The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (51 page)

Interestingly, Eunice Murray, a woman infamous for perpetually changing her account of the night Marilyn died, would even briefly insist that the actress never even spoke to Lawford on the night of her death. Although her contradictions began straight after the actress’s death, in time, possibly thanks to the onset of old age, it was obvious that Murray became confused as to what she could and could not say and whose story she should corroborate.

At the conclusion of Lawford’s call, at approximately 7.15pm, Marilyn carried her phone out of her bedroom and placed it in a small guest room across the hall which was currently being used as a temporary storage space. As usual, to soften the sound of any possible calls, she enclosed the phone with the pillows from her bed. Afterwards, she strolled back to her bedroom, took a further handful of Nembutals and lay down on her bed. At approximately 7.31pm, just as she was on the point of falling asleep and Murray was about to watch, on CBS-affiliated station KFMB, a repeat screening of the two-year-old
Perry Mason
courtroom drama ‘The Case of the Irate Inventor’, the phone rang again. Murray answered it. It was Joe DiMaggio’s 21-year-old son, US Marine private first class Joseph P., ringing from a public call box at his base at Camp Pendleton, 38 miles north of downtown San Diego. It was his third call of the day.

According to Eunice, she then walked across to the actress’s room, knocked on its door, entered and discovered Marilyn already drowsy, spread out across the mattress. The sedatives she had taken were beginning to work. In an interview for
The New York Post
, Murray partly corroborated this when she said, ‘Marilyn was already in bed when young DiMaggio called. She had already taken some sedation.’ Ominously, she had lost track of how much.

The housekeeper gently awoke Marilyn, passed on the news that Joe Jr was on the phone and asked if she wanted to talk to him. She confirmed that she did. Marilyn had left orders that she should always be summoned, unless she was busy, when he or any other of her former stepchildren called. Marilyn quickly woke herself up, arose from her bed, walked to the phone in the guest room and sat down on the floor. ‘She was in a very gay [happy], delighted mood when she spoke with him,’ Murray remembered. ‘I didn’t hear the words. But I heard her laughing.’ (The housekeeper delivered this account in 1974, several years before she changed her account of that night, claiming inaccurately that Marilyn picked up the phone and completed the conversation in her
bedroom
.)

Marilyn loved talking to DiMaggio. In fact, she relished speaking to all of her ex-stepchildren. As she had revealed to
Redbook
’s Alan Levy earlier in the year, she loved them more than she ‘loved anyone’, adding, ‘I didn’t want to be their mother, or stepmother, I wanted to be their
friend
.’ She enjoyed her conversations with Joe Jr so much that she didn’t even resent the fact that she always had to pay for them. His infrequent calls to the actress usually came reverse-charge, the last being two from San Diego on Friday 6 July. She was his sounding board for advice about his relationships, and such was the case that night when he called to announce that his 15-month engagement to 21-year-old Pamela Ries, an employee of a Kansas City trading stamp firm, had ended.

However, by the time Marilyn received this news, it was already old. They had actually split three weeks earlier, on or around Tuesday 10 July. The only paper the actress read was
The New York Times
, so she had missed the reports of it in several other dailies (
The Oakland Tribune
on Tuesday 31 July,
The Tucson Daily Citizen
and
The Bridgeport Telegram
, to name but two, one day later). Sadly, it seemed that, with regard to his return to bachelorhood, Marilyn was one of the last to know; we have to question here just how close DiMaggio Jr really was to her.

During their exchange, despite being sympathetic, she told him she was pleased the relationship had finished, as she believed the pair were unsuited. In contrast to Lawford’s account that the actress ‘sounded sleepy’ at that time, DiMaggio recalled Marilyn as being ‘Great. She was in fine form and if anything was amiss, I wasn’t aware of it.’ Since he was in the middle of watching a live telecast of the Baltimore Orioles/Los Angeles Angels baseball game, which was being played that night in Baltimore at the Memorial Stadium, his conversation with Marilyn was brief: just five minutes and not longer, as many have insisted. (It is worth noting that his call was the very last to be billed to that line during the actress’s lifetime.)

