The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Mickey Rudin—who was both Marilyn’s and Frank’s attorney —said in 1996, “Frank is a very, very compassionate person. He brought Marilyn to Cal-Neva to give her a little fun, a little relief from her problems. If she was upset during the time, well, she could have a crisis over what she was having for lunch, she was that emotional and high-strung. She could have had an imagined crisis, in fact.”

  However, Joe Langford, a Sinatra security employee at Cal-Neva, said that Marilyn’s crisis that weekend seemed to not be of the imagined variety suggested by Mickey Rudin. “When Frank saw her, he was pretty shocked at how depressed she was,” he recalled. “As soon as he got her settled in, he got on the phone with her psychiatrist [presumably Dr. Greenson] and started in on the guy. ‘What the hell kind of treatment are you giving her? She’s a mess. What is she paying you for? Why isn’t she in a sanitarium?’ He hadn’t seen her in a while and he couldn’t believe how broken-down she was.”

  It’s true that Sinatra was known to have great concern for his friends. However, that said, one of the biggest problems with him was that he also had terrible judgment when it came to some of those friends—many of whom were underworld characters. Moreover, he didn’t seem to care whom he exposed his mob pals to, which was one of the big problems at Cal-Neva that weekend. About three hours after Pat and Peter Lawford arrived with Marilyn, they found a surprise waiting for them in the Cal-Neva lobby: Sam Giancana, one of the world’s leading gangsters, who was deeply involved in all sorts of underworld activity, some of it reputedly having to do with the Kennedy brothers. As it happened, Sinatra had sent his private jet back to Los Angeles to pick him up and bring him to Cal-Neva. For Sinatra to have invited him to the resort at the same time as the president’s sister and her husband made no sense. Naturally, Pat was upset. She wanted to turn around and fly right back to Los Angeles. In fact, according to a witness, as soon as she saw Giancana, she said, “That’s it. We have to go.”

  Peter, who seemed embarrassed because Pat had spoken loudly enough to have been heard by Giancana, walked over to the mobster and shook his hand, then began conversing with him. The two repeatedly glanced at Marilyn while they spoke, as if they were taking about her. Because Marilyn just looked at Giancana with a dazed expression, it’s not known if she recognized him or not. “I don’t feel well,” she told Pat. “I can’t fly again. We can’t leave now.”

  Pat put her arm around Marilyn’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear. However, whatever she said upset Marilyn. “I don’t care,” she said, now raising her voice. “I don’t care about any of it. I just need to go and lie down, right now. Take me to my room, Pat. Right now.”

  With that, Peter walked quickly over to the two women and said something to them in an angry tone. Pat gave him a long, piercing look. Then, without saying a word to him, she led her friend away, her hand on the actress’s elbow.

  Roberta Linn, who was entertaining at Cal-Neva along with Frank Sinatra and Buddy Greco, recalled, “I remember that her hair was in disarray the entire time, sometimes hidden under a scarf. She was very sad and she seemed out of it. She was at Sinatra’s show every night—he was performing in the main room, and she would sit in the back looking very unhappy. I thought it was such a shame, this girl who had everything in the world, yet nothing, really. It was very hard to see her in this condition.”

  Sinatra’s friend Jim Whiting recalled, “Jilly [Rizzo, another close friend of Sinatra’s] told me that Marilyn had some kind of bad reaction to alcohol while she was at Cal-Neva. It sounded like alcohol poisoning to me. She was also having stomach problems then and the booze along with the pills was, I guess, having a bad effect on her.”

  There was more to it than just pills and “booze,” though. As earlier stated, Marilyn had developed the alarming habit of giving herself injections of phenobarbital, Nembutal, and Seconal—which she referred to as “a vitamin shot.” Joe Langford confirmed, “On the day she opened her purse and pulled out those syringes, I was standing right there with Mr. Sinatra and Pat Kennedy Lawford. Marilyn was very casual about it. She was looking for something else and just pulled them out and put them on the table. Sinatra went white, like a sheet. He said, ‘Marilyn. Jesus Christ. What are they for?’ She said, ‘Oh, those are for my vitamin shots.’ She was very nonchalant about it. Pat looked like she was going to faint. ‘Oh my God, Marilyn,’ she said. ‘Oh my God.’ Then Marilyn said, ‘It’s all right Pat. I know what I’m doing.’

