When Hockett entered Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom, he collected evidence of the possible cause of death, presumably the pill bottles on the bedside table. He collected eight of them. In one of the police photos there appears to be a water glass on the floor next to the bed. Clemmons stated that it hadn’t been there earlier, when the doctors helped him search the room for a drinking vessel.
The police investigators set up temporary headquarters in the kitchen, where Sergeant Robert Byron and his supervisor, Lieutenant Grover Armstrong, commander of the West Los Angeles Detective Division, began interviewing the witnesses. Byron stated that he arrived shortly after 5:30 A.M., and that Marilyn Monroe’s attorney, Milton “Mickey” Rudin, was there along with Engelberg, Eunice Murray, publicist Patricia Newcomb, and handyman Norman Jefferies. Apparently Greenson had left sometime between Clemmons’s departure and Byron’s arrival. In retrospect Clemmons believed that Rudin, Newcomb, and Jefferies were on the premises when he arrived at approximately 4:40 A.M. A number of cars had been parked in the courtyard, and he hadn’t entered all the rooms or the detached guest cottage.
When Byron asked Murray about the discovery of the body, she basically repeated the story she had told Clemmons, except that she altered the time frame by three and a half hours. Instead of saying that she had gotten up at midnight and seen the light under Marilyn’s door, Murray stated that it was closer to 3:30 A.M., and that she called Greenson at 3:35. Apparently, Murray, Greenson, and Engelberg had decided to change the chronology. Engelberg also advanced the time by three and a half hours, telling Byron that he had pronounced the actress dead at 3:50 A.M.—not “shortly after twelve-thirty A.M.,” as he had stated to Clemmons. In a follow-up report dated August 6, 1962, both Greenson and Engelberg reiterated the altered chronology. The time discrepancy wasn’t an aberration or an error on the part of one of them—all three had changed their story.
In his report, Byron described Murray as “possibly evasive,” and he recalled in a recent interview, “My feeling was that she had been told what to say. It had all been rehearsed beforehand. She had her story, and that was it.” As for Engelberg and Greenson, Byron reflected, “There was a lot more they could have told us…. I didn’t feel they were telling the correct time or situation.”
On Sunday morning Time and Life correspondent Tommy Thompson taped a lengthy interview with Eunice Murray in which she recounted the events surrounding the film star’s death in a sincere, soft-spoken voice, carefully measuring her words in a precise manner. In the following decades evidence would contradict her story, and she would ultimately refute many of her statements preserved on the Thompson tapes.
In her initial statements to the police and the press, Murray recalled that she first became concerned about Marilyn when she got up to go to the bathroom and saw the light on under the door. She clearly stated, “It was the light under Marilyn’s door that aroused my suspicions that something was terribly wrong.” However, Murray’s bedroom was adjacent to Monroe’s and had its own bath with its own entry from the Murray bedroom. On the way from Murray’s bedroom to her bathroom there is no view of Marilyn’s bedroom door. Only if Murray had walked out into the hallway would she have had a view of a light under the door. In any case, the “light under the door” would prove to be an impossibility (see floor plan in “Source Notes” of the Appendix).
After Marilyn Monroe’s friend Robert Slatzer learned of her death, he went to the Monroe residence with the executrix, Inez Melson, on Thursday, August 9.* Slatzer noted that the recently installed carpeting was so thick that it was difficult to close Marilyn’s bedroom door. The door scraped along the surface of the carpet, and it was impossible to see light beneath it. Murray, who was present during Slatzer’s discovery, admitted that he was correct and that she must have been mistaken.
The question remained—what actually led Murray to believe that “something was terribly wrong” in the middle of the night?
