The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (52 page)

Immediately after finishing the call, Lawford replaced the receiver and, with his house guests listening on intently, made light of the situation. But within minutes, he was having misgivings. Was her condition more serious than he thought, he wondered. He tried ringing her back. The phone was now busy. Bemused, he called the operator and asked her to check Marilyn’s lines. He was informed one phone was off its hook, the other was engaged in a call. To set his mind at rest, he then said he would drive out to her house and check on her personally. (It was a hollow suggestion. With Bobby Kennedy still in possession of his Lincoln Continental, he knew he couldn’t do this without raising suspicion.)

George Durgom dissuaded him from doing so, saying that, if something
was
indeed wrong with the actress, it would not look good if he was seen at the property. He was after all the President’s brother-in-law. After further cajoling from his house guests, the actor decided to ring the actress again. But with Marilyn now lying practically comatose on her bedroom floor, desperately trying to call Roberts, the phone was engaged, and with her other still off its hook, his call was naturally not answered. Eunice Murray would not have heard it anyway.
Perry Mason
still had three more minutes to run.

Producer Joseph Naar, another guest of Lawford’s that night and a long-time friend of Marilyn’s, then offered to go and see her. Lawford declined the proposal, impishly insisting that
he
was the one who should do so. Needing assurance that this was indeed the correct thing to do, the actor then called his manager, Milton Ebbins, but he too was against the idea. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, ‘I understand your apprehension and I think you’re absolutely right but, for heaven’s sake, you’re the President’s brother-in-law. You can’t go over there on your own. If you had to call the hospital or whatever, you’re going to have your picture on the front page and Jack [Kennedy]’s and everybody else’s. You’d better let this be handled by people who know what they’re doing and
not
you.’ After finishing his call, Ebbins rang the home of Marilyn’s lawyer, Milton Rudin. The time was now shortly after 8.28pm.

However, Rudin was out for the evening, socialising at a cocktail party at the home of Mildred Allenberg, the widow of Bert, Frank Sinatra’s agent at the William Morris Agency. At approximately 8.30pm, following the information left on Rudin’s answering service, Ebbins called the party and passed on a request for Rudin to ring him, which the lawyer did 15 minutes (and a couple of cocktails) later, in the region of 8.45. Ebbins then conveyed the story of how Lawford had called Marilyn at her home, explaining how, during their conversation, her voice seemed to fade away and when he attempted to phone her back, her line was busy. ‘I’ll check it out,’ Rudin replied. ‘I’m sure it’s okay. She does this all the time. She talks
to people; she takes a couple of pills and then she falls asleep with the phone hanging down.’ He was not overly concerned.

In a desperate show of empathy, Ebbins also instructed Rudin to contact Ralph Greenson who, from the home of his friends the Alberts, deceitfully informed him that he had seen her earlier that day and she was fine. When this news was passed back to Lawford, knowing straight away that it was incorrect, he told Rudin to call Marilyn’s residence, which he did in the region of 9.30pm – no less than 70 minutes after the actress’s first desperate plea for help. Lawford’s feeble indecisiveness, and that of his sluggish cronies, had cost Marilyn big-time. Her life, as we know, had sadly ebbed away.

Over at Fifth Helena, meanwhile, once
Perry Mason
had finished for another week, at precisely 8.28pm Murray switched off the television set and set about doing her chores. With the house about to be closed for six weeks and a trip to Europe to prepare for, there was a lot of tidying and washing to be done. Noticing the telephone in the guest room was still off its hook, she swiftly replaced it. She was in the garage, in the middle of doing her laundry with the help of Marilyn’s washing machine, when this phone rang. It was Rudin, who immediately informed her of the actress’s conversation with Lawford earlier that evening. Murray listened intently before telling him, ‘Why, of course she’s all right . . . the light is on and the radio (
sic
) is playing,’ but promised she would check on the actress anyway. While Rudin was reporting this update back to Lawford, Murray replaced the handset and walked to her employer’s bedroom. Sinatra albums could still be heard playing on the record player within.

