Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  James Hall was the second new informant on Marilyn’s death to appear. When the district attorney’s office did a reinvestigation of Marilyn’s death in 1982, Hall identified himself as an attendant with the ambulance that had arrived to take Marilyn to the hospital. He demanded to be paid for his testimony. When the district attorney’s office refused, he sold his story to a tabloid. He said he was resuscitating Marilyn when a man entered the room carrying a doctor’s bag, claiming to be Marilyn’s doctor. The man brushed him aside and plunged a large needle into her heart. Hall later claimed the doctor was Greenson. Yet Hall wasn’t able to explain why, if such a large needle entered her body, there wasn’t a mark on it. Hall said the needle broke several ribs, but the autopsy found no bruised or broken ribs.

  Lynn Franklin, a policeman in the Beverly Hills Police Department, was the third new informant to appear, after John Miner and James Hall. He claimed to have pulled Peter Lawford over for speeding shortly after midnight the night Marilyn died. Franklin said that Robert Kennedy was in the backseat along with another man that Franklin later identified from photos as Ralph Greenson. According to Franklin, Lawford told him he was going to the Beverly Hilton hotel, where Kennedy had checked in earlier that day, to pick up his luggage and then to take him to the airport.40

  In his 1998 study of Marilyn’s death, The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe, Donald Wolfe accepted the stories of James Hall and Lynn Franklin, while implying that Robert Kennedy had been directly involved in Marilyn’s death. He reconstructed a new version of what happened from a long interview with Norman Jefferies. Jefferies told Wolfe he spent Saturday evening watching television with Eunice Murray in her room. Between nine thirty and ten o’clock, Robert Kennedy, along with two men, appeared at the door. Eunice let them in. Kennedy ordered Eunice and Norman to leave the house for a while. They did so, returning around ten thirty. The men were gone, but Marilyn was comatose in the guest cottage attached to the house. Eunice called Engelberg, Greenson, and an ambulance, in which Hall was an attendant. Wolfe now repeated Hall’s story: He tried to resuscitate Marilyn, but Greenson plunged the needle into her heart, killing her. Marilyn was carried into her bedroom and placed on her bed. In this version of Marilyn’s death, she died in her house, not in the ambulance.

  Biographer C. David Heymann joined the theorists on Marilyn’s death with his reported interview with Peter Lawford, which he used in his 1989 biography of Jackie Kennedy and his 1998 biography of Robert Kennedy. According to Heymann, Lawford told him that Ralph Greenson, Bobby Kennedy, and he were together the night Marilyn died. Lawford also stated that Marilyn had had an affair with Greenson. If that is true, which I doubt, Greenson had a motive to kill her. Yet Lawford told other biographers little about the evening of August 4. Intensely loyal to the Kennedys, on his deathbed he said he would never reveal what he knew. He consistently told his partner and then wife Patricia Lawford Stewart, who was with him for eleven years, that Marilyn had accidentally killed herself, while he blamed himself for her death because he hadn’t gone to her house after she had called him. Whether drunk or sober, engaged in an ordinary conversation or sobbing with guilt, that’s the story he repeated. He repeated that same story to everyone else he knew.41

  Patricia Lawford Stewart became involved in litigation with David Heymann over misrepresentations of her in his biography of Robert Kennedy. She didn’t trust any of the other allegations he made. Loyal to Lawford after his death, she had her lawyer demand that Heymann provide her with the tape of his Peter Lawford interview, but he never did so. When I went through Heymann’s papers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, I found a transcript of the tape, but not the tape itself. When I called Heymann and asked to listen to it, he told me that he was planning to use it in his next book and thus he couldn’t honor my request. I challenge him to produce that tape because I question that it exists, even though authors are now using his transcript as proof that Ralph Greenson killed Marilyn.42

