The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  It was well known within the Sinatra crowd that the apartment was managed by Sinatra’s accountant, Harry Ziegler, and for years it was a way station for Sinatra’s pals, broads, and business associates. Angie Dickinson and Betsy Duncun had been residents along with actor Brad Dexter, who had once saved Sinatra from drowning.

  When Marilyn returned in 1961, Sinatra’s secretary, Gloria Lovell, was living in one of the Doheny units and Jeanne Carmen, one of Sinatra’s preferred blondes, was living in the other. According to Brad Dexter, Jeanne Carmen had known Sinatra and Johnny Rosselli for a number of years. Dexter, who first met Marilyn when he played a role in The Asphalt Jungle, recalled seeing Marilyn and Jeanne Carmen together at the apartment on several occasions.

  “They were friends,” Dexter recently stated. “I’d see them at Pucini’s with Frank, and sometimes at Palm Springs. Frank stayed in Marilyn’s apartment for a while after she moved out, and Jeanne was still there in 1964.”

  Marilyn and Jeanne Carmen had been acquainted since the early fifties. Carmen, like Marilyn, had started her career as a model and cover girl for girlie magazines, and she occasionally was cast in B movies, like The Monster from Piedras Blancas for Republic in 1959.

  Jeanne Carmen was a night person, and when Marilyn couldn’t sleep and Carmen wasn’t busy they’d while away the night talking and drinking. They often talked about men, sex and drugs, and sex and men. “We became barbiturate buddies,” Carmen stated, and it was on one such occasion, she remembered, that Marilyn talked about the baby girl who had been taken from her. “We were having a drink together and talking one night, and I told Marilyn I had once become pregnant with Frankie’s child and had an abortion. I was afraid it might happen again. And Marilyn said if I became pregnant I should have the baby no matter what Frankie said. Then she told me about the baby girl she had when she was nineteen or twenty. The baby was taken away from her and she said she had always suffered from guilt. She’d see young girls on the street or children in the park that would be about the age of her daughter and she’d wonder where her baby was and what she was doing…. She wouldn’t say who the father was. I was so astonished when she told me the story, and I think she must have seen the look of utter amazement on my face, because she suddenly stopped talking about it. We never discussed it again…. Marilyn had the characteristics a woman takes on around the tummy when she’s given birth, and I’m sure she was telling me the truth. Marilyn just wouldn’t make up things—not like that.”

  At Marilyn’s request, Ralph Roberts had followed her to the West Coast, and she leased a room for him at the nearby Chateau Marmont. “Rafe” helped her move in and installed the blackout curtains on her bedroom windows. She had learned the benefit of blackout curtains from Montgomery Clift, who found he couldn’t sleep without them. Allegedly they kept out extraneous noise and light, but the curtains also fulfilled a sensitive celebrity’s need for absolute retreat from the horrific monster that lurked just outside—the public.

  Roberts became her companion as well as masseur, and because Marilyn no longer drove a car, Ralph drove her to Dr. Greenson’s two or three times a week. Now that she was a Los Angeles resident again, the analyst extended himself in a doctor-patient arrangement that was unusually accommodating. Greenson told her that he would place himself on call, day or night, and gave her a special fee of fifty dollars per session. Frequently the sessions would be of two or three hours’ duration. Later, as her problems seemed to grow worse, he saw her almost daily, sometimes twice daily. His final bill to Marilyn’s estate, which was rendered prior to her funeral, was $1,450 for the month of July and the four days of August.

  Greenson didn’t approve of her relationship with Sinatra. In May 1961, he wrote to Dr. Kris: “Above all, I try to help her not to be lonely, and therefore to escape into the drugs or get involved with very destructive people, who will engage in some sort of sado-masochistic relationship with her…. This is the kind of planning you do with an adolescent girl who needs guidance, friendliness, and firmness, and she seems to take it very well…. She said, for the first time, she looked forward to coming to Los Angeles, because she could speak to me. Of course, this does not prevent her from canceling several hours to go to Palm Springs with Mr. F. S. She is unfaithful to me as one is to a parent….”

  Marilyn’s thirty-fifth birthday was June 1, 1961. That day she sent a telegram to Greenson stating “Dear Dr. Greenson: In this world of people I’m glad there’s you. I have a feeling of hope though today I’m Three Five.”

