Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Now, in the late night hours of August 3, while Pat Newcomb slept over in another bedroom, a drunk, angry Marilyn called the St. Francis and left yet another message. Then she took some of the Nembutal sleeping pills that the Vicente Pharmacy had delivered to her earlier that day, and tried to go to sleep.

  She was unsuccessful. She was disturbed repeatedly throughout the night by a series of anonymous telephone calls. The caller, a woman, kept repeating the same words: “Leave Bobby alone, you tramp. Leave Bobby alone.” The calls didn’t stop until five-thirty A.M.

  THE MURKY DETAILS OF MARILYN MONROE’S last hours alive, and of Peter Lawford’s involvement in them, have fueled speculation for three decades. Many of the principals are dead, and others have steadfastly refused to speak about these events. In recent years, however, the fog began to lift. More and more witnesses have come forward for the first time, and many participants have changed their stories, admitting that the rumors they had denied for years were in fact true.

  It is now possible to re-create a plausible scenario, based on eyewitness accounts, of the events that led up to Marilyn’s death. She was clearly frantic after her harrowing night of telephone harassment. Eunice, Murray’s son-in-law, Norman Jeffries, who was doing some of the renovation work on Marilyn’s home, recalled his shock at her appearance that Saturday morning: “She looked sick, desperately sick — not only in the physical sense — and I thought there must be something terribly wrong. She must have taken a lot of dope or something, or maybe she was scared out of her mind. I had never seen her look that way before.”

  Peter, concerned about Marilyn the night before, became alarmed at her condition that morning after talking either to her or to Pat Newcomb. Marilyn had demanded that Bobby tell her face-to-face that their relationship was over, and Peter realized that the situation was now so volatile that Bobby would have to do just that.

  For years Peter would deny that Bobby was even in California that weekend, but contemporary newspaper reports and eyewitnesses prove that he was in San Francisco. One of Peter’s neighbors, Ward Wood, places Bobby in Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon. And there are other accounts, secondhand but made compelling by their number, of Bobby’s presence.

  Sam Yorty, then the mayor of Los Angeles, recalled, “I do know that Bobby Kennedy was in town that day. He was staying at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. This was all told to me by the [Los Angeles] police chief, [William] Parker. He was very adamant that Kennedy was seen at the hotel the night of Marilyn’s death.”

  LAPD chief of detectives Thad Brown told associates he knew Bobby was in Los Angeles that day, as did former deputy DA John Dickey. And according to both Marilyn’s former business partner Milton Greene and Peter’s third wife, Deborah Gould, Peter admitted to them that Bobby was in LA and that he went to see Marilyn.

  Frank Neill, a former employee of Twentieth Century-Fox, later stated that Bobby arrived by helicopter at a landing pad near the studio’s stage eighteen, which was often used by the Beverly Hilton Hotel for that purpose. A confidential police source supports this story.

  A number of surveillance experts — among them Fred Otash and Bernard Spindel’s aide Earl Jaycox — have stated that they listened to some of the tapes made at Monroe’s home, including one recorded on the day she died. Their accounts of what is contained on the tapes are remarkably similar. A third (anonymous) source who listened to Spindel’ s tape is quoted by Anthony Summers in his Monroe biography, Goddess. His version, similar to the others, added an element that is especially interesting in light of the new information revealed to this author by Fred Otash about Marilyn’s bugging of herself and Bobby’s knowledge of it. “First,” the source told Summers, “you could hear Marilyn and Kennedy talking. It was kind of echoey and at a distance. .. . Their voices grew louder and louder. They were arguing about something that had been promised by Robert Kennedy. Marilyn was demanding an explanation about why Kennedy was not going to marry her. As they argued, the voices got shriller.”

  Bobby apparently had just learned about Marilyn’s own wiretaps and was looking for a recording device or microphone. “He was asking again and again, ‘Where is it? Where the fuck is it?’” The tape ended with the sound of a door slamming and then resumed, this time with another voice in addition to Marilyn’s and Bobby’s. Summers’s source didn’t recognize the voice, but was told by Spindel as they listened to the tape together that it was Peter Lawford’s. “RFK was saying words to the effect, ‘We have to know. It’s important to the family. We can make any arrangements you want, but we must find it.’

