Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  This conclusion, reportedly made ‘after an extensive investigation,’ suggests supernatural sleuthing ability — there was no way to determine what calls had been received at a number; only outgoing calls were registered at the telephone company, for billing purposes. Marilyn’s outgoing calls were potentially vital information. The police did check them, on the very first morning, but thereby hangs a really troubling tale.

  One of the surviving fragments of the police file is a report written in the late afternoon of the day after Marilyn’s death. Inspired by information given to Sergeant Byron by his boss, Lieutenant Armstrong, it states,

  Miss Monroe’s phone, GR6-1890, has been checked and no toll calls were made during the hours of this occurrence. Phone number 472-4830 is being checked at the present time.

  Exhaustive interviews with employees of General Telephone (GTE), the company that supplied Marilyn’s service, suggest this report was nonsense. In 1962 toll calls were recorded by hand, on cardboard slips, by the operator handling the call at the local traffic center. They were filed in boxes, which were then picked up at about midnight, seven days a week, and taken to company headquarters. Calls that could be dialed, Measured Message Unit calls, were recorded on a yellow tape roll, and that also ended up at headquarters. The toll calls were sorted first thing in the morning, then vanished into the accounting system for at least a week, usually longer.

  ‘There was just that brief time in limbo, in the very early morning, when you could theoretically get to them,’ said a former company security officer. ‘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.’

  Sergeant Byron himself refused all comment on the Monroe case, but GTE officials assumed his ‘check’ on one of Marilyn’s lines added up to no more than a comment from the security department that the only record immediately available had been that of Marilyn’s collated bill, which was probably made up till the end of July, four days before the crucial night.

  Routine practice, if a police check was required, was for the Police Chief personally to sign a request to the telephone company. Then, when the call slips came back to roost, an officer would go in person to General Telephone and make handwritten notes. Marilyn’s surviving phone records reflect exactly this procedure — done some two weeks after her death. They, in turn, offer up remarkable information of their own.

  The records for Marilyn’s two phones, as processed for billing up to late July, show a stream of toll calls, including the ones to the Justice Department. The police list of calls covering her last days, August 1 to 4, show only three calls. One, on Friday, was to Norman Rosten in New York, and the other two were to places near Los Angeles. This is odd indeed, for we know Marilyn spent a good deal of time talking long distance in her last two days. What happened, in the ten days before the police made their notes, to the missing calls?

  On August 12, in her article reporting ‘strange pressures’ on the police inquiry, reporter Florabel Muir said flatly of Marilyn’s phone records: ‘The police have impounded the telephone company’s taped record of those outgoing calls.’ Muir was an old hand on the police beat, with excellent contacts.

  Joe Hyams of the Herald Tribune, meanwhile, who, with Muir, was one of the very few reporters who did any serious digging, was also using his contacts. He stumbled on something sensational.

  ‘The morning after her death,’ said Hyams, ‘I contacted a telephone company employee and asked him to copy for me the list of numbers on her tape — a service he was willing to provide for a fee. Within the hour my contact called me back from a pay phone. “All hell has broken loose down here,” he told me. “Apparently you’re not the only one interested in Marilyn’s calls. But the tape’s disappeared. I’m told it was impounded by the Secret Service — I’ve never before heard of the government getting in on the act. Obviously somebody high up ordered it.”’

  Checks on how Hyams and Muir got their information supported their stories, and indicated that the phone records had already been removed by mid-morning on Sunday, within hours of Marilyn’s death being known publicly. It seems, moreover, that it was in fact the FBI that took the records, rather than the Secret Service.

  It is significant that the records had already been removed by early Sunday morning, because that was the one time they could be scooped up, before vanishing for weeks in the accounting system. Obviously, such prompt and sweeping action required the intervention of someone with great authority and clout, someone who could roust a top General Telephone executive from his bed early on a Sunday, then pressure him into immediate action.

