“She did not fire me as her psychiatrist.”
“What then?”
“The last time I saw Marilyn, she informed me she’d fired Pat Newcomb, which I thought was an excellent decision, incidentally, as well as Eunice Murray, which I considered unfortunate, because Eunice was, to use your word, supportive of her. I suppose I was ‘fired,’ too, in a sense … but only as what she called her ‘de facto agent.’ She was very smart, Mr. Heller. She knew what I didn’t, or hadn’t admitted—that I was out of my depth, trying to help her in the career department.”
“Sounds like maybe she’d finally shaken her worst dependency. And I don’t mean drugs.”
“You mean,” he said quietly, “me.”
“I mean you, Doc. She comes to you to cure her insomnia, and you prescribe total dependence on you. You give her twenty-four-hour service. You make house calls. You were the drug she was in danger of overdosing on.”
The sardonic smile returned. “And … as you say—she finally shook that dependance. I believe that last day of her life, though unpleasant, should have been a turning point.”
“Well, it was a turning point, wasn’t it? A turn into Westwood cemetery.” I waved off his good intentions. “You called it suicide, Doc. Every interview you’ve given, whether to the cops or the press, has it suicide.”
“And yet it wasn’t suicide.” His eyebrows were up, but nothing quizzical about it. “You needn’t bother making the case for me, Mr. Heller. I know it wasn’t suicide. I’ve read the autopsy results.”
“So are you prepared to say it’s murder?”
He sighed heavily. “I’m prepared to say—I have said in my interview with Deputy D.A. Miner and another with the so-called Suicide Squad—that Marilyn was in no way despondent, and that she was a poor candidate for suicide.”
“Those statements haven’t been made public.”
“That’s not up to me, is it? Mr. Heller, in the four days preceding her death, Marilyn took three business meetings, bought a ten-thousand-dollar Jean Louis gown, twice ordered deli food, and purchased one hundred dollars’ worth of perfume.”
Chanel, no doubt.
He was saying, “Over those few days, Marilyn met with me for eleven and a half hours, and they were good sessions, healthy sessions, with the expected ups and downs, but…” He shook his head, chuckled glumly. “The bittersweet truth, Mr. Heller, is that Marilyn was finally making spectacular headway in therapy. She was on her way to achieving a degree of security for the first time in her life. And she was ecstatic about the possibilities of the future.”
“Was she ecstatic at your last session? After her fight with Bobby Kennedy?”
“That was rough. That was difficult. But we are not talking here about unrequited love—no. She had already decided that she was moving on from the Kennedys.” He frowned. “Understand, she found it gratifying to be associated with such powerful and important people. But she felt used and betrayed, and she insisted on being treated respectfully. Bobby Kennedy barged in that afternoon, making accusations, demanding she hand over tape recordings and notebooks, and generally treating her like … chattel.”
“So who wouldn’t flip out?”
“Indeed. But any notion that she would have gone public with what she knew about the brothers, well, it’s nonsense. So is the notion that this confrontation would send her deep into a well of despondency.” He sighed. “Mr. Heller—would you put away the weapon? And would you allow me to play you a tape recording?”
I got up, took a magazine from a stack off a lower bookcase shelf, and folded it open over the nine-millimeter. I also moved the couch into its former position, and sat on the edge, facing him.
He nodded, twitched half a smile, and lifted an upright reel-to-reel tape recorder off the floor behind his desk somewhere, and rested it on the blotter. Then he removed a white cardboard tape box from a desk drawer, which required unlocking (the doctor’s security measures weren’t much), and fixed the spool in its niche and wound the tape into place.
“In the last few months,” he said, “Marilyn made a number of recordings herself. At home.”
He was telling me?
“These were stream-of-consciousness sessions, where she could talk to me, though I wasn’t present, as frankly and openly as she wished, particularly if I was not available and she wanted to express these thoughts and feelings. I have several hours of these tapes, and if they were made public, the notion that Marilyn took her life would soon disappear.”