In the book Marilyn: The Last Months, which Eunice Murray cowrote in 1975 with her sister-in-law, astrologist Rose Shade, she again altered her story. Instead of saying that she got up to go to the bathroom, she attributes the discovery that “something was terribly wrong” to her “Piscean qualities.” The book states:
A highly intuitive and gentle woman, born under a Piscean sign, she [Murray] seemed to sense that nightmare awaited not in sleep, but beyond her bedroom door. She recalls that night vividly:
“There was no reason I knew of for waking, for turning on the light and opening the door to the hall. There was no evidence of anything amiss until I saw the telephone cord at my feet. I knew then that something was terribly wrong. The cord ran from the spare bedroom [telephone room] across the hall and under Marilyn’s closed door. There was no sound from within her room, and thick carpeting made it impossible to tell if her light was on or not…. Cautious of awakening her unnecessarily, I did not tap on the door or call her name. Very much alarmed, however, I dialed her psychiatrist on the other line.”
In the altered version, Murray tells her readers it was the sight of the telephone cord running under the door that compelled her to call Marilyn’s psychiatrist at 3:30 A.M. However, the telephone cord running from the telephone room and under the door into Marilyn’s bedroom was not an uncommon sight after midnight; in fact, it was quite routine.
Two telephone lines ran to Marilyn’s residence. Her house number, GRanite 24830, was connected to a pink phone in the telephone room and an extension in the guest cottage. Her private number, GRanite 61890, led to the white phone in the telephone room. The pink and the white phone each had a thirty-foot extension cord, allowing Marilyn to take either one into her bedroom. Though Marilyn put the pink house phone under a pillow in the telephone room so its ring wouldn’t disturb her, her friends knew that Marilyn kept the private white phone in her bedroom at night. To the annoyance of many, she was a notorious night caller. On sleepless nights she often called people in the small hours of the morning to dispel her anxieties. Her friend Norman Rosten recalled being awakened on numerous occasions in the predawn hours and hearing the whispery voice on the phone saying, “Guess who this is.” When the phone rang at 2 A.M. and he fumbled in the dark for it, it didn’t take clairvoyance to know that Marilyn was calling. On the night before she died, her friend Arthur James stated that Marilyn left a message at 3 A.M. with his answering service. Obviously, the telephone cord of the private line leading under the door into Marilyn’s bedroom was the rule, not the exception.
If neither of Mrs. Murray’s stories regarding her suspicion that “something was terribly wrong” had plausibility, the question remains: What did occur in the middle of the night that motivated her to call Dr. Greenson?
Lieutenant Armstrong indicated in his report, “Mrs. Murray was vague and possibly evasive in answering questions pertaining to the activities of Miss Monroe during this time. It is not known whether this is or is not intentional.”
In statements made to the press on Monday, Pat Newcomb stated that she had been awakened at her Beverly Hills apartment at approximately 4 A.M. Sunday by a call from attorney Mickey Rudin. According to Newcomb, Rudin told her, “Marilyn has accidentally overdosed.” “How is she?” Newcomb inquired. “She’s dead,” Rudin replied. Newcomb said she then rushed from her Beverly Hills apartment to the Monroe residence, where she met her boss, publicist Arthur Jacobs. Although the police were officially notified of Marilyn’s death by Engelberg’s call at 4:25 A.M., it becomes evident from Newcomb’s statement that both Rudin and Arthur Jacobs had been informed of her death prior to the police. The driving time from Newcomb’s Beverly Hills apartment to Marilyn’s on a Sunday morning is approximately fifteen minutes. Yet during the time that Clemmons was at the Monroe residence—from 4:40 A.M. until approximately 5:30 A.M.—he didn’t see Pat Newcomb or Arthur Jacobs. However, Byron stated that Newcomb was there when he arrived shortly after Clemmons’s departure.
Although Newcomb claimed she spent early Sunday morning at Mar
ilyn’s dealing with the press and making numerous phone calls, Norman Jefferies described Newcomb as distraught and hysterical. Recalling that the police had difficulty dealing with her, Jefferies stated, “She was looking through drawers and going into Marilyn’s bedroom. She had spent Friday night at the house and perhaps she was looking for something she left there. The police had to control her. When they told us to leave because they were going to seal the house, she became unglued. They had trouble getting her out of the door. She kept trying to get back inside. I don’t know if it was because she couldn’t find what she was looking for, or if she just couldn’t deal with everything that had happened.”
According to Murray, “Pat Newcomb didn’t want to leave. She was sitting in the third bedroom [the telephone room] where she had so recently spent the night. She had quieted down from her previous hysterical state, but gave no impression of planning to move…. The police practically had to forcibly evict her.”
