Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Her imminent departure was intolerable to him, the ultimate rejection by his ultimate patient. He considered her, therefore, as one who failed to be his, and in the end he treated her just as such a man would: capriciously, placing her in a perilous situation. In some dark corner of his mind, he may have known or feared or even wished that his temerity would lead to tragedy.

  And herein lies the tragedy of Marilyn Monroe’s death. Something brave, new and mature was emerging in her those last months, as every deed, interview, human interaction and performance witnesses. She was finally taking control of her life, as those closest to her testified; she was in some inchoate way banishing the crippling ghosts that had so long surrounded her. Never contemptuous of those who had hurt or misguided her, she was now kinder still, more concerned than ever for those her life had touched. Only in this spirit can her finest qualities be appreciated—her refusal to malign husbands or lovers for the sake of a good interview; her rejection of self-pity; her devotion to Isadore Miller, to Arthur’s children, to the young DiMaggio. There were remarkable, almost miraculous acts of hope in her own future: her return to Joe, her new projects, her willingness to cast out the unhelpful people, the old and the jaded parts of her life.

  This buoyant spirit had been activated before, when she first turned her back on Hollywood in 1955, feeling that her life was stymied. That spirit returned to her now, too, and it must have had something to do with Joe DiMaggio—although not everything, for theirs was hardly a passionate love in its first full bloom, and they were both too wise not to know there were shoals yet to be negotiated. “But there’s a future, and I can’t wait to get to it,” she had recently told one reporter. Enthusiasm and humility, a green hope coupled with the longing to go on, to transcend what had been—rarely has so graceful a spirit been so cruelly silenced.

  Silenced indeed. Marilyn Monroe died at the mercy of those who believed their mission was to save her—not for her sake, but for themselves. They wanted to own her. Marilyn Monroe’s death gives new meaning to the phrase California Gothic.

  Late Saturday afternoon, Marilyn had begun to write to Joe, whom she so anxiously awaited; it would be pleasant to think that she was writing it after he telephoned. But something interrupted her, and the note was found, folded in her address book. When the house was searched for a suicide letter before her body was removed next morning, the address book was left untouched, or perhaps the note was discreetly left in place by the searcher. Like her life, it was something good, in process:

  Dear Joe,

  If I can only succeed in making you happy, I will have succeeded in the biggest and most difficult thing there is—that is, to make one person completely happy. Your happiness means my happiness, and

  * * *

  1. As for a small cache of Marilyn’s personal letters and papers, they were duly removed next day by Inez Melson, after whose death in 1986 they passed first to a collector, thence to DS.

  2. For what follows, the author is grateful for corroborative reports filed with John Miner by two internationally renowned pathologists: Dr. Milton Halpern, former chief medical examiner of the City of New York; and Dr. Leopold Breitenecker, medical examiner for the City of Vienna, professor at the University of Vienna and one of the great European forensic pathologists. In 1982, Dr. Boyd G. Stephens, chief medical examiner–coroner of the City and County of San Francisco, provided the City of Los Angeles with an independent review of the autopsy evidence. In 1992, DS further consulted Dr. Arnold Abrams, medical director of Pathology at St. John’s Hospital, Santa Monica.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  AUGUST 6–8, 1962

  THE BODY DESIRED BY MILLIONS belonged to no one: on Monday morning, August 6, Marilyn Monroe’s remains still lay unclaimed at the Los Angeles County morgue. And so, to no one’s surprise, Joe DiMaggio stepped in to adjudicate the last details. Late that afternoon, she was brought back to the Westwood Village Mortuary on Glendon Avenue, a few steps from busy Wilshire Boulevard.

  Ten years earlier, at the start of her great dash to stardom, Marilyn had asked her friend Allan Snyder to come to a hospital just before she was to be discharged: she wanted to look her best for the public and the cameras. For fifteen years, no one understood her fears and her features better than he, no one was more patient and loyal in devoting his craft to her benefit.

