Late in the morning of Saturday, 4 August 1962, Agnes Flanagan, one of Marilyn’s hairdressers and an old friend, paid an impromptu visit to Fifth Helena Drive. Shortly after she got there, she said that a delivery man appeared with a parcel. The packaging had been torn and clumsily mended with sticky tape. It seemed to have travelled all over the world. A smudged stamp indicated a date in Italian. Only three letters in the sender’s details were legible: ROM. Roma? Romi? wondered Marilyn. A message from the past or the future? Love is always an anachronism. The signal reaches you after the source has ceased transmitting. Was the parcel in itself a message? She opened it and then went out to the swimming pool with its contents, a little stuffed tiger. She sat down with her feet in the water, hugging it in silence. Agnes thought she must be terribly depressed, although she didn’t say anything. Not knowing what to do, Agnes eventually let herself out. Photographs of Marilyn’s garden taken the following day show two stuffed animals by the swimming pool, one of which looks like the tiger.
She didn’t mention the strange object to her analyst, who came over in the late afternoon. After asking Pat Newcomb to leave, Greenson talked to his patient for two hours, then suggested she go for a walk by the sea with Eunice. They walked a little way, but Marilyn couldn’t keep her footing in the sand, so they came back and she carried on talking to Greenson until seven p.m. The telephone rang repeatedly, but Greenson wouldn’t let Marilyn answer. He picked up once and curtly told a dumbfounded Ralph Roberts, ‘She’s not here,’ before hanging up.
The Greensons were going out to dinner that evening, so at seven Greenson had to go home and change. He had only just arrived when Marilyn rang in a state of animation to pass on some good news about Joe DiMaggio’s son. She asked him, almost as an aside, if he had taken her bottle of Nembutal. He said he hadn’t, startled by the question because he thought she had been cutting down on her use of barbiturates recently. She didn’t have any sleeping pills at her disposal as far as he knew, though, so he saw no reason to worry. In fact, Engelberg had prescribed her twenty-five capsules at her request the day before, enough to kill herself. He hadn’t thought to tell Greenson.
Left alone, Marilyn stayed on the phone. At half past seven, she spoke to Peter Lawford. He thought she sounded terrible – drugs or alcohol, or both. He tried to warn her analyst but Greenson couldn’t be reached, so he called his brother-in-law, Mickey Rudin. From this point on, accounts differ.
According to one version, the analyst and Rudin returned after dinner around midnight because Greenson, already in an edgy mood because he’d given up smoking, was concerned at the condition in which he’d left his patient. When they got there, Greenson went into her bedroom. It was a mess. The wooden bedside table was piled high with plastic pill bottles, none of them containing Nembutal, that jostled for space with a copy of Leo Rosten’s novel, Captain Newman, M.D. Marilyn was in bed. She mumbled something incoherent and he decided to let her sleep. It didn’t occur to him that her mention of Nembutal in her last call might have meant: I’ve got what I need to kill myself and I may use it. The novel on her bedside table had been placed face down so as not to lose her place. Greenson picked it up and read, ‘The psychiatrist, full of compassion, learned that the young man he had cured of his trauma had died in combat. “Our job is to make the well,” the doctor remarks, “well enough to go out and get killed.”’
On the table there was also a letter she’d started to DiMaggio:
Dear Joe, if I can just make you happy, I will have succeeded in the largest and most difficult thing of all: to make someone completely happy. Your happiness means my happiness, and
Rudin, however, told it differently. He said that Greenson had called him around midnight. The analyst was waiting for him at Fifth Helena Drive and immediately said that Marilyn had died. There is also a third version of events, which says that Greenson neither heard from Marilyn nor saw her alive after their last phone call.
Night falls on the Pacific Coast. The Santa Ana, a hot, dry wind, sweeps through Los Angeles on its way to the ocean, bearing snatches of ‘Dancing In The Dark’, the Sinatra song Marilyn is playing at her home in Brentwood. Her house has thirty-inch-thick cement walls and wrought-iron bars on every window. The sturdy hand-worked doors and gates are the embodiment of solidity and protection, as the high stucco walls and soaring eucalyptus trees are of privacy. When she’d moved in, she had described her home as a fortress where she could feel safe from the world. But this evening it feels like a prison. She thinks of Fitzgerald’s remark about Hollywood, city of ‘thin partitions’.
