Marilyn: A Biography (34 page)

The letter, however, was never sent.
Discovered in her desk, it was unsigned. The impulse that brought
her this close to DiMaggio consumed itself in its own literary
expression.

But, then, her life is so quiet at this
point. In comparison to the past, it is quiet.

During the final summer, Marilyn confided to
a friend that Dr. Greenson was attempting to make her more
independent and less insecure in her opinions. She volunteered this
information when asked why she was cutting herself off from several
old and trusted friends. Clearly Dr. Greenson was concerned by her
reliance upon the judgment of her hirelings. During that summer,
the regulars who had been in her employ, along with a few others,
found themselves outside Marilyn’s inner circle. . . . Ralph
Roberts was to feel [her housekeeper] Mrs. Murray’s role in this
very keenly, for when he came in the evening to give Marilyn her
massage, he found after his services were over that his presence
was no longer appreciated. Once, as he was lingering by Marilyn’s
bedroom door exchanging a word or two as in the old days, Mrs.
Murray gave him a look that clearly implied, “I thought we’d gotten
rid of them.”

The lady is not an insignificant
presence:

Mrs. Murray was a family friend of the
Greensons, had retired from part-time interior decorating work, and
though she had never been a housekeeper before, she was available.
Mrs. Murray, who spoke in careful accents, was to keep in constant
touch with Dr. Greenson. Marilyn knew of this arrangement, but she
was so deeply involved with her attempt at emotional recovery she
did not protest.

If we feel uneasy before this whole and
jealous appropriation of her life, still we are dealing not even
with the essential logic of psychoanalysis: she is so changeable
that she is scientifically intolerable. No doctor can follow the
results of his prescription. Not with her. So there is a natural
tendency to circumscribe her life to that point where fewer people
are able to affect the incommensurately sensitive needle of her
inner deflection. Fair hope! She may as well be quartered by
horses. Her strongest emotions become her most isolated. That she
has love for DiMaggio we can hardly doubt by now. Finally, he is
the man who wants the least from her — he is without calculation
about her talent! He only wants the rest of her. She will do well
to discover the rest of her! Perhaps she has never been so divided.
Her ambition to make films — that ambition which has beat like an
animal heart beneath every weakness since she first came to Fox
sixteen years ago — is an ambition now cautioned by a council of
lawyers. Installed upon an analyst’s couch, she has been reduced to
the smallest pieces of her person, and yet may be on the edge of
the most important affair of her life. It is as if the ambition
which is dying on one stage has sprung to life on another. In some
part of herself she has to be calculating a new life that will be
grander than she has known. Where that might offer hope, it will
also accelerate her terror. She will be further away from any
comfortable sense of a modest identity on which to attach a few
self-protecting habits. No, that modest identity, that sense of a
comfortable middle in her own body, can only come now from the
bitter taste of barbiturate. The recognition of defeat in the bite
of the capsule becomes her middle.

If the law of passion is that we cannot begin
to love again until we find a love greater than the last, the law
of narcissism must be that we cannot continue to adore ourselves
unless our display is more extraordinary than before. So, even as
she clings to DiMaggio on one flank, she is dreaming of historical
eminence on the other. Yet she is still interested in adventures up
the center. A clue to the unfinished state of everything about her
is that even on the last day of her life she discusses the
Playboy
contract she is supposed to sign when Larry Schiller
comes by to visit. It has been arranged for her to do a camera
session with Schiller to provide the necessary pictures. She will
appear on the front cover of
Playboy
, respectably dressed in
a white fur stole. On the back cover, however, will be seen a shot
taken at the same instant from the rear. With the exception of the
fur stole (which only passes around the nape of her neck), she will
have, from this second angle, nothing on. She will finally show
that famous set of cheeks which, as Philippe Halsman once remarked,
“seemed to wink at the onlooker.” Of course he had also said, “to
capture this wink with a [still] camera . . . is not so easy.”
Perhaps she has bad similar thoughts; perhaps Dr. Greenson has
dissuaded her (if we are to assume she has told him). In any case,
Pat Newcomb has already phoned Hugh Hefner to cancel the sitting,
but since Schiller has not yet heard, Marilyn does not bring
herself to confess this publicity dream has been filed, and instead
squanders a good amount of her morning’s energy being animated. It
is typical of one more minor episode in her day that will cost her
as much as a major transaction, but otherwise it is like many
another noon in that quiet almost humdrum summer (if not for the
occasional evening at Lawford’s) in the weeks after
Something’s
Got to Give
.

