Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  The only possible route of administration of a fatal dose of drugs is confirmed by the discovery, during autopsy, of a bizarre condition, which Miner said was unique in his review of autopsies: a major area of Marilyn’s colon bore “marked congestion and purplish discoloration,” a condition consistent with a rectal administration of barbiturates or chloral hydrate. “This abnormal, anomalous discoloration of the colon has to be accounted for,” said Miner in 1992. “Noguchi and I were convinced that an enema was absolutely the route of administering the fatal drug dose.”

  Abrams agreed:

  I have never seen anything like this in an autopsy. There was something crazy going on in this woman’s colon. And as for suicide, I simply can’t imagine a patient self-administering a fatal dose of barbiturates or even a sedative dose by taking the trouble to prepare and administer the solution! You don’t know what the necessary fatal dose will be, and you have no guarantee that it’s going to be absorbed before it’s expelled. Look: if you’re going to kill yourself with barbiturates, you do it with pills and glasses of water.

  As for Nembutal suppositories (sometimes fancifully suggested as the cause of death), these would only have reached about ten centimeters into the rectum: but in Marilyn’s case, the entire sigmoid colon, a section very much higher, was grossly discolored. Administration by enema was indeed the route by which the fatal dose was administered.

  In this regard, it must be recalled that Marilyn had a history of taking enemas “for hygienic and for dietetic purposes,” as Miner said (and as her designers, like William Travilla and Jean Louis, had known for a long time). “This was also much the fad among actresses in that era.”

  But this conclusion does not solve the problem of what was administered in this enema and by whom. An explanation is still required of exactly what happened in Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom between the end of her conversation with Joe DiMaggio, Jr., at seven-twenty or seven-twenty-five, and her almost incoherent replies to Peter Lawford at seven-forty or seven-forty-five. Perhaps the most poignant fact is that Marilyn seems to have been aware, as she answered Lawford’s call, that she was slipping over the edge from the kind of normal drug-induced sleep or sedation she knew so well, toward death—and she knew there was nothing she could do to reverse the situation. Quite contrary to those who say that Marilyn was crying “wolf” is the plain, tragic fact that she knew she was dying and could neither rouse herself nor summon help: “Say goodbye . . .”

  The exact circumstances of Marilyn Monroe’s sad and unnecessary death can, in light of all this, at last be established.

  First, it is important to remember that Ralph Greenson had ceased prescribing Nembutal for Marilyn Monroe. He was, as he said, “cutting down her dependence on Nembutal [which he no longer prescribed] by switching her to chloral hydrate [which he did] as a sleep-inducer.” In fact, he said he had asked Hyman Engelberg not to prescribe Nembutal without his permission: they were to monitor the drugs each was providing. But the previous day Engelberg wrote Marilyn a prescription for Nembutal without Greenson’s knowledge.

  “On Friday night,” Greenson wrote to Marianne Kris two weeks after Marilyn’s death, “she had told the internist that I had said it was all right for her to take some Nembutal, and he had given it to her without checking with me, because he had been upset for his own personal reasons. He had just left his wife.” During Saturday, however, Greenson observed that Marilyn was “somewhat drugged,” as he told Kris; he was too sophisticated and familiar with Marilyn not to recognize on what medication she was “somewhat drugged.”

  While the precise amount of Nembutal was unknown to him, the ineffectiveness of it was clear—she was awake, angry and difficult to manage. Greenson’s solution to this was revealed in the toxicological analysis: chloral hydrate, his drug of choice for her, was present in the blood and not the liver. And because the level of chloral hydrate was twice that of the Nembutal (which had accumulated in the liver, having been ingested gradually over many hours), it is clear that the chloral hydrate was administered after the Nembutal had been taken.

  In his haste that evening, Greenson perhaps overlooked one crucial factor, the adverse interaction of the two drugs. Chloral hydrate interferes with the body’s production of enzymes that metabolize Nembutal. It was the chloral hydrate that pushed Marilyn over the edge. Some of the Nembutal was being processed by the liver, but much (four and a half milligrams, more than a lethal dose) had not been metabolized. As Milton Rudin recalled Greenson saying on the night of Marilyn’s death: “God damn it! Hy gave her a prescription I didn’t know about!” John Miner recalled a similar, incomplete statement: “If only I’d known about that other prescription. . . .”

