The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (2 page)

Marilyn was a frequent houseguest in the home of Greenson and his wife, who presumably knew nothing about the affair . . . I also got hold of portions of the [Mafia-Teamster] tapes, and heard what seemed to be sounds of their lovemaking . . .

Marilyn’s house was being bugged by everyone—Jimmy Hoffa, the FBI, the Mafia, even Twentieth Century-Fox. Jimmy Hoffa wanted to gather information on Monroe and the Kennedys for personal use; the FBI wanted to ascertain what Marilyn knew about Frank Sinatra’s connections to the Mafia; the Mafia was curious as to what she knew about the FBI. As for Twentieth Century-Fox—her former studio [sic—] who knows what they wanted . . . ?

MM’s affair with Greenson took on a far greater meaning at the time of her death. Marilyn, as everyone later discovered, had threatened Bobby with the prospect of holding a press conference at which she planned to announce her assignations with both the President and the Attorney General. Such an admission would no doubt have resulted in a major scandal.

Bobby, on hearing of Marilyn’s plans—and somehow knowing of her concomitant relationship with Greenson, called the good doctor and convinced him that his star patient also intended to disclose her romantic dealings with the psychiatrist.

This would not only have terminated Greenson’s career but very likely would have landed him in prison. “Marilyn has got to be silenced,” Bobby told Greenson—or something to that effect. Greenson had thus been set up by Bobby to “take care” of Marilyn . . .

I certainly think Marilyn would have held a press conference. She was determined to gain back her self-esteem. She was unbalanced at the time—and Bobby was determined to shut her up, regardless of the consequences. It was the craziest thing he ever did—and I was crazy enough to let it happen.

Best friend and occasional lover, Frank Sinatra, was more than a little suspicious after learning a crucial detail from the autopsy. Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, stated, “When the cops said it was an overdose, he had no doubt about it, nor did I . . . It was only later when the autopsy revealed no residue of pills in her system that we got curious. Mr. S began to suspect Lawford and his brothers-in-law of possible foul play.”

Pat Newcomb countered to biographer Donald Spoto, “There’s no way they could’ve done this. I resent it so much . . . I’d like to see Bobby exonerated from this. He would never do it . . . He wouldn’t hurt her . . . He was in San Francisco.” Former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates conceded in his autobiography, “The truth is, we knew Robert Kennedy was in town on August 4. We always knew when he was here. He was the Attorney General, so we were interested in him, the same way we were interested when other important figures came to Los Angeles.” On Marilyn and Bobby, Gates continued, “Frankly, I never bought into the theory that she killed herself because he dumped her—if he did. My feelings were that she was emotional over many things; a relationship gone sour would be just one of many problems she had.”

Michael Selsman, a twenty-four-year-old press agent in 1962, held a job alongside Pat Newcomb within the Arthur P. Jacobs Company. Selsman relayed to biographer Jay Margolis, “After Marilyn died, I worked at Fox and Paramount as an executive. I’m from New York. Back in the sixties, I knew of [Marilyn’s acting coaches] the Strasbergs, and knew [their actress-daughter] Susan. The Strasbergs were horrible people, and Susan was, in my mind, destroyed by her mother. The parents were attention-seekers, users, preyed on weak-minded actors, and never came up with anything original. They copied Stanislavski and feasted on the notoriety of the few successful actors that happened to come up in New York at that time. There were thousands more who never amounted to anything. Those who can act, act. Those who can’t, they become coaches.”

Describing what it was like working with Marilyn day-to-day, Selsman relayed, “I never saw her happy. I never saw her laugh. Never heard any jokes from her. It was strictly business. All actors are shy and lonely people. That’s why they are actors . . . Marilyn’s concerns in the office were mainly about interviews and photo sessions. Pat was her main contact, so whatever she thought was threatening was discussed in private with Pat and sometimes Arthur . . . It was part of my job to be at the funeral. I attempted to coordinate with the reporters, photographers from around the world, and the press agents from Fox. It was a circus.” Selsman was queried as to what he knew about August 4, 1962:

Regarding Peter Lawford’s last full-length interview, Dean Martin’s ex-wife Jeanne remarked to Margolis, “Somebody would’ve said something years ago. The mystery of her death, people have let up on that one ages ago.” Informed that the autopsy revealed how Marilyn’s stomach was empty, Mrs. Martin replied, “I never read that. I never heard that. Don’t bother telling me because I wouldn’t
want
to know that.”

