Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (51 page)

“As I understand it,” claimed Ebbins, “Rudin had seen Ralph Greenson, his brother-in-law, earlier that day, and Greenson had been quite concerned about Marilyn. For his part, Rudin was convinced that Marilyn was a very sick girl: totally insane, for that matter. He felt Greenson had done everything he possibly could to help her and could do no more. In any case, Rudin had a second private telephone number for Marilyn’s house. He dialed it, and Eunice Murray picked up. She said Marilyn appeared to be fine. Murray could hear the radio on in her bedroom, and under the doorway she could see that the light hadn’t been turned off. She’d probably fallen asleep and, as was later discovered, dropped her Princess phone on the floor. It happened all the time. Rudin asked Murray to enter the bedroom to make certain Marilyn was asleep. Murray said she’d tried to get into the bedroom a few minutes earlier, but the door was locked from within.

“Does she usually lock her door?” asked Rudin.

“No,” responded Murray. “Not usually, but she does on occasion.”

Rudin later expressed regret that he hadn’t probed deeper, but under the circumstances, he thought MM had merely fallen asleep. He called back Milt Ebbins and then went out for dinner with his wife. Ebbins phoned Peter Lawford. “Maybe you ought to drive over there after all,” he suggested. Lawford said he would wait until the next day and then go to see her.

In the end, it was Eunice Murray who felt most uneasy about Marilyn. Waking up after a few hours of fitful sleep, she went back to Marilyn’s bedroom. Nothing had changed. The radio and light were still on, and the door remained locked. She knocked at the door and called Marilyn’s name. No answer. She went outside and peered through a
bedroom window. Marilyn unfailingly drew her blinds upon retiring, but to Murray’s surprise, they were wide open. The actress lay naked and motionless atop her bed, an arm extended, her eyes shut, mouth agape. Her position and appearance startled Murray. She returned to the house and immediately called Ralph Greenson, who’d returned home hours earlier. Something seemed terribly amiss with Marilyn, she told him, but she didn’t know exactly what. Greenson phoned Hyman Engelberg. Apologizing for the lateness of the hour—it was one thirty in the morning—Greenson quickly explained the reason for his call. Twenty minutes later, the two physicians stood in front of the entrance to Marilyn Monroe’s house.

“Eunice Murray let us in,” said Dr. Engelberg. “Because Marilyn’s bedroom door was locked, we grabbed a poker from the living room fireplace, walked outside, broke her bedroom window, undid the latch, lifted the window, and climbed into the room. Marilyn was sprawled across the bed. We were obviously too late, but we worked on her for more than an hour trying somehow to bring her back to life. I estimated she’d been dead since nine or ten p.m. Afterward we just sat there, silent and sullen. We were stunned. I have no idea how much time elapsed. Then we talked a little, and that’s when it emerged she’d received sleeping medication from both of us. But even if we hadn’t both medicated her with Nembutal, there were enough pill bottles in her medicine cabinet and on her night table to have killed a herd of cattle. The police confiscated no fewer than fifteen bottles of tranquilizers, sedatives, and sleeping pills from her house following her death, among them Seconal and chloral hydrate, both of which she probably procured during her visit to Mexico earlier that year. Still, I can’t say I wasn’t worried about covering my ass. Had Marilyn died ten years later, when authorities began paying attention to overdoses and their causes, Dr. Greenson and I could well have ended up together in a jail cell, our medical licenses revoked, our careers ruined.”

At three in the morning, Ralph Greenson phoned Mickey Rudin and gave him the news. Marilyn Monroe was dead, the victim of an
apparent suicide. Rudin climbed out of bed, dressed, and drove to Marilyn’s home, arriving at approximately the same time as Arthur Jacobs, head of the publicity firm that represented Marilyn. Rudin had called Jacobs earlier that evening, reaching him in the middle of a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Hearing that Marilyn might be in trouble, Jacobs had left the concert and gone home to await further word. Now, like the others, he was staring at Marilyn’s lifeless body. Pat Newcomb, who worked for Jacobs, had likewise been notified and arrived at Monroe’s home shortly after four in the morning.

“When I got there,” recalled Mickey Rudin, “Romey Greenson took me aside and whispered, ‘Engelberg gave her a prescription I didn’t know about.’ I didn’t want to get in the middle of it, so I kept my mouth shut. Mrs. Murray looked exhausted. She was doing the laundry. I couldn’t figure out why. I guessed it was Marilyn’s bedding and underclothes from the day before. I asked Dr. Engelberg whether anyone had called the police. Nobody had done that, so I asked him to place the call, which he did.”