  Greenson had no reason to kill her; she was his most famous patient, and her death devastated him. He hardly knew Peter Lawford. He was ambivalent about Bobby Kennedy; he had warned Marilyn many times that the Kennedys were only using her. In conversations with his family and in his letter to Marianne Kris of August 20, he put forth the “official version” of Marilyn’s death, while suggesting a new scenario. He suggested she killed herself because she couldn’t handle her lesbian urges. There may be some truth to the assertion. The European tabloids were soon to run Natasha Lytess’s lurid story of their affair, which would be a considerable humiliation to Marilyn as well as a public exposure of her deepest secret: she was the world’s heterosexual icon who preferred women as sexual partners. In fact, her long conversation that evening with Henry Rosenfeld, as reported by him to Anthony Summers, was mostly a diatribe against Patricia Newcomb, a woman who was very close to her. Her argument with Newcomb on Saturday is usually dismissed as a cover for her argument with Bobby Kennedy that afternoon, but it actually may have been more important than anyone has realized.

  There are other possibilities to the Kennedy scenario. Even if Bobby was at Marilyn’s house that night, it doesn’t mean that his companions administered the fatal enema. Chuck Giancana, Sam Giancana’s foster son, produced a best seller in which he argued that Giancana ordered the hit because he knew that Bobby Kennedy was there that day and he sent a Mafia hit man to deliver the enema to frame Kennedy as the killer. The plan didn’t work because he didn’t expect the extensive cover-up that happened that night and the one carried out by the Los Angeles Police Department, which drew attention away from Robert Kennedy.43

  The role of the FBI in Marilyn’s death is another avenue for exploration. Phyllis McGuire told me that the FBI had done what the Kennedys wanted in killing Marilyn. She even suggested that Hoover was in Los Angeles directing the operation: an FBI operative told Anthony Summers that a number of FBI agents were in town who normally wouldn’t have been there, and they took Marilyn’s telephone records from the Santa Monica phone company early on the morning of August 5. When Joe Hyams went there looking for them soon after Marilyn died, he was told that the FBI already had them.

  Hoover himself was troubled by Marilyn Monroe. His agents had been following her ever since she had applied for a visa to go to the Soviet Union in 1955 and had become involved with Arthur Miller. He knew of her involvement with the Hollywood Twenty in Mexico City in February 1962; an informer had filed an accurate report on her conversations with Fred Vanderbilt Field as well as her conversations with Bobby Kennedy in the ensuing months. Field claimed that José Bolaños was the informant, but a report filed with Hoover identified Eunice Murray as the source of the report, making a complex situation even more complicated. Hoover’s main concern for many years had been Communists, whom he believed were destroying the nation. Now the nation’s most famous film star, close to the president, seemed to be involved with them. It’s reasonable to assume, given Hoover’s paranoia about Marilyn and the Kennedys and the willingness of Otash and his men to sell copies of the tapes from the bugs that Otash had placed in Marilyn’s house initially for Joe DiMaggio or Jimmy Hoffa, that the FBI was also listening to those tapes.

  The Kennedys’ relationship with Hoover wasn’t simple. Bobby Kennedy had to force him to turn his attention to the Mafia, not just internal Communists, which were his passion. They considered firing him, but he had too much information about Jack’s womanizing for them to do that. Yet the FBI could help them.44 If Kennedy went to Marilyn’s house at ten o’clock the Saturday night Marilyn died with two men accompanying him, the men were in all probability FBI agents. Given that the FBI is experienced in putting devious scenarios into effect, it’s also possible that FBI agents killed Marilyn. But no one has discovered Bobby Kennedy’s movements that day, after he left Marilyn’s house Saturday afternoon. He seems to have driven off with Peter Lawford, but none of the guests at the Lawford party, which began at seven thirty, saw him at the house that night. Lawfor
d told Patricia Lawford Stewart that Bobby left before the party began.

