The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (56 page)

The tale continued with Monroe being strapped to a gurney, wheeled out to the ambulance, driven by Messrs Hall and Liebowitz to the nearby Santa Monica General Hospital and left in the ER (emergency room). However, for some inexplicable reason, the two ambulance men then decided to turn round and return Marilyn’s body to her home. The vehicle arrived back at the property at approximately 10.25pm and within minutes of its arrival, her body was being wheeled back into the house and laid out neatly across the bed in her room. With no first-hand knowledge of the situation, the company’s owner, Walt Schaefer, even inadvertently added to the ruse by telling the BBC in 1985, ‘She was alive when she was picked up,’ before admitting Marilyn ‘succumbed at the hospital’.

However, this entire tale was pure fabrication, as can be discerned from five irrefutable facts. One, Marilyn’s post-mortem clearly showed that there were ‘no needle marks’ on her body and it is inconceivable that two respected Los Angeles coroners, Thomas T. Noguchi and John Miner, could overlook the damage to her rib-cage and the fatal puncture marks to her heart. Second, for strict hygiene and safety reasons, doctors are not permitted to carry syringes of this size, with the needles attached, in their bags.

Third, it is abundantly clear that the lividity on her body became fixed while she was lying on her bed, the right-hand side of her face nearest to the mattress. Besides, if the actress’s body
had
indeed been carried from her house, loaded into the ambulance, driven to the hospital, left in the emergency room, escorted to her property and then transferred back into
her bedroom, the marks of faint lividity on her body would have changed in an obvious and un-fakeable manner and would not have appeared in the way they did during her autopsy.

Fourth, when the diligent Marilyn researcher Milo Speriglio put James Hall under a lie-detector test in the early 1980s, as he recalled in his 1986 book,
The Marilyn Conspiracy
, he saw the needle ‘almost jump off the scale’. Hall apparently made good money from his tale. Besides appearances in a couple of Marilyn documentaries, he also sold his story to
The Globe
newspaper for $40,000, appearing in the edition published on Tuesday 23 November 1982. When Speriglio protested about the piece, the paper’s editor shrugged off the complaint, saying Hall’s story ‘sells papers’. It was obvious that certain parts of the media were less concerned about spreading lies about the last night of Marilyn’s life than with making sales.

And fifth, in 1982, when the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office reinvestigated the case, the leader of the inquiry, Mike Carroll, contacted the two men whom he believed were in charge of the Schaefer ambulance sent to Marilyn’s house on the morning after she passed away. However, he did
not
get in touch with Hall and Liebowitz. Instead, he contacted Ken Hunter and Rick Stone and, according to the latter, it was he and not Hall who saw Dr Greenson pull a large hypodermic syringe out of his medical bag and place it in the actress’s heart. The matter became farcical when Liebowitz denied that he was ever at the house that morning. Hunter summed up the scenario perfectly when, in response to Carroll’s question about the incident, he replied, ‘That’s
bullshit
!’)

Now back behind his desk at the West Los Angeles Police Division, at 5.25am Sergeant Clemmons began filling out his investigations report. Despite his many misgivings about the case, he still wrote ‘Barbs – overdose’ as the cause of Marilyn’s death. He had evidently taken both Greenson and Engelberg at their word. It was a clear rush to judgement, since at that moment there was no way of knowing whether this was the case or not. Immediately after completing his account, and before he drove back to Fifth Helena, he called the coroner’s office. In turn, a deputy at the bureau called the Westwood Village Mortuary in Westwood Memorial Park. Mrs Guy R. Hockett, the wife of the managing director, took the call. ‘This is the coroner’s office,’ Deputy Coroner Howard Cronkite announced. ‘I have a hearse call for you. Marilyn Monroe is dead.’ Mrs Hockett was immediately stunned but, thinking it was another hoax call, responded by saying, ‘You’re kidding,’ before hanging up.

She told her husband about the call. ‘We get all kinds of calls like that,’ Guy later remarked. However he decided to ring back just to check. He
was horrified to discover that this was no crank call. Accompanied by his son, Don Hockett immediately jumped into his battered light-blue 1950 Ford panel truck and arrived at Marilyn’s house in Brentwood shortly after 6.30am.

