Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  “Greenson’s connection to the studio she perceived as the ultimate betrayal,” said Ralph Roberts.

  She deeply resented what she saw as his use of her. And she saw at last what was fundamentally true: that Hollywood was not her life, and that dependence on him was not her life. Her resentment of Greenson had reached the breaking point—so much was clear to all of us. He had tried to get rid of almost everyone in her life, and she didn’t have that many people to begin with. But when he tried it with Joe—I think that’s when she began to reconsider the whole thing. As for Engelberg and the pills and the shots, well it was obvious, wasn’t it? If you can’t control Marilyn one way, there were always drugs.

  Emboldened by her action with Eunice, Marilyn was about to take the step that she believed would free her as much as her remarriage to Joe. “She realized she had to get rid of Greenson,” according to Roberts, “and she seemed ready to do so. After all, she had support from a lot of us for that!”

  Marilyn had been, as Pat Newcomb knew firsthand, furious with her analyst over three things in three months: first, Greenson was in Switzerland when she returned from New York to find trouble brewing at Fox. “Marilyn was very angry about his not being there for her,” according to Pat—just as Marilyn had subsequently experienced physically his anger, which was a second cause of her resentment and whose perfidy she needed several days or weeks to realize. Third, she never forgot the way Greenson had tried to separate her from Joe.

  “Several times, she threatened to fire Greenson—to leave him,” Pat recalled, “but I never took her threats seriously.” Now at last Marilyn was about to turn a warning into a promise fulfilled. Eunice was to be booted out and Marilyn was about to marry, effectively abandoning Greenson and his therapy for a husband and a honeymoon. She may not have been explicit about a firm termination of their relationship, as she had been with Eunice, but it was certain that she was moving on.

  In his essay “Special Problems in Psychotherapy with the Rich and Famous,” Greenson neatly described the end of his relationship with this special client in a passage immediately following a lightly veiled disquisition on Marilyn, her background and her problems. The glittering generalizations show how emotional an issue this was for him, for all scholarly discretion is crushed beneath the weight of his unhappy memories:

  Rich and famous people believe that prolonged psychotherapy is a rip-off. They want their therapist as a close friend, they even want their wife and their children to become part of the therapist’s family. . . . These patients are seductive.

  Anyone in the audience who knew of his most famous client must have thought of Marilyn as he continued his projection of feelings onto her, and the implicit admission of his own history and dejection:

  Rich and famous people need the therapist twenty-four hours a day and they are insatiable. They are also able to give you up completely in the sense they are doing to you what was done to them by their parents or their servants. You are their servant and can be dismissed without notice.

  For Greenson, Marilyn had indeed become the rival Juliet, one to be controlled through the appearance of the most benevolent counsel. Talented, adored, applauded, beautiful, the actress in a way had taken the place of his sister Juliet in his complex feelings.

  For her part, and to his satisfaction, Marilyn had come to a point where she had worked only with Greenson’s approval; she arranged her social life according to his lights; she accepted or rejected roles only with his approbation (Huston’s film about Freud, for example, was out of the question, no matter how much she longed to be in it). Muffling by proxy the applause for Juliet that he so resented, he had kept Marilyn in his home. Putting forth the notion of her schizophrenia and receiving the blessing of his colleague Milton Wexler for such unorthodox treatment (but apparently not for the prodigal administration of a drug regime), Greenson had brilliantly orchestrated everything under the pretext of reordering her life. “Come inside with me,” he seemed to say. “Renounce your fame, and therefore affirm my supremacy,” his actions said. With Marilyn Monroe, Ralph Greenson finally became not only a musician but orchestrator and conductor.

  But he was indeed, as he himself had feared anyone thinking, the incarnation of the musician Svengali to this new Trilby, the performer of the world. Just as Eunice had done, Greenson was, with Marilyn, reversing the resented past pattern: he was subjugating the other. Eunice Murray had become a crippled version of the increasingly healthy Marilyn: now Ralph Greenson was himself retreating into a psychoneurotic fear of abandonment and rejection, precisely the mental attitudes Marilyn was learning to put behind her.

