The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  Clemmons believed he was the first officer called to the scene at 4:25 Sunday morning, so he was perplexed by the Landaus’ statement. He wondered if the police car they saw could have been the patrol car that Sergeant Marvin Iannone checked out of the Purdue Street garage before the 11:30 P.M. roll call Saturday night. Iannone was known to work for Hamilton in Intelligence, and whenever the president or the attorney general visited the Lawfords, Iannone received the special duty assignment from Hamilton to work the Lawford beach house.

  In an interview in 1994, Clemmons recalled an encounter with Iannone at the Purdue Street station in the weeks following Monroe’s death. “Say, Marv, you know what I think?” asked Clemmons, “I think Marilyn Monroe was murdered, and they’re covering up this whole damn thing because the attorney general was involved! What do you think?” Iannone stared at him for a few moments before turning and walking away without uttering a word.

  “He really avoided me after that,” Clemmons recounted, “Twenty years later, when Marv became police chief of Beverly Hills, and the district attorney’s office was putting together the threshold investigation on the Monroe case, I called him several times, but Marv never returned the calls. Maybe he thought I was going to ask him the same question—I was!”

  Robert Slatzer also returned again to Fifth Helena Drive to speak to Monroe’s neighbors. Elizabeth Pollard told him she remembered having friends over for cards on Saturday, August 4, and one of her guests remarking, “Oh, look, there’s Robert Kennedy!” They watched him walk into the Monroe residence with two other men in the late evening. Slatzer then sought out the officer reported to be the first policeman on the scene, Sergeant Jack Clemmons. The two men discovered that they shared the same suspicions.

  “Clemmons was convinced from the beginning that Marilyn was murdered,” Slatzer remembers. “On a scale of ten he was way over the top on that, but he had nothing to go on other than circumstances at the death scene and his gut feelings. I knew there was motive. After talking to Clemmons and the neighbors, I made up my mind to pursue it.”

  Following up on the Landaus’ statement regarding the ambulance, Slatzer spoke to Walter Schaefer of the Schaefer Ambulance Service, which received most of the emergency calls in the Brentwood area. Schaefer assured Slatzer that none of his ambulances had been called to Fifth Helena Drive on August 4 or 5.

  Slatzer also made repeated calls to Peter Lawford that went unreturned. He found that Eunice Murray’s phone had been disconnected and was told by neighbors that she had vacated her one-room Ocean Park apartment and left for an extended vacation in Europe. Slatzer found that Pat Newcomb had also suddenly vanished. She moved from her Beverly Hills apartment, leaving no forwarding address. A contact at Arthur Jacobs’s public relations firm informed Slatzer that Pat Newcomb had been dismissed and was traveling abroad. In trying to speak to Dr. Ralph Greenson, Slatzer was told by the doctor’s secretary that Greenson had also left Los Angeles for an extended period of time.

  The death of Marilyn Monroe was devastating to Ralph Greenson. A colleague at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute commented, “The fire went out in Dr. Greenson when Marilyn Monroe died. He never really recovered. He went on, but he turned inward after that…. He became a bit strange.”

  “Marilyn’s death was extremely painful for him,” his wife, Hildi Greenson, confirmed. “Not just that it was so public, which was terrible in itself, but that Marilyn, he felt, was doing much better—and then he lost her. That was quite painful.”

  Dr. Greenson was suffering to such a degree that he found it impossible to keep his office appointments with his regular patients. “It was awful,” he recalled, “But I felt I had to go on. And I went on, and I was upset. And my patients saw me upset…. With some of them, I had tears in my eyes, and I couldn’t hide it.”

  Actress Janice Rule, who was a patient of Dr. Greenson’s at the time, recalled the depth of Greenson’s anguish and remembered him stating, “There is no way in my lifetime I will ever be able to answer any of this.” A week after Marilyn’s funeral, Greenson took a leave of absence to visit his friend and colleague Dr. Max Schur in New York. Schur, a practicing psychoanalyst, had been an associate and personal physician of Sigmund Freud. Schur and Greenson had met when Greenson was a student in Bern and Vienna. In his deep distress, Greenson turned to Schur for emotional support. Their first session lasted twelve hours—the beginning of prolonged therapy in which Greenson hoped to “eventually begin to get over this.” Seven years later Greenson was still “devastated.” He told associates, “I don’t know that I will ever get over it really or completely.”

