—Marilyn Monroe to W. J. Weatherby, 1961
Captain Thad Brown, the legendary LAPD chief of detectives, was sleeping in his hideaway trailer in Malibu on Sunday morning when he was awakened by a police messenger pounding on his door with an urgent message. Chief of Police William Parker wanted to see him downtown about “some problems” as quickly as possible. Parker wanted Brown to take over the Marilyn Monroe case, and one of the “problems” was a scribbled note on a piece of crumpled paper found in Monroe’s bedcovers.
In 1978, Lionel Grandison disclosed that a scribbled note had once been in the Monroe file. It was rumored to be a suicide note. In a recorded interview with Robert Slatzer, Grandison stated that the note had been turned over to the coroner’s office by the West Los Angeles Police Department:
GRANDISON: There was a note—that was basically illegible…. It was scribbly, but allegedly in her handwriting…. I couldn’t determine precisely what the note said, but the fact remains that the note disappeared within one or two days.
SLATZER: Who do you think, in your opinion, confiscated this particular note?
GRANDISON: All I can say is that it was someone who had more authority than I—someone who didn’t want this note seen past the couple of days it remained in the coroner’s property.
SLATZER: Was Abernethy or Curphey aware of the note?
GRANDISON: Yes, they had to be.
Police investigator Finis Brown, brother of Thad Brown, revealed that the note contained a Kennedy phone number; and the assistant chief of the Intelligence Division, Virgil Crabtree, confirmed that there was a Kennedy number scribbled on it. The significance of the number may lie in a series of telephone calls Marilyn made on Friday, August 3, and Saturday, August 4.
Robert Slatzer spoke to Marilyn Monroe twice shortly before her death. He was in Columbus, Ohio, working on a television series, when she called on Friday, August 3. The call was placed from a pay phone near her home because she feared her phones were tapped. Slatzer’s friend Ron Pataki was with him when she called, and he recently confirmed the content of the calls Marilyn placed to Slatzer.
During the conversation on Friday, August 3, Slatzer told Marilyn he’d read in a newspaper that Bobby Kennedy was in San Francisco, where he was scheduled to speak before the American Bar Association on Monday, August 6. Knowing Marilyn was anxious to talk to Bobby Kennedy, Slatzer suggested she call Pat Lawford to find out where he was staying. According to a statement Peter Lawford made in a 1976 Long Beach Star interview, Marilyn called him on Friday in an effort to reach his wife, who was staying at Hyannisport. Peter Lawford stated that he reluctantly gave Marilyn his wife’s phone number at the Kennedy compound. When Marilyn reached Pat Lawford, she was told that Bobby Kennedy was registered at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. An operator at the St. Francis Hotel confirmed that Marilyn had tried to reach Kennedy there and had left several messages.
The scribbled note found in the bedclothes may have been Marilyn’s notations from her attempts to find Kennedy.
The telephone had been an integral part of Marilyn Monroe’s life, the immediate tool of communication for a soul who was essentially a loner and frequently suffered from a sense of isolation. The telephone seems to hold the key to her last moments. Peter Lawford had dramatically described Marilyn’s last telephone call—her voice fading until there was no response—and Dr. Greenson had painted the too-cinematic picture of Marilyn Monroe’s body being discovered with her outstretched hand tightly gripping the telephone. A media maelstrom arose over Marilyn’s last call:
MARILYN MYSTERY CALL
Marilyn Monroe got a mysterious telephone call not long before she was found dead from an overdose of barbiturates, The Times was told Monday night. Mrs. Eunice Murray, the blond beauty’s housekeeper, said the call came sometime after the actress retired to her bedroom Saturday night.
“I don’t remember what time the call came in,” she said, “and I don’t know who it was from.”
Though a number of people claimed to have spoken to Marilyn on the telephone Saturday night, only some of the claims have validity. Henry Rosenfeld, who had been a confidant of Marilyn’s since 1949, said he called her from New York on Saturday sometime between 8 and 9 P.M.Pacific time. He recalled that she sounded tired, but very much herself. Though he refused to reveal details of the conversation, he stated that Marilyn discussed plans for the future, including a theater party during a trip to New York the following Thursday.