  “If only,” then what? Would Greenson indeed have forgone that last heavy dose of chloral hydrate?

  Two weeks later, he described his departure that night to Marianne Kris in the most pacific tone: “I told Marilyn,” Greenson wrote to Kris, “that she should call me on Sunday morning when she awakened, and I left.” But in the event, Greenson felt irritated, resentful and rejected; unable to accept that his romantic self-image of savior had been terminated and aware that he could no longer continue in the mode of control he had so carefully constructed, he chose the easier route. “He’d had enough, he was exhausted, he’d spent the day with her,” as Milton Rudin said of him. And so, before departing, Greenson arranged for Marilyn to take a sedative enema, since she was physiologically resisting the effects of oral medication. Chloral hydrate would enable her to sleep. Short of the usual Engelberg injection, which Greenson tried but failed to obtain, the most powerful route of administration, as he knew, was an enema—something on which Marilyn often relied for other purposes. But she did not know that a chloral hydrate enema could be dangerous, even fatal, as a sequel to Nembutal.

  “She probably regarded this as an ordinary enema being given to her,” said Miner. “It would have been inserted slowly, not unpleasantly, not causing any immediate urgency for evacuation. After several minutes”—during which time she took Lawford’s call—“she then would have lapsed into unconsciousness. The absorption continued, and though still alive, she was dying.”

  But who, at last, gave the chloral hydrate enema?

  The only person who could have done it was Eunice Murray, and this was indeed her last act as Marilyn Monroe’s employee and Ralph Greenson’s watchdog. “I always felt the key was Mrs. Murray,” said John Miner thirty years after the fact, speaking fully for the first time.

  But Eunice was acting under orders from Greenson, the man she had looked to for fifteen years as her protector and employment provider. As her son-in-law Philip LaClair insisted years later, “Eunice did only what Ralph Greenson told her to do. She always followed his orders closely, because she had no formal training as a nurse. There’s a lot I could say about Greenson, but I won’t.”

  Accustomed to delegate the administration of medicine to others, it was logical for Greenson to ask Eunice to do this particular deed. Moreover, giving an enema is not within the range of a psychiatrist’s duties, especially not a male psychiatrist with a female patient: no matter how obsessive his attachment, Greenson’s ego would not permit so intimate a physical act. But asking an untrained woman with no nursing credentials to give a drug in such a way that its method of administration is potentially lethal—no matter how careful the instruction might have been—is professionally imprudent and in fact downright reckless.

  On the other hand, it is possible that Ralph Greenson never actually left Fifth Helena Drive that night—he may not have had to return at all. For years he claimed he went out to dinner with friends, but even when Greenson was questioned, his “friends” were never named, they never stepped forward of their own accord, and the Greenson family, interviewed frequently after his death, never identified anyone. Milton Rudin, for one, believed that Greenson was at home all evening. Even had he remained at Fifth Helena, Greenson would likely have absented himself (however proximately) during Eunice’
s nursing task; either way, responsibility for that task was his.

  This scene of the drama closes with another important detail previously remarked upon but never taken into account: Eunice’s inexplicable washing of garments and linens, as Clemmons attested and as Miner later learned. “Why, under these circumstances,” as Miner asked rhetorically, “would a housekeeper be doing the laundry at such an hour—unless the bedclothing had become soiled as a result of the administration of these drugs?” Abrams concurred: “Eventually, of course, when she slipped into her terminal coma, the enema had to be expelled. Thus the washing of the sheets,” which, as Miner added, “was an especially hard thing to understand unless Mrs. Murray was destroying evidence.”

  To the horror of everyone involved, what may have been intended as Marilyn’s long, deep sleep became her death.

