The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (61 page)

At the request of one of their supervisors, Mike Antonovich, the Board ordered John Van Der Kemp, Los Angeles’s District Attorney, to investigate charges made by Lionel Grandison, a former coroner investigator, that there were irregularities in the original inquiry and that he may have been ‘pressurised’ into signing the actress’s death certificate. He had also been quoted as saying the original 1962 investigation was incomplete and that a red diary, which detailed Marilyn’s relationship and conversations with the late Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy and her knowledge of CIA activities, had disappeared while at the coroner’s office.

In response to the growing speculation, Antonovich remarked that the allegations were serious enough for the District Attorney’s office to look into them. The board unanimously concurred that if any of the charges were substantiated the case would be referred to the Grand Jury. The District Attorney’s office meanwhile moved quickly to say that no investigation into the actress’s death was under way other than a review of statements made in a seven-part series which had appeared in
The New York Post
and which chronicled the strange circumstances surrounding Marilyn’s passing. At the behest of the county board of supervisors, Assistant Deputy District Attorney Mike Carroll was placed in charge of the investigation.

Interestingly, Theodore Curphey, the coroner in charge of the original 1962 inquiry, chose not to be a part of this new probe and even refused to co-operate with the investigators. ‘I’ll be goddamned if I’ll get involved,’ he told a DA investigator. Yet the District Attorney did not even serve him with a subpoena. Why? Was it because he knew far more about Monroe’s death than he had revealed back in 1962? Furthermore, why didn’t the investigators pursue him and insist that he participate? Regrettably, we’ll never know. Curphey passed away in November 1986.

The inadequacies of this new investigation did not end there. The County Board of Supervisors did not even bother to interview homicide detective Sergeant Robert Byron, the officer who had taken over from Sergeant Jack Clemmons on the morning after Marilyn’s death and the man responsible for filing the police report that evening. But individuals such as Dr Hyman Engelberg and the ambulance drivers that night, Rick Stone and Ken Hunter
were
questioned. Ralph Greenson regrettably was not. He had died of heart failure three years earlier in November 1979.

The investigating team began by asking themselves, ‘Was there a murder that night?’ Dr Noguchi’s original autopsy report was re-examined
and the few surviving police photos taken that evening were scrutinised. The probe accumulated a total of 309 documents and over five hours’ worth of audio-taped interviews. But after just three and a half months, the fresh inquiry into Marilyn’s death was closed down. In December that year, Mike Carroll issued a statement which said that there was ‘no credible evidence supporting a murder theory’. The report added, ‘There was a possibility that the death had been accidental, but suicide was more likely.’ When asked by the CBS
60 Minutes
show in 2006 if there had been a cover-up surrounding Marilyn’s death, Carroll replied, ‘As there was no murder, there was nothing to cover up, other than embarrassing information or connections.’ Regrettably, that was an area the team failed to examine.

Summing up, the reinvestigation uncovered no evidence of foul play, but concluded that the original probe into Marilyn’s death had not been conducted properly. It was determined that the officers who arrived at the actress’s home in Fifth Helena that night had failed to secure the scene; people freely came and went, possibly contaminating or destroying evidence. The reinvestigation also revealed that (as Dr Thomas Noguchi revealed) all lab work, tissue samples, and test results from the autopsy had disappeared from the county coroner’s office immediately after the official ruling had been made public. (Noguchi claimed that misplacement of samples had
never
happened in another case, before or since.) The report also confirmed, as I detailed in a previous chapter, that Monroe’s body may well have been moved after her death, as lividity (settling of blood) had appeared in different parts of her body at different times. But in truth, the new investigation was hampered from the start. Practically all the original police files pertaining to Marilyn’s death had been destroyed in compliance with departmental procedures.

Other documents relevant to the case were also missing, notoriously Marilyn’s telephone records. Due to where the actress lived, at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains, every call she made from her home in Brentwood was classed as long-distance and therefore logged. Following the announcement that she had been found dead in her bed clutching a phone, reporter Joe Hyams, working on another piece for
The New York Herald Tribune
, was determined to see her records and discover to whom she was talking just before she perished. So too was Florabel Muir, a crime correspondent employed by the huge, New York-based media conglomerate, the Hearst Corporation. However, their endeavours would prove to be fruitless. Someone had beaten them to it. As an employee at the General Telephone Company in Brentwood announced to Hyams at the time, ‘All hell’s broken loose down here. You’re not the only one interested in Marilyn’s calls.’

