Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  At about ten, said Jeanne Carmen, Marilyn called yet again. ‘Are you sure you can’t come over?’ she said. Marilyn sounded nervous, and said she was afraid there would be a repetition of the previous night’s calls, telling her to leave Robert Kennedy alone. Otherwise she sounded all right, and Carmen begged off one last time. Later the telephone rang again, but Carmen did not answer it.

  Also at about ten o’clock, Ralph Roberts learned next day, a woman with a ‘slurred voice’ called his answering service. Told Roberts was out, the caller hung up.

  Roberts, who was staying at a temporary address, had given his number to only two people apart from Marilyn, and they were business contacts. He believed the caller was Marilyn.

  There were no more known calls. At about 3:30 A.M., at the Greenson home in Santa Monica, the psychiatrist’s daughter, Joan, heard the telephone ring in her parents’ bedroom. There were muffled voices, the sound of her parents going downstairs, then the car starting. Feeling hungry, Joan went to the kitchen to raid the refrigerator.

  ‘I asked Mom what happened,’ Joan recalled. ‘She said there was a problem over at Marilyn’s, and I said, “Oh” — and went back to bed.’

  It was just a mile and a half from the Greenson house to Marilyn’s home. As he drove, the psychiatrist already feared the worst. The caller had been Eunice Murray, saying that she had noticed a light in Marilyn’s room at midnight. Then, after three, she had wakened to see the light still on. This was most unusual. Afraid to anger Marilyn by waking her unnecessarily, Murray said, she had called Greenson instead.

  ‘I told her to bang on the door,’ Greenson wrote to a friend that month. ‘She did, and there was no answer. And she went to the front of the house and looked into the window and could see Marilyn lying very quietly on the bed. I told her I was coming right over, and for her to call Dr Engelberg.’

  Greenson reached Marilyn’s house in five minutes. He too found the bedroom door locked. He too went outside to peer through the window. Some have questioned whether this was possible, because Marilyn’s windows were masked with heavy blackout drapes brought from the old apartment.

  In fact, according to Murray and Greenson, a barred window at the front of the house was ajar that hot summer night. An examination of contemporary photographs, and the window as it was when the first edition of this book was written, showed it was possible to reach in, part the drapes, and look straight at Marilyn’s bed.

  There was no way, however, of getting into the room, because of the bars. Greenson said he took a poker, broke an unbarred window at the side of the house — the smashed pane appeared later in press photographs — and then reached in to turn the handle. It was then easy to climb over the low sill.

  ‘I could see from many feet away,’ Greenson was to write, ‘that Marilyn was no longer living. There she was, lying face down on the bed, bare shoulders exposed, and as I got closer I could see the phone clutched fiercely in her right hand. I suppose she was trying to make a phone call before she was overwhelmed. It was just unbelievable, so simple and final and over.’

  Police pictures, taken a few hours later, show Marilyn stretched out, more or less covered with rumpled bedclothes. Her head lies on the pillow, right cheek down, eyes closed and face in repose as though serenely asleep.

  Dr Greenson opened the door and told Eunice Murray, ‘We’ve lost her.’ Dr Engelberg arrived fifteen minutes later and agreed, in Greenson’s words, that ‘she was hopelessly gone.’

  At 4:25 A.M., less than an hour after Eunice Murray had raised the alarm, the Central Los Angeles police switchboard took a call from Dr Engelberg. It was transferred to the West Los Angeles desk, which covered Marilyn’s neighborhood. The watch commander, Sergeant Jack Clemmons, picked up the phone himself. When the doctor said, ‘I am calling from the home of Marilyn Monroe. She’s dead,’ Clemmons suspected a practical joke. He decided to go to the scene himself.

  At the house, now alive with light, Eunice Murray showed the sergeant straight into Marilyn’s room, where the two doctors were sitting with the body.

  Dr Greenson, who did most of the talking, pointed out one pill bottle among the many that littered the bedside table. It seemed to tell its own story: the bottle was empty, with the top on, and the label read ‘Nembutal.’ There was no sign of a suicide note. The telephone was back on its rest, replaced by Dr Greenson.

  Everything seemed in order — indeed, Mrs Murray was tidying up in the kitchen and even doing the laundry. Yet something bothered Clemmons. ‘It’s not evidence,’ he said, ‘but I left with this uneasy feeling there was something I did not understand.’