  “Apparently, he was still looking for the recording device. Then they apparently came close to where the transmitter was. There was a clack, clack, clack on the tape, which Bernie said he thought was hangers being pushed along a rail. . . . Kennedy was screeching, and Lawford was saying, ‘Calm down, calm down. . . .’ Monroe was screaming at them, ordering them out of the house.”

  Then, according to the source, there were “thumping, bumping noises, then muffled, calming sounds. It sounded as though she was being put on the bed.” Two other people confirm the existence of this tape. Michael Morrissey, a Spindel employee who is now a Washington lawyer, listened to a few minutes of the recording and heard a bang or thump, as though someone were falling. And Bernard Spindel’s doctor, Henry Kamin, said Spindel told him about the tape, described a “violent incident” on it, and was “very nervous” about having it in his possession.

  Bernie Spindel’s Monroe tapes were seized during a raid on his home in 1966 by New York district attorney Frank Hogan’s office. Spindel told Life reporter John Neary, “Hogan really did Kennedy a favor by pulling the raid. They stole my tapes on Marilyn Monroe and my complete file.” Spindel’s lawyers sued to recover the seized materials, stating in their suit that among the items they sought to have returned were a “confidential file containing tapes and evidence concerning circumstances surrounding, and causes of death of Marilyn Monroe, which strongly suggests that the officially reported circumstances of her death are erroneous.” The suit failed, as did a later one by Spindel’s widow.

  The FBI says that it routinely destroyed its investigative file on Spindel, but at least one document still exists to reveal that a confidential source had informed the FBI in the mid-sixties of what Spindel’s tapes contained. More than half of the document is blacked out, but this remains: “He also said that Senator Bobby Kennedy was present at the time Marilyn Monroe died and ——— wanted to ‘get’ Bobby Kennedy off his back ——— could do so by listening to the various recordings and evidence ——— concerning Bobby Kennedy’s presence there at the time.”

  THIRTY

  In the five decades since Marilyn Monroe’s death, there has been so much obfuscation, so much evasion, so many lies told about the circumstances that many people have come to believe that Robert Kennedy and Peter Lawford were directly involved with her death, that they may even have murdered her to keep her from revealing her involvement with the Kennedy brothers. The confidential source who listened to the Spindel tapes, for instance, believed that when Peter and Bobby left Marilyn’s house on Saturday afternoon she was dead.

  There was, without question, a cover-up, and Peter Lawford was a part of it. But the weight of evidence points only to a cover-up of Marilyn’s relationships with the Kennedy brothers, not of her murder. It is virtually certain that Robert Kennedy did not see Marilyn again after his last visit to her house, and Marilyn was still alive throughout the evening hours of August 4. She spoke on the telephone to a number of people that night, including a studio hairdresser, Sidney Guilaroff, at nine-thirty; a recent lover, José Bolanos, between nine-thirty and ten; and Joe DiMaggio, Jr. at ten.

  While it is possible that Kennedy returned after ten that evening, he did not do so in the company of Peter Lawford, who is firmly placed in his home between the hours of seven P.M. and one-thirty A.M. by several friends and a maid who were with him that evening.

  Much more likely is that M
arilyn was overwhelmed by a crushing depression after Bobby and Peter left her house that afternoon. At four-thirty she urgently telephoned her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who made a highly unusual weekend house call. The actress was extremely disturbed when Greenson came to see her. He found her, he later told the suicide prevention team that investigated her death, “depressed and drugged,” “furious,” and “in a rage.” Circumspectly, Greenson said only that Marilyn had been involved sexually with “important men in government” and was feeling “rejected by some of the people she had been close to.”

  Greenson spent two and a half hours with Marilyn, after which he felt that he had calmed her down. But she remained depressed. The friends who spoke to her later in the evening say that she sounded sad and groggy, her words slurred, her responses slow.