“What’s on this tape?”
“Something interesting near the very beginning of the reel. Let me cue it up.…”
He did.
And he clicked the machine on, the tape whirring, and a very familiar, soft, slightly halting voice filled the little den.
“To have been loved by John Kennedy only to be rejected so badly is hard to understand. It really is. But Marilyn Monroe is a soldier. And the first duty of a soldier is to the commander in chief. He says ‘do this’ and you do that.”
I could well imagine Jack telling Marilyn to “do this.”
“My bruised little ego isn’t important. What is important is that these men will change the country. No child will go hungry. No person will sleep in the street and get his meals from a garbage can. They’ll transform America like FDR in the thirties.”
Greenson made a small openhanded gesture, as if to say, “See? Everything they did to her, and she was still loyal.”
“The president is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer. Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother. And so would I. I would never embarrass him. Or Bobby.”
“So much for a press conference,” I said.
“But there’s no room in my life for Bobby right now. All I ask is that he face me and deal with me directly, like a real man … and treat me with a modicum of respect.”
He clicked off the machine. Got up, moved it off his desk and onto the floor, then resumed his seat.
“These tapes in toto reveal,” he said, hands folded again, “a woman in command of herself, changing direction in positive ways. She’s decided herself to end any relationship with Robert Kennedy, she’s already fired Paula Strasberg, and soon would do the same with Eunice Murray and, for that matter, me … as her manager, that is.”
I shrugged. “You don’t have to be a shrink to know she doesn’t sound suicidal.”
“No. She had her sights on new artistic horizons—absurd as it might sound to some, she hoped to one day perform Shakespeare. She had the kind of long-term plans that do not reflect a patient on the verge of suicide.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Doc. She was murdered.”
This made him uncomfortable. Suddenly the dark eyes were looking somewhere other than my face.
I gave him a friendly grin. “Let’s talk about you, Doc. You don’t think she committed suicide. You know the accidental overdose verdict is bogus, based on the evidence. Yet you’re waist-deep in the cover-up.”
Dark eyes beseeched me from under a furrowed brow. “Haven’t I given you enough, Mr. Heller? What more could I have for you?”
“Let’s find out. You were there through the night. You know what happened. You know an ambulance came, you know high-level cops from the Intelligence Division were everywhere, all kinds of government spooks, and of course a studio cleanup crew. You let this go on for hours without officially notifying the police. You could lose your license for that, Doc. You don’t let a corpse sit for four hours or more before notifying the coroner.”
“You said it yourself, Mr. Heller. The police were already there.”
“So why did you play along? I have theories. Would you like to hear?”
He shrugged, his smirk stopping just short of disgust.
“Your treatment of Marilyn is riddled with unethical behavior. Whether that rises to the standard of you getting your license yanked, I couldn’t say. But you took Marilyn on, even though a lover of hers, a man she nearly married during thi
s period, was already your patient—Frank Sinatra. You took Marilyn on even though Mickey Rudin, your brother-in-law, was her attorney. You placed a former psychiatric nurse of yours, Eunice Murray, in your patient’s home as a spy. You inserted yourself into your patient’s business affairs, and—”
“Need we go over this ground again, Mr. Heller? I won’t argue I may have crossed certain ethical lines, but nothing that would cost me my license to practice.”
“Yeah? What if your first loyalty wasn’t to your patient? What if you were really working for the Kennedys?”
“What?”
“Frank Sinatra knew about Marilyn and Jack. Mickey Rudin knew. Back around ’60, when you took over Marilyn’s case, Frank was very close to the Kennedys. Was placing you as Marilyn’s shrink a way to keep track of her state of mind?”
Now the disgust was openly displayed. “Perhaps you should return the gun to your hand, Mr. Heller. Because that’s the only way I will sit for such insulting nonsense.”
“Well, it’s actually the lesser of two evils. The other possibility is that you’re a Soviet spy.”
