Those who scorned murder theories pointed to the fact that Marilyn had tried suicide before, and was plainly on the way to destroying herself. Her life story certainly demonstrates that. Still, murder theorists would retort, what safer way to murder a test pilot than by sabotaging his aircraft? What easier way to murder Marilyn than by simulating suicide?
Norman Mailer wrote: ‘For anyone who wished to embarrass the Kennedys profoundly, and begin perhaps a whispering campaign which would destroy them by ’64, how perfect a move to kill Marilyn in just such a way as to make it look like suicide in the first reports. As a suicide, however, it is so clumsily staged that by the second week every newspaper would be hinting at murder. That could do the Kennedys an unholy damage. Given the force of underground gossip … who would believe they had nothing to do with it? Even loyal Democrats might begin to wonder.’
As he admitted to the author with regret, Mailer wrote on the basis of little research. It was a gamble for a great writer, and one for which he was rightly attacked. Now that the research is done, however, Mailer looks far from foolish.
In a real sense, outside the requirements of justice, it does not matter whether Marilyn was murdered, whether she died by her own hand, or — as is just possible — overestimated her capacity for Nembutal. The key to the events surrounding her end lies in the word ‘scandal.’
It has been said that President Kennedy’s womanizing, and the mob’s knowledge of it, may ultimately have led to his assassination in Dallas in November 1963. In summer 1962 womanizing — and the loving and leaving of Marilyn — left the Kennedy brothers open to a different sort of assassination. Failing proof, jurists have said, we must sometimes assemble the evidence in piles, then consider their comparative size. For the historian, that is a legitimate exercise.
The piles of information in this book leave no doubt that the Kennedys took a perilously cavalier attitude toward sex, perilous because the evidence shows that their enemies knew, watched, listened, and waited for an opportunity to expose them. Murder or not, Marilyn’s death was such an opportunity.
It was wonderfully lucky for the Kennedys that the press failed to investigate Marilyn’s passing in 1962, that the job was left to right-wing scandalmongers with a limited audience. Luck, though, is perhaps an ill-chosen word. The circumstances of Marilyn’s death, which very much involved the Kennedys, were deliberately covered up.
*Press coverage shows that, ludicrously, photographers were able to trample through the house before it was sealed. One unpublished picture, traced by the author, clearly shows a bottle bearing the words: ‘Engelberg … 7.25.62 … 0.5 gms … at bedtime.’ The name of the drug is indecipherable, but this was probably the chloral hydrate, which did reach the Coroner’s office.
Trysting place. Marilyn met both Kennedy brothers at Peter Lawford’s California beach house. This rare photograph, showing the President [seated center), was taken by a neighbor in 1962.
The President at midnight — returning to his New York base, the Carlyle Hotel. Marilyn, reportedly was one of his female visitors there.
“Happy Birthday, Mr. President …” Madison Square Garden, May 1962.
The psychiatrist. Dr. Ralph Greenson, in whom Marilyn confided about her Kennedy affairs. He and his family befriended her in her final months of distress.
The last birthday and the end of a career. Marilyn, thirty-six that day, leaves Twentieth Century-Fox for the last time on June 1, 1962. Her companion is comedian Wally Cox.
Three months before the end. Marilyn had once said, “Gravity catches up with all of us.”
A place to die. The house in Brentwood, the morning of August 5, 1962. The room where Marilyn died lies behind the tree on the left. Twenty-four hours earlier she had sunk into deep depression after a messenger had delivered a toy tiger — perhaps the stuffed animal here seen abandoned on the grass.
Death in a bottle. The Coroner’s office never received some of the pills that littered Marilyn’s room. The bottle above bears the name of her internist, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, and is dated 7.25.62., eleven days before the end. It probably contained chloral hydrate, which helped kill Marilyn. The floor is heaped with scripts and a Western Union telegram offering fresh work. The glass object beside the bed may or may not be a water container. In an incomplete investigation, it was never properly identified.
