Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (18 page)

The fourth of August 1962 seemed an ordinary Saturday in the life of Marilyn Monroe, insofar as her life could be called “ordinary” at this stage, the world-famous actress now beset by depression and paranoia. Despite daily therapy with her personal psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who lived nearby, Marilyn's anxiety attacks and bouts of depression had worsened. She had accidentally overdosed, and her stomach had been pumped, on more than one occasion.

Marilyn had become increasingly dependent on Dr. Greenson, and she consulted him constantly about her troubled love life, which, by this time, had included relationships with two Kennedy brothers, Frank Sinatra, the baseball star Joe DiMaggio, the playwright Arthur Miller, and the scientist Albert Einstein. She also believed that both the Mafia and the FBI, not to mention the CIA, were keeping an eye on her in the wake of the Profumo scandal that summer, in which Russian spies had compromised English cabinet minister John Profumo by fixing him up with a young prostitute. And she was right to worry, because Monroe's relationships with both JFK and Bobby Kennedy—right in the middle of America's crisis over the Soviet plan to base nuclear missiles in Cuba, within striking distance of the mainland—had led to her being considered a serious security risk.

Marilyn had spent the previous evening at home, and in good spirits, with her press agent and best friend, Pat Newcomb, who had then stayed over. But when Pat arose the following day, Marilyn appeared “grouchy” and claimed not to have slept very well. Her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, later called in Dr. Greenson after Monroe asked her if there was “any oxygen in the house.” As the afternoon progressed, Marilyn's condition deteriorated: she appeared increasingly drugged and lethargic. Greenson had been trying to break Monroe's dependency on Nembutal, but knew she had received a new prescription the previous day. He knew, furthermore, that supplies of her favorite barbiturate were stashed around the house and that she could have taken these at any time.

Pat Newcomb left at 6
P.M.
After another session of therapy, Greenson left at 7
P.M.
At 7:15 Joe DiMaggio, Jr., her ex-husband's son, dropped by; Marilyn was happy to learn he was breaking off his engagement to a woman she did not like, and DiMaggio, Jr., later confirmed the actress was in high spirits by the time he left, as did Dr. Greenson, whom she had rung shortly afterward to inform him of the good news.

Then Eunice claims to have awoken at
3 A.M.
to see a light shining under Marilyn's bedroom door and a telephone cable leading from a socket in the hallway into the bedroom, both of which were highly unusual. Finding the door was locked, the housekeeper telephoned Dr. Greenson, who rushed over, broke into the bedroom via a window, and, at 3:
50 A.M.
, found the Hollywood actress lying naked, facedown and clearly dead. However, the veracity of their account began to seem more questionable when it emerged later in the investigation that not only would Monroe's deep-pile bedroom carpet have ensured that no light could have escaped from the room, but the door had no working lock. The plot appeared to thicken further when it was revealed that Arthur Jacobs, Monroe's publicist, had been informed of her death at between 10 and 10:30
P.M.
the previous evening: he could confirm the time as he had to leave a musical performance of another client to arrange the “press issues.” So we know that before poor Marilyn's body was even cold, a tissue of lies had already started to be spun.

The autopsy, carried out by Dr. Thomas Noguchi—who was later to conduct the high-profile autopsies on Natalie Wood and Robert Kennedy—concluded that Marilyn had died as a result of acute barbiturate poisoning. This led the psychiatric experts involved with the inquest to a conclusion of “probable suicide.” But Los Angeles County prosecutor John W. Miner—who had attended the autopsy and who was privy to all the facts surrounding her mysterious death—was furious. He didn't believe then that Monroe had taken her own life, either deliberately or by accident, and today, over forty years later, he still doesn't. So what really did happen to the celebrated Hollywood actress?

Norma Jeane Mortenson arrived in the world at 9:
30 A.M.
on June 1, 1926, at Los Angeles County Hospital. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Monroe Baker, had already walked out on Norma's father (well, her father according to the birth certificate at least), ostensibly because he had become “boring.” Gladys was later diagnosed with hereditary paranoid schizophrenia, a mental condition that also afflicted her mother and father and which had contributed to the deaths of two of her grandparents.

When Norma Jeane was only seven years old, her mother was committed to a “rest home” and the little girl was then moved around to various foster parents and institutions. With nowhere to live—her latest foster parents were moving to the East Coast and couldn't take her with them—she got married, to James Dougherty, just two weeks after her sixteenth birthday, in June 1942.

Since America was now at war, her new husband joined the navy and Norma Jeane went out to work. At just seventeen, she was already drinking heavily and suffering from depression. As a little girl, she had dreamed of stardom: “Even as a child I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night that there must be thousands of little girls sitting alone like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But, I thought, I'm not going to worry about them. I'm dreaming the hardest.” It must have seemed a faraway dream when she was clocking in at the munitions factory every morning at
7 A.M.

During the summer of 1944,
Yank
magazine commissioned a feature on young American women at work for the war effort. Private David Conover had been moving along the assembly line taking pictures of the most attractive employees when he came upon a young blonde who was busy fitting propellers. Although her face was covered in dirt and grease, he stopped in his tracks, stunned by her unusual beauty. Private Conover immediately offered Norma Jeane five dollars an hour to model for him, and the resulting pictures attracted the attention of the Blue Book modeling agency. Within a year, Norma Jeane had been featured on the front cover of no fewer than thirty-three national magazines, catapulting the young lady toward national stardom. Her first marriage proved an early casualty of her obsessive, meteoric rise.

In July 1946, one month after her twentieth birthday, Norma Jeane secured a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox. The studio wanted her to have a more glamorous name and, after a few duff suggestions, the casting director, Ben Lyon, came up with “Marilyn,” after his own favorite actress, Marilyn Miller. Then Norma Jeane offered her mother's maiden name. The studio director wearily asked what it was, but his eyes lit up when she replied, “Monroe.”