Moments after entering her bedroom, Hockett ordered everyone out. He and his son had work to do. Glancing down at the actress’s lifeless body, he observed that her face was bereft of make-up and her uncombed hair was in a shocking state, a result of the painful treatments she had received from colourist Pearl Porterfield. Noticing the deep purple colouring of her body, he asked Sergeant Byron how long the actress had been dead. When he was told three hours, he gave his son an understanding glance. His many years of experience told him she had been dead for a lot longer than that. Immediately after examining the actress’s body, Hockett echoed the sergeant’s earlier sentiments by announcing that ‘rigor mortis was advanced.’ In order for it to be strapped to the trolley, it took him in the region of five minutes just to straighten the body out. Only a corpse in such an advanced state of rigor mortis would require such an action. (While rigor mortis has been known to set in as little as three hours after death, taking into consideration the time of year and temperature of the room, in Marilyn’s case it was likely to occur in a minimum of five to six hours.)

Working with his son, Hockett then wrapped the actress’s body from head to toe in a shroud made of a cheap, pale blue woollen blanket, obtained from her bed, and strapped it, hands across stomach, onto a narrow tubular stretcher. At 7.45am, the undisputed Queen of Hollywood was unceremoniously wheeled out of her bedroom, through the front door, past the handful of reporters and the curious and 50 feet down the driveway, where she was trundled into the cargo space of a station wagon and transported to the Westwood Village Mortuary. There, for approximately one hour, she was discarded in a storeroom strewn with coats, drafting tables and dust brushes. Lights were turned off and the door locked. To all intents and purposes, Marilyn’s body had been left alone, in the dark in a shed. There was no certainly no dignity in her death.

At 9am, her cadaver was picked up by employee Clarence Pierce and, following a request by Milton Rudin, brought to the County Morgue in the Los Angeles Hall of Justice where she was weighed (117 pounds), measured (height 65½ inches), photographed (hair blonde, eyes blue) and fingerprinted. In preparation for her post-mortem, she was then placed in Crypt 33 and assigned a coroner’s case number, hers being 81128. Her next-of-kin was listed as ‘Gladys Baker – address unknown’. At 10.15am, coroner’s assistant Eddie Day wheeled Marilyn’s body out, laid it onto stainless-steel table number 1 and prepared it for its autopsy.

Back at Fifth Helena, in order to obtain suitable material for the day’s television news bulletins and the following morning’s newspapers, a handful of reporters had been allowed on to the bungalow’s forecourt. While some happily took shots of the outside of the building and images of Monroe’s living quarters through her windows, others overstepped the mark. Desperate to get a glimpse of the room in which the actress had died, film crews began poking their cameras obtrusively through the window Dr Greenson had smashed in order to reach the actress approximately nine hours earlier. Their shots were interrupted when an officer, catching sight of their actions, rushed over to the glazing and pulled across the white-coloured drapes which were hanging directly in front. Once the photographers and film crews had obtained their images and been ushered off the premises, the police began covering the windows with large, heavy, evidence-preserving cloth.

One respected Monroe biographer suggested that the actress
always
slept with her windows covered that way. However, close examination of the photos and newsreel footage taken on the morning of the actress’s death, before the sealing took place, clearly shows that, as Eunice Murray recalled, curtains were
all
that hung across the windows in Marilyn’s bedroom. Considering that the glazing adjacent to her bed faced the dark backyard, there was simply no need for such thick curtains. The same author also suggested that, each night, before bedtime, the actress would staple these heavy curtains to the frames. ‘She
never
stapled the drapes,’ Murray confirmed to Maurice Zolotow in 1973.

With such a high press presence, making a discreet exit from Marilyn’s was hard for everyone. Murray’s path to her green Dodge car had to be taken via the kitchen, up the side courtyard and by the guest apartment. When she reached her vehicle, she was helped into it by her son-in-law, Norman. Newcomb and Marilyn’s dog Maf were close behind. With Murray at the wheel, the car was driven out of the property and on to the corner of Carmelina and Sunset where Newcomb had arranged to meet her doctor. Afterwards, the publicist was dropped off at home.

