Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Hyams and Woodfield knew they had the makings of a sensational story. Hyams called Robert Kennedy’s Washington office for comment and was told that the attorney general would be very appreciative if the story were not run. As Woodfield recalled it, “Joe said to them, ‘It will eventually come out. Why don’t you just say you were at Peter Lawford’s?’ We weren’t saying that Bobby was involved in Marilyn’s death. No one would have guessed from the story that Marilyn and Bobby were involved. Still they refused to comment and asked us not to do the story.”

  Hyams did file the piece with the Herald Tribune, but the paper decided to kill it. The reporting contained, they felt, potentially libelous innuendo about the President and his brother.

  WHILE ROBERT KENNEDY was leaving Los Angeles, there was a great deal of activity at Marilyn’s house on Fifth Helena Drive. By the time Arthur Jacobs arrived at the scene, an ambulance had been called. James Hall, a driver for the Schaefer ambulance service, remembered that he received the call on the way back from another within a few miles of Marilyn’s house. “It took us only a few minutes to get to her house.”

  The official version is that when Marilyn was found, she was dead in her own bed, the telephone receiver in her hand. According to Hall, when he arrived with his partner, Murray Leib,15 Marilyn was in the guest bedroom, not her own room, and she was comatose but still alive. “We had to move her,” Hall recalled, “because you have to put the patient on a hard surface to do CPR or else the chest just sinks into the bed. We picked her up to lay her on the floor and we dropped her. I’ll never forget it because she was the only patient I ever dropped. The coroner talked about an unexplained bruise on her hip — that’s where we dropped her. Dead bodies don’t bruise, so she was definitely still alive.

  “I applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and she was coming around. Pat Newcomb was hysterical. She was trying to climb over us to get to Marilyn while I was working on her. She was screaming, ‘She’s dead! She’s dead!’ over and over again and I wanted to knock the crazy bitch on her butt. She was hampering what we were doing, but I don’t think even a slap on her face would have calmed her down, she was that crazy.

  “Just as Marilyn started coming around, this doctor arrived. I believe it was Dr. Greenson. He had a bag with him and he looked legitimate. He said, ‘I’m her doctor,’ and Pat Newcomb didn’t say he wasn’t, so I figured everything was okay because she never would have allowed anyone near Marilyn who didn’t belong there. I yielded to him and he leaned over her, pushed her breast to one side, and gave her an injection in the crease of her breast.

  “This guy was inept. He was very rough. I winced and thought, ‘God that must hurt.’ Then I heard a pop. It was quite a snap. One minute later she was dead. For years I’ve felt that she had been given an Adrenalin shot in an attempt to save her and it had failed. But now I don’t believe it was an accident. I think the shot was intended to kill her.”

  Hall’s story has been both partially corroborated and vehemently denied. Walter Schaefer, the owner of the ambulance service, confirmed that an ambulance was called to Marilyn’s that night. Pat Newcomb said that she did not go to Marilyn’s house until four in the morning, when she received a call from Mickey Rudin that Marilyn was dead. But Natalie Jacobs insists Pat Newcomb told her that she was the first person on the scene, and Natalie believed it was Pat Newcomb who called the Hollywood Bowl that evening.

  Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who performed the autopsy on Marilyn, stated that he examined her body carefully for needle marks, using a magnifying glass, and found nothing. But according to a bill submitted by Marilyn’s physician Dr. Hyman Engelberg to the Monroe estate, he gave her an injection the day before she died. Shouldn’t Noguchi have noticed an injection mark that recent? Could he have missed another?

  There is no way for Hall to know whether or not the injection he witnessed was intended to help or to kill Marilyn. Dr. Daniel Greenson, Ralph Greenson’s son, vociferously defended his father. “He felt sorry for Marilyn Monroe, much more than most doctors feel for their patients. He brought her over to our house a lot because she didn’t have a family. That’s what she really needed, he said. My sister and I did a lot of things with her, played games. She was a nice person.