  One of General Telephone’s 1962 security team, Bob Warner, was still with the company when this book was being researched. He said that he did not recall the removal of Marilyn’s phone records. Another man, however, had very specific recollections. Dean Funk, former publisher of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, was a close friend of the Division Manager for General Telephone, the late Robert Tiarks.

  Funk clearly recalled sitting with Tiarks before a board meeting, not long after Marilyn’s death, discussing the affair. ‘He told me that the FBI came in and got the records, the next day.’

  In a partially censored FBI document, written in 1973, a former senior FBI Los Angeles agent recorded that he had responded to a press inquiry on the subject by saying that he too ‘had no recollection of any such event.’ ‘No recollection’ is a time-honored official formula for providing a negative while reserving the right to ‘remember,’ if facts are later exposed.

  As this book went to press the truth was exposed. The author traced another former FBI agent, who asked to remain anonymous. He was a senior figure, who in 1962 was in charge of organized crime investigations in a major West Coast city.

  ‘I am convinced,’ he said, ‘that the FBI did remove certain Monroe phone records. I was on a visit to California when Monroe died, and there were some people there, Bureau personnel, who normally wouldn’t have been there — agents from out of town. They were on the scene immediately, as soon as she died, before anyone realized what had happened. I subsequently learned that agents had removed the records. It had to be on the instructions of somebody high up, higher even than Hoover.’

  Higher than Hoover? The former agent understood at the time that the orders came from ‘either the Attorney General or the President. I know that from my knowledge of the structure of the FBI, the way things were handled in those days. I knew this had come from someone via telephone and not through any trackable communication.’ So that it would not appear on the record? ‘That’s right,’ the agent replied.

  Dean Funk, the Santa Monica newspaper publisher, remembered one final detail from his conversations with former telephone company executive, Robert Tiarks. ‘He was hesitant in talking about it,’ Funk recalled, ‘but he said he knew there had been a call to Washington on the night Monroe died.’

  Before his enquiry was closed down, Dr Litman, of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Team, also learned that Marilyn had called the East Coast at about 9:00 P.M., as the last minutes of her life ticked away.

  The most significant testimony on the removal of the telephone records is clearly that of the retired West Coast FBI agent. His certainty that the orders came ‘higher even than Hoover’ — from Robert Kennedy or the President himself not only indicates the brothers’ awareness of the incalculable damage they could suffer were the phone records made public. To contain the damage, they were forced to turn for help to the one man in office who most detested Robert Kennedy, Hoover. It was more than humiliating — it meant that the brothers would forever be indebted to the FBI Director. They had to rely on him, of all people, to keep the Marilyn connection secret.

  Robert Kennedy, meanwhile, was still threatened by the record of earlier calls which — by the night of Marilyn’s death — had progressed so far into the accounting system that
they could not be removed by FBI intervention at General Telephone. The string of calls Marilyn made to the Justice Department in June and July, obtained by this author from Los Angeles police records, could only be obtained in the formal way, by a police visit to General Telephone’s office a couple of weeks after the actress’ death. Once again, somebody saw to it that normal routine was bypassed.

  In 1962 one police secretary, Shirley Brough, was responsible for typing all applications to see telephone records. She specifically recalled that, quite exceptionally, she was not given the Monroe paperwork. Brough, who then worked in the Intelligence Division, remembered that ‘it was all handled by the Captain’s secretary. This was done for confidentiality. This was something very extraordinary, because of the people Marilyn Monroe was known to have associated with. So they figured they would not take any chances at all.’

  The Captain, and head of the Intelligence Division, was James Hamilton, who personally directed the Monroe work for Chief Parker. Some time after the event he lunched with a crime reporter he had come to know and trust, Jack Tobin of the Los Angeles Times. Tobin said, ‘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 he knew much more.’

  Robert Kennedy knew Captain Hamilton very well indeed. He mentioned him several times in his book, The Enemy Within, and referred to him in the foreword as ‘my friend.’ Kennedy admired Hamilton’s intelligence-gathering system, and used his advice during his work in the Senate and at the Justice Department.

