by Lois Banner
On the weekend of July 19–21, Marilyn entered Cedars of Lebanon Hospital under an assumed name and had either a dilation and curettage or an abortion. In those days journalists bribed the staffs at hospitals for information when actors went in for treatment. Michael Selsman heard the story from reporter Joe Hyams.18 Selsman and many others heard that one of the Kennedys was the father. Marilyn didn’t see Bobby that weekend or the next week, although he was in Los Angeles at the end of the week to address the National Black Business Association. She did, however, spend the next weekend, the weekend of July 28 and 29, at Frank Sinatra’s resort hotel, Cal Neva, on the shore of Lake Tahoe. Patricia and Peter Lawford took her there; Peter was a part owner of the lodge. It seems she expected to meet Bobby Kennedy there. Billed as a rest for Marilyn, the weekend turned into a disaster that set the scene for her death seven days later.
Joe Kennedy had been connected to Cal Neva since Prohibition, when he went there to meet his mobster friends. They liked the resort because of its isolation, its gambling, and its many hidden tunnels, which offered an escape route if law enforcement officers appeared. The main lodge was located on the California-Nevada border, which bisected its main gambling casino. Some writers contend that Joe Kennedy secretly owned Cal Neva, along with mob associates. In 1960 a consortium including Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford bought a forty-nine-percent stake in the lodge, further obfuscating its mob connections. Sinatra’s friend Skinny D’Amato was brought in from his 500 Club in Atlantic City to manage it. Hollywood entertainers performed in its dining room and lounge, and Hollywood people went there, along with the mobsters. When Marilyn was making The Misfits in August 1960, she went there to see Frank’s show.19
Exactly what happened the weekend Pat and Peter took Marilyn there is murky. In fact, given the varying stories, two weekends may have been involved: that’s what Peter Lawford implied to Anthony Summers when he stated that he and Pat had taken Marilyn to Cal Neva during an earlier weekend that summer. That may have been June 29, when Frank took a lot of his Hollywood friends to Cal Neva to see his new show and his expansion of the lodge. Marilyn seems to have been using drugs heavily. On one occasion she left her phone line open to the switchboard, with the receiver by her mouth, so that if the operator heard heavy breathing (the sign of a barbiturate overdose), she could summon the Lawfords. Patricia Lawford Stewart told me Peter and Pat were summoned. They revived her and took her to a local hospital.20
The weekend of July 28 was the important one, given its proximity in time to Marilyn’s death. Sidney Skolsky contended that Marilyn went there that weekend to see Dean Martin, who was headlining, to talk about renewing filming on Something’s Got to Give. Another claim is that Sam Giancana ordered Sinatra to take her there, because he had concocted a scheme to use Marilyn to bring down the Kennedys. Another claim is that Peter and Pat lured her there under the pretext of meeting Bobby Kennedy. They wanted to get her out of town and away from Bobby, who was in Los Angeles. Whether or not he was supposed to be at Cal Neva, he never showed up.
The lodge was crowded, with as many as five hundred people there. With Sinatra’s bodyguard often near her, many people who saw Marilyn there thought she was a virtual prisoner. Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli were there, but they often went to the lodge. Joe DiMaggio knew what was going on. Skinny D’Amato, his close friend from New Jersey, was the manager of Cal Neva. When Joe was in San Francisco he sometimes flew to Lake Tahoe and spent time at Cal Neva with Skinny. Through his private investigators and phone taps, he knew the Kennedys were breaking with Marilyn. He was worried about her, and she may have telephoned him in San Francisco to go to the lodge. He went there the weekend of July 28, but he and Frank weren’t speaking and he was fearful that mayhem might ensue if he tried to enter the lodge, given Frank’s tough henchmen. Thus he didn’t try to rescue Marilyn, as he had when she was in the Payne Whitney Clinic in the spring of 1961.
