The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (58 page)

This belief was corroborated by Inez Melson, who remarked, ‘Marilyn didn’t have the temperament to commit suicide,’ and by Dean Martin, who declared, ‘I refuse to believe she took her life intentionally. I’m sure it was an accident. She was at my home a few days ago and she was very
happy.’ Her former husband, Arthur Miller, was in complete agreement. ‘I am sure Marilyn’s death was not deliberate,’ he remarked. ‘She did not kill herself. I am convinced it was a terrible accident.’

Photographer George Barris concurred. Referring to his recent photo shoot with the actress, he commented, ‘The girl spent five hours on a windy beach posing for pictures. The girl would never throw in the towel. She would not have worked so hard with me on the story of her life had she intended to take it. She had a lot to live for, and I know she felt that way too.’ Publicist Rupert Allan was equally accurate when he remarked, ‘Marilyn could
not
have intended to kill herself that night because she was too vain to have allowed herself to lie in a coffin with a dark patch in that blonde hair.’

Naturally, there was confusion too. When informed of her death, a stunned Gene Kelly was quoted as saying, ‘I am deeply shocked by this whole thing. I really don’t know what to say. I was going to see her this afternoon. We had a project on file for next year. She was in excellent spirits, very happy and very excited about her future projects. I just don’t understand it.’ Equally in shock was Marilyn’s great screen rival Jayne Mansfield, who remarked, ‘I just can’t believe it. I’m so sorry. I’m really so sorry.’ When asked for a quote, Jacqueline Kennedy offered only, ‘She will go on eternally.’ While in Italy, actress Sophia Loren, when told of Monroe’s passing, was unable to comment. She simply broke down and cried.

It wasn’t just political figures or movie stars who were affected. Millions of ordinary people across the world were grief-stricken by Marilyn’s death. America reported a rash of suicides. In New York, one such victim left a note saying, ‘If the most wonderful, beautiful thing in the world has nothing to live for, then neither must I.’ There were others in Mexico. Suicides by three teenage girls were attributed to the actress’s death. Police said photographs of Monroe were found in the rooms of each girl. Two of the deceased took sleeping pills; the third drank a bottle of rum, smashed it and used a piece of it to slash her wrists.

News of the actress’s passing naturally featured in every newspaper around the world, with the film industry taking the brunt of the blame. Moscow’s
Izvestia
led the charge when it dramatically wrote, ‘Marilyn Monroe was a victim of Hollywood. It gave birth to her and it killed her.’ Stockholm’s
Dagena Nyheter
agreed, saying ‘She is the victim of the glaring lights, the too severe demands, the cracking whips, the cheers and the juggling in the big circus tent of movies.’

However, Rome’s
Il Tempo
took an alternate perspective when, in a reference to the heavy demands modern movie stars are forced to endure for their art, it sensationally declared that she was murdered by
us
. ‘Who
killed her?’ it asked. ‘If we look ourselves in the face, we are forced to answer, “
We did
!”’ Meanwhile, other papers in Europe had an altogether different take on the matter. Germany’s
Frankfurter Abendpost
spoke for many when it lugubriously remarked, ‘The world took her completely to her heart and now the world seems a heartbeat poorer.’ But it was in Marilyn’s homeland of America where, quite possibly, the best tribute to the star was written in
The New York Post
: ‘The impact of Marilyn Monroe’s death was international. Her fame was greater than her contributions as an actress,’ was perhaps the finest at summing up this highly emotive situation.

Her passing, naturally, featured prominently on every television news bulletin. Special, full-length tribute programmes about her were also speedily prepared. America’s leading psychologist, Dr Joyce Brothers, even devoted one of her NBC shows to the actress, and asked, ‘If it was suicide, why?’ As part of its
Special Report
series, the company also hastily produced a one-hour radio presentation about Marilyn. Entitled ‘Fame Is Fickle’, it featured swiftly recorded tributes from people who had been closely associated with her, such as George Cukor, Richard Meryman and Milton Greene. However, some of those featured were not so close – psychiatrist Dr Cornelia B. Wilbur for one, who cropped up to discuss Marilyn’s mental condition at the time of her death, although the actress had not even been her patient.