  A year after Marilyn’s death, on his retirement from the police force, Hamilton became Chief Security Officer for the National Football League. Robert Kennedy was one of those who recommended him for the job. Hamilton’s son says, ‘He had a relationship with the Kennedys independent of his professional function.’

  On the morning of Marilyn’s death, when Chief of Detectives Thad Brown was summoned to headquarters because of a ‘problem,’ he was about to spend the day with the Assistant Chief of the regional Intelligence Division of the Treasury Department, Virgil Crabtree. The problem, Brown told Crabtree, was that a piece of crumpled paper had been found in Marilyn’s bedclothes. It bore a White House telephone number.

  Former FBI Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach had the same recollection, with a slightly different detail. ‘A Kennedy phone number,’ he said, ‘was on a nightstand by Monroe’s bed.’

  Police Chief Parker’s successor was Tom Reddin, who in 1962 was a Deputy Chief. He said, ‘Where Hamilton and his Intelligence Division were concerned, nobody knew a bloody thing about what was going on. Hamilton talked to only two people, God and Chief Parker. I was aware of the fact that there was a Hamilton investigation on the Monroe case, but I never knew what it was. I was also aware that there was supposed to be an internal document that never became public.’

  Former Chief Reddin added: ‘The Kennedy connection was a matter of common knowledge at the Police Department level I was at. The Kennedy — I should say Kennedys’— relationship with Marilyn Monroe was pretty generally accepted. We heard that one of her last calls was to Bobby.’

  Lawrence Schiller, one of the photographers who had covered the nude swim in Something’s Got to Give, was out of town when he heard the news of Marilyn’s death. He hurried back to Los Angeles, and that evening found himself sitting in the office of Arthur Jacobs, Marilyn’s public relations consultant.

  As he sat in the office, Schiller said, he overheard Jacobs talking with Pat Newcomb. Their great concern at the time, he said, was ‘what would be revealed by the telephone records.’

  They need not have worried. That embarrassment, it seems, had been well looked after.

  48

  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED THE night Marilyn died? Who did what in the vital hours? The answers are there, but they are elusive. Witnesses talked reluctantly, and some will now talk no more.

  In 1983, in a fashionable Los Angeles restaurant, Peter Lawford looked like a frail old man. He was only sixty, but worn out by a lifetime of excess. As conversation turned to the fatal night, the slouched figure stiffened, a shaking hand crawled across the table to the ashtray. The drawling voice started to tell the story. Then Lawford said, half-sobbing, ‘To this day I cannot forgive myself; there is no excuse for the fact I did not go. …’ He burst into tears, and the subject had to be dropped. Lawford died as this book was going to press.

  Also in 1983, Eunice Murray, as sharp as a pin at eighty-two, sat in a rundown house in Santa Monica, taking the questions and answering carefully. A memory that seemed clear on irrelevant minutiae suddenly became fogged on key issues concerning the night of the tragedy. The reporter departed feeling that, very courteously, Murray had been playing with him.

  Lawford and Murray had always been prime witnesses to Marilyn’s last hours, but they were never heard under oath. Police questioned Murray within hours of Marilyn’s death, then again a few days later. The second time, Lieutenant Armstrong, Commander of the West Los Angeles Detective Division, was present. The report of the interview revealed here for the first time reads:

  It is officers opinion that Mrs Murray was vague and possibly evasive in answering questions pertaining to the activities of Miss Monroe during this time. It is not known whether this is, or is not, intentional. …

  Part of the police file on Marilyn’s death, released in 1985 only after it had been obtained privately by the author. It shows that investigating officers were less than satisfied with the evidence of housekeeper Mrs Murray, a key witness.

  If Mrs Murray left the police feeling uneasy, Peter Lawford left them empty-handed. A 1962 police report reads: ‘An attempt was made to contact Mr Lawford, but officers were informed by his secretary that Mr Lawford had taken an airplane at 1:00 P.M.’ It was August 8, three days after Marilyn’s death, and Lawford had sought refuge in Robert Kennedy’s house in Hyannis Port.

