by Albert Jack
Pat Newcomb left at 6 P.M. After another session of therapy, Greenson left at 7 P.M. At 7:15 Joe DiMaggio, Jr., her ex-husband's son, dropped by; Marilyn was happy to learn he was breaking off his engagement to a woman she did not like, and DiMaggio, Jr., later confirmed the actress was in high spirits by the time he left, as did Dr. Greenson, whom she had rung shortly afterward to inform him of the good news.
Then Eunice claims to have awoken at 3 A.M. to see a light shining under Marilyn's bedroom door and a telephone cable leading from a socket in the hallway into the bedroom, both of which were highly unusual. Finding the door was locked, the housekeeper telephoned Dr. Greenson, who rushed over, broke into the bedroom via a window, and, at 3:50 A.M., found the Hollywood actress lying naked, facedown and clearly dead. However, the veracity of their account began to seem more questionable when it emerged later in the investigation that not only would Monroe's deep-pile bedroom carpet have ensured that no light could have escaped from the room, but the door had no working lock. The plot appeared to thicken further when it was revealed that Arthur Jacobs, Monroe's publicist, had been informed of her death at between 10 and 10:30 P.M. the previous evening: he could confirm the time as he had to leave a musical performance of another client to arrange the “press issues.” So we know that before poor Marilyn's body was even cold, a tissue of lies had already started to be spun.
The autopsy, carried out by Dr. Thomas Noguchi—who was later to conduct the high-profile autopsies on Natalie Wood and Robert Kennedy—concluded that Marilyn had died as a result of acute barbiturate poisoning. This led the psychiatric experts involved with the inquest to a conclusion of “probable suicide.” But Los Angeles County prosecutor John W. Miner—who had attended the autopsy and who was privy to all the facts surrounding her mysterious death—was furious. He didn't believe then that Monroe had taken her own life, either deliberately or by accident, and today, over forty years later, he still doesn't. So what really did happen to the celebrated Hollywood actress?
Norma Jeane Mortenson arrived in the world at 9:30 A.M. on June 1, 1926, at Los Angeles County Hospital. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Monroe Baker, had already walked out on Norma's father (well, her father according to the birth certificate at least), ostensibly because he had become “boring.” Gladys was later diagnosed with hereditary paranoid schizophrenia, a mental condition that also afflicted her mother and father and which had contributed to the deaths of two of her grandparents.
When Norma Jeane was only seven years old, her mother was committed to a “rest home” and the little girl was then moved around to various foster parents and institutions. With nowhere to live—her latest foster parents were moving to the East Coast and couldn't take her with them—she got married, to James Dougherty, just two weeks after her sixteenth birthday, in June 1942.
Since America was now at war, her new husband joined the navy and Norma Jeane went out to work. At just seventeen, she was already drinking heavily and suffering from depression. As a little girl, she had dreamed of stardom: “Even as a child I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night that there must be thousands of little girls sitting alone like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But, I thought, I'm not going to worry about them. I'm dreaming the hardest.” It must have seemed a faraway dream when she was clocking in at the munitions factory every morning at 7 A.M.
During the summer of 1944, Yank magazine commissioned a feature on young American women at work for the war effort. Private David Conover had been moving along the assembly line taking pictures of the most attractive employees when he came upon a young blonde who was busy fitting propellers. Although her face was covered in dirt and grease, he stopped in his tracks, stunned by her unusual beauty. Private Conover immediately offered Norma Jeane five dollars an hour to model for him, and the resulting pictures attracted the attention of the Blue Book modeling agency. Within a year, Norma Jeane had been featured on the front cover of no fewer than thirty-three national magazines, catapulting the young lady toward national stardom. Her first marriage proved an early casualty of her obsessive, meteoric rise.
In July 1946, one month after her twentieth birthday, Norma Jeane secured a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox. The studio wanted her to have a more glamorous name and, after a few duff suggestions, the casting director, Ben Lyon, came up with “Marilyn,” after his own favorite actress, Marilyn Miller. Then Norma Jeane offered her mother's maiden name. The studio director wearily asked what it was, but his eyes lit up when she replied, “Monroe.”
