The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (59 page)

As in all cases of what are known as ‘equivocal suicides’, where it was undetermined whether the death was by accident or suicide, Dr Curphey assigned a team of behavioural scientists to examine fully Marilyn’s lifestyle. Working from two battered desks, shoe-horned into a poky 12 by 10 foot office situated in the basement of the Los Angeles Veterans Administration mental ward, the team was headed by the aforementioned Dr Robert Lipman, a psychiatrist and professor at the UCLA, Dr Norman Tabachnick, a medical doctor, and Dr Norman L. Farberou, PhD, head of the Suicide Prevention Center.

On Monday 6 August, the unit set about their psychological autopsy by interviewing those familiar with the actress’s daily routines. They contacted first the people who knew her best, both personally and socially, and then her psychiatrists in both New York and Los Angeles. Dr Ralph Greenson told the investigators, ‘Marilyn had certain deep emotional problems but was responding well to treatment.’ The medical staff at New York’s Payne-Whitney clinic, where she had been hospitalised in February the previous year, were also interviewed. In addition, the suicide team made contact with everyone in and around Hollywood who was known to have spoken to the actress in the last few months, including her lawyers,
and concluded their examination by attempting to make an informed exploration of Marilyn’s final day, with special emphasis on her concluding minutes. To do this, they naturally paid a visit to the actress’s home in Brentwood. The results of their findings were then passed on to Curphey.

Ever since Marilyn’s death, reporters tipped off about her last phone call had been referring to it as the ‘mysterious phone call in the night’. Original newspaper accounts even suggested that the caller was Marilyn’s erstwhile Mexican friend, José Bolaños, and speculated the actress had killed herself because of his unrequited love. On Tuesday 7 August, while Peter Lawford watched on silently, rigidly refusing to come forward with the information they required, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department began their search to track Bolaños down. Their trawl covered Los Angeles and naturally his native land. When they did manage to find him at his home in Mexico, he defensively clarified – speaking through an interpreter, since his English was poor – that he had not made the call, was not responsible for Marilyn’s (apparent) sudden depression, had not seen her since the end of June and had not spoken to her since the first week of July.

But for the aspiring actor and screenwriter, this slice of reflected glory only managed to reignite his unquenchable taste for further fame and admiration. On Monday, 13 August, after seeing what newspapers would do (and pay) for any kind of Marilyn exclusive, he came out of hiding to fly to Los Angeles’s Westwood Memorial Cemetery, where he was seen mournfully placing flowers at the actress’s crypt. Posing solemnly as he did so for both the
New York Daily News
and the
Philadelphia Daily News
, he then revealed that he had been under sedation for four days following Marilyn’s death, verbally attacked Joe DiMaggio for banning him from her funeral and criticised the baseball legend for the way the actress had been buried. ‘It was a terrible thing to take this girl who was show business herself and put her away in a drawer in an abandoned cemetery,’ Bolaños exclaimed. ‘If this girl had died in Mexico, she would have had a state funeral.’

To cap it all, he then sensationally insinuated that he did after all, speak to the actress on the night she died and was told ‘something shocking, something that will one day shock the world.’ Well, the world waited . . . and waited . . . and waited but the story never came. Biographer, Anthony Summers even pressed him on the matter during research for his highly exhaustive, 1985 Monroe book,
Goddess
. But Bolaños still wasn’t talking. Why? Because simply he had no tale to tell. In the end, he wound up taking whatever he had in mind, which amounted to nothing, to his grave.

As a footnote to this tale, on Sunday 14 July, 1963, he wed the 33-year-old, Mexican-born, film actress, Elsa Aquirre. They divorced soon after. His voracious appetite for success in the film industry was unabated and in December 1966, in yet another desperate attempt to be seen on the arm of some other famous female, he began dating the Italian-born screen star, Gina Lollobrigida. But, as with Marilyn, the relationship was nothing but a short-lived, rather nebulous one. Remembered now as ‘Marilyn Monroe’s lover’, opportunist Bolaños died in his homeland on Saturday 11 June, 1994.