  Marilyn’s many plans for the future—movies she was going to make, galas she was going to attend—seem to indicate that she didn’t take her life. She even intended to go to the performance of Irving Berlin’s new musical in Washington, D.C., the event of the season and a fund-raiser for the Kennedys. She was having Jean Louis make a special dress for it. Some individuals said the dress was for her wedding to DiMaggio, planned for the following Wednesday, but Jean Louis told Anthony Summers that it was definitely an evening dress.45

  It’s possible, however, that her improving mood was key to her death: that’s what Robert Litman believed. It’s characteristic of individuals who suffer from manicdepressive syndrome that entering the up cycle can give them enough energy to kill themselves. Marilyn was in deep transference with Greenson, according to Litman. When Greenson left her Saturday night to go to a party and told her he would see her the next day, it could have sent her over the edge, since such patients want total attention from their psychiatrists. What gives me pause in accepting this explanation is the amount of Nembutal and chloral hydrate that were in Marilyn’s blood—enough to kill several men, more than the fifty tablets of Nembutal she had in her possession at the time she died. Some experts maintain that she had taken sixty Nembutal and large amounts of chloral hydrate, and the two do not interact well in an individual’s blood. It speaks to the issue of the enema, the fast application of drugs in a piston syringe that would have quickly killed her.46

  The Los Angeles Times of August 6, 1962, features an article titled “Film Capital Stunned By Blonde Star’s Death.” It contains statements by people who had seen Marilyn the week before she died, claiming she was happy when they talked to her. “I am deeply shocked,” said Gene Kelly. “I was going to see her this afternoon [Sunday]. We had a project on file for next year.” He had talked to her on the phone on Thursday. “She was in excellent spirits—very happy and very excited about her future projects.”

  Dean Martin made a similar statement and confirmed that Something’s Got to Give was going back into production in early 1963. Patricia Newcomb said Marilyn was planning to go to New York the next week to do a cover for Esquire. Lee Strasberg said she was finally going to audition for the Actors Studio. Joe DiMaggio expected to marry her on Wednesday. With so many projects, it seems unreasonable that she would take her own life. But that life is so filled with paradox, tricksterism, and passion achieved and thwarted that it is impossible to say what she would do. The geography of Marilyn’s life remains wide and deep, filled with the magic and mystery that has made her into a transhistorical symbol of the American imagination.

  Afterword

  Marilyn’s death garnered front-page headlines in every newspaper in the United States and most in Europe. Life gave her an eleven-page spread; Paris Match devoted thirty-six pages to a retrospective on her life. Every major European picture magazine gave her a feature and a cover. It’s said that the suicide rate in Los Angeles doubled the month after she died; the circulation rate of most newspapers expanded that month.

  Joe DiMaggio and Inez Melson planned Marilyn’s funeral. They avoided the normal large Hollywood affair to bury her in a crypt in the Westwood Village Memorial Cemetery and Mortuary, a small cemetery and mortuary in Westwood, not far from Marilyn’s house in Brentwood. It was one of the neighborhood cemeteries that had been built throughout the Los Angeles region in its early years. Many of Marilyn’s family members are buried there, including Grace and Doc Goddard and Ana Lower. After Marilyn was interred there, many other Hollywood notables followed suit, including Natalie Wood, Darryl Zanuck, Truman Capote, Billy Wilder, Jack Lemmon, and Dean Martin.

  The Westwood cemetery is a small place, a bucolic park in the midst of urban sprawl, a block away from the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood boulevards, one of the most heavily traveled intersections in the nation. Discreet gravestones are set in a sweep of green grass. Crypts have been built into walls at one side of the cemetery, with the walls open to the outdoors. An overhang protects the crypts and mourners from rain. After Ana Lower was buried there in 1948, Marilyn went there for spiritual regeneration. She would sit on a bench and read a book. It was a favorite place of hers. It’s not surprising that she wanted to be buried there. DiMaggio and Melson invited only thirty-one individuals to the funeral, including family and close friends. Hollywood people and the Kennedys were kept out, and Pinkerton guards were hired to enforce the guest list. Joe was angry at Hollywood’s treatment of Marilyn. He was also angry at Frank Sinatra and the Kennedys for their involvement in her death.