When her conversation with Joe Jr had concluded, Marilyn returned the phone to the guest room, but instead of covering it with pillows, which she habitually did, she merely lifted the receiver up and away from its cradle. She then walked back into the living room and elatedly passed on to Murray DiMaggio’s information. ‘She seemed very pleased about it,’ the housekeeper recalled, ‘and said she was going to call somebody to tell them the news.’ By way of the phone in her bedroom, that person was Dr Greenson, who at precisely 7.41pm was at home preparing for a dinner date at the home of his friends, Mr and Mrs Arnold Albert.

‘While I was shaving, Marilyn rang,’ he recalled in 1973. ‘“I have some good news,” she said. “I’ve just had a talk with Joe Junior and he’s broken up with the girl I never did like and I feel real good.”’ Greenson listened intently before replying, ‘That’s great.’ He then enquired what she intended doing that evening. Unsure at first, she then said she wanted to take a walk on the beach. He dissuaded her from doing so. ‘People will recognise you,’ he told her. Instead, he suggested she should drink a large glass of Coke to clear her head and once more join Murray on a drive up the coast highway. The actress enjoyed driving at night. ‘Sometimes we would drive for an hour,’ Murray recalled in 1973, ‘Zuma Beach, Point Mugu, Oxnard . . . It had a nice effect on her.’

Noticing then that one of her medicine bottles was missing, as a letter he wrote to Dr Marianne Kris testified, the actress next asked Greenson, ‘Did you take my Nembutals?’ He replied that he did not. He concluded the exchange by informing her, ‘If you need me, you know where I’m
going to be. Mrs Murray has my number. If anything happens, you know where to get in touch with me.’ After replacing the receiver, the actress walked back into the living room, stopped and, under the archway, announced to Murray, who was still watching
Perry Mason
, ‘I think we’d better not go for a ride,’ adding, ‘Goodnight, Mrs Murray. I think I’ll turn in now.’ She then turned and walked the four short steps back to her bedroom. Before closing its door, as an afterthought, she said, ‘Goodnight, honey.’ Within a few short minutes, the sound of Frank Sinatra recordings was once more heard emanating from the small, portable record player, which rested on the floor of the actress’s room.

At this point, shortly before 7.55pm on the evening of Saturday 4 August 1962, things get exceptionally sketchy about the final hours and minutes in the life of Marilyn Monroe. But, after five years of exhaustive research, and after examining every surviving scrap of evidence, scrutinising each piece of medical data, listening to every relevant interview, reading all applicable transcripts, devouring each newspaper report, watching every single significant television show, listening to each consequential radio programme, and after distinguishing the fact from the fiction, the truth from the lies, I firmly believe I can finally answer the five-decade-old mystery about how Marilyn Monroe, the world’s greatest film star and sex symbol, tragically died . . .

Chapter Ten

7.55pm, Saturday 4 August 1962–9.04am, Sunday 5 August 1962

A
t approximately 7.55pm, Marilyn walked into her bedroom, closed the door behind her, knelt down on the floor and started playing some Sinatra albums on her small white record player. Selected others were then collected and heaped on to the deck’s spindle. After this, in the region of 8pm, she began preparing for bed, which usually meant popping a small handful of Nembutals. But tonight, as she had just announced to Greenson, she could not find any. She had seemingly exhausted her supply. With this difficulty added to the disconcerting incident with Kennedy and Lawford, which was still swirling round her mind, she became restless. In an attempt to rectify this, she reached over to her bedside table and prepared, then swigged a liquid dose of the hypnotic sedative chloral hydrate.

Her bout of anxiety had caused her adrenal glands to release into her body atypical amounts of the corticosteroid hormone cortisol and adrenaline, which in turn had sparked an increase in her heart rate, blood pressure and respiration. With her physique now in such an advanced state of animation, she knew instinctively that resting that night was going to be nigh-on impossible. Her first attempt proved this. So, in a another attempt to alleviate the problem, at approximately 8.05pm, Marilyn clambered up from her bed, switched on her small table light and, assuming it would help her, lunged for several more mouthfuls of the chemical reagent.

Following many years of insomnia, she had developed a good understanding of medication and knew instinctively to switch drugs when her body had built up tolerance to one. But now there was a difference. Unbeknown to the actress, chloral hydrate, a drug she had been taking regularly for just nine days, interacts adversely with Nembutal, large quantities of which were still swirling around her system. When it began to harm her again that night, unlike the two previous incidents at the Cal-Neva the previous weekend and in her bedroom just 20 hours earlier, the rescue tragically did not come.