News of the actress’s financial shortfalls became public on Tuesday 7 August, when reporter Joe Hyams of the
Herald Tribune
news service announced, ‘Marilyn Monroe died [on] Sunday (
sic
) with less than $100 in her savings account and only $4,700 in her personal checking account.’ When pressed on the matter, Milton Rudin explained away the deficit by insisting she had a lot of bills and was involved in litigation over past debts, including a tax case pending in New York. He then lent weight to Hyams’ accusation by coming clean and admitting Marilyn’s estate could ‘ill afford the $100-a-day guards that are now posted in front of the actress’s home in Brentwood’. In fact, in her five bank accounts and in cash at her two homes, the actress died with just $6,813.17 to her name.

Her already depleted estate would be drained further by the salvo of invoices which began landing on executor Aaron F. Frosch’s desk at 120 East 69th Street, New York within weeks of the actress’s death. Some were from companies or individuals that the actress had some unfinished business with, such as the Department of Water and Power (who submitted a bill for $203.31), the Southern Counties Gas Company (who requested a payment for $185.62), the General Telephone phone company (for $274.61), the New York Telephone Company ($40.36), the Magnetic Springs Water Company ($3.60), the Reese Period Furniture company ($313.92), the Rand-Fields Incorporated Airline Company ($205.59), United Airlines Incorporated ($411.18), the Saks clothing company ($388.32), photo agency Globe Photos ($5,000), cleaner B.J. Denihan ($1,241.60), gardener Sam Tateishi ($939.55), and secretary Cherie Redmond ($689.30).

Others, however, originated from many of the actress’s so-called close friends and associates, including Milton Rudin of the law firm Gang, Tyre, Rudin & Brown who submitted a $10,000 bill for ‘legal services’, Dr Ralph Greenson, for ‘professional services’ ($1,400), Dr Hyman Engelberg, likewise ($478), make-up man Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder, strangely for ‘photographic’ reasons ($1,800), Agnes M. Flanagan for ‘hairstyling’ ($840), publicist Arthur P. Jacobs, for ‘reimbursement of expenses’ ($797.85), masseur Ralph Roberts ($470), and friend Norman Rosten’s wife, Hedda, for an unknown reason ($882.01).

Unpaid taxes took a substantial share. The IRS (Inland Revenue Service) moved quickly to assess and make claims for the current year, which included the California Franchise Tax ($2,614.24) and the 1962 Federal Income Tax bill ($21,724.72). But, after re-examining her files, the IRS discovered that Monroe was actually liable for tax for the previous
four
years. In order to reduce her tax bill, Marilyn had essentially deferred her salary contracts. After her death, she could make no more business deductions and hence, her previous ‘deferred incomes’ were now answerable for tax.

An invoice for 1958 (to the tune of $22,665.49) was swiftly calculated and submitted to the estate. Then, in an attempt to bring her file up to date, invoices for 1959, 1960 and 1961 were considered and a bill to the tune of $70,000 was soon dispatched. An additional demand (for $10,000), to cover the income tax assessment for the estimated years between 1958 and 1962, was also presented by the New York Income Tax Bureau. With such a major problem to be sorted, it was no surprise that Monroe’s accountant, Jack M. Ostrow, was forced to submit a hefty bill for $2,500 for his services to the estate.

The avalanche of claims did not end there. Eunice Murray’s son-in-law, the so-called ‘handyman’ Norman Jeffries, was next when he submitted a bill for two weeks’ wages ($360). Murray herself was close behind. With jaw-dropping gall, instead of presenting one invoice, she tendered
two
. The first, for the sum of $400, was for ‘housekeeping’ after Marilyn’s death, despite the fact she was, in her own words, out of the country on a six-week ‘tour of Europe’. The second, for a staggering $1,000, was to pay for her ‘services in remodelling and decorating decedent’s home’ in California, despite the fact that she had done neither. The audacity of it all increased another echelon when drama coach Paula Strasberg, from her home in New York, handed in a bill for a whopping $32,269.37 to cover ‘services rendered and expenses in connection therewith’. (After several negotiations, she felt compelled to reduce her bill by just $10,000.) Cash-strapped, heartless 20th Century-Fox were next in the queue, promptly submitting a $500,000 ‘breach of contract’ suit against Marilyn’s estate. In essence, they were suing her over her failure to finish
Something’s Got To Give
. (The suit was unsurprisingly contested and rightly dismissed.)

The estate’s executor, Aaron Frosch, did nicely out of this too. His law firm, Weissberger & Frosch, presented a $15,000 bill for ‘legal and accounting services’. However, quite possibly the most poignant bills received were for the sum of $5,000, a personal loan from Joe DiMaggio to help with the purchase of Marilyn’s 12305 Fifth Helena Drive home, and for $58.57 still owing to the Vicente Pharmacy on San Vicente
Boulevard. The latter meant that, sadly, the actress had died still in arrears for the drugs that had killed her.