  There were numerous details to be arranged that night, along with the sanitizing of what was, to say the least, an ugly situation. “Arthur said it was horrendous,” Natalie Jacobs recalled him saying after that night. “He never gave me any details, and I never asked him. He said only that it was too dreadful to discuss.”

  This appalling situation explains the long delay between the arrival of Greenson at Fifth Helena and the summons to police five hours later. If indeed he left at all, Greenson returned immediately after Rudin’s call to Eunice had sent her to Marilyn’s room—where everything had gone wrong. Marilyn was unresponsive; she had expelled the enema; and there were other aspects of the “horrendous” scene occurring in the case of someone comatose, moribund or even, by this time, dead.

  Certainly, as the telephone calls indicated and as Rudin conceded, Greenson arrived before the small hours, locating Engelberg only later at his temporary residence in West Los Angeles, where he lived because of his marital separation. Presumably there was an attempt to revive Marilyn, to reverse the effects of the drug. (Henry Weinstein recalled that at least once before, Greenson summoned Engelberg to pump out Marilyn’s stomach when she had apparently taken too many Nembutal in her Doheny Drive apartment.) Also, according to both Eunice and a note in the district attorney’s 1982 report, an ambulance was summoned around midnight and then dismissed on arrival—because she was dead, and because California law prohibits the transport of a corpse in an ambulance. Greenson and Murray must have felt an almost paralyzing panic as the enormity of the disaster became clear to them. How does one announce one’s involvement in, or explain one’s discovery of, the death of Marilyn Monroe, so much adored by all the world?

  Once it was clear that Marilyn was beyond resuscitation, there were details to be staged. A window had to be broken, so that it would appear as if a forced entry had been necessary. There was the blackout fabric to be removed (which it was, and neatly folded by the time police arrived), to substantiate the story concocted about Eunice retracting the drapes with a fireplace iron. Most of all, there was an account that Greenson and Murray had to fabricate and which they had to rehearse. And there were soiled linens to be cleaned.

  Had Ralph Greenson himself administered the fatal enema, Eunice Murray would have said so—if not during his lifetime, then after his death, when she had a great deal to gain financially and the public’s lingering suspicion of which to unburden herself. After Marilyn, Eunice worked neither for Greenson nor anyone else as nurse or housekeeper. One imaginative suggestion has been that Greenson provided her with hush-money, making a financial settlement to cover his own calamitous indiscretion. But a payoff does not accord with the poverty in which Eunice subsequently lived, moving from one small Santa Monica apartment to another until her daughters took her in frail old age.

  Very soon, then, there was a dark and dreadful collusion firmly in place.

  Ralph Greenson could never reveal what he knew about Eunice Murray because this would have effectively ended his career. He had hired a nonprofessional—and a troubled woman, at that—and asked her to perform a medical task because he could not locate Engelberg. This was a rank and reckless lack of professionalism, perhaps subconsciously justified by him because of his anger at his beloved but unresponsive patient. This was, after all, the most famous movie star in the world: he could not tell the truth of the matter. In fact, Greenson could be rather smug about the success of the cover-up, for when photographer William Woodfield later asked him about the large prescriptions of chloral hydrate he had allotted Marilyn, Greenson replied casually, “Well, I’ve made a number of mistakes in my time.”

  For her part, Eunice Murray could not point the finger at anyone else because she had done the actual deed. All she and Greenson could do was weakly state that they did not believe Marilyn Monroe took her own life deliberately. “Nobody then or later,” as John Miner said, “undertook to realize that Mrs. Murray was concealing information. She simply wasn’t telling the whole truth and never did thereafter.” Miner was correct, for apart from the insufficiency of her stories about the light and/or telephone cord beneath Marilyn’s bedroom door, Eunice did not lie so much as deny. Rightly, she denied the presence of Robert Kennedy: “I don’t recall him being there at all” in July or August, she said—because, indeed, he was not. Rightly, she denied the presence that night of Peter Lawford and of unknown assailants. Asked about her published memoir as a basis for solving the mystery, Eunice’s last statement on the record about the death of Marilyn Monroe sounds very like the beginning of a confession: of her book The Last Months, she said in 1987, “I wouldn’t swear to my version at all.”

