The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (53 page)

Pulling the car over and going to question the driver inside, he immediately recognised Lawford behind the wheel. ‘Peter, what are you doing, driving so crazily?’ Franklin asked. Flashing his torch to see the other occupant of the vehicle, he noticed Kennedy sitting in the back seat. (Accusations that Dr Greenson was in the car too are logistically unfeasible.) Lawford allegedly told him they were rushing to get Kennedy back to his hotel room, checked out and on to a flight to San Francisco. The police officer ordered Lawford to slow down and then allowed the car to proceed. (When Franklin spoke to the hotel the following day, he gathered that Kennedy had checked out approximately 20 minutes after he had encountered the pair in the street.)

After picking up his belongings, the Attorney General was driven back to the actor’s beachside house. (I estimate the time was now shortly after 1.25am.) Waiting for him there was a helicopter, chartered by Lawford from the Los Angeles Air Taxi Services Inc., based at the nearby Santa Monica Airport in Clover Field. In the cockpit that night was Hal Connors. Despite attempts to prove otherwise, Connors’ connection to the actor was cemented on Sunday 5 June 1966, when, in an interview with the local newspapers, he innocently disclosed he had recently flown Lawford to a meeting with Jacqueline Kennedy and his then former wife, Pat.

The actor failed dismally in his attempts to keep the aircraft a secret. ‘When I was talking to Peter about Marilyn’s death,’ Lady Lawford recalled in her book
Bitch
, ‘I did not mention to him that I knew his bright yellow helicopter was not parked by the beach house. Instead a dark coloured helicopter, like the Kennedy boys used to rent, had been parked at Peter’s house.’ Her memory was almost perfect. The colour of the helicopter the Attorney General was believed to have used that night was blue. Moreover the photographer William Woodfield, during his research into Monroe’s passing for
The New York Herald Tribune
, witnessed a log verifying that a helicopter had indeed been dispatched to Lawford’s home in the early hours of Sunday morning to collect Bobby and whisk him to Los Angeles International Airport.

Amid his nervousness, the actor had also clearly overlooked the fact that the noise of the craft would awaken his sleeping neighbours. Besides their ire at having their slumber interfered with, their rage was magnified when, according to reporter Joe Hyams, the helicopter’s rotating blades started to blow huge gusts of sand on to their buildings and into their swimming pools. Their anger was no doubt intensified further by the knowledge that,
if they dared to complain about it to the local authorities, their grievances would have fallen on unresponsive ears. As the Santa Monica Municipal Judge, Blair W. Gibbens, inadvertently let slip to the press on Monday 1 August 1966, ‘All the time Peter was married to the sister of President Kennedy, the police gave
permission
[emphasis added] to Connors to land at the Lawfords and transport them wherever they wanted to go. They, in effect, looked the other way.’

As Lawford declared to the Hollywood columnist Bob Thomas in October 1964, ‘It’s the
only
way to commute.’ The actor adored this mode of transport so much that he used it at almost every possible opportunity, the beach at the rear of his house being his favoured pick-up and drop-off point. For example, in January 1962, during a break in the filming of
The Longest Day
, the actor made special arrangements for a helicopter to collect him there and whiz him to the nearest airport, simply to allow him to spend a few extra minutes fawning at the feet of the passing-through President. Two years later, in 1964, during work on the Carroll Baker drama
Sylvia
, he arranged for a copter to collect him every day from the beach and alight, 11½ miles to the east, in a clearing made especially for his arrival, on the back lot at Paramount where the film was being produced. (Connors admitted that, by his reckoning, between 1963 and 1966, he had landed on the beach no fewer than 27 times.)

With Bobby Kennedy safely inside, and with Santa Monica airport still closed at this time of day, the helicopter began its journey of approximately six statute miles to Los Angeles International Airport where he was booked on a 339-mile Western Airlines flight lasting approximately one hour (in all probability, plane number 720-047B N93145) back to San Francisco International Airport. A car ready to whisk him back to the Bates’ family ranch was waiting for him there. (At 9.30am, Bobby joined his family for Sunday mass at the nearby St Mary’s Catholic Church.)

