“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.”
Otash should also have been able to hear Monroe’s call to Lawford, though the former PI also never acknowledges another, later call, from her second husband’s son, Joe DiMaggio Jr. (his mother was starlet Dorothy Arnold). Monroe and her ex-stepson, a twenty-one-year-old marine private, had remained close. “If anything was amiss, I wasn’t aware of it,” DiMaggio Jr. says. “She sounded like Marilyn.”
Hours later, Marilyn Monroe is dead.
Chapter 25
In the early hours of Sunday, August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe’s live-in housekeeper wakes with a sinking feeling. She knocks loudly at her employer’s locked bedroom door, and when there is no answer, she calls Ralph Greenson.
Greenson comes over, breaking into Monroe’s bedroom via the window. He finds a horrifying scene: the thirty-six-year-old movie star lying naked, lifeless, facedown on her bed, still clutching the telephone receiver.
At 4:20 a.m., Greenson alerts the LAPD.
According to a 1985 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Fred Otash quotes Peter Lawford as instructing him to “do anything to remove anything incriminating” at Monroe’s house that could connect her to Jack and Bobby. Biographer James Spada argues that “the cover-up that was designed to prevent anyone from finding out that Marilyn was involved intimately with the Kennedy family has been misinterpreted as a cover-up of their having murdered her.” But Sergeant Jack Clemmons, a homicide detective and the first LAPD officer to arrive at Monroe’s home, states, “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.” One of the bottles—found empty—originally contained fifty Nembutal capsules, prescribed only two or three days earlier.
In a 1983 interview for the BBC, the “cover-up” concept resurfaces. Biographer Anthony Murray recalls his exchange with Marilyn’s former housekeeper: “There was a moment where she put her head in her hands and said words to the effect of, ‘Oh, why do I have to keep covering this up?’ I said, ‘Covering what up, Mrs. Murray?’ She said, ‘Well of course Bobby Kennedy was there [on August 4], and of course there was an affair with Bobby Kennedy.”
Yet the housekeeper’s recollections may not be entirely reliable. She changes her story, first saying she called Greenson just after midnight, and then around 3:00 a.m., leaving hours unaccounted for between Monroe’s time of death and the initial call to the police. Also, she was on the verge of losing her job. “I can’t flat out fire her,” Monroe had told the psychiatrist. “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.”
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 examiner Dr. 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 (who would later become known as “Coroner to the Stars” and inspire the title character on the hit television series Quincy) to quote the Latin 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 Monroe 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 results for People magazine as “acute combined drug toxicity, chloral hydrate and Nembutal.”
But Miner holds a differing opinion. He is convinced that the actress was administered an enema (a routine Hollywood weight-loss technique, though due to months of health issues, Monroe’s body was already at its lowest weight of her adult life) containing the lethal combination of Nembutal and the sedative chloral hydrate.
Though Dr. Gurdin’s suspicions about the psychiatrist’s involvement with Monroe’s broken nose will not become known for another half century, Ralph Greenson is also an unofficial “suspect.” Miner proposes that Greenson allow him to listen to recently taped sessions with the actress as a way for the psychiatrist to clear his name. Greenson (whose 1978 essay “Special Problems in Psychotherapy with the Rich and Famous” would bring him further dubious notoriety) agrees, on the condition that Miner not reveal the contents, a promise he keeps until after Greenson’s death. The tapes reveal a woman willing to examine what mistakes she’s made in previous relationships, and filled with conflicting references to a hopeful future and unresolved feelings for both of the Kennedy brothers.