  44

  AT ABOUT FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning, on Sunday, August 5, a young reporter named Joe Ramirez got a world scoop. The great actor, Charles Laughton, was dying, and Ramirez had asked a contact in the Coroner’s office to call him as soon as it happened. The contact called instead to say Marilyn Monroe was dead. Ramirez, who worked for a minor agency called City News, rushed to his office and put the news on the wire.

  The story came too late for the Sunday newspapers, but it flashed around the world, startling early-morning radio listeners and sending news editors scrambling for the telephones.

  Over in Studio City, photographer Bill Woodfield was rousted out of bed by reporter Joe Hyams. Both men knew Marilyn — Woodfield was still in the midst of negotiations over the nude swim pictures; Hyams, the respected correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, had written a story on her only weeks earlier, after a chance encounter in a store. Hyams and Woodfield piled into Hyams’ black Mercedes, which had once belonged to Humphrey Bogart, and headed for Marilyn’s house in the first thin light of dawn.

  Associated Press columnist James Bacon, a sometime lover from Marilyn’s starlet days, had been tipped off about the death by a friend with a radio tuned to the police network. He too drove to the scene. There were a couple of police cars there now, and a small cluster of neighbors standing in the street in dressing gowns. ‘I pulled an old trick,’ Bacon said. ‘I went up to a cop and said I was from the Coroner’s office, and got into the house. I didn’t stay long, just long enough to see her lying there on the bed. … I noticed that her fingernails were unkempt. The Coroner’s staff did arrive a few minutes later, and I got out of there right away.’

  The Coroner’s man, Guy Hockett, saw at once, as Dr Greenson had also observed, that Marilyn had been dead for ‘several hours.’ Rigor mortis was advanced, and ‘it took about five minutes to straighten her out. … She was not lying quite straight, sort of in a semifetal position. Her hair was all burnt up, in terrible condition from all those treatments, you know. She didn’t look good, not like Marilyn Monroe. She looked just like a poor little girl that had died, no makeup, fuzzy unmade hair, a tired body. To some degree or other, we all come to that. …’

  The Coroner’s men wheeled out Marilyn’s body, covered by a blue blanket, and loaded it into a battered station wagon. They took their burden first to Westwood Village Mortuary, next to the cemetery where her maternal grandmother was buried. The remains of the most famous star on earth were lodged for a while in a broom closet cluttered with brushes, coats, and specimen bottles.

  A couple of hours later the body was moved to Crypt 33 at the County Morgue, in the Los Angeles Hall of Justice. Marilyn had become a statistic — Coroner’s Case No. 81128.

  Two photographers got into the morgue that day. One, Bud Gray of the Herald-Examiner, snatched a picture of the shrouded corpse while a colleague covered the click of his camera shutter by flicking his cigarette lighter. Leigh Wiener, a freelance photographer who sent his pictures to Life magazine, arrived carrying a camera case in one hand and bottles of whisky in the other. Offered a drink, one of the attendants opened a stainless-steel door and pulled out the sliding shelf carrying Marilyn’s remains. Wiener took pictures of the body, covered and uncovered. One, which has been published, shows a toe sticking out of the crypt, with an identification tag attached. The press had photographed the
famous body for the last time.

  Across the country, the living were asked for their reactions. The former husbands said little. Reached on the beat by police radio, James Dougherty managed only, ‘I’m sorry.’ Arthur Miller, for all his skills as a wordsmith, could hardly speak at all. Through a family member, he was quoted as saying, ‘It had to happen. I don’t know when or how, but it was inevitable.’ Miller said he would not be going to the funeral, because ‘she’s not really there any more.’

  The day before, in San Francisco, Joe DiMaggio had played in an exhibition game, then met friends at Bimbo’s club. He heard the news very early in the morning, probably relayed to him through friends of Frank Sinatra. He took the first available flight to Los Angeles, contacted his son Joe, Jr., at Camp Pendleton, and retreated with two close friends behind the door of Suite 1035 at the Miramar Hotel, not far from Marilyn’s house.

