The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (48 page)

That evening, before she travelled back home, Marilyn was escorted to Peter Lawford’s beachside home where another party was under way. A friend of the actor Dick Livingstone recalled that the actress looked pallid and suggested she should get some sun.

After another restless night, and painfully aware that the tablets Dr Engelberg had prescribed for her were not working, during the morning of Friday 3 August Marilyn called him at his office at 9730 Wilshire Boulevard and asked him to drive over. At a cost of $10, using a short, small-gauge needle, he administered, to her buttocks, an injection of liver and B12 vitamins. He also billed her $25 for the house call. At the end of their brief session, he wrote out a prescription for 25, 1.525-grain Nembutal tablets, the strongest available in capsule form, with the instruction that she should take one each night to aid with her sleep. He also scribbled a prescription for two other medicines: one for 25, 25mg anti-allergy Phenergan tablets; the other for 32 of the pink-in-colour, long-acting barbiturates known as ‘Pink Ladies’ (which came minus a label). Using a hastily summoned taxi, Eunice Murray collected them immediately from the Vicente Pharmacy on San Vicente Boulevard and returned to Marilyn’s home straight afterwards.

The hours of that afternoon were occupied by mundane, household matters. With the actress intending to leave for New York next week and Murray set to begin a six-week tour of Europe, Marilyn’s Fifth Helena property was about to be shut. So, in an attempt to wrap up all the outstanding financial manners involving the house, she and Murray sat down at the table and began calculating what bills had yet to be paid. These included $28 to the Sherman Oaks Veterinary Clinic, $111.45 to the Thompson Electric Company and a total of $1,480.18 (in two separate cheques) to cover Arthur Jacobs’ forthcoming publicity work for her during the month of August. One City National Bank of Beverly Hills cheque, for the sum of $124.10, to cover Murray’s out-of-pocket household expenditures, was also approved by the actress. (Another, for $200, to cover her weekly wage, was authorised a day later, on Saturday 4 August.) A cheque for $52.59 to the municipal utility agency, the Department of Water and Power, was also prepared but, because Marilyn disputed the amount they claimed she owed, she refused to sign it.

Once the number-crunching had been concluded, the actress called her friend Norman Rosten in New York, chiefly to discuss her just-published
Life
magazine article. ‘It was great,’ he said. ‘We liked the spirit.’ Their 32-minute conversation soon turned to other subjects: her future and their meeting in a month. ‘I’m invited to a benefit performance of a
new musical [
Mr. President
] at the end of September,’ Marilyn informed Rosten. ‘We’ll go together. Box seats, the works. We’ll have a great time. We have to start living, right?’ Optimism continued to flow. Marilyn excitedly spoke about her burgeoning Mexican-style garden, telling him it was going to be ‘beautiful’.

Their conversation was interrupted by a long-distance call on her other line. It was film director J. Lee Thompson ringing from Yucatan, Mexico, where he was undertaking pre-production work on United Artists’ forthcoming adventure movie
The Mound Builders
, starring Yul Brynner, which was set to roll in the autumn. (It would later be retitled
Kings of the Sun
.) Before dashing to the phone, Marilyn hurriedly concluded her conversation with Rosten by insisting, ‘I’ll speak to you on Monday.’ Thompson was ringing to confirm their meeting the following afternoon. She told him it was still on and announced she was looking forward to it enormously. Then, at precisely 4pm, with the aid of another rented car, Marilyn was driven to Dr Greenson’s house for their obligatory end-of-day session. After collecting her $6.05 pills from her regular dispenser, the Vicente Pharmacy, she returned home to find a guest waiting for her, attired in a bathing suit, sitting by her pool.

‘I arrived at the house on Friday night after work,’ Pat Newcomb recalled in an interview for
The Los Angeles Herald Examiner
. ‘I was fighting a bad case of bronchitis and had decided to enter a hospital for a complete rest. But Marilyn called me and said, “Why don’t you come out here? You’ll have all the privacy you want. You can sun in the back [garden] and have all the rest you want and you won’t have to go to a hospital.” It was typical of Marilyn, this concern for friends. So I accepted her invitation. I found her in wonderful spirits. Some furnishings for her house had just arrived from Mexico. She was in a very good mood; a very happy mood.’

