July of 1962 was a tense time for the United States and the entire world, a
period of perilous confrontation between the West and Communist nations. The
Soviet Union declared that it would defend China against any attacker. Americans
had begun to die in Vietnam. And in tests that month, the U.S. detonated a
series of advanced nuclear bombs.
On July 26 an official of the FBI's
Domestic Intelligence Division -- the counterespionage department -- filed a
cryptic note at headquarters in Washington based on reports from agents in
Mexico City: "Info received from informants [names deleted] advised Marilyn
Monroe attended a luncheon at the residence of Peter Lawford with President
Kennedy. Informants characterized Monroe's views as positively and concisely
leftist."
This strange document and others filed under Marilyn Monroe --
Security Matter -- C (the "C" stood for Communist) were to be withheld by the
U.S. government for more than 40 years. Behind them lies a disquieting story
that began five months earlier in an exotic foreign city.
In February,
lounging in a Mexico City hotel suite, the world's most famous movie star had
sipped champagne with a scion of one of America's most illustrious families.
Marilyn Monroe was getting acquainted with Frederick Vanderbilt Field,
great-great-grandson of the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. Monroe had
flown south to buy paintings and furniture for her Mexican-style house in
California, and Field, who had lived in Mexico for years, was on hand to show
her around. An ordinary meeting of the rich and famous? Not so, we now know, as
far as the FBI was concerned.
Monroe, as the Bureau already knew, had
for some time been having a dalliance with President John F. Kennedy. Three
weeks earlier, at a dinner party in Los Angeles, she had also had a first
tête-à-tête with his brother Robert, the Attorney General. It was a scenario
filled with potential risk, for the woman involved with two of the nation's
leaders was drinking too much, abusing prescription drugs and seeing a
psychiatrist almost daily.
Her friend Field, meanwhile, was no ordinary
plutocrat. He was an unrepentant supporter of communism and was being watched
constantly by U.S. agents. Monroe's association with Field, coupled with her
involvement with the Kennedys, made her a security risk.
The FBI's July
26 document, made available this year, was written 10 days before Monroe's
death.
Back in 1985, when my biography of Monroe was published, I
suspected that the authorities had not told the full truth about the actress's
final months. Freedom of Information Act requests for documents the FBI might
have on the actress turned up the "105" file on her, a designation applied to
"foreign intelligence matters." Most of that file, however, was withheld under
"B1," an exemption covering matters of national security.
Three years
earlier, the office of the Los Angeles County District Attorney had conducted a
review of the circumstances of Monroe's death, a probe prompted by continuing
public controversy and a claim by a coroner's aide that he had been coerced into
signing her death certificate. The D.A.'s investigators, I learned, had been
told by the FBI that there was certain material they could not see -- material
concerning Monroe's visit to Mexico.
I brought suit against the FBI to
release its 105 file, a move that prised out two documents that were almost
completely blacked out by the censor's pen. To release the full contents, FBI
attorneys asserted, would violate the request of another agency -- almost
certainly the CIA -- and compromise sources. Though I moved on to other
assignments, I did not give up on the 105 file. Each year, I had my lawyer press
the FBI to release the withheld documents.
This past year, the FBI
finally provided me with more than 100 pages, this time with far less
censorship. Soon after, I obtained some 500 pages from the D.A.'s 1982 case
review. Together, the documents throw new light on Monroe's death, one of the
most enduring mysteries of the 20th century.
Suicide or Murder?
Not long before she died, a D.A.'s
report shows, Monroe discussed suicide with an actress friend, Jeanne Carmen.
Were she ever to kill herself, she said, she "would dress in a white nightgown,
take an overdose of pills and go to bed. The sheets and spread would be white
and she would have her hair and makeup done. A friend would be informed of the
suicide to make sure that after her death she was neatly positioned and the
bedroom was in order."
A shabbier scene greeted police summoned to
Monroe's home in Los Angeles in the early hours of August 5, 1962. The star had
evidently been dead for some time. She was naked, in a semi-fetal position, her
face unmadeup, her hair a mess, in a disordered room. There were pill bottles on
the bedside table, and the autopsy report was to give the cause of death as
"acute barbiturate poisoning due to ingestion of overdose." In the space for
"Mode of Death," autopsy surgeon Dr. Thomas Noguchi circled "Suicide," adding
the word "probable." That was the verdict coroner Theodore Curphey announced at
a press conference 12 days later, saying he thought the overdose had been
"self-administered," the pills swallowed "in one gulp."
