The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  On September 23, 1961, Sinatra was given the grand tour of the White House family quarters and taken out to the Truman Balcony for Bloody Marys. Presidential aide Dave Powers observed, “Sinatra sat on the balcony sipping his drink and looking out at the sun streaming in and the wonderful view of Washington we got from there. He turned to me and said, ‘Dave, all the work I did for Jack—sitting here like this makes it all worthwhile.’” The following day Frank boarded the Caroline on a flight to Hyannisport with Pat Lawford, Ted Kennedy, Porfirio Rubirosa, and Rubirosa’s wife, Odile. When they landed, Sinatra strolled off the Kennedy plane holding a glass of champagne, followed by twelve pieces of luggage, a case of wine, a dozen bottles of champagne, three cartons of ice cream, and two loaves of Italian bread.

  On September 25, they all went cruising with Jack on the Honey Fitz, and the president listened to Sinatra talk about his trip to Italy and his audience with Pope John XXIII. Sinatra also put in a good word for his Italian friends in Chicago.

  But his Italian friends in Chicago weren’t happy about their own relationship with the Kennedys. Shortly after Sinatra’s visit, Sam Giancana telephoned Johnny Roselli with a litany of complaints. There was a third party on the line—the FBI:

  ROSELLI: He [Frank Sinatra] was real nice to me…. He says: “Johnny, I took Sam’s name, and wrote it down, and told Bobby Kennedy, ‘This is my buddy, this is what I want you to know, Bob.’” Between you and I, Frank saw Joe Kennedy three different times—Joe Kennedy, the father. He called him three times…. He [Frank] says he’s got an idea that you’re mad at him. I says: “That, I wouldn’t know.”

  GIANCANA: He must have a guilty conscience. I never said nothing…. Well, I don’t know who the fuck he’s [Frank’s] talking to, but if I’m gonna talk to…after all, if I’m taking somebody’s money, I’m gonna make sure that this money is gonna do something, like, do you want it or don’t you want it. If the money is accepted, maybe one of these days the guy will do me a favor.

  ROSELLI: That’s right. He [Frank] says he wrote your name down….

  GIANCANA: Well, one minute he [Frank] tells me this and then tells me that and then the last time I talked to him was at the hotel in Florida a month before he left, and he said, “Don’t worry about it. If I can’t talk to the old man [Joseph Kennedy], I’m gonna talk to the man [President Kennedy].” One minute he says he’s talked to Robert, and the next minute he says he hasn’t talked to him. So, he never did talk to him. It’s a lot of shit…. Why lie to me? I haven’t got that coming…. When he says he’s gonna do a guy a little favor, I don’t give a shit how long it takes. He’s got to give you a little favor.”

  For several months Ralph Roberts had taken on the routine of driving Marilyn on errands after her massage sessions, and in the afternoon he would drive her to Dr. Greenson’s several days a week. Marilyn had become quite dependent on Roberts and sometimes referred to him as her “brother.”

  On a Saturday in the latter part of October, Roberts recalled Marilyn emerging from Dr. Greenson’s deeply upset. She was weeping. “Dr. Greenson thinks you should go back to New York,” she cried. “He’s chosen someone else to be a companion for me. He said that two Ralphs in my life are one too many. I told him I call you Rafe. ‘He’s Rafe,’ I said, over and over. But he says, no—that I need someone else!” The next day Ralph Roberts checked out of the Marmont and went to the Doheny apartment to collect his massage table and say a tearful good-bye before returning to New York.

  Several days later, a middle-aged, birdlike woman with gray hair and impish eyes entered the patio in front of the Doheny apartment just below Sunset Strip. As she walked by the ornamental fountain near the tall iron security gates, she stopped at the building directory, where she had been instructed to press the buzzer for apartment number three. Behind the black enameled door of the apartment she would find Marilyn Monroe. “Marilyn Monroe” was only a film star’s name to her. She had never seen a Monroe movie or followed the celebrity’s career.

