Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Noguchi’s subjects were to include Sharon Tate, William Holden, Natalie Wood, and John Belushi. In 1968 he would probe the ruined head of Senator Robert Kennedy.

  Noguchi and John Miner, the observer from the District Attorney’s office, were profoundly affected when the sheet was drawn back on Marilyn Monroe. Miner said, ‘Tom and I had looked at thousands of bodies, but we were both very touched. We had a sense of real sadness, and the feeling that this young, young woman could stand up and get off the table any minute.’

  Noguchi labored over Marilyn for hours, his scalpel slicing into the body that had graced so many pinups, his surgeon’s saw carving a way to remove the brain that had made millions lust and laugh. We learn from his notes that Marilyn was a ‘36-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female weighing 117 pounds and measuring 65½ inches in length. The scalp is covered with bleached blonde hair. The eyes are blue.’ We are told that ‘distribution of the pubic hair is of female pattern. The uterus is of usual size.’ We learn of the scars the photographer’s airbrush had hidden so efficiently, of the appendectomy, of the gall-bladder removal. We learn that, for all the storied excess, the living Monroe had been in fairly good shape.

  When Marilyn was wheeled away, the beauty was gone. A picture retrieved from police files — the only known surviving postmortem photograph — shows a sagging, bloated face, hair hanging limp and straight over the edge of the table. The facial muscles had been severed during the removal of the brain, the remains sluiced with water once the doctor’s work was done.

  The surgical part of the autopsy, Noguchi knew by now, did not hold the medical explanation of Marilyn’s death. Apart from a couple of bruises, which could have been caused by blundering into furniture, there was no evidence of physical violence. Knowing pill bottles had been found on the bedside table, Noguchi said, he guessed already that the vital answers would come from the toxicologist — the poisons specialist.

  Early on Monday morning, while Los Angeles commuters were still on their way to work, head toxicologist Ralph Abernethy considered a range of specimens waiting in his laboratory. They included eight pill containers — one of them the empty Nembutal bottle — vials of blood and urine, and specimens from Marilyn’s stomach, intestines, liver, and kidneys. Dr Noguchi was requesting a test for alcohol and for barbiturates.

  Within hours Noguchi knew Marilyn’s blood contained 4.5 milligrams percent barbiturates, and no alcohol at all; she had not drunk any quantity of her favorite tipple, champagne, for several hours before expiring. Contrary to repeated assumption down the years, Marilyn did not die from the classic combination of alcohol and pills.

  The drugs, however, were the key. Further tests showed 13 milligrams percent pentobarbital in the liver, and 8 milligrams percent chloral hydrate in the blood. Pentobarbital is the chemical identified in the sleeping pill Nembutal, and chloral hydrate was one of the less dangerous sedatives found at Marilyn’s house.

  A pathologist at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, Dr Christopher Foster, pointed out that it is notoriously difficult to say precisely how much of a drug had been consumed. He calculated, however, that Marilyn’s Nembutal intake was some ten times the normal therapeutic dose. The chloral hydrate level itself indicates ‘a fairly stunning intake,’ up to twenty times the amount usually recommended for sleep. Either of the drugs, taken in such quantities, could individually have proved fatal. Taken together, they were even more likely to kill.

  Noguchi’s internal examination had shown congestion and hemorrhaging of the stomach lining, a typical result of the irritation caused by barbiturates taken in excess. This, together with the laboratory analysis and the bottles found in Marilyn’s room, was all too familiar to men who saw overdose victims every day.

  On August 10, five days after the death, Dr Noguchi submitted his final autopsy report, giving the cause of death as ‘acute barbiturate poisoning due to ingestion of overdose.’ Under the heading ‘Mode of Death,’ he circled ‘Suicide,’ adding the word ‘probable’ in his own hand. This was the verdict the Coroner would announce to the press a week later.

  The suicide finding has not satisfied a number of critics, who have disputed, above all, Noguchi’s conclusion that Marilyn swallowed the overdose, or — in Coroner Curphey’s phrase — that it was ‘self-administered.’

