by Lois Banner
But the official chronology for the calls Peter Lawford received during his party that evening was probably off by several hours, with implications for Marilyn’s mood at the time of her death. The only people who attended Lawford’s party were producers George “Bullets” Durgom and Joe Naar, along with his wife, Dolores. Dolores Naar (later Nemiro) told me that Marilyn didn’t call Peter until nine o’clock. Dolores assumed this was the “say good-bye to the president” phone call. Lawford seemed concerned over the call, but not excessively so. He returned to the poker game they had been playing. There weren’t any more phone calls before they left around ten thirty. Both Bullets Durgom and Irma Lee Reilly, Peter’s housekeeper, stated that during the party no alarm was raised about Marilyn.31
It’s possible that Marilyn’s phone call to Peter at nine wasn’t a suicidal plea for help; rather, she may have told him she was finished with the Kennedys. Fred Otash, the private investigator everyone in Hollywood used, revealed that Peter had come to his office at two A.M. to ask him to go to Marilyn’s house to remove any incriminating Kennedy documents. According to Otash, Lawford stated that Marilyn told him that the Kennedys were treating her like a piece of meat and she didn’t want to see them anymore. She had tried unsuccessfully to call the president. She wanted Peter to say good-bye to him for her. Lawford tried to persuade her to go to the beach house and talk to Bobby, but she responded that there was nothing more for her to say. She had served her purpose. Indeed, the Suicide Prevention Team discovered she had called the White House at nine P.M., West Coast time.32
In his interviews, Anthony Summers found that Marilyn spoke on the phone to several individuals between eight thirty and ten o’clock. She talked to Henry Rosenfeld, her New York dress manufacturer friend, and to hairdresser Sidney Guilaroff, her friend who was an intimate to many Hollywood stars. Guilaroff revealed the details of his phone conversation with Marilyn in his 1991 autobiography, Crowning Glory: Marilyn told him that Bobby Kennedy had been there that day and had threatened her.33 At nine o’clock she called Jack Kennedy in the White House and didn’t reach him. Next came a phone call to Peter Lawford, the “say good-bye to the president” phone call. She may have talked with José Bolaños; he said she dropped the phone in the middle of a conversation with him because she heard a noise in the house. At ten Ralph Roberts’s answering service received a garbled message from a fuzzy-voiced woman whom Ralph was certain was Marilyn. (Some biographers place that phone call at eight thirty, which supports the official version of Marilyn’s death, but overlooks the calls from Guilaroff and Rosenfeld. Roberts told Summers it occurred at ten.)
Joe and Dolores Naar left Peter’s party about ten thirty. At eleven Peter called them, expressing concern about Marilyn and asking Joe to go over to her house and check on her. They lived four blocks away from Marilyn, and Joe agreed to do so. At about the same time Peter called his friend Bill Asher and his manager Milton Ebbins asking them to go with him to the house, but they refused.34 As Joe was leaving his house, Peter called again, telling him not to bother because the doctor was with Marilyn. That’s what Joe Naar told James Spada and that’s what he told me. When I asked Naar why no one had come forward at the time of Marilyn’s death with this information, he told me that Patricia Newcomb had asked them not to. It was the first indication I had of a cover-up.
In this revised version, at eight thirty Eunice Murray did check on Marilyn for Milton Ebbins and she was fine. By ten fifteen or thereabouts Eunice checked again and found Marilyn comatose. She called Greenson and Engelberg, both of whom rushed over. Marilyn was still alive, and Greenson called an ambulance, which took her to the hospital. She died on the way and was taken back to Brentwood and placed in her bed. This was the story Eunice Murray told Anthony Summers after she broke down in the middle of filming the BBC documentary Say Goodbye to the President. You can see it on the video.
If Peter called Ebbins at ten thirty alarmed about Marilyn, after the party was over, as well as at seven thirty, which was in the official version, and Ebbins then called Rudin, who called Murray, (replicating the pattern of the earlier calls) the time frames of everyone’s stories would coincide, with the doctors arriving at Marilyn’s house at about eleven. Someone would have called Peter at this point, telling him the doctor was there. Thus he called Joe Naar shortly after eleven to tell him not to go to Marilyn’s house. In fact, Lawford probably didn’t want Joe at Marilyn’s house; what was going on was too dicey to involve anyone else.