Aside from the tidal wave of tributes, accusations and wild speculations, at 6.04am precisely Los Angeles-West Coast time (9.04am East Coast time) on the morning of Sunday 5 August, a call deriving from GLobe 1-1900 in Santa Monica was made to President John F. Kennedy at the White House. Since Kennedy was away for the weekend at the family’s compound in Hyannis Port, the operator there had to convey the call. Telephone logs reveal that the exchange lasted little more than 20 minutes. The caller was his recently roused, clearly disorientated, half-intoxicated brother-in-law, Peter Lawford. There was but one reason for his call: to pass on the news of the death of Hollywood’s most famous star.

Chapter Eleven

The Fallout

Sunday 5 August 1962–Monday 28 October 1985

A
t 7am on Sunday 5 August, Dr Thomas T. Noguchi, the 35-year-old Deputy Medical Examiner of Los Angeles County, arrived at his office at the Hall of Justice on Temple Street. He was given to working on Sundays. They were was the busiest for a Los Angeles coroner. For some reason, Sunday just happened to deliver more unexplained deaths and suspicious fatalities than any other day. Routinely, he removed his coat, sat down behind his desk and glanced down at the list of persons who had passed away in suspicious circumstances during the previous 24 hours. This day, however, would stand apart from the others. Among the inventory of 18 that morning was the name ‘Marilyn Monroe’. Thinking it was a bizarre coincidence for two women to share such a world-famous moniker, he at once dismissed it. The thought that the woman on the list could be the renowned movie star whom he had idolised for so many years was simply incomprehensible.

At this juncture, his phone rang. It was his boss, Dr Theodore Curphey, calling to inform him that the person in question was indeed the well-loved actress. Once a legend of the silver screen, she was now coroner case no. 81128. Curphey instructed a shell-shocked Noguchi to perform her post-mortem personally and not to entrust it to any assistant.

Beginning at 10.30am, on stainless-steel table no. 1, Monroe’s autopsy took five hours, during which Noguchi took samples of her blood, liver, stomach, urine, kidney and intestines. He also sent for testing eight drug bottles found on her bedside table. Recalling his examination of her body, he said, ‘There was no evidence of an injection. I looked for needle marks. This is a standard part of any autopsy. There were no needle marks on the
surface of her body, which might indicate the use of any drugs administered . . . The examination I made [also] included the contents of her vaginal passage, which were made on a smear and studied under a microscope. There was no indication of sexual intercourse.’

John Miner, an employee of the District Attorney’s office, was in attendance when Dr Noguchi carried out his autopsy and concurred as to how the two of them examined the cadaver, looking intently for any needle marks and finding none.

In addition, it was noted in the ‘Anatomical Summary’ of the autopsy that, besides the lividity on her face, there was also ‘slight ecchymosis of the left-side of the back and left hip’. Ecchymosis – also known as a bruise or a contusion – is an injury to biological tissue in which the capillaries are damaged, allowing blood to seep into the surrounding tissue. Marked by a purple discolouration of the skin, it is usually caused by blunt impact. In Marilyn’s case, in all probability it occurred was when she was either haphazardly bundled up off the floor and placed on the bed or when she was moving furniture around with Newcomb the previous afternoon.

Later, when he scrutinised his colleague’s autopsy report, Miner admitted there was one thing about it that bothered him: a reference to ‘congestion and purplish discoloration of the colon’. As many conspiracy theorists have insisted, this would be consistent with the administering of an enema and thereby of poison. During research on this project, I discussed this notion with a noted pathologist, who remarked, ‘What you’re doing with the enema is you’re giving a high dosage level of drug. You have a rapid absorption into the body.’ Interestingly, he concluded by saying, ‘If the poison had been administered this way, it
wouldn’t
have got as far as the stomach. It would
only
have gone into the intestine.’ In a multitude of cases, this would be so. However, with regard to Marilyn, it was
not
. According to her New York internist, Dr Richard Cottrell, in the summer of 1961, as a result of her emotional stresses, she was diagnosed as suffering from colitis, a form of inflammatory bowel disease, and this ailment alone accounted for her, seemingly bruised and discoloured, ‘purplish’ colon. Furthermore, as many coroners will agree, when people die, this part of the body begins to discolour anyway.