  He was joined there, at Robert Kennedy’s invitation, by Pat Newcomb. According to Dr Farberow, chief of the Suicide Prevention Team, Newcomb had declined to be interviewed before leaving. ‘She stonewalled me,’ Farberow recalled, ‘was uncommunicative.’

  It took thirteen years before Peter Lawford was finally interviewed by the police, during the police review of the case in 1975. He also talked to the District Attorney in 1982. Investigators found it hard to evaluate Lawford’s statements. ‘He was intense,’ said one interrogator. ‘He was not iffy about it, he was real sure about what he was saying.’

  Lawford’s story changed as the years passed, and from one police interview to another. Happily, comparing the key players’ statements with those of others never before interviewed, we can make a stab at reconstructing the last hours.

  Several people were invited to Lawford’s home on that fatal Saturday evening. They included a television producer, Joe Naar, and his wife, Dolores. The Naars lived two miles from the Lawford beach house, and just four blocks away from Marilyn. They were friendly with the Lawfords, and had met both Marilyn and Robert Kennedy at their home. According to the Naars, Peter Lawford telephoned sometime on Saturday to ask them over for supper. Since Marilyn was also invited, Lawford asked if they would bring her in their car.

  Joe Naar said that later, before they set out that evening, ‘Peter called to say Marilyn would not be coming after all. She was tired and felt like staying at home.’

  It may be, however, that Marilyn did make a brief appearance at the Lawford house, early in the evening — perhaps going ahead with her intention, as expressed to Dr Greenson in the afternoon, of driving to the beach.

  In 1979, in a conversation after Darryl Zanuck’s funeral, actress Natalie Wood, who had been a friend of Marilyn for years, said she and actor Warren Beatty had been at the Lawford house a few hours before Marilyn died.

  Following up on this, I contacted Beatty in 1983. He said, very hesitantly, ‘I, ah, I did see her the night before she died. But, ah, I don’t think
I would see any particular thing to be gained by expounding on it, er … I don’t really want to be quoted. I don’t think I’ll speak about it. …’

  By ‘the night before she died,’ was Beatty referring to Friday or the fatal Saturday? Mystery surrounds Marilyn’s activity on both evenings. Beatty refused to say any more on the subject.

  If Marilyn did go to the Lawford house on Saturday evening — or indeed if Beatty and Wood were there — it was an extremely brief visit, and before the other supper guests arrived. None of them were there when Joe and Dolores Naar arrived, at around eight-thirty.

  With the Naars at the supper party was producer George ‘Bullets’ Durgom. He had been at the Lawfords’ in the past, he said, when Marilyn ‘would come in with Bobby and then leave.’ That night, Durgom recalled, Lawford had ordered a Chinese dinner to be sent in, and there was talk of Marilyn having been invited. It is at this point that the stories start to diverge.

  Lawford, in his original statement to the press, spoke of only one call to Marilyn, at 7:00 P.M., in which she begged off, claiming weariness. This meshes with the Naars’ version, which has Marilyn canceling before they arrived at the party. Lawford, however, when finally interviewed by the police in 1975, introduced a whole new series of phone calls to Marilyn and an ensuing drama.

  Lawford told the police he had first telephoned Marilyn about 5:00 P.M., which was around the time Marilyn, distraught, had called in Dr Greenson. Lawford said she ‘sounded despondent’ over the dismissal from Something’s Got to Give and ‘some other personal matters.’ He urged her to come over for the evening, and she said she would think about it.

  At 7:30 P.M. or a little later, according to this Lawford version, he called Marilyn again because she had failed to turn up. She still sounded depressed, and ‘her manner of speech was slurred. She stated she was tired and would not be coming. Her voice became less and less audible and Lawford began to yell at her in an attempt to revive her. [He described it as a verbal slap in the face.] Then she stated, “Say goodbye to Jack [John Kennedy], and say good-bye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.”’