  “Marilyn was dead when my father arrived at her house. He felt so awful that a patient of his killed herself. It really hurt him terribly, on a personal level. If he saw someone kill her, he certainly would have said something because he would want to relieve himself [of that burden]. I hate all this speculation, and especially that guy who says he saw my father plunge a needle into Marilyn’s heart. That’s ridiculous, and I’ve got to say that it hurts me.”

  The true cause of Marilyn Monroe’s death may never be ascertained, what with all the loose ends and contradictory statements. Little of what has been said about what occurred that night has gone unchallenged — including reports of Peter Lawford’s activities.

  That Peter finally did go over to Marilyn’s house in an attempt to remove any evidence linking her to the Kennedys, and then went to see Fred Otash, has been attested to convincingly by Otash, by an associate of his who prefers to remain anonymous, and by two of Peter’s wives. Deborah Gould states emphatically, “Peter did say that he was the first one there that morning. He never admitted that he took a suicide note, but he didn’t deny it either. I still believe to this day that he did.”

  Peter’s last wife, Patricia Seaton Lawford, told the Los Angeles Times in 1985 that Peter told her he had gone to see Fred Otash sometime after Marilyn’s body was discovered. “He approached Otash afterward,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what it was about, but I think it was to make sure that nothing would harm Peter’s family.”

  That was, of course, an overriding concern. There can be no question that a massive cover-up began the moment Marilyn Monroe died, one that would have been necessary no matter what the cause of her death. It began with a several-hour delay in notifying the police and continued with carefully rehearsed versions of what happened from Mrs. Murray and Marilyn’s doctors, versions that contain glaring inconsistencies and (it was later learned) evasions. It extended the next morning to the confiscation of Marilyn’s telephone records by the FBI.

  It is certainly plausible that Peter Lawford would do everything possible to protect the Kennedys and that he would have turned again to the person who had helped him with sensitive matters in the past — Fred Otash.

  Milt Ebbins and several other of Peter’s closest friends, however, firmly believe that Lawford could not have done any such thing. “Peter never did anything by himself,” Ebbins said, an observation confirmed by many of his associates. “He would have called me to go over with him, or Joe Naar or Pete Sabiston — nine people he would have called. And even if he did go over there, why wouldn’t he have told me about it afterward? He told me everything. He knew implicitly that I could be trusted.”

  It was uncharacteristic behavior for Peter, but the situation he found himself in was extraordinary, unprecedented — and dangerous.

  Dolores Naar’s belief that Peter was told to do what he must — and not involve anyone he didn’t have to — makes a great deal of sense under the circumstances.

  Another of Ebbins’s objections to this scenario concerns time. “I spoke to Peter at his house at one-thirty that night. Bullets Durgom told me he was there until one-thirty. At three o’clock I called Peter and there was no answer. He always disconnected the phone when he went to bed. He was very drunk when I spoke to him at one-thirty, and he couldn’t have driven in that condition. I’m sure he passed out and that was that.”

  Time frames are notoriously unreliable in reconstructions of events long past, and rarely more so than in the mystery of Marilyn Monroe’s death. Mrs. Murray gave times as widely disparate as midnight and three A.M. as the point at which she realized something was wrong; Dr. Greenson said he was alerted at three; Dr. Engelberg said it was eleven or twelve. Most of the people interviewed for this book
are uncertain about times. The question, “Could it have been earlier?” was answered, “Yes. Or later.”

  That Peter did not answer his phone when Ebbins called him at three A.M. is not proof that he was in bed, passed out. He could just as well have been at Marilyn’s house or at Fred Otash’s. According to Otash, Peter was “half crocked or half doped” when he arrived at his door; no matter how drunk Peter was when he heard that Marilyn was dead, the news could have sobered him up enough to drive.

  Several years after the original publication of this book, this author discovered a White House phone log at the Kennedy Presidential Library near Boston. It indicated that a call from Peter Lawford had come in at 7;30 A.M. the morning of August 5th. That would have been 4:30 Los Angeles time. It’s close to inconceivable that the call could have been about anything other than Marilyn’s death.

  Ebbins believed that Peter did nothing but grapple with indecision that night. If he did more, it was only to protect the presidency of Jack Kennedy. Fantastic speculation aside, the most plausible verdict about the death of Marilyn Monroe is that it was a suicide — either intentional or accidental — and that a full-scale cover-up was immediately put into place to keep her relationships with the Kennedys from becoming public.

