The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (6 page)

According to Miner, they met for several hours, during which Greenson discussed “not only Marilyn's habits, but also the private confidences she shared with her psychiatrist.” Greenson expressed his firm opinion that Marilyn Monroe had
not
committed suicide. Then he played a half-hour tape that Marilyn had made at her home on her own tape recorder. The contents of this tape also led Miner to conclude she had not committed suicide.

Miner later recalled, “Dr. Greenson was very strongly of the opinion that Miss Monroe did not commit suicide. He was very much distressed by her death. The notion that she committed suicide added to that distress, because he firmly felt that she did not commit suicide—very much so, very much so. That I can state. He did not bar me from saying that.”

Of all the circumstances, contradictions, and puzzles regarding the death of Marilyn Monroe, perhaps this Greenson interview is the most mind-boggling. It poses two unalterable questions: Why did Greenson reverse his opinion, and what was on the tape played for John Miner?

Without ever having testified under oath about his knowledge of Marilyn Monroe's death, Greenson died in 1979.

Miner stated, “I gave my word to the man and he's dead. So I don't expect ever to reveal it. It's possible that a judge could order me to reveal it and put me in jail for contempt of court if I refused. I hope I never have to cross that bridge.”

After the interview, Miner left Greenson's office a shaken man. He too became convinced that Marilyn Monroe had not committed suicide, and he filed his opinion in a memorandum to the district attorney as well as the coroner's office.

When investigative journalist Anthony Summers asked about the contents of the memorandum, Miner recalled that it stated: “As requested by you, I have been to see Dr. Greenson to discuss the death of his late patient Marilyn Monroe. We discussed this matter for a period of hours, and as a result of what Dr. Greenson told me, and from what I heard on tape recordings, I believe I can say definitely that it was not a suicide.”

When Summers asked if Greenson thought Marilyn Monroe was murdered, Miner made the significant response, “That is something on which I cannot respond.”

When Noguchi learned about Miner's memorandum, he stated, “If Miner's evaluation in 1962 was correct, the only conceivable cause of Monroe's death was murder.” Noguchi ruled out an accidental overdose, stating that “an accidental overdose of that magnitude was extremely unlikely. From my forensic experience with suicide victims, I believe that the sheer number of pills Monroe ingested was too many to swallow ‘accidentally.'”

The memorandum shocked Coroner Curphey. Two of the most important people in arriving at a probable-suicide verdict were Greenson and Miner, and both had changed their opinion. At this point Curphey should have called for a formal inquest and put witnesses under oath. Instead, he chose to suppress information, and Miner's memorandum soon vanished from the files. Curphey called Grandison into his office and asked him to sign the death certificate, which indicated the cause of death as “probable suicide.”

Grandison said, “The standard procedure when we were about to close a case was that all the reports, charts, and other paperwork on the case were there in the file. It would contain the conclusions drawn by the pathologist, the determination of the police, and whatever other agencies made any type of investigation of the case. This file had none of that information in it.” Before signing the death certificate Grandison recalled, “I asked Dr. Curphey about the missing paperwork…. This was maybe the third or fourth time I had called the missing items to his attention.” Grandison also noted that the autopsy report had been altered. “I had seen the initial autopsy report, and this wasn't the same report. The report had been completely changed.” When Grandison asked about this, Curphey lost his temper. “He got very angry,” Grandison vividly remembered. “He said, ‘Listen, you sign the death certificate…or else I'm gonna do something!'”

At the time Grandison was a young man with a wife and children, and he believed he would lose his job if he didn't follow Curphey's orders. Reluctantly, he signed the death certificate.

 

On August 21, 1962, Curphey and the Suicide Prevention Team called a joint press conference to announce the final findings of the “exhaustive
investigation” that had lasted a full fifteen days. Farberow announced that Monroe had “suffered from psychiatric disturbances for a long time. She experienced severe fears and frequent depressions; mood changes were abrupt and unpredictable…. In our investigation we have learned that Miss Monroe had often expressed wishes to give up, to withdraw, and even to die. On more than one occasion in the past, when despondent or depressed, she had made a suicide attempt using sedative drugs. On these occasions she had called for help and had been rescued. From the information collected about the events of the evening of August 4, it is our opinion that the same pattern was repeated, except for the rescue…. On the basis of all the information collected, it is our opinion that her death was a suicide.”