The night was now over for Kennedy. But not for Lawford. In a 1985 interview for
The Times
, speaking by telephone from his home in Cannes, France, Fred Otash recalled that, shortly after midnight (
sic
), the actor called to say something traumatic had happened. Knowing Otash operated a round-the-clock service, Lawford arranged to meet the private investigator immediately at his office at 1342 North Laurel Avenue, West Hollywood. According to Otash, the actor arrived at (approximately) 2am, looking ‘completely disorientated and in a state of shock’. He informed Otash he had just left Monroe’s home, that she was dead and that Bobby Kennedy had been there earlier. He also informed him they had got Kennedy out of the city and back to Northern California.

Clearly engulfed with paranoia, Lawford asked Otash to go out to Marilyn’s house to look for things he had missed and dismantle the
sophisticated bugging equipment within. Having been the one who had helped secrete it in there back in February, Otash was obviously the right man to carry out such a task. After settling on a fee, he agreed to execute the request. Accompanying Otash to the actress’s home that night was, in all probability, his employee, John Danoff. In less than an hour, surveillance equipment was ripped out and hard-to-budge wires were hidden away in nearby crevices. ‘I took what I could find and I destroyed it; period,’ Otash admitted. With the aid of dusters, the two men worked diligently to cover their tracks. The actress’s place was now completely clean and, most importantly, tidy. Their sanitising was so competent that precious few fingerprints now remained in the property; not even one of Marilyn’s.

However, their first task after arriving at the building (at approximately 2.25am) was to haul Marilyn’s lifeless body off the floor, remove her terry-cloth bath robe and lay her down on her bed. They placed her downwards, the right side of her face against the mattress, in the direction of the bedroom door. Due to the unrelieved weight of an inert, heavy mass, Greenson and Murray found it impossible to carry out such a task on their own. The actress had been left, completely abandoned on the floor, on her back, pretty much in the position in which she perished, for well over five hours. It seemed that, even in death, as screen actress Kim Novak once remarked, Marilyn was being treated like ‘a piece of meat’. No wonder she had despised Los Angeles so much.

Evidence that Marilyn’s body was moved in this way and at that time is provided by the picture taken just prior to her autopsy, which was published in Anthony Summers’ 1985 book
Goddess
. As this verified, the lividity – the settling and pooling of blood in direct response to gravity, which can be changed, by moving the body, only in the first six hours after death – had become ‘fixed’ on the right side of her face, meaning that she was in this position by the time it had become permanent – in this case, at around 2.40am. Subsequently, when the blood vessels within the body begin to break down, the lividity becomes ‘fixed’. As her autopsy observed, this form of lividity was ‘noted in the face, neck, chest, upper portions of arms and the right side of the abdomen’.

However, proof that she was moved into that position – in this instance, from the floor to her bed – came with the discovery, during her post-mortem, of ‘faint lividity’ found in her ‘back and posterior aspect of the arms and legs’, but which disappeared ‘upon pressure’. These markings demonstrate that, in the time prior to the lividity becoming fixed, she was in a different position entirely – in this case, on the floor, lying on her rear.

In layman’s terms, she died on her back and was transferred to her bed, where she was placed face down, head facing left; there, at the six-hour
mark, the lividity in her body became permanent. But – as the official LAPD pictures prove – after it had become fixed and rigor mortis had set in, her head was inexplicably moved
again
, in the opposite direction, to her right, to face the wall. Her autopsy corroborated this, insinuating that her body, most prominently in her ‘head and neck regions’, had been moved at least twice after she died. This fact was verified by another, highly important source: the investigators in the 1982 reinvestigation into the actress’s death. Their probe discovered that lividity had indeed appeared on different parts of Marilyn’s body at different times.

Immediately after arriving back at his office, Otash called Lawford to inform him he had successfully completed his task. The message had to be relayed to Lawford, though. With anxiety getting the better of him, he had hit the bottle after returning home, consuming a mix of Scotch and Bloody Marys, and, by 3am, had passed out on a chair.