  “[Marilyn] was still going through her purse until, finally, she found what she was looking for: a pin. As we all stood there with our mouths open, she opened a bottle of pills and picked one out. Then—and I had never seen anything like this before—she put a small hole at the end of the capsule, and swallowed it. ‘Gets into your bloodstream faster that way,’ she said. She turned back to Pat and said, ‘See, I told you I knew what I was doing.’ ”

  Later that night, after Sinatra’s performance in the main showroom at Cal-Neva, the Lawfords and friends shared a few cocktails. Marilyn had only one drink. Still, she excused herself from the group, saying that she wasn’t feeling well and needed to rest in her room. Sometime later Pat went to check on her. According to a later recollection, Pat knocked on Marilyn’s door for a while before a wobbly Monroe let her in, then flopped back down on her bed. She was nauseous, she said. Pat grew concerned and asked Marilyn if she had taken another of her “vitamin shots.” At some point, Marilyn became violently ill. Pat later said she knelt next to her, holding her friend’s hair back as she threw up into the toilet. After this episode, Pat helped Marilyn change into a different outfit because the white blouse Marilyn had been wearing was stained with vomit. Marilyn then asked Pat to throw the top away in a trash can on the premises, claiming that “people will be going through the garbage in my room later.”

  Obviously, it turned out to be a very difficult weekend for all concerned at Cal-Neva, made even more so by the swarms of FBI agents due to Sam Giancana’s presence. As a result of Sinatra’s poor judgment, much fiction has been spun from the stories that have circulated—most of which are not true—about those couple of days in July 1962. Place Sinatra in a room with a Kennedy, a mobster, and a movie star, and what else can one expect but rumors, gossip, and innuendo? Add the FBI to the mix—with its theories presented as “fact” in its files—and it’s a sure recipe for confusion. In fact, Marilyn Monroe aficionados refer to this brief period as “The Lost Weekend,” because there have been so many conflicting stories about it.

  What we do know is this: Marilyn Monroe was dreadfully sick, emotionally and physically, the entire time she was at Cal-Neva. Whenever she was left alone for even fifteen minutes, she would pop a couple more pills, take another “vitamin shot,” and make herself even sicker. At one point during the weekend, Pat Kennedy Lawford raided Marilyn’s purse and got rid of all of the syringes. “She’s a very sick woman,” Pat told Peter. That was an understatement. In fact, between July 1 and August 9, Marilyn had twenty-seven appointments with her psychiatrist, Greenson, and thirteen with her internist, Engelberg.

  “Frank Sinatra didn’t know what to think about any of it,” said his valet, George Jacobs. “He was upset, though. He loved Marilyn, yes. But this was pushing it. For her to maybe die at Cal-Neva while he was there? That would have been terrible. So, after he’d seen enough, he said, ‘Get her out of here and get her out of here now.’ And that was it. We had to do what he said, get her out of there. You know, you felt bad about it, yeah. I mean, the woman was sick. But as compassionate as Sinatra was, he had a line and she crossed it. He didn’t want her dying at Cal-Neva, and that’s just the truth of it.”

  Ken Rotcop, who was a guest at Cal-Neva, recalled seeing Marilyn leave the resort. “She was shaking, she had chills, she looked very very sick.” Stacy Baron, another guest of the hotel, recalled, “I was in the lobby and I saw Peter Lawford on one side of her and Pat on the other side and they were practically carrying this woman out of there. I recognized the
two of them but I couldn’t figure out who the woman was because she had her head down and was just sort of groggy. Then she raised her head and I got a real shock. It was Marilyn Monroe. I was stunned. And as I was standing there with my mouth open, I heard Pat say to Peter, ‘This is all your fault, Peter. This is all your fault.’ And Peter said, ‘Not now, Pat. Jesus Christ, not now.’ ” I just watched them leave, thinking, my God! Marilyn Monroe looks like death.”