In the bedroom, when Guy Hockett and his son placed Marilyn’s body on the gurney, he noted, “Rigor mortis was advanced, and she was not lying quite straight, and it took about five minutes to straighten her out…. We had to do quite a bit of bending to get the arms into position so that we could, you know, put the straps around her.” He added, “She didn’t look good, not like Marilyn Monroe. She looked just like a poor little girl that had died….” When the time of death is unknown, it is often determined by the extent of rigor mortis. Over the first four to fourteen hours after death the muscles of the body contract to rock-hardness. Hockett recalled that they placed the body on the gurney sometime between 5:30 and 6 A.M. He estimated that she had died approximately six to eight hours earlier, or sometime between nine-thirty and eleven-thirty Saturday night.
As Marilyn Monroe’s body was wheeled out of the house, the mortician’s gurney passed over a tile embedded in the entryway, with the Latin inscription “Cursum Perficio,” which literally translates, “I have run the course.” Reporter Joe Hyams stated, “Mr. Hockett wheeled Marilyn Monroe’s body out of the front door at about six-thirty A.M. They wheeled it down to the courtyard near the gates where the mortuary van was parked. Her body had been wrapped from head to toe in a shroud made of a pale blue woolen blanket from the bed. They had placed the body, hands folded across the stomach, on the gurney and tied it down with leather straps at the feet and waist.”
Hyams and photographer William Woodfield noted that Captain James Hamilton of the LAPD Intelligence Division was there along with several intelligence officers. Knowing that Hamilton rarely appeared at a crime scene, let alone a suicide, Hyams realized that there was more to be learned regarding the death of Marilyn Monroe. Neighbors told Hyams of the strange sounds heard in the night—a woman screaming, and later a hysterical woman’s voice yelling, “Murderers! You murderers! Are you satisfied now that she’s dead?” Others said they had heard a helicopter circling overhead shortly before midnight.
Soon after Marilyn’s body was placed in the mortuary van, Newcomb, Jefferies, and Murray were escorted by Sergeant Marvin Iannone from the kitchen entrance. Coroner’s seals were then placed on the doors of the main house and the guest cottage. Though Newcomb said she had driven to the Monroe residence after Rudin’s call, her car wasn’t there. Photos and newsreel footage show that she was led from the house and got into the passenger seat of Murray’s two-tone Dodge. As Jefferies opened the passenger door of Murray’s car and Newcomb stepped inside, photographers scrambled for pictures and reporters bombarded her with questions concerning Marilyn’s last hours. Once again becoming hysterical, Newcomb turned on the press and screamed, “Keep shooting, vultures!” As she was driven away from Marilyn Monroe’s home for the last time, she yelled out the window, “How would you like it if your best friend died?”
Not long after Murray’s car pulled out of the gates, Guy and Don Hockett drove out of the courtyard in the mortuary van with the film star’s body. Though Billy Woodfield wasn’t ordinarily a press photographer, his instinct grasped the moment. Recently recalling the incident, Woodfield reflected, “Hyams had pressed me into service as a newsy—not my bag—but when the mortician’s van drove off I said to Joe, ‘C’mon, we’ve gotta follow the money!’” Woodfield grabbed Hyams and they ran to their car and followed Hockett’s van. Not knowing where the van was headed, they followed it to the Westwood Village Mortuary, where Alan Abbott, the mortuary attendant who helped in preparing bodies for embalming, was waiting.
Leaving the body momentarily unattended, the Hocketts and Abbott entered the mortuary building. Woodfield took several photos of the shrouded body in the van, then he and Hyams entered the mortuary to question Hockett. Walking to the office, Woodfield recalled passing the embalming room, where an array of specimen jars had been neatly arranged on a cart beside the embalming table. Name and case number tags were on each jar, and Monroe’s name had been written on the embalmer’s tags.
