Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  There was another feeling. Meryman said, ‘I was glad to leave. I didn’t like the atmosphere in that house — there was something creepy, something sick about it. I felt that it was an island. There was a fortress feeling, a feeling of us against the world, of being embattled.’

  Marilyn had given Meryman a line to fit Life’s theme. ‘Fame will go by,’ she had said into his microphone, ‘and, so long, I’ve had you, Fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I’ve experienced, but that’s not where I live.’

  They sounded like last lines, and have been treated so ever since, though Meryman had no such thought as he flew back to New York, the interview transcripts in a briefcase at his feet. At the same point on the tape Marilyn had said something else: ‘I now live in my work,’ said the nervous, rapid-fire voice, ‘and in a few relationships with the few people I can really count on.’

  There was no more work, and Marilyn was left to agonize about her friends.

  40

  DURING THE PHOTO SESSION for Vogue, the photographer noticed Marilyn looking pensive, when he wanted her laughing, alive. He asked Pat Newcomb to lighten her mood, and Newcomb said, ‘What about those two loves in your life?’ Marilyn giggled. The photographer had no idea who the lovers were, but he got his shot.

  Something’s Got to Give had portrayed Marilyn as a shipwreck survivor who has been out of the world for years. She was to ask her rescuers, ‘Who’s President now?’ Told it is Kennedy, she would respond, ‘Which Kennedy?’ In real life, Marilyn’s friends could be forgiven for asking the same question, as they picked up stories linking her first to one brother, then to the other, then again to the first.

  New York had been abuzz with gossip when Marilyn sang at the President’s birthday concert. Legend had since placed Marilyn in bed with one or the other brother that night. Susan Strasberg, who attended the party afterward, recalled that both the President and Marilyn left early — separately.

  The New York Times, in its normal coverage, said the President returned to his hotel, the Carlyle, at 2:00 A.M. His recent biographer, Ralph Martin, later quoted an unnamed eyewitness as saying that Marilyn joined him there. If she did, she and the President had a fairly brief meeting.

  Jim Haspiel, Marilyn’s young friend, was waiting outside her apartment that night. He had been to Madison Square Garden earlier, and hoped to catch Marilyn for a word when she came home. She arrived alone soon after four o’clock, stepping out of a limousine, carrying her shoes.

  ‘Her hair,’ said Haspiel, ‘was no longer groomed as it had been for the show. It now looked like cotton candy, as though she had combed it out.’

  Marilyn needed company and attention after she got home. Ralph Roberts, the masseur, remembers her calling him to request a massage. He shook himself awake, and hurried to her apartment to oblige.

  Whatever occurred that night, the presidential follies were continuing. Once again they touch Marilyn’s life, and there are allegations that add another factor to the dangerous scenario — drug-taking.

  From early 1962 till his death, according to a number of sources, the President carried on a Washington liaison with a woman named Mary Meyer. Meyer, nearer to Kennedy’s own age than his other mistresses, had known him since university days. In the late fifties, after a failed marriage to a senior CIA officer, she had moved to a home in Virginia, where she had Robert Kennedy and his family as next-door neighbors. During the presidency she pursued a somewhat dilettante life as a painter and friend of the famous. One friend was Jackie Kennedy, and Meyer on occasion visited the White House.

  In the 1970s, during a welter of controversy about her relations with the President, one of the Meyer intimates made news with the allegation that she had introduced the President to marijuana. James Truitt, a friend and former Washington Post executive, said Meyer took six marijuana cigarettes to the White House on one of her trysts with Kennedy. They smoked together, and the President joked about a forthcoming conference on narcotics. He also showed an interest in drug use in general, according to Truitt, and mentioned that he was familiar with cocaine.

  The President also discussed drug use with Marilyn, according to a statement made by Peter Lawford in 1982, when law-enforcement officials were reviewing the circumstances of Marilyn’s death. Lawford said that when Kennedy and Marilyn met at his home in 1961 ‘they spent a portion of the evening discussing pills.’

  Mary Meyer did not long survive Marilyn — she was shot dead in 1964, in circumstances that were never satisfactorily resolved. Her name came up again twenty years later, with publication of an autobiography of Dr Timothy Leary, the psychologist best known for his experiments and advocacy of mind-altering drugs, LSD in particular.

