The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (23 page)

The caller said, “Marilyn Monroe is dead. She just committed suicide.” Deputy District Attorney John Miner reacted rather strongly to this information: “That’s right. Clemmons says Greenson said he was calling with respect to Monroe, that she had committed suicide. I don’t think that ever happened. It’s contrary to the kind of man Greenson was. I think Clemmons said that to cover himself for not having followed department regulations.”

In an article published on August 5, 1973, Greenson stated that he told Dr. Hyman Engelberg and housekeeper Eunice Murray, “Okay, I’ll call the police.” Speaking to Sgt. Clemmons, Greenson purportedly said, “I want to report the death of a person, a sudden and unexplained death.” Clemmons came right over. When he arrived, he found three people: a sarcastic Greenson, a frightened Mrs. Murray, and a sullen Engelberg. Greenson pointed to the empty bottle of Nembutal, implying that it spoke for itself. The psychiatrist did not cry over the death of his patient. Clemmons told Brown and Barham, “I strongly disliked Greenson’s attitude. He was cocky, almost challenging me to accuse him of something.”
³³

THE GREENSON AND ENGELBERG AGREEMENT

Ralph “Romi” Greenson, M.D., and her physician Hyman “Hy” Engelberg, M.D., long-standing friends, allegedly failed to let each other know what they were prescribing for Marilyn days before she died. Anthony Summers wrote, “Dr. Greenson would later say he had brought in Dr. Engelberg to try to wean Marilyn away from sleeping pills. The two doctors agreed to keep in touch concerning the drugs they prescribed for her, but the system may have broken down.”

Peter Lawford agreed with Hyman Engelberg’s diagnosis for Marilyn: she was bipolar. Lawford relayed to Heymann, “Marilyn had a death wish of sorts but didn’t actually want to die, at least not in her more sane moments. In my opinion, she had manic-depressive tendencies and should have been on a different type of medication.”

In 1982, Engelberg told the District Attorney’s Office, “I saw her Friday evening [August 3, 1962]. It was to give her an injection of liver and vitamins . . . usually in the buttocks, sometimes possibly in the upper arms where you usually give intramuscular injections . . . Probably in the buttocks because that’s the usual place I would put it.” Ralph Greenson explained to Dr. Marianne Kris how all drugs were prescribed by Engelberg and not Greenson himself, “I had an internist who would prescribe medication for her and to give her vitamin injections and liver injections, so that I had nothing to do with the actual handling of medication. I only talked about it with her and he kept me informed.”

Greenson said he didn’t know anything about Engelberg’s August 3 Nembutal prescription, while Engelberg claimed he knew nothing about any chloral hydrate prescriptions. If what both these doctors asserted is true, then they negligently placed Marilyn Monroe in a highly perilous situation. Chloral hydrate decreases the metabolic rate of Nembutal, making the Nembutal less likely to be absorbed quickly into the liver and, therefore, more likely to be lethal. Both doctors would have known the effect of chloral hydrate on Nembutal. Yet, their claims of ignorance took precedence over everything else.

Engelberg emphatically stated that Marilyn could only have obtained chloral hydrate in Tijuana because, he believed, no American doctor would write the prescription. However, Engelberg
did
write one such chloral hydrate prescription on June 7, 1962, one day before Marilyn was fired from
Something’s Got to Give
. As noted by Detective Sgt. Robert E. Byron and his team, a prescription bottle was recovered from Marilyn’s bedroom, dated July 25, for fifty 500-milligram chloral hydrates, and it was refilled on July 31. Toxicologist Raymond Abernathy also noted the same dates for the original and refilled chloral hydrate prescriptions, as detailed in the coroner’s report.

In total, fifteen pill bottles were found on Marilyn’s bedside table, according to Westwood Memorial Mortuary employee Guy Hockett and his son Don, yet Abernathy only inventoried eight (an unidentified bottle was later added to the original seven). The statements Greenson made to biographer Maurice Zolotow,
Something’s Got to Give
set photographer William Read Woodfield, and even Marilyn’s housekeeper Mrs. Eunice Murray confirm that the psychiatrist suggested chloral hydrate for his star patient. Mrs. Murray wrote in her book, “Under Dr. Greenson’s guidance, she was taking only chloral hydrate pills for sleep.” After interviewing Greenson, Zolotow wrote in a September 14, 1973, article, “Her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, was attempting to cut down her dependence on Nembutal by switching her to chloral hydrate as a sleep-inducer.”

