The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  In mid-June, Zanuck arrived in New York and conferred with his attorney, Arnold Grant, while secretly buying additional shares of Fox stock to ensure success in his forthcoming boardroom battle to regain control of the studio. “We had no knowledge of what Zanuck was up to,” Milton Gould later stated. “He spent weeks buying up thousands of shares of stock in order to win enough votes to unseat us.”

  During the summer of 1962, the attorney general’s helicopter often descended on the Fox lot. Bobby Kennedy would leap out wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt, followed by Secret Service agents wearing blue suits and ties, and they would hurry to Jerry Wald’s office for preproduction meetings on The Enemy Within. On these visits Kennedy frequently spent the night at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, which was only a few minutes away.

  On Saturday, June 23, two weeks after Marilyn’s dismissal from Fox, Bobby Kennedy flew to Los Angeles and Peter Lawford arranged for Marilyn and Kennedy to meet. Kennedy was to attend a dinner party at the Lawford beach house, and Marilyn was invited. According to Patricia Seaton Lawford, the purpose of Bobby Kennedy’s visit was to stop Marilyn from trying to contact the president. She had been trying to reach him at the Oval Office and at Hyannisport, abandoning her code name, stating, “This is Marilyn Monroe, and I expect to speak with Jack!” If she wanted to save her career, she would have to become cooperative—to remain silent.

  Shortly before Marilyn was to meet Bobby Kennedy at the Lawfords’, dress designer Jean-Louis’s assistant, Elizabeth Courtney, recalled, “I never saw her so nervous about a party. We altered three dresses before Marilyn found the right one.” When Marilyn left the room during one of the fittings, Courtney asked Hazel Washington what was going on. “She’s seeing the man, honey,” Hazel answered.

  “Who is it?” asked Courtney.

  “Kennedy,” Hazel said.

  “You mean the president?” wondered Courtney.

  “No, the other one—the brother,” was the reply.

  Marilyn arrived at the Lawfords’ party two and a half hours late.

  The following day, Sunday, June 24, Bobby Kennedy paid a visit to Marilyn’s home. Neighbors saw his arrival in the Fifth Helena cul-de-sac, and Mrs. Murray stated that he arrived alone, driving himself in a convertible. “He was casually dressed,” she recalled, “looking boyish in slacks and an open shirt.” Norman Jefferies was working on the house that day and had been told he’d have to “clear out before Kennedy came.” But he recalled that Kennedy arrived just as he was leaving. Marilyn showed Kennedy her new kitchen, and then they went outside by the pool and spoke for over an hour. “Marilyn did not seem bubbly or excited by his visit,” Mrs. Murray said.

  While there’s no record of what was discussed during the private meeting between the film star and “the General,” one can surmise what was discussed by the effects. The next day, Monday, June 25, Bobby Kennedy called Judge Rosenman and, according to Fox archives, studio head Peter Levathes was told to renegotiate Marilyn’s contract for the completion of Something’s Got to Give. “I got word to try and negotiate with Miss Monroe from New York. I don’t know whether it was from Milton Gould or Judge Rosenman,” stated Levathes.

  Sixteen days after her humiliating dismissal, the studio did an amazing about-face and was asking her to return.

  On Thursday, June 28, Marilyn Monroe had a meeting with Peter Levathes to discuss her terms for resuming work on Something’s Got to Give. As he arrived at her home, chilled caviar and trays of canapés and cocktails awaited him, and a punctual Marilyn Monroe emerged to greet him. She was uncharacteristically businesslike. In one of her better offscreen performances, she was the new no-nonsense Monroe. Whitey Snyder and Sidney Guilaroff had worked all afternoon creating a startling, severe look for the actress, who wore a conservative Norman Norell dress of sober beige complemented by her horn-rimmed glasses. Levathes admitted to being impressed by this savvy superstar, who appeared to be the exact antithesis of the image created by his own studio’s negative press campaign.

