The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (7 page)

Thad Brown disclosed to syndicated Hollywood columnist Florabel Muir that he saw Monroe's phone records on Chief Parker's desk, but that Parker had put the August toll tabs under lock and key. A Muir column that was pulled from afternoon editions of the New York
Daily News
on August 8, 1962, stated:

S
TRANGE
P
RESSURES ON
M
ARILYN
P
ROBE

Thad Brown later told Robert Slatzer that Parker had “called him on the carpet” for mentioning the phone records to Florabel Muir. When Slatzer asked Muir about the records, she said Parker had the phone records in his desk and had flashed them in front of her, stating that they were his insurance of heading the FBI “when the Kennedys get rid of Hoover.”

“I asked her what phone calls Marilyn had made during that last billing period,” Slatzer said, “and Florabel told me she had learned from Thad Brown that a number of the calls were to Bobby Kennedy.” Slatzer then called Parker about the phone records. “He emphatically denied any knowledge of them and hung up on me,” Slatzer recalled. He then went down to the Central Division Headquarters and confronted Parker in the
hallway about the records. Parker angrily retreated into his office and had Slatzer removed from the building.

 

Press coverage shows that Robert and Ethel Kennedy had arrived in San Francisco on Friday afternoon, August 3, with four of their children. The San Francisco
Chronicle
reported that Kennedy arrived “without his usual flashing smile and shook hands woodenly with those who welcomed him.” After his speech, scheduled for Monday, the attorney general and his family planned a ten-day vacation in the state of Washington.

A special FBI report on the attorney general's activities that weekend specified that he “spent the weekend at the Bates Ranch located sixty miles south of San Francisco. This was strictly a personal affair.” The ranch, located in Gilroy, was owned by John Bates, a friend of the Kennedy family. Bates had met John Kennedy when they both served in the navy during the war, and their mutual friend Paul Fay had been named by the president as the undersecretary of the Navy. Bates was a frequent guest at Hickory Hill, Bobby Kennedy's home, and Kennedy had asked him to head the antitrust division of the Department of Justice.

Bates has steadfastly insisted that Bobby Kennedy spent the entire weekend at his ranch. “The attorney general and his family were with us every minute from Friday afternoon to Monday,” John Bates maintained to Monroe's biographer Donald Spoto in 1992, “and there is simply no physical way that he could have gone to Southern California and returned.” Bates is certain that he would have known about it if Bobby Kennedy had left long enough to reach Los Angeles that day and return. The Gilroy parish priest confirmed that Bobby Kennedy and his family attended the 9:30
A.M.
mass at the Church of St. Mary's on Sunday, August 5, approximately when Marilyn Monroe's body was being prepared for autopsy.

In the process of his investigation, however, Thad Brown discovered something startling—the attorney general
had
been in Los Angeles on Saturday, August 4. Thad's brother, detective Finis Brown, related, “I talked to contacts who had seen Kennedy and Lawford at the Beverly Hilton Hotel the day she took the overdose. I went to Thad with the information, and Thad said he had been informed of the fact. He knew Kennedy was in Los Angeles that night, and he told Chief Parker.”

Los Angeles is 360 miles south of Gilroy. For the attorney general to fly expeditiously from the Bates Ranch to Los Angeles would have re
quired a ten-minute helicopter commute to either the San Jose Airport or the Naval Air Station, followed by a fifty-minute flight to the Santa Monica Airport and a ten-minute commute to the 20th Century-Fox heliport—where Bobby Kennedy frequently landed during his preproduction meetings at Fox for the film version of his book
The Enemy Within
. Including the five-minute drive from Fox to the Beverly Hilton Hotel, the elapsed time is one hour and fifteen minutes.

Apparently, Thad Brown had done his job too well. Shortly after he relayed his information about Bobby Kennedy to Chief Parker, he was removed from the case. Finis stated that from then on the case was exclusively in the hands of Captain James Hamilton. Under Hamilton, it was handled in an atmosphere of absolute secrecy. Even the department's most trusted employees were cut off from knowing anything about the investigation.

In 1962, Tom Reddin, the deputy chief who later succeeded Parker, recalled, “Where Hamilton and his Intelligence Division were concerned, nobody knew a bloody thing about what was going on. Hamilton talked to only two people—God and Chief Parker.” He added, “I was aware of the fact that there was a Hamilton investigation of the Monroe case, but I never knew what it was. I was also aware that there was supposed to be an internal document that never became public.”

