The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (62 page)

Later that Sunday evening, DiMaggio dejectedly boarded his United Airlines plane for California. Throughout the journey, he sat sorrowful and declined to speak to anyone. Visibly grief-stricken, lines were etched in his face when he alighted at Los Angeles International Airport at 10.37am on Monday 6 August. Refusing to make any statements to waiting newspaper reporters, he immediately went into seclusion in suite 1035 at Santa Monica’s Fairmont Miramar Hotel at 101 Wilshire Boulevard. Incessant sounds of sobbing were heard emanating from his room.

However, he did not remain there for long. He had the unenviable chore of identifying his former wife’s corpse. When he reached the county morgue, situated in the coroner’s office in the Hall of Justice, 211 West Temple Street, he was visibly shaking. An attendant greeted him at the entrance and led him down a long, silent corridor which ended with a room lit by a cold fluorescent lamp. DiMaggio found himself in a room containing 50 death compartments. Crypt number 33 was pulled out. The white sheet covering the body within was pulled back and, as he anticipated, it was that of the actress. Attached to her left big toe was a tag, which identified her as being case number 81128.

Noticing the welt of red blotches along the right side of her face, Joe nodded numbly to the questions the attendant asked and confirmed that this was indeed the body of Marilyn Monroe. His breath came in short bursts as the attendant draped the sheet back over the actress’s body. He took one more look at the woman he loved so deeply and walked out. By the time he had completed this arduous task, Marilyn’s body had been lying, unclaimed, on the cold mortuary slab for almost 21 hours.

DiMaggio, however, was not the first non-mortuary employee to see the actress’s cadaver in this post-autopsy state. It was
Life
magazine’s Leigh A. Weiner who, just nine hours after its examination, ghoulishly photographed Monroe’s body as it lay in the crypt. In the early hours of Sunday 5 August, Weiner and his colleague, columnist Thomas (Tommy) Thompson, were sent on an assignment to cover the actress’s death. While Thompson was preparing the text, Weiner drove across town to Marilyn’s home in Brentwood. He arrived to be greeted by the sight of a handful of policemen and approximately 15 other photographers.

Soon, the front door of the property swung open and Marilyn’s lifeless body was wheeled out and loaded into the back of the coroner’s black van. Weiner’s camera captured the moment, but it certainly was not the ‘exclusive’ shot his editor had requested. ‘It wasn’t much of a picture at all,’ he lamented to
The Los Angeles Times
. Using a nearby call box, he then hastily called his boss to deliver the bad news and was promptly instructed to ‘try and get a picture of the body in the morgue’ – but only on the provisos that the images be tasteful, that he should not break any laws and that he should do his utmost not to tarnish the magazine’s excellent reputation. Weiner rushed back to his car and tailed the van all the way to the morgue.

Having waited for almost 18 hours, he climbed out of his vehicle shortly before midnight on that Sunday evening, walked to the building and strode up its long corridor. In his bag, aside from his camera, was a brown paper bag containing two bottles of whisky. He asked the three on-duty guards if they knew a friend of his who used to work there, pulling the drink from his rucksack and asking them whether they would like some. Two accepted; one declined. Small talk soon gave way to the day’s big talking point: the death of screen legend Marilyn Monroe.

In an attempt to entice them further into his scheme, Weiner then suggested that, since she had died in nearby Brentwood, her body must have been brought here. At once, the teetotal member of the night crew announced that this
was
the case, adding that her body was ‘Right here, in Crypt 33,’ before asking, ‘Do you want to see it?’ But before Weiner could reply, one of the other men interjected by saying, ‘Wait a minute. Ever seen a dead body before?’ When the photographer announced he had, the men relaxed and the short walk to the actress’s body was taken. He reached the crypt just as an assistant was preparing to fasten the aforementioned tag to Marilyn’s big toe. The man opened the door of the crypt and slid the drawer out. A thin white sheet concealed the actress’s body. Just as the employee was attaching the label, Weiner asked the man if he could take a photo of it. There were no objections.

Weiner lifted his camera from his bag and began snapping away. Overcome by emotion, he was unable to restrain himself. The photo of the
toe led to another’ then another, then another, each one becoming progressively more explicit and sinister. Besides the image of the toe tag, he also managed to capture, in every conceivable angle, images of the actress’s unclad body sprawled on a marble slab, with and without the sheet. ‘Before long I had taken five rolls of film,’ he recalled for
The Los Angeles Times
. After an hour in the room, at approximately 1am, Weiner left and drove to the airport to send his undeveloped images to his magazine. DiMaggio, the next visitor to Marilyn’s crypt, would not arrive for another 13 hours.

