The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (52 page)

T
elephone records indicate that on the day Marilyn returned from Cal-Neva, Monday, July 30, she placed an eight-minute call to the Justice Department. Only the ominous ear of electronic surveillance may know what Marilyn had to say to Bobby Kennedy.

During the week, Marilyn entered a whirlwind of discussions about new projects. There were conferences at the studio with director J. Lee Thompson about her next Fox production,
What a Way to Go
. She spoke with Gene Kelly about a new musical. There were plans for her to do a musical version of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
, and she spoke with composer Jule Styne about the score.

On Tuesday, July 31, she called her East Coast friend Henry Rosenfeld to discuss plans for a three-day New York trip in early September. She was going to give a theater party in Washington, D.C., and wanted Henry to be her escort at the opening night of the new Irving Berlin musical,
Mr. President
, directed by Joshua Logan.
Mr. President
was to open on September 6 at the National Theater in Washington, and the press had reported that President Kennedy and Jackie would be in attendance. Interestingly, Marilyn Monroe was making a point of being there the same
night, and she had ordered a new $6,000 evening gown from Jean-Louis for the occasion. It promised to be a memorable night at the theater.

On Tuesday evening, July 31, Marilyn invited Whitey Snyder and wardrobe assistant Marjorie Plecher to her home. They were engaged to be married, and together they celebrated both the wedding plans and Marilyn's new start date for
Something's Got to Give
, which was set for September 16. The Snyders recalled how optimistic and enthusiastic Marilyn was about the future. “She never looked better—she was in great spirits,” Plecher commented.

Mrs. Murray didn't stay overnight on Wednesday, and Marilyn spent the evening at home. She had made an appointment with Kennedy hairstylist Mickey Song, who had helped her at the birthday gala. Song arrived at her house assuming Marilyn wanted her hair styled. Instead, she wanted to pump Song for information about the Kennedys. “She figured who else would know more about the Kennedys' private life than their hairdresser?” Song recalled. Marilyn asked him questions about both Bobby and Jack Kennedy—where they had been, and if Song had seen them with “other women.”

“I didn't want to get involved, and she knew I was being evasive, so she said, ‘Don't you want to help me?' Then she told me that the Kennedys were using me, just as they were using her. She tried to make us comrades against the Kennedys. I just said, ‘I'm not being used. They're treating me great!'” Several weeks later, after Marilyn's death, Song said, “I saw Bobby, and he said to me, ‘You're always defending the Kennedys, aren't you? That's good. I heard a tape Marilyn made of you a couple of weeks ago.'

“I was stunned. I had no idea she was taping me. I guess she was trying to get something on them. At the time I didn't really care about Marilyn or the Kennedys. Now, I think she was abused. They played with her, and they tired of her, and I think they found her a lot of trouble to get off their hands. She wasn't going to go that easily.”

In mid-July, Marilyn went to private investigator Fred Otash and asked him to supply her with electronic equipment to bug her own telephone. Unknown to Marilyn, Otash was already involved with bugging her home and apartment. At the time she hadn't told Otash why she wanted the equipment, but it occurred to him that “maybe she wanted to have something she could hang over Bobby's head.”

Some years after Marilyn's death, Otash told the
Los Angeles Times
that he had been hired by the master surveillance expert Bernard Spindel
to install electronic listening devices at the homes of Peter Lawford and Marilyn Monroe. Spindel had told him that Jimmy Hoffa was trying to obtain compromising information on the president and the attorney general. However, there is no hard evidence that the surveillance was actually made for Hoffa. If the contents of the tapes were as devastating as Otash claimed, they were never used to effect by Hoffa during his egregious problems with Robert Kennedy. In all probability the surveillance tapes were contracted by the CIA counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, whose signature is on one of the transcript cover sheets. Domestic surveillance is prohibited under the CIA charter; but, as the Church Committee hearings revealed, CIA domestic surveillance was commonly carried out by contracting private investigators, such as Spindell's B. R. Fox Company, which had a history as a CIA contractee.

 

According to Eunice Murray, on Thursday, August 2, “Marilyn, who was fascinated by greenery and plants, spent four hours at Frank's Nursery in Santa Monica, and ordered citrus trees and an array of flowering plants for her garden.” And Dr. Greenson saw her twice that day. According to his final bill, he saw her once at his residence, and later at her home.

On Thursday evening, Marilyn was invited to the Lawford beach house, where Peter's friend Dick Livingston recalled, “She came in carrying her own bottle of Dom Perignon champagne. She drank it over little ice cubes from Peter's ice cube maker. She had on the damnedest outfit—a pair of hip-huggers with a bare midriff that revealed her gallbladder operation scar—and a Mexican serape, wrapped around her neck. She was absolutely white, the color of alabaster.” Livingston said to her, “My God, Marilyn, you ought to get some sun.” She looked at him and whispered, “I know. What I need is a tan—and a man.”

 

Bobby Kennedy, along with Ethel and four of the children, jetted into San Francisco on Friday, August 3. The attorney general was scheduled to speak at the opening of the American Bar Association Conference on Monday, August 6, and he planned to spend the weekend at the Bates Ranch, located about sixty miles south of San Francisco. The
San Francisco Chronicle
stated, “He was without his usual flashy smile and shook hands woodenly with those that welcomed him. Perhaps the cares of the administration are weighing heavily on him.” Or perhaps Kennedy had
read columnist Dorothy Kilgallen's lead item in the
New York Journal-American
that day:

Kilgallen had been zeroing in on the Kennedy-Monroe story and had questioned a number of people close to the Kennedys, including Kenny O'Donnell. Kilgallen had called Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department on Wednesday, August 1, to try to verify the rumors. Kilgallen later claimed she had learned about Marilyn's Kennedy affairs through a source close to the film star. The Angleton CIA document inferred that Kilgallen's source was Howard Rothberg. However, while Rothberg was Kilgallen's interior decorator and a social friend, he did not know Marilyn. Rothberg became privy to intimate details of Marilyn Monroe's private life through a complex series of relationships.