He stayed at a nearby motel—or at another location on the lake. There’s a touching story that Marilyn went outside early in the morning and, looking up the hill, saw Joe there. Marilyn told Ralph Roberts that Pat Kennedy Lawford had persuaded her to go to the lodge and she had spent much of the weekend avoiding both Joe and Frank.21
The story becomes more precise late Saturday night in the central dining room. Marilyn was sitting in the front of the room beside Frank and several burly men. She was drinking champagne and popping red pills, probably Seconal. Peter Lawford may have told her earlier that day that Bobby was ending their relationship. According to Betsy Hammes, who was there, she looked disheveled. At one point during the evening she slumped over, and the burly men beside her half carried and half walked her out of the room. The next day Betsy asked a Sinatra aide why Marilyn had been taken out of the dining room. He told her they had to “roll Marilyn over a barrel.” In other words, they took her to her room and made her vomit, fearing that she had taken too many pills. In this version of what happened, Giancana, who went to her room, was a Good Samaritan trying to empty Marilyn’s stomach of a possible overdose.22
In Marilyn’s room someone took pictures of what went on. Frank Sinatra wasn’t there, but his camera was used. When he got it back, he had photographer William Woodfield, who often took photographs for him, develop the roll. It turned out to have on it seven frames of Sam Giancana, fully clothed, on top of Marilyn’s back, seeming to ride her like a horse. Was he raping her? Was he trying to help her? Woodfield saw the film before Sinatra destroyed it. It was blurry and imprecise. He couldn’t tell exactly what was going on. Other men were in the room. Some say they were Giancana associates, and they gang-raped Marilyn; the story circulated in Hollywood that Giancana had visited “Sicilian sex” on her—in other words anal intercourse—as a punishment for her involvement with Bobby Kennedy. Such intercourse was used in Sicily as a means of birth control.23
Pat Kennedy Lawford, Peter Lawford, and Frank Sinatra were at the lodge that weekend. Why none of them helped Marilyn is perplexing, although Pat may have already gone to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. For his part, Sinatra seems to have ordered his guards to take Marilyn out of the dining room because he didn’t like her pill taking. Roberta Linn, a singer and friend of Sinatra’s who was there, thought he was protective of Marilyn that weekend. Phyllis McGuire had a different version of events. No matter how angry Giancana was at the Kennedys, Phyllis told me, he wouldn’t have harmed Marilyn, because of her involvement with his friends DiMaggio and Sinatra. Loyalty to friends was part of the Sicilian code of honor, and Giancana wouldn’t violate it. (It’s possible, of course, that Phyllis didn’t tell me the truth.)
George Edwards contended that Sinatra even considered marrying Marilyn as a way of protecting her against others and against herself. Edwards heard about the supposed orgy with Marilyn, but he was skeptical that it had happened. He drove Marilyn to the airport the next day, and she mostly talked about having upset Giancana because she hadn’t acted like a lady and had taken so many drugs. Giancana disliked drugs as much as Sinatra did.24
Marilyn went back to Los Angeles in Sinatra’s private plane, along with Peter Lawford—and perhaps Pat. (By one account the plane landed in San Francisco briefly, so that Pat could take a plane to Hyannis Port.) When they landed at the Los Angeles airport, a limousine picked up Marilyn and took her to her Brentwood home. The next morning she was up at eight, working in her garden. This early-morning activity suggests she wasn’t upset by whatever had happened at Cal Neva. She made an eight-minute phone call to Bobby Kennedy at his office that morning; she may have been angry at him for not appearing at Cal Neva. Some say she had given up on him and wanted an apology in person for the way the Kennedys had treated her. She saw Ralph Greenson every day that week, but that was her usual practice. The only clear proof of untoward behavior at Cal Neva is that Joe resigned his job with the Monette Company and said he was moving to Los Angeles to take care of her. Yet no record exists that he called her that week; he didn’t seem to think she wa
s in any immediate danger.