  “Promise me something, Whitey,” she had said, using his familiar nickname, while he brushed and lined, highlighting here and toning there.

  “Anything, Marilyn.”

  “Promise me that if something happens to me—please, nobody must touch my face but you. Promise you’ll do my makeup, so I’ll look my best when I leave.”

  “Sure,” he said, teasing. “Bring the body back while it’s still warm and I’ll do it!”

  A few weeks later, Allan received a gift box from Tiffany’s. Wrapped in a light blue pouch was a gold money clip with an engraving:

  Whitey Dear

  While I’m still warm

  Marilyn

  Now it was time to call in the promise. On Tuesday, August 7, the telephone rang at Snyder’s Malibu home.

  “Whitey?” Joe was calling from his hotel room in Santa Monica. “Whitey, you promised—will you do it, please—for her?”

  No explanation was necessary. They both remembered.

  “I’ll be there, Joe.”

  And so Allan drove to the mortuary. Swiftly, deftly, reverently, he took up his bases and brushes, his liquids and rouges, and worked there in the cool room. He had done this job so many times, had worked on her while she laughed and chatted or simply slept; he had prepared Marilyn for so many public appearances before she exited from dressing rooms, airplanes and clinics. Now, as Allan completed his task, Joe entered.

  On Wednesday morning, August 8, Allan returned early, knowing that the makeup would surely need retouching.

  Joe was still there. He had spent the night with his beloved, his fingers clasped tightly, his gaze fixed on Marilyn’s features: it was the solitary vigil of an adoring knight, worshipful from twilight to dawn on the eve of a great battle. Now Joe sat motionless, leaning forward as if by sheer force of love and longing he could urge her back to life for their wedding. To strangers, reporters and writers, he never uttered her name again, nor did he ever remarry.

  Joe made a hard decision during those three days. There would be no Hollywood stars or directors at the funeral, no producers or studio executives, no newsmen, reporters or photographers: they had only hurt Marilyn, he said. Instead, only thirty relatives and friends were to be admitted, among them Berniece, who had come from Florida out of respect for the half-sister she scarcely knew but had come to admire from afar; Enid Knebelkamp, Grace’s sister; the Snyders; Lee and Paula Strasberg; May Reis; Ralph Roberts; and the Greenson family, with Eunice Murray. Jim Dougherty, remarried, was at his job with the Los Angeles Police Department, and Arthur Miller, also remarried, likewise declined to attend.

  Gladys, still at Rockhaven, never knew of her daughter’s death. She was released from the sanitarium several years later and, after living for a time with Berniece, entered a Florida nursing home where she died of congestive heart failure on March 11, 1984, at eighty-two. When questioned, Gladys seemed not quite certain who Norma Jeane was or who she had become.

  The service began in the mortuary chapel at one o’clock, when an organist offered a selection from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and one of Marilyn’s favorite melodies, “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz. A local minister preached, taking his text from the Book of Amos: “How wonderfully she was made by her Creator.” Then, as Joe had requested, Lee Strasberg spoke briefly: “We knew her,” he said, his voice shaking and his eyes glazed with tears, “as a warm human being, impulsive, shy and lonely, sensitive and in fear of rejection, yet ever avid for life and reaching out for fulfillment. The dream of her talent was not a mirage.”

  Before the casket was closed, Joe bent over, weeping openly as he kissed Marilyn. “I lo
ve you, my darling—I love you,” he said, placing a nosegay of pink roses in her hands. Henceforward for twenty years, flowers would be delivered weekly from Joe to her burial place—just as he had promised Marilyn when she told him of William Powell’s pledge to the dying Jean Harlow. Joe then led the group from the chapel to the crypt, a hundred yards away. They passed the grave markers of Ana Lower, buried here in 1948, and of her niece Grace McKee Goddard, who had followed five years later.