On Thursday 9 August, the day that Inez C. Melson, Marilyn’s former business manager and now guardian of her mother, was appointed by Frosch to serve as a ‘special administratrix’ of the actress’s estate in California, the attorney prematurely made public details of Monroe’s woefully outdated will, made on Saturday 14 January 1961. A spokesperson for his firm announced, ‘It is a simple will and may surprise some people who are left out. I understand that Joe DiMaggio knew the will’s contents and was guided by them in deciding who to invite to the funeral.’ In the antiquated wish-list, admitted to probate and officially published on Friday 10 August, it was revealed that Marilyn had (via her cash, life insurance, personal effects and shares in Marilyn Monroe Productions Inc.) left in excess of $1 million and had provided her institutionalised mother, Gladys Baker, with an income of $3,500 a year. The sum of $10,000 was left to her half-sister, Berniece Miracle.

However, mouths dropped when it was announced that a lifetime revenue of $2,500 per annum had also been bequeathed to the widow of Marilyn’s one-time drama coach, Michael Chekhov, and a 25 per cent slice of any remaining residues from the estate had been bestowed to two people the actress had actually excised from her life, namely her New York psychiatrist, Dr Marianne Kris, and her acting coach, Lee Strasberg, the latter of whom in addition was left a large slice of the actress’s personal clothing and effects.

There were disagreements over the will from the start. In October, Melson disputed the document, claiming it had been written out while Marilyn was under the undue influence of both main beneficiaries. Her claim was dismissed and the will was admitted into probate. Almost three years later, on Monday 21 June 1965, it was announced that Marilyn’s estimated $1 million estate had indeed been almost entirely consumed by taxes, in this case, the highest federal rate of 70 per cent. Despite the fact that the estate had, at that juncture, collected a sum in the region of $800,000 through deferred salaries and sales of film rights to television, there were no allowable exemptions or expenses. Furthermore, the IRS also reassessed the actress’s estate as $118,000 for disqualified deductions between the years 1958 and 1962. By now, in total, Federal income tax had claimed $452,000, state tax $64,850 and inheritance tax $150,000. With $173,288 still owing to various preferred creditors, the executors of Monroe’s estate were forced to formally notify the family and friends mentioned in the will there would be, for the foreseeable future anyway, ‘no significant amount for any beneficiary’.

There wasn’t even enough spare money to pay for the care of Marilyn’s
mother, Gladys. Her bill at the Rockland Sanitarium in Glendale now stood at $4,133. Special means to pay for it were urgently discussed with the executors of the estate, but with no help coming from that direction, an appeal for donations was immediately put out. In response, a hand-addressed envelope arrived, containing an unsigned note which read, ‘Put this on Marilyn’s mother’s bill.’ The gift consisted of . . . two $1 bills. It was the
only
contribution. ‘Not a soul in Hollywood has come forward since it was disclosed that there may not be enough money in Miss Monroe’s estate to pay for the care of her mother,’ Melson dejectedly remarked at the time. The wrangling over the actress’s money would roll on for another eight years.

In the interim, in the first week of August 1962, the official investigation into Marilyn’s death was still continuing. The actress had (officially) passed away five days earlier and the American media was beginning to ask why it was taking so long for Los Angeles’s highly trained medical team to reach its conclusion. In most cases of suicide, the coroner’s office would take just 24 hours to disclose to the public the pathological assessment as to the contents of the deceased’s stomach and the nature of any drugs that might have caused their death. When quizzed by reporters about his team’s apparent unhurried demeanour, Theodore Curphey snapped back, ‘My investigation is being routinely conducted.’

On Friday 10 August, in a hastily arranged press conference to appease the fast-emerging cluster of inquisitors, Dr Curphey announced vaguely that ‘more than one drug’ may have caused the actress’s death, adding that he ‘may still order an inquest’ but would not decide until he had received a final report from poison experts the following week. He announced that his experts had taken away for testing the contents of at least 12 prescription bottles found on her bedside table. Curphey also admitted that, to begin with, he had even looked into the possibility that Marilyn might have swallowed a fast-acting poison such as cyanide in addition to the overdose of sleeping pills.