Fans thought the
suicide finding a slur on Marilyn's character, that her death had been a tragic
accident. Others suspected the overdose had been administered by someone else,
perhaps by injection -- that their idol had been killed. The D.A.'s 1982 review
opened with a formal Request for Investigation of the possible "murder" of
"victim Marilyn Monroe" by a person or persons unknown. A mere four months
later, though, the probe was closed down. A report was issued stating that there
was "no credible evidence supporting a murder theory." There was a possibility
that the death had been accidental, but suicide was more likely.
A
senior forensic pathologist consulted by the D.A.'s office took the view that
the original medical findings on Monroe were accurate. In an interview this
year, though, Dr. Steven Karch, a retired assistant medical examiner for the
city of San Francisco, pointed out what he sees as troubling flaws in the
forensic evidence. Monroe's internist, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, told the D.A.'s
investigators that he had prescribed only one of the medications that killed
her. If so, asks Karch, where did the other medications come from? The records
are contradictory on how the police and coroner's staff handled the many drugs
found at the house. A coroner's document indicates that nothing was removed from
the scene. The bedside table was still littered with pill bottles the following
day; Monroe's business manager, Inez Melson, the first person allowed access
after the police left, told me she simply threw them away. Why, then, do other
documents indicate that eight medication containers were analyzed at the
coroner's laboratory?
Most disquieting is the fate of specimens taken
from Monroe's body during the autopsy. When Dr. Noguchi asked the head
toxicologist to test tissue samples, he told the D.A.'s staff years later, he
was told they had already been "destroyed." Why? Toxicologist Dr. Raymond
Abernethy refused to comment when I asked him for an explanation. "The last
thing in the world you do is dispose of tissue," Dr. Karch says today. "To throw
away the tissue is, I think, astonishingly damning. There's no justification,
because you never know when you might want to go back and look again."
Given such irregularities, Karch adds, "you can't rule out the
possibility that Marilyn Monroe was murdered. If I had my druthers, I would
classify this death as 'undetermined causes.' To me -- and I'm not by nature a
conspiracy theorist -- the circumstances of her death remain a mystery."
The only other person present in Monroe's house when she died,
supposedly, was Eunice Murray, her housekeeper. Questioned by the D.A.'s staff
in 1982, Murray said she raised the alarm when -- having woken "in the middle of
the night" -- she noticed a telephone cord under Monroe's bedroom door. To avoid
being disturbed, the actress usually left the phones outside her room at night,
muffled by pillows. The unusual sight of the cord snaking under the door, Murray
said, alarmed her enough to call Monroe's psychiatrist.
The
psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, was dead by 1982, but years earlier he told
police that he rushed to the house in response to the housekeeper's call, broke
a window to get into Monroe's room, and found her unresponsive. He then phoned
her internist, Dr. Engelberg, who hurried to the house. Monroe was "sprawled
over the bed," Engelberg told the D.A.'s staff 20 years later. "I took out my
stethoscope and listened to make sure her heart wasn't beating ... she was dead.
... I got on the phone and called the police."
The D.A.'s report did not
question the credibility of the principal witnesses, did not mention the
destruction of forensic specimens, and essentially rubber-stamped the original
findings.
A Flawed Investigation
The man who headed the 1982 review, former Assistant D.A. Ronald Carroll,
met with me recently at his home in Southern California. He is retired now but
has vivid memories of the Monroe probe, and sturdily defends the way it was
handled. "My job was to look for evidence of murder," Carroll said, "and I
didn't find any. There were pieces of information that might have thrown light
on aspects of Marilyn Monroe's final days, her involvement with the Kennedy
brothers, for instance. But that's for the biographers and the historians. It
wasn't my job, wasn't the assignment we had."
Newly released files
reveal one of the report's more egregious omissions. Former coroner Curphey,
whose suicide finding effectively closed the original case, refused to cooperate
with the D.A. in 1982. "I'll be goddamned if I'll get involved," he told a D.A.
investigator. Curphey would respond, he said, if served with a subpoena, but the
D.A.'s office took no action. Why did the D.A.'s office not think it vital to
interview such a senior official, who was still alive and had been privy to all
information available back in 1962?
The D.A.'s office did interview the
police officer who first reached Monroe's house after her doctor reported her
death. Sgt. Jack Clemmons said the death scene had not looked "kosher" to him
and that the housekeeper's version of events had been inadequately investigated.
The D.A. gave Clemmons's comments no weight, not least because his record showed
that he had minimal investigative experience and no familiarity with suicide
cases.
