When Marilyn left, said Joe Langford, it was ‘in an awful hurry. I think she was giving them some problems.’ Two witnesses — the widow of Sinatra’s pilot, and the co-pilot — told a haunting tale of the return to Los Angeles.*
Sinatra’s aircraft, a twin-engined Martin named after the singer’s daughter Christina, was a $6 million investment, a flying palace with wood paneling, wall-to-wall carpeting, bar, luxurious bathroom — and a piano. According to the pilot’s widow, Barbara Lieto, her husband was ordered to Lake Tahoe on short notice. He came home in the early hours, uncharacteristically furious.
According to Mrs Lieto, Marilyn boarded the plane drunk. It seems the flight first took Marilyn, Peter and Pat Lawford, and one of Marilyn’s hairdressers, to San Francisco. The crew waited while the passengers went into the city, then Mrs Lawford took a commercial flight to the East Coast.
It was late when the Sinatra plane left for Los Angeles and, according to Mrs Lieto, Peter Lawford, also now drunk, got into a violent argument with the pilot about where it should land. Lawford insisted they should land at Santa Monica, even when the pilot pointed out that the airport there was closed during the hours of darkness.
When the plane finally landed at Los Angeles, after midnight, Marilyn was ‘out of it, a mess.’ She emerged from the airplane barefoot, and the pilot had to help her put on her shoes. She then left for home in a limousine, while the crew gave Lawford a ride to Santa Monica in their car. The pilot became further angered when Lawford insisted on stopping a few blocks from his home to make a half-hour telephone call from a public booth. Why, they wondered, could he not wait a mere five minutes, till he got to the beach house?
With hindsight, one must wonder whether Lawford, too, was now worried about security.
There had clearly been great tension during the visit to the Cal-Neva Lodge. One of Marilyn’s East Coast friends, Dr Sandy Firestone, remembered a call from Marilyn in the weeks before she died, complaining that ‘she was being pressured to go to parties, that she didn’t particularly like Peter Lawford because he was having big orgies.’
Photographer Billy Woodfield, whom Sinatra often asked to process photographs he had taken, remembered how — after the Cal-Neva visit — the singer asked him to print a roll of photographs taken at the Lodge. ‘Some of the pictures, about nine frames,’ Woodfield recalled, ‘showed Marilyn on all fours. She looked sick. Astride, either riding her like a horse or trying to help her up — I couldn’t make out which — was [Mafia boss] Sam Giancana.’
Marilyn appeared in the photographs to be in distress, and Sinatra asked Woodfield what he thought he should do with them. ‘I suggested he burn them,’ Woodfield said, ‘and he did — in front of me.’
Though both Marilyn and Giancana had been fully clothed in the photographs, the mafioso told several people he had had sex with her. Marilyn said so, too, according to her friend Jeanne Carmen. Giancana mocked the actress’s poor performance, while she spoke of the episode with disgust.
During the final nightmare, Joe DiMaggio, still trying to help Marilyn, came to Lake Tahoe. The Cal-Neva bell captain, Ray Langford, recalled getting him a room at the nearby Silver Crest Motel. DiMaggio wanted to know where Marilyn was, and Langford, not yet aware that she had arrived — said he did not know. Langford’s brother, Joe, said DiMaggio wanted to get in touch, but did not actually enter the Cal-Neva ‘because there was a feud between him and Sinatra at the time.’
Another witness, who arrived at the Cal-Neva within a week of Marilyn’s death, was told an eerie story by an employee. He recalled looking down from the casino, near dawn, to see Marilyn ‘at the edge of the pool, barefoot, swaying back and forth. She was staring up the hill.’ Concerned, the Cal-Neva man went to Marilyn, and found her still standing there, still looking upward. He followed her gaze, and there was DiMaggio standing in the driveway, ‘staring back.’
Before she died Marilyn talked about the Cal-Neva visit to her masseur, Ralph Roberts. ‘She told me it was a nightmare, a dreadful weekend,’ Roberts recalled. ‘She didn’t want to go particularly, and when she got there she found Joe there. She couldn’t go out of her room without the conflict of Sinatra. Joe was terribly jealous of Sinatra.’
