‘Lawford told Marilyn Bobby Kennedy was going to be there,’ Wither recalls, ‘and that Warren Beatty* and Natalie Wood would maybe be dropping in. Marilyn said, “Who else?” and Lawford mentioned some ladies whose names she said she recognized as high-priced call girls. She got very upset about that, and asked how he dared invite her when those women were going to be there. And she hung up. … Lawford talked to her once more, after she had taken the pills, and he phoned the lawyer, Milton Rudin. …’
One of Lawford’s neighbors had been given a similar account by Lawford’s friend, producer ‘Bullets’ Durgom, who admitted having been a guest at the beach house that night.
Detective Otash, who knew Durgom, quoted him as having said that ‘Bobby was very worried about Monroe getting spaced out and shooting her mouth off. He told Peter, “Get her to your place. She won’t talk to me now, you get her to the beach.”’
Re-interviewed in 1986, Durgom denied any knowledge of this. He said Robert Kennedy was not there, but that Marilyn was expected. ‘The one thing I remember clearly,’ he added, ‘is Pat Newcomb coming in, at maybe 9.30. She stood on the step and said, “Peter, Marilyn’s not coming. She’s not feeling well.”’
Durgom said that ‘at about 10 or 11 o’clock, Lawford tried to call Marilyn and could not get through. As a result, after a call to Marilyn’s lawyer, Milton Rudin, ‘the lawyer and somebody else went over to the house … and it was too late.’
Lawford’s servant for many years, Erma Lee Reilly, said — as do supper guests Joe and Dolores Naar — that there was ‘no word of worry over Marilyn’ until she left around 10:00 P.M. Robert Kennedy was not there while Reilly was in the house.
Juliet Roswell, a former employee of Marilyn’s press agent, Arthur Jacobs, corroborates Jacobs’ wife’s statement, that Marilyn was known to be seriously ill or dead well before midnight. ‘I went out there,’ Jacobs told her, ‘at eleven o’clock.’
Dolores Naar, who had left the Lawford supper party with her husband before eleven o’clock, said she is ‘very clear’ that Lawford phoned soon after that to say ‘Marilyn’s doctor’ had given her a sedative, and she was resting.
What happened between late evening and 3:30 A.M., when housekeeper Eunice Murray finally telephoned psychiatrist Greenson? Greenson’s daughter Joan believed that — when the alarm was first raised — it was decided not to call in her father. Meanwhile, there had been activity at Marilyn’s house.
Controversy swirled around the 1985 statement by the owner of California’s largest ambulance company, Walter Schaefer, that an ambulance was called while Marilyn was still alive. He identified the ambulance crew as Ken Hunter and Murray Leib.
Leib continued to deny being on duty that night, but former driver Hunter was quoted as saying he and Leib picked up Marilyn ‘in a comatose state’.
Another Schaefer driver, James Hall, stated — initially in a paid newspaper interview — that he was on the ambulance crew that night. He places the time as ‘3 A.M. or after’. He said Marilyn’s assistant, Pat Newcomb, was ‘distraught’, and already there when he arrived, and that Marilyn was not yet dead. Newcomb denied arriving till much later, and said no ambulance men were present when she did reach the house.
Hall said he and his colleague attempted resuscitation, but were interrupted by the arrival of a man who identified himself as a doctor. The presumed ‘doctor’ took command, gave Marilyn an injection, then pronounced her dead. Hall said the police arrived as the ambulance crew were leaving.
Hall’s story receives some corroboration from his family. His father, Dr George Hall, a retired police surgeon, said his son told him of the incident at the time. Hall’s former wife and sister said the same.
There can be no doubt an ambulance was called, an ambulance never mentioned in any press or surviving police report. No less than seven former employees of Schaefer’s, one now a company Vice-President, recalled hearing about the call in 1962.
Marilyn’s regular doctor, Hyman Engelberg, claimed talk of an ambulance is ‘pure imagination’. However, he also said he thinks the time the alarm was raised ‘must have been around eleven or twelve’.
Engelberg told both ABC and a District Attorney’s investigator that he himself was called in between 2:30 and 3:00 A.M., considerably earlier than the 3:50 A.M. time reflected in the 1962 police report.