  That day they were gathered at the center of the neighborhood where Marilyn had spent almost all her life. It was the same small arena where she had grown and gone out to work in such a brief but brilliant radiance, this local girl who now belonged to the world. There were Hawthorne and the old Bolender house to the south; the Los Angeles Orphans Home eastward in Hollywood, near the place where Gladys and Grace worked at film-cutting benches and took the girl to the movies; and very close, Nebraska Avenue, where she lived with Aunt Ana, and Emerson Junior High School, where Norma Jeane was “the Mmmmm Girl,” dating the wise-cracking Chuck Moran. Near them, too, were University High; the house where she married Jim; the soundstages of Twentieth Century—Fox; and Fifth Helena Drive.

  They stood silently while the coffin was placed in a marble wall-crypt to which a bronze plaque was attached:

  MARILYN MONROE

  1926–1962

  After the mourners had departed, reporters, newsreel photographers and the public were at last permitted to approach. In the cemetery garden, cameras clicked and movie film whirred all afternoon and through the quiet evening.

  Afterword:

  The Great Deception

  AFTER THE PUBLICATION of his book The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe in 1974 (see chapter 11, footnote beginning on page 227), Robert Slatzer continued to trumpet his unfounded relationship with Marilyn Monroe, presenting, without proof, information about himself and about her affair with Robert Kennedy and turning it into a cottage industry. Quoted in magazine articles, cited in books and featured on sensational television shows, Slatzer became the ultimate torchbearer and self-proclaimed authority. Marching as a heroic pursuer of justice, he played point man in a long-running, grotesque literary charade that matches any other for brazen audacity.

  Others contributed to the legend. They include Lionel Grandison, a former coroner’s aide who said that the police falsified Marilyn’s autopsy; Jack Clemmons, the sergeant who first arrived at Marilyn’s home the morning of August 5, 1962; Milo Speriglio, a private detective who published his own fantastic allegations based on Slatzer’s questionable testimony; and Jeanne Carmen, who has described herself as one of the star’s closest friends but who, like Slatzer himself, was completely unknown to anyone who knew or worked with Marilyn. Slatzer and company regularly trot onto television talk shows, where they cheerfully corroborate one another’s outlandish assertions.

  In part, the success of Slatzer’s enterprise witnesses the permanent fascination the world has for Marilyn Monroe, the first public icon to suffer an untimely death during the 1960s. The subsequent allegation that her murder was politically motivated elevated her to the pantheon of that era’s tortuous history, and the supposed involvement of the Kennedys tapped into the realm of conspiracy and fable pre-eminently attached to that family.

  But how did such colorful tales originate?

  The first plank of it was put into place by New York gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen even before Marilyn died. On Friday, August 3, 1962, she published the news that Marilyn was “vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio.”1 She was then rivaled by columnist Walter Winchell, who pointed to “one of the President’s appointees . . . who ran like a Husband [sic]—back to his wife.” Winchell was following a lead from the right-wing fanatic Frank A. Capell, a man who—like Winchell himself—deeply hated the Kennedy clan, believing them soft on communism. Since 1938, as confidential investigator and then chief of the Subversive Activities Department for the Sheriff of Westchester County, New York, Capell had seen Communists lurking everywhere. But he was no ideal American: moving to the Compliance Division of the War Production Board, he was indicted and pleaded guilty in 1945 to three counts of conspiring with a colleague to solicit bribes from government contractors. Forced into civilian life, he began publishing a Communist-baiting newsletter, The Herald of Freedom.

  One of Capell’s buddies was Jack Clemmons, the first policeman on the scene after Marilyn’s death. Clemmons was also connected to The Police and Fire Research Organization (more familiarly, “Fi-Po”), a team dedicated to exposing “subversive activities which threaten our American way of life.” In this capacity, Clemmons met with Capell just six weeks after Marilyn’s death to investigate supposed Communist affiliations in Hollywood. Clemmons then introduced Capell to Maurice Ries, president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an anti-Communist forum that made headlines in the 1950s when it charged the Screen Writers Guild with fostering a Communist invasion of the movie world. At a meeting attended by all three men, Ries held forth on the hundreds of files he had compiled on celebrities, turning at last to the case of Marilyn Monroe.

