The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (49 page)

With the contract therefore still unsigned and the actress clearly uninterested in discussing the topic further for the moment, Schiller’s visit was brief and he was soon on his way to Palm Springs for the weekend. But before he left, Marilyn insisted on giving him a tour of her house. ‘Mind the doggy smell,’ she warned. After wishing him goodbye, the actress walked back inside the property and began sifting through the set of nude swimming shots, taken on the set of
Something’s Got To Give
, which he had left behind. Considering most focused on her rear side, she scribbled on the back of some of them, ‘These should go to
Playboy
.’ After which, she wandered back into the garden and joined Murray in the task of replacing its flowers. At midday, Pat Newcomb climbed out of her bed and, after consuming one of the housekeeper’s freshly prepared herb omelettes, joined them in the allotment. Almost immediately, Marilyn imparted to her details about Thompson and made it clear she was unhappy about it. It was for this reason that Newcomb made her aforementioned remark, ‘by the time I saw her, she was in a rage.’

As the afternoon rolled on, Marilyn’s home received four more calls, two each from Ralph Roberts and Joe DiMaggio Jr. (The latter’s first was timed at 2pm, the second at 4.30pm.) With the house’s occupants busy either in the garden or in another part of the property, none were answered. Deciding where to position her recently acquired furniture was the actress’s main concern. Some items had recently arrived from Mexico, while the chest of drawers purchased from the Pilgrim’s Furniture Store on Wednesday had been delivered that afternoon. Marilyn paid the
$228.80 owing for the latter by way of a hurriedly scribbled cheque, which Murray handed with a smile to Earl Shero, the store’s van driver.

When exhaustion from moving the furniture started to set in, the actress and Newcomb collapsed into chairs and spent some time lounging by the side of the pool and chatting. At 4pm, the items purchased from the Franks Nurseries & Flowers store three days earlier were delivered. Then, at approximately 4.15pm, allowing time for the van to be clear of the area, and giving them time to leave before J. Lee Thompson was due to arrive (they were unaware he had cancelled), two further individuals were seen entering the actress’s home. According to Marilyn’s card-playing neighbours, and chiefly as recalled by Mrs Elizabeth Pollard, one matched the description of Peter Lawford, the other that of Bobby Kennedy. But, unlike those before them, they were
not
expected.

A great deal of mystery still surrounds the Attorney General’s precise movements that weekend. What we do know for certain was that, on Friday 3 August, Bobby, along with his wife Ethel and four of his children, had arrived in San Francisco, where he was due to record an interview for KGO-TV’s popular daytime variety programme,
The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show
, and, on the following Monday, in front of 7,000 lawyers and 5,000 family and friends, address the 85th American Bar Association Convention. As the
San Francisco Chronicle
noted, he was ‘with most of his family, but without his usual flashing smile’. As Kennedy walked through the airport, Major Yu of Korea held up a camera to take his picture, but unwittingly left its lens cap on. Noticing the mistake, Bobby shouted, ‘Take it again. You didn’t get anything.’ Was he was desperate to make sure every part of his visit to San Francisco was recorded?

Immediately after their arrival, the Kennedys checked into room 4221 at the St Francis Hotel. Following this, it was believed that the Attorney General spent the next few days at a ranch belonging to his respected attorney friend John Bates, and located in Gilroy, 85 miles south of San Francisco, high in the Santa Cruz mountains. He was
not
, it was claimed, in Los Angeles or, for that matter, anywhere near Marilyn’s home in Brentwood. ‘Kennedy couldn’t have slipped down to Los Angeles,’ Bates insisted to the BBC in 1985. ‘We all hiked up to the top of the ranch and had a big touch-football game, which was a typical family game of the Kennedys. Eleven of us played . . . we returned to the compound for a swim. The children showered and dressed for dinner. Bobby sat with them as they ate. It was a full, active day.’