Significant corroboration that an ambulance was called came following publication of this book’s first edition from a reporter named John Sherlock. Sherlock said he had managed to bring up the subject of Monroe’s death with psychiatrist Dr Greenson, whom he had met while covering a medical convention. Greenson said Monroe had indeed been removed from her home by ambulance on the night she died.
Mrs Murray, the housekeeper, caused a sensation in 1985. While being interviewed by me for the BBC, she delivered herself of the version usually offered for public consumption. Then, as the camera crew were starting to clear up, she said suddenly, ‘Why, at my age, do I still have to cover this thing?’
Mrs Murray then astonished us by saying Robert Kennedy had indeed visited Marilyn on the day she died, and that a doctor and an ambulance had come while she was still alive. She said much the same to the ABC team.
Mrs Murray did say these things. However, while the reporters she spoke with felt she was trying to tell the truth, there were contradictions and inconsistencies in her interview.
Three years earlier, however, Mrs Murray appeared entirely lucid. In 1982, in a conversation with researcher Justin Clayton, she said she had ‘found Marilyn’s door ajar’ at about midnight. As Clayton vividly recalled, Mrs Murray then ‘stopped dead, suddenly raised her hand to her mouth, and said, “I mean, I found the door locked. …”’ In 1985, referring to her interviews with the police in 1962, Mrs Murray told me, ‘I told whatever I thought was … good to tell.’
One of the policemen called to Marilyn’s home was Marvin Iannone, who was to become Chief of Police in Beverly Hills. He refused to answer questions when approached in 1986. Former Sergeant Robert Byron, however, the homicide detective called in that night, agreed to interview.
Byron was roused from his bed around 5:00 A.M., and it took him forty-five minutes to reach Marilyn’s house. He said the only people present were the attorney, Milton Rudin, Dr Engelberg, and Eunice Murray. ‘Engelberg,’ Byron recalled, ‘told me he’d had a call from the housekeeper who said Marilyn was either dead or unconscious. He came over and found Monroe dead. The lawyer said very little. He didn’t want to discuss much about it.’ The psychiatrist, Dr Greenson, was no longer at the house by the time Sergeant Byron arrived.
Byron and his superior, Lieutenant Grover Armstrong, Chief of Detectives in West Los Angeles, conducted the main interviews. As the reports show, they had some difficulty reconciling the accounts of Mrs Murray, Dr Engelberg, and Dr Greenson, especially with regard to timing. They felt strongly enough to write in one report that Mrs Murray was ‘possibly evasive’. Byron, a veteran policeman, had been a Homicide detective for five years. ‘My feeling,’ he recalled, ‘was that she had been told what to say, that it had all been rehearsed beforehand. She had her story, and that was it.’
As for Dr Engelberg and Milton Rudin, Byron said, ‘as far as those two were concerned it was a negative result. … They were telling me what they wanted me to know. That was my feeling at the time. I was thrown by their attitude.’
All in all,’ Byron remembered, ‘I got some wild answers. There was a lot more they could have told us. … I didn’t feel they were telling the correct time or situation, but we did not do what we’d normally do, and drag them into the station.’
The investigation was not pursued further, Byron explained, because there were no signs of violence at the scene, and because the autopsy clearly reflected barbiturate poisoning. The memory of those interrogations, though, still rankled.
Byron said he heard, from police sources at the time, ‘that Robert Kennedy had come to see her. …’ That was outside the scope of
Byron’s investigation. Today, however, there is corroboration of Robert Kennedy’s departure from Los Angeles.
Following up the lead that Kennedy had left by helicopter, I interviewed the family of the late Hal Conners, who frequently flew to the beach for Peter Lawford. Conners’ daughter, Patricia, remembered her father staying out late the night Marilyn died. ‘Next morning,’ she said, ‘I remember saying, “Did you hear Marilyn Monroe died?”, and he didn’t really answer at all.’
Conners’ chief pilot, and Vice-President of the Los Angeles Air Taxi Service, was James Zonlick. Zonlick, traced in Florida, recalled an occasion when Conners picked up Robert Kennedy at the beach, and in unusual circumstances.