  “Maybe”

  After Marilyn Monroe returned from Cal-Neva on July 29, 1962, she spent so much of the next few days alone behind the walls of her modest home in Brentwood, it made monitoring her state of mind a near impossibility. Only Eunice Murray and her doctors—Greenson and Engelberg—seemed to know what was really going on with her, and they weren’t exactly forthcoming to her friends. “After Cal-Neva, Pat was worried to death for her,” shared a friend of Mrs. Kennedy Lawford’s. In the days after their return from Nevada, Pat tried to call Marilyn, with no success. Finally, she asked Peter to run an errand for her. Pat had salvaged the blouse Marilyn soiled in Reno and now saw its return as an opportunity for Peter to check in on her troubled friend. Therefore, Peter dropped by Marilyn’s, and as Pat later reported, he found her in “better than good spirits.” Pat was relieved. That evening, Pat telephoned Marilyn, who finally answered. Now she seemed distant and depressed, and this was mere hours after Peter’s pleasant visit with her.

  During their conversation, Pat questioned Marilyn about what she had done that day. Marilyn said that she had seen her doctor (not specifying which one), and, she claimed, the only other person she had come into contact with the entire day was Eunice Murray. Pat, knowing that her husband had spent the better part of an hour at Marilyn’s, found her withholding of this information to be very odd. Peter had said he spent long enough time at her home to enjoy a cocktail with her at the pool, and he even described her as having been in a “silly mood.” However, Marilyn now painted a picture of her day without Peter as a part of it. Pat challenged Marilyn, explaining that she knew that Peter had been there to return the blouse, and she was baffled by Marilyn’s reluctance to voluntarily discuss Peter’s visit.

  Though Marilyn apologized for not telling Pat about Peter’s time there, Pat was more interested in why she decided to withhold the information. Marilyn, when pressed, explained that she didn’t want Pat to feel jealousy over Peter’s visit. That explanation angered Pat and she let Marilyn know it. Marilyn, who was not used to Pat’s clipped manner, began to cry and reassure her friend that nothing was going on between her and Peter. “I didn’t think for a moment anything was,” Pat told Marilyn, “and I still don’t—because he’s not attracted to you, Marilyn.” Pat then went on to say that Peter didn’t see Marilyn as a sexual being, but more as a wounded child. “She told Marilyn that she thought it was sick that Marilyn viewed every man as wanting her and every woman as being jealous of her,” this same intimate of Pat explained many years later. “Pat said that she thought Marilyn behaved like that because she had no important men in her life—no father, no brothers.”

  From this trustworthy source’s account, it would seem that Marilyn took a browbeating from Pat that night. The call ended abruptly, at Pat’s initiation. Unfortunately, this confrontation between good friends would never be fully resolved. However, it may have been that conversation that led Marilyn to reach out during this period to a man from her past she still called “Daddy.”

  “The phone rang one day when my mother was at the grocery store,” recalled Nancy Jeffrey in an interview for this book. “Daddy [Wayne Bolender] answered. It was Marilyn. He wanted to know how she was doing, he had heard that she was having a hard time. She said that she was fine. She would never have shared with him any of her sorrow, though. My parents would watch things on TV and get very upset. I think they felt that maybe she should not have gone into show business, that maybe her life would have been better. Anyway, somewhere in the conversation, I know that she asked my father, ‘Daddy, are you disappointed in the way my life has turned out?’ And all he said was, ‘Norma Jeane, I promised you on your wedding day that I would always love you—and I will keep that promise until the day I die. I still love you, Norma Jeane.’ That’s what he told me he told her, just like that.”

  Marilyn then revealed to Wayne Bolender the primary reason for her call. She asked if he had any paperwork from her time at his home so long ago that might help convince Stanley Gifford Sr. and his son, Stanley Gifford Jr., that she actually was related to them. He explained that, unfortunately, there was no such documentation. It’s been said that he also attempted to discourage her from contacting the Giffords again. He believed it would only lead to more disappointment for her. However, Marilyn wrapped up the call apparently undeterred. She would contact the Giffords again, she insisted. The next time she did so, they would listen. The next time she did so, they would believe her claim to be “one of them” was the truth.