The autopsy showed that Marilyn’s blood contained the equivalent of 8mg of chloral hydrate and 4.5mg of Nembutal per 100mg. This meant that in the five-minute period immediately prior to her death, she had dissolved and swallowed approximately 17, 500mg capsules of choral hydrate, double her regular daily intake and (in a period up to 7pm) a dosage totalling approximately 2,400mg of Nembutal – in other words, the concentration contained in 24 pills, just one shy of Friday’s prescription. The 13 per cent of it found in her liver proved she had been slowly
absorbing the drug for a prolonged period of time before she died. As we know, Marilyn started consuming Nembutal at around 5pm, approximately 3 hours 40 minutes before she passed away.

Furthermore, thanks to the cross-tolerance of chloral hydrate with Nembutal, Marilyn already had a high tolerance to both drugs, even though she had been prescribed the former for only a short time. Moreover, thanks to the phenomenon called tachyphylaxis, a medical term describing a swift decrease in the response to a drug after repeated doses over a short period of time, she needed larger and larger doses to have an effect.

Two details noted by Noguchi are often put forward by conspiracy theorists as an indication that Marilyn died by means other than an overdose of barbiturates. First, there was an absence of ‘refractile crystals’, the residue left by the drugs, which would have been expected to be present in the actress’s stomach at the time of death. As the autopsy report stated, ‘The stomach is almost completely empty . . . No residue of the pills is noted. A smear made from the gastric contents examined under the polarized microscope shows no refractile crystals . . . The contents of the duodenum are also examined under the polarized microscope and show no refractile crystals.’

This fact was actually of little significance. As Marilyn was a barbiturate addict, her stomach would become as familiar to drugs systematically ingested as it was to food regularly eaten. The drugs would have been so swiftly digested and passed into the intestines that a habitual drug user such as herself might die with no trace of the pills whatsoever in their stomach.

It has also been suggested that the absence of any traces of yellow dye from the Nembutal capsules in her stomach is significant. However, considering Marilyn died several hours before she was found and over 12 hours before her autopsy, there was no reason why any such dye should be present. As coroners agree, the acid in a stomach quickly absorbs and destroys the gelatine capsules, since that was what they are designed to do. Besides, Nembutal itself does not possess a colouring agent and hence does not leave a trail. Instead, the so-called yellow colouring originates from the capsule, which means that, if she had broken open the pills and, prior to swallowing, mixed the contents with a glass of water – which she frequently did – there would be no stains in her stomach.

It is also worth remembering that the absorption time decreases when a subject uses the medicine on a regular basis, which Marilyn was known to do. In truth, the 24 Nembutal capsules would have dissolved in her body within just 20 minutes, as they were designed to do. The fact that she could consume such a vast quantity in such a short period of time was not
new to those who knew her. Director John Huston remarked that, during the shooting of
The Misfits
in 1960, he once saw her devour 20 or more tablets in just one day, as well as drinking copious amounts of alcohol.

As Noguchi’s autopsy report shows, he specifically requested that the intestines, the stomach and their contents were tested and saved for further study, which might have identified further drug residues and enabled a more certain assessment of the cause of death to be made. Yet, when the report from the toxicological laboratory arrived, he noticed that the lab technicians had not tested the other organs he had sent them. They had examined only the blood and liver and not the stomach and the intestine. So why the failure? As Noguchi admitted, ‘The evidence found in the analysis of the blood and the liver, together with the empty bottle of Nembutal, and the partly empty bottle of choral hydrate, pointed so overwhelmingly to suicide that the head toxicologist, Raymond J. Abernathy, apparently felt that there was no need to test any further . . . But I should have insisted. I didn’t follow it through as I should have done. As a junior member of the staff, I didn’t feel I could challenge the departmental heads on procedures.’ Just a few weeks later, in late August 1962, Noguchi thought better of it and asked Dr Abernathy if he had kept the stomach and intestine that he had sent him. But he was shockingly informed that, since the case was now closed, they had been disposed of too.