  Leary, who in 1962 was conducting research at Harvard University, said Meyer came to see him in the spring of that year. She talked of a mysterious lover, ‘a very important man … a public figure.’ She said the lover was impressed by what he had heard of LSD, and wanted to try it himself.

  Meyer had come to Dr Leary, as a sort of academic fountainhead, to find out all she could about the drug. Intrigued, Leary obliged, and the two met several times in the coming months. Then, a few weeks later, Leary met Marilyn Monroe.

  The encounter occurred in May, during Marilyn’s hopeless weeks on Something’s Got to Give, and probably just before she sang for the President. In California, just starting to take on its image as the fulcrum of the sixties’ drug culture, Dr Leary was bemused to find himself feted as the guru of psychedelia, the role that would eventually make him a household name. On the East Coast his research had been largely academic; here he found a host of people, most of them in show business, who had already been experimenting with mind-altering drugs. Some of them were doing so with the support and approval of prominent psychiatrists.

  The meeting with Marilyn came at the end of a party in the Hollywood Hills attended by a mix of doctors and celebrities, including Jennifer Jones and Dennis Hopper. ‘I was exhausted,’ Leary said. ‘I had been rushed around town, taken to one of the big studios, and then bombarded all evening with questions about drugs. I went to a bedroom and lay down, and after a while Marilyn came in and roused me. I had not seen her earlier at the party, but guess she’d arrived after I’d gone to bed. She wanted to meet me, and she wanted me to introduce her to LSD.’

  Leary tried to explain that LSD was not a drug one took nonchalantly. None was taken that night — indeed it was Marilyn who pressed a drug on Leary. She gave him two pills she called ‘Randy-Mandys.’ That is the street name for Mandrax, a sedative popular among drug users in the early sixties because it gives a sense of euphoria when combined with alcohol. Marilyn said she had got hers ‘from a Mexican boyfriend,’ and joked that they were aspirin. The pills sent Dr Leary off into a deep sleep.

  Marilyn called Leary’s hostess in the morning and they lunched at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. Leary, now awake and interested, found Marilyn ‘full of contradictions. Funny and playful, but very shrewd. We talked about drugs, and I told Marilyn about a project I was setting up in Mexico that summer. She said she wanted to come on down and join us. But she also wanted to try LSD then and there.’ Leary said Marilyn seemed ‘wobbly,’ but he had no idea that she was under constant psychiatric care, nor how disturbed she was.

  That night Leary did introduce Marilyn to LSD — ‘a very small dose.’ They drove together to the wide beach at Venice, and walked by the sea in the dark. ‘It was joyous,’ said Leary.

  Dr Oscar Janiger, now Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology at the California School of Medicine, was a central figure in West Coast drug experimentation in the early sixties. He confirmed details of Leary’s visit to Los Angeles that summer, and remembered that Leary’s hostess, Virginia Dennison, gave Marilyn yoga lessons. Dr Janiger said, ‘People I was working with knew Marilyn well.’

  Leary’s account indicates that two of the President’s women — Meyer and Marilyn — were seeking out LSD at t
he same period. The image of Marilyn playing with LSD, in her mental condition and at that point in her life, is horrifying.

  Early in the week after her dismissal by Twentieth Century-Fox, Marilyn flew to New York. That week also, or soon after, she met for the last time with W. J. Weatherby, the British reporter she had been seeing occasionally since The Misfits. They had not met since the previous year. ‘I could see the change in her as I walked toward her,’ Weatherby recalled. ‘There was a delicate, worn air about her now. … I couldn’t believe that the woman I saw had changed so much.’

  Weatherby and Marilyn talked about Arthur Miller’s remarriage, and then Marilyn said mysteriously, ‘Maybe I’ll get married again myself.’ She seemed serious, then vouchsafed, ‘Only problem is, he’s married right now. And he’s famous; so we have to meet in secret.’ She added that her lover was in politics in Washington. Then, minutes later, she was singing the President’s praises. She thought he was ‘going to be another Lincoln.’ Later, in Central Park, Weatherby dared to ask whether Marilyn knew the President personally. She did not reply, and went on throwing potato chips to the squirrels.

  Henry Weinstein, producer of Something’s Got to Give, dates the beginning of Marilyn’s slide to death, not as her firing on June 8, but to the previous weekend, when — as we know from the Greenson children — she was plunged in black despair.