  At the time, Levathes was unaware that Pat Newcomb was behind the door, listening to every word and making notes of the meeting. “I found, surprisingly, that she was an astute businesswoman in many ways,” Levathes said later, “She was very rational. You couldn’t have had a better meeting with an actress. She had a kind of renewed interest in the project that was infectious. I was finally confident that the picture would be made. In fact, I even authorized a new rewrite of the script incorporating Marilyn’s ideas.”

  As June came to an end, an agreement was in the works for the resumption of Something’s Got to Give, and the studio agreed to renegotiate Marilyn’s contract into a million-dollar deal—$500,000 for Something’s Got to Give, plus a bonus if it was completed on its new schedule, and another $500,000 or more for a new musical called What a Way to Go, to be produced by Arthur Jacobs. It was much more money than Marilyn had ever made in the past. Incredibly, Fox agreed to junk the Walter Bernstein rewrites and revert to the Nunnally Johnson script that Marilyn preferred, and the studio agreed to replace George Cukor with a director approved by the star.

  It was an astonishing victory for Marilyn that had been brought about by a call from Bobby Kennedy to Samuel Rosenman—but at what price? Had she agreed to forever refrain from contacting JFK? When she signed the new contract, how much of her heart would be on the dotted line?

  In early July, Bobby Kennedy again visited Los Angeles on his way to Nevada, where he was to meet General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and view the first hydrogen bomb test in the continental United States—then a top secret. Exactly one month before Marilyn Monroe’s death, a Fourth of July barbecue was held at the Lawfords’, which was attended by both Marilyn and Bobby Kennedy. It was a conciliatory gathering. To all appearances the differences between the Kennedys and Marilyn had been mended. Bobby and Marilyn walked on the beach together, and the film star listened attentively as the attorney general discussed sensitive world matters, atomic testing, and politics.*

  Fox planned to resume filming Something’s Got to Give, starring Marilyn Monroe, in the third week of July, but inexplicably, once the new contract had been drawn, Marilyn’s attorney, Mickey Rudin, began a delaying tactic. Fox wanted to get the contract signed and the film back into production as quickly as possible, but the contract sat on Rudin’s desk unsigned.

  Numerous calls to Rudin by Fox attorneys went unreturned. The studio planted an item with columnist Earl Wilson stating, “Mickey Rudin is deliberately dragging his feet on the new pact with Monroe. Once the million-dollar contract was drawn up, Marilyn Monroe’s attorney, Rudin, seems to be in no rush to ratify it.”

  But it was Marilyn who was in no rush to sign the contract. Learning that Zanuck was about to launch his D-Day invasion of the Fox board at meeting scheduled for July 25, she was playing her waiting game. However, there was no way to foresee the outcome of what promised to be a formidable boardroom battle. There was no guarantee that Rosenman, Gould, and Loeb wouldn’t prevail, or that Marilyn’s career wouldn’t remain hostage to the Kennedy faction. Until Zanuck made his move on the twenty-fifth, Marilyn remained a Rosenman pawn. And it was Marilyn’s gambit to delay signing the contract until the Kennedys were in check.

  57

  Checkmate

  I now live in my work and in a few relationships with the few people I can really count on. Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.

  —Marilyn Monroe

  In July 1962, U.S. surveillance satellites photographed newly constructed Cuban long-range ballistic missile installations. Within fifteen weeks the Cuban missile crisis would bring the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. At this perilous time in history, J. Edgar Hoover received another confidential memorandum from the FBI office in Mexico City headed “MARILYN MONROE—SECURITY MATTER—C [Communist].”

  Dated July 13, 1962
—just three weeks prior to Marilyn’s death—the document, which was withheld from the FBI’s Monroe file, survived in highly censored form in the FBI files of both Peter Lawford and Frederick Vanderbilt Field.

  Under the Freedom of Information appeals process, FOI attorney James Lesar was told by the FBI that the source of the censored information in the Monroe memorandum was an informant. The FBI had been requested by another intelligence agency (CIA) not to reveal the informant’s name. However, the FBI disclosed to Lesar that the source was someone who knew both Field and Monroe and had recently been in private conversation with both of them.