  DiMaggio quietly did what somebody had to do. Marilyn’s body was at first unclaimed. Her mother was incompetent, in a home, and Marilyn’s half-sister agreed that DiMaggio should arrange the funeral. He insisted it must be a small, restrained affair. DiMaggio said nothing at all to the press. In private, his friend Harry Hall remembered, he sat weeping in his room, unopened telegrams scattered on a table beside him. When he did talk, he fulminated about Sinatra, those in his circle, and about the Kennedys. ‘He held Bobby Kennedy responsible for her death,’ Hall remembered. ‘He said that right there in the Miramar.’

  Between fits of weeping, Paula Strasberg said Marilyn had ‘a quality second to no actress in the world.’ She added, incredibly, ‘Marilyn had no worries at all.’ Her daughter, Susan, later offered the compassionate reflection, ‘An iron butterfly, some people had called her. Butterflies are very beautiful, give great pleasure, and have very short life-spans.’

  Milton and Amy Greene heard the news over the telephone in their hotel bedroom in Paris. They were especially shaken because Amy had had a premonition that Marilyn was in serious trouble, and had made Milton call her before leaving New York. She had said she was fine, and everyone had laughed.

  Directors, bosses, and stars were badgered for opinions. Billy Wilder, getting off a plane in Paris without knowing the news, was asked what he thought of Marilyn. ‘I said whatever I said, probably not all that kind,’ Wilder recalls ruefully. ‘Then in the cab on the way to the hotel I suddenly saw the placards through the cab window. They never told me, those SOB’s. …’

  Later Wilder made his tribute to Marilyn’s acting ability, as did John Huston. During The Misfits, Huston recalled, he had feared ‘it would only be a few short years before she died or went into an institution.’ Joshua Logan declared Marilyn ‘one of the most unappreciated people in the world.’

  Darryl Zanuck, President of Twentieth Century-Fox and a man who had taken a long time to appreciate Marilyn, was generous. ‘Nobody discovered her,’ he said, ‘she earned her own way to stardom.’

  Sir Laurence Olivier thought, ‘Popular opinion is a horribly unsteady conveyance for life, and she was exploited beyond anyone’s means.’

  ‘I heard the flash over the radio at seven A.M.,’ said Clark Gable’s widow, Kay, whose husband had died after The Misfits, ‘and I went to Mass and prayed for her.’

  The Greenson family was grief-stricken. Dr Greenson had telephoned the news from Marilyn’s home during the night, and came home exhausted. He kept repeating that he was sure it had been an accident. Long afterward, still punishing himself, he would say, ‘She was a poor creature, whom I tried to help and ended up hurting.’ In the immediate aftermath, he met Joe DiMaggio; each found himself consoling the other.

  Frank Sinatra said he was ‘deeply saddened … I’ll miss her very much.’ His valet, George Jacobs, recalled, ‘It was a bad time, that August. Strange things had been happening. Frank was in shock for weeks after Marilyn died, distraught. He called me and said, “Let’s get out of here,” and we went down to Palm Springs.’

  Pat Newcomb, who reached Marilyn’s home early that morning, caused a scene as she left. ‘Keep shooting, vultures!’ the press aide shrieked at the photographers. She was quoted as saying — though she denied it in her interview for this book — ‘When your best friend kills herself, how do you feel?’ In total contradiction of all we now know, Newcomb said Marilyn had been ‘feeling great,’ had been in high spirits the previous evening.

  In public, Peter Lawford said ‘Pat [Kennedy] and I loved her dearly. She was probably one of the most marvelous and warm human beings I have ever met. Anything else I could say would be superfluous.’

  On the telephone to a friend that morning, Lawford had been incoherent. He had found a pair of Marilyn’s sandals at the beach house, and ordered his butler to have them bronzed. He wandered into the home of a neighbor, Sherry Houser, ‘in a complete state of shock, devastated, weeping. He kept saying he had been the last person to talk to her.’ That detail, far from superfluous, lies at the core of the mystery surrounding Marilyn’s death.

  In New York that day, Marilyn’s biographer, Maurice Zolotow, found himself at a party crowded with people in politics, some of them close to the Kennedys. Already, Zolotow recalls, the name of Robert Kennedy was woven into the conversation about Marilyn’s tragedy.

