Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

  The phone then went dead, Lawford told the police in 1975. He assumed Marilyn had hung up, tried several times to call her back, and found the number consistently busy.

  In 1982 Lawford told a similar story to the District Attorney’s investigators, with variations. He now said there was no second conversation, that the number was busy when he tried to call back. It stayed busy for half an hour, so he called the operator. Told the phone was off the hook, he became seriously concerned. By this time, according to one of his servants, Lawford was also very drunk.

  A member of the Suicide Prevention Team, Dr Litman, said he learned that, after the last call from Marilyn, Lawford placed a call to Washington.

  Lawford said he wanted to go himself to check on Marilyn, but first turned to his agent, Milton Ebbins, for advice. Ebbins confirmed that this conversation occurred, though accounts differ as to whether Ebbins was present at supper or whether Lawford called him at home. He said he told Lawford it would be a mistake to go, and promised instead to call the attorney Marilyn shared with Frank Sinatra, Milton Rudin, who also happened to be Dr Greenson’s brother-in-law.

  Ebbins said he reached Rudin at another party, and Rudin, who was interviewed by police in 1962, said he received the call at about 8:45 P.M. He said Ebbins told him of the cause for concern and he agreed to call Marilyn’s house. About fifteen minutes later he did call, and the phone was answered by Mrs Murray.

  Rudin turned down an interview request during research for this book, so we must make do with what he told the police three days after Marilyn died. According to the police report, he said he had asked Mrs Murray ‘as to the physical well-being of Miss Monroe, and was assured by Mrs Murray that Miss Monroe was all right. Believing that Miss Monroe was suffering from one of her despondent moments, Mr Rudin dismissed the possibility of anything further being wrong.’

  Eunice Murray agreed that Rudin called, but insisted the lawyer said nothing about the troubling call Marilyn had supposedly had with Lawford. She assumed it was merely a casual inquiry and, without checking on Marilyn, said all was well. According to this version, that was effectively that. Mrs Murray would then doze till about 3:30 A.M., then awake, find the door locked, and call Dr Greenson in alarm.

  The rest would be history, except that this scenario presents some major problems. First, consider two questions, two weak points in the public account. They concern motivation.

  All these years later, we still do not know why Murray became concerned about Marilyn in the middle of the night. Given that, according to her, Rudin had said nothing to arouse concern about Marilyn, is it really likely that the mere sight of a telephone extension cord under Marilyn’s door would have sent Murray rushing to the telephone to wake Dr Greenson in the early hours of the morning?

  A memoir ghosted by a Murray relative, Rose Shade, tells merely that ‘some sixth sense warned Eunice of danger.’ That is not easy to accept.

  With Mrs Murray the question is ‘Why?’ In the case of Peter Lawford, it is ‘Why not?’ Why, after his worrying telephone conversation with Marilyn, did Lawford not simply get in his car and make the short trip to her house?

  Lawford’s answer was that he called his agent, Milt Ebbins, and that Ebbins told him, ‘You can’t go over there! You’re the brother-in-law of the President of the United States. Your wife’s away. Let me get in touch with her lawyer or doctor. They should be the ones to go over.’

  Ebbins backed up the gist of this story, but does it ring true? If, as Lawford always maintained, there was no Marilyn involvement with the Kennedys, why did he feel it necessary to start a complicated chain of phone calls? Why did Ebbins feel the matter was so sensitive? There really was no reason not to respond naturally, and simply go to see Marilyn.

  The next snag is the problem of timing — both of Mrs Murray’s actions and of the activity at the Lawford house. Here the stories collapse in a mess of inconsistencies, which, once unraveled, help resolve the bigger questions.

  Mr and Mrs Naar, who offer the most cogent account of the evening, said they left the Lawford’s supper party fairly early, ‘well before eleven.’ They were home, and getting undressed for bed, when they got an unexpected call from Lawford. He said he was worried because ‘Marilyn had called to say she had taken pills, perhaps too many. She herself had expressed concern that perhaps she had overdone it.’

