Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (95 page)

Greenson and Murray were less than forthcoming and much less than consistent in subsequent accounts over the years. But two telephone calls provide important clues to a final resolution of the mystery surrounding Marilyn’s last night.

The first call came from Joe DiMaggio, Jr., who persisted in his day-long effort to get through to Marilyn. He finally succeeded between seven and seven-fifteen, when she picked up the telephone and the two had a pleasant conversation during which he informed her that he had decided to break his engagement to a young woman Marilyn did not like.
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As Joe, Jr., told police, he found her alert, happy and in good spirits—especially when he shared this news. Their chat lasted about ten minutes. Even Eunice Murray confirmed that during this conversation Marilyn was “happy, gay, alert—anything but depressed.” Greenson repeated a similar impression: he said Marilyn called him after hearing from Joe, Jr., and that she sounded “quite pleasant and more cheerful.”

The second call came from Peter Lawford, still hoping to persuade Marilyn Monroe to attend his little supper party. Lawford spoke with Marilyn soon after Joe, Jr.—at seven-forty or seven forty-five—and heard a woman in a very different condition from that heard by Joe, Jr.

Lawford heard Marilyn muttering in thickened speech, her voice slurred and almost inaudible. Distressed and disoriented, she frightened Peter, himself no stranger to the effects of barbiturates, alcohol and other drugs, and familiar with Marilyn’s own habits in this regard. Attempting to rouse her to consciousness, he shouted her name several times over the telephone, asking what was wrong. Finally, with a great effort, she seemed to inhale, and then Marilyn Monroe said, “Say goodbye to Pat, say goodbye to the president, and say goodbye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.” At that point, Lawford said later, “I really started to get angry and frightened.” Oddly, Marilyn whispered, “I’ll see, I’ll see,” and then she was silent.

Thinking Marilyn had hung up the telephone, Lawford immediately tried to call Monroe back, but he heard only a busy signal that engaged the line for the next half-hour. When he asked an operator to interrupt the conversation, he was told that the phone was off the hook or out of order. Frantic, he telephoned Milton Ebbins, who had also been invited to and declined the now defunct supper party. “Peter was obviously deeply concerned,” Ebbins recalled—and he would remain concerned through the evening, despite repeated assurances from several people that Marilyn was well and there was no cause for alarm.

There was, of course, very much cause for just that.

In less than a half hour, something terrible happened to Marilyn Monroe, as the coroner later noted:

Monroe was laughing and chatting on the telephone with Joe DiMaggio’s son . . . and not thirty minutes after this happy conversation, Marilyn Monroe was dying. . . . This was one of the strangest facts of the case.

Peter Lawford understood her few words as indicating that she was dangerously drugged or even dying. Something was so wrong and different that he was convinced this was not what some people later claimed—a cry of “Wolf!” With panic in his voice, he then tried to
obtain help for her from whomever among his friends he could enlist. And in this effort he persisted so fiercely that even an eventual call from no less than Milton Rudin was not enough to allay his fears.

First, there was Ebbins:

Peter said, “Let’s go over there [to Marilyn’s house]. I want to go over there right away—I think something terrible is happening to Marilyn.” But I said, “Peter, don’t do it! You’re the president’s brother-in-law! If you go over there, if she’s drunk or drugged or something, you’ll see headlines all over the place and you’ll get yourself involved. I’ll tell you—let me call Mickey Rudin, and if he says so, then you can go, because otherwise, if you go, you’re really opening a can of worms.”

Ebbins then called Rudin—a logical choice, since he was Marilyn’s attorney—reaching his office at eight twenty-five. He learned that Rudin was attending a party at the home of Mildred Allenberg, the widow of Sinatra’s agent, and Ebbins called Rudin there. “Rudin asked me to let him check it out—to see if there was any trouble,” Ebbins recalled. “So he telephoned Mrs. Murray.” With this account Rudin concurred: “I did not call [Greenson]. He had had enough, quite frankly. He had spent the day with her. But I did call the housekeeper.”