  “I’ll tell you a story,” Ries said. “Marilyn had been having an affair with Bobby Kennedy, and Bobby promised to marry her, and then he changed his mind and wanted to get rid of her. And she was threatening to go public with the story, and the Kennedys had her murdered to shut her up.”

  “It sounds very interesting,” Clemmons said, adding later, “Capell said we should look into this. He said, ‘Jack, will you help me?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, Frank, I’ll help you.’ ”

  His assistance took the form of a call to the Coroner’s office, where Clemmons learned that no residue of pills had been found in Marilyn’s stomach during autopsy. “For a long time that was really the only hard physical evidence we had,” Clemmons recalled. But it was enough to convince him and Capell that Ries was right in his theory, and at once Capell (thus Clemmons) “kept feeding information to Walter Winchell, and over a period of time Walter Winchell printed the whole theory in his column.”

  Capell’s own version of the story was published in 1964 as The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe by his own Herald of Freedom imprint. In this seventy-page pamphlet, he offered an odd combination of autopsy, police and court reports with a haphazard and somewhat hysterical review of alleged Communist affiliations of almost every principal in Marilyn’s life, from Arthur Miller to Ralph Greenson to Hyman Engelberg. Capell used the snippets published by Winchell (which was virtually a case of Capell citing himself) and grandly announced his verdict. After a lengthy conjecture about Marilyn’s romance with Robert Kennedy, Capell claimed that, “because of the closeness of their friendship, she was led to believe his intentions were serious.” He then states that, since Kennedy was a Communist sympathizer, he “wanted her out of the way” because of his “mad ambition,” and so he covered up her murder by “deploying his personal Gestapo.” Such a paranoid imagination is perhaps unknown since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  At this point, into the picture stepped J. Edgar Hoover, who learned of the imminent publication of Capell’s book through Winchell, Hoover’s close friend and regular conduit for celebrity news. The FBI director at once gleefully wrote to Robert Kennedy: “[Capell’s] book will make reference to your alleged friendship with the late Miss Monroe. Mr. Capell stated that he will indicate in his book that you and Miss Monroe were intimate, and that you were in Miss Monroe’s home at the time of her death.” Appropriately, Kennedy made no reply.

  In 1964 and 1965, Capell and Clemmons collaborated still further, joining a radical right-wing ideologue named John Fergus in yet another defamatory political attack—this one aimed at Senator Thomas H. Kuchel of California, a Republican who incurred the wrath of racist groups by supporting the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  Capell, Clemmons and Fergus were indicted in February 1965 by a California grand jury for conspiracy to libel by obt
aining and distributing a false affidavit asserting that Senator Kuchel had once been arrested on a morals charge—specifically, that he had a homosexual encounter in the back of a car. The affidavit was based on an actual 1950 case, but one involving entirely different people and in no way connected to Kuchel. After the indictment, Capell and Clemmons issued the unintentionally hilarious statement that the press had demonstrated “disregard for our accepted standards of fair play.” After a two-month trial, it was determined that the conspirators engaged in “arm-twisting” to obtain a false affidavit, and “with smirking satisfaction began to apply it to their own purposes.” The judge accepted guilty pleas from Capell and Fergus; charges against Clemmons were dropped on condition he resign from the Los Angeles Police Department.

  With the framers of the “Kennedy-killed-Monroe” fiction thus disgraced by 1965, the matter should have died. But the vein of malicious gossip it tapped was too appealing, the Kennedy-Monroe story too inflammatory to forget. Nothing more came into print before Robert Kennedy’s death in 1968, although the rumor mill continued to grind pernicious morsels. Stories were matched and swapped, embellished and improvised. But after Kennedy’s assassination, the whispers became shouts.