The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (54 page)

In an interview with the biographer George Carpozi Jr, the exceedingly forthright Clemmons remarked that the scene ‘looked to me as though a murder had been committed. The body had been moved. The room had been straightened out. I saw all the classic elements of an attempt to cover up a homicide to make it seem like a suicide.’

In 1982, during the Los Angeles District Attorney’s reinvestigation of the case, the man in charge of the probe, Mike Carroll, poured scorn on Clemmons’ claims. ‘His opinion was not based on any kind of professional training or experience,’ he remarked in 2006 during CBS Television’s
48 Hours Mystery
show on the investigation. ‘He was not a detective; he was not an experienced detective and certainly
not
a homicide detective.’ During Clemmons’ many years of policing, however, he had witnessed a vast number of suicide victims and, in his opinion, an overdose of sleeping tablets usually caused victims to suffer spasms, vomiting and foaming of the mouth before they died in a distorted position. But there was nothing like that here. (Nor should he have expected it. Expelling doesn’t always occur in situations like these, as any pathologist will testify. The victim simply goes to sleep.)

Furthermore, the room was in impeccable order. The actress’s few sparse belongings had seemingly been arranged neatly around the room; her clothes had been neatly folded and stacked; purses and handbags had been lined up in a straight line against the wall; correspondence was stacked under her bedside table in tidy piles. It was the first time in his long career that Clemmons had been called out to an overdose case and found the room in which the victim had apparently died in such perfect condition. Although there had in fact been no murder, but with regard to a cover-up he was quite correct.

‘Who else is here?’ Clemmons enquired. ‘Two doctors,’ Murray replied before making introductions. He would recall Engelberg as being ‘remorseful’ and Murray as ‘scared’ and ‘very, very quiet’, adding that she spoke in ‘hushed tones’. Amazingly, at no time during his visit did he confront Milton Rudin, who was still at the property, concealed in the guest room. During Clemmons’ eventful 40 minutes at the property, he watched Murray flit nervously from one room to another, executing chores such as loading medium-sized cardboard boxes into her car and emptying (and then dumping into the trash can) the contents of Marilyn’s refrigerator.

Her use of the house’s Hotpoint washing machine and dryer, stored in the garage, was, in his opinion, her strangest action. He correctly guessed
she had been doing this for several hours and was currently on her third load. When pressed on the matter, she replied truthfully that, since the house was about to be sealed off, and with so many people about to descend on it, she was just meticulously carrying out her duties as a housekeeper by making sure that the property was clean, tidy and presentable.

The seemingly outlandish behaviour at Marilyn’s home that night did not end there. Clemmons would recall Greenson as being ‘sarcastic’ and ‘unnatural’. When Clemmons first entered the actress’s bedroom, the psychiatrist had his head buried in his hands. But after a few moments he raised it. ‘He had a strange, unusual
smirk
on his face,’ Clemmons recalled. ‘He had a sort of leer, which was out of place.’

The sergeant was then shown a table alongside the bed which, besides a copy of the gardening magazine,
Horticulture
, contained a total of 15 empty prescription pill bottles. Some had labels; some did not. (The officer drafted in to replace Clemmons, Sergeant Robert E. Byron, would also recall seeing the same number. However, according to Dr Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report, only eight containers were found beside Marilyn’s bed. I can clear up this discrepancy: the seven other bottles were, according to mortician Guy Hockett, non-prescription and therefore not required for the actress’s autopsy. The eight in question were 2 x Librium (dated 7 June and 10 July 1962), 1 x sulfathalidine (25 July 1962), 2 x chloral hydrate (25 July 1962 and 31 July 1962), 1 x Nembutal (3 August 1962) and 1 x Pink Ladies (also from 3 August but devoid of a label). Strangely, there was also one for nodular (cystic) acne, now empty but dated some nine months earlier, on Saturday 4 November 1961.)

Engelberg was naturally aghast at this huge amount, only one of which, Nembutal, had been authorised by him. He was also shocked to see the containers for chloral hydrate. It was a drug he never used or prescribed. In an interview with the LAPD, he insisted, ‘I knew
nothing
about chloral hydrate. I
never
gave her chloral hydrate.’ Since it was a country in which you could purchase any drug you chose, he firmly believed that Marilyn had purchased them in Tijuana during her trip to Mexico in February, rather than, as was in fact the case, receiving them via Greenson.