When told that many now agree Bobby Kennedy was in Los Angeles on August 4
before
Marilyn died and
after
she died, Mrs. Martin said, “I don’t care where he was. He didn’t kill Marilyn. Bobby Kennedy would not kill anybody. He would
kill
somebody? It’s impossible. It’s such yellow journalism.” After bringing to her attention that biographer Heymann had actual interview tapes of Lawford’s own voice mentioning the conspiracy to murder Marilyn, Mrs. Martin responded, “I knew the Kennedys very well. I knew Peter very well. If anybody took pills, it was Peter.”
¹

As for the bugging tapes he heard, Lawford told Heymann:

You could apparently hear [on Mafia-Teamster tapes] the voices of Marilyn and JFK as well as Marilyn and RFK, in addition to MM and Dr. Ralph Greenson. In each case, you could hear the muted sounds of bedsprings and the cries of ecstasy. Marilyn, after all, was a master of her craft.

It is certainly possible that Peter Lawford obtained Mafia-Teamster recordings. In fact, as noted by Anthony Summers, Lawford tried to obtain Mafia tapes in at least one other instance, regarding gangster Mickey Cohen’s female associate Juanita Dale Slusher (a.k.a. Candy Barr). This information is supported by a D.A.’s investigation into Lawford’s activities in 1961.

Fred Otash recalled to biographer James Spada, “Something strange happened with Lawford one day. He came to me and said, ‘Fred, have you got some means for me to make secret recordings?’ I said, ‘Yes, what do you need?’ He would never tell me what they were. So my vibration is that he was possibly wiring up Jack Kennedy and Bobby.”

Jayne Mansfield’s press secretary, Raymond Strait, who knew Otash for twenty years, agreed: “I’ve listened to tapes in which Jayne and the President were the principal players. Lawford had copies of the tapes and once, during a bong-sharing session with Jayne in the Pink Palace, played them back for her. Later on, she prevailed upon Peter to play them for one of her lovers but he declined. Peter apparently owned quite a library of audio tapes of his famous brothers-in-law and their trysts with famous Hollywood sex symbols.”

Strait told Margolis: “Otash knew conversations between me and Jayne before I even met him! He taped Jayne because, after all, she slept with both of them [Jack and Bobby Kennedy]. Wherever they were at, Otash was there a little bit ahead of them . . . The only thing that worried Fred at all was the Johnny Stompanato case [in which actress Lana Turner’s brutal lover was purportedly murdered by her daughter Cheryl]. Fred was very complicit as an accessory after the fact because he removed the knife, put Cheryl’s fingerprints on it and put it back in! Lana Turner killed Johnny Stompanato. Lana caught him and Cheryl in bed together. He went after her daughter, and Lana jumped in the middle and he got it. Mother and daughter love each other. ‘Save my career,’ so Cheryl saves Lana’s career, and that’s what Cheryl did.”

When Jay Margolis interviewed Joe Naar, Joe said he was not only Lawford’s best friend, but also a friend of the Kennedy family. According to Naar, he and Lawford repeatedly went over Marilyn’s last night and Lawford blamed himself for the movie star’s death.

Peter Lawford was a close friend of Marilyn Monroe for more than a decade. Never a man to make decisions on his own, as confirmed by his lawyer Milt Ebbins, the English actor was an unwilling participant in her murder. By all accounts, feeling extremely guilty for years following his friend’s death, and aware of what the Kennedy brothers had done both to him and to Marilyn, Lawford confided as much to biographer C. David Heymann. A year later, Peter Lawford was dead.
²

MARILYN’S CLOSE FRIENDS GET SUSPICIOUS

At around 7:30 in the evening of Friday, July 13, 1962, George Barris captured the final professional photograph of Marilyn Monroe during her lifetime. A freelancer for
Cosmopolitan
magazine, Barris recalled, “I said, ‘Marilyn, this is the last picture I’m going to take of you.’ She was sitting on the sand and we had this Scandinavian heavy sweater she was wearing. She bundled up and she had covered her knees with the blanket. She leaned forward and said, ‘Alright, George, this is just for you.’ She puckered her lips and threw a kiss to me. She said, ‘This is for you and the world and this is the picture I want to be remembered by.’”