  Lawford asked Joe Naar to stand by to go to check on Marilyn, and Naar agreed. Then, said the Naars, Lawford called again to say there was, after all, no cause for alarm. The Naars went to bed.

  The Naars’ evidence is vital, because it shifts the whole drama to a much later point in the evening. Both Mr and Mrs Naar are adamant that, during the supper party, between eight and soon after ten, there was no talk of concern for Marilyn, not a word about ‘good-bye’ phone calls. Had this drama started already, they insist, they could not have failed to hear about it. It was an intimate gathering, and they knew Lawford and Marilyn well. Yet, until the Naars left the Lawford house, all was calm.

  The evidence of Bullets Durgom, the other known guest, is consistent with the Naars over the vital question of timing. He said it was late that evening, when he and Lawford were sitting around drinking, that Lawford declared his serious concern about Marilyn. It was then, Durgom said, that inquiries were started.

  Here we must turn back to Mrs Murray. Immediately after the death, Dr Greenson wrote to friends saying Mrs Murray had first noticed a light on in Marilyn’s room at midnight. She had then, as Greenson understood her, dozed off again till her ‘sixth sense’ woke her again about 3:30 A.M.

  In the very first press quotation attributed to her, Murray spoke of first seeing the light on ‘at midnight’. The first officer on the scene, Sergeant Clemmons, said Murray told him she had first become alarmed ‘at midnight.’

  In a long initial interview with this author, she told me — three times — that she had wakened to discover the body ‘about midnight.’ Pressed on the point, Murray backtracked, saying the events of that unhappy night may now be jumbled in her mind.

  Mrs Murray agreed there was a lengthy delay in calling the police, but laid that delay at the doctors’ door. ‘They had much to talk about,’ she said, ‘on how it could have happened, no doubt having to do with how many tablets they had prescribed for her.’ Yet Dr Greenson’s earliest statements to the police, and his correspondence, say flatly that the first he knew of a crisis was the call from Mrs Murray at 3:30 A.M.

  There is a great difference, actually and in the ordinary perception of a witness, between midnight and half past three. If Mrs Murray did realize Marilyn was dead or in serious trouble at midnight, and if she did not call Dr Greenson then, what did occur between the late evening and the early hours of the morning?

  That mystery may well have been resolved, thanks to the discovery of new witnesses with startling, fresh information.

  Arthur Jacobs, the head of the company which handled Marilyn’s public relations, was never questioned about what happened on the night of her death. He was long dead when this book was being prepared, but his widow, Natalie, offered a firsthand account that completely changes the story.

  As we have seen, the Jacobses were close to Marilyn. They spent a great deal of time with her in the last months, nursing her through her troubles and listening to her unhappy story of love for the President and of meetings with Bobby Kennedy.

  Natalie Jacobs would never forget the night of August 4, 1962. It was the eve of her birthday, and she and Arthur went to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl that Saturday night. They sat under the stars listening to Henry Mancini’s orchestra, and piano duets by Ferrante and Teicher.

  It was a fine night, and Natalie was in love. She and Arthur were not yet married, and this was a rare peaceful evening undisturbed by the demands of Hollywood clients. Then, toward the end of the concert, the peace was interrupted. Someone — she thought one of the staff of the Hollywood Bowl — came to Jacobs with a message. It was from Pat Newcomb, Natalie
believed, and the news was that Marilyn was dead.

  ‘We got the news long before it broke,’ said Natalie. ‘We left the concert at once and Arthur left me at our house. He went to Marilyn’s house, and I don’t think I saw him for two days. He had to fudge the press.’

  Natalie Jacobs was absolutely certain the news of Marilyn’s death reached them before the concert ended. A check in the Los Angeles Times for that day shows that the concert had begun at 8:30 P.M.; it certainly ended well before midnight. Natalie Jacobs believed they had the news by 11:00 P.M.

  Reminded that according to the version given to the police and for public consumption, Marilyn’s body was not discovered till 3:40 A.M. the next morning, Natalie replied, ‘Allow me to tell you why. My husband fudged everything — I cannot tell you why. I was not there. I was at home. That was his business.’