Despite his finest attempts to protect his friend, it was fairly easy to find flaws in Bates’s recollections. Several people reported seeing Bobby at Los Angeles’s Beverly Hills Hotel during the evening of Saturday 4 August,
while many others, including Los Angeles’ Mayor, Sam Yorty, US Senator George Smathers, Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker (who kept Kennedy under surveillance during the visit), future LAPD Police Chief Thomas Reddin, LAPD Chief of Detectives Thad F. Brown, LAPD homicide detective Dan Stewart (who was told when he visited Marilyn’s home on the morning of her death), the Chief of Homicide at the Sheriff’s Department, Hugh McDonald (who was informed by Brown), former District Attorney John Dickey, Fox publicist Frank Neill (who witnessed Bobby’s helicopter landing at the studio) and the meticulous, news-hungry gossip columnists Florabel Muir and Louella Parsons (who spent several weeks researching it), corroborated the fact that the Attorney General
was
indeed in the vicinity that day. The smokescreen surrounding his trip was so intense that all visual references to it were eradicated. Radio host John C. Dvorak, a former employee of the
San Francisco Examiner
, announced on his show,
Dvorak Uncensored
, that all photos taken of the Attorney General in Los Angeles on Saturday 4 August 1962 suspiciously disappeared from the newspaper’s archives.

But two men were by far the best first-hand witnesses to the Attorney General’s visit. The first was Peter Lawford himself, who clandestinely confirmed Kennedy’s presence to his final wife, Patricia Seaton, during work on his (ultimately unfinished) memoirs. The second was LAPD employee Daryl F. Gates, who received news of Kennedy’s visit courtesy of the FBI and wrote about it in his 1992 book,
Chief: My Life In The LAPD
. ‘We knew Robert Kennedy was in town on August 4,’ he revealed. ‘We always knew when he was there. He was the Attorney General, so we were interested in him, the same way we were when other important figures came to Los Angeles.’

There was a third witness: Marilyn’s house-spy, Eunice Murray, who, after 23 years of denying it, finally came clean in 1985 during interviews for the ABC and BBC television stations. She admitted that Kennedy was in the city that day and
had
in fact paid a visit to the actress’s home that Saturday. ‘Yes, oh sure [he was a visitor]. Oh sure,’ she remarked. Then, in a statement referring to Kennedy guardians such as John Bates, Murray correctly observed, ‘It became too sticky that the protectors of Robert Kennedy had to step in to protect him.’

Her ABC TV confession was scheduled to be aired for the first time on Thursday 26 September, during a 26-minute ‘Marilyn And The Kennedys’ segment on the station’s popular
20/20
news magazine show, but it was cancelled at the eleventh hour without any explanation. A severely truncated, 13-minute version, due to be transmitted on the programme a week later, Thursday 3 October, went the same way. The show’s chief reporter, the attorney, journalist and writer Geraldo Rivera, a man who
had almost single-handedly helped save the station due to his ground-breaking, highly popular style of reporting, was aghast at the axing and immediately quit his post in protest. ‘I’m appalled,’ he blasted at the time. ‘I think that story was a solid piece of TV reporting. They are not going to get away with this.’ Joining him in his actions were two of the show’s other presenters, television legends Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs.

The man responsible for killing the ambitious report was Roone Arledge, then president of ABC Sports and chairman of the channel. He maintained that the segment contained little substantive evidence and dismissed it as ‘sleazy’ and ‘gossip column stuff’. To which the veteran reporter Downs was quick to remark, ‘I do not associate myself with sleazy reporting . . . This so-called “sleazy” piece was more carefully documented than anything
any
network did during Watergate.’

Could the axing of the slot, however, be ascribed to other reasons, such as Mr Arledge’s then ongoing friendship with Bobby Kennedy’s widow, Ethel? Or possibly to Arledge’s assistant, Jeffrey Ruhe, who just happened to be married to Mary Courtney Kennedy, Bobby and Ethel’s fifth child? Or even to a top executive at ABC News, David Burke, who once happened to be Edward Kennedy’s top aide? I’m sure it did. So did Geraldo Rivera, who publicly chastised Arledge, saying his boss was acting out of ‘friendship’ rather than ‘sound journalistic judgment’, and being quoted as saying, in another outburst, ‘The decision smacks of cronyism, though I can’t prove that.’ Aside from ABC executives, a few scant acquaintances and Messrs Rivera, Walters and Downs, virtually no one has viewed the segment and the very few unbiased individuals who have are united in the belief that the report is something which everyone should know about. Unfortunately, 25 years on, a first screening of the feature still looks highly unlikely.

Research shows that, in all probability, during the morning of Saturday 4 August, after spending just one day in San Francisco, the Attorney General left Bates’ ranch by car, boarded a plane at the Salina Municipal Airport in Saline County, Kansas, 23 miles south of Gilroy, alighted at Santa Monica Airport (which was still operating at irregular hours) and then climbed aboard Lawford’s chartered helicopter, which landed at the heliport near Stage 12 of the deserted 20th Century-Fox back lot (where he was spotted by the aforementioned Frank Neill). He could not descend on his regular spot, the sand adjacent to Lawford’s seafront home. On this hot Saturday afternoon, several thousand sun-worshippers were frolicking on the beach which encircled it. After disembarking, Bobby climbed into his brother-in-law’s waiting Mercedes and was whisked with alacrity to Marilyn’s home, reaching it, completely unexpected, in the region of 4pm.

