The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

also having stomach problems then and the booze along with the pills was, I guess, having a bad effect on her.”

There was more to it than just pills and “booze,” though. As earlier stated, Marilyn had developed the alarming habit of giving herself injections of phenobarbital, Nembutal, and Seconal—which she referred to as “a vitamin shot.” Joe Langford confirmed, “On the day she opened her purse and pulled out those syringes, I was standing right there with Mr. Sinatra and Pat Kennedy Lawford. Marilyn was very casual about it. She was looking for something else and just pulled them out and put them on the table. Sinatra went white, like a sheet. He said, ‘Marilyn. Jesus Christ. What are they for?’ She said, ‘Oh, those are for my vitamin shots.’ She was very nonchalant about it. Pat looked like she was going to faint. ‘Oh my God, Marilyn,’ she said. ‘Oh my God.’ Then Marilyn said, ‘It’s all right Pat. I know what I’m doing.’

“[Marilyn] was still going through her purse until, finally, she found what she was looking for: a pin. As we all stood there with our mouths open, she opened a bottle of pills and picked one out. Then—and I had never seen anything like this before—she put a small hole at the end of the capsule, and swallowed it. ‘Gets into your bloodstream faster that way,’ she said. She turned back to Pat and said, ‘See, I told you I knew what I was doing.’ ”

Later that night, after Sinatra’s performance in the main showroom at Cal-Neva, the Lawfords and friends shared a few cocktails. Marilyn had only one drink. Still, she excused herself from the group, saying that she wasn’t feeling well and needed to rest in her room. Sometime later Pat went to check on her. According to a later recollection, Pat knocked on Marilyn’s door for a while before a wobbly Monroe let her in, then flopped back down on her bed. She was nauseous, she said. Pat grew concerned and asked Marilyn if she had taken another of her “vitamin shots.” At some point, Marilyn became violently ill. Pat later said she knelt next to her, holding her friend’s hair back as she threw up into the toilet. After this episode, Pat helped Marilyn change into a different outfit because the white blouse Marilyn had been wearing was stained with vomit. Marilyn then asked Pat to throw the top away in a trash can on the premises, claiming that “people will be going through the garbage in my room later.”

Obviously, it turned out to be a very difficult weekend for all concerned at Cal-Neva, made even more so by the swarms of FBI agents due to Sam Giancana’s presence. As a result of Sinatra’s poor judgment, much fiction has been spun from the stories that have circulated—most of which are not true—about those couple of days in July 1962. Place Sinatra in a room with a Kennedy, a mobster, and a movie star, and what else can one expect but rumors, gossip, and innuendo? Add the FBI to the mix—with its theories presented as “fact” in its files—and it’s a sure recipe for confusion. In fact, Marilyn Monroe aficionados refer to this brief period as “The Lost Weekend,” because there have been so many conflicting stories about it.

What we do know is this: Marilyn Monroe was dreadfully sick, emotionally and physically, the entire time she was at Cal-Neva. Whenever she was left alone for even fifteen minutes, she would pop a couple more pills, take another “vitamin shot,” and make herself even sicker. At one point during the weekend, Pat Kennedy Lawford raided Marilyn’s purse and got rid of all of the syringes. “She’s a very sick woman,” Pat told Peter. That was an understatement. In fact, between July 1 and August 9, Marilyn had twenty-seven appointments with her psychiatrist, Greenson, and thirteen with her internist, Engelberg.

“Frank Sinatra didn’t know what to think about any of it,” said his valet, George Jacobs. “He was upset, though. He loved Marilyn, yes. But this was pushing it. For her to maybe die at Cal-Neva while he was there? That would have been terrible. So, after he’d seen enough, he said, ‘Get her out of here and get her out of here now.’ And that was it. We had to do what he said, get her out of there. You know, you felt bad about it, yeah. I mean, the woman was sick. But as compassionate as Sinatra was, he had a line and she crossed it. He didn’t want her dying at Cal-Neva, and that’s just the truth of it.”