  Marilyn’s funeral, held in the mortuary chapel, was brief. A local minister read verses from the Bible; Lee Strasberg delivered a eulogy; and a record of Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” was played. Flowers formed a huge array in front of the crypt. Joe had a large heart of red roses made, and Jane and Robert Miller, Arthur’s children, sent a floral wreath with a card signed “Bobo” and “Butch.” The wife of the Mexican president sent a wreath of gardenias and roses, with a card reading, “From the Children of Mexico.” It honored the donation of ten thousand dollars that Marilyn had made to the National Institute for the Protection of Children when she visited Mexico City in March 1962.1

  The funeral didn’t end as discreetly as it began. Michael Selsman, who was in charge of monitoring the event for the Arthur Jacobs agency, told me that a crowd of thousands lined the streets in Westwood, hoping to get a glimpse. Several hundred people lined the walls of the cemetery, peering in. Once the invited guests and the Pinkerton guards left, that crowd couldn’t be restrained. Many of them leapt over the walls and rushed into the cemetery. They descended “in one big wave” on the floral tributes and tore them apart. They grabbed every flower from the individual displays in a furious rush to take a souvenir. In death, as in life, Marilyn was an object of fan devotion and of the potentially out-of-control crowds those fans could turn into. Patricia Rosten called the possessiveness of Marilyn’s normally adoring fans, the way they tried to take something from her—a lock of hair, a piece of her dress—the “dark side” of her fame. Now it was a flower from the floral tributes at her funeral that they were after.2

  Marilyn has passed over into history, but the question I began this book with remains: Was Marilyn a feminist? Is she one of the women who changed the world’s attitude toward women? She took actions that could be called feminist: she made herself into an actress and a star, she formed her own production company, she fought the moguls to a standstill, and she publicly named the sexual abuse visited on her as a child. But she never called herself a feminist. The term wasn’t yet in widespread use, and the movement wouldn’t appear until a number of years after her death. Hedda Rosten, her secretary and close friend, identified her as “the quintessential victim of the male.” Norman Rosten, Hedda’s husband, who was equally close to Marilyn, saw her relationship to feminism differently. He contended that Marilyn would have quarreled with her “sisters” on the issue of sexual liberation. She had achieved the financial and legal gains they sought. And she enjoyed her femininity, recognizing its power over men.3

  Marilyn’s stance as reported by Norman Rosten sounds like a postfeminist position, which privileges power over oppression and emphasizes the power women possess through their femininity and sexuality. On the other hand, one could argue that it was her fixation with her femininity—and her attitude toward it, sometimes regal and sometimes tormented—that caused her victimization in the end. No matter how hard she tried, Hollywood and its men refused to consider her as anything more than a party girl and in the end they treated her like a slut they could use with impunity. She commented to W. J. Weatherby, that “black men don’t like to be called ‘boys,’ but women accept being called ‘girls,’” as though she were offended by the latter term. And she didn’t like male violence. That is apparent in the dispute she had with Weatherby over Ernest Hemingway. Weatherby liked Hemingway for his un
derstanding of human nature. Marilyn didn’t like his masculine heroes. “Those big tough guys are so sick. They aren’t even all that tough! They’re afraid of kindness and gentleness and beauty. They always want to kill something to prove themselves!” She praised the young people who were beginning to rebel against social conventions. In her best moments, she saw herself as part of that movement.

  Yet Marilyn had no gender framework to support her stance, no way of conceptualizing her situation beyond her individual self, to encompass all women, whose rights were limited in the 1950s. Had she lived a few years longer, into the mid-1960s, the feminist movement could have offered the concept of sexism as a way to understand her oppression and the idea of sisterhood as a support.

  The most important statement about Marilyn made after she died was Arthur Miller’s play After the Fall. James Baldwin walked out of it and considered forming a group of celebrities to boycott it. Norman Rosten was deeply upset, and Hedda Rosten even more so. The critics didn’t like it. The Marilyn of After the Fall is a monster—the opposite of Roslyn of The Misfits. She is addicted to drugs and to sex, bent on self-destruction and on destroying her marriage. The play takes place against a backdrop of the Jewish concentration camps in Germany after World War Two. They are now empty of people but filled with memories. Miller—Quentin, a lawyer, in the play—connects Marilyn—a singing star called Maggie in the play—to the camps. The central moment of the play occurs when Miller identifies her with a line of men she has serviced sexually and demands that she take responsibility for her outrageous sexual behavior. Marilyn refuses: the men did it to her; she doesn’t feel that she needs to acknowledge any blame nor seek absolution through a confession of guilt.