  Peter had planned a dinner party Saturday night with Marilyn and a few other friends, including the Naars, George “Bullets” Durgom, an agent friend of his, and Milt Ebbins. Despite the earlier scene with Bobby, Peter still hoped Marilyn would come, and at six o’clock he called Joe Naar, who lived near her, and asked him to pick her up on his way over. Around seven-thirty, just as the Naars were leaving the house, they got another call from Peter. Marilyn wasn’t feeling well, he told them, and wouldn’t be coming.

  Peter didn’t tell the Naars, but he was deeply disturbed by the conversation he’d just had with Marilyn. She had sounded terrible. “I could hear the depression moving in on her,” he would say later. “Her voice sounded slurred, she seemed to be slipping away. She didn’t understand everything I said.” Peter told LA Police Department investigators in 1975 that he began to yell at her, to give her a “verbal slap in the face,” but that she had simply said, “Say good-bye to Pat, say good-bye to the President, and say good-bye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.” Then there was silence, as though Marilyn had not hung up but had just put the receiver down — or dropped it.

  Concerned, Peter called back fifteen minutes later, but heard only a busy signal. Around eight, after several more attempts met by nothing but the busy tone, Peter called the operator to check on the line. He was told that no one was speaking on the telephone and it must be out of order.

  Now Peter was deeply worried. He knew that Marilyn had very good reason to be depressed, even suicidal. Most people would have jumped in their cars and sped to Marilyn’s house. But Peter Lawford was not a decisive man. He rarely took action without conferring with someone, and this night, because of the sensitive nature of Marilyn’s relationships with his brothers-in-law, Peter was especially reluctant to involve himself before he sought some advice. Instead of rushing to Marilyn’s aid, he picked up the telephone.

  The first person he called was Ebbins, who earlier had begged off the dinner party. “Milt, a very strange thing just happened,” Peter told him. He then related Marilyn’s series of good-byes and said he wanted to go over and see if Marilyn was okay.

  “For God’s sake, Peter, you’re the President’s brother-in-law,” Ebbins told him. “You can’t go over there. Your wife’s out of town. The press will have a field day. Let me get in touch with Mickey Rudin [Marilyn’s attorney]. It’s better to let someone in authority handle this.” Ebbins telephoned Rudin at about eight-fifteen and got his answering service. The service located Rudin at a cocktail party at the home of Mildred Allenberg, the widow of Burt Allenberg. The lawyer called Ebbins back at about eight-thirty. When Milt explained what had happened, Rudin told him to sit tight while he telephoned Eunice Murray at Marilyn’s home.

  According to Mrs. Murray, the attorney inquired as to Marilyn’s welfare but did not tell her of Ebbins’s inquiry or suggest that there was any reason to suspect trouble. Murray, knowing Marilyn was in bed and having no reason to suspect all was not well, told Rudin that as far as she knew Marilyn was fine. (Murray later said that she was out of the house for part of the afternoon and although she knew Bobby Kennedy had been there, she was not aware of an argument between him and Marilyn.)

  In 1962, Rudin was interviewed by police investigators. (He has refused all requests for interviews on this subject since.) At that time, according to the interviewer’s report, Rudin said that after speaking to Mrs. Murray he believed that “Miss Monroe was suffering from one of her despondent moments” and that he had “dismissed the possibility of anything further being wrong.”

  Rudin then called Milt Ebbins back to tell him that there was no cause for worry. “Milt,” he said, “you know there isn’t anything in the world I wouldn’t do for Marilyn. Please don’t be concerned about her.” “Well, Lawford’s very worried,” Ebbins replied.

  “You just tell him what I said.”

  Ebbins called Peter, who told him that he wanted to hear directly from Rudin. When Rudin called Peter he said, “Believe me, she does this all the time. If there was any reason to be alarmed, we’d be way ahead of you because Mrs. Murray would have called us. But she does this every night.”

  Still, Peter told Milt he wanted to go over to Marilyn’s. Finally Ebbins said to him, “So go. Get in your car and go. I can’t stop you.” But Peter didn’t go. Instead, he made more phone calls. One of the calls, according to Dr. Robert Litman, one of the members of the suicide prevention team, was to Washington. Another was to Bill Asher, who gave him the same advice Milt Ebbins had: “I don’t know, Peter. You’re the President’s brother-in-law. We don’t want to break into Marilyn’s window and find out something’s happened.”