When Woodfield telephoned Greenson and asked him why he allowed such heavy doses of chloral hydrate for Marilyn, Greenson snidely replied, “Well, I’ve made a number of mistakes in my time.” Engelberg stated it wasn’t unusual to prescribe Nembutal for Marilyn. In fact, Engelberg told the District Attorney’s Office in 1982 that Nembutal was the only sleeping medication he ever prescribed for Marilyn. In the same interview, Engelberg relayed, “I don’t know of anything Dr. Greenson gave her. Maybe he did. I cannot answer for him . . . As far as I know, I was the only one writing prescriptions, but I couldn’t swear to that.”

Greenson’s wife Hildi told private investigator Cathy Griffin, “The idea was that she was never to be said no to when she wanted a prescription, because the only thing that would happen was she would go somewhere else . . . So, whenever she asked for a drug, she would get it.”

Greenson’s daughter Joan explained, “All she had to do was call her doctor and he would prescribe it to her. Then the physician was to call later and tell him . . . If Father felt that it was an excessive amount or too dangerous, he would usually pour some out when he was at Marilyn’s house.”

Greenson wrote in a 1964 paper, “The administering of a drug is a responsibility since it may cause physical side effects, it may be emotionally upsetting to the patient, misused by the patient, and it may lead to addiction and death.” If it’s true that Greenson and Engelberg had a plan to “wean” Marilyn off barbiturates, as communicated by Greenson to the Suicide Prevention Team, it seems more than curious why Engelberg would consistently lie on the record by stating he never prescribed chloral hydrate for Marilyn when he clearly did.

Greenson wrote in a letter to his friend and colleague Dr. Marianne Kris on August 20, 1962, “I later found out that on Friday night she had told the internist [Engelberg] that I had said it was all right for her to take some Nembutal, and he had given it to her without checking with me, because he had been upset himself for his own personal reasons.”

Engelberg had just split from his wife after some twenty-seven years of marriage. Meanwhile, biographer Donald Spoto made a chilling point about how Greenson knew Marilyn well enough to know which medication had caused her to be “somewhat drugged.”

The accounts of biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles and Engelberg himself directly contradict Greenson’s story about Marilyn “tricking” Engelberg into giving her some Nembutal on August 3. According to Guiles, Marilyn asked for the Nembutal prescription because she regarded chloral hydrate as a mild sedative that didn’t always do its job. She wanted something that actually worked because, apparently, she had developed a tolerance to the other drug. In 1982, Engelberg told the District Attorney’s Office that, since it was standard operating procedure to prescribe Nembutal for Marilyn, he didn’t consider it an unusual request.

Hildi Greenson disclosed what, she claimed, her husband did during the weeks leading up to Marilyn’s death: “In trying to help Marilyn get off the barbiturates she was on, he was giving her a different kind of medication [chloral hydrate] that is not quite as addictive and he was able to turn the tide, as it were. She was getting less and less dependent on the drugs.”

In her book, Mrs. Murray discussed the ineffectiveness of chloral hydrate as it related to her employer. Marilyn had said to her, “You know they used to give these to the soldiers in the war for sleeping. They’re really very mild.” Mrs. Murray stated on an April 1992 edition of
Hard Copy
, “She was taking something she said was very mild. She called it chloral hydrate. And she would take it with a glass of milk or something of the sort.” Why would chloral hydrate be found in Marilyn’s system the night she died when she specifically requested the stronger drug from her physician?

Greenson attempted to resolve this discrepancy in his letter to Dr. Kris, claiming his alleged final 7:30–7:40 p.m. phone call with Marilyn ended in the following manner: “At the end of the conversation she asked me whether I had taken away her Nembutal bottle . . . I said to Marilyn I had not taken her Nembutal, and I didn’t know she was taking Nembutal, and she quickly dropped the subject. I thought perhaps she was just confused.”

Would other doctors have dismissed Marilyn’s Nembutal remark as casually as Greenson did? His daughter Joan later said, “Ironically, one of these doctors, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, gave her a prescription for Nembutal the Friday before she died, but he didn’t inform my father because he separated from his wife that day. He was moving out of the house that day.”