Unsurprisingly,
Life
chose not to use any of Weiner’s images. On Sunday 22 August 1982, on the 20th anniversary of Marilyn’s death, Weiner was interviewed in the ‘Cal’ section of
The Los Angeles Times
. During the piece (from which the preceding quotes were taken), he was asked, ‘Have you ever taken a picture that bothered you?’ Without hesitation, he cited the shots he had taken of Marilyn Monroe in the crypt shortly after her death.

At approximately 2.30pm on Monday 6 August, before leaving the morgue to begin arrangements for the funeral, DiMaggio instructed that his former wife’s cadaver that be transferred to the Westwood Village Mortuary in West Los Angeles where, at 11am on Tuesday 7 August, Allan Snyder desolately arrived to administer the actress’s make-up for the very last time. Armed with a flask of gin, he adhered to a promise he had made to the star in jest in 1953 just after she had finished shooting
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
.

During a brief stay in hospital, and in response to a request for a photograph, Marilyn had summoned Snyder to her bedside to make her up. As he was doing so, she said to him, ‘Promise me something, Whitey. If anything happens to me, if I ever die, nobody must touch my face except you. Promise me you will make me up.’ He smiled and replied, ‘Just bring the body back while it’s still warm.’ The request that her personal make-up man should prepare her for her funeral replicated the scenario at the death of Monroe’s great idol, Jean Harlow, back in June 1937. Many years later, the actress reminded him of his pledge with a short engraving on a gold money clip, which read, ‘Whitey Dear, while I’m still warm, Marilyn.’

In a phone call during the afternoon of Sunday 5 August, DiMaggio rang Snyder to enquire, ‘You will do it, won’t you? You promised.’ DiMaggio had one further request. ‘Can you make her look as gorgeous as she did in the pictures?’ ‘Oh yes,’ Snyder replied. ‘I sure can, Joe.’

‘I had never made-up a dead person before,’ Snyder remarked to the
Chicago Tribune
in 1973. He arrived to find the actress spread out on a steel table. He went over and touched her on the forehead. If he didn’t, he knew fear would overcome him and he would turn and run out. ‘As soon
as I started working,’ he recalled, ‘I got so intent on doing it right, that it didn’t bother me. It was just like she was asleep.’ He put a special, rouge-coloured foundation on her face, known as the ‘20th Century-Fox’ base, and followed it with eye shadow and lipstick. ‘She looked beautiful,’ Snyder recalled in 1963. ‘She looked the way you wanted to remember her.’ In another interview, he remarked, ‘It was the hardest and best job I have ever done. I’m only sorry the general public didn’t see her.’

He completed his task in the anteroom at precisely 3pm. Just as he was leaving, he ran into DiMaggio. ‘Okay, Joe,’ Snyder affirmed. The baseball legend shook his hand and thanked him for coming. The make-up man then watched the baseball legend walk over and sit down beside Marilyn’s coffin. ‘He was alone with her many times,’ remarked a mortuary source. ‘He was a man obviously bereaved, a man still very much in love with her.’ The next morning, the day of the funeral, Snyder returned to the mortuary early to find the baseball legend still sitting in the same position. His eyes were red, watery and inflamed. Although DiMaggio had in fact returned to his hotel room late on Tuesday night and returned to the Westwood mortuary just a few hours later, at 7.30 on Wednesday morning, Snyder believed that the baseball legend had remained by his former wife’s coffin all night.

Funeral director Allan Abbott spent two days at the Westwood Village Mortuary assisting in the preparations for Marilyn’s funeral. On the morning of the service, the embalmer decided to use a surgical procedure to reduce the swelling which, through the post-mortem, had developed in the back of her neck. So he cut away some hair, made an incision and sutured it up tight. Naturally, because of this damage to Marilyn’s already thin tresses, studio hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff was summoned. ‘When she was dead, they rang me and asked me to dress her hair,’ he recalled in 1966 for
Films and Filming
magazine. ‘I couldn’t do it. But I told them I had one of her wigs left from
The Misfits
, which I could re-style the way she wore it at the end.’ Guilaroff immediately set about cutting and shaping one of the wigs and sent it over.

