushed past the startled young woman and ran down the hallway. Frightened now, Singer stayed right behind Peter. He swung open Judy’s bedroom door and found her in a deep sleep, the telephone receiver still in her hand. He looked at her and his face went chalk white. “Is she breathing?” They listened in deathly silence, and in a few moments Singer said, “Yes, Peter, she’s breathing normally.”

Singer told Peter to come back into the living room with her, sit down, and have a drink. After about five minutes he had calmed down enough to explain himself to her.

“Peter told me that he was talking to Judy on the phone,” Singer recalled, “and she had taken some sleeping pills. She fell asleep in the middle of the conversation and Peter just freaked. Can you imagine what a horrible ride that was for him, driving clear the hell out to Judy’s house, terrified that she might have died — just like Marilyn.”

15 Leib refused to discuss these events.