Though he had officially been removed from the Monroe case, “Thad became somewhat obsessed,” recalled his brother, Finis. “He pursued matters privately after Parker removed him. He kept his own extensive Monroe files—including copies he had obtained of her phone records.” While Chief Parker considered the Marilyn Monroe file with the telephone records as insurance that he would one day be appointed head of the FBI, Thad Brown considered his private Marilyn file as his own job insurance within the department. Thad Brown stored the file in his garage in Northridge, where copies of Marilyn Monroe's telephone records were to mold in the dark for thirteen years.

O
n Sunday, August 5, Marilyn Monroe's body was “posted,” or made ready for release to the next of kin. But there seemed to be no loved ones and no immediate family. Her mother, Mrs. Gladys Baker Eley, was confined to the Rockhaven Sanitarium in Norwalk, California. A call to an official of the sanitarium elicited the response, “Mrs. Eley has never heard of Marilyn Monroe.” Ultimately, Marilyn's half sister, Berniece Miracle, who lived in Gainesville, Florida, authorized release of the body to Joe DiMaggio.

Arrangements were made by DiMaggio and Inez Melson, Gladys's guardian, with funeral director Guy Hockett of the Westwood Village Mortuary. The funeral was scheduled for 1
P.M.
on Wednesday, August 8, at Westwood Memorial Park, where Marilyn had buried two of her surrogate mothers: Grace McKee Goddard, who died in 1953; and “Aunt” Ana Lower, the only person in Marilyn's childhood who had shown her an unqualified degree of love and affection. Hockett recalled that Marilyn frequently spent long hours in the cemetery sitting on a bench near Ana Lower's grave.

Monroe's body arrived at the mortuary at noon on Tuesday, August 7.
That afternoon Allan “Whitey” Snyder, Marilyn's makeup artist, received a call from DiMaggio.

“Whitey,…you promised, remember?”

In 1952 Marilyn had undergone an appendectomy at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. On the day she was released Whitey arrived and worked his magic—making her radiantly beautiful for the waiting press. Afterward Marilyn elicited a promise.

“Promise me something, Whitey.”

“Anything, Marilyn.”

“Promise me that, if something happens to me—please, never let anybody touch my face but you. Promise you'll do my makeup, so I'll look my best.”

“Sure,” he said, jokingly. “Bring the body back while it's still warm, and I'll do it!”

Several weeks later Whitey received a gift package from Tiffany's. Inside was a gold money clip with the engraving:

Fortified with a bottle of Smirnoff, Whitey drove to the mortuary, where he did Marilyn's makeup for her final appearance. Sidney Guilaroff was supposed to do Marilyn's hair, but when he saw her body, he collapsed on the mortuary floor. Instead, she wore the wig from
The Misfits
.

On Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. Murray met Inez Melson and Berniece Miracle at Marilyn's house to select what Marilyn would wear. They chose the pale green Pucci dress Marilyn had worn at a press conference in Mexico City earlier in the year.

Hockett's assistant, Alan Abbott, recalled that DiMaggio spent the entire night beside her casket in the Chapel of the Palms. On Wednesday morning, when Whitey Snyder returned to check the makeup job, DiMaggio was still there. “His eyes were red from weeping, and he was transfixed, gazing at her,” Whitey recalled. “There were a lot of thought waves bouncing around that silent chapel—a lot of love, regrets, anger, frustration, and sorrow. It was a bit eerie. I think he blamed Hollywood for her death—Hollywood and the Kennedys.”

Joe DiMaggio had always been in love with Norma Jeane. His biggest rival was Marilyn Monroe. He felt their relationship had been damaged
by her career, and he wanted none of the Hollywood element at her funeral—no stars, producers, agents, Hollywood friends, or press. Only thirty relatives and friends were to be admitted; included were the Strasbergs, Berniece Miracle, Mickey Rudin, Ralph Greenson and his family, Eunice Murray, Whitey Snyder, Ralph Roberts, Inez Melson, and Pat Newcomb. The only newsperson admitted was DiMaggio's friend Walter Winchell. Among those who wanted to attend, but were shut out at the gate, were Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter and Pat Lawford, the entire Hollywood press corps, and the Who's Who of Hollywood.