When Eunice found Marilyn comatose, she also called Patricia Newcomb, who called Arthur Jacobs, the head of the firm. Jacobs was then at the Hollywood Bowl listening to a concert. His fiancée, Natalie Trundy, remembered that he received the phone call from Newcomb stating that Marilyn was comatose at about eleven o’clock at the Bowl, and he rushed over to Marilyn’s house. An usher had tapped him on the shoulder during the performance and told him that he had an important phone call, and he went to the office to take it, returning to tell Trundy briefly about it before he left. Trundy didn’t see him for several days, but he refused to tell her what had happened.
When Jacobs got to the house, Newcomb was already there, and Rudin arrived shortly after. Rudin said that Newcomb was hysterical when he arrived.
Peter Lawford may have gone to the house, although Patricia Lawford Stewart is adamant that he didn’t go there but rather had Otash go in his place. In fact, all of Peter’s friends interviewed by Summers and Spada—Rudin, Ebbins, Asher, Naar, Durgom—and his housekeeper, Irma Lee Reilly, stated that he was useless in a crisis like this and that he had been drinking so heavily that evening that he passed out. Thus he wasn’t at Marilyn’s. Besides, after Marilyn died, Bobby Kennedy had to be gotten out of town. In the revised version of Marilyn’s death, Peter arranged for a helicopter to pick up Bobby on the beach in front of his house and to take him to the airport in Santa Monica or Los Angeles for a flight back to the Bates ranch in the Santa Cruz mountains.
Meanwhile, executives at Fox were contacted and they showed up at the Brentwood house to remove any incriminating evidence of their dealings with her. Everything that might be detrimental to the studio or might reveal her relationships with the Kennedys was taken out of her file cabinets. A cover-up story was put together. If the individuals involved in doing this arrived at Marilyn’s house at eleven, they had more than five hours to concoct their story, since Greenson called the police at four thirty.
Some of the planning that night was brilliant, as the conspirators put together stories for Eunice Murray and the doctors in particular to use in talking to the police and the press. Yet some of it seems haphazard, as though the people involved were under great stress. Surely these friends of Marilyn knew that she never slept entirely in the nude: she wore a bra because she believed that it would keep her breast muscles firm. They were foolish to put her body nude in the bed. They must have known that the lock on her bedroom door didn’t work and that after the Payne Whitney episode, Marilyn didn’t lock her bedroom door, anyway. And, the glass from the broken window had fallen inside the bedroom, not outside it, indicating that it had been broken from outside the room. Thus the story that Greenson broke a window to get in was preposterous.
When the first policeman arrived at four thirty, he was disconcerted to find Eunice Murray doing laundry in the laundry room. She never gave much of an explanation for doing this. The conspirators placed a note in plain view that Marilyn had written to Joe DiMaggio. It stated that a life was justified if the individual was faithful to one person. It seems a plant to deny the relationships with the Kennedys and to suggest that she was going to reconcile with Di Maggio.35
Arthur Jacobs and Patricia Newcomb were publicists by profession, adept at concealing the truth and creating fictions. What better individuals to deal with Marilyn’s death, making it seem like accidental suicide. They put the “official version” out on the wire. Patricia was devoted to Marilyn and was constantly with her, but she was close to the Kennedys, especially Bobby
, whom she’d known for years. She didn’t want him connected to Marilyn’s death. Patricia was distraught; she had to get out of town. She attended Marilyn’s funeral the next Wednesday, but she immediately flew to Hyannis Port, where she was seen with Pat and Peter Lawford and other Kennedys. The story was put out that Jacobs had fired her because she had screamed at the press, but Michael Selsman, her associate in the Jacobs firm, told me that he had never heard about the firing. She had just suddenly disappeared. (He also told me that she had shown no indication that she had bronchitis that weekend.) Arthur Jacobs called Selsman at five thirty Sunday morning and told him to go to Marilyn’s house to deal with the press. When Selsman asked him what had happened, he replied, “You don’t want to know.”