Another visitor to the actress’s home was her attorney, Milton Rudin. His early evening visit was brief. He came to discuss the restarting of
Something’s Got To Give
and the new Fox contract, which was still sitting on his desk. (It would in fact sit there for weeks and would ultimately remain unsigned. Apparently, he resisted validating it due to fears that his client would once again fall short of her contractual obligations. Since
Something’s Got To Give
was not set to resume shooting until December or in the first week of 1963 at the very earliest, he felt that it would be best for all concerned if he delayed signing the contract until nearer that time – by when, he believed, Marilyn would have had enough time to recuperate and be ready for the demands of filming.) With the matter needing to be resolved, they arranged to meet at his office first thing on Monday morning. ‘She seemed cheerful and anxious to get the picture
started again. She was in good enough spirits,’ he remarked. At precisely 7pm, with the house once more bereft of food, an assortment of fine wine, spirits and pre-cooked exotic foods, intended for both Marilyn and Newcomb, was delivered by the Briggs Delicatessen. (The bill amounted to $49.07.)

Once some of the food had been digested, at 9.30pm, Monroe climbed into her publicist’s car and was driven to her favourite Italian restaurant, La Scala on the Sunset Strip. Corroborating popular myths, Peter Lawford, as well as his manager, Milton Ebbins, joined them there. The actor had an ulterior motive for doing so: to enquire about her plans for the following day.

Those who encountered the actress that night would recall she was devoid of make-up, rather edgy and, at the end of the evening, exceptionally tipsy, failing to acknowledge leading costume designer Billy Travilla when he walked over to say hello. Travilla had designed the actress’s clothes in eight of her movies (
Monkey Business
in 1952 was their first,
Bus Stop
in 1956 their last) and was responsible for the most famous dress in Hollywood history: the white crepe halter-top dress and sunburst-pleated skirt the actress wore for the classic subway-wind scene in
The Seven Year Itch
. She had even signed a nude calendar for him with the words, ‘Billy Dear, please dress me forever. I love you, Marilyn.’ But tonight, she failed to recognise him. He apparently meant nothing to her. Seeing no recognition at all in her face when he leant forward to give her a peck on the cheek, Travilla left her table naturally hurt.

Having finished their drinks, and after saying their farewells to Lawford and his manager, Marilyn and Newcomb returned to Fifth Helena. I can reveal a fact overlooked for almost 50 years, even by the chief medical examiner and coroner, Dr Theodore J. Curphey, during his lengthy examination of the circumstances surrounding the actress’s death: just as she had at the Cal-Neva, during the early hours of Saturday 4 August, in a desperate attempt to sleep, Marilyn inadvertently came close to exceeding her tolerance level. The Nembutal tablets she had promised Dr Engelberg she would take in small, regular doses were clearly not working and so, in order to reach the desired level, she consumed more. As Dorothy Kilgallen recalled, ‘Shortly after midnight, she was found unconscious by the “housekeeper” Mrs. Eunice Murray (
sic
Pat Newcomb) but she was revived and she got through Saturday. Perhaps that experience accounted for her depression on Saturday . . . ’

Oblivious to the can of political worms she had unleashed and the troubles about to unfold, Marilyn awoke at approximately 8.45am on the morning of Saturday 4 August. Murray was there to greet her. She had been at the
property since 8am. As her car was still being repaired, her mechanic, Henry D’Antonio, had driven her there.

Pressed wearily against the kitchen wall in her white wraparound terry-cloth bath robe, Monroe sipped a glass of grapefruit juice and became agitated at her press secretary, who was still resting in bed. ‘To sleep twelve hours in her house was like feasting in front of a starving person,’ Murray admitted. ‘I had been able to sleep and Marilyn hadn’t,’ recalled Newcomb. ‘When I came out [at 12 midday] looking refreshed, it made her
furious
.’ Her memory of that morning continued. ‘Marilyn had had some calls that morning and, by the time I saw her, she was in a rage.’

It has become part of Monroe folklore that the calls in question had originated from Peter Lawford and Bobby Kennedy respectively. Rumours persist that they had followed other, far more disturbing calls, which had come during the night, the last taken by Marilyn at precisely 5.30am. During this last call, a female voice was apparently heard to scream, ‘Leave Bobby alone! If you don’t, you’re going to be in
deep
trouble!’ The vitriolic rants concluded with the actress supposedly being described as a ‘tramp’. The calls, which naturally upset the actress, were believed to come from San Francisco.

In fact they didn’t. The instigator of this long-believed, often-repeated story was Jeanne Carmen, the queen of low-budget B-movies and Marilyn’s apparent ‘best friend’. (Following Marilyn’s death, Carmen carved a niche for herself by appearing in practically every Monroe television report, documentary and expose, managing to turn her fleeting encounters with the actress into a fully fledged career.) Carmen’s assertion that she had once been Monroe’s neighbour was quite true. She had met the actress for the first time in September 1961, when Marilyn moved back into her flat at 882 North Doheny Drive, West Hollywood, a block in which Carmen also resided. Nevertheless, their time together there was brief and, once Monroe had moved into her new home in Brentwood in February 1962, they would never see or speak to each other again.

