That sounded innocent enough, but in his prize-winning biography Robert Kennedy—And His Times Schlesinger proceeded to say more, and helped fuel the rumors which have ever since haunted the enigma of Marilyn Monroe’s death. “There was something at once magical and desperate about her,” Schlesinger wrote.
Robert Kennedy, with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directness of response to distress, in some way got through the glittering mist as few did. He met her again at Patricia Lawford’s house in Los Angeles. She called him thereafter in Washington, using an assumed name. She was very often distraught. Angie Novello [a Justice Department aide] talked to her more often than the Attorney General did. One feels that Robert Kennedy came to inhabit the fantasies of her last summer. She dreamily told her friend W. J. Weatherly of the Manchester Guardian that she might get married again; someone in politics in Washington; no name vouchsafed. Another friend, Robert Slatzer, claims she said Robert Kennedy had promised to marry her. As Weatherly commented, “Could she possibly believe that Kennedy would ruin himself politically for her?”
Which happens to be exactly the motive a generation of investigative journalists have ascribed as the cause of Marilyn Monroe’s death.
Among the most vocal of these journalists was Robert Slatzer, who claimed to have married Monroe briefly in the early fifties and said he remained her lifelong friend. In his book The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe, published in 1974, Slatzer alleged that when Robert Kennedy reneged on his “promise” to marry Monroe she was in a position to blackmail him with her “diary,” which mysteriously disappeared after her death. Lending credence to that argument, Los Angeles private investigator Robert Speriglio said he had investigated Slatzer’s background and believed he had indeed married Monroe as he said he had. Based on his own investigation, Speriglio also believed Monroe was murdered because of the diary.
In the twenty years since her death, speculations and theories about how and why Marilyn Monroe died have grown as numerous as the theories surrounding the assassinations of President Kennedy and of Robert Kennedy himself. The most prevalent of them called Monroe’s death murder, done to silence her and prevent her from destroying Robert Kennedy’s political career. I called her death suicide—both twenty years ago and today—but I admit there are many disturbing questions that have remained unanswered.
Norma Jean Baker was born in Los Angeles General Hospital (now the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center), to a mother with a history of mental illness and a “biker” father who deserted her mother before Norma Jean was born and who died in a fiery motorcycle accident not three years later. When her mother was committed to a mental institution, the little girl was sent to live with different sets of foster parents, ranging from whisky-drinking low-lifes to religious fanatics. In between she spent years in a Los Angeles orphanage.
The war saved her. In 1942 women were being hired to work in defense plants, and Norma Jean broke out of her foster-parent straitjacket by acquiring a job at an aircraft factory, where she met and soon married James Dougherty, who represented even more long-range security. But in that same year she was also perceived as an emerging beauty, with soft blond hair, wide, dreamy blue-gray eyes, and a voluptuous figure that drew whistles at the aircraft plant. At war’s end she was nineteen, and photographers were asking to snap her picture.
And she still clung to a childhood dream—remembered in a poignant interview a few years later when she was just starting out as a motion picture actress doing bit parts. In an interview with Associated Press columnist James Bacon at the RKO studio, she recalled that she had lived in a foster home near the studio when she was a little girl. She received an allowance of five cents a month from her foster parents, in exchange for which she washed all of the dishes. “They had kids of their own and when Christmas came there was a big tree and all the kids in the house got presents but me. One of the other kids gave me an orange.”
Marilyn said she could still remember eating that orange all by herself. “And I could look up and see the RKO studio water tower. I think that’s when I decided that someday I would be an actress, and someday I would get inside that studio.
“And here I am,” she told Bacon. “It’s a real dream come true.”
