Marilyn & Me (12 page)

Marilyn was in the front yard, dressed in a simple, light-colored slacks outfit. She was on her knees, I think doing something with the flowers. As I got out of the car, she stood up and looked as if she’d been expecting someone else. Her hair was uncombed and loose, her face without makeup. You’d never know it was Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t look like any of the pictures that I had taken.

“I didn’t know you were going to come by,” she said. She wasn’t very friendly, and she seemed impatient.

“I just wanted to drop these off for you to see,” I said, handing her an envelope with a few prints and more foreign magazines with cover shots of her. “I’m taking Judi and the baby to Palm Springs for the weekend, but when Pat called last night to say you were no longer interested in doing
Playboy
, I just wanted to hear it direct from you.”

“Pat wasn’t authorized to make that call,” she said, and I saw that she was upset. It was the first time I felt anger coming from her.

“Should I discuss this with Pat on Monday?” I asked.

“It’s still about nudity. Is that all I’m good for?” she replied, but I didn’t think she was looking for an answer. “I’d like to show that I can get publicity
without
using my ass or getting fired from a picture,” she continued. “I haven’t made up my mind yet. Let’s leave it at that. I’ll call you.”

Her expression said, “Leave me alone.”

Without another word, I handed her the envelope.

“I’ll look at them,” she said.

“And I’m out of there,” I said to myself.

I
n Palm Springs, Judi, Suzanne, and I checked into a junior suite at the Ocotillo Lodge and spent the afternoon around the pool and making plans for Sunday—maybe some shopping and then a drive into the desert. It was good to relax for a bit, I thought, but that didn’t last long.

On Sunday morning, Billy Woodfield called me at the hotel before 7:00 a.m.

“Marilyn’s dead,” he said.

“Come on, Billy,” I murmured into the phone and hung up on him.

He called right back. “Larry, put on the radio. It’s news. She’s dead.”

Now I was fully awake, and I understood that he wasn’t jerking me around. “I’m coming back,” I said. “Her house?”

“Yes,” Billy replied.

I just didn’t understand it. Marilyn Monroe was dead
at thirty-six. I don’t remember what I thought or discussed with Judi on the drive back to Los Angeles, but I remember keeping the radio on all the way home. The early reports were of suicide, but she hadn’t seemed suicidal when I saw her the previous morning. On the other hand, how would I know what “suicidal” looks like? I’d read that she had had such episodes in the past and that she’d been revived every time.

Back in L.A., I dropped Judi and the baby off, grabbed my bag of cameras, and headed up Santa Monica Boulevard to Brentwood. My adrenaline was coursing through my body. I had to put my emotions on hold so that I could deal with her death professionally. When I arrived at her house, I saw that the front gate was wide open and that there were people all over her lawn. Pat Newcomb, with dark sunglasses on, was being helped into the backseat of a car by a police officer. A second later, Eunice Murray emerged from the house and was taken to the same vehicle. She was white as a sheet. The car drove off.

There were cops all around, but nobody was asking for press credentials, which I didn’t have with me. As I walked around, I noticed three or four other photographers and a few newsreel cameramen. That was when I saw a broken window on the right side of the house. Inside I could see what looked like an empty bedroom, but I could not see the bed. I lifted my Leica and started shooting. Then my eye
caught someone who might have been Mickey Rudin, Marilyn’s attorney. He was walking beside another man, who was leading Marilyn’s dog out of the house. Earlier, Marilyn’s body strapped to a gurney, beneath a coroner’s blanket, had been wheeled out a side door. Marilyn—so alive before my cameras—was now dead. She was being taken to the coroner for an autopsy.

Photos of that day showed me dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and dark-colored slacks with only one camera around my neck. My attempts to remain professional were to no avail. I just stopped taking pictures and returned to my car. I don’t even remember whether I went home or just hung out with Woodfield.

Months later, it would be confirmed that Marilyn spoke on the phone with Peter Lawford on the evening of her death. Joe DiMaggio’s son would tell friends that he called her asking for advice about his girlfriend. FBI files released four decades after her death revealed that in Los Angeles Bobby Kennedy had borrowed a car that afternoon and had driven over to see Marilyn, though he was known to be in Northern California that night. When you string these facts together, it didn’t seem like Marilyn was on the brink of taking her life.

Later on the afternoon of her death, I went to my studio to develop my film. When I opened the door, I found an oversize envelope on the floor. It was the one I had given
Marilyn. It was now marked to my attention. Someone had slipped it through the large mail slot in the door. It was eerie. It took me a while to open it, and when I did, I pulled out a single print. Someone had written on the back: “Send this to
Playboy
, they might like it.” Years later I was able to confirm it was Marilyn’s handwriting. The agreement with
Playboy
for the purchase of the poolside photos of Marilyn was concluded in September 1962, but Hefner, not wanting to exploit the circumstances of her death, decided not to publish them until the January 1964 issue of
Playboy
, which appeared in late November 1963, ironically the week of President Kennedy’s assassination.

Both
Life
and
Paris Match
had assigned me to cover the events surrounding the tragedy over the next few days, though I wasn’t the only photographer they assigned. Marilyn’s body was at the mortuary in Westwood when I got a call from Billy Woodfield. He said he had a way in and asked if I wanted to go with him to take pictures—the last pictures anyone would ever take of her. I told him flat out that I had no interest and hung up without saying good-bye. Why capture someone who was so vibrant and beautiful as a lifeless corpse? I was sure that someone would take that picture, though, and I was just as sure that it would be an ugly picture.

In the days before the funeral Joe DiMaggio visited Marilyn’s body at the funeral home in Westwood. Whitey did her makeup, and Gladys Rasmussen—her hairdresser from her early days at Fox—did her hair. Missing at the services at the Westwood Village Mortuary were many who had worked with her and loved her. Her
Some Like It Hot
co-stars, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, were not there. The directors George Cukor, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Elia Kazan were not there. Her first husband, Jim Dougherty, and her third, Arthur Miller, were not there. Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, and Wally Cox were not there. The Kennedy brothers were not there. The word was that DiMaggio had made sure that those he thought had destroyed her were not invited to pay their respects.

The Strasbergs were there, and Lee Strasberg delivered the eulogy. He called her “a legend.” He described her as “a warm human being, impulsive and shy and lonely, sensitive and in fear of rejection.” He talked about her hopes for the future and spoke of her “luminous quality—a combination of wistfulness, radiance, yearning—that set her apart and yet made everyone wish to be part of it.”

Of the pictures I took that day, the one that resonated for me was of Joe DiMaggio and his son in his military uniform, at the funeral. The tragedy, love, and unrelenting sadness of the moment were all on the great DiMaggio’s grief-stricken face.

I was there with other members of the press to take pictures, not to shed tears. In addition to my coverage of the funeral,
Life
asked me to send them some head shots taken in May during the filming of
Something’s Got to Give
. The next morning the picture editor called to tell me that my photograph of Joe DiMaggio and his son would run across two pages. I was afraid to ask him whose image of Marilyn had been selected for the cover. I figured that it had to be one by one of the great photographers: Milton Greene, Richard Avedon, Arnold Newman, or Alfred Eisenstaedt.

On Monday morning I went to the
Life
offices in Beverly Hills to get an advance copy of the magazine. I was stunned to discover that they had used one of my photographs on the cover, the image where she was wearing the golden fur cap with the matching fur surrounding her neck, the picture where she looked like she was breathing in a little more air, the ethereal shot where she looked like an angel. It’s the Marilyn I most remember, and it was on the cover of
Life
magazine.