The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (55 page)

So, if Murray was indeed lying, as it seemed, what was she covering up? The fact that she had failed so miserably in her duty to watch over the actress, was guilty of tampering with the scene and that she had actually discovered Marilyn’s body five and a half hours prior to the time she officially declared to the authorities, were the most likely answers. Her intent not to incriminate herself was prevalent in her second police interview about the incident, which took place at her Ocean Avenue home at 8.30 on the morning of Friday 10 August. In his report of their discussion, Lieutenant Armstrong, Commander of the West Los Angeles Police Division, was forced to conclude, ‘Mrs Murray was vague and possibly evasive in answering questions pertaining to the activities of Miss Monroe . . . ’ He summed up by saying, ‘It is not known whether this is, or is not, intentional.’

Greenson naturally did his utmost to substantiate Murray’s tales. According to his later statement to Sergeant Robert Byron, he received a phone call from Murray shortly after 3.05am. Immediately after ending it, he rushed by car to the actress’s house, took a poker from the fireplace, smashed a window to gain access to her bedroom, reached in, unlocked the latch, climbed in and discovered the actress dead, face down on her bed, phone receiver in her right hand. In an interview with Maurice Zolotow, he disclosed more about the night, saying, ‘Her finger was still in the dial,’ while Murray recalled to the same writer that the phone was ‘
under
her body’.

Marilyn had indeed been discovered in her bedroom, phone receiver near her right hand, by Murray shortly after 9.30pm. But Clemmons did not see the receiver in her hand at 4.35am, as both he and the LAPD’s pictures would confirm. As any pathologist will testify, a person dying as a result of a barbiturate overdose would be likely to relax upon death and let go of any item they might be holding, such as a telephone, before they slid into a life-threatening coma. The scenario whereby Marilyn had committed suicide and was found in her bed with her phone clasped in her hand had, in all probability, emanated from Arthur Jacobs. A top-level spin-doctor, his yarn was accepted by every major press bureau across the globe.

Marilyn’s chauffeur, Rudy Karensky, and Murray’s son-in-law, Norm (summoned to repair the window in the bedroom), were soon at Fifth Helena; so too was the actress’s friend, reporter James Bacon, who raced to the property immediately following a tip-off from the Associated Press news agency. He was admitted to the premises after misleadingly telling a policeman at the scene he had been sent from the coroner’s office. Inez Melson, the legal guardian of the actress’s mother, appeared shortly after. At once, she requested to see the actress’s body and the room in which she died. ‘There were pill bottles everywhere,’ she recounted to biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles in 1968, ‘some empty, some full on the night stand and dresser. I walked into the bathroom and saw the cabinet’s shelves crowded with Marilyn’s allergy pills, tranquillizers and sleeping tablets. I had an impulse to run through these two rooms, snatching up the bottles and hiding them in my bag, but I knew that was impossible.’

At approximately 5.05am, Detective Sergeant Byron and his colleague, Sergeant Marvin Iannone, as well as officers Coberley, McGuire, Curran and Gillis, arrived to relieve Clemmons of his duties. Moments after Iannone’s arrival, he began a walking tour of the actress’s home and, as he recalled, found ‘nothing unusual or amiss’. However, his feeling soon changed when he walked into the actress’s bedroom and took a more prolonged look at Marilyn’s body. In his original report, he made it quite clear that, in his opinion, ‘rigor mortis had set in by the time police arrived’. His already interesting statement became even more thought-provoking when he remarked, ‘While I was there, Dr Greenson was so visibly shaken that he would not return to the bedroom where Miss Monroe’s body lay.’ (This original, 1962 remark clearly casts doubt on Byron’s later comment that Greenson had gone by the time he arrived at Monroe’s house.)

Though he obviously never disclosed his true feelings to the police, the doctor clearly felt certain that the Attorney General’s highly traumatic, completely unexpected visit to Marilyn’s home the previous afternoon had played a key part in her death. Evidence of this can be found in a surviving audio-taped interview between him and William Woodfield, the photographer and independent Marilyn investigator. Several months after her demise, when pressed about the incident, an evidently troubled Greenson was heard to reply, ‘I can’t explain myself or defend myself without revealing things I don’t want to reveal. You can’t draw a line and say, “I’ll tell you this but I couldn’t tell you this.” It’s a terrible position to be in to have to say I can’t talk about it because I can’t tell you the whole story. Listen . . .
talk
to Bobby Kennedy.’

