Read The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story Online

Authors: Keith Badman

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Arts & Literature, #Actors & Entertainers, #Television Performers

The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (64 page)

On the day of the funeral, three eminent Hollywood actresses – Lisa Kirk, Rosalind Russell and Carroll Baker – arrived in New York en route from Southampton, England aboard the
Queen Mary
. When waiting photographers requested them to pose, they linked arms, flashed their widest smiles and broke into a spontaneous, high-kicking dance routine. The Associated Press distributed this picture with a caption saying how ‘shocked and saddened’ by Monroe’s death the actresses were. It was a
typical Hollywood reaction: business as usual, beneath a thin coating of crocodile tears. The world was indeed carrying on and getting back to normal. Within days of the funeral, a bill for $4,352 from the Westwood Village Mortuary was dispatched to the executors of Marilyn’s estate.

At 5pm, several hours after the actress’s entombment, Los Angeles County district attorney John Miner, who had been present at Marilyn’s autopsy, paid a visit to the Beverly Hills home of Ralph Greenson. During the call, after giving his word he would not divulge its contents, Greenson apparently played to Miner a 40-minute audio-tape recording of the actress supposedly talking about, among other subjects, her father-in-law Isidore Miller, actress Mae West, fan Robert Slatzer, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and President John Kennedy. Miner would recall that Marilyn sounded ‘anything but suicidal’. ‘She had very specific plans for her future,’ he would announce years later. ‘She knew exactly what she wanted to do.’ (Dr Greenson’s widow, Hildegard, would later tell
The Times
she did not know whether the tapes existed and had never heard her husband discuss them.)

At 5.30pm, DiMaggio returned to the Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery in an automobile driven by a friend. The car stopped but he did not get out. He simply sat and stared at the mausoleum for many minutes in meditation. He wanted to say one final, private farewell to the one woman he truly loved. DiMaggio never stopped thinking about her; nor did he ever consider forgiving those responsible for her death.

Days after the funeral, DiMaggio apparently remarked to Walter Winchell, ‘If one of those Kennedys had showed up . . . I would have taken a baseball bat and bashed in their faces. All of those sons-of-bitches killed Marilyn.’ His anger towards them ran deep. Three years later, on Saturday 18 September 1965, at New York’s Yankee Stadium, he stood in a line-up honouring the 2,000th major league game played by the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle. Bobby Kennedy was in attendance, smiling and shaking the hands of everyone in the queue – everyone bar Joe, who decided to take one step back and avoid him altogether.

Joe DiMaggio’s devotion to Marilyn was evident for the next two decades. Every week until the first week of August 1982, exactly 20 years after her death, he had a standing order with the Parisian Florist store in Beverly Hills to place, three times a week, six red roses in the black metal vase at Marilyn’s grave, just as he had promised her when she told him of actor William Powell’s vow to the dying Jean Harlow. DiMaggio always paid the $500-a-year bill for Monroe’s flowers in advance.

Unlike Marilyn’s two other husbands, or the other men who knew her (or
claimed
to have known her), Joe refused to write a tell-all book or talk
about her publicly. He even declined a $50,000 offer to discuss his former wife in the popular monthly women’s magazine
McCall’s
. People knew it was taboo to even ask him about her. If anyone dared to do so, he would forcibly say, ‘
Stop
right there.’ The words would fall like a curtain in front of him.

Never remarrying, the baseball legend passed away on Monday 8 March 1999, aged 84, following complications from lung cancer. According to his lawyer and confidant, Morris Engelberg, his very last words were, ‘I’ll
finally
get to see Marilyn.’

So there we have it. In conclusion: throughout my exhaustive examination, it became copiously clear to me that, by and large, history was dutifully respectful to the legacies of the late President Kennedy, his wife Jacqueline and brother Bobby, to name but a few. Yet, aside from the multitude of devoted Marilyn worshippers around the globe, hardly ever did I come across evidence which expressed concern about how the multitude of malicious, unfounded and fabricated allegations about the actress, concocted either to protect the guilty or to line the pockets of money-hungry glory seekers, might actually tarnish
her
legacy. I found this abhorrent.

Moreover, the long-believed assertion that the actress had deliberately taken her life was, in my opinion, a slur on her extremely warm, generous and exceedingly affectionate character. In closing, I seriously hope that, some day, the charge of ‘probable suicide’ on her death certificate be changed to simply, ‘accident’. She deserves this. She has not earned the stigma which suicide brings. Now, with the results of my meticulous, five-year investigation being made public for the first time, I genuinely hope that it will go a long way towards rectifying this. Then, and only then, will you, Marilyn, be able to finally rest in peace.

I sincerely hope that, one day, you do . . .

Index

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