His dark eyes showed white all around. “Oh, my God—you really do need to leave, Mr. Heller. I have tried to be cooperative.…”
He’d asked me to, so I got the gun back in hand. Didn’t exactly point it at him. Didn’t exactly not point it at him.
“Your Communist ties are well known by Uncle Sam,” I reminded him. “You and Dr. Engelberg. I’d like to talk to him, too.”
“You can’t. He’s in Switzerland.”
“What, making a deposit? You Beverly Hills Commies kill me. So, with your ties to Eunice Murray and her husband—who I understand built this very house we’re in—and ol’ silver-spoon Communist Vanderbilt Field and a whole passel of fellow travelers, you’ve surrounded Marilyn with caring, Communist attention. But what if you have arranged to be Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist so you can hear the things that Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy shared with this eager-to-learn young woman? And didn’t you even help her craft questions to ask Bobby, for her to write the answers down in her notebooks?”
“You can’t believe this.”
I let the gun droop. “Actually, I can’t. It is absurd—are you working for the Kennedys, or the Soviet Union? Or maybe Jack and Bobby are Commie spies. Even Ian Fleming couldn’t sell this crap. But you couldn’t take that chance, could you?”
“What chance?”
“That your very real Communist associations would come out. That’s why you had to go along with whatever the Kennedys’ favorite at the LAPD, Captain Hamilton of the Intelligence Division, asked. And what was asked of you by the CIA or FBI or Secret Service or whatever mix of spooks came around to haunt Marilyn’s hacienda that night. You had no choice. You even, at first, became the spokesman for the suicide crowd. But that finally caught in your craw, didn’t it?”
He said nothing. He was looking past me, either at the window or maybe into his conscience. I considered offering him mine—the nine-millimeter one.
“It’s not often I have to give a doctor a bad prognosis,” I said, “but here it is—today somebody pulled me in and told me bad things about you. Some true, some false or at least exaggerations. I have a reputation, as you noted, for what these gents call ‘rough justice.’”
Now his eyes met mine. “I don’t follow you, Mr. Heller.”
“Somebody, CIA or FBI or, yeah, even Secret Service, grabbed me and tried to sell you to me as Marilyn’s killer. Thinking I would do something rash, like break into your house and put a bullet in your brain.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I do kid around. But not this time. They thought they could play me. Manipulate me into taking you out. Play me a phony tape and watch me dance. Chances are, I would have wound up either dead or arrested for your murder. Maybe Hamilton is sitting out there in an unmarked car, waiting for a gunshot. Anyway, in somebody’s eyes, you would make a good corpse and I would make a better patsy.”
He thought about that. “What can I do?”
“I would write everything down or record it, essentially a full confession, and let everyone know … start with Hamilton … that should you have a fatal accident, that information will go public. Public in the way they thought Marilyn was going to.”
Now his smile bore no disgust. “That is good advice, Mr. Heller. You may not be as ‘crazy’ as you seem.”
“First, hearing that from a psychiatrist is kind of a relief. Second, I got out of the Marines on a Section Eight, so don’t be too sure.” I stood, tucked the nine-mil in my waistband, zipped the jacket over it. “You mind if I go out the front door?”
“Please.”
“Sorry for the intrusion, Doc.”
I was halfway out the den when he said, “There is no way in my lifetime, Mr. Heller, that I can ever make up for this—for aiding the very people who likely took that sweet child’s life.…”
“You’re right. Probably isn’t.”
“I don’t really know if I will ever get over it, completely. And I’ll always wonder if there was some way I might have saved her.”
I shrugged. “You might try therapy.”
And left him there.
CHAPTER 23
At Flo’s Roxbury manse, I learned just how hard and fast my little Brenda Starr could work. For all the pampering cocktail parties and press junkets, she proved as hard-boiled a newswoman as Rosalind Russell pretended to be in His Girl Friday.