  With this new evidence, a great deal falls into place. It is now obvious why the various guests at the Lawford house heard nothing about alarming phone calls with Marilyn during the early evening. We can now see why Lawford called two of his guests, the Naars, only after they had returned home, to ask them to stand by to go and check on Marilyn. And if the truth was now to be ‘fudged,’ we can see exactly why he called back to tell them not to bother.

  It is time, too, to turn for a moment to the medical evidence. Professor Keith Simpson was keenly interested to learn that Marilyn’s body was already stiff, in rigor mortis, when Dr Greenson entered her room at about 3:40 A.M. Professor Simpson said, ‘Rigor mortis only shows after four to six hours, which places her death well before midnight.’

  Marilyn sounded befuddled when she spoke to various friends between eight and ten o’clock that Saturday night. It seems most probable that it was soon after 10:00 P.M. that she slipped into a terminal coma. It is highly unlikely, though, that she simply lay dead in her bed until Mrs Murray’s call to Dr Greenson in the early hours.

  Another piece of evidence strongly suggests that this timing is correct, that the true drama began long before Greenson was alerted. The evidence indicates that others were present at the house long before Marilyn’s psychiatrist, and that, for a while, they hoped she might survive.

  In 1982, during the District Attorney’s review of the case, investigators learned the entirely fresh information — never even hinted at before — that an ambulance was called to Marilyn’s home that night.

  The DA’s staff talked to a former ambulance driver called Ken Hunter, who in 1962 worked for Schaefer Ambulance, the biggest private ambulance company in the Los Angeles area. He said he attended Marilyn’s home with an assistant, ‘in the early morning hours.’ He said — to the DA’s men at any rate — that Marilyn was already dead. As the crew left, the police were arriving.

  Hunter told the author he saw no doctors or police. He seemed evasive, and refused further contact after an initial call. He had told the District Attorney that he thought his assistant that night had been an employee named Murray Liebowitz. So the author traced Liebowitz, who had changed his name to Leib.

  The telephone interview with Leib began with a series of silences on his part, even on whether he had once driven for Schaefer Ambulance. When I explained my interest, he said, ‘I don’t want to be involved in this. … I wasn’t on duty that night. I heard about it when I came to work next morning. … I’m not worried about anything, there’s nothing to worry about. Don’t bother to call me anymore.’

  The late Walt Schaefer, then still running the ambulance company he had founded, gave several interviews for this book. He confirmed, with utter certainty, that a Schaefer ambulance was called to Marilyn’s home. Asked whether Murray Liebowitz was one of the crew, he said, ‘I know he was.’

  Schaefer said he learned of the Monroe call the next morning, and that the bill was subsequently paid by her estate. ‘We’d hauled her before,’ he recalled, ‘because of the barbiturates. We’d hauled her when she comatosed.’

  The ambulance company chief then added the most remarkable detail of all on the events of the fatal night. He said the ambulance ‘took her to Santa Monica Hospital. She passed away at the hospital. She did not die at home.’

  Walt Schaefer did not remember with certainty who arranged for the ambulance or whether anyone accompanied Marilyn to the hospital. His company only kept records for five years, so there was no way of documenting the episode. Initial research at Santa Monica Hospital has bore no fruit. The staff have changed many times since 1962, and it may be that the emergency room personnel never knew who they were treating — if indeed Marilyn ever reached the hospital.

  Many questions remain. Who called the ambulance? Who was able to accomplish the quiet return of a dead Marilyn to her home — before Mrs Murray sounded the alarm at 3:30 A.M.? If this was done, how to explain the telephone found in Marilyn’s dead hand?*

  Testimony suggests that several people may have been at Marilyn’s home before that hour. Natalie Jacobs said Arthur Jacobs was there within an hour of leaving the Hollywood Bowl, probably by 11:30 P.M. Several people placed Milton Rudin, the lawyer, at Marilyn’s house in the middle of the night.

  Lawford’s agent, Ebbins, who said he called Rudin earlier in the evening to raise the first alarm, said the lawyer called him at four in the morning — before the police were called.