  Marilyn also became increasingly close to Patricia Kennedy Lawford and frequented the Lawford beach house in the company of Frank Sinatra and Dean and Jeanne Martin. Neighbors of the Lawfords reported seeing Marilyn at the Lawfords’ during Jack Kennedy’s visit in June 1961. Ralph Roberts recalled her speaking of a visit with the president and saying, “I made his back feel a lot better.”

  In mid-June, when Sinatra performed at the Sands in Las Vegas, Marilyn was there along with Peter and Pat Lawford and Jean Kennedy Smith. Eddie Fisher, who was there with Elizabeth Taylor, recalled, “Elizabeth and I sat in the audience with Dean and Jeanne Martin and Marilyn Monroe, who was having an affair with Sinatra, to watch his act. But all eyes were on Marilyn as she swayed back and forth to the music and pounded her hands on the stage, her breasts falling out of her low-cut dress. She was so beautiful—and so drunk. She came to the party later that evening, but Sinatra made no secret of his displeasure at her behavior, and she vanished almost immediately.”

  She had become ill, and Sinatra may have attributed her illness to the mortal sin of not being able to hold her liquor. But Sinatra didn’t know that the pain Marilyn suffered in her side for over a year had become tormenting. No amount of barbiturates or alcohol helped. Dr. Hyman Engelberg had been unsuccessful in diagnosing the problem until it became acute. She was finally told she had an inflamed gallbladder, and in the last week of June, Ralph Roberts and Pat Newcomb returned with her to New York, where she entered the Manhattan Polyclinic Hospital. Doctors discovered that she had impacted gallstones, and on June 29 she went into surgery for a cholecystectomy.

  Marilyn was released from the hospital on July 11, and outside a crush of reporters, photographers, and fans waited with their questions, flashbulbs, and autograph books—screaming, trying to touch her, shouting questions, tugging at her sweater. How are you feeling?…Smile…Sign this to David!…Do you miss Arthur Miller?…You killed Gable!…Please sign this, Miss Mansfield!…What’s your next picture?…Is it true that you and Joe are getting back together?…Look over here!

  There was an animalism and cruelty to the crowd Marilyn hadn’t sensed before. “It was scary,” Marilyn said. “I felt for a few minutes as if they were just going to take pieces out of me. Actually, it made me feel a little sick. I mean, I appreciated the concern and their affection and all that, but—I don’t know—it was like a nightmare. I wasn’t sure I was going to get into that car safely and get away.”

  While she was recuperating in her New York apartment, Berniece Miracle arrived for a visit.

  “For several months I had been aware of a transition in Marilyn’s attitude,” Berniece stated. “New problems were coming at her from every direction. In our telephone conversations, her usual wistfulness about getting together had changed to strong invitations. ‘I need you to be with me,’ Marilyn had said. ‘I need to talk to you, Berniece, and not over the telephone!’”

  Though they had spoken on the phone and written frequently, Marilyn hadn’t seen her half sister since the California visit in 1946, and the urgency mystified Berniece. There was an ecstatic reunion at Marilyn’s apartment. Joe DiMaggio and his friend George Solotaire joined them for dinner. There was a lot of catching up to do, and late-night discussions about Gladys.

  Following her separation from John Eley, Gladys had been confined for eight years in Rockhaven Sanitarium in Verdugo City, California, where she was officially diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. She had tried to escape s
everal times, and there had been suicide attempts.

  Through the years Marilyn had paid for her mother’s care, and Gladys frequently wrote Marilyn letters of complaint that Rockhaven wasn’t operated by members of the Christian Science faith. Marilyn received one of her mother’s letters during Berniece’s visit, and Berniece noted that Marilyn had difficulty reading it.

  “I can’t finish this letter now,” Marilyn said with tears in her eyes. “I just can’t finish Mother’s letter. I’ll just put it away for a while.” With her eyes firmly closed, Marilyn continued, “I just get angry. I know it’s irrational. I know that she didn’t mean to turn her back on me. She didn’t purposely get sick. I try and try, but I still get angry—even when she was with me, she wasn’t there. God, poor Mother…”

  Berniece recalled that she kept waiting for Marilyn to reveal the matter that was so important she couldn’t discuss it over the phone. “I kept listening, trying to figure out what she wanted to say, and trying to figure out how I could help. I kept waiting for her to get around to exactly what was troubling her.” According to Lena Pepitone, Marilyn had invited Berniece to New York in order to give her a large sum of money, “so they can live better and educate their kids.”