  In the afternoon, East Coast time, at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, the elderly Joseph Kennedy, still recovering from his stroke, was doing convalescent exercises in the swimming pool. Relatives and members of the entourage were close by. Old Kennedy’s chauffeur and Man Friday, Frank Saunders, was in the water with him. ‘His niece, Ann Gargan, came up and said Marilyn Monroe was dead,’ Saunders recalled. ‘The old man began saying, “No … No …,” and we left the pool. A strange silence came over everybody there. It was such a curious reaction, I thought, and it stuck in my mind. Years later, when the rumors came out about Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy and then Robert Kennedy, I remembered the silence that August afternoon. It was like attending a wake, but there wasn’t one. …’

  In California, at the Bates ranch south of San Francisco, Robert Kennedy went to church that morning. Afterward he relaxed with his hosts, horseback riding and playing touch football. John Bates said Marilyn’s name had come up several times since the Attorney General’s arrival on Friday, but only in the general context of her problems. ‘We were all aware,’ he added, ‘that she had some acquaintance with Jack.’

  Bates thought the fact that Marilyn had died came up only on Sunday evening, when the party returned to the city. Asked whether Kennedy showed any reaction, Bates said ‘No. It was really taken rather lightly. …’ As if it was just another Hollywood tragedy? ‘That’s right. It was discussed,’ said Bates, ‘in sort of an amusing way.’

  On Monday, Robert Kennedy addressed a meeting of the American Bar Association. Then he dined privately with the Director of the CIA, before setting off on vacation with his family.

  In Washington, President Kennedy made a scheduled announcement. He called on Congress for laws to enforce stricter control over the use of dangerous drugs.

  Early on Sunday morning, in Los Angeles, a young Deputy Medical Examiner, Dr Thomas Noguchi, had reported for the weekend shift. He found a note on his desk from his chief, Coroner Theodore Curphey, asking him to perform the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe. A Deputy District Attorney with forensic experience, John Miner, would attend as observer for the DA.

  The Los Angeles Chief of Detectives, Deputy Police Chief Thad Brown, was a legendary figure, a man given to working around the clock. When he did relax he would escape to a hideaway at Malibu, a trailer with no telephone. That Sunday morning a police dispatch rider arrived with an urgent message. Marilyn Monroe had died, and there was a problem. Would the Chief of Detectives please come to headquarters at once?

  The man ultimately responsible for the inquiry was Police Chief William Parker, a nationally respected officer. He shared a good deal of his worries with his wife, Helen, and she remembered that ‘he wanted special attention paid to this particular cas
e by the investigators, and he tried to send the best men out there, including detectives from the downtown office, because there was so much talk that she was very close to John or Robert Kennedy. And Mr Parker was very fond of Robert, thought he was very intelligent, thought he would’ve been a better President than John.’

  ‘Robert and John Kennedy were supposed to be Catholics, I think,’ said the Chief’s widow, ‘and Mr Parker was a Catholic. And maybe he thought undue pressure would be brought, that possibly the Republicans would jump on it. And so he said, “The thing has to be straightened out in more ways than one.” Mr Parker was very, very strict, and he would lay the law down to get to the bottom of this. He would say, “Save no one.”’

  Chief Parker is indeed remembered as a man of integrity. Yet weeks later, when his wife asked how the Monroe case was going, Parker was uncharacteristically vague. ‘It seemed to be a big question mark,’ Helen Parker recalled. ‘I remember him just doing this’ — and she draws a big question mark in the air.

  There was a Coroner’s investigation, and it was flawed. There was a police investigation, and there was a cover-up.

  45

  BY 10:30 A.M. ON August 5, within six hours of the first official knowledge that Marilyn was dead, the most highly advertised, overpromoted body on earth lay, covered by a plastic sheet, in a long, windowless room under the Hall of Justice. Eddy Day, the autopsy assistant, had prepared Marilyn on Table 1, a stainless-steel slab equipped with a water hose and drainage system, and a scale for weighing human organs.

  The autopsy surgeon, Dr Noguchi, would become a controversial figure in later years. Having risen to the post of Chief Medical Examiner, he would be demoted for allegedly mismanaging his office and sensationalizing celebrity deaths — a charge he fought. In the storm of controversy that followed, his colleagues elected him Chairman of the Board of the National Association of Medical Examiners.