Shortly before or after the call from Rosenfeld, Marilyn called hairdresser Sidney Guilaroff, whom she had known since the 1940s. Guilaroff told Anthony Summers that the call came at approximately 9 P.M. For decades Guilaroff refused to discuss this conversation, but he recently revealed that Marilyn called him not once but twice that Saturday. The first call came in the late afternoon. “Marilyn was extremely upset. She was in tears and quite hysterical,” Guilaroff confided. “She said that Bobby Kennedy had been to her house with Lawford, and that Bobby had threatened her. There was a violent argument. She was afraid—terrified. I tried to calm her down.”
The second call came at approximately nine that night. “She was more composed, but I can still hear the fear in her voice. Whatever had happened during Bobby’s visit in the afternoon had frightened her. I told her we would talk about it in the morning. I never imagined we would never speak again.”
Jeanne Carmen, Marilyn’s former next-door neighbor at her Doheny apartment in West Hollywood, stated that Marilyn called her sometime between 9 and 10 P.M. According to Carmen, Marilyn sounded exhausted and nervous, but she was neither groggy nor slurring her words. “She sounded frightened and didn’t want to be alone,” Carmen recalled. “She wanted me to come over, but I was tired myself and told her I’d call her the next day. My phone rang again about a half hour later. It may have been Marilyn, but I didn’t answer.”
José Bolaños, a Mexican screenwriter Marilyn met in Mexico City in February 1962, said he called Marilyn from a nearby restaurant at 10 P.M. Bolaños had escorted her to the Golden Globe Awards in March, and they had become romantically involved. He had only recently returned to Los Angeles to see her. Though Bolaños has also refused to disclose the content of their last discussion, he said she didn’t hang up the phone but put down the receiver in the middle of their conversation and never returned. Bolaños added, “Marilyn told me something that will one day shock the whole world.”
Peter Lawford claimed that Marilyn’s last call, in which she slurred her words and faded away, occurred at approximately 7:30 P.M. However, his estimate of the time is inconsistent with the statements of all those who are known to have spoken with her between 7:30 and 10 P.M.: Joe DiMaggio, Jr., Henry Rosenfeld, Jeanne Carmen, Sidney Guilaroff, and José Bolaños. If Lawford is to be believed, then the call when Marilyn apparently lapsed into unconsciousness must have occurred after 10 P.M.
In 1986 Lawford’s guest “Bullets” Durgom confirmed that Marilyn’s last conversation with Lawford took place sometime after 10 P.M. Durgom stated, “It was at about ten or eleven that Lawford tried to call Marilyn back and could not get through.” According to Durgom it was after that when “the lawyer [Mickey Rudin] and somebody else went over to the house…and it was too late.” Lawford’s maid, Irma Lee Reilly, confirmed “there was no word of worry over Marilyn” before ten o’clock.
According to Joe and Dolores Naar, who were also guests at Lawford’s that evening, when they arrived at approximately eight o’clock there was no indication of alarm or concern about Marilyn. The dinner, which turned out to be Chinese takeout, wasn’t served until about nine. The Naars recall that Lawford had been drinking heavily, and the party ended early. They left the Lawford house shortly after ten. The Naars are adamant that, during the two-hour time frame when they were with Lawford, no alarm was raised about Marilyn Monroe and not a word was said about a phone call in which she asked Lawford to “say good-bye to the President.” Dolores Naar recalled, “It was a very light, up evening.
During dinner there was one call from Marilyn that Peter took, but he wasn’t gone long, and when he returned, he calmly said, ‘Oh, it’s Marilyn again’—like she does this all the time. His attitude didn’t change. There was no indication that anything was wrong. I picked up on nothing like that.”
The Naars knew Lawford and Marilyn well and insist that if anything alarming had happened while they were at the Lawford residence, they would have known about it. The Naars recalled that they returned to their home “well before eleven” and were getting undressed for bed when they received an urgent phone call from Lawford. “He was in a panic about Marilyn,” Dolores Naar stated. “Marilyn had called him and was incoherent. He was afraid she had taken too many pills and was in trouble….”