Rothberg was a friend of Ron Pataki, a syndicated drama critic for the Scripps-Howard newspaper in Columbus, Ohio, where Pataki was a longtime friend of Robert Slatzer. They had grown up together in Columbus, and it was through Slatzer that Pataki obtained his job with Scripps-Howard. When Anthony Summers was researching
Goddess
in 1984, he interviewed Pataki along with several friends of Slatzer's who had firsthand knowledge of Slatzer's relationship with Marilyn Monroe.

Today Ron Pataki still lives in Columbus, where he has become a therapist with a doctorate in theology. In a recent interview he recalled, “Oh, yes, I was very aware of Bob's long-standing friendship with Marilyn. Whenever Bob was in Columbus we'd get together, and oftentimes Bob spoke to Marilyn on the phone. A few times he'd put me on the phone, and I spoke to her on several of those long, rambling calls…. She called me several times looking for Bob when he was staying at my place. She called here once from Reno or Cal-Neva. She knew Bob had a real understanding of her. She could always turn to him with her troubles.”

Pataki recalled that Slatzer had returned to Columbus to work on a wildlife television series in the summer of 1962, and he remembers two calls that Slatzer received from Marilyn shortly before she died.

“It may have been the last part of July or the first of August when Marilyn called,” Pataki stated. “I was at Bob's and answered the phone. They spoke for a long time. After Bob hung up, I knew he was upset, and I asked him what was wrong. He told me Marilyn was having trouble with the Kennedys. He was very worried about her, and we talked about the problems Marilyn was having with JFK and his brother, the attorney general.”

When Pataki was recently asked if he had talked to Dorothy Kilgallen or Howard Rothberg about Marilyn's problems with the Kennedys, Pataki paused before responding, “I may have.”

Pataki and Dorothy Kilgallen were lovers. Referred to in Lee Israel's book
Kilgallen
as “the out-of-towner,” Pataki was one of the last people to see Kilgallen before her untimely death, and he knew many of Dorothy's friends—including Howard Rothberg.
^*

On Friday, August 3, Marilyn again called Robert Slatzer in Columbus, Ohio. Slatzer related that Marilyn was anticipating seeing Bobby Kennedy that weekend. When Slatzer told her he had read that Bobby was in San Francisco to attend a conference, she told him she was going to try to find out from Patricia Lawford where he was staying, and said, “I'm going to blow the lid off this whole damn thing! I'm going to tell everything! Everybody has been calling trying to get the story anyway—Winchell, Kilgallen. And it's clear to me now that the Kennedys got what they wanted out of me and then moved on!”

Slatzer related, “I warned her against proceeding with the press conference and advised that she be discreet in revealing her plans to others. She said, ‘Well, I've told a couple of people already.' I urged her to keep quiet about it, and wait and see what happened over the weekend.” It proved to be the last time they spoke.

Although Bobby Kennedy's family was staying at the Bates Ranch, the American Bar Association had provided accommodations for him at the St. Francis Hotel. After calling Patricia Lawford in Hyannisport and learning that Kennedy had reservations at the St. Francis, Marilyn called the
hotel on Friday afternoon. A hotel operator stated that Marilyn unsuccessfully tried to reach the attorney general a number of times, and left several messages.

It must have been disconcerting for Robert Kennedy to note that everywhere one looked that week there were pictures of Marilyn Monroe. She was on the cover of
Life
and
Paris-Match. Life
was involved with a special publicity campaign that featured large billboard displays of Marilyn. The
Life
magazine story had hit the newsstands that Friday and contained the Richard Meryman interview, in which an outspoken Marilyn discussed the Hollywood studio system and her thoughts on fame:

And Marilyn was starting all over again. In that last week she had told Slatzer, “I'm cleaning house, and I'm starting with Paula. She's gone!” And in fact Marilyn had already given Paula Strasberg a one-way ticket back to New York.

Marilyn had once said, “I'm not as mature as I should be. There's a part of me that has never developed and keeps getting in the way, getting me in lousy situations, screwing up relationships, stopping my rest. I think about it all the time. My mother wasn't strong-minded. Maybe what I'm talking about is a weak-minded quality I inherited from her.”

But things were coming together now. At age thirty-six, the waif was becoming independent. Her battle with Fox and her determination not to let the Kennedys control her were maturing experiences, and had steeled her will. People were no longer going to be able to take advantage of her vulnerability. She had made up her mind to rid herself of people she now realized didn't have her best interests at heart.

She was planning to get rid of Pat Newcomb as well as Dr. Greenson. “That last month she became convinced that Greenson wasn't doing her any good,” Ralph Roberts said. “It was only a question of time before she was going to get rid of him, as well as Mrs. Murray. She was radically turning on Greenson and Mrs. Murray the woman he'd put with her, she felt, to spy on her.”

Marilyn had learned that her old publicist and friend Rupert Allan was returning from his stay in Monaco, and Marilyn hoped he would replace Newcomb. She commissioned Roberts to find Allan for her. “Tell him this is very important,” Marilyn said.

“Ralph did reach me,” Allan remembered. “But I had jet lag after the flight from France and a bad case of bronchitis. I knew if I spoke one word to Marilyn, she would insist on coming over with chicken soup and aspirin. And I was really too sick for that.” When Allan later learned that the “very important business” may have concerned her press conference regarding the Kennedys, he commented, “I don't know how I would have handled that…. I was angry and saddened by the way the Kennedys had treated her, but I think that I could have talked her out of making it public knowledge.”