The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (57 page)

Just days after Marilyn’s funeral, Murray checked out of her apartment at 933 Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica, leaving no forwarding address. Her neighbours in the block claimed that, shortly after the actress’s demise, she had suddenly come into money and, according to many, embarked on an extended six-month trip to Europe. In fact this excursion lasted just six weeks, the same period that Marilyn was due to be away for, in New York, Washington and Mexico. ‘The trip was planned for a long time,’ Murray remarked to Maurice Zolotow in 1973. ‘Marilyn had made arrangements to have somebody come to the house while I was away. I flew to Montreal and then to Paris and then to Geneva where I met my sister and her husband . . . we rented a car and drove through Switzerland, France, Holland and Germany. I never made any efforts to conceal my whereabouts . . . I’ve never run away in my life. When I’m travelling, I always leave my number with my daughter.’

As for Pat Newcomb, shortly after Marilyn’s funeral on Wednesday 8 August 1962, she parted company with the Arthur Jacobs Press Agency. Her efforts to prevent photographers from taking images of her and reporters from obtaining stories about her had caused immense damage with the press, so much so that her employer had no choice but to fire her. Immediately after her sacking, she checked out of her Santa Monica apartment and then, as a guest of Peter and Pat Lawford, she flew to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts and took up residence in their summer cottage in Marchant Avenue. She soon became a member of the Kennedys’ staff.

On Sunday 12 August, she was pictured with, among others, JFK and the Lawfords aboard Kennedy’s yacht, the
Manitou
, on a 12.35pm cruise around Johns Island, Maine. One week later, on Sunday 19 August, she was seen in the President’s company again, this time at Lawford’s home. At the end of the month she travelled to Europe. When she returned to America in February 1963, thanks to Bobby Kennedy, she was placed on the government payroll as a motion picture specialist for the US Information Agency in Washington DC.

On Friday 22 November 1963, the day that President Kennedy was tragically shot in Dallas, Texas, Newcomb helped take care of Bobby’s children. By December that year, she had resumed her work in Hollywood as a publicist and was handling the affairs of movie actress Arlene Dahl; by October 1964, she was assisting Kennedy with his New York senatorial campaign. She returned to Tinseltown in 1966 to manage the career of actress Natalie Wood. Following Bobby Kennedy’s death in June 1968, Newcomb returned to 20th Century-Fox, resurrecting her role as a publicist, when, during production of the musical
Hello Dolly
, she began running the affairs of the singer and actress Barbra Streisand. Impressed by her continued silence over Monroe, the singer apparently chose Newcomb personally for the job.

In August 1970, Newcomb arrived back in Washington to work for R. Sargent Shriver’s recently formed Congressional Leadership for the Future, campaigning on behalf of Democratic candidates throughout the country for November’s Congressional races and travelling extensively throughout the United States, assisting with speeches, luncheons and dinners, participating in community events and gaining support for candidates. In later years, she became a vice-president at MGM.

Unsurprisingly, throughout her career, her loyalty to Monroe was unending and as far as the actress was concerned, she was always reluctant to speak. For weeks after Monroe’s death, she received several offers, most notably from the
New York Journal-American
newspaper, requesting her to tell her side of Marilyn’s story. She spurned them all. ‘Marilyn paid me my
salary during her lifetime,’ she remarked to the Hollywood columnist Mike Connolly, ‘and I’m not going to write any post-mortems about my best friend.’ She touchingly kept her word, and does so to this day.

Peter Lawford was never able to truthfully put pen to paper about the incident. He was aware that, if he did, he would have to confirm to the world that he had utterly failed the actress in her time of need. Regardless of the original, highly publicised reports that Joe DiMaggio Jr was the actress’s last caller that night, there is no doubt that Lawford was the very last person to speak to Monroe, by way of that 8.20pm telephone call. Moreover, we can totally disregard the accounts of Marilyn’s short-lived boyfriend, José Bolaños, garment millionaire Henry Rosenfeld and hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff, and of Marilyn’s self-proclaimed best friend, Jeannie Carmen, who all claimed to have spoken to the actress on the night she died – Rosenfeld at 9pm, Guillaroff at 9.20, Bolaños (from a bar in Santa Monica) at 9.30 and Carmen at 10. Since Marilyn had passed away by 8.40pm, it was impossible for them to do so.

