Page 95 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

The recordings place both Peter Lawford and Bobby Kennedy at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, deep in conflict with a highly emotional Marilyn, who’s demanding “an explanation as to why Kennedy was not going to marry her.”

“It was a violent argument about their relationship and the commitment and promises Bobby made to her,” Otash writes in his notebook. “She said she was passed around like a piece of meat.” The attorney general loses control of his tone of voice, which becomes “screeching, high-pitched.”

He’s not leaving without finding what he came for—Marilyn’s diary. The little red book where she kept all her notes about “political things.”

“Where is it? Where the fuck is it? We have to know. It’s important to the family. We can make any arrangements you want, but we must find it.”

Marilyn refuses to answer.

“She was really screaming … Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbors from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking to get out of there.”

Marilyn lies in bed with her white telephone. She’s calmed herself with some pills. Talking to friends might make her feel better.

She holds it together when Joe DiMaggio Jr. calls—she’s so proud of Joey, now a twenty-year-old military private—but by the time she reaches her friend and hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff after 8 p.m., she’s rambling.

“Danger … betrayals … men in high places … clandestine love affairs,” she says, before finally declaring, “I know a lot of secrets about the Kennedys. Dangerous ones.”

When José Bolaños telephones at 9:30, Marilyn claims to have news for him that “will one day shock the whole world.”

She sets the phone down.Is someone at the door?

Eventually, Bolaños ends the call.

Marilyn picks up the telephone again. She was supposed to go over to Peter Lawford’s again for dinner tonight, but he’d made excuses on her behalf.

“Marilyn’s not coming, she’s not feeling well,” he’d told the other guests.

Now Lawford is alarmed by the drifting quality of her voice on the phone. He shouts at her, desperately trying to draw her focus.

Marilyn answers sweetly, “Say good-bye to Pat, saygood-bye to Jack, and say good-bye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.”

Is he?

Silence is his only answer.

Marilyn is too far gone.

CHAPTER 69

MARILYN MONROE DIES; PILLS BLAMEDtheLos Angeles Timesannounces on August 6.

At the County Morgue, Coroner Theodore J. Curphey gives his “presumptive opinion,” pending an autopsy, that “death was due to an overdose of some drug.”

The case is assigned to a “suicide team.”

In a 1954 interview Marilyn gave to journalist-turned-screenwriter Ben Hecht at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she had said, “There was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.”

Now her prediction has become eerily, horribly true.

Was it an accidental overdose? Or was it deliberate? And if so, was it suicide … or murder?

Says LAPD homicide detective Sergeant Jack Clemmons, “It was the most obviously staged death scene I had ever seen. The pill bottles on her bedside table had been arranged in neat order and the body was deliberately positioned.”

Peter Lawford quickly instructs investigator Fred Otash to “do anything to remove anything incriminating” at Marilyn’s house that could connect her to Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

But “incriminating” covers a lot of potential ground.

During an interview with the BBC, Mrs. Murray says words to the effect of “Oh, why do I have to keep covering this up?”

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