Clearly, this was the call in which Marilyn had lapsed into unconsciousness. The call hadn’t occurred at “approximately seven-thirty,” as Lawford stated to the press and later to the police. Marilyn’s alarming call occurred after the Naars had returned to their home, sometime after ten and “well before eleven.”
The Naars recalled that Lawford’s urgent call to them occurred at approximately ten-thirty. “We lived near Marilyn’s house, and he asked Joe to run over there and see what was wrong.” Joe Naar had already undressed for bed, but by the time he had put his clothes back on and was hurrying out the door to drive to Marilyn’s house, Lawford called back. “He said that he’d spoken to Marilyn’s doctor,” Dolores recalled, “and he had said that he had given her sedatives because she had been disturbed earlier and she was probably asleep—‘so don’t bother going,’ Peter told Joe.”
The pair of phone calls to the Naars is perplexing. Lawford stated that when Marilyn’s voice seemed to fade away, he yelled at her over the phone in an effort to revive her, then the phone went dead. When he called back he received a busy signal. In the 1962 press reports, Lawford said he had the operator check the line, and was told that the phone was off the hook and there was no conversation. Were both of Marilyn’s phones off the hook with no conversation on either line? This would have been the case if, as Jose Bolarios stated, Marilyn didn’t hang up the phone, but put down the receiver in the middle of the conversation and never returned.
If Marilyn had left her private line off the hook at 10 P.M., and within the next half hour made the alarming call to Peter Lawford on an extension of the house phone, both lines would have been off the hook and without conversation when Lawford asked the operator to intervene. After Lawford then placed the urgent call to the Naars at approximately ten-thirty to ask Joe to go over and “see what was wrong,” something or somebody prevailed on him to call back in the hope of preventing Joe Naar from discovering what actually had occurred.
Having learned that Marilyn Monroe had died with her hand gripping the telephone, Herald-Tribune correspondent Joe Hyams tried to obtain a copy of Marilyn’s telephone records. “The morning after her death,” recalls Hyams, “I contacted a telephone company employee and asked him to copy for me the list of numbers on her billing tape.” Hyams’s contact at the telephone company told him, “All hell’s broken loose down here. Apparently, you’re not the only one interested in Marilyn’s calls. The tape’s disappeared…. I’m told it was impounded by men in dark suits and well-shined shoes…. Somebody high up ordered it.”
Later a former General Telephone security officer told Hyams that the tapes and toll tabs were confiscated early Sunday morning. “There was just that brief time in limbo, in the very early morning, when you could theoretically get to them before they vanished in the accounting system. After that, they were irretrievable for days, even if J. Edgar Hoover himself wanted them. With the formalities we had then, no ordinary cop could have got to Marilyn’s records till nearly two weeks after her death.”
However, Captain James Hamilton was no ordinary cop. As head of the LAPD Intelligence Division he wielded a great deal of power and influence. According to former chief Tom Reddin, “Hamilton knew that true power was invisible—that visibility was vulnerability. He was certainly an invisible power in Los Angeles. Hamilton knew where all the bodies were buried, and who buried them.”
Former mayor Sam Yorty recalled, “Hamilton’s Intelligence Division was Parker’s version of the FBI. Parker believed that he was the man who would one day succeed J. Edgar Hoover, and Bobby and Jack Kennedy led Parker to believe he was their choice.”
Correspondence between Robert Kennedy and Chief Parker and Captain Hamilton preserved in the Kennedy Library confirms Yorty’s observation. Their friendship had gone back to the mid-fifties, when Bobby Kennedy was on the West Coast and Hamilton and Parker assisted him in the Senate rackets investigations. In his book The Enemy Within, Robert Kennedy frequently mentions Captain Hamilton as a friend and source of information.
It was Captain James Hamilton, no ordinary cop, who had confiscated Marilyn Monroe’s telephone records, and it was Captain James Hamilton who directed the cover-up of information relating to the circumstances of Marilyn Monroe’s death for Chief William Parker. Los Angeles Times crime reporter Jack Tobin, an acquaintance of Hamilton’s, had lunch with him shortly after Marilyn’s death and years later revealed, “Hamilton told me he had the telephone history of the last day or two of Marilyn Monroe’s life. When I expressed interest, he said, ‘I will tell you nothing more.’ But it was obvious that he knew more.”
