The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (60 page)

His ambiguity ended when Curphey startlingly, and quite suddenly, announced the first findings of Raymond J. Abernathy, the principal toxicologist on the case. ‘Marilyn died from a massive overdose of drugs nearly
twice
[emphasis added] that needed to kill her.’ (The toxicologist’s actual statement to Curphey was ‘Her [Marilyn’s] blood stream contained nearly twice as much barbiturate as necessary to kill a person.’) This dramatic admission was reproduced in practically every major newspaper around the world (including the British tabloid, the
Daily Mirror
, on Saturday 11 August), but hardly anyone was inquisitive enough to query further Curphey’s announcement. One American-based reporter, though, was.

Moved by this extraordinary statement and the inexplicable delays on the case, he was propelled to investigate further. His article, published on the front page of the
San Francisco Chronicle
on Sunday 10 August 1962, became one of my most remarkable discoveries during my research. There, in clear, bold black and white, was the headline: ‘Strange Pressures On Marilyn Probe’. The report, which emanated from
The New York Times
, read as follows:

‘Strange pressures’ are being put on Los Angeles police investigating the death of Marilyn Monroe, sources close to the probers said last night. ‘This is why,’ the sources said, ‘Coroner Theodore J. Curphey has failed thus far to make public just what poison was found by toxicologists in the stomach of the 36-year-old actress. That is also why police investigators have refused to make public the record of phone calls made from Miss Monroe’s home last Saturday evening, hours before she took an overdose of sleeping pills. The police have impounded the phone company’s taped record of outgoing calls. The purported pressures are mysterious. They are apparently coming from persons who had been closely in touch with Marilyn in the last few weeks . . . Normally in suicide probes, the record of such phone calls would have been made available to the public within a few days.

Without any shadow of a doubt, in the knowledge that Marilyn had attempted to contact President Kennedy and had seen his brother Bobby just hours before she died, the US Government had taken a keen interest in the case and was determined to oversee the proceedings. (Curphey had bowed to similar pressure three years earlier, when on Tuesday 23 June 1959, at a press conference in Los Angeles, he declared that the
Superman
television actor George Reeves had committed suicide with a self-inflicted gun shot, despite the fact that many, including his mother, firmly believed that he had actually been murdered.)

One week later, on Friday 17 August, after almost two weeks of probing, the verdict was finally reached in the Monroe inquiry. In a small, scruffy room, into which 30 newsmen had packed, Los Angeles coroner Theodore Curphey began by announcing that Marilyn ‘had suffered from psychiatric disturbances for a long time’ and had ‘experienced severe fears and frequent depressions’. His report continued with the declaration that her ‘mood changes were abrupt and unpredictable. Amongst symptoms of disorganisation, sleep disturbance was prominent, for which she had been taking sedative drugs for years and was familiar with and experienced in the use of sedative drugs and was well aware of the drugs. [In July, with Greenson] Miss Monroe had been taking psychiatric treatments, resulting
in an effort to reduce her consumption of the drugs and it was partly successful during the last two months.’

With Dr Norman Farberou sitting dependably by his side, he went on to confirm that Monroe had died from ‘acute barbiturate poisoning . . . remnants of the drug pentobarbital [Nembutal] sleeping pills were found in her liver and chloral hydrate was found in her blood . . . [and] there was no distinguishable physical evidence of foul play . . . Miss Monroe had unwittingly and unfortunately played the greatest role of her career. The method of her death may accomplish some good by bringing to the attention of the public the work being done in Los Angeles County to help those who are contemplating self-destruction.’

His team of suicide investigators, he explained, had said that Marilyn may not have intended to die when she took the overdose; their findings showed, he said, that she had ‘more than once tried to kill herself when she was disappointed or depressed’.

His announcement complied with reports released the previous week, which stated that Monroe had previously tried to commit suicide four times, twice before she was 19. The psychologists said that, after each of the earlier attempts, Marilyn had called for help and had been saved. They added that the pattern of events leading up to the actress’s passing on the evening of Saturday 4 August was the same except for the fact that this time she was not rescued. ‘We have learned that Miss Monroe had often expressed wishes to give up, to withdraw and even to die.’ (In a 1982 interview with the investigators carrying out a fresh probe into the actress’s death, Dr Hyman Engelberg flatly rejected this allegation. ‘I’m not aware of any deliberate suicide attempt,’ he insisted. ‘I was only aware of the one time when she currently had too much to drink and had taken possibly slightly more than she should have [a reference to the July 1962 weekend at the Cal-Neva]. But that was
not
a suicide attempt.’)