The shock is that she will be dead in hardly
more than twelve hours. Or will it be in less? The autopsy will
prove casual, and never determines the hour of her death. It could
be as early as nine o’clock that night or as late as three in the
morning, and the bottle from which she takes her final pills is
never determined, since the specific drug is never analyzed in her
autopsy. Still, enough barbiturates will be discovered in her blood
to kill her several times over if she took the pills on an empty
stomach. On the other hand, if she ate that night, the dose could
not prove fatal until she digested the food, for the autopsy showed
her stomach and intestines are completely empty. The hour of her
death is therefore not insignificant. If she was no longer alive by
midnight, every account which has her going to dinner is obviously
a lie. Her intestines could not have digested the first part of her
food so quickly, even if she had regurgitated most of the meal.
Only a stomach pump could have left her so empty. But then only a
doctor could have administered the pump, an act which no doctor
reports. The possibility that she was dead for hours while attempts
were made to resuscitate her has to be prominent.

Besides, there are several versions of her
dinner. One, given by a reporter who would not allow his name to be
used, offers a quiet party at Marilyn’s house which is attended by
Peter Lawford, Bobby, Pat Newcomb, and Mrs. Murray. After dinner,
the others want to go on to Lawford’s place on the beach, but
Marilyn wishes to stay where she is and then wants Bobby to stay
with her. He refuses and leaves. A little later Marilyn begins to
call, and keeps phoning him.

Another version places Natalie Wood and
Warren Beatty in a party at Lawford’s house in Malibu which Marilyn
proceeds to leave. What is common to both stories is that nothing
remarkable is happening. If she had been alive in the morning,
there would be little interest in the night. One way or another,
she seems to have had some disagreement with Kennedy. Whatever was
the dimension of her quarrel, it was apparently sufficient to start
taking pills. If she then calls Lawford’s house several times, we
do not begin to guess what abuse or importunings took place. It is
after all just as likely she made every effort to be gay, at least
until the last call.

In its turn, Guiles’ version, which may be
here no more than a compendium of the lies he was told, has Marilyn
alone that night, and agitated by a phone call from Malibu, where
she is invited to join Lawford, Kennedy, and, by Marilyn’s
description, “a couple of hookers.” Much offended, she goes early
to her bedroom, where Mrs. Murray reports her resting for a period
and trying to sleep while a stack of Sinatra records are played.
Then comes a time when she must have felt a warning she had taken
too many pills. She begins to make calls. It is almost certain she
tried to reach Ralph Roberts, for his answering service would later
report that a call came in “from a woman who sounded fuzzy-voiced
and troubled.” Guiles has it that “she did get through to” the
Easterner or his friend,

and she told one of the men that she had just
taken the last of her Nembutals and she was about to slip over the
line. One of them attempted to phone Mickey Rudin, Marilyn’s
Hollywood attorney, but he was out for the evening. Why such
indirect means of summoning help were chosen will never be
known.