Marilyn in death. The photograph, taken after autopsy, bears a police file number. The facial discoloration occurred after death, and it is the surgeon’s work that caused her face to sag. Before the procedure, say those present, the lifeless Marilyn remained beautiful.
46
IN THE WEEKS AFTER MARILYN’S death, autopsy surgeon Thomas Noguchi was troubled by things other than forensic detail. From his chair in the Hall of Justice, he said, he ‘had the strong feeling that the case was being delayed, and that the scene of death had been disturbed.’
In 1962, before Coroners’ investigators were introduced, a forensic pathologist had to rely on law-enforcement sources for relevant evidence other than the dead body itself. Noguchi said, ‘It seemed to me, from all I observed, that it’s very likely the Police Department did close things down. I’ve encountered this often in my experience, in deaths involving important people. …’ The facts support his hunch.
On the morning Marilyn died, and before her house was sealed, experienced reporters saw the familiar beginnings of a police inquiry into an unnatural death. ‘It was a typical police scene,’ recalled James Bacon of the Associated Press, ‘with the cops checking things, making chalk marks, measuring, and so on.’ Many photographs were taken, the Los Angeles District Attorney determined during his 1982 review. According to a retired police officer, who wished not to be named, fingerprints were lifted. Joe Hyams, for the New York Herald Tribune, saw detectives covering Marilyn’s bedroom ‘with large, canvas, evidence-preserving cloth.’
At this earliest stage, it seems, the inquiry was being conducted by detectives of the West Los Angeles Division, because the death occurred in their jurisdiction. Meanwhile, just as Police Chief Parker had told his wife he intended, headquarters began its own investigation. Although never publicly revealed, it lasted for weeks.
Thad Brown, the Chief of Detectives summoned from his weekend retreat when Marilyn died, was a man who insisted on staying in personal touch with his men and the cases they were investigating. ‘Thad involved himself personally in the Monroe case,’ recalled one of Brown’s senior staff, former Inspector Kenneth McCauley. ‘He was particularly interested in it. The boys did their homework.’ Brown’s brother and son, both former policemen themselves, confirmed this.
Brown’s adjutant, ‘Pete’ Stenderup, handled the Chief of Detectives’ paperwork. ‘Thad followed through considerably on that one,’ he remembered. ‘If any guys that were working on it wanted to see him, I was to make sure they got in to see him. If anything written came in, I made sure he got it. I remember anything from three to eight pages a day for weeks and weeks. These were notes, what we called “fifteen/sevens,” officers’ memoranda. They were confidential, not part of the package that can be subpoenaed into court — the informal suspicions as to what might have happened. Robert Kennedy was mentioned frequently in those reports. …’
Brown was not personally running the Monroe inquiry. His responsibility was Homicide, and — perhaps thanks to the early forensic indications — his men never got the case. It was sent instead to another legendary figure, Captain James Hamilton, head of the Intelligence Division. He handled the matter in an atmosphere of secrecy that cut off his most trusted employees.
Hamilton’s top aide, Lieutenant Marion Phillips, said, ‘We knew about the inquiry, but we didn’t get in on it at all. It was too damned hot. Captain Hamilton and Chief Parker were conferring on it. It went on and on, and weeks later the file went to the Chief.’
Twenty years on, virtually nothing remained of the blizzard of paperwork that went across police desks. In 1974, after a new surge of public interest in
the case, Kenneth McCauley, by then Commander, had requested a search for the Monroe records. Homicide Special Section informed him that:
RHD [Robbery and Homicide Division] has no such records. Investigators contacted West Los Angeles Division and were informed that they had no crime reports in their files pertaining to Miss Monroe’s death. …
The report concluded that the vacuum was the innocent result of routine file destruction every ten years. A year later, after press allegations that Chief Parker had blocked the Monroe inquiry to curry favor with the Kennedys, the then Police Chief asked Organized Crime Intelligence to make a fresh search. They found that even the routine Death Report, the most basic record of an unnatural death, was missing from the files. Officers began a somewhat humiliating paper chase across the city.