  ‘“I’m at Marilyn’s house now,”’ Ebbins quoted Rudin as saying, ‘“and she’s dead.” And do you know, no one has ever mentioned Rudin being at her house? He was there.’

  Interviewed in 1973, Pat Newcomb also said she heard news of Marilyn’s death ‘around four,’ from Rudin, calling — she thought — from Marilyn’s home.

  In 1982, in a statement to the District Attorney’s staff, Peter Lawford for the first time injected into his story the precise time at which he heard the death news, and how. He said he was wakened at 1:30 A.M. by a phone call from Ebbins, passing on news from Rudin that Marilyn was dead. Lawford said he was ‘sure he received the verification at 1:30 A.M. because he looked at the bedside clock at the time of Ebbins’ call.’

  Ebbins, for his part, said he indeed tried to pass on the news to Lawford — but not till 4:00 A.M., and he said he got no response from Lawford’s phone. ‘I called but I couldn’t get anyone,’ Ebbins said. ‘The phone didn’t answer. …’ Had Peter Lawford gone out? And if so, what was his purpose?

  *New information, dealt with in the Postscript, may explain the matter of the telephone.

  49

  BEFORE DAWN ON THE morning of Sunday, August 5, about 5:00 A.M., the radio crackled into life at an apartment in Hollywood used by one of the most effective and discreet security men on the West Coast. He talked only on the written understanding that his name not be used, but five intensive interviews, and complex crosschecks, confirmed his background and expertise, and indicated that he was telling the truth.

  The radio call, said the security man, was a summons from Fred Otash, the Hollywood private detective whose name has been linked with surveillance of Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers. Otash, as he readily admitted, was a man for hire. On this occasion, ironically, the mission called for a cover-up on behalf of the Kennedys.

  It took the security man some twenty minutes to get up and drive to Otash’s office. There, he said, he found Otash in the company of Peter Lawford, ‘squirming like a worm in a frying pan.’

  The briefing was intense and to the point. The security man was told that Marilyn was dead, that she had tried the night before to reach the President at the White House — he had, in fact, been at Hyannis Port over the weekend — and that she had done so in the midst of great upset over Robert Kennedy.

  According to the security man, ‘Lawford said Monroe had been in a rage about being used and refused. She did not want to be treated as a piece of meat.’ The security man understood that Marilyn had left some sort of note, which had already been removed. His job, he was told, was to check her house, especially for papers or letters, that might give away her affairs with the Kennedys. He was also to
try to discover potential sources of leaks, and take action to silence them.

  Fred Otash, faced with the security man’s statements, said, ‘I know that [the security man] has been saying that I called him up in the middle of the night, and that we had a meeting with Peter Lawford and discussed clearing up after Marilyn Monroe died, and well, my response to that is, “I will neither confirm nor deny it.” All I’ve got to do is say that, and I’m going to end up in front of a grand jury.’*

  The consultant says he judged the assignment impracticable, but he was to be well paid — thousands of dollars were involved. He had excellent police contacts, as I confirmed, and by about nine o’clock he was able to walk into Marilyn’s house with a police officer.

  The policeman was from another division in the city, and had no proper business at the house. He was nervous, and the two men spent only twenty minutes on the scene. The security man therefore had no chance to perform his task, and left empty-handed. Before leaving, however, he noted an important detail — a filing cabinet in the garden room had been forcibly opened.

  Bills submitted to Marilyn’s estate by the A-1 Lock and Safe Company show that during the summer she had the lock changed on a filing cabinet at her home. Joe DiMaggio’s friend, Harry Hall, who accompanied him to the house later on Sunday, says DiMaggio ‘looked for what he referred to as a book, and it was gone. All her personal notes were gone.’

  The security consultant, called to meet Lawford that Sunday morning, learned that ‘Bobby Kennedy had been at Marilyn’s house sometime Saturday, and was at Lawford’s house sometime in the evening. They had tried to talk her into coming to the beach house. I understood Bobby had been in town and then got out by what Lawford referred to as the Air Force. I think he left soon after Marilyn’s last call.’