  The critics have raised several objections. They have said it is usual to find traces of pills in the stomach — fragments of gelatin capsules and sometimes intact undigested pills. They say barbiturate capsules leave a telltale trail of colored dye in the system. They have suggested that barbiturate victims usually vomit before expiring.

  Skeptics have also noted that no drinking glass was found in Marilyn’s bedroom, and no water — she would surely have needed water to wash down all those pills. In short, their suspicion has been that somebody else administered Marilyn’s fatal dose — that she was murdered.

  The absence of a drinking glass is curious. A District Attorney’s review in 1982 tried to resolve the problem by referring to a published photograph of the death scene, which ‘appears to show a drinking vessel.’ The relevant picture shows an object by the bedside table that could conceivably be a flask.

  Marilyn’s bathroom, which opened off her bedroom, had no functioning plumbing that night because of the remodeling operations. If she went to another room for water, Mrs Murray did not notice.

  Good police work at the start should have documented the presence or absence of a glass. Yet none of three relevant police reports mention the subject. The meager record only creates further confusion. The Death Report states that fifteen medicine bottles were found on the bedside table. Only eight are listed in the toxicology reports.

  Press reports noted that Marilyn’s house was formally sealed by 8:30 A.M. on the morning of her death. Inez Melson, as her mother’s guardian, was authorized to deal with Marilyn’s effects. She was allowed in with her husband a day later, and recalled that the bedside table was still littered with pill bottles. ‘We found bottle after bottle after bottle,’ Melson said in an interview. ‘There were sleeping pills, including Nembutal and Seconal. Whoever had been there before us did not take them away.’

  Mrs Melson, thinking impetuously of Marilyn’s reputation, destroyed the drugs. ‘We threw them all down the toilet, and I think I took the bottles away and put them in the garbage,’ she recalled. ‘There’ve been many times since that I’ve wished I’d saved them.’ Melson cannot be blamed; it was immensely inefficient that each and all of the bottles were not delivered to the Coroner long before.*

  Inefficiencies aside, the critics’ further objections have generally been rebuffed by leading forensic pathologists. Medical Examiners from six American cities, two British pathologists, two toxicologists, and a gastroenterologist were consulted during research for this book, in some cases without knowing that the subject was Marilyn Monroe.

  On the minor issues raised, the doctors agreed with the opinions offered to the Los Angeles District Attorney, during his 1982 review, by Dr Boyd Stephens, Chief Medical Examiner for San Francisco.

  As to the absence of vomit, the pathologists unanimously rejected the notion that most barbiturate victims throw up before dying. Sometimes they do; more often, especially when Nembutal is taken over several hours, they simply go peacefully to sleep.

  Nembutal capsules do contain a coloring agent, but it rarely leaves a trail, unlike Seconal, which often does. The coloring, when it is found, comes from the capsule rather than the Nembutal itself. There would be no stain at all if the capsules had been broken open and swallowed as liquid, and this is something Marilyn sometimes did do.

  These details dealt with, there is a considerable difference of opinion over the matter on which the critics have been most vociferous — the fact that no residue of the capsules was discovered in Marilyn’s stomach. This indicates, the critics have said, that she did not swallow the fatal dose, that it was administered some other way — perhaps by injection. This,
they have said, points to murder.

  Dr Stephens, reporting to the Los Angeles DA in 1982, was not troubled by the absence of capsule residue. It is, he points out, again a question of ‘sometimes, and sometimes not.’ Remnants of capsules are often found in the stomach, but whether they are found depends on several factors: when the victim last ate, or drank liquid, and how much; the victim’s individual metabolism; whether the victim was a habitual drug user with a high tolerance; and whether the drug was taken in one dose or over a period of several hours.

  In Marilyn’s case there is conflicting evidence on food intake. Eunice Murray has said Marilyn did not eat all day, while Pat Newcomb recalled having eaten a hamburger lunch with her. By evening, in either case, her stomach would have been virtually empty and prone to rapid absorption of barbiturates. After years of drug abuse, Marilyn almost certainly had a high tolerance for barbiturates; friends recalled her having taken astonishingly high dosages without serious effect.