Driven by that dream, Norma Jean divorced Dougherty in 1946 and became one of the countless young girls who arrive in Hollywood each year, knowing that beyond the locked gates of motion picture studios incredible fame and riches can be won—not only by talent, but by a “look,” a shape, an inflection of the voice. But success did not come overnight for the young woman who now called herself Marilyn Monroe. It was four long years before she finally landed a walk-on part in a gangster film called Asphalt Jungle. Her scenes were brief but electric, and moviegoers were enchanted by her beauty, her sensuality, and yet through it all a vulnerable innocence which she never lost. Her new fans and the studio bosses took notice. She won better and larger roles until, in 1953, scandal almost derailed her rise to stardom. It was revealed that she had posed nude for a calendar while she was a struggling starlet.
The studio heads awaited the national outcry of outrage and shock. But the criticism, amazingly, never came. There was something about Marilyn Monroe that everyone liked, no matter what. Bravely, she held a press conference to face belligerent reporters. Why had she posed naked? Monroe answered simply, “Because I needed the money.”
One outraged female reporter apparently couldn’t believe that Monroe had really been completely nude. “Didn’t you have anything on at all when you posed?” she asked.
“Only the radio,” Monroe said, smiling, and won everyone’s hearts forever.
The controversy over the calendar catapulted Monroe to worldwide celebrity, a status she never lost. At the height of her fame, she received thousands of letters a week, dozens proposing marriage. According to The New York Times, Communists denounced her as a capitalist trick to make the American people forget how miserable they were.
But somewhere along the way things started to go wrong. In 1954 she married the most popular male athlete in the country, Joe DiMaggio, the baseball player. The marriage lasted only nine months. In 1956 Marilyn entered into another “dream” marriage, this one to the country’s leading intellectual playwright, Arthur Miller. That dream also ended in divorce, in 1960. In fact, during the period of her greatest career success she had one personal disaster after another, ranging from miscarriages to failed marriages. She was told by doctors that she would never be able to have a child.
And then her acting career began a disastrous dip. Two films, Let’s Make Love and The Misfits, were box-office disappointments. And she started battling with her studio, 20th Century-Fox, over her next film, Something’s Got to Give. She said she didn’t want to do the picture. But now, for the first time, the studio, which used to be awed by its star, refused to bow to her wishes. The bitter message was clear. She was no longer a box-office phenomenon who could make her own rules.
Against that depressing background, the emergence of the two Kennedy brothers in her life must have seemed thrilling and magical. Shoddy Hollywood types may have been downgrading her, but at the same time she was rumored to be romancing the President of the United States. And then his brother the Attorney General began paying close attention to her, too, even visiting her Hollywood home.
Everything else in her life had turned sour. Strapped for cash, she was forced to give up her expensive cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel and rent a modest home in Brentwood. She was taking so many tranquilizers that her psychiatrist became alarmed and had to put her on a pill-reducing program. And then, for one reason or another, the only bright light in her existence, the Kennedy connection, began blinking off, and her “distraught” calls to Robert Kennedy commenced—until, eventually, she couldn’t reach him on the telephone.
At this point, Marilyn Monroe became so depressed that her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, insisted she hire a psychiatric nurse/housekee
per, Eunice K. Murray, to watch over her. And yet Monroe was fighting back. She had contacted the president of 20th Century—Fox about resuming work on the suspended motion picture. And she was actively considering offers to appear in a Broadway musical and a giant Las Vegas show for which she was guaranteed fifty-five thousand dollars a week.
So Mrs. Murray wasn’t really worried when Marilyn Monroe came down to breakfast on August 4, 1962.
“Orange juice?” Monroe said with a smile. “Looks good.” Dressed in a blue robe, she appeared surprisingly cheerful as she sat down across a table from the housekeeper, poured herself some juice and started chatting. But suddenly she asked Mrs. Murray a question that startled her. “Is there any oxygen in the house?”
Oxygen? Mrs. Murray thought. This wasn’t a hospital. Why would oxygen be kept in a private home? She told Marilyn there was none and asked her why she wanted it. Marilyn said she was just curious.
Later that morning, Mrs. Murray telephoned Dr. Greenson to report the strange question, and Greenson said he would stop over later and talk to Marilyn about it.