Rudin reached Eunice at about eight-thirty or a few moments later, in the room at the guest cottage. After asking her to check on Marilyn, he waited “for about four minutes, and then she came back to me and said, ‘She’s fine.’ But I had a feeling she never went out to take a look.” Rudin’s intuition served him well, as Eunice’s account of his call suggested: “If only [Rudin] had told [me] that he had received a worried call from someone,” she lamented in her book. “If only . . . ,” then
what?
She would have actually taken the trouble to ascertain Marilyn’s condition? But in her memoir, Eunice wrote nothing about Marilyn’s nonresponse: she did not say that she went to the door, that she knocked, called out to her—nothing.

Rudin then called Ebbins and reported his conversation with Eunice; Ebbins in turn reported to Lawford. Still, Lawford was neither satisfied nor convinced: becoming more and more drunk as the evening
progressed (and Ebbins knew from subsequent calls), he persisted in his anguished concern for Marilyn, calling other friends to enlist help.
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Among these was Joe Naar, who lived on Moreno Avenue, a half-mile from Fifth Helena. Lawford called him at about eleven, asking him to drive over to determine Marilyn’s welfare “because she sounded as if she might have overdosed,” as Naar said later. As he was dressing to do just that, Naar received another call—this time from Ebbins, countermanding Lawford’s request and saying that everything was fine: Rudin had just contacted him to the effect that “Marilyn’s doctor has given her a sedative [thus Naar, quoting Ebbins] and she was resting. The doctor was Greenson.”

While Ebbins continued to keep people away from Fifth Helena, Lawford repeatedly sounded the alarm, calling Asher as late as one o’clock Sunday morning, imploring him to make the trip to Marilyn’s house. Only at one-thirty did Lawford desist in his efforts—because by then he had learned the truth in a telephone call from Ebbins, who had heard the news from Rudin. According to Lawford, Rudin had telephoned Ebbins at exactly that time from Fifth Helena, where Rudin and Greenson “had found Marilyn dead at midnight.” Lawford’s confidence as to the time was based on his simultaneous glance at a bedside clock.

In fact, according to Milton Rudin, Marilyn was dead before midnight. He recalled, in his first full discussion of this night for the record, that he returned home early from the Allenberg dinner party and before he prepared to retire, he received a call from his brother-in-law Ralph Greenson: “I got a call from Romey. He was over there. Marilyn was dead.” Rudin said he drove at once to the scene.

The brief timespan during which Marilyn’s death must have occurred becomes narrower still in light of another telephone call, this one received by Arthur Jacobs at the Hollywood Bowl, where he was attending a concert with the producer Mervyn LeRoy and his wife, and with
the actress Natalie Trundy—later to be Mrs. Arthur Jacobs—on the eve of her birthday. “At about ten or ten-thirty,” according to Natalie Jacobs,

someone came to our box and said, “Come with us right now, please, Mr. Jacobs. Marilyn Monroe is dead.” That I will never forget. Arthur asked the LeRoys to take me home. I don’t know why, but I had the distinct impression it was Mickey Rudin who called Arthur at the Bowl, and that he [Rudin] had been called by Greenson from Marilyn’s house.

Well before midnight, then, several people close to Marilyn were aware of a terrible disaster and were moving to control it.

According to Natalie Jacobs, Arthur arrived at Fifth Helena, conferred with those already present and then departed. The burden of the worldwide public-relations tangle that was soon to begin would be handled by Marilyn’s friend, Pat Newcomb. Pat was not at home that evening and could not be reached until several hours later. She was finally informed of Marilyn’s death about five o’clock Sunday morning by Rudin. “I remember his exact words,” according to Pat. “He said, ‘There’s been an accident. Marilyn has taken an overdose of pills.’ I asked, ‘Is she okay?’ and he said, ‘No, she’s dead. You’d better get over here.’ That I remember.”

These firsthand reports fully contradict the entire official report of Marilyn Monroe’s death, which depends on Ralph Greenson’s and Eunice Murray’s versions of the events.

To be accepted, the accounts of Greenson and Murray relied on the consensus that no one thought there was anything amiss until around three o’clock Sunday morning, August 5—fully ninety minutes after Lawford’s telephone call from Ebbins and almost five hours after the news was reported to Jacobs.