Curphey then stepped forward to announce the coroner's verdict: “Probable suicide.”

 

The final verdict, however, has been languishing for over three decades on a dusty shelf in the subcellars of the Los Angeles Hall of Records. The true verdict as to what happened to Marilyn Monroe on August 4, 1962, has always been contained in R. J. Abernethy's toxicology report.

As limited as the report was in 1962, computerized information banks available to the world of forensic medicine in the 1990s allow an analysis of the original report that yields definitive answers to the unanswered questions of decades ago. Abernethy's report clearly states that the blood sample contained 4.5 milligrams (mg) percent barbiturates and 8.0 mg percent chloral hydrate. Computer analysis reveals that Case #81128 had to have swallowed from twenty-seven to forty-two Nembutal capsules (pentobarbital) to reach a blood level of 4.5 mg percent. In addition, she had to have consumed from fourteen to twenty-three chloral hydrate tablets to reach a blood level of 8.0 mg percent. The percentages in the blood, therefore, revealed that a total of from forty-one to sixty-five capsules and tablets had to have been ingested. However, this does not include the 13.0 mg percent pentobarbital that Abernathy's report indicates was also discovered in the liver. Computer analysis reveals that an additional eleven to twenty-four Nembutal capsules had to have been consumed to account for the liver concentration. Therefore, a minimum of fifty-two to a maximum of eighty-nine capsules had to have been consumed for Case #81128, to succumb from the oral ingestion of the lethal dosage. However, in the thousands of fatal cases involving acute barbiturate poisoning
due to the ingestion of an overdose, not one case involves the ingestion of over twelve capsules in which no residue has been found in the digestive tract. No case has ever been reported in which the victim has as high as 4.5 mg percent pentobarbital and 8.0 percent chloral hydrate in the blood and no refractile crystals or concentrations found in the stomach or intestinal tract. Yet Noguchi was unable to find capsule residue or any trace of refractile crystals or concentrations of the barbiturates in Monroe's stomach or intestines.

Table 1 illustrates that Marilyn Monroe was on the high end of the mg percentage in the blood. Only Case #4 and Case #1 indicate slightly higher percentages in the blood. (All of the cases indicate stomach concentrations.) However, Monroe also had a high concentration of chloral hydrate, which is synergistic with pentobarbital and greatly increases its lethal effect. The combined dosage was sufficient to kill from nine to twenty people.

 

TABLE 1. Tissue Concentrations from Fatal Cases Involving Pentobarbital
Prepared by toxicologist Robert H. Cravey

 

The information banks of forensic medicine further establish that there is no case on record of a fatal dose by oral ingestion involving such high concentrations in the blood of both pentobarbital and chloral hydrate. The victim inevitably dies before the fatal concentrations can approach such a high blood level. Monroe would have been dead before even 35
percent of the total barbiturates had been absorbed from the digestive tract into her bloodstream. It is not possible for the remaining 65 percent to have been absorbed from the digestive tract and to vanish without a trace, because when the heart stops beating, the blood stops circulating, and the bodily functions shut down, absorption from the digestive tract into the bloodstream abruptly ceases. The remaining pentobarbital and chloral hydrate could not have entered the bloodstream by ingestion, suppository, enema infusion, or any other absorption process.

How then was the fatal dose administered? It could only have been by needle injection, or what is termed a “hot shot,” in which the victim rapidly looses consciousness and succumbs in a matter of ten to twenty minutes.

Sergeant Jack Clemmons was correct that Sunday morning, August 5, 1962, when he returned to division headquarters with the conviction that something was very wrong. Marilyn Monroe did not commit suicide. Technology of the modern world of forensic medicine gives the final verdict—Case #81128 was a homicide victim.