The Death Report, along with a handful of other documents, was finally located in a suburban garage. Chief of Detectives Thad Brown, never satisfied with the outcome of the case, had squirreled away a few documents from the early stages of the investigation. His son now handed them back to the Intelligence team, who duly collated them and reported to the Office of Operations.
In 1979, in an apparent follow-up to the 1975 inquiry, a note went to Captain Finck of OCID (Organized Crime Intelligence Division). It reads:
The case folder prepared for Chief Gates is on file in OSS; the case folder in OSS contains all the reports in this folder, plus additional information and photographs.
OSS (Office of Special Service) was used for oddball jobs that did not fit normal categories. Since the Police Department found it so hard to keep track of things, it seems sensible to record where the surviving Monroe file was last sighted. It would, of course, be interesting to examine the full file, along with its ‘additional information and photographs,’ but the Police Department has not welcomed research on Monroe.
The man who supervised the 1975 review of the case was Daryl Gates, then Director of Operations. In 1984, as Police Chief, he refused to release the police file on Marilyn’s death. It was, he said, ‘retained in a confidential file.’ Subsequently, as this book was being published, he did release what appears to be part of the original dossier.
Lieutenant Marion Phillips, the former senior desk man in Police Intelligence, did not know what happened to the original files. He was told in 1962 that Chief Parker ‘had taken the file to show someone in Washington. That was the last we heard of it.’
After Parker’s death, in 1966, the Republican Mayor of Los Angeles, Sam Yorty, asked the Police Department to send over the Monroe file; he had heard the Kennedy rumors and was curious. The police told him simply, ‘It isn’t here. …’
It would be wrong to imply that Chief Parker broke his tradition of iron integrity over the Monroe case. On the evidence, it seems more likely that — presumably satisfied murder was not involved — he passed the file on to a higher authority, thus washing his hands of the matter. That would account for the Chief’s weary gesture to his wife weeks later, when he simply drew a question mark in the air.
The Police Department was not the only authority to investigate Marilyn’s death. In 1982, after a fresh burst of public controversy, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors asked the District Attorney’s office to review the case.
The specific cause of this review was a public statement by a former Coroner’s aide, Lionel Grandison. He had claimed publicly that he had been pressured into signing Marilyn’s death certificate when he worked in the Coroner’s office in 1962. Because he had been a County employee, the Board of Supervisors felt his allegations should be examined.
Assistant District Attorney Ronald Carroll investigated Grandison’s claims, and some other aspects of the case. He did not find Grandison credible, and disposed of some red herrings that had been raised over the years. He then concluded — and was at pains to point out his careful qualification — that ‘based on the information available, no further criminal investigation appears required into Miss Monroe’s death.’
The Carroll enquiry, however, did discover that the District Attorney’s office was actively involved after Marilyn died. During research for this book, the Deputy DA assigned to the case at the time, Jon Dickey, steadfastly avoided discussing the matter. Specifically, he would not say whether he tried to interview Peter Lawford or Robert Kennedy. No trace of his inquiry can be located in existing files.
Research, however, revealed that a number of reports were made in 1962 by the DA’s Investigator, Frank Hronek, who — as we noted earlier — had earlier observed both Marilyn’s contacts with mobsters and the nocturnal goings-on at the Lawford house. Today there is no trace of Hronek’s reports in the DA’s files.
According to his family, Hronek died suspecting that organized criminals were involved in the events surrounding Marilyn’s death, and that there was indeed linkage to the Kennedy affairs. He specifically mentioned mobsters Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, and said the Central Intelligence Agency intervened at some stage. Hronek suspected Marilyn had been murdered.
In 1962, within thirty-six hours of Marilyn’s death, Coroner Curphey asked that ‘all available information’ be passed to the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center. Next day the Center’s founder, Dr Norman Farberow, said, ‘We are interviewing anybody and everybody. We will go as far back as is necessary.’ Two days later, as he was saying that his inquiries had no limitations, the Los Angeles Times reported: INQUEST POSSIBILITY LOOMS. Next day the New York Herald Tribune headline was WHAT KILLED MARILYN? PROBE WIDENS.
