The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (66 page)

Marilyn may have had paranoid tendencies, but in this instance she was very much in tune with the real world. She was right about the phones. She was right about being watched. In fact her whole home was bugged, and so was Peter Lawford’s home, where she had rendezvoused with her two most powerful lovers. The bugging was not being done by the government.

Though she almost surely did not know it, the recording devices and the sinister people behind them may have been precisely the reason Robert Kennedy had become incommunicado. Kennedy was in the fifth year of a personal war against organized crime in general and Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa in particular. The struggle had been joined when Kennedy was Chief Counsel to the McClellan Committee in the US Senate, and carried on, with unprecedented force, when he became Attorney General. Hoffa was convinced Robert Kennedy had used the attack on his union as a stepping stone to national power for himself and his brother, and in a sense he was right. The union boss and his mob friends hated both of the elder Kennedy brothers enough to want them dead—and were reportedly not above saying so, among themselves—but they especially hated Bobby.

In the course of the struggle, Robert Kennedy had created a special “Get Hoffa” strike force in the Justice Department, with the FBI, the IRS, and the government itself aligned on his side. But Jimmy Hoffa and his Mafia allies were not without their own resources and their own considerable army of foot soldiers. Hoffa knew the Kennedys were vulnerable because of their womanizing. When he learned of the amorous dance of John and Robert and Marilyn Monroe—by one account the information came to him as early as 1957—he must have rubbed his hands in glee.

The ideal weapon for this phase of the war on Kennedy happened to be a human being who happened to already be on Hoffa’s payroll—the man acknowledged by his peers to be the best wiretapper in the world, one Bernard Bates Spindel. Spindel had learned the basics of his trade in the US Army Signal Corps and in army intelligence during the Second World War. One of the ironies of his remarkable career is that he could easily have served on the Kennedy side in the bugging wars: as a young man he applied for a job with the CIA but was rejected. Though he is said to have worked both sides of the fence thereafter, Bernie Spindel spent the bulk of the rest of his days beating the government spooks at their own game. Spindel had been taping Robert Kennedy for his client Jimmy Hoffa since at least the late 1950s. According to Hollywood-based private eye Fred Otash, Spindel got the Marilyn Monroe assignment in the summer of 1961.

Otash has said Hoffa summoned him and Spindel to a meeting in Florida that summer. Hoffa wanted “to develop a derogatory profile of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and their relationships with Marilyn Monroe and with any other woman. The strategy . . . was to use electronic devices.” The first target was Peter Lawford’s home, where bugs were placed not only on the phone lines but “in the carpets . . . under chandeliers and in ceiling fixtures.” Otash says the tapes from the Lawford bugging contained conversations between both Kennedys and Marilyn, and phone conversation to arrange rendezvous between both Kennedys and Marilyn, and both Kennedys and other women.

Another private detective who worked on the assignment, John Danoff, has been more graphic in his description of the tapes from the Lawford house: it “was cuddly talk and taking off their clothes and the sex act in the bed—you could hear the springs squeaking and so on.”

If this was good stuff, maybe better stuff could be had at Marilyn’s home, the modest Spanish-style house in Brentwood in which she spent the last months of her life. Marilyn’s friend Arthur James says he was asked in the spring of 1962 to get Marilyn out of the house so that “people could come in there and bug . . . for the purpose of getting evidence on Bobby Kennedy.” James says he turned the request down, and never told Marilyn about it. The house was bugged anyway. Examination in later years turned up indications of eavesdropping devices both on the phones and on the premises.

Despite all these frightening developments, there are indications Marilyn had rebounded to some extent from her depressions during her last few days. The studio, with reluctance but with little choice in the matter, had rehired her on
Something’s Got to Give
, and shooting was set to resume before the end of 1962. She was negotiating on other film projects, giving interviews, enjoying setting up and landscaping the Brentwood house, the first home she had bought and lived in on her own. She had set several appointments for the week that would follow her death. Though never a model of stability, she did not appear to be a person who was contemplating suicide.