C
aptain Thad Brown, the legendary LAPD chief of detectives, was sleeping in his hideaway trailer in Malibu on Sunday morning when he was awakened by a police messenger pounding on his door with an urgent message. Chief of Police William Parker wanted to see him downtown about “some problems” as quickly as possible. Parker wanted Brown to take over the Marilyn Monroe case, and one of the “problems” was a scribbled note on a piece of crumpled paper found in Monroe's bedcovers.

In 1978, Lionel Grandison disclosed that a scribbled note had once been in the Monroe file. It was rumored to be a suicide note. In a recorded interview with Robert Slatzer, Grandison stated that the note had been turned over to the coroner's office by the West Los Angeles Police Department:

 

G
RANDISON:
There was a note—that was basically illegible…. It was scribbly, but allegedly in her handwriting…. I couldn't determine precisely what the note said, but the fact remains that the note disappeared within one or two days.

S
LATZER:
Who do you think, in your opinion, confiscated this particular note?

G
RANDISON:
All I can say is that it was someone who had more authority than I—someone who didn't want this note seen past the couple of days it remained in the coroner's property.

S
LATZER:
Was Abernethy or Curphey aware of the note?

G
RANDISON:
Yes, they had to be.

 

Police investigator Finis Brown, brother of Thad Brown, revealed that the note contained a Kennedy phone number; and the assistant chief of the Intelligence Division, Virgil Crabtree, confirmed that there was a Kennedy number scribbled on it. The significance of the number may lie in a series of telephone calls Marilyn made on Friday, August 3, and Saturday, August 4.

Robert Slatzer spoke to Marilyn Monroe twice shortly before her death. He was in Columbus, Ohio, working on a television series, when she called on Friday, August 3. The call was placed from a pay phone near her home because she feared her phones were tapped. Slatzer's friend Ron Pataki was with him when she called, and he recently confirmed the content of the calls Marilyn placed to Slatzer.

During the conversation on Friday, August 3, Slatzer told Marilyn he'd read in a newspaper that Bobby Kennedy was in San Francisco, where he was scheduled to speak before the American Bar Association on Monday, August 6. Knowing Marilyn was anxious to talk to Bobby Kennedy, Slatzer suggested she call Pat Lawford to find out where he was staying. According to a statement Peter Lawford made in a 1976
Long Beach Star
interview, Marilyn called him on Friday in an effort to reach his wife, who was staying at Hyannisport. Peter Lawford stated that he reluctantly gave Marilyn his wife's phone number at the Kennedy compound. When Marilyn reached Pat Lawford, she was told that Bobby Kennedy was registered at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. An operator at the St. Francis Hotel confirmed that Marilyn had tried to reach Kennedy there and had left several messages.

The scribbled note found in the bedclothes may have been Marilyn's notations from her attempts to find Kennedy.

 

The telephone had been an integral part of Marilyn Monroe's life, the immediate tool of communication for a soul who was essentially a loner and frequently suffered from a sense of isolation. The telephone seems to hold the key to her last moments. Peter Lawford had dramatically de
scribed Marilyn's last telephone call—her voice fading until there was no response—and Dr. Greenson had painted the too-cinematic picture of Marilyn Monroe's body being discovered with her outstretched hand tightly gripping the telephone. A media maelstrom arose over Marilyn's last call:

M
ARILYN
M
YSTERY
C
ALL

Though a number of people claimed to have spoken to Marilyn on the telephone Saturday night, only some of the claims have validity. Henry Rosenfeld, who had been a confidant of Marilyn's since 1949, said he called her from New York on Saturday sometime between 8 and 9
P.M.
Pacific time. He recalled that she sounded tired, but very much herself. Though he refused to reveal details of the conversation, he stated that Marilyn discussed plans for the future, including a theater party during a trip to New York the following Thursday.