  She pressed the buzzer, and there was a long wait before the door was opened by the platinum blonde with the incredible blue eyes and the radiant glow. Marilyn Monroe stood at the door barefooted, wearing a red Chinese kimono, her hair tousled with sleep.

  “Hello,” the middle-aged lady said softly. “My name is Eunice Murray. Dr. Greenson said you’d be expecting me.”

  50

  The Lady of Shalott

  The shackles of an old love straightened him:

  His honour rooted in dishonour stood,

  And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

  Eunice Murray stated in her book, Marilyn: The Last Months, that she had been hired “primarily to drive Marilyn Monroe to and from her apartment and the psychiatrist’s office, and carry out such things as answering the door and phone, cleaning and dusting.” Mrs. Murray had other duties as the film star’s housekeeper which she never discussed.

  Some years after Marilyn’s death, when it was learned that Mrs. Murray was a trained psychiatric nurse, it was assumed that Dr. Greenson had placed her in Marilyn’s home to monitor her behavior; however, to surreptitiously place a psychiatric nurse in a patient’s home was an unprecedented procedure, and there were other aspects of the relationship between Dr. Greenson and Mrs. Murray that proved to be unusual.

  Friends of Marilyn’s regarded Mrs. Murray as peculiar. Whitey Snyder described her as “a very strange lady. She was put into Marilyn’s life by Greenson, and she was always whispering—whispering and listening. She was this constant presence, reporting everything back to Greenson.”

  Jeanne Carmen sensed that Mrs. Murray wasn’t the simple housekeeper-companion she pretended to be. “I wasn’t crazy about Mrs. Murray. I don’t know what I didn’t like about her, but I just thought she was rather sneaky. When she was there I tried to avoid going around.”

  Mrs. Murray treated Marilyn’s friends and associates with subtle disdain, and in her condescending way she gained a controlling influence on Marilyn’s daily life. The day seemed to revolve around the four o’clock appointment with Dr. Greenson at his office. The “office” was in reality Greenson’s home in Santa Monica.

  In 1968, Mrs. Murray revealed that she always drove Marilyn to Greenson’s home, where the film star was frequently invited to stay on for supper. Dr. Greenson’s wife, Hildi, recalled that Marilyn often insisted on helping them cook and clean up afterward, saying, “I do dishes very well. I learned how in the foster homes and the orphanage.” In effect, Marilyn became a member of the household. The Greensons’ daughter, Joan, a student at the Otis Art Institute, quickly became Marilyn’s friend. Dr. Greenson also encouraged his twenty-four-year-old son, Danny, to spend time with his celebrity patient. At the time, Danny was a medical student at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was an active member of SLATE.

  The Greenson home was a large Mexican-Monterey-style house on a hill with views of Santa Monica and the distant ocean. The walls were wood-paneled; the ceiling was crossed with hand-hewn beams set in place by studio craftsmen during the prolonged Hollywood strike called by John Murray and Herb Sorrell in the forties. A huge fireplace was embellished with Mexican tiles, which also decorated the stairway and the kitchen. Many of the tiles Marilyn admired had been set in place by Eunice.

  The living room had an inviting warmth and elegance. An antique table stood in front of the fireplace, and large bookcases lined the length of one wall. A grand piano was often played by Elizabeth Greenschpoon Rudin, Dr. Greenson’s sister. She had become a concert pianist and frequently accompanied the chamber concerts that Marilyn often attended in the Greenson living room. Far from the taunts of the street toughs of Brownsville, Romi would play the violin in his Santa Monica home as friends and appreciative guests listened.

  Among the guests who frequented these chamber concerts were Henry Weinstein; Celeste Holm; Dore Schary; writer Leo Rosten; Hannah Weinstein; Lillian Hellman; Otto Feni
chel’s widow, Hanna Fenichel; and Dr. Lewis Fielding.*Ralph Greenson’s mother, Katharine Greenschpoon, who had once directed the concerts at the Brownsville Labor Lyceum, often held the place of honor at these evenings of cultural pleasures. However, it was a glaring violation of all the traditional tenets of psychoanalysis for Dr. Greenson to have taken his patient into his home. It was a totally antianalytic approach to therapy and was highly criticized by his psychiatric colleagues when it became known years later.