There then followed four years of success and failure in both her career and love life, leading to, after the sudden death of a lover, her first real suicide attempt, when she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Throughout the 1950s, Marilyn became more and more ubiquitous, appearing in hundreds of films, TV shows, musicals, and radio broadcasts. By the end of the decade, Norma Jean had become Hollywood's golden girl, mixing with the rich, famous, and powerful. But the recognition she craved didn't make her happy. Her marriages to two much older men, each highly acclaimed in his field, clearly illustrated her search both for security and for a father figure. Her short union with Joe DiMaggio was quickly followed by her third marriage, this time to America's most celebrated playwright, Arthur Miller. It was after her divorce from Miller, in 1961, that things began to go badly wrong. Was it really a coincidence that this was when her affair started with the most powerful man in the world, President John F. Kennedy?
After the divorce from Miller, Marilyn, increasingly dependent on alcohol, barbiturates, and Dr. Green son, became friends with the English actor Peter Lawford and his wife, Patricia, a sister of JFK. It was at one of their parties that she first met the Kennedy brothers. Unsurprisingly, this drew the attention of the FBI, whose head, J. Edgar Hoover (see also “John Dillinger: What ever Happened to America's Robin Hood?” page 77), was obsessed with building a file on the growing sexual adventures of the president and his brother Robert, the attorney general. The Mafia were also taking a close interest in the actress. The FBI among others believed that the Kennedy brothers’ father, Joe, had been a partner of the infamous Mafia don Frank Costello during the Prohibition years. It was said that decades later, when JFK ran for president, the old man had called on the Cosa Nostra to help buy votes. Some Mafia members believed the Kennedys then owed them a favor or two and expected a close, lucrative relationship with the Kennedy administration once John had taken office.
So they were furious when Bobby Kennedy, the newly appointed attorney general, made it his personal crusade to crack down on organized crime, making the wrong sort of enemies in the process, many of whom vowed revenge. Even so, most Mafia members realized the Kennedy family, the biggest mob of them all, now had public opinion firmly on their side, not to mention all the state police forces and the U.S. military at their instant beck and call. Any act of revenge on the Kennedys would have to be carefully thought out, more carefully than the customary sort of Mob hit on a rival family member. In 1962, exposing the Kennedys’ many infidelities to the press was thought the best tactic to diminish public support for the brothers. Monroe had found herself in bed, so to speak, with some of the most dangerous people in the world, and still didn't realize it. Instead she was naively dreaming of becoming America's First Lady.
Marilyn's love affair with the president be came common knowledge among the American power set during the first six months of 1962, but remained unknown to the public. Hoover's FBI was busily building a file detailing Monroe's movements and had even, some believed, placed listening devices inside her home. Increasingly worried by her “chattering” about their relationship, the president was even more alarmed by his brother-in-law's discovery that she kept a detailed diary of their sexual encounters and what they had discussed. JFK abruptly ended the affair in July, using his brother Bobby as the messenger. Unfortunately for the administration, Bobby too then fell under the actress's spell. Marilyn, still bitter from her rejection by the president, did not reciprocate his fee
lings, but she embarked on a love affair with him nevertheless.
Marilyn had no intention of marrying the smitten younger Kennedy, however, even on one occasion asking Dr. Greenson, “Oh, what am I to do about Bobby?” Greenson was more concerned about the psychological damage such affairs were doing to his client and about her personal safety. The international threat to America was from the Cuban missile crisis and the domestic problem was coming from the Mafia. Marilyn knew too much about too many people, mobsters and politicians alike, and more than one group was worried that she might spill the beans. Her increasingly erratic behavior had turned her from a trophy blonde to an outright liability. When Bobby unceremoniously broke off their affair by having the private telephone line he had installed for her disconnected, Marilyn was devastated. She bombarded the White House switchboard with telephone calls but was never connected with either Kennedy. Distraught, she had told friends—including Peter Lawford, JFK's brother-in-law—that she planned to “come clean” about her relationships with both brothers in revenge for the way she felt she had been treated by the pair.