  As for Engelberg, his distribution of dangerous and habit-forming drugs, not to say his continued reliance on Greenson, put him in no position to expose anyone’s deeds—which he very likely considered at worst an unfortunate accident.

  But of course it was much more than that, and herein lies the unspeakable sadness of Marilyn Monroe’s fate.

  She had been under the supervision of a man who can at best be termed obsessive, and this she realized to the extent that she knew their relationship had to end. This he realized, too, admitting to colleagues that he had reached a classic state of countertransference; his work with her could no longer be justified.

  “Dr. Greenson took her death very personally,” said John Miner,

  for he was involved with this lady to a strong degree. He was deeply shaken, even devastated by it. Even though a psychiatrist is supposed to maintain a defense mechanism, he could not restrain himself. In his own way, he loved this girl in the sense that she was a wonderful person to him. He had become very emotionally attached to her.

  And more than attached, for Greenson deeply resented her increasing independence—thus his systematic attempt to separate her from good friends. His patient’s death indicates the awful possibilities when an analyst does not keep to his boundaries and yet continues, knowing full well that his own emotions are intimately intertwined with his patient. In the end, he no longer regarded either his own responsibilities or her needs. When he said he had “tried to help but ended up hurting her,” Greenson spoke perhaps the truest self-assessment of his life.

  Out of patience, fearing the loss of his best beloved, enraged at himself and at what he considered her ill-advised dismissal of Eunice and of himself (which was imminent if not actual), Ralph Greenson ordered Marilyn Monroe sedated—as he had for so long, with Engelberg’s assistance—so that the rupture of their relationship might not occur: “Call me on Sunday morning.”

  But it was finally just as the other Ralph, the loving Ralph Roberts, had said: “If you can’t control Marilyn one way, there are always drugs.” John Huston may have known more than he let on when, told of her death, he said angrily, “Marilyn wasn’t killed by Hollywood. It was the goddam doctors who killed her. If she was a pill addict, they made her so.”

  As for Eunice Murray, she had experienced the fullness of her life with Marilyn, in the replica of her own house, with a surrogate daughter and working with a surrogate ministerial husband. But the situation had failed her, and so in a way as she administered the sleeping drug sh
e was putting this entire part of her life to rest, however ignorantly and unaware of the final effect. She was the stooge of Ralph Greenson—an unpretty term but in this case an accurate one for an emotionally crippled and dependent woman, and so she must have felt when she cried out at the age of eighty-five, twenty-five years later, “Oh, why—at my age—do I have to keep covering up for this thing?”

  The monumental self-absorption and ego-neuroses of her two major caregivers enabled them to observe Marilyn at the happiest time of her life, at a stage of growth so full of promise—yet they strove to keep her dependent on them and on them only.

  At the last, the custodians could not sustain what they perceived as her rejection of their tyranny. “We’ve lost her,” Greenson said ironically to Murray, announcing her death. On his utterance of this statement they both agreed: in a way they already had lost her, when she made her decision to dismiss them.

  Ralph Greenson may have helped patients to whom he did not become obsessively attached. But in a serious way he was a personal and professional failure: an egocentric, slick entertainer; a storyteller jealous of the limelight; a possessive and tyrannical man who could pass for a brilliant therapist only in Hollywood, where even social performance is applauded and admired. He treated Marilyn Monroe not as a growing, maturing woman, one who was becoming healthier and stronger. On the contrary, he wished to keep her frail, collared to dependence on him forever. Weary of interrupting his personal life to deal with the struggles of his primary patient—an involvement he had himself worked hard to create—he was at the end resentful that Marilyn was withdrawing from his orbit, was moving out of his control, toward Joe and therefore away from him. Having spun for himself the mantle of guardian and protector, father and caregiver, he found it was an intricate web. He had worked tirelessly to limit Marilyn’s outside contacts, to make his devotion her only love and his care her only support. In any relationship, this is a dangerous program; in a therapeutic situation, it is catastrophic.