The Brentwood household included a housekeeper-companion, a sixty-year-old woman named Eunice Murray, who had been installed by Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson. Mrs Murray, who seems to have had some experience dealing with psychiatric patients, came on the scene after Marilyn had alienated a succession of nurses. It was Mrs Murray who had found the Brentwood house for Marilyn to buy, and Mrs Murray who brought her own son-in-law into the household as a salaried handyman. The housekeeper and the handyman were two of many links between the film star and the psychiatrist. During her final summer, Marilyn saw Dr Greenson in his professional capacity as often as twice a day. She also relied on him increasingly for advice and moral support, spent a great deal of time in his home, and became close to his children. Marilyn came to depend on Greenson so heavily that some of her friends observed that the doctor was, in effect, running her life. It was a pattern she had lived through before with her acting coaches, and if it troubled her there is only one indication that she may have been trying to change it: a report that she made inquiries about replacing Mrs Murray with a housekeeper of her own choosing at the end of July, just before she died.

As it happens, Mrs Murray has become the enigma within the riddle of the Marilyn Monroe case. Her evidence is critical, because, according to the officially accepted version of events, she was the only other person in the house when Marilyn died. But beginning with her first statements to police that night, and stretching almost to the present day, her accounts have been so abstruse, ever-changing, and self-contradictory that they may be interpreted in any number of vastly different ways. In the impossible event that any party or parties were ever put on trial for the murder of Marilyn Monroe, one can imagine Mrs Murray in the role of witness for either the defense or the prosecution, depending on the story she chooses to tell on that particular day. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this kindly and soft-spoken old lady is either impossibly befuddled or is doggedly hiding a dangerous truth.

Mrs Murray is not alone in her capacity for confusion about the last hours of Marilyn’s life. In fact, virtually all of the small number of people who spent extended periods of time with Marilyn that weekend have shown an alarming tendency to forget or to offer contradictory stories, so much so that their testimony would seem highly suspicious even if there were no other reason to doubt the official suicide verdict. And there are plenty of other reasons.

Given all the fuzzy recollections, it is impossible to reconstruct with any certainty the last two days Marilyn Monroe spent on this earth. There are a few documented facts. One is that Robert Kennedy was in California that weekend. With his wife and four children in tow, he was to address the American Bar Association meeting in San Francisco, staying at the ranch of a lawyer named John Bates, about sixty miles south of the city. Marilyn knew Kennedy was coming, and was still desperately trying to contact him. Her phone records for the four days she lived in August were mysteriously confiscated, but an enterprising reporter established that she made several calls to the San Francisco hotel where the Bar Association had reserved rooms for Kennedy, and that the calls were not returned. Bit by bit, evidence has emerged that Kennedy left the San Francisco area to visit Marilyn that weekend. His host John Bates has steadfastly insisted that this could not have happened. A number of other witnesses, including Los Angeles police, claim otherwise.

For her part, Marilyn spent the early hours of Friday shopping for plants to landscape her yard. She visited her doctor and her psychiatrist. No one has clearly established what she did that night. One of the questionable sources for Marilyn’s activities that weekend, her press aide Pat Newcomb—who later worked for and was close to the Kennedys—has said she and Marilyn dined at one of their favorite Santa Monica restaurants that evening, but that she could not recall the name or location of the restaurant.

At dawn on Saturday, 4 August, Marilyn’s friend and self-described “sleeping-pill buddy” Jeanne Carmen received a phone call from Marilyn, speaking in “a frightened voice . . . and very tired—she said she had not slept the entire night” and complaining about “ ‘phone call after phone call after phone call’ with some woman . . . saying, ‘you tramp . . . leave Bobby alone or you’re going to be in deep trouble.’ ” During this call and twice later in the day, Marilyn asked Carmen to come over and “bring a bag of pills” but Carmen was busy and couldn’t comply.