Now fast-forward to August 3 of that same year. “When I was in New York after I left Los Angeles and Marilyn Monroe, I was putting together the story for
Cosmopolitan
, which was to be about twelve pages and a cover,” Barris remembered. “She called and asked, ‘How is everything going?’ ‘Fine.’ ‘George, you must come back. I have some very important things we have to talk about. It’s very important.’ ‘Marilyn, it’s Friday. I’ll try to come out by Monday if it’s alright.’ ‘Please, promise me.’ I said, ‘I promise.’”

Barris told Jay Margolis he regretted not going back to California on August 4, the very next day. Margolis asked him, “Marilyn never let on that she was going to hold a press conference, right? She just said she had to talk to you about something important?” Barris confirmed, “That’s all she said.”

Barris reflected in his 1995 book: “She never seemed happier . . . I was very happy for her . . . She said she’d probably just relax, go out to dinner, and then maybe go over to the Lawfords’ for their regular Saturday night party. Then she said, ‘Love you—see you Monday.’ I said I loved her, too.”

During her final interview before her untimely death, Marilyn told George Barris, “The happiest time of my life is now . . . There’s a future and I can’t wait to get to it—it should be interesting! I feel I’m just getting started; I want to do comedy, tragedy, interspersed . . . I have no regrets, because if I made any mistakes, I was responsible . . . I like to stay here (in California) but every once in awhile I get that feeling for New York. Here all I have to do is lock the [front and back] doors and go. I like ground to stand on.”

“Why would she take her life?” George Barris asked Jay Margolis. “We did photographs at Santa Monica beach near Peter Lawford’s. Marilyn bought a new house in Brentwood but it wasn’t furnished. She had gone to Mexico to furnish it Mexican style. She was waiting for the furniture to arrive. Marilyn said to me, ‘How can we photograph there if it doesn’t look right? What can we do?’ ‘If you want to go back where you lived with your first husband in Catalina, I’ll try.’ ‘No, I don’t want to go back.’ ‘My friend’s home in the Hollywood Hills would be perfect. When I brought it up, he said all he wants is a picture of you and him as a souvenir. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.’ ‘No, it’s okay.’ I took a picture of him with Marilyn. All the other photos are at his home.”

In 1995, using those pictures taken at Santa Monica Beach and in North Hollywood at his friend Tim Leimert’s house, George Barris created a touching and tender book about Marilyn Monroe, with her own words guiding the narrative. It was a project they planned to do sometime in the future just days after they became friends in September 1954. Back then, Marilyn was making
The Seven Year Itch
in New York and Barris was photographing her. That film became his favorite Marilyn Monroe movie. “What I particularly liked about Marilyn was that she didn’t act like a movie star,” he wrote. “She was down to earth . . . Sure, she was beautiful and sexy, but there was an almost childlike innocence about her . . . Marilyn was always polite and friendly to everyone on the set.”

Evelyn Moriarty was Marilyn’s stand-in for her final three movies:
Let’s Make Love
(1960),
The Misfits
(1961), and the unfinished
Something’s Got to Give
(1962). Moriarty relayed to biographer Richard Buskin, “Buck Hall was the assistant director on
Something’s Got to Give
and, like the rest of the production office, he hated her. He was a bastard. According to what I was told by the camera operator and Bunny Gardel, who did her body makeup, when they were working on
Bus Stop
[in 1956], Buck Hall would ogle Marilyn. She called him a Peeping Tom and he never forgave her for that. Well, by the time of
Something’s Got to Give
, the Fox executives were fed up with Marilyn. You could feel the tension when she walked on the set. Although the crew adored her, she was a piece of meat as far as those execs were concerned and they treated her like one.

“June 1 [1962] was Marilyn’s thirty-sixth birthday. So, that morning I bought her a cake with candles, but [director] George Cukor and the Fox executives wouldn’t let me give it to her until they got a full day’s work out of her. Late in the afternoon, George finally said I could wheel out the cake and he joined in our little celebration, but the smiles were fake. Afterwards, as Marilyn was leaving, I was with her, Bunny Gardel, and [hairstylist] Agnes Flanagan, and I said, ‘She’s not going to be here Monday because of the way that Buck Hall and the others just treated her on the set.’ Still, I didn’t know she was never going to be in again.”