At twelve noon, Mrs. Murray heard an argument in the hall. Pat Newcomb, Monroe’s friend and press agent, had slept over the night before. And from what Murray could hear, Monroe was angry because Newcomb had removed her sleeping pills that night and Monroe hadn’t been able to sleep. Now Mrs. Murray knew why Monroe, who usually slept until noon, had dropped into the kitchen for breakfast so early that morning. She heard the door slam as Newcomb left.
Dr. Greenson arrived in the afternoon and spent two hours with his celebrated patient. He later reported that she was “confused and disoriented,” but even up until the time of his own death several years later he never divulged Marilyn’s reason for asking about oxygen.
Monroe, as usual, remained in her robe all day, spending most of that time in bed, talking on the telephone. Nevertheless, Mrs. Murray perceived no hint of a suicidal depression. In fact, at 7:30 P.M. Monroe was laughing and chatting on the telephone with Joe DiMaggio’s son, Joe Junior.
Yet—and this was one of the strangest facts of the case—not thirty minutes after that happy conversation, Marilyn Monroe was dying.
We know this from the report of a telephone call made to Monroe at about eight that night. And the identity of the person who originated the call was another strange fact that has provided grist for the murder theorists. For it was Robert Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford.
Lawford didn’t reveal the occurrence of that telephone conversation until a columnist who was a personal friend of Monroe’s, Earl Wilson, got onto it. Twenty years later, in his New York Post column, Wilson wrote:
I’ve been remembering that weekend twenty years ago when Marilyn Monroe died mysteriously.
I remember very vividly the last words that anybody re-called her saying. Marilyn spoke them to Peter Lawford and he told them to me.
“Hey, Charlie,” Lawford told Wilson he had said to Monroe, using a slang salutation of those days. He had telephoned her because she was supposed to join him and friends for a poker game and then dinner. His wife, Patricia, was on Cape Cod at the Kennedy compound.
According to Lawford, Monroe’s voice was slurred. She said she couldn’t come to dinner that night. Then she added words that were chilling: “Say goodbye to Pat, say goodbye to the President. Say goodbye to yourself because you’ve been a good guy.”
Then, abruptly, she clicked off.
According to Wilson, Lawford said that when somebody says goodbye, “I think that’s terminal.” He thought she was dying, and, alarmed, he called his manager, who reminded him of a problem. “You’re the brother-in-law of the President of the United States. You can’t go over there.” However, the manager apparently tracked down Milton Rudin, Monroe’s agent, who called Monroe’s house. It was then about 9:30 P.M., an hour and a half after her explicit “goodbye” conversation with Lawford.
Rudin inquired if Monroe was “all right.” And Mrs. Murray knew that the light was still shining in Monroe’s bedroom, and the cord to her telephone was still under the door. When Monroe was awake, and hadn’t taken any pills, she always placed that telephone in another room for the night. So Mrs. Murray believed that Monroe was alive and well. And Rudin was reassured.
Mrs. Murray then went to sleep. But sometime in the middle of the night she awoke and noticed that the light was still burning in Monroe’s room. Monroe never stayed awake that late. Was something wrong? She tried the door and found it locked. Monroe didn’t answer her calls. Frightened, Mrs. Murray summoned Dr. Greenson, who broke a window with a poker from the fireplace to gain access to Monroe’s bedroom.
They found the famous actress lying nude on her bed. In a poignant image that soon flashed around the world, Monroe’s arm was outstretched, her hand on the telephone, as she lay in death.
Sergeant Jack Clemmons, watch commander at the West Los Angeles police station, logged a telephone call from Dr. Greenson reporting Monroe’s death at 4:25 A.M. Sunday. Marilyn Monroe? he thought. It had to be joke. Instead of alerting a cruiser, as he normally would have done, he drove over himself to check the call.
Clemmons became suspicious immediately about the circumstances of Monroe’s death. For one thing, the timing bothered him. Mrs. Murray said that they had found the body shortly after midnight, but Clemmons hadn’t been called until 4:25 A.M. What had gone on in the meanwhile? Dr. Greenson said they had telephoned the studio and some of Monroe’s business associates, but the sergeant did not believe that the calls could have taken four hours. Had someone been destroying evidence of foul play? he wondered.