It appears that, immediately after her death, and with extreme discretion, Marilyn’s direct-distance dialling records were impounded by Secret Service men, described as wearing ‘dark suits’ and ‘well-shined shoes’. Her demise had now become a ‘highly secretive, intelligence division operation’. As Hyams would remark, to his knowledge, it was the first time that someone’s phone records had been seized so fast to protect someone or something. The key to this benevolent cover-up was surely the protection of Bobby Kennedy.

Acting on the orders of J. Edgar Hoover and LAPD Chief William H. Parker, records of her final calls were confiscated by Captain James Hamilton who, as noted by the Kennedy Library, was a very close friend of the Attorney General. Four months after Marilyn’s death, Parker supposedly took a 723-page file about the actress’s death, which included details of her phone records, and showed it to ‘someone’ in Washington. Curiously, according to correspondence held in the aforementioned library, on Wednesday 12 December 1962 Parker met with Bobby Kennedy at the College Park Motel in College Park, Maryland for what was described as a ‘mutual matter of interest’. The cover-up over Marilyn’s death was well and truly underway at this point and, naturally, Parker was the chief organiser.

Endeavours by reporters to see this file took an unfortunate twist on Saturday 16 July 1966, when, at a convention of the Second Marine Division Association in the Pacific Ballroom of Dallas’ Statler Hilton Hotel, in front of more than 1,000 Marine veterans, and just moments after he had received a plaque citing him as one of the nation’s foremost police chiefs, Parker collapsed to the floor and started to gasp. He was rushed to the Central Receiving Hospital but was pronounced dead 35 minutes later at precisely 11.10pm. He was 64. Immediately after his demise, journalists believing his death would now lift the veil of secrecy surrounding Marilyn’s last phone calls, descended on Parker’s office only to find them missing once again; an unnamed, recently resigned intelligence man from the FBI had beaten them to it, broken in and made off with the file in which they were contained.

The file mysteriously reappeared 16 years later when, in 1982, the investigators at the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office were handed a copy by the Los Angeles Police Department. By this time, however, its original 723 pages had been whittled down to just 54. (It is highly likely that the first case file had been destroyed some 20 years earlier. Fresh searches for it, on both hard copy and microfilm, were undertaken by the LAPD on Tuesday 27 August 1974 and Wednesday 22 October 1975. Their trawls, however, would prove to be fruitless.)

Interestingly, the remaining pages from the original 1962 investigation
did not derive from the police department, but from the home of former Chief of Detectives Thad Brown, Chief Parker’s successor. Brown had passed away 12 years earlier in October 1970 and had apparently once remarked to Virgil Crabtree, the US Treasury’s assistant chief of intelligence in Los Angeles, that a White House number, scribbled on a piece of crumpled paper, had been found among Marilyn’s bed sheets on the night she died. Therefore he firmly believed (incorrectly as it would turn out) that she had tried calling President John Kennedy in the moments before she died and was desperate to keep the fact a secret. As we know, the actress did indeed attempt to speak to Kennedy that day, but it was hours, not minutes before she passed away.

Announced as being found among Brown’s own ‘private archives’, the details of Marilyn’s final phone calls were actually found in a file stored among other possessions in his garage at his home. Through the dogged determination of many recent Monroe biographers, most notably Milo Speriglio and Anthony Summers, details of the actress’s last phone calls are now much clearer. However, a great many pages of the original 1962 file are still missing.

Moreover, on Thursday 19 August 1982, just eight days after the new investigation had started, actor Ted Jordan, a star of television’s classic, long-running western series
Gunsmoke
, came forward to claim he had the actress’s red diary. ‘I hesitated to say anything [about it] for many, many years,’ he announced to the press, ‘because I was afraid.’ However, serious doubts were cast on his claims when, following Jordan’s revelation, Chris Harris, a spokesman for the Beverly Hills antique dealer Doug Villiers, announced that he had upped his $100,000 offer to $150,000 for the item and even arranged an appointment with the actor to discuss it. But Jordan did not show up. Mike Carroll even went public, declaring he would like to discuss the diary with Jordan. His calls were, curiously, not returned.