  Apparently, no firm decision was taken that Thursday about a termination to her therapy: this was to be something discussed by them over the next several days, or perhaps when Joe arrived and they announced their future plans; in any case, it would not have been an easy task for Marilyn to confront Greenson with this dramatic news.

  Whatever the substance of their sessions, Marilyn asked Eunice to drive her on several errands in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Their last stop was The Mart, an antique collector’s paradise on Santa Monica Boulevard, where Marilyn went in search of a bedside table. “I have a Spanish house in Brentwood,” she told the store’s owner, Bill Alexander, “and I’m so happy, because I’m going to be married to someone I was married to once before.” They chatted about furnishings, and Marilyn selected a table to be delivered on Saturday. She would have lingered to browse and talk further, but (thus Alexander) “her housekeeper and companion seemed anxious and nervous and said, ‘Marilyn, we should be leaving. I will wait for you in the car.’ ” Around six o’clock, Marilyn invited Allan Snyder and Marjorie Plecher to the house for champagne and caviar. They recalled how happy and optimistic she was, radiating charm and wit and good health.

  On Friday, August 3, 1962—as reported by the Associated Press wire service that evening and by the Los Angeles Times next morning—Robert and Ethel Kennedy and four of their children arrived by airplane in San Francisco, where they were met by their good friend John Bates and his family. The Kennedys were guests at the Bates ranch outside Gilroy—eighty miles south of San Francisco, three hundred fifty miles north of Los Angeles and high in the Santa Cruz Mountains—for that entire weekend, prior to the attorney general’s opening address at a convention of the American Bar Association on Monday, August 6.

  This social note would have no relevance at all to the life and death of Marilyn Monroe were it not for the fact that from 1962 on, the most outrageous assertions were made—not only about a tryst between Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe that weekend, but also about Kennedy’s direct involvement in her death. The origin and accumulation of these claims—and the absurd alternate theories of a murder cover-up variously involving organized crime, the FBI and the CIA—are dispatched in the Afterword to this book. But a brief outline of the attorney general’s weekend, and of the several witnesses who attest to his considerable distance from Los Angeles, should be herewith provided.

  The Kennedys and the Bateses were already friends, and in a way the Bates family was reciprocating a previous weekend they had enjoyed at Hickory Hill, Robert Kennedy’s Virginia compound. John Bates, then forty-four, had graduated from Stanford University in 1940 and had served for three years in the Navy. Through a college fraternity brother named Paul B. Fay, a close friend of John F. Kennedy, Bates met and also became a friend of Kennedy. After the war, Bates took his law degree from Berkeley in 1947 and joined the San Francisco firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, where he worked with such distinction that he eventually became a senior management partner.

  By the time John Kennedy became president, John Bates was one of California’s most prestigious and respected attorneys, holding, among other positions, the chair of the judiciary committee of the Bar Association of San Francisco. It was no surprise, then, that the new administration invited him to head the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. This position Bates considered but rejected,
preferring instead to remain with his law firm and to retain his California residence, where he and his wife were raising their three children.

  “It was a difficult decision,” said Bates years later, “but I gratefully declined. When I learned that the attorney general was to address the bar convention, I wanted to show my appreciation for the offer to join the Kennedy administration, and so my wife and I invited Bob to join us for the weekend.” Kennedy’s presence at the remote Bates ranch in Gilroy that weekend is beyond dispute: in fact it was documented not only by the Bates family and household employees in detail, but also by the Gilroy Dispatch the following Monday. “The attorney general and his family were with us every minute from Friday afternoon to Monday,” said John Bates, “and there is simply no physical way that he could have gone to Southern California and returned.” Accounts to the contrary by the media and so-called eyewitnesses Bates always considered “outrageous, ridiculous and disgraceful.”

  Bates is quite correct, for the airstrip nearest to his ranch is at San Jose, an hour’s journey by car. Because of the deep canyons, steep mountains and high power lines, helicopter flights have been always dangerous in and out of Mount Madonna, the site of the Bates ranch. The only practicable means of transportation from Gilroy to Los Angeles in 1962 was by car, a journey of no less than five hours each way.