She puts on Sinatra’s ‘Dancing In The Dark’ again. Dancing in the dark ’til the tune ends. She remembers a night a few months earlier: they’d made love as if for the last time, hopelessly estranged and yet unable to let go of one another, like survivors of a shipwreck clinging to debris in a lurching sea. We’re dancing in the dark and it soon ends. It was the first time they’d circled blindly around one another as they made love. We’re waltzing in the wonder of why we’re here. Usually he wanted the lights to be on. She loved the hungry, tender way he looked at her, the fact he could only orgasm if he saw desire in her eyes, the way he’d pull back at the last moment to take in her pellucid beauty. But it couldn’t last. Dancers in the dark, their sad waltz had driven them apart and now all they had left was the night. Time hurries by, we’re here and we’re gone. Their time was up. All they had was the moment, the darkness, their sweat, their clutching hands; no image of the other, no words, just the music and their bodies. Looking for the light of a new love, to brighten up the night. She thought of Romeo. They’d also danced together in the dark, their bodies infinitely far apart but their hearts joined as if they had finally reached dry land. And I have you love, and we can face the music together, dancing in the dark.
On the other side of America, Norman Rosten was startled awake in the early-morning light of his New York apartment. He’d forgotten the cold stone balcony on East 57th Street, but as he heard the phone ringing, part of him sensed this was the call he had been steeling himself for ever since. Superficially, though, his conversation with Marilyn couldn’t have been more cheerful and excited.
‘Did you see the latest interview in Life?’ she asked.
‘You bet,’ he said. ‘It was great. Very brave and free. You talked as if you were someone who has nothing to lose.’
‘There’s always something to lose. But we have to start living, right?’
She talked about her house, which was almost finished. The tiles were in; the furnishings were finally on their way. ‘It’s Mexican, naturally,’ she said, laughing. ‘An imitation, of course. I can’t wait for you to see the garden. It’ll be so beautiful, all new shrubs. By the way, the film may still get made. And I’ve had offers from all over the world. Yes, some wonderful offers, but I’m not thinking about them yet.’
She barely paused for breath. There was something she was saying in code, a message between the lines he couldn’t quite decipher.
‘Let’s all start to live before we get old,’ she said. ‘How are you really? How’s Hedda? Are you sure everything’s all right? Listen, I have to hang up, got a long-distance call on the line. I’ll speak to you on Monday. G’bye.’
Afterwards he thought she’d fooled him. She hadn’t said she was on the verge of suicide – perhaps she didn’t know yet. He and his wife were among the thirty-one mourners at Marilyn’s funeral. The actress had left their daughter Patricia five thousand dollars to pay for her studies. When he got back to New York, he found a poem Marilyn had written for him.
I
I left my home of green rough wood,
A blue velvet couch.
I dream till now
A shiny dark bush
Just left of the door.
Down the walk
Clickity clack
As my doll in her carriage
Went over the cracks –
‘We’ll go far away.’
II
&
nbsp; Don’t cry my doll
Don’t cry
I hold you and rock you to sleep
Hush hush I’m pretending now
I’m not your mother who died.
Brentwood, Fifth Helena Drive
Night of 4–5 August 1962
If this were film noir, it would open with a shot of the wind in the eucalyptus trees. It has come off the Mojave Desert, travelling over the salt lake beds strewn with crystals to blow in, soft and warm, over Beverly Hills, Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica. Now it’s passing Ventura Boulevard, gliding through Brentwood on its way out to sea. It’s a peaceful Saturday night, no different from any other Saturday night in this part of LA.