Shortly before or after the call from Rosenfeld, Marilyn called hairdresser Sidney Guilaroff, whom she had known since the 1940s. Guilaroff told Anthony Summers that the call came at approximately 9
P.M.
For decades Guilaroff refused to discuss this conversation, but he recently revealed that Marilyn called him not once but twice that Saturday. The first call came in the late afternoon. “Marilyn was extremely upset. She was in tears and quite hysterical,” Guilaroff confided. “She said that Bobby Kennedy had been to her house with Lawford, and that Bobby had threatened her. There was a violent argument. She was afraid—terrified. I tried to calm her down.”

The second call came at approximately nine that night. “She was more composed, but I can still hear the fear in her voice. Whatever had happened during Bobby's visit in the afternoon had frightened her. I told her we would talk about it in the morning. I never imagined we would never speak again.”

Jeanne Carmen, Marilyn's former next-door neighbor at her Doheny apartment in West Hollywood, stated that Marilyn called her sometime
between 9 and 10
P.M.
According to Carmen, Marilyn sounded exhausted and nervous, but she was neither groggy nor slurring her words. “She sounded frightened and didn't want to be alone,” Carmen recalled. “She wanted me to come over, but I was tired myself and told her I'd call her the next day. My phone rang again about a half hour later. It may have been Marilyn, but I didn't answer.”

José Bolaños, a Mexican screenwriter Marilyn met in Mexico City in February 1962, said he called Marilyn from a nearby restaurant at 10
P.M.
Bolaños had escorted her to the Golden Globe Awards in March, and they had become romantically involved. He had only recently returned to Los Angeles to see her. Though Bolaños has also refused to disclose the content of their last discussion, he said she didn't hang up the phone but put down the receiver in the middle of their conversation and never returned. Bolaños added, “Marilyn told me something that will one day shock the whole world.”

Peter Lawford claimed that Marilyn's last call, in which she slurred her words and faded away, occurred at approximately 7:30
P.M.
However, his estimate of the time is inconsistent with the statements of all those who are known to have spoken with her between 7:30 and 10
P.M.
: Joe DiMaggio, Jr., Henry Rosenfeld, Jeanne Carmen, Sidney Guilaroff, and José Bolaños. If Lawford is to be believed, then the call when Marilyn apparently lapsed into unconsciousness must have occurred after 10
P.M.

In 1986 Lawford's guest “Bullets” Durgom confirmed that Marilyn's last conversation with Lawford took place sometime after 10
P.M.
Durgom stated, “It was at about ten or eleven that Lawford tried to call Marilyn back and could not get through.” According to Durgom it was after that when “the lawyer [Mickey Rudin] and somebody else went over to the house…and it was too late.” Lawford's maid, Irma Lee Reilly, confirmed “there was no word of worry over Marilyn” before ten o'clock.

According to Joe and Dolores Naar, who were also guests at Lawford's that evening, when they arrived at approximately eight o'clock there was no indication of alarm or concern about Marilyn. The dinner, which turned out to be Chinese takeout, wasn't served until about nine. The Naars recall that Lawford had been drinking heavily, and the party ended early. They left the Lawford house shortly after ten. The Naars are adamant that, during the two-hour time frame when they were with Lawford, no alarm was raised about Marilyn Monroe and not a word was said about a phone call in which she asked Lawford to “say good-bye to the President.” Dolores Naar recalled, “It was a very light, up evening. During
dinner there was one call from Marilyn that Peter took, but he wasn't gone long, and when he returned, he calmly said, ‘Oh, it's Marilyn again'—like she does this all the time. His attitude didn't change. There was no indication that anything was wrong. I picked up on nothing like that.”

The Naars knew Lawford and Marilyn well and insist that if anything alarming had happened while they were at the Lawford residence, they would have known about it. The Naars recalled that they returned to their home “well before eleven” and were getting undressed for bed when they received an urgent phone call from Lawford. “He was in a panic about Marilyn,” Dolores Naar stated. “Marilyn had called him and was incoherent. He was afraid she had taken too many pills and was in trouble….”

Clearly, this was the call in which Marilyn had lapsed into unconsciousness. The call hadn't occurred at “approximately seven-thirty,” as Lawford stated to the press and later to the police. Marilyn's alarming call occurred after the Naars had returned to their home, sometime after ten and “well before eleven.”