  Thus the investigation of Marilyn’s death was hampered at every turn. Witnesses told contradictory stories but were never questioned under oath. Evidence was confiscated, even destroyed. Police interviewers noted that some of the principals were “possibly evasive,” but none of them was pressed for more complete answers. The police wanted to question Peter, a key participant in Marilyn’s last days, but were told that he had left town on a trip and was unavailable. Investigators never followed up with him, although he had gone no farther than Hyannis Port.

  There are many reasons why the Monroe cover-up was allowed to succeed. Chief among them was the immense power and popularity of the Kennedys. Many of the key figures in the investigation were Kennedy supporters, people who were willing to turn a deaf ear and blind eye to what they were learning, or even to obstruct justice. Local law enforcement officers could do worse than ingratiate themselves with the President of the United States; at least one Los Angeles police official hoped for an administration appointment. And J. Edgar Hoover was more than happy to assist in the confiscation of such evidence as Marilyn’s telephone records; with this kind of ammunition against the Kennedys he need never worry about their replacing him.

  It took more than twenty years for the conspiracy of silence around the Monroe case to crack, and many people refuse to talk about it to this day. Some observers believe that those who maintained their silence were rewarded. Mrs. Murray, who began to change her story in 1985, took seven trips to Europe in the years immediately following Marilyn’s death, and she was not a wealthy woman.

  Pat Newcomb was rumored to have gone directly to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port and from there on an extended vacation. Truman Capote, a close friend of Monroe’s, said, “The Kennedys didn’t kill her, the way some people think. She committed suicide. But they did pay one of her best friends to keep quiet about their relationship with her. The friend knew where all the skeletons were, and after Marilyn died, they sent her on a year-long cruise around the world. For a whole year no one knew where she was.”

  Peter, for his part, was never put on tape as saying anything other than that Marilyn’s death was a tragic accident that left him deeply remorseful that he hadn’t gone to her aid immediately. He insisted until his death that Bobby Kennedy was on the East Coast the night Marilyn died and that the talk of affairs between Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers was nothing but “nonsense.”

  He repeatedly turned down large sums of money to tell the story. In 1976, he signed a contract with a New York publisher to write his autobiography for an advance of sixty thousand dollars, and was offered another hundred thousand dollars from the National Enquirer for serialization rights to the book. An editor worked with Peter in Palm Springs, but after two weeks the man gave up in despair and the publishers canceled the contract: Peter refused to talk about what they really wanted him to talk about — Marilyn and the Kennedys. “When Peter was desperate for money, practically destitute, he still wouldn’t do it,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He was too fond of Jackie and her kids, too fond of Jack’s memory, and too conscious of his reputation in his own kids’ eyes to ever do something like that.”

  In 1984, Peter told the Los Angeles Times, “Even if those things were true, I wouldn’t talk about them. That’s just the way I am. Plus the fact, I have four children. I’m not going to embarrass them. I’m not going to embarrass the rest of the family.”

  To avoid “embarrassment” at the time of Marilyn’s death, Peter proved himself a master of prevarication. There was a great deal of press speculation over the identity of the “mystery caller” to whom Marilyn was supposed to have been speaking when she died, telephone in hand. Peter “revealed” to columnist Earl Wilson that he had been. “She said she felt sleepy and was going to bed,” Peter said. “She picked up the phone herself on the second ring, which leads me to believe that she was fine. She did sound sleepy, but I’ve talked to her a hundred times and she sounded no different.”

  In another interview a few days later, Peter claimed to know nothing of Marilyn’s tortured emotional condition toward the end of her life: “If she had fits of depression, they were behind closed doors. She was not the kind to come moaning around with her troubles. She was always gay — she ‘made’ our parties when she came.”

  ON MONDAY, AUGUST 6, Pat Lawford flew back to Los Angeles from Hyannis Port to attend Marilyn’s funeral. To the Lawfords’ shock, they and all of Marilyn’s other Hollywood friends were barred from the services by Joe DiMaggio, who had taken over the funeral preparations. The official reason, a spokesman for DiMaggio said, was that “if we allow the Lawfords in, then we’d have to allow half of the big stars in Hollywood. Then the whole thing would turn into a circus.”