Her telephone was, unsurprisingly, ringing when she opened her apartment door. For 48 hours, she remained by the apparatus, fielding calls from all over the world. It was estimated that the tally reached over 250. Journalists from as far away as England, Paris and Tokyo were desperate to know what precisely had happened to the world’s most famous screen actress. All she could do was reiterate, as she believed, that ‘Marilyn’s death just had to be an accident’ and ‘things were going too well for her for it to have been anything else.’ When fatigue began to set in, she varied her response by saying, ‘She has been in a marvellous mood lately and the studio had assured her she would be allowed to finish
Something’s Got To Give
.’

Murray too headed home. One day later, amid accusations from Marilyn’s friends that she had sold her ‘exclusive’ version of the tragedy to a national magazine, she was driven out to Chatsworth, a district in the San Fernando Valley, to visit her daughter Marilyn LaClair and her family. She returned to her home at 933 Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica the following morning, Monday 6 August, to find reporters camped outside. Her landlord advised her to give them what they wanted, a quote or even a short interview. She reluctantly agreed on the latter, allowing two or three reporters into her apartment at a time. Sitting on a couch in her living room, Murray did her best to answer their questions.

Unsurprisingly, when her replies were published in the following day’s papers, she was misquoted, her answers twisted, particularly with regard to Marilyn’s mysterious last call. When asked about the call by the Los Angeles Police Department, she had replied, ‘I don’t remember the call, the time the call came in and I don’t know who it was from.’ Evasive though it sounded, she was telling the truth on all three counts. Now she told a United Press International journalist, ‘Miss Monroe seemed
disturbed
after the phone call.’ But there was no way that she could have known this. People wondered whether she had been tipped off about Lawford’s fumbling and was ready to unite with Marilyn’s friends against him. It was more likely that, for Murray, no doubt in a state of exhaustion, confusion was already setting in.

On Tuesday 7 August, Murray reluctantly returned to 12305 Fifth Helena Drive. She had been asked to help choose the clothes for the actress’s funeral the following day. Despite it being the task of Marilyn’s half-sister, Berniece Miracle, and Inez Melson, they had requested Murray’s help due to her obvious first-hand knowledge of the actress’s garments. (Murray and Melson returned to the house five days later, on Sunday 12 August, to tearfully pack up Marilyn’s belongings for storage.)

While Murray was performing her motherly duties, fielding questions from the press and making preparations for her former employer’s burial, Monroe’s friends continued to vent their anger over the actress’s death, in particular towards her so-called housekeeper. Once more, Dorothy Kilgallen was used as their mouthpiece. One close associate of Marilyn blasted to her, ‘The reporters out in California missed a bet in accepting the identification of Eunice Murray as a “housekeeper”. If she’s just a plain ordinary housekeeper, I’m a circus acrobat.’

The unnamed friend’s tirade raged on:

Why didn’t the press ask her where she’d kept house before and for whom? I think they would find out she was a personal friend, an interior decorator and that she had moved in at the request of one of Marilyn’s doctors to stick close and not let the actress out of her sight. Marilyn was too miserable to be allowed to lock herself in a room with a lethal dose of Nembutal.

You can wager a small sum that she has sold her exclusive version of the tragedy to a national newspaper. She certainly didn’t tell much to the reporters. For instance, she told them, ‘Marilyn seemed disturbed after the last telephone call. When she went to her bedroom she really was depressed.’ But Mrs. Murray never explained what Marilyn did or said to convey the impression that she was disturbed and depressed and if Marilyn
was
very disturbed and depressed at 8pm why did Mrs. Murray wait until 3am before checking her? If she was just a housekeeper, why would she be checking on her employer at all, prowling around at three o’clock in the morning looking for a light under the floor? She should have kept to her own quarters, not gone snooping and speculating. Of course, if she was an unofficial bodyguard to Marilyn, it was something else again.

In a piece for
The Oneonta Star
, Kilgallen wrote:

So poor Marilyn’s death is liable to remain a mystery, quite unnecessarily because Hollywood pulled another of its hush-hush jobs. If this same sad thing happened in Cincinnati the facts would have been given out and it would have been all over in a few days. But this is California and nobody has stopped talking about it because it wasn’t handled in a clear-cut manner. In the land of Perry Mason, Marilyn’s death has become ‘The Case of the Prowling Housekeeper’.