Of course, the means is not so indirect.
Mickey Rudin, who is also Sinatra’s lawyer, is as well Dr.
Greenson’s brother-in-law, and it is possible they are looking to
discover Greenson’s number. What seems to agree in all accounts is
that they are far from complacent at this point. If they have been
laughing at Marilyn earlier in the evening, or been made uneasy by
a hint of desperation or threat in the manner, her last phone call
has been to say good-bye. Whoever was on the phone with her has now
heard the unmistakable entropy of a sleeping pill stupor, that
thickening whistle of death around each lurch of the voice, that
moronic halting urgency which is shocking to whoever will hear it.
What the two men did in response (since it is almost certainly too
late) may be less interesting than what they were to do in the next
few days. If Marilyn was a suicide, however, it is possible that
the doctors were reached earlier than they declared and were
working on her with that stomach pump. In any case, whether in
contact with Marilyn’s house or not, this won’t prove the
Easterner’s most shining hour. He will next appear in San Francisco
with his family after a Marine helicopter puts down at the pad next
to Lawford’s house on Sunday morning. Of course, what other high
government official would not have done precisely the same? What we
can expect from all the stories is that if efforts were being made
to protect Bobby Kennedy, none of the versions can afford to be
accurate. Some were obviously shaped in isolation from others. It
is unlikely Dr. Greenson and Pat Newcomb, for example, had an
opportunity to exchange notes, since each places himself alone with
Marilyn in the early evening. It is probably such discrepancies
that would later feed rumors of murder. For example, Mrs. Murray
reported that when Marilyn’s door was found locked at three in the
morning (although Marilyn’s door was always locked), she went
outside to the garden after hearing no reply to her knocks and
peered through the drapes of Marilyn’s bedroom window. From there
she claimed to have seen Marilyn lying across the bed in a
“peculiar” position, and proceeded to call Dr. Greenson to come
over. One wonders why a psychiatric assistant did not proceed to
break the window herself, but instead was content to wait for the
doctor. Then there is a discrepancy whether Dr. Greenson arrived
first, which is Mrs. Murray’s version, or whether it was Dr.
Engelberg, the internist, who had at Marilyn’s request changed her
prescription from chloral hydrate to Nembutal just the day before.
The police report has Dr. Engelberg using a fireplace poker on the
window to “gain admittance.” Finally, we are asked to suppose
Marilyn’s drapes were sufficiently open for Mrs. Murray to look in,
when they were stapled down ever since Marilyn occupied the house.
An assumption has to arise that Mrs. Murray discovered the death in
other fashion. Since Marilyn was found in the nude and yet without
a brassiere, it is also not impossible she was in bed with a lover
when she died, a most unhappy thought. Equally, she could have gone
unto some final coma while trying to get dressed to go out, and
later have been undressed by others on the assumption it would look
more natural. Nor are one’s questions reduced by the fact that Mrs.
Murray will go off on a six-month tour of Europe in the next few
days, and Pat Newcomb, who is naturally hysterical in the
aftermath, will be flown to Hyannisport. Then the FBI — we are face
to face once again with a story whose author does not choose to
give his name — is reported to go into the Santa Monica phone
company’s office in the next day and remove the paper tape that
lists Marilyn’s toll calls for the night. Perhaps that is why for
many a year rumor will have Marilyn dialing the White House on her
last night. Brood long enough on the terror of such an end in
vertigo and frustration, and one can believe she left with a curse
and lives near us still — First Lady of American ghosts. Why then
not also see her in these endlessly facile connections of the
occult as giving a witch’s turn to the wheel at Chappaquiddick?
Yes, it is easy in the echo of her poor death across that bed in
the cement-brick room of a Brentwood hacienda to see the beginning
of many a vow and many a career. For if it is true of Bobby Kennedy
that his presence developed with every year, and he was not without
greatness by his last night, why not also assume that part of so
fine and mysterious a process was not only commenced in the hour of
his brother’s death but in the reckoning he took of himself on the
escape from Los Angeles in the dead morning hours after Marilyn was
gone.

Yet if we are to grant her this much effect
upon the development of one American hero, why not assume even more
and see her death as the seed of assassinations to follow. For who
is the first to be certain it was of no interest to the CIA, or to
the FBI, or to the Mafia, and half the secret police of the world,
that the brother of the President was reputed to be having an
affair with a movie star who had once been married to a playwright
denied a passport for “supporting Communist movements.” While even
the FBI would hardly be so imaginative as to cast Marilyn in the
mold from which Mata Hari is made, they did not need to keep a
tight surveillance upon her for any better reason than to keep
surveillance upon the Kennedys. The question to propose, if we are
ready to think the FBI did remove the Santa Monica telephone
company’s tape, is,
which
wing of the FBI? Are they
protecting the reputation of the Kennedys, or amassing evidence
against them? And is there some fear in the summits of the CIA that
the President himself — it is not long after the Bay of Pigs — is
the willing or unwitting leader of a movement from the left that
will wash at the roots of America? If such a suspicion is much too
grand, one can still suppose that the head of the FBI was
interested in obtaining a few more pieces of information to trade
against the time he might be asked to reduce his power. Do we have
to decide it is altogether impossible that in years to come Bobby
Kennedy might feel his power to criticize the official
investigations of his brother’s death would have to wait until the
hour he was back in the White House? If Marilyn was the spirit of
mischief — “Happy Birthday, dear President” — that spirit may have
reached into the machines of history. By the end, political stakes
were riding on her life, and even more on her death. If she could
be murdered in such a way as to appear a suicide in despair at the
turn of her love, what a point of pressure could be maintained
afterward against the Kennedys. So one may be entitled to speak of
a motive for murder. Of course, it is another matter to find that
evidence exists.