At three, Eunice said, she awoke, “for reasons I still don’t understand” (as she said with her typical blend of feigned innocence, coy vagueness and a
soupçon
of bogus mysticism). She then noticed a light under the door to Marilyn’s room, tried to open the door, found it locked and then, her concerns aroused, telephoned Greenson. He instructed
her to take a fireplace poker, then to go outside the house and part the draperies through the open grille-covered front casement windows, to see if Marilyn was asleep and apparently well. Eunice did as she was told and saw Marilyn lying nude and motionless on the bed. This she reported back to Greenson on the telephone. He rushed over and, using the same fireplace iron, broke a second, unbarred window (on the side of the house), which he unlatched, thereby climbing into Marilyn’s bedroom. A moment later he unlocked the bedroom door from within to admit Eunice, saying quietly to her, “We’ve lost her.” At three-fifty, Greenson telephoned Engelberg, who pronounced Marilyn dead. At four-twenty-five, the two doctors then called the police, who arrived at the house ten minutes later.

The first flaw in the story was the idea that light shone under the door: new, deep-pile white carpeting had recently been installed in Marilyn’s bedroom, so thick that for two weeks it had prevented the door from being fully closed, which it could not be until a slightly pressed arc was worn into the carpet. No light could be seen beneath the door. Confronted with this later, Eunice quickly amended her account to say that she became alarmed when she noticed the telephone cord leading under the door.

But there were even more serious problems.

For one thing, there was never an operating lock on Monroe’s door, a fact Murray conceded years later in written correspondence. On February 9, 1987, archivist and genealogist Roy Turner wrote to Eunice (whom he had befriended), asking, “Was Marilyn’s door locked when you found her?” She replied in one handwritten word following his question: “No.” This would have been entirely true, for Marilyn never locked her bedroom door; leaving the door unlocked had been a lifelong habit, especially reinforced since the Payne Whitney experience. “She didn’t lock doors,” Pat said years later. “I never thought about that, but it’s true.” Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan concurred.
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Moreover, the idea that Eunice parted the draperies of Marilyn’s bedroom window with a fireplace poker and found the actress, sprawled dead across her bed, is impossible to accept. The window coverings were not draperies but the heavy blackout fabric from Doheny Drive, nailed across the casement and beyond both sides of the window by Ralph Roberts soon after Marilyn moved in. Disturbed by the slightest light when trying to sleep, Monroe had them installed in one piece: there was no part in the middle for Eunice to push aside even if the windows had been open.

The question of timing also proved troublesome for Eunice. When she was interviewed by Sergeant Jack Clemmons, the first police officer arriving on the scene at four-thirty-five on the morning of August 5, Eunice said she had called Greenson to the house at about midnight. But soon she must have realized the problems this would cause, for Greenson had not called the police until four and a half hours later. And so, by the time a detective interviewed her later that Sunday morning, she changed the time of her call to Greenson to three. The summons at about midnight would, however, have been consistent with the news reported to Lawford by Ebbins, that Rudin and Greenson were at the house before one-thirty, and that Marilyn was already dead.

Greenson told the police the same story as Murray, but his version never changed because he agreed to be interviewed but rarely, never wrote a memoir and was never challenged. The failure in both versions to mention the presence of Milton Rudin further damages the credibility of Greenson’s account.

The weakness of this official version effected many results, not least among them a series of fantastic conspiracy theories, the inventions of nefarious plots and counterplots, government-inspired murder and so on. The problem is obvious for any theory involving the FBI, the CIA, organized or disorganized crime, the Kennedys or Kennedy cronies: there is simply no concrete evidence to support any such claim.
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The psychiatrist and the housekeeper always neatly escaped scrutiny themselves—he because of his accomplishments, prestigious position and canny retreat behind the curtain of professional confidence, and she by virtue of a brilliantly calculated public image, reinforced via print and television interviews, as a dear little old lady.

But as their individual histories and their actions that final evening revealed, and as the medical record would soon confirm, it was these two alone who had something to hide.

1
. In a desperate move to save the picture, Fox had decided to replace Cukor.

2
. See FBI File # 77-51387-293, dated August 6, 1962 and registered August 21, 1962.