One of the other bottles on the actress’s night stand, Clemmons was told, had once contained Nembutal tablets. It was lying upside down; its top was just an inch or two away. In an attempt to shift the blame away from himself and on to his colleague, Greenson then remarked, ‘She must have taken all of these.’ ‘That’s a lot of pills,’ Clemmons replied. Engelberg recalled later, ‘At the bedside, I remember clearly the empty bottle of Nembutal, which I had given her. I remember having the impulse of saying [to myself], “Oh God, I’m gonna get involved in this.
Maybe I’ll hide the bottle.” I then said [to myself], “Oh, to hell with it. I didn’t do anything wrong . . . ”’ When asked by Clemmons, Engelberg confirmed that he had indeed approved a 25-tablet, prescription refill of the drug (no. 20858) just two days previously. The general consensus, much to Greenson’s relief, was that Marilyn must have expired after consuming that entire bottle and
not
by swallowing the chloral hydrates. He knew that, if it was deemed that his actions had accidentally caused her death, he could face an involuntary manslaughter charge which, under Californian law, carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison.

With that fact in mind, Clemmons became suspicious when he noted that there was no drinking glass in the room. Without this, he wondered, how could she have possibly swallowed the amount of pills which she was credited with taking? His suspicions intensified when he was informed that the bathroom in her room had been shut off due to remodelling and, as Murray remarked, that Marilyn had not ventured out of her room again after she retired for the night shortly before 7.55pm. (His scepticism increased when, just a few days later, back at the station, he glanced at the photos of the death scene taken for the coroner and noticed that a drinking receptacle had now miraculously materialised in the images. It was obvious that it had been placed in that position at approximately 5.15am when Clemmons departed from the scene and headed back to the police station. This was
another
almighty oversight in Greenson and Murray’s attempts to suppress what had happened.)

As the sergeant began scrutinising the bedroom he kept bumping into the other individuals present. ‘It looked like a convention,’ he recalled. Clemmons took another glance at the body and then asked Murray if he could use the telephone. He was told he could and was led by the housekeeper into the kitchen, where the apparatus was now being stored. (Rudin had moved it there. With him using the guest room as a hideout, he did not wish to be discovered.) Clemmons’ call back to the Police Department served two purposes: first, to put out another request for policemen at the scene (his first appeal was strangely unheeded); second, to enable him to pass the bad news on to a colleague.

‘Hello, Jim,’ he said. ‘I’m at Marilyn’s house . . . Yeah, that’s right. She’s dead. It looks like an OD [overdose]. I knew you’d want to know.’ He was speaking to James E. Dougherty, Marilyn’s first husband, who was sitting in his squad car in North Hollywood, just 10 miles from the actress’s home (and not lying in bed with his wife, as some previous Monroe biographers have claimed), when he received the call on his police radio. Exercising immense decorum, at no time during the conversation did the sergeant remark to Dougherty he felt that there was a conspiracy going on at the home.

Clemmons placed the phone back into its cradle and walked back to the actress’s bedroom where he began collecting statements. Right from the start they were riddled with discrepancies. Murray started by telling him she had discovered Marilyn’s body at approximately 12 midnight and called Dr Greenson shortly after. In a 1966 interview, Clemmons remarked, ‘According to what they were telling me, all of this occurred shortly after midnight. I told them, “No one is going to go along with four hours sitting around with a corpse on your hands, when you know very well that you have to call the police.” They didn’t want to answer but I pressed.’ He asked again, why had they taken so long to contact the police? Greenson immediately interjected, insisting that they could not do so until they had received permission from 20th Century-Fox’s publicity department. This was of course nonsense. Clemmons knew then he was not hearing the truth. ‘That’s not an answer,’ he retorted.