After the weekend at Cal Neva, she may have considered remarrying Joe; that’s what his friends and family thought. He had changed over the years. He had acceded to her demands that he accompany her to public events in which she played her sexy self and attend high-brow plays with her. He had followed her suggestion to undergo therapy, and it had taught him to control his anger. He no longer drank liquor or large amounts of coffee. He even came to like reading poetry with Marilyn. After he moved to Florida in his later years, he praised her intellectual achievements. He was impressed that she quoted from Chekhov and Dostoyevsky and listened to Beethoven.25
The Marilyn most people saw the last week of her life seemed contented, as she worked in her garden and went to a gardening nursery for an afternoon, choosing plants and bushes for her grounds. She and Eunice Murray oversaw the workers who were refurbishing the house, while they discussed plans for building a guest room over the garage where her New York friends could stay when they visited. She spoke to Gloria Romanoff often that week, since Gloria had invited her to go to dinner with a friend from China on Sunday evening and Marilyn couldn’t decide what to wear. Gloria told her to wear one of her brightly colored Pucci silk dresses.26
On Wednesday night, she called Red Krohn, the gynecologist during her 1958 pregnancy with whom she had become so angry. She hadn’t spoken to him since. She sounded miserable, and she asked to see him. Are you still angry about the baby? she asked. He told her that he had put it behind him, and they agreed to have dinner the next week. Had her endometriosis flared up? Did she still hope to become pregnant? Was she considering adopting a child? Gloria Romanoff thought she wanted to talk to Krohn about breast implants, since her breasts had shrunk during her weight loss.27
Hairstylist Mickey Song maintained that Marilyn invited him to her house on Wednesday evening and questioned him about the Kennedys, since he was their hairdresser, although Lawford’s friend producer William Asher didn’t think that Song knew the Kennedys. On Thursday night Marilyn went to a party at Peter Lawford’s house. According to Dick Livingston, Peter’s friend, who was there that evening, she looked unkempt. “She had the damnest outfit on,” Livingston said, “a pair of hip-huggers with a bare midriff and her gallbladder scar showing and a Mexican serape around her neck. She looked very white, and I told her she needed to get some sun. She said, I know, I need a tan and a man.”28 Natalie Wood, who was at the party, observed her in a corner dejectedly repeating the number thirty-six again and again. She had turned thirty-six on June 1. That was a rocky age in Hollywood: both Clara Bow and Greta Garbo had left the screen at thirty-six. That week was the fifth anniversary of Marilyn’s 1957 miscarriage of a Miller baby, which must have depressed her. An hour after she left the Lawford party, however, she was at her home in Brentwood, drinking champagne with Whitey Snyder and Marjorie Plecher, Whitey’s wife, who served as Marilyn’s wardrobe girl and costumer. She was upbeat with them, happy about being reinstated at the studio.29
On Thursday and Friday she had a series of important phone calls. She spoke to Gene Kelly about doing a film and with Jule Styne about doing a musical version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on Broadway with Frank Sinatra. She was supposed to meet with Kelly that Sunday in Hollywood and with Styne in New York the next week. On Friday she went to the Fox screening room to view several movies that J. Lee Thompson had directed. He was under consideration to direct her next film for Fox. That evening she went for dinner at a favorite restaurant with Pat Newcomb and Peter Lawford. Pat spent the night at Marilyn’s house, supposedly because she had bronchitis and wanted to soak up the sun the next day on Marilyn’s patio.
For twenty years after Marilyn’s death, the official version of what happened on Saturday, August 4, didn’t essentially vary. It was based largely on the initial testimony of Eunice Murray, Ralph Greenson, and Peter Lawford to journalists and investigators, although the police didn’t interview Lawford until some years later. It begins with a description of Saturday as an uneventful day, with Marilyn and Pat Newcomb sitting by the pool. Ralph Roberts arrived at nine A.M. and gave Marilyn a massage; she took several phone calls, including one from Sidney Skolsky. (According to Steffi Skolsky, they talked about his biopic on Jean Harlow, not about the Kennedys, and Marilyn said she was going to remove the Strasbergs as beneficiaries in her will.) A series of claims have been built around Marilyn receiving a stuffed animal by mail that morning, but Pat Newcomb told me that no such animal arrived.30 Pat and Marilyn began arguing, presumably because Pat had slept the night before and Marilyn hadn’t. The argument became so heated that Ralph Greenson was called at four thirty that afternoon to calm her down. He stayed until seven.
He then left to go to a party with his wife. Marilyn was calmer, although Greenson asked Eunice Murray to stay at the Brentwood house that night, which she normally didn’t do. At seven fifteen there was a phone call from Joe DiMaggio Jr. Marilyn talked to him for thirty minutes, expressing delight when he told her he wasn’t going to marry his girlfriend, whom she didn’t like. The time was seven forty-five. Marilyn called Greenson, telling him about Joe Jr. She seemed to be in excellent spirits. She called Peter Lawford to tell him that she wasn’t going to the party he was holding that evening.