Earlier in the year, when Marilyn had just moved into the new house, DiMaggio had gone to see her with Harry Hall, his old friend from sports-promotion days. ‘He knocked at the door,’ Hall recalled, ‘and she opened it, saw Joe, and slammed the door. Joe said, “Well, one of these days.”’ They went back again later, Hall says, and this time Marilyn let them in. He believed DiMaggio still had hopes of remarrying Marilyn, and others did say they had met on friendly terms in the last months.
Sometimes even DiMaggio lost patience. During Something’s Got to Give, scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson tried to get him to go to California to help Marilyn. ‘He promised to call her on the phone,’ Johnson recalled, ‘but was adamant against trying anything further. … So far as he was concerned, she was a lost lady, and while there might be someone to save her, he wasn’t the one. In short, he’d had it.’
In the last months, though, DiMaggio returned to his obsession. The goings-on at Lake Tahoe enraged him. ‘He was very upset,’ said Harry Hall. ‘She went up there, they gave her pills, they had sex parties, and Joe thought — because at that time he was a friend of Sinatra — it should never have happened. … He felt he should’ve had enough respect for Joe; he should’ve left her alone.’
In 1962, DiMaggio had a lucrative job, at a salary of $100,000 a year, as a representative of V. H. Monette, an East Coast company supplying American military post exchanges. He had told the company president, Valmore Monette, that he was ‘still very much in love with Marilyn.’ On August 1, 1962, the week Marilyn was to die, DiMaggio quit the company. According to Monette, ‘He told me he had talked to Marilyn and thought she had finally agreed to leave the movies and remarry him.’
In her final months Marilyn had acknowledged DiMaggio’s devotion. She wrote her former husband:
Dear Joe,
If I can only succeed in making you happy — I will have succeeded in the bigest [sic] and most difficult thing there is — that is to make one person completely happy [Marilyn’s italics]. Your happiness means my happiness.
The letter, never sent, was found after Marilyn’s death.
DiMaggio was not only furious with Sinatra, he was furious with the Kennedys. In the spring of the year he had visited Marilyn along with his son Joe, Jr., and the son’s fiancée, Pamela Ries. Ries remembered that Marilyn talked with DiMaggio about Robert Kennedy, and a row followed.
Marilyn was now twisting and turning in her bitterness over Kennedy. In late July, during a massage session with Ralph Roberts, she suddenly asked, ‘Ralph, have you heard any stories about me and Bobby?’
Roberts replied, ‘All Hollywood is talking about it!’ To which Marilyn retorted, ‘Well, it isn’t true. He’s not my sort. He’s too puny.’
That same week, just before the last Cal-Neva visit, Robert Slatzer was about to leave for the East Coast. During a farewell drive with Marilyn, she veered from enthusiasm to despondency, from talking about ‘starting a whole new life’ to complaining about Robert Kennedy. She wondered gloomily whether he had abandoned her because she was not sufficiently educated. Finally she burst into tears, sobbing that men wanted her ‘only as a plaything.’ Kennedy, she supposed, ‘had got what he wanted.’
Marilyn had said of Kennedy, as she and Slatzer looked at her diary together, ‘Maybe his wife would like to know some of the things he told me. It’s all in here, and I’m glad I made notes.’
Former private detective John Dolan, one of the sources on the wiretapping of Marilyn, says the wiretappers discovered she had been desperate enough to call the Attorney General at home in Virginia. He had been enraged.
‘Robert Kennedy became incommunicado,’ Robert Slatzer said, ‘and she wasn’t going to settle for that.’
Paul D’Amato, the man said to have represented Gianc
ana’s interests at the Cal-Neva Lodge, confirmed to me that Marilyn had been there just before she died. Chain-smoking Marlboros, while sitting in pyjamas in what would prove to be his deathbed, D’Amato spoke of the visit and the flight that took Marilyn away for the last time.
Then, pursing his thin lips, D’Amato murmured, ‘Of course, I didn’t say that.’ He added, ‘There was more to what happened than anyone has told. It would’ve been the big fall for Bobby Kennedy, wouldn’t it?’
Marilyn was now thinking about death. She consulted the lawyer she shared with Sinatra, Milton Rudin, about making a new will. She reportedly wished to cut the Strasbergs out of it because they had ‘taken advantage’ of her. The will never was changed. Rudin, who thought ‘she was obviously deeply ill,’ kept putting Marilyn off.