Fearing recriminations, Lawford would, to begin with, deny making that last call to Marilyn. However, close friends of the actress knew he had done so and proceeded to make it public, telling Dorothy Kilgallen who decided to announce it publicly in her syndicated column just three days after Monroe’s death. She brazenly wrote, ‘They [the friends] also have it figured out that Peter talked to her over the telephone after Joe DiMaggio Jr, not before, as Peter indicated when he blithely told the investigators that she sounded sleepy but otherwise perfectly fine.’

Gossip of Lawford’s shortcomings spread throughout Tinseltown within days of her death, and most of the Broadway/Hollywood crowd began maliciously referring to him as ‘The man who failed Marilyn Monroe the most.’ His name was mud at every bar, grill, dinner party and film set. In March 1966, reporters discovered that Lawford had been furtively visiting the actress’s crypt and depositing three fresh, yellow daisies, one of the actress’s favourite flowers. He would harbour guilt about her death for the remainder of his life.

Lawford was nevertheless responsible for originating one of the most persistent myths concerning Marilyn’s last hours – that of her immortal, final words, ‘Say goodbye to Pat [his wife], say goodbye to the President and say goodbye to yourself because you’re a nice guy.’

His con actually began the day after her death. On Sunday 5 August, during a heated discussion with Lady Lawford about Marilyn’s death (she forthrightly told him he could have done more to help her), the actor, in a determined attempt to mollify his mother, suddenly announced that the actress had actually ended their conversation with a special message.
However, it wasn’t the famous line we all know. Tailored to be more flattering towards Lawford himself, it began life as, ‘Say goodbye to Pat, say goodbye to Jack [JFK] and say goodbye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy, Charlie.’ (Charlie was the nickname given to Lawford by his fellow Rat Pack members because of his cigarette cough, which reminded them of the character Charlie the Seal in the 1942 Abbott and Costello film comedy,
Pardon My Sarong
.)

And thus the legend of Marilyn’s last words was born. Missing completely from his interviews with the
San Francisco Chronicle
of Thursday 8 August 1962 and the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
of August 1962 (in which he insinuated that it was he and not José Bolaños who was the last person to speak to the actress), as well as from pre-1970s biographies of the actress, it would actually take Lawford nine years to release full details of the actress’s supposed final line.

In 1971, at a time when his career was heading for the doldrums and high-profile acting jobs were almost non-existent (bit-parts in television shows such as
Bewitched
,
The Virginian
and
The Doris Day Show
were among the highlights), he began basking in his glorious past, particularly in the fact that he had been the very last person to speak to Marilyn Monroe. Seeing it as a way of resurrecting his failing career, he wasted no time in resurrecting his ‘final phone call’ ruse to anyone who would listen. Having once gone to great lengths to deny it, he was now revelling in the fact.

In October of that year, he recounted his highly exaggerated story to the veteran author Earl Wilson, who published it for the very first time in his Hollywood expose,
The Show Business Nobody Knows
. The tale gained extra impetus a little over two years later when the writer reiterated it in his January 1974 publication,
Show Business Laid Bare
. Now, almost four decades on, the fictitious farewell speech has successfully managed to worm its way into the public consciousness, Monroe folklore and practically every book, magazine and television programme ever produced about the actress. But the truth is, she never said it. The goodbye speech was a figment of Lawford’s guilt-riddled imagination, produced to appease his mother’s fury.

At 5pm on Thursday 16 October 1975, following the publication in
Oui
magazine of an article titled ‘Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?’ by the investigative reporter Anthony Scaduto, in which the Los Angeles Police Department was severely criticised for its original handling of the case, the division was finally spurred into interviewing Lawford for the very first time. The setting was his then home at 1006 Cory Avenue, Los Angeles. But the information he provided was essentially worthless. No longer a part of the Kennedy clan, but with a close friendship with JFK’s widow
Jacqueline to consider, he vehemently denied that Bobby Kennedy had been in Los Angeles during the weekend of 4 and 5 August 1962 and misleadingly claimed to have called Marilyn on that Saturday evening just to ascertain why she hadn’t yet arrived at his home.