Then, according to the official version, she crashed. By eight fifteen she called Lawford, with a “good-bye” message. According to Lawford, she said, “Say good-bye to the president and say good-bye to yourself, because you’re a good guy.” It sounds like a suicidal plea for help, although we have only Lawford’s word about it. He repeated it, however, for the rest of his life. Marilyn drifted off the phone. Lawford called her back, but the line was dead. He called the operator, who said the telephone was off the hook. He then called Milton Ebbins, his manager, to ask what to do, and Milt told him not to go to Marilyn’s house. It would look bad if the president’s brother-in-law was discovered there if anything was really wrong with Marilyn. For some reason he didn’t try to call Marilyn on the second phone line she had or send any of the guests at the party to see what was going on. Ebbins called Mickey Rudin, who called Eunice Murray to check up on Marilyn. Eunice called back to say Marilyn was fine. Peter’s party lasted until ten thirty. After that he went on a drinking binge, and passed out.
Meanwhile, in the official version, Marilyn retired early and Eunice Murray went to bed. Eunice woke up at three A.M., sensing that something was wrong. She looked in Marilyn’s bedroom window to check on her, because the bedroom door was locked. Marilyn was in a strange position in her bed. Worried, Eunice called Greenson to come over, and he did. Because the door to Marilyn’s bedroom was locked, he took a fireplace poker and smashed a window, so that he could open it and climb in. He found Marilyn dead, lying naked under a sheet. He called Engelberg to come over, and at four thirty he called the police, telling them that Marilyn had committed suicide. By the time the police arrived shortly after, rigor mortis was extreme, indicating that she had died six to eight hours earlier, which would be between eight thirty and ten thirty. (Rigor mortis sets in as soon as death occurs.)
Thomas Noguchi, an assistant coroner who did the autopsy on Marilyn’s body, found no evidence of foul play, except for a bruise on her back, which could have been caused by bumping into furniture. He determined that she had taken huge doses of Nembutal and chloral hydrate, although she hadn’t drunk any alcohol that day. Theodore Curphey, the coroner, hired the Suicide Prevention Team, a group of local psychiatrists who ran a suicide hotline, to determine if suicide was a possibility. They interviewed her psychiatrists and doctors, who testified to her many drug overdoses, some of which seemed to have been suicide attempts. The team discovered that Marilyn had obtained two prescriptions for twenty-five Nembutal pills each from a different doctor only days before she died. Thus she had as many as fifty Nembutal pills in her possession that Saturday. They concluded that suicide was probable. The district attorney closed the case after five days, ruling it a probable suicide. No inquest or grand jur
y investigation was held. It was assumed Marilyn had died as early as eight thirty, soon after the call to Lawford, from a massive overdose of Nembutal and a toxic dose of chloral hydrate.
What I have narrated was the official version of Marilyn’s death, accepted by the police and the press, except for a few maverick journalists. It wasn’t substantially challenged until 1985 with the publication of Anthony Summers’s Goddess: The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe. A wellknown British journalist, Summers turned to investigating Marilyn’s death after the editor of London’s Sunday Express commissioned him to write an article about the Los Angeles district attorney’s 1982 reinvestigation of Marilyn’s death. Realizing that the reinvestigation hadn’t been thorough, Summers decided to do his own investigation and write his own book. Indefatigable, intelligent, and bold, Summers interviewed some six hundred fifty people. He discovered an alternative scenario to the official one.
In the first place, Summers concluded that Bobby Kennedy had been at Marilyn’s house the afternoon of her death and perhaps that evening. Fox publicist Frank Neill saw Bobby land by helicopter at the Fox lot that morning; neighbors of Lawford’s saw Bobby at Lawford’s beach house later that day; and neighbors of Marilyn saw him walking to her house in the early afternoon. The Los Angeles Police Department knew he was there that day. Summers discovered more. Greenson was called at four thirty that afternoon because Marilyn and Bobby had a major altercation, not because of her quarrel with Pat Newcomb. Greenson did stay until seven P.M. and Marilyn did talk with Joe DiMaggio Jr at seven fifteen, Ralph Greenson at seven forty-five, and Peter Lawford at about eight, telling him that she wasn’t going to his party. By about eight fifteen he received the “say good-bye to the president” phone call, according to the official version.