‘Hal told me about it about three days later,’ Zonlick remembered. ‘We got a call from the police department because there had been complaints from the neighbors about the late hour. This was the only night trip we made in there. I got the impression it was around 9:30, or perhaps as late as 11:00 P.M. Hal had picked Robert Kennedy up at the beach house and left him at Los Angeles International Airport. … He was a little pleased that we’d handled that V.I.P. sort of person.’
Ed Connelly, who also flew for Conners, had a similar memory. ‘He had landed on the Santa Monica Beach without lights,’ said Connelly, ‘It was mysterious … uncharacteristic for Hal to do that sort of thing. He was almost giggly about it.’ Neither Zonlick nor Connelly, who both became pilots for major airlines, could recall exactly when the flight occurred. Zonlick, however, believed it was probably in the second half of 1962 — the right time frame.
There is confirmation, from two sources, that Peter Lawford that night commissioned a security man to clear up evidence of the Kennedy connection at Marilyn’s house. Detective Fred Otash, who earlier refused to confirm or deny involvement, finally admitted it. He was aware of the irony, that a man involved in bugging the Kennedys should now act on their behalf.
Otash said wearily, ‘Well, Lawford came to me. I was the guy in town who sorted out personal problems for the rich and famous. I’d helped Lawford before, over a drug problem he had with the Sheriffs Department. My services were for hire, and I said we’d do our best.’
Lawford told his last wife, Pat Seaton, that he employed Otash on several occasions, including the night of Marilyn’s death.
Urgent action was taken to contain the damage Otash’s knowledge might cause. Otash said, and an associate confirms, that Secret Service agents that year ‘muscled’ him into handing over his file on Kennedy activity in Los Angeles.
There were other urgent measures to protect the Kennedys. It is no coincidence that photo agency files contain not a single picture of Marilyn with either Kennedy brother, not even of the very public meeting with the President on the night she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ at Madison Square Garden.
Globe Photos did have at least two pictures of Marilyn with the President that night. ‘In one of them,’ said a former senior executive, ‘he was looking up at her. You could see the admiration in his eyes — it was a great picture. …’
About a fortnight after Marilyn’s death, two men flashing FBI badges visited Globe’s offices. ‘They said they were collecting material for the presidential library,’ says the former executive. ‘They asked to see everything we had on Monroe. I had a stock girl look after them, and then — afterwards — we found that everything was gone, even the negatives. Believe me, over the years that loss must have cost us thousands of dollars. They took the lot.’
‘It became so sticky,’ said Marilyn’s housekeeper, Mrs Murray, in 1985, ‘that the protectors of Robert Kennedy, you know, had to step in there and protect him. Doesn’t that sound logical?’
It does indeed. In 1996, when Marilyn’s hairdresser friend Sydney Guilaroff published his autobiography, he finally opened up on what — he said — the actress told him when she phoned around 9:30 P.M. on the night of her death.
‘Marilyn telephoned me in despair,’ he wrote, ‘She rambled on about being surrounded by danger, about betrayals by “men in high places,” about clandestine love affairs …’ Marilyn sounded frantic, and told Guilaroff Robert Kennedy had been at the house, ‘threatening me, yelling at me.’ She was having an affair with Robert, she admitted that she had also had an affair with the President, and that — reneging on what she claimed was a promise to marry her — Robert was now saying their relationship was over.
According to Guilaroff, Marilyn said she had responded to being dumped by the President’s brother with a threat of her own. She had said she would ‘go public,’ hold a tell-all press conference.
Soon afterwards, apparently while making another call, Marilyn would die. As reported earlier, a number scribbled on a scrap of paper — found near her on the bed — would turn out to be a number at the Kennedy White House.
Some eight hours after the final fateful call, when the frenzied rush to cover up Marilyn’s involvement with the Kennedys was still under way, Peter Lawford in his turn telephoned and reached President Kennedy in Massachusetts, where he was spending the weekend. That the call was made — at 9.04 A.M. East Coast time, 6:04 A.M. on the West Coast — is firmly established by the official White House phone log. (see following page.)
One is left to imagine the conversation the President and his brother-in-law had that morning.
