Page 96 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“Covering what up, Mrs. Murray?”

“Well of course Bobby Kennedy was there [on August 4], and of course there was an affair with Bobby Kennedy.”

On the other hand, Mrs. Murray was on the verge of losing her job. Marilyn had been trying to get rid of her.

“I can’t flat out fire her,” Monroe had told Dr. Greenson. “Next thing would be a book—Secrets of Marilyn Monroe by Her Housekeeper. She’d make a fortune spilling what she knows and she knows too damn much.”

The Associated Press reports,2 CLOSE TO MARILYN LEAVE HOLLYWOOD.

Eunice Murray leaves town with no forwarding address.

The Arthur Jacobs Agency acknowledges that Pat Newcomb, formerly employed as Marilyn’s personal publicist, “is no longer with us.” According to theHollywood Reporter,she’s accompanied Peter and Pat Kennedy Lawford to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port.

At the autopsy, John Miner, who heads the medical-legal section in the Los Angeles DA’s office, wants to know more. It is established protocol for the chief medical examiner to conduct celebrity autopsies, but inexplicably, junior medical examinerDr. Thomas Noguchi performs the procedure on the five-four, 118-pound actress.

Dr. Noguchi’s examination is meticulous, and his subject clearly makes an impression, stirring the pathologist to quote the Italian poet Petrarch: “It’s folly to shrink in fear if this is dying. For death looked lovely in her lovely face.”

Bearing in mind that “when you are a coroner, you start from the assumption that every body you examine might be a murder victim,” Dr. Noguchi examines Marilyn and detects neither needle marks indicating a drug injection nor signs of physical violence beyond a fresh bruise just above her left hip.

The autopsy confirms blood toxic with barbiturates, and also a stomach empty of food particles, even the yellow dye that coats Nembutal capsules. But Dr. Noguchi never performs the full range of organ tests, stopping short after analyzing the blood and the liver. “I am sure that this could have cleared up a lot of the subsequent controversy, but I didn’t follow through as I should have.”

The forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht interprets the autopsy as “acute combined drug toxicity, chloral hydrate and Nembutal.”

Miner is convinced that someone administered an enema to Marilyn containing the lethal combination of Nembutal and the sedative chloral hydrate.

Ralph Greenson is also an unofficial “suspect.” Miner claims that the psychiatrist allows him to listen to sessions Greenson has taped with Marilyn, sessions filled with conflicting references to a hopeful future and unresolved feelings for both of the Kennedy brothers.

“I tell you, doctor,” Marilyn says in one session. “I’m glad he [Jack] has Bobby. It’s like the Navy—the president is the captain and Bobby is the executive officer. Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother and so would I, I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

Marilyn asserts, “As you see, there is no room in my life for him [Bobby]. I guess I don’t have the courage to face up to it and hurt him. I want someone else to tell him it’s over,” she says. “I tried to get the president to do it, but I couldn’t reach him.”

But Greenson then destroys the tapes, so there is only Miner’s recollection to go on.

“When they found Marilyn Monroe,” theLos Angeles Timesreports, “one of her hands grasped a telephone. Perhaps she had called for help. She’d been calling for help all her life.”

It may have provided some vestige of comfort.

Not long before she died, she’d confided in the journalist W. J. Weatherby. “Do you know who I’ve always depended on? Not strangers, not friends. The telephone! That’s my best friend.”

Epilogue

CHAPTER 70

Chapel of Westwood Memorial Cemetery

Corridor of Memories

August 8, 1962

“THE EARTHLY REMAINS of Marilyn Monroe are left to the ultimate loneliness,” British Pathé news service reports in a newsreel titled “The Final Farewell to Marilyn Monroe.”

“I don’t believe it—I don’t believe it,” says Dean Martin, who’d successfully lobbied for Marilyn to return as his leading lady inSomething’s Got to Give.The film will never be completed.

One week earlier, on August 1, Joe DiMaggio had quit his job as a traveling executive to relocate to the West Coast. He was worried about Marilyn and wanted to be near her.

Now she is dead.

On the night of August 5, Joe DiMaggio grieved next to Marilyn’s body, having flown from San Francisco to Los Angeles after hearing the news. There were rumors that he’dproposed marriage to Marilyn for a second time. Instead, he’s overseeing her funeral.

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