In a home office as messy as she was well-groomed, Flo Kilgore sat in a T-shirt and rolled-up jeans and no shoes, fingers flying at her Smith-Corona, machine-gunning keys, answering each ding with a forceful carriage return. The converted bedroom was filled with filing cabinets, research books, folders of clippings, and haphazardly stacked steno pads, though she never seemed to have any trouble finding in a flash whatever she needed.
I was chiefly a bystander, or sitter, plopped in a comfy chair between a filing cabinet and a worktable, finishing the last couple hundred pages of The Carpetbaggers. My God, did anybody really have this much sex?
Anyway, my presence was needed for the questions and clarifications she would on occasion toss over her shoulder, her fingers frozen over the keys, poised to attack once I had provided whatever tidbit she required.
We started (if I may generously include myself as part of the process) around 10:00 A.M., after her cook fed us corned-beef hash and buttermilk pancakes, and she had a draft of the story by 1:00 P.M.
She handed it to me, saying, “Remember, we don’t have to solve the mystery. Just raise legitimate questions, and throw light on the dark areas.”
That she had.
Tough but fair, with plenty of confidential sources but a good number going on the record (myself included), the in-depth article made no bones about personal relationships between Marilyn Monroe and both John and Robert Kennedy, and established clearly that RFK had been at MM’s house the afternoon before she died.
The scientific impossibility of an accidental drug overdose by Marilyn, and the probability of a “hot shot” injection having killed her (despite the deputy coroner’s search for injection marks), was stunningly well argued. The presence of the studio, police, and likely government cleanup crews manipulating the scene and even staging the suicide break-in, all during the early morning hours before the death was officially called in, was firmly established.
“What do you think?” she asked, bright-eyed, her smile tentatively proud.
“Ship it,” I said.
But what she did was call it in, and somebody in New York took down the copy word-for-word (“… period, paragraph…”), all twenty-five hundred of them.
We took a late lunch at Nate ’n Al’s, both casual, though she’d traded her T-shirt and Levi’s for a white blouse and gray skirt. I still had on the lime-green polo and darker green Jaymar slacks I’d worn over to her place this morning. We laughed in the face of death by sharing a huge pastrami and Swiss cheese sandwich.
/> “You really like it?” she said eagerly.
“I love pastrami.”
She giggled. “No. You know.…”
“I think,” I said grandly, Russian dressing dribbling down my mouth, “you will be the first Hollywood columnist ever to win the Pulitzer.”
She beamed, her blue eyes bright; her dark brown hair bounced at her shoulders, none of that bouffant noise. “You’re not teasing?”
“No. It’s a well-substantiated piece. What now?”
“Now I wait to hear from my editor.”
“Will he get back to you on a Saturday?”
“For this story, you bet.”
But she didn’t hear till deep into Sunday. I was back at my bungalow, and Sam had come over to use the hotel pool. I was in my swim trunks and a Catalina pullover, about to follow him out, when the phone rang.
She was in tears. And angry.
“Cocksuckers,” she said.
Flo didn’t swear lightly, so I knew at once her story had been nixed.
“What did your editor say?”
“He said I did a ‘damn good job of research.’ But even though the Herald Tribune is a Republican paper, this is an election year, and the story would seem a ‘gratuitous slap’ at the president and his brother. They’re killing it.”
“Christ, how the hell do you write off exposing a movie star’s murder as a gratuitous fucking slap?”
“I think this is more than just editorial policy. I … Nate, I know it’s more.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have contacts in the administration.” She wasn’t crying now, at least not sobbing, though she snuffled some. “They say the Trib sent the story over by telex and asked them to confirm or deny the reporting about Bobby and Jack. They refused to do either, which was bad enough, but you can bet some pressure was put on, behind the scenes.”
“Always is. Can you take it elsewhere?”
Her sigh seemed endless. Then: “If a paper as right-leaning as the Trib won’t print the thing, who will? I might find a magazine to use it, but I would likely lose my job. And I like my job. Anyway … I used to like my job.…”
Bye Bye, Baby Page 29