  While Stanley Gifford Jr. believes to this day that he is not related to Marilyn Monroe, there is no telling what five minutes in her presence could have done to sway him and his father. Even if they hadn’t believed they were blood relatives, they could have been convinced to take Marilyn under their wings. There was at least a possibility that they may have seen in her what so many others already had—a woman who simply wanted what so many other people already have: a place to belong. Marilyn ended the phone call with her “Daddy” on an optimistic note. “Maybe that’s what I need,” she concluded. “Maybe if I find my brother, that will change everything.”

  As had happened so many times before, Marilyn Monroe’s hopes for happiness in her future hinged on one word: Maybe.

  Final Curtain

  She is at peace and at rest now and may our God bless her and help her always. I… gave her Christian Science treatments for approximately a year… wanted her to be happy and joyous…

  — Gladys Baker Eley on the death of her daughter, Marilyn Monroe, in a previously unpublished letter, circa 1962

  August 4, 1962. While there’s no way to know with certainty what Marilyn Monroe’s state of mind was on this day, she had every reason to at least be happier. Just a few days earlier, on August 1, she had signed a one-million-dollar contract with Fox for two pictures. Moreover, her attorney, Mickey Rudin, also settled the conflict with the studio over Something’s Got to Give. The movie was back on track and would begin filming again in October. *

  Yet despite the bright possibilities that may have lain ahead, by most verifiable accounts, this Saturday had not been a good one for Marilyn Monroe. She was experiencing extreme emotional highs and lows, and her contact with others during her depressive moments would leave many baffled by just why she was in such a state. Since most all of the principal players have contradicted each other, it may be impossible to establish who came and went from the Monroe household that day, and at what time. It is known that at some point, Dr. Greenson was called to the house by Eunice Murray. When he arrived, he found Marilyn in a drugged, depressed condition. A day earlier, Marilyn had filled a prescription (by Dr. Engelberg) for twenty-four—some have said twenty-five, but he said twenty-four—Nembutal, and it was believed that she had taken more than necessary. At another point, while Greenson was with Marilyn, Peter Lawford called. Marilyn said that she wished to talk to Bobby, but Peter was known to try and steer Marilyn away from that topic.

  “Yes, I think she was fixated on Bobby that day,” Peter Lawford would say years later. “I’m not sure why. One thing led to another, one obsession to another you might say until, I think, she had worked herself into a deep despondency over the Kennedys.” Lawford continued with this observation. “The Kennedys may have been the subject of her great sadness,” he said, “but the thing about Marilyn is this: While it may have been the Kennedys in that moment, in the one before it, it may have been Something’s Got to Give, and in the moment after, Joe [DiMaggio]. Or maybe all three at the same time. There was no way to account for her mood swings… fo
r her deep depressions. You can’t blame the Kennedys. They were just a facet of a much bigger problem.”

  Marilyn had heard that Bobby was in San Francisco that weekend, scheduled to give an address the following Monday to the California Bar Association. When she called Pat Kennedy Lawford, she was told that Bobby and his wife, Ethel, were staying at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. It turns out, however, that they were staying at the ranch of John Bates, president of the Bar Association, some sixty miles south of the city. It’s unclear whether or not Pat was also attempting to shift Marilyn’s focus off of the Kennedys. The closest of Marilyn’s friends, the ones privy to her obsessions and their consequences, knew it was crucial to deflect her attention from the Kennedy brothers whenever possible.

  At approximately 7 p.m. on August 4, Dr. Ralph Greenson left Marilyn’s home, requesting that Eunice spend the night there to keep an eye on his patient. Around the time of Greenson’s departure, Peter called to invite Marilyn to a dinner party at his home. She declined, which wasn’t unusual for Marilyn—she had been known to take to her room on nights like this one, when she was attempting to endure one of her many emotional plunges. Marilyn brought a telephone into her bedroom and closed the door. It appears that the rest of this evening, indeed the rest of Marilyn’s life, would be spent alone in this room, thus destroying any hope of detailing precisely what transpired that night within those four walls.