The House of Kennedy(38)
A “very often distraught” Monroe takes to phoning Bobby in Washington, and rumors swirl that the attorney general tries but fails to persuade the studio to rehire her. Yet although struggling actor Robert Slatzer (who in 1991 claims, without evidence of a marriage certificate, that he and Monroe were married for five days in 1952) quotes her as saying “Robert Kennedy promised to marry [me],” the actress herself denies a sexual relationship with Bobby. “I like him,” she tells her masseur Ralph Roberts, “but not physically.”
According to Florida senator George Smathers, Monroe is also making “some demands” of the president, and there are fears she’ll call a press conference to reveal details of a secret relationship. Smathers tells Seymour Hersh that he sent “a mutual friend” to “go talk to Monroe about putting a bridle on herself and on her mouth and not talking too much because it was getting to be a story around the country.”
Monroe has become a dangerous liability, going so far as to phone Jackie with the declaration that she was to become the second Mrs. Kennedy. Journalist Christopher Andersen reports Jackie responding, “Marilyn, you’ll marry Jack, that’s great. And you’ll move into the White House and you’ll assume the responsibilities of first lady, and I’ll move out and you’ll have all the problems.”
*
Shortly after 7:00 p.m., on Saturday, August 4, 1962, Peter Lawford receives a call from a woozy Monroe at his and Patricia’s Santa Monica mansion. “Say good-bye to Pat,” she instructs Lawford to tell his wife. “Say good-bye to Jack and say good-bye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.”
This conversation is the closest thing pointing to Monroe’s state of mind or intentions that day, though there’s only Lawford’s word for it—for although Monroe was a lifelong diarist, no recent diaries are later found in her house. Earlier diary entries, though, give clues to her fearful state of mind. In 1956, she wrote in a green leather diary of “the feeling of violence I’ve had lately about being afraid of Peter [Lawford] he might harm me, poison me, etc. why—strange look in his eyes—strange behavior.”
Neither are any tape recordings of her phone calls found—yet there ought to have been. After all, she’d paid for it to be done.
According to medical records released on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, two months earlier, on June 7, 1962, Monroe had made an emergency visit to Michael Gurdin, a UCLA plastic surgeon. She’d seen him previously, in 1958, under the name “Miller” (she’d been then married to playwright Arthur Miller, her third husband, though they’d divorced in 1961). Now using the alias “Joan Newman,” she arrives at Dr. Gurdin’s office with her longtime psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, seeking treatment for “an accidental fall.” But Dr. Gurdin is skeptical. He tells a colleague that he “thought she [Monroe] was beaten up,” and discussed his suspicions that her psychiatrist had committed the abuse. Modern X-rays confirm “a minute fracture of the tip of the nasal bone.”
After that, Monroe contacts Fred Otash and requests he install a bug on her phone so she can record her own phone calls—possibly as insurance against threats or blackmail.
“Marilyn wanted a mini–phone listening device,” Otash reveals in records his daughter, Colleen, later shares with the Hollywood Reporter. “You could hide it in your bra.”
The irony is that inside the walls and in the roof of Monroe’s 2,624-square-foot, four-bedroom, three-bath hacienda-style home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive—which the star had purchased only six months earlier for $90,000 (a 2010 sale fetched $3.85 million)—recording devices have already been installed by…Fred Otash.
Otash knows his way around Hollywood, first as a vice detective—he left the LAPD in the mid-1950s after wrangling with Chief William H. Parker—and then as head of the Fred Otash Detective Bureau, until he lost his state license following a 1959 conviction in a Santa Anita Race Track conspiracy. According to the Los Angeles Times, he drinks a quart of Scotch and smokes four packs of cigarettes a day.
As a paid “fact verifier” for gossip magazines, who also “find[s] out what the Democrats were up to on behalf of Howard Hughes and Nixon,” Otash keeps copious notes on the intimate lives of celebrities, many of whom travel in Kennedy circles. James Ellroy tells The Hollywood Reporter that Otash “was always talking about bugging [JFK brother-in-law] Peter Lawford’s beach pad and getting the goods on Kennedy. He told me Jack [sexually] was a two-minute man. But I did not trust him not to dissemble.” (On that topic, columnist Earl Wilson quotes Marilyn as describing her encounters with the president this way: “Well, I think I made his back feel better.”)
Otash’s extensive, and only partially authorized, access to her home leads to his eventual bombshell declaration: “I listened to Marilyn Monroe die.”
On that Saturday afternoon in August before Marilyn Monroe called Peter Lawford, Otash places both Lawford and Bobby at her Brentwood bungalow, deep in conflict with a highly emotional Monroe.
“She said she was passed around like a piece of meat,” Otash writes. “It was a violent argument about their relationship and the commitment and promises he [Bobby] made to her. 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.”