That same morning I was reporting to work at the Medical Examiner’s Office. Since I had joined the office as a deputy medical examiner, I had worked every Sunday and sometimes seven-day weeks because we were understaffed and the work was becoming back-logged. But on that morning I discovered something strange. Dr. Curphey had telephoned the office early to leave me a message. The note on my desk read, “Dr. Curphey wants Dr. Noguchi to do the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe.”
I didn’t think for a moment that he meant the movie star. I simply assumed it was another woman who happened to have the same name, perhaps because to me, as to almost all Americans, Marilyn Monroe was a phantom goddess of the screen, not a real person. In fact, my immediate thoughts were on a different track altogether. I felt sure that this autopsy was going to present a very special scientific problem. A more senior medical examiner would normally have performed the autopsy. And yet Dr. Curphey had made a unique call early on a Sunday morning assigning me to the job.
I was accustomed to requests to perform the more difficult scientific cases because I, alone on Dr. Curphey’s staff, was a university faculty member, assistant professor of pathology for Loma Linda University Medical School, and Board-certified in both clinical and anatomic pathology. So, thinking that this namesake of Marilyn Monroe was going to give me trouble, I began to read the investigator’s report on the death. The decedent was a female Caucasian, blue-eyed, five feet four inches, weight one hundred and fifteen pounds. She had been pronounced dead by a Dr. Engelberg. Many bottles of pills had been found on the table beside her bed, the report continued, including an empty bottle of Nembutal, a sleeping pill, and a partially empty container of another sleeping pill, chloral hydrate, a “knockout” pill, famous as the ingredient in Mickey Finns.
Under the heading “Additional Information,” I found my first real clue as to what had caused the death of this woman named Marilyn Monroe: “Dr. Hyman Engelberg, 9370 Wilshire Boulevard, had given refill on Nembutal day before yesterday.” And farther along in the report I found this note: “Psychiatrist talked to her yesterday, very despondent.”
On Friday the woman had purchased fifty Nembutals, and the next day the bottle beside her bed was empty. A routine suicide, I thought. But why, then, had Dr. Curphey assigned me to it? Perhaps because the autopsy wouldn’t match the facts in the investigator’s report. I knew from experience that autopsies oft
en produce surprises. In fact, I believe that at least twenty percent of autopsies nationwide reveal that the initial theory of the cause of death is wrong.
At about nine-thirty that morning I changed into my white autopsy gown and walked down a narrow fluorescent-lit hallway to the autopsy room. I opened the door, the scent of formaldehyde immediately signaling the presence of death. In front of me, under fluorescent lights, was a long windowless room. Stainless-steel autopsy tables were evenly spaced across a tiled floor, each equipped with a water hose and drainage system, a sink, and a suspended scale. Pathologists dictated their observations into a tape recorder as the autopsy proceeded, or immediately afterward.
In retrospect, I should have been alerted at once to the fact that this was a “special case” by the presence of Deputy District Attorney John Miner, who was the liaison officer to our department.
The body on Table 1 was covered with a white sheet. I pulled it back slowly and stopped. For an instant I couldn’t grasp the fact that I was looking at the face of the real Marilyn Monroe.
It was the first time in my young professional life that I had been emotionally affected by the sight of a decedent on an autopsy table. Forensic pathologists are, of course, inured to death; we must concentrate on our professional duties. And in my case, my mental attitude was additionally fortified by my Buddhist upbringing. Buddhism teaches that life does not end in death; instead it transfers to a new state of being and is, therefore, eternal.
But no one, professional or not, Buddhist or not, could have been unaffected by the sight of the beautiful Marilyn Monroe, so untimely dead. I couldn’t help thinking that here, before me, was a person so incredibly fortunate in every way—from the endowment of an astonishing beauty to the talent, and drive, that had transported her from the ranks of factory workers to a woman who walked with presidents. All gone, so young.
The Coroner Series Page 5