The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (50 page)

Nevertheless, Bobby was now livid. In no uncertain terms, he told Marilyn she would have to leave both him and his brother alone. They did not want to hear from her any more. At this point, after further heated altercations, Marilyn screamed and flew into a hysterical rage. After screaming several obscenities, she supposedly flailed wildly at him with her fists and then, in her fury (according to unconfirmed reports), pounced at him with a small kitchen knife. Lawford immediately intercepted, lunging forward to grab her arm, knocking her to the floor and wrestling the knife away. The actress then lay motionless on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.

While Marilyn’s poodle Maf barked away loudly, the two men quickly departed from the property, climbed into Lawford’s car and drove to the actor’s beach house. Unknown to the two men, the recording equipment strategically placed throughout Marilyn’s home had allowed Sam Giancana’s men to eavesdrop and record every detail of what had just
transpired. (Bobby would be forced into making one further visit to the house before the day was over.) The Attorney General fled the scene an anxious man. In a 1985 interview for
The Times
, private eye Fred Otash recalled that Kennedy went over to Lawford’s beachside home and worryingly remarked, ‘She’s ranting and raving. I’m concerned about her and what may come out of this.’ Naturally, they were desperate to speak to her again.

Testimony that the Attorney General travelled to Lawford’s house came from two dependable sources. The first was a neighbour of Lawford’s, Ward Wood, innocently observing life from his Santa Monica window, who saw Bobby climb out of the car and enter the premises. The second was the actor’s mother, Lady May Somerville Lawford, who in her posthumously published 1986 autobiography,
Bitch
, announced she had called her son at this time to inform him that her home had been burgled. ‘The telephone lines were very busy,’ she recalled, ‘but I finally got through. “I’ve been robbed,” I exclaimed to Peter, who could not have cared less about my dwindling jewel and silver collection.’ (Verification of this theft was found in bona fide LAPD records, which revealed that, during the evening of Friday 3 August, two items were stolen from her apartment at 1392 Kelton Avenue, West Los Angeles, namely two cut-glass inkwells and a silver tray inscribed ‘George IV’.) In the background, during her brief, spiritless exchange with her offspring, she claimed she could hear, as she described it, the ‘awful Boston accent of
Bobby Kennedy
[emphasis added]’.

Lawford was clearly uninterested in his mother’s latest burglary, her third in recent weeks. ‘Later,’ he said before abruptly hanging up. He was more concerned about reaching Marilyn, who by now was trying to ring the President in Hyannis Port. It was a fruitless attempt. So, at approximately 5pm, Marilyn called Dr Greenson who agreed to drop by at once. He arrived 15 minutes later to find her still emotionally distraught and immediately administered a sedative: a shot of pentobarbital diluted in a glass of water. ‘I came over and remained about two hours (
sic
),’ Greenson informed the Los Angeles Police Department. ‘She was quite upset. She was also somewhat disorientated. It was clear she had taken some sleeping pills during the day.’ (She had and would continue to do so, intermittently, for the next three hours. In an attempt to calm herself, between the hours of 5 and 7pm, Marilyn consumed approximately 12 more Nembutal tablets. To speed up their effects, and to make them enter her bloodstream much faster, she employed the trick shown to her by her co-star Montgomery Clift on the set of
The Misfits
, pricking the top of each capsule with a pin and pouring its contents directly into a glass of water.)

Curious as to what had brought about her distressed state and caused
the mess strewn around the place, Greenson naturally probed further. In his statement to the LAPD after Marilyn’s death, he declared that Marilyn replied by telling him ‘she’d had an irrational argument with Pat Newcomb’ and that she ‘resented the fact that Newcomb had taken some pills the night before and slept 12 hours and Marilyn had also taken pills and slept only six hours’. (Newcomb would become incensed by part of this remark. On Wednesday 19 September 1973, she rightly denied she had consumed Marilyn’s medicine. ‘It’s outrageous,’ she stormed to an
Independent (AM)
reporter. ‘I’m stunned! I didn’t take
any
of her pills. I slept
without
pills. I further think his remarks about a patient are unethical.’) Greenson went on to inform the department, ‘Marilyn was talking in a confused way. At this time, I didn’t know she had been given [by Dr Engelberg] a Nembutal prescription she had filled the day before.’ This part of his statement was true; much of the rest was entirely false.