Jack Clemmons, a sergeant with the West Los Angeles branch of the LAPD, was the first police officer to arrive on the scene, setting foot in Marilyn’s Brentwood home at 4:50 a.m. Like Hyman Engelberg, he discerned that the actress had been dead since the evening hours of August 4. He started asking questions—he wanted to know why they’d waited so long before contacting the police.

“We felt we had to first get clearance from Twentieth Century–Fox’s publicity department,” responded Greenson.

“The cop shot Dr. Greenson an unbelieving glance,” said Hyman Engelberg. “I mean, this bloke was a regular Sherlock Holmes. He had it all figured out. Not that Greenson’s explanation was true or made any sense, but this fellow had already determined that Marilyn hadn’t died by her own hand. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, he never deviated from that opinion, telling anyone who’d listen that Marilyn Monroe had been killed, that her corpse had been taken from her bedroom, then returned several hours later. This theory, propounded
by any number of conspiracy buffs, finally brought forth an ambulance driver who claimed he’d been summoned to the Monroe residence and had carted Marilyn’s body off into the night. Mind you, not a shred of evidence, not a scintilla, supported any of this. It was pure conjecture. The cop was eventually dismissed by the Los Angeles Police Department for continuing to hawk his mawkish tale. I have no clue what became of the ambulance driver. I do know that an entire mythology was created around Marilyn’s death, part of which had to do with the so-called little red diary, which supposedly contained all sorts of state secrets that had been conveyed to Marilyn by the Kennedys. We were told by the myth makers that Bobby Kennedy himself somehow got hold of the diary and disposed of it by dumping it in the Potomac.”

According to Dr. Engelberg, the five-hour autopsy performed on Monroe later that day—August 5—did little to establish the exact cause of death. Thomas Noguchi, otherwise known as “the coroner to the stars,” conducted the autopsy. Surprisingly, he found no trace of barbiturates in Marilyn’s stomach lining or digestive tract and reported no evidence of needle puncture wounds, despite the fact that Dr. Engelberg had given her three separate injections over the last four days of her life. Calling Monroe’s death “a probable suicide,” Noguchi was widely criticized for having conducted an incomplete and inconclusive autopsy of Monroe, including the issuance of a merely partial toxicological report. Most notable was his failure to test Marilyn’s small intestine to determine the presence of barbiturates and alcohol. Nor did it help that an entire set of Marilyn’s tissue slides disappeared at some point during the autopsy, making it even more difficult to determine a definitive cause of death.

“There’s no question that Marilyn killed herself,” said Peter Lawford. “But as with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, there were those that couldn’t accept the obvious. There had to be some other, more sinister, and convoluted explanation. Lee Harvey Oswald, a virtual nobody, couldn’t possibly have killed the president of the United States without help from some higher authority. In Marilyn’s case, the
most popular alternative theme had it that Bobby Kennedy hired a couple of hit men to dispose of his former lover because of her threat to hold a press conference wherein she would reveal the salacious details of their affair as well as her tryst with the president. So what! There were dozens of women who could’ve made more or less the same claim. It was clear to anyone with half a brain that Marilyn Monroe, at age thirty-six, had inadvertently taken her own life.”

•  •  •

Joe DiMaggio didn’t disappoint. On the afternoon of August 4, the day he and his two brothers took part in an Old Timers’ charity baseball game in San Francisco, the forty-seven-year-old former star center fielder for the New York Yankees thrilled thirty thousand spectators by belting a soaring home run into the left-field bleachers. After the game, the Yanks, having sponsored the event, presented the Clipper with a Wittnauer wristwatch inscribed with his name. That evening, Joe, Lefty O’Doul and O’Doul’s stepson, Jimmy, plus a couple of Lefty’s pals, went out to dinner and then on to the 365 Club, best known for its comely chorus line of showgirls. Aware of DiMaggio’s plans to remarry Marilyn Monroe, Lefty O’Doul said to him, “Think of tonight as your bachelor party.”

Regretting that he hadn’t called Marilyn that night, Joe retired shortly after two in the morning. Five hours later, the phone rang in his Beach Street home. Dr. Hyman Engelberg was calling from Marilyn’s Brentwood residence. The connection was poor, but DiMaggio made out the words “a terrible accident” and “Marilyn’s dead, I’m sorry.”

Not yet in shock, DiMaggio called Inez Melson. Marilyn’s business manager had just heard the news from Mickey Rudin and was about to call Joe when he called her. After speaking with Melson, DiMaggio phoned Harry Hall and asked his old friend to pick him up at the airport in Los Angeles. He’d try to catch the nine o’clock United Airlines flight in the morning.