Inexplicably, the D.A.'s investigators did not bother to
interview homicide detective Sgt. Robert Byron, the officer who took over from
Clemmons and filed the only three police reports that have survived. Those
involved in the probe knew that he, too, had doubts about housekeeper Murray's
veracity. Byron and a colleague had felt strongly enough to include their
suspicion in a report filed on August 8, three days after Monroe's death.
"It is officers' opinion," they wrote after interviewing the housekeeper
for a second time, that she was "vague and possibly evasive in answering
questions pertaining to the activities of Miss Monroe. It is not known whether
this is, or is not, intentional." I spoke with Byron -- for the only interview
he ever gave -- in 1986 at a dimly lit roadhouse north of Los Angeles.
By the time he and his superior got to Monroe's house on the night of
her death, Byron remembered, Dr. Greenson was gone. Milton Rudin, the attorney
Monroe shared with Frank Sinatra, was there, and seemed to be in charge. "He'd
probably told Mrs. Murray, ‘Don't say anything,' " Byron told me. "My feeling
was that it had all been rehearsed." As for Rudin and Dr. Engelberg, the officer
said, "There was a lot more they could have told us … I didn't feel they were
telling the correct time or situation."
I asked former Assistant D.A.
Carroll why his office had not interviewed Byron. "It beats me," he responded.
"We had his written reports. Still, he should have been interviewed."
Both Byron and Clemmons suspected that the witnesses were covering up
something in particular: the time frame of events on the death night. The
account of one witness -- yet another person the D.A.'s staff did not get to --
suggests that suspicion was well founded.
The housekeeper and doctors
claimed that Monroe was found dead at around 3:30 a.m. Their testimony is badly
shaken, though, by an interview I conducted in 1985 with Natalie Jacobs, widow
of Monroe's press spokesman Arthur Jacobs. Word that the actress was dead
reached the Jacobses, Natalie told me, while she and her husband were attending
a Henry Mancini concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The concert was over by 11 p.m.,
which means some insiders learned Monroe was dead by then, at the very latest.
After my book was published, Juliet Roswell, a former employee of
Jacobs, corroborated his widow's statement. In an interview with me, she said
her boss told her that he "went out there [to Monroe's home] at 11 o'clock."
If true, the statements of these two witnesses leave several hours
unaccounted-for. "We would have looked further," former Assistant D.A. Carroll
recently told me, "if we had known that some individuals knew Monroe was dead
five or six hours before the police were called."
Press spokesman
Jacobs, a renowned Hollywood spin doctor, had been summoned from the concert to
start urgent damage control. "Arthur had to fudge the press," Natalie said. "He
went to Marilyn's house … fudged everything." Michael Selsman, then a young
publicist working for Jacobs, told me he was roused before 6 a.m., ordered to
Monroe's house, and got there as the reporters began to arrive. "Arthur told me
to give out as little information as possible," said Selsman. "He knew about
Marilyn and the Kennedys." Should the story get out, the publicist had heard
Jacobs worrying, the political fallout could be immense.
I interviewed
Mrs. Murray six times while doing research for my book. She stuck more or less
to her old account until our last conversation, a 1985 interview for a BBC
television documentary. The camera crew was starting to pack up when 83-year-old
Murray put her head in her hands and cried, "Why, at my age, do I still have to
cover this thing? … It became so sticky that the protectors of Bobby Kennedy had
to step in and protect him."
Had the D.A.'s men interviewed
photojournalist William Woodfield, who worked on the story for the New York
Herald Tribune at the time of Monroe's death, they would have had evidence of
such protection. Woodfield managed to get through to Monroe's psychiatrist on
the phone months after her death. He recorded the conversation, and the tape
survives to this day. Having struggled to answer several questions, Dr. Greenson
ended the call with an outburst. "I can't explain or defend myself," he said,
"without revealing things I don't want to reveal … It's a terrible position to
be in, to say I can't talk about it. I just can't tell the whole story. ... Talk
to Robert Kennedy!"
Monroe and the Kennedy
Brothers
Monroe was drawn to powerful men and keenly interested in
politics. She had had an on-off dalliance with John Kennedy since before his
election in 1960 and met Robert just before her 1962 Mexico trip, at the Santa
Monica home of the brothers' sister Pat and her actor husband Peter Lawford.
Knowing Robert would be present, she brought with her a prepared list of
political talking points, which they discussed at length. "Bobby was
enthralled," recalled guest Joan Braden, and soon Monroe was talking about the
"new man in my life." She identified him to one friend only as "the General"
because, she coyly explained, he was a prominent public figure. "The General"
was how Justice Department insiders spoke of Robert Kennedy. The President's
brother and the actress began exchanging phone calls, as Robert's secretary
Angie Novello has confirmed. Robert visited Monroe at home in California,
according to several sources, including the FBI's former Los Angeles
agent-in-charge, Bill Simon, who more than once lent Kennedy his Cadillac
convertible to "go see Marilyn."