Joan Greenson hears the phone ringing in her parents’ bedroom around three in the morning. Awake now, and feeling a little hungry, she goes into the kitchen to raid the fridge. ‘I asked Mom what happened,’ she recalled afterwards. ‘She said there was a problem over at Marilyn’s, and I said “Oh”, and went back to bed.’
Shortly before dawn, Sergeant Jack Clemmons is on duty as watch commander at the police station on Purdue Street. The phone rings. The caller identifies himself as Dr Hyman Engelberg. ‘Marilyn Monroe has died. She’s committed suicide.’
Thinking it could be a hoax, Clemmons asks, ‘Who did you say this is?’
‘I’m Dr Hyman Engelberg, Marilyn Monroe’s physician. I’m at her residence. She’s committed suicide.’
‘I’ll be right over.’
If this were film noir, a rewrite would put Greenson centre stage:
The screen goes momentarily black; a phone rings.
‘West Los Angeles Police Department. Sergeant Clemmons speaking.’
‘Marilyn Monroe has died of an overdose.’
‘What?’
‘Marilyn Monroe has died. She’s committed suicide.’
‘Who is this?’
‘Her psychiatrist, Dr Greenson. This is not a hoax.’
Driving down San Vicente Boulevard, Clemmons radios for a back-up patrol car to meet him at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive. He speeds down the deserted streets to Carmelina Avenue, then turns into the short cul-de-sac. The address is at the end of the street. He goes into the house, enters a bedroom, and sees a body sprawled across a bed. A sheet is pulled up over its head, leaving visible only a shock of platinum-blonde hair. ‘She was lying face down in what I call the soldier’s position,’ Clemmons said afterwards. ‘Her face was in a pillow, her legs stretched out perfectly straight.’ He immediately thinks she has been placed that way, with one hand close to the telephone and the cord under her body as she lies diagonally across the mattress.
A few weeks earlier in New York, Marilyn had told W. J. Weatherby, ‘You know who I’ve always depended on? Not strangers, not friends – the telephone! That’s my best friend . . . I love calling friends, especially late at night when I can’t sleep.’
A distinguished-looking figure is sitting despondently by the bed, his head in his hands. He says he was the one who rang the police. Another man standing by the bedside table introduces himself as Dr Ralph Greenson, Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist. He says she has committed suicide and points to the empty Nembutal bottle on the bedside table. ‘She took the whole bottle. When I got here, I could see from many feet away that Marilyn was no longer living. There she was, lying face down on the bed, bare shoulders exposed, and as I got closer I could see the phone clutched fiercely in her right hand. I suppose she was trying to make a phone call before she was overwhelmed. It was just unbelievable, so simple and final and over.’
Sergeant Clemmons finds Dr Greenson’s hypothesis odd. Why would she ring someone when Mrs Murray was in the house? Police Officer Robert E. Byron, who arrives on the scene later, notes in his report that Greenson had taken the telephone out of Marilyn’s hand, no easy task once rigor mortis had set in. Studying the two doctors, Clemmons also notes that Dr Engelberg seems uncommunicative and that the psychiatrist, who does most of the talking, has a strange, defensive attitude. He seems to be challenging him to accuse him of something. Clemmons says afterwards he kept thinking, ‘What the hell’s wrong with this fellow? Because his attitude just didn’t fit the situation. There was something wrong about the look in his eye.’
‘Did you try to revive her?’ he asks the psychiatrist.
‘No, it was too late – we got here too late,’ Greenson replies.
‘Do you know when she took the pills?’
‘No.’
Clemmons goes to ask Eunice Murray for her version of events.
‘I knocked on the door,’ Murray says, ‘but Marilyn didn’t answer, so I called her psychiatrist, Dr Greenson, who lives not far away. When he arrived, he also failed to get a response on knocking on the door, so he went outside and looked through the bedroom window. He saw Marilyn lying motionless on the bed, looking peculiar. He broke the window with a poker and climbed inside and came around and opened the door. He told me “We’ve lost her”, and then he called Dr Engelberg.’
Returning to the bedroom, Sergeant Clemmons asks the doctors why they’d waited four hours before calling the police.