Wiretapper and electronics expert Bernard Spindel even went on record as saying Kennedy was
present
at the time Marilyn died. In a heavily censored FBI document dated Monday 13 March 1967 – but not released
until Tuesday 13 June 1972 – he said proof was attainable by ‘listening to the various recordings’. The validity of his claim was elevated on Thursday 15 December 1966, when, in a nine-hour operation, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office raided Spindel’s home on charges of illegal eavesdropping. In a report in
The New York Times
published six days later, on Wednesday 21 December, it was revealed that some of the seized material contained ‘tapes and evidence concerning circumstances surrounding and causes of death of Marilyn Monroe, which strongly suggests that the officially reported circumstances of her demise are erroneous’.

Doubts were cast on their authenticity when, in his report of the incident, the Manhattan Assistant District Attorney, Ronald Carroll, wrote, ‘Spindel’s asserted desire to have the tapes made public appears to have been a ploy . . . The tapes were, in fact, heard by staff investigators and
none
of the tapes contained anything relating to Marilyn Monroe.’ Unsurprisingly, however, Spindel was unrepentant, insisting in a separate interview that ‘The tapes and files
did
concern the actress’s death, and contained facts and data in which the names of Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford
were
mentioned.’ The equipment and recordings evidently meant a lot to Spindel and later, in a motion before the New York Supreme Court Judge, Owen McGivern, he unsuccessfully sought to retrieve them.

After initially going missing, the audios apparently resurfaced in 1968. A price of $50,000 was supposedly placed on them, and a deal with a former policeman was seemingly struck. As the right-wing journalist Ralph de Toledano, a key figure in the United States’ Conservative movement, remarked to the BBC in 1985, ‘Just prior to the sale, Bobby was assassinated. Had Bobby not been shot, I am convinced that those tapes would have been duplicated and sent across the country to various newspapers and would have had tremendous impact [in discrediting him] in the coming [Presidential] campaign.’ According to Fred Otash, they are probably ‘the most exciting tapes ever made, with the exception of Watergate’. However, as of 2010 the recordings have still not materialised and, in all probability, are never likely to do so.

Moments after his arrival, and since there was no logical reason for anyone still to be on the property, Sergeant Iannone began asking everyone to leave. His request came at a time when the number of people gathered outside had started to swell significantly. News of Marilyn’s death had, unsurprisingly, spread rapidly on the news wires and the area was now overrun with a vast number of television and newspaper reporters and nightwear-wearing bystanders, many of whom attempted to either drive past the house or walk by and gawp ghoulishly through the gates. For some inexplicable reason, a fire engine even descended on the property.

Working on orders from the police administrator, Baldo M. Kristovich, the area had to be cordoned off. A seal was placed on the entrance to the house and the notice, ‘Any person breaking into or entering these premises will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law’, was posted on the building’s front door and gates.

Despite doing this, the officers called to the scene that day still failed in some of their other duties. Clemmons neglected to declare the property a crime scene, a forensic investigation team was not summoned and the police failed to carry out a full inventory of everything contained in the house. The police also failed to effectively secure the scene. Yellow tape should have sealed off the entire property, not just the front gates, while everyone inside – friends of the actress, reporters and innocent bystanders, who were allowed to roam around freely – should have been asked to leave much earlier. As one police offer sarcastically observed, ‘It was like Grand Central Station that morning.’ As a consequence of their lingering, vital evidence could have been either contaminated or destroyed. The property was not completely sealed until 8.30am, approximately four hours after Sergeant Jack Clemmons had appeared at the scene and 45 minutes after Marilyn’s body had been taken to the morgue.

Inspector Ed Walker of the Los Angeles Police Department arrived, siren silent, at the same time as Pat Newcomb. The latter had left her apartment immediately after receiving a 5am call from the actress’s attorney, who was still camped out at Marilyn’s house. ‘Something’s happened to Marilyn,’ Rudin solemnly announced. ‘She’s dead.’ (Aside from speaking to Newcomb, 75 minutes earlier, in the region of 3.45am, the attorney had also made a progress-report call to Lawford’s business manager, Milton Ebbins. Attempts to speak to the actor personally had proved futile. He was still inebriated in a chair.)