“To be honest,” said Mickey Rudin, “none of us knew what to do.
I contacted Aaron Frosch in New York, but he didn’t know what to do either. Marilyn’s mother was locked away in a mental hospital, so we couldn’t turn to her. I called Inez Melson and got a phone number in Florida for Berniece Miracle, Marilyn’s half sister, but she wasn’t around. Ultimately we took the cowards’ way out: we turned to Joe DiMaggio.”

Harry Hall picked Joe up at the airport at ten o’clock and drove him to the Los Angeles County Morgue, where he and Inez Melson officially identified Marilyn’s body. He signed the forms to have the body released for autopsy purposes, after which it would be transported to the mortuary at Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery, where Marilyn often indicated she wanted to be interred after her death. Hall then drove Joe to the Miramar Hotel. Checking into suite 1035, DiMaggio locked the door behind him and called his son. Joe Jr. arrived at the Miramar in the early afternoon. He found his father seated on the bed, his shoulders “stooped with grief.” As he sat there, said Joey, “a sound came out of him, an inhuman sound, almost like the roar of a lion. He then bent over and started to weep in deep gulps and gasps. We were alone at the time. Harry Hall had gone out to buy some booze. He returned with a couple of bottles of scotch and vodka. My father stopped crying, but he refused to drink. In addition, he refused to speak to the press. They kept calling the hotel for a comment. He instructed the front desk manager to hold his calls, except for Inez Melson and Berniece Miracle. Burying Marilyn would prove to be the most difficult thing my father ever had to do.”

Joe sent Berniece Miracle a telegram, requesting permission to make the final funeral arrangements. He wanted a small, simple, very private service for Marilyn, with “none of the usual Hollywood crowd.” Berniece agreed and granted him power of attorney to carry out his plan. Later that day, Joe, Joe Jr., and Harry Hall drove out to Monroe’s Brentwood house. The police were still there. “It was terribly depressing, what with all of Marilyn’s books, phonograph records, clothes, and furs still in place, as if she’d merely gone to the corner to buy a
newspaper,” recalled Joey. “Maf, her little dog, eventually wound up with Frank Sinatra’s secretary. After looking around, we headed for Marilyn’s bedroom and located some of her correspondence and personal papers. My father rifled through the bundle, pausing here and there to read this or that. I have no idea what he was looking for. I don’t think he knew, either.”

Joe’s face suddenly brightened. He’d come across a short letter Marilyn had recently written to him but never mailed:
“Dear Joe, If I can only succeed in making you happy—I will have succeeded in the biggest and most difficult thing there is—that is to make
one person completely happy
. Your happiness means my happiness. Marilyn.” DiMaggio neatly folded the handwritten note and slipped it into a pocket.

Berniece Miracle arrived in Los Angeles the following afternoon, Monday, August 6, and took a cab to the Miramar, where she, Joe, and Inez Melson went over DiMaggio’s list of funeral guests. They then issued a statement to the press, which read in part:
“Last rites for Marilyn Monroe must of great necessity be as private as possible so that she can go to her final resting place in the quiet she always sought.” On Tuesday morning, Berniece and Inez Melson met with Eunice Murray at Marilyn’s home to select an appropriate burial gown for the actress. From her wardrobe closet they chose a chic, long-sleeved, apple green Pucci gown that Marilyn had last worn in February, while visiting Mexico.

That same evening, Whitey Snyder and his wife, Marjorie, arrived at the Westwood Memorial Park mortuary, where Marilyn’s body was being kept. After Whitey’s wife dressed the actress in the green gown selected for the somber occasion, Whitey began applying makeup, gradually transforming Marilyn’s death mask into a glowing presence. Agnes Flanagan came in to work on Marilyn’s hair. Assessing the damage done to the deceased’s scalp during the autopsy, she opted for a hand-styled blond wig similar in appearance to the hairdo worn by Marilyn in her most recent films.

“Joe DiMaggio sat in the cool, dark room and quietly watched as the three of us attended to Marilyn,” said Whitey Snyder. “He simply
stared at Marilyn’s face, his body bent slightly forward toward her, his hands clasped tightly in his lap. He didn’t move. We finished our work about eleven at night and left the mortuary. Joe remained behind. Because of her funeral on Wednesday, August 8, I decided to return to the mortuary in the early morning to retouch Marilyn’s face. Joe was still there, in the same spot, having obviously spent the night alone with Marilyn as she lay in her open, bronze casket lined with champagne-colored satin. Lost in a trance, he barely noticed me when I came in. As I was about to leave, he said softly, ‘Thanks, Whitey—I’m certain you know that you were always one of Marilyn’s favorites.’ ”