  While all this was going on, Peter did an excellent acting job in front of his guests. “I picked up on nothing,” Dolores Naar recalled. “Except that during the evening there was a call and Peter said, ‘Oh, it’s Marilyn again’ — like she does this all the time. His attitude didn’t change. It was a very light, up evening.” Erma Lee Riley, Peter’s maid, agreed: “There wasn’t a word of worry about Marilyn.”

  But by the time the Naars left the Lawford house at around eleven, Peter was very drunk — and still concerned about Marilyn. Shortly after the Naars arrived home, Peter telephoned and asked Joe to go by Marilyn’s house and check on her. Joe, who had already undressed for bed, put his clothes back on and was headed out the door when Peter called again. “He said that he’d spoken to Marilyn’s doctor,” Dolores recalled, “and he had said that he had given her sedatives because she had been disturbed earlier and she was probably asleep, so don’t bother going. He said, ‘You’ll just wake her up.’” These were an odd pair of telephone calls in an evening replete with oddities. Why did Peter, who had been worried about Marilyn since seven-thirty, wait until the Naars had returned home to indicate any concern to them over Marilyn? And why did he first ask Joe to go over to Marilyn’s (after being told by Mickey Rudin that she was okay) and then, just a few minutes later, tell him not to go? Dolores felt that the two calls were “calculated to mislead us. Joe and I wondered, ‘Why did he call us the second time and tell us not to go?’ Maybe because by then he knew that Marilyn was dead.”

  Or dying. For Marilyn Monroe’s press agent — traditionally the first person notified in a Hollywood emergency — did receive an urgent telephone call during a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. Arthur Jacobs and his fiancée, Natalie, were enjoying the Henry Mancini orchestra when they were disturbed about an hour before midnight. According to Natalie Jacobs, now Arthur’s widow, the call was most likely from Pat Newcomb, who worked for Jacobs, and the news was that Marilyn Monroe was dead. “Pat Newcomb was the first one at the house,” Natalie Jacobs insisted.

  In light of the recollections of other witnesses, however, it is more likely that Arthur Jacobs was summoned because Marilyn had fallen into unconsciousness and could not be roused. Such a situation, demanding official medical assistance, would have required under any circumstances that Marilyn’s press agent be alerted. Given the potentially explosive nature of Monroe’s relationships, the greatest care needed to be taken.

  If Pat Newcomb alerted Arthur Jacobs to Marilyn’s condition, it is likely that she also alert
ed Peter. This would explain his abrupt about-face with the Naars. By now, Peter would have been very near panic. If Marilyn Monroe were to die, it would be impossible to keep reporters and photographers from descending on her house and discovering any number of items linking her to the Kennedys — her diary, her personal telephone book, perhaps even a suicide note. Peter could not have been anything but frantic at the prospect.

  According to a number of sources, the extraordinary late-night events of August 4 finally pushed Peter Lawford into action. As Dolores Naar says, “Peter probably called Jack or Bobby and was told to take care of things — do whatever he had to do. And do it yourself — don’t involve anybody else under any circumstances.”

  The first thing Peter did, from all appearances, was help Bobby Kennedy leave Los Angeles. According to LA police chief William Parker, Kennedy was seen at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Saturday night, so he did not return to San Francisco immediately after he left Marilyn’s house that afternoon. William Reed Woodfield, a photographer who had taken some of the last nude photographs of Marilyn during the filming of Something’s Got to Give, embarked on an investigation of Marilyn’s death with New York Herald Tribune writer Joe Hyams within a few days of the event. Woodfield heard that Bobby Kennedy had been rushed by helicopter from Peter’s house to Los Angeles International Airport late Saturday night.

  On a pretext, Woodfield gained access to the flight logs of the helicopter company Peter used most frequently. There, for the night of August 4, he found a notation that a helicopter had been dispatched to the Lawford house for a trip to the LA airport sometime around midnight. The next morning at nine-thirty, Robert Kennedy attended Sunday mass near San Francisco.