Joan explained what she claimed her father did when he arrived at Marilyn’s home: “That Saturday he had checked her medication. No new pills were there. He had not received a call that she had gotten new medication. It was a small oversight.”

Hildi Greenson agreed: “It happened on a bad day. A divorce either became final or [Engelberg] was moving out of his house. The internist forgot to call. My husband didn’t know that she had the Nembutals or Seconals, or whatever they were.”

In the police report #62-509 463, Hyman Engelberg stated that, by the time Marilyn refilled his original prescription for twenty-five pills, there should have been a total of fifty Nembutals. He was right. In Anthony Summers’ updated version of
Goddess
(2000), following page 432, there is a photograph of a Monroe prescription on which Engelberg’s name and the date July 25, 1962, are visible. This was the original 100-milligram Nembutal prescription for twenty-five pills, which was then refilled on August 3. The 1982 District Attorney’s Report read: “The refilled prescription recovered at the scene dated August 3, 1962, was attributed to a refill Dr. Engelberg had given Miss Monroe on that date.”

Not only did Engelberg “forget” to tell Greenson about the August 3 refill, but he also “forgot” to tell him about the original prescription on July 25. Pat Newcomb told Donald Spoto, “She asked for some Nembutals. Engelberg was having problems with his wife . . . Greenson didn’t know she was in this state of wanting these pills. The fact that Engelberg forgot to tell Greenson was malpractice. It was fifty pills and she already had chloral hydrate.”

If Greenson and Engelberg were telling the truth regarding their ignorance of one another’s prescriptions, we would have to assume Marilyn took only three Nembutals before swallowing the remaining forty-seven on that final evening. To do this, Marilyn would have had to hoard Engelberg’s pills from the original prescription (July 25)
and
the refill on August 3. Given her regular use of those drugs, could she really have waited almost a week-and-a-half before finally deciding to take most of the pills in one go on August 4?

The two doctors knew this didn’t make any kind of sense, so Greenson and Engelberg concocted a cockamamie story about how Marilyn went behind both their backs to get
another
Nembutal prescription and
another
refill. The problem is, they weren’t very creative. Referring to Twentieth Century-Fox employee Dr. Lee Siegel, the 1982 District Attorney’s Report read in part: “The Suicide Team found that Dr. Siegel had prescribed an unknown quantity to Miss Monroe on July 25, 1962, and also noted that she had received a refill of pills on August 3, 1962, and attributed that prescription to Dr. Siegel.”

The dates of Siegel’s alleged prescriptions are the same dates for both of Engelberg’s prescriptions. To put it simply, Greenson and Engelberg said Marilyn went doctor shopping in order to make it appear as if she had access to fifty Nembutal pills the day she died. The fact that she didn’t have enough Nembutals on hand to match the amount later found in her bloodstream means Marilyn was
not
responsible for her own death.

Dr. Robert Litman was a member of the Suicide Prevention Team. He told Donald Spoto, “I am stuck with the information that she went out and got pills from Siegel and Engelberg.” Lee Siegel vehemently denied that he ever saw Marilyn again after the studio fired her on June 8. His alleged Nembutal prescription and refill aren’t mentioned in any of the police reports, and when the case was reopened again in 1982 the district attorney’s report conceded: “The prescriptions attributed to Dr. Siegel were not recovered by the Coroner’s representatives.” So, there is no proof that they ever existed.
³⁴

Peter Lawford had a significant role in the death of Marilyn Monroe. On August 8, the day of her funeral, Lawford told a reporter that he was the last person to speak to the actress when on the phone with her four nights earlier. He would later report that this took place at around 7:30 p.m. on August 4. Meanwhile, Joe DiMaggio “held Bobby Kennedy responsible for her death,” according to good friend Harry Hall. Displaying plenty of animosity toward the President and Attorney General, DiMaggio told the funeral director, “Be sure that none of those damned Kennedys come to the funeral.” Joltin’ Joe’s close friend Morris Engelberg asserted, “No woman in the world will ever be loved the way he loved her. He loved her in life and in death.”

Peter Lawford and his wife Pat Kennedy were quite upset when DiMaggio barred them from the service. “It seems to be a concerted effort to keep some of Marilyn’s old friends from attending,” Lawford remarked. DiMaggio, on the other hand, privately growled, “If it wasn’t for her so-called friends, Marilyn would still be alive today.”