A further attempt to reopen Marilyn’s case came on Monday 28 October 1985, when, at a news conference held shortly after he resigned as foreman of the Los Angeles County Grand Jury, Sam Cordova called for a new investigation, saying that two rulings of suicide had left unresolved questions. The Board of Supervisors asked the jury to consider such an inquiry. However, the District Attorney, Ira Reiner, was uninterested, contending that there was no need for a new probe, and remarked that Cordova was making the plea for a special prosecutor so as to gain personal publicity. It was, as Reiner asserted, ‘the swan song by a man hungry for popular attention’.

Their opinion has not changed 15 years on, in 2010. In the eyes of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, on the night of Saturday 4
August 1962 (or on the morning of Sunday 5 August), Marilyn Monroe committed suicide because, quite simply, she was depressed. Los Angeles police officials concur with this, insisting they have no reason whatsoever to doubt it. Despite numerous requests by historians and fans alike to exhume her body for a fresh, modern-day, all-answering DNA test (examination of her fingernails or a few strands of hair would be able to determine whether poisons or paralysing drugs were present in her body at the time of her death, resolving the matter once and for all), the Board’s decision is final and the chances of them changing their opinion is now extremely remote.

Chapter Twelve

Goodbye, Marilyn

Sunday 5 August 1962–Wednesday 8 August 1962

E
arly on the morning of Monday 6 August, police in New York cordoned off Marilyn’s 444 East 57th Street apartment, seized the assets within and placed them in the police department’s property clerk’s office, pending any court action of her will. (They would remain there for five years, until the third week of November 1967.) The sealing, a normal procedure in out-of-town deaths, was ordered by the actress’s New York attorney, Aaron R. Frosch. The police’s inventory noted 41 items, including four fur coats (one of which was a white ermine), seven stoles, a number of fur hats and several articles of jewellery, namely diamond pins, earrings, rings and gold charms, one of which evinced the inscription, ‘Don’t be bitter – Glitter’.

Assessors would place a value of $1,423 on the fur and jewellery, and of $11,057 on her personal effects, clothing and furniture. Cash totalling just $3.50 was also found. It was no better at Marilyn’s other home at Fifth Helena, where clothing and personal effects totalling just $1,550 and furniture and fittings amounting to just $2,486 were found.

In Los Angeles, one day earlier, the coroner’s office had received a telegram from Gainesville, Florida. It was from Berniece Miracle, Marilyn’s elder half-sister and, due to her mother’s illness, the actress’s next-of-kin. It announced that Joe DiMaggio would be taking care of the actress’s body.

The search for Marilyn’s immediate family members was being handled by mortuary employee Lionel Grandison. He had located her mother, Gladys, in nearby La Crescenta but was told by the director of the Californian sanatorium where she was institutionalised that she was incompetent. The suggestion to contact Miracle came from Mrs Inez
Melson, Monroe’s former business manager and now conservator of Gladys’ estate. However, when Grandison contacted Miracle, a telegram came back authorising the release of Marilyn’s body to either Melson or Joe DiMaggio. She had neither the resources of strength to handle such matters. And so, with Melson too declining responsibility, it was down to good old, ever-dependable Joe to take charge of this emotive matter.

DiMaggio was in San Francisco with his brothers Dominic and Vince for a baseball Old-Timers Show at Candlestick Park when he learnt the tragic news. His sister, Marie, had informed him after hearing the summary in a radio bulletin. DiMaggio had just finished eating breakfast when the phone call came through. Moments later, there was another. It was Grandison, asking him if he would be prepared to come to Los Angeles to ‘identify Marilyn’s body’. He agreed. ‘He just walked out without a word,’ Dominic remembered. DiMaggio went back to his room and called Miracle. She asked him if he would begin making arrangements for the funeral. ‘Yes,’ he replied,’ and she announced she would ‘arrive [in Los Angeles] as soon as possible’.