Dr Greenson, the psychiatrist, had been seeing Marilyn almost every day, except when she went to Lake Tahoe. In other circumstances, he would write to a friend within days of her death, ‘I should have played it safe and put her in a sanitarium, but that would only have been safe for me and deadly for her. …’
Weeks earlier, talking about her career to Life magazine, Marilyn had said, ‘It might be kind of a relief to be finished. It’s sort of like I don’t know what kind of a yard dash you’re running, but then you’re at the finish line and you sort of sigh — you’ve made it! But you never have, you have to start all over again.’
On July 26, Robert Kennedy came to Los Angeles once more, and made a speech to the National Insurance Association. At midday, as he was on his way to the engagement, the Los Angeles office of the FBI received an anonymous call, warning of a plan to kill him. The caller said ‘gangland characters’ were plotting the murder.
On July 30, 1962, Marilyn made her final call to the Justice Department, as logged in the surviving telephone records. The call lasted eight minutes, and she made it on the Monday of her last week alive.
*See Chapter 11, p. 107.
†In 1972, when he was first ready to publish his Monroe book, which dealt at length with the Kennedy aspects of her story, Slatzer received a specific threat that his life would be in danger if publication went ahead. His then publisher, a minor California company, also received a frightening warning. Two men came to the home of Slatzer’s editor, Thom Montgomery, and beat up the man who answered his door in the belief that they were attacking Montgomery. Montgomery, who confirmed this incident and other threats, said the company almost simultaneously went out of business, summarily bought out in a way that executives believed was part of an operation to suppress the Monroe book. The book was published two years later, without incident, by Pinnacle House.
*Witnesses were somewhat confused about the timing of Marilyn’s departure. At least two suggested it was the day before her death. The passing of time has presumably led them to concertina events in their minds, for other data placed Marilyn fairly firmly in Los Angeles in the very last days of her life.
Part Five
THE CANDLE BURNS DOWN
‘Who killed Marilyn Monroe? — that’s a question. … That was a tragedy.’
SEAN O’CASEY
42
‘DO YOU KNOW WHO I’ve always depended on?’ Marilyn had asked reporter W. J. Weatherby. ‘Not strangers, not friends. The telephone! That’s my best friend. I love calling friends, especially late at night when I can’t sleep. I have this dream we all get up and go out to a drugstore.’
Marilyn worked her mechanical friend hard in her last days. Ensconced at home, she rattled off calls to contacts on the East Coast. She told Henry Rosenfeld, the fashion tycoon, that she would be coming to New York soon, and wanted him to escort her to the first night of Mr President, a new show opening in Washington. She called Lena Pepitone, her New York maid, and talked about plans to give a party in September.
Marilyn was in a whirl of discussions about future projects. She talked to Gene Kelly about a musical with a World War I setting, to Sidney Skolsky about a film on Jean Harlow, with herself playing the lead. She made outings to a screening room to see the films of director Lee Thompson, who was keen to use her in the film that would later be made as What a Way to Go. She spoke to composer Jule Styne about plans for a musical version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, starring herself and Frank Sinatra.
Firm arrangements came out of the calls. On Sunday Marilyn was due to meet with Skolsky and Kelly, then dine with Sinatra and the Romanoffs. She was scheduled to see Lee Thompson on Monday, then fly to New York to meet with Styne.
None of the people Marilyn spoke to thought she sounded depressed that last week. Two old friends from the studio, makeup man Whitey Snyder and wardrobe assistant Marjorie Plecher, came round for drinks. They recalled, ‘She never looked better; she was in great spirits.’
There were glimpses of another mood. Marilyn called the California psychic, Kenny Kingston, whom she had consulted in the past. On this occasion her theme was love. Kingston, who got carried away remembering it, quoted Marilyn as saying, ‘Love is the one immortal thing about us. Without it, what can life mean?’
On Wednesday that week, gynecologist Dr Leon Krohn played a round of golf at the Hillcrest Golf Course. It was his day off, and he was irritated when summoned to the clubhouse for an urgent call. It came from Marilyn, whom he had last treated years earlier, shortly before her miscarriage at the end of Some Like It Hot.