The D.A.'s review dealt cursorily with
stories about Robert and Monroe, pouring scorn on a claim that the Attorney
General visited Monroe on the day of her death. "There is no evidence that he
was in Los Angeles," a report noted, and newspapers placed him in San Francisco
that weekend. In fact, from Friday evening to late Sunday, Kennedy was on a
ranch owned by a political supporter 60 miles south of San Francisco. From
there, authoritative sources indicate, he indeed made a trip to Los Angeles.
Daryl Gates, who in 1962 was an aide to the Los Angeles police chief --
he went on to head the force himself -- is one such source. "Our records show
that [Kennedy] was in Los Angeles," he said this year. Several other senior
police officers have said the same. One of the 1982 D.A. investigators told me
that John Dickey, a Deputy D.A. in Los Angeles in 1962, said he, too, was told
the Attorney General was in Los Angeles on Monroe's last day alive. Ward Wood, a
Lawford neighbor, told me he saw Robert Kennedy arrive at the Lawford house that
"late afternoon or early evening," by car.
Several people, including
Monroe's housekeeper, claimed that at some point that day the President's
brother did go to Monroe's home.
We know Monroe had several phone
conversations during her final hours. Two of them appear to have been highly
significant. A young scriptwriter she met in Mexico, José Bolaños, told me he
phoned her sometime after 9 p.m. Monroe told him, he said, "something that will
one day shock the whole world." I pressed him, but he would not elaborate.
At about 9:30 p.m. Monroe called Sydney Guilaroff, doyen of Hollywood
hairdressers and a confidant of several stars. When I interviewed him for my
book, he, like Bolaños, refused to reveal what she had said. Before his death in
1997, however, Guilaroff, in a little-noticed memoir, wrote that Monroe had
sounded frantic. She had told him: " ‘Robert Kennedy was here, threatening me,
yelling at me … I'm having an affair with him … I had an affair with JFK as
well.' She said that Robert Kennedy had journeyed to Los Angeles that afternoon
not merely to break off his own affair but to warn Monroe about ever phoning the
White House again. ‘It's over,' he had told her. ... Now Marilyn was sobbing on
the phone. 'I'm frightened … I know a lot of secrets about what has gone on in
Washington. ... Dangerous ones.' "
That the brothers should have wanted
to cut off contact with Monroe is no surprise. Dallying with her had been
foolhardy from the start. Both were married men in an age when adultery by
public figures was even more perilous than it is today. Their folly was
compounded by the fact that they apparently talked too much when with Monroe.
The 1982 investigators gave some attention to a claim that Monroe kept a journal
in which she scribbled notes about her conversations with Robert Kennedy on
subjects such as his crusade against the Mafia, his efforts to put Teamster
leader Jimmy Hoffa behind bars, and the confrontation with Fidel Castro's Cuba.
The D.A.'s report quoted associates saying they had seen no such diary and
doubted whether -- in her final months especially -- Monroe was capable of
keeping one.
Yet no fewer than seven people, including Monroe's friends
and two reporters, are on record as saying the actress did habitually make notes
in a diary. One was Jeanne Carmen, the girlfriend with whom Monroe discussed her
scenario for suicide. In a memo summarizing an interview with Carmen -- omitted
entirely from the 1982 report -- an investigator wrote: "Monroe informed Carmen
that Robert Kennedy made numerous business telephone calls from Monroe's
residence. Monroe was aware of Kennedy's plans regarding Castro and apparently
wrote them in a diary. ... One evening Kennedy, Carmen and Monroe were at
Monroe's apartment when Kennedy discovered the diary. He examined it and became
upset. He told Monroe she should never put anything in writing and to throw the
diary away. Carmen doesn't know what Monroe did with the diary."
Political Entanglements
If the
notebook posed a threat, Monroe's loose lips posed an even greater one. Evidence
of that comes from the FBI file on Monroe's February 1962 visit to Mexico, the
file that neither the D.A. nor I were allowed to see back in the '80s. What we
now have of it shows why it was considered sensitive.