However, in July 1962, during the final two weeks of Marilyn's life, there were reports that she was feeling more positive about the future than she had been. She had received several new offers of film parts, her friends were many and supportive, and, despite everything, she was still optimistic about reviving her relationship with the president.
In this frame of mind, she happily accepted an invitation from Frank Sinatra to a weekend at the Cal Neva Resort on Lake Tahoe, believing the Kennedys to be behind the invitation. Accounts of this weekend differ, but they are all highly colored. One goes that Monroe was taken aback to discover the brutal gangster Sam Giancana was there, apparently to warn her against creating problems for the brothers. Another version has Joe DiMaggio arriving unexpectedly at the lodge and becoming furious with both Sinatra and the Kennedys for luring his ex-wife there, plying her with drugs and alcohol, and taking compromising photographs to be used as blackmail should she ever threaten to expose her affairs with John and Bobby. The following weekend, Marilyn was found dead at her home in Brentwood, California, having apparently committed suicide, the subsequent mystery and intrigue surrounding her death involving some of the best-loved and most influential people on the planet.
According to the official version of events, after Joe DiMaggio, Jr., left at around 7:30 P.M., Peter Lawford then phoned Marilyn at 7:45 P.M. to invite her to a party. He testified Monroe sounded heavily drugged—somewhat contrary to the upbeat mood reported by DiMaggio—and that she failed to respond several times before shouting her own name repeatedly into the phone. Lawford then quoted how Marilyn had ended the conversation: “Say goodbye to Pat, say goodbye to the president and say goodbye to yourself because you are a nice guy.” She then hung up.
The next official evidence we have is the statement of Eunice Murray, the housekeeper, who claimed to have seen the light on under the bedroom door at 3 A.M. and telephoned Dr. Greenson. He then confirmed he arrived and broke in through Marilyn's bedroom window at 3:50 A.M. to find the actress dead, at which point he telephoned the police. At 4:25 A.M. Sergeant Jack Clemmons of the Los Angeles Police Department received a phone call from Dr. Engelberg, Marilyn's personal physician, who told him his patient had committed suicide. Given what we know about the evidence today, it would have been quite impossible for Engel berg to diagnose suicide at that stage, although Clemmons is adamant that that is what he was told.
When the police officer arrived at the scene, he noted three people with the body, Eunice Murray, Dr. Greenson, and Dr. Engelberg, who led Clemmons to it and made a point of bringing to his attention the bottles of drugs on the bedside table. Clemmons noted: “She was lying facedown in what I call the soldier's position. Her face was in a pillow, her arms were by her side, her right arm was slightly bent. Her legs were stretched out perfectly straight.” The policeman's immediate reaction was that she had been placed in that position. Having been at the scene of numerous suicides, he knew that, contrary to what most people believed, victims of an overdose of sleeping tablets tend to suffer convulsions and vomiting before they die, often ending up in a contorted or twisted pose.
The testimony of the three witnesses convinced Sergeant Clemmons that they were lying. Publicly all three witnesses maintained their original story that the body was found at 3:50 A.M.; privately they stated the body had been discovered four hours earlier but they had been “not allowed” to contact the police until Twentieth Century-Fox had given them permission. Clemmons then noted that no light—let alone the telephone cable reported by Eunice Murray—was able to pass under the bedroom door and that it had no working lock. Crucially, there was no drinking glass in the room, or indeed any kind of receptacle that could have contained the water or alcohol Marilyn would have needed to swallow so many pills.
The police officer took a closer look at the window Dr. Greenson claimed to have broken to gain access to the room, and found broken glass on the outside, consistent with the window having been broken from inside the room and not from the outside.