  Since 1962, the Kennedy schedule for that weekend has been well preserved in the Bates family guest books and documented in their photo albums. On Saturday morning, August 4, both families rose early and ate large breakfasts before Robert and Ethel Kennedy joined John and Nancy Bates for a horseback ride.

  The foreman of the Bates ranch, Roland Snyder, was another witness to the weekend. “I saddled the horses for Mr. and Mrs. Bates and for Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, then they lined up and I took their picture and they took off for Mount Madonna. They were here all weekend, that’s certain. By God, he wasn’t anywhere near L.A.—he was here with us.”

  The morning ride was followed by swimming and a barbecue lunch back at the compound. “I was fourteen at the time,” recalled John Bates, Jr., “and was about to go off to boarding school. I remember Bob [Kennedy] teasing me about it, saying, ‘Oh, John, you’ll hate it!’ ”

  During Saturday afternoon, the attorney general—in a typical Kennedy-style challenge—suggested that everyone race a mile to an open field for a game of touch football. “The best flat meadow for field games,” according to John Bates,

  was at the top of the ranch. So off we went, and all eleven of us played. We then went back to the compound for a swim and some games, and then the children showered and dressed for dinner. I remember Bobby sitting with the children as they ate and telling them stories. He truly loved his children.

  After the children were put to bed, the four adults sat down to dinner: Nancy Bates remembered their discussion of Kennedy’s upcoming speech, which was reviewed and edited by Ethel (and on which the attorney general worked intermittently during the weekend). “Dinner lasted until about ten-thirty,” said John Bates, “and we were in our bedrooms not long after that.”

  Sunday morning, August 5, the Bates and Kennedy families were up early for the trip to Mass in Gilroy, their presence documented by the local press next day. After luncheon back at the Bates ranch, John drove the Kennedys to San Francisco, where they were to stay at the home of Paul Fay during the convention. That afternoon and evening the Kennedys spent in San Francisco with John and Nancy Bates and other friends of both the Bates and Kennedy families (among them Mr. and Mrs. Edward Callan and Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Tydings). It is significant that over a span of more than thirty years not one of the dozen people who were with Marilyn on August 3 and 4—at her home and at Lawford’s—ever mentioned the presence of Robert Kennedy. In fact, when the stories began to be taken for truth, everyone took pains to deny these allegations. Finally, the FBI records confirm without any doubt precisely this schedule kept by the attorney general and his family that weekend.2

  Friday, August 3, was a warm and unusually humid summer day, full of activity for Marilyn. She awoke early and refreshed, perhaps because she had not taken sleeping pills the night before. Then she spent ninety minutes with Greenson at Franklin Street and stopped at Briggs to add some items to her party list for the following week. Back at her home, Hyman Engelberg was waiting, apparently at Greenson’s request. He injected her and gave her a prescription for twenty-five Nembutal capsules. These were added to a store of chloral hydrate, the instant “knockout pills”—actually a liquid enclosed in a gelatine capsule—that had been prescribed by Greenson to wean Monroe off barbiturates, as he later detailed. Lee Seigel had also written for her a prescription for an unknown quantity of Nembutal on July 25 and refilled it on August 3. The precise numbers of pills available to Marilyn Monroe during the last months of her life was lost in the confusion of the days after her death and the conflicting accounts of several medical and legal sources, but clearly she had no trouble obtaining drugs in quantity.

  The ease and redundancy of drug availability was partly due to a failure of communication between Greenson and Engelberg, made more difficult by Engelberg’s protracted and painful divorce from his wife, and he was often difficult to locate in late July and early August. Engelberg said later that he was careful to limit Monroe’s supply of Nembutal to one a day, and Greenson claimed that a primary object of his therapy was to break his patient’s drug dependency—but if their statements accurately expressed their protocols, both doctors were failing spectacularly.