Monroe had spent
10 days in Mexico, shopping, socializing and drinking too much. It appeared to
be a harmless vacation trip, but on March 6, four days after Monroe got back to
Los Angeles, the senior FBI official in Mexico sent Director J. Edgar Hoover a
four-page report. Quoting two unnamed people close to her, it said that Monroe
had "associated closely with certain members of the American Communist Group in
Mexico ... present and/or past members of the Communist Party, U.S.A., and their
friends and associates who share a common sympathy for Communism and the Soviet
Union … during the course of this visit a mutual infatuation arose between
subject [Monroe] and Frederick Vanderbilt Field ... [source's name deleted] said
it was obvious that the subject was completely enamored with Field. She said
that subject thinks that Field is rich, stable, intellectual, and dependable."
Field, who was married, made no mention of having had a fling with
Monroe, either in his published memoir or in interviews with me. He did say his
impression was that "sexually, Marilyn did a fair amount of one-night stands."
Whether or not he and Monroe were "enamored," it is clear that they took to each
other at once. Field had long espoused Communist doctrine and was by his own
account "a good, unrebellious comrade."
Monroe seemed to gravitate to
left-wingers. Her doctors, psychiatrist Greenson and internist Engelberg, had
both been involved with the Communist Party. Her housekeeper's brother-in-law
Churchill Murray, who introduced Monroe to diplomats in Mexico, was a member of
the group of Communists in exile there. Field deemed Monroe's politics
"excellent." She was of the left, odd though it may seem to a public that
recalls only the blond bimbo of her movies. Her psychiatrist's daughter, Joan
Greenson, told me that Monroe was "passionate about equal rights, rights for
blacks, rights for the poor. She identified strongly with the workers." The FBI,
a document shows, deemed her to be "very positively and concisely leftist."
While in Mexico, the FBI learned, Monroe chattered about the night she
met Robert Kennedy and the long political conversation they had. She told José
Bolaños and Field that they had debated U.S. policy on Cuba.
No foreign
policy issue was more sensitive than Cuba in early 1962. The Cuban missile
crisis was only months away. Robert Kennedy was directing secret American
attempts to overthrow Castro, and anything he said on the subject would have
been of interest to the Cubans and the Soviets. Some of the American Communists
in Mexico City, the new documents indicate, were in touch with Soviet-bloc
embassies.
Two weeks after the report on Monroe reached FBI
headquarters, on March 22, Director J. Edgar Hoover went to the White House to
talk to President Kennedy. At least in part, Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach
remembered, Hoover's purpose was to warn Kennedy about his womanizing. Kennedy
was not readily deterred.
According to credible witnesses, he slept with
Monroe two days later, during a weekend break near Palm Springs.
In the
following weeks, Monroe continued to have contacts with the Kennedy brothers and
also -- by phone -- with Field. She stayed on the West Coast but invited Field
to use her Manhattan apartment for a visit that summer. All the while, the files
show, FBI agents were tracking Field wherever he went.
On July 13, J.
Edgar Hoover received a bombshell report from Mexico. Two sources -- the names
are redacted -- reported on what Monroe told them: "She had luncheon at the
Peter Lawfords with President Kennedy just a few days previously. She was very
pleased, as she had asked the President a lot of socially significant questions
concerning the morality of atomic testing."
July had seen the first
known detonation of an H-bomb on U.S. territory, and more tests followed; Robert
Kennedy, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at his side, witnessed one of
them. Anything Monroe passed on about what the Kennedys said privately on the
subject would have been of interest to the Communist side. Nothing in the
available record shows that Hoover warned the brothers of Monroe's
indiscretions, but it would have been extraordinary had he failed to do so. And
it would also have been extraordinary if the Kennedys did not, at that point --
just three weeks before her death -- move to sever their connection with Monroe
once and for all.
When she was found dead, according to her
psychiatrist, Monroe had a phone "clutched fiercely in her right hand." Whom had
she been calling as she slipped into unconsciousness? Los Angeles chief of
detectives Thad Brown told Virgil Crabtree, the U.S. Treasury's assistant chief
of intelligence in Los Angeles, that a White House number, scrawled on a piece
of crumpled paper, had been found in the dead woman's bedclothes. "It was
determined," Brown's aide, Inspector Kenneth McCauley, told me, "that she had
called John Kennedy just before she died."
That last evening, President
Kennedy was in Cape Cod enjoying a break. The White House switchboard, though,
could patch calls through to him wherever he was. The Presidential phone log
shows that early the following morning, at 9:04 East Coast time -- 6:04 on the
West Coast -- Kennedy took a call from Peter Lawford in California. The two men
talked for some time.
Robert Kennedy, back at his friend's ranch, spent
the day horse riding and playing football. News of Monroe's death came up, his
host remembered, but was discussed "lightly, in a sort of amusing way."
Former BBC
journalist Anthony Summers is the author of seven nonfiction books including
"Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe."