  None of the doctors consulted were prepared to commit themselves on the number of capsules consumed. Dr Noguchi has ventured a figure of between thirty and forty, and other doctors’ estimates hovered between fifteen and forty.

  In 1962, at his press conference, Los Angeles Coroner Curphey expressed the opinion that Marilyn ingested a large amount of the drugs ‘within a short period of time.’ He was quoted as estimating she swallowed the pills in ‘one gulp within — let’s say — a period of seconds.’

  None of the doctors commenting later, including Dr Noguchi, agreed with this notion. Absorption of a drug by the liver, as in Marilyn’s case, means the digestive process has been underway for some time. The liver evidence suggests that Marilyn had taken some drugs several hours before dying.

  It is here that the experts start to differ. Dr Stephens, of San Francisco, reporting to the Los Angeles District Attorney in 1982, said that, on the basis of the autopsy record, he too would have concluded that Marilyn died ‘of acute barbiturate poisoning from the ingestion of an overdose.’ Other eminent doctors found that conclusion too sweeping, and it was the empty stomach that bothered them.

  Dr Keith Simpson was Emeritus Professor in Forensic Medicine at London University, and senior pathologist to the Home Office, the top government forensic expert in Britain. He studied all the available information on Marilyn’s death, at my request, and commented: ‘Had I been doing that autopsy I would not have been happy to write it off promptly as suicide due to ingestion. The barbiturate levels in the blood and liver are high enough, in my experience, to make it likely that you would find a residue of the capsules in the stomach. Yet nothing was found.’

  Professor Simpson said, ‘It should have been routine to look further on in the digestive process, in the duodenum and the rest of the small bowel. An examination of those organs would probably have located at least some small residue if the overdose was indeed a result of swallowing Nembutal capsules.’

  In Los Angeles, Dr Noguchi admitted ruefully that no such examination was ever made. He sent specimens of the relevant organs to the laboratory, but they were not tested. The tests were not done, Noguchi assumed, because the toxicologist felt the evidence in blood and liver was sufficient proof of the cause of death.

  Noguchi said he did in fact try belatedly to have the specimens tested. ‘For some reason I felt uncomfortable,’ he said, ‘and shortly after the case was formally closed I called Toxicology and requested the check. … Abernethy told me the organ specimens had been destroyed.’

  Toxicologist Abernethy refused to comment on the destruction of the medical evidence. Later efforts to find the slides from the specimens, which are listed in the official record, turned up nothing. Nor do any medical photographs survive, though many were taken.

  Dr Noguchi said he wished he had demanded checks on the intestines in the first place. ‘I should have insisted that all the organs be analyzed,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t follow through as I should have. As a junior member of the staff, I didn’t feel I could challenge the department heads on procedures. …’

  A fuller examination of the small intestine might have revealed the capsule residue that was absent in the stomach, and a great deal of controversy would have been avoided. As it was, the field was left clear for murder theories.

  Was Marilyn given the fatal barbiturate dose by injection? All the doctors interviewed say this method — by introducing the drug straight into the bloodstream through a vein, into a muscle, or subcutaneously — would cause very rapid death, and that goes against the fact that a large quantity of barbiturates had been in the system long enough to be absorbed by the liver. All three people present at the autopsy said that Dr Noguchi used a magnifying glass to look for injection marks, not omitting to study the vagina and under the tongue. He found nothing.

  There is one other way the fatal dose could have been administered. It is possible to insert drugs colonically — in layman’s terms, by enema. Amy Greene, Marilyn’s friend in New York, said Marilyn took frequent enemas, as early as the mid-fifties. Marilyn’s former Los Angeles neighbor, Jeanne Carmen, remembered her complaining about chronic constipation. Enemas are used to relieve that complaint. Their use was also a common fad, particularly among show business people in those days, as an aid to instant weight loss.

  ‘The colon shows marked congestion and purplish discoloration,’ says the autopsy record. This could have been a clue, except that it does not say where on the colon the damage was.