Shortly before she died Marilyn Monroe had said, “Everybody is always tugging at you. They'd all like sort of a chunk of you. They kind of like take pieces out of you.” Ironically, among the few invited mourners were those who had been the most voracious.

Over fifty Los Angeles police officers controlled the crowds and traffic. Twentieth Century-Fox hired another forty security guards to keep the uninvited out of the cemetery. Bleachers were built along the exterior of the north wall to accommodate the press. Robert Slatzer, who had flown in from Columbus, Ohio, was among the crowd mourning behind the barricades.

Because of the traffic, the services started late. Inside, only the distant drone of media helicopters broke the silence. Eunice Murray recalled, “The handful of mourners seemed to sit withdrawn and remote, each lost in his own thoughts.”

As Guy Hockett's wife began playing “Over the Rainbow” on the organ, DiMaggio tearfully sat near the front of the chapel next to his son, Joe Jr. Lee Strasberg then read the brief eulogy:

Before the casket was closed, DiMaggio stood and took a long last look. Eunice Murray remembered Marilyn looking like a child sleeping peacefully among the flowers—forever young and beautiful. DiMaggio bent down and kissed her on the forehead, murmuring, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

The procession of mourners wordlessly followed the casket to the Corridor of Memories, where her body was entombed. After the rites they silently dispersed. Soon the frenzied fans and the frustrated press invaded the cemetery—trampling graves, crushing flowers, grasping souvenirs.

After everyone was gone, that evening, DiMaggio returned and said his last farewell. For the next twenty years Joe DiMaggio had fresh red roses placed in the urn beside the crypt where Norma Jeane's body rests today behind the variegated marble with the simple bronze plaque:

 

MARILYN MONROE

1926–1962

S
everal days after the funeral, Sergeant Robert Byron of the West Los Angeles Division sought to interview Peter Lawford. He was told by the actor's secretary that Lawford was out of town and would return to the city in several weeks. The day after the funeral, Peter and Pat Lawford along with Pat Newcomb flew to Hyannisport, where they stayed as guests in Robert Kennedy's residence. On Friday, August 10, Peter Lawford gave an interview to Hearst Washington correspondent Marianne Means:

Jacqueline Kennedy had departed with Caroline on Tuesday, August 7, for an extended holiday in Europe. On August 11 and 12, President Ken
nedy, the Lawfords, Pat Newcomb, and White House press secretary Pierre Salinger spent the weekend in Maine at the retreat of former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney on John's Island. Sunday the group spent the day on board the sixty-two-foot coast guard yacht
Manitou
.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, reporter Joe Hyams learned that Lawford's neighbors were upset that a helicopter had touched down on the Santa Monica shore behind the Lawford residence in the early hours of Sunday morning, August 5, blowing sand into their swimming pools. Ward Wood, another neighbor, had told a police department contact that he saw Bobby Kennedy arrive in a Mercedes at the Lawford mansion “late Saturday afternoon or in the early evening.”

This information led Hyams to contact Billy Woodfield, who had recently been commissioned by Frank Sinatra to take photos of his private jet from a helicopter rented from the Conners Helicopter Service of Santa Monica. Woodfield knew that Sinatra's pal Peter Lawford used the same services, as did many other Hollywood celebrities. Under the pretext of doing an article on the helicopter service to the stars, Woodfield asked to review the Conners flight logs listing all of their famous customers. Turning to the pages dated August 4 and 5, he discovered that a helicopter had been hired to pick up a passenger at the Lawford beach house early Sunday morning. Woodfield recently recalled, “The time in the log was approximately two o'clock Sunday morning. It confirmed what the neighbors had told us.”

Attempting to piece together Monroe's last hours, Woodfield then called Dr. Ralph Greenson. According to Woodfield, the psychiatrist wouldn't discuss what had occurred, ending the call with, “Look, I cannot explain myself without revealing things I don't want to reveal. You can't draw a line and say, ‘I'll tell you this, but I won't tell you that.' I can't talk about it, because I can't tell you the whole story…. Listen, talk to Bobby Kennedy.”

Woodfield recalls, “Hyams knew he had a powerful news item.” “He called the attorney general's office and asked if Robert Kennedy would comment on our information. They called back and said, ‘The attorney general would appreciate it if we didn't file the story.'”

Hyams stated, “I filed the article about Bobby and Marilyn with the
Herald Tribune
on the Monday or Tuesday after the funeral, but they killed it. It never ran.”