Her gentle taps on the door were met with a deafening silence. ‘Marilyn, Marilyn,’ Murray whispered. There was no answer. As she confirmed in a 1982 interview with the American researcher Justin Clayton, she noticed the door was half closed. Her initial attempts to open it further proved futile. The heavy, solid wood door was inexplicably jammed more tightly than usual. Sensing something was amiss, she walked out of the house into the cold, dark August evening and round to the windows of the actress’s bedroom. In
Marilyn: The Last Months
, Murray recalled, ‘Behind the iron grille, I could see that the casement window was slightly ajar. The deeply recessed Spanish sill prevented me from reaching inside.’

So she rushed back inside, grabbed a poker from the fireplace and returned outside to the glazing. With the aid of the implement, she was now able to pull back the drapes and peer inside Marilyn’s room. She was greeted with the sight of the actress’s body, lying face up, motionless across the floor. The upper part of her torso was pressed against the lowest section of the door. Her phone was near her right hand. (The fact that Murray had discovered Marilyn’s body in that position was actually
uncovered in 1967 by Fred Lawrence Guiles during research on his book
Norma Jean
. He wrote at the time, ‘After Mrs. Murray became worried about Marilyn, she went outside and peered into Marilyn’s bedroom. The blinds were drawn, but she could make out Marilyn’s body lying on the
floor
[emphasis added].’ But strangely, by the time his manuscript was published two years later, in 1969, his reference to how the actress had been discovered had inexplicably been cut from the text. One wonders why.)

Now gripped by panic, Murray ran back inside the building and raced to Marilyn’s room where, once more, she desperately tried to gain entrance. With the actress’s inert body lying against the opening, it was a demanding task. Pressing her shoulder hard against the door, Murray managed to prise it open a tad further, just enough for her to squeeze herself in, drag the phone towards her and call Greenson to inform him of the situation. (Proof that Eunice used
this
line and not the one in the guest room came via Marilyn’s phone records, which revealed that, after DiMaggio Jr’s reverse-charge call at approximately 7.30pm, there were no further calls made on that line for the remainder of the night. Investigating officer Sergeant Byron of the Los Angeles Police Department would confirm this in his report of the incident, which stated with regard to the phone, GR476-1890, that ‘no calls had been made during the hours of the occurrence [the actress’s death]’. In fact, the phone in the guest room would not be used for another seven hours.)

Within ten minutes, Greenson was at the property. Following Murray’s lead, he grabbed a poker from the fireplace, rushed back outside, smashed a pane in her other window (the one not protected by decorative, wrought-iron bars), unhooked the catch and climbed in. He dashed over to the actress’s body and immediately began examining it. Less than a minute after he began doing so, he realised he was too late. Marilyn Monroe was dead. Speaking in 1973, he recalled, ‘I took her pulse. No pulse, no breathing, no nothing.’

‘We’ve lost her,’ Greenson sadly announced to Murray. The doctor had hauled Marilyn’s body away from the door to allow her to enter. It was now just after 10.10pm.

However, instead of ringing the local authorities to inform them of the accident, he rang first the publicity department at 20th Century-Fox and then Milton Rudin, who in turn immediately called Arthur P. Jacobs at home. But Jacobs wasn’t there. He was with his fiancée, actress Natalie Trundy, at the Hollywood Bowl, watching, from 8.30pm, the 41st Annual ‘Pops’ show, which tonight featured the award-winning composer, arranger and conductor Henry Mancini and the American piano duo, (Arthur) Ferrante and (Louis) Teicher.

In a 1985 interview for the BBC, Trundy recalled, ‘About three-quarters of the way through the concert, someone came to our [private] box and said, “Arthur, come quickly. Marilyn is dead . . . ”’ After being told discreetly about the situation, almost certainly by a uniformed Bowl employee, Jacobs drove his companion home to her apartment at 122 Canyon Drive, next door to where, at no. 120, Pat Newcomb lived and was currently resting in bed.