  Eleven years after Marilyn’s death, Dr. Greenson defended his unorthodox therapeutic procedure in the Medical Tribune of October 24, 1973, saying “It is controversial, I know that. Nevertheless, I have practiced for some thirty-five years, and I did what I thought best, particularly after other methods of treatment apparently hadn’t touched her one iota.” But by making Marilyn a quasi-member of his household, the doctor transgressed one of the rules of analysis stated in his own textbook The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, in which he criticized anti-analytic technique. On Chapter 5, Dr. Greenson wrote, “The anti-analytic procedures are those which block or lessen the capacity for insight and understanding. The use of any measure or course of action which diminishes the ego function of observing, thinking, remembering and judging belongs in this category. Some obvious examples are the administering of drugs, certain kinds of transference gratifications, diversions, etc.” Dr. Greenson admitted that his break with the traditional doctor-patient relationship was an inappropriate procedure. “I did it for a purpose,” he told the Medical Tribune. “My particular method of treatment for this particular woman was, I thought, essential at that time. But it failed. She died.”

  Friends and colleagues of Dr. Greenson’s related the despondency and anguish the doctor went through in the years following Marilyn’s death. The “strange sardonic smirk” that Sergeant Clemmons noted in the doctor’s expression when he first arrived at the death scene was but the beginning of a problem of conscience that would haunt Ralph Greenson until his own death in 1979. There were priorities that the doctor had put above the welfare of his patient—priorities that led him to sacrifice the basic tenets of his profession. “I did it for a purpose,” he had stated, but “the purpose” in the case of Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the welfare of the patient. Dr. Greenson was faced with the dilemma of justifying himself before distinguished colleagues, while at the same time not revealing the depth of his knowledge concerning the circumstances of Marilyn Monroe’s death, for in doing so he would have to reveal the nature of his own priorities—the deeply guarded secret of his hidden life.

  Dr. Greenson maintained a dual identity within the Communist Party. According to Norman Jefferies and former FBI agent Ernest Phillips Cohen, Dr. Ralph R. Greenson was an agent of the Comintern. While forty pages of Dr. Greenson’s lengthy and highly redacted FBI dossier are still withheld by the FBI under the “Internal Security—C (Communist) 105” ruling, Eunice Murray’s son-in-law, Norman Jefferies, stated that Dr. Greenson controlled the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Committee (ASPC), which proved to be a vital force in promoting communist ideology on the West Coast. Fronted by John Howard Lawson, the ASPC had at one time been overtly prominent in promoting communist causes in the Los Angeles area before being forced to go underground by the HUAC investigations and the blacklisting of many of its Hollywood members.

  Under Greenson’s coordination, in 1947 John Howard Lawson and screenwriter Albert Maltz* organized the Hollywood Film Quarterly and the Hollywood Writers Mobilization for Defense. Designated by the attorney general as communist front organizations, they had their headquarters on the campus of UCLA, where Dr. Greenson was a member of the faculty. According to Greenson’s FBI file, he moderated some of the Writers Mobilization events and spoke at several of their public forums.

  Louis Budenz, a Communist Party leader and one time managing editor of the Daily Worker, was the founder of the National Arts, Sciences, and Professions Committee. Budenz defected in 1949 and gave a clear and informative picture of how the committee functioned and its purposes:

  How the Communist writers, scientists and professionals were mobilized and how they obtained the cooperation of scores of non-Communists in this Red-controlled organization is a rather simple story. As a start, small knots of Communist writers, artists and scientists in New York and Hollywood asked others, friends and acquaintances to join them on the Committee. As usual, the Communist leaders made sure that they had secret control of the apparatus of the organization. That meant having enough concealed Communists on the executive committee and in the key posts to exercise directive power.

  Budenz went on to say that the requirement for party members within the committee was “their prime loyalty to Marxism and to Joseph Stalin, the greatest living Marxist. No other loyalty was tolerated, no matter how pre-eminent they may have been in their own spheres.”