There then followed four years of success and failure in both her career and love life, leading to, after the sudden death of a lover, her first real suicide attempt, when she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Throughout the 1950s, Marilyn became more and more ubiquitous, appearing in hundreds of films, TV shows, musicals, and radio broadcasts. By the end of the decade, Norma Jean had become Hollywood's golden girl, mixing with the rich, famous, and powerful. But the recognition she craved didn't make her happy. Her marriages to two much older men, each highly acclaimed in his field, clearly illustrated her search both for security and for a father figure. Her short union with Joe DiMaggio was quickly followed by her third marriage, this time to America's most celebrated playwright, Arthur Miller. It was after her divorce from Miller, in 1961, that things began to go badly wrong. Was it really a coincidence that this was when her affair started with the most powerful man in the world, President John F. Kennedy?

After the divorce from Miller, Marilyn, increasingly dependent on alcohol, barbiturates, and Dr. Green son, became friends with the English actor Peter Lawford and his wife, Patricia, a sister of JFK. It was at one of their parties that she first met the Kennedy brothers. Unsurprisingly, this drew the attention of the FBI, whose head, J. Edgar Hoover (see also “John Dillinger: What ever Happened to America's Robin Hood?” page 77), was obsessed with building a file on the growing sexual adventures of the president and his brother Robert, the attorney general. The Mafia were also taking a close interest in the actress. The FBI among others believed that the Kennedy brothers’ father, Joe, had been a partner of the infamous Mafia don Frank Costello during the Prohibition years. It was said that decades later, when JFK ran for president, the old man had called on the Cosa Nostra to help buy votes. Some Mafia members believed the Kennedys then owed them a favor or two and expected a close, lucrative relationship with the Kennedy administration once John had taken office.

So they were furious when Bobby Kennedy, the newly appointed attorney general, made it his personal crusade to crack down on organized crime, making the wrong sort of enemies in the process, many of whom vowed revenge. Even so, most Mafia members realized the Kennedy family, the biggest mob of them all, now had public opinion firmly on their side, not to mention all the state police forces and the U.S. military at their instant beck and call. Any act of revenge on the Kennedys would have to be carefully thought out, more carefully than the customary sort of Mob hit on a rival family member. In 1962, exposing the Kennedys’ many infidelities to the press was thought the best tactic to diminish public support for the brothers. Monroe had found herself in bed, so to speak, with some of the most dangerous people in the world, and still didn't realize it. Instead she was naively dreaming of becoming America's First Lady.

Marilyn's love affair with the president be came common knowledge among the American power set during the first six months of 1962, but remained unknown to the public. Hoover's FBI was busily building a file detailing Monroe's movements and had even, some believed, placed listening devices inside her home. Increasingly worried by her “chattering” about their relationship, the president was even more alarmed by his brother-in-law's discovery that she kept a detailed diary of their sexual encounters and what they had discussed. JFK abruptly ended the affair in July, using his brother Bobby as the messenger. Unfortunately for the administration, Bobby too then fell under the actress's spell. Marilyn, still bitter from her rejection by the president, did not reciprocate his feelings, but she embarked on a love affair with him nevertheless.

Marilyn had no intention of marrying the smitten younger Kennedy, however, even on one occasion asking Dr. Greenson, “Oh, what am I to do about Bobby?” Greenson was more concerned about the psychological damage such affairs were doing to his client and about her personal safety. The international threat to America was from the Cuban missile crisis and the domestic problem was coming from the Mafia. Marilyn knew too much about too many people, mobsters and politicians alike, and more than one group was worried that she might spill the beans. Her increasingly erratic behavior had turned her from a trophy blonde to an outright liability. When Bobby unceremoniously broke off their affair by having the private telephone line he had installed for her disconnected, Marilyn was devastated. She bombarded the White House switchboard with telephone calls but was never connected with either Kennedy. Distraught, she had told friends—including Peter Lawford, JFK's brother-in-law—that she planned to “come clean” about her relationships with both brothers in revenge for the way she felt she had been treated by the pair.

However, in July 1962, during the final two weeks of Marilyn's life, there were reports that she was feeling more positive about the future than she had been. She had received several new offers of film parts, her friends were many and supportive, and, despite everything, she was still optimistic about reviving her relationship with the president.

In this frame of mind, she happily accepted an invitation from Frank Sinatra to a weekend at the Cal Neva Resort on Lake Tahoe, believing the Kennedys to be behind the invitation. Accounts of this weekend differ, but they are all highly colored. One goes that Monroe was taken aback to discover the brutal gangster Sam Giancana was there, apparently to warn her against creating problems for the brothers. Another version has Joe DiMaggio arriving unexpectedly at the lodge and becoming furious with both Sinatra and the Kennedys for luring his ex-wife there, plying her with drugs and alcohol, and taking compromising photographs to be used as blackmail should she ever threaten to expose her affairs with John and Bobby. The following weekend, Marilyn was found dead at her home in Brentwood, California, having apparently committed suicide, the subsequent mystery and intrigue surrounding her death involving some of the best-loved and most influential people on the planet.

According to the official version of events, after Joe DiMaggio, Jr., left at around 7:
30 P.M.
, Peter Lawford then phoned Marilyn at 7:45
P.M.
to invite her to a party. He testified Monroe sounded heavily drugged—somewhat contrary to the upbeat mood reported by DiMaggio—and that she failed to respond several times before shouting her own name repeatedly into the phone. Lawford then quoted how Marilyn had ended the conversation: “Say goodbye to Pat, say goodbye to the president and say goodbye to yourself because you are a nice guy.” She then hung up.