Basically corroborating Dr Thomas Noguchi’s findings, Curphey then announced that ‘Marilyn’s death was caused by an overdose of the sedative Nembutal. She received a prescription for about 40 or 50 tablets only three days before her death. The bottle was found empty in her room . . . Now that the final toxicological report and that of the psychiatrist consultants have been received and considered,’ he concluded, ‘it is my conclusion that the death of Marilyn Monroe was caused by a self-administered overdose of sedative drugs and the mode of death is probable suicide.’ The adjective ‘probable’ was used because Marilyn left no suicide note. The policy of the coroner’s office was to qualify the word ‘suicide’ unless the victim had left a note.

Asked by a member of the press whether the actress was ‘quite disturbed’ when she died on Sunday 5 August (
sic
), Farberou replied indirectly by
saying, ‘I can tell you this. I think it would be safe to speculate on the fact.’ He also admitted that his team’s investigation had uncovered certain ‘conflicts’ in Marilyn’s personality. ‘I am not at liberty to tell you what is in the report,’ he admitted, ‘but we did investigate fantasies and thoughts of death and dying.’

When Dr Curphey announced to the world’s media that Marilyn’s death was down to a ‘probable suicide’, however, Noguchi flipped. He immediately rushed to Dr Robert Lipman, the chairman of the suicide prevention team assigned to the actress’s case, and demanded to know how he could possibly say that Marilyn’s death was a ‘probable suicide’ when there was no medical evidence of her ever having taken orally any sedative drugs. Lipman replied, ‘That was not really my department. I canvassed the views among Marilyn’s psychiatrists and doctors as to what they thought and studied their documentation.’ As Noguchi dejectedly remarked, ‘The actress could have swallowed the Nembutals herself and the residues of the capsules could have gone straight through and down into the large intestine. But it was
never
tested. So no one can
ever
know for sure.’

Nevertheless, the actress’s death certificate was altered according to the verdict announced by Curphey. Under ‘Mode of Death’ Noguchi had circled ‘Suicide’ but at a later date had added the word ‘probable’ in pencil. In an August 1973 interview with the Monroe biographer Maurice Zolotow, Noguchi explained how he reached this decision. ‘On the basis of my examination, plus my toxicologist report plus the report of the behavioural scientists, I arrived at the verdict of probable suicide, based on acute barbiturate poisoning, specifically an overdose of Nembutal and chloral hydrate. Either of these would have been enough to kill Miss Monroe.

‘While it is true that persons habituated to Seconal, Nembutal, Sodium Amytal, Tuinal and other varieties of heavy barbiturates sometimes lose count and accidentally kill themselves, in my experience this kind of accident, brought about by what the profession calls “automatism”, where the victim automatically consumes more pills than he/she can handle, only applies if you take three or more pills and you lose count and you may unwittingly take say, 10 pills resulting in a 1.5 per cent milligram concentration which is enough to kill you. But when there are 40 or 50 capsules involved, it indicates a deliberate intent to commit suicide.’

When asked why there were no residues of Nembutal in her stomach, Noguchi replied, ‘This is not uncommon. A person addicted to barbiturates develops what we call a “dumping syndrome”, which is to say that the stomach dumps the drugs more quickly than usual into the intestines, as the stomach is conditioned to so much Nembutal . . . It was
also common to find the stomach empty when the victim has not had any food during the time previous to the overdose.’ (True. Marilyn did not eat a thing on her final day alive.) Summing up, he correctly declared Monroe’s death a ‘clear case of barbiturate poisoning’, confirming that is was ‘self-induced as I have seen in all my years as a forensic pathologist and I would estimate that I have performed and supervised over 1,000 post-mortems.’ (Due to his subsequent autopsies on world-famous personalities such as Bobby Kennedy and the actresses Sharon Tate and Natalie Wood, Noguchi would go on to become sardonically known as the ‘coroner to the stars’.)