  Dr. Greenson’s priorities, therefore, were beyond the welfare of any one person—even beyond the traditional tenets of his profession.

  As the secret leader of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Committee, Dr. Greenson was in charge of a number of professional groups within the committee. Among them was the Doctors Professional Group, of which Dr. Hyman Engelberg was a prominent member.

  Another division within the structure of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Committee was the People’s Educational Center, which was established and funded by Frederick Vanderbilt Field. Among the instructors at this school who taught communist ideology were Dr. Hyman Engelberg and Dr. Frank Davis, a close friend of Dr. Greenson’s and head of the UCLA psychology department. Clearly the bond between Greenson and Engelberg went far beyond their professionalism, their family relationships, and their sharing of medical offices. They shared a vision of world order under Marxist ideology.

  In 1955, Dr. Oner Barker, Jr., who still practices today at his offices in Hollywood, gave testimony to the Senate Committee that Dr. Engelberg was a member of the Communist Party and belonged to the same professional cell that Dr. Barker had joined within the ASPC. Engelberg had openly used his name in connection with communist front activities, but after the Senate investigations he too went underground.

  One of Greenson’s contacts within the hierarchy of the Comintern was Frederick Vanderbilt Field. As the director of the American Russian Institute, Field was also associated with Greenson’s mother, Katherine Greenschpoon, who was on the board of directors, according to the Senate Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California bulletin of 1948.

  During the 1950s, after Frederick Vanderbilt Field was exposed by Louis Budenz as a Comintern operative, he fled to Mexico City, where he lived with a group of expatriate Americans, including some of the Hollywood Ten who were defended by Gang Tyre Rudin and Brown. One of the expatriates close to Frederick Vanderbilt Field in Mexico was Churchill Murray, Eunice Murray’s brother-in-law.

  Field was closely monitored by the FBI in Mexico City, and according to Norman Jefferies, continued his links to the United States through the Comintern leader in Los Angeles—Dr. Ralph Greenson.

  As early as 1964, Frank Capell wrote in the Addenda of his booklet The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe:

  Dr. Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s psychiatrist, resides at 902 Franklin Street in a home built by the husband of Mrs. Eunice Murray, Marilyn’s “housekeeper.” Mrs. Murray’s husband was a left-wing labor leader and organizer who often came home “messed up” from his strike and organizing activities. Dr. Greenson held meetings in his house for a number of years at which an odd group of people assembled. They consisted of well dressed professional appearing people, Negroes, and laboring type persons. Neighbors got the impression that Greenson’s home was used for some type of “cell” meetings. The Greensons were described by neighbors as being strong advocates of a socialist government.

  Because Capell was considered something of an extremist who saw a red around every corner, his suspicions were discounted. But Capell’s suspicions about the reds around the corner on F
ranklin Street were correct.

  Whenever possible, a cell leader had psychiatric training. It was the responsibility of the cell leader to periodically interview key cell members in order to evaluate their state of mind and dedication. Testimony before the Senate Fact Finding Committee established that psychoanalysts’ offices across the United States were used by Soviet espionage agents as havens for the safe transfer of confidential information. The one-on-one situation of the outside visitor in a confidential office setting was quite ideal. Among the members of the Psychoanalytic Institutes established in New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., Topeka, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles were a wide spectrum of analysts with varied political convictions and loyalties; among them were the close-knit heirs of Freudian-Marxism, such as Otto Fenicher’s disciple Dr. Ralph Greenson.

  Once Marilyn Monroe became Greenson’s patient, he became one of the most important Comintern operatives in America; he had access to the mind of a woman who often shared the bed of the president of the United States and was an intimate of the attorney general.

  As Greenson had correctly stated, Marilyn Monroe had a tendency to “get involved with very destructive people, who will engage in some sort of sado-masochistic relationship with her.” Ironically, among those people were her psychiatrist, her physician, and her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, who joined in a conspiracy to surround Marilyn Monroe within a sphere of influence designed to gather intelligence from her relationship with the president of the United States and the attorney general.