The Naars recalled that Lawford's urgent call to them occurred at approximately ten-thirty. “We lived near Marilyn's house, and he asked Joe to run over there and see what was wrong.” Joe Naar had already undressed for bed, but by the time he had put his clothes back on and was hurrying out the door to drive to Marilyn's house, Lawford called back. “He said that he'd spoken to Marilyn's doctor,” Dolores recalled, “and he had said that he had given her sedatives because she had been disturbed earlier and she was probably asleep—‘so don't bother going,' Peter told Joe.”

The pair of phone calls to the Naars is perplexing. Lawford stated that when Marilyn's voice seemed to fade away, he yelled at her over the phone in an effort to revive her, then the phone went dead. When he called back he received a busy signal. In the 1962 press reports, Lawford said he had the operator check the line, and was told that the phone was off the hook and there was no conversation. Were both of Marilyn's phones off the hook with no conversation on either line? This would have been the case if, as Jose Bolarios stated, Marilyn didn't hang up the phone, but put down the receiver in the middle of the conversation and never returned.

If Marilyn had left her private line off the hook at 10
P.M.
, and within the next half hour made the alarming call to Peter Lawford on an extension of the house phone, both lines would have been off the hook and without conversation when Lawford asked the operator to intervene. After
Lawford then placed the urgent call to the Naars at approximately ten-thirty to ask Joe to go over and “see what was wrong,” something or somebody prevailed on him to call back in the hope of preventing Joe Naar from discovering what actually had occurred.

 

Having learned that Marilyn Monroe had died with her hand gripping the telephone,
Herald-Tribune
correspondent Joe Hyams tried to obtain a copy of Marilyn's telephone records. “The morning after her death,” recalls Hyams, “I contacted a telephone company employee and asked him to copy for me the list of numbers on her billing tape.” Hyams's contact at the telephone company told him, “All hell's broken loose down here. Apparently, you're not the only one interested in Marilyn's calls. The tape's disappeared…. I'm told it was impounded by men in dark suits and well-shined shoes…. Somebody high up ordered it.”

Later a former General Telephone security officer told Hyams that the tapes and toll tabs were confiscated early Sunday morning. “There was just that brief time in limbo, in the very early morning, when you could theoretically get to them before they vanished in the accounting system. After that, they were irretrievable for days, even if J. Edgar Hoover himself wanted them. With the formalities we had then, no ordinary cop could have got to Marilyn's records till nearly two weeks after her death.”

However, Captain James Hamilton was no ordinary cop. As head of the LAPD Intelligence Division he wielded a great deal of power and influence. According to former chief Tom Reddin, “Hamilton knew that true power was invisible—that visibility was vulnerability. He was certainly an invisible power in Los Angeles. Hamilton knew where all the bodies were buried, and who buried them.”

Former mayor Sam Yorty recalled, “Hamilton's Intelligence Division was Parker's version of the FBI. Parker believed that he was the man who would one day succeed J. Edgar Hoover, and Bobby and Jack Kennedy led Parker to believe he was their choice.”

Correspondence between Robert Kennedy and Chief Parker and Captain Hamilton preserved in the Kennedy Library confirms Yorty's observation. Their friendship had gone back to the mid-fifties, when Bobby Kennedy was on the West Coast and Hamilton and Parker assisted him in the Senate rackets investigations. In his book
The Enemy Within
, Robert Kennedy frequently mentions Captain Hamilton as a friend and source of information.

It was Captain James Hamilton, no ordinary cop, who had confiscated Marilyn Monroe's telephone records, and it was Captain James Hamilton who directed the cover-up of information relating to the circumstances of Marilyn Monroe's death for Chief William Parker.
Los Angeles Times
crime reporter Jack Tobin, an acquaintance of Hamilton's, had lunch with him shortly after Marilyn's death and years later revealed, “Hamilton told me he had the telephone history of the last day or two of Marilyn Monroe's life. When I expressed interest, he said, ‘I will tell you nothing more.' But it was obvious that he knew more.”