Expecting to find the actress alone, they were taken aback to see the
delivery van and both Murray and Newcomb. Also in shock was Marilyn. Still attired in her terry-cloth bath robe, she was mortified that they could just drop in on her without any kind of warning. Most alarmingly for the actress, a woman famed for her immaculate, breathtaking beauty, they had caught sight of her completely devoid of make-up and beautification. (Proof of this would come in the medical authorities’ report, which unflatteringly described her body, at the time of death, as ‘unkempt’ and ‘in need of a manicure and pedicure’ – nail polish was flaking from her toes – and noted that she hadn’t shaved her legs or dyed the roots of her hair. As
The Los Angeles Times
reported at the time, this indicated ‘a lack of interest in maintaining her usually glamorous appearance’. If Marilyn was indeed planning to see Kennedy on that fateful day, as many historians have insisted, why would she have allowed him to see her in such an ill-prepared condition? Of course, she would not have, which leads me to the conclusion that his arrival at her house that afternoon was entirely unexpected.)

After entering the property, knowing that the house was bugged, Kennedy asked the actress if they could go somewhere quiet to chat. Still traumatised, she agreed. Speaking in 1985, Eunice Murray recalled, ‘They went out on the terrace in the rear of the garden.’ In an October 1985 interview with
The New York Post
’s Jack Schermerhorn, she went one stage further by revealing, ‘Marilyn and Bobby were
arguing
[emphasis added] in the rear of the garden . . . ’ With her threats about holding a tell-all press conference still hanging over the Kennedys, Bobby urgently needed to talk some sense into her. While they chatted, Lawford went inside the house to speak to the other two women. Sensing she was in the way, and with her car now back from the garage, at precisely 4.35pm Murray climbed into her vehicle and drove to the local market.

Despite starting in a friendly tone, Marilyn’s conversation with the Attorney General soon became heated and, once inside the property, he forthrightly informed her once again that her loose talk to journalists
had
to stop. Then, against a backdrop of Frank Sinatra discs, their argument became aggressive. Giving credence to the belief that he was desperate to find the actress’s little red ‘diary of secrets’, Kennedy allegedly began to scream, ‘Where is it? Where the
fuck
is it?’ He became even more agitated when she refused to tell him. Walking from one room to another, he was now a very angry individual indeed.

The fact that there was such a dichotomy in Bobby’s personality was certainly not new to those who knew him. In 1968, New York comic-strip cartoonist Jules Feiffer highlighted the fact in a drawing entitled ‘Good Bobby and Bad Bobby’. The good side of him was shown to be a saint, a family man and an ardent civil libertarian; the bad side was depicted as
a fervent wiretapper, ill at ease with grown-ups and liberals, an extremely callous man, who would forcibly run over anyone who dared get in his or his brother’s way. Unfortunately, Marilyn encountered the latter side that day.

Legend has it that, while he and Lawford frantically searched the cupboards and feverishly rummaged through her drawers, Marilyn became hysterical; unsurprising since, in front of her eyes, they were savagely ransacking her prized new home. She then ordered them to leave. They did not. Now extremely agitated herself, she supposedly screamed at Bobby, telling him she felt ‘used and passed around like a piece of meat’ and announcing she didn’t want to be treated that way any more. ‘They argued back and forth for, maybe ten minutes,’ Lawford remarked in a previously undocumented 1984 interview. ‘Marilyn became more and more hysterical.’ As the actor recalled, she goaded Bobby further by announcing that her press conference would take place first thing on Monday.

In fact, her itinerary for that Monday confirms that Marilyn had planned nothing of the kind. In the morning, she had arranged to see Milton Rudin and in the afternoon dress-fitter Elizabeth Courtney, while a rearranged 5pm meeting with film director Lee J. Thompson at the office of her publicist, Arthur Jacobs, was set to conclude her day. (With the CIA’s file detailing Marilyn’s plan to hold a conference not seeing the light of day until 1992, we have to ask just how this rumour gained such notoriety before then. The answer is Robert Slatzer’s 1974 publication,
The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe
. Obviously remembering the actress’s outburst on the television news on Thursday 2 August, he had decided to make much more of it than it really was.)