He dropped the matter, content in the knowledge that Detective Sergeant Robert Byron, the next officer summoned to the scene, would get it all sorted when he officially started the investigation. (Despite seeing first-hand the many abnormalities at the scene, as a law enforcement officer Clemmons’ job was simply to determine the facts and log the information in a police report. The onus would be on others in his department, in this case Byron, to question and pursue any oddities in the case.) ‘Since I had made an issue of the fact that it had taken them four hours to call the police,’ Clemmons recalled to the American press in 1972, ‘they decided, by the time I left and before Byron arrived, that no one was ever going to buy this four-hour business so they had better change their story.’ Which was exactly what they did.

When Byron arrived and started asking questions, Murray at once began insisting that she had found the actress’s body ‘shortly after 3am’. (Strangely, no one at the LAPD ever thought to question this discrepancy.) This time was the one picked by most of the national newspapers. According to one report, compiled by the
New York Herald
’s Joe Hyams, the housekeeper ‘awoke suddenly from a sound sleep with the ominous feeling that something was not right’. In another, she was awakened by an uneasy dread she couldn’t explain and, through the gap under the actress’s bedroom door, found Miss Monroe’s light still burning, her door locked and no answer to her knock. ‘Somehow, it didn’t seem right,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘It seemed strange and unusual.’ So she went outside and looked in the bedroom window. ‘I saw Miss Monroe lying on the bed. That’s when I called Dr Greenson.’ Official reports of the actress’s death say Murray phoned the doctor at precisely 3.35am.

Murray’s recollection of a light shining from underneath Marilyn’s bedroom door on the night she died has been a major topic of debate for
many years. According to folklore, a new extremely thick, shag-pile, white woollen carpet produced in India had just been laid in the room and the chance of seeing any kind of light emanating from under the door was minimal. Legend has it that the covering was so deep that, until a suitable amount of wear and tear had taken place, it was impossible to even shut the door.

On both counts, this was untrue. As Linda Nunez, the daughter of the family who, in 1963, moved into the actress’s home recalled, the carpet in the room
was
indeed thick, but certainly not enough to prevent the door from being closed. Going by this testimony, it is therefore extremely likely that Murray’s recollection of seeing a light emanating from under her employer’s door on the night she died was true. Furthermore, regardless of what we have previously been told, haunted by the happenings at the Payne-Whitney Clinic just 18 months before her death, Marilyn
never
locked the entrance of the room in which she slept.

Her friend Dorothy Kilgallen queried the ‘locked-door’ ruse at the time. In her column published on Sunday 19 August 1962, she asked, ‘Why was Marilyn’s door locked that night when she
didn’t
usually lock it?’ Another individual to corroborate this was Ralph Roberts. Due to his regular, late-night visits to her bedroom, he knew first-hand that Marilyn
never
locked the door of her room. As we learnt in a previous chapter, her secretary Cherie Redmond remarked she could not find a lock in the property that worked. (This was, in fact, attributable to one simple reason: the safety of the previous occupants’ children.)

In another interview (carried out during the afternoon of Monday 6 August), Murray remembered she ‘went to bed at midnight and noticed that the light was still on in Marilyn’s bedroom but didn’t think that was unusual’. Then, with confusion clearly setting in, in another interview carried out on the exactly the same day, she contradictorily claimed that she ‘walked out into the hallway and saw the telephone cord under Marilyn’s door. That’s all I needed as a clue. I knew immediately that something was terribly wrong, because after midnight, with the telephone in her room and she hadn’t put it to bed, well I knew something had to be wrong.’

This was another anomaly. Greenson, her personal make-up artist, Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder and many other friends all recalled receiving regular late-night calls from the actress. The
Daily Mirror
journalist Donald Zec even penned a piece honouring her nocturnal actions. Published on Monday 25 January 1960, it was entitled ‘Marilyn’s On The Line – At Half Past Three In The Morning’. Greenson even corroborated the fact, remarking to George Carpozi Jr that the actress called him at ‘two in the morning, three, four, five in the morning, countless, countless times’.

Among the many others who would recall sharing late-night conversations with Marilyn was the actress and singer Eartha Kitt. In a 1989 interview, she revealed that the actress used to call her because ‘she was fighting the same feelings as me. Both of us were orphans. Both of us suffered from that terrible nameless fear that haunts you when normal people are sleeping. Like me, she knew success. She knew what it was like to be an idol. But what does that mean when, deep down, you know that you were not important enough for your own mother to want you?’