Immediately after receiving the news, a shell-shocked Newcomb clambered out of bed, threw a raincoat over her nightclothes, grabbed her sunglasses to protect her weary eyes and climbed into a car driven by her next-door neighbour, Natalie Trundy. She arrived at Marilyn’s home 15 minutes later but was barred from entering. The large gates of the house had been shut tight and were remaining so. When the hacks caught sight of Marilyn’s press secretary, clad in pyjamas and wearing shades, desperately trying to gain access to the property, they immediately descended upon her and, amid an orgy of flashbulbs, wasted no time in trying to obtain a quote.

‘How do you feel about Marilyn’s death?’ one forcibly asked. The question caught Newcomb off guard and she snapped back, ‘When your best friend kills herself, how do you feel? What do you do?’ Accusations that she also screamed, ‘Murderers! You murderers! Are you satisfied now
that she’s dead?’ were denied by the publicist. But allegations that she shouted ‘Keep shooting, vultures’ at the photographers were
not
. She was hysterical with grief and police had to move in to restrain her. Her outbursts could be heard all the way down Fifth Helena.

She soon calmed down, however. ‘This must have been an accident,’ Newcomb dejectedly remarked to another reporter. ‘Marilyn was in perfect condition and was feeling great. We had made plans for today. We were going to the pictures this afternoon.’ At that moment, the gates of the property suddenly swung open and she was seemingly permitted to enter. In fact it was a mistake and within moments of her arrival, police were asking her to
leave
. But she was not listening and made it clear that she had no desire to move. She walked in an almost hypnotic state through the property and managed to stagger into the bedroom in which she had stayed on Friday night. Patrolmen at the scene did their best to comfort her.

Newcomb’s departure from the bungalow two hours later, at approximately 7.45am, coincided with that of the wagon carrying Marilyn’s body to the mortuary. Even then, the police had to forcibly evict her, allowing her to make one call – to her psychiatrist, whom she agreed to meet at once – before they did so. Contrary to previous reports, at no time during her visit to Fifth Helena did Newcomb see the actress’s body.

It was during this point of the morning that, while Marilyn lay dead on her bed, her emerald and diamond earrings, given to her by Frank Sinatra in September 1961 and worn for the only time at the Golden Globes event in March 1962, were plundered from her bedroom wardrobe. Always believing they would one day be stolen, she had secreted them in the tip of one of her shoes, a fact known only by her close associates.

An ambulance dispatched by Schaefer Ambulance Services of 4627 Beverly Boulevard, the largest private ambulance company in the city, had arrived at the scene just moments after Newcomb. In the vehicle were attendants Ken Hunter and Rick Stone, who recalled pulling up at the house and seeing her ‘standing outside screaming’. The two men then entered the bungalow and strode into Marilyn’s bedroom. In December 1982, during the reinvestigation into her death by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, Hunter recalled that Marilyn was lying on her side, head facing right, and was ‘pretty cold . . . she was blue . . . like she had settled, like she had been laying there a while . . . I could look across the room and tell that she was dead.’ He didn’t touch the actress’s body but his colleague, Stone, briefly did. In Hunter’s words, he ‘checked her just to see if [she was] dead or not’. After being informed the body would be removed by a mortician, they immediately left.

Regardless of the tale told by some previous Monroe biographers, this was the
only
Schaefer ambulance summoned to the actress’s home that
weekend. Legend has it that, in the region of 10.10pm, during the evening of Saturday 4 August, Eunice Murray made an emergency call to the local Schaefer Ambulance Services. Company employees James Hall and Murray Liebowitz arrived at Marilyn’s property within minutes of receiving a private emergency, Code 3 – lights and sirens – call and discovered the actress in a comatose state, slumped on her bed, on her back, her head hanging over its edge. In a 1982 interview for a British tabloid newspaper, Hall claimed that his original attempts to save Marilyn’s life had been successful. ‘The colour started coming back into her cheeks,’ he recalled. Within minutes, Dr Greenson arrived at the scene. Shocked to discover the actress was still conscious, he ordered Hall to remove the resuscitator from her mouth and began massaging her heart. He did this for a few minutes before reaching into his bag, pulling out a syringe with a long needle filled with a brownish fluid and injecting it straight into Monroe’s heart, chipping one of the actress’s ribs in the process. In Hall’s words, ‘he was trying to find her heart. He had to count down her ribs to locate it, just like a novice. A few minutes later, he pronounced her dead.’