Upon removing the body from the van, Alan Abbott became concerned when he discovered that the press had followed Hockett back to the mortuary. “I hid Miss Monroe’s body in a broom closet,” he recalled. “One of them had offered me ten thousand dollars if they could take a picture of the corpse. I knew it wouldn’t be long before they’d be descending on us like locusts, and I urged the Hocketts to call in some security. There was just the three of us there and it was a bit frightening—the lull before a storm. Pinkerton’s sent over twenty security guards to keep the press at a distance, and before the day was over we could have used more.”
Before leaving, Woodfield was able to get a photo of the shrouded body of one of the greatest motion picture stars of the twentieth century lying in a broom closet cluttered with mops, brushes, rags, and specimen bottles.
3
“Toodle-oo!”
It was Hollywood that destroyed her—she was a victim of her friends…
—Joe DiMaggio
Hollywood was shaken by the news that Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide. Her death was the biggest news story of 1962, ultimately consuming more type space than the Cuban missile crisis, which occurred several months later. MARILYN MONROE A SUICIDE, read the London Times headline. The Los Angeles Times put out extra editions and rushed them to the newsstands. MARILYN DEAD was the eighteen-point headline in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
Joe DiMaggio heard the news early Sunday morning in San Francisco. He took the first plane to Los Angeles. Checking into suite 1035 at the Miramar Hotel, not far from Marilyn’s home, he refused to speak to the press and went into seclusion. His friend Harry Hall recalls that he took her death very hard and wept bitterly.
Robert Slatzer was awakened early Sunday morning by a phone call from his friend and neighbor Dr. Sanford Firestone. Dr. Firestone had been present on August 1, when Marilyn had called Slatzer at his home in Columbus, Ohio, from a pay phone in Los Angeles. In an interview with writer Anthony Summers on March 23, 1983, Dr. Firestone discussed his presence along with Slatzer’s friend Ron Pataki when Marilyn had called. Dr. Firestone stated, “I know there was some kind of problem. After the call, Bob said she was very nervous, and very afraid…as far as Bobby Kennedy, and the Kennedys….”
When Dr. Firestone called Slatzer about Marilyn’s suicide, he said, “Bob, I’ve got some bad news—Marilyn’s dead. Sleeping pills, they say.”
“She wouldn’t do it!” Slatzer exclaimed, “She had too many plans.”
He hung up without saying good-bye and turned on the television: “…and authorities report that Marilyn Monroe died at 3:40 A.M. of an apparent overdose of barbiturates…”
When Arthur Miller heard the news, he was quoted as saying, “It had to happen. I don’t know when or how, but it was inevitable.” He added that he would not be going to the funeral. “She’s not really there anymore.”
Marilyn’s first husband, James Dougherty, was told of her death by Sergeant Clemmons, who called him after filing his report. Dougherty was a fellow police officer in Van Nuys and an acquaintance of Clemmo
ns’s. When Clemmons told him, Dougherty replied, “I was expecting it.”
Marilyn’s friend and mentor, Lee Strasberg, made an unusual statement to the New York Herald-Tribune: “She did not commit suicide…. If it had been suicide, it would have happened in quite a different way. For one thing, she wouldn’t have done it without leaving a note. There are other reasons, which cannot be discussed, which make us [Strasberg and his wife, Paula] certain she did not intend to take her life.” Strasberg’s perplexing utterance may have been influenced by Marianne Kris, who was Marilyn’s New York psychiatrist and a friend and neighbor of the Strasbergs. Kris was in frequent communication with her associate, Dr. Ralph Greenson, and it is likely that he told Kris about the circumstances of Marilyn’s death.
Actor Peter Lawford stated to the press, “Pat [Patricia Kennedy Lawford] and I loved her dearly. She was probably one of the most marvelous and warm human beings I have ever met. Anything else I could say would be superfluous.”
The public learned little of Marilyn’s last hours from the sketchy and often contradictory published statements by the key witnesses: actor Peter Lawford, housekeeper Eunice Murray, psychiatrist Ralph Greenson, publicist Pat Newcomb, attorney Milton Rudin, and physician Hyman Engelberg. There was no coroner’s inquest or official investigation, so none of the key witnesses were ever obligated to testify under oath, and many of them, as Murray admitted in 1986, “told what was good to tell at the time.”
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Page 2