  In the later part of July, before Berniece was to return to her home in Florida, Ralph Roberts drove Marilyn and Berniece to the Roxbury farm to retrieve some of Marilyn’s possessions. Knowing that Marilyn was coming, Miller absented himself. Roberts recalled that Marilyn smelled eau de bourgeoisie perfume on a fur coat she had left in a closet, and à la Goldilocks she said, “Some Magnum madam has been sleeping in my bed and wearing my coat.” She then promptly dropped the fur into a trash can.

  That Miller had made a point of not being there bothered Marilyn, and she complained to Norman Rosten, “I told him [Miller] I’d be there, but when I arrived he wasn’t. It was sad. I thought maybe he’d ask me in for coffee or something. We spent some happy years in that house. But he was away, and then I thought, ‘Maybe he’s right’—what’s over is over, why torment yourself with hellos? Still, it would have been polite, sort of, don’t you think, if he’d been there to greet me? Even a little smile would do.”

  Before returning to Hollywood, Marilyn told Lena Pepitone that she thought Frank Sinatra was going to marry her. Though he hadn’t asked her yet, Marilyn’s intuition told her “he’s almost ready.” Unlike Joe DiMaggio, who didn’t want her to be in the movies, Sinatra was in the same business as she was. “Frankie wouldn’t expect me to be a housewife. We can both have our careers. It’ll be perfect…I hope.” Crossing the fingers of both hands and holding them in the air, she then closed her eyes, and said, “Let me be lucky—just once!”

  During the summer of 1961 Marilyn socialized a great deal with Sinatra and the Rat Pack. In August she spent a weekend with Sinatra on his yacht, and Dean Martin’s wife Jeanne said, “I remember going up to Frank’s house before we got on the boat and he said, ‘Will you please go in and get Marilyn dressed so we can get in the limo and go?’ She couldn’t get herself organized, but she was the one person Frank was patient with.”

  Dr. Greenson, who felt that Marilyn’s relationship with Sinatra was destructive, wrote to a colleague at this time, “She was terribly, terribly lonely” and she expressed a “feeling of mistreatment, which had paranoid undertones.” Greenson went on to state that he felt Marilyn was reacting to her current involvement with “people who only hurt her.”

  In September, Lena Pepitone received an excited call from Marilyn. “You’re coming out to California. I’m going to show you Hollywood!” Marilyn had asked Pepitone to bring her a special dress that she wanted to wear to a Democratic Party fund-raiser she was going to attend at the Hilton Hotel with Frank Sinatra. It was a green sequined dress that Marilyn had Jean-Louis design at a cost of three thousand dollars. Pepitone recalled that Pat Newcomb made the arrangements, and she was flown out to California in first class. Marilyn’s chauffeur, Rudy Kautzky, was waiting at the airport. When Pepitone arrived at the apartment, Marilyn threw her arms around her in a warm greeting, exclaiming, “Baby lamb, you’re here! You made it!”

  Pepitone remembered Sinatra arriving in full evening dress to take Marilyn to the Hilton and being surprised to find Marilyn actually ready on time. “Marilyn flew into the room like an exotic tropical bird; with her platinum hair and green-sequined gown, she electrified the apartment. Frank’s face lit up. He was clearly thrilled by the way she looked. With a breathless ‘Frankie,’ she embraced him. Then, after telling Marilyn to close her eyes, Sinatra pulled out of his pocket a gorgeous pair of emerald and diamond earrings and clipped them to her ears. Marilyn exclaimed how beautiful they were and Frank said, ‘They oughtta be. They cost thirty-five-thousand dollars!’”

  One of the guests at the fund-raiser was Philip Watson, the Los Angeles County assessor, who was invited to a more intimate gathering in the Kennedy suite at the Hilton later in the evening. “She was there in the room with him [JFK],” Watson recalled. “I had heard stories about them, and it came as no particular surprise. I was introduced to them both, I spoke to her, too, and I thought her a beauty—she was in a skintight sequined dress.”