  In the weeks following the funeral, the press revealed that Marilyn Monroe had left the bulk of her estate to Lee Strasberg, but that she had died broke and in debt. Though columnists Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen occasionally printed items about the strange circumstances of the film star’s death, the tragedy faded from the news, and the Marilyn Monroe story seemed on its way to becoming just another sad chapter in Hollywood Babylon. By year’s end, the police department closed its file on the case. When asked in later years what happened to the Monroe file, Captain James Hamilton’s former assistant, Lieutenant Marion Phillips, said, “In 1962 Chief Parker took the file to show someone in Washington. That was the last we heard of it.”

  The records show that Parker’s only trip to Washington after Monroe’s death was on December 10, 11, and 12, 1962. Correspondence between Parker and Robert Kennedy in the Kennedy Library reveals that Parker met with Kennedy on December 12 at the Park University Motel in College Park, Maryland, about something Parker described in his letter as “a matter of mutual interest.”

  In June of 1963, Hamilton suddenly resigned his position as chief of the Intelligence Division, and Parker selected Daryl Gates to replace him. “I was astonished,” Gates remarked. “Jim Hamilton, the captain of Intelligence, was Parker’s man in that position from day one and I had assumed Jim would never leave.” But Hamilton went on to a better-paying job as head of security for the National Football League. “Robert Kennedy suggested Jim,” Daryl Gates recalled. Before departing, Captain Hamilton promoted Marvin Iannone to lieutenant and transferred him to the downtown office of the Intelligence Division.

  When Pat Newcomb returned from her European trip in February of 1963, she relocated to Washington, D.C., where she became liaison officer of the United States Information Agency headed by George Stevens, Jr. George and Liz Stevens were personal friends of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, as was Pat’s immediate boss, Don Wilson. Newcomb served as the liaison between Hollywood and the Capitol, organizing Hollywood participation in film festivals around the world and arranging for motion-picture personalities, such as Kirk Douglas, to travel abroad and make personal appearances at international motion-picture events. In between her worldwide travels Newcomb socialized with the Kennedys; she was frequently a guest at Hickory Hill. In late October 1963 she fell from a horse while riding with Bobby Kennedy and broke her arm. Correspondence between Kennedy and Newcomb in which she refers to herself as “Berthe Bronco” and Kennedy refers to himself as “Charlie Generous” reveals a light-hearted amusement concerning the episode.

  10

  The Paper Chase

  The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.

  —John F. Kennedy, October 1963

  Over a hundred and ten books have been published on the subject of Marilyn Monroe since her death. In 1964, Frank Capell’s seventy-page booklet, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, was the first to say that the film star was murdered, and that the Kennedys were involved. Capell, whom many considered to be a right-wing extremist, was a former FBI agent and publisher of an anticommunist pamphlet, Herald of Freedom. He claimed that Marilyn Monroe’s murder was part of a communist plot involving Jack and Robert Kennedy. Capell’s extremism obscured many of the accurate revelations con
tained in his slender book.

  Though the publication received scant attention, it was reviewed by J. Edgar Hoover. A personal memo from the FBI director to Attorney General Robert Kennedy dated July 8, 1964, states:

  Mr. Frank A. Capell is publishing a 70-page paperback book entitled “The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe,” which should be ready for publication about July 10, 1964.

  According to Mr. Capell, his book will make reference to your alleged friendship with the late Marilyn Monroe. Mr. Capell stated he will indicate in his book that you and Miss Monroe were intimate and that you were in Miss Monroe’s residence at the time of her death.

  Any additional information concerning the publication of the above book will be promptly brought to your attention.

  Critics scoffed at Capell, but Robert Kennedy took him seriously. When Richard Nixon released a long list of people whose phones had been tapped during previous administrations, Capell appeared on a list of those put under surveillance by Robert Kennedy.