As their conversation unfurled, the actress went on to divulge to Greenson all that had happened between her and the Kennedys and revealed that she had almost overdosed the previous evening. He found the revelations both surprising and startling and resolved that his latest, decisive consultation with Marilyn should be completely free of interference. Since Murray was, as we know, an invaluable spy for the doctor, she was asked, on her return to the house, to stay for the evening, something she ordinarily did only rarely. But Pat Newcomb was told to leave. Greenson implied that her presence was upsetting Marilyn. He explained, ‘I said that, instead of Pat staying overnight, Pat should go home and Mrs Murray remain the night. I didn’t want Marilyn to be alone.’

At 5.30pm, just as Newcomb was leaving, Marilyn peered out from the hallway and, as if to plead for her forgiveness, shouted, ‘I will phone you in the morning.’ Unbeknown to the actress, fearing a repeat of the previous night’s scenario, Newcomb had confiscated one of Marilyn’s Nembutal bottles. Before returning to her apartment, the publicist drove over to
Playboy
’s offices to return Monroe’s unsigned contract and hand in the actress’s annotated naked swimming shots.

A phone call interrupted Greenson’s further discussions with the actress. At approximately 6pm, Ralph Roberts rang for the third time and once more, failed to reach her. ‘She’s not here,’ Greenson told him sternly before slamming the phone down. (Eunice Murray, who usually answered the telephone, had not at that time returned to the house, having decided to drop by her apartment and collect some clothes which needed washing, ready for her trip to Europe.) Roberts dismissed the curt reply and immediately set off to Beverly Hills to buy steaks and potatoes for the following evening’s barbecue.

Our tale now takes an extraordinary twist. It is at this point in my attempt to accurately piece together the events leading up to and after Marilyn’s death that I become fully aware of the lies and twisted accounts emanating from practically all of the key players involved in the tragedy, and the faulty memories of the rest. One by one, it seemed that almost every one of them would chop and change their account of events on Saturday and Sunday, 4 and 5 August 1962.

We begin with her not-so-loyal housekeeper cum spy, Eunice Murray. In
Marilyn: The Final Months
, she announced that, ‘Sometime between 2pm and 4pm’ her friend Henry D’Antonio and his wife paid a visit to Marilyn’s home. A motor mechanic by trade, D’Antonio was returning Eunice’s car, which she had left with him earlier that morning on her way to Marilyn’s home. The couple’s request to meet the actress was thwarted when Murray informed them she was resting in her bedroom. In truth, it was shortly before 4.30pm when the couple visited; the time when Marilyn was engaged in a heated discussion with Kennedy. As you will guess, this was the
real
reason why she couldn’t meet Murray’s friends. The excuse that Marilyn was ‘resting in her bedroom’, made by Eunice both that day to her friends, and subsequently to newspaper reporters – on Monday 6 August, when asked by reporters how the actress spent her final day, Murray incredibly replied, Marilyn ‘spent most of Saturday in
bed
resting . . . She wasn’t ill. She was just resting’ – was made for no other reason that to conceal that the actress had been speaking with the Attorney General.

Then we come to her doctor, Ralph Greenson, who informed Detective Sergeant R.E. Bryon that the reason for his visit to Marilyn’s home that afternoon was because she was ‘having trouble sleeping’. If we are to believe this story, it would have meant that he was trying to help Monroe rest at around 5.15 in the afternoon while her house-guest, Pat Newcomb, was still present. Greenson’s justification for visiting the actress is completely blown out of the water when we read Newcomb’s account of her last moments with Marilyn. ‘I left at 6.30pm,’ she insisted (although it was actually a full hour earlier). ‘When I last saw her,
nothing
about her mood had changed. She said to me, “I’ll see you tomorrow. Toodle-oo.” She was in good mood, a happy mood.’ Newcomb never once mentioned Monroe’s tired demeanour or how Greenson was there just to get the actress rested.

Confusion was to reign further when the doctor, albeit briefly, insisted that he never even visited Marilyn that day. However, proof that he did was close at hand. On Monday 15 July 1963, he deposited an invoice for the sum of $1,400 for his services to Marilyn Monroe’s estate and, according to that bill, in clear black and white, the date given as his final session with the actress was Saturday 4 August 1962.