On Thursday, August 9, Robert Slatzer met with executrix Inez Melson and Eunice Murray at Monroe's house. “Inez was going through what
remained of Marilyn's papers in the file cabinet kept in the guest cottage,” Slatzer recalled, “She told me that when she arrived at the house early Sunday morning she discovered the cabinet had been broken into and many of Marilyn's things were missing. It was obvious that the lock had been forcibly broken.”

Slatzer remembered Marilyn's concern over the security of her papers. When she had given him a tour of her new house the previous April, she mentioned that things kept disappearing from her files, and she had ordered the lock changed and bars installed on the guest cottage windows. A bill to the Monroe estate from the A-l Lock and Safe Company of Santa Monica indicates that the locks were changed on March 15, 1962. When Slatzer asked Melson if she had found Marilyn's red diary, Melson said she didn't know anything about the diary. She hadn't seen it.

Before leaving, Slatzer went with Murray to the bedroom where Marilyn's body had been discovered. Though Murray said she had called Norman Jefferies early Sunday morning to repair the broken window, Slatzer noticed that the window was boarded up and hadn't been repaired. He found shards of broken glass lying outside in the dirt of the flower bed, rather than inside where they logically would have fallen.

Slatzer recalls that the last time he had seen Marilyn was just before he left for Ohio in mid-July. She had called from a public phone, and he remembered the unusual urgency to her voice: “Pick me up at six,” Marilyn had asked; “I'll meet you at San Vicente and Carmelina.” Slatzer remembers driving to the Brentwood corner near her home. Expecting to wait, he was surprised to find her standing on the corner, a lonely figure who went unrecognized—without makeup and wearing large sunglasses, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail under a scarf. “Hi,” she called out as he pulled up to the curb. She hopped in beside him with a big smile, placing her oversize pocketbook on the floor of his Cadillac.

Though she seemed her effervescent self, as they drove north toward Point Dume just beyond Malibu Beach, Slatzer recalls becoming aware of the emotional difficulties she was going through. Shortly after the president's birthday gala in May, Marilyn was suddenly cut off from communication with Jack Kennedy, and the phone number she had to his private line was disconnected. She had been told in a brutal fashion by Peter Lawford that she was never to speak to the president again.

“It was a devastating emotional blow that led to her breakdown on the set of
Something's Got to Give
at 20th Century-Fox,” Slatzer recalled. “In her rage and despondency she placed numerous calls to the White House
demanding an explanation. Bobby became the emissary to soothe the fury of the woman scorned. I hadn't realized the extent of her involvement with Bobby until she told me that day. When I last saw her she confided to me that Bobby had only recently tried to sever their relationship as well. Like Jack, Bobby offered no explanation.” Slatzer perceived that the Kennedys' rejection had touched a raw nerve in Marilyn, and her devastation was turning to anger.

“What Marilyn revealed to me that day on the beach, I found deeply disturbing,” Slatzer confides. She removed her small red diary from her bag and showed Slatzer her “book of secrets.”

“What is it?” Slatzer asked.

“It's my diary,” she replied, “I want you to look through it.”

Slatzer remembers thumbing through the pages and finding notes of her conversations with the Kennedys. Some of the topics included government plans to use mobsters to assassinate Fidel Castro, atomic testing, Sinatra's ties to the underworld, civil rights, Bobby Kennedy's efforts to jail Jimmy Hoffa, and a note indicating that Bobby Kennedy had persuaded the president to withdraw American air cover in the Bay of Pigs disaster. Slatzer said he asked her why she had made the notations.

“Mostly because Bobby liked to talk about political things,” she replied. “I wanted to be able to talk about things he was interested in. So I'd make notes after our conversations, and then I'd learn as much as I could about the subjects so that I could talk about them intelligently.”

“Has anybody else seen this book?” Slatzer asked.

“Nobody.” she answered. “But I'm so angry I may just call a press conference and show it to the whole world and let everybody know what the Kennedys are really like!”

Slatzer recalls trying to persuade her to forget about the Kennedys and concentrate on her career—to put away her diary and not show it to anybody. “Obviously Bobby doesn't want anything more to do with you, and for your own good, you'd better forget about him,” he advised.

“It's not that easy,” she replied.

Several days later, Slatzer left for Ohio, where he received a series of disturbing calls from Marilyn—ending with the one on Friday, August 3, when it seemed so important for her to locate Robert Kennedy.