At that time Marilyn had stamped off in a temper over his warnings that she stay away from drugs and alcohol, and to take it easy if she wanted to have her baby. Now, calling out of the blue, Marilyn asked, ‘Are you still angry with me — about the baby?’ Nonplussed, the doctor assured her he was not.
Marilyn wanted to see Krohn as soon as possible. They agreed to have dinner, but Marilyn was to die before they could meet. Was Marilyn mourning her unborn children? That last week was the fifth anniversary of the loss of her first child by Arthur Miller. Or did she want to talk to Krohn about a more recent female disaster, the reported abortion of a few weeks earlier?
Marilyn was reaching out to old friends. A day or two before she died, as masseur Ralph Roberts kneaded away the tension, she told him whom to take calls from and whom to refuse. One caller she wanted to talk to was Marlon Brando, by now an intimate of seven years’ standing. They chatted for a long time when he returned her messages. According to Roberts, Brando made her laugh a lot. The actor himself preferred not to comment on their last conversations.
Marilyn talked to at least three people about the Kennedys, in a way that suggests great confusion. From the Barrington Park phone booth, where she stood watching children for the last time, she telephoned Arthur James.
‘What can I do about “He”?’ she asked, apparently referring to the President. She went on to complain, as she had to Slatzer, that Robert Kennedy had ‘cut her off cold,’ but it was ‘Jack’ she could not get out of her mind.
Marilyn called James again on the last Wednesday, but reached only his answering service. She left word that she needed his help. ‘I tried to call back,’ James said, ‘but another female answered the phone, and hung up.’
On Friday afternoon, August 3, according to the phone records, Marilyn telephoned Norman Rosten in New York. She wanted to know what he and his wife thought of the Life interview, and talked about new job offers and of coming East soon. ‘We’ll have a great time,’ she said. ‘Let’s all start to live before we get old. …’
Marilyn’s voice seemed to Rosten frenetic, racing on unnaturally from one thing to another. He was worried enough by the call to write a follow-up letter, but she was to die before it arrived.
Marilyn was flailing around for solace. On Friday she also called Anne Karger, mother of her old lover Fred and a loyal friend. ‘It was the day before she died,’ said Elizabeth Karger, Fred’s last wife. ‘She said she was very much in love, and was going to marry Bobby Kennedy. But she sounded depressed.’ Anne Karger, said her daughter-in-law, told Marilyn she was deluding herself. She merely replied, ‘If he loves me, he will.’
That same day — Friday — Marilyn went to a phone booth to call Robert Slatzer, now at his home in Columbus, Ohio. Four friends were with him at the time, and the three still alive confirm the call occurred. Two of them spoke to her themselves. Marilyn had been looking at a script by Doral Chenoweth, a writer friend of Slatzer, and she told him she liked it. He was impressed by the fact that she had clearly read his work carefully. The play, This God Bu$ine$$, was later successfully produced.
Slatzer’s restaurateur friend, Lee Henry, also talked to Marilyn for a few moments. He recalled recognizing the famous voice, but said, ‘You could tell she was either on booze or drugs.’
Slatzer himself talked to Marilyn at length, not for the first time that week. The previous day, he said, he had called her to tell her Robert Kennedy was going to California that weekend and that — if Marilyn must — it would be a good chance to talk to him.
Now, on Friday, Marilyn was saying she had continued to try to reach Kennedy in Washington but in vain. Was Slatzer sure Kennedy was coming to California? Slatzer told her to look in the papers. Marilyn said she would telephone her friend, and Kennedy’s sister, Pat Lawford. Pat was at the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts, but Marilyn would call Peter Lawford to get the number. Pat Lawford, in turn, would tell her how to reach Robert Kennedy.
Peter Lawford later confirmed that Marilyn did call to ask for Pat’s number. He gave it to her. We do not know whether Marilyn then obtained a number for Robert Kennedy, and actually reached him. We do know Robert Kennedy was in California that weekend.
Press coverage and FBI documents show that Kennedy flew into San Francisco on Friday afternoon, accompanied by his wife and four of their children. The Attorney General was combining business with pleasure: an address to the American Bar Association would be followed by a vacation in the mountains of Washington State. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that he arrived ‘without his usual flashing smile’ and shook hands ‘woodenly’ with those who welcomed him.
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe Page 40