  ‘Something happened that weekend,’ Weinstein said, ‘and what it was nobody really knows. I mean, people do know. I think the only one who really knew what happened is Pat Newcomb.’

  Newcomb, the press aide, spent a great deal of time with Marilyn when she collapsed. According to Mrs Murray, she brought Marilyn sedatives to replace those taken by Dr Greenson’s stand-in. It even occurred to Norman Jeffries, Mrs Murray’s son-in-law, that Marilyn ‘seemed to be a prisoner in her bedroom.’

  Pat Newcomb, for her part, vigorously denied ever supplying medication, and rejected the notion that Marilyn was a ‘prisoner’. Although a personal friend of the Kennedys since before her time with the actress, she threw no light on what caused the sudden crisis. Yet Marilyn’s total collapses during her life can generally be linked to some specific disaster: the loss of a baby or the failure of a relationship. Had Marilyn’s relationship with the Kennedy brothers started to collapse?

  On June 13, Marilyn sent an odd, wordy telegram. It went to Robert Kennedy’s home in Virginia, and read:

  DEAR ATTORNEY GENERAL AND MRS ROBERT KENNEDY: I WOULD HAVE BEEN DELIGHTED TO HAVE ACCEPTED YOUR INVITATION HONORING PAT AND PETER LAWFORD. UNFORTUNATELY I AM INVOLVED IN A FREEDOM RIDE PROTESTING THE LOSS OF THE MINORITY RIGHTS BELONGING TO THE FEW REMAINING EARTHBOUND STARS. AFTER ALL, ALL WE DEMANDED WAS OUR RIGHT TO TWINKLE.

  MARILYN MONROE

  The rambling telegram to Robert and Ethel Kennedy, less than two months before Marilyn’s death.

  Somewhat improbably, Marilyn was refusing a Kennedy invitation. Two weeks later, though, she did meet Robert Kennedy. He flew into Los Angeles on the evening of June 26, as part of a cross-country journey to discuss organized crime. FBI documents do not mention his wife, Ethel, as being with him.

  Marilyn now met the Attorney General over dinner at the Lawford house, arriving two and a half hours late. The next day, according to Mrs Murray and one of the neighbors, he visited Marilyn at home.

  Eunice Murray said Kennedy arrived alone, driving himself in an open Cadillac convertible. ‘He was casually dressed,’ she recalled, ‘looking almost boyish in slacks and open shirt.’ It was on this occasion, according to Norman Jeffries, that he was supposed ‘to clear out before Kennedy came.’ But he happened to be leaving just as the distinguished visitor arrived. According to Mrs Murray, Kennedy stayed about an hour. She said Marilyn ‘did not seem bubbly or excited by his visit.’

  In the five weeks that remained, Marilyn would not be seen again with either Kennedy brother. By most accounts, she was now deeply dejected whenever she was out of the public eye. According to Peter Lawford, his wife, Pat, the Kennedys’ sister, did her best to cheer Marilyn up. On several occasions the Lawfords invited her to stay overnight at the beach house, and once they were made acutely aware of her misery.

  ‘I’m a light sleeper,’ Lawford said in a brief interview for this book, ‘and one night I woke up for some reason. It was dawn, and I looked out of the window and saw a figure standing on the balcony. It was Marilyn with a robe on, and it seemed like she was drunk, and I went out and said, “Are you okay?” There were tears streaming down her face. Pat by then had woken too, and we brought her in and talked to her.’

  Peter Lawford claimed he did not know why Marilyn was so unhappy.

  From early July, Marilyn turned to her doctors in a way that suggests utter desperation or hypochondria, or both. She saw psychiatrist Greenson on twenty-seven of thirty-five days, and her physician, Dr Engelberg, on thirteen. Assuming the doctors’ records are correct, Marilyn was therefore in Los Angeles almost all that time. We know, though, from a number of witnesses, that she made at least three trips out of town — two of them to Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe, the casino resort reportedly owned jointly by Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana.

  Peter Lawford said he and his wife took Marilyn to the Cal-Neva three weeks before she died, when Sinatra was performing there. She stayed in Chalet 52, one of the cluster of cabins used by Sinatra and his guests. The staff, from the housekeeper to the bellboys, remember a sad, withdrawn figure.