The autopsy conclusions were that, judging by the high level of sedatives—eight milligrams of hydrate and four milligrams of Nembutal in her blood count and a much higher concentration, thirteen milligrams of Nembutal, in her liver—and the absence of any signs of foul play, Marilyn had taken her own life. These findings were soon disputed by some key forensic experts, however, who pointed out that no traces of Nembutal had been found in either her stomach or intestinal tract. There was also no evidence of the yellow Nembutal capsules, which would not have fully dissolved by the time the autopsy took place. An injection was ruled out because no needle marks were found and because such a high dose would have caused instant death plus residual bruising around the site of the puncture mark. So, as Marilyn appeared to have taken nothing orally and nothing directly into the veins, forensic experts concluded that the drug had been administered by way of an enema. This was consistent with the bruising on the victim's lower back and would account for the “abnormal discoloration of the colon.” In other words, the drugs that killed her must have been introduced anally.
Now, I'm no expert, but I think that most people would agree that to prepare a fatal cocktail of drugs and then push it up your own backside is an unlikely way to commit suicide. So despite Monroe's famously erratic behavior and ongoing depression, suicide has been ruled out by every mental-health professional reviewing her case. Indeed, it is alleged that detailed notes made of taped conversations with her psychiatrist only a week before her death reveal her as anything but suicidal. Yet those tapes, along with other vital evidence and statements, have all gone missing. John W. Miner has been consistently clear in his views: “Marilyn Monroe bears the stigma of suicide. That is wrong and must be corrected.”
So, if we are to rule out suicide, then there are only two other possibilities for us to consider: accident or murder. But if Marilyn did die as a result of rectally administered barbiturates, then it is hard to see how that could be an accident. Let's be honest, who could claim that they pushed a poisonous drug up Marilyn Monroe's rear by accident—and surely she would have noticed?
Marilyn's psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson, and her physician, Dr. Engelberg, were working together to reduce the insomniac actress's Nembutal dependency by replacing it with chloral hydrate, but taken together they are a powerful and dangerous mixture. One suggestion is that Engelberg had given Monroe a further prescription of Nembutal and forgotten to inform Greenson. As Engelberg was having serious marital problems at the time, other, more personal matters may have occupied his mind.
Perhaps Marilyn—who once commented, “Yes, I enjoy enemas, so what”—had been taking Nembutal throughout the day, explaining its presence in her liver and blood. Without knowing this, Dr. Greenson could then have prepared a chloral hydrate enema to be administered by Eunice Murray, which became deadly on inter action with the Nembutal. Any doctor would be reluctant to admit to such a mist
ake, especially in relation to such a high-profile patient, and this would perhaps explain the many discrepancies in the stories of those who found the body and the apparent staging of the scene that the police were unhappy about. It would also explain evidence that the body was discovered at 10 P.M. and not 3:50 A.M., along with an ambulance driver's account that Marilyn was taken to hospital in a coma before midnight where she died before the body was returned and “found.” Eunice Murray would certainly wish to stay quiet, as it would have been she who administered the fatal dose. So this is quite a powerful theory. But if it is true then the doctors involved would be guilty only of negligence, and certainly not murder.
But if not an accident, could it have been murder? Several witnesses have placed Bobby Kennedy at the scene on the day of the death. There is also reliable evidence that he removed Monroe's diaries and other notebooks. Her angry telephone calls to the White House and the fear of her speaking publicly were a real problem for the Kennedy administration. Indeed, it would be a mistake to rule out certain governments at certain times taking drastic action to prevent a scandal. But as Bobby Kennedy approached most matters from a very high moral standpoint, it is hard to believe he would personally hold Monroe down and push barbiturates up her bottom to kill her. He made no secret of his visit to Monroe that day and was seen there by many people, including a policeman. Are we to seriously believe he—or somebody he was with on that day—killed Monroe? After all, Marilyn Monroe, the drunken actress who famously sang a very breathy “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” at Madison Square Garden in front of the world's media, hardly posed a major threat to the most powerful government in the world. What classified information could she alone possibly have had that no one else had access to? The promiscuity of the Kennedy brothers was well known in 1962. Might the government's fear of the headline “I Slept with the President,” by Marilyn Monroe, have led to her assassination, when the chorus of replies would probably have been: “Who hasn't?”