Moreover, at that time, according to his former manager, Milton Ebbins, he was already losing touch with reality and almost always ‘out-of-it’ on alcohol, cocaine and other mind-bending drugs, a totally unreliable eyewitness to almost everything that had transpired in his volatile past. Evidence of his inability to recall the night of Marilyn’s death had come in 1974 during an interview with the reporter Ken Hood, in which Lawford disclosed that his wife was away ‘in New York’ and that Marilyn had been invited to his home that night to ‘play a game of poker’.

His next recollection has a ring of truth about it – ‘Her manner of speech was slurred . . . Her voice became less and less audible’ – but what followed did not. He then claimed that he began yelling at her in an attempt to revive her, describing it as a ‘verbal slap in her face’. The report quoted Lawford as correctly saying he had a ‘gut feeling that something was wrong’ and revealed that he still blamed himself for not going over to her home.

The fact that Lawford told the police that, on the night of Marilyn’s death, he had ‘tried to convince her to forget about her problems and join him and his wife, Pat for dinner’ further corroborates Ebbins’ accusation. The actor had evidently forgotten that Pat was away that weekend with her brother, John, and various other members of the Kennedy family in Hyannis Port.

Also made to suffer for the loss was Dr Greenson. Hate mail began arriving at his home and office immediately after Marilyn’s passing, calling him a ‘criminal’, ‘a communist quack’ or a ‘Hollywood murderer’. He took her death badly. Evidence of this came on Sunday 15 August 1962, when, in a letter to the actress’s close friend Norman Rosten, he typed, ‘It is so hard to write about because writing makes it all so real and all so final and one keeps hoping it isn’t true or permanently true. I think I can accept the fact that Marilyn died, but it is so hard to believe that we will never see her again or hear her . . . ’

The lives of Murray, Newcomb and the Kennedys, as well as, albeit under an intolerable weight of guilt, those of Lawford and Greenson, were indeed continuing. Meanwhile, on the morning of Sunday 5 August 1962, Marilyn Monroe’s body lay flat out on a stainless steel mortuary table. All that awaited her was her autopsy and burial. Her body was still warm when Kay Gable became the first friend and celebrity to pay tribute to the fallen star. ‘I heard the [news] flash over the air at 7am [Pacific
Daylight Time],’ she solemnly declared. ‘I went to mass this morning and prayed for her.’

Tributes were naturally relentless for the rest of the day. Director George Cukor was the next to comment. ‘I just can’t think. It’s infinitely sad. Very tragic. There had been some talk of resuming production on the picture [
Something’s Got To Give
] but nothing was definite. I don’t think the actual disappointment of the film led her into this. I think she had these problems all her life which she tried to conquer. The great pity is, was I as helpful as I could have been? This is what one thinks when something like this happens.’

Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen spoke as a friend when she remarked, ‘When I first heard Marilyn was dead, I said, “Oh no, it can’t be,” which is what almost everyone else said. But, as the voice on the telephone filled in the details, I found myself thinking, “Of course, of course. This is the way it would have to be, nude, the pill bottles, the record player, all alone . . . ”’ Immediately after hearing of the actress’s demise, the British actor, singer and
Let’s Make Love
co-star, Frankie Vaughan furiously declared, ‘Hollywood has got to carry the can for this.’ His accusation was naturally shot down by those in Tinseltown. In another comment, Cukor blasted, ‘It is an awful lot of nonsense the charge that Hollywood claimed her life . . . Hollywood, in a sense
created
her.’ His opinion was shared by John Huston, director of
The Misfits
. ‘The girl was an addict of sleeping pills and she was made so by the God-damn doctors,’ he proclaimed. ‘It had nothing to do with the Hollywood set-up.’ A columnist for the Hearst Corporation concurred. ‘Man, those head-shrinkers, pro and amateur, sure did a great job on that poor dame, didn’t they?’

Possibly the most revealing remarks about the actress came from her former acting coaches, Lee and Paula Strasberg. In a statement prepared that morning, they correctly hypothesised, ‘She did
not
commit suicide. We have no doubt that what happened was an unfortunate accident. She did have trouble sleeping but the pills didn’t help her a great deal.’ Tellingly, they added, ‘She had not taken any for a long time and she must have taken an overdose by accident. If it had been suicide, it would have happened in a quite different way. For one thing, she couldn’t have done it without leaving a note. There are other reasons, which we cannot discuss, which make us certain she did not intend to take her life.’ (The latter was an obvious reference to Marilyn’s firing of the Strasbergs on Thursday 2 August.)