  Mae Shoopman, then a cashier at the Lodge, recalled, ‘She wasn’t well. She kept herself disguised pretty much, kept herself covered with a black scarf, and stayed in her room a good deal of the time. In fact, everyone became alarmed about it, because she would go to sleep with the telephone at her ear open to the switchboard. I think she was frightened, and it was a way of not being alone.’

  It was thanks to the telephone operator, perhaps, that Marilyn did not die that weekend. Sitting up in the casino office, as the music blared and the late-shift croupiers hovered over the tables, the operator heard strange sounds and stertorous breathing on the line from Chalet 52. She called the manager, who raised the alarm, and Marilyn made it through another overdose.

  Peter Lawford told the author he knew nothing about the crisis till morning. In one statement to the police he said his wife, Pat, was in Marilyn’s room that night, and realized the danger when Marilyn fell out of bed. Gloria Romanoff, who was also there that weekend, said, ‘I think some of this gets a bit hazy because they were all drinking a good deal.’

  As Romanoff recalled it, ‘Marilyn drank champagne, and some vodka, and would take sleeping pills. The Lawfords walked her about, after midnight, trying to keep her awake, and I think they called Frank in, too. I remember Marilyn telling me one of her problems was that she’d taken pills so long, they didn’t work for her the way they did for other people. So she’d begin about nine in the evening, and build up that lethal combination of booze and pills.’

  In this pathetic state, Marilyn was whisked over the mountains to the airport at Reno, onto Frank Sinatra’s private plane — which was making news that year as a sort of flying pleasure-dome — and back to the care of her doctors and her companion, Eunice Murray.

  Murray said she recalled no trips to Tahoe. Nor did she have any recall at all on another vital issue — the possible real trigger for this week of Marilyn’s despair. She may have been pregnant again.

  ‘I’d like to be a complete woman, and have a child,’ Marilyn had said early in the year, during her trip to Mexico. She was still hoping, after all the miscarriages and all the damaging abortions. She went on talking about babies throughout her last months, and seemed to dwell on it in one of her last interviews.

  In late June she told photo-journalist George Barris, ‘A woman must have to love a man with all her heart to have his child. I mean, especially when she’s not married to him. And when a man leaves a woman when she tells him she’s going to have his baby, when he doesn’t marry her, that must hurt a woman very muc
h, deep down inside.’

  Marilyn was talking less than a month after her abrupt collapse into a haze of drugs. Several people, interviewed during research for this book, believed Marilyn had been pregnant a few weeks earlier.

  Arthur James, mutual friend of Marilyn with Charlie Chaplin, Jr., and Edward G. Robinson, Jr., said Marilyn came to his house at Laguna Beach for a weekend ‘about a month, maybe six weeks’ before her death. Chaplin and Robinson, both now also dead, were present.

  ‘It was obvious the poor girl was in trouble,’ said James, ‘even by her standards. She had told us about the Kennedy thing previously, and now she was sick. Marilyn said she had lost a baby, and I thought there had been a miscarriage.’

  The word was going around at the time that Marilyn had had an abortion. Bill Woodfield, one of the photographers on call for Something’s Got to Give, recalled one of Marilyn’s dressing-room team — he thought it was hairdresser Agnes Flanagan — telling him that Marilyn was ‘looking so poorly’ because she had just had an abortion. He was told it had been performed in Mexico.

  The same suggestion was made by Fred Otash, the private investigator who was allegedly engaged in surveillance of Marilyn at this period. He said he learned from a police source at the time that there had been an abortion. ‘An American doctor went down to Tijuana to do it,’ Otash asserted, ‘which made Marilyn safe medically, and made the doctor safe from U.S. law.’

  Bordertown abortions were commonplace in 1962, when the operation was still illegal in the United States. Ironically, on the day Marilyn died, an American woman would make international news by traveling for an abortion to Sweden, where the operation was legal.

  There is no medical evidence to support the theory that Marilyn had been pregnant. Her autopsy, on August 5, offered no information one way or the other, but neither a miscarriage nor a properly performed abortion would necessarily leave traces after some weeks had passed. Marilyn’s phone records do show that she was placing calls to Cedars-Sinai Hospital during June, which may or may not be significant.