In addition to the cover-up that night, the police conducted their own cover-up. It included Theodore Curphey’s instructions to the Suicide Prevention Team not to investigate the possibility of foul play. Robert Litman, head of the team, told me he found these instructions strange; they ruled out murder as a possibility. Moreover, the day after the autopsy was done samples of Marilyn’s blood and tissues that had been taken for further investigation disappeared, as did all records of any investigations the police conducted. Only someone with great authority could have ordered the disposal of the autopsy materials and the police files. Bobby Kennedy was close to both William Parker, head of the Los Angeles Police Department, and James Hamilton, head of the LAPD Organized Crime Intelligence Division. Kennedy often consulted with Parker and Hamilton about his investigative work as attorney general.
Joe DiMaggio allowed neither Kennedys nor the Hollywood crowd to attend Marilyn’s funeral; he thought they were implicated in her death. Ralph Greenson told Robert Litman, when Litman interviewed him several days after Marilyn’s death, that Marilyn was involved with men at the highest level of government. When reporter William Woodfield called Greenson and asked him what had happened the night of Marilyn’s death, Greenson said, “Ask Robert Kennedy.” This statement is well known among Marilyn researchers. What isn’t known is that Greenson said he always thought Bobby should have admitted to having been there that day. He then clammed up and, ever after, denied that Marilyn had been involved with Bobby. Peter Lawford and his friends told variations on the official story, which ended with Marilyn committing suicide or taking an accidental overdose.
Still the question remains: Why did Bobby Kennedy go to Marilyn’s house in the first place? Marilyn had been calling both Kennedys nonstop, and she was good at tracking them down. Department of Justice officials called her “out of control.”36 She was threatening to hold a press conference and make public a diary she had kept of her conversations with Bobby about politics, in which she had written down what he’d told her about such matters as Cuba, the nuclear bomb, and his crusade against the Mafia. Marilyn sometimes couldn’t remember the details of politics, and she kept a record of her conversations about it. She also knew about the Kennedys’ sexual involvements, which could destroy their political course if she revealed them. Reporters in that time rarely revealed what they knew about politicians’ sex lives, and all Jack’s conquests had kept quiet. Marilyn would be unique among them for speaking out.
Otash agents listening to Marilyn’s conversations on Saturday, August 4, heard a fierce argument between her and Bobby. He could be heard rifling her house and asking her, “Where did you put it?” Turning belligerent, she refused to give “it” to him and began to hit him. He left after about an hour. Some say he took a doctor with him who gave her a shot. That sounds extreme to me; I can’t imagine that such an attack wouldn’t have terrified Marilyn to the extent that she would have left the house and gone into hiding. The best conclusion is that he was looking for the diary.
Some researchers believe Marilyn wouldn’t have held the press conference, but I’m not so sure. When I interviewed photographer George Barris, he convinced me she would have held it. Barris is a gentle man, kind and soft-spoken; I can understand why Marilyn chose him to photograph her that summer and then dictated an autobiography to him. He told me I was the first Marilyn biographer since Gloria Steinem to have interviewed him. On Friday, August 3, Marilyn called Barris in New York and asked him to go to Los Angeles immediately because she needed to see him. Barris believed she wanted him to set up a press conference for her. He was a journalist as well as a photographer, and he could easily do it. She couldn’t use the Jacobs agency because Pat Newcomb was close to the Kennedys. Barris told Marilyn that he couldn’t get there until Monday, and they made a date to meet then. Rupert Allan stated that Marilyn had called him that Friday and left a message that she wanted him to set up a press conference for her, but he was ill and didn’t respond.37
Bobby Kennedy had an alibi for the weekend. He maintained that he spent it with his family at the ranch of John Bates, an old friend, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, eighty miles south of San Francisco. John Bates’s son recently sent pictures from that weekend to Susan Bernard, Bruno Bernard’s daughter, who published them in her 2011 book about her father’s photographs of Marilyn.38 If they are accurate, the sightings of him in Los Angeles constituted a form of hysteria among a group of people who didn’t know each other. But photos can be deceiving, and Mark Anderson, a photographer I consulted, stated that the position of the sun in them and the shadows on the faces of the individuals in them indicated that they weren’t taken when John Bates said they were taken. Kennedy friends were loyal to the family; it’s conceivable that, like so many people involved in Marilyn’s death, they told only part of the truth.