Quite suddenly, the investigation died. On August 12, exactly a week after Marilyn’s death, the headline in the San Francisco and New York press — but not in Los Angeles — read BARE MYSTERY ‘PRESSURES’ IN MARILYN PROBE. Florabel Muir, a veteran police reporter, wrote that ‘strange pressures are being put on Los Angeles police … sources close to the probers said tonight. … The purported pressures are mysterious. They apparently are coming from persons who had been closely in touch with Marilyn the past few weeks.’
Five days later Coroner Curphey closed down the case. Seventy newsmen were summoned to hear him and the Suicide Prevention Team announce the verdict of ‘probable suicide.’ There was plenty to say about pills, and past history, and probable time of death. Newsmen went away satisfied, and that was that.
Dr Greenson, struggling with his ethical conscience, had tried to tell the truth. He had assisted the authorities when they came to him, and nothing had happened. Now he was left to be the target of malicious gossip.
Two years later, caught on the run by a reporter, Greenson would say, ‘I can’t explain myself or defend myself without revealing things that I don’t want to reveal. It’s a terrible position to be in, to say I can’t talk about it. I just can’t tell the whole story.’
Pressed to say more, Greenson ended the conversation with an abrupt: ‘Listen … talk to Bobby Kennedy.’
The exchange was preserved on audiotape.
47
THE KEY TO THE ‘WHOLE story’ may have been the silent witness grasped in Marilyn’s stiff fingers when Dr Greenson stepped in to find her dead — the telephone. It was a dramatic angle, and the press pounced on it. So, before the abrupt end to their investigation, did the Suicide Team.
The Team’s chief, Dr Farberow, wanted to ask Greenson whether, before he hung up the phone, he heard a dial tone or silence, indicating a broken connection. Had Marilyn died talking to someone, and who? By the second day there were banner headlines about the ‘Mystery Phone Call,’ and the star of the show — for a while — was Eunice Murray.
In her personal press interview Murray said she ‘thought Marilyn might have been phoning someone when she saw that the light was on in Marilyn’s bedroom as she went to bed at midnight.’
As early as 8:00 A.M. the next morning, Mrs Murray was being quoted on radio broadcasts as saying she ‘saw a light shining under Miss Monroe’s door.’ Just how Murray knew the light was on, since she agreed later the pile of the new carpet allowed no light to
shine through, has been a bone of contention. To see the light, she would have had to go out into the yard and look at the windows.
Murray was to maintain that it was not the light, but the sight of the telephone extension cord, snaking across the hall and under the door, that drew her attention. Whatever she saw, the telephone mystery became a major news item.
Murray was quoted as saying of the call, ‘I don’t remember what time it was and I don’t know who called her, but Marilyn seemed disturbed about it. …’ How Murray knew the call disturbed Marilyn, when she said she last saw her around eight o’clock, is another moot point. She told the author she could not remember the call at all.
As the banner newspaper headline became HUNT MYSTERY FRIEND, one of Marilyn’s friends came out of the woodwork. The Kennedy brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, issued a statement through his agent, Milt Ebbins. ‘At approximately 7:00 P.M.,’ said Ebbins, Lawford ‘called to invite her and her friend, Pat Newcomb, to attend a small dinner party at his home.’ He says Miss Monroe told him she would like to come but that she was tired and was going to bed early. In a personal interview, Lawford said, ‘There didn’t seem to be anything at all wrong with Marilyn. She sounded fine.’
Whatever the truth of the Lawford tale — and he was to change it as time went by — it was certainly not, as one newspaper claimed, ‘the end of the mystery.’ If he called at seven, whose call ‘disturbed’ Marilyn much later that evening?
In 1962 the authorities successfully snuffed out further speculation about the telephone. ‘There was no mystery call,’ said a member of the Suicide Team at Coroner Curphey’s final press conference. The police, for their part, had blandly announced that Marilyn ‘received no telephone calls at a time which might have been related to her death.’ Sergeant Byron, the detective who had initiated the inquiries at Marilyn’s house, said flatly that Lawford’s call was the last Marilyn received.