Meanwhile, back at Fifth Helena, the next phase of the Marilyn whitewash was ready to begin. At approximately 3.10am, just moments after Otash and his colleague had absconded from the property, Dr Greenson called Dr Hyman Engelberg, who was asleep at his home at 9730 Wilshire Boulevard. In truth, Greenson had no reason whatsoever to summon Engelberg; a fully trained doctor himself, he was perfectly capable of ascertaining Marilyn had passed away. It is therefore safe to assume that he called his colleague for one simple reason: he wanted the man responsible for prescribing the pills which had been partly responsible for killing the actress present at the scene and face-to-face with the police. Greenson evidently had no desire to face the music alone.

Engelberg arrived within minutes. ‘She was sprawled over the bed, and she was dead,’ he remarked in 1982 in an audio-taped interview for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. ‘I took out my stethoscope to make sure her heart wasn’t beating; checked her pupils because that’s one of the sensitive ways to tell if a person is dead or not. I said she was dead, which, of course, Dr Greenson knew anyway, but I had to go through the motions.’ Original reports insist he pronounced her dead at precisely 3.35am. Fifty minutes later, at approximately 4.25, he decided to call the Los Angeles Police headquarters. ‘Marilyn Monroe has died,’ he solemnly announced. ‘She’s committed suicide. I’m Dr Hyman Engelberg, Marilyn Monroe’s physician. I’m at her residence. She’s committed suicide.’

Later, when asked by the Department why he had taken so long to make this call, he replied, ‘We were stunned. We were talking over what happened. What she had said.’ In another interview, Engelberg explained the procrastination this way. ‘The reason there was a delay in calling the police is that normally you don’t call the police, you call the mortuary to remove the body. Dr Greenson and I discussed this back and forth.’ He
added, ‘I strongly insisted that, because of whom she was and that it might be a suicide, we should call the police.’

Engelberg’s call was then passed on to the West Los Angeles Police Division. On the other end of the line was the station’s weekend watch commander, Sergeant Jack Clemmons. The doctor reiterated the fact that Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide. Immediately after ending the call, Clemmons made a note of the time, assigned another officer to take his place, climbed into his police car and drove along Sunset Boulevard in the direction of the actress’s home. During the journey of approximately three miles, he radioed for a squad car to meet him there. Knowing that scoop-hungry reporters regularly eavesdropped the police airwaves, he feared that, once news of the actress’s demise had filtered out, an army of hacks, curious bystanders and news and television reporters would descend on the property, and he wanted some assistance, in particular a sergeant to take charge of the scene and another to protect the area.

For one fleeting, incredulous moment, the thought crossed his mind that this whole thing might be a hoax. ‘It seemed incredible,’ he recalled in 1966. ‘I didn’t want somebody playing a big joke on the Police Department so I decided I would go to the scene.’ The notion of it being a prank, however, evaporated the moment he pulled up on the driveway of the property and met the people inside.

At approximately 4.35am, after hearing the washing machine and dryer hard at work in the garage, he was met at the front door by Eunice Murray. Following confirmation from her that Marilyn had indeed passed away, he was led into the bedroom where he caught sight of the actress’s two doctors seated on chairs, next to her body, which was lying outstretched diagonally across her bed. A sheet was high over her head and a champagne-coloured blanket was tucked up around her shoulders. The sergeant recalled she was lying in what he described as the ‘soldier’s position’. Her face was on a pillow, her arms were by her side, her right arm was slightly bent and her legs were stretched out perfectly straight. Clemmons instinctively knew that she had been placed that way. (As we learnt earlier, Greenson, Otash and Danoff had strategically laid her in that position just over two hours earlier.) Her head was at the top left of the bed, her feet at the bottom right. As the surviving LAPD photo shows, the left side of her face was now resting on the pillow, the complete opposite of the way she was when the lividity on her body became fixed. This would prove to be the first of several major blunders in the conspiracy. Importantly, in complete contradiction to the long-believed folklore, there was no telephone in Marilyn’s hand.

Moreover, despite the widely publicised stories which said that the only thing she wore in bed each night was the perfume Chanel No.5, the truth
was actually quite different. Believing it essential to help keep her shape, as everyone who knew the actress would testify, she wore a bra to bed every night of her mature life. But this night, she was
not
wearing one.