  Another writer, Fred Lawrence Guiles, first became intrigued by the Monroe story when he traveled to Reno in September of 1960. He discovered that The Misfits’ crew was filming nearby and began frequenting the location, where he befriended the film’s producer, Frank Taylor, and Marilyn’s masseur, Ralph Roberts. Eventually he was introduced to Marilyn. Though he never saw her again after The Misfits wrapped production, he was forever captivated and became one of her biographers. Deeply disturbed by the news of her death, in 1963 Guiles wrote a screenplay, Goodbye, Norma Jean, envisioned as a motion-picture biography. Frank Taylor brought Guiles’s screenplay to the attention of Pat Newcomb, who at that time was assisting Bobby Kennedy in preparing the cinematic eulogy to John Kennedy, Years of Lightning—Day of Drums, for the U.S. Information Agency.

  With the assistance of Newcomb, Goodbye, Norma Jean became enlarged into a Ladies’ Home Journal magazine series in 1967 called The Final Summer of Marilyn Monroe. Newcomb assumed that Robert Kennedy’s involvement with Marilyn would not be mentioned; however, Guiles discreetly referred to “An Easterner—a married man not in the [film] industry…an Easterner with few ties on the coast…a lawyer and public servant with an important political career…an attorney who often stayed at his host’s beach house.” “The Easterner’s” identity was readily discernible beneath the disguise, and he was about to run for president. Newcomb had only recently recruited Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, and her accumulated coterie of Hollywood friends to support “the Easterner’s” campaign. Newcomb was so angered by Guiles’s revelation that she hasn’t spoken to him since.

  Guiles’s magazine series was subsequently published as a book in 1969 under the title Norma Jean: The Life of Marilyn Monroe. (The correct spelling, as indicated on the birth certificate, is Norma Jeane.) It became a runaway bestseller, and for the first time the general public learned about Marilyn’s relationship with a “public servant with an important political career.” Guiles accepted the coroner’s verdict of probable suicide, but Robert Slatzer did not, nor did he hesitate to reveal the name of “the Easterner.” Though Slatzer was a writer of romantic fiction, he found himself becoming an investigative journalist out of necessity—nobody else knew what he knew. Imbued with a love of classic literature, Slatzer had arrived in Hollywood in the 1940s with a young man’s high hopes of becoming an important screenwriter. He eked out a living as a journalist for Scripps-Howard, and in time he did well as a Hollywood writer and director.

  Initially Slatzer’s investigation into Marilyn Monroe’s death was an attempt to bring about an official inquiry; however, he soon discovered that the doors in the long marble halls of officialdom were firmly closed to him. In time he joined forces with Frank Capell and Jack Clemmons in the accumulation of investigative information. What started as a small file ended up a vast storehouse of material that now overflows his Hollywood Hills home.

  Slatzer began compiling his investigative information in book form in 1964, but it was a long, tortuous odyssey from conception to completion. Death threats, beatings, break-ins, and arson lay along Slatzer’s labyrinthine path to publication. At one time in 1972 the monitored death threats became so severe that Slatzer was compelled by the Los Angeles Police Department to have a bodyguard.

  When Slatzer’s book The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe was finally published in 1974, Publishers Weekly termed it “bizarre and disturbing…touching and convincing.” Briefly on the bestseller list, it was the first major volume to document evidence that Marilyn Monroe was a homicide victim and that Robert Kennedy was implicated. Included in Slatzer’s book was the transcript of an interview he conducted with a man named Jack Quinn. Quinn had contacted Slatzer in 1972, after reading about his forthcoming book in a newspaper. Quinn claimed he worked for the Los Angeles Hall of Records and had recently reduced the Monroe police file to microfilm. He gave Slatzer permission to record their conversation, which is preserved in the Slatzer archives:

  QUINN: You’re right about the coroner’s inadequate investigation…. Did you see the photographs of her…the coroner’s photographs taken in her bedroom?

  SLATZER: No.