On Wednesday 12 August 1970, chiefly due to the reselling of television rights to her – at that time, rarely seen – 1957 movie,
The Prince and the Showgirl
, the actress finally managed to do in death what she had failed to do in life: get out of debt. On that day Aaron Frosch proudly announced to the press, ‘We’ve
finally
managed to pay off everything,’ with creditors set to receive ‘100 cents on the dollar’. With a value of $1,250,000, he went on to estimate that, from that moment on, a sum of $20,000 a year or more would roll into the estate.

However, his joy would prove premature. Just over five years later, on Tuesday 16 December 1975, Marilyn’s estate once more fell foul of the IRS when it was announced that it now owed more than $90,000 in back taxes and interest. According to the California Franchise Tax Board, in a suit filed that day in the superior court, a sum of $51,243 in taxes, between the years 1963 and 1970, was sought, in addition to $12,080 in penalties and, significantly, $27,604 interest from Aaron Frosch. It was the first time that those close to the estate had become aware of the attorney’s suspect ways. Their fears were confirmed in March 1981 when, in a suit initiated by Marianne Kris, he was sued for $200,000 for illegally plundering Marilyn’s estate. The doctor claimed that Frosch had illegally paid himself wages from the estate. (The suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.)

In 2010, thanks to royalties and the proceeds of her movies and image rights, the actress is still in the black, generating – via CMG (Curtis Management Group) Worldwide, the licensing agent for MMLLC (Marilyn Monroe Licensing Co.) – on average more than $8 million annually. Most of it goes to Anna Strasberg, Lee’s widow, whom he met at the Actors Studio in 1967 and married three months later. Lee Strasberg died in February 1982, at which point the Monroe inheritance passed onto his wife. Almost immediately, she began launching her own Marilyn Monroe licensing business, hiring the astute Los Angeles lawyer Roger Richman to secure lucrative publicity rights. It worked. In that year alone,
the Monroe estate earned $71,253. (Six years later, in 1988, it had risen to $1.1 million.)

Between 1983 and 1995, Richman struck many money-making licensing deals, among them a ‘Marilyn Monroe Boutique’ at Bloomingdale’s department store in New York, print and television adverts for Absolut vodka and cosmetics company Revlon Inc., plus an assortment of dolls, T-shirts and coffee mugs. In 2000, Strasberg created Marilyn Monroe LLC, which, in her opinion, owned Monroe’s publicity rights. She has a controlling interest in that entity; the Anna Freud Centre, a London psychiatric institute that inherited Dr Marianne Kris’s stake after her death in November 1980, owns the rest. Jeffrey Lotman, chief executive of the Los Angeles licensing firm Global Icons, announced recently that after Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and actor James Dean are the most valuable dead-celebrity brands. (At the time of writing, I have no doubt that Michael Jackson will soon feature among these.)

However, there was a severe setback for MMLLC in their multi-million dollar operations when, on Monday 17 March 2008, Judge Margaret M. Morrow, of the United States District Court, Central District of California ruled that CMG and MMLLC did
not
in fact own the ‘right of publicity’ for Marilyn Monroe, insisting that they had been playing ‘fast and loose with the courts’ simply to benefit from a recently passed California law, which granted rights of publicity to a celebrity’s estate.

Commenting on the decision, Surjit Soni of the Pasadena-based Soni Law Firm, counsel for the parties representing photographers Tom Kelley and Milton H. Greene, said, ‘This ruling reconfirms that MMLLC and CMG’s stranglehold on the Marilyn Monroe licensing business is
broken
. Licensees who have, according to
Forbes
magazine, paid approximately $7 million in royalties to CMG in 2007, which represents over $50 million in wholesale revenues, are now free to license Marilyn Monroe photographs directly from the copyright owners at a
lower
total cost and a
higher
profit potential.’ The decision paved the way for licensees to work directly with the respective owners of some of the actress’s iconic images, many of which soon gathered together under the ‘Marilyn Monroe Licensing Group’ banner at Legends Licensing LLC. The right to exploit Marilyn’s images this way was upheld by the United States District Court of New York on Tuesday 2 September 2008.

Meanwhile, the certainty of Dr Thomas Noguchi in 1973 about how exactly the screen legend died had failed to dampen the ardour of Monroe conspiracy theorists. Thanks in part to the numerous biographies and highly embellished, tell-all articles about the star which appeared at regular intervals throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, it came as no surprise
when, on Wednesday 11 August 1982, following a recent exposé in
The New York Post
newspaper and amid outcries that there had been a cover-up in the original probe, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously called for a new investigation into Marilyn’s death.