Ken Rotcop, who was a guest at Cal-Neva, recalled seeing Marilyn leave the resort. “She was shaking, she had chills, she looked very very sick.” Stacy Baron, another guest of the hotel, recalled, “I was in the lobby and I saw Peter Lawford on one side of her and Pat on the other side and they were practically carrying this woman out of there. I recognized the two of them but I couldn’t figure out who the woman was because she had her head down and was just sort of groggy. Then she raised her head and I got a real shock. It was Marilyn Monroe. I was stunned. And as I was standing there with my mouth open, I heard Pat say to Peter, ‘This is all your fault, Peter. This is all your fault.’ And Peter said, ‘Not now, Pat. Jesus Christ, not now.’ ” I just watched them leave, thinking, my God! Marilyn Monroe looks like death.”

“Maybe”

After Marilyn Monroe returned from Cal-Neva on July 29, 1962, she spent so much of the next few days alone behind the walls of her modest home in Brentwood, it made monitoring her state of mind a near impossibility. Only Eunice Murray and her doctors—Greenson and Engelberg—seemed to know what was really going on with her, and they weren’t exactly forthcoming to her friends. “After Cal-Neva, Pat was worried to death for her,” shared a friend of Mrs. Kennedy Lawford’s. In the days after their return from Nevada, Pat tried to call Marilyn, with no success. Finally, she asked Peter to run an errand for her. Pat had salvaged the blouse Marilyn soiled in Reno and now saw its return as an opportunity for Peter to check in on her troubled friend. Therefore, Peter dropped by Marilyn’s, and as Pat later reported, he found her in “better than good spirits.” Pat was relieved. That evening, Pat telephoned Marilyn, who finally answered. Now she seemed distant and depressed, and this was mere hours after Peter’s pleasant visit with her.

During their conversation, Pat questioned Marilyn about what she had done that day. Marilyn said that she had seen her doctor (not specifying which one), and, she claimed, the only other person she had come into contact with the entire day was Eunice Murray. Pat, knowing that her husband had spent the better part of an hour at Marilyn’s, found her withholding of this information to be very odd. Peter had said he spent long enough time at her home to enjoy a cocktail with her at the pool, and he even described her as having been in a “silly mood.” However, Marilyn now painted a picture of her day without Peter as a part of it. Pat challenged Marilyn, explaining that she knew that Peter had been there to return the blouse, and she was baffled by Marilyn’s reluctance to voluntarily discuss Peter’s visit.

Though Marilyn apologized for not telling Pat about Peter’s time there, Pat was more interested in why she decided to withhold the information. Marilyn, when pressed, explained that she didn’t want Pat to feel jealousy over Peter’s visit. That explanation angered Pat and she let Marilyn know it. Marilyn, who was not used to Pat’s clipped manner, began to cry and reassure her friend that nothing was going on between her and Peter. “I didn’t think for a moment anything was,” Pat told Marilyn, “and I still don’t—because he’s not attracted to you, Marilyn.” Pat then went on to say that Peter didn’t see Marilyn as a sexual being, but more as a wounded child. “She told Marilyn that she thought it was sick that Marilyn viewed every man as wanting her and every woman as being jealous of her,” this same intimate of Pat explained many years later. “Pat said that she thought Marilyn behaved like that because she had no important men in her life—no father, no brothers.”

From this trustworthy source’s account, it would seem that Marilyn took a browbeating from Pat that night. The call ended abruptly, at Pat’s initiation. Unfortunately, this confrontation between good friends would never be fully resolved. However, it may have been that conversation that led Marilyn to reach out during this period to a man from her past she still called “Daddy.”

“The phone rang one day when my mother was at the grocery store,” recalled Nancy Jeffrey in an interview for this book. “Daddy [Wayne Bolender] answered. It was Marilyn. He wanted to know how she was doing, he had heard that she was having a hard time. She said that she was fine. She would never have shared with him any of her sorrow, though. My parents would watch things on TV and get very upset. I think they felt that maybe she should not have gone into show business, that maybe her life would have been better. Anyway, somewhere in the conversation, I know that she asked my father, ‘Daddy, are you disappointed in the way my life has turned out?’ And all he said was, ‘Norma Jeane, I promised you on your wedding day that I would always love you—and I will keep that promise until the day I die. I still love you, Norma Jeane.’ That’s what he told me he told her, just like that.”