Now, as she lay on her bed, the chloral hydrate she had consumed first disrupted the electrical and chemical signals between her brain and her heart and lungs, causing them to slow down artificially, misleading her body into falling asleep. Absorbed through the lining of her stomach, the drug flooded into the actress’s bloodstream. Travelling to her brain, the substance then engulfed her respiratory centre, completely smothering it. Without the electrical signals from her brain, her breathing became irregular, shallow and less frequent. No doubt as a reaction to the chloral hydrate, her lungs then became congested.

Arising from her bed, she started to gasp, became drowsy and sluggish. Then, after losing her sense of judgement, and following a futile attempt to open her bedroom door, she collapsed to the floor, landing on her back. A toxic dose of drugs was now beginning to ravage her body. Frail, otiose screams were made to attract Murray’s attention. But the housekeeper did not hear them. She was still glued to the television set, watching Perry Mason preside over another case. Her hearing was poor, so the volume on the apparatus was set to high. Marilyn’s despairing cries for help were also drowned out by the discs, which were still spinning on her record player.

Shortly after 8.20pm, the phone on Marilyn’s floor rang again. She lunged at it. It was Lawford. His 45 minutes of sporadic perseverance had paid off. Considering their previous exchange had ended so abruptly, he was desperate to speak to the actress again. According to Joe DiMaggio’s close friend Walter Winchell, immediately after she answered the call, a weak, almost incoherent cry rang out. ‘Get a doctor, quick,’ she ominously declared. ‘I think I took too many pills.’ Her heart was now pumping less and less blood around her body.

Thinking it was another cry for attention, Lawford did nothing. Instead, knowing that his wife Pat was away for the weekend, he unsympathetically retorted, ‘I’m a married man. I can’t get involved.’ As Fred Otash revealed in 1985, the actor, thinking that she was once again being overdramatic, then jokingly instructed Marilyn in an act of bravado in front of his house guests ‘not to leave any note behind’. After several seconds of silence, the line went dead.

With Lawford proving to be utterly useless, and with the phone still just about clasped in her hand, shortly before 8.25pm Marilyn mustered enough energy to call one other friend: Ralph Roberts. Unfortunately he was still out, collecting food for their barbecue the following day. Consequently, she was only able to reach his answering service. Her message was garbled. He would recall that the voice sounded ‘fuzzy and troubled’. Those words would be her last. She slipped into unconsciousness, and then a coma, soon afterwards. The flow of blood around her body had by now turned into a trickle. With each passing minute, Marilyn’s life systems began to close down, muscle by muscle, organ by organ, until eventually there was
nothing
. In medical terminology, her body had suffered from respiratory depression and a cardiovascular collapse. According to Dr George P. Varkey MB, FRCP of London, Ontario, death would have come within 25 to 35 minutes of her taking her last, lethal dose of medicine. And in Marilyn’s case, it did.

Confusion over her precise time of death was to reign. Mortician Guy Hockett estimated that the actress must have died somewhere between 9.30 and 11.30pm and the coroner’s office noted the time of death as 3.40am. The police, clearly confounded as to what precisely had happened, wildly estimated the time of death as ‘sometime between 8pm and 3.35am’.

Although not precise in its times, the highly reliable
San Francisco Chronicle
was more accurate in its original reporting. ‘Marilyn died shortly after she retired for the night at 8pm,’ the paper announced. The American journalists Stan Hays and John Edwards were also pretty near the mark when, in a syndicated report filed on Sunday 5 August, they wrote, ‘Doctors think she died sometime between 8pm and 9pm.’ In fact, Marilyn Monroe, one of Hollywood’s finest actresses, tragically passed away at approximately 8.40pm.

To begin with, Peter Lawford was not alarmed. After all, Marilyn had sounded fine during their last conversation just 65 minutes earlier and he was all too familiar with her occasional previous, melodramatic pill-popping scenes. He knew from her friends that she was apparently inclined to sometimes fake a suicide attempt in order to arouse sympathy. Anyway, he firmly believed that the tablets she consumed were not harmful; certainly not injurious enough to assist in any suicide attempt. But he was wrong. Like Marilyn, he was a pill addict and routinely believed he was never in danger with the drugs he was consuming. Worryingly, he too had no idea about an addict’s tolerance before fatality. (His death at 61, on Monday 24 December 1984, from cirrhosis of the liver and heart and kidney failure, was actually precipitated by his excessive drug-taking and chronic abuse of alcohol.)