‘We had to get permission from the studio publicity department before we could call anyone,’ Greenson replies.
‘The publicity department?’ Clemmons repeats.
‘Yes, the 20th Century Fox publicity department. Miss Monroe is making a film there.’
Clemmons subsequently tells several journalists, ‘It was the most obvious murder I ever saw.’
If this were a film, a shot of the ambulance containing Marilyn’s body under a white sheet would slowly fade out and be replaced by a black screen with ‘THREE MONTHS EARLIER’ in white letters. Then it would cut to the rushes, a clapperboard saying, ‘SOMETHING’S GOT TO GIVE’, and underneath, ‘MARILYN, LAST TAKE’. The unedited footage that followed would look like images from a dream, almost too real, the lighting and grain possessing a strange, gruelling clarity that a camera wouldn’t ordinarily be able to capture. Marilyn had been a tightrope-walker who was oblivious to the drop beneath her feet, but now she knew she could fall. She looked like a ghost. The ghost of the star of Sunset Boulevard, a blonde Norma Desmond.
Los Angeles County Coroner’s office, the morgue
5 August 1962
Greenson never revealed much about the last time he saw Marilyn. In a phone conversation with the journalist Billy Woodfield, on the evening after the funeral, he said, ‘Listen, I can’t explain myself without revealing things I do not want to reveal. You can’t draw a line and say, “I’ll tell you that, but not that . . .” I cannot speak about it, because I cannot tell you the whole story . . . Ask Bobby Kennedy.’ He did insist on one thing, though. He said she was asleep in the guest bedroom in the wing of her house rather than her own, as if she didn’t feel at home. But he quickly added that she often slept there. When Woodfield asked him about the repeat prescriptions of chloral hydrate and the ‘youth shots’, Greenson said, ‘Everyone makes mistakes. Including me.’
Speaking to Norman Rosten, he said, ‘I received a call from Marilyn around four-thirty p.m. She seemed somewhat depressed and on large amounts of medication. I went over. She was furious with a friend who had slept fifteen hours the previous night whereas she’d slept terribly. After I’d spent approximately two hours and half with her, she seemed calmer.’ Mickey Rudin remembered hearing the psychoanalyst exclaim on the night of Marilyn’s death, ‘Goddam it! Hy gave her a prescription I didn’t know about!’
Rudin described Greenson as exhausted: ‘He’d had enough; he’d spent the day with her. He wanted to at least have a peaceful Saturday evening and night.’ Greenson also explained to an investigating officer that she had been extremely upset on the phone at not having a date that evening – the fact that the most beautiful woman in the world was alone. He thought she had died feeling rejected.
We know nothing directly from Greenson about the causes of his patient’s death. This was a secret he carried to his grave. Remarks in letters
to Marilyn’s other analysts or comments he made in conversations, which were revealed thirty or more years later, are the only clue to his reactions. In a letter to Marianne Kris two weeks after Marilyn’s death, he wrote, ‘On Friday night, she had told the internist that I had said it was all right for her to take some Nembutal, and he had given it to her without checking with me, because he has been upset for his own personal reasons. He had just left his wife. On Saturday, however, I observed that she was somewhat drugged and guessed what drug she must have taken to be in the state.’ He mentioned Marilyn’s decision to stop therapy with him. ‘She wanted to replace it with recordings of her thoughts. I realised I was starting to irritate her. She was often irritated if I was not absolutely and completely in agreement with her . . . She was angry with me. I told Marilyn we’d talk about it again, that she should call me on Sunday morning, and then I left. But that Sunday she was dead.’
The psychoanalyst was questioned at length, first by the police, who called him in two days later to the Justice Department to make a statement, then by the district attorney, who had commissioned a ‘psychological autopsy’, and finally by a collection of twelve experts called the Suicide Investigation Team. Robert Litman, one of two psychiatrists on this ‘suicide team’, was a former pupil of his. When he went to question Greenson, he found him terribly upset, and ended up acting more like a grief counsellor than a forensic investigator.
Marilyn's Last Sessions Page 25