As per his demand, Greenson’s visits to Marilyn’s home never exceeded the 90 minutes/two hours mark. So, at 7pm on that Saturday night, having earned his fee, he was preparing to head home. Before he left, he handed to Murray, who had just returned from her errands, a small scrap of paper bearing the telephone number where he could be reached that evening. After waving the doctor goodbye, Marilyn walked back into her home and ushered Maf into the back garden where, for a few short minutes, the two played a game of fetch-ball – the actress threw the poodle’s two small toy animals, the aforementioned tiger and a lamb, into the air and he ran to retrieve them from where they had landed. The gathering dusk curtailed their game. The actress then walked back inside her home and told Murray to put Maf to bed. It was 7.05pm. (The toys were not collected, remaining motionless on the grass at the exact spot where they had landed. Hence the unusual United Press International (UPI) picture, taken on the morning of Marilyn’s death, of two abandoned baubles strewn across the lawn in the actress’s back garden.)

Just as Marilyn was entering her living room, her telephone rang. It was Peter Lawford.
New York Post
columnist Earl Wilson quoted the actor as saying, ‘She picked up the phone herself on the second ring, which leads me to believe that she was fine.’ According to Lawford, the call was to invite Marilyn to a small dinner party at his home. ‘I asked her to have dinner with me, with Pat Newcomb and [Hollywood agent] “Bullets” Durgom,’ he recalled, ‘but Marilyn decided not to come . . . and I wound up with “Bullets”.’ In another interview, he remarked, ‘Thinking she was lonely, I asked her to have dinner with me and some friends. But she decided not to come along. She said she was going to bed.’

In another piece, he recalled that, during their conversation, Marilyn requested the Hyannis Port number of his wife, Pat. (It was a ruse. The actress actually requested the number not for Pat but to speak to the President. The number she had been using was clearly incorrect. Staff at the White House, which Monroe had originally called, were responsible for telling the actress where the President was staying that weekend.) Lawford also admitted that Marilyn ‘sounded sleepy’, blithely adding, ‘I’ve talked to her a hundred times before and she sounded no different.’

While I have no doubt that Lawford
did
call Marilyn at the time he claimed, 7.05pm, I do not believe he called to invite her to dinner that evening (which, in fact, was just a delivery of Chinese food, intended to be eaten straight out of the cardboard cartons in which it came). Why would any host invite such an important guest as Monroe to a get-together with just minutes to spare before the other, less important invited guests were due to start arriving? In any case, with his wife Pat still away at the Kennedys’ compound in Hyannis Port, the small gathering at Peter’s
beachside home that night was, in all probability, just another of his regular, thinly veiled sex parties, attended by a few close pals and two high-class prostitutes. Since she was still traumatised by the sexually tinged events that had occurred at Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge the previous weekend, surely he knew that Marilyn would want no part in this kind of event.

In all likelihood, Lawford instead rang for two reasons. First, he was desperate to see how Marilyn was, following her arduous ordeal just a couple of hours earlier; second, with Bobby Kennedy still sitting by his side, the actor was desperately trying to quieten and reason with her. Only then was the appeasing, eleventh-hour offer to join them at his beach house presented. According to Fred Otash, ‘She [Marilyn] said, “No, I’m tired. There is nothing more for me to respond to. Just do me a favour. Tell the President I tried to get him. Tell him goodbye for me. I think my purpose has been served.” Marilyn then hung up the phone.’

Around 20 minutes later, at precisely 7.35, after imparting details of their conversation to Bobby, Lawford tried ringing the actress back. He rang several times but each time the line was engaged. (He would not be able to reach her again for 45 minutes.) Otash recalled, ‘Bobby got panicky and said, “What’s going on?” He [Lawford] said, “Nothing. That’s the way she is.”’ He was used to Marilyn’s occasionally busy telephone lines.

Exasperated by what had happened, realising the place was bugged and desperate to be away from the property before the guests started to arrive, Bobby got up and, using the actor’s car, drove to the Beverly Hilton Hotel (which, by chance, was across the street where, several years earlier, his father Joseph had lived for a time with actress Gloria Swanson). As normal, Bobby’s hotel suite had been charged to Lawford. (He would, however, fail to pay for it, as well as for all of the Kennedys’ subsequent stays there, and was still shirking his financial obligations to the establishment some 15 months later, in November 1963. On Monday 4 May 1964, the Hilton Hotel Corps., the owner of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, was forced to issue a writ against him and his production firm for the sum of $9,011, to cover all outstanding lodgings, services and costs. Lawford should have settled the demand earlier. Prior to the court order, his unpaid bill stood at just $6,762.)