Anthony Summers published his book in 1985. In the more than twenty-five years since then, new theories have periodically appeared about Marilyn’s death, often based on new information provided by new witnesses. Primary among these witnesses are John Miner, the assistant district attorney who participated in the autopsy; James Hall, an ambulance attendant who claimed to have been at Marilyn’s house with the ambulance the night she died; and Lynn Franklin, a Beverly Hills policeman who claimed he pulled over Peter Lawford on a speeding charge that night. Attention has also focused on Norman Jefferies, Eunice Murray’s son-in-law, who worked as a handyman at Marilyn’s house, and on writer C. David Heymann’s claim that Peter Lawford told him that he, Greenson, and Bobby Kennedy were together that night. An allegation of murder runs throughout these testimonies.
John Miner was the first “authority” on Marilyn to maintain that she had been killed through the administration of a drug-laced enema. The theory makes sense as a way of explaining how such large amounts of Nembutal and chloral hydrate got into her blood quickly. Enemas were used by Hollywood actresses, including Marilyn, for quick weight loss. (She also suffered from constipation, caused by the drugs she was taking, another reason to use enemas.) Miner was the first individual to assert that Eunice Murray gave her the enema, although there is no proof for this charge. Eunice wasn’t a nurse; she was a housekeeper and a companion. Marilyn gave herself enemas.
Miner also stated that he possessed a transcript of a tape that he claimed Ralph Greenson had played for him several days after she died. He first made this claim to Anthony Summers in 1982. Marilyn had presumably made this tape for her psychiatrist in the weeks before she died, and Greenson played it for Miner to prove that she hadn’t killed herself when the district attorney sent Miner to question him. Greenson destroyed the tape, and Miner then went home and wrote it down from memory, producing thirteen pages in several hours. The tape has come to play a major role in Marilyn scholarship, given what appear to be its insights into Marilyn’s sexual proclivities and her state of mind at the time she died.
I met Miner at a Marilyn Remembered event in 2005; we both taught at the University of Southern California, and we became friends. Over the next several years I interviewed him many times. He was a small man, eighty-five years old, with a booming voice. He gave me a copy of the transcript at our first meeting, and I was shocked by its claim that Marilyn was fixated on enemas. I became suspicious o
f him when he told me he had done interviews with Hollywood actresses about their sex lives for Alfred Kinsey’s studies on sexuality. Checking him with the Kinsey Institute, I was told by the director they had never heard of him. My suspicions of him increased when he suggested that we write a study of the Marquis de Sade together, while extolling the virtues of enemas to me.
Miner told other Marilyn biographers he spent six hours interviewing Greenson, but he told me he hadn’t questioned him at all. He had too much respect for Greenson to question him; he simply listened to the tape and went home, he told me. Then I learned that Miner had gone bankrupt. Selling the transcript was an obvious way to make money. He first tried to sell it to Vanity Fair, but when they asked Anthony Summers to validate it, Miner had only a few handwritten notes on a yellow legal pad to give him. In other words, he hadn’t written down a transcript of the tape until twenty years after he presumably heard it. On Summers’s recommendation, Vanity Fair refused to buy it.
After this refusal, Miner constructed a transcript and sold the rights to it to Matthew Smith, who featured it in his 2003 book, Marilyn’s Last Words.39 Miner then sold it to Playboy in 2005, after the Los Angeles Times did a cover story on him. Then I found out more about Miner. Some years previously he had been convicted of suggesting to several women in the district attorney’s office that he perform enemas on them, resulting in the revocation of his license to practice law for several years.
When I suggested to him that he should write an autobiography, he said he couldn’t because of the “horrible things” he had done to women. He wouldn’t tell me what those “things” were, although I suspect he was referring to his approaches to the women in the D.A.’s office. There were also his stories about being the featured speaker at a convention in Las Vegas on sadomasochists, discussing those who used enemas as well as whips and chains. After all he told me, I concluded that he had made up the transcript, which represented his sexual interests, not Marilyn’s.