  That Engelberg’s injections were something more than vitamins is evident from the thirty-two-minute call documented by her General Telephone records. Norman Rosten recalled that during their conversation she was “cheerful, excited . . . high, bubbly, breathless. She seemed high. . . . She raced from one subject to another [with] barely a pause.” But although her tone seemed manic, Marilyn had a lot of news and was clear about her plans: she said she was feeling better than ever, that she would soon be back at work, that her house was nearing completion, that she was getting several film offers. It was, Marilyn said, time for them all to put the past behind them and begin to live before they were too old; no doubt Eunice Murray and Ralph Greenson were in her mind even as she spoke.

  Other telephone calls kept Marilyn busy throughout Friday afternoon, as her records document. She spoke with the handyman Ray Tolman at his home in Fullerton, to arrange for him to work at the house early the following week: there was heavy cleaning to do, as well as some important repairs necessary. She then telephoned Elizabeth Courtney and Jean Louis to ask if they could deliver her new dress for a final fitting the next day; but suddenly remembering that would be Saturday, she corrected herself, said she did not want to interrupt their weekend and added that she could wait until Monday.

  In midafternoon, Jule Styne, who was looking forward to composing her songs for I Love Louisa, telephoned from New York with another idea. He proposed to Marilyn a film musical version of Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which had been a successful Fox film in 1945. To this idea she responded enthusiastically and added that since she was coming to New York the following week, they could meet in his office. Thus an appointment was fixed for the following Thursday, August 9, at half past two: “She was very excited about the idea,” recalled Jule Styne, “and she would have been wonderful in it. We spoke of [Frank] Sinatra for the other leading role.” Marilyn also agreed to give a long interview for a photoessay accompanying her appearance on the cover of Esquire, and there were various social engagements as well. “My husband and I were expecting her to arrive that week,” according to Paula Strasberg, who had begun to purchase theater tickets for her visit.

  Arthur Jacobs called to say that their meeting with J. Lee Thompson was scheduled for Monday at five o’clock to discuss I Love Louisa. Marilyn was delighted at the rapid progress of this project, too. Her calendar was filling up fast, and as even Eunice had to admit later, there was nothing somber about her attitude: “Ther
e was too much to look forward to.” The phone calls were interrupted when Marilyn decided she should dash over to Frank’s Nursery, where she ordered several citrus trees, flowering plants and succulents; delivery was arranged for the following day. Very likely she planned her wedding to be set outdoors, and the garden and pool area needed plantings and color.

  Yet Marilyn Monroe was functioning soberly and creatively even after a second meeting with Greenson that Friday afternoon. She called Pat Newcomb, whom she invited to dine out with her. Pat, however, was suffering a bout of bronchitis—to which Marilyn replied, “Why don’t you come out here and stay for the night? You’ll have all the privacy you want, you can sun in the back yard and have all the rest you want.” As Pat said later, “I accepted her invitation. She was in a very good mood, a very happy mood.”

  And so the two women dined quietly that Friday evening at a local restaurant, and then returned to Fifth Helena. Eunice Murray had gone to her home for the night, and Marilyn and Pat retired early. Pat slept soundly in the small second bedroom diagonally opposite Marilyn’s, but Marilyn endured another night of only intermittent sleep.

  A few minutes after eight on the morning of Saturday, August 4, Eunice Murray arrived at Fifth Helena for her last day of work, which was to include supervision of the garden plantings. Marilyn wandered into the kitchen at about nine, wrapped in her white terry-cloth robe, and poured herself a glass of grapefruit juice. An hour later, Lawrence Schiller drove up: he had been one of the trio photographing the swimming scene on the set of Something’s Got to Give, and he had come to discuss a magazine feature exploiting the pictures; as ever, Marilyn had retained the right to approve or reject photos for American magazines. That morning, according to Schiller, Marilyn was fresh and alert, “seemingly without a care,” and tending a flower bed in front of the house when he arrived. She gave him a tour of her remodeled guest cottage and then marked the photos with a grease pencil, indicating her selection and rejection.