The Eavesdroppers’ Story
We turn back, with all due caution, to the lingering threat that would long imperil the Kennedys — one that, after his brother’s assassination, would continue to hang over Robert Kennedy.
The Eavesdroppers’ Version
Fred Otash, who shipped the tapes from the West Coast to Bernard Spindel in New York, said Marilyn was ‘half bombed out of her mind on pills’ by the time Kennedy left her home in late afternoon. This fits with Dr Greenson’s comment that Marilyn appeared ‘somewhat drugged’ when he arrived — responding to her sudden summons — about 5:00 P.M.
Otash insisted that from then on, rather than Marilyn reaching out to Kennedy that evening, he tried to get her to come to the Lawford beach-house. Marilyn’s response, Otash said, was, ‘Stop bothering me. Stay away from me.’
Otash’s colleague, the security consultant, recalled how a shaken Lawford described the situation. ‘It’s specific in my mind,’ he said. ‘Marilyn had done a turnabout. Lawford said Marilyn had called the White House, trying to reach the President, saying, “Get your brother away from me — he’s just using me. …”’
Otash and the consultant, the California end of the bugging connection, say they learned nothing of the very final night hours, the hours obscured by conflicting stories about the discovery of the body, the ambulance episode, and Robert Kennedy’s hurried departure. Others, though, close associates of the man who received the tapes, Bernard Spindel, told a troubling story. One, traced only in recent months, said he listened to the recordings.
In 1985, during negotiations over television rights, I found myself meeting with Mark Monsky, a Vice-President of NBC Television News. Monsky told me that, while he had never investigated the Monroe case himself, he had been told about it by a longstanding and reliable contact. The contact was a man who had provided technical services to the government — not in the electronic area — since the early sixties. Monsky said the contact had known Spindel, and thus had knowledge of the Monroe tapes. After considerable difficulty, the contact was persuaded to meet me.
At a first meeting, in New York’s Metropolitan Club, I was not even permitted to know the man’s name. In due course I did learn it, but cannot reveal it for reasons I hope the reader will understand. Like the security consultant in California, he was still professionally active. His career — and perhaps his personal safety — depended on maintaining his anonymity.
The man spoke on the Monroe matter reluctantly, and refused offers of high payment to tell his story publicly. He told me his story on numerous occasions, at intervals of several months, and always consistently. The contact said he visited Bernard Spindel at his home in Holmes,
New York, ‘not long after his first heart attack’ — which occurred in 1967. He recalls sitting in the living room, as Spindel ate crackers and sipped ginger ale. They were alone.
Spindel told him that, in 1962, he had been ‘hired to get the goods on RFK’. The equipment installed in Marilyn’s home had included a minute ‘grain-of-rice’ microphone, almost invisible when set in a wall or woodwork, the pride and joy of Spindel’s latest engineering. It transmitted to a tape bank, situated some distance away and below ground, perhaps in a basement. Spindel had developed a system for recording extremely slowly, so that one long reel could cover some fifteen hours of recorded sound.
Somebody, presumably one of Otash’s minders, came regularly to collect the ‘take’. At least one of Marilyn’s two phones was wired, and a bug transmitted from her bedroom. According to the new source, Spindel played him some forty minutes of tape, all of it covering activity at Marilyn’s home on the day she died.
The tape reflected two visits by Robert Kennedy. ‘First,’ he says, ‘you could hear Marilyn and Kennedy talking. It was kind of echoey and at a distance, as though the sound was in a room next to the site of the transmitter, perhaps in some sort of hallway.’ Marilyn’s bedroom was, in fact, around a corner from a large vestibule opening off the front door.
The source said both Marilyn’s and Kennedy’s voices were easily recognizable. Like Otash — and it is worth noting that the source and Otash did not know each other — the source says there was a heated argument. ‘Their voices grew louder and louder,’ he recalled. ‘They were arguing about something that had been promised by Robert Kennedy. Marilyn was demanding an explanation as to why Kennedy was not going to marry her. As they argued, the voices got shriller. If I had not recognized RFK’s voice already, I am not sure that I would have known it was him at this point. He was screeching, high-pitched like an old lady. …’