Thad Brown disclosed to syndicated Hollywood columnist Florabel Muir that he saw Monroe’s phone records on Chief Parker’s desk, but that Parker had put the August toll tabs under lock and key. A Muir column that was pulled from afternoon editions of the New York Daily News on August 8, 1962, stated:
STRANGE PRESSURES ON MARILYN PROBE
“Strange ‘pressures’ are being put on Los Angeles police investigating the death of Marilyn Monroe,” sources close to the probers said last night.
Police investigators have refused to make public the records of phone calls made from Miss Monroe’s home last Saturday evening, hours before she took an overdose of sleeping pills. The police have impounded the phone company’s taped record of outgoing calls. Normally in suicide probes here, the record of such phone calls would have been made available to the public within a few days.
The purported pressures are mysterious. They apparently are coming from persons who had been closely in touch with Marilyn the last few weeks.
Thad Brown later told Robert Slatzer that Parker had “called him on the carpet” for mentioning the phone records to Florabel Muir. When Slatzer asked Muir about the records, she said Parker had the phone records in his desk and had flashed them in front of her, stating that they were his insurance of heading the FBI “when the Kennedys get rid of Hoover.”
“I asked her what phone calls Marilyn had made during that last billing period,” Slatzer said, “and Florabel told me she had learned from Thad Brown that a number of the calls were to Bobby Kennedy.” Slatzer then called Parker about the phone records. “He emphatically denied any knowledge of them and hung up on me,” Slatzer recalled. He then went down to the Central Division Headquarters and confronted Parker in the hallway about the records. Parker angrily retreated into his office and had Slatzer removed from the building.
Press coverage shows that Robert and Ethel Kennedy had arrived in San Francisco on Friday afternoon, August 3, with four of their children. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Kennedy arrived “without his usual flashing smile and shook hands woodenly with those who welcomed him.” After his speech, scheduled for Monday, the attorney general and his family planned a ten-day vacation in the state of Washington.
A special FBI report on the attorney general’s activities that weekend specified that he “spent the weekend at the Bates Ranch located sixty miles south of San Francisco. This was strictly a personal affair.” The ranch, located in Gilroy, was owned by John Bates, a friend of the Kennedy family. Bates had met John Kennedy when they both served in the navy during the war, and their mutual friend Paul Fay had been named by the president as t
he undersecretary of the Navy. Bates was a frequent guest at Hickory Hill, Bobby Kennedy’s home, and Kennedy had asked him to head the antitrust division of the Department of Justice.
Bates has steadfastly insisted that Bobby Kennedy spent the entire weekend at his ranch. “The attorney general and his family were with us every minute from Friday afternoon to Monday,” John Bates maintained to Monroe’s biographer Donald Spoto in 1992, “and there is simply no physical way that he could have gone to Southern California and returned.” Bates is certain that he would have known about it if Bobby Kennedy had left long enough to reach Los Angeles that day and return. The Gilroy parish priest confirmed that Bobby Kennedy and his family attended the 9:30 A.M. mass at the Church of St. Mary’s on Sunday, August 5, approximately when Marilyn Monroe’s body was being prepared for autopsy.
In the process of his investigation, however, Thad Brown discovered something startling—the attorney general had been in Los Angeles on Saturday, August 4. Thad’s brother, detective Finis Brown, related, “I talked to contacts who had seen Kennedy and Lawford at the Beverly Hilton Hotel the day she took the overdose. I went to Thad with the information, and Thad said he had been informed of the fact. He knew Kennedy was in Los Angeles that night, and he told Chief Parker.”
Los Angeles is 360 miles south of Gilroy. For the attorney general to fly expeditiously from the Bates Ranch to Los Angeles would have required a ten-minute helicopter commute to either the San Jose Airport or the Naval Air Station, followed by a fifty-minute flight to the Santa Monica Airport and a ten-minute commute to the 20th Century-Fox heliport—where Bobby Kennedy frequently landed during his preproduction meetings at Fox for the film version of his book The Enemy Within. Including the five-minute drive from Fox to the Beverly Hilton Hotel, the elapsed time is one hour and fifteen minutes.
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Page 6