  Peter was outraged at his exclusion. “The whole thing was badly handled,” he said. “Marilyn had lots of good friends here in town who will miss her terribly and would love to have attended her final rites.” Joe DiMaggios private response to Peter’s published comment got closer to the truth about the snub: “If it wasn’t for her so-called friends, Marilyn would still be alive today.” It was a comment that hit home for Peter, as did another from Dr. Ralph Greenson when he was asked who — or what — bore responsibility for Marilyn Monroe’s death: “There’s enough blame for everyone to share.”

  Peter spent the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge that a large portion of that blame was his. He had brought Marilyn into the sexually charged, politically dangerous vortex of the Kennedys, a world with which she was emotionally unable to cope. He had watched ineffectually as she repeatedly courted death with drugs and alcohol. He had been instrumental in creating the situation that would finally send her over the edge. And after she called out for help, he vacillated for hours as her life slowly slipped away.

  For years afterward, Peter would break into tears whenever the subject of Marilyn’s death was raised. “I blame myself for the fact that she is dead,” he told journalist Malcolm Boyes in 1982. In his 1984 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said, “To this day I’ve lived with this. I should have got in my car and gone straight to her house. I didn’t do it.” At that point in the interview, he broke down and cried.

  The most vivid example of just how much Peter was haunted by Marilyn’s death occurred about a year after the event. In Judy Garland’s Los Angeles house, Scottie Singer, her young secretary-companion, was watching television; Judy was in her bedroom. Suddenly Singer heard frantic pounding at the front door. She jumped up to open it, and Peter rushed in. “Where’s Judy?” he shouted. “What’s happened to her?”

  “Peter, what are you talking about?”

  “I’ve gotta get to her!” He pushed past the startled young woman and ran down the hallway. Frightened now, Singer
stayed right behind Peter. He swung open Judy’s bedroom door and found her in a deep sleep, the telephone receiver still in her hand. He looked at her and his face went chalk white. “Is she breathing?” They listened in deathly silence, and in a few moments Singer said, “Yes, Peter, she’s breathing normally.”

  Singer told Peter to come back into the living room with her, sit down, and have a drink. After about five minutes he had calmed down enough to explain himself to her.

  “Peter told me that he was talking to Judy on the phone,” Singer recalled, “and she had taken some sleeping pills. She fell asleep in the middle of the conversation and Peter just freaked. Can you imagine what a horrible ride that was for him, driving clear the hell out to Judy’s house, terrified that she might have died — just like Marilyn.”

  15 Leib refused to discuss these events.

  THIRTY-ONE

  A few months after Marilyn’s death, Mickey Song, the hairdresser, was at a Kennedy family party. The President and First Lady were there, along with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy and a dozen other family members. Everyone was having a fine time, talking and laughing, when Song piped up. “You know who I really miss?” he said to no one in particular.

  “Who?” someone in the group asked.

  “Marilyn Monroe,” Song replied.

  The entire room fell dead silent. “They looked at me like, ‘How could you bring that up?’” Song recalled. “I felt terrible. I really hit a sore point when I said that.”

  The death of Marilyn Monroe deeply shocked the Kennedy brothers. Their cavalier attitude toward women, their recklessness, their hedonism, their arrogance — all had contributed to the death of a fragile, sensitive soul. On August 5, Jack and Bobby Kennedy became older, wiser men.

  Still, the family hubris was deeply ingrained. While the Kennedys felt bad about what had happened to Marilyn, they never blamed themselves. They needed an outsider to pin the rap on — however subtly. The scapegoat, of course, was Peter. While Jack remained friendly with him, most of the others in the family ostracized him. No matter that Jack and Bobby had pushed matters to an extreme. No matter that Peter had merely offered them an ambience they ardently sought. No matter that most of the Kennedys had partaken of Peter’s life-style to one degree or another — and no matter that Pat, at least at the beginning, had been right there with them. Peter became a symbol of all that had gone wrong.