  Only Eunice Murray, José Bolaños, Churchill Murray, and Ralph Greenson fell into that category. The likely informant was Bolaños. Field had claimed that Bolaños was “a man of left-wing pretensions, deeply distrusted by the real left,” when he warned Marilyn not to have anything to do with him.

  In March 1962, Bolaños had followed Marilyn back to the United States from Mexico and was her escort at the Golden Globe Awards. When Anthony Summers interviewed Bolaños in 1983, Bolaños stated that he had visited Marilyn in New York in April 1962, and that he last saw her in Los Angeles in early July.

  Bolaños is further confirmed as the source by the FBI’s disclosure that the details in the confidential memorandum were “heard directly from Marilyn by the informant.” Marilyn is quoted as saying that she “attended a luncheon at Peter Lawford’s residence with one of the Kennedy brothers.” Significant questions were discussed, including political matters. One of the “significant questions” had been “the morality of atomic testing.” The FBI indicated that the luncheon at Lawford’s home occurred in early July, which was when Bolaños last saw Marilyn.

  At this critical juncture of the cold war, the relationship of the Kennedy brothers with Marilyn Monroe became a grave national security matter. American intelligence agencies had become acutely aware of the connection between Monroe and suspected Soviet agent Frederick Vanderbilt Field. The CIA document signed by counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton (see “Appendix”) establishes that electronic surveillance had, indeed, been placed on Marilyn’s home. At the same time, Field’s FBI file indicates that he was under intense surveillance in June and July. Alarms again reverberated down the FBI corridors when agents learned that Field had left Mexico City, crossed the border, and was driving to New York. He arrived on July 10 and was staying as a guest in Marilyn Monroe’s apartment at 444 East Fifty-Seventh Street, where he remained for several weeks.

  When Bobby Kennedy returned to Washington after viewing the secret hydrogen bomb test, J. Edgar Hoover was waiting with another bomb to explode.

  On Tuesday, July 17, Marilyn dialed the attorney general’s private number but was unable to speak with him. Monroe’s telephone records of July 17 indicate that she tried several times to reach Kennedy through the Justice Department switchboard but was not put through to the attorney general. Following his meeting with Hoover, Bobby Kennedy suddenly cut off communication with Marilyn. Like Jack Kennedy, he offered no explanation.

  Jeanne Carmen observed, “All of a sudden she couldn’t get through to Bobby. She had no idea what happened, why she couldn’t get through. She was extremely angry.”

  “Damn it! He owes me an explanation!” Marilyn said to Robert Slatzer. “I want to know what happened, and I want Bobby to tell me himself!”

  During July, telephone records indicated that Marilyn tried to reach Kennedy at the Justice Department from her Brentwood home on eight occasions. Marilyn had also tried to reach him at his Hickory Hill home. “Bobby was furious with Marilyn for taking this liberty,” related Patricia Seaton Lawford.

  From early July until August 4, the doctors’ bills show that Marilyn saw Dr. Greenson on twenty-seven of thirty-five days, and her internist, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, on thirteen. On a number of these visits, the records show that Marilyn received injections. The records may reveal not only her own problems, but those of her doctors as well. Her loss of the Kennedy relationship had been, in a sense, their loss too. At the same time they had considerable concern as to why Marilyn had been suddenly shunned. Perhaps they realized it had been discovered that she was a security problem.

  The doctors and the Kennedys had a burgeoning common cause—to keep Marilyn quiet. Greenson could keep a daily update on her state of mind and intentions, and both Greenson and Engelberg could see to it that she was sedated when she was overwhelmed by anger. Engelberg’s ex-wife, Esther Maltz, recently made the comment, “Hy kept Marilyn sedated for Dr. Greenson.” And, of course, there was Mrs. Murray, who could keep an eye on Marilyn from within the house and report danger signs.

  Robert Slatzer recalled that shortly before he left for Columbus, Ohio, in late July, Marilyn called him from a Brentwood pay phone. She had become convinced her phones were tapped. Marilyn wanted to see him, and it was later that day they drove up the coast to the beach at Point Dume. Slatzer said Marilyn alternated between tears and anger as she spoke about the Kennedys and their refusal to speak to her.