Marilyn made a number of other phone calls during the morning—one to her friend and masseur Ralph Roberts, making a tentative plan for dinner at her home that evening. At one point Mrs Murray’s son-in-law Norman Jeffries, Jr encountered Marilyn while working on the kitchen floor. She was wrapped in a bath towel, looking “desperately sick” as though “she must have taken a lot of dope . . . or was scared out of her mind. I had never seen her look that way before.” Late in the morning, Marilyn’s hairdresser Agnes Flanagan visited and observed that Marilyn was “terribly, terribly depressed” at the delivery, via messenger, of a stuffed toy tiger. The significance of the tiger has never been explained.

The afternoon is a mystery about which very little clear information is available. The only reported event with several sources to support it is a visit by Robert Kennedy to Marilyn’s home. If Kennedy did visit, it would not have been the first time. Jeanne Carmen says she was once at Marilyn’s when Kennedy arrived, and Marilyn, fresh out of a bath and dressed in a bathrobe “jumped into his arms” and “kissed him openly, which was out of character for her”.

A private investigator working for Robert Slatzer reports that a neighbor of Marilyn’s was hosting a bridge game on the afternoon of 4 August, and that the ladies at the game—understandably interested in the comings and goings at the home of their famous neighbor—observed Robert Kennedy arrive in the company of another man “carrying what resembled a doctor’s bag”. A daughter of one of the women at the game (the woman is deceased) has repeated the story, adding that the hostess was harassed for weeks by men warning her “to keep her mouth shut”. Robert Kennedy himself allegedly testified in a deposition—no record of which is available—that he did visit Marilyn’s home that afternoon escorted by a doctor, who injected the distraught actress with a tranquilizer to calm her down. Mrs Murray, having denied over the course of twenty-three years that Kennedy had been in Marilyn’s home that Saturday, finally admitted on camera in a 1985 BBC documentary that the Attorney General had been there during the afternoon, though she offered no details. Peter Lawford’s ex-wife Deborah Gould says Lawford told her Kennedy went to Marilyn’s that Saturday to tell her once and for all that the affair was over, and the confrontation left her “very very distraught and depressed”. A neighbor of Lawford’s says he saw Robert Kennedy arrive by car at Lawford’s home during the afternoon.

Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, fills in the story as of about four-thirty or five p.m. Dr Greenson has said Marilyn called him in an anxious state, seeming “depressed and somewhat drugged”. He went to her house, spending “about two and half hours” there. According to his carefully worded account, she told him she had been having affairs with “extremely important men in government . . . at the highest level”, and that she had expected to be with one of these men that evening, but had been disappointed. At around six-thirty p.m., the masseur Ralph Roberts called to confirm the dinner plans. Roberts recognized Dr Greenson’s voice, as it told him Marilyn was not home. Joe DiMaggio’s son Joe Jr tried to call twice, reaching Mrs Murray, who said Marilyn was out. The press aide Pat Newcomb had spent the night in the house and had been on the scene all day. According to Greenson, Marilyn now became angry with Newcomb, and he asked Newcomb to leave.

There is an interesting sidelight to this seemingly minor incident. One source—a friend of Newcomb’s who also knew Marilyn—has said that Pat Newcomb, a bright and attractive young woman, was herself “deeply in love with Bobby Kennedy”. Marilyn considered the younger Newcomb a rival as well as a friend, and had been jealous of her in the past. Newcomb, who was sequestered in the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port immediately after Marilyn’s death and who subsequently became a Kennedy employee, has long refused comment on the Kennedys’ relationships with Marilyn.

Though Marilyn “seemed somewhat depressed”, Greenson had seen her “many, many times in a much worse condition”. He had a dinner engagement, and, according to his account, he judged that Marilyn was sufficiently recovered that he could return to his home around seven-fifteen, asking Mrs Murray to stay the night as a precaution. At about seven-forty p.m., Greenson says, Marilyn called him to report that she had talked to young DiMaggio. She sounded in better spirits.

The Kennedys’ brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, gave a number of differing accounts of the night Marilyn died to a number of different people. In all of them, he claims to have had a phone conversation with Marilyn at about this time, in which she turned down his invitation to come to dinner at his home. The dinner party may have been the gathering Marilyn had hoped to attend with Robert Kennedy that night. By this time, she was in no shape to go.