In fact, the call which had angered Marilyn so that morning had originated from her publicist, Arthur Jacobs, who, as he revealed in interviews at the time, had rung to inform her that director J. Lee Thompson’s flight to Los Angeles had been delayed and that subsequently he would be unable to attend their meeting that afternoon. (A new time of Monday at 5pm was pencilled in.) Marilyn had been looking forward to meeting Thompson immensely. Her annoyance arose from the prospect that, at the tail end of the day, she would once more be at a loose end with nothing to do and no one to see.

Further assertions have been made about the actress’s final day. One was that her spirits had been rocked by the unexpected arrival in the post
of a package containing two cuddly stuffed toys, a tiger and a lamb. Supposedly she was unsure of the sender’s identity and put the surprise present down to an unknown admirer. However, this was another invention. Marilyn did not receive such a parcel. She’d had the toys she was apparently sent that morning for months, as testified by a posed August 1961 picture with Maf. Another toy tiger, the one pictured lying on the grass of Marilyn’s back garden on the morning of Sunday 5 August, had in fact been purchased by the actress herself, from the Vicente Pharmacy, for the grand sum of $2.08, on Monday 2 April 1962.

Marilyn also apparently made a request from Murray for oxygen during the day, a fact some Monroe biographers have tried to imply was unusual or sinister. Yet as we know, Pat Newcomb suffered from bronchitis. Such a request, if she did indeed make it, would have been made merely to assist with her publicist’s breathing. Additionally, one respected Marilyn biographer has led us to believe that Monroe paid another visit to Jean Harlow’s mother that Saturday. This is clearly untrue, for the reasons laid out in Chapter 8. With these rumours and untruths out of the way, however, I can now reveal precisely how the remainder of Marilyn’s final day panned out.

In the region of 9am, Isidore Miller called from New York, but was told by Murray, ‘Marilyn is dressing. She’ll call you back.’ She didn’t. The housekeeper evidently forgot to pass the message on. ‘If she had,’ as Miller remarked to
Good Housekeeping
magazine in 1963, ‘she would have talked to me. She even always interrupted a business conference to talk to me. I waited and waited. Marilyn did not call.’

As I can reveal here for the first time, the actress was unable to speak to him anyway. At that precise time, for 75 straight minutes, she was lying flat out on her brown, faux-leather, 70-inch foldaway massage table, receiving her obligatory Saturday rubbing from Ralph Roberts. ‘I gave her a massage that last day, in the morning from 9 to 10.15,’ he confirmed. Contrary to the aforementioned myths, according to which Marilyn began the day rattled by malicious phone calls and the arrival of a strange parcel, Roberts himself recalled to reporter Joe Hymas in September 1962 that ‘she was in wonderful shape and
not
tense.’ His visit was the real reason why the actress chose to get up so early that morning. Before he left, he promised to ring her back that afternoon to discuss the quantity of steaks and potatoes he should purchase for the following day’s barbecue.

It was at approximately 10.25am that she learnt, via the call from Jacobs, that Thompson was not coming. So, with no one special to prepare for, Marilyn decided to remain in her bath robe and stay unglamorous. In the words of
Life
magazine columnist Ezra Goodman, ‘She takes hours to get her hairdo and make-up just right for public appearances, but privately she
likes to scamper about without any make-up at all and with her hair dishevelled.’

At approximately 10.30am, while Murray was tending to the plants in the actress’s garden, and the housekeeper’s son-in-law, Norman Jeffries, having recently arrived, was attending to the house’s renovations, Marilyn welcomed photographer Lawrence Schiller to her property. He had stopped by to see if the actress had signed a contract with
Playboy
magazine. Following her high-profile shoots for
Paris Match
and
Life
and the yet-to-be-published sets for
Cosmopolitan
and
Vogue
, Hugh Hefner’s world-famous publication had expressed a novel idea of featuring Marilyn’s face on the front cover of one of its magazines and her bottom, as you will guess, on its rear. Through a telephone conversation with Newcomb just days earlier, Schiller knew that the actress was having doubts about the piece. Not wishing to be perpetually perceived as merely a sex object, Marilyn was sceptical and therefore noncommittal about the pictorial. ‘I’m tired of being known as the girl with the shape,’ she had recently lamented. ‘I don’t want to play sex roles anymore.’