  QUINN: She had bruises on her, but they were edited out of the final report…. I saw the reports from the intelligence units. We were supposed to destroy a lot of their original records and condense everything into a neat package for microfilming.

  SLATZER: So what do you make of it?

  QUINN: The bruises? I don’t know what they mean…. Bobby went to the house to see her—that’s what the police record says. Bobby went to see her on that last Saturday. That was after he got a call from her at Peter Lawford’s house. Now, the day before, when she was supposed to have been hysterical—I guess that was sometime in the late afternoon—she was saying how she was going to do this and that…

  SLATZER: What else did you spot to make you suspicious?

  QUINN:…One of the queer things about the Marilyn Monroe case was how the original folder from the autopsy report happened to get lost…and when they found it all that stuff about the two Kennedy brothers was taken out…. Everything from the investigative report over the ten previous days, going back from Marilyn’s last Saturday to the previous Wednesday, was not there anymore.

  SLATZER: Any idea why?

  QUINN: Because of the position of the Kennedy family. Actually, he didn’t lie. He just didn’t tell the truth.

  SLATZER: Who?

  QUINN: Bobby. When he gave his statement to the police—

  SLATZER: He clouded it, in other words.

  QUINN: Yeah. And did you know about the chloral hydrate? I’m talking about the discovery of Nembutal and chloral hydrate.

  SLATZER: Noguchi was the one who did the autopsy on her.

  QUINN: Yeah, that’s him. But when they did the autopsy on her, things like disclosing the shade of her fingernails never came out. I’m trying to tell you about the effect of chloral hydrate and Nembutal have on the fingernails, like turning them blue. Well, anyhow, all that was cut out. They did a hell of an editing job on that damned thing…. Do you know the whole record ran 723 pages, and they boiled it down to 54?

  SLATZER: But everything’s on the microfilm in its original form—right?

  QUINN: Well, you can petition the city for a hundred years, and they’re going to deny it exists. And what they’ll probably release is the fifty-four pages.

  Quinn and Slatzer then met at a Hollywood restaurant. Slatzer brought along cinematographer Wilson Hong to witness the conversation. Quinn asserted that an official statement was made by Bobby Kennedy to the Los Angeles Police Department. “From what I saw in the deposition, it said that there was almost a divorce pending with Jackie and JFK.”

  Slatzer asked, “Wasn’t there anything about Bobby’s having an affair with Marilyn?”

  “No,” Quinn replied. “All Bobby said was that JFK was supposed to have been involved with Marilyn and that JFK had dispatched him to come out here and talk to Marilyn because JFK was getting a
lot of phone calls from Marilyn and was afraid of the embarrassment it might cause him. Bobby also said that his brother was having wife problems because of Marilyn’s calls to the White House. All of this was in Bobby Kennedy’s deposition.” Quinn then went on to say, “Bobby also said in his deposition that he and Peter Lawford went to Marilyn’s house late in the afternoon of August 4. There was a violent argument and Marilyn was grabbed by Bobby and thrown to the floor…. Then she was given an injection of pentobarbital in her armpit, which settled her down.”

  Slatzer then asked, “Does the record show that one of them injected Marilyn with the drugs?”

  “No,” Quinn replied. “One of them called for a doctor to come over and give Marilyn the injection.”

  “What doctor?” Slatzer inquired.

  “I don’t remember his name,” Quinn responded. “All I can tell you is that Kennedy’s deposition shows that Marilyn went into a tantrum and that she was screaming, ‘I’m tired of this whole thing, of being a plaything!’ Bobby said that Marilyn complained that she was called over to Lawford’s house at times when they had prostitutes and that she was tired of the whole mess.”

  Quinn then told Slatzer that according to the deposition, Marilyn lunged at Bobby and clawed him. Quinn went on to say, “It’s also on the record that the doctor came to the house at five o’clock. There’s a statement from him that he gave her a shot. But he didn’t say what drug was in the shot. But RFK said in his statement that the doctor gave Marilyn the shot under her left arm. He even named the artery on the tape. He said the shot that went into her was pentobarbital.”