  Professor Simpson summed up: ‘The absence of capsule residue, somewhat surprising in view of the barbiturate level in the blood and liver, would suggest to me one of three things. The first possibility is that Marilyn Monroe took a gradual intake of barbiturates during the course of the day — and Dr Greenson did think she was somewhat drugged when he visited her in the afternoon. This earlier Nembutal intake would have stayed in the blood for up to eight or twelve hours. She may then have taken a sudden dose of perhaps fifteen pills together — not necessarily more — and this, coupled with the previous doses, may have proved fatal. Monroe is known to have abused sleeping pills, and may have survived such a dose in the past. She may have believed she could do so again, not realizing the cumulative effect of the pills taken earlier. In that case, her death may have been not suicide, but a tragic mistake.’

  Before hearing Professor Simpson’s second possibility, it is important to reconsider Marilyn’s series of telephone calls to her friend, Jeanne Carmen, on that fatal Saturday. She had called early in the morning, asking Carmen to bring over some sleeping pills. She had made the same request later, and then called again about 10:00 P.M. — though Carmen could not remember whether she was still asking for pills.

  If Marilyn was begging for pills, what does that mean? Did she want to be sure of having enough drugs to commit suicide? Had she already consumed the bulk of the twenty-five capsules prescribed on the previous day? Was that why, as Eunice Murray’s son-in-law observed, she looked so ravaged on Saturday morning? The questions are unanswerable, but they bring us to Professor Simpson’s next option. It is as sad to contemplate as the first.

  ‘I would also want to know,’ said the Professor, ‘whether, on top of the pills taken during the day, there was a separate dose administered by another route. On the evidence, the possibility of another mode of entry should be seriously considered. The fatal dose — the one that pushed her over the edge — could have been administered rectally. It could easily have been put in along with a washout.’

  Such a final dose, Professor Simpson pointed out, could have been given by somebody who was unaware of the dangerously high drug level that had accumulated in Marilyn’s system during the preceding hours. Again, her death would have been an accident, inadvertently caused by a second person.

  The third possibility, and it is just that — a possibility — is that the fatal dose, by ‘another mode of entry,’ was delivered with malice aforethought. That, of course, would have been murder.

  Evidence aside, what reason was t
here to kill Marilyn? Did anyone have a motive? Three main theories have been offered.

  Some hinted darkly that Marilyn knew too much, that she and her diary had become too explosive, that the Kennedys — or some shadowy agency on their behalf — did away with her. Others speculated that Marilyn, already linked to the Kennedys by gossip, was killed by the brothers’ enemies to insure an explosion of scandal that would destroy the presidency. Which enemies?

  One right-wing tract, noting that many of those around Marilyn had leftist connections, suggested a Communist murder plot designed to protect Robert Kennedy — portrayed by the Right as a rabid left-winger — from scandal.

  Norman Mailer, in his 1973 book on Marilyn, took the murder option seriously. He considered ‘there was much motive for the right wing of the FBI or the CIA to implicate Bobby Kennedy in a scandal.’

  Hank Messick was an award-winning writer on organized crime and a former consultant to New York’s Joint Legislative Committee on Crime. He believed that the Mafia — aware of the Kennedy affairs, and inspired by Marilyn’s recent close call with death at Lake Tahoe — manipulated a drugged Marilyn, calling out for help, to lure Robert Kennedy into a trap.

  Messick pointed out that in 1961 mobsters used chloral hydrate, one of the drugs found in Marilyn’s system, in a scheme to discredit a man running for local office by drugging him, putting him in bed with a young woman, then having photographs taken. In Marilyn’s case, Messick suggested, the plan was to have Robert Kennedy come to Marilyn’s rescue. Then, compromised by being at Marilyn’s home in the dead of night, he would be forced to ease up on organized crime or be destroyed by exposure.

  The plot failed, Messick said, when Kennedy hardened his heart and failed to rise to the bait. He refused to respond to Marilyn’s pleas, and she died. Messick said his thesis is based on unattributable interviews with sources at the Justice Department and in organized crime.