  “She was angry and hurt—totally outraged—that they had both cut her off overnight,” Slatzer recalled. “Only two months ago she had been singing happy birthday to the president and was the celebrated guest at the party that followed. That association meant a great deal to her. Suddenly it was over and she felt she had been used, mistreated, and then totally rejected.”

  While Marilyn and Slatzer were discussing her problems, she pulled out of her large carryall handbag some papers wrapped with a rubber band. They were handwritten notes from Bobby Kennedy—some of them on Justice Department stationery. She also showed Slatzer her red diary and allowed him to browse through it. Inside, he saw notes pertaining to conversations with the Kennedys regarding the Bay of Pigs, Castro, the Mafia, and Jimmy Hoffa. When Slatzer asked Marilyn why she had made the notes, she said, “Because Bobby liked to talk about political things. He got mad at me one day because he said I didn’t remember anything he told me.”

  Slatzer questioned what she was going to do if Jack or Bobby Kennedy continued not speaking with her, and Marilyn angrily responded, “I might just hold a press conference. I’ve certainly got a lot to say!”

  Marilyn Monroe was in a position to bring down the presidency. She was cognizant of Jack Kennedy’s marital infidelities and other private matters. She had his notes and letters and was privy to Kennedy’s involvement with Sam Giancana. That the Kennedy brothers had discussed national security matters with the film star added to an astonishing array of indiscretions. The Profumo affair, which eventually brought down the British government, was to surface in the following year.

  A number of people have questioned just how serious Marilyn may have been about calling a press conference. Marilyn was notable for not speaking ill of anybody. She once said to Sidney Skolsky, “I’ve never been in a public fight or feud. I have the most wonderful memory for forgetting things.” But Jeanne Carmen observed that Marilyn was extremely angry and determined. She believed Marilyn would have told all had she lived. But as long as her career remained hostage to Judge Rosenman and the Kennedy faction on the Fox board, Marilyn had no choice but to remain silent. As the crucial date of the boardroom battle for control neared, Marilyn’s million-dollar contract still remained unsigned on Micky Rudin’s desk.

  It was a hot and humid day in New York City on Wednesday, July 25, when the 20th Century-Fox board gathered for the decisive conflict. With Judge Samuel Rosenman presiding, Darryl F. Zanuck and Spyros Skouras sat opposite their adversaries as Milton Gould launched a vicious verbal assault on Zanuck. Characterized as “a womanizer, a drunk, a prolifigate gambler, and a producer of flops,” Zanuck remained calm as his detractors attempted to demean his reputation.

  “The bile just poured out of them,” Zanuck said later. “It was filthy stuff—mostly about my private life.”

  When the torrent of invective concluded, Rosenman turned to Zanuck and said, “And now perhaps Mr. Zanuck would tell us what he would do for
the company if he did become president.”

  Lighting up a cigar, Zanuck stood and said, “I have nothing to say. If you want me, fine. If not, get somebody else!” He then continued on with a four-hour tirade about the mismanagement of the studio, and the giant financial losses that had accrued in his absence. At the conclusion he was elected president by a vote of eight to three. The three voting against him were Rosenman, Gould, and Loeb. They promptly resigned, and Spyros Skouras, the former president, replaced Rosenman as chairman of the board.

  With Zanuck’s victory, Marilyn had won. Something’s Got to Give would resume filming as soon as schedules could be arranged. Marilyn Monroe would be the star under the new million-dollar contract she was now ready to sign. She was no longer hostage to the Kennedys. The “dumb blonde” had outmaneuvered “the General.”

  58

  The Devil’s Weekend

  Win at all costs!

  —Joseph P. Kennedy

  On July 28 and 29, a week prior to her death, Marilyn spent the weekend at the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe. What really happened on this mysterious weekend has been obscured by speculation and the misleading statements of Peter Lawford. Those few who witnessed the events have been loath to say what actually took place.