Eunice Murray decided the actress would want to be buried in her chartreuse, pale green Pucci dress and matching green chiffon scarf. She instinctively knew that the outfit was a favourite of Marilyn’s and fondly recalled seeing her in it at her press conference in Mexico City just six months ago. Berniece thought otherwise and suggested something in either blue or white, but Eunice stood firm. The actress should be dressed in
that
pale green outfit.

Monroe’s funeral took place at 1pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern Daylight Time) on Wednesday 8 August, at the Westwood Village Mortuary
chapel in the grounds of the Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery, at 1218 Glendon Avenue in West Los Angeles. It was only the second such event to be held in the park’s new oratory. It was said that DiMaggio chose this location as the actress’s final resting place because of its obscurity. Due to its location, within a block of houses, parking garages and high rises just off Wilshire Boulevard, the cemetery was originally almost impossible to locate and was once one of the best-kept secrets in Los Angeles. Poignantly, it stood just a mile away from 20th Century-Fox’s studios.

Marilyn’s body arrived in a new 1962 Cadillac Eureka hearse. Allan Abbott, Sydney Guilaroff, Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder and mortuary employees Ronald Hast, Leonard Krisminsky and Clarence Pierce were the pallbearers. Before entering the chapel, Joe DiMaggio gazed up towards the sky as if to say, ‘At least the sun has chosen to shine for her this day.’

Among the many floral tributes, four dozen red roses and the text of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning love sonnet had been dispatched to the cemetery by a mysterious stranger. The flowers had been ordered by a man described as a ‘theatrical gentleman in his early 30s’ from florist George Reppert at his House Of Flowers store based in New Brunswick, New Jersey. ‘The man parked a large white sports car outside (my shop), walked in and ordered the flowers,’ Reppert recalled at the time. ‘“I want $50 worth of red roses, only the best, sent to the funeral of Marilyn Monroe,” he said. He told me to sign the card, “In loving memory.” He also ordered the complete text of “How Do I Love Thee” by Miss Browning to accompany the roses.’ Regrettably, we shall never know the identity of this enigmatic individual.

The private and sombre service began with the strains of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and featured, at Marilyn’s request, Judy Garland’s classic 1939 recording, ‘Over the Rainbow’. The service was conducted by Reverend A.J. Soldan, a Lutheran minister from the Village Church of Westwood, who read a non-denominational service including Psalm 23, chapter 14 of the Book of John, and excerpts from Psalms 46 and 139. The Reverend’s service was based on the quotation, ‘How fearfully and wonderfully she was made by the Creator.’ Later, at the entombment, he intoned, ‘For as much as it pleased almighty God to take the soul of Marilyn Monroe, we therefore commit her body, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, sure and certain of hopes for eternal life.’ The Lord’s Prayer was also read.

DiMaggio’s original choice to read a tribute at the service was Marilyn’s close friend, the poet-author Carl Sandburg. Due to his poor health, he was unable to attend, but he kept his promise of writing a eulogy to the actress, which he wired from his home in North Carolina. It was delivered at the service by a tearful Lee Strasberg. In full it read:

Marilyn Monroe was a legend. In her own lifetime she created a myth of what a poor girl from a deprived background could attain. For the entire world she became a symbol of the eternal feminine. But I have no words to describe the myth and the legend. I did not know this Marilyn Monroe.

We, gathered here today, knew only Marilyn, a warm human being, impulsive and shy, sensitive and in fear of rejection, yet ever avid for life and reaching out for fulfilment. I will not insult the privacy of your memory of her, privacy she sought and treasured, by trying to describe her whom you knew to you who knew her. In our memories of her, she remains alive not only a shadow on the screen or a glamorous personality. For us Marilyn was a devoted and loyal friend, a colleague constantly reaching for perfection. We shared her pain and difficulties and some of her joys. She was a member of our family. It is difficult to accept the fact that her zest for life has been ended by this dreadful accident.

Despite the heights and brilliance she attained on the screen, she was planning for the future. She was looking forward to participating in the many exciting things which she planned. In her eyes and in mine her career was just beginning. The dream of her talent, which she had nurtured as a child, was not a mirage. When she first came to me I was amazed at the startling sensitivity which she possessed and which had remained fresh and undimmed, struggling to express itself despite the life to which she had been subjected. Others were as physically beautiful as she was, but there was obviously something more in her, something that people saw and recognized in her performances and with which they identified. She had a luminous quality, a combination of wistfulness, radiance, yearning to set her apart and yet make everyone wish to be a part of it, to share in the childish naiveté which was so shy and yet so vibrant.