At once, he headed over to Marilyn’s Brentwood home, arriving there in the region of 11pm to find those present in a state of high panic. Considering his role as the actress’s publicist, his first task was to sweep the property for anything that might be classed as incriminating towards her or the studio. Cupboards were rifled through, drawers were ransacked and her two private filing cabinets were broken into. A small selection of photos, letters and incriminating telephone notepad scribbles, made by the actress during her recurrent nights of insomnia, were among the items seized. He also snatched her red pocket diary, which, in all probability, he found concealed under the mattress on the actress’s bed. (Reports which said that, at this point of the evening, the entire contents of Marilyn’s cabinets were seized and destroyed are false. The multitude of surviving items – letters, receipts, pictures, legal documents, mementos, etc. – which the actress had secreted away were featured and illustrated in an October 2008
Vanity Fair
magazine piece entitled ‘The Things She Left Behind’.)

It was not unusual for a film studio to cover up the death scene of one of its employees. The death of Hollywood director and producer Paul Bern is possibly one of the best examples. On Monday 5 September 1932, just four months after his marriage to Jean Harlow, Bern’s naked, lifeless body was discovered in his home, lying on the floor of his bathroom. MGM’s Louis B. Mayer announced that Bern had committed suicide ‘because of his impotency’ and inability to sexually satisfy Harlow. However, the truth was quite different: Bern had been murdered by his former wife, Dorothy Millette. Mayer knew he had to protect his prize asset, Harlow, at any cost and knew he could not release details of a mysterious woman visiting Bern that fatal night. The thought that Harlow might then be accused of murdering her husband was incomprehensible; as a convenient way out of getting them all out of this most awkward predicament, the suicide scenario was conceived.

Using the telephone in Marilyn’s bedroom, Jacobs then called one of his employees, Michael Selsman, and informed him of the actress’s death. He also warned him to be ready to handle a barrage of questions about it from the media and instructed him not to mention any names, in particular those of the Kennedys, in any of his statements. Jacobs had
arrived at Monroe’s home within minutes of Milton Rudin. (It has been impossible to prove or disprove claims that Fox publicity executives John Campbell and Frank Neill were also present in the house that night.) Just moments after they did so, a clearly agitated Greenson began shifting the blame away from himself by telling the attorney, ‘God damn it. He [Dr Hyman Engelberg] gave her a prescription I didn’t know about.’ This was true. Greenson was completely oblivious to his colleague’s actions. Furthermore, he knew full well that, if checks were made, the authorities would indeed find out that Marilyn had been given a fresh prescription for 25 Nembutals by Engelberg just a day before she died.

Discussions in Marilyn’s bedroom were interrupted by another phone call. It was Lawford. Word had quickly spread that Marilyn was in a bad way. Following an order from Bobby Kennedy and an earlier tip-off by phone, he was ringing to enquire about the actress’s welfare. ‘Is she dead?’ he asked. Murray took the call and confirmed she was. (According to recently released FBI reports, originally dated Monday 19 October 1964, Kennedy called Lawford from his San Francisco hotel room that night to enquire of Marilyn’s well-being. But once again, this was inaccurate on two points. First, he did not say, ‘Is she dead
yet
?’ and second, he was not in San Francisco. He was still in his room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and would not return to Frisco until later, as we will see.)

Greenson’s plan to inform the authorities of Marilyn’s death was halted when Lawford forcibly announced he had to delay doing so until any potentially incriminating evidence, particularly pertaining to the Kennedys, had been excised from the building. With no alternative, the doctor reluctantly agreed. Thus Hollywood’s greatest-ever conspiracy was set in motion.

Following a call from Lawford, and after his party guests had departed for the night, the Attorney General drove back to the actor’s property, collected him and set off in the direction of the actress’s home. Once there, the two men immediately set about an all-encompassing sweep of the place. Finding and securing any incriminating evidence against the Kennedys, in particular Monroe’s small red diary, was of huge importance. In all probability, Jacobs handed the diary over to the Attorney General during his visit.

After an hour of extensive searching through the cupboards, drawers and cabinets, conducted in silence, Kennedy and Lawford climbed back into the actor’s car and hastily departed for the Beverly Hills Hotel. Unfortunately for the two men, their breakneck journey managed to catch the attention of a Beverly Hills police officer named Lynn Franklin. At approximately 12.40am, just 40 minutes after starting his regular midnight
shift, Franklin saw a dark-coloured Lincoln Continental speed east on Olympic Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Guessing that the vehicle was going in excess of 80 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone, he switched on his red light and pursued.