  By 1961, Marilyn’s affair with the president wasn’t much of a secret in Hollywood. Associated Press columnist James Bacon revealed that Marilyn had told him of the relationship during the campaign. “She was very open about her affair with JFK,” Bacon stated. “In fact, I think Marilyn was in love with JFK.” Marilyn’s friend Jeanne Carmen was present at a number of Jack Kennedy’s visits to the star. According to Carmen, Marilyn’s affair with the president wasn’t a well-kept secret. “It was known in the industry. I don’t think the public would have believed it then if they heard it. They would have closed their minds to it. The public didn’t want to hear stuff like that. I wonder if they want to hear it now? But the industry knew. I mean they were very brazen. I’m amazed it didn’t get out.”

  Edwin Guthman, Robert Kennedy’s former press secretary, recalled being at several parties at the Lawford beach house with Robert Kennedy when Marilyn and the president’s brother were together. One of the parties took place in the first week of October 1961, shortly after Guthman attended a conference in San Francisco with the attorney general. “After the party at Lawfords’,” Guthman recalled, “she had too much to drink to drive home, and we both drove her to her place, an apartment somewhere around Beverly Hills. Bob asked me to come along too. He didn’t say why, but his reason was pretty obvious. He didn’t want to be seen going off alone in a car at night with Marilyn Monroe.”

  Look magazine photographer Stanley Tretick remembered seeing Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn dancing together at a party. “It was in a hotel at a posh, semiprivate affair, a fund-raiser sort of thing. They were dancing very closely, with their bodies very close together, and it looked rather romantic. It just struck me at the time, ‘My, they really look like a nice couple together.’”

  Marilyn wrote to Norman Rosten about dancing with Bobby Kennedy at a party.

  He was very nice, sort of boyish and likeable. Of course he kept looking down my dress, but I’m used to that. I thought he was going to compliment me, but instead he asked me while dancing who I thought was the handsomest man in the room. I mean, how was I going to answer that? I said he was. Well, in a way he was!

  Marilyn needed Dr. Greenson’s absolute confidence in telling him about her relationships, and while he tried to discourage her relationships with many men, including Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, he didn’t discourage her relationship with either Jack or Bobby Kennedy. In the interview conducted after Marilyn’s death by Robert Litman of the Suicide Prevention Team, Greenson referred to her relationship with “two powerful and important men in government.” Litman’s report stated, “Greenson had very considerable concern that she was being used in these relationships. However, it seemed so gratifying to her to be associated with such powerful and important men that he could not declare himself to be against it.”
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  Sinatra’s secretary, Gloria Lovell, recalled that the “chairman of the board” often spoke to the Prez on the phone. Whenever the president called, she would interrupt business meetings to tell Sinatra there was a call from the White House. “Frank would smile at everybody, pick up the phone and say, ‘Hiya, Prez!’ After each one of those calls Frank pranced around, so proud of the fact that the president was ringing him up.”

  Frank’s private life fascinated the president, who had an endless curiosity as to what Frank was doing, and to whom. Judith Campbell Exner recalled that during her visits to the White House, Kennedy always quizzed her about Sinatra. “Almost immediately, Jack started pumping me for gossip, most of it directed at Frank. What was Frank doing? Was it true that he was seeing Janet Leigh? We always went through the same routine.”

  Peter Lawford recalled, “During one of our private dinners, Jack brought up Sinatra and said, ‘I really should do something for Frank.’ Jack was always so grateful to him for all the work he’d done in the campaign. He said, ‘Maybe I’ll ask him to the White House for dinner or lunch.’ I said that Frank would love that, but then Jack said, ‘There’s only one problem, Jackie hates him and won’t have him at the White House.’ But the president brightened up a few minutes later and said, ‘I’ll wait until Jackie goes to Middleburg, and I’ll have Eunice be the hostess.’ So that’s what he did. When Jackie left, JFK’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln called Frank and invited him to the White House. He flew to Washington for the day and a car drove him up to the southwest gate. Even without Jackie there, the president still wouldn’t let him come in the front door,” Peter Lawford continued. “I don’t think he wanted reporters to see Frank Sinatra going into the White House. That’s why he never flew on Air Force One, and was never invited to any of the Kennedy state dinners or taken to Camp David for any of the parties there. He got to Hyannis, once.”